It was nearly six when his mobile rang. ‘Yes, Hooper? Really think it needs a SOCO? OK, call them.’ He listened to a little more from his junior, then switched off the phone and turned apologetically to Carole. ‘Sorry, Mrs Seddon. I’ll have to go. Ring me on the number I gave you if there’s anything else.’
‘There’s hardly likely to be anything else, is there?’
‘I meant if you had any adverse reactions to what you saw, Mrs Seddon. We could put you in touch with a counsellor if you like.’
‘I’m sure I’ll be fine, thank you very much.’
‘Well, you just take it easy.’ Good Cop had become Extremely Caring Compassionate Cop. What was happening to the police force?
There was a tap on the door behind the bar and Will Maples appeared with a tentative cough. ‘Sorry, Lennie. I’m afraid we’re going to have to open up.’
‘Of course, Will. Can’t keep the good people of Weldisham from their pints, can we? Could you do the lady another large brandy, please?’
‘Certainly.’
‘On my tab.’
There was another unmistakable wink from Baylis. And an embarrassed look from the manager. Whatever the hold Baylis had over him, Will Maples would rather it didn’t exist. Carole felt certain that the tab which had been alluded to did not exist. But she did not feel the righteous anger such an arrangement might normally have fired in her. DS Baylis was a kind man, a good policeman. A few free drinks to ease relations with the public couldn’t do much harm.
‘You just relax, OK, Mrs Seddon.’ He stopped at the door. ‘Let’s hope we meet again one day . . . in more pleasant circumstances.’
‘Yes, I’d like that,’ said Carole, as the latched door clattered shut behind him.
But she didn’t relax. All she could think was that a SOCO was being called up to the barn. She knew ‘SOCO’ stood for ‘Scene of Crime Officer’.
Which meant that the police thought there was a crime to investigate.
Chapter Three
Left on her own, Carole had an opportunity to look around the interior of the Hare and Hounds. Another carved shingle over a doorway the far side from the Snug announced that that way lay the restaurant. More rustic notices over doors beside the bar identified the toilets.
The atmosphere being sought after in the pub was that of a comfortable country house. There were pairs of riding boots and the odd crop, metal jelly moulds, blue and white striped milk jugs and cat-gut tennis racquets in wooden presses. Wooden-shafted golf clubs and antiquated carpenters’ tools leaned artlessly against walls. Books were randomly scattered, without dust-jackets, their covers faded reds, blues and greens. Names like John Galsworthy, Warwick Deeping and E. R. Punshon gleamed in dull gold on their spines. To the wall of the Snug an ox yoke and an eel trap had been fixed. Behind the bar loomed a stuffed pike in a glass case.
All of these artefacts were genuine, but bore the same relationship to reality as the log-effect gas fire did to real flames. They had no natural affinity with their environment; they had been carefully selected to create an instant ambience.
Some of them also raised logical anomalies. For a start, everything that wasn’t firmly screwed to the wall was in a glass-fronted cupboard or on a shelf out of reach. Suppose someone came into the pub and fancied reading a chapter of E. R. Punshon? They couldn’t do much about it while the volume remained three feet above their head.
The piscatorial exhibits prompted the same kind of questions. The Hare and Hounds was a good five miles from the nearest river, the Fether, which reached the sea at Fethering. So it couldn’t really be counted as a fisherman’s pub. The eel trap looked quaint and out of place. There probably were eels in the Fether, but Carole wondered whether they had ever, at any stage in history, been caught by the contraption fixed on the wall. And, though she didn’t know much about fish, she thought it unlikely that a pike would ever have lived in such a fast-flowing tidal river.
On the dot of six, Will Maples unlocked the pub’s one exterior door, and was only just back behind the bar before his first customer of the evening arrived. Red-faced, in his fifties, ginger hair turning the colour of sand. Everything about the man seemed self-consciously to breathe the words ‘pub regular’, from his bottle-green corduroy trousers, deceptively clumsy shiny brown brogues, Guernsey sweater and over-new-looking Barbour to his cheery, ‘Evening, Will, old man. Pint of the usual.’ It was a voice that had been to the right schools, or learned to sound as if it had been to the right schools.
The man shook himself like a dog, as if to remove stray raindrops, though in fact there were none on the waxed shoulders of his jacket. He gave a quick nod to Carole through in the Snug, though with an air of puzzlement, almost of affront. How did she come to be there? He had the look of a man who prided himself on being first into the Hare and Hounds at six every evening.
‘Evening, Freddie,’ said Will Maples with automatic bonhomie. ‘How’s your week been?’
Carole corrected her surmise. It wasn’t every evening that the regular made his appearance. Perhaps just Friday evenings.
‘Bloody awful,’ the man called Freddie replied. ‘Up in the Smoke, dealing with bloody idiots all the time. Wonderful to be back down here. Minute I get off the train at Barnham, I feel my lungs opening up for the first time in a week. Bloody great to be back in Weldisham.’
On a day like this, thought Carole, in pitch darkness?
‘Oh, it’s a beautiful village,’ the manager agreed, in a tone that made not even the smallest attempt at sincerity. ‘There you are.’ He placed the pint on the counter. ‘In a jug, as per usual.’ But his next words went even further to undermine his customer’s status as a genuine ‘regular’. ‘Settling in all right then, are you?’
The man called Freddie raised his hand dramatically to freeze the conversation and took a long swallow from his tankard. He smacked his lips in a cartoon manner and licked the little line of froth from the upper one. ‘Sorry, old man. Best moment of the week. Can’t talk till I’ve done that, eh?’
He chuckled fruitily. Will Maples joined in, a meaningless echo.
‘Oh, we’re getting there,’ Freddie went on. ‘Pam has the worst of it, of course. She’s been up and down from town like a bloody yo-yo this week. Trying to stop the builders treading wet footprints all over the bloody kitchen. Waiting in for deliveries of fridges and what have you from men who never bloody turn up when they say they’re going to.’
‘Still, early days.’
Carole was beginning to wonder whether Will Maples had a stock of bland responses to every kind of customer’s remark and moved a mental dial round to the right one as required. Maybe it was a skill all landlords had to develop. She wondered whether Ted Crisp, owner of the Crown and Anchor in Fethering, had a similar range of programmed responses. Not for use with her, of course, but with the general run of his customers. Though she wasn’t by nature a ‘pub person’, Carole Seddon tentatively liked to think of Ted Crisp as a friend.
‘Oh yes,’ Freddie agreed. ‘Less than a month since we moved in. Rome wasn’t built in a day, eh?’ Once again the ‘eh?’ cued a fruity laugh, and a dutiful echo from the landlord.
The duologue was then opened up by the arrival of another regular, though this one’s credentials seemed more authentic than Freddie’s. Dressed in jeans and a thick plaid workshirt, the newcomer had a thin face, scoured red by exposure to the elements, over which hung a hank of tobacco-like hair. The fingernails of his large hands were rimmed with black. His mouth was a lipless line that didn’t look as if it opened more than it had to. His age could