The Poisoning in the Pub

Twenty-One

– Carole Seddon wasn’t quite so confident the following morning at about a quarter to ten as she brought her Renault to a halt in the empty car park of the Crown and Anchor. She felt exposed, and her main anxiety was that Ted Crisp might issue forth from his fortress to ask what the hell she thought she was doing there.

But he didn’t appear. There were no signs of life from inside the pub, and from the look of the boarded-up frontage it might have been out of business for some months. Carole settled down to wait. She had brought her customary Times crossword, but was too tense even to look at it. She let the paper stay in the capacious handbag, into which, after much indecision before she left High Tor, she had put another item.

Say one thing for Matt, he was good on timing. More or less on the dot often his vehicle appeared at the end of the lane that led down to the Crown and Anchor. Carole got out of her car. She hadn’t made detailed plans for the forthcoming encounter, but she had decided that the best time to catch Matt would be before he rang or knocked on the pub door. Ted’s current unpredictable responses might not make him an ideal witness to the conversation she hoped for.

She was surprised by the vehicle Matt was driving. She had expected one of those long flat-back lorries whose whole back was filled with beer barrels, but instead he was in a white van. A large white van, certainly, but nothing that could be dignified with the title of a ‘lorry’. Delivering from that somehow made the inclusion of a tray of scallops in the load look more likely.

Fortunately the driver didn’t seem in any hurry to get out of his cab. As Carole approached, she could see him hunched over the steering wheel, checking through some paperwork on a clipboard. Though his van window was open, he didn’t see her coming and looked up in surprise as she coughed to gain his attention.

It took him a moment to register where he had seen her before. Politely, she extended her hand and said, “Carole Seddon. We met at the Seaview Café.”

He did not take her hand. Instead, he sneered and said, “I remember. You’re Ted Crisp’s current bit of stuff, aren’t you?”

Though deeply offended by the description, Carole decided that this was another occasion where the impression that they were ‘an item’ might assist the cause of investigation, so she made no objection. All she said was, rather pompously, “It is not in that capacity that I have come to see you this morning.”

“Oh.”

“I met your fiancée Sylvia yesterday.”

“Really? She didn’t say nothing about that.”

“Well, that’s her business. The reason I’m here is that I wanted to talk about the delivery you made to the Crown and Anchor the Monday before last.”

“Well, you may want to talk about it – I bloody don’t!” He slammed his clipboard down on the passenger seat and got out of the van. Though he had been higher than her in his seat, he hadn’t loomed in the way he did now, standing beside her. She was very aware of the intricate tracery of tattoos on his bare forearms. “I’ve got a delivery to make. That’s what I do – I make deliveries. I don’t bloody talk about them.”

Carole decided it was the moment to take a risk. Not a decision that she made terribly often. She reached into her bag and produced the object that had caused her such soul-searching before she left the house. It was her old ID card from work, hopelessly out of date, but it did at least have a recognizable photograph (Carole Seddon hadn’t changed her hairstyle since her late teens) and the words ‘Home Office’ printed on it. She had thought it might prove just sufficient to fool someone of Mart’s intelligence.

Her gamble paid off. Looking at the ID with a new caution in his eyes, he asked, “What’s all this then?”

Having set off on her course of duplicity, Carole couldn’t backtrack now. “It’s a Health and Safety matter,” she said drily, feeling pretty secure that Matt wouldn’t know that Health and Safety came under the Department of Work and Pensions rather than the Home Office.

“Oh yes?” He tried to sound casual, but she had caused him a little anxiety. Health and Safety had become the bugbear of any business, with no one quite sure what new arbitrary prohibition was about to be introduced. Children being stopped from playing conkers, pancake races forbidden, hanging baskets outlawed, all to prevent the unlikely occurrence of someone getting hurt. The papers had pounced on such stories of bureaucratic petty-mindedness, so Matt must have heard of them. And no doubt there were as many baffling new regulations for delivery men as there were for anyone else.

“According to our records,” Carole went on, weaving a bit more of her growing fabric of lies, “you made a delivery here in the morning of the Monday before last.”

Sullenly, he agreed that he had. As Carole went on, she realized that she should really have brought a clipboard or a file of notes. That would have made her enquiries look more official. Still, too late for that now. “You delivered three barrels of beer…”

“Yes, it’s a regular order. May change a bit week by week, according to how well the boozer’s supply is going. It’s not my business what’s ordered. I just pick up the dockets with the orders, oversee the loading at the depot, and get off on my rounds.” He was distancing himself ever further from any responsibility for what had happened.

“So the depot…” Carole went on, trying to sound as though she were confirming something she already knew rather than seeking new information, “…is at the brewery – right?”

“No. The brewery’s miles away, Midlands somewhere, I think. The depot’s in Worthing. Stocks everything pubs need.”

“Who owns the depot?”

“Snug Pubs. Small chain they are, own a lot of pubs in the West Sussex area.”

“But they don’t own the Crown and Anchor, do they?”

“No. But there are quite a lot of local independent pubs that use the service. If the depot’s got extra capacity, makes sense to use it.”

“So it’s not just beer you deliver. It could be food as well, could it?”

“Look, what is this?” Matt seemed close to losing his patience. Carole, wondering how long the subterfuge could be maintained, flashed her obsolete Home Office ID at him again.

It had the effect of calming him down, at least for a moment. “Yes, sometimes deliver food,” he said truculently. “Van’s got a refrigerated section in the back. Depends what’s on the docket.”

“And what happens to these dockets?”

“Customer keeps one copy, so’s they can check the delivery’s all there…and for their records. Then the top copy, the one they sign, goes back to the office at the depot. I take them all back at the end of each day before I knock off.”

Carole nerved herself. She was about to ask the direct question, whether Matt had actually delivered the tray of dodgy scallops to Ray in the kitchen of the Crown and Anchor. Just before she did, she wondered for the first time whether the police had also questioned Matt about that delivery. Maybe not, if they’d believed Ted Crisp’s story about Ray not being in the kitchen that morning. How much trouble the landlord had caused in his attempt to shield his simple-minded helper…

She asked the question. “Did you make any food deliveries here that Monday morning?”

For a moment it looked as though he wouldn’t answer. But then something…the power of the Home Office ID again, perhaps…forced him into a grudging reply. “There was a tray of stuff that had to come.”

“What was it?”

“I don’t know. It was covered with foil. It was on the docket, so I picked it up from the fridge at the depot.”

“I’m surprised you don’t know what it was. Surely the contents of the tray were printed out on the docket?”

“No, it’d been written on in pencil.”

“On both copies?”

“Just the top copy, one that went back to the depot.”

So, thought Carole, no incriminating evidence would be left in the Crown and Anchor kitchen. “And where is the depot?”

“Worthing. I told you.”

“Where exactly?”

“Fleet Lane,” he replied grumpily.

“And what’s it called? Snug Pubs?”

“No. They use it, but I don’t think it belongs to them. Depot’s called KWS. Something Warehouse Services, I suppose.”

“And the K?”

“No bloody idea. Everyone just talks about ‘KWS’.”

“Back to this tray of food you delivered here…”

“Look, is this going to take much longer? I do have deliveries to make.”

“Just a couple more questions. Who signed for the tray when you delivered it to the kitchen?”

“That bloke who’s often here. Good few sandwiches short of a picnic.”

“The one who got killed in the fight last Sunday?”

Matt nodded. “Poor bugger. Wrong place at the wrong time.” This seemed to be becoming a universal view of Ray’s death.

“You didn’t get involved in that fight, did you? Because I know you and Sylvia were here that evening.”

“No way. We’d gone well before the trouble started.”

“Are you sure about that?”

He looked affronted. “Of course I’m bloody sure.”

“It’s just that the fight appeared to be started by the bikers outside the pub.”

“So?”

“You were wearing black leather that night.”

“Just because you dress in black leather doesn’t mean you’re a bloody biker!”

“So why were you wearing black leather?”

He looked embarrassed for a moment, then mumbled, “Because Sylvia likes it. She says it’s sexy.”

Having made that admission, there was now a restlessness in his eyes, a look that was verging on suspicion. Carole realized that her interrogation time might be running out. Quickly she asked, “Going back to the pencil-written instructions on your docket…was there anything unusual about them, anything odd you were meant to do?”

He considered his answer, maybe wondering how much information he dared give her. “I had to pick up another tray from the kitchen and take it back to KWS.”

“Was that an unusual thing to happen?”

“No. Sometimes the publicans – or even more often the chefs – had some complaint about their order…or the wrong stuff’d got delivered. So quite often there was stuff to take back.”

“So what happens to that stuff when it gets back to the warehouse?”

“There’s a special bay you have to put it in.”

“And then?”

“Dunno. Not my responsibility.” Matt gave Carole the firm impression that he wished everything was not his responsibility.

“Just one last question…Were there any other instructions written in pencil on the docket?”

He hesitated for a moment, then said, “No. Just deliver the scallops, take the other tray back.”

Ah. So he had known the contents of the tray he delivered. Carole was about to press him further, but was stopped in her tracks by the appearance of Ted Crisp in the pub doorway. He looked scruffier than ever, as though he’d slept in his clothes. Which he quite possibly had.

“What the hell’s going on?” he barked.

“Come for the delivery,” said Matt.

“Yes, I know why you’ve come.” He turned to Carole. “But what the hell are you doing here?”

Ted Crisp stared at her. His look was upsetting. It was entirely without affection. He stood beside Matt, the two of them in some way complicit, united against her.

Awkwardly, making some feeble excuse for her presence, Carole beat a retreat to the Renault. And for the first time she entertained the awful possibility that Ted Crisp himself might have something to do with the series of disasters at the Crown and Anchor.