The Poisoning in the Pub

Twenty-Three

The Saturday morning was overcast, but no less hot. In fact the low ceiling of grey cloud seemed to press down on Fethering, making the air stale and stuffy. Kelly-Marie was waiting in the hallway of Copse-down Hall and opened the door before Jude had time to press the buzzer. After saying hello, Jude moved instinctively towards the communal kitchen, but Kelly-Marie gestured and limped towards the stairs. “My room’s a nicer place to talk.”

She was right. The studio flat was high enough for the view from its open windows to miss out the shabby street beneath and go over the roofs of Fethering to the dull silver gleam of the sea. Though the space was small, it had been decorated with intelligence and style. There were bright prints on the wall, mostly of dogs, and on the shelves a collection of canine figurines. Proud photographs in silver frames showed a beaming Kelly-Marie surrounded by what must have been her parents and brothers. One of the shots also featured two large long-haired spaniels. Jude wondered whether Kelly-Marie missed the family dogs now she was living on her own. And there must have been other sacrifices the girl had made to achieve her ambition of independent living.

Next to a radio⁄CD player on one shelf stood a vase of fresh summer flowers, whose perfume made the air feel less heavy. The sight immediately prompted Jude to ask whether Kelly-Marie had placed the flowers where Ray had died.

“Yes,” she replied simply. “He was my friend.”

In the corner of the room stood a small television with integral video recorder. Up here Kelly-Marie could escape the wall-to-wall Sky Sport and masculine backchat of the communal room below and watch the kind of programmes she enjoyed. Jude found herself conjecturing what those programmes might be.

Kelly-Marie also had her own kettle, which had just boiled in preparation for her visitor’s arrival. Of the options offered, Jude asked for a cup of black coffee.

The girl held up a jar of instant and announced with a big smile, “Fairtrade.”

“That’s good.”

“Yes. We have to look after the planet.” Once again she sounded as though she were parroting words she had been told by someone older. “Otherwise there will not be a planet to hand on to our children.”

Jude found herself wondering whether the girl was ever likely to have children, but the thought did not seem to worry Kelly-Marie. Her movements, as she prepared the coffee and a cup of tea for herself, were very slow and deliberate, as though she were controlling some tic or tremor in her hand.

Till they’d got their drinks, they kept the conversation bland, continuing to talk about basic ecology and whether the current hot summer was a symptom of global warming. Kelly-Marie appeared to be very keen on Green principles, though her actual knowledge of the subject was limited. She just seemed to know that there was a lot of waste. “People throw things away all the time. Good things. Things that still work. And people throw them away because they want a new one. Viggo’s like that. When he gets new clothes he just throws the others away. I’ve often rescued stuff of his and taken it down to Oxfam. What a waste. People should always check through the rubbish bins to see that nothing that’s still useful has been thrown away.”

“Do you do that?”

“I do it here. At home…” She corrected herself. “At Mummy and Daddy’s house Mummy does it.”

As soon as the drinks were ready and the girl was sitting opposite her, Jude launched into the subject that had brought her to Copsedown Hall. “It was desperately sad about Ray, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. Very sad.” But she said it in a matter-of-fact way. There was no sadness in her voice. Maybe she had already done her grieving. Leaving the flowers might have been an act of closure for her. Or perhaps her permanently sunny disposition could process painful events better than more conventional minds.

“You used to talk to him a lot?”

“Yes. But I wasn’t his girlfriend.” As it had on their previous encounter, the word made her giggle.

“What did you talk about?”

“Everything. I explained things to him. He didn’t understand anything about recycling.” Her tone was maternal. She had known that she was more blessed intellectually than Ray and she had done her bit to protect him from the world. Jude found resonating in her mind the old proverb: “In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

“You know how he was killed, don’t you, Kelly-Marie?”

“Oh yes. The police came here and told us.”

“Did they ask you lots of questions?”

“Yes.” The blue eyes behind the thick glasses rolled exaggeratedly. “They do go on, don’t they?”

“They certainly do. Did they ask you things like when you’d last seen Ray, whether there were people he was in trouble with, whether he had any enemies?”

“All that stuff.”

Jude was slightly tentative with her next question. Kelly-Marie would be quite within her rights to refuse to answer it. “So what did you tell them?”

She needn’t have worried. The girl had no inhibitions about spilling the beans. “I told them I last saw him on the Sunday. Just before he went to the pub.”

“How was he?”

“Very excited. He was going to see Dan Poke, from off the television. Ray got very excited about famous people from off the television. He said he was going round the back afterwards to get Dan Poke’s autograph.”

Jude felt another pang for Ray’s simple-mindedness. He had thought the Crown and Anchor would become like a theatre, with a stage door. Like the Pavilion in Worthing, where he had gone round to get an autograph from Lyra Mackenzie, his X Factor idol. He hadn’t realized that, though the evening’s star had been in the kitchen prior to making his entrance, Dan Poke was never going to leave the pub by the back way. Ray’s misunderstanding was what had led him to wait by the kitchen door, isolated from the warring crowds in front of the pub, a pitifully easy target for his murderer.

“Thank you very much, Kelly-Marie. And the police’s next question…was Ray in trouble with anyone, so far as you know?”

“He wasn’t happy because his boss at the pub shouted at him.”

“Ted Crisp.”

“I don’t know what his name was. But Ray was very upset because this man shouted at him, and he’d never shouted at him before. Ray hated it when people shouted at him.”

“Yes, so I’d heard.”

“So he went back to his mother’s for a while.”

Jude wondered for a moment whether it was worth telling Kelly-Marie that Nell Witchett had died, but couldn’t think of any reason for doing so. If the girl didn’t know already, all the news could do was potentially to upset her.

“But, apart from Ted Crisp shouting at him,” Jude went on, “was there anything else that was upsetting Ray?”

Kelly-Marie was silent, processing her answer. Then she said. “I think there was. He said he was worried about something, worried that people were trying to do harm.”

“Do harm to who?”

“I don’t know, but he did say it wasn’t anyone here at Copsedown Hall. Maybe it was something to do with his mother.”

“Or at work, at the Crown and Anchor?”

Kelly-Marie clearly hadn’t considered this possibility before. “Yes, I suppose it could have been.”

“But he didn’t say who had told him about this threat, about the people who were trying to do harm?”

The girl shook her head very slowly. “No, he didn’t tell me that.”

“Well, had Ray had any unexpected visitors in the weeks before he died?”

Another slow shake of the head. “I don’t think so. But I’m not here when I’m at work.” The idea seemed to strike her as funny, and another huge infectious beam spread across her broad face. “None of us have many visitors here, except for family people…well, the ones who’ve got family people.”

Jude gestured to the photographs. “Are those yours?”

Kelly-Marie nodded eagerly. “Mummy and Daddy and Rob and Daniel. My brothers.” She was clearly proud of them.

“And the dogs?”

“Marks and Spencer. That’s a shop,” she explained.

“Yes, I have heard of it,” said Jude, with a smile.

“Do you have a dog?”

“No. My neighbour does.”

“What kind is it?” The sparkle in her eye showed they had definitely got on to Kelly-Marie’s favourite subject.

“A Labrador. But he’s got a poorly foot at the moment.”

“Oh dear.” The girl seemed more upset by this news than she had when talking about Ray.

“It’s getting better,” Jude reassured her.

“And what’s the dog’s name?”

“Gulliver.”

“That’s a funny name.”

“Haven’t you heard of Gulliver? He’s a character from a book.”

The girl solemnly shook her head. Jude noticed there was something missing in the room. No books. She wondered how developed Kelly-Marie’s reading skills were.

“Do you mind if we go back to what Ray said about thinking someone was going to do harm to someone?”

“Fine.”

“You said you didn’t know who was under threat from whatever the harm was, but do you know what the actual threatened harm was?” The girl looked blank. “What harm was going to be done…did Ray mention that?”

Another firm shake of the head. “The police asked me that too, and I couldn’t tell them either. I would tell if I knew. But I can’t.”

The girl sounded so pathetically apologetic that Jude hastened to assure her there was no problem. “You can’t give me information you haven’t got, can you?”

Kelly-Marie agreed that she couldn’t, but still looked disappointed.

“So we know Ray was worried about some harm being done. We don’t know what the harm was, who it was going to be done to, or who had told Ray about it. Is there anything else you can remember from the conversations you had with him?”

“Well,” the girl replied slowly, “I think Ray thought it would be all right.”

“Sorry? What would be all right?”

“Whatever the harm was. He said there was a way of stopping it happening…”

“Yes?”

“…and he was worried about that.”

“Do you know why?”

“I think it was because it was something he had to do.”

“Ah.” The thought went through Jude’s mind that that something might be changing round two trays of scallops…as he thought, the safe one for the unsafe one…though in the event it had been the other way round.

“And that was what worried him,” Kelly-Marie went on. “Ray always worried when people wanted him to do things, when he had to take…what’s that word?”

“Responsibility?”

“Yes. Responsibility.” She repeated the word slowly, savouring it. “Ray was always worried he’d do things wrong, he’d let people down.”

“Can you remember when you had this conversation with him, Kelly-Marie?”

Her broad brow wrinkled with the effort of recollection. Then it cleared. “Yes. Not last weekend, the weekend before. Because I was here on the Sunday. Usually I go to Mummy and Daddy’s for Sunday lunch, but that weekend they’d had to go to Shropshire for a wedding. Ray told me about him having to take…responsibility…” she enunciated the word with great caution “…on that Sunday.”

The timing worked perfectly. They had had the conversation the day before the poisoning at the Crown and Anchor. But who on earth had set Ray up? Who had told him to take responsibility for the switching of the scallop trays? Who had convinced him that his actions would save the pub from an outburst of food poisoning?

Jude stayed with Kelly-Marie for a half-hour or so longer, but didn’t get much more useful information. Soon she stopped trying and allowed the conversation to move on to Kelly-Marie’s beloved family and dogs. She found herself making comparisons with Ray’s situation. The girl clearly had loving parents and when they died, she would still have the support of her two brothers. Also her experience of sheltered housing at Copsedown Hall was much more successful than Ray’s had been. She was managing very well.

“Have you got plans for the rest of the weekend?” asked Jude, as she rose to leave.

Kelly-Marie beamed. “I’ll see Mummy and Daddy tomorrow. And the boys. And the dogs.” It was the best prospect she could imagine.

Jude said she’d see herself out, but Kelly-Marie insisted on accompanying her to the main door. She knew her manners.

As she opened the front door, Kelly-Marie turned at a sound from the kitchen. In the doorway lounged a bulky figure with shaved head, combat trousers and a camouflage-patterned T-shirt. In his hand was a shiny new mobile phone. There was something familiar about the man, but Jude was astonished when Kelly-Marie said, “Morning, Viggo.”

He had had a complete makeover. Gone were long hair and beard, gone the biker’s leather kit. Jude could hardly prevent herself from gaping at the transformation.

He didn’t respond to Kelly-Marie’s greeting, but stared hard at Jude and said, “On your way then, are you?”

She said she was, exchanged fond farewells with Kelly-Marie and, as she walked out into the stifling outside air, could sense Viggo’s eyes boring into the back of her head. She didn’t lose the feeling of being watched until she got back to Woodside Cottage.