The Poisoning in the Pub

Twenty-Six

Viggo looked very big amidst the clutter of the Wood-side Cottage sitting room. The loss of his beard and long hair did not seem to have diminished his bulk. His new uniform of camouflage T-shirt and combat trousers made Jude even more aware of his similarity to the scarred man whose photograph she had been looking at so recently. He held his new mobile phone like a badge of office.

Carole had stayed. After all, Jude was not supposed to be expecting her visitor. Besides, she did not particularly want to be alone with Viggo. Though Sally Monks had thought it unlikely that he would be violent, there was still something threatening in his demeanour.

He refused the offer of a drink, and there was a long silence after he sat down. It seemed as though he had only planned as far as getting to Woodside Cottage. What he did when he got there was still being processed in his slow brain.

Eventually he said to Jude, “You came to Copse-down Hall. To see Kelly-Marie.” The accent he used was strange, with a slight American twang, as though it had been borrowed from one of his favourite action movies. It certainly wasn’t the voice he had used when Jude had first met him with Ray in the Copse-down Hall kitchen.

“Yes, I did.”

“You shouldn’t take advantage of her. She’s not very bright.”

Jude was affronted. “I have not taken advantage of her.”

“Then why did you come to see her?”

“Why shouldn’t I come to see her?”

“Was it to talk about Ray?”

“It might have been,” said Jude with an unhelpful smile. She was unwilling to give out any information until she had worked out what had brought him to Woodside Cottage.

“You know Ray died?” said Viggo.

“I don’t think anyone in Fethering could avoid knowing that, Viggo.”

He raised his hand in a gesture borrowed from some movie. “Not Viggo. Call me ‘Chuck’.”

Jude pretended she hadn’t seen the look of exasperation on Carole’s face, as she said, “Very well, Chuck.” She reckoned the new name had probably been lifted from Chuck Norris, star of many martial arts movies.

“Ray had to die,” Viggo⁄Chuck announced portentously.

“What on earth do you mean by that?” asked Carole, who thought she’d been kept out of the conversation far too long.

“Don’t ask questions. Accept reality. Ray’s dead. That’s all there is to it.” His delivery was staccato, but without spontaneity. The words sounded as if they had been practised in front of a mirror.

Carole spoke again. “And do you have any idea who killed him?”

“Lady,” said Viggo, “I told you not to ask questions.”

“Why have you come here?” asked Jude.

“I’ve come to tell you not to meddle in things that don’t concern you.” The menace of what he said was again let down by his delivery. The learned quality of his words diminished the threat they embodied.

“And who’s told you to tell us that?”

“Nobody. Nobody tells Chuck what to do.” He smiled a strange smile which only seemed to work on one side of his face.

“So if you’ve come here on your own initiative, what’s your reason for telling us not to meddle?”

This question patently confused him. Again he gave the impression that he hadn’t prepared fully for this encounter. It was a moment or two before he said, “Don’t meddle. You don’t need to know why.”

“And if we do meddle, as you call it,” asked Carole, “what will happen to us?”

“Don’t go there,” he replied,, “if you want to keep breathing.”

Jude was beginning to have a problem stopping herself from giggling. The young man’s posturing was so inept, his American accent kept slipping and his B-movie dialogue made him almost pathetic. On the other hand, there still was something dangerous about him. Who could say how far he would go in making his fantasies real? It would pay to proceed carefully.

Carole was not held back by any such inhibitions. “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” she said. “You sound like a hitman from some second-rate thriller.”

The description seemed to flatter him rather than anything. “Hitman? You could be right,” he responded. “Second-rate – never.”

“Are you telling us you are a hitman then?”

He appraised Carole with narrowed eyes, then said, “If I were, I wouldn’t tell you. It’s not a business you brag about. A good hitman doesn’t stand out from the crowd. He takes his instructions, does the job, gets the money and then sinks back into obscurity. All he does then is keep his gun clean and ready.”

“And do you have a gun to keep clean and ready?”

“I wouldn’t tell you that either. Let’s just say, when it becomes necessary, I’ll be tooled up.”

“Where would you get a gun from?” asked Carole with something approaching contempt. “It isn’t the kind of thing that you can just pick up at Fethering Market.”

Her tone annoyed him. “You can get guns if you know the right people. A lot of military stuff got smuggled out of Iraq.”

Carole’s ‘Huh’ showed how unlikely she thought that was.

“What kind of gun have you got?” asked Jude, more gently.

He smiled a strange half-smile, his mouth only curling up one side of his face. “I favour revolvers. With them you can fill your spare time playing Russian roulette.” He laughed as if he’d just made a rather good joke, then looked serious again. “Anyway, like I say, a hitman always sinks back into obscurity. Till the next job comes along.”

“Is that how you operate?” asked Jude.

He gave her a thin smile. “Like I said, hitmen don’t talk about their work. They just hit – hard, efficient, fast.”

“And is it your work as a hitman that makes you worried about my having visited Kelly-Marie yesterday?”

“Just lay off the kid. Ray’s dead. Talking won’t bring him back.”

“No, but it might help find who murdered him.”

He let out a little cynical laugh he’d heard from some film star. “People who try to find murderers often get murdered themselves.”

“Well, I think that’s a risk we might be prepared to take. Are you actually threatening us?”

“Not threatening. Warning.”

“And if we don’t heed your warnings,” said Carole who was getting a bit sick of Viggo’s play-acting, “what are you going to do to us – go into hitman mode, get out your gun – which you have of course been keeping clean and ready – and blow us away?”

“Don’t joke, lady. You could be playing with fire.”

This got the harrumph it deserved from Carole, but Jude started on another line of questioning. “The thing about hitmen is that they work to order…” Viggo nodded in acknowledgement of this self-evident rule of the profession. “Contracts are taken out on people, and the hitmen fulfil the contracts. Is that how you work, Chuck?” She made the name sound as phoney as it was.

“I didn’t say I was a hitman.”

“No, but you’d like to be one, wouldn’t you?”

This question threw him. His façade of cool dropped just for a moment as he hissed, “Yes. I could do it. I could do that kind of stuff. I have done that kind of stuff.”

“Have you?” asked Carole contemptuously.

“I…I…” He looked confused for a moment, then rescued himself with an old line. “If I had, I wouldn’t tell you. Like I said, hitmen keep quiet about their work.”

“You said earlier,” Carole went on, “that nobody told you what to do.”

“That’s right.”

“Which, if it’s true, must mean that you’re not a hitman. Hitmen, as we’ve established, do exactly what they’re told.”

He was silent for a moment, trying to work out the logic of that. Jude, who had been fiddling with her mobile phone, joined the attack. “So who would you take orders from? It’d have to be someone you respect, wouldn’t it? You wouldn’t take orders from someone you didn’t respect, would you?”

“No,” he said cautiously, still not sure where this was all leading.

“So what kind of a man would you respect?”

“Someone who’s tough. Someone who stands up to people. Someone who wouldn’t give away any secrets even under torture.” As he itemized it, this wish-list, so far from Viggo’s own character, sounded pitiful.

“Someone like this?” As she said the word, Jude thrust her mobile phone towards him. On the screen appeared Zosia’s photograph of the scarred man with the bikers at the Crown and Anchor.

There was no doubt from Viggo’s reaction that he knew who it was. However much he faffed around with subsequent denials, his first instinctive reaction had been the give-away. Eventually, he said, “So what if I do know him? What’s it to you, lady?”

“Some people think that that man started the fight at the Crown and Anchor last Sunday.” Jude wasn’t too sure about the accuracy of what she was saying. She hadn’t actually heard anyone express that opinion, but she thought it might elicit some response from Viggo.

“So what if he did? Fighters fight. That’s what they do.”

“Do you know the name of the man in the photograph?” Carole asked suddenly.

“I don’t do names.”

“Except to change your own from time to time, Viggo.”

That riled him. Carole’s pale blue eyes took the full beam of his black ones. “Chuck,” he said. “I’m Chuck.”

“Then who was Viggo?”

“Someone else.”

Carole was getting sick of his gnomic responses. “So who was the man in the photograph?”

“You won’t get that out of me, even under torture.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. You’re talking to two middle-aged women in Fethering. We don’t do torture.”

“Others do.”

“Yes, maybe.” Carole looked with exasperation towards Jude, who tried another approach.

“The man in the photograph went to Copsedown Hall to see you.”

Viggo didn’t question her assertion. “So?”

“Why did he come and see you?”

The man’s face took on a pugnacious look. “I can have friends, I can’t I?”

“Friends? Heroes, maybe. Is he your hero?”

“Why shouldn’t he be? He’s a man of action. He’s strong.”

“Does that mean you would take orders from him?”

“What do you mean?”

“You said you’d only take orders from someone you respected. The way you describe this man who came to see you, he’s someone you’d respect.” Viggo nodded. “So, what orders did he give you?”

The man’s face closed down. “Orders are secret. Information is only given out on a ‘need-to-know’ basis. No operative should know what orders another operative has been given.”

Carole was beginning to wonder how much more of this nonsense they had to listen to, but Jude persevered. “From the way you speak, you sound as if you are also an operative yourself.”

“You may make that observation, lady. I can neither confirm nor deny it.”

“Even under torture?”

He seemed unaware of the ribbing tone in her voice, as he solemnly confirmed, “Even under torture.”

“So you wouldn’t confirm whether you have also received orders from the man in the photograph?”

“You’re right. I wouldn’t.”

“Would you tell us whether the man in the photograph ever came to Copsedown Hall to talk to you?”

He smiled arrogantly. “Some of us don’t need face-to-face contact to get our orders.”

The way he looked at his mobile while he said this prompted Jude’s next question. “You mean you get your orders on the phone?”

That appealed to his self-importance. “Text,” he said. “Text received. Mobile discarded so there’s no record of the message. Operative obeys order. Job done.”

“And what kind of job are you talking about?”

“Any job.”

“A hitman’s job?”

“That, lady, I would never reveal.”

Carole and Jude looked at each other, raised their eyebrows and both mouthed, “Even under torture.”

Viggo – or maybe Chuck – departed soon after. He left the two women feeling confused. Why had he come? He appeared to be threatening them, warning them off. But quite what he was warning them off was difficult to tell through all his posturing and secondhand dialogue.

“Why should he suddenly want to see you?” asked Carole. “Why today?”

Jude spoke slowly as she pieced together a possible motivation. “He saw me at Copsedown Hall yesterday. He saw that I had been talking to Kelly-Marie. Maybe he thinks I’m getting close to the truth of what happened to Ray, and he comes here to warn me off?”

“Do you think he’d work that out on his own initiative?”

There was a firm shake of Jude’s head. “I don’t think he does much on his own initiative. Beneath all that swagger and bravado, Viggo’s is a very weak personality. I reckon he reported my visit to Kelly-Marie to someone else, and that someone else gave him instructions to come and put the frighteners on me.”

“And who is that ‘someone else’? The scarred man?”

“We don’t seem to have many other candidates for the role.”

In spite of the heat, a shiver ran through Jude. Inept though he had been, Viggo’s visit had got her rattled. Both she and Carole were left with the uneasy sense that under certain circumstances the man could be dangerous.