The Poisoning in the Pub (23 page)

As in the Hare and Hounds, the bar staff wore mulberry shirts with the grey logo of the pub’s name across the breast pockets. At the bar Jude picked up a wine list, turned it over and
pointed out to Carole a logo and a name.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘Home Hostelries. We should have remembered. The Hare and Hounds at Weldisham was a Home Hostelries pub back when Will Maples used to run it.’

‘Yes, of course.’

Jude turned the list the right way round and, from the surprisingly good selection of white wines, ordered two large Maipo Valley Chardonnays. Exactly what they’d had in Weldisham. In
every detail, Home Hostelries pubs were clones of each other.

When Jude turned back to Carole with the drinks, her friend was making little nodding gestures over to a dark corner of the pub.

Where sat the man with a scarred face and missing fingers whom they had last seen fighting outside the front of the Crown and Anchor.

This was easier than they had dared hope, but the situation also presented difficulties. They were guilty of the same lack of planning as Viggo had demonstrated the day before. The logic of
coming to the Middy had seemed obvious to both of them, but neither had given any thought to what they should do when they found their quarry. For Carole the scenario was particularly perplexing.
She didn’t think she was very good with new people even when she’d been introduced to them. And the thought of just walking up to a man of whose propensity to violence she had been a
witness was very alien.

Characteristically, Jude did not suffer from such hang-ups. Nodding for Carole to follow her, she walked straight towards the alcove where the scarred man was sitting. He looked up at her with
some puzzlement, but like most men approached by Jude, didn’t object to what he was seeing.

‘I think we’ve met before,’ Jude announced, taking possession of a chair opposite him. Carole scuttled awkwardly to an adjacent one.

‘Oh yeah?’ The man looked fuddled. The pint whose remains he was spinning out was clearly not his first of the day.

Jude gestured towards it. ‘Get you another of those?’

He nodded. ‘Stella.’

Carole looked at her friend in desperation. Don’t leave me alone with him, the pale blue eyes pleaded. But by then Jude was back at the bar.

Carole cleared her throat, trying to think of an appropriate pleasantry for the occasion, but couldn’t come up with anything. The only sentence that came into her mind was: ‘That was
a very good fight you got involved in at the Crown and Anchor last week.’ But she didn’t think that would have been right.

Still, her silence didn’t seem to bother the man. His eyes remained fixed somewhere in the middle distance. Perhaps he didn’t care who approached him, so long as they bought him a
pint of Stella.

Jude handed over what he required and the man thanked her, though without taking much notice of the supplier. His interest in her as an attractive woman had been eclipsed by the more urgent
priority of a drink in his hand. He took a long swallow.

Jude continued her frontal approach. ‘We saw you at the Crown and Anchor in Fethering, a week ago today, when that fight broke out.’

He wasn’t as drunk as he had appeared to be. A light of caution came into his eye as he put his pint down on the table. ‘So?’

‘That was the night a man called Ray got stabbed.’

He nodded. ‘I heard about it. That kind of thing happens when people get into fights.’

‘Do you like getting into fights?’ asked Jude with a directness that Carole wouldn’t have been capable of.

He smiled. The scarring on his face meant that only one side of his face turned up. He had the original stiff upper lip. It was also spookily like the smile they had seen from Viggo when he came
to Woodside Cottage. ‘Fights?’ the man echoed. ‘Getting into fights outside a pub? That’s not fighting, not if you’ve done the real thing.’

‘By doing “the real thing”, do you mean that you’ve been in the army?’

He nodded in appreciation of her logic. ‘That’s exactly what I mean.’

‘And is that where you got the injuries?’

He nodded, his hand instinctively going up to the scarred side of his face. ‘Patrol outside Basra. Roadside bomb. Killed the driver. I got this. Driver was my mucker.’

‘I’m sorry.’

The hazel eyes he turned on Jude now didn’t look drunk at all. ‘Yes, everyone’s sorry. Nobody can do anything about it, though. I was going to train as a chippy when I got
out.’ He waived the maimed hand from which two and a half fingers were missing. ‘Not going to be much use with that, am I?’

‘But presumably you had good hospital treatment for your injuries?’ said Carole.

‘Oh, yes. They patched me up all right. I even got some compensation. Not much, though. It doesn’t go far.’

‘And you still get benefits, don’t you?’

‘Yeah. They’re not much, either. My dad was in the army. Signals.’

‘During the Second World War?’

He nodded. ‘Served out in Egypt. And he came back here and he was treated like a bloody hero. He’d done his bit to save us all from Adolf Shickelgruber. And I come back, and
I’ve done my bit to save us all from Saddam Hussein . . . and does anyone give a shit? No, even here in Portsmouth, where you’d have thought they knew something about the armed forces,
I’m treated like some kind of pariah. Oh yes, people say, sure you had a rough time, but the war you were fighting was one we shouldn’t have got involved in in the first place. Illegal
war. Turned Iraq into a bigger bloody mess than it was before we went in. Let me tell you, there’s not a lot of sympathy for an Iraq veteran. They want to forget about us, bloody government
does too. We’re what’s left, we’re the mess. They want to sweep us under the carpet.’

‘Do you live round here?’ asked Carole.

He flicked his head back, gesturing in the direction of a shabby sixties tower block they’d noticed as they arrived. ‘Flat up there.’

‘Sorry, we don’t know your name.’ said Jude.

‘No, you don’t.’ He seemed quite happy to let that status quo continue.

‘I’m Jude, this is Carole.’

‘Carole Seddon,’ said her friend, who liked to have the niceties maintained.

He still didn’t seem inclined to give them his name, so Jude persisted, ‘I knew Ray, the man who died.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘And we’ve both met Viggo.’

Are action flicked in his hazel eyes, then he seemed to make a decision and announced, ‘My name’s Derren Hart.’

‘And you know Viggo, don’t you?’ For a moment he contemplated denying it. ‘Or should I call him “Chuck”?’ Jude went on.

‘I’ve met him, yes,’ Derren conceded.

‘He seems to regard you as a hero,’ said Carole tartly, ‘even if nobody else does.’

‘Viggo’s got problems.’

‘Apparently he once tried to join the army,’ said Jude.

‘He told me that. The army may be hard up for recruits, but they still aren’t going to take on someone like him.’ The man let out a bark of laughter. ‘He’s a few
bricks short of a load.’

‘So was Ray.’

‘Yes. You know, I’ve met people who reckon anyone who goes into the forces must have mental problems. You join up with something where you’re trained to obey orders without
question. Some people reckon only a lame-brain would do that.’

‘And what do you reckon?’

Derren Hart turned his hazel eyes on Carole, and there was a new, appraising look in them. Either he’d never been as drunk as he was pretending to be, or else he had sobered up very
quickly. ‘I reckon . . .’ he said slowly, ‘that in certain situations – crisis situations, battle situations – making people obey orders without question is the only
way of getting things done. If someone stops to make a moral judgement, it’s already too late. They’ll have been blown away before they’ve made their decision.’

‘And would you still believe in obeying orders without question?’ asked Jude.

‘It would depend who the orders came from.’

‘Like Viggo said, the orders would have to come from someone you respected?’

‘Maybe. There might be other reasons why you’d obey someone.’

‘The amount of money they were paying you?’ suggested Carole.

He didn’t like that. The look of concentrated malevolence he turned on her made Carole certain that she’d touched a nerve. Derren Hart was in the pay of someone. Maybe he’d
been paid to bring the bikers to the Crown and Anchor? And to start the fight there? If so, who was his paymaster?

‘Look, why are you asking me these questions? What’s your interest in all this?’

‘Oh,’ Jude replied with arch fluffiness, ‘we’re just two little old ladies from Fethering. There’s been a murder on our doorstep and we’re doing our amateur
sleuthing best to find out whodunnit.’

In spite of himself, the half-smile again flickered across his face. ‘Is that what you’re doing? How sweet and charming. But has it possibly occurred to you that you’re asking
for trouble? A lot of murders happen because someone has been too curious and they present less of a risk dead.’

‘Are you saying that that’s why Ray was murdered?’ asked Jude. ‘He had information someone wanted kept quiet?’

‘I’m not saying anything about Ray. I never met the bloke. I know nothing about him. I’m just saying that, though you present yourselves as a couple of harmless old biddies,
you could be putting yourselves in serious danger.’

‘From whom?’

‘Like I said, less curiosity might give you longer lives.’ It was clear where Viggo had got his B-movie lines from.

That thought prompted Jude to ask, ‘You said you know Viggo. How well do you know him?’

‘I met him at a pub called the Cat and Fiddle.’

‘Is that the one on the Littlehampton Road out of Fedborough?’

‘Right. I used to go there with the bikers. Viggo kind of hung on to the group. He is a bit of a hanger-on by nature.’

‘Yes. And when you first met him, was he dressed as a biker?’

‘No, not the first evening. He’d got all the gear by the next night, though. The real bikers thought he was a joke. They didn’t want him hanging around, but I said he
wasn’t doing any harm.’

‘You took his side?’

‘If you like. Though that makes it sound a bigger deal than it was.’

‘You’re not a biker yourself, are you?’ Carole observed.

‘I’ve got a bike,’ Derren responded defensively.

‘But you don’t dress like a biker.’

‘No, but I’ve got mates who’re bikers. Guys I grew up with from round here.’

‘Do they include Matt?’ asked Jude suddenly.

‘Matt?’

‘Delivery driver who lives in Worthing.’

Derren Hart shook his head. ‘Never heard of a biker called Matt.’

‘But the ones you do know,’ asked Carole, ‘you can organize them to go anywhere you want to, can you?’

‘What are you on about?’

He looked so angry that Jude thought she’d better leap in before Carole actually accused him of controlling a Rent-a-Mob operation. ‘Sorry, could we get back to Viggo,’ she
said soothingly. ‘Did he ask you about your time in the army?’

Derren Hart’s anger vanished, and he seemed almost embarrassed as he replied. ‘Yes, he was interested in that stuff. I told you, he tried to join up.’

‘So you talked to him a lot about it?’

‘A bit.’

A picture was beginning to emerge for Jude. Here was the ex-soldier, traumatized by his experiences in Iraq, desperate to talk about them, but finding nobody back home was interested. The only
audience he could get was the half-crazed fantasist Viggo. Who no doubt lapped up everything he was told. And started to regard Derren Hart as an action hero to match those in his beloved
movies.

‘You know that Viggo’s stopped dressing as a biker now, do you?’ asked Carole.

The man didn’t commit himself to an answer.

‘He’s now dressing exactly like you.’

‘Is that so?’ He couldn’t keep a little tinge of satisfaction out of his words. He wasn’t in a position to be choosy about his sources of hero worship.

‘You know how impressionable he is?’ said Jude. ‘He’d do anything you tell him.’

‘Really?’ Again the small note of satisfaction.

Carole went into full interrogation mode. ‘Have you told him to do anything?’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Viggo talked about hitmen getting instructions by text on mobile phones.’

Derren Hart’s half-smile reappeared, and he chuckled. ‘Listen, lady, we’ve agreed the guy’s a fantasist. If he wants to believe in a world where assassination orders are
issued by text message, we can’t stop him, can we?’

‘Did he talk about that kind of thing to you?’

‘Look, he lived in a world of his own. A world full of violence and hitmen and Russian roulette and orders given by text message. He talked about lots of stuff, but it wasn’t real,
it was all in his head.’

‘But you’ve never issued him an order by text-message?’

He held out his mutilated hand. ‘One of the many things this is not good at is text messaging.’

‘And you don’t know of anyone else who might have issued text-message orders to Viggo?’

His shrug told them the unlikeliness of their getting an answer to that question.

‘You went to see Viggo at Copsedown Hall . . .’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Another of the residents saw you arriving.’

‘Who?’

‘I don’t think that really matters,’ said Jude.

Her words had been designed to protect Kelly-Marie, but the curt nod Derren Hart made suggested that he had probably worked out the identity of the witness and filed away the information.

‘But you didn’t give him any orders then?

The tautness of his ‘No’ suggested he was getting a little weary of their questioning, but Carole pressed on, ‘And did you ever issue orders to Ray either?’

‘I told you – I never met the guy.’

‘Are you sure? Because we believe that someone told Ray to substitute a tray of scallops in—’

The scarred face closed down. Whether that was because the two women had got close to the truth, there was no means of knowing. Without speaking another word, Derren Hart downed the rest of his
pint and left the pub.