The Poisoning in the Pub (33 page)

Oh, and Gulliver’s leg healed completely.

Christmas can be murder . . .

Carole Seddon hates Christmas – it all seems rather a waste of time. So when her neighbour and best friend, Jude, drags her along to go shopping at a local store called Gallimaufry, she can feel her inner-Scrooge knocking. But the sales are on and even Carole can’t resist a bargain.

Then, a few days later, Gallimaufry is burnt down and a body is discovered in the ashes. It seems like a tragic accident, but no-one can die of natural causes when a gun is involved. The victim was young, pretty and in a long-term relationship – who could possibly want her dead?

With a host of suspicious characters – the infamous womanizer Ricky Le Bonnier with a string of ex-wives; Piers Duncton, a comedy writer who just isn’t that funny; or Anna Carter, the lonely dog walker – the lady detectives know they have their work cut out for them.

And as they dig deeper they discover a host of half-truths and lies. It seems that someone in Fethering
has a deep, dark, deadly secret – and is prepared to kill to keep it.

The eleventh novel in the Fethering Mysteries is available now in Macmillan hardback.

In a sense, the murder let Carole Seddon off the hook. All the social niceties she had been worrying about throughout December seemed much less important after someone had been killed.

For many years Carole had tried to ignore Christmas. As a child, she had observed it with the tense middle-class rigour that her parents had brought to everything they did. In the early years of her marriage to David the festival had been slightly less fraught and when their son Stephen was small they had gone through the required rituals with an attitude which at times approached the relaxed.

But Carole’s painful divorce from David had put an end to the idea of Christmas as a season of goodwill. The adolescent Stephen had reacted – as he did to most pressures – by burying himself in work, and as soon as his age made it decent for him to do so, had contrived to spend Christmas away from both of his parents.

But Stephen’s life had changed. He was now married to Gaby. They had an adorable daughter Lily. And for some months Stephen had been talking in terms of ‘a proper family Christmas’. It was a prospect that filled Carole Seddon with a sense of deep foreboding.

She wasn’t sure whether knowing that Jude would also be around over this particular Christmas made things better or worse. In previous years her neighbour had been away for the duration ‘with friends’ (into details of whose identity Carole didn’t probe). That was really all that was said about Christmas. Carole would be staying in Fethering, Jude would be away with friends. And by the time the New Year started, the last thing anyone wanted to hear about was the details of someone else’s Christmas. Which suited Carole very well.

Jude was the closest the tightly buttoned Carole had to a friend, and the knowledge that she would be next door at Woodside Cottage throughout the holiday should have been cheering. But Carole had never been good at seeing the positive side of anything, and Jude’s presence in Fethering over Christmas did present her with a lot of challenging questions.

For a start, how did Jude celebrate Christmas, if at all? Carole was properly wary of her neighbour’s New Age tendencies. Would there be crystals and joss sticks involved? And then again, how much of Carole would Jude want to see over the Christmas period? She was notoriously casual about social arrangements. Already Carole had had a card through the door of High Tor, inviting her to Woodside Cottage on the Sunday before Christmas for an ‘Open House, from twelve noon until the booze runs out’. This did not accord with any of Carole Seddon’s rules for entertaining. When was she meant to arrive (assuming, that is, that she actually went)? And, even more unsettling, when was the right time to leave? She liked party hosts to be very specific about such details. ‘Drinks 6.30 to 8.30’ – you knew where you
were with an invitation like that. Even better, ‘Drinks and Canapés 6.30 to 8.30’ – then you knew you wouldn’t be getting a full meal and could have a little cottage cheese salad waiting in the fridge for when you got home.

But open house . . . that could mean anything. Was there food involved? Was there an actual sit-down meal and, if so, at what point during the time between twelve noon and the moment the booze ran out would the guests be sitting down to it? The whole thing made Carole Seddon very nervous. She couldn’t imagine a less appealing concept than that of an open house. Houses like High Tor should, in her opinion be permanently closed, with invited guests arriving by prearrangement only. If people started coming to your house any time they felt like it, the potential for embarrassment was unimaginable.

Amidst all her agonizing about the invitation, Carole wouldn’t admit to herself what was really worrying her. It was meeting Jude’s other friends. Her neighbour was currently working as a healer (a word from whose pronunciation Carole could never exclude an edge of scepticism), but it was clear that, before she moved to the middle-class gentility of Fethering, Jude had had an extremely varied and colourful life.

Carole had never quite got all the details of this life, just hints from things mentioned in passing. This was not because Jude was secretive – she was the most open of women – but because Carole always felt reticent about probing too overtly. This did not mean that she was not intrigued by her friend’s past, and she had pieced together quite a few gobbets of information about it. At various stages of her life Jude had been a model, an actress and a restaurateur. She had been married at least twice, cohabited with other men, and had a stream of lovers (more numerous in Carole’s imagination than they ever could have been in reality). But whenever Carole got to the point of asking for more flesh to be put on this skeletal history, the conversation seemed invariably to glide on to other subjects. Jude was not being deliberately evasive; she was just such an empathetic listener that people – even self-contained people like Carole – soon found themselves talking about their own lives and problems rather than hers.

But the thought of Jude’s friends was worrying. The thought of the other guests who might attend the Christmas open house. It wasn’t that Carole had never met any of Jude’s friends. The people who used her healing services often became more than clients and Carole had been introduced to some of them. She had even met one of Jude’s lovers, Laurence Hawker, who had lived out the last months of his life at Woodside
Cottage.

But Carole was worried about the ones she hadn’t met. Worried about the kind of people they might be – positive, relaxed people like Jude herself. People for whom being alive seemed part of a natural process rather than, as it often felt to Carole, a challenging imposition. People who would think that Jude’s neighbour was irredeemably dowdy, with her anti-septically tidy house, her pension from the Home Office, her Marks and Spencer’s clothes, her sensible shoes, her straight-cut grey hair and rimless glasses over pale blue eyes. Carole Seddon knew that she could never compete with the faint aura of glamour which always hung about Jude.

With that perverse vanity of the shy, she was much more worried about what people might think of her than she was inclined to show any interest in them.

The other thing that worried her was that one of Jude’s friends at the open house might ask how she usually spent Christmas. Or worse, might find out how she actually had spent the past few Christmases.

In her bleakest moments Carole thought her ideal would be never to prompt any emotion from anyone. But now her granddaughter Lily was in her life, this was becoming a difficult stance to maintain. There was one emotion, however, which Carole Seddon never wanted to prompt in anyone, and that was pity.

When she had moved permanently to Fethering, raw from her divorce and smarting from her notcompletely voluntary early retirement from the Home Office, she had known the risks of appearing pitiable. A woman the wrong side of the menopause, on her own in a seaside village . . . she was morbidly afraid of slipping into the stereotype of the solitary swaddled figure reading a magazine in a shelter by the beach.

It was to counter this danger that she had bought a dog. Gulliver was a Labrador and his original purpose had been to stop Carole from looking as if she was alone when she went for walks on Fethering Beach. She couldn’t be seen to be walking because she had nothing else to do; she was walking to exercise Gulliver. No one could pity her for that.

They could pity her, though, if they knew that she had spent the last few Christmases completely on her own.

Not that it had been too bad, from her point of view. Each year she had stocked up with nice food. Not turkey and all the trimmings, but slightly more lavish fare than what she usually ate. A bit of wine, too – the amount she drank increased each year, a direct result of her developing friendship with Jude. That, together with a good book from the library and the Christmas Eve
Times
Jumbo Crossword, was all she really needed. She didn’t watch much television, though seeing the Queen’s Speech was an essential ritual engrained from her childhood. Otherwise she might track down an obscure documentary on some minor channel, but would watch nothing that made any acknowledgement of the season. Or she would listen to the radio. She found radio mercifully less Santa-obsessed than television.

The only moment when she made any reference to Christmas was when she rang her son Stephen at eleven o’clock sharp to wish him the compliments of the season. Neither asked the other how they were celebrating, both perhaps afraid of truthful answers, but the required politesse – and even a degree of cheeriness – was maintained.

Then Boxing Day dawned; the major stress was over for another year. And on the few occasions when she was asked about her Christmas, Carole could say with complete veracity what so many people said: ‘Oh, you know, quiet.’

This year, however, things would be different. Not only was there Jude’s open house to negotiate, but also Stephen, Gaby and Lily were going to come to High Tor for Christmas Day. Carole Seddon faced the prospect with apprehension, leavened by occasional flashes of excitement.

Stephen had rung on Thursday the eighteenth of December, exactly a week before Christmas Day, to confirm arrangements. Sometimes Carole found his mannerisms distressingly like those of his father. David, despite being a control freak in many ways, had never been good at making arrangements. With him each detail of a plan had to be tested from every angle before he would commit himself to it. And in that morning’s phone call Stephen behaved in exactly the same way.

‘Mother, I thought I’d better just run through the timetable for Christmas Day,’ he said, his voice echoing David’s nervous pomposity. His calling her ‘Mother’ was a bad sign. When he was relaxed – which he had been, increasingly, since marriage and fatherhood – he called her ‘Mum’.

‘I thought we’d got it agreed,’ Carole responded. ‘I talked to Gaby about everything. Have any of the arrangements changed?’

‘No, not really, but obviously the whole schedule is kind of predicated on when Lily sleeps.’ There were office noises in the background. Phoning his mother from work showed how much importance Stephen attached to the call.

‘Yes, Gaby told me. She said Lily’s usual pattern these days is having her morning sleep around half past ten, so if you leave Fulham then she can sleep in the car . . . Fulham to Fethering an hour and a half, maybe two . . . you’ll be with me between twelve and twelve-thirty, which will be perfect.’

‘Yes.’ Her son’s silence reminded Carole uncomfortably of her ex-husband assessing a plan for flaws. ‘Did Gaby talk to you about food for Lily?’

‘Yes, she gave me a list. I’ve got lots of milk and yoghurts, Ready Brek, Weetabix, sweetcorn, frozen peas. I can assure you, Stephen, your daughter will not starve during her stay at High Tor.’

‘No, no, I didn’t think she would.’ But Stephen still sounded troubled. ‘Did you talk to Gaby about the turkey?’

‘What about the turkey?’

‘Well . . . erm . . .’

Oh no, the ‘erm’ was one of David’s favourite mannerisms. Carole was not being allowed to forget her ex-husband.

‘Stephen, if you mean whether or not Lily is given any turkey to eat, yes, Gaby and I have discussed it. I will purée some and put a little on a plate for her. If she likes it, she can eat it. If she doesn’t, fine. I won’t be insulted by Lily turning her nose up at my turkey.’

‘Oh, good.’ Still he sounded hesitant. There was something he wanted to say to her, something awkward, something he knew she wouldn’t like.

Just before Stephen put it into words, Carole realized, with a sickening sense of recognition, what it would be.

‘Mother . . . I . . . erm . . . spoke to Dad last night . . .’

‘Oh yes?’ Now she knew what was coming, Carole’s defences were quickly in place.

‘He hasn’t, in fact, finalized his own plans for Christmas.’

‘That’s no surprise to me. Your father was never great at committing himself to arrangements about anything.’

‘No. He has had an invitation to have Christmas lunch with some friends locally . . . you know, in Swiss Cottage.’

‘Good.’

‘But they’re not people he knows very well. He’s not sure whether he’ll be an imposition on them.’

‘Well, that’s for him to decide, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’ There was another long silence from Stephen’s end. Knowing exactly what he was about to say, Carole had to restrain herself from hissing out, ‘Oh, get on with it.’

‘The fact is, Mum . . .’ He was trying to soft-soap her now. ‘. . . I was just wondering . . . erm . . . whether, since we’re all going to be together on Christmas Day—’

‘No, Stephen.’

‘I mean, it’s not as if you and Dad are at each other’s throats these days, like you used to be. You were fine at our wedding and—’

‘No, Stephen.’

‘Why not?’

She wasn’t about to quantify the reasons why having David in High Tor on Christmas Day would be such undiluted agony, so she restricted herself to a third ‘No, Stephen.’