Jude looked around, wondering whether the scarred man or Viggo had initiated the violence, but she could see no sign of either of them in the struggling mêlée. Like all fights, this one was ugly and incompetent, but that didn’t stop people from getting hurt.
Even before the whine of a police siren was heard, Jude had pulled her neighbour by the hand and whispered urgently, “Come on. Let’s get the hell out of here!”
“But Ted…” Carole murmured pitifully. “Ted…”
Jude dragged her away. By now the police Panda was in the car park, blue lights strobing across the chaos. “Round the back way,” hissed Jude. As they moved, they heard the first roar of a motorbike engine starting. The leather-clad brigade weren’t planning to stay to be interviewed by the police. Other engines roared and throbbed in the night air.
It was a momentary shock to realize that the motorbikes were coming in their direction. Rather than risking being stopped at the entrance to the Crown and Anchor car park, the bikers were going to make good their getaway across the dunes. Carole and Jude shrank against the back of the pub as the cavalcade thundered past. Incongruously, in their midst, also making its off-road escape, was a silver Smart car. Its tiny bubble of a body bounced dangerously on the uneven surface as it surged towards the freedom of the coast road.
From somewhere on the seaward side of the pub came the sound of running footsteps departing across the shingle at the top of the beach.
The door to the kitchen was open, letting out a very white rectangle of light on to the rough dune grass. Approaching, Carole and Jude saw there was someone standing in the doorway. As he turned to rush inside, they saw the anguish on Ed Pollack’s face. And the blood spattered down the front of his white chefs jacket.
Unblocked by his shadow, the shaft of light was stronger still. It illuminated a small body lying on its back.
The T-shirt retained its newly purchased creases, but some of the white letters of ‘Fancy a Poke?’ were now red. From Ray’s still chest protruded the white handle of a kitchen knife.
Thirteen
Carole Seddon was faced with an ethical dilemma which challenged everything she had accepted as gospel when she worked in the Home Office. She and Jude had discovered Ray’s body. They were possibly the first people to discover Ray’s body. And as such, they had a duty to tell the police what they had seen.
On the other hand, part of her – a part encouraged into unethical behaviour by Jude, who didn’t suffer from such niceties of conscience – didn’t want to tell the police anything. This part of her produced the very convincing, but casuistic, argument that the police had got quite enough on their plates with their investigation into Ray’s death. They didn’t need the interference of two middle-aged women. If someone who’d seen them at the Crown and Anchor had suggested the police should interview them, then that would be different. In those circumstances they would of course cooperate. But she and Jude didn’t want to be responsible for adding to the workload of the investigating officers.
Carole felt considerably relieved – and rather virtuous – when she had reached this conclusion.
When she and Jude discussed what they had witnessed that evening, they found that at every turn they faced unanswered questions.
Where had the bikers come from? Where did they go back to after their getaway across the dunes of Fethering Beach? Come to that, who was in the Smart car that escaped by the same route?
But the most important question of all was: who had killed Ray?
From circumstantial evidence, the obvious conclusion was that Ed Pollack was the perpetrator. The knife was from his kitchen. They had seen him covered in blood. The easy solution would appear to be that Ed Pollack had done it. But surely that couldn’t be true? For a start, what motive did the chef have?
Carole and Jude both had the feeling that the murder was part of a bigger campaign, a campaign that was being waged against the landlord of the Crown and Anchor.
Ted Crisp looked out of place in the Seaview Café. In fact, it struck Carole for the first time, he looked out of place everywhere except behind the counter of his pub. That, she suddenly realized, had been one of the problems with their brief relationship. Ted felt awkward going to restaurants for meals, he’d always rather be at his home base, but sitting at the bar of the Crown and Anchor had never been Carole Seddon’s idea of an evening out. Which was one of the many reasons why the affair was doomed to failure.
He just didn’t look right, though, sitting in a Fethering Beach café whose frontage opened on to the shingle and where hordes of holidaymakers queued up for tea, burgers and ice cream. Amid all the tanned and sunburnt skin on display, Ted Crisp had a prisoner’s pallor. But then he never did go outside the pub much. Whether entirely true or not, it was his proud boast that he’d never before set foot on Fethering Beach. And it was only twenty yards from the front of the Crown and Anchor.
But Ted Crisp couldn’t be at his home base now. The whole of the pub, including his flat upstairs, the area for the outside tables and the car park, was now a crime scene.
It was the Tuesday, and the police showed no signs of moving on their collection of white cars and vans around the Crown and Anchor. The area behind the kitchen where Ray’s body had been found was still shrouded by a white tent-like structure, and there was police tape everywhere. Fethering opinion was that the forensic team had had plenty of time to search every nook and cranny of the place, and that their continued presence meant that they had found ‘something very suspicious’. Old prejudices surfaced in conversations outside the High Street shops. The people who weren’t ‘pub people’ shared the views of Greville Tilbrook. They had never really taken to Ted Crisp. He was scruffy and was automatically assigned the role of an alcoholic. Publicans drank, everyone knew that. Then again, his manners were a bit rough. And, though he was welcoming enough – in his own way – to visitors to the pub, he never did anything to help the wider community of Fethering. He wasn’t ‘part of the village’.
Add to all that the fact that his bar manager was an immigrant…Polish…Some of their pilots were very helpful to us during the war, but…well, they were foreign. Someone Polish couldn’t be expected to understand the fine nuances of society in a place like Fethering.
Ted Crisp looked as if he’d personally heard and suffered from all of these slights and taunts. Carole had never seen him so down.
It was the first time they’d met since the confused ending of the Sunday night. And she’d had some difficulty tracking him down. The Crown and Anchor telephone had been answered by an anonymous policewoman, whose brief was clearly to give out no information about anything. And Carole had got no reply from Ted’s mobile. But then Jude had made contact with Zosia, and it was through the Polish girl they had found out that Ted Crisp was staying at the Travelodge up on the Fedborough bypass, ‘with a bottle of Famous Grouse’. Messages left there had either not been passed on to Ted or ignored by him, and eventually on the Tuesday Carole had decided she would drive to the Travelodge and force him to talk to her. Jude was busy that morning with a healing appointment for a woman with a dodgy hip, otherwise she would have gone along too.
Ted Crisp had taken a while to answer the phone call from reception, and only grudgingly agreed to come down and see Carole. He had quickly vetoed her suggestion that she should come up to his room. Maybe too many empty whisky bottles lying around?