Jude sat back and took a thoughtful sip of her wine. “That’s good. And of course Matt dresses in black leather, doesn’t he? Just like the bikers do. Maybe he was behind the sudden influx of bikers into the Crown and Anchor.”
Carole was attracted by the idea. Her pale blue eyes sparkled as a chain of logic began to join up in her mind.
“So it looks,” said Jude, “like we need to make contact with the monosyllabic Matt.”
“Yes, I thought I’d do that,” said Carole boldly. “For a start, he knows who I am. Then again, if he and Sylvia are really under the illusion that Ted and I are an item…”. She didn’t manage to suppress all of her distaste for the expression “…then it might not seem odd if I were to approach him.”
“Makes sense.”
“The question is: where am I going to find him? We don’t know his surname, so the basic phone-book approach is out of the question.”
“Ted must have a number for where Sylvia’s staying. She keeps on and on about wanting him to ring her back.”
“Yes, but Ted’s in such an uncooperative mood at the moment. I tried ringing him at the Crown and Anchor earlier. Zosia said he wasn’t there, but there was a kind of hesitancy in her voice that made me think he probably was there, just not taking calls.”
“We could go back down to the pub and confront him.”
Carole looked at her watch. “Nearly closing time. We’d be lucky to make it before they locked up. Anyway, as I said, I don’t think Ted’s very likely to give us much cooperation.”
“Well, he’s got to start cooperating. Keeping things to himself isn’t doing any good. If he’d told the police about Ray being in the kitchen alone that Monday morning when the rest of them were all down in the beer cellar…”
Jude didn’t need to finish the sentence. Another silence ensued. Finally the day was beginning to cool. The slightest of breezes animated the herbal smells of Jude’s garden.
A sudden idea came to Carole. “I know! The one place I can guarantee to find Matt is when he makes the next beer delivery to the Crown and Anchor.”
“Good idea.”
“Mind you, whether Ted will even vouchsafe us that information…”
“Zosia will.” As she spoke, Jude picked up her mobile from the table and summoned a number from the memory.
The Polish girl answered. There was a very small amount of subdued mumbling in the background. It didn’t sound as though the Crown and Anchor had yet got its evening trade back. Still, it had only reopened that day.
When Jude identified herself, Zosia sounded disproportionately pleased to hear her – another indication perhaps that she’d had a long boring evening without much to do.
Jude thought it worth checking whether she could talk to Ted, but Zosia said awkwardly, “No, I’m sorry, he’s a bit…tied up at the moment.” Jude had a perfect mental image of the landlord slouched over a large Famous Grouse miming that he didn’t want to take the call.
“Oh well, you could tell me, Zosia. You remember the Monday of the food poisoning?”
“Hardly likely to forget it, am I?”
“No. But I remember you saying that the beer delivery van came that morning. I just wonder, are the deliveries always made on a Monday?”
“That’s the regular pattern, yes.” Jude nodded this information to Carole, who looked a little downcast. She’d geared herself up to a confrontation with Matt, and now it looked like she’d have to wait till Monday.
Would she still have the confidence then that she had now with a few glasses of Chardonnay inside her?
“But,” Zosia went on, “everything’s all over the place at the moment. We had our first closure, which put the beer takings down, but then we had the Dan Poke evening when we sold infinitely more than we would normally. Then they couldn’t deliver Monday, because we were closed down again…for reasons which I don’t need to spell out to you. So they’re making the delivery tomorrow morning.”
“What sort of time?”
“Usually around ten. So we can get everything sorted before we open at eleven.”
Right, ten o’clock tomorrow morning it is, thought Carole when the information had been relayed to her. My confrontation with Matt. And she still had enough Chardonnay inside her to relish the prospect.
Twenty-One
– Carole Seddon wasn’t quite so confident the following morning at about a quarter to ten as she brought her Renault to a halt in the empty car park of the Crown and Anchor. She felt exposed, and her main anxiety was that Ted Crisp might issue forth from his fortress to ask what the hell she thought she was doing there.
But he didn’t appear. There were no signs of life from inside the pub, and from the look of the boarded-up frontage it might have been out of business for some months. Carole settled down to wait. She had brought her customary Times crossword, but was too tense even to look at it. She let the paper stay in the capacious handbag, into which, after much indecision before she left High Tor, she had put another item.
Say one thing for Matt, he was good on timing. More or less on the dot often his vehicle appeared at the end of the lane that led down to the Crown and Anchor. Carole got out of her car. She hadn’t made detailed plans for the forthcoming encounter, but she had decided that the best time to catch Matt would be before he rang or knocked on the pub door. Ted’s current unpredictable responses might not make him an ideal witness to the conversation she hoped for.
She was surprised by the vehicle Matt was driving. She had expected one of those long flat-back lorries whose whole back was filled with beer barrels, but instead he was in a white van. A large white van, certainly, but nothing that could be dignified with the title of a ‘lorry’. Delivering from that somehow made the inclusion of a tray of scallops in the load look more likely.
Fortunately the driver didn’t seem in any hurry to get out of his cab. As Carole approached, she could see him hunched over the steering wheel, checking through some paperwork on a clipboard. Though his van window was open, he didn’t see her coming and looked up in surprise as she coughed to gain his attention.
It took him a moment to register where he had seen her before. Politely, she extended her hand and said, “Carole Seddon. We met at the Seaview Café.”
He did not take her hand. Instead, he sneered and said, “I remember. You’re Ted Crisp’s current bit of stuff, aren’t you?”
Though deeply offended by the description, Carole decided that this was another occasion where the impression that they were ‘an item’ might assist the cause of investigation, so she made no objection. All she said was, rather pompously, “It is not in that capacity that I have come to see you this morning.”
“Oh.”
“I met your fiancée Sylvia yesterday.”
“Really? She didn’t say nothing about that.”
“Well, that’s her business. The reason I’m here is that I wanted to talk about the delivery you made to the Crown and Anchor the Monday before last.”
“Well, you may want to talk about it – I bloody don’t!” He slammed his clipboard down on the passenger seat and got out of the van. Though he had been higher than her in his seat, he hadn’t loomed in the way he did now, standing beside her. She was very aware of the intricate tracery of tattoos on his bare forearms. “I’ve got a delivery to make. That’s what I do – I make deliveries. I don’t bloody talk about them.”
Carole decided it was the moment to take a risk. Not a decision that she made terribly often. She reached into her bag and produced the object that had caused her such soul-searching before she left the house. It was her old ID card from work, hopelessly out of date, but it did at least have a recognizable photograph (Carole Seddon hadn’t changed her hairstyle since her late teens) and the words ‘Home Office’ printed on it. She had thought it might prove just sufficient to fool someone of Mart’s intelligence.