“Hello, darling.” Dan Poke arrived in the bar and, as he kissed Jude full on the lips, he squeezed the flesh of her waist. He confirmed she was all right for a drink – she had hardly touched hers – and moved towards the bar.
“One of the girls will take your order,” said Jude.
“Oh. Right.” He came to sit opposite her. Jude felt she had scored a small victory. Dan Poke clearly hadn’t been to the club before, and he did look slightly ill at ease in the unfamiliar environment. Jude had a minimal territorial advantage.
He was dressed in grubby jeans and T-shirt. The grey ponytail hung lankly, greasy with sweat, and there was thick stubble round the square of his beard. He’d certainly not made any effort to smarten himself up for her. Once again, Jude was struck by what an unattractive man he was.
As promised, one of the waitresses appeared and he ordered a Belgian beer. “Don’t bother with a glass, love. And, to save you asking, yes, I am Dan Poke.”
“Oh,” said the girl without interest, and returned to the bar.
“I’m surprised you don’t offer her one of your cards,” said Jude.
“Oh, come on, darling, I do have standards.”
“She looks very pretty to me.”
“I don’t mean standards about that. I mean I have standards about not handing out my cards when I’m actually on a date with another woman.”
“How very gracious of you.”
“Yeah, one of the last old-fashioned gentlemen.” He smiled what some woman must once have told him was a seductive smile. “I’m very glad you rang me.”
“Well, you interest me.”
“Yeah, a lot of women find that,” he said complacently. “And they tend to get even more interested after I’ve shagged them.”
An experiment I am not going to put to the test, thought Jude. But she said, “I found your act very interesting when I heard it in Fethering.”
“Probably a bit naughty for a sleepy little shithole like that. But I was only doing it to help out an old mate.”
“Ted Crisp.”
“Right.”
“You heard about the murder that happened that night, didn’t you?”
“Course I did. All over the bloody media, wasn’t it?”
“What did you feel about it?”
“Feel about it? Why should I feel anything?”
“Well, it did happen straight after your gig.”
“So what? Doesn’t make me responsible for it, does it? Hot night, people had drunk a lot, a fight broke out. At least, that’s how I heard it happened. Anyway, you start fighting, people are going to get hurt. Reflection of the society we live in. Binge-drinking and all that. I’m not saying it’s a good thing, but it’s nothing to do with me. That night I just done me act and pissed off before the trouble started.”
“Off to a woman in Brighton, I heard.”
“Yeah.” He smiled at her lecherously. “I’m afraid I do suffer from an overactive libido.”
“Bad luck,” Jude commiserated as though she were sharing his joke.
“Fortunately, though, I know how to get treatment for the condition.” As he said this, he placed a hand unambiguously on her thigh and moved it upwards.
Jude shuddered inwardly. He really was such a repellent little creature. She could never understand men who, in the teeth of the evidence, regard themselves as irresistible to women. Dan Poke, she felt sure, was the sort who, when she did finally express her deep lack of interest in going to bed with him, would mark her down as a lesbian. No woman of normal tendencies could resist his charms.
On the other hand, she had to admit that she had played up to his self-image. Ringing him had been tantamount to presenting herself as a piece of meat for his enjoyment. And she would probably need to maintain that front until she could get the information she wanted out of him.
Jude didn’t remove his hand, but he took it away when she asked, “Did you hear that there was another violent death in Fethering?”
“The Russian roulette bloke? Yes, I heard about it. Now you’re not going to blame me for that one too, are you? I was nowhere near the place when it happened.”
“No. I just wondered if you knew the man.”
Dan Poke shook his head vigorously; the lank ponytail flipped to one side. Was Jude imagining it, or was there a new caution in his manner? She went on, “He was in the audience at the Crown and Anchor the night you appeared.”
“So? Darling, I do a lot of gigs. They’re attended by a lot of punters. They all know what I look like. I haven’t a clue what any of them look like. People in the street often think they know me because they’ve seen me on the telly. Think they bloody own you, and all. It’s just one of the things that happens when you’re a celeb.”
“So you were never introduced to Viggo?”
“Look, what is this? Some kind of third degree? I thought you were here because you wanted a shag. Quick, uncomplicated sex. I get my rocks off, you get the thrill of shagging a celeb. Or have I misunderstood the reason why we’re meeting here?”
Jude’s cover wasn’t quite blown, but she didn’t think she could sustain the pretence much longer. So she opted for the truth. “The reason we are meeting here is that I want to talk to you about your role as a director of Home Hostelries.”
Thirty-Five
While she drank her Maipo Valley Chardonnay, Carole was kicking herself for not bringing The Times with her. She felt exposed sitting alone drinking in the Hare and Hounds. She never had thought of herself as a ‘pub person’, and doing the crossword would make her look much less awkward. Besides, that day’s was a rather difficult one. She hadn’t filled in many clues over her lunch of soup and bread and she wanted to re-engage with its intellectual challenge. But her copy of The Times was sitting on the kitchen table at High Tor.
So she sat and sipped, trying to give the impression of the kind of person whose rich and busy mental life stopped her from looking like a woman in a pub drinking on her own. And meanwhile, she observed the behaviour of the bar staff. Apart from the purple-haired one who had served her, there was another girl and two young men. The older of the two, from the way he ordered the others around, was clearly the manager. And in fact there was a sharpness, a shifty alertness about him, which reminded Carole of the previous incumbent of the job, Will Maples.
Carole decided that he was the one she should talk to. Achieving that goal meant careful management of her Chardonnay. She had noticed that the manager only served at the bar as a last resort. His juniors had first call on the customers and, only when they were all fully occupied, would he actually dispense drinks.
She watched and waited until he was free. In the meantime she took out her mobile, to give the illusion of busyness. Idly she summoned up the photographs which Zosia had taken and Jude had forwarded on.
She found the shot of the bikers watching Dan Poke’s act, the one with Derren Hart in the middle of the group. And for the first time, because she was trying to look as though she had something to do, she scrutinized all of the people in the photograph. She saw the tall man called William who had spoken to Dan Poke after the gig. The man who had been sitting drinking Belgian beer with a group of other smartly dressed young men.
And suddenly she realized where she had seen him before. Shadowed by the effects of the flash, his face had lost its chubbiness. And Carole Seddon recognized the man she had last seen some years before behind the bar of the very pub she was sitting in. It was Will Maples. The Home Hostelries manager who had disappeared after being unmasked as a drug dealer.
A new thought burgeoned in Carole’s mind, a thought that needed confirmation. And she might be able to get that confirmation from the current manager of the Hare and Hounds. Fortunately, on a hot summer evening, a lot of people relished the idea of a drink on the fringes of the South Downs, so the pub was filling up. Carole waited till all four bar staff were busy serving customers, then slurped down the remains of her drink and positioned herself behind the man who’d just been served his round by the manager.