Breakfast at the White Hart was a surprisingly lively affair. Newspaper headlines were left unread as individual experiences of the night were relived and the developments of the morning discussed. Some of the guests had slept through the whole drama; others had clearly been craning out of windows to keep up. The ambulance had long gone, but there were now two police cars and a van parked outside the side door that led up to Bryce’s wing. There was blue and white scene-of-crime tape sealing off this entrance and the gate outside. A uniformed policeman was standing guard and men and women in protective white forensic suits came and went, looking like so many spacemen getting ready for a moon landing.
Twenty minutes after Francis and Priya had spotted the balding guy emerging from his car, he knocked on Francis’s door and introduced himself as Detective Sergeant Brian Povey, CID. After a quick chat with the pair of them he asked to see Priya alone.
‘The same questions all over again,’ she said on her return. ‘I think they think I did it.’
‘You were in a relationship with him and you were first on the scene,’ Francis said. ‘In police terms that puts you firmly in the frame.’
‘I suppose it does.’
Since then DS Povey had been joined by an important-looking female with a younger man in tow. ‘It’s the West Country version of Prime Suspect,’ Francis joked to Priya. Not that the policewoman looked anything like Helen Mirren. She was shorter, for a start. And younger. Early forties, Francis reckoned, with shoulder-length dark hair and a crimson lipsticked smile. Her companion looked as if he could keep her out of trouble, though; he was a burly prop-forward type, with cropped curly blond hair.
Now Francis and Priya sat together at a table in the corner of the dining room, Francis wolfing down a full English while Priya toyed with a kipper and a torn-off half of brown toast. There was a hush and the clatter of cutlery being put down. The policewoman and her sidekick were at the far end of the room, with Cathy Tyndale next to them.
‘Good morning, ladies and gents. If I could just introduce myself. I’m Detective Chief Inspector Julie Morgan and these are my colleagues Detective Sergeant Brian Povey and Detective Sergeant Steve Wright – no relation to the Radio Two DJ, I’m afraid. I’m sorry to disturb your breakfast but I have an important announcement to make. As you all, I’m sure, know by now, there was a death upstairs during the night. We have no reason to believe at the moment that this was due to anything other than natural causes, but as the gentleman in question was relatively young, and there are a couple of other factors to be taken into account, we will be keeping the part of the hotel where the fatality occurred sealed off. Once an autopsy has taken place we should have a clearer picture, but for the time being my team will be taking statements from everyone who stayed here last night. So if you could please make yourselves available to one of the officers sitting downstairs in the guest lounge we would be grateful. This is particularly important if you are checking out this morning. Any questions?’
‘Are you in fact saying that this is now a formal murder investigation?’ It was that unmistakable fluting voice: the badger-woman, Ms Westcott.
‘Absolutely not, madam. As I said, we’re keeping an open mind on the fatality until we get the results of the autopsy.’
‘Taking statements from everybody staying in the hotel doesn’t sound like a terribly open mind.’
‘At this stage, it’s a formality we need to go through. Once people have left the area, it becomes a whole lot harder to gather the information we need.’
‘So you do need to gather information. That hardly suggests a simple death from natural causes.’
‘And what about all these people popping in and out in forensic suits?’ piped up a man at a central table.
‘Do you actually suspect foul play?’ came another voice.
It was at this moment that Dan Dickson strode into the breakfast room. He was accompanied by a tall blonde in a crimson pencil skirt and fish-net tights. There was a hush. Dan’s eyes darted nervously around the occupied tables until his gaze settled on Cathy the manageress.
‘Are we too late for breakfast?’ he asked.
Involuntary laughter rippled across the room. Dan looked taken aback. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘have I missed something?’
Whatever they were saying in public, Francis knew the police had serious suspicions. Rapidly and efficiently, particularly for a Sunday morning deep in a rural area, a Major Incident Investigation was clearly under way. As he looked out of his bedroom window at half nine in the morning, he could see that the place was swarming with all the characters associated with serious crime: forensics people, photographers, scene-of-crime officers (SOCOs in the jargon). That last, grey-haired guy who had emerged from the blue BMW with a heavy black medical bag looked suspiciously like a pathologist, almost certainly from the Home Office recommended list.
For the time being Francis held off from giving his statement. It wasn’t as if he were leaving today, and he didn’t particularly want to waste good coffee-drinking time in the shuffling, politely grumbling queue that had formed outside the guest lounge downstairs; in which, at twin green baize card tables, sat two officers taking statements, WPC Wendy of earlier and DS Brian Povey. He would pop along later, when the smoke had cleared. Maybe at that point he might get a chance to talk to DCI Julie Morgan herself.
Not that any of this was Francis’s business, even if he did have the girlfriend of the deceased camping in his room. But there was no way it wasn’t intriguing. What lay behind all this activity, he wondered, as he drained his coffee cup and strolled off down the garden. Was it just a string of police officers covering their respective arses? Was it down to that bruise on Bryce’s cheek, the unusually red eyes, or even the love bite? Had somebody – Priya perhaps – said something untoward? Or maybe DS Brian Povey had turned up something else suspicious in the room?
There were lots of people who disliked Bryce, and plenty of them were here in town this weekend. But who, seriously, hated him enough to want to kill him? In a traditional murder mystery, of course, Dickson would be the main suspect, bigged up at the start, only to be replaced further on with less obvious characters, until finally the least likely person of all would turn out to have done it. But in mundane reality the idea that one writer would do away with another because of a bad review was so ridiculous that of course Dickson wasn’t in the frame. A spat with Bryce was just what he needed. A diary item in the Sentinel, followed by an amusing five minutes on the Today programme on literary feuds – it could do him nothing but good.
If George and Martha had been on the case, Francis thought, who else would they have wanted to speak to? Bryce’s two previous partners, for sure; but thinking through what Priya had told him earlier, Francis reckoned it would be interesting to talk also to her jilted boyfriend. Was being spurned in love enough of a motive for murder? In the books, yes. But in real life? Allied with something else, who knew?
Francis’s talk wasn’t until three that afternoon. Unless he was going to listen to Alain de Botton on the news or Jennifer Saunders on her life in laughs, he had the rest of the morning to kill. What the hell was the harm in satisfying his curiosity? Probably Conal O’Hare would refuse to speak to him and that would be that. But at least he would have tried.