The police had now closed down the bar, restaurant, terrace and garden of the White Hart. Resident guests were being allowed to stay in their rooms, but had to keep to the front entrance and main staircase and make arrangements to drink and eat elsewhere. Just down the road The Coffee Cup on the corner was busy with festival goers leafing through Sunday newspapers. But it wasn’t the headlines they were talking about. ‘Dead on the bed’ … ‘statements from everybody’ … ‘but at the peak of his career’… ‘come off it, would he really stoop to …?’ … ‘well, the body’s gone off now, unless that was a giant breadstick I saw’ …
Back in Francis’s room, there was no sign of Priya. Just the soft leather bag she’d brought along from Room 29 earlier; inside, visible, were her washbag, a couple of colourful T-shirts and a pair of black, shiny plastic trousers. Next to this on the bed was a transparent blue scarf that – hey, hey – was exactly like the one Grace had been wearing when Francis had seen her at Wyveridge, barely two hours before. It looked like she’d already got her interview – and he hadn’t even told her his room number!
Francis found the note cards for his talk on the chest of drawers by the TV. They were exactly where he’d left them, still bound by the lilac rubber band that had once held a bundle of Peruvian Fairtrade asparagus. Was it his imagination, or were they ever so slightly out of kilter? Francis scooped the little package into his man-bag and headed off downstairs. The bar and dining rooms were empty and silent. The queue for giving statements had abated, so he went in and made the acquaintance of Detective Sergeant Brian Povey, who was sitting alone at a card table in the corner of the guest lounge.
Francis hadn’t given a police statement before. He found it an intriguingly old-fashioned procedure, with DS Povey writing notes in longhand, then compiling a draft and reading it back, before finally getting the necessary signature. It reduced what had actually happened to a few bland sentences, and how helpful would they be in catching a murderer?
At four twenty am I was woken from sleep by loud screams outside my bedroom at the White Hart (Room 21). I came out to find Ms Priya Kaur sitting on the stairs at the end of the corridor in a state of considerable distress. I comforted her in the corridor and when other hotel guests appeared took temporary charge of the situation …
Povey was throughout admirably polite and patient.
‘Funny, isn’t it,’ said Francis, at the end, ‘I’m a crime writer by profession and yet I’ve never even seen anyone give a police statement, let alone given one myself.’
‘What kind of crime writing is that then?’
Francis explained; and was then gratified to discover that not only had DS Povey heard of George Braithwaite, he was a fan. ‘I love your denouements,’ he said. ‘Never quite what you expect.’
‘I do my best.’
‘And the way,’ DS Povey went on enthusiastically, ‘that wife of his, what’s she called …?’
‘Martha.’
‘Martha, yes, keeps getting in the way with her bright suggestions. Truer to life than you’d imagine, especially round here.’ He raised his eyebrows suggestively. ‘I tell you what though. Her nibs likes your stuff too.’
‘Your boss?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m flattered.’
Really, he was. Two real police personnel, approving of his work.
‘Of course it bears no relation to the shit we really have to put up with!’ Povey laughed and Francis somehow managed a smile in return.
Outside, the uniform on the front door was the same sharp young blonde – Wendy – whom Francis had first met at five in the morning.
‘Hello again,’ he said. ‘You’re having a long day.’
‘Looks like it, sir.’
‘They’ve moved the body now, I understand.’
‘I’m afraid I’m not allowed to discuss operational details, sir.’
Francis turned right down the road out of town, which led past a row of neat bungalows and then a long, dense hedgerow, with a muddy ditch in front and an open field behind, until he came to The Sun Rising, a quaint-looking old pub whose sign featured a cheery yellow orb winking as it rose over the edge of a cartoon-book green hill. The inside lived up to the promise of the exterior: wood-panelled front and back bars, no games machines, and only discreet modernisation. Outside, picnic tables ran down a pretty garden to apple trees at the bottom. The barman was rather a splendid specimen: bald as a billiard ball, with greying mutton-chop sideboards, and an accent that was a little too strainedly posh to be convincing.
‘Yes, sir, and what can I do you for?’ he repeated to each customer in turn, like something out of a bad sitcom. Eventually he came to Francis, giving him the sort of super-polite reception that he often got from rural people, to show that whatever might be said elsewhere about the denizens of the English countryside, there was absolutely no racial prejudice here. Francis returned the compliment, giving his host the benefit of his best received English accent as he asked for a pint of ginger beer shandy.
‘That’s half ginger beer and half bitter, is it, sir?’
‘Yes, thanks.’
‘Any particular bitter?’
‘Something good and local?’
‘I’ll give you the Dewkesbury Demon then.’
‘Not too strong?’
‘Three point eight. That do you?’
‘Fine. It sounded rather stronger.’
‘Oh no, sir, he’s a relatively puny demon, the Dewkesbury one.’
Traditional taproom relations happily established, Francis ordered fishcakes and chips. If you wanted to eat outside, you were given a wooden bird with a number on it, which you placed on your table of choice; but today, he saw, there wasn’t a single one left. He was about to find a dark corner indoors, when a grey-haired couple started to get up from one of the tables down by the apple trees. Francis shot over and asked if they were leaving. They were.
‘OK if I join you?’ he asked the other pair who were sharing. Even as he noted the milky-blue eyes of the woman with tightly curled dark hair, and the muscly black guy in the yellow T-shirt beside her, his stump neatly wrapped in a tailored sleeve, he realised that this must be Anna the rejected mistress and her new boyfriend, Marvin the Marine. What a beautiful coincidence; you really couldn’t have made it up.
He put his bird down next to their drinks. ‘Thanks,’ he said. And then, after a few moments, ‘Bit packed today, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ said the woman. ‘They’ve had to close the bar at the White Hart, so I think a lot of people have decamped here.’
There was another pause. Francis contemplated the dappled sunlight filtering through his pint of shandy and Anna’s adjacent ginger beer. Then, with a jolt, he noticed that Marvin’s good hand had no thumb. Just four fingers and a mini stump.
‘Are you staying there too?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Anna replied. ‘And we were really enjoying it. Lively bar, nice restaurant, quite funky rooms, but it’s all gone a bit spooky now … after the events of last night … which we pretty much slept through, being right at the other end of the hotel.’
‘Didn’t the fire alarm wake you up?’
‘Only briefly. You?’
‘I was in a room right next to the action, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh really.’
She was as inquisitive as Francis himself. Bit by bit he fed her the key elements of the morning and his place in them, wondering if and when she would fess up to the reason for her interest. After a bit they exchanged names and Francis’s suspicions were confirmed. He shook Anna’s delicate, artistic hand and, in as natural a fashion as he could muster, Marvin’s chunkier fingers, and explained what he was doing at the festival.
‘Sorry to be so curious about everything,’ Anna said with a light laugh. ‘The thing is, I knew Bryce …’
‘Really?’
Beside her, Marvin frowned. ‘Sweetheart,’ he began, his voice a gravelly bass with a strong Midlands accent.
She put a hand on his good arm, which rippled with well-defined muscle. ‘It’s fine, Marv. No, the thing is,’ she went on, turning to Francis, ‘I was his girlfriend for a while.’
‘No wonder you’re interested …’
She shrugged. ‘So what about all these polizei everywhere?’ she asked. ‘Do they know something we don’t?’
‘Since they’re not talking to anybody,’ Francis replied, ‘my guess is as good as yours. They may be erring on the side of caution. What with Bryce being the age he was and apparently healthy. Which was the case, as far as I can understand. I mean, he didn’t have any underlying conditions that you knew about, did he?’
‘He had high cholesterol. Of the wrong sort. That he refused to even attempt to reduce. Apart from making the occasional half-hearted jog across Hampstead Heath.’
‘No special diets then?’
She laughed. ‘He used to sometimes buy that Benecol spread to put on his toast. As if that was going to make much difference to a man who ate out in restaurants all the time.’
‘What about drink?’
‘Plenty of that. Every now and then he’d have these stints of trying to give up for a month, usually in January, but then he’d get so grumpy he’d be back on it after a fortnight.’
‘Drugs?’ Francis asked.
‘Sweetheart,’ Marvin growled again.
Anna gave him a swift, uncompromising look. It was clear she wasn’t going to be told what to do by anyone, least of all her new boyfriend.
‘Bryce wasn’t a spliffer, put it that way,’ she said.
‘Something else?’
‘Maybe.’
‘I’m guessing coke.’
Her smile gave her away. ‘He didn’t do it a lot,’ she said. ‘But he wouldn’t turn it down and yes, he did buy the occasional wrap for special occasions.’
‘And that was it?’
‘He did a bit of ecstasy in the Eighties, I believe. But he’d packed all that in by the time I met him. We had a couple of Es right at the start, but then he started worrying about his age, you know, the effect it might have on his heart.’
‘Fair enough. And you’d never have put him down as the suicidal type?’
‘Bryce? God no!’
Francis laughed at her reaction. ‘Why not?’
‘Too much vanity.’
‘Don’t vain people ever kill themselves?’
‘I’m sure they do. But not here, not now. It might be a possibility if he were miles from anywhere with nobody to look after him and laugh at his jokes. But at the start of a literary festival. With a brand-new girlfriend. When he was about to give one of his talks. To a sold-out tent. I don’t think so.’
‘When it comes to his enemies among the literati,’ Francis asked, ‘can you seriously imagine any of them wanting to bump him off? Getting something into Private Eye would surely be easier.’
‘Believe me,’ Anna said, ‘there are plenty of writers who wouldn’t mind seeing Bryce dead. But no, you’re right, they’d be more likely to try and murder his reputation than murder him.’
‘Who were his particular enemies?’
‘Dan Dickson is up there. Especially after yesterday. As for the others, Bryce writes a big review every week. Many of them are negative. But that’s his schtick. I suppose the interesting thing about all this is that a literary festival is the one time where quite a few of his victims are gathered in one place. If it is murder, it’s a murderer with a sense of humour.’
‘And what about you? How did you feel about him?’
‘You think I did it!’ She laughed and glanced sideways at Marvin, whose scowl had deepened further. ‘No, I have plenty of good reasons to be cross with Bryce. But murder isn’t quite my style. I have subtler ways of operating.’
‘Such as?’
‘Never you mind.’
‘Number seventeen,’ a waitress up the garden was calling.
The arrival of his fishcakes gave Francis an excuse to change the subject to the neutral topic of pub food: how pretentious it so often was in the countryside, and how the spread of gastropubs had all but destroyed the traditional old boozer. From there they segued on to literary festivals and their proliferation. What had begun with Hay and Cheltenham had now grown to the point where there was barely a charming rural spot left in the UK without its own little litfest.
With each step away from a discussion of the newly deceased ex, Marv’s facial expression relaxed, until by the time they were onto festivals he was laughing out loud. Francis had realised that there was no way he was going to get anything significant out of Anna while her personal protection detail was around. If he wanted to know more, he would have to try and get her alone later.