The Hanging in the Hotel (31 page)

‘What is this investigation?’ asked Jude ingenuously. ‘I didn’t think there was any investigation to be pursued. I thought your view was that it was all
coincidence.’

‘Oh, shut up,’ said Carole.

Jude’s phone rang just after Carole had gone back to High Tor. It was Suzy with another emergency. A big lunch party and two of her regular waitresses had flu. Would Jude
mind . . .?

As she phoned for a taxi, Jude felt good. At least that particular bridge had been rebuilt. She’d never doubted it would happen in time, but was reassured to know that she and Suzy were
back on their old footing.

In spite of the bullish note on which her conversation with Jude had ended, Carole still felt restless and short-tempered. The weather didn’t help. Nor did the plaintive
padding around of Gulliver. His early morning walk had been postponed because of the rain – Carole had just taken him onto the waste ground behind the house to do his business – and he
felt aggrieved by the omission. Gulliver didn’t mind walks in the rain; he enjoyed sploshing about and rolling in puddles; it was only his wet blanket of an owner who was put off by the
thought of washing and drying him after they got back. So he was as grumpy as she was.

Carole made herself a cup of coffee she didn’t really want and sat in her front room, trying not to listen to the incessant dribbling of rain down a piece of guttering that needed mending.
The noise offended her sense of rightness. Carole Seddon prided herself on keeping High Tor in immaculate repair, and the water in the broken gutter sounded a constant reproach.

She tried to think if there was anyone she could phone up. There were Fethering people who would be perfectly happy to exchange social niceties, but she had no real reason, apart from boredom,
to call them.

She supposed she could ring Stephen. The afterglow of their lunch at Hopwicke House had faded a little, and it was down to her to maintain contact. Her conversation with the wedding-organizing
couple at the auction of promises had made her realize how ignorant she was of the basics of Stephen and Gaby’s plans. She should really ring up to show an interest. But that’d have to
be later. A call from his mother while he was at work was so unprecedented, Stephen would probably assume she was ringing to announce the diagnosis of a life-threatening disease.

There was a novel by her bed that Carole was quite enjoying, but the effort of going upstairs to fetch it seemed insuperable. She looked out of the window. The rain had to stop soon, then she
could take Gulliver on to Fethering beach and blow the grumpiness out of both of them.

Carole found she was hearing the gurgling from the broken gutter again and to block it out, picked up a copy of the
Fethering Observer
. It was the previous week’s; the next one
wasn’t due out till Thursday. She wondered how much coverage would be afforded then to the demise of Donald Chew.

Without much optimism, she flicked through the pages in search of something to divert her. The report of a recent spate of dustbin fires didn’t promise to do the trick. Nor did news of
Fethering’s plans to twin with a seaside town in Belgium. And though a headline about a pensioner being found guilty of causing unnecessary suffering to rabbits intrigued, the subsequent
story disappointed.

What stopped her was an article about Fethering town council’s successful application for a licence to hold civil weddings in the town hall. Carole did not have any plans to remarry. Nor
did she think the grey-fronted civic rectangle opposite Fethering parish church would be a sufficiently glamorous venue for Stephen and Gaby. What interested her about the article was the name of
its reporter.

She remembered sitting in Donald Chew’s office when his receptionist announced a call from ‘Mr Floyd from the
Fethering Observer
.’

The by-line on the town hall article was ‘Karl Floyd’.

Carole Seddon had no aptitude for subterfuge. She didn’t possess the skills to take on another identity or disguise her voice, but she knew a lie was necessary. While she
was in his office, Donald Chew had said that he would fix a meeting with ‘Mr Floyd from the
Fethering Observer
.’ As she waited for the phone to be answered, Carole just prayed
that the receptionist would not recognize her voice.

‘Renton and Chew,’ the enhanced vowels announced.

Too late Carole wished she’d gone out to a public phone box. The invention of the 1471 last caller identification service must have wreaked havoc with the world of espionage.

She plunged in, hoping – rightly, as it transpired – that no attempt would be made to trace her call. ‘Good morning. I’m calling on behalf of Karl Floyd at the
Fethering Observer
. I believe he has a meeting with Mr Donald Chew scheduled for this week.’

‘Well, yes, he did, but—’

‘I just wanted to confirm the time of that meeting.’

The enhanced vowels at the end of the line sounded bewildered. ‘It was for Monday.’

‘Yesterday?’

‘Yes. And since Mr Floyd didn’t come here, I assumed he’d got my message.’

Carole thought on her feet. ‘Oh yes, he must’ve done. Sorry, he’s out of the office today. I just found something about the meeting on a Post-it note on Mr Floyd’s
computer, and thought it needed action. Sorry to have troubled you.’

‘No problem,’ said the enhanced vowels, perhaps relieved at not having to spell out again the circumstances of her boss’s death.

Carole ended the call. Then, having just claimed to be ringing from the
Fethering Observer
, she rang the real
Fethering Observer
.

The lunch at Hopwicke House was part of a day-long seminar given by one of the few companies that still realized the value of lavish corporate entertaining. They were an
up-market accountancy firm, whose invitation list had only included people the capture of whose business would justify the outlay. A surprising number of these had agreed to turn up; they
hadn’t made their fortunes by failing to recognize the value of a free lunch. Each one of them had arrived determined to make no change to their existing accountancy arrangements. But they
were all duly appreciative of Max Townley’s cooking, and listened with apparent interest to the blandishments of the accountants who were trying to ensnare their business.

Because of the tight timetable to which the seminar had been planned, lunch was a relatively short break. Some wine was drunk, but not a great deal. The dining room was clear by two-fifteen;
tidying and re-laying for dinner would be complete by quarter to three.

Jude had to go to the first-floor linen room to fetch clean tablecloths. The mobile laundry service delivered everything up there – bedding, towels and table drapery.

The linen room was also the base for the chambermaids and, when the hotel had had one, the housekeeper. (As profit margins tightened, Suzy had cut the full-time post, and the housekeeper’s
duties were thereafter shared between the chambermaids or added to Suzy’s already excessive workload.) As well as stocks of linen, the room’s shelves were filled with individual packets
of soap, shampoo, shower-gel, shower-caps, teabags, instant-coffee granules, sweetener, long-life milk and cream, shoe-cleaning wipes, sewing kits and all the other impedimenta which form an
obligatory part of the twenty-first-century hotel experience – even in a country house hotel.

There was a clipboard on the wall of the linen room for the daily bedroom sheets. On these forms were three columns: for the room numbers, for guests’ names to show whether or not the room
was occupied, and for the ticks the chambermaids had to put in when the room had been cleaned and tidied ready for the next guest. A form of shorthand was used to show when beds needed new sheets
rather than just remaking, when breakages had occurred, and when maintenance work – like replacing light bulbs, retuning television sets or unblocking sinks – was required.

The clipboard gave Jude an idea. There was no fixed schedule for removing its old sheets. Often they wouldn’t be cleared until their mass became too great for the new one to be clipped in,
which was the case on this occasion. Jude flicked through and found the sheet for the Wednesday in the small hours of which Nigel Ackford had died. The ticking of the form that morning had been
erratic. With a police investigation on the premises, the chambermaids’ re-tidying of the bedrooms had had a low priority. But the names showing which rooms had been occupied were all in
place.

Pushing at the release clip, Jude slid out the relevant sheet. She folded it and put it in her pocket, with a view to checking the rooms against the Pillars of Sussex guest list at Woodside
Cottage.

Downstairs, the accountants were leading their prey to the next sales pitch in the conference suite. ‘Wish they were all like this,’ Suzy confided to Jude, as the
last guest left the dining room. ‘One of the big downturns of the hotel industry is watching customers lingering over their meals, while all you want to do is move in and clear up.’

‘Are they here for dinner?’

‘No, thank God. Tea and biscuits at five, then they’re off – the company people to plan their follow-up phone calls, and the potential clients to forget they’ve ever been
here.’

‘Does that mean you’ve got an evening off?’

‘No, but it’s not stressful. Just a private party.’

‘Oh?’

‘Kerry Hartson’s sixteenth.’

‘Amazing to think she’s that young.’

‘I know. She’s been fifteen going on twenty-five for a long time.’

‘So is it going to be a wild teenage rave here tonight?’

‘Good heavens, no. Just an elegant family dinner party. No doubt she’ll go clubbing with her mates on some other occasion.’ Suzy’s shoulders rose in an involuntary
shudder. ‘Anyway, thank God I no longer have to deal with Kerry.’

‘Why did you take her on, Suzy?’

‘Oh, she wanted to learn the hotel business. As ever, I needed another pair of hands.’

An inadequate answer, but Jude let it pass.

They were in the kitchen. The other waitresses had knocked off, and Max had gone to do whatever it is that chefs do in the afternoon – in his case, possibly practising television celebrity
faces in front of a mirror.

‘Do you fancy a coffee?’ asked Suzy.

‘Please.’

‘Come back to my place.’

Jude had been into the barn before, but was once again struck by the elegance of its decoration. As with her wardrobe, Suzy had used only the best designers; everything in the barn conversion
was minimalist and perfect.

In the kitchen she produced a couple of cappuccinos from the Italian coffee-maker, and sat down at the long wooden table. The rain had stopped ; the weather was warm enough now for the French
windows to be opened, and for the two women to look out to the rolling green curves of the South Downs, cleansed by their recent drenching.

Suzy let out a long sigh. ‘I hope things settle down a bit now. I think I’ve had more than my share of bad luck in the last two weeks.’

‘Two deaths in the hotel,’ said Jude.

‘Exactly. Two too many.’

‘And is it your view that there was a connection between them?’

Another, even longer, sigh. ‘I honestly don’t know. And I’m afraid I don’t really care. Sounds callous, but maybe I am. You have to develop a strong core of selfishness
if you run your own business. When the first death happened, I was afraid it threatened the hotel. Now . . .’ The sculpted shoulders shrugged.

‘You think the danger’s gone away?’

‘The danger of damaging publicity, yes. There are always other dangers to a business like this, mind you, so I can never relax. Recessions, lack of bookings, international crises,
Americans still pussy-footing about travelling abroad. If I want to worry, I can always find something to worry about.’

‘So why have you stopped worrying about the bad publicity?’

The hazel eyes turned curiously towards Jude. ‘I told you. The young man’s death was reported in the local paper, and Hopwicke House wasn’t even mentioned.’

‘And what about the old man’s death? Are you confident that will be discreetly reported too?’

‘Yes. I am, actually.’

‘And is that because the editor of the
Fethering Observer
and Detective Inspector Goodchild were both here on Saturday night when it happened?’

Suzy Longthorne framed her face in two hands, which she swept up through her auburn hair. ‘That may have something to do with it. Oh, stop looking at me with righteous indignation,
Jude.’

‘I wasn’t.’

‘Yes, you were. If there’s one thing my years of the so-called “celebrity lifestyle” have taught me, it’s that you need people to fix things for you. And if you get
an offer of having something fixed, then you’d be very stupid to turn it down.’

‘Even if what is being fixed for you is the cover-up of a murder?’

‘If I thought a murder had been committed, Jude, I might feel differently. But I don’t.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, really. From the moment you found that young man’s body, you have been the only person in the world who thought it was murder. Well, maybe you’ve convinced your friend
Carole too. Nobody else thinks it was anything other than suicide.’

‘Then why did they all start making excuses and fabricating alibis?’

‘For reasons of their own. For self-protection. To avoid bad publicity. Not because they thought they were murder suspects.’

‘But—’

‘It’s you who planted that idea, Jude. And all the questioning from you and your friend Carole just got people more nervous, so they started to make up new stories to get you off
their backs.’

Jude’s brown eyes returned the hazel stare. ‘Do you sincerely believe what you’re saying, Suzy?’

‘Of course I do.’ She laid her long hands palms upwards on the table, pleading. ‘God, Jude, how long have we known each other? Can’t you tell when I’m speaking the
truth?’

‘Yes. I can.’ But Jude wished she could have said it with more conviction. ‘Very well. Say Nigel Ackford did commit suicide – what about Donald Chew?’