Читать книгу The Sinking Admiral - Simon Brett - Страница 7

It’s amazing the attraction television has for ordinary people. Not watching the wretched box, but appearing on it. People seem prepared to undergo any kinds of humiliation for one brief moment of having their faces seen in the nation’s sitting rooms. And that situation’s got worse since the unrestricted spread of so-called ‘reality’ shows.

A demonstration of this syndrome was being acted out at the Admiral Byng pub in the Suffolk seaside village of Crabwell. It was a March Monday, one of those biting cold ones when it seemed that winter would never release its icy hold. The much-quoted view that in that part of Suffolk there was no protection from the cold winds off the Ural Mountains was wheeled out once again in many huddles around village fireplaces. It was a time of year when business at the Admiral Byng would normally have been even worse than usual, but on this particular March day the pub was heaving. And that was because word had got around Crabwell that a television documentary was being made there.

The programme was being fronted and produced by Ben Milne, a journalist in his early thirties, highly skilled in the business of turning cameras on people long enough for them to make fools of themselves. And then working on the footage in the editing suite to make them look even more stupid.

He had cut his teeth on an ITV series called Skeletons in the Cupboard, which tapped into the growing online enthusiasm for genealogy. But, unlike the previous, more benign BBC version of the show, whose high spot was always making the celebrity subject cry, Ben Milne’s programme basically tried to dig the dirt on the celebrity’s antecedents. Illegitimate births were gloated over, appearances in the Newgate Calendar, and transportations to Australia were welcomed with open arms. And involvement in the Slave Trade or a murder enquiry proved to be pure televisual gold. As with many ITV programmes, Skeletons in the Cupboard was a red-top interpretation of the BBC’s more sedate original.

Of course, when discussed by Ben Milne, he was keen to emphasise the series’ serious agenda, and he spoke in just the same way about the documentary he was making in Crabwell. At a time when across the country up to twenty pubs were closing every week, it was, as he would state in his sober-faced introduction, ‘important to focus on the realities of the licensed victuallers’ business, which is why I have brought my cameras to a typical, traditional English pub, the Admiral Byng in Crabwell’. He was a good-looking young man with very short hair and brown eyes, which he knew how to make look caring and empathetic. He switched on their full charm as he told each member of the Admiral Byng’s staff and the regulars how much he hoped his documentary would help save their village pub from the fate of so many others.

Amy Walpole, the bar manager, was not taken in by him. She was red-haired, freckled, tall, thin as a rake, with the kind of supple body that men drool over. And from her position behind the counter she had witnessed much drooling as evenings lengthened and her customers got more drunk. But Amy wasn’t taken in by any of it. Experiences from her varied emotional history had rendered her, now in her late thirties, immune to the manipulations of men. She no longer nurtured hopes – or at least she would never admit to anyone that she nurtured hopes – that somewhere out there was the perfect partner for her. So, while recognising that Ben Milne was attractive, she also recognised that he was not the kind of man to be trusted further than she could throw him. In fact, she thought he was probably a bit of a prick.

Nor was she taken in by his assurances that his television programme would turn around the fortunes of the Admiral Byng. Her job as bar manager made Amy Walpole all too aware of the dwindling profits of the business. Winters were always bad, but none had been as bad as the one that was currently extending its stay into March. All the factors gloomily detailed by the newspapers – general belt-tightening, ever more expensive fuel, the availability of cheap beer and spirits in supermarkets – were having their effects on the Admiral Byng. The rest of the staff weren’t aware of how close to the wind they were sailing, but Amy was kept up to date with bad news by the pub’s owner.

Geoffrey Horatio Fitzsimmons, landlord of the Admiral Byng, must have been well into his seventies. He was never referred to, incidentally, by his full name. The closest anyone got to that was calling him ‘Fitz’. But more often – and perhaps inevitably – he was known as ‘the Admiral’. Certainly that was how all the pub staff referred to him. His bluff manner and drawling vowels, together with his silver hair and moustache, his uniform of gold-buttoned blazer and cravat, gave the impression of a patrician public-school background, but nobody in Crabwell actually knew much about his past. There was also a common assumption, from the way he talked, that at one stage of his life he had been extremely rich. Some of the staff, gossiping in the kitchen, believed he still was.

Well, if that were the case, Amy Walpole knew his wealth didn’t come from the Admiral Byng. She was too close to the account books to believe that. And from conversations with the Admiral she recognised how genuinely anxious he was about the future of his business. The idea that Geoffrey Horatio Fitzsimmons had a vast fortune stashed away somewhere and wasn’t using it to bail the pub out just didn’t make sense. Apart from anything else, although the kitchen and casual bar staff had received their regular stipend, Amy Walpole herself had not been paid for three weeks. The Admiral kept saying he would regularise the situation ‘soon’, but she knew that the money just wasn’t there.

Amy liked her boss. He could be infuriating, though. He was one of those alcoholics who never appears to be drunk, but is just permanently topping himself up. His constant tipple was red wine – preferably something robust and French, he didn’t believe in all this new-fangled New World rubbish – but in the evenings he could also get a long way down a bottle of malt whisky. Laphroaig was his favourite. What effect his lifetime’s drinking had had on his health Amy didn’t like to speculate. The Admiral himself always said that if he gave up the booze his body would drop dead from sheer shock.

He was also, by her standards, something of a Luddite. He didn’t even use a mobile phone. ‘When I’m home people can ring me on the pub number,’ he always said. ‘And when I’m not home they can leave me a message. No telephone call is so important that it can’t wait a couple of hours.’

Fitz’s dinosaur attitudes applied to other technology as well. Amy had had to argue for a long time to persuade him to upgrade his old bar-room till to a more user-friendly electronic model. And her strongest powers of persuasion were also required to get him to buy a laptop and printer for the pub’s tiny office. But the idea of touching either of the devices was anathema to him. Fitz, Amy often thought, would have been happiest living in the 1950s, before any of this troubling technology had become available to the general public.

Whether he’d ever been married or in any kind of permanent relationship no one knew. Certainly there had been no romantic skirmishes since he’d moved to Crabwell. Amy knew she was an attractive woman, and long experience in the pub trade had inured her to the advances of landlords, but the Admiral had never so much as touched her on the shoulder. She was certain he wasn’t gay, but his emotional history – like many other areas of his life – remained unknown to the people of the village.

In spite of the more annoying aspects of his personality, Amy still had a fierce loyalty to the Admiral, remembering the generosity with which he had welcomed her when she first arrived in Crabwell.

She had been quite surprised, though, when he’d agreed to the intrusion into his pub of Ben Milne and the camera crew. She didn’t think he would buy into the theory of the publicity bestowed by the documentary turning around the Admiral Byng’s fortunes, and it seemed out of character for him deliberately to threaten his protective secrecy. But there was no doubt that the television people were there with the Admiral’s consent.

They didn’t see much of him, though, on that first day of filming. Running the whole width of the Admiral Byng’s first floor there was a long, low gallery. In a previous incarnation it had acted as the pub’s function room, but fewer and fewer people in the Crabwell area seemed to be having functions these days. Or maybe for weddings, birthdays, and post-funeral wakes they now booked venues slightly less shabby than the village pub.

Besides, Geoffrey Horatio Fitzsimmons had rather colonised the space for himself. Though his bedroom was on the floor above, this gallery, which he referred to ironically as ‘the Bridge’, was where he spent most of the time when he was not downstairs in the bar. And the clutter of his files and documents had spread over time until there was no surface in the room uncovered. It was from the Bridge, with its broad view across the steely expanse of the North Sea, that the Admiral conducted his business. But none of his employees was bold enough ever to ask him what that business was.

On the first day of Ben Milne’s filming at the Admiral Byng the landlord spent most of his time up in the Bridge. Amy Walpole had been kept so busy at the bar dealing with the uncharacteristic flood of custom that she hadn’t checked them out in detail, but she’d been aware throughout the day of a procession of visitors going up the side stairs to visit the Admiral. Presumably he’d made some private arrangement with Ben Milne to be interviewed another day. There was no way the journalist was going to make his film without talking to the Admiral Byng’s landlord.

Amy Walpole’s unenthusiastic attitude to the invasion of documentary-makers was not typical of the Admiral Byng’s staff and regulars. Most of them responded with the customary reaction of ordinary people to the prospect of being ‘on the telly’. They all wanted their fifteen seconds of fame.

Of no one was this truer than Meriel Dane, the queen of the pub’s kitchen. Honey blonde since anyone could remember, and always dressed a good ten years younger than her real age; she was a woman of unbridled aspiration. Nobody who didn’t dwell inside Meriel Dane’s head could be aware of the glorious futures she constantly created for herself (despite some less than successful experiences in her past). Frequently these fantasies involved impossibly glamorous men who would succumb to her substantial charms, but she had career ambitions too. Meriel Dane was convinced that she was about to become the next big thing in television chefs, so she regarded her participation in Ben Milne’s documentary as a kind of audition.

‘You see, Ben,’ she confided as she rolled out the pastry for the day’s pies, ‘I always add a couple of special ingredients when I’m doing steak and kidney. They impart a subtlety to the taste, which is commented on by many of the Admiral Byng’s customers. Satisfied customers, I should say. People who order my steak and kidney pie never regret their choice. They are always satisfied. One of my secret ingredients,’ she went on slyly, almost winking at the camera, ‘is Worcester sauce – just a little shake of the bottle into the mixture. I’m never one for measuring things too exactly. I have an instinct for the right amount. Most of my cooking is instinctive. I am rather a creature of impulse, you know.’

She leaned forward to the camera, fully aware of the amount of ample cleavage that the movement revealed. It was Meriel Dane’s view that there was a lack of glamour in the current stock of television chefs. Most of them were men, for a start – and not very attractive men at that. What British television needed was a series by someone who put the sex back into cookery. Someone remarkably like Meriel Dane, in fact.

‘And my other secret ingredient, Ben, no one suspects. But being here by the sea in Crabwell – and me being the kind of person who is really drawn to the sea, I do add a little maritime flavour to my steak and kidney. Oysters. Not a lot of them – it’s not a steak and oyster pie – but just enough to provide that little salty tang. And nobody – but nobody – can identify what gives the pie that oh so distinctive flavour.’

Meriel Dane smiled. A warm smile, promising who knew what delights ahead. She reckoned the little piece she’d just done to camera, confiding the secrets of her steak and kidney pie, would edit neatly into a show reel to engage the enthusiasm of even the most jaded television executive.

She looked at her watch and felt a little frisson, knowing the delights that lay ahead for her that evening… if she played her cards right… and Meriel Dane was always confident in her ability to play her cards right. In the meantime, flirting with Ben Milne was a reasonably pleasant way of passing the time. He was quite attractive in an angular way, and Meriel Dane always rather fancied herself in the role of cougar.

And then Ben went and spoiled it all by asking her about the budgetary restrictions on the Admiral Byng’s food operation.

Because they had driven up from London that morning, Ben Milne’s cameraman Stan, according to some abstruse ruling known only to his union, had to stop work at five for a three-hour break. He left then, and went to the B & B in a nearby village, which he’d booked in preference to one of the Admiral Byng’s bedrooms. Ben, though, was staying in the pub. Unable to shoot any further footage for the time being, he bought himself a large glass of Chilean Merlot and sat in a corner of the bar, drinking as though he’d earned it. Amy Walpole still didn’t trust him. Though without his cameraman he couldn’t actually record anything that happened, she still sensed that he was vigilant, listening out for those telling details that might contribute something to his eventual hatchet job.

But the absence of the camera had an immediate effect on the day’s business. All of those locals who kept away from the Admiral Byng most of the year but had ‘just happened to drop in’ that day suddenly vanished when there was no further chance of them being immortalised on video. Though Amy was in no doubt that a lot of them would be back the following morning.

The stresses of the day were catching up on her. She’d been so busy that she hadn’t had a chance to get any lunch and she felt headachey. What she needed was a brisk walk along the Crabwell front to blow away the cobwebs. And Ben Milne was now the only customer in the bar.

Grabbing from its hook the beaten-up Barbour jacket that Fitz had given her, Amy Walpole told him she had to go out for a while. If he needed a refill or anything else before she was back, he should call through to Meriel in the kitchen. She’d help him out.

The wind from the Urals was predictably invigorating once she got outside, but Amy was used to it. All the Crabwell locals instinctively adopted a particular stance, leaning into the wind as they walked. Amy comforted herself with the thought that at least it wasn’t raining. But the weather was dull and miserable, almost impossible to see where the slate grey of the sky met the slate grey of the sea. It was one of those Suffolk afternoons when there wouldn’t really be a dusk, just a darkening of the grey until it was imperceptibly transformed into black.

There weren’t many people about, though a little way up the beach Amy could see a group of Girl Guides struggling against the wind to erect some tents on the shingle. She remembered the girls’ leader Greta Knox telling her they had some camping exercise planned, though it didn’t look much fun on a cold March evening. She recognised Greta’s stocky outline amongst the girls, and waved vaguely in her direction. Whether Greta saw her or not, she couldn’t judge.

Amy also saw, lingering on the edge of the group, trying to avoid doing anything useful, a girl called Tracy Crofts to whom she had more than once refused service at the bar of the Admiral Byng. In spite of her protestations, Amy knew the girl to be underage. There was a general view in Crabwell that it was only a matter of time before Tracy Crofts, a seething mass of teenage hormones, came to no good.

Amy Walpole lived in a dilapidated little seafront cottage only five minutes’ walk from the pub, and she felt a strong temptation to go home, however briefly. Just to put her feet up, have a cup of tea. But she resisted the impulse. She knew how much more difficult it would be to force herself back to work if she succumbed to home comforts.

So she walked determinedly in the opposite direction from her cottage. Towards the end of the beach where, drawn up on the sand, there were a lot of boats. Including the dinghy owned by her boss. No surprise really that its name, picked out in silver stick-on letters across the stern, was The Admiral.

More of a surprise, though, that afternoon, was that the boat’s owner was standing by it, checking the cords that tied down the tarpaulin cover from which the mast protruded. He wore no overcoat, just his usual blazer.

‘Evening, Admiral,’ said Amy.

‘Hello there.’ There was an uncharacteristic air of complacency in his smile, of relief almost, as if he had just achieved something very necessary.

‘Problems with the cover?’

‘Just checking it, Amy. There have been rather too many thefts from boats on the beach here recently.’

‘Have you got much of value in there?’

‘Now that’d be telling,’ he replied with an enigmatic grin.

‘I’ve hardly seen you today.’

‘No, I’ve been busy in the Bridge.’

‘So I gathered. And you haven’t talked yet to Ben Milne, the Grand Inquisitor?’

‘No. That pleasure is scheduled for tomorrow. Seems to me to be a rather cocky young man.’

‘I think if you work in television that goes with the territory.’

He grinned, then his face clouded as he said, ‘Also, Amy, you and I need to have a long talk.’

‘Really?’ She spread her hands wide. ‘Well, I’m happy to talk now.’

‘No, no.’ The Admiral shook his grey head. ‘That will keep till tomorrow too. I have other plans for tonight.’

‘And what do they involve?’

‘Tonight, Amy, is to be my “Last Hurrah”. I plan to get extremely drunk.’

‘Oh. Drunker than usual?’

‘Very definitely.’

‘Are you celebrating?’

‘Something like that,’ replied the Admiral, with a teasing hint of mischief in his voice.

But as it turned out, he never did have an inquisition from Ben Milne. Or his long talk with Amy Walpole. Because, by the next morning, the Admiral was dead.