Peter Robinson - Before the poison

‘Shush,’ I said, putting my fingers to my lips. The girls might well be slight and scarcely clad, tottering about on the icy cobbles in high heels, but their boyfriends were big strapping lads, squaddies from Catterick camp, some of them. Still, I’d have backed Melissa in a fight with any one of them. I had got used to the groups of young girls who went around most of the winter in short skirts, skimpy tops and high heels, but I could see how they might confuse a visitor. ‘It’s an old English tradition,’ I said. That covered a multitude of eccentricities.

Melissa shivered. ‘An unhealthy one, I’d say. Are we nearly there yet? I keep thinking I’m going to slip any moment and break my neck.’

‘We are.’

Word must have spread about the group of crazy Americans, because as soon as we entered the pub, the conversations quietened down and people glanced in our direction. It was a mixed crowd, some kids, but quite a few pensioners and middle-aged couples, too. I saw Wilf Pelham sitting with a group of cronies down the far end, and he waved at me. Forgiven, then. I waved back. I wanted a chat with him, anyway. There was no band, and the piped music wasn’t too loud to drown out conversations, which soon began to pick up again all around us.

‘My shout, I think,’ said Melissa with a glance towards the crowded bar and a mischievous smile. ‘Isn’t that what you Brits say?’ In only a few days, with a true actor’s ability to mimic, she had picked up plenty of British terms and could even manage a fair imitation of the Northern accent. Geordie, which you heard a fair bit around Richmond, still defeated her.

‘You don’t have to,’ I said. ‘I’ll go if you want.’

‘Why? It looks like fun. Is it unladylike?’ she mocked me, putting her hand on my arm. Then she sloughed off her coat, handed it to Dave and plunged forward into the crowd. Dave laughed, and we managed to squeeze ourselves on a bench and cadge a stool for Melissa from the next table. If she needed one, that was. She seemed to be more in the mood to play the house, and I saw her already engaging the people next to her at the bar in conversation. They were clearing a way for her to get served before them as if she were royalty. Such is the magic of the Hollywood star. Or Melissa’s charm. Pretty soon she would be playing darts with them. And winning.

She soon came back with the drinks – I’m not sure what kind of beer mine was, but it was in a pint glass and it tasted all right – and perched on the stool. Heather had said she would try to join us at some point in the evening, and I had given her a rough plan of our route. I kept checking for her out of the corner of my eye, hoping she would make it. I knew she wanted to meet Melissa, and I was looking forward to seeing her again.

As it turned out, she walked into the Castle not long after we’d got there, with that way she had, slinky but not overdone, picking me out almost immediately and smiling at me. She obviously knew some of the people at the bar, because she stopped here and there to say hello or wish them a happy new year before she joined us. I suppose in her job you got to know the locals.

There wasn’t much room, so I jumped up, gave her a quick kiss and let her have my spot. I introduced her to Melissa and Dave, then said I’d be back in a minute and went to have a word with Wilf. When Heather saw where I was going, she rolled her eyes, but it was an indulgent roll. Then she leaned forward and started chatting animatedly with Melissa, and I was forgotten. Even before I got to Wilf’s table, the two of them got up and Heather led Melissa over to some people clustered around the far end of the bar. In seconds, they were all chatting away like old friends. Pretty soon Melissa would be best friends with everyone in the pub. She was good like that. Dave, left to his own devices, was talking to the middle-aged couple sitting next to him.

‘Hello, lad,’ said Wilf. ‘Sit yourself down.’

I sat and rested my pint on the table. ‘How are you, Wilf?’

‘Fair to middling. When you get to my age you think every little ache and pain’s a herald of the end.’

‘So you haven’t got cancer?’

‘Not as I know of. Just what they call acid reflux. They stuck that tube down my throat and had a shufti, then gave me a new prescription. Them new pills do the trick.’

‘I’m glad to hear it.’

‘Isn’t that Melissa Wilde with your friend over there?’

‘I’m surprised you recognise her.’

‘I keep my eyes open and my ears to the ground.’ He gave me a mischievous glance. ‘I went to see Death Knows My Name at the Station a while back.’

I groaned and put my head in my hands.

‘Nay, lad, it weren’t so bad. Tha’s no Bernard Herrmann, mind you.’ He studied Melissa, who was talking animatedly with the people Heather had introduced her to. ‘Good Lord, if I was twenty years younger…’

I laughed. ‘More like fifty, Wilf.’

‘Hey! None of your lip. I could tell you tales would make your toes curl.’

‘I’ll bet you could. And by the way.’ I pointed to Dave. ‘That’s her husband over there.’

‘Then he’d better keep an eye on her, little bloke like that. Some of those lads up there, their reach exceeds their grasp when they’ve had a few, if you follow my drift.’

‘I don’t think he’s got anything to worry about. Dave can take care of himself.’ So can Melissa, for that matter, I might have added.

‘They’ll be friends of yours, then, from the movie business?’

‘Yes.’ I told Wilf how I had come to know Dave and Melissa through my work, then we made small talk about Christmas for a while. Wilf had spent the holidays with his daughter and son-in-law in Blackpool until their constant bickering had driven him back home. ‘I wouldn’t bother going at all if it wasn’t for the little ’uns,’ he said. ‘But a man can’t ignore his own grandchildren, can he?’

‘No,’ I said, feeling a bit guilty about not seeing my own grandchild this Christmas.

Someone brought Wilf another pint, and he took a long swig and wiped his lips with the back of his gnarly hand. ‘So how’s your investigation going?’

‘It’s not really an investigation,’ I said, feeling rather silly. ‘Anyway, whatever it is, it seems to have stalled.’

‘So where do you go now?’ Wilf asked.

I shook my head. ‘I’ve been reading her journal.’

‘Journal?’

‘Yes.’ I told him about Louise and Grace’s scant possessions. ‘It’s amazing, what she saw, what she did. She was everywhere.’

‘Aye,’ said Wilf. ‘We often forget what role the women played while the men were busy trying to maim and kill each other.’

‘It makes her seem less likely to have killed anyone as far as I’m concerned.’

‘Maybe it was a disgruntled patient,’ Wilf said. ‘I’ve told you what a sadistic bastard Old Foxy was.’

‘So he lacked a good bedside manner. That’s not unusual in a doctor, and it’s hardly a motive for murder.’

‘Depends what he did and to whom.’

‘I’ll take it under advisement.’ I sipped some more beer. ‘I’m still interested in that young lad in uniform who Grace had lunch with in Richmond shortly before it happened.’ I explained about how my original theory had been shot down by Louise Webster’s discoveries.

Wilf scratched his stubbly chin. ‘All this raking up the past has had me feeling quite nostalgic these past few weeks. You said you got the impression this was an old friend and that he would have been a young lad when the war started?’

‘Yes. If she’d had a child in, say, 1931, he would have been about eight then and twenty-one in 1952.’

‘But she didn’t.’

‘No. I was wrong about that.’