Paul Gitsham - The Last Straw

Stribling’s eyes narrowed and he barely glanced at the mugshot of Severino. “Nope, never seen him.”

“You seem very sure of that, Larry. Are you certain? Perhaps you could take a closer look at the photo. It’s funny how when you take a closer look at something, you notice things that you didn’t before.” He glanced meaningfully at the smouldering ashtray. “Things that you realise that you need to do something about.”

Stribling scowled, clearly uncomfortable about the idea of betraying one of his punters to the police and possibly by extension himself. Warren decided to make it easier on him. “Look, it hasn’t got anything to do with you or this bar. We’re simply trying to track the movements of this man and your pub came up as somewhere he might have stopped for a drink.”

Stribling sighed, but pulled the photo over anyway. Plucking a pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket, he squinted hard at the photo. “Eleven days is a long time ago, Chief Inspector, and Friday nights are our busiest night.” He continued looking at the photo, a frown puckering his forehead. “I have to say that he does look a bit familiar. Last Friday, you say…yeah, definitely. He was here for a few hours. I remember ’cause he sat at the bar, getting in the way of people trying to get served. I was gonna tell him to move, but he was spending a fair bit, you know. Most of the punters were students here for my Friday night drinks promotion. By the time I’ve paid the duty and VAT and taxes, the profit on each pint is two-thirds of fuck-all. He was drinking good stuff, though — probably made more profit from him than ten of those bleedin’ students.”

Warren felt a surge of excitement. “Can you remember if he was here with anyone else?”

Stribling shook his head. “On his own at the bar, like I said. Looked bloody miserable, to be honest.”

“Any idea why?”

Stribling looked at him incredulously. “Not a bloody clue. This isn’t Cheers , you know, where everyone knows your name. None of my business what’s upset him. I just serve the drinks.”

Warren persisted. “And he didn’t meet anyone here?”

Stribling shrugged helplessly. “I wasn’t really paying attention, to be honest. I was mostly serving down the other end of the bar. Although, come to think of it, he did eventually move from the bar to one of the tables in the corner. He might have gone over with someone.”

Warren struggled to hide his frustration; all he had so far was that Severino had gone to the pub a week before Tunbridge’s murder. He tried to picture the bar that night. Heaving with students guzzling pints of cheap lager, whilst Severino sat alone on a bar stool getting steadily more drunk. Warren looked at the bar again. It was long and straight, closed at both ends to deter cheeky, DIY pint-pourers, but with hinged lids to allow staff easy access to and from the area behind the bar. Two modern tills with touchscreens meant that servers didn’t have to turn their backs to the customers when they took their money. Two tills…

“Was there anybody else working that Friday?”

Stribling looked at him as if he was soft in the head. “Yeah, ’course. Can’t run a bar on my own, can I? Friday night it’s our Kel behind the bar and Dazza collecting glasses.”

“May I speak to them, please?” asked Warren, deliberately keeping his tone polite.

Stribling shrugged, then called out to the young woman with the vacuum cleaner.

“Kel!”

Nothing.

“Kel!”

Still nothing.

Marching around the bar, Stribling reached out and tugged on one of the leads. The earphone popped out and she jumped in surprise.

“Bloody ’ell, Dad! What did you do that for?”

“’Cause you’re always plugged into that sodding thing. Could be a bloody air raid and you’d never know anyfink about it.”

Or a fire alarm, thought Warren, noticing that the abandoned cigarette still seemed to be doing its thing. He thought he’d read somewhere that modern cigarettes were supposed to go out if left unattended. He wondered how long that was supposed to take.

The young woman was about nineteen or twenty, Warren guessed, although it was a bit difficult to tell under all of the piercings and white and black face make-up. He supposed she was what kids these days called a Goth or was it an emo now? Warren remembered them from when he was her age, although he and his mates had just referred to them as miserable buggers.

He forced a smile and introduced himself, showing her Severino’s photograph. As she spoke to him Stribling disappeared off to find ‘Dazza’, the third member of this family enterprise.

Squinting at the picture with the one eye that wasn’t obscured by her jet-black fringe, she nodded and smiled briefly.

“Yeah, I remember him.”. She pointed at a bar stool in front of the till nearest the front door. “He sat there all night, drinking. Didn’t say very much, just stared at his drink. One of those dark, moody Mediterranean types.” Clearly the sort of man she found attractive, Warren thought, amused.

“Did he meet anyone here?”

She frowned, then brightened as she remembered, then frowned again as the memory clearly irritated her. Warren hoped for her sake that she never took up poker; hiding what she was thinking was not one of this girl’s strong suits.

“Yeah, some blonde bimbo sat herself down next to him late in the evening. She clearly wasn’t his type-” Warren discounted this observation as potentially biased “-but she wouldn’t give up. Eventually they moved to the corner over there.” She pointed to a small, circular wooden table flanked by short, cushioned stools. “They had a couple more drinks and then left.” She sniffed her disapproval. “He was clearly pissed — she shouldn’t have taken advantage like that.”

Warren fought the urge to smile; he doubted that Severino had felt taken advantage of. And if he was, he doubted that he would care too much. Then his amusement disappeared like a puff of smoke as he considered that Severino might well have been taken advantage of in more ways than he could have imagined at the time.

“Did you know her at all?”

“No, but I know the type. Skinny, blonde, big tits.” Everything Kel wasn’t, thought Warren, feeling a twinge of sympathy for the girl.

“Can you remember any more details?”

Kel squeezed her eyes shut as she tried to remember one, single customer from several days previously. “I think she was wearing a pink top and jeans.”

“How old would you say she was? Was she tall?”

“Probably about twenty, average height.” She shook her head. “That’s all, sorry.” Warren smiled encouragingly as he handed her his card. “Thank you. If you remember anything else at all, no matter how trivial, please call me.”

As Kel returned to work Stribling reappeared, followed by a young lad of about seventeen, presumably ‘Dazza’. The lad was pale and pimply, with a spectacular case of bed-head. The T-shirt he wore above the tracksuit bottoms had clearly been slept in and was somewhat vintage, judging by the smell. The logo proclaimed that the owner was experiencing the same shit but on a different day.

“This is my Darren. We call him ‘Dazza’ or ‘Daz’, like the washing powder. We was gonna call him Ariel but that’s a girl’s name.” The pause for a laugh stretched uncomfortably.

“I suppose you could have named him Percival and called him Percil for short,” suggested Warren, unable to help himself. Everyone looked at him blankly. Warren decided not to comment that it was a ‘Bold’ choice of name for someone so unused to a washing machine.

Stribling continued, “He helps us out if it’s busy — just collecting glasses, of course,” he added hastily. Warren pushed the photo across.