Paul Gitsham - The Last Straw

“Oh, yeah, I remember him. Sat on his own all night before some bird suddenly appeared out of nowhere and before you know it they was off in the corner and getting all cosy.” Dazza had clearly been impressed by Severino’s quick work.

“Can you remember anything about the woman?”

Dazza didn’t even pause. “Oh, yeah, she was well fit. I served her a couple of times.” Warren pretended not to notice the lad’s slip-up, although the glare from his father suggested that words would be had about what not to say in front of police officers. Unfortunately, he couldn’t remember specifics, although he was fairly confident that he’d remember her if he saw her again. None of the bar staff knew her name or could remember seeing her before that night or since. The bar didn’t have CCTV, although there were some council-owned cameras further up the street that might have caught an image.

Thanking them for their time, Warren headed for the front door, before pausing briefly.

“Oh, by the way. You might want to deal with that sooner rather than later.” He pointed to the smoking bar towel covering the smouldering ashtray, which had now caught alight.

The next stop for Warren was Mr G’s nightclub. Warren had secured a good parking space near to the White Bear, so he decided to stretch his legs and walk to the club. At a brisk pace, he was there in just over five minutes. Even allowing for a slow, drunken stagger, it was obvious that the club was within reasonable walking distance from the pub.

Mr G’s was set slightly back off a side street and took up two floors. The ground-floor bar was already open, although the half-dozen customers visible through the floor-to-ceiling windows were sitting at small, round metal tables drinking coffee rather than beer. The neon ‘Mr G’s’ sign above the door was turned off and, instead, wooden chalk-boards advertising the soup-of-the-day and the lunch-time special flanked the entrance.

Stepping inside, Warren introduced himself to the young woman serving behind the bar and asked to see the manager. A few moments later, a youthful-looking man in a pair of light chino trousers and a pale-blue short-sleeved shirt came down the stairs. Walking briskly over to Warren without any hesitation, he stuck his hand out and introduced himself as Jack Baker. Responding to Warren’s request for a private word, he led the way up the stairs to the main club.

There was something not quite right about an empty nightclub, with the lights on in the middle of the day, Warren reflected. It seemed empty and lifeless. It reminded him of the times he’d visited Susan’s school after home-time or during the holidays. Without the crackle and fizzle of youthful energy, the building seemed almost lonely. Of course, more than one teacher had commented that the school ran a lot more efficiently without the pupils getting in the way and interrupting the paperwork.

The club was fairly straightforward and unpretentious. Most of the floor-space was given over to a large, square, empty dance floor, surrounded on three sides by a raised dais with tables and chairs. A boxed-in DJ booth faced the bar, now shuttered, that took up most of the fourth side. The room smelt faintly of stale beer and air-freshener. An elderly lady in an apron was mopping the floor by the DJ’s box.

Flanking the bar were two doors. One with a toilet sign, the other with ‘Staff Only’. Leading Warren through the second door, Baker turned right and entered an office. Much to Warren’s surprise, the office was light and airy with large windows overlooking a generously sized pub garden. Two desks that wouldn’t be out of place in a bank or a solicitor’s office occupied most of the floor-space. In the farthest corner from the door a large, steel safe, the size of a king-size refrigerator, dominated the wall. To Warren’s astonishment, the closed door of the safe was adorned with hand-painted children’s pictures and the artist responsible for the masterpieces was sitting in the corner on several sheets of newspaper cheerfully splattering paint all over another sheet of A4.

Baker smiled at Warren’s look of surprise. “Not quite what you were expecting, Detective Chief Inspector?”

Regaining his composure, Warren shook his head. “I have to say, Mr Baker, that I have been in the back offices of many pubs and clubs in my time and the word that usually springs to mind is ‘dingy’. This is somewhat different.”

Baker laughed good-naturedly. “I should hope so. I’m a businessman first and foremost, not a publican. I have a degree in business and law and spent most of the first ten years after university working for blue-chip companies in London. I’ve tried to bring some of that ethos with me to Mr G’s.”

“So how does a London businessman end up in the middle of Hertfordshire, running a nightclub?” asked Warren curiously.

Baker waved a hand vaguely in the air. “Sometimes life just leads you where you least expect it to. In London I had my own office and secretary and a view of the river, but I wasn’t really enjoying myself. My Dad, George — that’s where the ‘Mr G’ came from — ran this place for thirty years and it was just like you’d expect. Dingy. I never thought I’d ever have anything to do with it. Anyway, he dropped dead of a heart attack about five years ago and I inherited the place, just as I was starting to fall out of love with London. I was worried about Mum being all alone and I’d been rekindling an old friendship from my childhood, so I decided to jack the job in in London and come back here to run this place. I married the friend and decided I didn’t want to move away from where I grew up.

“To be honest, for the first twelve-months this place was a bloody mill-stone around my neck and I hated it. The books were a mess, the place was a dive with a real reputation as a Friday-night meat market. We had drug problems and frankly it was the sort of nightclub you’d have had to drag me kicking and screaming to on a night out normally.

“In the end, I decided enough was enough and I closed us down for two months. I sacked the door staff, who were responsible for half the drug-dealing anyway, and turned downstairs into a nice, decent bar suitable for a quiet drink or a coffee at lunchtime and a meeting place in the evening. Upstairs, I just decided to go back to basics, making the dance-floor as big as possible and concentrating on giving people what they want: decent music to dance to on the weekend and live music and comedy to listen to during the week.

“As you can see, I run this place as I would any other business. The one thing I was missing about working in London was my office. So I gutted the old office, painted the walls white instead of black, got rid of the topless calendar on the back of the door and entered the twenty-first century.” He nodded towards the toddler in the corner. “I even bring my daughter to work a couple of days a week to save on childcare. Marlene, who sits over there, was my dad’s assistant for years and I kept her on. She treats Isla here like another grandkid.” At the mention of her name, the little girl looked over and gave a big, gap-toothed smile, before resuming her painting. “I don’t think anyone expected me to succeed, to be honest, even my mum. But last year we turned a profit for the first time in nearly a decade. By the end of this year, the club will have made enough to pay off the second mortgage Dad took out on his and Mum’s house to keep this bloody place open.”

Warren was impressed and said so, before getting down to business. The contrast with Larry Stribling couldn’t have been greater. Without even being asked, Baker offered to call up the security footage of the night in question.

“One of the things I decided to change was the club’s relationship with the police. I’m not saying my old man was a crook, but he skirted the law and regarded the police as something of a hindrance rather than a partner. As a club we have a proactive approach: drug dealers are shopped immediately; under-age drinkers are photographed and banned and they can’t come back until they have proof of age; and we keep our eyes and ears open for any dodgy booze and fags and report it to the police. We’re also helping set up a zero-tolerance zone with other pubs and entertainment venues like the cinema — anybody banned from one place has their photo taken and it’s immediately circulated around everywhere else. We’ve got about two dozen people who can’t get served in any of the pubs in the scheme. Our goal is to extend the system across the town centre.”