The Hanging in the Hotel Read online

  PRAISE FOR SIMON BRETT

  AND THE FETHERING MYSTERIES

  ‘A new Simon Brett is an event for mystery fans’

  P. D. James

  ‘Murder most enjoyable . . . An author who never takes himself that seriously, and for whom any fictional murder can frequently form part of the entertainment industry’

  Colin Dexter, Oldie

  ‘A crime novel in the traditional style, with delightful little touches of humour and vignettes of a small town and its bitchy inhabitants’

  Sunday Telegraph

  ‘With a smidge of adultery thrown in, some wise observations about stagnant marriages, disillusioned lovers and the importance of friendship, and, of course, plenty of whiffy red herrings, it all makes for a highly enjoyable read’

  Daily Mail

  ‘This is lovely stuff, as comforting – and as unputdownable – as a Sussex cream tea. More please’

  Brighton Evening Argus

  ‘Crime writing just like in the good old days, and perfect entertainment’

  Guardian

  ‘I stayed up until three in the morning and chewed off two fingernails finishing this delightful, thoroughly English whodunnit’

  Daily Mail

  ‘Simon Brett comes up trumps yet again . . . an excellent thriller but also a well-observed social commentary’

  Irish News

  ‘One of the exceptional detective story writers around’

  Daily Telegraph

  ‘[Brett is] highly commended for atmosphere and wit’

  Evening Standard

  ‘Simon Brett writes stunning detective stories . . . I would recommend them to anyone’

  Jilly Cooper

  ‘Simon Brett is a man of many talents . . . totally engrossing and unusually funny’

  London Life Magazine

  ‘For readers who like their crime told elegantly and light-heartedly, with a wit which bubbles throughout plot and narrative . . . pure pleasure from beginning to end’

  Birmingham Post

  ‘One of the wittiest crime writers around’

  Antonia Fraser

  THE HANGING IN THE HOTEL

  Simon Brett worked as a producer in radio and television before taking up writing full time. As well as the much-loved Fethering series, the Mrs Pargeter novels and the Charles Paris detective series, he is the author of the radio and television series After Henry, the radio series No Commitments and Smelling of Roses and the bestselling How to Be a Little Sod. His novel A Shock to the System was filmed starring Michael Caine.

  Married with three grown-up children, Simon lives in an Agatha Christie-style village on the South Downs.

  The Hanging in the Hotel is the fifth novel in the Fethering Mysteries series. The ninth, Blood at the Bookies, is available now.

  Also by Simon Brett

  A Shock to the System

  Dead Romantic

  Singled Out

  The Fethering Mysteries

  The Body on the Beach

  Death on the Downs

  The Torso in the Town

  The Hanging in the Hotel

  The Witness at the Wedding

  The Stabbing in the Stables

  Death Under the Dryer

  Blood at the Bookies

  Mrs Pargeter novels

  A Nice Class of Corpse

  Mrs, Presumed Dead

  Mrs Pargeter’s Package

  Mrs Pargeter’s Pound of Flesh

  Mrs Pargeter’s Plot

  Mrs Pargeter’s Point of Honour

  Charles Paris novels

  Cast, in Order of Disappearance

  So Much Blood

  Star Trap

  An Amateur Corpse

  A Comedian Dies

  The Dead Side of Mike

  Situation Tragedy

  Murder Unprompted

  Murder in the Title

  Not Dead, Only Resting

  Dead Giveaway

  What Bloody Man Is That? A Series of Murders

  Corporate Bodies

  A Reconstructed Corpse

  Sicken and So Die

  Dead Room Farce

  Short stories

  A Box of Tricks

  Crime Writers and Other Animals

  First published 2004 by Macmillan

  First published in paperback 2004 by Pan Books

  This electronic edition published 2009 by Pan Books

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd

  Pan Macmillan, 4 Crinan Street, London N1 9XW

  Basingstoke and Oxford

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-0-330-46678-3 in Adobe Reader format

  ISBN 978-0-330-46677-6 in Adobe Digital Editions format

  ISBN 978-0-330-46679-0 in Mobipocket format

  Copyright © Simon Brett 2004

  The right of Simon Brett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you’re always first to hear about our new releases.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  To Sophie and Jeremy

  with lots of love

  Chapter One

  As the taxi entered the gates, Jude looked up at Hopwicke Country House Hotel, a monument to nostalgic pampering. The mansion had been built in the early eighteenth century by George Hopwicke, a young baronet who had increased his considerable inheritance by ‘the successes of his plantations in the West Indies’, or, in other words, by his profits from the slave trade. The main building was a perfectly proportioned cube, the ideal echoed in so many late twentieth-century developments of ‘exclusive Georgian town-houses’. The elegantly tall windows on the
three floors at the front of the house looked down from the fringes of the South Downs, across the bungalow- and greenhouse-littered plain around Worthing, to the gunmetal glimmer of the English Channel.

  Stabling and utility buildings were behind the house, neatly shielded by tall hedges. The hundreds of acres in which George Hopwicke had built this testament to his taste and opulence had been sold off piecemeal for development over the centuries, and at the beginning of the twenty-first century only a four-acre buffer protected the upper-class elegance of the hotel from the encroachments of the ever-expanding English middle classes, and from the encroachments of the present. Even the brochure said, ‘Leave the twenty-first century behind when you step through our elegant portals.’

  It’s remarkable, Jude thought as the taxi nosed up the drive, how much nostalgia there is in England for things that never existed. To escape the present, the English like nothing better than to immerse themselves in an idealized past. She felt sure the people of other nations – or other nations whose peoples could afford the luxury of self-examination – also venerated the past, but not in the same way. Only in England would the rosy tints of retrospection be seen through the lens of social class.

  The taxi crunched to a halt at the furthest point of the gravel arc, which went on round to rejoin the road at a second set of tall metal gates. The semi-circle of grass the drive framed was laid out as a croquet lawn.

  Jude paid off the driver, without calculating how large a chunk the fare would take out of her evening’s earnings, and hurried through the classical portico into the hotel.

  New visitors were intended to notice the artfully artless displays of impedimenta that tidily littered the hallway, but Jude had seen them all before, so she didn’t pause to take in the coffin-like croquet box with the mallets spilling out, the randomly propped-up fishing rods, the brown-gutted tennis racquets in wooden presses, the splitting cricket bats and the crumpled leather riding boots. Nor did she linger to scan the walls for their hunting prints, mounted antlers, stuffed trout or ancient photographs of dead-looking tweedy men surveying carpets of dead birds.

  Everything in the displays of which Jude took no notice supported her theory about English nostalgia. Hopwicke Country House Hotel aspired to an image of leisured indolence, set in comforting aspic somewhere between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was a world of field sports and tennis parties, of dainty teas on shaven lawns, of large slugs of brandy and soda before many-coursed dinners. It was a world in which nobody was so indelicate as to think about money, and in which all the boring stuff was done by invisible servants. It was a world that had never existed.

  But though the guests of Hopwicke Country House Hotel deep in their hearts were probably aware of this fact, like children suspending disbelief to their own advantage over the existence of Father Christmas, they willingly ignored it. None of the clientele, anyway, had the background which might qualify them to argue with the detail of the hotel’s ambiance. Real aristocrats, whose upbringing might have contained some elements of the effect being sought after, would never have dreamed of staying in such a place. American tourists, whose images of England were derived largely from books featuring Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple and Lord Peter Wimsey, found nothing at all discordant. And, though the trust-funded or City-bonus-rich young couples who made up the rest of the hotel’s guest list might occasionally assert themselves by sending the wine back, they were far too socially insecure to question the authenticity of the overall experience for which they paid so much over the odds. When they departed the hotel, they didn’t blanch as they flashed a precious-metal credit card over the bill. In that detail, the image was sustained; no one was so indelicate as to appear to think about money.

  As to all the boring stuff being done by invisible servants, here the hotel was on less certain ground. Though that was certainly the effect to which the management aspired, they didn’t have at their disposal the vast armies of staff which would have ensured the clockwork precision running of an Edwardian country house. Economy dictated that there were never really enough bodies around to do everything that was required, that the hotel’s owner ended up doing far more menial work than she should have done and that, when one member of staff failed to turn up on time, chaos threatened.

  Which was why Jude had received an emergency call from the hotel’s owner that April afternoon. There was no one at the antique reception table as she hurried past, just a tiny brass bell to summon service. Jude was making for the kitchen at the end of the hall, but noticed a door opposite the bar entrance was open, and moved towards it.

  Steep steps led down to the hotel’s cellar. The lights were on. As Jude peered down, a familiar face looked up at her.

  ‘Thank God you’ve come!’

  ‘What is it this time?’

  ‘Bloody waitresses! Stella’s cried off because she’s going out with some new man, but she promised me her daughter’d come in. Bloody kid rang in at quarter to four to say she couldn’t do it.’

  ‘Any reason?’

  ‘Didn’t say. Told me and rang off.’

  ‘Suppose you should be grateful she rang at all.’

  ‘Why? God, Stella’s going to get an earful when she next comes in!’

  ‘Don’t sack her.’ Jude’s voice was firm and cautionary. ‘You can’t afford to lose any more staff.’

  ‘No.’ Suzy Longthorne the hotel owner sighed, and held out two bottles of port. ‘Could you take these?’ She picked up two more, turned off the cellar light, came up the stairs and locked the door behind her. ‘Going to need a lot of port tonight,’ she said, and led the way through to the kitchen. Inside, she put the bottles down on the table and wearily coiled her long body into a chair.

  Even though she had thickened out around the neck, Suzy Longthorne remained a beautiful woman. It was still easy to see why she had graced so many magazine covers, been a desirable trophy for so many photographers and pop singers, been so frequently pursued and so frequently won. The famous hair, which had been through every latest style for nearly four decades, almost certainly now needed help to maintain its natural auburn, but looked good. The hazel eyes, though surrounded by a tracery of tiny lines, were still commanding. And the lithe, full-breasted figure seemed to have made no concessions to the years, though less of its toning now came from the gym than from the extraordinary effort of running Hopwicke Country House Hotel.

  Suzy was incapable of dressing badly. Other women in the same pale grey T-shirt, jeans and brown leather slip-on shoes would have looked ordinary, sloppy even. Suzy Longthorne could still have stepped straight onto a catwalk. On her even the blue-and-white-striped butcher’s apron looked like a fashion accessory.

  In fact, a perfect photo shoot could have been done at that moment – the chatelaine of Hopwicke House in her kitchen. Like the rest of the hotel, the room had been restored by expensive designers to a high specification. Without losing its eighteenth-century proportions or its wide fireplace, the kitchen had been equipped with the latest culinary devices. Hidden lighting twinkled knowingly on surfaces of stainless steel and the copper bottoms of serried ranks of utensils.

  The two women had known each other since their late teens, when both had been picked up as potential ‘Faces of the Sixties’. But Jude’s modelling career had stuttered to a quick end. Though she didn’t lack for offers of work (among other things), a couple of long photo shoots and one catwalk show had brought home to her the incredible tedium of the job and she had moved sideways into acting in the blossoming world of fringe theatre and television.

  But Jude’s relationship with Suzy had endured. Not on a regular basis – frequently years would elapse between contacts – but it was always there. Usually, Suzy was the one who contacted Jude at the end of another of her high-profile relationships. And the tear-stained famous face would be buried in Jude’s increasingly ample shoulder, while the perfidies of men were once again catalogued and bold unrealizable ambitions for a relationship-fre
e life were once again outlined.

  Suzy never seemed aware of what others had observed in their encounters with Jude – that they were the confiders, she the confidant. Jude rarely gave away much information about herself and, though her own emotional life had been at least as varied – if not as public – as Suzy’s, little of it was aired. There were friends to whom Jude did turn in moments of her own distress, but Suzy Longthorne was not one of them.

  Yet the relationship wasn’t one-sided. Suzy mattered to Jude. There was a core of honesty in the woman that appealed to her, together with a strong work ethic. And Jude was endlessly fascinated by the problems that accompanied the fulfilment of many women’s dream – that of being born incredibly beautiful.

  Suzy Longthorne had bought Hopwicke Country House Hotel with the proceeds from the breakdown of her longest marriage. For thirteen years she had stayed with Rick Hendry, as he metamorphosed from ageing rocker to pop entrepreneur to television producer, and as his tastes had shifted from the maturity of his wife to the pubescent charms of wannabee pop stars. Rick had made his name with a band called Zedrach-Kona, who produced supposedly profound sci-fi-influenced concept albums in the late seventies. The success of these, including the massive seller The Columns of Korfilia, had made him rich and famous for a year or two, then rich and forgotten. But in his fifties, Rick Hendry had found a new incarnation as an acerbic critic on Pop Crop, a television talent show which pitted the talents of manufactured boy and girl bands against each other. His own company, Korfilia Productions, made the show, and so once again for Rick Hendry the money was rolling in.

  By that time, being back in the public spotlight meant his ego no longer needed the support of marriage. The divorce settlement had been generous and Suzy had invested it all in Hopwicke House.

  The venture had started well. The conversion of the space from private dwelling to hotel had been expensively and expertly completed. The recollected glamour of its new owner gave the venue an air of chic. Well-heeled names from her much-publicized past booked in. Journalists who’d cut their cub-reporting teeth on interviews with Suzy Longthorne commissioned features for the newspapers and magazines they now edited. For a place that marketed itself as a discreet, quiet retreat, Hopwicke Country House Hotel got a lot of media coverage.