The Poisoning in the Pub Read online

  The one person who might have provided the final proof of his guilt wasn’t around to give evidence. Derren Hart, aware that the police were on his trail, had gone to ground. Probably using techniques from his army training, he had simply disappeared.

  Only for a few weeks, though. Then his body was found floating in the sea off Portsmouth. He might have been helped on his way, but that could never be proved. Will Maples might have arranged from remand prison to help him on his way, but that could never be proved either. Anyway, there were enough drugs and alcohol in Derren Hart’s system for him to have fallen into the sea by accident. Or indeed on purpose. Either way, he wouldn’t be around to testify against Will Maples. Derren Hart became just another statistic among the thousands of lives destroyed by the illegal war in Iraq.

  And Will Maples became another statistic among prisoners serving life for murder. Meanwhile, at Home Hostelries the job of ‘winkling’ publicans out of properties that the company had its eyes on was handed over to younger, equally shark-like men built in the Will Maples mould.

  Needless to say, there were no charges against anyone else in the company hierarchy. Certainly not against Melissa Keats. She had done nothing wrong. If she wanted to use her spare time to help an ill-used woman get a decent divorce settlement, well, that was up to her…The Home Hostelries PR team moved in and the whole affair was glossed over. Will Maples had been a dangerous maverick, working on his own without company approval, a bad apple who would soon be very properly paying for his misdeeds.

  In the event, though, Melissa Keats did cut all ties with Sylvia Crisp, who ended up using a much less aggressive solicitor. And, since Carole Seddon had meanwhile organized a rather good one to represent Ted Crisp, the eventual divorce settlement did not do Sylvia many favours. The view of the court was that, since she had done nothing to help her husband build up the business of the Crown and Anchor, she had little claim on its profits. And Ted was able to pay her off without selling the pub.

  During the divorce proceedings, Matt decided that he didn’t like being Sylvia Crisp’s fiancé any more, and dumped her. A very embittered woman, she moved out of the area.

  Dan Poke couldn’t be proved to have done anything illegal either. He kept his directorship at Home Hostelries and continued to advise them on suitable properties to target as he trailed from pub to pub his increasingly tired stand-up material. He still maintained his Jack-the-Lad exterior, proffering cards to all the women he met. But he got very few take-ups. In some ways it was no surprise when, on the eve of his fiftieth birthday, he was found hanging in his dressing room after a gig in a shabby club in Telford.

  There was a happier outcome for Sally Monks. The ‘hot date’ she’d been preparing for when Jude rang her turned out to be more than a ‘hot date’. He was Mr Right, and by the end of the year Sally Monks was married to him.

  Kelly-Marie continued to see her adored family and dogs every Sunday. The rest of the week she managed very well on her own at Copsedown Hall. Which she would continue to do until some misguided government cost-saving exercise closed the place down.

  Meanwhile the people of Fethering went about their daily routine as they always had. There was a bit of a scandal when Greville Tilbrook left his wife and set up house with Beryl. Local feeling did not allow them to stay long near the footpath which they had fouled, and they moved soon afterwards to a village in Somerset, where Greville Tilbrook took no civic responsibilities at all.

  Another casualty of Will Maples’s campaign of harassment survived surprisingly well. Carole and Jude had reckoned Shona Nuttall would probably drink herself to death in her dusty velvet bungalow in Southwick, but to their surprise, they heard that she had sold up there. She had had her hair redyed and moved out to open a bar in Benalmadena on the Costa del Sol. There she became a great favourite with British ex-pats, round whom she frequently threw her flabby arms and with whom she was frequently photographed. And out there, quite cheerfully, she did drink herself to death.

  Her old domain, the made-over Cat and Fiddle, reopened, serving exactly the same ‘hospitality experience’ that customers would get from the Hare and Hounds in Weldisham, the Middy in Fratton or any other of the ever-increasing number of pubs in the ‘Home Hostelries family’.

  But the Crown and Anchor in Fethering did not succumb to such uniformity. It remained defiantly unconventional, reflecting the character of its landlord, Ted Crisp. Zosia ran the bar with exemplary efficiency, but still managed to get her journalism degree. And the fame of Ed Pollack’s cooking went so wide that booking a table on Fridays and weekends became quite difficult. Though Ted Crisp loathed the word, more than one newspaper review described the Crown and Anchor as a ‘gastropub’.

  For Carole and Jude life in Fethering continued much as before. Jude felt increasingly restless, sensing that she was in desperate need of new stimulus, but she did not share these thoughts with her neighbour, knowing they would only upset her. And Carole’s life was softened and enlivened by the existence of her granddaughter, who grew more beautiful with every passing day. Carole felt quite soppy about Lily, and would send the little girl frequent emailed pictures from the laptop which was now such a central feature of High Tor.

  Oh, and Gulliver’s leg healed completely.

  EOF