CHAPTER 25
Pat wasn’t entirely sure there was such a thing as a vintage gin.
An artisan gin, a nice gin, but gin was gin, surely?
Wine was subject to the vagaries of the weather, the soil, so could be improved by a good year, a delicious harvest, but a spirit was distilled in a sealed system.
It was exactly the same every single time.
But as she walked into the kitchen to meet a rather ebullient Prichard, she didn’t have the heart to disabuse him of his enthusiasm.
‘Vintage, you say? Well, then I suppose it would be rude not to have a small glass.’ She smiled as she sat down at the table, edging her laptop to one side.
‘Rude?’ declared Prichard, popping the cork and inhaling the heady aroma.
‘It would be obscene not to!’ He sighed loudly with evident satisfaction.
‘I can’t believe I found it right at the back of the cupboard, winking at me like a goddess.
’ He paused, plucking two small glasses from the shelf behind him.
‘I thought you might need cheering up, what with the art competition and your painting’s exorcism from the team photograph.
And I know how you don’t like Sunday nights. ’
‘Exorcism?’ Pat sniffed as he gave her a glass. It smelt oddly like elderly alcoholic jam. ‘Well, that’s what it felt like. It was like some sort of voodoo. A kind of excommunication.’
She took a sip and felt the strong, fiery liquid slip down her throat. Her whole body shivered briefly. It was indeed vintage stuff.
‘What did Jacqui say?’ she asked.
‘It was very long and complicated, but she didn’t want her car and the car park and the giant wheelie bins destroying the bucolic nature of all the other paintings, so she went over to Dorna’s, and Dorna did some weird computer thing, and then poof! Your painting was gone!’
‘Right,’ replied Pat, taking another swig. ‘Well, she certainly sent me packing.’
‘To Coventry, hahaha,’ Prichard laughed. It wasn’t funny.
‘Congratulations again on coming second.’
‘Oh, thank you, it was nothing.’ He smiled broadly. It clearly was something. ‘How was your weekend?’
‘Sofia’s having a baby,’ Pat announced. It sounded surprisingly emotional, momentous even, when said out loud.
‘Stone the starlings! Congratulations, Granny!’ grinned Prichard. ‘Granny!’ he giggled, mainly to himself.
‘I’m looking forward to maybe being a better granny than I was a mother.’
‘You’ll be one those proud grannies who tells everyone about their grandchild’s first steps, first words, how talented they are and how they are really, actually, very special indeed.’ He smiled. ‘You’re going to be a terrible bore!’
‘I saw Derek in the pub with another man,’ said Pat. ‘That Marcus fellow.’
‘Now that is news,’ pronounced Prichard.
She went on to describe the scene, with Marcus in his chocolate-brown shirt and matching tie, and the flirting-turned-tiff-turned-hugging.
‘They looked as if they knew each other, but to be honest, I couldn’t focus as much as I wanted to; I didn’t want Derek to see me. Luckily he was too busy giving Marcus his come-to-bed eyes. Oh, and we also found evidence that Henry was on the cliff on the afternoon of the nineteenth of April.’
‘You did!’ Prichard leant forward. ‘How?’
‘It was Sofia’s idea. We looked through all the images that were taken in Westlinke and posted that day on social media using various hashtags and things, and we managed to spot his hair and his shoulder and a sleeve.’
‘Really! Let’s have a look.’
Prichard and Pat began scrolling through the various Instagram photos taken around Birling Gap. They were all smiling faces and ice-cream cones and beaming groups with their hands pointing in the air, which was apparently the universal pose for tourists to show that they were having fun.
‘I’m much slower at this than my daughter,’ said Pat, hunched over the keyboard, peering at the screen.
‘But you have to find the hashtag Birling Gap or Seven Sisters and then scroll through. Ah! There.’ She pointed.
‘You see. There’s Henry’s dark hair and the shoulder of his suit.
A glimpse of his white shirt cuff. If you look again, there he is in the background. ’
‘So he is,’ agreed Prichard, his nose edging closer and closer to Pat’s screen. ‘You can see his nice shoes too.’
‘Oh, I missed those. You’re right. He was wearing them when they found him on the beach. The question is, what time was this? I’m not sure how any of this works really.’
‘I know, me neither,’ agreed Prichard. ‘I’m a total tech-tard. And what’s that?’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘There? On the ground?’ He pointed. Their heads moved in closer together. ‘Is that a shadow? Someone else standing next to him?’
‘Oh God!’ said Pat, flopping back in her chair and draining her glass of damson gin in one. ‘If only we knew someone who could help with all this stuff.’
‘Well …’ Prichard paused and raised an eyebrow. ‘There is someone we could call.’ He hesitated for another moment. ‘Dorna!’
Pat groaned. She admired that about Prichard: the way he stayed civil and didn’t write people off just because they’d done things he disagreed with.
He could still see the whole person, not just the offence.
It was a valuable reminder, she thought, that people weren’t all good or all bad.
However difficult she found Dorna, perhaps she needed to be a little more like Prichard sometimes.
But she wasn’t quite there yet.
‘No,’ she said flatly. ‘I don’t want that woman in my house.’
‘Even if she can help? She’s amazing with computers.’
‘Surely there’s someone else?’
‘At eight fifteen on a Sunday night?’
‘But she might have murdered Henry!’
‘In which case she can sit here and quietly incriminate herself. Come on, you’ll enjoy that. And then we can perform a citizen’s arrest in the kitchen.’
‘Dorna Braddon doesn’t do anything quietly.’
‘Well, she can noisily incriminate herself and then we can arrest her.’
‘Except obviously, on the night of Henry’s disappearance she was in the Cairngorms, at least according to the police.’
‘The choice is yours.’
It took Dorna half an hour to arrive, during which time Pat had almost worn a groove of irritation from the back door to the sink, as she paced up and down her kitchen muttering, ‘I can’t believe you made me do this.’
Inevitably, Dorna parked her enormous Audi Q9, more suited to an LA rapper than a village lane, right on the verge of pain, blocking the last sliver of evening light eking through Pat’s kitchen window.
Pat sat rigid at her pine table, breathing deeply, summoning images of calming landscapes.
The garden gate clattered open, then shut, and moments later came a hammering on the kitchen door.
‘Yoo-hoo!’ called Dorna through the letter box. ‘I bring bubbles!’
Pat opened the door slowly. ‘Dorna.’ Her voice was clipped and tense. ‘Good evening.’
‘Two bottles!’ With a shake of her bangles, Dorna shoved the bottles of Bollinger champagne straight at Pat and proceeded into the kitchen.
‘Oh,’ she sighed as she stood by the table in the blaze of a bright spot from the overhead lighting.
‘It looks bigger on the outside.’ She ran a hand through her cropped red hair as she glanced around the kitchen, then smiled at Pat.
‘Have you just moved in?’ Her hand was poised quizzically in the air.
‘Although I could have sworn you’ve been here for years. ’
‘Years,’ said Pat, and in the ensuing silence, she opened the champagne with a loud pop.
‘Fizz!’ announced Prichard. ‘Who doesn’t love that?’
He leapt into action, blowing the dust off some flutes that were lurking at the back of one of the shelves and handing Pat and Dorna one each.
‘Cheers,’ he said, clinking Dorna’s glass with his own. ‘Thank you for coming.’
‘Well, I felt a little guilty about cutting your painting out of the art club photo, to be honest,’ replied Dorna, looking at Pat.
‘So it’s good to know that you don’t bear a grudge.
’ She turned back towards the kitchen table and took a sip of champagne.
Both Pat and Prichard watched as she took in the contents of the noticeboard.
Pat’s heart sank and Prichard’s face tightened into a rictus grin.
In their haste and damson haze, neither of them had thought to take the thing down.
Dorna’s eyes moved from her own name to the mention of Boho Golf & Spa, to the death of Henry and her possible involvement with Fi and Derek and the word Swinging appearing haphazardly next to her Post-it.
Bats was written in bold marker pen, Injured hand was also on the board, as was the Fin du Monde guest house.
She drained her glass and slowly placed it back on the table.
Her cheeks were suddenly very flushed, eyes glimmering with what Pat guessed was shock and perhaps a little – or a lot of – rage.
‘Well, well, well, haven’t we got a couple of Poirots in the room!
So where have you got me? In the lighthouse with the lead piping, while swinging with Fi and eating bats?
This is madness! What are you doing? The poor man’s death was deemed a suicide.
Is this some sort of elaborate trap? A stitch-up?
’ She laughed so loudly that Dave got up from his cushion and left the room.
‘Seriously?’ Her lip curled in confused astonishment.
‘What’s going on here? What are you doing? ’
‘We’re trying to find out who murdered Henry Clayton,’ said Pat, sitting down at the table. ‘And we were hoping you might help.’
‘Why would I help you?’ said Dorna. ‘You’ve been nothing but unpleasant since the day I first met you. Bossing people around on the Downs. Shouting at them to put their dogs on leads. It’s as if you own the place!’
‘We didn’t get off to the best start, I admit,’ replied Pat, pouring herself some more champagne and giving Prichard a beseeching glance.