Hanging in the Hotel , livre ebook

Canongate Books - Simon Brett

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186 pages

English

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'Crime writing just like in the good old days, and perfect entertainment' Guardian'Simon Brett writes stunning detective stories' JILLY COOPER'King of the witty village mystery' TelegraphFethering resident Jude soon regrets helping out at an event at the Hopwicke Country House Hotel. The all-male society, The Pillars of Sussex, are visiting and keep Jude up until the small hours when the last of the rowdy men goes to bed. When one guest doesn't show up for breakfast the next morning, Jude presumes he's feeling the effects of the night before and searches him out. Only to discover his body hanging from the beams of a four-poster bed. Unconvinced that this was suicide, Jude enlists the support of fellow amateur sleuth Carole to crack the case.

Informations

Publié par	Canongate Books
Date de parution	06 juin 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781786897893
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0240€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Simon Brett worked as a producer in radio and television before taking up writing full-time. He was awarded an OBE in the 2016 New Year’s Honours ‘for services to literature’ and also was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2014 he won the CWA’s prestigious Diamond Dagger for an outstanding body of work. simonbrett.com

Also by Simon Brett
The Fethering Mysteries The Body on the Beach Death on the Downs The Torso in the Town Murder in the Museum The Witness at the Wedding The Stabbing in the Stables Death Under the Dryer Blood at the Bookies The Poisoning in the Pub The Shooting in the Shop Bones Under the Beach Hut Guns in the Gallery Corpse on the Court The Strangling on the Stage The Tomb in Turkey The Killing in the Cafe The Liar in The Library
The Charles Paris Theatrical Series Dead Room Farce A Decent Interval The Cinderella Killer
The Mrs Pargeter Mysteries Mrs Pargeter’s Point of Honour Mrs Pargeter’s Principle Mrs Pargeter’s Public Relations

First published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2019 by Black Thorn, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2019 by Black Thorn, an imprint of Canongate Books
First published in 2004 by Macmillan Publishers Ltd, Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR
blackthornbooks.com
Copyright © Simon Brett, 2004
The moral right of the author has been asserted
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidentsare either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
eISBN 978 1 78689 789 3

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 commandin