Dead And Buried Part 18

'But it wasn't just that, was it?' asked Cooper.

'What do you mean?'

'Well, you mentioned Nancy and Maurice getting tetchy. Running a kitchen can be quite stressful anyway. If the Whartons became difficult to work with, I can see why you might have walked out on them.'

Maclennan laughed. 'I'm not some kind of prima donna, you know. I don't storm out in a hissy fit every five minutes. It was a fully thought-out decision, made in the best interests of my own career.'

'So who took over the kitchen when you left?'

'Nancy, so far as I know. She had a couple of staff to help her, but they weren't exactly qualified chefs, if you know what I mean. It's hardly a surprise that the quality of the menu nosedived. I tried to be a bit adventurous, and produce quality. They went for pub grub. What a phrase. Pub grub.'

He said it with such venom and contempt that Cooper could imagine the conflicts there might have been at the Light House while Maclennan was working there. Maurice Wharton was famously irascible a in fact, he'd made it his trademark. And Nancy was no soft touch, either.

'Do you remember the time the couple from Surrey went missing?'

'Sure,' said Maclennan. 'It was on all the news programmes.'

'You were still working at the Light House then, weren't you?'

'Yes a but you appreciate I was in the kitchens all the time? I didn't see any of the customers. At least, not until we'd finished serving and cleaning down, then I might go out into the bar for a drink to wind down.'

'Just staff in the bar by then?'

'Well, unless Maurice had let a few regulars stay for a bit of a lock-in. You know it happens.'

'Yes, everyone knows it happens,' said Cooper.

'But then it was just a few of the same old faces. I never stayed long on those nights. Not my idea of congenial company.'

The hostility in his voice sounded genuine. It was more than just the resentment of an ungrateful public that was common among people working in the hospitality and service industries. Maclennan's tone suggested that he knew too much about these particular customers personally.

But a moment later he seemed to have second thoughts. He straightened up, took a look round, stubbed out his cigarette.

'Well, it was a shame when they had to close the pub,' said Maclennan. 'I suppose they'd seen it coming for quite a while, though.'

'The Whartons, you mean?' asked Cooper.

'Yes. Well, Maurice in particular. You could see him getting more and more depressed. I reckon it was weighing on his mind for years before they eventually had to pull the plug. I mean, a man wants to believe that he can support his family and run a business properly. Maurice was a proud sort of bloke. I'm not surprised it hit him so hard.'

'You say he was getting depressed?'

'Oh, aye. Morose, he was. He'd always been such a character. Cantankerous, you'd say. Crabby and bad-tempered maybe. But a lot of it was show. He liked to live up to his reputation.'

'His image as Mad Maurice,' said Cooper.

'That's it. He loved all that. It gave him a bit of fame. He played up to it something rotten at times, winding up the tourists and so on. Regulars who knew him thought it was hilarious. "That's Mad Maurice for you," they'd say. But, well ... when the pub started to get into trouble, you could see it was more than that. Maurice lost heart all of a sudden. One day we all realised that he wasn't joking any more. He really was moody. He began to drink, too. Well, when a landlord starts to drink his own booze, it's the beginning of the end, in my view. A very slippery slope. Poor old Maurice.'

'I dare say you know Mr Wharton's health is very poor?' said Cooper.

'That's on account of the booze, though, isn't it? The booze and the stress. I couldn't say which caused which. Probably a bit of both. Like a vicious cycle.'

'Circle,' said Cooper.

'What?'

'It's a vicious circle.'

'That's what I said.'

Cooper found himself distracted by the sight of a couple of estate agents he wasn't familiar with. They didn't have offices in Edendale, so their properties were probably more on the western borders of the county.

He realised Maclennan was looking at him strangely.

'Sorry, what were you saying?'' asked Cooper.

'I was saying that you might want to talk to Josh Lane, Sergeant. He was their regular barman. The Whartons had quite a few casual staff while I was there, but Josh was full time, right up to the end. He became almost like one of the family.'

'Thank you.'

Cooper took a last look round Chapel-en-le-Frith. The men's hairdresser's was doing good business. Two women were chatting outside the post office, near a recruitment poster for Hope Valley Rugby Club. At a beauty parlour in the high street they were offering a fish foot spa treatment. Ten pounds for a fifteen-minute session.

'I can't tell you anything else,' said Maclennan. 'As you can see, I got out before it was too late. You might call me a rat deserting a sinking s.h.i.+p, I suppose. That would be fair. But if you ask me, Maurice Wharton was sinking in a sea of his own alcohol.'

16.

At the council house on the Devons.h.i.+re Estate, Nancy Wharton was on her own. She examined Cooper critically for a moment on the doorstep. He knew she would be weighing him up, placing him for what he was, but hopefully remembering him too.

She glanced then at Gavin Murfin. It had been a difficult decision whether to bring Murfin along. In many ways, Carol Villiers would have been a better choice. But Gavin had been well known at the Light House. Mrs Wharton should recognise him, even if she didn't know Cooper himself.

'Old faces,' she said. 'I suppose you want to come in.'

'Please, Mrs Wharton.'

Every house had a unique smell. Cooper never got tired of walking into someone else's home and trying to identify the aromas. Sometimes it was a mix of artificial scents a air fresheners, perfumes, furniture polish. At other times it could only be called a stench. Substances too noxious to mention oozed out of the furniture, and the carpet stuck to his feet as he crossed a room.

Here, the Whartons seemed to have brought subtle hints of the Light House with them on to the Devons.h.i.+re Estate. He couldn't quite put a name to the smells, but they were creating those momentary flashes of memory, the way scents sometimes could, being so much more evocative than the other senses.

It might be the type of furniture polish used, or the mingling of old beer and smoke that you might get used to if you'd lived with it for years. But if he closed his eyes, he could almost imagine himself sitting in the snug at the Light House. He could practically taste the beer, hear the buzz of conversation around him.

One smell in particular was teasing him. When he caught a fleeting whiff of it, Matt's face loomed up in his mind, red and sweating, with the suggestion of a s.n.a.t.c.h of conversation that he couldn't quite grasp. It was like the elusive memory of a dream that he knew was still there in his mind when he'd woken up, but which slipped away whenever he thought about it.

As a result of the sensations Cooper was experiencing in the Whartons' sitting room, Murfin was the first to speak.

'You might remember us, Nancy. We both knew Mad ... er, Mr Wharton. Sorry.'

Nancy noticed Murfin's moment of embarra.s.sment, and her face slipped into a bitter smile.

'Oh don't worry,' she said. 'I've heard it all before. Don't you think I know what people used to call him? Imagine what it was like being "Mrs Mad Maurice" for all those years.'

'I'm sorry,' said Murfin again, though it wasn't necessary and was obviously too late.

Cooper gave him a warning glance. If Gavin was going to mess up with the public, it was a different thing altogether from what went on in the office. That couldn't be tolerated.

He knew he had to tread carefully with the Whartons if he was going to get any more out of them than Diane Fry had. Questions about Maurice's tendency to alcoholism were probably out, then.

'It was such a shame about the pub closing,' he said. 'You and Mr Wharton must have been devastated.'

Mrs Wharton shrugged. 'We could see it was inevitable for a long time. We had a balance sheet like Journey to the Centre of the Earth. It looked as though we were tunnelling to Australia. You can only fall so far before you hit rock bottom.'

'But how did it happen?' asked Cooper.

'How? Well, it started with the crackdown on drinking and driving. n.o.body gets up there any other way, do they? Then there was the smoking ban in 2007. We did our best, but who wants to sit outside in this environment? Customers were getting blown away by the wind in the winter, and eaten by midges off the moor in the summer. Then the recession came along. We actually thought that might help us for a while. People staying at home for their holidays instead of going abroad, you know. What do they call that?'

'A staycation?'

'Yeah. What a load of c.r.a.p. Oh, more folk came to the Peak District, I suppose, but they weren't spending any money. Not in our pub.'

'The Light House used to have a very good reputation.'

'Oh yes. At one time Maurice Wharton was known far and wide. My husband was respected for the quality of the beer he served. Traditional ales, you know. We used to serve Hardy and Hanson, William Clarke, Marston's Pedigree. We had guest beers on draught, rotated on a monthly basis.'

'Greene King,' said Murfin.

'Timothy Taylor's Landlord,' said Cooper.

Nancy smiled again, just a little. 'All those. And we had a selection of over twenty malt whiskies. Irish and Welsh, as well as Scotch. Sales of beer declined by another ten per cent in our last year, in spite of a warm spring and a royal wedding, and all the things we thought might bring people out to the pub. The budget put duty up to nearly eight times what it is in France, and over twelve times the duty in Germany or Italy. And that's not to mention an escalator, so duty goes up two per cent more than inflation every year. It was crippling.'

For a moment Cooper had a sense of deja vu, as if he was listening to the familiar litany of complaints from farmers like his brother. Things were always bad in the farming industry. Prices were never right, costs were always too high, the weather was either too dry or too wet. Small farmers were going bust for much the same reasons that Nancy Wharton was giving him. In a nutsh.e.l.l, they couldn't make their businesses pay any more.

'We're not alone,' said Nancy. 'Not by a long way. Jobs are being lost throughout the industry. The pub trade is being decimated.'

'My colleague Detective Sergeant Fry came to talk to you about Aidan Merritt,' said Cooper tentatively.

'I can't tell you any more than I told her.'

'I'd particularly like to know about any contact Mr Merritt had with other customers.'

'You know what? Aidan kept himself pretty much to himself.'

'Could there have been anyone who had a grudge against him?'

'A grudge? Like who?'

'Ian Gullick is a name that's been mentioned.'

Nancy looked away, no longer willing to meet Cooper's eye. It was a perfectly natural reticence, he supposed. Who would want to criticise their own customers? It was a kind of loyalty a and Cooper understood loyalty.

'I wouldn't know anything about it,' said Nancy finally. 'I'm sorry, really I am. It's horrible what happened to him, but what else can I say?'

Cooper nodded. A roadblock, then. Move on.

'I understand.'

She looked at him steadily. 'And I suppose you're going to ask me about those tourists, too a like the woman did?'

'Yes, I'm afraid so. The Pearsons. They were in the Light House the night before they disappeared.'

'Yes. We went through it all with the police when it happened. They spoke to everyone who might have had any contact with them, including me. It seems I served them at the bar.'

'Yes, I've seen your statement.'

'Well, then. I don't know what earthly use it could have been. Those two people were certainly alive and well when they left the pub. What good does it do going over every minute and every second of what they did in the days before they skipped off?'

'In case someone noticed anything about them, or the Pearsons gave away a clue of some kind about what they were going to do.'

Nancy picked up a woollen sweater and pulled it around her shoulders, as if she was cold.

'Well, there was nothing. Nothing at all. For heaven's sake, I didn't have a clue who they were. They came in the pub, and they were just some tourists, that's all. We used to get hundreds of them every week. Thousands in the summer. I had no idea they were going to be in the least bit different to any other tourists. When they came to the Light House, we didn't even know their names.'

'And then there was the previous night,' said Cooper.

'What do you mean?'

'The night no one ever talked about.'

'I'm sorry, I don't understand you.'

'The night before,' repeated Cooper. 'It was the night of the Young Farmers' Christmas party.'

'Party? Oh yes, that. Of course it was. But no one ever mentioned the Pearson people being there.'

'Did you not see them?'

'Why would I? The place was packed. It was just before we closed for Christmas. On a night like that, you never really noticed anybody. It was head down over the bar, trying to remember what drinks to ring up on the till.'

'You have two children, don't you?' said Cooper.

'Yes, Eliot and Kirsten. They're seventeen and fifteen. I don't know what I'd do without them. Kirsten is at Hope Valley College. She'll be doing her GCSEs this summer. She doesn't want to stay on after that, though. She's interested in becoming a beautician or a hairdresser.'

Cooper thought she sounded vaguely disappointed.