Fethering 02 (2001) - Death on the Downs Read Online Free
Author: Simon Brett, Prefers to remain anonymous
riding boots and the odd crop, metal jelly moulds, blue and white striped milk jugs and cat-gut tennis racquets in wooden presses. Wooden-shafted golf clubs and antiquated carpenters’ tools leaned artlessly against walls. Books were randomly scattered, without dust-jackets, their covers faded reds, blues and greens. Names like John Galsworthy, Warwick Deeping and E. R. Punshon gleamed in dull gold on their spines. Tb the wall of the Snug an ox yoke and an eel trap had been fixed. Behind the bar loomed a stuffed pike in a glass case.
All of these artefacts were genuine, but bore the same relationship to reality as the log-effect gas fire did to real flames. They had no natural affinity with their environment; they had been carefully selected to create an instant ambience.
Some of them also raised logical anomalies. For a start, everything that wasn’t firmly screwed to the wall was in a glass-fronted cupboard or on a shelf out of reach. Suppose someone came into the pub and fancied reading a chapter of E. R. Punshon? They couldn’t do much about it while the volume remained three feet above their head.
The piscatorial exhibits prompted the same kind of questions. The Hare and Hounds was a good five miles from the nearest river, the Fether, which reached the sea at Fethering. So it couldn’t really be counted as a fisherman’s pub. The eel trap looked quaint and out of place. There probably were eels in the Fether, but Carole wondered whether they had ever, at any stage in history, been caught by the contraption fixed on the wall. And, though she didn’t know much about fish, she thought it unlikely that a pike would ever have lived in such a fast-flowing tidal river.
On the dot of six, Will Maples unlocked the pub’s one exterior door, and was only just back behind the bar before his first customer of the evening arrived. Red-faced, in his fifties, ginger hair turning the colour of sand. Everything about the man seemed self-consciously to breathe the words ‘pub regular’, from his bottle-green corduroy trousers, deceptively clumsy shiny brown brogues, Guernsey sweater and over-new-looking Barbour to his cheery, “Evening, Will, old man. Pint of the usual.” It was a voice that had been to the right schools, or learned to sound as if it had been to the right schools.
The man shook himself like a dog, as if to remove stray raindrops, though in fact there were none on the waxed shoulders of his jacket. He gave a quick nod to Carole through in the Snug, though with an air of puzzlement, almost of affront. How did she come to be there? He had the look of a man who prided himself on being first into the Hare and Hounds at six every evening.
“Evening, Freddie,” said Will Maples with automatic bonhomie. “How’s your week been?”
Carole corrected her surmise. It wasn’t every evening that the regular made his appearance. Perhaps just Friday evenings.
“Bloody awful,” the man called Freddie replied. “Up in the Smoke, dealing with bloody idiots all the time. Wonderful to be back down here. Minute I get off the train at Barnham, I feel my lungs opening up for the first time in a week. Bloody great to be back in Weldisham.”
On a day like this, thought Carole, in pitch darkness?
“Oh, it’s a beautiful village,” the manager agreed, in a tone that made not even the smallest attempt at sincerity. “There you are.” He placed the pint on the counter. “In a jug, as per usual.” But his next words went even further to undermine his customer’s status as a genuine ‘regular’. “Settling in all right then, are you?”
The man called Freddie raised his hand dramatically to freeze the conversation and took a long swallow from his tankard. He smacked his lips in a cartoon manner and licked the little line of froth from the upper one. “Sorry, old man. Best moment of the week. Can’t talk till I’ve done that, eh?”
He chuckled fruitily. Will Maples joined in, a meaningless echo.
“Oh,
All of these artefacts were genuine, but bore the same relationship to reality as the log-effect gas fire did to real flames. They had no natural affinity with their environment; they had been carefully selected to create an instant ambience.
Some of them also raised logical anomalies. For a start, everything that wasn’t firmly screwed to the wall was in a glass-fronted cupboard or on a shelf out of reach. Suppose someone came into the pub and fancied reading a chapter of E. R. Punshon? They couldn’t do much about it while the volume remained three feet above their head.
The piscatorial exhibits prompted the same kind of questions. The Hare and Hounds was a good five miles from the nearest river, the Fether, which reached the sea at Fethering. So it couldn’t really be counted as a fisherman’s pub. The eel trap looked quaint and out of place. There probably were eels in the Fether, but Carole wondered whether they had ever, at any stage in history, been caught by the contraption fixed on the wall. And, though she didn’t know much about fish, she thought it unlikely that a pike would ever have lived in such a fast-flowing tidal river.
On the dot of six, Will Maples unlocked the pub’s one exterior door, and was only just back behind the bar before his first customer of the evening arrived. Red-faced, in his fifties, ginger hair turning the colour of sand. Everything about the man seemed self-consciously to breathe the words ‘pub regular’, from his bottle-green corduroy trousers, deceptively clumsy shiny brown brogues, Guernsey sweater and over-new-looking Barbour to his cheery, “Evening, Will, old man. Pint of the usual.” It was a voice that had been to the right schools, or learned to sound as if it had been to the right schools.
The man shook himself like a dog, as if to remove stray raindrops, though in fact there were none on the waxed shoulders of his jacket. He gave a quick nod to Carole through in the Snug, though with an air of puzzlement, almost of affront. How did she come to be there? He had the look of a man who prided himself on being first into the Hare and Hounds at six every evening.
“Evening, Freddie,” said Will Maples with automatic bonhomie. “How’s your week been?”
Carole corrected her surmise. It wasn’t every evening that the regular made his appearance. Perhaps just Friday evenings.
“Bloody awful,” the man called Freddie replied. “Up in the Smoke, dealing with bloody idiots all the time. Wonderful to be back down here. Minute I get off the train at Barnham, I feel my lungs opening up for the first time in a week. Bloody great to be back in Weldisham.”
On a day like this, thought Carole, in pitch darkness?
“Oh, it’s a beautiful village,” the manager agreed, in a tone that made not even the smallest attempt at sincerity. “There you are.” He placed the pint on the counter. “In a jug, as per usual.” But his next words went even further to undermine his customer’s status as a genuine ‘regular’. “Settling in all right then, are you?”
The man called Freddie raised his hand dramatically to freeze the conversation and took a long swallow from his tankard. He smacked his lips in a cartoon manner and licked the little line of froth from the upper one. “Sorry, old man. Best moment of the week. Can’t talk till I’ve done that, eh?”
He chuckled fruitily. Will Maples joined in, a meaningless echo.
“Oh,
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