The Hanging in the Hotel
Read The Hanging in the Hotel Online
Authors: Simon Brett
PRAISE FOR SIMON BRETT
AND THE FETHERING MYSTERIES
‘A new Simon Brett is an event for mystery fans’
P. D. James
‘Murder most enjoyable . . . An author who never takes himself that seriously, and for whom any fictional murder can frequently form part of the
entertainment industry’
Colin Dexter,
Oldie
‘A crime novel in the traditional style, with delightful little touches of humour and vignettes of a small town and its bitchy inhabitants’
Sunday Telegraph
‘With a smidge of adultery thrown in, some wise observations about stagnant marriages, disillusioned lovers and the importance of friendship, and, of
course, plenty of whiffy red herrings, it all makes for a highly enjoyable read’
Daily Mail
‘This is lovely stuff, as comforting – and as unputdownable – as a Sussex cream tea. More please’
Brighton Evening Argus
‘Crime writing just like in the good old days, and perfect entertainment’
Guardian
‘I stayed up until three in the morning and chewed off two fingernails finishing this delightful, thoroughly English whodunnit’
Daily Mail
‘Simon Brett comes up trumps yet again . . . an excellent thriller but also a well-observed social commentary’
Irish News
‘One of the exceptional detective story writers around’
Daily Telegraph
‘[Brett is] highly commended for atmosphere and wit’
Evening Standard
‘Simon Brett writes stunning detective stories . . . I would recommend them to anyone’
Jilly Cooper
‘Simon Brett is a man of many talents . . . totally engrossing and unusually funny’
London Life Magazine
‘For readers who like their crime told elegantly and light-heartedly, with a wit which bubbles throughout plot and narrative . . . pure pleasure from
beginning to end’
Birmingham Post
‘One of the wittiest crime writers around’
Antonia Fraser
Simon Brett
worked as a producer in radio and television before taking up writing full time. As well as the much-loved Fethering series, the Mrs
Pargeter novels and the Charles Paris detective series, he is the author of the radio and television series
After Henry
, the radio series
No Commitments
and
Smelling of Roses
and the bestselling
How to Be a Little Sod
. His novel
A Shock to the System
was filmed starring Michael Caine.
Married with three grown-up children, Simon lives in an Agatha Christie-style village on the South Downs.
The Hanging in the Hotel
is the fifth novel in the Fethering Mysteries series. The ninth,
Blood at the Bookies
, is available now.
Also by Simon Brett
A Shock to the System
Dead Romantic
Singled Out
The Fethering Mysteries
The Body on the Beach
Death on the Downs
The Torso in the Town
The Hanging in the Hotel
The Witness at the Wedding
The Stabbing in the Stables
Death Under the Dryer
Blood at the Bookies
Mrs Pargeter novels
A Nice Class of Corpse
Mrs, Presumed Dead
Mrs Pargeter’s Package
Mrs Pargeter’s Pound of Flesh
Mrs Pargeter’s Plot
Mrs Pargeter’s Point of Honour
Charles Paris novels
Cast, in Order of Disappearance
So Much Blood
Star Trap
An Amateur Corpse
A Comedian Dies
The Dead Side of Mike
Situation Tragedy
Murder Unprompted
Murder in the Title
Not Dead, Only Resting
Dead Giveaway
What Bloody Man Is That? A Series of Murders
Corporate Bodies
A Reconstructed Corpse
Sicken and So Die
Dead Room Farce
Short stories
A Box of Tricks
Crime Writers and Other Animals
First published 2004 by Macmillan
First published in paperback 2004 by Pan Books
This electronic edition published 2009 by Pan Books
an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd
Pan Macmillan, 4 Crinan Street, London N1 9XW
Basingstoke and Oxford
Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-0-330-46678-3 in Adobe Reader format
ISBN 978-0-330-46677-6 in Adobe Digital Editions format
ISBN 978-0-330-46679-0 in Mobipocket format
Copyright © Simon Brett 2004
The right of Simon Brett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital,
optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be
liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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www.panmacmillan.com
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To Sophie and Jeremy
with lots of love
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.