The Hanging in the Hotel (3 page)

‘Anything you can talk about? Want to talk about?’

‘Some things, maybe. Certainly this.’

From a pocket in her apron, Suzy extracted an envelope. It bore the Hopwicke House crest, but no name, address or stamp. The back had not been sealed, just tucked in, and the envelope was
slightly bent from its sojourn in the apron.

‘Kerry found it in one of the rooms she was checking. She said she opened it because she thought there might be a tip inside . . . though I think she was just being nosy.’

Jude picked up the envelope. ‘May I?’

Her friend gave a defeated nod.

There was only one sheet of paper inside. Of the same quality as the envelope, again it bore the Hopwicke House crest. Centred on the page were three lines of printed text.

The phone call had disturbed Carole Seddon. Her life was rigidly compartmentalized, and many of its compartments had, she hoped, been sealed up for permanent storage. To have
one of those old boxes opened threatened her hard-won equilibrium.

Having retired from the Home Office early (and the earliness still rankled), moving with her Labrador Gulliver to a house called High Tor in the seaside village of Fethering had seemed an
eminently sensible solution to the problem posed by the rest of her life. And, though the arrival of her next-door neighbour had added extra dimensions to that life, in her more po-faced moods
Carole could still feel nostalgic for the acceptable dullness of Fethering pre-Jude.

There was a sharp division in Carole Seddon’s mind between the life she had lived in London and now lived in West Sussex. Although she was happy to discuss her career as a civil servant,
she had kept few London friends, and never talked about her personal life. Jude was one of the very few people in Fethering who knew her neighbour had once been married and was a mother.

Had the phone call come from David, Carole would have been less flustered. Her relationship with her ex-husband had now settled down to something totally inert, its only remarkable feature being
the fact that two people with so little in common had ever spent time together. Mutual financial interests, or news of long-lost relatives’ deaths, necessitated occasional phone calls, which
were politely conducted without warmth, but without animosity.

It was Stephen, however, who had rung Carole that evening, and she wasn’t so sure what her relationship with her son had settled down to. On the rare occasions when she could no longer
keep the lid on that particular compartment battened down, its contents prompted a mix of unwelcome emotions. She felt guilty for her lack of maternal instinct. Stephen’s birth had been a
profound shock to her, shattering the control which up until then she had exercised over all aspects of her life. A woman who indulged in any kind of self-analysis might have deduced she had
experienced post-natal depression, but for Carole Seddon that was territory into which she did not allow her mind to stray. She had been brought up to believe that giving in to mental illness was
self-indulgent. Life was for getting on with.

All she knew was that, from the start, Stephen had represented a challenge rather than a blessing. She could not fault herself on the meticulous attention she had given to his upbringing, but
she knew she had never felt for him that instinctive love about which so many parents wax lyrical.

So when, as an adult, Stephen drifted further away from her, Carole felt no extra guilt, no regret, possibly even an inadmissible degree of relief.

They never lost touch. Present-givings at Christmas and birthdays were meticulously observed. They rarely met in London, but at least twice a year Stephen would come down to the Fethering area
and take his mother out for lunch. The meals were eaten in anonymous seaside restaurants or pubs, and passed off amiably enough.

On these occasions Carole would say the minimum about her local doings, but Stephen seemed quite happy to monopolize the conversation. He talked almost exclusively about his work, which involved
computers and money in a combination his mother never quite managed to grasp. She should have taken more interest when he first started his economics course at Nottingham University; then maybe she
would have been able to follow the subsequent progress of his career. As it was, when they met she felt increasingly like someone at a party who hadn’t caught the name of the person to whom
they were talking initially, and had left it too late to ask.

So, if a question about their relationship had been put to them, both Carole and Stephen would have said they ‘got on’. In spite of the divorce, theirs could by no means be
classified as a ‘dysfunctional’ family; it was just one that lacked spontaneous affection.

Inside Carole grew the suspicion, which she was unable to voice – even to herself – that the entire contents of her son’s gene-pool derived from his father, and that Stephen
Seddon was, in fact, a deeply boring man.

But exciting things happen even to boring men, and that evening Carole’s son had had exciting news to impart.

‘Mother . . .’ he’d said. As a child, he’d always called her ‘Mummy’. When he left for university, the word seemed to embarrass him. ‘Mother’ was
safer, less intimate. He’d stuck with it.

‘Mother, I’m engaged to be married.’ The wording, too, seemed formal, distancing.

It was the last thing Carole had been expecting. For Stephen to ring was unusual enough; for him to ring with anything to say beyond vague pleasantries was unheard of. ‘Ah,’ she had
responded, caught on the hop. ‘Wonderful.’

Funny, she’d never really thought of her son as having a sexual identity. He’d certainly never brought any girls home. Though maybe, given the state of his parents’ marriage,
he might have considered that an unnecessarily risky procedure.

‘Her name’s Gaby. I met her through work.’

‘And what work is that? Remind me again.’ Of course she didn’t say the words, but Carole was surprised how readily they came into her mind. The unspoken response struck her as
funny, and she knew it would have struck Jude as funny too.

She managed to come up with a more socially acceptable, ‘So how long have you known each other?’

‘Three years. But we’ve only been going out together for the last seven months.’ Stephen spoke of his fiancée with exactly the same seriousness as he did about the work
that Carole didn’t understand.

‘Does she do the same sort of thing as you do? Is she in the same company?’ Whatever that’s called.

‘Oh no, no, she was a client. We set up a financing package for the agency she works for,’ he continued, confusing his mother even more. She understood the individual words; they
just didn’t seem to link together into anything that made sense.

‘Ah.’ Carole tried desperately to think what potential mothers-in-law were supposed to say in these circumstances. ‘So have you thought yet about when you’re going to get
married?’

‘September the fourteenth,’ her son replied, surprisingly specific.

‘Well, that sounds fine.’

‘It fits in with Gaby’s parents. They always spend August in the South of France.’

Oh yes, of course. The fiancée would have parents. Presumably at some point Carole would have to meet them. She shrank instinctively from the thought of contact with these unknown people.
If their daughter was called Gaby, and they spent their summers in the South of France, then perhaps they weren’t even British?

‘Also,’ Stephen went on, ‘that date suits Dad fine.’

Carole was shocked by how much that hurt. Not just Stephen continuing to call David ‘Dad’ while she had been relegated to ‘Mother’, but the implication of her
ex-husband’s complicity in her son’s life. David had been told about the wedding before she had. He’d probably met Gaby. They all lived in London, after all. (At least, presumably
Gaby lived in London.) Perhaps David was regularly included in social excursions with the young couple.

Her marriage, the event Carole thought she had locked away for ever, was evidently still capable of breaking out and reviving her pain.

‘I’d like you to meet Gaby,’ Stephen pressed on doggedly.

Carole felt new guilt. She should have said that before he did. ‘I’d love to meet Gaby soon’ – that’s what she should have said. And yet, in the shock and smarting
from the hurt, she was forgetting even her most basic good manners.

‘Oh yes, I’d love that!’ Trying to make up the lost ground, she only managed to sound over-effusive.

‘We want to come down the weekend after next.’ As her son spoke, Carole realized he was following an agenda. His and Gaby’s lives between now and the wedding were rigorously
planned. Telling his mother the news and introducing her to his bride-to-be were duties that had to be performed and fitted into their schedule. ‘We’ve got to be in the area.’

‘Oh, why?’

No answer could have surprised her more than the one Stephen came up with. ‘We’re looking at some houses down your way.’

‘Really?’

‘Gaby’s very keen to get out of London. We’re looking for a big family house in the country for the next stage of our lives.’

So formally did her son speak these words that Carole knew, had Jude been there to hear them, they would both have giggled. But, on her own, Carole was too winded by the implication of
Stephen’s words to offer any response.

‘So I was wondering, Mother, whether you’d be free for Sunday lunch that weekend.’

‘Lunch? Sunday week. Yes, that sounds fine.’ Uncharacteristically gushing, she added, ‘I’m simply thrilled at the idea of meeting Gaby!’

‘She’s longing to meet you,’ Stephen asserted, with all the enthusiasm of a weatherman announcing a cold snap. But he hadn’t finished. ‘There is one thing,
Mother.’

‘Yes?’

‘I am very keen that you and Dad should both be at the wedding. Will that be all right?’

‘Yes,’ said Carole Seddon. ‘Yes, of course it will be.’

That was only one of her worries after she had put the phone down. A lot of moribund emotions had been stirred up, reminding her they were still far from dead. And she knew they wouldn’t
go away. September the fourteenth would be a climax, a day of maximum stress, but that would not end the process. She was reliving the myth of Pandora’s box. Now it had been opened, Carole
was made aware of its fragility, and felt foolish for the misguided reliance she had placed on its security.

Another troubling thought occurred to her. It was rare for Stephen to come down to Fethering, and even rarer for him to stay overnight. On the few occasions when he wasn’t just down for a
quick pub or restaurant lunch and away, she had put him up in her spare bedroom. But if he was coming with a fiancée . . . The spare room only had a single bed. Oh dear, would she have to
arrange for a double to be brought in? Worse than that . . . would she actually have to ask Stephen what sleeping arrangements he and Gaby favoured? The potential embarrassment loomed large enough
to cloud Carole’s entire horizon.

Seriously shaken, she wanted to talk to Jude. But even though the April evenings were drawing out, it still went against Carole’s nature to knock on the front door of Woodside Cottage.

She telephoned instead. Jude was out.

The outside door of the kitchen clattered open and, as Max Townley entered, Suzy slipped the sheet of paper and envelope back into her apron. The chef was dressed in black
leathers; he’d parked his worshipped motor bike outside. He had once tried to impress Jude with the fact that this was a Ducati, but her patent lack of interest hadn’t allowed him to
get far. As he came into the kitchen, he removed a crash helmet, revealing short bluish-black hair. He was as lithe and jumpy as a Grecian cat, his eyes piercingly pale blue, and his thin mouth
permanently tight with discontent.

He nodded acknowledgement to the two women, and focused sneeringly on Suzy’s Piaget watch. ‘It’s all right. They’ll get their precious dinner in time. Fat lot
they’ll notice, though.’ He moved angrily across to a butcher’s block, on which stood a box of vegetables and flicked through it. ‘Still no celeriac.’

‘They hadn’t got any celeriac,’ said Suzy evenly.

‘I know they hadn’t this morning. You said you’d ring them.’

‘I did ring them, and they still didn’t have any celeriac.’

‘Well then, get a bloody different supplier! How am I supposed to produce a celeriac remoulade without bloody celeriac?’

‘You’ll have to do something else.’

‘I thought you’d agreed a menu with the guests.’

‘They won’t notice.’

The chef’s head snapped back and he faced his employer, but the retort on his lips died in her stare. He returned to the vegetables, mumbling, ‘No, hardly matters what I give them,
does it? Might as well nip down and get them takeaways from Macdonald’s. Bloody peasants’d probably prefer that.’

Morosely, unzipping his leathers, he went through into the pantry to change into his freshly laundered white jacket, black-checked trousers and clogs.

Jude knew she had just witnessed a battle of wills, and also knew Suzy had won it beyond doubt. The triumph might simply be a credit to strength of personality, or maybe there was some other
source of power. There had been rumours of an affair between the chatelaine of Hopwicke House and her chef, but Jude doubted their veracity. Such rumours clung around Suzy and every attractive man
she met, but she was too shrewd an operator to put her business at risk by an unprofessional liaison.

Kitted out in his chef’s gear, Max slipped a couple of heavy-bladed knives out of their slots, like a cowboy drawing his six-shooters, and started to chop fresh carrots on the
butcher’s block. His movements were slick from experience, and flamboyant by choice. He was a chef who, when he was working, welcomed – and played up to – an audience. Jude
recalled some talk of his being considered for a television series, of a pilot programme about to be made, but she’d never heard the outcome. She could imagine Max successful in the role. His
sulky good looks, his showmanship and waspish tongue might be just what a television scheduler wanted in the ever-more-desperate search for new ways of dressing up images of food.