Death at the Bar

‘I was at Yeovil,’ said Watchman. ‘Where is Norman?’

‘Painting down by the jetty. The light’s gone. He’ll be in soon. He’s started a portrait of me on Coombe Rock. It’s going to be rather wonderful. I’m wearing a red sweater and the sea’s behind me. Very virile!’

‘Good Lord!’ said Watchman cheerfully.

‘We’ll get your things out for you, sir,’ said old Pomeroy. ‘Will!’

A tall fox-coloured man came through the doorway. He screwed up his eyes, peered at Watchman, and acknowledged his greeting without much show of enthusiasm.

‘Well, Will.’

‘Evening, Mr Watchman.’

‘Bear a hand, my sonny,’ said old Pomeroy.

His son opened the luggage carrier and began to haul out Watchman’s suitcases.

‘How’s the Movement, Will?’ asked Watchman. ‘Still well on the left?’

‘Yes,’ said Will shortly. ‘It’s going ahead. Will these be all?’

‘Yes, thanks. I’ll take the car round, Seb, and join you in the bar. Is there a sandwich or so anywhere about, Abel?’

‘We can do a bit better than that, sir. There’s a fine lobster Mrs Ives has put aside, special.’

‘By George, you’re a host in a million. God bless Mrs Ives.’

Watchman drove round to the garage. It was a converted stable, a dark building that housed the memory of sweating horses rubbed down by stable lads with wisps of straw. When he stopped his engine Watchman heard a rat plop across the rafters. In addition to his own the garage held four cars. There was Norman Cubitt’s Austin, a smaller Austin, a Morris and there, demure in the corner, a battered two-seater.

‘You again!’ said Watchman, staring at it. ‘Well I’ll be damned!’

He returned to the pub, delighted to hear the familiar ring of his own steps, to smell the tang of the sea and of burning driftwood. As he ran upstairs he heard voices and the unmistakable tuck of a dart in a cork board.

‘Double twenty,’ said Will Pomeroy, and above the general outcry came a woman’s voice.

‘Splendid, my dear. We win!’

‘So, she is here,’ thought Watchman as he washed his hands. ‘And why, “my dear”? And who wins?’

III

Watchman, with his cousin for company, ate his lobster in the private taproom. There is a parlour at the Feathers but nobody ever uses it. The public and the private taprooms fit into each other like two L’s, the first standing sideways on the tip of its short base, the second facing backwards to the left. The bar proper is common to both. It occupies the short leg of the Public, has a counter for each room and faces the short leg of the Private. The top of the long leg forms a magnificent ingle-nook flanked with settles and scented with three hundred years of driftwood smoke. Opposite the ingle-nook at the bottom angle of the L hangs a dart board made by Abel Pomeroy himself. There, winter and summer alike, the Pomeroys’ chosen friends play for drinks. There is a board in the Public for the rank and file. If strangers to the Feathers choose to play in the Private, the initiates wait until they have finished. If the initiates invite a stranger to play, he is no longer a stranger.

The midsummer evening was chilly and a fire smouldered in the ingle-nook. Watchman finished his supper, swung his legs up on the settle, and felt for his pipe. He squinted up at Sebastian Parish, who leant against the mantelpiece in an attitude familiar to every West End playgoer in London.

‘I like this place,’ Watchman said. ‘Extradordinarily pleasant, isn’t it, returning to a place one likes?’

Parish made an actor’s expressive gesture.

‘Marvellous!’ he said richly. ‘To get away from everything! The noise! The endless racket! The artificiality! God, how I loathe my profession!’

‘Come off it, Seb,’ said Watchman. ‘You glory in it. You were born acting. The gamp probably burst into an involuntary round of applause on your first entrance and I bet you played your mother right off the stage.’

‘All the same, old boy, this good clean air means a hell of a lot to me.’

‘Exactly,’ agreed Watchman dryly. His cousin had a trick of saying things that sounded a little like quotations from an interview with himself. Watchman was amused rather than irritated by this mannerism. It was part and parcel, he thought, of Seb’s harmless staginess, like his clothes which were too exactly what a gentleman, roughing it in South Devon, ought to wear. He liked to watch Seb standing out on Coombe Rock, bareheaded to the breeze, in effect waiting for the camera man to say ‘OK for sound.’ No doubt that was the pose Norman had chosen for his portrait of Sebastian. It occurred to him now that Sebastian was up to something. That speech about the artificiality of the stage was the introduction to a confidence, or Watchman didn’t know his Parish. Whatever it was, Sebastian missed his moment. The door opened and a thin man with untidy fair hair looked in.

‘Hallo!’ said Watchman. ‘Our distinguished artist.’ Norman Cubitt grinned, lowered his painter’s pack, and came into the ingle-nook.

‘Well, Luke? Good trip?’

‘Splendid! You’re painting already?’ Cubitt stretched a hand to the fire. The fingers were grimed with paint.

‘I’m doing a thing of Seb,’ he said. ‘I suppose he’s told you about it. Laying it on with a trowel, I am. That’s in the morning. Tonight I started a thing down by the jetty. They’re patching up one of the posts. Very pleasant subject, but my treatment of it so far is bloody.’

‘Are you painting in the dark?’ asked Watchman with a smile.

‘I was talking to one of the fishing blokes after the light went. They’ve gone all politically-minded in the Coombe.’

‘That,’ said Parish, lowering his voice, ‘is Will Pomeroy and his Left Group.’

‘Will and Decima together,’ said Cubitt. ‘I’ve suggested they call themselves the Decimbrists.’

‘Where are the lads of the village?’ demanded Watchman. ‘I thought I heard the dart game in progress as I went upstairs.’

‘Abel’s rat-poisoning in the garage,’ said Parish. ‘They’ve all gone out to see he doesn’t give himself a lethal dose of prussic acid.’

‘Good Lord!’ Watchman ejaculated. ‘Is the old fool playing around with cyanide?’

‘Apparently. Why wouldn’t we have a drink?’

‘Why not indeed?’ agreed Cubitt. ‘Hi, Will!’

He went to the bar and leant over it, looking into the Public.

‘The whole damn place is deserted. I’ll get our drinks and chalk them up. Beer?’

‘Beer it is,’ said Parish.

‘What form of cyanide has Abel got hold of?’ Watchman asked.

‘Eh?’ said Parish vaguely. ‘Oh, let’s see now. I fetched it for him from Illington. The chemist hadn’t got any of the stock rat-banes, but he poked round and found this stuff. I think he called it Scheele’s acid.’

‘Good, God!’

‘What? Yes, that was it – Scheele’s acid. And then he said he thought the fumes of Scheele’s acid mightn’t be strong enough, so he gingered it up a bit.’

‘With what, in the name of all the Borgias?’