LITMIR.BIZ

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no denying he ended up dead, Miss Walpole. We weren’t informed that he shot himself, and I doubt if he drowned in a few inches of water.’

      ‘He might have, if he was already unconscious.’

      ‘True.’

      ‘Is concussion a possibility?’

      ‘A knock on the head, you mean? Self-inflicted? No chance.’

      ‘I didn’t say self-inflicted.’

      Cole grinned. ‘You watch too much crime on television. It isn’t like that in the real world. Don’t forget we’ve got the suicide note.’

      ‘The questionable suicide note,’ Amy said.

      ‘All right. Let’s play it your way. The only people who know about the existence of this note are your good self and the officer who attended the scene last night. Have you mentioned it to anyone else?’

      She hesitated for a nanosecond. She had mentioned it to Ben. But she didn’t want to complicate things, so she said, ‘No.’

      ‘Then don’t. This is how we root out guilty parties. If someone else concocted the note, as you seem to be implying, they’ll give themselves away at some stage. Clever, eh?’

      ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

      ‘And just to be quite certain, we’ll be fingerprinting the paper the note was written on. Forensics can get prints off anything these days.’

      Amy caught her breath. ‘Mine could be on it. I lifted the envelope from the tarpaulin.’

      ‘But they won’t be on the letter inside. The only prints we can expect to find are those of the person who wrote it and the officer who opened it. If, God forbid, we find any others, that individual will have some explaining to do.’

      Amy was silent.

      ‘So this will be our little secret, Miss Walpole. Are you with me?’

      She gave a nod, but her mind was in turmoil. Touch as little as possible at a crime scene. If only she’d listened to her own inner voice.

      ‘Another thing,’ Cole said. ‘I want you to print something now on your computer. We noticed you’ve got one in your office.’

      ‘Print what?’

      ‘A notice in large letters saying the pub is closed until further notice owing to the sad death of the owner.’

      Having printed the note as requested, and closed the door on the detectives, noting incidentally that the younger of the two looked as good from the back as he did from the front – then scolding herself for even thinking that when she’d seen Fitz dead not twelve hours ago – Amy let Meriel know that she might as well have the day off.

      ‘With the pub closed until the police decide otherwise, there’s nothing else we can do.’

      Meriel was not happy, and, looking around the kitchen, half a dozen dishes seemingly on the go at once, a massive number of vegetables already prepped, Amy could see why.

      ‘You don’t usually work this hard on a Tuesday, Meriel.’

      ‘We don’t usually have a film crew in the bar dragging in all and sundry, and hungry with it. We don’t usually have detectives eating my full English. And I don’t usually have the chance to… to… oh never mind. Get out of my way and I’ll try to salvage some of this. They’re going have to let us open once they confirm it’s suicide.’

      Amy turned in the door. ‘How do you know about that?’

      Meriel smiled. ‘Little pitchers, big ears. And that,’ she pointed to the extractor above the big catering oven, ‘still leads into the old chimneys, they’re all connected. When it’s turned off, I can hear half the conversations in the bar, clear as day. Now if you don’t mind, you may not have anything to do with the bar closed, but I have no intention of letting this lot go to waste. It’ll do for funeral-baked meats, if nothing else.’

      Amy used the locked front door as an opportunity to give the bar a good clean. The old chairs, the scuffed walls, the tables with their ingrained sticky beer would also be put to use for the wake, she was sure of that, it wasn’t as if there was anywhere else to go after the funeral – once they were allowed to have the funeral – she might as well make the bar as presentable as possible. She shook her head, feeling tears coming on again, smarting at the back of her eyes. No, she would not cry. Last night was bad enough, she wasn’t going to let it all get to her in broad daylight as well. A deep breath, a bucket of hot water, and a brutally effective and pungent spray cleaner, that was more use than tears right now.

      As Amy got to work she thought how odd death was, the way someone, anyone – loved or hated, it didn’t matter – just suddenly stopped. The incredible cessation of life. No wonder people had invented religion to make sense of it, nothing else did. She scrubbed harder, as old memories, unbidden, threatened to well up. She’d trained herself to be tougher than this, not to look back, not to dwell. It wasn’t even as if Fitz had been a good boss, his business skills were appalling, but he had been kind to her when she’d needed help, and she’d not forget that. The arrival of not one, but two, good-looking men in town was not going to let her forget Fitz’s kindness, even if most people had been all too ready to consider him a bit of a joke. There had been much more to Fitz than most people saw, Amy wasn’t even sure she knew what that more might be, but she knew he wasn’t just the village drunkard, the old buffoon. And he was no suicide. Whatever he’d been planning for his ‘Last Hurrah’, it had been something he’d personally found thrilling, something that had generated that twinkle in his eye. She threw away the second dirty bucket of water and rinsed the sink. Fitz had been planning something all right, but it most certainly was not suicide.

      Amy was halfway back to her cottage, the wind no less brutal than it had been in the middle of the night, the sky only slightly less lowering, when a new thought occurred to her. Ben Milne and his cameraman Stan had been filming most of yesterday afternoon. Cutaways of the pub, close-ups of the dust caught in the nautical ceiling decoration – ‘for atmosphere only, love’, Stan had assured her, with a wink to Ben – long shots of the desolate seascape beyond the small windows, and plenty of vox pops, where Ben – as producer-presenter – had his own style, simultaneously enthused but also laid-back, just this side of too cocky, yet not quite as charming as he no doubt thought himself. They must have taken at least a couple of hours of video footage, and not all of it could have been her own or Meriel’s cleavage, despite Stan’s obvious interest in the female form. She’d been too busy with the influx of non-regulars, all of them keenly hoping to get caught on camera, to pay much attention to the people who’d visited Fitz yesterday afternoon, but Amy was aware that the stairs up to the Bridge had been busier than usual. And somewhere in all that footage there might well be a clue to what else had been planned yesterday, something that would make the police look more closely into their suicide theory, something that would help her help them – even if they clearly did not want her help.

      Amy turned on her heel and headed back to the pub. The last she’d seen of him, Ben was stomping upstairs to his room, with dire threats about suing the pub if the promised Wi-Fi didn’t work, and how the hell was he supposed to copy all their film in the time the police had given him. Amy knew enough about technology to know he needed neither Wi-Fi nor a great deal of time to copy from the camera memory card to his own laptop’s hard disc or a memory stick, but she’d assumed he was using the tantrum to get himself off and back into bed, making up for lost sleep and last night’s hangover.

      She let herself back into the pub and checked in the kitchen. She was pleased to see Meriel appeared to have tidied everything well enough, and then went upstairs to Ben’s door. She knocked, and was surprised when Ben opened up almost immediately.

      ‘About bloody time,’ he said, walking away, neither looking at her, nor removing his headphones, ‘just put it on the bed, I asked for that over an hour ago.’

      ‘Asked for what?’ Amy said, standing in the doorway.

      ‘Huh?’

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