‘We stored stuff over the trapdoor, timber, logs for the inn. I guess they didn’t look very hard,’ he said, avoiding Dryden’s eyes.
‘When d’you go down last?’
He shrugged again, running a hand through the thinning hair. ‘Last day, perhaps second to last, to make sure there was nothing worth taking away with us. There were some glasses I think – but we left most of them because they were old-fashioned straights. Worth a fortune now,’ he laughed. ‘And Mum wanted some kids’ books, a few wooden toys.’ Dryden looked him in the eyes, which were small but calculating. So he’d remembered to check the cellar out. He could see why the police wanted another word.
‘That last night in the pub. It must have been extraordinary, knowing that you might not come back. Any of you. What was it like – party or wake?’
‘Bit of both,’ said Woodruffe, tipping the mug back. ‘There was certainly a party on by the time I closed the place, no point in leaving half-filled barrels, was there? We’d saved one for the next morning but they drank the rest and I wasn’t charging. MoD had put enough cash behind the bar to keep them happy for a week. A few lads had too much, and we had the old boys from the almshouses in – kinda guests of honour, if you like, and they can put it away. But then they didn’t have far to stagger home.’
‘No trouble? No scores settled?’
‘I’ve told the police everything, OK?’ Dryden noticed he hadn’t answered the question.
‘Punch-up?’
‘Nothing that wouldn’t have been out of place in most pubs on a Saturday night. A family dispute, there’s nothing like brothers for falling out.’
Dryden was mildly drunk, the effects of the third pint multiplying his natural intuition. With fifty people left in the village there can’t have been that many siblings in the bar that night. ‘Twin brothers?’ he asked, remembering the list he’d compiled from the TA records.
Woodruffe watched a couple kiss at a table in the shadows. ‘Like I said, the police are on to it.’
Dryden decided not to push; he could track down the Smith brothers soon enough, although he suspected DI Shaw would have got there first.
On the river a boat went past, its engine spluttering, the portholes lit.
‘That last morning there was some trouble, when one of the old women was dragged out of her home. But you helped calm everybody down, didn’t you? People seemed to respect you.’
Woodruffe held his face in a mask.
‘I’ve always wondered why,’ said Dryden, allowing the ambiguity to remain unclarified.
‘What was the bloody point?’ he said. ‘We’d sold up, taken their money, and now they wanted us out. If there’s one thing running a boozer teaches you it’s to give up on anything if you think you’re coming second.’
Dryden opened his notebook at the page where he’d listed his eight potential victims, turning it so that Woodruffe could read. ‘We know the victim was average height – five-ten, eleven – something like that. Any of these a lot bigger, or a lot smaller?’
Woodruffe read the list too quickly. ‘Nah. Paul Cobley wasn’t a big lad – but, it’s difficult to tell. And Jimmy Neate looked six foot.’
Dryden closed the notebook. ‘Ellen Woodruffe, your mother. Did I speak to her that last day? Is that possible?’
He stood. ‘Doubt it. Mum didn’t want to go and she didn’t make a secret of it, but she was very ill that summer, and she wasn’t stupid. She knew the army would do what it wanted to do. She’d had a coupla strokes the year before, paralysed her left side, so she knew she was on borrowed time. She wanted to die in Jude’s Ferry; in fact that’s all she wanted. But she didn’t die, that took longer, a lot longer than she wanted. Anyway, she left quietly enough. She’d given up the fight.’
‘I’m sorry – what happened to her?’
‘I got her into a nursing home on the coast. Lowestoft. Cost a fortune, of course, but we’d banked the money when we sold the pub to the army back in the nineties. The price was good, very good. We know why now, of course – so they could chuck us out for good.’
The landlord pulled out a wallet and flicked it open. It was her again, a hand held to ward off the sun, the arcaded front of a Victorian seaside villa behind. In discreet letters above the bay window a sign read ‘Royal Esplanade’.
‘She died in ’97, that winter. But she did come home in a way. I scattered her ashes at St Swithun’s – on the feast day. I didn’t ask. I just did it. So she came home in the end.’
