pine. So was the one long bar. Despite the pub’s proximity to Fratton Park, home of Portsmouth Football Club, there were no big plasma screens for Sky Sports. On blackboards menu choices were displayed in italic chalk writing. Painted boards listed The Middy’s theme nights, Monday, Curry Club. Tuesday, Quiz Night. Wednesday, Two-For- One Steak Special. Thursday, Comedy Club. Friday and Saturday, Live Music. Sunday nights appeared to have no theme. Nor from a quick look around the various bays separated by pine uprights, did they appear to have many customers.
As in the Hare and Hounds, the bar staff wore mulberry shirts with the grey logo of the pub’s name across the breast pockets. At the bar Jude picked up a wine list, turned it over and pointed out to Carole a logo and a name.
“Look,” she said, “Home Hostelries. We should have remembered. The Hare and Hounds at Weld-isham was a Home Hostelries pub back when Will Maples used to run it.”
“Yes, of course.”
Jude turned the list the right way round and, from the surprisingly good selection of white wines, ordered two large Maipo Valley Chardonnays. Exactly what they’d had in Weldisham. In every detail, Home Hostelries pubs were clones of each other.
When Jude turned back to Carole with the drinks, her friend was making little nodding gestures over to a dark corner of the pub.
Where sat the man with a scarred face and missing fingers whom they had last seen fighting outside the front of the Crown and Anchor.
This was easier than they had dared hope, but the situation also presented difficulties. They were guilty of the same lack of planning as Viggo had demonstrated the day before. The logic of coming to the Middy had seemed obvious to both of them, but neither had given any thought to what they should do when they found their quarry. For Carole the scenario was particularly perplexing. She didn’t think she was very good with new people even when she’d been introduced to them. And the thought of just walking up to a man of whose propensity to violence she had been a witness was very alien.
Characteristically, Jude did not suffer from such hang-ups. Nodding for Carole to follow her, she walked straight towards the alcove where the scarred man was sitting. He looked up at her with some puzzlement, but like most men approached by Jude, didn’t object to what he was seeing.
“I think we’ve met before,” Jude announced, taking possession of a chair opposite him. Carole scuttled awkwardly to an adjacent one.
“Oh yeah?” The man looked fuddled. The pint whose remains he was spinning out was clearly not his first of the day.
Jude gestured towards it. “Get you another of those?”
He nodded. “Stella.”
Carole looked at her friend in desperation. Don’t leave me alone with him, the pale blue eyes pleaded. But by then Jude was back at the bar.
Carole cleared her throat, trying to think of an appropriate pleasantry for the occasion, but couldn’t come up with anything. The only sentence that came into her mind was: “That was a very good fight you got involved in at the Crown and Anchor last week.” But she didn’t think that would have been right.
Still, her silence didn’t seem to bother the man. His eyes remained fixed somewhere in the middle distance. Perhaps he didn’t care who approached him, so long as they bought him a pint of Stella.
Jude handed over what he required and the man thanked her, though without taking much notice of the supplier. His interest in her as an attractive woman had been eclipsed by the more urgent priority of a drink in his hand. He took a long swallow.
Jude continued her frontal approach. “We saw you at the Crown and Anchor in Fethering, a week ago today, when that fight broke out.”
He wasn’t as drunk as he had appeared to be. A light of caution came into his eye as he put his pint down on the table. “So?”
“That was the night a man called Ray got stabbed.”
He nodded. “I heard about it. That kind of thing happens when people get into fights.”
“Do you like getting into fights?” asked Jude with a directness that Carole wouldn’t have been capable of.
He smiled. The scarring on his face meant that only one side of his face turned up. He had the original stiff upper lip. It was also spookily like the smile they had seen from Viggo when he came to Woodside Cottage. “Fights?” the man echoed. “Getting into fights outside a pub? That’s not fighting, not if you’ve done the real thing.”
“By doing ‘the real thing’, do you mean that you’ve been in the army?”
He nodded in appreciation of her logic. “That’s exactly what I mean.”
“And is that where you got the injuries?”
He nodded, his hand instinctively going up to the scarred side of his face. “Patrol outside Basra. Roadside bomb. Killed the driver. I got this. Driver was my mucker.”
“I’m sorry.”
The hazel eyes he turned on Jude now didn’t look drunk at all. “Yes, everyone’s sorry. Nobody can do anything about it, though. I was going to train as a chippy when I got out.” He waived the maimed hand from which two and a half fingers were missing. “Not going to be much use with that, am I?”
“But presumably you had good hospital treatment for your injuries?” said Carole.
“Oh, yes. They patched me up all right. I even got some compensation. Not much, though. It doesn’t go far.”
“And you still get benefits, don’t you?”
“Yeah. They’re not much, either. My dad was in the army. Signals.”
“During the Second World War?”
He nodded. “Served out in Egypt. And he came back here and he was treated like a bloody hero. He’d done his bit to save us all from Adolf Shickelgruber. And I come back, and I’ve done my bit to save us all from Saddam Hussein…and does anyone give a shit? No, even here in Portsmouth, where you’d have thought they knew something about the armed forces, I’m treated like some kind of pariah. Oh yes, people say, sure you had a rough time, but the war you were fighting was one we shouldn’t have got involved in in the first place. Illegal war. Turned Iraq into a bigger bloody mess than it was before we went in. Let me tell you, there’s not a lot of sympathy for an Iraq veteran. They want to forget about us, bloody government does too. We’re what’s left, we’re the mess. They want to sweep us under the carpet.”
“Do you live round here?” asked Carole.
He flicked his head back, gesturing in the direction of a shabby sixties tower block they’d noticed as they arrived. “Flat up there.”
“Sorry, we don’t know your name.” said Jude.
“No, you don’t.” He seemed quite happy to let that status quo continue.
“I’m Jude, this is Carole.”
“Carole Seddon,” said her friend, who liked to have the niceties maintained.
He still didn’t seem inclined to give them his name, so Jude persisted, “I knew Ray, the man who died.”
“Oh yes?”
“And we’ve both met Viggo.”
A reaction flicked in his hazel eyes, then he seemed to make a decision and announced, “My name’s Derren Hart.”
“And you know Viggo, don’t you?” For a moment he contemplated denying it. “Or should I call him ‘Chuck’?” Jude went on.
“I’ve met him, yes,” Derren conceded.
“He seems to regard you as a hero,” said Carole tartly, “even if nobody else does.”
“Viggo’s got problems.”
“Apparently he once tried to join the army,” said Jude.
“He told me that. The army may be hard up for recruits, but they still aren’t going to take on someone like him.” The man let out a bark of laughter. “He’s a few bricks short of a load.”
