Dead Simple

climbed out of the car and went up to the door. Above it was a sign saying, ‘John and Margaret Hobbs, landlords’.
    Inside, the saloon bar was deserted and so was the drab restaurant area off to the left. The place smelled of furniture polish and stale beer. A fruit machine flashed and winked away in a far corner, near a dartboard.
    ‘Hello?’ Branson called out. ‘Hello?’
    Grace leaned over the bar and saw an open trap door. He lifted a flap in the counter, went behind it, kneeled and shouted down into the cellar, which was illuminated by a weak bulb. ‘Hello? Anyone there?’
    A gruff voice came back. ‘Be up in a moment.’
    He heard a rumbling sound, then a grey beer barrel, with ‘HARVEY’S’ stamped on the side, gripped by a pair of massive, grimy hands, appeared, followed by the head of a burly, red-faced man, in a white shirt and jeans, sweating profusely. He had the bulk and the broken nose of an ex-boxer. ‘Yes, gents?’
    Branson showed him his warrant card. ‘Detective Sergeant Branson and Detective Superintendent Grace of the Sussex Police. We’re looking for the landlord. Mr Hobbs?’
    ‘You’ve found him,’ he wheezed, climbing out, then hauling himself up on to his feet and staring at them warily. He stank of body odour.
    ‘Wonder if you’d mind taking a look at these photographs and see if you recognize any of the faces. They might have come in here last Tuesday night.’ Branson laid the photographs on the counter.
    John Hobbs studied each of the photographs in turn. Then he shook his head. ‘No, never saw them before.’
    ‘Were you working here on Tuesday night?’ Grace asked him.
    ‘I’m here every sodding night,’ he said. ‘Seven days a week. Thanks to your bloody lot.’
    ‘Our lot?’ Grace said.
    ‘Your Traffic Division. Not easy to make a living running a rural pub, when your chums in Traffic sneak around outside, breathalysing all my customers.’
    Ignoring the comment, Grace said, ‘Are you absolutely sure you don’t recognize them?’
    ‘I get ten people in here on a mid-week night, it’s Fat City. If they’d been here, I’d have seen them. I don’t recognize them. Any reason why I should?’
    It was moments like this that made Roy Grace very angry at the Traffic Division. For most people, being stopped for speeding, or to take a breathalyser check, was the only contact they ever had with the police. As a result, instead of viewing the police as their friends and guardians of the peace, they regarded them as an enemy.
    ‘Do you watch television? Read the local papers?’ Grace asked.
    ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m too busy for that. Is that a crime?’
    ‘Four of these boys are dead,’ Glenn Branson said, riled by the man’s attitude. ‘They were killed in a traffic accident on Tuesday night.’
    ‘And you walk in here with your big swinging dicks, looking for some poor sodding landlord to blame for plying them with drink?’
    ‘I didn’t say that,’ Grace replied. ‘No, I’m not. I’m looking for this lad who was with them.’ He pointed at Michael’s photograph.
    The landlord shook his head. ‘Not in here,’ he said.
    Looking up at the walls, Branson asked, ‘Do you have CCTV?’
    ‘That meant to be a joke? Like I have money to buy fancy security gizmos? You know the CCTV I use?’ He pointed at his own eyes. ‘These. They come free when you’re born. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a barrel to change.’
    Neither of them bothered to reply.

31
    Michael shivered. Something was crawling through his hair. It was progressing steadily, determinedly, towards his forehead. It felt like a spider.
    In panic, dropping the belt buckle, he jerked his hands up, sweeping furiously at his hair, fingers raw and bloody from scraping away at the lid.
    Then it was on his face, crossing his cheek, mouth, chin.
    ‘Jesus, get off, you fuckwit!’ He smacked at his face with both hands, then felt something small and sticky. It was dead, whatever it had been. He wiped what remains he could feel off the thick, itchy growth of his stubble.
    He had always been fine with most creatures, but not spiders. When he was a kid, he’d read a story in the local newspaper about a greengrocer who got bitten by a tarantula that was concealed in a bunch of bananas and had nearly died.
    The beam of the torch was very faint now, giving a dark amber glow to the interior of the coffin. He was having to hold his head up to stop the rising water washing over his cheeks