A family will and a troubled son, Jack’s case was a lethal cocktail of intrigue and deception...
BY TOM HINDLE
Jack set down the large Bloody Mary that she had just made for Robert, before quickly mixing an old fashioned for herself. Ice cubes clinking, she then stepped from behind the bar and sat beside him on the neighbouring stool.
At midday, the place was empty, cold January sunlight pouring through the windows and bouncing off the bare brick walls. That would change come the evening, when the lawyers and stockbrokers in the surrounding office blocks clocked off for the night. Even with Christmas party season behind them, by seven o’clock the place would be full of raucous laughter and pulsing music. Neon light would bounce off whisky jars and cocktail glasses, while the smell of citrus and spirits filled the air. But right now, it was a quiet place to talk.
“I can’t believe it,” said Robert. “I can’t believe she’s actually cutting me out of the will.”
Jack didn’t answer, taking a sip instead from her old fashioned.
She didn’t want to be a detective. She had her bar and her well-earned reputation as one of the best mixologists in London. She had her flat in the rooms above it and her beloved 1976 Mini Cooper parked in the garage down the road. In short, she had everything she needed. But a bar is a strange place.
People said things at bars that they wouldn’t say anywhere else. Jack had heard husbands confess to friends that they were cheating on their wives.
Business partners plotting to embezzle insurance companies. She could be standing right in front of them, mixing their next drink. Once there was a bar between them, it was as if they genuinely believed she was working in some kind of sound-proofed booth.
And while the only involvement Jack wanted in her customers’ affairs was that she made the cocktails over which they discussed them, the simple truth was that she was observant. She was sharp. She was just good at putting things together.
And when it had been reported in the paper that she, in a 10-minute conversation over a strawberry daquiri, had solved the two-year-old disappearance of a priceless vase, attention had come her way. Requests for help with similar problems. One reporter had even irritatingly dubbed her the Daiquiri Detective.
She’d never responded, though. Never taken a case.
Until now. Until Robert.
“I don’t
