The Karaoke Bar: A Cumbria Crime Christmas Novella by Rachel McLean and Joel Hames, book 1.5 in the Cumbria Crime series - Chapter 1

“Put a bloody smile on your face,” said DC Nina Kapoor as they shoved their way through the crowd. DC Tom Willis gave her his best fake grin to make her shut up.

The pub Nina had dragged him to had apparently been around for more than a century, and he’d walked past it plenty of times. But he didn’t think he’d ever set foot inside, and he wasn’t entirely sure he was in the right pub now. Yes, it was cold and wet outside, and he’d agreed to go for a pre-Christmas drink with Nina after yet another complaint that she hardly saw him outside work these days. But this place wasn’t what he’d expected.

The noise, that was normal. The crowd, the press, the Christmas jumpers, and plastic mistletoe draped over their heads, all that was expected. The all-but toothless man standing next to the bar with a microphone in his hand, belting out White Christmas in a voice that wobbled alarmingly from note to note. Well, Tom was here with Nina, and Nina was in her Elvis gear. So that was pretty much par for the course.

But the clientele was different.

Tom stopped, brought up short by the mass of people, and looked around. As far as he could see, there were just two rooms with the bar running between them, each room containing three small tables, a little space for standing, and not much else. There was room for twenty people to drink here in comfort, thirty at a pinch.

There had to be fifty of them sitting and standing around, and as far as Tom could tell, the youngest was probably seventy.

“Where the hell have you brought me?” he asked, as she steered him towards a gap that had appeared in a corner.

“The Miner’s Yard,” she replied. “I told you about this place.”

“You said it was full of miners.”

“What did you expect? The mine shut down before you were born, Tom. These people haven’t been underground since Do They Know It’s Christmas was in the charts. Wait here.”

Nina forced herself towards the bar, and Tom found himself squashed up against the wall as a large woman with dyed orange hair pushed past. “J20,” he shouted after his friend, but there was no way she could hear him.

He’d told her he wasn’t drinking. He’d be heading over to Harriett’s later, his first time at her house. He didn’t want to turn up in a taxi slurring his words and barely able to stand, which tended to happen when he went out with Nina and didn’t specify no alcohol. So, he’d specified no alcohol. She’d told him he was no fun anymore, that he’d forgotten his friends now he had a girlfriend. He’d reminded her that he’d agreed to go to the pub, so that couldn’t be true. But that he wouldn’t be drinking.

He hoped she’d remembered.

The woman who’d pushed past him was having a shouted conversation with a bald man near the door – shouting was the only way you could be heard. “You can’t trust people who don’t smoke,” she said, then disappeared outside into the rain, the man close behind. By the bar, Nina waited while a grey-haired gent in a crumpled yellow shirt had a heated debate with the barmaid.

“Don’t be silly,” she was saying. “I can’t stop people singing songs just because you don’t want them to.”

The man walked away, shaking his head and muttering, and Nina edged her way in. Tom couldn’t hear what she ordered, because at that moment, another bald man picked up the microphone and started belting out Jingle Bell Rock. This one had a perfectly round head, darker than anyone else’s here, and a forehead so lined Tom could have lost himself in there.

Tom sighed. A Christmas-themed karaoke night, in a tiny bar populated by octogenarians. Not how he’d envisaged spending his December evenings. Not this year, at least.

Nina made her way back towards him, a bottle in one hand, a glass in the other, exchanging smiles and greetings with the other drinkers. Tom eyed the glass suspiciously, but it was the bottle she pushed towards him. To his relief, it was orange juice.

“No J2O,” she shouted into his ear.

“What’s that?” He nodded at her glass.

“Lemonade. I don’t drink till I’ve done my bit. When you’ve been doing it as long as I have, you don’t need booze to fuel your performance.”

Tom smiled, wondering how many of the octogenarians thought of their drunken squawking as a performance.

He swigged from his bottle and surveyed the pub. This lot must have been doing it a lot longer than Nina; they’d have been retired when karaoke had first hit Cumbria. He sensed movement from the corner of his eye and turned to see a door open at the far end of the room. A well-built, white-haired man wearing a checked shirt staggered through it, pursued by the reek of urine. Tom grimaced and turned back towards Nina.

Nina was in her full Elvis kit, early seventies version. The white jumpsuit, with its beads and braids and a metal belt that looked like the kind of thing a boxer would wear. Finished with a red cape, her quiff rising inches from her head, with the scar from her recent encounter with a killer still faint on her forehead, the overall effect was remarkable. When Tom had spotted her standing under the streetlight at the end of Lowther Street, he’d been lost for words.

And yet the people in the pub had barely noticed.

“How come no one’s commenting on your clothes?” he asked her.

“This old thing?” She grinned. “They’ve seen it before. And it takes a lot to impress this bunch. What d’you think of the place?”

He forced the smile back on, but not quick enough. Nina’s expression darkened.

“I’m sorry they don’t serve fillet steak and Chateau Tom-and-Harriett here,” she said. “But this is Whitehaven, mate, not the West End.” She turned away from him.

He touched her arm. “It’s fun,” he shouted. “Really.”

“Hmmm,” she replied. Maybe he should have a drink after all.

The orange-haired woman was making her way back from the bar now. She stopped to exchange what looked like insults with a frail-looking white-haired woman who seemed to have dressed for a different occasion entirely. She wore a dark patterned dress with a pale lemon cardigan. By the look of the cardigan, the orange-haired woman had just spilled her drink on it. Tom watched as they gestured at each other, then Orange-hair moved away and the other woman returned to her conversation with a tall, thin man leaning on a stick.

There was a lot of leaning going on, Tom realised, but most of it was down to alcohol rather than age. A lot of leaning, and staggering, and bumping into people. The lemon cardigan had been a mistake. Hopefully, Nina’s Elvis costume was easy to wash.

The music had paused, but the white-haired man he’d seen coming out of the toilet took the microphone and began a rendition of Ring of Fire. Tom found himself nodding along. The man had a good voice, other customers were looking on approvingly. For nearly three minutes, conversations subsided, and when the man had finished, a short burst of applause ran around the room before the chatter resumed its previous level.

“Who’s that?” Tom asked. Nina seemed to know everybody here.

“Dunno. Not a regular,” she replied as the man’s place was taken by a short, stout woman with a mass of black hair cascading down her back. Probably a comparative youngster in her sixties, Tom thought. Her rendition of Sweet Child of Mine was decent, but not strong enough to quieten the crowd the way her predecessor had.

“When are you on?” he shouted.

“Not long now,” Nina shouted back. “Couple of songs.”

The first of those songs was It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year, and it was clear from the groans, when yet another grey-haired man took the microphone, that it wasn’t going to be a wonderful time at all, not for those forced to listen. The man swayed as he sang, his hand flicking at the red braces he wore over a dark shirt. The relief that swept through the bar when he’d finally finished was almost physical.

Tom caught the heavy scent of urine again and turned towards the door. Before it closed, he caught sight of something on the floor. He turned to Nina.

“There’s a man on the floor,” he shouted. “In the loos.”

She laughed. “That’ll be Billy.”

Tom stared at her.

She shrugged. “I know, it’s disgusting. His wife says he’s an animal. But that’s what he does when he drinks too much. Just lies down on the floor and sleeps.”

The orange-haired woman was up next, with a passable version of Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire.

“Give ’em hell,” Tom said, as Nina approached the bar and took the microphone from the woman. He might have wished her luck. But Nina wouldn’t need it.