The Killing in the Café

TWENTY-SIX

‘Good God!’ The Renault almost swerved dangerously when Carole had the conversation reported back to her. ‘Josie Achter and Quintus Braithwaite! I can’t believe it.’

‘It does sound unlikely, I agree. But she had no reason to make it up. And it fits the minimal description Hudson gave us. “Married and travelled a lot.” Quintus Braithwaite had many foreign postings and was often away at sea.’

‘Yes, but … to think of him as the great love of Josie Achter’s life, the reason why she got divorced … it doesn’t sit very comfortably with me.’

‘Nor me. But it must be true. There’s also the fact that Quintus Braithwaite’s dinghy was stolen and used on the night of October the third.’

‘Are you suggesting he took it himself?’

‘Yes.’

‘What, to dispose of Amos Green’s body?’

‘I suppose so.’ Jude felt confused. ‘I don’t know.’

‘But his affair with Josie – if such a thing ever happened – must have been over long ago. Quintus Braithwaite is a pompous bore and an idiot, but I really can’t see him as a murderer.’

‘It’s always the unlikely ones …’ Jude suggested.

A disgruntled ‘Huh’ was heard from Carole. ‘I’m sure we’re barking up a tree that’s so wrong it’s not even in the right country. I thought we set out today trying to find something that connected the late Amos Green with Fethering. And have we got anything?’

Jude was forced to concede that they hadn’t. ‘The only tenuous link we do have is that Binnie Swales served him in Polly’s on the afternoon of the third of October.’

Carole nodded. ‘Yes.’ Then a recollection came to her. ‘Do you remember when we went to the Crown and Anchor after the relaunch of Polly’s Community Café?’

‘Yes.’

‘Binnie said then that she used to serve behind the bar at Fethering Yacht Club.’

Jude caught the excitement in her friend’s voice. ‘And you’re thinking she might have been on duty on the night of Becky Granger’s fiftieth? That she might have seen Josie and Quintus dancing together?’

‘Well, it’s worth asking, isn’t it?’

Binnie’s house was one of the few fishermen’s cottages in Fethering not to have undergone gentrification. Most of them were now owned by rich weekenders from London who – while keeping the lines of the quaint eighteenth-century exteriors – had refurbished everything inside to the highest possible spec.

But, though ungentrified, Binnie’s had not been left in its pristine pre-war state. There was a row of these cottages on the opposite side of the Fether estuary from the yacht club. Right next door to Kent Warboys’ conversion. Originally the sheds from which his home had been created had served the owners of the cottages as storage space, workshops and a small factory in which their wives gutted and prepared the day’s catch for sale.

The back of the cottages had a fine view over the English Channel, much appreciated by their twenty-first-century owners (though the first owners probably never looked that way, being already sick to the back teeth of the sea).

The outside of Binnie’s cottage might have looked shabby and run down, but the interior had been extensively redecorated. Redecorated, however, very much in Binnie’s style, reflecting the range of colours in the clothes she wore.

In spite of the smallness of her hall, its space was dominated by a stuffed badger. Astride it like a miniature jockey was a purple teddy bear. The walls were papered in diagonal stripes of silver and gold. The front parlour into which Carole and Jude were ushered was equally eccentric. And if the sitting room at Woodside Cottage could be described as ‘cluttered’, a new word would have to be coined for Binnie’s.

It was just the sheer range of objects in the room that took one’s breath away. Every surface was covered with an eclectic collection which included carved wooden miniature chairs, ceramic figurines, glass bon-bons, Indian jewellery, ivory elephants and a stuffed owl. The walls were thick with movie posters, chalk drawings, metal advertising signs for Bird’s Custard and ‘Virol – for Anaemic Girls’, royal souvenir mugs and sepia photographs of World War One Tommies. To accommodate yet more stuff, wires had been fixed across the ceiling, and from these hung parasols, bouquets of artificial flowers, plastic medals on ribbons, a policeman’s helmet, some brass cooking utensils, wooden tennis rackets and a rubber vampire bat.

Binnie was dressed that Saturday in a kind of orange string vest over a scarlet twinset, an electric blue PVC miniskirt, horizontally striped tights in green and yellow and silver ballet shoes. She noticed them looking round as they entered the front parlour. ‘And every single thing in this room has a story attached to it. Some people write autobiographies …’ She gestured to the confusion of objects around her. ‘This is my autobiography. A story behind everything here.’

‘I’m sure it’s all fascinating,’ said Carole, aware that her words were coming out more harshly than she intended, ‘but actually it’s not that we want to talk to you about.’

Binnie Swales did not look too upset by the rejection of her life story. ‘Fine. Would you like some tea or coffee?’ She chuckled. ‘I’ve had a little experience of serving tea and coffee.’

‘No, we’re fine,’ said Jude, answering for both of them. ‘Just had coffee.’ It wasn’t true but they didn’t want anything to delay the progress of their investigation.

‘What we really want you to do,’ said Carole, ‘is to cast your mind back to the days when you were working behind the bar at the Fethering Yacht Club …’

‘Well, there were plenty of those. Any particular day you had in mind?’

‘It was probably about twelve, thirteen years ago, a Saturday night. Might you have been working then?’

‘Could have been.’

‘It was a fiftieth birthday party,’ said Jude.

‘The yacht club bar’s seen a good few of those.’

‘I’m sure it has.’

‘I mean, it hasn’t got much in the way of facilities. Not a potential “wedding venue” like Chichester Yacht Club and some of the other big ones are. But if you want a local piss-up in Fethering, you’re not exactly spoiled for choice, so you might as well get pissed in the yacht club.’

Jude tried to get back to the subject, saying, ‘The woman whose birthday it was was called Becky Granger.’

Binnie shook her head. ‘Name doesn’t mean anything to me. Mind you, it’s quite possible I helped out at the party and never heard her name. Bookings for that kind of thing went through the Vice-Commodore.’

‘Do you have a name for him?’ asked Carole eagerly.

‘Yes. He was called Denis Woodville.’ Carole and Jude exchanged looks. They remembered meeting him when they were investigating the death of Aaron Spalding. ‘But I’m afraid you won’t get anything out of him now. Died five or six years back.’

‘Ah. Pity.’

‘Well, possibly not that big a pity.’ Clearly Binnie had not warmed to that particular Vice-Commodore. ‘He was a pompous git, like they all are down the yacht club. Any other way you can single out this particular fiftieth?’

‘I gather everyone got pretty drunk,’ said Carole.

‘I asked if you could “single it out”. Everyone gets pretty drunk at every fiftieth birthday party.’

‘Yes. Sorry.’

‘Apparently Quintus Braithwaite was among the guests at this particular one.’

‘Was he? That’d be quite unusual. Before he retired, he was off abroad so much that he didn’t come to the yacht club that often.’

‘He was definitely there that night. Apparently made quite a show of himself on the dance floor.’

‘Oh God.’ Binnie let out a raucous laugh. ‘Now it comes back to me. Quintus Braithwaite – “Dad Dancing” at its most ghastly. Yes, he’d had a skinful that night.’

‘Was his wife there?’

‘The sainted Phoebe? She wasn’t, actually. On holiday with the kids somewhere so far as I can recall. No, Quintus was on his own in Fethering. I couldn’t imagine him behaving like he did if Phoebe had been around.’

‘You talk about his “Dad Dancing”,’ said Jude, ‘but who was he doing the dancing with?’ She thought the question was a better approach than actually mentioning Josie Achter’s name.

‘Well, that was the really strange thing about it.’

‘Oh?’

‘He danced with the most unlikely person in the room. Woman who became my boss.’

‘Josie Achter?’ Carole couldn’t stop herself from saying the name.

‘Yes, you’re right. If ever there was an unlikely coupling … I can only think that Josie had been at the booze as much as Quintus had. I’d always thought of her as uptight, even a bit prim – but that night … God, nobody was going to forget the way they saw them dance that night … virtually pushed everyone else off the floor.’

‘And do you know,’ asked Jude, ‘whether she and Quintus left the yacht club together that night?’

‘Sorry, I’ve no means of knowing. End of an evening like that, you’re so knackered, all you want to do is get home to bed, but there are still all the glasses to be collected up and cleaned, the debris of the food to be cleared, crockery and cutlery to be put in the dishwasher. Then there’s always a hardcore of the boozy lot who want to go on drinking all night, and all you want to do is get to bed and … In answer to your question, no. I have no idea who went home with who that night.’

‘And do you know if the relationship developed?’

‘Quintus and Josie? No idea. Seems unlikely.’

‘But surely,’ said Carole, ‘in a place like this, there must’ve been a lot of gossip.’

‘Oh, sure. Yes, for the week or so afterwards, nobody talked about anything else. Plenty of sniggering in the yacht club, for sure, and I’d just started doing the odd shift at Polly’s, so I heard a lot of idle chatter there too. But then I think Quintus went off abroad again and it all died down.’

‘And the pair of them have never been seen together since?’

‘Well, I’ve certainly never seen them together since.’

‘Not even in Polly’s?’

‘Quintus used to go there from time to time, more since he’s been retired, but he’d always got Phoebe with him. And I suppose there may have been occasions that Josie was also in the café in a professional capacity when the Braithwaites came in for a coffee, but I never saw them behave to each other in any way that was unusual.’

‘So,’ asked Carole, ‘what is the verdict of the Fethering grapevine on what happened between the two of them?’

‘Both got very drunk one night and behaved in a way that was totally out of character for them.’

‘End of story,’ said Jude glumly.

‘End of that story, so far as I can tell,’ said Carole gloomily.

‘And end of the Polly’s Cake Shop story.’ Binnie sighed. ‘I can’t believe how much I miss working there.’

‘Would you really have wanted to go on with Phoebe Braithwaite as your manager?’ asked Carole.

‘No, the last month of working out my notice was a right pain from beginning to end. The lovely Phoebe had no interest in her staff … well, the members of staff who weren’t stuck-up bitches like she is. And I could see the whole thing was falling apart, and her precious volunteers were leaving in droves, but there was no way she was going to take any advice from anyone. No help from anyone either.’

‘Did you offer your services?’

‘Of course. Every time one of her toffee-nosed volunteers failed to turn up for a shift I offered to step into the breach. And every time she said, “No, I’m sorry, Binnie. That wouldn’t look right. You see, I am trying to update the image of Polly’s”.’

Jude let out a dry chuckle. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t punch her in the face.’

‘Oh, I’ve been insulted by better women than Phoebe Braithwaite. No skin off my nose. But then when it was actually my last day, the volunteers were in a worse state than usual – they’d all volunteered to go off and do other things, like go skiing or “take Gabriel to the Pony Club”. And I said to her, “Look, Phoebe, I know today’s the last day I’m being paid for, but I am prepared to come back, anytime you want, as a volunteer.”’

‘That was very generous of you.’

‘Well, I loved the place, didn’t I? I didn’t enjoy seeing it going downhill.’

‘And what was Phoebe’s reaction?’ asked Carole.

‘Oh, same old, same old. “That’s most kind of you, dear Binnie, but I’m afraid that wouldn’t work, you know, you being here as a volunteer. I’m afraid you wouldn’t fit in with Polly’s new image.” Well, stuff that, I thought, and I haven’t been back there since. Which is just as well, because I gather the place has now closed down for good.’

‘We’re not absolutely sure that’s going to happen,’ said Jude. ‘The Action Committee still have hopes of reopening it with a new management structure.’

‘I won’t hold my breath,’ said Binnie.

‘But if it were to reopen …’ Carole began tentatively, ‘under a professional manager … and with a different sort of volunteers … and you were asked to help out …?’

Jude was pleased to hear Carole’s words. They meant that she hadn’t rejected out of hand the possibility of managing the Volunteer Rota in a revamped Polly’s.

‘Who knows?’ was Binnie’s reply. ‘I’ve seen too many local Community Projects fall apart to get overexcited about the chances of Polly’s rising from the grave.’

‘Well, I hope you’re wrong,’ said Jude.

‘Oh, so do I. Nothing I’d like more than being back waitressing there … under any regime. That is, any regime but one. I’d be quite happy if Hitler or Stalin was in charge, but there’s no way I’m ever again going to work under Phoebe Braithwaite.’

Jude chuckled. ‘You’ll be all right on that score. The Braithwaites are completely out of the equation now. They have adjourned to focus their considerable energies on messing up some other charity.’

‘I’m very glad to hear it.’

‘So if the café does reopen,’ Carole persisted, ‘you might consider working there for free?’

‘Oh yes. If it happens. It’s not the money, you see. I can manage all right on my pension. And …’ she waved around at her personal museum ‘… none of this paraphernalia is expensive. I just buy stuff I like. No, it’s the people I miss at Polly’s. I’d happily work there for free.’

‘Well, we’ll see what can be done,’ said Jude.

The old woman shook her head. ‘I’m not optimistic.’

‘Going back to another matter, Binnie …’

‘Yes, Carole?’

‘This is a long shot, but presumably from the back of this house you get a very good view of the sea?’

‘Yes, I like it. One of the reasons why we bought the place.’

‘We?’

‘Yes. I was married when I came to Fethering.’

‘Oh? And …?’ Carole put the enquiry as delicately as she could.

‘My husband died within two years of our arriving here. Pancreatic cancer. Three weeks from diagnosis to death.’

‘I’m frightfully sorry.’

‘Don’t worry, Carole. It’s been a while.’

Jude observed that Binnie didn’t wear a wedding ring.

‘No, I took it off after he died. To my mind a marriage involves two people. Take one away, it’s no longer a marriage. Also, wearing a wedding ring can inhibit other possibilities in one’s life. I didn’t want to announce to the world that I was hors de combat so far as sex was concerned.’

‘And did the plan work?’ asked Jude, with the smallest twinkle in her eye.

Binnie’s eyes twinkled back as she said, ‘I had my moments. Not love, obviously. My husband was the only one I was ever going to love, but … I had my moments.’ She looked puzzled for a moment. ‘How did we get on to that?’

‘I was asking about the view from the back of your house.’

‘Oh yes, that’s right, Carole. Yes, I love it. My bedroom faces out the back. I don’t sleep too well these days and I like nothing better than looking out over the night-time sea, watching the lights of the ships as they cross to and fro. Making up stories for them, where they’ve come from, where they’re going to, that kind of thing. And of course in the daytime I enjoy watching the little boats too. I know who a lot of them belong to, you know, from my time at the Fethering Yacht Club. There are some very good sailors round here. Some very bad ones too. Weekenders from London who buy the biggest boats they can to show how much money they’ve got while they haven’t got the first idea of how to actually sail the things. Quite funny sometimes. From my bedroom I see them leaving the yacht club moorings and then getting swept out by the current of the Fether. Haven’t a clue what they’re doing. More often than not, their first few trips end up with calls to the coastguard for someone to come out and tow them back in. Then they don’t come down to the Fethering Yacht Club so often. Take up golf at Goodwood instead, perhaps. You’d be surprised how many of those big boats moored at the Fethering Yacht Club don’t get taken out to sea from one year’s end to the next. Their owners are actually afraid to use them.’

‘I was just thinking,’ said Jude, ‘back to October the third, you know, the Saturday when you served Amos Green in Polly’s Cake Shop …?’

‘Yes, I wondered when you were going to get on to that.’

‘Well, I was wondering, that evening after work, when you came back here, did you watch the sea out of your bedroom window?’

‘Course I did. I do that every night. Much more interesting than anything I’ve ever seen on the telly. That’s why I don’t have a telly.’

‘But you can only see during daylight?’ asked Carole. ‘Presumably once it gets dark, you can’t see anything other than the lights?’

‘You can see most of what goes on inshore and, you know, round the estuary. There’s quite a lot of light spillage from the streetlamps along the Parade. They don’t get turned off until eleven.’

‘But that particular evening,’ Jude went on, ‘did you see anything strange?’

‘What kind of strange?’

‘Anyone out there in a small boat …’ Jude hazarded, ‘you know, a dinghy, probably rowing it?’

Binnie grinned complacently. ‘Yes, I did see someone.’

‘Do you know who it was?’

She shook her head. ‘Too dark to see that.’

‘Or how many people were in the boat?’

Another shake of the head.

‘But did you recognize the actual boat?’

‘Oh yes. I know who owns all the boats in Fethering.’

Jude couldn’t wait. ‘And was it,’ she asked, ‘the blue-painted rowing boat that belongs to Quintus Braithwaite?’

‘Oh no,’ replied Binnie. ‘It came from much closer than that.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It was an inflatable. A silver rubber dinghy. The one Kent Warboys keeps at the end of his garden.’