The Killing in the Café

TWENTY-EIGHT

They didn’t get much more out of Binnie. Not that she was unwilling to speak, she just didn’t have much more to tell them. She had seen the body in the store room, closed the door and gone home. She had never even contemplated informing the police. ‘I thought somebody else’d find the body soon enough, no point in me getting myself involved. And I do remember from the days when I used to watch crime series on the telly that the person who discovers the body is always the first suspect, and I could do without all that hassle of questioning and what-have-you.’

‘But didn’t you find it odd,’ Carole had asked, ‘when there was nothing in the media about the body being found in Polly’s?’

Binnie had shrugged. ‘Yes. But it wasn’t my business.’

‘And thinking of who might have killed Amos Green – did you reckon that was your business?’

‘Some things it’s best not to get involved in.’

‘So …’ Jude had asked, ‘you really haven’t any suspicions at all as to who might be the murderer?’

‘Not really, no.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Just that the last thing the dead man did, you know, when I gave him the bill for his coffee, was to ask if Josie Achter was around.’

‘And you told him that she was in Brighton for the day.’

‘Yes, because that’s what I’d been told. But presumably she came back from Brighton at some stage.’

In a way they had both known that there would come a moment when the investigation was bound to point towards Josie Achter. Like roads and Rome, everything seemed to lead back to her.

They had no contact number. She was still either in her hotel in Hove or, if the sale had gone through, in her new flat. Carole and Jude had no idea what either of those addresses were. And Rosalie had very firmly told Jude that her mother didn’t want her new mobile number given out.

They racked their brains for ways to get in touch with her. Since Josie had mentioned being a part of the Jewish community in Hove, Carole wondered whether they should try contacting the synagogue there. Surely they’d have contact lists for their congregation?

Then Jude remembered something that had been said at the EGM when Kent Warboys announced that he was the owner of Polly’s Cake Shop.

‘What, you think he’d have a number for Josie Achter?’

‘I should think he probably would.’

‘Well, we’re going to have to contact him at some point.’ Carole grimaced. ‘To ask him about the use of his rubber dinghy on the night Amos Green’s body disappeared.’

‘Yes, but I don’t want to do that yet. Not until we’ve got more information about that evening.’

‘Very well, but why are you—’

‘At that EGM, Kent said the SPCS Action Committee Treasurer had sat in on a couple of his meetings with Josie Achter.’

‘And you’re thinking he might have a mobile number for her?’

‘Exactly.’

Jude had been right. When she rang Alec Walters he was quite happy to give her the number.

‘Shall I ring her straight away?’ asked Jude, uncharacte‌ristically vacillating.

‘Yes, definitely.’

There was no reply and no means of leaving a message.

‘Maybe it’s because it’s the Sabbath,’ said Carole. ‘Try again in the morning.’

On the Sunday morning the phone was answered. When Jude identified herself, it was clear that Josie Achter had not been to charm school since their last encounter. ‘I have nothing to say to you,’ she said.

‘I’m ringing in connection with the death of Amos Green.’

That did get a response – or at least stopped Josie from switching her phone off. ‘What do you know about his death?’

‘A friend and I have been doing some investigation.’

‘Why?’

‘Because we’re intrigued by what happened. We don’t think Amos Green committed suicide. We think he was murdered.’

‘We’d better talk,’ said Josie Achter.

She was still living in the hotel – she hadn’t quite completed on her new flat – but she didn’t want to talk in the lounge there or a place like a pub or café. Though the day before’s rain had continued unremittingly, she led them down to an empty shelter on the sea front.

‘So what’s all this about?’ she asked. She came across to Carole and Jude as both tentative and probing. She wasn’t about to give them any information until she knew how much they knew.

‘We have discovered,’ said Jude, ‘that the day he died, Amos Green was in Fethering.’

‘So what’s that to do with me?’

‘He came into Polly’s that afternoon looking for you.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Binnie told us. She served him.’

‘Right. You say “the day he died”. When his body was washed up on Fethering Beach he had already been dead for some time. How do you know when he died?’

‘His body was seen in the store room at Polly’s late that afternoon. The third of October. There was a gun in the room as well, but too far away for him to have used it on himself.’

‘Did either of you see the body?’ Josie was still assessing the extent of their knowledge.

‘No.’

‘Then who did see it?’

‘Sara Courtney told me she’d seen the body in the store room,’ said Jude.

‘But Binnie had seen it before she did,’ said Carole.

‘Hm.’ The wind lashed against the thick glass of the shelter, wetting their shoes. It was bitterly cold.

‘So,’ Jude pressed on, ‘you can’t deny that there was some connection between you and Amos Green.’

‘I’m not denying it. So has your assiduous amateur sleuthing worked out what that connection was?’

‘We talked to your ex-husband yesterday,’ said Carole.

‘God, you have been thorough.’

‘He said that your marriage broke up because you’d met someone else.’

‘Did he?’

‘Or rather, re-met someone else.’

‘Yes, that’s what happened.’

‘And we know when and where you re-met him,’ said Jude.

‘Remind me.’ Josie Achter still retained her carapace of cynicism, but she was clearly shaken by the amount of information they were producing.

‘About twelve years ago. At Fethering Yacht Club. At a party to celebrate Becky Granger’s fiftieth birthday.’

Her face registered that that was a big shock. ‘How on earth do you know this stuff?’

‘Hudson was very helpful to us.’

‘Yes, he bloody would be.’

‘But things didn’t quite work out, did they?’ Carole observed. ‘You got divorced because you’d re-met a former lover, but in the event the two of you didn’t end up together. Had the idea been that he would get divorced too?’

‘We’d talked about it.’

‘But it seems he didn’t keep his side of the bargain, did he? He went back to his wife … assuming his wife ever even knew that he had cheated on her.’

‘His wife knew he had affairs,’ said Josie in a matter-of-fact tone.

‘Wasn’t it difficult for you,’ asked Carole, ‘having them living so close to you?’

‘Close?’

‘You at Polly’s Cake Shop, Quintus and Phoebe Braithwaite in the Shorelands Estate.’

Josie Achter looked at Carole in amazement, then burst into harsh laughter. ‘You think the love of my life was Quintus Braithwaite? I’m not sure whether that’s more funny or insulting. You imagine that I could even bear to touch that pompous oaf?’

‘Well, apparently you were all over each other at Becky Granger’s fiftieth.’

‘That is just a measure of how effective my little plan was. I wanted people to talk about how Quintus and I behaved that night at the yacht club, but it never occurred to me they’d still be talking about it twelve years on.’

‘What you’re saying,’ suggested Jude, ‘is that dancing with Quintus all evening was just a smokescreen?’

‘Exactly that. I loathe him – always have. But that evening I knew the ghastly Phoebe was out of the country. I also knew that he’d respond if I came on to him – he always had been a bit of a groper. What’s more, he’d been at the booze all evening. It wasn’t difficult.’

‘And you needed the smokescreen,’ said Jude with sudden insight, ‘because Amos Green was also at the party and you didn’t want people to suspect there was anything between you and him?’

‘That was it,’ Josie admitted. ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw Amos in the yacht club. He was having a thing with a friend of Becky’s, not that that lasted once we were back together again. My feelings for him were as strong as ever. And he said he felt the same. And from that moment, I knew I couldn’t continue the masquerade of my marriage to Hudson. I had to be with Amos; that was all there was to it.’

‘Except of course he wasn’t good “husband material”, was he?’ said Jude, quoting Janice Green.

‘No. Mind you, I’m still glad I divorced Hudson. That wasn’t going anywhere. Never had been.’

‘But you must have been aware of the effect that divorce was going to have on Rosalie.’

‘Not really. She was entering adolescence, not the best time of a girl’s life. I don’t know that our getting divorced made that much worse for her than it would have been anyway.’ She spread her hands wide in a gesture of helplessness. ‘You can’t make an omelette without …’

Jude recoiled from the callousness in the woman’s voice. Carole asked, ‘So you and Amos Green never cohabited?’

‘No. The affair continued until the divorce was final. Then he disappeared again. Never good at taking responsibility for his actions. When one of his women got serious it frightened him. As your friend said, not good “husband material”.’

‘Well, at least he’s not hurting any more women now.’

‘No.’ And to the surprise of both Carole and Jude, a tear glinted at the corner of Josie Achter’s eye.

‘So,’ asked Jude, ‘you didn’t see him the day he died? That Saturday, the third of October?’

‘No, I was spending the Shabbat – the Sabbath – with my widowed mother in Brighton. I didn’t get back to Fethering till nearly eleven.’

‘And you didn’t look in the store room?’

‘Why would I do that? At that time of night?’

‘So you’ve no idea when the body was moved?’

‘For God’s sake! I didn’t know there was a body there. The first I knew about Amos’s death was when I saw a photograph of him on the television news.’

‘And how did you react?’

‘I was devastated. I had long since reconciled myself to the fact that we’d never be together, but I was amazed how much it hurt to know that I would never see him again.’

‘And did you think he had committed suicide?’

‘Never for a moment. Amos did not hate himself. He loved himself.’

‘So who do you think killed him?’ asked Jude.

‘Assuming, that is, that you didn’t?’ Carole dared to add.

Josie Achter looked at her bleakly. ‘You don’t understand, do you? I loved Amos. He had hurt me more than anyone I knew, but that didn’t stop me loving him.’

‘So who do you think killed him?’ Jude repeated.

‘I’ve no idea,’ Josie replied wearily.

‘Where was Rosalie that day?’ asked Carole.

‘She was with me in Brighton.’

‘Really?’ Carole looked unconvinced. ‘Sharing the Shabbat with your widowed mother? Rosalie told me she’d given up what she called “all that Jewish crap”.’

‘She was always very close to her grandmother. She bonded more with her than she ever did with me. For her grandmother, Rosalie would pretend that she still believed “all that Jewish crap”.’

‘But she didn’t come back to Fethering with you that night?’

‘Of course not.’ Josie wrinkled her nose. ‘She stayed in her squalid little flat in Brighton, surrounded by all her druggie friends.’

‘What we haven’t talked about …’ said Jude gently, ‘is the first time you met Amos Green.’

‘No, we haven’t,’ Josie agreed shortly.

‘How did you meet?’

‘It was fairly soon after Hudson and I got married. We had just bought the house in Esher and he was using one of the spare bedrooms to work in. Which wasn’t ideal because he couldn’t really see clients there. So we had plans drawn up for a proper studio to be built on the back of the house.’

‘We were in it yesterday morning,’ said Carole.

‘Oh, yes. Anyway, Hudson was very busy as ever, so we agreed that I’d sort of follow through the progress of the planning application, which involved a lot of trips to Kingston and …’

‘And Amos Green was on the planning committee,’ Carole completed the sentence for her.

‘Yes. And we fell for each other just like that. It was a terribly difficult time for me. Because I realized what a massive mistake I had made in marrying Hudson. I had thought what I felt for him was as good as love got, and then when I met Amos … this sounds terribly corny, but I knew it was the real thing.’

‘And you didn’t consider just cutting your losses and moving in together?’

‘Oh, we talked about it, yes. But we were both so recently married and we felt we had loyalties and … In retrospect we were very stupid. We should have followed our instincts, but … we didn’t. And then life got complicated.’

‘In what way?’

‘Amos got into trouble in connection with the planning committee. There were allegations that he had been accepting bribes from some architects to give favourable responses to their planning applications.’

‘Do you know if they were true?’

Josie shrugged. ‘I didn’t quite honestly care. All I knew at the time was that it meant I could see even less of Amos. Our time was tight enough, what with the demands of our spouses, and then Amos had to keep going off to give evidence at enquiries and … It was a very difficult time for both of us.

‘And then I fell pregnant with Rosalie and that seemed to be a sign for me. A sign that we should end it. If we’d set up together, Amos would never have coped with the responsibility of bringing up a child. Hudson would clearly provide a much more stable background. He’d be a much better father for Rosalie.’

Jude looked steadily into the woman’s dark eyes. ‘Even if he wasn’t actually her father?’

Josie Achter gave the words exactly the same emphasis as she repeated, ‘Even if he wasn’t actually her father.’

‘Did Amos Green even know you were pregnant?’ asked Carole.

Josie shook her head. ‘He was under so much pressure at the time … I couldn’t have added to it.’

‘And do you know if he was ever prosecuted for taking bribes?’

‘I don’t know. I do know that he had to resign as a councillor.’

‘Did he talk to you about the details of the case against him?’

‘Not much. All he did say was that if he ever decided to take up blackmail he’d got a lot of information on a lot of architects’ practices that could be extremely valuable one day.’

‘Did he name any of those companies?’ asked Jude.

‘I’m sure he did, but it’s a long time ago and it was at a pretty stressful time for me. Oh, actually I do remember one – and only because it was such a dreadful name. “Fit The Build”.’

‘Oh,’ said Jude, remembering when Kent Warboys had told her the really bad name of one of his former companies.