The Killing in the Café

TWO

Jude had suggested they stay in the pub to eat, but Carole insisted that she had in the fridge the ‘perfectly adequate remains of a chicken salad’ she’d made on the Friday. She didn’t also say that the real reason she wanted to get home was to watch a Sunday evening television series featuring nuns and midwives to which she had become secretly addicted.

So home they went: Jude to her house, Woodside Cottage (though so far as anyone could tell there had never been a wood anywhere near it), and Carole next door to High Tor (though there wasn’t a tor within a hundred and fifty miles of Fethering).

While Carole settled down with her perfectly adequate salad for an evening of prayer and placentas, Jude found the light on the answering machine flashing when she entered her sitting room. The message was from one of her clients, Sara Courtney, who sounded to be in a really bad way.

Sara had come to her a couple of years before, on the edge of a serious nervous breakdown and contemplating suicide. In her early forties, she had just come to the end of a very long cohabiting relationship with the chef of the Brighton restaurant she co-owned. The door to her future, which she had thought would at some point involve marriage and children, had been slammed in her face.

So she had not only taken an emotional knock but, as a partner in the business, had also lost her livelihood. Her former partner had subsidized the restaurant by taking on huge loans which Sara didn’t know about, and also to subsidize his cocaine habit, which she didn’t know about either. She had thought his ‘unwinding in a club after a long evening over a hot stove’ had involved alcohol at the worst. How wrong she had been. The result was that the restaurant into which she had invested all of her savings had to be sold to settle the debts her former partner had run up.

Her sense of identity had also been challenged. Sara Courtney had always prided herself on being self-reliant. She had worked her own way up in the catering trade, never relying on the financial support of any man. So the loss of the restaurant also took away her raison d’être.

As a result of this double private and professional battering, she had completely lost confidence in every aspect of herself. She was delusional and seemed to have a very tentative hold on her sanity. She lost the certainty that a healthy mind can distinguish the real from the imaginary. Ugly fantasies filled her days, and nightmares kept waking her at night. She had started self-harming; her forearms, which she always kept covered in public, were ragged with scars.

Jude, who’d never suffered under the illusion that her style of healing was a complete cure for everything, had despatched Sara first to her GP, who’d prescribed a course of anti-depressants. As these began to dilute the patient’s more self-destructive impulses, Jude had started a series of healing sessions designed to bolster her confidence.

These had continued over some months and were soon showing positive results. From the almost catatonic state of despair in which Sara had first visited Woodside Cottage, she was starting to see the possibility of life continuing, though not perhaps in the way she had envisaged that it might in the past.

She was still very fragile, but she did at least manage to get a job, working as a waitress in Polly’s Cake Shop. This was, of course, way below her skills level, but it was a step in the right direction. Josie Achter had been impressed by her new employee’s efficiency and understanding of the business and had increased her responsibilities until she was acting virtually as an assistant manager. Sara was entrusted with the contacts list for all the staff and often ended up working out their shift rotas.

Jude reckoned that Sara Courtney’s relapse into emotional wreckage must be something to do with Polly’s Cake Shop and the prospect of her losing her job.

She was only half right. When she rang back she heard that Sara’s upset had been related to Polly’s Cake Shop. But she was not traumatized by the threat to her employment.

She was traumatized because she had seen a dead body there.