The Killing in the Café

THIRTY

Sara still had the mobile number on her contacts list from the time when she had been working at Polly’s Cake Shop. It was answered rather blearily on the fourth ring.

And without argument a meeting was agreed. Carole and Jude got back into the Renault and retraced their route eastwards along the A27.

The area certainly lived up to its ‘manky’ description. Brighton is famous for its splendid seafront, the Regency Pavilion and the trendy chaos of the Lanes; but there’s another side to the town, a warren of dilapidated houses, whose boards of non-matching bell-pushes signify transient multi-occupancy.

Rosalie Achter was subdued as she let them in. It was a one-bedroom flat with a door leading off presumably to a bathroom. There was no separate kitchen. A basin, a kettle and a Calor Gas ring supplied her cooking needs. An empty and a half-full bottle of vodka stood beside them. The bed was a mattress on the floor with a sleeping bag on top, scrumpled as if its occupant had only just emerged. The whole place looked very studenty, in marked contrast to the impersonal tidiness of the flat over Polly’s Cake Shop.

There were no pleasantries, no offers of drinks. Picking up from the conversation she’d had on the phone, Jude said, ‘Your mother gave you an alibi for the whole of Saturday the third of October.’

‘Oh, what did she say I was doing?’

‘Spending the Sabbath with her at your grandmother’s house.’

‘Huh, the day you catch me doing that … Still, my mother is trying to help me for once, so perhaps I should be grateful for that.’

‘If you weren’t in Brighton that day,’ asked Carole, ‘then where were you?’

‘I was actually here in the flat most of the day. Wish I’d stayed, given how things turned out, rather than going to Fethering.’

‘And what made you go to Fethering?’

‘A phone call. From Amos Green.’

‘Had you spoken to him before?’

‘No. I didn’t recognize the name. But then he explained who he was.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He told me that he was trying to contact my mother, because they had been very close at one time. And he was in the Fethering area and he thought it’d be nice for them to meet up again “for old time’s sake”.’

‘But he hadn’t managed to contact her?’

‘No. When she spends the Shabbat with Granny, she keeps her mobile phone switched off.’

‘And then …?’ Carole prompted.

‘And then he started boasting about how close he’d been to my mother. He said they’d had an affair more than twenty years ago, but when she was already married to my father. And then they’d re-met in Fethering … eleven years later. And because my mother claimed she was in love with Amos, she told my father she wanted a divorce. Amos Green was the cause of my parents splitting up. But then he didn’t stay around and he was the cause of my mother becoming so bitter and destructive. Amos Green was the cause of her breaking up any chance I had of keeping a relationship with my father.’

‘Hudson Vale?’ asked Jude.

‘Of course Hudson Vale! So virtually everything that has been screwed up in my life has been caused by Amos Green.’

‘So what did you do?’ asked Carole quietly.

‘I fixed to meet him at Polly’s Cake Shop after closing time. And before I left here I got a gun.’

‘How on earth did you do that? It’s not easy just to pick up a gun.’

‘It’s easy if you’ve got the kind of friends I have in Brighton.’ She spoke with a degree of pride; the pride of a middle-class girl who had reacted against the values of her upbringing. ‘There are a couple of guys I used to hang around with who’re very into the drug scene here.’

‘Gang members?’

‘You bet. No problem for one of them to lay their hands on a gun. He owed me a favour, anyway.’

‘So,’ asked Carole, ‘you went to Fethering with the firm intention of killing Amos Green?’

‘Yes,’ the girl replied coolly. ‘He had to pay for all the evil he had caused. But for him, my mother and father wouldn’t have divorced. I’d still have a proper relationship with the father I love.’

Jude was tempted to say that that father loved her too, but didn’t think it was quite the moment.

‘So you duly met Amos Green at Polly’s?’

‘Yes. After everyone else had gone home.’

Carole and Jude exchanged looks. That had been a miscalculation on Rosalie’s part, but again it wasn’t the right moment to raise the matter.

‘And when you met …?’

‘I took him into the store room. I don’t know why. Maybe I thought shooting him in there would make less mess.’

‘And did you talk to him?’

‘There wasn’t much to say. I shot him through the temple. I was amazed how little blood there was.’

‘Did you deliberately shoot him through the temple so that it could look like suicide?’ asked Carole.

‘I hadn’t thought that far. All I knew was that I wanted him dead.’

‘And what did you feel when you’d killed him?’

‘I felt strange. Shocked perhaps, but also relieved. It was like a great weight had been lifted off my back.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘I put the gun on the window sill … not for any particular reason. I wasn’t thinking of anyone finding it and wondering how it got there. I went out of the store room into the yard at the back, then through to the beach. I’d got the keys, of course. And then I just walked along the sands for a while. Feeling numb, really, but also euphoric. I don’t know how long I was there.’

Long enough, thought Carole and Jude, for both Sara and Binnie to have time to look in the store room and see the body.

‘Anyway, after a while I started thinking more practically. I had achieved what I’d wanted to achieve, I’d killed Amos Green. But now I needed to get rid of his body.

‘Well, of course the sea was the obvious place. If I weighed his body down. But I couldn’t just chuck him in from the shore. He’d get washed back on to the sand straight away. So I realized I’d need a boat to take him out to the deeper water. I could handle a boat. I used to be a member of the yacht club, until my mother decided I was meeting “the wrong kind of people” there.

‘So I thought about who I knew with a boat that I could borrow.’

‘And came up with the name of Kent Warboys?’

‘Exactly. We’d had this affair for a time and I knew he felt guilty about the way he’d broken it off – particularly because he then got engaged so quickly to Sara Courtney. So I didn’t have to put much pressure on him. He said I could borrow the rubber dinghy, so long as I put it back in his garden when I’d finished – and so long as I never told him what I needed it for.

‘After it got dark, I picked up the rubber dinghy and rowed it along as near as I could get to Polly’s back yard, moored it and then fetched the body. Bloody heavy, it was.

‘I used some rope and bits of broken concrete I found in the yard and then dragged Amos Green to where the boat was. I rowed him out to beyond where I knew the seabed shelved and pushed him over the side.’

Rosalie Achter beamed in recognition of her achievement. ‘And I felt my life had been cleansed,’ she said.

‘And didn’t you feel any regret?’ asked Jude.

‘Good heavens, no.’ There was a silence. ‘Well, yes, there was one thing I regretted.’

‘What?’

‘I regretted I hadn’t found some stronger rope to tie his body to the concrete. If I had, he’d still be down there.’