The Killing in the Café

by Simon Brett

  She was quite relieved to be able to say, ‘No, it wouldn’t be proper.’

  ‘I thought not.’

  ‘Has she mentioned it recently … you know, seeing the body?’

  ‘No. She only talked about it once. When she was trying to explain to me how low she felt at times. It was just when we were starting to get to know each other … you know, that stage when you tell your new partner the worst things about yourself, to see if it’ll put them off.’

  ‘And what Sara told you didn’t put you off?’

  ‘No, it’s her I love … and I guess the mental fragility just comes along as part of the package.’

  ‘Hm. And what did you tell her?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘What were the worst things about you?’

  He chuckled. ‘Nothing, I’m glad to say … or at least nothing that put her off.’ And Jude realized that was all the answer she was going to get.

  So, cautiously, she moved on to another subject. ‘Sara never said to you, did she, whether she recognized the body she claimed to have seen? Whether it looked like someone she knew?’

  ‘No,’ said Kent. But was Jude being hypersensitive to detect a new carefulness in his reply? Was he really unaware of the connection between the body seen in Polly’s store room and the one found on Fethering Beach?

  ‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘you reckon I should encourage Sara to apply for managerial jobs? You think she’s up to it?’

  ‘I think Sara has a very shrewd estimation of her own abilities. If she reckons she’s up to anything, then I’m sure she is.’

  ‘Thank you, that’s really helpful. I’m sorry to have bothered you, but I didn’t really know who else to ask. There aren’t that many people around who know Sara really well. She was so locked up in that relationship with the bastard restaurateur that she doesn’t seem to have many friends.

  ‘Which is actually another thing that we have in common,’ Kent added.

  Jude looked at him in some surprise.

  ‘Oh, I’ve got any number of acquaintances, I see a lot of people in the course of my work, but I wouldn’t say I have many close friends.’

  ‘So, when you’re in a relationship with someone, it tends to be very closed-in and exclusive, does it?’

  ‘I suppose it does, really, yes.’

  ‘Which must make things painful if it breaks up.’

  ‘Yes, the closer a couple are, the more pain when it does end.’ Kent looked at Jude as if he felt he had to defend himself. ‘Look, I know you’re a friend of hers, but I swear I have no intention to hurt Sara. I’m not denying I’ve had other relationships since the divorce where we’ve got very close, but it didn’t work … you know, different priorities, age difference, women wanting children when I’ve already got some; all the usual reasons. But I do sincerely believe that in Sara I have finally found the right one.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘And well, it’s been strange, this extended Christmas break. It’s a long time to spend together when a relationship’s fairly new. I just hope I haven’t crowded Sara, haven’t been too full-on for her.’ He looked a little anxious. ‘And maybe that’s why she insisted on going up to London to do some shopping today. Perhaps I was making her feel a bit claustrophobic. Perhaps she needed a bit of space.’

  ‘Maybe. Mind you, I should point out that some of the January sales have started early. Even the Sunday after Christmas is quite a popular day for shopping.’

  He chuckled. ‘Yes, I hadn’t thought of that.’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about a thing, Kent. I’m sure the pair of you’ll be fine.’

  ‘I hope so. I sincerely hope so.’

  ‘Well, Gulliver and I must be on our way.’ Jude stood up and moved closer to the window. She looked down at the garden. It was neatly laid out and well looked after, though there wasn’t much growing at that time of year.

  Kent followed her eye-line. ‘As you can imagine, only very hardy stuff survives down there. All the salt spray and the wind.’

  ‘I’m sure.’ She noticed there was a locked gate in the wall that led down to the beach. And, just inside it, on a light trailer, was a silver-coloured rubber dinghy.

  ‘Do you use that much?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, just for pottering around. My real boat’s in the Fethering Yacht Club marina – or moored to the few pontoons they have the nerve to call a marina.’

  ‘Hm.’ Jude looked across the river mouth to the main expanse of Fethering Beach. ‘It was over there, of course, that my friend Carole and I found the body of Amos Green,’ she said casually.

  ‘Yes, I heard about that.’

  She turned to face him. Her brown eyes, though gentle and compassionate, could also be compelling, not to say transfixing. ‘Sara told me that you knew Amos Green.’

  ‘She told me she’d mentioned that to you. But I should say that “knew” is rather overstating the situation. I had dealings with Amos Green many years ago when I was doing some development in the Kingston area. He was on the local council there, involved in planning applications. I never knew him socially.’

  ‘And you haven’t seen him since?’

  ‘God, no.’

  ‘And you don’t know of any connections he had with Fethering?’

  ‘None at all,’ said Kent Warboys.

  TWENTY-ONE

  As Jude walked Gulliver back through the afternoon chill to Woodside Cottage, her mind was full. The main question she kept asking herself was why Kent had wanted to see her. He clearly was interested in Sara’s mental strength and whether she could cope with a managerial job, but at the same time that seemed to be almost a distraction. Jude got the feeling that his real purpose had been to get some other information out of her. But she couldn’t for the life of her think what that information was. Or indeed whether he’d got what he wanted from her.

  He’d also been extremely uncommunicative about Amos Green. Or perhaps, to put a less cynical slant on his behaviour, he had simply told her all he knew about Amos Green, and it wasn’t very much. They had met professionally over some planning issue when Kent Warboys was working in the Kingston area – end of story.

  But he did know that Sara had mentioned the connection to Jude. For a moment, as Gulliver pulled her resolutely homeward in expectation of his supper, she wondered if that was why Kent had wanted to see her: to check out whether she knew any more about his dealings with Amos Green. But the idea seemed tenuous.

  Or was the situation even more serious? Had Kent Warboys attached himself to Sara Courtney because he’d had something to do with Amos Green’s death and knew she was a kind of witness, having seen the body in the store room? Was his apparent love for her a masquerade, just a way of controlling her, to ensure that she didn’t take the information she possessed to the police?

  But that scenario felt far-fetched and melodramatic. And to Jude, who was a pretty good reader of human emotions, Kent Warboys’ love for Sara had seemed absolutely genuine.

  She wondered whether it was worth her contacting Janice Green to see if she could shed some light on the relationship between Kent and her late husband. But Jude wasn’t optimistic of her enquiries getting anywhere. Janice had very firmly closed that chapter of her life.

  Anyway, when she got back to Woodside Cottage there was a message on the answering machine that drove all other thoughts out of her head.

  It was from Carole – absolutely characteristic of her to leave an important message on the landline. In spite of her growing love affair with computers, she was still suspicious of mobile phones. She thought they should only be used for trivia. Any really important information should be communicated on a proper phone.

  It was good news. Chloe Seddon, having scared her parents and grandparent out of their wits by apparently being unable to breathe, had responded very well to the hospital treatment. The doctors’ view was that she was suffering from croup, whose symptoms can be very scary to young parents witnessing them for the first time.

>   Chloe was being kept in hospital overnight for observation – and both her parents were going to be there with her. Carole would stay in the Fulham house, put Lily to bed and give her breakfast in the morning. The expectation was that Chloe would be discharged from the hospital after the doctor’s rounds the following morning. And, if nothing else untoward had happened, Carole would be back in Fethering the following afternoon. Just in time to see the New Year in (though Carole didn’t mention that – New Year’s Eve was one of those dates that she just pretended wasn’t in the calendar).

  Jude felt hugely relieved. She also knew why Carole’s message sounded so breezy and matter-of-fact. And why her neighbour had been so panicked the day before; why memories of her own loss made her so fearful for her new granddaughter. And Jude knew equally that, when they next met, that aspect of Carole’s behaviour would not be mentioned.

  It was a cold, slow January. Carole and Jude were reconciling themselves to the frustrating prospect of never getting any closer to unmasking the murderer of Amos Green. And, as time went by, the need to investigate became less urgent. The world was full of unsolved murders. This looked like being another one.

  Meanwhile there was a lot happening at Polly’s Community Café. Not a lot in the sense of a lot of customers. The bleak weather and the feeling that everyone had overspent at Christmas meant that the residents of Fethering didn’t go out much. The café was nowhere near making a profit, and was being subsidized by what was left of Kent Warboys’ twenty grand. Regret was expressed in some quarters that so much had been spent on the relaunch, particularly because, in spite of Lesley Tarquin’s fluent name-dropping, the event had received no press coverage whatsoever.

  In mid-January Hammo and Binnie, having worked out their notice, left to test the choppy waters of the winter job market. And instantly, according to the reports of those few who did still frequent the café, standards went down, particularly in the home cooking area. When taking over as what was effectively unpaid manager, Phoebe Braithwaite had instantly cancelled all of Josie Achter’s contracts with catering suppliers in Brighton. She was sure that her Volunteer Rota of Joannas or Samanthas contained some very skilled cooks – ‘Quintus and I have been to some absolutely yummy dinner parties with most of them.’ But whereas they might be highly skilled at spending a whole day realizing the recipes of the latest television chef sensation, few of them proved to have the abilities required by a short-order cook. Knocking up all-day breakfasts that didn’t use every pan in the kitchen proved beyond the capabilities of most. The skill-sets of some of them were so iffy that even preparing beans on toast could be a challenge.

  And of course in the real world Phoebe Braithwaite’s Volunteer Rota was soon shown to be inadequate. Though beautifully worked out as an Excel spreadsheet on her computer (with different colours for the individual volunteers), it failed to take into account the basic rule of all human interaction – that a lot of people are extremely inefficient, and that also they change their minds.

  So while all of the Joannas or Samanthas had enthusiastically filled in Phoebe’s neatly printed availability lists before Christmas, when the prospect of an ongoing commitment became real they remembered all kinds of inconvenient details that had slipped their minds. A few had completely forgotten family skiing holidays that had been booked ‘yonks ago’. Some had committed themselves to regular Pilates classes or volunteer reading with ‘the slower ones at the local primary’. At least one had started a passionate affair with her next-door neighbour ‘which is just taking up all my time’. Others had decided to focus their energies on different charitable causes which involved less of a time commitment. A good few just got bored with the whole concept of Polly’s Community Café.

  News of these lapses filtered through to Carole and Jude. They heard from local residents who’d found the service ‘intolerably slow’. Then there were those who’d turned up at Polly’s to find a notice on the door saying ‘Closed due to staff shortage’.

  Jude got some sense of how far down the project had declined when she received a wheedling call from Phoebe Braithwaite asking if she ‘might consider stepping in to help out on a few shifts at the café …?’ Given the way she’d been treated when her volunteering had last been discussed, Jude realized the extent to which Phoebe was scraping the barrel. She politely declined the generous offer.

  All in all, what happened through January to Polly’s Community Café merely reinforced the truism that there are few worse bases for a business than goodwill. When staff are being paid for doing a job they can be bawled out – or even sacked – for inefficiency. When they are volunteers, the management has no sanctions against them.

  Then reports spread through the village of food poisoning. A couple of local worthies had got on the wrong side of a prawn salad in Polly’s Community Café and suffered the consequences. Some careless volunteer must have left the ingredients out of the fridge too long. There was no hope of keeping the incident quiet, and it wasn’t much of an advertisement for the services of the café in a place as gossipy as Fethering.

  Things could not continue in that way. It was with no surprise that Jude heard the news Phoebe Braithwaite had suffered a slipped disc and was hors de combat as far as running the café was concerned. In the course of her healing work, Jude had seen many examples of how agonizing back pain could be. But she also knew how frequently it proved to be psychosomatic. And the timing of Phoebe’s onset of agony did seem at least serendipitous.

  It caused her even less surprise when an email to all of the SPCS Action Committee summoned them to another EGM at Hiawatha the following Monday.

  TWENTY-TWO

  ‘I’m afraid the figures just don’t add up,’ said Alec Walters in sepulchral tones. Having served as Treasurer for almost every society in Fethering, this was not the first time he had communicated such news. Most local initiatives had a very short life-span. Usually they came to an end due to the departure of their guiding light, the individual whose energy and enterprise had started the thing up. The moving-away from Fethering of such figures – or sometimes their death – was quickly followed by the demise of the project they had originated. It was rare that a replacement with comparable get-up-and-go could be found. And those who did have the requisite get-up-and-go didn’t want to inherit someone else’s initiative – they wanted to set up their own.

  Phoebe Braithwaite’s slipped disc need not have had such a terminal effect, but it was clear from her husband’s attitude at the EGM that he had long since lost interest in Polly’s Community Café and was looking for something else on which to focus his ego.

  ‘Thank you for that analysis, Alec – which I have to confess doesn’t surprise me. You may recall I’ve warned about financial problems ahead at many meetings of this committee.’

  Nobody could recall him making such warnings. Chiefly because he had never made them. But nobody thought it polite to mention the fact.

  ‘I think there comes a point,’ he continued, ‘in any enterprise, when you have to recognize the enemy’s got the upper hand and cut your losses. In any naval engagement, a good captain is the one who knows not only when to attack, but also when to make a tactical withdrawal.’

  The implication, of course, was that this observation was based on the Commodore’s own experience of naval engagement, though the worst danger any of the ships he’d served had been faced with was an outbreak of swine flu.

  ‘And I think we have probably reached that point with Polly’s Community Café.’

  There was an apathetic murmur of reaction from the assembled committee members, a significantly smaller number than those who had attended the previous EGM. Flora Claire, disgruntled that during its brief existence nobody had done anything about turning Polly’s into a Naturopathic Health Centre, was not present. Nor was Lesley Tarquin. She had moved back up to London to resume her career in PR (with hopefully more success than she had achieved in Fethering).

  There was also someone in the sitting r
oom who shouldn’t have been there. Laid out on a sofa and intermittently groaning was Phoebe Braithwaite, extracting the maximum value from her slipped disc. As a non-committee member she had no right to be present and Quintus’s explanation that ‘it’s the only place the old thing can get comfortable’ was clearly nonsense in a house the size of Hiawatha. But no one – not even Arnold Bloom – made any comment on this clear breach of committee protocol.

  Jude reckoned Phoebe Braithwaite was there to inhibit criticism of her running of Polly’s Community Café – and to counter any that actually did arise. Look at me, she seemed to be saying, I worked so hard on the café that I ended up with a slipped disc. She knew about the strong English aversion to hitting a man – or in this case a woman – when she was down.

  ‘So I think it’s time,’ Quintus Braithwaite continued, ‘to pull the plugs on Polly’s Community Café. It was a splendid enterprise, into which many people – particularly my wife Phoebe – put in hard work way beyond the call of duty. But in this increasingly commercial world – given the competition from the multinational chains like Starbucks, Costa and Caffè Nero – a locally run Community Project like Polly’s is bound to be up against it. So I think the best thing we can do is to close the place down – with enormous thanks to the efforts of everyone involved – and to make this the last meeting of the SPCS Action Committee.’

  The majority in the room murmured lethargic agreement, but Alec Walters had a practical objection to raise. ‘I’m afraid it’s not quite as simple as that. The SPCS Action Committee does have a bank account – two, in fact, both current and savings accounts. And there are still funds in there, mostly what remains of Kent Warboys’ generous gift of twenty thousand pounds. If the accounts are to be closed, we must make decisions on where that money should go.’

  ‘Can’t we just give it to charity?’ asked Quintus dismissively.

  ‘I think we’d need to check with Mr Warboys himself about that. Although his gift was not officially hypothecated for the running of Polly’s Community Café, I think there is no doubt that that was the cause for which it was intended to be used.’