by Simon Brett
‘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.’
THIRTY-ONE
The police did become involved at that point. Rosalie Achter seemed unworried at the prospect of being charged with murder. She still thought what she had done was entirely logical and justifiable.
Jude persuaded Sara Courtney finally to tell her story to the police. She also handed over the handkerchief bearing the stain of Amos Green’s blood. And testimony from Binnie confirmed what they had both seen in the store room of Polly’s Cake Shop.
Rosalie Achter was duly arrested. She refused to let her mother come to see her in prison where she was awaiting trial, but she was very pleased that Hudson Vale, the man she still thought of as her father, visited her. That fractured relationship was one which was to heal over a long period of prison visiting. Later into her sentence, he also brought his second wife and twin daughters to meet her.
And when Rosalie came out of prison, having served the minimum term that the judge had given her, she spent a lot of time with her new family, the family she had always dreamed of while locked into the poisonous relationship she shared with her mother. And she appeared never to ask herself the question of who her birth father actually was.
Josie Achter she never saw again.
The fate of Polly’s Cake Shop (as it was now renamed) was predictable. It did reopen (with no fanfare) under the management of Sara Courtney. The Volunteer Rota was very efficiently organized by Carole Seddon and, to her delight, Binnie returned to her waitressing duties. Carole surprised herself by how much she enjoyed being in charge of the volunteers. Maybe, for the first time in her life, she felt the tiniest tingling of Community Spirit.
And for a while the café worked well. But, from the financial point of view, it had always been a knife-edge operation and there was no surprise when, at the end of May, its final closure was announced.
The precipitating cause of this decision was a very happy one. Sara Courtney announced that she was pregnant. She and Kent were to be married in August. The marriage turned out to be a very successful one and, after ten years of looking after the children, Sara found the career she wanted running a restaurant in Fedborough that her husband had bought for her.
Less happy was the news in early June of Binnie Swale’s death. In spite of all the memories in her house, without her work at Polly’s, life had seemed empty to her. It turned out, from the dates on her funeral Order of Service, that she had been eighty-nine years old.
Things turned out better for Hammo the chef. After a couple of anxious months without work, he was taken on as assistant to Ed Pollack at the Crown and Anchor. And as the two young men shared recipes and experiments, the reputation of the pub’s food grew even higher. People even booked from London to sample their menus.
Meanwhile Warboys Heritage Construction continued its development on the Polly’s Cake Shop site. The upstairs flat was gutted and work began on the other two flats which would be built on the yard. Though at the planning stages, these dwellings had been proposed as ‘affordable housing’; in the event they became rather higher spec than that. When the properties finally came on to the market, the estate agent’s details described them as ‘luxury accommodation’. So no young couples, ‘brought up round here but unable to afford local prices’ were able ‘to stay in the area of their birth’. And of course Kent Warboys, having made a killing out of the café site, started eyeing up other retail and accommodation units along Fethering Parade with a view to further development.
As usual, he had done nothing illegal. His support for the SPCS Action Committee had been genuine; the twenty thousand he’d injected into the project had been real money. But he’d known from the start that all he had to do was sit and wait. The proposal for Polly’s Community Café, ticking a lot of desirable boxes for the local authority, had speeded the passage of his larger designs through the planning process. But he knew it wouldn’t last. Experience had told Kent that very few Community Projects of that kind survive more than a few months.
For a while the café part of the building remained closed. Then the announcement came that it would reopen in the New Year as a Starbucks. This time no one in Fethering seemed to mind. Quintus Braithwaite felt no urgency to write again to the Fethering Observer about the threat of ‘a genuinely local business becoming an identikit branch of an international, overpriced conglomerate with an idiosyncratic attitude to paying British taxes’. Nor did he and Phoebe form another protest group. The SPCS Action Committee was far away in their past. They had since moved their charitable focus from the welfare of abandoned donkeys in the Holy Land, via various other good causes, to the renovation as an arts centre of a pig sty that had once belonged to G. K. Chesterton.
(As to the expensive notepaper that Quintus had had designed for himself, having kept a few sheets back for his personal archive, he passed the rest on to Phoebe. She in her turn passed it on to one of her Joannas or Samanthas, who helped out with remedial reading at Fethering Primary School. So Quintus’s fine letterhead ended up being scribbled on. If only the schoolchildren with their felt pens knew how much their scrap paper had cost per sheet.)
In fact some Fethering residents positively welcomed the news of Starbucks’ forthcoming arrival, thinking it might make the village more upmarket and raise house prices. Who could say, one day Fethering might even get its own branch of Waitrose and its gentrification would be complete.
And for Carole and Jude, life went on in its usual way. The existence of her two gorgeous granddaughters animated Carole’s life considerably.
And Jude continued the process of healing.