The Killing in the Café

by Simon Brett

  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.

  THREE

  Jude rang back straight away. Sara sounded so distraught that she suggested she come round to Woodside Cottage. When the woman arrived she was hollow-eyed and trembling, in almost as bad a state as she’d been when they first met. At her best Sara Courtney was a very attractive woman, slender with straight black hair and olive-black eyes that suggested some possible Mediterranean heritage. But she was looking far from her best that afternoon.

  Jude comforted her with cuddles and green tea, but it still took some time for Sara to calm down sufficiently to be coherent. Patiently Jude kept saying, ‘Just wait. Wait till you’re ready. Then tell me exactly what you saw.’

  Finally Sara managed to give an answer that was not interrupted by hysteria. ‘It was last night,’ she said. ‘When I was tidying up at the end of the day.’

  ‘What time would that be?’

  ‘Last orders half past five on a Saturday and the café closes at six. The waitresses clear the tables and stack the dishwashers. The kitchen staff tidy up in there. It doesn’t take long. I should think they were all gone by six thirty. I was just going round checking everything before I set the alarms and locked up.’

  ‘So you were alone in the café?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And was Josie up in the flat? Or Rosalie?’

  ‘No. Josie was in Brighton and it was Rosalie’s day off. Anyway, she doesn’t live in the flat any more, she’s got her own place in Brighton. And she tries to avoid working weekends when she can. So it was just me who saw it.’ There was a new level of uncertainty in her voice. Jude remembered it from when Sara had been at her worst, when she had distrusted every thought or image that went through her head; when she literally thought she was going mad.

  ‘And where did you see it?’

  ‘In the store room. Right at the back of the café.’

  ‘The back faces on to the beach?’

  ‘Yes. There’s a little yard behind, then a service road, then the beginning of the dunes.’

  ‘I know it. So the store room contains all the stuff that doesn’t need refrigeration?’

  ‘Yes. Though there are two big freezers in there as well. And there are shelves full of spare crockery and cutlery, kitchen roll, loo paper, spare light bulbs, everything …’

  ‘And yesterday evening a dead body?’

  ‘Yes.’ The reminder threatened once again to destabilize Sara Courtney, but she swallowed deeply and went on, ‘It was a man. I think he’d been shot.’

  ‘Where was the wound?’

  ‘Oh his right temple. A neat hole.’

  ‘Much blood?’

  ‘Only a trickle. I wiped it clean with my handkerchief.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I just … it seemed awful … him lying there, with the blood … Somehow I felt I had to wipe it away.’

  Jude made no comment. She was glad Carole wasn’t there. Her neighbour would have gone all prissy and Home Office at that point, berating Sara for interfering with a crime scene … if, of course, it was a crime scene, and not just a product of the woman’s heated imagination.

  ‘You didn’t recognize the man, Sara?’

  ‘I’d never seen him before.’

  ‘What age was he?’

  ‘Late fifties, early sixties perhaps.’

  ‘Wearing?’

  ‘Jeans and a kind of plaid work shirt.’

  ‘And what, was he just lying on the floor?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You didn’t see any signs that he’d been moved there? Any trail of blood or …?’

  ‘As I said, there was very little blood. Just the bit on his temple that I wiped off.’

  ‘Hm. What about a gun?’

  ‘Gun?’

  ‘Well, if there was a bullet hole in his temple, presumably the bullet come out of a gun. Did you see any sign of a gun?’

  There was an almost imperceptible pause before Sara replied, ‘No, no sign of it.’

  Jude decided not to question this. Not at that moment, anyway. ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘Last night?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I didn’t do anything. I went home – and I had a terrible night. Every time I closed my eyes I saw the same image – of the man dead.’

  ‘So you haven’t told anyone about what you saw?’

  ‘No, you’re the first person.’

  ‘You didn’t think of calling the police?’

  ‘My life’s complicated enough as it is.’

  Which was a strange reply to the question, but Jude didn’t pick up on it. Instead she said, ‘But surely by now someone else will have seen the body, won’t they? I mean, Polly’s is open today, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh yes. Sunday’s one of our busiest days this time of year. Business makes most of its profit over the weekends.’

  ‘So have you been back there today?’

  ‘Yes. I was scheduled to work all day, but I cried off pretty early, claimed I’d got food poisoning.’

  ‘But did you go back to the store room?’

  ‘Yes. I steeled myself to it. I knew I had to.’

  There was a silence. ‘And?’ Jude prompted.

  ‘And the body wasn’t there.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘No sign
that it ever had been there. And that got me more panicked than if I’d found it again. It made me think back to—’

  ‘To when you first came to see me?’

  ‘Yes. I was worried that my mind was going again, that I was seeing things like I did when … You know how quickly one thought leads to another?’ Jude nodded. ‘And I thought if I’m hallucinating, seeing stuff that isn’t there, then I’m not on the way to recovery like I thought I was. Last night I very nearly took a razor to my arm again – only just managed to stop myself. I’m right back where I started and there’s no hope for me. I’m finished.’

  ‘Of course you’re not, Sara. This isn’t the first time you’ve slipped back, you know that. But you’ve bounced back before, and you’ll bounce back from this too.’

  Sara shook her head miserably. ‘No, this time I think it’s for good.’

  ‘That’s what depressives always think. That’s what’s so dispiriting about the disease. When you go down you can never envisage coming up again. But you will, Sara, you will.’

  All that prompted was a wry, disbelieving, humourless grin.

  ‘Tell me, though … now, now you’ve had time to consider it, do you really think you did see the body in the store room last night?’

  ‘Well, I think I did.’ She looked very confused. ‘I hope I did.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘If I didn’t, then I really am going mad again.’ Jude didn’t comment. ‘I can’t stand it. I haven’t got the energy to go through all that again. I think this time I really will have to—’

  ‘Don’t even think about it,’ said Jude with gentle firmness. ‘This is only a minor setback. You’re bound to have a few of those. But you will come out of it.’

  Sara didn’t even nod at this reassurance. Tears, ready to flow again, glinted in her eyes.

  Jude, who knew about the savage tricks the mind could play, wondered whether Sara had actually seen anything or not. Certainly, if a murder had happened, and if it ever came to court, she would be the most unreliable of witnesses.

  ‘And sadly, I suppose,’ said Jude, ‘you don’t have any proof of what you saw?’

  ‘Only this.’ Sara Courtney reached into her jeans pocket and pulled out a white handkerchief. On it was a rust-coloured bloodstain.

  FOUR

  ‘I think, if we could call this meeting to order …’ The speaker, Commodore Quintus Braithwaite, banged his gavel on the table. He was the kind of man who would always have his own personal gavel.

  The Commodore was in fact a relative newcomer to Fethering. That is to say that – though he had been the owner of a large house in the Shorelands Estate to the west of the village for many years – he, his wife Phoebe and their three children had spent very little time there. It was only after his retirement from the Royal Navy that he became a full-time resident. He had quickly become a familiar sight around Fethering, favouring tweed jackets or khaki gilets, open-necked shirts with very large checks and corduroy trousers in burgundy or English mustard yellow. He appeared just to have given up one uniform for another.

  And for the past two years he had involved himself in every aspect of village life, bringing to local affairs the organizational skills which had raised him through his career in the Forces. The actual quality of those organizational skills was something on which the Fethering jury was still out.

  The latest village initiative in which Quintus Braithwaite was involving himself was the ‘Save Polly’s Cake Shop’ campaign, already shortened to ‘SPCS’. Indeed it was he who had written the letter to the Fethering Observer about the threat from ‘an international, overpriced conglomerate with an idiosyncratic attitude to paying British taxes’, also known as Starbucks.

  And he was very much taking over the second meeting of the campaign’s committee. For a start he had decreed that it should take place at his house, which gave him home advantage. The Shorelands Estate was an exclusive gated community with complicated regulations for its residents as to when they could hang out their washing or mow their lawns. Many of the houses, like the Braithwaites’, backed on to the sea, and a good few had sailing dinghies lined up at the ends of their gardens. Quintus Braithwaite, who had commanded considerably larger vessels during his professional life, was an avid sailor and very bossy to anyone who crewed for him (usually his wife Phoebe). He kept his main boat on one of the riverside moorings owned by Fethering Yacht Club, but he also owned a small blue-painted tender with an outboard which was kept at the end of his garden.

  The house itself – named, incongruously, ‘Hiawatha’ – was a big six-bedroomed affair, built in what a 1950s architect had reckoned to be Elizabethan style. This meant there was a lot of red brick, a few supernumerary turrets and far too many tall chimneys twisted like barley sugar. Inside, no attempt had been made to continue the Elizabethan motif. The décor in all of the rooms had the immaculate impersonal gloss which can only be supplied by very expensive interior designers.

  They were meeting in the sitting room, a huge space filled with an excess of large sofas. Rather than commanding the sea view, its picture windows faced inland towards the ‘Green’ at the centre of the Shorelands Estate, but since the thick brocade curtains were closed, nobody missed anything.

  For the less well-heeled members of the SPCS campaign group, the house displayed a daunting opulence. Phoebe Braithwaite, a twittery woman in a Liberty print dress whose eyes blinked a lot behind thick glasses, had supplied tea, coffee and biscuits in very fine china. Thrown by the splendour of the venue, few of those present were about to question anything their host proposed.

  Jude was there simply to support Sara Courtney. Her client seemed to have settled down after her outburst that Sunday at Woodside Cottage. There had been no more mention of the dead body she had possibly seen in the store room. But ten days on, Jude knew that Sara was still very brittle and might need support when the fate of her place of employment was discussed.

  Having called the meeting to order, Commodore Quintus Braithwaite didn’t mess around. He moved straight on to the power coup which he had clearly planned. ‘Now, what we want to do this evening is to get an action committee in place, so that we can move forward in a constructive manner. At the last meeting I asked for nominations for someone to be Chair of the committee but, since we haven’t had any, I feel it my duty to step into the breach. So if we could take a vote on—’

  ‘Just a minute, just a minute.’ The interruption came from Arnold Bloom, a Fethering resident whom Jude recognized but didn’t know well. He was a small man who habitually wore a frayed suit and tie. Unmarried, he lived in the former fisherman’s cottage where he had been born. He still slept in the bed where the birth had taken place. His hair, dark but very thin, was combed down from a central parting in a manner which made it look as if it had been painted on to his bony cranium. Arnold had run the village’s small hardware store until the opening of a large Homebase nearby had ended its financial viability. Since then he had taken over Fethering’s Crazy Golf course (its title now modernized to Adventure Golf). He had the embittered conviction that the world had done him wrong, and had been Chairman of the Fethering Village Committee for as long as anyone could remember.

  ‘I was at the last meeting, Quintus,’ he went on, ‘as were a lot of other people present this evening who I’m sure could bear me out on this – and I have no recollection of nominations being asked for Chairman of this SPCS committee.’

  ‘It may not have been said in so many words,’ the owner of Hiawatha protested, ‘but I think it was implicit in our discussions.’

  ‘I don’t think that at all,’ said Arnold Bloom. ‘All that was said was that at the next meeting we would need to appoint a Chairman.’

  ‘I prefer the word “Chair”,’ said the Commodore.

  ‘Well, I prefer the word “Chairman”. At meetings of the Fethering Village Committee I don’t like to be referred to as a piece of furniture.’

  ‘I think you’re being rather sma
ll-minded, Arnold.’

  ‘Do you? Well, I think I know rather more about the workings of Fethering than you do. I was born in the village; I’ve lived here all my life.’

  ‘Well, I have owned this house for over thirty years.’

  ‘Not quite the same, though, is it, Quintus? You may have owned the house but you’ve hardly spent more than the odd week in it.’

  ‘That,’ the Commodore responded with some hauteur, ‘is because I have been abroad, defending the realm on behalf of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second.’

  ‘I’m sure she was very grateful to you,’ said Arnold Bloom drily, ‘but it doesn’t change the fact that you know very little about how this village works. We do still have some respect for democracy in this neck of the woods, you know.’

  ‘I too have an enormous respect for democracy. That was another thing I was defending, as well as the realm.’

  ‘Well if, Quintus, you have as much respect for democracy as you claim, why are you trying to ride roughshod over the democratic system to get yourself elected as Chairman of this committee?’

  ‘I am not “riding roughshod”. I am offering my services on behalf of the community.’

  ‘Very generous of you. But I still think we should have checked to see whether there are any other nominees for the post of Chairman of the SPCS Action Committee.’

  ‘Well, are there?’ The Commodore looked balefully around his sitting room, daring anyone else to put themselves forward. Nobody did. ‘Right, it would seem that—’

  ‘Just a minute. If you can put yourself forward, then so can I.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Yes. I, Arnold Bloom. I am putting myself forward as a candidate for the position of Chairman of the SPCS Action Committee.’

  ‘But you can’t do that.’

  ‘Why not? You just did.’

  ‘My situation is entirely different from yours.’

  ‘In what way?’