The Killing in the Café

by Simon Brett

  This raised huge enthusiasm from the committee, even to the extent that Phoebe Braithwaite peered round the kitchen door to see what was going on.

  Kent Warboys raised his hands to quell the reaction before it turned into applause. ‘Now, I don’t want you to think that I’m being completely altruistic here. I’m not proposing to buy that place and make a gift of it to the SPCS Action Committee – much as I would like to be able to do that. No, I am a businessman and what I am proposing is a business plan. If Warboys Heritage Construction were to purchase the Polly’s Cake Shop site, my plans would be to improve and refurbish the existing flat above the café, and to build two more flats on what is currently the back yard.’

  ‘But, Kent,’ objected Arnold Bloom, gleeful that the conversation had moved on to a subject on which he was something of an expert, ‘I think you might find it hard to obtain planning permission for such a project. The local Planning Committee, I’m glad to say, are very averse to uncontrolled development of this locality.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Quintus Braithwaite interposed, ‘but the members of the Planning Committee are reasonable people. There’s one Kent and I know who’s also a member of Fethering Yacht Club, and I’m sure if we were to casually spell out to him the advantages of—’

  ‘I’m afraid nowadays backscratching by the Old Boys’ Network doesn’t work quite the way it used to, Mr Chairman.’ Arnold was approaching his high horse with great relish. ‘If you’re suggesting you’re going to get planning permission on a nod and a wink and a few expensive dinners, then—’

  ‘I am not suggesting anything of the kind! I am only saying that if one has useful contacts, one should—’

  ‘And I am telling you that we’re no longer in the days of T. Dan Smith and John Poulson!’ Puzzled looks on the faces of the younger committee members showed that they weren’t familiar with corruption trials of the early 1970s. And also suggested that Arnold Bloom might be a lot older than he looked. He went on, ‘Planning permission is not something that can be taken for granted. We’re very close here to the Arundel Park Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and the idea of luxury flats being built on Fethering seafront is just the kind of thing that …’

  Kent Warboys had raised a polite finger to stop Arnold in mid-flow, and it worked. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt you, Arnold, but I have no plans to build luxury flats. What I am talking of building is what we are constantly being told by every government of every hue is needed – particularly here in the southeast – affordable housing.

  ‘The existing flat and the ones I’m proposing to build will be priced in such a way that they could allow three young couples, brought up round here but unable to afford local prices, to stay in the area of their birth.’ Another murmur of approbation.

  ‘And in all this, let me stress that I am not forgetting the reason why you are all gathered here tonight at Hiawatha. You are the SPCS Action Committee, and your aim is to meet the goal of saving Polly’s Cake Shop. Well, my plans would achieve that, because the profit made on selling the three flats on the site would enable me to offer the ground-floor café area to be developed as a Community Amenity rent-free!’

  This time Kent Warboys did not prevent the assembled throng from clapping. Nor from strongly endorsing his proposal that Warboys Heritage Construction should enter negotiations for the purchase of Polly’s Cake Shop.

  Needless to say, the minute Quintus Braithwaite had banged his gavel to mark the official ending of the meeting, Phoebe was straight in from the kitchen with her tray of wine and glasses. There was an atmosphere of celebration in the drinking that followed, and in the course of it Jude was introduced to Kent Warboys.

  ‘Ah, we have a mutual friend,’ he said.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Sara Courtney.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘She’s very grateful to you for the help you gave her when—’ he didn’t want to spell out too much detail in public – ‘when she needed it.’

  ‘My pleasure. Glad she’s feeling better.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Kent Warboys with a grin. ‘She’s feeling a lot better.’

  And the way he said the words made Jude wonder whether he had made any contribution to Sara’s newfound well-being.

  EIGHT

  Jude was surprised the following morning to have a phone call on the dot of seven. It was rather earlier than she liked to begin the process of waking up.

  She was also surprised to find that the caller was Carole.

  ‘Is everything all right? Has the baby started?’

  ‘No, I haven’t heard anything from Fulham for three days.’ She sounded upset by this lack of communication.

  ‘Well, I’m sure in this case no news is good news. They don’t want to ring you until there’s something to say.’

  ‘Maybe not.’ Carole didn’t sound convinced. ‘Stephen always did have a very secretive streak.’

  Congenital? Jude wondered. But she didn’t voice the thought. Instead she said, ‘Everything will be absolutely fine. Gaby had all those tests last week and they all proved that the baby was in excellent form.’

  ‘Yes. But I still worry.’ This was unusual from Carole. Normally she’d do anything rather than express her feelings – or admit to having any. ‘I’ve been awake most of the night.’

  Jude was well practised in supplying comfort to the troubled, but she’d rarely had to offer it to her neighbour. ‘Look, do you want to come round and talk about it?’

  ‘Well …’ Carole was tempted. ‘But I haven’t taken Gulliver out for his walk yet.’

  ‘Or had breakfast?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then I’ll tell you what we’ll do. Just give me time to have a shower and get some clothes on, then I’ll join you for a walk. A good workout for Gulliver should take what … half an hour …?’

  ‘About that.’

  ‘Which would mean that at eight o’clock, when Polly’s Cake Shop opens, we could settle down for an indulgently large breakfast there.’

  Carole didn’t demur. Which was a measure of how bad a state she was in. Normally she hated being organized by anyone. But on this occasion she needed help. Even more remarkable, she had virtually admitted to Jude that she needed help.

  It was nippy on Fethering Beach. The October mornings were cold. Jude had already put Woodside Cottage’s central heating on, timed for a couple of hours early morning and a couple early evening. And if she was at home in the evening, she lit a fire. Carole, who still thought the whole concept of central heating was something of an indulgence, hadn’t switched hers on yet.

  As they passed over the dunes on to the beach, Jude looked back at the service road and the gates to Polly’s Cake Shop’s yard. Yes, there would be room for a couple of flats there. Not very big, but with amazing views. She looked along the row of similar yards for the other shops and wondered if any of them might be bought up for similar development. And indeed if that was part of Kent Warboys’ long-term plan.

  But she wasn’t there for that kind of speculation. The purpose of the walk was to comfort Carole. ‘It’s natural for you to worry,’ she said, ‘but it will all be all right. Because of the tests she had last week you know more about the health of Gaby’s than you do about most unborn babies. And it’s not as if she had any problems with Lily’s birth, did she?’

  ‘Well, the labour wasn’t particularly comfortable.’

  ‘No, but it never is. That’s why it’s called “labour”.’ Though childless herself, through her clients Jude had a wide knowledge of the problems of pregnancy. ‘But is there any particular reason why you’re worrying so much about Gaby?’

  ‘Why? Should there be?’

  ‘I don’t know, do I? That’s why I’m asking. I just wondered if there was anything from your own experience of childbirth that might make you especially anxious.’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘What?’

  But if Carole had been on the verge of some confession, she changed her mind. ‘Nothing,
’ she replied briskly. ‘As you say, labour is never a walk in the park, but with Stephen … nothing went wrong.’ And that was all Jude was going to get on the subject.

  It was quite cold on the beach. The clocks were due to go back the next weekend, but till then it was still dark at seven thirty in the morning. There was also a bit of sea mist. The tide was going out, exposing vast expanses of sand. Unsurprisingly the two women seemed to be alone on the beach, apart from Gulliver, who’d been released from his lead and was conducting elaborate guerrilla warfare with inanimate lumps of seaweed along the shoreline.

  ‘Anyway, how was your new committee meeting last night?’ Carole asked, infusing the ‘new’ with the implication that the subject was somehow frivolous and flaky.

  ‘Oh, like committees always are. Tedious and unnecessary.’

  ‘They don’t have to be.’ During her time at the Home Office, Carole had prided herself on ‘running a good committee’. ‘It’s all a matter of who’s chairing the thing. If the Chair’s weak, then nothing works.’

  ‘I don’t think this Chair’s weak so much as self-aggrandizing. Former naval man, pillar of the Fethering Yacht Club, who goes under the unlikely name of Quintus Braithwaite. Have you come across him?’ Carole had, after all, been a Fethering resident longer than Jude had.

  ‘Doesn’t ring a bell – and it’s not the kind of name you’d be likely to forget. Where does he live?’

  ‘The Shorelands Estate.’

  Carole let out a snort of contempt. ‘Say no more. That lot never leave their gated compound, except to take their 4x4s out to Waitrose. Anyway, you say he’s not a weak Chair?’

  ‘No, but he seems to think it’s all about him.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Carole nodded sagely. ‘That type can be almost as destructive as the weak ones. And this palaver is all in the cause of saving Polly’s Cake Shop for the village, is that right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I can’t understand why you got on the committee.’

  ‘Well, it was through a …’ Jude had nearly said ‘friend’, but she knew how shirty Carole could get when friends she didn’t know about were mentioned ‘… a client.’

  ‘Oh?’ Even with the change of word, Carole sounded a bit frosty.

  ‘Yes, she’s going through a bad patch; she needs a lot of support.’

  ‘Huh,’ said Carole Seddon, as only Carole Seddon could say ‘Huh’. ‘I thought you gave your patients support by healing them, not by joining committees you don’t want to be on.’

  Jude knew that the use of the word ‘patients’ rather than ‘clients’ was deliberate, an attempt to rile her. She was determined not to react.

  But they were interrupted by furious barking from Gulliver. He was over at the shoreline, suspicious and angry, circling something he had found there.

  Carole and Jude drew closer. The darkness of the night was paling into grey and they could see quite clearly what had upset the dog.

  It was the body of a man, swollen to the point of bursting out of his clothes and hideously discoloured. Ropes tied around his ankles were broken and frayed.

  But they could see clearly enough that in his right temple there was a bullet hole.

  NINE

  ‘Well,’ said Ted Crisp as the two women sat down in the Crown and Anchor with large Sauvignon Blancs that evening, ‘it sounds odd to me. Probably means the body wasn’t a “Fethering Floater”.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve heard of them, “Fethering Floaters”,’ said Jude. ‘But I can’t remember the details.’

  ‘I can remember them,’ said Carole tartly. ‘The subject came up when that poor boy Aaron Spalding drowned in the Fether.’ She was referring to the first case they had ever worked on together, just after Jude had moved into Woodside Cottage.

  ‘Yes. Remind me.’

  Ted picked up the cue. ‘It’s an old tradition round here, a story passed down the generations. But perhaps more believable than many of the Fethering old wives’ tales. It’s something to do with the Fether being a tidal river and how that affects the currents where it actually meets the English Channel. Basically it’s reckoned that anyone who drowns in the Fether gets swept out to sea and then the undertow gets hold of the body and drags it back to land. So they usually turn up on Fethering Beach within twenty-four hours. And they’re called the “Fethering Floaters”.’

  ‘Well, the one we found this morning wasn’t one of them,’ Carole observed.

  ‘More likely washed in from the Channel,’ said Ted. ‘Illegal immigrant, perhaps, trying to get over here in a boat that wasn’t seaworthy.’ Of course he didn’t know anything about the bullet hole.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Carole. ‘All I know is that from the state of decomposition, the body had been in the water for considerably longer than twenty-four hours.’

  ‘Yes, it had probably been in there nearer three weeks.’ As soon as the words were out, the look on Carole’s face told Jude that she shouldn’t have said that. She hadn’t mentioned anything to her neighbour about Sara Courtney’s story of having seen a dead body at Polly’s Cake Shop.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ came the instant, suspicious response.

  ‘I just … erm …’ Jude floundered. ‘As you say, the state of decomposition. That body looked as if it had been in the sea getting on for three weeks.’

  ‘And since when have you been an expert in forensic pathology, Jude?’

  ‘Oh, you know, you see things. All those grisly American series … CSI whatever … you pick it up.’

  Jude knew how unconvincing she sounded. She knew too that, when they were next alone together, Carole would grill her about her lapse. She looked down at her glass, which had unaccountably become empty.

  ‘I think we’d better have a couple more of the large Sauvignon Blancs,’ she said to Ted. ‘Need it after what we’ve been through today.’

  Carole’s instinct to protest that she didn’t need any more was stopped at source by Ted actually pouring the drinks. ‘Police give you a rough time, did they?’ he asked.

  ‘They were studiously polite,’ Jude replied. ‘But obviously they wanted a lot of information.’

  ‘We were, after all, the first people to discover the body,’ said Carole. ‘So they started off pretty suspicious. But it soon became clear that there was no possible connection between us and the corpse.’

  ‘And we really had nothing to tell them, beyond the fact that we’d found it. But that didn’t stop them grilling us for what felt like hours.’

  In spite of uneven encounters with the police since she’d left the Home Office, Carole still had an instinct to protect the Force when it came under attack. ‘They were just doing their job, Jude. They usually arrive on a crime scene knowing absolutely nothing about what’s happened, none of the background. You can’t blame them for all the questions.’

  ‘No, I suppose you’re right,’ Jude agreed grudgingly.

  ‘Anyway, Carole,’ said Ted, ‘at least you’ve provided the Fethering Observer with another predictable headline.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, it’s always the same thing when a dead body’s found in this part of the world, isn’t it? The report always begins: “A woman walking her dog …” and then goes on to describe the nasties that the woman walking her dog discovered. And this time you and Gulliver have the honour of playing those two central roles.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose we do,’ said Carole. She was subdued, feeling the delayed shock of what she and Jude had encountered on Fethering Beach that morning.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Ted, ‘from my point of view, speaking as landlord of the Crown and Anchor, I’m just glad it happened now rather than at the beginning of the tourist season. Dead bodies are not among the amenities your average punter looks for in a beach holiday.’

  ‘But you’ve had a good summer, haven’t you?’

  ‘You betcha. Zosia and Ed have worked their little socks off.’ He referred to his bar manager and chef. ‘No, it’s
been good.’ Ted Crisp still hadn’t quite come to terms with the fact that the Crown and Anchor, mainly thanks to Zosia’s efficiency and Ed Pollack’s cooking, had become a success. Having first become a destination pub, it was now sometimes even referred to as a ‘gastropub’. Occasionally he felt nostalgia for its former scruffiness.

  ‘Anyway, enough about things washed up on the beach. Let us lighten the mood with a well-chosen joke.’ Ted Crisp could never forget for long that – in a former life – he had been a stand-up comic. ‘What lies at the bottom of the ocean and twitches?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Jude obediently. ‘What does lie at the bottom of the ocean and twitches?’

  Ted Crisp burst into a raucous laugh as he replied, ‘A nervous wreck!’

  Carole sniffed. ‘You’ve always known how to raise the tone, haven’t you, Ted?’

  They ended up staying in the Crown and Anchor to eat. As with the second glass of Sauvignon Blanc, Carole had initially resisted the suggestion, but her mind didn’t take much changing. The morning’s events had unsettled her and the prospect of fisherman’s pie was a comforting one.

  But she had hardly taken a mouthful of Ed Pollack’s speciality when Carole received a call on her mobile that put dead bodies and everything else clean out of her mind.

  It was from Stephen. Gaby had gone into labour.

  TEN

  She couldn’t eat any more and said she had to get back to High Tor in case the phone rang. Jude’s argument that if Stephen had contacted her on the mobile once he could do so again did not hold any sway. Carole needed to be alone. Alone with her fears.