The Killing in the Café

by Simon Brett

  ‘Maybe that’s what all men are looking for – the secret of eternal youth. Shacking up with a younger woman is supposed to do the trick – certainly Kent kept saying how young I made him feel. The blood of young virgins – huh. And this lot—’ her wide, unsteady gesture took in everyone present at the Fethering Yacht Club – ‘are all trying to recapture a time when they were younger and less stressed, just “messing about in boats” …’ She nodded derisively towards Quintus Braithwaite. ‘Getting up to stupid things in their dinghies, playing secret games and—’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Carole eagerly. ‘Do you actually know something that Quintus—?’

  But Rosalie had already moved on. She swilled down the remains of her drink. ‘So what shall I do now – make a scene? Really bugger up Kent and Sara’s celebration. Tell Sara what a devious bastard she’s taking on; spill the beans about all the shady deals he’s been involved in over the years; destroy any hopes of happiness they might have?’

  For a moment she looked as if she was about to put that plan into action. Then her shoulders slumped, tears started in her eyes and, with a mumbled, ‘I must go’, she edged her way through the crowd to the exit door.

  ‘Do you think we should go after her?’ asked Carole.

  To her surprise, Jude shook her head. ‘I think it’s something she’s got to sort out on her own.’

  They might have had further discussion, had Sara Courtney not come across at that point to give them both lavish hugs. She too had had a little too much to drink, but it hadn’t had the destructive effect on her that it had had on Rosalie Achter. Sara seemed positively to sparkle from head to toe. ‘I’m having such a wonderful time,’ she said. ‘I’d given up hopes of ever having an engagement party.’

  ‘Didn’t I tell you you should, “Hang on in there”?’

  ‘You did, Jude, you did. And bless you for it.’ Sara let out a little giggle. ‘Well, maybe you should be next.’

  ‘Next to do what?’ asked Carole.

  ‘Get engaged. Get married – now it’s legal for you.’

  The look on Carole’s face when she heard this was one that Jude would cherish for a long, long time.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  ‘Well, there’s one positive thing we have got out of the evening,’ said Jude.

  They were sitting in the unkempt cosiness of Woodside Cottage’s sitting room. The fire had just been lit and was beginning to draw. Though they had both had quite a lot at the Yacht Club, Jude had insisted they needed ‘another drink to debrief’. And Carole hadn’t put up much of an argument against the idea.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

  ‘Related to the investigation.’

  ‘Ah, you were thinking of what Rosalie said about Quintus Braithwaite getting up to secret things in dinghies.’

  ‘I wasn’t, actually, though I agree that might be something worth investigating.’

  ‘Yes. And what’s more, Jude, we’ve never really followed up on the theft of Quintus’s dinghy, have we? You know, the night Sara saw the body.’

  ‘You’re right, and we will try to find out more about that, but the piece of information I was pleased we got this evening was the name of Rosalie’s father.’

  ‘Hudson Vale.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Well, apart from being a rather unusual name, in what other way is it of use to us?’

  ‘It gives us an opportunity to find out more about Josie Achter.’

  Carole still couldn’t see where all this was leading. Jude explained, ‘I’ve still got a feeling that there is some connection between the dead man and Josie Achter.’

  ‘And where do you get that from? The corpse’s aura?’

  Jude was used to these jibes at her practices and beliefs, but as ever she didn’t rise to this one, saying instead, ‘I’ve just a feeling there’s something relevant in the Achter family background – or perhaps I should say the Vale family background.’

  ‘Well, if you say so.’ Carole didn’t sound convinced.

  Jude produced her laptop and switched it on. ‘Hudson Vale, Hudson Vale … there can’t be many Hudson Vales around, can there?’ She clicked through to Google and consulted the screen. ‘Plenty about the Hudson Valley in New York State. And there’s a road in Coventry actually called Hudson Vale.’

  ‘I wish I knew what you were trying to find out,’ said Carole plaintively.

  ‘I’m just trying to get a contact for him. Ah, this looks promising.’ She moved the laptop round so that Carole could see the screen. The website was headed: ‘HUDSON VALE PHOTOGRAPHY’. And the examples of his work showed that he was more than just a wedding snapper.

  There were pictures of supermodels and pop stars, portraits of minor royals and magazine spreads. When it came to photography, Hudson Vale was clearly near the top of the tree.

  Jude clicked on to the ‘Contact’ page. There was an email address and a telephone number. If she’d had less to drink at the yacht club, she probably wouldn’t have rung it at after nine in the evening. But as it was, she did.

  The answering voice was gentle, public school educated. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Is that Hudson Vale?’

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘I want to talk to you about your daughter Rosalie.’

  ‘Oh God,’ said the voice. ‘You’re not from the police again, are you?’

  Hudson Vale didn’t mind seeing them on a Saturday. ‘Ergh,’ he’d said on the phone, ‘when I started in this business I had a wedding every bloody Saturday. At least thank God I don’t have to do that any more. With brides you very quickly get simpered out.’

  Their appointment was for eleven o’clock. As Carole’s Renault joined the A3 at Milford, a cold, wintry rain began. It hadn’t let up when she turned off the motorway, following the signs to Esher and Kingston, and looked as if it was set in for the day.

  Hudson Vale was still living in the fine, five-bedroomed Georgian house he’d shared with Josie and Rosalie. He answered their knock on the door very promptly, as if he had been waiting in the hall for them. A tall, willowy man with long white hair and fashionably round, black-framed glasses over startlingly blue eyes, he led them through the house to his studio. Through a closed door they passed they could hear the sounds of his twin daughters playing, presumably with their mother, but Hudson made no reference to them.

  The studio had been built on to the back of the house and to a very high spec. Presumably, if this was where he met his clients, it needed to be smart. Jude got the impression that it was a part of the house the two little girls were not allowed to enter.

  What was striking was that, while the walls of the rooms they had come through had been decorated by paintings from various hands, in the studio everything on display was Hudson Vale’s own work. Even more striking was how many of the photographs were of Rosalie; some in colour but most in monochrome. Black and white was clearly his favoured medium. Rosalie as a baby, Rosalie as a little girl, Rosalie trembling on the edge of adolescence. There was a particularly charming colour print of her, aged perhaps eleven, giving her father a big cuddle. The pale blond hair of the younger Hudson Vale contrasted with Rosalie’s tight, jet-black curls, and his blue eyes sparkled with happiness.

  There were no images of Rosalie after the age of eleven. To Jude the lavish display contrasted sharply with the complete lack of family photographs in Rosalie Achter’s soulless flat in Fethering.

  Hudson’s studio was well equipped. Gesturing to the inevitable Italian machine, he offered his guests coffee. Jude asked for a cappuccino. Carole, who in a café would have demanded ‘ordinary black coffee’, asked for an Americano without milk.

  The garden-facing wall of the studio was all glass doors, which could clearly concertina back to the sides when the weather was more clement. Though the rain was still lashing down and it was February, the garden was well tended and must have looked glorious in the summer. Jude commented on this while Hudson made the coffee.


  ‘Yes, it’s beautiful,’ he responded. ‘I have to confess I do rather love this office. Sometimes I almost resent having to leave it to go out and take photographs.’ He gestured towards two closed doors. ‘I’m very self-sufficient here, you see. Bathroom through there. The other’s my darkroom.’

  ‘I didn’t know photographers still used darkrooms,’ Carole observed.

  ‘A lot of them don’t. But I’m afraid I’m a bit of a Luddite when it comes to digital cameras. I prefer old-fashioned rolls of film. For me a lot of the most creative work happens in the processing. I can achieve a subtlety of tone then that I just can’t get with the digital equipment.’

  Carole looked round at the photos on display. ‘Well, the effect is certainly wonderful.’

  Jude too looked around. ‘I can’t help noticing—’

  He was ahead of her. ‘Yes, they all are of Rosalie. She has an amazingly expressive face.’

  ‘But I gather you don’t see much of her these days,’ said Carole rather clumsily. Jude would have been more subtle.

  Hudson Vale shrugged. ‘No, I’m afraid I don’t. I tried to see as much of her as possible after the divorce, but Josie didn’t make it easy for me. Then, as she got into her teens, Rosalie seemed to turn against me, didn’t want to see me. Which I suppose was fair enough. I’d been painted as “the man who done her mother wrong”, so why should she want to spend time with me?’

  ‘You’re saying that’s how Josie painted you?’ asked Jude.

  ‘Probably. Maybe not. It doesn’t really matter what the reason was. Rosalie ceased to want to see me.’ The memory was still painful to him. ‘Then she went to college in Brighton and got in with a bad lot, and then I would only hear if she got in trouble with the police. Which was why I asked if you were the police last night. I had a horrible vision of the whole thing starting up again.’

  ‘If you were estranged from Rosalie, why did the police get in touch with you rather than Josie?’

  ‘Usually they’d tried Josie first. And she’d given them my number, saying our daughter was as much my responsibility as hers.’

  There was a silence. ‘What kind of trouble did Rosalie get into in Brighton?’ asked Jude gently.

  ‘Oh, mixing with the wrong set, drugs, you know. She actually had some boyfriends who were dealers, got very close to the gangs who were running the operation there. She mixed with some pretty nasty people, the kind who got involved with gunfights and …’ He sighed. ‘I know, she was the classic example of the nicely brought-up middle-class girl reacting against her nice middle-class upbringing. And in her case it was probably worse because of the divorce. I think a lot of her behaviour was just punishing me and her mother for having got divorced, having broken up the happy family … though I think she knew long before that that it wasn’t really a happy family.’

  ‘We saw Rosalie yesterday evening,’ Jude announced suddenly.

  ‘Oh, how was she?’ The question was instinctively solicitous. However little he had seen of his daughter in recent years, there was no doubt that Hudson Vale still loved her.

  ‘Well …’ Carole looked across to Jude, checking how much information she should give. Granted permission, she said, ‘It was actually at a party. She was pretty drunk.’

  Hudson looked puzzled. ‘I’m sorry to sound rude, but I can’t quite imagine why you two would have been at the same kind of party as Rosalie.’

  ‘I take your point. It was an engagement party for someone she worked with at Polly’s Cake Shop.’

  ‘That would make sense.’

  ‘But,’ said Jude deliberately, ‘the man her friend was getting engaged to was a former lover of Rosalie’s.’

  ‘Ah.’ He made no further comment.

  ‘An older man,’ Jude continued.

  Hudson Vale shrugged. He had clearly given up trying to keep tabs on his estranged daughter’s love life.

  ‘I gather you’ve remarried,’ said Carole, again more direct than Jude would have been.

  ‘Yes. It’s wonderful to be given a second chance in life.’ But he didn’t sound totally convinced by his own words.

  ‘And has Rosalie met her half-sisters?’

  He shook his head firmly. ‘No. They belong to different chapters of my life.’ Echoing the words of Janice Green. For a moment Carole wondered whether her own life was divided into chapters. And she came to the conclusion that it was. Childhood, the Home Office, David, Stephen, divorce, post-divorce, Fethering. And she wasn’t really expecting any further chapters beyond Fethering. Yes, it was a way of looking at one’s life, no worse and no better than any other.

  Maybe Hudson’s talk of ‘chapters’ had also reminded Jude of Janice Green, because her next question was: ‘Does the name Amos Green mean anything to you?’

  He shook his head. ‘No. And it’s a fairly unusual name, so I’d probably remember if I had heard it.’

  ‘You might have seen something in the news about him,’ said Carole. ‘His body was found on Fethering Beach back in October.’

  ‘Doesn’t ring a bell. Why are you interested in him?’

  ‘We actually had the misfortune to find his body on the beach,’ said Jude. ‘And we are pretty sure that he was murdered.’

  ‘I see,’ said Hudson. ‘So, in answer to my question of last night, you are not the official police but a pair of intrepid amateur sleuths.’

  Carole and Jude looked at each other rather shiftily. It was an accusation neither of them could deny.

  ‘Look,’ he went on, ‘I agreed to see you this morning because I thought you might have some news of Rosalie. I’m not sure that I was planning to get involved in a murder investigation.’

  ‘We fully understand that,’ said Jude, ‘but we’re desperately trying to find some connection between Amos Green and Fethering.’

  ‘Then I’m not quite sure why you’re asking me. I haven’t been to Fethering for years. And recently the only conversations I’ve had with Josie have been rather tight-lipped affairs over financial issues that didn’t get properly sorted out in the divorce.’

  ‘Do you mind if we ask you about the divorce?’ asked Carole.

  ‘Well, I can’t really see what business it is of yours …’

  ‘It isn’t any of our business,’ said Jude in a manner which was on the edge of flirtatious, ‘but …’

  It worked. He relented. Spreading his arms wide in a gesture of submission, he said, ‘All right, ask me about the divorce. It’s so long ago now that I’m not about to start weeping at the recollection.’

  ‘Josie described your divorce to me as “sticky”.’

  ‘Show me the divorce that isn’t sticky. When two people have invested a large chunk of their lives into something which turns out to be a complete disaster … well, it’s not exactly a recipe for ecstasy, is it?’

  There was a heartfelt ‘No’ from Carole, as Jude went on, ‘Josie also said she got a very bad financial deal from you and your lawyer.’

  ‘I’m sure she didn’t just say “lawyer”.’

  ‘No. “Bastard lawyer” was her exact expression.’

  ‘And no doubt “bastard ex-husband” came into the conversation as well.’ Jude could not deny it. ‘And no doubt she also complained about her having to live in a poky little flat in Fethering, while I …’ His gesture around the lavish studio meant he didn’t need any more words.

  ‘Yes, I did get a bit of that too.’

  ‘And presumably you also got lots of detail about my “unreasonable behaviour” being the reason for the divorce?’

  ‘She did use those words, yes.’

  ‘That would figure. Strange how, over the years, people create their own versions of history. I’m sure Josie’s narrative of the divorce is very imaginative.’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘I never wanted a divorce. I’m not suggesting my relationship with Josie was particularly good, but we managed to rub along. My only reason for wanting to stay together was Rosalie. I was afraid a split woul
d do her irreparable damage …’ He shook his head gloomily. ‘And it seems that I was right.’

  ‘So it was Josie who asked for the divorce?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you say the marriage had jogged along all right for over ten years. What was it that suddenly made her want to end it?’

  ‘She’d met someone else. Or rather re-met someone else. She never gave me any name for him, but she insisted this was the real thing and she had to take her only possible chance of happiness.’

  ‘Did she say where she’d met him?’ asked Carole.

  ‘Not where she’d met him originally, no. But when he came back into her life, it was at some yacht club on the south coast where a friend of hers was having a fiftieth birthday bash. It was a Saturday night, twelve, thirteen years ago. I wasn’t there, off on some assignment abroad, can’t remember where.’

  ‘This yacht club wouldn’t have been in Fethering, would it?’

  ‘Could have been.’ Hudson Vale shook his long white hair. ‘I honestly can’t remember. I was in a pretty emotional state at the time – and very busy with my work. Career just taking off in a big way – I’d got my first major magazine contract which was going to involve lots of foreign travel – so I was kind of preoccupied.’

  ‘And was that why Josie got custody of Rosalie in the divorce settlement? Because you’d be travelling so much?’

  ‘Yes, and the thinking was that I’d still see lots of her; you know, there was a very civilized timetable arranged for my having access to Rosalie, but Josie managed to screw that up – and to poison Rosalie’s mind against me.’

  ‘One thing that seems odd,’ said Jude, ‘is that, as far as we can tell, since she came to Fethering and opened Polly’s Cake Shop, Josie’s been on her own.’

  ‘I really wouldn’t know about that. I closed my mind to it.’

  ‘So you’d have no idea what happened to the man for whom your wife left you?’