by Simon Brett
‘None at all. On the occasions when I went to the Fethering flat to pick Rosalie up for my access days, I never saw any evidence of a man living there.’
‘And you don’t know any more about the man who Josie thought was “the real thing”?’
‘Nope. As I said, I didn’t want to find out about him. All I know was that he was married and that he travelled a lot.’ He looked at his watch. He had been very co-operative so far, but maybe his patience was wearing a bit thin. ‘I’m going to have to chuck you out soon,’ he said. ‘I promised my girls that I’d play with them. I tend to be very busy all week, so at weekends …’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Jude. ‘We very much appreciate your having given up your time for us.’
‘No problem. And if you see Rosalie …’
‘Yes?’
‘Give her my love, won’t you?’
‘Of course.’
‘One thing …’ said Carole.
‘Mm?’
‘Would you by any chance have a contact number for Josie’s friend, the one whose fiftieth she attended?’
‘I might well,’ said Hudson Vale, switching on his tablet. ‘I did the photographs for her wedding way back and I always keep all my clients’ contact details. Yes, here it is – Becky Granger.’ He read out the digits. ‘That was her mobile. Whether she’s still kept the same number, I’ve no idea.’
‘Well, thank you, anyway.’
Hudson Vale rose from his chair and gestured towards the door. Carole and Jude also stood up. ‘Just one more thing …’ asked Jude.
‘Yes? This is getting horribly Columbo, you know.’ His tone was sharper. It was time they should be on their way.
‘When I talked to Josie, she seemed very bitter.’
‘I think that’s not uncommon with divorcées.’
‘But she was particularly bitter about anti-Semitism.’
‘What?’ Clearly that was the last thing Hudson Vale had been expecting.
‘She said she’d experienced prejudice all her life and it was at its worst in “nice middle-class areas” like Fethering … or possibly Esher …’
‘Well, I don’t know where she got that from. It’s certainly something I’d never been aware of during our marriage … and Josie never mentioned to me that she felt like that.’
‘She also suggested that anti-Semitism was one of the causes of your breaking up.’
He looked genuinely amazed. ‘I’ve no idea where she got that from. Right from the start, when I first met her I thought her being Jewish was wonderfully exotic. I felt so boringly blond and British. In fact, Josie’s Jewishness was a big part of her attraction to me.’
TWENTY-FIVE
In the Renault on the A3, Carole looked disapproving as she heard her neighbour blithely lying in her conversation to Becky Granger. ‘I know it’s ages ago, but I was at your fiftieth …’
‘Not that many ages ago,’ Becky Granger reproved her mildly from the other end of the phone. ‘I’m not quite ready for the scrapheap yet.’
‘Sorry. I was there with a boyfriend. You and I hadn’t met before.’
‘And I probably didn’t meet you then. There were a lot of people there I didn’t know. My then boyfriend was a member of the Fethering Yacht Club and I think he issued invitations to every other member. Extravagant bastard … one of the many reasons why we’re no longer an item.’ She sighed. ‘Oh, it all seems a long time ago. That party was such a scrum.’
‘Anyway, Becky, I got your number through Josie Achter.’
‘Oh my God, I haven’t heard that name for ages. How is the old boot? Still in Fethering? Still got the café?’
‘No, she’s sold up and moved to Hove.’
‘Has she? I haven’t heard a squeak from her for ages – probably not since that party.’
‘And it was at the Fethering Yacht Club, wasn’t it?’
‘Blimey, how much did you have to drink that night? Yes, of course it was.’
Carole’s lips were tight. To be able to hear Jude’s blatant lies and not to be able to hear the other end of the conversation was doubly frustrating for her.
‘Well, Becky, Josie and I were trying to remember the name of someone she met that night, someone she hadn’t seen for a long time …?’
‘Are we talking about the guy she spent the whole of the evening dancing with? They were all over each other. Which was so unlike Josie. Normally at parties she was all buttoned up, never wanted to draw attention to herself. But that evening … I’d have been embarrassed if I hadn’t been in such a state that I was incapable of embarrassment.’
‘It probably would be that guy she was talking about. Josie was saying she’d lost touch with him.’
‘Well, she’d certainly found touch with him at the party.’
‘So what was his name?’
‘Oh my God, you’re really testing me now. We are talking over ten years ago.’
‘Please try and remember.’
‘I am trying. Oh, it was one of those unusual man’s names. Sounding old-fashioned. Ending with “us”.’
‘Amos?’ asked Jude excitedly.
‘No, not Amos. It was …’ There was a silence. ‘Quintus! That’s right. His name was Quintus.’
TWENTY-SIX
‘Good God!’ The Renault almost swerved dangerously when Carole had the conversation reported back to her. ‘Josie Achter and Quintus Braithwaite! I can’t believe it.’
‘It does sound unlikely, I agree. But she had no reason to make it up. And it fits the minimal description Hudson gave us. “Married and travelled a lot.” Quintus Braithwaite had many foreign postings and was often away at sea.’
‘Yes, but … to think of him as the great love of Josie Achter’s life, the reason why she got divorced … it doesn’t sit very comfortably with me.’
‘Nor me. But it must be true. There’s also the fact that Quintus Braithwaite’s dinghy was stolen and used on the night of October the third.’
‘Are you suggesting he took it himself?’
‘Yes.’
‘What, to dispose of Amos Green’s body?’
‘I suppose so.’ Jude felt confused. ‘I don’t know.’
‘But his affair with Josie – if such a thing ever happened – must have been over long ago. Quintus Braithwaite is a pompous bore and an idiot, but I really can’t see him as a murderer.’
‘It’s always the unlikely ones …’ Jude suggested.
A disgruntled ‘Huh’ was heard from Carole. ‘I’m sure we’re barking up a tree that’s so wrong it’s not even in the right country. I thought we set out today trying to find something that connected the late Amos Green with Fethering. And have we got anything?’
Jude was forced to concede that they hadn’t. ‘The only tenuous link we do have is that Binnie Swales served him in Polly’s on the afternoon of the third of October.’
Carole nodded. ‘Yes.’ Then a recollection came to her. ‘Do you remember when we went to the Crown and Anchor after the relaunch of Polly’s Community Café?’
‘Yes.’
‘Binnie said then that she used to serve behind the bar at Fethering Yacht Club.’
Jude caught the excitement in her friend’s voice. ‘And you’re thinking she might have been on duty on the night of Becky Granger’s fiftieth? That she might have seen Josie and Quintus dancing together?’
‘Well, it’s worth asking, isn’t it?’
Binnie’s house was one of the few fishermen’s cottages in Fethering not to have undergone gentrification. Most of them were now owned by rich weekenders from London who – while keeping the lines of the quaint eighteenth-century exteriors – had refurbished everything inside to the highest possible spec.
But, though ungentrified, Binnie’s had not been left in its pristine pre-war state. There was a row of these cottages on the opposite side of the Fether estuary from the yacht club. Right next door to Kent Warboys’ conversion. Originally the sheds from which his home had been created had
served the owners of the cottages as storage space, workshops and a small factory in which their wives gutted and prepared the day’s catch for sale.
The back of the cottages had a fine view over the English Channel, much appreciated by their twenty-first-century owners (though the first owners probably never looked that way, being already sick to the back teeth of the sea).
The outside of Binnie’s cottage might have looked shabby and run down, but the interior had been extensively redecorated. Redecorated, however, very much in Binnie’s style, reflecting the range of colours in the clothes she wore.
In spite of the smallness of her hall, its space was dominated by a stuffed badger. Astride it like a miniature jockey was a purple teddy bear. The walls were papered in diagonal stripes of silver and gold. The front parlour into which Carole and Jude were ushered was equally eccentric. And if the sitting room at Woodside Cottage could be described as ‘cluttered’, a new word would have to be coined for Binnie’s.
It was just the sheer range of objects in the room that took one’s breath away. Every surface was covered with an eclectic collection which included carved wooden miniature chairs, ceramic figurines, glass bon-bons, Indian jewellery, ivory elephants and a stuffed owl. The walls were thick with movie posters, chalk drawings, metal advertising signs for Bird’s Custard and ‘Virol – for Anaemic Girls’, royal souvenir mugs and sepia photographs of World War One Tommies. To accommodate yet more stuff, wires had been fixed across the ceiling, and from these hung parasols, bouquets of artificial flowers, plastic medals on ribbons, a policeman’s helmet, some brass cooking utensils, wooden tennis rackets and a rubber vampire bat.
Binnie was dressed that Saturday in a kind of orange string vest over a scarlet twinset, an electric blue PVC miniskirt, horizontally striped tights in green and yellow and silver ballet shoes. She noticed them looking round as they entered the front parlour. ‘And every single thing in this room has a story attached to it. Some people write autobiographies …’ She gestured to the confusion of objects around her. ‘This is my autobiography. A story behind everything here.’
‘I’m sure it’s all fascinating,’ said Carole, aware that her words were coming out more harshly than she intended, ‘but actually it’s not that we want to talk to you about.’
Binnie Swales did not look too upset by the rejection of her life story. ‘Fine. Would you like some tea or coffee?’ She chuckled. ‘I’ve had a little experience of serving tea and coffee.’
‘No, we’re fine,’ said Jude, answering for both of them. ‘Just had coffee.’ It wasn’t true but they didn’t want anything to delay the progress of their investigation.
‘What we really want you to do,’ said Carole, ‘is to cast your mind back to the days when you were working behind the bar at the Fethering Yacht Club …’
‘Well, there were plenty of those. Any particular day you had in mind?’
‘It was probably about twelve, thirteen years ago, a Saturday night. Might you have been working then?’
‘Could have been.’
‘It was a fiftieth birthday party,’ said Jude.
‘The yacht club bar’s seen a good few of those.’
‘I’m sure it has.’
‘I mean, it hasn’t got much in the way of facilities. Not a potential “wedding venue” like Chichester Yacht Club and some of the other big ones are. But if you want a local piss-up in Fethering, you’re not exactly spoiled for choice, so you might as well get pissed in the yacht club.’
Jude tried to get back to the subject, saying, ‘The woman whose birthday it was was called Becky Granger.’
Binnie shook her head. ‘Name doesn’t mean anything to me. Mind you, it’s quite possible I helped out at the party and never heard her name. Bookings for that kind of thing went through the Vice-Commodore.’
‘Do you have a name for him?’ asked Carole eagerly.
‘Yes. He was called Denis Woodville.’ Carole and Jude exchanged looks. They remembered meeting him when they were investigating the death of Aaron Spalding. ‘But I’m afraid you won’t get anything out of him now. Died five or six years back.’
‘Ah. Pity.’
‘Well, possibly not that big a pity.’ Clearly Binnie had not warmed to that particular Vice-Commodore. ‘He was a pompous git, like they all are down the yacht club. Any other way you can single out this particular fiftieth?’
‘I gather everyone got pretty drunk,’ said Carole.
‘I asked if you could “single it out”. Everyone gets pretty drunk at every fiftieth birthday party.’
‘Yes. Sorry.’
‘Apparently Quintus Braithwaite was among the guests at this particular one.’
‘Was he? That’d be quite unusual. Before he retired, he was off abroad so much that he didn’t come to the yacht club that often.’
‘He was definitely there that night. Apparently made quite a show of himself on the dance floor.’
‘Oh God.’ Binnie let out a raucous laugh. ‘Now it comes back to me. Quintus Braithwaite – “Dad Dancing” at its most ghastly. Yes, he’d had a skinful that night.’
‘Was his wife there?’
‘The sainted Phoebe? She wasn’t, actually. On holiday with the kids somewhere so far as I can recall. No, Quintus was on his own in Fethering. I couldn’t imagine him behaving like he did if Phoebe had been around.’
‘You talk about his “Dad Dancing”,’ said Jude, ‘but who was he doing the dancing with?’ She thought the question was a better approach than actually mentioning Josie Achter’s name.
‘Well, that was the really strange thing about it.’
‘Oh?’
‘He danced with the most unlikely person in the room. Woman who became my boss.’
‘Josie Achter?’ Carole couldn’t stop herself from saying the name.
‘Yes, you’re right. If ever there was an unlikely coupling … I can only think that Josie had been at the booze as much as Quintus had. I’d always thought of her as uptight, even a bit prim – but that night … God, nobody was going to forget the way they saw them dance that night … virtually pushed everyone else off the floor.’
‘And do you know,’ asked Jude, ‘whether she and Quintus left the yacht club together that night?’
‘Sorry, I’ve no means of knowing. End of an evening like that, you’re so knackered, all you want to do is get home to bed, but there are still all the glasses to be collected up and cleaned, the debris of the food to be cleared, crockery and cutlery to be put in the dishwasher. Then there’s always a hardcore of the boozy lot who want to go on drinking all night, and all you want to do is get to bed and … In answer to your question, no. I have no idea who went home with who that night.’
‘And do you know if the relationship developed?’
‘Quintus and Josie? No idea. Seems unlikely.’
‘But surely,’ said Carole, ‘in a place like this, there must’ve been a lot of gossip.’
‘Oh, sure. Yes, for the week or so afterwards, nobody talked about anything else. Plenty of sniggering in the yacht club, for sure, and I’d just started doing the odd shift at Polly’s, so I heard a lot of idle chatter there too. But then I think Quintus went off abroad again and it all died down.’
‘And the pair of them have never been seen together since?’
‘Well, I’ve certainly never seen them together since.’
‘Not even in Polly’s?’
‘Quintus used to go there from time to time, more since he’s been retired, but he’d always got Phoebe with him. And I suppose there may have been occasions that Josie was also in the café in a professional capacity when the Braithwaites came in for a coffee, but I never saw them behave to each other in any way that was unusual.’
‘So,’ asked Carole, ‘what is the verdict of the Fethering grapevine on what happened between the two of them?’
‘Both got very drunk one night and behaved in a way that was totally out of character for them.’
‘End of sto
ry,’ said Jude glumly.
‘End of that story, so far as I can tell,’ said Carole gloomily.
‘And end of the Polly’s Cake Shop story.’ Binnie sighed. ‘I can’t believe how much I miss working there.’
‘Would you really have wanted to go on with Phoebe Braithwaite as your manager?’ asked Carole.
‘No, the last month of working out my notice was a right pain from beginning to end. The lovely Phoebe had no interest in her staff … well, the members of staff who weren’t stuck-up bitches like she is. And I could see the whole thing was falling apart, and her precious volunteers were leaving in droves, but there was no way she was going to take any advice from anyone. No help from anyone either.’
‘Did you offer your services?’
‘Of course. Every time one of her toffee-nosed volunteers failed to turn up for a shift I offered to step into the breach. And every time she said, “No, I’m sorry, Binnie. That wouldn’t look right. You see, I am trying to update the image of Polly’s”.’
Jude let out a dry chuckle. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t punch her in the face.’
‘Oh, I’ve been insulted by better women than Phoebe Braithwaite. No skin off my nose. But then when it was actually my last day, the volunteers were in a worse state than usual – they’d all volunteered to go off and do other things, like go skiing or “take Gabriel to the Pony Club”. And I said to her, “Look, Phoebe, I know today’s the last day I’m being paid for, but I am prepared to come back, anytime you want, as a volunteer.”’
‘That was very generous of you.’
‘Well, I loved the place, didn’t I? I didn’t enjoy seeing it going downhill.’
‘And what was Phoebe’s reaction?’ asked Carole.
‘Oh, same old, same old. “That’s most kind of you, dear Binnie, but I’m afraid that wouldn’t work, you know, you being here as a volunteer. I’m afraid you wouldn’t fit in with Polly’s new image.” Well, stuff that, I thought, and I haven’t been back there since. Which is just as well, because I gather the place has now closed down for good.’
‘We’re not absolutely sure that’s going to happen,’ said Jude. ‘The Action Committee still have hopes of reopening it with a new management structure.’
