Or was the situation even more serious? Had Kent Warboys attached himself to Sara Courtney because he’d had something to do with Amos Green’s death and knew she was a kind of witness, having seen the body in the store room? Was his apparent love for her a masquerade, just a way of controlling her, to ensure that she didn’t take the information she possessed to the police?
But that scenario felt far-fetched and melodramatic. And to Jude, who was a pretty good reader of human emotions, Kent Warboys’ love for Sara had seemed absolutely genuine.
She wondered whether it was worth her contacting Janice Green to see if she could shed some light on the relationship between Kent and her late husband. But Jude wasn’t optimistic of her enquiries getting anywhere. Janice had very firmly closed that chapter of her life.
Anyway, when she got back to Woodside Cottage there was a message on the answering machine that drove all other thoughts out of her head.
It was from Carole – absolutely characteristic of her to leave an important message on the landline. In spite of her growing love affair with computers, she was still suspicious of mobile phones. She thought they should only be used for trivia. Any really important information should be communicated on a proper phone.
It was good news. Chloe Seddon, having scared her parents and grandparent out of their wits by apparently being unable to breathe, had responded very well to the hospital treatment. The doctors’ view was that she was suffering from croup, whose symptoms can be very scary to young parents witnessing them for the first time.
Chloe was being kept in hospital overnight for observation – and both her parents were going to be there with her. Carole would stay in the Fulham house, put Lily to bed and give her breakfast in the morning. The expectation was that Chloe would be discharged from the hospital after the doctor’s rounds the following morning. And, if nothing else untoward had happened, Carole would be back in Fethering the following afternoon. Just in time to see the New Year in (though Carole didn’t mention that – New Year’s Eve was one of those dates that she just pretended wasn’t in the calendar).
Jude felt hugely relieved. She also knew why Carole’s message sounded so breezy and matter-of-fact. And why her neighbour had been so panicked the day before; why memories of her own loss made her so fearful for her new granddaughter. And Jude knew equally that, when they next met, that aspect of Carole’s behaviour would not be mentioned.
It was a cold, slow January. Carole and Jude were reconciling themselves to the frustrating prospect of never getting any closer to unmasking the murderer of Amos Green. And, as time went by, the need to investigate became less urgent. The world was full of unsolved murders. This looked like being another one.
Meanwhile there was a lot happening at Polly’s Community Café. Not a lot in the sense of a lot of customers. The bleak weather and the feeling that everyone had overspent at Christmas meant that the residents of Fethering didn’t go out much. The café was nowhere near making a profit, and was being subsidized by what was left of Kent Warboys’ twenty grand. Regret was expressed in some quarters that so much had been spent on the relaunch, particularly because, in spite of Lesley Tarquin’s fluent name-dropping, the event had received no press coverage whatsoever.
In mid-January Hammo and Binnie, having worked out their notice, left to test the choppy waters of the winter job market. And instantly, according to the reports of those few who did still frequent the café, standards went down, particularly in the home cooking area. When taking over as what was effectively unpaid manager, Phoebe Braithwaite had instantly cancelled all of Josie Achter’s contracts with catering suppliers in Brighton. She was sure that her Volunteer Rota of Joannas or Samanthas contained some very skilled cooks – ‘Quintus and I have been to some absolutely yummy dinner parties with most of them.’ But whereas they might be highly skilled at spending a whole day realizing the recipes of the latest television chef sensation, few of them proved to have the abilities required by a short-order cook. Knocking up all-day breakfasts that didn’t use every pan in the kitchen proved beyond the capabilities of most. The skill-sets of some of them were so iffy that even preparing beans on toast could be a challenge.
And of course in the real world Phoebe Braithwaite’s Volunteer Rota was soon shown to be inadequate. Though beautifully worked out as an Excel spreadsheet on her computer (with different colours for the individual volunteers), it failed to take into account the basic rule of all human interaction – that a lot of people are extremely inefficient, and that also they change their minds.
So while all of the Joannas or Samanthas had enthusiastically filled in Phoebe’s neatly printed availability lists before Christmas, when the prospect of an ongoing commitment became real they remembered all kinds of inconvenient details that had slipped their minds. A few had completely forgotten family skiing holidays that had been booked ‘yonks ago’. Some had committed themselves to regular Pilates classes or volunteer reading with ‘the slower ones at the local primary’. At least one had started a passionate affair with her next-door neighbour ‘which is just taking up all my time’. Others had decided to focus their energies on different charitable causes which involved less of a time commitment. A good few just got bored with the whole concept of Polly’s Community Café.
News of these lapses filtered through to Carole and Jude. They heard from local residents who’d found the service ‘intolerably slow’. Then there were those who’d turned up at Polly’s to find a notice on the door saying ‘Closed due to staff shortage’.
Jude got some sense of how far down the project had declined when she received a wheedling call from Phoebe Braithwaite asking if she ‘might consider stepping in to help out on a few shifts at the café …?’ Given the way she’d been treated when her volunteering had last been discussed, Jude realized the extent to which Phoebe was scraping the barrel. She politely declined the generous offer.
All in all, what happened through January to Polly’s Community Café merely reinforced the truism that there are few worse bases for a business than goodwill. When staff are being paid for doing a job they can be bawled out – or even sacked – for inefficiency. When they are volunteers, the management has no sanctions against them.
Then reports spread through the village of food poisoning. A couple of local worthies had got on the wrong side of a prawn salad in Polly’s Community Café and suffered the consequences. Some careless volunteer must have left the ingredients out of the fridge too long. There was no hope of keeping the incident quiet, and it wasn’t much of an advertisement for the services of the café in a place as gossipy as Fethering.
Things could not continue in that way. It was with no surprise that Jude heard the news Phoebe Braithwaite had suffered a slipped disc and was hors de combat as far as running the café was concerned. In the course of her healing work, Jude had seen many examples of how agonizing back pain could be. But she also knew how frequently it proved to be psychosomatic. And the timing of Phoebe’s onset of agony did seem at least serendipitous.
It caused her even less surprise when an email to all of the SPCS Action Committee summoned them to another EGM at Hiawatha the following Monday.
TWENTY-TWO
‘I’m afraid the figures just don’t add up,’ said Alec Walters in sepulchral tones. Having served as Treasurer for almost every society in Fethering, this was not the first time he had communicated such news. Most local initiatives had a very short life-span. Usually they came to an end due to the departure of their guiding light, the individual whose energy and enterprise had started the thing up. The moving-away from Fethering of such figures – or sometimes their death – was quickly followed by the demise of the project they had originated. It was rare that a replacement with comparable get-up-and-go could be found. And those who did have the requisite get-up-and-go didn’t want to inherit someone else’s initiative – they wanted to set up their own.