‘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.’