‘And you’re thinking he might have a mobile number for her?’
‘Exactly.’
Jude had been right. When she rang Alec Walters he was quite happy to give her the number.
‘Shall I ring her straight away?’ asked Jude, uncharacteristically vacillating.
‘Yes, definitely.’
There was no reply and no means of leaving a message.
‘Maybe it’s because it’s the Sabbath,’ said Carole. ‘Try again in the morning.’
On the Sunday morning the phone was answered. When Jude identified herself, it was clear that Josie Achter had not been to charm school since their last encounter. ‘I have nothing to say to you,’ she said.
‘I’m ringing in connection with the death of Amos Green.’
That did get a response – or at least stopped Josie from switching her phone off. ‘What do you know about his death?’
‘A friend and I have been doing some investigation.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we’re intrigued by what happened. We don’t think Amos Green committed suicide. We think he was murdered.’
‘We’d better talk,’ said Josie Achter.
She was still living in the hotel – she hadn’t quite completed on her new flat – but she didn’t want to talk in the lounge there or a place like a pub or café. Though the day before’s rain had continued unremittingly, she led them down to an empty shelter on the sea front.
‘So what’s all this about?’ she asked. She came across to Carole and Jude as both tentative and probing. She wasn’t about to give them any information until she knew how much they knew.
‘We have discovered,’ said Jude, ‘that the day he died, Amos Green was in Fethering.’
‘So what’s that to do with me?’
‘He came into Polly’s that afternoon looking for you.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Binnie told us. She served him.’
‘Right. You say “the day he died”. When his body was washed up on Fethering Beach he had already been dead for some time. How do you know when he died?’
‘His body was seen in the store room at Polly’s late that afternoon. The third of October. There was a gun in the room as well, but too far away for him to have used it on himself.’
‘Did either of you see the body?’ Josie was still assessing the extent of their knowledge.
‘No.’
‘Then who did see it?’
‘Sara Courtney told me she’d seen the body in the store room,’ said Jude.
‘But Binnie had seen it before she did,’ said Carole.
‘Hm.’ The wind lashed against the thick glass of the shelter, wetting their shoes. It was bitterly cold.
‘So,’ Jude pressed on, ‘you can’t deny that there was some connection between you and Amos Green.’
‘I’m not denying it. So has your assiduous amateur sleuthing worked out what that connection was?’
‘We talked to your ex-husband yesterday,’ said Carole.
‘God, you have been thorough.’
‘He said that your marriage broke up because you’d met someone else.’
‘Did he?’
‘Or rather, re-met someone else.’
‘Yes, that’s what happened.’
‘And we know when and where you re-met him,’ said Jude.
‘Remind me.’ Josie Achter still retained her carapace of cynicism, but she was clearly shaken by the amount of information they were producing.
‘About twelve years ago. At Fethering Yacht Club. At a party to celebrate Becky Granger’s fiftieth birthday.’
Her face registered that that was a big shock. ‘How on earth do you know this stuff?’
‘Hudson was very helpful to us.’
‘Yes, he bloody would be.’
‘But things didn’t quite work out, did they?’ Carole observed. ‘You got divorced because you’d re-met a former lover, but in the event the two of you didn’t end up together. Had the idea been that he would get divorced too?’
‘We’d talked about it.’
‘But it seems he didn’t keep his side of the bargain, did he? He went back to his wife … assuming his wife ever even knew that he had cheated on her.’
‘His wife knew he had affairs,’ said Josie in a matter-of-fact tone.
‘Wasn’t it difficult for you,’ asked Carole, ‘having them living so close to you?’
‘Close?’
‘You at Polly’s Cake Shop, Quintus and Phoebe Braithwaite in the Shorelands Estate.’
Josie Achter looked at Carole in amazement, then burst into harsh laughter. ‘You think the love of my life was Quintus Braithwaite? I’m not sure whether that’s more funny or insulting. You imagine that I could even bear to touch that pompous oaf?’
‘Well, apparently you were all over each other at Becky Granger’s fiftieth.’
‘That is just a measure of how effective my little plan was. I wanted people to talk about how Quintus and I behaved that night at the yacht club, but it never occurred to me they’d still be talking about it twelve years on.’
‘What you’re saying,’ suggested Jude, ‘is that dancing with Quintus all evening was just a smokescreen?’
‘Exactly that. I loathe him – always have. But that evening I knew the ghastly Phoebe was out of the country. I also knew that he’d respond if I came on to him – he always had been a bit of a groper. What’s more, he’d been at the booze all evening. It wasn’t difficult.’
‘And you needed the smokescreen,’ said Jude with sudden insight, ‘because Amos Green was also at the party and you didn’t want people to suspect there was anything between you and him?’
‘That was it,’ Josie admitted. ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw Amos in the yacht club. He was having a thing with a friend of Becky’s, not that that lasted once we were back together again. My feelings for him were as strong as ever. And he said he felt the same. And from that moment, I knew I couldn’t continue the masquerade of my marriage to Hudson. I had to be with Amos; that was all there was to it.’
‘Except of course he wasn’t good “husband material”, was he?’ said Jude, quoting Janice Green.
‘No. Mind you, I’m still glad I divorced Hudson. That wasn’t going anywhere. Never had been.’
‘But you must have been aware of the effect that divorce was going to have on Rosalie.’
‘Not really. She was entering adolescence, not the best time of a girl’s life. I don’t know that our getting divorced made that much worse for her than it would have been anyway.’ She spread her hands wide in a gesture of helplessness. ‘You can’t make an omelette without …’
Jude recoiled from the callousness in the woman’s voice. Carole asked, ‘So you and Amos Green never cohabited?’
‘No. The affair continued until the divorce was final. Then he disappeared again. Never good at taking responsibility for his actions. When one of his women got serious it frightened him. As your friend said, not good “husband material”.’
‘Well, at least he’s not hurting any more women now.’
‘No.’ And to the surprise of both Carole and Jude, a tear glinted at the corner of Josie Achter’s eye.
‘So,’ asked Jude, ‘you didn’t see him the day he died? That Saturday, the third of October?’
‘No, I was spending the Shabbat – the Sabbath – with my widowed mother in Brighton. I didn’t get back to Fethering till nearly eleven.’
‘And you didn’t look in the store room?’
‘Why would I do that? At that time of night?’
‘So you’ve no idea when the body was moved?’
‘For God’s sake! I didn’t know there was a body there. The first I knew about Amos’s death was when I saw a photograph of him on the television news.’
‘And how did you react?’
‘I was devastated. I had long since reconciled myself to the fact that we’d never be together, but I was amazed how much it hurt to know that I would never see him again.’