Jude, who knew about the savage tricks the mind could play, wondered whether Sara had actually seen anything or not. Certainly, if a murder had happened, and if it ever came to court, she would be the most unreliable of witnesses.
‘And sadly, I suppose,’ said Jude, ‘you don’t have any proof of what you saw?’
‘Only this.’ Sara Courtney reached into her jeans pocket and pulled out a white handkerchief. On it was a rust-coloured bloodstain.
FOUR
‘I think, if we could call this meeting to order …’ The speaker, Commodore Quintus Braithwaite, banged his gavel on the table. He was the kind of man who would always have his own personal gavel.
The Commodore was in fact a relative newcomer to Fethering. That is to say that – though he had been the owner of a large house in the Shorelands Estate to the west of the village for many years – he, his wife Phoebe and their three children had spent very little time there. It was only after his retirement from the Royal Navy that he became a full-time resident. He had quickly become a familiar sight around Fethering, favouring tweed jackets or khaki gilets, open-necked shirts with very large checks and corduroy trousers in burgundy or English mustard yellow. He appeared just to have given up one uniform for another.
And for the past two years he had involved himself in every aspect of village life, bringing to local affairs the organizational skills which had raised him through his career in the Forces. The actual quality of those organizational skills was something on which the Fethering jury was still out.
The latest village initiative in which Quintus Braithwaite was involving himself was the ‘Save Polly’s Cake Shop’ campaign, already shortened to ‘SPCS’. Indeed it was he who had written the letter to the Fethering Observer about the threat from ‘an international, overpriced conglomerate with an idiosyncratic attitude to paying British taxes’, also known as Starbucks.
And he was very much taking over the second meeting of the campaign’s committee. For a start he had decreed that it should take place at his house, which gave him home advantage. The Shorelands Estate was an exclusive gated community with complicated regulations for its residents as to when they could hang out their washing or mow their lawns. Many of the houses, like the Braithwaites’, backed on to the sea, and a good few had sailing dinghies lined up at the ends of their gardens. Quintus Braithwaite, who had commanded considerably larger vessels during his professional life, was an avid sailor and very bossy to anyone who crewed for him (usually his wife Phoebe). He kept his main boat on one of the riverside moorings owned by Fethering Yacht Club, but he also owned a small blue-painted tender with an outboard which was kept at the end of his garden.
The house itself – named, incongruously, ‘Hiawatha’ – was a big six-bedroomed affair, built in what a 1950s architect had reckoned to be Elizabethan style. This meant there was a lot of red brick, a few supernumerary turrets and far too many tall chimneys twisted like barley sugar. Inside, no attempt had been made to continue the Elizabethan motif. The décor in all of the rooms had the immaculate impersonal gloss which can only be supplied by very expensive interior designers.
They were meeting in the sitting room, a huge space filled with an excess of large sofas. Rather than commanding the sea view, its picture windows faced inland towards the ‘Green’ at the centre of the Shorelands Estate, but since the thick brocade curtains were closed, nobody missed anything.
For the less well-heeled members of the SPCS campaign group, the house displayed a daunting opulence. Phoebe Braithwaite, a twittery woman in a Liberty print dress whose eyes blinked a lot behind thick glasses, had supplied tea, coffee and biscuits in very fine china. Thrown by the splendour of the venue, few of those present were about to question anything their host proposed.
Jude was there simply to support Sara Courtney. Her client seemed to have settled down after her outburst that Sunday at Woodside Cottage. There had been no more mention of the dead body she had possibly seen in the store room. But ten days on, Jude knew that Sara was still very brittle and might need support when the fate of her place of employment was discussed.
Having called the meeting to order, Commodore Quintus Braithwaite didn’t mess around. He moved straight on to the power coup which he had clearly planned. ‘Now, what we want to do this evening is to get an action committee in place, so that we can move forward in a constructive manner. At the last meeting I asked for nominations for someone to be Chair of the committee but, since we haven’t had any, I feel it my duty to step into the breach. So if we could take a vote on—’
‘Just a minute, just a minute.’ The interruption came from Arnold Bloom, a Fethering resident whom Jude recognized but didn’t know well. He was a small man who habitually wore a frayed suit and tie. Unmarried, he lived in the former fisherman’s cottage where he had been born. He still slept in the bed where the birth had taken place. His hair, dark but very thin, was combed down from a central parting in a manner which made it look as if it had been painted on to his bony cranium. Arnold had run the village’s small hardware store until the opening of a large Homebase nearby had ended its financial viability. Since then he had taken over Fethering’s Crazy Golf course (its title now modernized to Adventure Golf). He had the embittered conviction that the world had done him wrong, and had been Chairman of the Fethering Village Committee for as long as anyone could remember.
‘I was at the last meeting, Quintus,’ he went on, ‘as were a lot of other people present this evening who I’m sure could bear me out on this – and I have no recollection of nominations being asked for Chairman of this SPCS committee.’
‘It may not have been said in so many words,’ the owner of Hiawatha protested, ‘but I think it was implicit in our discussions.’
‘I don’t think that at all,’ said Arnold Bloom. ‘All that was said was that at the next meeting we would need to appoint a Chairman.’
‘I prefer the word “Chair”,’ said the Commodore.
‘Well, I prefer the word “Chairman”. At meetings of the Fethering Village Committee I don’t like to be referred to as a piece of furniture.’
‘I think you’re being rather small-minded, Arnold.’
‘Do you? Well, I think I know rather more about the workings of Fethering than you do. I was born in the village; I’ve lived here all my life.’
‘Well, I have owned this house for over thirty years.’
‘Not quite the same, though, is it, Quintus? You may have owned the house but you’ve hardly spent more than the odd week in it.’
‘That,’ the Commodore responded with some hauteur, ‘is because I have been abroad, defending the realm on behalf of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second.’
‘I’m sure she was very grateful to you,’ said Arnold Bloom drily, ‘but it doesn’t change the fact that you know very little about how this village works. We do still have some respect for democracy in this neck of the woods, you know.’
‘I too have an enormous respect for democracy. That was another thing I was defending, as well as the realm.’
‘Well if, Quintus, you have as much respect for democracy as you claim, why are you trying to ride roughshod over the democratic system to get yourself elected as Chairman of this committee?’
‘I am not “riding roughshod”. I am offering my services on behalf of the community.’
‘Very generous of you. But I still think we should have checked to see whether there are any other nominees for the post of Chairman of the SPCS Action Committee.’
‘Well, are there?’ The Commodore looked balefully around his sitting room, daring anyone else to put themselves forward. Nobody did. ‘Right, it would seem that—’