Palmer-Jones 01 - A Bird in the Hand (17 page)

When Adam was pulled free only George Palmer-Jones and Tina were there to see. Tina had mud on the hem of her dress and on her face. She said nothing to Adam, but waited and watched him, apparently hoping that he would turn to her for comfort. When he did not respond she bent to help the men to clear their equipment, to coil their ropes, and allowed herself a few tears of relief and disappointment.

They all left George to deal with Adam. They stood quite close together. It was as though they were alone.

“I’d better call an ambulance,” George said, “ to make sure that nothing’s broken.”

Adam spoke for the first time.

“No.” The sudden sound was explosive, startling. “No fuss. I don’t need an ambulance.”

“Who pushed you?” George asked.

“I don’t know.” Then with sudden panic: “ No one. No one pushed me. I fell in. It was all my fault. I wanted to see how deep it was and I fell in.”

“You must tell me. And tell the police. Tell them what really happened. They’ll send somebody to look after you. They’ll make sure that it doesn’t happen again.”

Then the boy did begin to cry. With frightened and hysterical sobs, he begged George to believe that it was an accident, not to tell the police. George put his arm round Adam, held him very tight, tried to calm him. Tina watched the intimacy with pain, turned away and walked into the building.

George felt that the physical contact gave him some of the status of fatherhood. He felt privileged and responsible.

“You must tell me,” he repeated. “You know that you can trust me. You must let me help you.”

But the white face turned up to him, beseeching him not to ask any more. George was helpless and angry, but could not direct his anger towards the boy.

They walked together towards the Windmill kitchen where there was hot strong tea and whisky. Tina sat next to him and tried to take his hand, but Adam still ignored her. There were no more questions. Ella presided over the teapot and made concerned and comforting noises. The others sat quietly, shocked and sympathetic.

Slowly, with great control, Adam told his story. He had been out on the marsh. He had seen very little and, not knowing that the Windmill had closed for the day, went there to see if anything had been seen elsewhere in the district. When he found it was shut he had waited, hoping to see other birders. He had heard stories about the well and had tried to lift the planks covering the shaft to see how deep it was. He had lost his balance and slipped. He was sorry to have caused so much trouble. He seemed very tired, and spoke as if he were making a great effort.

Molly too had accepted responsibility for Adam. She had told Mr. Anderson that they would find him a bed for the night and that they would take care of him. Finally, it was Ella who looked after him. When she saw that he was exhausted she wrapped him in a blanket, sat him in her car and drove him back to the cottage. She did not ask him questions or expect him to tell her what had happened. The room she gave him was small and safe, like his room at home, and he slept without dreaming.

George had told Ella that he would lock up. He was not tired. They sat in the kitchen surrounded by the debris of the party. Molly made another pot of tea. They had finished the scotch.

“Did anyone see Adam today?”

There had been lazy, companionable gossip at the table. They were enjoying the safe outcome of the drama. The question broke through the gentle conversation with a rudeness and authority which Rob resented immediately.

“Why? Should we have wiped his nose, taken his hand and told him to find somewhere safer to play?”

“No. But you might have seen who pushed him.”

“But he said that he fell by accident.”

“Yes. He said that he fell.”

“But you think that he was pushed.”

Tina interrupted aggressively:

“Who do you think pushed him? What makes you think that it wasn’t an accident?”

George was irritated by their questions. There was no time for polite explanation.

“Just accept that I need to know if anyone saw him. Perhaps you could all tell me what you were doing this afternoon.”

But they had no sense of urgency and began to speculate about Adam’s story and the possibility that he was telling the truth.

“He could have fallen,” Peter said. “Those planks were really rotten.”

“Why does he say that he fell if he was pushed?” Tina asked.

Molly answered before George had a chance to speak:

“Because he’s frightened. He’s so frightened that he can’t think clearly, and he can’t trust anyone enough to tell them what really happened.” She saw that she had hurt Tina and went on quickly, “He’s the sort of person who can’t confide easily. It doesn’t mean that he doesn’t want to.”

Peter was continuing his own line of thought.

“It seemed strange that he was so vague about the time he fell,” he said. “I know that he didn’t have a watch, but I would have thought he could have made a rough guess.”

“He did say that he had been in the well for some time when the cars arrived for the party,” Rob reminded him. “ He says that he shouted but no one heard him. That’s not surprising. Everyone arrived at the same time and there was a lot of noise.”

“It must have been horrible,” Tina said. “ To be there in the dark, to know that people were so close to you, and not to be able to make them hear.”

Peter was still trying to fix the time of the incident.

“If he was telling the truth about hearing the cars at the party, he fell or was pushed some time in the late afternoon or early evening. I was here at about four o’clock.” After this announcement he went on to answer George’s question, smiling as if to apologize, that it had taken so long to come to the point.

“I stayed in the cottage all morning, then met Rob as I’d arranged in the hide, at about two thirty. Tina was with him. Tina and Rob went off on their own, Tina first. They both headed for the Windmill, but I saw Rob on the shingle bank soon after. I went for a walk on the marsh, then did the coastguard garden and came back past the Windmill. I didn’t go in. I thought that Ella might rope me in to make sandwiches. I went straight back to the cottage and it was half past four when I arrived home.”

“Did you see anyone on the marsh?”

“No one at all. I didn’t even see Ella. I just presumed that she was there.”

There was a short silence and then Tina started to speak. She talked abruptly, defensively, and Molly thought that she was blushing.

“If you must know, I was looking for Adam. We’d been talking at Scarsea. He asked me to look out for a copy of the
Handbook
for him. Someone at the university bird club has one for sale. I wanted to let him know.”

“What made you think that he would be at Rushy today?”

She shrugged. “He always seems to be here. And I thought he might be at the film.”

“Where did you look for him?”

“I went past the Windmill on to the shingle bank. I didn’t see him or anyone else. If he’d been on the marsh I would have seen him from there. Then I went to look at that patch of cover between the Windmill and the coastguards. We’ve been thinking of building a Heligoland trap over it and I wanted to work out how much wood and wire netting we’d need.”

“What did you do then?”

“I went back to Peter’s cottage to get ready for the party. I got back soon after five, I should think.”

Rob repeated his movements of the afternoon.

“So you walked straight along the beach towards Skeffingham. Did you see anyone?”

“A few fishermen and bait diggers.”

“Which way did you come home?”

“I walked straight back along the track past the Windmill.”

“What time did you get back?”

“About six o’clock.”

“Have we got any idea what Adam was doing earlier in the day?” Peter asked.

George looked with a question at Molly. She shook her head.

“He left home quite early, just after the postman had been, his father says. But no one knows where he went. That’s not unusual apparently, but his father says that he hadn’t gone birdwatching—he’d left his binoculars and telescope at home.”

“No,” Rob said definitely. “That can’t be right. He wouldn’t have come to Rushy without his optical gear. If his father’s telling the truth, he can’t have planned to come to Rushy.”

“If he left home soon after the postman had called at the house, could he have had a letter,” Tina asked tentatively, “ arranging to meet him?”

“That wouldn’t have stopped him bringing his binoculars.”

There was no more tea and they were starting to feel cold. George drove them all back to the cottage. There Peter gave up his room for George and Molly, and placed his sleeping bag next to Rob and Tina on the living-room floor. George did not go to bed, and was astonished that Molly could lie in the big, shapeless bed in an undisturbed slumber. The sense that the person who had inspired such terror in Adam and in Sally was beyond logic, beyond reason, remained with him. The routine of arranging the details of time and place seemed futile, irrelevant. He felt that he was hiding his weakness behind a pretence of efficiency. But still he was compelled to do it, to ignore his urge for some kind of unspecific, irrational action. He could not sleep.

Once more he read through his notes, intending to add to them the details of the information gained that evening. As he sat at the small table in Peter’s bedroom he could hear the young people talking in the room below him and realized that they too would go without sleep. He read the cramped, precise writing of the notes, looked at the plans he had made, then set the paper aside with dissatisfaction. All the facts were important, but he felt, now, that he knew them by heart. He was sure that he was missing something vital, some connection, something which would give a new perspective on the major characters involved. Because he was sure now that he had met all the major characters. He had talked to the murderer.

He was sure that the person who had killed Tom and who had tried to kill Adam was someone he knew. But the details of time and place and opportunity had not helped. All the people he was considering as possible suspects had the opportunity of attacking Adam, and all except Cranshaw could have killed Tom French. Even the exclusion of Cranshaw depended only on Jack’s inconclusive evidence. He took a fresh sheet of paper and made a list of the people he meant to see the next day. He must see Terry. If Terry persisted with his story that he had seen nothing, George must talk to his landlady in the hope that she could get the truth from him. It was ludicrous that they had an eye witness but no information. He must talk to Bernard Cranshaw, whose instability was obvious, and who knew, George thought, more than he was telling. That evening, at the Windmill, George had felt that Cranshaw was hiding something. He would talk to Ella, to anyone who might have been out on the marsh, who might have seen Adam. And he would talk to Adam himself. He dreaded that interview and did not expect much from it. By now the boy would have had time to perfect his story.

It was light and he was very cold when he climbed into the big, soft bed next to Molly. Although he was cold he did not hold her. He was afraid of waking her. He lay straight, on his back, and slept only lightly, allowing his mind to continue its work. So when he woke he knew where Peter Littleton fitted into it all. He had made the vital connection.

The door was opened to them as soon as they knocked. Mrs. Black was a large woman. She wore a flowered apron over her dark clothes.

“You’ve come about Terry,” she said flatly.

“That’s right,” said George. He wasn’t surprised. The whole village must know about his inquiries by now.

“You’d better come in then.”

He was surprised by her lack of hospitality, at the resentment in her voice. She showed them into a spotless, cramped living room.

“Well,” she said. “Have you found him?”

When they did not reply she asked:

“You
are
from the police?”

“No, Mrs. Black. My name’s Palmer-Jones. I wanted to talk to Terry. What has happened to him?”

She looked exhausted.

“I don’t know. The police think that he’s run away because he killed Tom French. They’re looking for him.”

Because they were not the police, she motioned them to sit down, and sat herself, large and proud, in an upright chair, fierce despite her tiredness and depression.

“But that’s not true, Mr. Palmer-Jones. He’s a kind, good-natured boy. I wouldn’t be afraid to think of him as my son. He has never hurt anyone in his life and I can’t believe that he would hurt Tommy, his friend. He always called Tommy his friend. He’s been with me for a long time, Mr. Palmer-Jones, and I know more about him than a policeman who’s never met him.”

Molly went over to the stiff, controlled woman and took her hand. Mrs. Black, with her dark clothes and her tense, mindless grief, reminded Molly of a person recently bereaved.

“We don’t think that Terry killed anyone, Mrs. Black. When did he go missing?”

“Sunday. He left work early. Before lunch.”

Molly was still holding the woman’s hand. She looked quickly at her husband.

“That must have been soon after I spoke to him.”

Then she said very gently:

“Mrs. Black, do you have any idea where Terry went?”

She shook her head. Silent tears ran down her cheeks.

“I phoned the hospital,” she said. “If he was worried or upset why didn’t he talk to me? I would have helped him.”

“The hospital?” Molly asked, ignoring her impulse to comfort and reassure the woman.

“Since he was a boy until he came to stay with me, he lived in a big hospital just outside Skeffingham. It was the only place I could think where he would go.”

“Do you know where he lived before he was sent to the hospital?”

“He never talked about it. He didn’t have much of a memory.

I think it was with his grandfather, but even the staff at the hospital didn’t seem to know. It was twenty-five years ago.”

“Did anyone in the village see him after he left the hotel?”

“Yes. The landlord of the Blue Anchor saw him. He looked in at the pub, but he didn’t stop.”