Palmer-Jones 01 - A Bird in the Hand (21 page)

“There is one lady who may be able to help—our head waitress, Annie. Your young lady worked under her in the dining room. We have so many casual staff that I’m sure you won’t expect me to remember. But Annie will be able to help you. Please don’t keep her away from her duties for too long. We’re rather busy and it will soon be lunchtime. If you’d like to use my office, I’ll send her to you.”

Annie cheered him immediately. She was an energetic, middle-aged woman with short grey hair who had the competent, efficient air of a nurse. Making sure that the manager had gone, she sat down and stretched her tired feet in front of her, grateful for the unexpected rest. She spoke with a north-country accent.

“Sally was a quiet girl, hard-working. She’d come with good references from a big hotel in Scotland, but she had no airs and graces. The residents didn’t take to her, you know, as they did to some of the girls, because she didn’t push herself forward, she didn’t make any effort to be friendly to them. But she was a good worker. We missed her when she left.”

“Did she have any boyfriends? Perhaps among the guests. Did she talk about anyone special?”

“No. I’d never seen her with a boy. That’s why I was so surprised when she left like that. We didn’t have any idea. She always went away from the island on her days off, but she said that she was exploring. Walking, you know. She was that type of girl. Quiet, reserved. That’s why we were all so shocked.”

“Shocked?”

“Aye. When we realized she was expecting. She started to be late coming down in the mornings, and one of the other girls found her being sick. I think she was hoping, you know, that it wasn’t true, but she had to believe it in the end. It’s happening all the time here, though you’d think these days they’d have more sense. But I never would have expected it of Sal.”

“And did she never mention anybody who could have been the father? Anybody at all?”

“I remember, the day just before she left—she went quite suddenly without telling anybody. He—” she pointed to the desk where George sat—“ he was furious. Well the day before, she went to a party on St. Mary’s. She worked herself into a terrible state about it because she was supposed to be working that night, and none of the girls would swap with her. She was so upset that I let her go in the end. She’d have been no use at work. I suppose it was expecting that was making her so depressed. One of the girls asked her about the party. You know how malicious these girls can be. They were teasing her about some man they’d seen her with, and to stop them Sally told them about the party. It wasn’t an islander who was giving it, it was a birdwatcher. You know, they all come to the islands in the autumn.”

“Do you know his name?”

She shook her head regretfully. “I remember that she stayed out all night. I was worried about her because she’d been so depressed. She got the first boat back the next morning. Then she must have packed up all her stuff. She left that day. I never saw her again.”

“And she never got in touch? You didn’t know what had happened to her?”

Annie shook her head. “No, though the police were here looking for her later that week. They scared me at first. I wondered what had happened. I thought she might have had an accident. But they said they just wanted to take a statement from her. They’d raided that party she went to, and they’d found drugs there. They wanted her to be a witness. I never would have thought that she’d be mixed up in anything like that.”

“Do you remember any details of the case? Who was being charged?”

“No. The police didn’t mention anything like that.”

George prepared to leave then, and Annie, regretfully, got up to go back to work.

“Did you know Peter Littleton?” George asked suddenly.

“The one that married that lass on St. Agnes? Aye, of course I know the name and I knew him by sight. He used to bring his wife here for dinner, sometimes, when they were first married, but I haven’t seen him for a couple of years. He’s left her now, you know.”

“Did Sally Johnson know him?”

“I don’t think she would have known him, but she would have known of him, that’s for certain. He was a character. Everyone on Scilly knew of him.”

George held the door for her and followed her out. It was cool and quiet in the hotel. Outside the heat and the humidity overpowered him. Even on the sea, in the crowded, noisy boat, it seemed unnaturally airless. When he arrived at St. Mary’s he was told that there were no tripper boats that day to St. Agnes, so he chartered one himself, taking a momentary pleasure in asking for a receipt so that he could charge the expense to Clive Anderson. As soon as he had enjoyed the thought, it seemed in poor taste.

Because there were no day-trippers, St. Agnes was quiet. It was mid-day and the pub near the quay was open but, despite tremendous temptation, he walked past. He had been to St. Agnes often enough for some of the locals to recognize him, but he did not feel ready yet to answer questions. St. Agnes was his favourite Scilly isle. As he walked up the track, between the dry-stone walls, the familiar and peaceful sights and smells relaxed him. He felt at home.

He was walking past the Gugh, the sandy peninsula on the east of the island, when somebody caled his name. Before he turned he recognized the voice. Charlotte Cavanagh had been schoolmistress on St. Agnes for thirty years. She had come to the island as a young widow straight after the war. When she retired she moved from the schoolhouse to a tiny cottage on the shore, but little else had changed. The islanders had admired her, and been afraid of her when she first arrived, brave and outspoken and a little wild. She still kept herself apart. She was Mrs. Cavanagh to most of them, and she rarely mixed socially with any of the island families. She was passionately interested in the islands, in their history, natural history and archaeology. She painted them and wrote about them, but she still did not belong.

She was very tall, and was dressed as dramatically and eccentrically as usual, in bright orange corduroy trousers, a fisherman’s smock and sandals. Her grey hair was short and her face was long and bony, very forceful and expressive. She was carrying a sketch pad and pencils.

“Darling boy,” she said. “ You knew I was bored and you’ve come to see me.” She still spoke with the extravagance that was fashionable in her pre-war adolescence. It was as if time had stopped with the death of her husband at the beginning of the war, when she was twenty.

“Not exactly to see you,” he said, “ but I want to talk to you.”

“You must come for lunch. Come now, before I die of curiosity. I want to know all about it. What’s brought you here? Not a rare bird because I should have heard, and we should be invaded by hundreds of dirty young men. How’s darling Molly? You didn’t come last autumn. I do miss you both.”

Her cottage was shady and smelled, George thought, like a good whole-food shop. She made tea deftly and seriously like an oriental woman, then brought out a loaf, cheese and smoked fish. They sat together by an open window. The breeze moved the curtains and carried into the house the scents of the garden. George sat without eating, without thinking, just enjoying the peace.

“Darling, do stop being so mysterious. Tell me what it’s all about.”

“Did you ever meet Tom French?” he asked. “He came here a few times, although I think he stayed on St. Mary’s when he was last on Scilly. He was a birdwatcher. He was murdered about a fortnight ago, in Rushy, the village on the north Norfolk coast.”

She was not shocked. Very little shocked her.

“I’ve probably met him. I try to see most of the rarities. The birdwatchers all seem to know me, and I talk to them, but I don’t know any names. Are you involved in it professionally?”

“Not really. I retired last year, you know. But I was asked to find out if the murderer was a birdwatcher and I agreed.”

“And what brings you here?”

“Peter Littleton.”

“Ah, of course, dear Peter. Did he know the poor boy?”

“He was a friend. But I think there were other connections.”

“And you’ve come here to find out what they were?”

“Something like that.”

“I’m not sure that I want to help you. Peter was a dear friend.” He must have shown his disappointment, his tiredness, because she grinned. “But of course I’ll talk to you about Peter. If I don’t someone else will, and the islanders don’t like him.” She smiled again, a wide mischievous smile. “When he left, it wasn’t with a whimper. They’re still talking about it. He wrote a rude, if accurate description of his wife in red paint on the post office wall. You can still see it faintly even now. And he drove Ted Baxter’s tractor into the harbour.

“Of course they never liked him. He was an outsider and a birdwatcher too, which made it worse. He lost his temper before he went. But those were childish things, hurtful but not vicious, and Barbara provoked him. I taught her, you know. Barbara Baxter she was then. Quite a pleasant little thing. A bit simple. Not at all academic. She tried her best, but she wasn’t up to it. Of course Ted Baxter blamed me for the poor school reports. Instead of letting her go with her friends to the comprehensive on St. Mary’s where she would have been perfectly happy, he sent her to a private school on the mainland. They didn’t teach her anything useful and made her sulky.”

“Did you see a lot of Peter Littleton?”

“He used to come down quite often. For some intelligent conversation.” She smiled at herself. “That sounds terribly arrogant and snobbish, doesn’t it? We’re just different, Peter and I. We didn’t fit in. Ted Baxter is an intelligent man. His intelligence makes him a lot of money. But he isn’t interesting. Peter would come to see me, perhaps one evening a week. We would listen to my music, talk about books. The islanders thought it was very strange that he took so much interest in me. When he went off as he did, they almost blamed me. Very medieval, as if I were a witch who’d cast a spell on him.”

“Did he ever mention a girl, Sally Johnson? She worked on Tresco. She would have been here two years ago.”

“I know that there was a girl. He never told me her name.”

“Did he tell you anything about her?”

“For that summer he talked about nothing else. No practical details like her name or where she worked. Just about how much in love he was. Madly in love like a teenager.”

George remembered fleetingly that Rob had described Tom’s love for Sally like that. Charlotte continued:

“Then came the agonizing about whether he should leave Barbara. He felt he owed her something. She had given him four years on St. Agnes and he loved the place. He had decided that he would leave her, when the girl disappeared. For a while he tried to find her, but she’d hurt his pride. He thought that she’d just decided that she didn’t want to know him.”

It was tantalizing. He knew that Peter and Sally had been seeing each other that summer, that they had fallen in love, but there was still no proof.

“If I’m right about the identity of the girl,” George said, “she was pregnant. Did Peter know that?”

“No,” she said, moved almost to tears. “Oh, the poor darling boy, the poor girl. He never knew. He thought that she just ran away.”

Ted Baxter was as hostile as George had expected him to be. He was a short, squat man, built like a Welsh miner. When George arrived he was scraping the mud from his wellingtons at the kitchen door. It was teatime. He must have been impressed by George’s air of authority because he asked him, grudgingly, into the house. When George explained why he was there Baxter’s hostility became focused not on George, but on his son-in-law. The farmer made no pretence at concern about the death of a birdwatcher, but although it was obvious that his only feeling for Peter was one of obsessive hatred, his attitude to his son-in-law’s involvement in the case was ambiguous. He was worried that his daughter might, in some way, become implicated, but he was delighted that all his suspicions about Peter’s character had been confirmed. He supposed, without question, that Peter was the murderer.

As bearer of such news, George was made almost welcome. Baxter ordered his wife to pour tea for George and in a musing, gloating way began to talk. The farmhouse was not a traditional cottage but a modern bungalow with large windows giving a spectacular view down the island to the sea. As George listened to the man talking, he looked out and thought that it was a perfect place to fall in love.

“I was against it from the start,” Baxter said. “ She could have done better than that layabout. She was as pretty as a picture. She could have had any man she wanted. She said that he’d been to Oxford, but you would never have known, the way he dressed and talked. They let anyone into the universities now. Degrees are two a penny. He had no job when he first came here, no prospects. He was one of those twitchers, sleeping rough on the beach. He met Barbara in the Tavern. She was working there that summer. She didn’t need to work but she’d just left school, and was feeling bored. You know these young people. He got round her somehow with his smooth talking and his poetry, and his fancy ways.

“He came to see me, respectable enough, to ask if they could get married. I can tell you I was shocked. To be fair, he was willing enough when I said to wait for a year, but she wouldn’t have it. She wanted to be married that summer, and nothing else would do. I should have been firm, told her to wait, but in the end I agreed. She’s our only daughter and maybe we spoil her.

“It never worked out of course, not from the beginning. He was a clown. He couldn’t settle to work. I run a serious business and he never could take it seriously. All the same, I could have put up with all that, Mr. Palmer-Jones, if he’d been good to our Barbara. After they were married he hardly seemed to take any notice of her. He’d got what he wanted—her money and a home on the island here. We put them in the old farmhouse where we lived until we had this place built. It was comfortable enough—Barbara had it done out just as she wanted—but he never appreciated it. There was a garden at the back of the house, and he just let it run wild. I had to send one of my men down to clear it in the end. He took no care of the place.

“He never took Barbara out. He spent all his free time out on the island with his binoculars looking at bloody birds. And in the evenings, when it was too dark to see, he’d have his nose stuck in a bloody book. Barbara used to come round here, just to have someone to talk to. He was mad about those birds. Crazy. Look at the way he behaved when he left here. That wasn’t the work of a sane man. Barbara’s been on tranquilizers ever since that night. She still can’t sleep properly without the tablets. That’s what birdwatching does to a man. It turns his mind, and changes him into a lunatic. I won’t have them on my land now. I can’t bear to see them.”