Palmer-Jones 04 - A Prey to Murder (11 page)

George looked up from the papers he was reading with extreme distaste.

‘Where did Oliver live?’ Pritchard asked.

‘He had a house in Wolverhampton,’ Fenn said.

‘So he did,’ Pritchard said. ‘My colleagues have found it for us. But it was a long way for him to come every day.’

‘He didn’t mind the travelling,’ Fenn said quickly. ‘He had that old blue van. He’s had it for years …’ Then when Pritchard continued to look at him with disbelief he added: ‘There was a room here where he sometimes stayed, if he was working late or for some reason he didn’t want to leave the birds.’

‘Here?’ Pritchard asked. ‘In the house?’

Fenn seemed shocked by the notion. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘Not in the house. It’s in the building where we keep the birds in quarantine. It was intended originally for volunteers. Then Kerry decided she wanted to work here too so we didn’t need any extra help.’

‘You didn’t show it to us when we were looking round earlier.’

‘No,’ Fenn said. ‘I didn’t think it was important.’

George was packing files neatly back into the cabinet. Pritchard looked at him and he shook his head slightly to show he had found nothing of significance.

‘We’d better have a look,’ Pritchard said, as if it were a routine chore. ‘Then we’ll go away and leave you alone.’

Reluctantly Fenn led them along a pleasant path through the trees to the Centre. Oliver’s room was small, with two bunks on one wall and a small hand-basin on the other. Grey blankets were folded neatly on the bunks. George thought it was very similar to a British Rail sleeping compartment Oliver must have been at home there.

Pritchard lifted the mattresses off the wire-framed bunks and shook out the blankets.

‘Has it been cleaned since Oliver slept here?’ he asked.

Fenn shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Oliver saw to all that.’

By then Pritchard was on his knees, peering under the lower bunk.

‘It’s a bit dusty under here,’ he said. ‘Reminds me of home.’ When he stood upright he held a small scrap of paper between his thumb and first finger. A series of numbers was written in pencil. Pritchard held out the paper so that Fenn could see it.

‘Does this mean anything to you?’ he asked.

Fenn shook his head.

‘What about you, Mr Palmer-Jones?’

George looked at the numbers. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know what that is. It’s the telephone number at Gorse Hill.’

They walked together slowly through the turnstile and towards the car. There was already a scattering of cars in the car park and in the gatehouse shop a few people were looking at the tea towels and mugs all printed with falcon heads. Another coach was pulling up with a group of schoolchildren hanging out of the windows. Kerry Fenn hurried out of the gatehouse to meet the new party, then saw the men and hesitated. She stood by the turnstile willing them to go. As Pritchard and George reached their car Fenn turned and joined his daughter, put his arm around her in a gesture of comfort and support. As Pritchard drove off George looked back and saw that the couple were still watching with relief as the policeman pulled out into the road.

‘What did you make of that then?’ Pritchard asked.

George was still thinking of the father and daughter, supporting each other, facing the threat of the inquiry together.

‘Fenn’s a lonely man,’ he said. ‘ I remember his wife. He had some sort of breakdown when she died. Before that the falconry was a hobby. He was quite detached and academic about it. He wrote books about its history and gave witty after-dinner speeches. He had been a solicitor before he founded the Falconry Centre and he spoke rather well. Then there was the tragedy of his wife’s accident and his illness and the birds seemed to take him over. I suppose that nothing else was important to him.’ Like Stuart Masefield, George thought. The birds took him over too.

‘Except his daughter,’ Pritchard said. ‘He had his daughter to look after.’

‘Yes. I’ve never met her before. I think she was abroad when I visited before. They do seem very close.’

George was lost in memory of the lively competent man he had known before Lydia Fenn’s death. Fenn had seemed to have regained his confidence and composure with the success of Puddleworth, but the second tragedy of Eleanor’s murder had shattered his poise again. He admired Eleanor as I did, George thought. Now he really only has his daughter and his birds left to care for. I have my wife.

Pritchard was talking again, a little impatiently.

‘I meant…’ he said, ‘what did you make of Oliver’s having a copy of the Gorse Hill telephone number?’

‘I suppose,’ George said slowly, ‘ that Nan Oliver must have been lying and she had spoken to him since their separation after all.’

‘Exactly,’ Pritchard said. ‘ The Olivers don’t have a telephone at home. The whole family seem more involved with Gorse Hill than I’d realized at first. Did you know that Oliver’s son and Mrs Masefield’s granddaughter are very friendly?’

‘No,’ George said.

‘I thought your wife might have told you. She discovered that little fact.’

‘No,’ George said. ‘She didn’t tell me.’ He felt suddenly guilty because he had excluded Molly and had so obviously resented her interest. He wished Molly were sitting beside him so he could hold her hand and make everything right. He wanted to tell her that his admiration for Eleanor had been an old man’s folly and meant nothing, that without Molly he, like Fenn, would lose his identity and reason. But Eleanor Masefield was dead and Molly would never be sure if George’s expression of love for his wife would have been so certain if the woman had lived.

George never found out how the local police came to have keys to Frank Oliver’s house. Perhaps Oliver had given some to a neighbour.

The house was at the end of the terrace, backing on to a canal. At the end of the road was a series of railway arches and every twenty minutes a train would go past at chimney-pot height, rattling the windows and making the light shades shudder. In the house next door a fat old lady in an upstairs window stared down at them. The window was dirty and George could see nothing of the room but it seemed to him that the woman was laughing at them.

George was not sure whether he would be invited into the house. Oliver had stopped keeping birds of prey there some years before, so the excuse that he was a Wild Life Act Inspector no longer applied. When Pritchard pulled up behind the police car already parked close to the kerb, George stayed in his seat and made no move to accompany the superintendent.

‘Come on,’ Pritchard said. ‘What are you waiting for?’

‘I thought I might be in the way,’ George said.

‘No,’ Pritchard said. He nodded at the uniformed policeman who waited impassively on the pavement. ‘I’ll tell them you’re a civilian expert. That’s true, isn’t it? There might be all sorts of papers which would mean nothing to me. We might be breaking a few rules, but it’ll save a lot of time in the end. See?’ He grinned.

‘I didn’t help much at Puddleworth. All Fenn’s paperwork was immaculate. It was possible to trace all his British birds of prey back to captive breeding pairs.’

‘Ah well,’ Pritchard said. ‘ I think we’ll find things are a bit different here.’

He ambled up to one of the constables, his big face puckered into a smile, and clapped him on the shoulder.

‘Good of you to come, lads,’ he bellowed. ‘Good of you to help us out. Well then, are you going to let us in? I expect you’re busy. We country chaps don’t know the sort of problems you face. You’ve got a terrible crime rate, I hear.’

Bemused, they opened the door for him. When he and George were inside he closed the door firmly behind him so the policemen were left outside on the pavement.

‘Don’t worry, lads!’ he said as he shut the door. ‘I’ll drop the keys in at the station.’

They were standing in a dark, windowless hall. There was lino, patterned like wood block, on the floor, and stairs with brown carpet directly ahead of them. The house seemed dusty and airless but not dirty. Oliver, after all, had known that he would be away for a few days. He had been in Sarne for at least three days before the murder if Eleanor’s story about the blue van was to be believed.

‘Where was Oliver staying in Sarne?’ George asked suddenly as Pritchard let him into the small sitting room. ‘Do you know?’

Pritchard shook his head. ‘We’re not sure,’ he said, ‘but there was space enough for him to sleep in the van. Unless his wife put him up and isn’t telling.’

‘You don’t know where the van was parked?’

‘Not on the council estate where the Olivers live, but he’s too clever to do that anyway. We should have more news when we get back – the lads are working on that today. There wasn’t a sleeping bag in the van, or any clothes, but if he’s camping out now, lying low, he would have taken those with him.’

‘I’m sorry,’ George said. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have asked. It was none of my business.’

‘I’ll tell you,’ Pritchard said, ‘ if you’re poking your nose where it’s not wanted. Now then, let’s have a look in here.’

After the darkness of the hall the room seemed suddenly light, but it was so cluttered that the impression was soon lost. George thought that Oliver’s family could have taken no furniture with them when they went. Against one wall stood a table and dining chairs which looked as if they had been produced during the austerity of war. There was a settee and easy chair in mustard leatherette near to the gas fire and a large colour television set in one corner. On the wall furthest from the window was a unit of shelving and cupboards.

‘If he was nicking birds, then selling them, he must have kept some record,’ Pritchard said. He nodded towards the cupboards under the shelves which still held momentos of family life – souvenirs from Aberystwyth and Aberdeen, a photograph of thin children playing on a beach. ‘We’ll have a quick look round,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll make a start in there.’

He led George through a glass door into the kitchen. Standing in the middle of the room he could have touched the walls on either side of him. The white distemper on the walls was peeling and there were flakes of it on the painted floor. The sink was old, made of white enamel. There was a long cupboard with a few tins of food, a box of tea bags, some powdered milk, and next to it an ancient gas stove and a refrigerator. Everything was reasonably clean and tidy but it was obvious that Oliver had not cared about the house. No rooms had been decorated, no new carpet or furniture had been bought, since Nan had left. The only unusual feature in the kitchen was a large chest freezer which took up the whole of one wall. The freezer was not switched on and when Pritchard lifted the lid it was empty.

‘What would he want that for then?’ Pritchard asked. ‘ I suppose it was useful with a big family and he didn’t bother to get rid of it.’

‘No,’ George said. ‘I don’t think it was that. When he had his own birds here he would have kept their food in it.’

Pritchard looked surprised.

‘Raptors eat animals,’ George said. ‘Rabbits, mice, day-old chicks. It’s much easier to buy them in bulk and keep them frozen.’

Pritchard raised his eyebrows. ‘I always thought falconry was a romantic sort of hobby,’ he said. ‘I saw that film –
Kes
– years ago and thought it was great. I didn’t expect a freezer full of corpses.’

From the kitchen there was a back door into the garden. Pritchard had a key but the door was stiff as if it was seldom used. After transferring his birds Oliver would have had no reason to go out there. The aviaries still stood but they were rusting and full of rubbish and the grass and weeds were waist high. The place smelled of cats and the stagnant canal beyond the wire-mesh cages. There were signs of the garden that had been there before. Straggly flowers bloomed among the weeds and in one corner an enormous crown of rhubarb, its leaves the size of elephant ears, still survived.

Upstairs there was nothing of interest. There were three bedrooms and a bathroom with a huge white bath stained by a dripping tap. Oliver still used the middle room which he must have shared with his wife. The bed was made and there were clothes in the chest of drawers. The largest bedroom still contained two sets of bunks for the boys and the walls and curtains were covered in brightly coloured aeroplanes. The smallest, where the girls must have slept, had two single beds, so close to each other that they almost touched. George wondered if Oliver had put up the wallpaper for his sons, if he had participated at all in the life of the family. Perhaps it had all been left to Mrs Oliver and his only role had been to give her more children. Yet the trinkets from Wales and Scotland, the photographs of the beach, showed that in the beginning at least there had been family holidays. They must have had something in common then. George found the house depressing and wished they could leave. Pritchard however, back in Oliver’s room, seemed unmoved.

‘We’ll leave all this to the experts,’ he said, dismissively waving his hand over the double bed with the nylon sheets, the candlewick bedspread. ‘I’ll let them in this afternoon and they can search it properly then. Let’s see what we can find in the downstairs cupboards.’

He bounded down the stairs like a big friendly dog in search of a chocolate treat.

At first the contents of the cupboards were disappointing. The first contained a jumble of papers as if letters, paid bills, magazines were put in there only because Oliver was afraid to throw them away. Pritchard sifted through the receipts, the forms explaining how to fill out other forms, with a thorough and delicate attention which impressed George. He seemed convinced that somewhere amid the debris they would find a clue to Oliver’s whereabouts.

The next cupboard was more fruitful. It was almost empty and the contents were ordered as if Oliver needed to keep it tidy. The first find was a card index system in a small box which lised raptor species in alphabetical order. Each card was hand written and had obviously been amended and updated. Pritchard handed it to George.

‘Is this anything to do with the work at Puddleworth?’ he asked.

George took the box and began to look carefully at the cards.