Palmer-Jones 04 - A Prey to Murder (2 page)

‘I don’t know what we could do,’ he said.

‘Please, George,’ she said, as appealing suddenly as a young girl. ‘Please come. I need your help.’

There was an edge of desperation in her voice which made him think that the peregrines were only an excuse and that she may be in some real trouble. Perhaps it was in an attempt to appear gallant, to match the old-fashioned helplessness of her summons, that he said immediately: ‘Of course. Of course we’ll come.’ Perhaps he only needed an excuse to enjoy her company.

Across the table in their untidy kitchen where most of the agency’s work was done, Molly looked at him and smiled at his weakness.

As they drove down the hill into Sarne it seemed to George that it had scarcely changed since his childhood. They arrived in the early evening and the town was empty. It had been a sunny day in mid May, but now the sun was filtered through a grey haze of thin cloud. The town was surrounded by hills and to the west, beyond Gorse Hill the hills became higher where Powys began. It seemed to George that the town was always in shadow. That was how he remembered it, a series of grey houses and small, shuttered shops, where he would be taken by his aunts who would purchase small items and exchange patronizing pleasantries with the shopkeepers. His mother had died when he was a child and he had been brought up by his father and his spinster aunts. Now everything seemed smaller and rather shabby. The high street was narrow and no major chain stores had been attracted there. One of the shops was boarded up. Perhaps the new by-pass had been bad for business. The cattle market which had seemed an immense and exciting place in childhood was passed in a flash without notice. Of course he had been back to Sarne many times since he had left it, with great relief at eighteen, but each time he returned it seemed to have shrunk and grown more dingy.

Molly was driving. She manoeuvred past the parked cars in the high street, then the road climbed steeply again past the church. He had enjoyed going to church. It had at least given a taste of something more than small business and gossip. He must have seen Eleanor’s parents there, perhaps Eleanor herself because she still attended, but he could drag no image of them from his memory.

Past the church the road forked. One way joined the by-pass and continued to Radnor. The other climbed again to Gorse Hill. It was unfenced and led up through banks of gorse and the twisted stems of trees misshaped by the wind. It ended in a barn and a footpath. Just before the barn was the entrance to Gorse Hill. The house was hidden from the road by a fold in the land and a garden full of trees. It was like an oasis in the bleak, uncultivated sweep of the hill.

Two stone pillars marked the entrance to the hotel. They were worn by age and the wind and covered in moss and lichen. They seemed much older than the house itself. Carved at the top of one of the pillars was the head of a falcon. George had seen it before but that evening it had a special significance. In the strange light it was possible to believe that there was some magical, mysterious connection between the falcons and the man who had owned the land where they bred.

Without comment Molly drove between the pillars and turned the bend in the drive so that they could see the house and the high wall of the hill behind. The house was large, Victorian and rather ugly. It was the setting which made it imposing. At one end there was a large glass conservatory which reflected the misty evening sunlight. The house was beautifully maintained. George saw that it had been freshly painted since they had last visited and the gardens were immaculate. An expensive new car was parked in the Masefields’ private garage at the back of the house.

So Eleanor is making a go of it, he thought, with an almost personal pride in the woman’s achievement. I always knew she would.

As the car pulled up Veronica rushed out of the double front door to greet them. She appeared so quickly that she must have been watching for them from the kitchen window. She was wearing a flowered overall. She must have been preparing flowers for the dinner table because as she ran down the steps on to the gravel she was carrying a pair of scissors in one hand.

‘I’m so glad you’ve come,’ Veronica said in a breathless stage whisper, her pretty anxious face pushed through the window so that it was close to George’s. ‘Mother’s been behaving very oddly. I think she might be mad.’

Helen was in her room, preparing for work, thinking of Laurie. I should write this down, she thought, I should write down how I feel today because nothing so wonderful will ever happen to me again. Old people never feel like this. When I’m older I want to remember what it was like. But she did not write. She remembered the day again, hesitating in her mind to find the words to describe it, so that when she did record what had happened she would get it right.

Laurie had asked her to show him the peregrines. She must have told him about them in one of their long conversations. He had waited until they were alone to ask her, but the invitation, if it was an invitation, was casually given.

‘I was thinking of going for a walk on the hill tomorrow,’ he had said, whispering across the table to her in the school library. ‘Why don’t you come too? You could show me your peregrines. I’d like you to come.’

Laurie was in a different crowd from her at school. She worked hard. She would go to university, perhaps even to Oxford. He was in the sixth form to re-sit O levels. His only A level subject was music. He was brilliant at music. Everyone knew that.

Her grandmother had wanted to send Helen to the private school where Veronica had been educated as a boarder, but for once her parents had stood up to Eleanor. The girls could decide, they said. And the girls had chosen the comprehensive in Sarne, probably because that was what Eleanor had least wanted. Helen had never had a real boyfriend. She had been out with other boys at school, but no one she was serious about, no one who cared about her. Laurie was different.

It was a hot shimmering day, the first very hot day of the spring. The Welsh mountains were hidden by a heat haze by mid morning. She had not known how to dress. She was always aware that she had none of the flair or style of her friends and that in comparison with them she looked staid and uninteresting. In the end she had decided on the clothes she would have worn for a walk on her own – jeans and a T-shirt and sandals. She went to the kitchen to pack a picnic. She had agonized too over that. Perhaps Laurie had only planned to spend an hour with her and to come prepared for a day would seem a foolish presumption. But he need never know. If he left her before lunch time, the picnic could stay in the rucksack.

Laurie’s mother was in the kitchen, supervising the serving of breakfast. Mrs Oliver had worked at Gorse Hill since the hotel had opened and her mother had worked there before, for Eleanor’s parents. Helen had always been intimidated by the woman. She was stern and humourless and – helped by a couple of teenagers from Sarne – it seemed to Helen that she did most of the work in the kitchen. Eleanor and Veronica planned the menus and added elegant finishing touches but it was Nan Oliver, her face red from the heat, who chopped and kneaded and stirred according to their instructions. Helen wondered if Laurie had told his mother that they were meeting. If he had, Mrs Oliver made no comment, and only watched as Helen packed cold meat and salad into containers, helped herself to cakes from the tin in the larder.

On her way out of the house she met her father who was coming out of the office. He was a tall man, with a long face, like a horse’s, and thinning sandy hair. It seemed to Helen that he looked strained and tired. It was a busy time of the year, the start of the season, and he did all the bookings and accounts, all the buying.

‘You don’t look very well,’ she said. He was so quiet and dependable that they took him for granted.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I’m fine.’ He looked at her rucksack, at the thin jacket she carried over her shoulders.

‘Will you be out all day?’ he asked. ‘ You know it’s the Wildlife Trust Open Day tomorrow. Your grandmother will expect you to be here to help.’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’m going for a walk on the hill.’

‘On your own?’

‘No,’ she said and could feel herself blushing. ‘With a friend.’

‘Enjoy yourself,’ he said. ‘Really. Have a lovely day.’ He smiled at her. ‘ Stay out as long as you like. Eleanor will have to manage without you.’

She had arranged to meet Laurie by the barn where the footpath started. The grass around the building was long and mixed with clover and buttercups. Before they had moved to Gorse Hill her father had run his own photographic business in Sarne and they had come to Gorse Hill every Sunday for lunch. She remembered picking huge bunches of clover and buttercups to take home to the town with her and being disappointed because they died in the car. She reached the footpath before Laurie, and sat on the grass where they had arranged to meet and waited for him. Everywhere there was a sickly scent of gorse.

Perhaps she had fallen asleep for a moment or perhaps she was just dazed by the unaccustomed heat and the sunshine, because she did not hear him approach. She felt his hand on her shoulder and turned to face him, so shocked that she had no time to prepare the way she looked or to say the things she had planned. He had never touched her before. They had talked for hours but they had never touched. He stood above her, blocking out the sun. He was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt with a Greenpeace slogan on the front. In those few moments she thought she saw everything about him in sharp detail. Perhaps even then she knew that she would want to remember it all clearly and write it all down. She stood up.

‘I wasn’t sure you’d come,’ he said. It occurred to her for the first time that he might be as nervous as she was.

‘You should have known that I would,’ Helen said.

He took her hand and they walked together up the footpath. It was well worn, used by ramblers looking for Offa’s Dyke, eroded in places to the bare rock. He knew more about birds than she did and pointed out meadow pipit, skylark, lapwing. Away from the field around the barn which had once been cultivated, there was only bracken, rough grassland and a few sheep. The path was very steep and soon they were high above Gorse Hill looking down on the roof of the house. She was lightheaded with the effort of climbing and the heady scent of the gorse.

‘Does your grandmother own this land?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘All the way to the top of the hill. But she lets the grazing to a farmer.’

‘Well,’ he said gently. ‘Where’s your peregrine eyrie?’

The footpath flattened, crossed the face of the hill before reaching the summit and led into the next valley, but above them the hill became more sheer and rocky. It might perhaps have been possible to climb there without a rope. There were buttresses and shady slopes and crevices where there were still grass and birch saplings, but from where they were standing that seemed impossible. Halfway up the cliff, in a narrow fold in the rock, was the eyrie. With the naked eye they could only see the white stain of dropping and an indistinct grey shape which might have been the female, but Laurie seemed not to mind.

‘It’s terrific,’ he said. ‘ What a beautiful view she must have right over the valley. Next time we come we’ll try to get some binoculars.’

‘My grandmother has some,’ she said. ‘I’ll borrow hers.’ She did not want to appear too excited about his plans for future visits to the eyrie. Perhaps he was only interested in the falcons and she was deluding herself that he liked her.

They found a place to sit just below the path, behind a big, pink smooth boulder. They were hidden from the path there and looked down over Gorse Hill and the town. It was, Helen thought, their own eyrie. He put his arm around her bare shoulders and kissed her. His lips and his face were warm.

They spent most of the day there. They shared the picnic and talked and kissed and lay on their stomachs to look at the view. A group of racing pigeons flew over and the small male peregrine appeared from nowhere, separated one brilliant white pigeon from the crowd and killed it from below. It was over so quickly that she might not have noticed what was happening if Laurie had not pointed it out to her.

‘How do you know so much about birds?’ she asked.

‘My dad was keen,’ he said. ‘ He used to take us out when we were kids.’

‘You won’t tell anyone about the nest, will you?’ she said suddenly. ‘My grandmother’s afraid someone’s going to steal the young.’

‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘ Who would want to steal them?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said vaguely. ‘ Falconers I suppose.’

‘Why does your grandmother think they’re in danger?’

‘She said there was a van she didn’t recognize parked at the end of the lane near the barn on two evenings last week. It was an old blue van with a registration number from outside the area.’

‘Did she contact the police?’

‘I don’t know. She might have done. She seems suddenly to be obsessed by the birds. She never bothered much when Grandpa was alive and he was the one with the real interest. Now she’s trying to persuade us all to take turns at guarding the eyrie. My parents think she’s going loopy.’

‘Do you?’

‘I don’t know. Something’s happening. She’s usually so cool and proper. She’s been secretary of the Sarne Wildlife Trust for ages but I thought she enjoyed the social events and that she wasn’t really committed. The Trust is holding its Open Day at Gorse Hill tomorrow. She’s making herself very unpopular with the other members because she’s trying to persuade them that all the money they raise at the Open Day should go to pay a warden to protect the peregrines.’

‘I’m coming tomorrow,’ he said quietly. ‘To the Open Day. The Trust has asked the Folk Club to do some music. I’ll be singing. You don’t mind?’

‘No,’ she cried. ‘ Of course I don’t mind.’

‘I was afraid,’ he said, ‘ that your parents might not like me.’

‘Of course they’ll like you,’ she said, then added: ‘Besides, it’s not them that matter. It’s Grandmother.’

She returned to the hotel to find it transformed. A marquee had been erected on the lawn and a man with patched jeans was testing a public-address system. Fanny was in disgrace because she had eaten six meringues which had been prepared for the following day. Eleanor was directing operations and the committee of the Wildlife Trust were gathered around her. None of that mattered. Helen sat by the open window, listening to the unfamiliar shouting and noise in the garden below, then dressed for work in the dining room. All the time she dreamt of Laurie.