Palmer-Jones 04 - A Prey to Murder (8 page)

Pritchard beamed. So Oliver had inside information. It was all he needed. The inquiry would be quickly over.

They persuaded Fenn to go into the house to phone his daughter while they searched the Range-Rover. Fenn would have liked to insist on being there but he did not have the strength to stand up to Pritchard’s jovial good humour. He did as he was told and walked over the grass to the house.

The birds were quiet and hooded on portable perches in the back of the car. George listed the species – redtailed hawk, saker falcon, goshawk and an adult peregrine – and noted the numbers on the plastic cable tie bands on their legs.

‘Red-tailed hawk and saker falcon aren’t found in the wild in this country,’ he said. ‘They will have been imported under licence or bred at Puddleworth. The Department of the Environment will tell us from the numbers on the plastic bands. At least, they should be able to. I’m afraid they’re not renowned for their efficiency.’

‘What about the others?’

‘They breed in the wild in this country and both species are regularly illegally taken. As I explained, as far as I know Murdoch Fenn has never been suspected of breaking the law and I’m sure they will have been legally bred in captivity. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has an investigations department. If Fenn has ever been involved in anything dubious the investigations officer would know. If you like I could ask him if he’s heard any rumours …’

‘Yes,’ Pritchard said. ‘You do that.’ They continued their search of the car. There were no young birds. There was a piece of rope but it was not long or strong enough to let a man down the rocky cliff to the eyrie.

‘We’ll have to let him go,’ Pritchard said. ‘For the time being.’ He turned to George. ‘You’ll be staying at Gorse Hill for a while, will you?’

‘I don’t know,’ George said awkwardly. ‘ The family may prefer me to leave. I wouldn’t want to intrude and I certainly wouldn’t want to interfere in your investigation.’

‘No question of that,’ Pritchard said. He hesitated. ‘I’ll have to visit this falconry centre in Puddleworth. I was hoping you might come with me. I’m still not convinced that Fenn’s not involved.’

‘Doesn’t all the evidence point to Frank Oliver’s being the murderer?’ George asked. ‘His van had been seen on the hill during the week. His employment with Fenn would have introduced him to other, less scrupulous falconers, so he would easily find a market for the birds. He could have moved the body from the hill to the weathering ground in his van while Fenn was asleep, without attracting too much attention.’

‘You’re probably right,’ Pritchard said easily, ‘but Fenn could be implicated. If he wanted those birds it would be natural for him to get Oliver to do his dirty work.’ He locked the Range-Rover and they began to walk back to the house. ‘ You will come with me to Puddleworth? We might find something there to lead us to Oliver.’

It took George a while to answer. He looked to an upstairs window where Helen stood and stared out across the garden in blank disbelief.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ll come.’ Eleanor had hired him. He would see the thing through to the end.

Laurie Oliver left the Open Day before it was ended. After his meeting with his father he wandered round the garden looking wildly for Helen, but when he could not see her he walked away. Like a child he needed instant comfort and he ran for his home. The confrontation with his father had humiliated and confused him. He disliked the man, yet felt hurt because his father had seemed indifferent to his presence. He wanted the security of the noisy house with the children playing and his mother complaining. He wanted to be sure of himself again. Even Helen was a threat to his confidence and he walked past the strangers on his way to the lane with his head bent, hoping no one would approach him.

He began to walk from Gorse Hill into the town. The makeshift car park was still full and cars were parked on the grass verge of the lane, but people were beginning to drift away. Several times he had to stand aside to let cars past, but it was three quarters of an hour later, when he had almost reached the town, that he heard the sound of a vehicle behind him and turned to see his father’s blue van rattle round a corner towards him. For a moment he thought his father had followed him to apologize, to reestablish contact, but the driver hardly seemed to notice him and the van hurtled on down the narrow road, almost touching the overgrown hedges on each side.

He walked down the high street but saw no one he knew. The shop windows were empty and shuttered for the weekend, and there was no one about. When he arrived home the house, too, was unusually quiet. His mother was alone there. Heather had taken the children for a walk to the park, she said. His mother was ironing. The ironing board was in the middle of the living room and she stood behind it, firm and implacable, pushing the heavy iron over the household’s clothes.

‘I wasn’t sure you’d be back yet,’ he said. She usually finished early on a Sunday but it had been so busy at Gorse Hill he had thought she might be working overtime. He was glad she was back. She paused in her ironing.

‘I told Mrs Mead I had to finish on time,’ she said grimly. ‘I told her: “ I’ve got a family of my own to look after. This is supposed to be the Wildlife Trust’s Open Day. Let them do their own washing up.” Mrs Masefield would have had something to say but Mrs Mead let me go.’

She looked sharply at her son. ‘What’s the matter with you, then?’ she said. She had realized immediately that he was upset. ‘What happened?’

Although the plastic basket was still full of washing she stood the iron on its end, switched it off at the plug and began to wind the flex round the handle.

‘Come on,’ she said, already beginning to become irritated. ‘Tell me what it’s all about.’ He had always needed more care than the others. He had taken up more of her time and the others had missed out because of it. They did not seem to mind – Heather said he was sensitive and she should be more sympathetic – but she thought there was something nervy and girlish about him. She wished he were more robust, for his own sake as well as hers.

He’ll grow out of it, she thought. It’s a stage he’s going through. But she had been thinking that since he was five years old. He had sobbed every day not to be left at school, and he had clung to her as she tried to leave the classroom. He looked very similar now, drained and wretched, slouched on his chair. She wondered when she would make time to finish the ironing. She loved him of course but begrudged the interruption to her peace. She had a lot to think about.

‘I saw Dad,’ he said. ‘At the Open Day.’

‘What was he doing there?’

He could not tell whether the information was news to her. Her face and her voice gave nothing away. He had wondered if she had seen Frank at Gorse Hill, if he had been into the kitchen to see her. She left the ironing board standing and sat beside him.

‘He was working for the bloke from Puddleworth.’

She nodded. She understood whom Laurie meant. During her marriage she had lived with Frank’s obsession with birds of prey. At their terraced house in Wolverhampton, the small back garden which she had planned as a safe place for the children to play had been filled with aviaries and cages. She had lived with the rituals of breeding and feeding and flying. When they were first married Frank had been working for British Rail as a steward and the falconry had been a hobby like racing pigeons or growing leeks. Then he had come to the attention of Murdoch Fenn and had become a fanatic.

‘So he’s still working at Puddleworth, is he?’ she said, almost to herself.

‘I suppose so.’

‘Well,’ she said, turning back to Laurie. ‘ What did your father want?’

‘Nothing,’ Laurie said angrily. ‘He said he was too busy to talk to me.’

‘So?’ she said. ‘Wasn’t he always too busy to talk to us?’

‘He talked to Steve,’ Laurie said, with a sudden flash of jealousy. ‘He offered Steve a job.’

‘What sort of job?’ she demanded.

‘I don’t know.’ Laurie was sulky, because mention of Steve would always provoke her to a reaction. ‘He paid Steve fifty pounds.’

‘Why didn’t Steve tell me?’

‘He might be your favourite,’ Laurie said, aware that he was being childish again, but unable to help himself. ‘He might be your favourite but he doesn’t tell you everything.’

She seemed about to say something, but then they heard children’s voices outside. They had been playing in the sandpit in the park and they had sand in their shoes, in their pockets, in their hair. They ran in demanding food and their mother’s attention. They wanted to tell her all about it. Heather followed them, as excited as they were. She had heard in the town that Eleanor Masefield was dead. She had been pecked to death, people were saying, by one of the big hawks from Puddleworth.

‘Is it true?’ she asked her mother. ‘What do you know about it?’

Nan Oliver shook her head.

‘I don’t know anything about it,’ she said.

The police did not arrive to look for Frank Oliver until later. The two younger children were in bed. The police searched the rest of the house then insisted that Michael and Carol should be woken up so they could search their bedroom.

‘What’s he done?’ Nan Oliver demanded, facing the police officers, her legs braced as they had been when she stood ironing. ‘ He’s never been in trouble with the police. He’s a bastard but he’s always stayed within the law. I don’t want those children woken.’

‘We need to talk to him,’ they said, polite, sympathetic, but becoming impatient.

‘He’s not here,’ she shouted. ‘What do you want to talk to him about?’

‘Eleanor Masefield was murdered,’ they said. ‘We think he may have information about her death.’

‘Not murdered,’ she said quietly. ‘They said in Sarne it was an accident. With the birds.’

She had no stomach then for the fight and let them go upstairs to search the children’s bedroom. When they came down they would not leave. They sat on a sofa in the sitting room and stared at her. Dazed, Laurie and Heather watched them question their mother, and when one said: ‘A cup of tea would be nice,’ Heather got up to make it.

There were two of them, a man and a woman in civilian clothes. They had introduced themselves as they came in but Laurie never saw them again and did not remember their names.

‘Divorced are you?’ the policewoman asked.

‘Separated,’ said Nan Oliver.

‘When did you last see your husband?’

‘When I left him four years ago.’

‘Did you know he was in Sarne?’

‘Not until this afternoon. Laurence, my son, saw him at Gorse Hill and told me.’

‘But you were in Gorse Hill this afternoon. Didn’t you see him?’

‘No,’ she said, trying to keep her temper. ‘I was in the kitchen all afternoon. I was busy. Didn’t they tell you that?’

‘When did you last have any communication with your husband?’ the man asked.

‘I’ve told you. Four years ago.’

‘You haven’t spoken to him on the telephone or written to him since that time?’

‘I’ve written to him asking for maintenance,’ she said bitterly. ‘But I never had any reply.’

‘You didn’t tell him about a pair of peregrine falcons nesting on the hill above the hotel?’

She looked at the policeman as if he were mentally defective.

‘I left him because of his bloody birds,’ she said. ‘What would I want to do that for?’

They seemed at last to believe her. The policeman turned to Laurie.

‘Had you arranged to meet your father this afternoon?’

‘No,’ Laurie said.

‘But you knew he would be at Gorse Hill?’

‘I thought he might be.’

‘What did your dad say to you when you saw him?’ ‘Nothing,’ Laurie said. ‘Just that he was working there and he’d keep out of our way. That’s why I wanted to see him. To tell him to leave us alone.’

‘How did you know he’d be at Gorse Hill?’

‘My brother Steve met Dad in a pub in the town earlier in the week. Steve told me he was working here. When we left Wolverhampton Dad had a job at the Falconry Centre at Puddleworth. I knew there was a falconry display at the open day so I thought he’d probably be there.’

‘Did he say anything else to your brother, to Steve?’

Laurie hesitated. He knew his mother would not want Steve implicated at all, but jealousy made him vindictive.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘ He offered Steve a job.’

The police officers looked together at Mrs Oliver. ‘Where is your other son?’ the woman asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Nan Oliver said wretchedly. ‘ He left here straight after breakfast. I haven’t seen him since. But he’s a grown man. He doesn’t have to tell us where he spends his time.’

‘Where might he be?’

She gave the names and addresses of some friends. At last they seemed satisfied and left.

Oliver’s van was found parked that evening near the station in Shrewsbury but he and Steve seemed to have disappeared.

At Gorse Hill each of the women was isolated in her own room and seemed unable to receive strength or comfort from the rest of the family. Richard Mead scuttled between them with useless bursts of energy, but when they heard him coming they shrank away from the sound and pretended not to hear the tap on the door, the soft words of sympathy. It had become his main purpose in life to please his women and make them happy. Now it seemed he was a failure even at that.

Since he had met Veronica she had depended on him. His friends told him, when they first married, that he was infatuated with her and that soon the honeymoon would be over. He would realize what a mistake he had made. She was too young for him. She was silly. But the honeymoon had never ended and he was still entranced by her prettiness and her trust.

It had been no great sacrifice to sell the photographic studio, so that Veronica could move back to Gorse Hill to be with her mother. The only way to make a living was to do an endless round of tedious weddings and sentimental portraits of fat toddlers. There was only a limited market for the landscape and wildlife photographs he most enjoyed. He had not begrudged Veronica the lack of his own independence, but he hoped that she might recognize it as an expression of his love and be a little grateful. Now her rejection hurt him deeply. She seemed hardly to recognize that he was there.