Palmer-Jones 05 - Sea Fever (15 page)

When George made a phone call from Pemberton to Gwen Pullen, the curator of the museum, to ask her to dinner at Rashwood Park, she had been horrified.

“What do you want to stay there for?” she demanded. “It’s a hideous place, George. And the food will be disgusting. Besides, its immoral to support the scheme. It’ll only encourage the developer to do the same thing somewhere else.”

Now at the lodge which still marked the entrance to the estate, George thought she had been right. He could not stay in the place and put money into the pockets of the developer who had caused such desecration. Even while he was working on an investigation, he would not do it. Much better to sleep in the car somewhere and find another way to meet Greg Frank’s girlfriend. But even as he hesitated, he knew these were moral scruples he could not afford. This place had some relevance in the relationship between Duncan James and Greg Franks. Besides, he had managed to persuade Gwen to come to Rashwood Park to eat with him, and she knew more about seabirds than anyone else in Britain. He drove up the pink gravel drive and parked in front of the hotel.

He had worried when he had booked the night at Rashwood Park that they would not allow him into the dining room in such casual clothes, or that at least his attire would make him conspicuous, but his anxiety was unfounded. It was not that sort of hotel. The guests seemed rather to pride themselves on their informality. They sat in the bar in tracksuits, with towels round their necks, and talked about handicaps and forehands and weights. It was much worse, George thought, than pretentious young men talking about art. Even Molly would concede that.

The receptionist behind a pine desk in the entrance hall wore an orange jumpsuit. All the staff, it seemed, wore orange uniforms.

“I telephoned earlier,” he said when at last he caught her attention, “and booked a room for tonight.”

She nodded distantly, so he thought at first she still had not heard him, but when she gave him his key, she smiled a toothy and unnatural leer—as much part of the corporate design, George thought, as the uniform, and for one dreadful minute he was afraid she would tell him to “have a nice day.” His bedroom had a colour television, miniature bar, and shower, none of which he wanted. He would have preferred a real bath and a pile of thick warm towels. The bed had a duvet—an import from the Continent which he detested. Already suitably angry, he went downstairs to meet Gwen Pullen and to find Greg Franks’ girlfriend and the Mr. Barnes who was responsible for such a monstrous building.

Gwen Pullen was sitting in the bar, drinking whisky, waiting for him. She was a middle-aged spinster, large-boned, a little clumsy, and shyness sometimes made her loud and hearty. She waved a large black handbag at him to attract his attention, and he wondered if it had been a mistake to ask her to come. He had hoped to sit, quiet and unnoticed, until he heard the voice he recognised as belonging to the girl he had telephoned earlier. Gwen, with her untidy shock of black hair and her dark-rimmed spectacles, being jolly and girlish, was hard to hide. He bought a drink and sat beside her.

“George,” she said. “My dear, how’s Molly? I’ve had Roger Pym on the telephone to me all day.”

“Were you able to help him?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “Not with a skin. I’ve checked everything we have at the museum, and there’s nothing at all that fits the description of the bird you saw. Then I remembered seeing something in the journal of a rather tedious and unadventurous nineteenth-century explorer that came into my possession a couple of years ago. He led an expedition to the Aleutian Islands and recorded a colony of petrels extremely similar to the bird you saw.”

“With red feet?” George interrupted.

“Yes,” she said. “ Very definitely with red feet. He didn’t take any specimens—not because he was squeamish but because, I gather, he was a very poor shot. I don’t know of any more recent expeditions to the Aleutians—there’s nothing in the literature. The Island he mentioned is uninhabited and quite hard to get to. But it might be worth a visit. Roger Pym is already making plans, I think.”

“Yes,” George said, “ he would be.”

“I understand he found the bird,” Gwen said, “so I can understand why he’s excited. He’s already thinking of names, you know. Pym’s petrel sounds a bit pretentious, don’t you think?” George said nothing.

He stood up and led her towards the dining room. It was possible Franks’ mysterious girlfriend and her boss were already there. He chose a table at the far side of the room, so he had a view of the whole restaurant and anybody coming in or out. He sat Gwen with her face to the wall, hoping to make her slightly less conspicuous.

“What are you doing here anyway, George?” she asked. “Is it just about the bird? It wouldn’t have anything to do with Greg Franks, would it?”

“Did you know him?” George asked, surprised, in a low voice, hoping she would match the volume of hers to his.

“He came into the museum occasionally before his trips to exotic places, trying to get information about the birds he might see there. He could be an awful nuisance, but I rather liked him.” She looked around her and said, “ Whatever possessed you to stay in a dreadful place like this? You’d be more comfortable on the sofa in my flat.”

He shrugged and waited until the waiter had deposited tepid soup in front of them.

“It might have a bearing on Greg Franks’ death,” he said. “How on earth did they get planning permission?”

“George,” she said roguishly, “ I do believe you’re changing the subject.”

“No,” he said. “ Really. It might be important.”

“We’re all supposed to be attracting tourism,” she said. “The service industry, I believe they call it. It’s the same at the museum. There’s no money for any real research anymore. No money for paying reputable biologists. The whole place is staffed now by starving young graduates on some government scheme. They’re very pleasant children, and they try their best, but as soon as we’ve trained them up, they come to the end of their contract and have to move on. Yet we do seem to have money for a new restaurant, where the food is actually almost as disgusting as in here, and we do seem to have money to renovate the shop so we can sell toy dinosaurs and lousy tea towels. That apparently is what the public wants, so that’s the service we have to provide.”

He waited until she had run out of breath. He knew better than to stop her in midflow.

“So the council bent the planning rules because they think Rashwood Park will attract tourists?” he said.

“No,” she said. “ No, I don’t actually think any rules were bent. Rashwood isn’t in the greenbelt. It isn’t a site of special scientific interest. Some of the botanists at the museum were muttering that it should have been. They claimed some rare plant or other. But there was no evidence. It was all anecdotal. And when Duncan James came to do his survey, he didn’t find anything, so there were no grounds to prevent the planning application’s going ahead.”

“I only came here once before it was ruined,” he said, “but I thought the woodland looked very good, and that the lake might attract some wildfowl. Didn’t any of the local birdwatchers come here? They might have found something to give it the status of a site of special scientific interest.”

“The only person I knew to cover it all,” she said, “was your friend Greg Franks. And that was a long time ago. Before he started this twitching business.”

As soon as the meal was over, she said she had to go. Some of the children in her department were coming round to her flat for a talk, she said, about their futures. They were really very good, and there were still some institutions in the country not seduced by the notion of the service industry. She hoped she might be able to help them.

He lingered in the restaurant over the coffee and recognised the voice of the young woman who had spoken to him on the phone as soon as she entered the restaurant. The place was quite quiet. As she walked through the swinging doors, she was laughing. It was good-humoured, innocent laughter. Her head was thrown back, and her mouth was open. She could still not have heard, George thought, that Greg was dead. She was almost certainly the woman Mrs. Franks had seen with her son, shopping in Bristol. She was blond, beautiful, and long-legged. Her clothes were obviously expensive. Yet she made no attempt at sophistication. These good times were a novelty to her; she knew enough about the world to think they would not last. She intended to enjoy every moment of them while she had the chance.

There were four of them, and they sat at the best table in the restaurant, by a window with a view down the garden to the lake. The woman’s companion, whom George took to be Barnes, was a square fat man built like a bull terrier. He seemed to say very little but ate with a ravenous intensity, as if he had known great hunger. They were entertaining another couple, who ate little but drank heavily throughout the meal. As the evening progressed, the couple, who were middle-aged, conventionally dressed, became more and more wrapped up in each other, sharing their own bottle of wine, their own domestic jokes, so Barnes and Franks’ girlfriend might have been strangers placed at the table by chance.

George called for more coffee and waited, listening as best he could, to what was being said at the table some distance from him. Once he looked up and caught Barnes’ eye. He wondered if he had caused the man to be suspicious of him, but that seemed ridiculous. Then he began to fear that it would be impossible for him to talk to the young woman on her own. He imagined them in some private room, drinking together until late that night or sweeping down the drive in one of the ostentatious cars parked outside. In the end Barnes made it easy for him. While she was still eating dessert, he pulled a twenty-pound note from his pocket and passed it across the table to her.

“Gus and I have some business to discuss,” he said. “Get yourself a taxi home. I’ll see you in the office tomorrow.”

He stomped through the dining room on his short, fat legs, aware that all the waitresses knew he was the boss and were staring at him, followed by the middle-aged couple, who walked like grotesque bridesmaids, a couple of paces behind him.

Greg’s girlfriend seemed unoffended by her dismissal. She sat for a moment scraping the last remnants of chocolate sauce from her pudding bowl and looking out the window. It was dark, and coloured spotlights lit up the trees by the lake and the statue on the patio outside. She gathered up her handbag, and waving cheerfully to the waitresses, she wandered out to the bar. Her hair was very long and tied up in an elaborate plait. George followed her. He expected her to go immediately to one of the public phones in reception to call a taxi, but she stopped instead at the bar and perched on one of the tall stools, her smooth legs crossed. The barman obviously knew and liked her, and there was a lot of good-humoured banter. Again George felt unable to approach her, and he sat waiting until she was on her own. Suddenly the bar was busier. A group of middle-aged men came in demanding drinks all at once. Conversation with the barman was impossible, and she slipped from the stool and wandered into a quiet corner. George went up to her.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” he said. “ I wanted to talk to you about Greg Franks.”

She looked up without suspicion, smiling. “You phoned me this evening.” she said. “I was getting ready to come out.”

He nodded.

“Sit down,” she said easily. Perhaps she thought he was too old to do her any harm. Perhaps she thought she could look after herself.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve some very bad news.”

“About Greg?”

He nodded again.

“Has he been arrested?”

“No,” George said. “ Would that be likely?”

She shrugged and, for the first time, regarded him with suspicion.

“Are you the police?”

“No,” he said, and she smiled at him. She had an artificial tan and a big friendly smile that was completely different from the receptionist’s. Her teeth were very white in the brown face.

“I was in Cornwall with Greg,” George said. “ We were on a boat, birdwatching. I’m afraid he’s dead.”

“No,” she said, wanting to think it was a mistake, a joke in bad taste, but held by his age and authority. “ I don’t believe it. Why haven’t I heard?”

“It was on the radio,” George said gently. “ The police informed his parents. I suppose they didn’t know to come to you.”

“He was so well,” she cried. “Was it an accident?”

“He was drowned,” George said. “The police think it was murder.”

Then she began to cry. There was little shock in the tears. She was not surprised by disaster. She spent her life expecting it. Her happiness had always been precarious.

In the bar the businessmen were becoming rowdy. There was boozy laughter and loud, crude jokes.

“Let me take you home,” George said. “ We can’t talk here.”

“I don’t know you,” she said, but it was almost a formality. She was not really frightened of him.

“I’m a friend of Greg’s,” he said, and she looked at him gratefully because that allowed her to trust him.

“Greg never wanted anyone to know where he was living,” she said. “But I don’t suppose it matters now.”

She directed him back to the city and along the river to a hilly district below the suspension bridge, with narrow winding streets and terraced houses. Obviously it had become fashionable since George had known the area well. There was a new delicatessen on one corner, and on another an old lady stood bewildered on the pavement staring into a dimly lit wine bar where once her local pub must have been. Ferndale Avenue was wider than most of the streets and backed onto a churchyard. The houses were Edwardian, big, and had been divided into flats. They would be too expensive for students and most single young people, and George thought the population would be elderly, shabby, respectable. Occasionally they passed an uncurtained window, and George saw elegant, decaying rooms, a piano, a canary in a large hanging cage.

“It’s number seven,” she said. “ You can park round the corner in the alley.”

Discretion had become a habit, he thought. Greg would not want the neighbours to see how many visitors came to the house. He followed her instructions. In the dark lane behind the house she got out of the car, smoothing her skirt automatically, searching in her bag for her keys.