Palmer-Jones 05 - Sea Fever (16 page)

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t even know your name.”

“Didn’t Greg talk about me, then?”

“Not to me,” George said. “Perhaps to the others, who were younger.” But she seemed not to believe him.

“It’s Vicky,” she said. “ Vicky Jones.”

The night was hot and humid. There was the smell of dusty streets and the trees in the churchyard. She used one key to let them into a cool gloomy hall painted with green gloss paint and a second to open the door to her ground-floor flat. She switched on a light and drew the curtains. That was a habit, too, George thought, a ritual.

The room was big and square. It was conventionally furnished—at one end was a glass dining room table and four chairs and at the other a sofa which might have been bought at any High Street store. But there were touches of excess: a cream leather chair, a very expensive hi-fi system, and in one corner a stuffed and mounted gazelle. Vicky saw George looking at the animal.

“Greg bought it,” she said. “It was a present. After one of his trips abroad.”

“How long had you been living together?” George asked.

“About a year,” she said. “ On and off. He went away a lot. On business.”

“What business was that?”

She shrugged. “He’d never tell me,” she said. “And in the end I thought it better not to ask.”

“But you guessed?”

“I suppose so.”

“Didn’t it make any difference to you?” George asked. “The fact that Greg was a drug dealer?”

She looked at him, wondering if he would understand if she explained. Perhaps she decided he was too old. “ Look,” she said. “He was fun. At first that was enough.”

Yes, George thought. It was true. Greg had been fun. He said nothing, and she took his silence as condemnation.

“You can’t understand what it was like!” she said. “I’ve been in care since I was six. First I was in a children’s home, like a workhouse, run by a bunch of nuns. Then they moved me to a foster family. They were all right, kind enough, but kids moved through that house like peas on a conveyor belt. Short-term care, they called it, and they were only used to giving short-term love. I got left there for some reason, and the love ran out. When I was sixteen, I was out on my own, and since then no one’s given a monkey’s what happened to me. I felt I’d missed out on everything. I wanted a good time, colour, music, excitement. Two years ago I met Greg. He made me feel so special. You don’t know. He’d send me flowers. Bring me presents. Take me out dancing all night. Then he’d disappear, sometimes for weeks. It was birdwatching, he’d say. It was always birdwatching.”

“He really was a birdwatcher,” George said.

“I know.” And for the first time since he had told her of Greg’s death, she smiled. “ Sometimes I went out with him. It was such fun. Everyone seemed to know him. I went to Porthkennan once and stayed at Myrtle Cottage.”

“But you thought that sometimes he used birdwatching as an excuse?”

She nodded. “At first I thought he was going away with other women. Perhaps he was. I wouldn’t have minded. As long as he came back to me. And he always did. Then sometimes he would have so much money. Hundreds, thousands of pounds, all in cash. When I asked what he did, he said he was an entrepreneur. He bought and sold, he said. Whatever people wanted.”

“When did you start work for Mr. Barnes?”

The sudden change of question did not appear to surprise her. Shock had made her passive, responsive. She would be afraid of taking the initiative. Besides, she was used to doing as she was told.

“About three years ago. I took a typing course straight after school; then I went to work in his office. Just as a junior at first, typing and filing. I became his personal assistant six months ago.”

“What does that involve?”

Again she smiled and answered the unspoken question. “Nothing smutty,” she said. “ Nothing like that. Sometimes he likes me to go to dinner with him and his clients. That’s all. He never married. In the office I’m more like a personal secretary.”

“Did Greg ever ask you about your work?” George asked.

Her mood changed suddenly, and she looked uncertain and resentful. “Who
are
you?” she demanded. “Why are you asking all these questions? You must be a policeman.”

“No,” he said. “ I promise I’m not a policeman. I’ve been asked by Greg’s parents to find out why he died and who killed him.”

She accepted his explanation immediately and looked up at him with fresh tears. “He never got on with his parents. He said they crowded him. I told him he was lucky to have a mum and dad who bothered about him.”

“You can understand why they’re so upset,” George said, playing on her sentiment. “ They loved Greg as much as you did.”

“Yes,” she said. “It must be dreadful for them.”

“Greg did talk to you about your work, didn’t he?” George asked gently. “ Especially about the Rashwood Park complex?”

“He said he couldn’t understand how they came to get planning permission to build on the site,” she said. “ He used to go birdwatching in the park, and he said the lake was brilliant in the winter.” She looked up apologetically. “ He told me what birds he’d seen there,” she said, “but I never could remember their names. I think it made him cross because I couldn’t get more interested.”

“So he was surprised when Squirrel developed Rashwood Park?” George said, prompting her, trying to bring her back to the subject, wishing he had Molly’s patience for this sort of interview.

“There were flowers, too,” she said. “Rare flowers.”

“Did he ask you to try to find out how the company gained planning permission?” George asked.

She nodded. “At first he thought Mr. Barnes must have bribed some of the councillors on the planning committee,” she said, “ but I brought home a report from the Nature Conservancy Council which said that there were no rare species in the site, and there was no reason to give it special protection.”

So then George knew how Greg Franks and Duncan James were connected. Barnes had not bribed the councillors on Somerset’s planning committees, but the apparently incorruptible regional officer of the Nature Conservancy Council had. Greg had found out and had blackmailed Duncan James. The cheque in the letter Mrs. Franks had opened was one payment. The Rashwood brochure sent to Cranmers was an indication that another was required. Presumably Duncan had phoned the number on the brochure and had been summoned to Cornwall.

Vicky got up and disappeared into a bedroom. When she returned, her face had been washed and more makeup applied.

“Did Greg tell you what he intended to do with the information you’d given him?” George asked. “Was he planning to go to the police?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “Nothing like that.” She looked at him, a little embarrassed. “He said it would be a nice little earner. The import business was getting a bit risky, he said. He’d have to start taking more care. The new line might be more profitable. He seemed pleased with me. Soon afterwards he moved into the flat full-time.”

“Did Greg tell you anything about this weekend in Cornwall?” George asked. “It might help me find out who killed him.”

“He was looking forward to it,” she said. “ He told me it would be a real laugh. ‘A boat full of people who either hate me or owe me money, or both, all having to be polite,’ he said.” She looked awkwardly at George again. “ That makes him sound horrible,” she said, “but really he wasn’t. He was so clever at describing people. He would have come home at the end of the week and told me stories about them, so I would have laughed and laughed.”

“Did he tell you any stories about them before he went?” George asked.

She shook her head.

“Did he tell you who was going to be there?”

“No, he didn’t tell me anything else about it at all. But I knew he was looking forward to it.”

George imagined Greg’s planning the weekend with a sort of gleeful mischief. Who else, he wondered, was Greg blackmailing? Who hated him and why? He tried to remember the night and day on the
Jessie Ellen.
There was tension, but all the details had disappeared in the elation after the petrel.

“Did Mr. Barnes know that Greg was blackmailing Duncan James about the conservation report?” George asked.

“I didn’t say anything about blackmail!” She felt she had betrayed Greg with her confidence.

“But that’s what he meant,” George said seriously. “Isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose so.”

Greg had made her happy, so she had persuaded herself he was beyond morality, manipulating people for his own amusement. And to entertain her.

“Did Mr. Barnes know what was going on?” George asked.

“No. Of course not. He’s a dangerous man. He wouldn’t allow anything to threaten his business.”

“But Greg was threatening it,” George said. “Duncan James might have decided that he couldn’t take any more pressure and gone to the authorities.”

“I don’t know if Greg ever thought about that,” she said.

“What would Barnes have done if he’d found out?”

“I don’t know,” she said again.

Perhaps Barnes
had
found out, George thought. Perhaps one of the
Jessie Ellen’s
passengers had been paid by him to murder Greg. Then he thought he was being silly. Barnes was a businessman, not a gangster, and the idea that one of the people staying at Myrtle Cottage was a professional killer was laughable.

Vicky was lost in thought, and he decided it was time to go.

“Look,” he said, “can I get in touch with anyone to stay the night with you? A friend or a relative?”

But he knew the answer before she replied. “No,” she said. “There’s no one.”

He was in the gloomy hall when she called him back.

“People didn’t realise,” she said. “ With Greg it was a game, a bluff. He didn’t do it for the money. Not really. It was the excitement, the sense of power. If the people hadn’t paid him, he would never have used the information he had against them. That’s not blackmail. Is it?”

But she didn’t wait for an answer, and with her image of Greg reconstructed, she returned to her flat.

George stood for a moment, collecting his thoughts under a streetlight. The street was quiet. He realised later that the car must have been parked with others outside the flats. He did not hear the noise of the engine until he had turned up the alley, and then it was so close behind him and the headlamps were so bright that there was little he could do to escape. He squeezed against the high brick wall just in time, and he thought it was a drunken driver, that he had had a close shave. It was only when the car braked sharply and backed with a sudden screech of tyres, then came at him again, that he realised he was the target of a deliberate attack. There was nothing then that he could do. The bonnet of the car caught him and threw him towards a row of dustbins stacked neatly against a wall. Just before he lost consciousness, he heard the clatter of a lid as it fell onto the alley and saw the trail light of the car as it disappeared into the main street.

When Claire Bingham had finished the interviews with the guests at Myrtle Cottage, Wargan called her back to Heanor and told her the investigation lacked direction. He had been speaking to an officer from the serious crime squad in Bristol about Rosco’s previous conviction for arson. It was, it seemed, a simple act of revenge. He had been sacked from Sinclair’s boat yard and had set fire to the place on the same night. The files said that Rosco was a strange, moody sort of man. You could imagine him reacting to a difficult situation with a burst of violent temper. The court had accepted that Rosco had not known about the security officer’s visiting the place.

“He probably did his boss a favour in the end,” the officer in Bristol said. “The place is all yuppie flats now.”

Wargan called Claire Bingham into his office, and she felt as she always did in his presence, like a naive schoolgirl.

“I can’t see your problem,” he said bluntly. “ Why are you making such a meal of it? One of your suspects, Louis Rosco, has already killed a man after a sudden fit of violence. All you need is to find a connection between him and the victim. You should be concentrating all your energy on that. Don’t bother with the rest of the bunch. Send them home if they want to go!”

“But Rosco didn’t even know that Franks would be on the trip,” Claire said. She knew she sounded shrill and defensive, but she wanted, more than anything, to complete the investigation without Wargan’s help or interference. He had told her too many times that a mother’s place was with her children.

“How do you know that?” he demanded. “ You’ve only Rosco’s word for it. Young Franks was into drug dealing, and Rosco had a boat. Perhaps they were working together. You need proof that they knew each other, that’s all.”

He paused, and she watched him in the laborious process of thought. “Then there’s the boat,” he said. “How could an ex-con afford a boat like the
Jessie Ellen
? No bank’s going to lend a penny to a man like that. Perhaps he was making his money from drugs, too.”

He smiled unpleasantly, and she was afraid for a moment that he was going to reach out and pat her hand. She hated him most when he tried to be fatherly.

“Have Rosco in for questioning,” he said. “ If you can’t handle him, I’ll talk to him myself.”

She was on her way to pick up Rosco when there was a phone call for her from George Palmer-Jones. George said that he was sorry, but he would not make it back to Cornwall after all tonight. There was an interesting lead which he felt he should follow. He was prepared to give her more details of his discovery, but her interview with Wargan had made her short-tempered. She said she was in a hurry and would speak to him on the following day.

Rosco had spent the afternoon at the cottage on the shore. He had been sawing a dead elm into logs, then splitting them with a heavy old-fashioned axe and stacking them in a honeycomb against the house, aware all the time that there was a uniformed policeman in the lane watching him. When Claire Bingham and Berry arrived, Rosco had put his axe away and was pegging out washing on the line in the small back garden, though by then it was almost dusk, and there was no chance of its drying.