Palmer-Jones 05 - Sea Fever (19 page)

“What happened?” Claire Bingham asked. “Was it an accident?”

“No,” George said. “It was no accident.” He explained about the cheque sent from Cranmers to Greg Franks. “Someone thought I needed scaring off.”

“But who?” Claire said. “Not Duncan James. He wouldn’t organise a thing like that.”

“Oh, no,” George said. “ It wasn’t Duncan James. Anne James probably phoned Duncan and told him I’d been asking questions, but you’re right. Duncan wouldn’t go in for violence. Presumably he panicked and got in touch with Barnes. I think the stunt with the car was Barnes’ idea. Someone capable of turning Rashwood Hall into such a hideous mess would be capable of anything. Think how it must have seemed to him when I turned up at Rashwood Hall and then went home with his personal assistant. I booked a room at the hall in my own name.”

“Do you think the assault on you is connected in any way with the Franks murder?”

“Not necessarily. James probably hadn’t told Barnes he was being blackmailed by Greg. I’d guess he’d want as little contact with the developer as possible. Barnes might have organised last night’s ‘accident’ just because he didn’t want it widely known that he had bribed an officer of the Nature Conservancy Council to withhold information which would have made Rashwood Park declared a site of scientific interest.”

“I’m here officially to check on Rosco,” Claire said. “ It does seem a remarkable coincidence that he and Franks should have met four years ago.”

“I don’t know if it was coincidence or design,” George said, and told them about his conversation with Vicky Jones. “Greg seems to have taken a perverse and mischievous pleasure in bringing together people who disliked him,” he said. “He could have provoked any one of them to murder.”

By the time the doctor arrived and the sister triumphantly shepherded the women from the ward, they had formed a plan of campaign for the day.

Claire Bingham went south to the city centre. On the road from Heanor to Bristol she had experienced a crisis of confidence which, if Molly Palmer-Jones had not been sitting beside her, she would have blown up out of all proportion.

She might even have called it a breakdown. It happened on the M5 just outside Exeter, but it must have been brewing for days, since she was given the responsibility for the Franks murder investigation. Then, driving at speed on the outside lane of the motorway, she had been conscious, with a sudden, dizzying self-awareness, that nothing in her life was working properly. She had a vision of the disparate elements of her life as mechanical components exploding away from her, as in the slow-motion film of a bombed car. Before, she felt, she had managed to keep things together with an effort of will. Now she had lost control of it all. Later she was to put the experience down to exhaustion or shock. Her husband realised, too, that it was close to the anniversary of her mother’s death. At the time she was terrified, and though she continued to drive up the motorway, passing lorries and caravans like an automaton, she thought she was insane and knew she would never take responsibility for anything again.

“I think we should stop for coffee at the next services, don’t you?” Molly Palmer-Jones said. Claire never knew if the suggestion was coincidental, or if Molly had sensed her sudden tension. “And breakfast—it must be breakfast time by now.”

So, obediently Claire had turned the car off the motorway into the service station. She looked at the car clock and saw that the time was eight o’clock. Even from the car they could smell the bacon frying in the transport café where the lorry drivers were eating in smoky isolation. But once she had switched off the ignition, Claire could not move. She was rigid, her knuckles white as they gripped the steering wheel, her neck and shoulders braced against the back of the car seat.

“My dear,” Molly said, “What is the matter?”

If anyone else had asked the same question, Claire would have shook her head and remained stiff and tight-lipped. But the elderly woman’s interest and understanding allowed her to speak. It all came out, the impossibility of living with Richard, the impossibility of working with Wargan, her guilt and frustration. Her life, she said at last, was one massive cock-up.

The most miraculous thing about the whole encounter, she later told Richard, was that by the end of it they were both laughing. They laughed at the pomposity of men and the weakness of women who were taken in by it, and at Claire herself for taking them too seriously. Claire was never sure how the tension had been released and confidence restored. Molly had listened but said very little. There was no physical contact, no comforting embrace. But at the end the crisis was over, and she felt able to start again.

“Coffee,” Molly said. “Now we definitely need coffee. And mounds of toast.”

So they walked across the car park to the cafeteria, with its piped music and the smell of baking bread pumped specially from the kitchen to make the place appear welcoming. Then they sat at a quiet table gossiping, more like mother and daughter than like strangers.

Claire Bingham’s loss of nerve on the M5 was to prove a turning point in the case, though they never discussed it again. There were no longer two separate and parallel investigations. She found herself prepared to listen to Molly’s ideas and trust her judgement. By the time they had the conference with George in the hospital, she was open to his theory that Duncan James had been blackmailed by Greg Franks over the Rashwood development. She listened carefully to the views of Molly and George and found they had quite different ideas about how the case would be resolved. With the experience on the motorway, her hero worship had returned. She was prepared to consider a flexibility in her methods which would have astounded her colleagues at Heanor, who saw her as a mindless follower of rules.

It was Claire who charmed and wheedled information and reminiscences from the retired policeman who had looked into the fire at Sinclair’s boat yard. It was Claire who came up with the ultimate coincidence.

She went first to the police station in the city centre where Rosco had been charged with arson and manslaughter. A middle-aged detective constable was waiting for her, but she soon gathered that Wargan, who had arranged the visit by phone, had not described it as of any urgency or importance.

“Just background you wanted, according to your superintendent,” the D.C. said, pulling a chair for her up to his cluttered desk. “There won’t be many people working here who remember the case now. Everything’s changed.”

“What have you got in the way of background?” she asked, and he brought out a few tatty pieces of paper, case notes, photocopies of which she had already seen.

“Is that all?” she said. “ There must be something else. Someone who remembers the Rosco case. It was a big fire. It must have stuck in people’s memories.”

And because she was attractive and smiled at him, he made coffee for them both and talked to her. He told her about Hubert Rolfe, the detective sergeant who had never believed Rosco had planned the fire by himself, and who had made such a nuisance of himself about the case that he was forced to take early retirement.

“Not a popular man, Hubert Rolfe,” the detective said. “ Not here.” He looked around him to check that no one was listening. “Too straight sometimes for his own good. He’s a great one for causes. Now he’s got a bee in his bonnet about the development of the docks. Says it’s changed the character of the city. You often see letters from him in the paper.”

“I’d like to speak to Rolfe,” Claire said. “ Where does he live? Would he speak to me?”

“He still lives in Bedminster,” the detective said. “I believe he and his wife bought the police house there before he retired. If he’s not at home, he’ll be on the bowling green. His wife will point you in the right direction. And he’ll speak to you. He’ll speak to anyone that’ll listen.”

She walked out into the sunshine, into a busy shopping street and through the centre, past Saint Mary Radcliffe Church towards the river. It was a place of prosperity and style, of warehouses with newly scrubbed brickwork turned into offices for computer firms, of attractive wine bars and expensive apartments overlooking the water. Outside the Arnol Fini Arts Centre a student was handing out publicity about a university production of
The Duchess of Malfi.
It was the sort of place where Claire Bingham felt at home.

She crossed the river by a narrow footbridge close to the SS
Great Britain
and found Rolfe’s home almost immediately. It was semidetached, neat, immaculately cared for, the pebble dash facing newly white washed. At the other end of the road she could see the red brick bulk of the old Wills’ tobacco factory. This was a different Bristol from the elegance of Clifton or the affluence of the docks. She might have been in industrial Lancashire. There were net curtains at the windows, and as she walked up the street, she felt she was being watched.

When Claire Bingham knocked at the door, it was opened by a tiny woman in a flowery nylon overall with a duster in her hand. From the open door came the smell of newly cleaned windows and furniture polish.

“I’m sorry, my dear,” Mrs. Rolfe said, hardly looking at the caller, her attention still inside where the brasses needed doing. “Hubert’s not here. He never is in the mornings. Not in this weather. You’ll find him in the park. On the bowling green.” And she closed the door firmly on the dirty, uncertain world outside.

The park could have been in a northern town, too. It was small, rather scruffy, bordered on one side by allotments. There were rusting wrought iron lamp posts and elderly ladies walking threadbare dogs in the sun. In contrast the bowling green was perfectly smooth, and there was a smart new pavilion at one end. Outside the pavilion she asked a ferocious woman dressed in the club uniform of grey skirt and blazer for Hubert and was directed disapprovingly to a bench by the green. With the uniform the woman seemed to have taken on a prefect’s bossiness, and throughout her conversation with Hubert Rolfe, Claire could hear her calling orders and encouragement to her partner.

Hubert Rolfe was dozing on one of the iron benches which had been set along the edge of the green. He might have begun to watch the game, but when Claire reached him, his eyes were shut and he was snoring gently. When she woke him, he startled but remained in the same position, his legs stretched out before him, his head tilted slightly back.

“Who are you?” he asked sharply. “What do you want?” His voice had strong Lancastrian vowels, and she thought he would always feel himself a stranger in this city.

She showed him her warrant card. “ I wanted to ask for your help,” she said. “ It’s about Louis Rosco.”

“Why? I thought he was out. What’s he been up to now?”

“He’s been taken into custody in Cornwall. A young man was drowned, and it’s turned out to be murder. My superintendent thinks Rosco is responsible.”

“It doesn’t sound likely to me,” Rolfe said. Claire thought he must have cultivated his north-country accent for years, determined not to be taken for one of those west-country yokels. “Rosco’s no murderer. Not unless he’s changed.”

“Tell me about the original offence,” she said. “Tell me about the fire.”

Then at last he sat upright and alert on the bench, no longer half-asleep with his eyes closed against the sun. He looked more like a soldier than a policeman. His hair was shaved very short at the back and sides, and he had a small grey moustache. She came to realise that he was slightly mad.

“The city around the docks was a different place then,” he said. “That was before the developers got their hands on it. There were rough pubs, still a lot of derelict land after the war, a few old girls on the game.… Not that what we’ve got now is any improvement.”

She nodded to show she was listening but knew he would have to tell the story in his own way.

“Then there was the boat yard,” he said. “Sinclair’s boat yard. The owner was a Scot. It wasn’t a flash place, but it was known for the quality of the workmanship. Mostly it took on refits, repairs, and occasionally they would be commissioned to do a one-off.” He looked at her strangely. “I used to call in there a lot,” he said. “I like boats. I had dreams at one time of building one myself, taking off around the world. But there was always work and the kids to feed. And now I’m too old.”

He paused, trying to re-create the excitement of the old dream and failing. “I used to call in,” he repeated, “so I knew Rosco before he was arrested for the fire. I had a lot of time for him. He was a grafter. Not showy but reliable.”

He paused again and clapped as the loud woman in the grey blazer put a bowl close to the jack.

“Then Sinclair wanted to expand,” he continued. “ I can’t remember the details. Not now. There was a big order, apparently, that he couldn’t meet without new equipment. So he took on a new partner. Someone who wanted to buy into a successful local business. At least that’s what he said at the time.”

Now she did feel she should interrupt.

“But if he was such a good worker, and the business was expanding, why did they make Rosco redundant?”

He looked at her. “Well,” he said, “ that’s the big question, isn’t it? That’s what I wanted to know.”

“And did you come up with an answer?” she asked, knowing already that he would have, because he was the sort of man to worry at a problem until he had come up with a solution.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “I came up with an answer. Rosco was sacked because that gave him a good excuse for setting fire to the yard.”

“But why?” she cried, although she thought she had already guessed.

“It was an insurance fraud,” Rolfe said, and waited, as if he expected applause. “An elaborate insurance fraud.”

“But why did Rosco go along with the plan?” Claire asked.

“He was made an offer he couldn’t refuse,” Rolfe said. “After the Rosco case I made it my business to find out about the businessman Sinclair took into the boat yard as a sleeping partner. More like a gangster than a businessman, I found out. Involved in all sorts of unsavoury business. But wanting to go respectable. And desperate for land so he could have a piece of the action in the dock development. I should think he’d have some powerful means of persuasion.”