Palmer-Jones 05 - Sea Fever (9 page)

“Yes,” he said. He thought he would not want to be away longer than that. It was the end of August, and a high-pressure system over Europe would mean migrant birds in the valleys. The intrusion of the thought shamed him, and he said nothing.

She stood up and smoothed the seams of her skirt.

“If you discover anything,” she said, “I’ll expect you to pass the information onto me.”

But she smiled, and he thought the words were added out of kindness rather than any expectation that he would achieve anything. She was humouring him. He nodded sadly and thought that at least Molly would be pleased. Claire and Berry left the room before he did, and he stood there until he heard her car move up the valley to the main road.

When Claire Bingham got home, there was still a light in the living room. Richard had not drawn the curtains, and through the big picture window, which gave such a wonderful view over the harbour, she saw her husband asleep on the settee. The television was flickering with the black-and-white images of an old movie. Claire left Richard sleeping and went upstairs to Tom’s room. She lifted him from his cot and cuddled him, smelling the baby powder, the clean soapy scent of him. He hardly stirred, and when she set him back under the cover, he was still asleep. When she woke Richard, he was surprisingly kind to her. Perhaps he recognised her tension. He made her tea, and they drank it together in bed.

In the Palmer-Jones bedroom in Myrtle Cottage it was cooler than in the rest of the house. The walls were thick and had kept out much of the heat of the day. The sash window was open, and the drawn curtains moved occasionally. Molly was in one of the twin beds reading by a low, heavily shaded lamp. She wore a nightshirt with a huge picture of Mickey Mouse on the front, a present from one of their children after a trip to the States. The children never gave him frivolous presents, he thought. Perhaps he had taken their education too seriously, and they thought him humourless and stern. Molly set down her book and waited for him to speak.

“I’m going to the Franks,” he said. “Tomorrow morning. Do you want to come?”

“No,” she said. “ I’ve been thinking about it. It would be better if you went by yourself.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure about that inspector,” she said. “I don’t think she’ll get anywhere with these people.”

“And you will?” he demanded.

She ignored the sarcasm. “Yes,” she said. “At least I know how to listen. People will talk to me.”

She was right. She could sit next to a stranger and, with a quiet and sympathetic energy, charm from him confidences, anxieties, a full life story. It was because she was interested, she said. Most professional listeners weren’t really. Doctors, social workers, teachers asked intimate questions, then used most of their brains to think about what they would have for tea. Professional detachment they called it.

“Why are you bothering with all this?” he said. “It’s nothing to do with us. Not now. Leave it to the inspector.”

“No!” she said, leaning forward, so the big Mickey Mouse on the front of the shirt wrinkled and seemed to be frowning.

“Greg Franks was a drug dealer!” he said. “Did you realise that?” When she was a social worker, Molly had worked with addicts. He had heard her wish a more violent death than drowning on the dealers who supplied them.

“No,” she said, “but that makes no difference. We have to know who killed him. You don’t understand. Whatever you say, we are involved. You involved us by agreeing to come here. You were involved by those blasted seabirds.”

And then there was nothing he could say except that at least the trip to Bristol would give him the opportunity to go to the museum to look at their collection of birds’ skins.

Rose stood quite still in Matilda’s bedroom. It was directly above the living room, and she heard the muffled voices of the people who remained there. The windows were open, and occasionally she caught a full phrase usually spoken by the policewoman, whose voice was clear and shrill.

The baby was asleep on her side, with one hand stretched above her head beyond the bars of the cot. The room was lit by a low light, and in the corners there was shadow and the faint, mysterious movement of a ceramic mobile hung from the ceiling. Rose stroked the extended hand of the baby, then stood at the window staring out towards the sea.

She heard the door open but did not look around. She knew it would be Gerald. He had been following her around all evening offering affection, comfort, love. She found his loyalty touching, but she was not sure she could face him now. She had come to the baby’s room to be alone.

“Rose,” he whispered. He thought she would resent the intrusion, but the sense of her across the room made him feel heady and reckless. All the old dreams of marriage, of settling down with her, becoming a family, returned to him. He had never wanted her so much. “I came to see if there was anything I could do.”

She turned to face him because she had come to believe that unkindness was worse than anything, and she did not want to hurt him. He saw that she was crying.

“Oh, Gerald,” she said. “Dear Gerald. I don’t know what to do. Everything’s such a mess.”

It had never before in any situation occurred to him that she might need him. She had been the determined one who held her family and business together, who made her own decisions. She had been the one who cheered him out of his loneliness and laughed at his weakness. He felt suddenly very strong and hopeful.

He moved to the window to stand beside her.

“It’ll be all right,” he said awkwardly, putting his arms around her, touching the bare skin of her shoulder, stroking it. “We’re tired. It’s the shock. We’re all upset about Greg.”

“I’m not upset,” she said. He thought, looking at her so closely, at the lines around her eyes, the strain in her dark and heavy face, that she must be older than he. He had always thought of himself as boringly middle-aged in comparison to her, and the idea was flattering. He felt she had paid him a compliment. “I’m not upset,” she said again. “Don’t you understand? I’m bloody relieved that he’s not around to trouble us anymore.”

She laid her head on his shoulder, and for a moment Gerald stood in the warm half light of the nursery, quite content. It seemed a moment of great promise and significance, the beginning of something magnificent. He had never been happy before.

Then Rose broke away. She did it gently, because even in her distress she could not bring herself to be unkind. She took his hands in hers and lifted them away from her body.

“Look,” she said. “This won’t do. It isn’t fair. You’ll have to go.”

“No,” he cried. “ I want to be with you. I want to help.”

“No one can do that now,” she said, and took his hand again and led him to the door and sent him away.

She returned to the window, listening again to the voices of the people in the room below, trying to hear where their conversation might be leading. Soon after, the voices stopped. There were footsteps, the front door shutting, and the sound of a car engine being started. The headlights were reflected on the dense green leaves, and the car moved up the valley.

It was what Rose had been waiting for. She thought that now she was safe. She assumed that both police officers had left Porthkennan. In her anxiety and need for reassurance Inspector Bingham’s promise to leave a policeman to “keep an eye on them“ was forgotten.

She left the baby’s room and walked carefully downstairs. At the front door she paused to make sure the house was quiet. She did not want Gerald and his clumsy sympathy again that night. Outside, she listened again, but there was only the screech of a tawny owl hunting on the moor by the tin mine, and she began to follow the lane down the valley. She was wearing no shoes, and the tarmac road outside the house, which had been unbearably hot during the day, was pleasantly warm. Even in the dark she could follow the path without a torch. She avoided the worst of the bramble and nettle.

When she reached the water, it was high tide, and the shingle beach was covered. As she approached the door of Rosco’s cottage, she could feel the spray on her face from the waves breaking over the bigger rocks. Before she reached the house, she knew it was empty, and the unexpected stillness made her panic. She had hoped to see the lantern hanging from the hook in the low ceiling and Louis in the low chair by the window waiting for her, patient, calm, unassuming. In the past he always had been, and she realised how much she had taken him for granted. She opened the door and called inside to him, even went into the bedroom to see if he was sleeping there, but she knew from the beginning it was useless, and she would have to return to Myrtle Cottage disappointed.

Berry, who had followed her with interest down the lane and had suffered the blackthorn and bramble scratches patiently to have his curiosity rewarded, sensed her frustration as she passed quite close to him on her way back to the big house. She had not come to Rosco’s to make a casual, friendly call or even, he thought, to discuss what had happened to Greg Franks. They were obviously what he, in his old-fashioned way would have called “ romantically attached.” Claire Bingham would have said they were lovers.

Claire Bingham would probably have taken the opportunity to go into the unlocked cottage and to search it, though she, too, had a healthy respect for rules. It never crossed Berry’s mind. They had no search warrant, and he had not obtained permission of the owner. Perhaps it would not have made much difference if he had gone inside. In that light, with only a torch to search with, there was no guarantee that he would have found the gun, hidden as it was between the mattress and the metal frame of Rosco’s bed. Even if he had defied the rule, there was no certainty that things would have been different. At the time he was more concerned about the woman. She seemed so frantic, almost haunted. So he just made sure that the door of Rosco’s house was firmly secure and followed her back up the path to Myrtle Cottage.

Claire Bingham left home on Sunday morning while Richard was still sleeping. She knew it was a kind of escape. She hoped to avoid his tantrums about missing squash, the wheedling persuasion, the inevitable guilt. The guilt came all the same, as it always did with the joyous freedom which hit her as soon as she left the muddle of the house to begin work. The joy and the guilt were inseparable.

She had woken up early and lay, quite still so she would not disturb Richard, thinking of the Franks murder. It seemed to her now that Palmer-Jones had been right, and it was unlikely that the murder was premeditated. If anyone had planned to kill the young man, they would surely have chosen somewhere less public, less exposed. Was the crime then purely opportunistic, a spur-of-themoment decision to settle an old score? Or had something happened on Friday night or Saturday morning to drive someone to murder? In any event, Claire thought it inevitable that murderer and victim must be previously known to each other. Franks might have been irritating and objectionable but would have been unlikely to drive a total stranger to such violence.

So, she decided as she showered and dressed, the aim of her interviews at Porthkennan would be to trace any connection between Greg and the other passengers and to reconstruct in detail all that had happened after the birdwatchers had joined the boat. It seemed simple and straightforward. She drank hot coffee too quickly, then drove fast down the harbour road, past the
Jessie Ellen
, still moored at the quay. She felt vigorous and refreshed.

Before leaving Heanor, she collected Berry from his parents’ home. He had been relieved from surveillance duty outside Myrtle Cottage in the early hours of the morning by another detective, and Claire had arranged to pick him up. Many of the terraced houses in the street where he lived had been bought by hopeful immigrants from the north and turned into guest houses. In some cases the hopes had obviously not been realised; even on this bank holiday weekend hand-painted signs advertised that there were still vacancies.

Through large bay windows Claire saw tired landladies preparing for breakfast, setting ketchup bottles on plastic tablecloths, pouring sugar into plastic bowls.

In the car Berry told her about Rose’s walk to the cottage on the shore.

“What was she after?” Claire asked.

“Him, I think,” Berry said. “ Rosco.”

“They seem an unlikely sort of pair,” she said, unconvinced.

“All the same,” he said, “I think that’s how it is.”

When they arrived at Myrtle Cottage, Claire decided to interview Rose first. Whatever the reason for her midnight wander down the valley, it was a sign of panic. She thought the woman would be ready to talk.

For their interview they used the dining room, which was at the back of the house, cool and shady, a little gloomy. The light was filtered through the overgrown shrubs, planted too close to the window in the garden beyond. The furniture was dark and heavy and looked as if it had been inherited from an elderly relation. The room was rarely used.

“Mrs. Pengelly,” Claire Bingham began.

“Miss,” Rose interrupted. “ I’ve used my maiden name since my divorce.”

“Ah, yes.” Claire looked at a piece of paper in a brown file. “When was that?”

“Twelve years ago,” Rose said.

“You have lived in Myrtle Cottage since that time?”

Rose nodded. There was a silence which she felt expected to fill. “It was left to my husband by his grandmother,” she said. “When I met him, he was an actor in a small community theater group. He did a bit of writing and directing, too. Then he was offered the opportunity of working in London. Things hadn’t been brilliant between us, and I certainly didn’t want to move out of Cornwall, so we separated. Later he fell in love with a young actress, and we divorced. It was all quite friendly. When he went, I had two small children, so I stayed in the house. He’s doing rather well now, and he’s quite happy for me to stay here.”

“Have you seen your husband recently?” Claire asked.

“Not since the children were old enough to travel to London by themselves. He used to come to Porthkennan to collect them for holidays, but they’re both at college in town now, and he sees more of them now than I do.”