Come Death and High Water (George & Molly Palmer-Jones)

by Ann Cleeves

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

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  www.panmacmillan.co.uk/bello

  Contents

  Ann Cleeves

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Ann Cleeves

  Come Death and High Water

  Ann Cleeves is the author behind ITV’s VERA and BBC One’s SHETLAND. She has written over twenty-five novels, and is the creator of detectives Vera Stanhope and Jimmy Perez – characters loved both on screen and in print. Her books have now sold over one million copies worldwide.

  Ann worked as a probation officer, bird observatory cook and auxiliary coastguard before she started writing. She is a member of ‘Murder Squad’, working with other British northern writers to promote crime fiction. In 2006 Ann was awarded the Duncan Lawrie Dagger (CWA Gold Dagger) for Best Crime Novel, for Raven Black, the first book in her Shetland series. In 2012 she was inducted into the CWA Crime Thriller Awards Hall of Fame. Ann lives in North Tyneside.

  Chapter One

  Charlie Todd, hidden behind black leather and helmet, began the steep descent to the shore. He felt like Mr. Toad at the start of his wild, outrageous adventure, and bent low over the handlebars of his motorcycle. It was easier to imagine, when he was going downhill, that he was riding a more powerful machine, and Charlie Todd was a great believer in the imagination. Imagination, after all, had made him a fortune. He looked down over the river. The mud was turned into golden sand by the September afternoon sun, and the island, tear-drop shaped at the mouth of the estuary, was deceptively clear. It looked very close. He could see the Land Rover moving slowly over the rocks at the south end. John would be on his way to collect the weekend guests. Charlie was not looking forward to the committee meeting, but as he did not like to cause disappointment, he quickly put all thought of it from his mind. The lane was narrow, the typical Devon hedges a tangle of bramble and hawthorn, and for a while he was forced to concentrate on the road. There was no need to hurry because John would wait for him, but he did not want to cause the others too much inconvenience. Not today. He drove round a sharp bend, through a small, overgrown wood, and once more the estuary was spread before him. He had bought the island nearly five years before, and since then had spent every summer there. He supposed that he should feel sad at the prospect of leaving it behind, but Charlie Todd never felt regret. He looked forward with commitment and passion and enjoyment to his new venture, was totally immersed in his new enthusiasm. But because he was a great believer in imagination, it did occur to him that the others might be a little sad that the island was to be sold.

  “Mummy, do you have to go out now?” The girl dribbled grimy tears. “You promised last night that you’d help, then you went to that meeting. Daddy wouldn’t let me wait up for you.”

  Pamela Marshall looked at her watch. She would already be five minutes late for Jerry. She would not usually have worried about that, but today she had to talk to him before they met the others.

  “I am sorry, darling. Perhaps Daddy can help. He’ll be home soon. Or Edward. It’s his chess night, isn’t it? He’ll be in at five.”

  “None of them can do French as well as you.”

  Sian hated French and worried about it. Pamela looked at her watch again, and then at the immaculate kitchen, cluttered already with school bag, dirty sandwich box, gym kit, and then at her unbelievably untidy, bedraggled daughter. She stifled her irritation.

  “I can’t stop now, darling. You know it’s my Gillibry weekend, but I’ll be back on Sunday afternoon. Forget about French tonight. Do your other homework, and I promise that I’ll help you on Sunday night.”

  Sian smiled and Pamela’s irritation disappeared. Her daughter might be untidy and not very academic, but she was no disgrace to her. She was at least pretty.

  “I must go now,” she said, “or the others will have to wait for me. There’s plenty in the freezer. If Daddy does happen to be late, just help yourselves. Or perhaps it would be nice if you and Edward could have a meal ready for him when he gets in.”

  She kissed her pretty daughter on the forehead, tied her expensive, hand-knitted Guernsey casually around her neck, and hurried away before her son or her husband could distract her further.

  With relief Jasmine Carson locked the front door of her flat behind her. Despite its comfort and convenience she hated it. For thirty years she had taught biology at a private girls’ school and her rooms there had been her home. They had been high ceilinged, impressively proportioned. When she retired it had seemed sensible to buy somewhere appropriate to her needs, and she had chosen a ground-floor flat in a new well-appointed block on the sea front. She had always been congratulated on her common sense and while she had been tempted to move somewhere older, to a cottage perhaps with a garden, she had resisted in favour of central heating and a built-in kitchen. Now she was too proud, too afraid perhaps of making a worse mistake, to move again, and knew that the flat would be her home until she died. She supposed that she would get used to it. Already she could bear what had seemed the unbearable heat of the communal areas, and she presumed that the other residents, most of them elderly, would come to realize that she had no interest in the lives of their children who lived in Milton Keynes or Johannesburg, would stop showing her photographs of apparently identical grandchildren.

  She drove inland from Gillicombe, the seaside town which she had made her home. The road followed the bank of the estuary and as the tide ebbed, the island became an island no longer, different from its surroundings not in substance but in kind, a lump of sandstone surrounded by muddy sand. That is my real home, she thought. She felt as tensely excited as a young girl off to a dance, hoping that her lover would be there, expectant of adventure, new experience. Then:

  Romantic old fool, she thought. What’s so special about the place anyway? Fifty acres of sandstone at the mouth of the estuary, and it only becomes an island at high tide. Not a proper island. Not remote at all. Only three miles from the biggest tourist town in North Devon.

  But whatever she made herself think, she knew that the pain of rheumatism in her hips and her spine disappeared as she drove along the river to meet the Land Rover, and that the real reason for tolerating the dreadful flat on the sea front was that at night, from her bedroom window, she could see the light of the Gillibry buoy.

  It was a pleasant walk down the hill from the main road to the quay. A breeze blew from the sea. The two young men had hitch-hiked from Gillicombe, but were content to walk the last mile.

  “I don’t understand,” said the tallest, lazily, “why you keep coming to the island. You were never that keen on ringing, even when we were kids. Now you hardly ever bother to come out with the North Devon Ringing Group. I don’t even kn
ow if you’ve still got a valid ringing permit. But you’re still a member, still pay the subs, and now you’re on the committee.”

  “I’m on the committee,” said the other, Mark, “because you co-opted me.”

  “I mean, I understand why it’s so important to me. I’ve got that boring job in the shop, most of my friends—like you and Jon—have gone away to college, and there’s not much else to do round here. But you’re different. You’re into all sorts of things—music, politics. You’ve loads of friends at university.”

  “I suppose so. But it is special, Gillibry, isn’t it?” He seemed ashamed then of being so serious, and when a motorbike—apparently without a silencer—drove so fast down the lane behind them that they had to climb into the hedge, he was pleased to be distracted.

  “Wasn’t that Charlie?” he asked.

  Nick, the tall one, shrugged.

  “Probably. He’s an appalling driver. He’ll get himself killed one day.”

  “What happens to the island if he dies?”

  “Didn’t you know? He’s left it to the observatory in his will. It’s the sort of grand gesture he’s good at.”

  “Do you think he’s mad?”

  “Of course he’s mad. Mad as a hatter.”

  “No, I mean medically mad. Certifiable.”

  Nick shrugged again.

  Mark continued: “I don’t suppose that he can be. If he were properly mad he wouldn’t be able to make that much money.”

  “It’s an odd way to make a living, writing daft children’s stories. Have you ever seen them?”

  “Yeah. I think they’re really good. But I suppose if he had been medically mad his family would have locked him up years ago. He always was the black sheep, wasn’t he? Until he got rich. Then they decided that he was just eccentric.”

  Nick shifted the rucksack on his back. He had his own view of the Todds.

  “It’s your first committee meeting, isn’t it?” he said. “ I hope that you don’t find it too boring. They’re all the same. Nothing ever happens.”

  Jerry Packham lingered over his work, pleased at last with the result. His bags were ready and subconsciously he listened for Pam’s car, for the change of gears on the steep lane. He knew that she would be late. She always was. It was one of her ways of stressing the nature of the relationship between them. She would be expecting him to be waiting at the gate for her as usual. But today he was reluctant to leave. He wondered for one mad moment if he should tell her that he did not want to come, that he was too busy, that he wanted to finish the series of paintings, but he knew that he did not have the courage. He would finish the affair, but not yet. She had dominated the partnership so completely that he hesitated to take the lead even in separating. Besides, he wanted to see Charlie.

  He had first illustrated Charlie’s stories for a joke, before they were published. Charlie had lived in his village then, and they had shared the same local. Charlie had been convinced even then that the stories would make his fortune. Jerry had never been to art college. He had left school at fifteen and become apprenticed to a sign writer. When the man retired he had taken over the business and expanded it. He had begun to design menus, posters, had even tried a set of postcards and found that they had been easy to sell. The sign writing became less important. In his spare time he enjoyed sketching and had been persuaded to sell the results through the numerous gift shops in Gillicombe. The illustrations had been fun to do; he had let himself go. There had never been any formal arrangement between himself and Charlie. He had never really believed that the books would be accepted for publication, and when they were, it seemed right that they should come under Charlie’s name, that Charlie should get all the publicity and most of the money. The television serial had made the stories famous, and Jerry had taken no part in that.

  It had been one of Jerry’s birdwatching friends, George, who had suggested that Jerry should get an agent to negotiate a better contract with the publisher.

  “Those books are made by the illustrations,” George had said. “They’re superb. Without them, I doubt if Charlie would have been published at all.”

  So he had received a more generous proportion of the royalties in the most recent series of books. He had become used to seeing his drawings reproduced in comics, on children’s sketch pads, on sweet packets. He was comfortably off, but he was bored by the characters in Charlie’s books. Each story seemed the same as the last. It was time to try something new. He had been offered other commissions and had decided that he should tell Charlie that he would not be available to work for him, at least for a while.

  Now he was working on a children’s encyclopedia of the countryside. It was very different from the illustration of Charlie’s fantasies, but he was enjoying the precision and the subtlety of it. He was looking at a recently completed colour plate of leaves and trees when he realized that the doorbell was ringing, and he hurried, rather pleased with himself, to meet Pamela.

  As he looked down over the island, Doctor Derbyshire experienced, as he always did, a sense of achievement and of pride. Charlie might have financed the observatory, but the idea had been his. Without his organization, his persistence, Charlie would have grown bored with the negotiations to purchase, would have given up the project. Charlie was like a child and the doctor knew how to handle him.

  Mrs. Derbyshire drove her husband to the quay. He disliked driving. He fussed over his luggage and made her check again that his favourite jersey was packed. She sighed with maternal irritation. He had not been happy since his retirement from general practice. She was grateful for the island. It stopped him mooning around the house, sulky and petulant as a schoolboy. That had been a dangerous time and she had been worried. The planning and the intriguing had given him life again, given him a future.

  Paul Derbyshire looked at his watch and then over the shore. The Land Rover was on its way. John was a reliable boy. He looked forward to the committee meeting, planned his chairing of it. The committee were all well-meaning, enthusiastic people, but needed a strong chairman to give them proper direction. His wife watched his enjoyment with satisfaction, and planned a private, pleasant weekend. They were a happy couple but she understood nothing of the complexities of his affection for the island. She saw it as a toy, a distraction. It kept him busy.

  But it’s the only contact I have with real beauty, he thought as he waited for the Land Rover. It’s the daughter I never had, my creation.

  She would never have imagined him capable of such lyrical folly. She waved at the other birdwatchers and drove off to her knitting and a nice glass of sweet sherry.

  When John Lansdown first moved to the island, every trip to the mainland was a challenge. There was no track. The Land Rover was driven south from Gillibry over steep green rocks, through seaweed-filled pools on to the shore. There, the sand could be soft and the gullies deceptively deep. If the tide had not ebbed sufficiently there was a danger of being stuck halfway across the channel. It had made him nervous. The Land Rover was his responsibility. Now he knew the way and was used to the Land Rover. Only in thick fog was he still wary. Automatically he counted the seals on the sandbank and estimated the number of waders on the shore. He hoped to persuade the others to try the new cannon net and would need to know what they could expect to catch. His reaction to the September committee weekend was ambiguous. The committee members were competent ringers and knew the observatory system. Some of them were friends. It was easier, perhaps, than having a group of strangers to stay, certainly easier than the schoolchildren who were the observatory’s usual visitors, but he always felt that he was on trial throughout the weekend and that the committee was assessing his competence to run the place. He knew that Elizabeth felt the same. She supervised all the domestic arrangements in the observatory, and though it was organized like a youth hostel, she cooked three meals a day for the visitors. The thought of Elizabeth brought back the pleasure of anxious excitement which he had been feeling since she had told him that sh
e was pregnant. She had insisted that no one else should know. He wanted to tell everyone he met—it meant after all that now she really belonged to him—but she had a kind of superstition about it. It was natural, he supposed, because of the miscarriage she had suffered when she was married to Frank. He was certain that nothing would go wrong. How could it, when things were going so well for them? They both loved the island. In the precarious world of natural history he had a secure job. Charlie Todd might be an eccentric neighbour, but he subsidized the Gillibry Trust’s funds so that although John and Elizabeth were not well paid, they received more than they would have done from any other conservation charity; and their home was reasonably warm and well maintained.

  He turned the Land Rover sharply, and then he could see the people waiting for him at the quay. What can they be talkung about? I thought. They’re all so different. What can they have to say to each other?

  Carefully, aware that they were watching, he drove the Land Rover from the sand on to the stone slipway. It had been a jetty once. Ships had sailed from there to the Armada. Now the estuary had silted up. There was sand and saltmarsh, and the people waiting there with their bags and suitcases looked slightly ridiculous. He jumped down and opened the back of the Land Rover.

  “We’ve been discussing the paddock heligoland,” Miss Carson said immediately. “When I was on the island last I was appalled. It should be repaired at once. Charlie says that he can give us some wire mesh. Perhaps we could organize a working party.”

  Of course, they would have that in common. They were passionate ringers. He thought that Jasmine was the schoolmistress of stand-up comics and cartoonists. She was big-busted and formidable in thick woollen stockings and lace-up boots. She climbed without fuss, without a hint of rheumatism, into the back of the Land Rover.

  “If you want us to do the work, it’ll have to be soon. Mark goes to college again at the end of the month, and I’m very busy.”