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

by Ann Cleeves

  “And that,” Molly said, “must be Charlie.” She was studying the photograph intently.

  George by this time had moved into the sitting room. On one of the dresser shelves a sheaf of papers had been propped in an old toast rack. He sat at the small table and sorted through them. Most of them were unpaid bills and demands for payment. Many referred to the cottage in the Storr Valley. There was a strongly worded letter from the council about rates, and final demands from the South-West Electricity Board and British Telecom. There was a letter from a hire-purchase company threatening court action because only one payment had been made towards the purchase of a motorcycle. These bills seemed to be in no order and there was no indication that they had been paid. Mixed with them were a number of programmes of the Canal Theatre Company and an entrance ticket for Alton Towers.

  “No wonder he wrote such good children’s stories,” Molly said. She had come into the living room and was looking at the mess spread across the table. “He never really grew-up, did he?”

  “He must have had an accountant to deal with all this,” George said. “But perhaps he just refused to accept financial advice.”

  He collected the papers together and put them back in the toast rack. He felt disappointed, frustrated. He had learned that Charlie had owed money, but there was nothing about Todd Leisure Enterprises. His only hope now was that Connibear, with his privileged access to official information, would make the vital discovery. Molly sensed his disappointment, took his arm and led him out of the building.

  When they returned to the observatory John and Elizabeth were in the middle of a violent row. George had expected to see John in the ringing room. He had wanted to ask if his suggestions for the seabird paper had been helpful. But John was not in the ringing room or the library.

  “We’ll walk through to the kitchen,” he said. “It must be nearly supper time.”

  They could hear John when they were still in the dark, dusty corridor which led from the dining room. He was shouting.

  “Something’s going on,” he said. “I must know what it is. You must tell me, Lizzie.”

  “Of course something’s going on.” Her voice was bitter, scornful. “Two people have been killed. One of our friends has been arrested for murder.”

  “Not that,” he said, as if that did not much matter. “ Not that. It’s you. You lied to me. Last week you told me that you’d been to the ante-natal clinic, but there wasn’t a clinic. Not on that Friday. I looked at your card. Please Elizabeth, don’t shut yourself off from me. Not now. I must know.”

  “What bloody right do you have to be checking up on me?” She was beside herself. “ I don’t belong to you. I’m not even your bloody wife.”

  “Is there someone else?” He was making a great effort at self-control. He spoke gently “You’re right. You don’t belong to me. I wouldn’t want to restrict you in any way. I just want to know what’s going on. You owe me that.”

  “Oh, stop talking in clichés,” she said. “You’re making yourself ridiculous.”

  They heard a door slam. George presumed that she had gone to the flat. When they got to the kitchen, it was empty.

  They prepared their own supper that night. John explained that Elizabeth was ill, and asked if they would mind getting their own. Molly enjoyed it. She liked cooking. They invited John to join them, but he refused. He went to the flat without starting the generator, and they sat in the kitchen, discussing the case and eating their meal by the light of a tilly.

  “We don’t seem to have moved forward very far today,” George said. “We know that Charlie needed money, but I’d gathered that anyway.”

  “I don’t understand why he needed money. He must have had oodles of it. At one time you saw the characters from his stories in every comic and on everything from pencil cases to fizzy drinks.”

  “I think he just spent it all. He doesn’t seem to have been very organized about finance.”

  “So that would have given him a motive for blackmail.”

  “That, and the kind of moral blackmail he seems to have gone in for. He wouldn’t have thought of it as blackmail. As I see it, he found out that perhaps the family hadn’t been quite open in its business dealings, told them that he knew about their misdemeanours, then suggested, for example, that they gave a donation to the Canal Theatre Company.”

  “Surely the fact that he was planning to sell the island would suggest that the Todds weren’t prepared to give in to the blackmail. He still needed the money.”

  “I suppose so. It’s all conjecture.”

  “But how would Charlie know of their business fiddles, if he never went near the family?”

  “That had occurred to me. Maybe Nicholas Mardle talked to Charlie. He could have passed on staff gossip, and Charlie might have investigated it, and saved it for future use.”

  “Do you think that the policeman will tell you if he finds anything suspect in Todd Leisure?”

  “Oh, I think so. Just to humour me. It won’t mean anything to them.”

  They washed the dishes.

  “I think,” George said, “that we’ll both go to the mainland tomorrow.”

  As they went to bed, early, they heard the sound of sobbing from the flat. They could not tell whether John or Elizabeth was crying.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Elizabeth drove them both across to the mainland the next morning. At breakfast John had been carefully affectionate. He had not asked her where she was going and he had not touched her. She had been gentle with him, but she had given nothing away.

  It was another clear and sunny day, but there was a wind, which had blown the sand into hard ridges so that the Land Rover jolted and rattled across. Elizabeth did not speak to them. Molly was never very aware of what people were wearing, but she noticed that Elizabeth looked smart. On the island the girl usually wore jeans, long shirts, John’s jerseys. Now, in a skirt and a jacket, wearing shoes instead of trainers, with a handbag by her side, she seemed to Molly sophisticated, frightening. Even driving the Land Rover across the shore she was an elegant professional woman. It was not the new image itself, but the ability to change so dramatically that intimidated. It seemed to Molly that she was a different woman. John must have noticed that she had dressed up, Molly thought. How can he have felt? She wished, almost, that she had stayed on the island, so that he would have had something else to think about. He would have felt obliged to entertain her. The thought of him there, lonely and jealous, imagining Elizabeth’s betrayals, moved her. She passed no judgement on Elizabeth’s behaviour, but she wished that things had worked out differently.

  At the quay George got out quickly and drove away in his van.

  “He has some business in Gillicombe,” Molly said in explanation. “I thought I’d take my car to explore. Do a bit of sightseeing.”

  “Yes,” Elizabeth said vaguely. “It is very pretty.”

  Molly pretended to fumble with her car keys while Elizabeth drove off. In the country lanes that led from the quay the Land Rover was easy to follow. It was high enough to show above the hedges and the lane was so winding that Molly could stay close to it without being seen. As the road widened and they approached Gillicombe, Molly allowed three cars to overtake her, but the Land Rover was still visible ahead of her. It drove along the Promenade, turned into the High Street and parked neatly outside the office of Todd Leisure Enterprises. Molly turned into a side street and parked. She had presumed that Elizabeth had intended to go into the Todds’ office, and was surprised, when she walked into the High Street, to see that the girl was still there. She was standing on the kerb at a zebra crossing, waiting for the traffic to stop. Luckily she seemed to be daydreaming. Certainly she did not see Molly. A car driver had to sound his horn before she started over the crossing, and she gave a wave of apology to him as she ran across the street.

  The High Street was busy in the way that small towns are busy on weekday mornings. There were women with prams and pushchairs and howling child
ren dragged by one hand. They were all laden with shopping and all in a hurry. Even the elderly ladies who pushed trolleys or carried nylon shopping bags and wore gloves walked quickly, with purpose, and the shouted greetings to acquaintances were lost as they moved on up the street. Only the men seemed leisurely, prepared to stand in shop doorways watching the street. Elizabeth looked at her watch, then went into a boutique and began to look at the dresses and skirts on the sale rack. The shop doors were open, and from the other side of the street Molly could see her. The girl did not show any real interest in the clothes. It was as if she were early for a date and was killing time. Molly, looking in a gift-shop window, could see the boutique reflected in the glass. Jostled by busy, hurrying women who had dinners to cook, washing to put out, she felt that her inactivity, her passive watchfulness made her an outsider, not a true representative of her sex. She was relieved when the girl came out of the shop and began to walk briskly. Molly stayed on the opposite side of the street and kept some distance behind her.

  Then Elizabeth disappeared, as if by some conjuring trick. One moment she was there. Molly’s vision was blocked by a large woman on the pavement and a delivery van on the road. Then, when she could see the opposite side of the road again, the girl had gone. Feeling a little bewildered Molly crossed the road and the apparent magic was explained. There was a narrow archway between two shops. A flight of steps led through it to a cobbled path. Molly just glimpsed Elizabeth following the path round a sharp left turn. Feeling like an elderly Alice, she followed. It was, in fact, like leaving the real world behind. As she turned too she walked into sunlight and what could have been the set for a film about the middle ages. Ahead of her was the parish church. There was a grass bank, and trees. On the right of the cobbled path was a small courtyard of almshouses, unchanged for three hundred years. The cobbles of the path spread into the courtyard. There was still a pump and trough in the middle of it, and two old ladies dressed in black chatted in the sun. The path led past the church to a terrace of houses, then through a pair of wrought-iron gates to another busy road. But in the churchyard and its surroundings there was no sense of the hurry and noise and female frenzy of the shopping streets. Even the weather was different. Enclosed by the high, soft stone walls, it was sheltered from the sharp sea breeze, and it seemed that the warmth of the summer was trapped there. Elizabeth walked past the church and into one of the terraced houses opposite. She did not knock at the door.

  Molly savoured the place. She forgot for a moment the urgency of the mission. Then she went to investigate. It was an office. A tasteful brass plate on the wall was inscribed Thompson, Lessing and Marshall, Solicitors. Next door there was a second-hand bookshop, and Molly waited there. The shelves near the window contained cookery books. Molly browsed through them happily while she watched the churchyard outside. The elderly shopkeeper took her for a connoisseur as her interest did not move to the other books in the shop, and they had a pleasant conversation about English food for more than half an hour. Molly was just beginning to think that she should move, should explore the church perhaps, when Elizabeth appeared. The girl stood still in the sunshine. Her long hair had been pinned back from her face by wooden slides. Deftly she pulled out the slides, put them in her bag, and shook her hair loose. It was a curious gesture of freedom.

  Elizabeth walked immediately back to the Land Rover, then drove away. Molly did not follow her. She felt that the purpose of the visit had been achieved.

  George went to the police station. He asked to speak to Connibear, but was told that it was Connibear’s day off. There was no message for him. He did not ask to speak to Savage, afraid that the superintendent’s tact and gratitude had reached their limit. It was an anticlimax.

  He had arranged to meet Molly in the Italian café near the station, and as he waited he grew more irritable. When she arrived he was drinking coffee from a tiny cup. It was thick and strong as medicine, but she wanted food, and George had to wait while she went to the counter, exchanged greetings with the proprietor, found out how many children he had, how long he had been in Gillicombe, how business was. When she returned she began to describe the churchyard, the almshouses, her enchantment at having found it, and he had to interrupt to ask where Elizabeth had been going.

  “To a solicitor’s office.”

  “What were the names of the solicitors?”

  “Thompson, Lessing and Marshall.”

  “William Marshall, the solicitor, was Pamela’s husband.”

  She was quiet for a moment, considering the implications of this, then: “ I don’t know that she saw him. It’s surely unlikely that he’s at work again so soon after his wife’s death.”

  “It depends, I suppose, how distressed he was by it.”

  “She could have been there on business.”

  “What business would Elizabeth have, with a solicitor?”

  She did not answer.

  “I don’t understand,” he said, “ how it all fits together—Elizabeth’s visit to the Todds’ office on the same day as Charlie, the week before his death, and now this. What does she have to do with the Todds?”

  “Perhaps,” Molly answered facetiously, “Charlie went in to blackmail Ernest and Laurence. They knew that John and Elizabeth were hard up, so they hired Elizabeth to kill Charlie. Pamela heard her on the way back from setting fire to the Wendy House, so Elizabeth had to finish her off too. Today, she’s been in to the Todds’ solicitors (I presume that they are the Todds’ solicitors) to collect the money.”

  But George did not laugh. “Are John and Elizabeth hard up?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I get the impression that they don’t have much money. Is it important?”

  “I don’t know. It might be.”

  “We’re going to see Doctor Derbyshire next, aren’t we?” she asked. “ I wonder if we’ll get anything interesting out of him.”

  She bit into her second ham and tomato roll.

  She’s not shocked by anything, he thought. She worked with people who were in pain for so long that she detached from it. He found the doctor’s taste for young girls unpleasant, even disgusting.

  “I wonder if the wife knows,” she said, and her voice did express some emotion now. “How dreadful if she does, and she still cares for him. She must be so frightened for what he might do.”

  “Might he be dangerous?”

  “I suppose he might. It all seems to be confined to the realms of fantasy, though. So long as it’s all a sort of glorified daydream, I should think he’d be safe.”

  “Yes,” George said. “But the difference between fantasy and reality might not be so obvious to someone else.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, suppose that Charlie found a letter, or a diary, full of the doctor’s ramblings, he couldn’t be expected to know that the events described were only make-believe. Charlie liked children too. He wrote stories for them. Besides his curiosity about other people’s personal affairs, it might have occurred to him that he should have done something about his discovery of the doctor’s predilections.”

  “So he threatened to go to the police, and the doctor strangled him.”

  “The letter which Jasmine found could certainly be read like that. He could have arranged to meet Charlie in the seawatching hide very early, before Jerry was due to arrive, to discuss it.”

  “But how could he be sure that Jerry wouldn’t suddenly arrive and surprise him?”

  “The flaps of the seawatching hide open on all sides. It’s possible to see someone as soon as they leave the observatory.”

  “Do you think that’s how it happened?”

  “No, but we must see him anyway.”

  From the start Molly was intrigued by the tone of the conversation between Paul Derbyshire and his wife, Marjory. She was a tall woman, calm and slow-speaking, with an air of assurance. She was polite, but distant, as if her mind were elsewhere. They lived in a big house, near to the shore, at the end of a long straight roa
d of similar houses. It was out of the town, near the golf course. There were no trees, and the wind blew up the bleak, straight street and around the ugly brick houses. The house was separated from the water by a stretch of dunes, and as George and Molly got out of the car, sand blew in sharp swirls around their ankles and stung their eyes. Sand was piled like a snowdrift outside the boundary fence.

  Marjory opened the door to them. She did not speak, but stood, patient and serene, waiting for them to announce their business. She was dressed in expensive, conventional, nondescript clothes. Her hair was grey, permanently waved. George, whose temper had not improved, stated their business shortly. She invited them in and called to her husband:

  “There are some friends to see you, dear.”

  Although they were ordinary words, they seemed to Molly wrong, out of context. It’s as if she’s calling to a child, Molly thought. She struggled to place the tone exactly. But she doesn’t sound like a mother, more like a nanny or a kindly, elderly aunt.

  The doctor emerged from a door at the back of the house. They were all still standing in the hall.

  “How nice to see you,” he said. “How very nice. Marjory, this is George Palmer-Jones. You will remember that I’ve talked about him very often. And this must be Molly.” He hardly acknowledged Molly’s presence, and continued quickly. “You must be stranded by the tide, of course. What good fortune that you’ve come today, George. I’ve just received Finches of the World from the publisher. I put in my order some months ago. I’d be glad of your opinion. There are one or two points that I’d question, but I haven’t your experience in the field.”

  He talked George back into the room from which he had appeared and the women were left together. There was no sense of awkwardness. Marjory smiled sweetly and indulgently after her husband, and offered tea. She showed Molly into a small, rather cold sitting room, but Molly followed her into the kitchen, and she seemed not to mind.