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

by Ann Cleeves

  “We’re ready now. As soon as you hear the cannon, get over the wall—there’s a stile just beyond Elizabeth if you need it. We’ll have to secure the net around the birds.”

  Then he was gone, and apparently whispering the same message to Jerry. She did not have the opportunity to ask if he had seen George.

  Nothing happened. It seemed that she had waited for hours with her cheek against the cold, pink rock of the wall. Still her husband had not come from the Wendy House, and still she was convinced that if the cannon was fired there would be a tragedy. If I stand up, she thought, and shout and wave, all the birds will be disturbed. They will rise, like some noisy multi-coloured magic carpet, and then the cannon will not need to be fired. She never knew if she would have had the courage to stand up and expose herself to the others’anger, because the cannon was fired. There was an explosion which echoed around the estuary, the rush of the net and the beating of wings.

  “It’s worked!” John shouted triumphantly. “It’s worked. Come on everyone. Over the wall.”

  It had worked. It had not backfired, blown up in Nicholas’s face. There were no screams. There was no blood. She felt embarrassment at her foolish anxiety, at the scene she had nearly caused, and an immense relief. She scrambled over the wall. She could see Jasmine Carson and Paul Derbyshire hurrying up from the east. Even they seemed infected by the general excitement. The younger observatory members were already running around the edge of the net, checking that none of the birds had been hurt.

  Where is George? she thought. He would enjoy all this. Where is he?

  She checked her impulse to join the others, to be a part of the successful operation, and looked back along the width of the island. She began to shout: “ George! George!”

  Everything happened very quickly then. She saw George running through the Wendy House garden towards the cliff. He was followed by other men, strangers. There was another explosion. A bright red flare lit the sky. It was pretty as a firework. The other observatory members realized that something was happening, that there was some other drama away from the net. John looked up briefly, but he would not let them go. He was responsible for the birds. He yelled at them to stay where they were until all the birds had been bagged. Molly ran along her side of the wall, through the gap at the end of it, to meet George by the cliff.

  Nicholas Mardle was in the water. The tide was on the ebb, and a fierce current had already pulled him north, towards the open sea. He was already opposite the observatory garden. He was struggling desperately, but was making no headway against the relentless pull of the water. He had been wearing wellingtons and a bulky anorak, and his heavy clothes seemed to be dragging him under. George was shouting. It seemed to Molly that he was almost crying with frustration.

  Then, miraculously, an inflatable boat raced round the north end of the island. It appeared beyond the seawatching hide and circled, sending a cloud of waders from the rocks by the slipway before stopping by the boy. One of the men in the boat pulled Nicholas aboard.

  Another man, one of the strangers, had joined Molly and George. “It’s all right, sir,” he said. “They’ve got him.”

  “I should have known,” George said, “ that the cannon net was too obvious. What a blunderhead I was.”

  “You were wrong about that perhaps, sir, but right about everything else.”

  “The boy could have been drowned. You know that he was pushed.”

  “It’s all right now,” the man repeated.

  Molly interrupted. Her anxiety, her sense of exclusion, had made her furious. “George, what has been going on?”

  He recognized her anger.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll explain. As Superintendent Savage says, there’s nothing to worry about now.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said. Then: “George, you were right? About the murderer?”

  “Yes,” Savage replied. “Mr. Palmer-Jones was right. I’ll just get Connibear, then I’ll be ready to make an arrest. Would you rather wait here?”

  “No,” George said. “I’ll come.”

  They walked through the gap in the wall, to where the others were ringing the waders. They sat in a semi-circle in two ringing teams. John and Jerry were putting the rings on the birds’ legs, Paul Derbyshire and Jasmine were weighing and measuring them and Elizabeth and Mark were writing details of the birds and ring numbers in a notebook.

  As George, Molly and the policemen approached, they all looked up.

  “Superintendent Savage,” Elizabeth said. “ What are you doing here? Do you want to train to be a ringer?”

  “Where’s Nick?” asked John. “I saw the flare. Is he all right?”

  George nodded, but said nothing.

  “Miss Jasmine Carson,” Savage said. “ I arrest you for the murder of Pamela Marshall and Charles Todd, and for the attempted murder of Nicholas Mardle.”

  Jasmine Carson stood up stiffly. She straightened her skirt over the swollen joints of her knees.

  “I was surprised,” she said, “ at the strength of the instinct for survival. When I planned to kill Charles, I did not think that I would mind, too much, being caught. So long as I was successful. But when it came to it, I was prepared to fight like an animal to stay free. Well, it’s all over now. Somebody had to do it. There was no other way.”

  She looked at them all, as if to say goodbye, then walked off between the policemen. When she came to the stile to the track, she refused to take Savage’s arm, and climbed it alone.

  Chapter Seventeen

  John insisted that they finish ringing all the waders. Nick was brought ashore. He was shocked and cold, but when the tide ebbed away to allow Savage and Connibear to take Jasmine Carson off in the Land Rover, he refused to go with them.

  “I’m not going to miss this,” he said. “ I want to know exactly what happened.”

  So they sat, that evening, in the common room, with the driftwood fire and the tillies, and George explained it all.

  “When did you know that it was Jasmine?” John asked. “I can still hardly believe it.”

  “I should have known on the night Pamela Marshall died, when I checked all the bedrooms and found Jasmine asleep.”

  “What do you mean? Could you tell that she was only pretending to be asleep?”

  “It’s not that, though she may have been acting. No. There were some sleeping pills in her bedroom. I suppose that she took them when her arthritis was painful. I should have known then that she had murdered Charlie Todd. Pamela was a different matter. Nicholas was giving such a good impression of a homicidal maniac that I was confused. He wasn’t the only one of you, of course, who confused the issue. There were Elizabeth’s mysterious trips to the mainland, and Doctor Derbyshire’s raid of the Wendy House. They shook my faith for a time in my judgement that Jasmine might be the murderer.”

  “My dear boy, I’m sure that you never considered, for a moment, that I could have been the murderer.” Paul Derbyshire was jolly and nervous, and his eyes were watchful. He was wondering what else George would say.

  “Not for a moment,” George answered. “ But you did search the Wendy House, that morning? While John, Nick and Mark went to the seawatching hide.”

  “Yes. I didn’t know that he was dead then. I thought that he was seawatching. He had something which belonged to me.”

  “Had you asked him to give it back to you?”

  “Yes. He refused to give it.”

  “What was it?”

  “A diary.”

  Although it was conducted in front of all the others, the conversation was intensely personal. Nobody interrupted.

  “Jasmine found a letter, you know, in your waste bin. I saw her find it. That must have pleased her. She would have told me about it eventually, but it suited her purpose much better for me to ask to see it. She expected me to take it to the police, although she was too clever to say so. She was beginning to realize that I found the case against Nicholas unconvincing, and she wanted to
give me another suspect. It was, perhaps, foolish to have given her that opportunity.”

  The warning had been gently given, but Paul Derbyshire recognized it.

  “Oh yes,” he said. “Yes. Quite. It won’t happen again.”

  That was the end of it. Nobody discussed, even among themselves, what the doctor had been hiding.

  George turned to Elizabeth. “ Can you tell us why you went to see Ernest Todd and William Marshall?” he said. “Or is it still a deadly secret? Molly imagined you as a secret agent of the Todds, sent by them to kill Charlie.”

  “Did she? How exciting! How clever of you to find out where I’d been. It’s all much more boring than that, I’m afraid. I don’t mind explaining now. I’ve talked to John about it.”

  She reached out and took John’s hand.

  “When I was divorced I told Frank that I didn’t want any of his money. He was very generous and offered me a lump sum as my share of the house. I refused it. I wanted to be independent. I still do, but with a child coming it would be useful to have a little money, a little security. I’d made a big gesture of refusing Frank’s money. I felt that John expected me to be very uncompromising, very independent. I didn’t want to admit, I suppose, that I had mellowed. I called in to see Ernest, just to ask the name of a good solicitor who might be able to negotiate with Frank on my behalf. He seemed the sort of person who would be able to recommend one. He was very kind, suggested Mr. Marshall and phoned up to make an appointment for me to see him. Then he asked me out to dinner, and got very angry when I refused. I would have told John what it was all about before going to the solicitor, but he found out that I hadn’t been to the clinic and started getting pig-headed and autocratic, so I kept it a mystery just out of spite. When I went to the solicitor’s I didn’t actually see William Marshall, Pam had died by then and he was taking compassionate leave. But I saw someone else who is going to deal directly with Frank’s representative, and we’ll probably be able to settle it without going to court. I’m sorry if I misled you.

  “Now,” she said. “Please don’t be so provoking. We’ve disposed of all the red herrings, so do tell us why you should have known, on the night that Pam died, that Jasmine had killed Charlie. And how you finally worked out who had killed him.”

  “I couldn’t understand why the murderer chose that particular time and place to kill him. The crime wasn’t committed in anger. There was no evidence of a fight. So, the murderer must have planned to kill Charlie in the seawatching hide. Obviously the killer must have known that Charlie would be there—that made John an unlikely suspect. But if he knew that Charlie would be there, he would have known that Jerry could be expected too. Although the flaps of the hide give a reasonable view of the island, and there would be some warning of Jerry’s approach, it would have been lunacy to choose that particular spot to do it. So, either Jerry was the murderer, or it was someone who could be certain that Jerry wouldn’t wake up in time to interrupt.

  “Can you remember, on the night before Charlie’s death, Jasmine poured out the cocoa? Several of you mentioned that, when you described what had happened after the fire. Usually, her arthritis made her avoid having to do anything of that sort in front of other people. When I went for coffee with her, she made me pour it out. Her hand isn’t very steady and it embarrassed her. But on the night of the fire she had to make certain that Jerry would sleep. I believe that you got a strong dose of her sleeping medication. That’s why you felt so hungover the next day.”

  “Did she set fire to the Wendy House, then?”

  “Yes. I think that she went to talk to Charlie, having already decided that if he didn’t listen to her, she would try to kill him. She wore the duffel coat and boots from the lobby, so that in the poor light if anyone did see her, she would be fairly anonymous. He refused to be persuaded by her, so she tipped over the lamp as she went past the open window. She hoped that the arson would be thought to be an accident. When Charlie survived the fire, she decided to try again. She would have been able to see from her bedroom window that the fire had been extinguished. It was because of the Wendy House fire that Pam Marshall had to die. She heard Jasmine out on the island on the night of the fire. Jasmine’s arthritis gave her a very distinctive walk. Jasmine knew that Pamela wanted to talk to me. I think that Pamela may have given away something of her suspicion. So Jasmine killed her.”

  “What about the guy rope? Did she take it specially to strangle Charlie?”

  “No. She couldn’t have done. But she did take it. She was on the island the week before Charlie died. She saw a Sabine’s gull, if you remember. You were staying here too, Nick. You know what a stickler she is for tidiness. I think perhaps you’d left a net out. She tried to put it away, but again, the stiffness in her fingers made her fumble it. She left the guy out. She didn’t want to admit that she’d made a botch of it, so she just put the guy in her pocket. Charlie Todd would have been waiting in the hide, that morning. The door would have been open because he was expecting Jerry. The sea and the wind would have been making so much noise that he wouldn’t have heard her coming. She was wearing the coat again, and the boots. He would have been surprised to see her, but not frightened. I expect that she sat on the seat behind him. His attention would have been held by the sea. It would have been easy to kill him.”

  No one spoke. The edges of the room were in shadow, and in the firelight the faces were expressionless, unfamiliar. George continued:

  “It was always probable, of course, that she had killed Pamela too, but there were two points which made me quite certain. The murderer used chloroform to drug Pamela before killing her. Jasmine knew that Pamela already suspected that she was the murderer. If Pamela had woken up to find Jasmine in her room, she would have screamed. Jasmine made certain that she did not wake up. How many of you knew that there was chloroform in the ringing room? Only John. The jar was not marked, so how could you know? But she was a biology teacher. She would have been interested in what the school groups were doing.

  “Then there was the fact that the murderer had lit the tilly in Pamela’s room. Jerry heard it being pumped. Jasmine wanted to do the thing properly. She would have needed two hands to force in the knife, so she couldn’t have held a torch. She knew about anatomy. She knew where she wanted the knife to go. She wanted to see what she was doing.”

  “But why?” Mark said. He was distressed, agitated. “Why did she have to kill Charlie?”

  “It was because of the island, wasn’t it?” Jerry said quietly. “ It was all she had. When she retired she lost all her friends, except us. She hasn’t got any relatives. She doesn’t care about anything else.”

  “But she knew Charlie,” Elizabeth interrupted. “ She knew that he was quite likely to change his mind about the island. He was always having weird ideas, but they never usually developed into anything. He wasn’t serious about it.”

  “He was serious about this, though,” George said. “It was the lack of motive which disturbed me most. Like you, I thought that Jasmine knew Charlie well enough to realize that he was inconsistent, unreliable. She wouldn’t have murdered him because of a sudden whim, which could have been forgotten on the following day. But he was serious about this. And she knew that he was.”

  “But how could she know? She didn’t know any more than the rest of us.”

  “I’m afraid that she did. I’m sure that she knew more than a week ago that Charlie was planning to sell the island, that he had been thinking about it for a long time, and that he had already begun negotiations.

  “Charlie was short of money. He knew that Jerry was losing enthusiasm for illustrating his stories, and that without the pictures the books were unlikely to sell. He could have sold the cottage at Storr, but he was becoming greedy. He wanted more money than that would have fetched. He had become passionate about the canal-boat project, and you know that he enjoyed being a benefactor. But, more importantly, he had a grand dream for the island. He was becoming bored by the observatory. Yo
u see, he wasn’t going to sell Gillibry, just shares in it. He was planning to develop it.

  “That, of course, was why he renewed contact with his brothers. He needed their help to turn his scheme into reality. They recognized the financial possibilities and Ernest began to use his contacts to get some dubious plans agreed by the planning department.

  “I was blind. I was convinced that Charlie was blackmailing the Todds. I couldn’t think of any other explanation for their reaction to my questions. It was Albert himself who told me that Charlie had instigated the illegal practices which he’d discovered. You can imagine that Jasmine was horrified.

  “You see, Charlie’s dream was to turn the island into a miniature Disneyland, with a fun fair, bars, all sorts of attractions. When we were searching the Wendy House we found a ticket for Alton Towers. He had been there while he was in the Midlands. He wanted to turn the island into that sort of amusement park.”

  “How typical of Charlie,” Jerry said with some affection. “ It wouldn’t have been only for the money. He would have loved the idea of it.”

  “But Jasmine Carson was appalled.” “How did she find out about Charlie’s plans?” Mark asked.

  “Marie, the Todds’ secretary, was one of her ex-pupils. Marie told me that they kept in touch. Savage went to see her last night. She confirmed to him that she saw Jasmine last week. She inadvertently mentioned something of what the Todds were planning, and Jasmine bullied the rest out of her. She was too frightened to tell the Todds about it, and I really don’t think she suspected it had anything to do with the murder. So when Charlie dropped his bombshell on Friday evening, Jasmine already knew about his plans. She knew that he wasn’t being quite honest. And she had had a chance to brood about it. She is a very logical person, and very ruthless. She didn’t have a lot to lose. She is ill, in considerable pain. She weighed up the risk and she took it. And of course she had to act quickly.”