Palmer-Jones 05 - Sea Fever

by Ann Cleeves

  “Well,” he said in his growling voice, “How’s it going?”

  She shook her head. “ No one will admit to speaking to him on the boat yesterday after he went to lie down,” she said. “They all seem to have been so excited about this rare bird that they took no notice of anything. The probation officer, Mrs. Pym, thinks she might have come across him at work, possibly when he was at a probation hostel on bail. Can we check their records on that?”

  “No,” Wargan said, finding apparent satisfaction in making the investigation more difficult and complicated for her. “ I phoned them this morning. There was a fire at the hostel. I checked the date of the fire with our records on Franks. It will have been while he was on bail. The place was gutted, and all their records were lost.”

  “What sort of fire?” she asked. “Arson?” It was, she thought, a coincidence. Rosco had been convicted of arson.

  He shook his head. “Apparently not. There was a detailed investigation, and they found it was started by an electrical fault.”

  “Have you got an address for Franks yet?” the inspector asked. “No one here seems to know where he’d been living since he left his parents.”

  The superintendent shook his head. “ He seems to have disappeared from all the official records about a year ago,” he said. “He hasn’t claimed dole or social security in that time, and he hasn’t paid tax or national insurance. The car he was driving was registered and insured in his father’s name. We’ll put out a press statement this afternoon and get his picture in the papers tomorrow. Someone will know where he’s been living.”

  He would enjoy doing that, Claire thought. Wargan always got on well with the media. He especially liked being on local television news, smiling roguishly at the female interviewer, developing his accent so nobody could mistake him for an incomer.

  Berry had been sitting apart, listening to the conversation. Now, for the first time he spoke. “What about Louis Rosco?” he said. “Is he still on the Jessie Ellen? Should we get a search warrant and go over his cottage before he comes back?”

  Wargan shook his head. “ No need for that,” he said. “ We know that the first time Franks and Rosco met this weekend was at Heanor, and Rosco’s been under observation since then. There can’t possibly be anything belonging to Franks in the cottage. They’ve done a thorough search of the boat now and found nothing there. Rosco can go home as soon as he wants to, though I think we should have him in to the station later for questioning. He’s your most likely suspect, isn’t he? He’s killed a man once.” He nodded towards the dining room door. “I can’t imagine any of that bunch out there having the guts. Still, it’s your case.”

  So a second opportunity to search the cottage on the shore was missed. When the police made a connection between Franks and Rosco, they searched the cottage, but then they were looking for drugs. By that time, the gun lying between the lumpy flock mattress and the metal frame of the bed had been moved, and they found nothing.

  Chapter Seven

  Duncan James spent the day outside, waiting with mounting panic for the summons to the dining room to be questioned. At least in the garden, with its open view down the valley, he could fight off the claustrophobia which had been tormenting him since he had gone below deck on the Jessie Ellen to sleep. His father had worked as a young man in a tin mine, and whenever Duncan thought of the working conditions he must have endured, he felt ill. Claustrophobia had dominated Duncan’s childhood and altered his life. The irrational fear of dark, damp places had been one of the spurs to his academic success. It had sent him from Cornwall to civilised inland Britain. It had made him cautious and thrifty. The tin mine represented insecurity, poverty, failure.

  Now he was back in Cornwall, and the childhood fear had returned. In the bunkroom across the yard he had slept badly, and when he did drift into unconsciousness, he dreamed of drowning in dark cold water. Even in daylight in the sunny garden, the memory of the dream returned. He tried to banish it by thinking of Anne at home in Somerset with the children and, by an effort of will, maintained a degree of equilibrium and calm.

  He could not remember being happy before he knew Anne. They had met at university. She had been an undergraduate, and he had been doing post-doctoral research and a little teaching. He had seen her first when he had taken a small group into some beech woods to collect fungi for identification. The colour of the beech woods and her hair and her smile still glowed in his memory. He had known even then on the first meeting that she was special. She had changed him in a month. His colleagues told him that she had made him human. Before Anne he had been notorious for his bad temper and his unwillingness to compromise. Suddenly he found a sense of humour.

  Duncan did not dare ask her to marry him until she had completed her degree. Then he needed several drinks to give him the courage to make the proposal, and he had botched it with his shyness, so in the end she had proposed to him. Afterwards he had been too excited to sleep for a week. He had wandered round the university in dazed and bedraggled confusion while she made the arrangements for the wedding. If he had understood more clearly the difference in their backgrounds, it might never have taken place. In the classlessness of academic life it had not mattered. He realized that she never had to worry about money, that she had been to a boarding school, that her father had some land in the West Country, but at university everyone’s parents seemed wealthier than his had been. There had even been a certain status in being poor. He had imagined, if he thought about it, that her father was a farmer.

  She bullied him once, soon after they met, to take her to Cornwall to show her where he had been brought up. It was late autumn, raining, and the weekend was a bleak anticlimax. His parents, who had been older than most of his friends’ parents, were dead, and there were no other relatives to introduce her to. He showed her the rented cottage where he had lived as a child, and she made no comment then, no comparison with her own home. It was only after they were engaged that she drove him to meet her parents in Gloucestershire, and when he saw where they lived, he thought at first she was playing a trick on him. The long drive, the acres of garden, the house so old and grand that he might have been taken there as a schoolboy on an educational visit, astounded him. There were two farms on the estate and a gamekeeper; most of the village was dependent on Anne’s father for employment. It almost wrecked the relationship. For a time he lost all his confidence in her. He thought he must have misjudged her. Because she was rich, he supposed she must be different. Then she persuaded him that was ridiculous, and at last the old happiness returned. It was only later, when they were married, that he discovered that his fear had been justified and that in some important things she was different.

  Now, sitting in the garden waiting for the ordeal of being questioned, he tried not to blame Anne for the mess he was in. He knew it was all his own fault.

  The police kept him waiting all morning, and he wondered in the heightened state of nervous panic if they had done that on purpose to frighten him. It was early afternoon when Berry came to find him. The policeman saw a large, uncoordinated man walking backwards and forwards along the overgrown path by the stream. He was dressed with an old-fashioned shabbiness, and when Berry called to him, he turned with a sad and frightened look, like a child asking a stern parent not to deal with him too harshly. When Duncan was led into the sudden shadow of the dining room, he blinked shortsightedly and peered unhappily towards the inspector. She had been disturbed by the superintendent’s visit and the fact that they still had no recent address for Greg Franks. Her superiors would see that as incompetence, and she had wondered even if she should leave Berry to complete the statements while she devoted her energy to that. She had decided in the end to stay, but her attention was still on the problem of where Franks had been living, and her questions were mechanical and routine. She could not believe that this absentminded academic could help her.

  “Dr. James,” Inspector Bingham said, “why did you decide to come to Cornwall this
weekend?”

  “I was interested in the birdwatching element,” he said. “ I work as regional officer for the Nature Conservancy Council, but ornithology isn’t really my subject. I thought this holiday would be an excellent introduction. My patch covers the whole of the south-west peninsula, and it did seem important to learn a little about seabird identification.” He was rather proud of his answer, and it gave him confidence. Only the sergeant, sitting out of sight, half-hidden by a giant rubber plant, gave Duncan some cause for concern. He had calm blue eyes, and Duncan had a guilty sense that the sergeant could tell when he was lying.

  “When did you decide to come to Heanor?” the inspector asked.

  “Only last week,” he said. “It was an impulse. I had a few days’ leave to take. I was lucky there was still a place available.”

  “Yes,” she said. “ I see. How did you hear about the trip?”

  “I’d read about them in the natural history press,” he said. “They’re quite famous, you know.”

  “Had you met Greg Franks before?”

  “Not as far as I’m aware,” Duncan said. “I may have met him through my work. I come across pressure groups and representatives of natural history societies occasionally, but having met Greg, I doubt if he was involved in that kind of thing. And besides, I think I should have remembered him if I’d seen him before. He was quite an exhibitionist.”

  There was a pause.

  “What effect did that exhibitionism have on the other passengers?”

  It was the sergeant who spoke, and Duncan found the question strangely disturbing.

  “I don’t know,” he said lamely. “ Franks seemed to take a delight in annoying them, but there was a lot of conversation I didn’t understand. I hadn’t met them before, you see, so it was difficult to gauge their reactions. There was some wrangling about lists. That seemed incomprehensible to me.”

  “Yesterday afternoon,” the inspector said, “when Greg Franks told everyone he was going to lie down, the others say that they were too interested in the seabird to notice what was going on. But you tell me that you’re not a birdwatcher, so you might have been more aware of other things. Did you go to see Greg during that time?”

  “No,” Duncan James said. “ I quite forgot about him until later.”

  “You didn’t notice anyone else move forward to the deck where he was sleeping?”

  “No,” James said. “I’m sorry. I was reading.”

  “But you did go to look for Greg when they found the rare bird?”

  “Oh, yes,” James said. “ That’s when I remembered him. And the others seemed so excited by the bird. They were afraid of missing anything. So I volunteered.”

  “Was everyone on the deck when you left?”

  “I don’t know.” He allowed himself to play the part of vague, absentminded academic for all it was worth. “ There was so much noise and confusion, you see.”

  “Yes,” she said, “ so I’ve been told. You didn’t see anything unusual when you went to look for Greg?”

  “No,” he said, hesitating, “ not at first. When he wasn’t on deck, I supposed he was in his bunk. He had looked terribly ill. Then, when I went below, there was no sign of him. Nothing. Even his sleeping bag had disappeared.”

  “How long was it before you went back to the others to tell them he was missing?”

  There was a hesitation, and though the inspector seemed not to notice, Duncan was aware of the sergeant’s perceptive and compassionate gaze.

  “I suppose it must have seemed rather a long time,” Duncan said, “before I went back on deck. I looked in the places where he might have been. I thought he might have been sick in the lavatory or lying down in the saloon. It seemed inconceivable, of course, that he could have just have disappeared. When I did go back to the others, they didn’t believe me.”

  “No,” the inspector said.

  He was still waiting for the awkward questions that he had been dreading and did not realise that the interview was over until the inspector asked if he would send Mr. Matthews in as he went out. His relief gave him courage, and at the door he hesitated.

  “I’d like to get home as soon as possible,” he said. “ Would it be all right to go back tomorrow?”

  The inspector looked up at him and smiled.

  “I can’t stop you, of course,” she said. “But I’d rather you stayed here for a couple of days. You had planned to be here on holiday anyway, hadn’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said. “ Very well. I understand.”

  Only when he was outside the door, away from the steady stare of the sergeant, did he begin to shake uncontrollably.

  Gerald Matthews repeatedly took off his spectacles and rubbed them with the hem of his jersey in what they thought was a gesture of nervousness and was in fact the result of a contained excitement. All day he had been even more aware than usual of Rose. He watched her from a distance, knowing that if he made a wrong move, the fragile understanding which he felt had spontaneously developed between them in Matilda’s bedroom would be lost. He saw her for the first time as vulnerable, unhappy, obtainable. It never occurred to him that by offering her marriage now he would be exploiting her shock and sadness. He wanted her. The gentleness and tact he showed now in his discretion, in keeping his distance, was a tactic in obtaining her. Concern and consideration for her feelings had nothing to do with it.

  He thought of Greg Franks’ death with a celebratory joy. His problem was in trying to keep the emotion under control. He managed it by involving himself in Roger Pym’s research into the possible identification of the petrel and channelled his excitement into that. Yet all the time he was watching Rose through the living room window, so in touch with her that he believed he could smell her hair and hear the peaceful breathing of the baby on her knee.

  When Gerald Matthews was called into the dining room, he was aggressive and hostile. It was not exactly a performance—more a welcome opportunity to release the tension which had been building up all day. The inspector did not read too much into his reaction. He was the sort of man who would pride himself on complaining, on standing up for his rights. He was pale, slight, ageless. He would look much the same when he was fifty.

  “Look!” he said. His voice was flat, hard, northern. “What have you been doing to upset Rose Pengelly? She was nearly in tears when she came out of here.”

  “What does that have to do with you?” Claire asked. She smiled a cruel, tight-lipped smile. You’re a failure, she thought. Rose Pengelly’s chosen Rosco. Don’t you know that yet?

  “I’m her friend,” Gerald Matthews said, blustering, hoping that he would be taken for Matilda’s father. “A very special friend.”

  “You help her, do you? Support her in times of crisis?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Does she confide in you?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Did she tell you, for example, who was the father of her child?”

  “I didn’t ask,” he lied. “ It was none of my business.”

  Claire smiled again, laid her palms deliberately on the table, and leaned forward. She wanted to show him who was in charge.

  “Tell me about Greg Franks,” she said.

  “There’s nothing to tell. I’d only met him a couple of times. He was not the sort of birdwatcher I approve of. He probably wouldn’t even have called himself a birdwatcher. He would say he was a birder or a lister—dreadful Americanisms. He didn’t know very much about common birds. These youngsters move onto rarities too quickly, in my opinion. They don’t put in the groundwork. I’d been watching my local reed bed for years before I started going to the Scillies.”

  She considered his words as the ravings of a lunatic. She had no idea what he was talking about. But they all came back to these birds, she thought. Perhaps I’m missing something. Can they really matter in a case like this? She turned Gerald Matthews’ attention back to Greg Franks.

  “So you disapproved of him?”

&n
bsp; “I did.”

  You were probably jealous of Franks, she thought, because he was young and irresponsible. He knew how to enjoy himself. It was hard to imagine Gerald Matthews as ever having been young, and she had by now gained an impression of Greg as a man who, above all things, knew how to enjoy himself.

  “Apart from the birds,” she said, “ was there any reason for the disapproval?”

  “I’d heard rumours,” he said.

  “About drugs?”

  “Yes,” he said. “And about other things. Everyone knew he was mixed up in something shady. It was as if they thought he was clever. ‘Look at Greg Franks,’ they’d say. ‘ Just back from Thailand,’ or ‘Just bought a new ’scope,’ or ‘Driving a new car.’ ‘Bet he didn’t get that on the dole,’ they’d say. It made me sick. I didn’t think Rose should have him here. She agreed not to let him stay again, but here he was. She’s too kindhearted.”

  “So you weren’t expecting him to be here this weekend?”

  “No,” Gerald said sulkily. “It was a shock. I don’t know what made her change her mind.”

  “Have you asked Miss Pengelly why she allowed him to come?” she asked. He muttered that it was none of his business, and she could do what she liked.

  Molly Palmer-Jones spent all day listening. It was not exactly that she was eavesdropping. She was always in full view of the people who were talking. It was that they did not consider her worth bothering with. They thought she posed no threat. And the shock made them want to talk; they were glad to have someone sympathetic to share their worries with. When they came away from Molly, they felt better.

  Even when she was in the shady dining room, she was listening—to the whispered conversation between the inspector and her sergeant that was taking place when she entered the room, and to the subtext beneath the questions, trying to follow the line of reasoning which prompted Claire Bingham to ask them. Molly was left with the disturbing impression that there was little logic, that the questions were a random, almost desperate attempt to find a previous relationship between Greg and the other passengers. It was clear already that there were no witnesses to the murder, or if anyone had seen anything suspicious, they were not admitting it.