Palmer-Jones 04 - A Prey to Murder

by Ann Cleeves

  ‘Tell me,’ Pritchard had said, ‘about your connections with Kerry Fenn. Does she employ you and Oliver? She mixes in all the right circles, doesn’t she? She typed the shopping list of birds and gave it to Oliver, so you would both know exactly which species to take.’

  But Williams had smiled suggestively, so that the plastic mask turned into a leer.

  ‘My only connection with Kerry Fenn is purely personal, Superintendent,’ he said. ‘I can give you details of that if you want me to, but I think it might shock your elderly friend here.’

  And he had stuck to his story that his relationship with Kerry was physical. She had fancied him, he said. She had a Lady Chatterley fantasy. What was he do to? They had kept it secret because her father would have disapproved. It seemed more likely to Pritchard that the fantasy was Williams’ but the taxidermist would not change his story, and as they left he gave them a triumphant smile.

  They found Fenn in the office of his bungalow. He looked grey and tired. He saw them through the window coming down the path from the Centre and got up to meet them at the door.

  ‘I’m busy,’ he said. ‘Kerry usually does the books but she’s away. I’m not so good with figures as she is.’ But the attempt to refuse them entry was half-hearted and he sighed and let them into the house. ‘I can’t give you very long,’ he said. ‘I‘m doing a display at half past three.’

  The three men stood uneasily in the hall.

  ‘Shall we go into the kitchen?’ Pritchard said gently. ‘We’ll be more comfortable there.’

  Fenn led them into the big kitchen and they perched ridiculously on high stools by a built-in bar, like three garden gnomes.

  ‘Would you like some coffee?’ Fenn asked, but Pritchard shook his head.

  ‘What do you know about Theo Williams?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s a taxidermist based in the village here,’ Fenn said. ‘He has rather a good reputation. He prepared some of our displays in the visitors’ centre.’

  ‘Is he interested in birds of prey?’

  ‘He seems to be. His father was a gamekeeper. Theo used to go out with him and learned from him, I suppose. He’s not a falconer.’

  ‘Are Williams and Oliver friendly?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think they particularly like each other but Williams comes here occasionally to talk to Frank Oliver.’ Fenn paused. ‘I don’t suppose it matters,’ he said, ‘that Oliver’s got himself into more serious trouble now but I used to think they might have had some business connection. Williams used to go shooting with his father when the old man was still alive. He probably sees some of the schedule one birds of prey as fair game and I expect Oliver has been able to find a market for the mounted skins.’

  Pritchard turned helplessly to George.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ George said, ‘the business connection between Williams and Oliver is rather more serious than that.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Fenn said. ‘ I don’t understand you.’ He stared out of the window as if he had lost interest in the conversation. Throughout the conversation George felt Fenn’s attention wandering as if he were a very old man or a child.

  ‘Oliver and Williams work together,’ George said. ‘They steal eggs and young birds of prey from the wild to sell to falconers. We’re sure now that some of the birds were smuggled abroad for sale. That’s why Oliver was on the hill at Sarne on the day of Eleanor’s murder.’

  ‘I see,’ Fenn said absently. ‘Yes. I see.’

  ‘We don’t believe Williams and Oliver are working alone,’ George said. ‘ We think they’re employed by someone with a greater organizational skill, someone perhaps who has legitimate business abroad.

  ‘I can understand that,’ Fenn said, showing for the first time that he was following the line of George’s argument. ‘Neither Frank Oliver nor Williams is very bright.’

  George paused, hoping perhaps that Pritchard would take over the explanation, but the policeman motioned for him to continue.

  ‘Where is your daughter, Mr Fenn?’ George asked.

  ‘Mm?’ Fenn looked up, startled from his daydreams by the question.

  ‘Where is Kerry?’ George repeated.

  ‘Oh she’s in Holland,’ he said. ‘We’re hoping to import some birds from a centre there.’

  ‘Does she go abroad quite often?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She’s good at that side of things and she seems to enjoy it. I’m very lucky.’ Still he did not grasp the implication of the questions. ‘What has Kerry to do with Theo Williams and Frank Oliver?’

  ‘We think she may be employing them,’ George said. ‘We think she finds the buyers for the birds. She has met influential falconers here and abroad. As you’ve said she’s good at organization. She tells the men what to steal and disposes of the eggs and young when they’re delivered.’

  Fenn began to laugh, a sad, wracking, crazy laugh which shook his body like a cough.

  ‘She’s a girl,’ he said, ‘a pretty, sweet girl. You’re mad.’

  Pritchard took the flimsy shopping list of birds from a file. ‘This was typed on the machine in your office,’ he said. ‘ We found it in Oliver’s house.’

  Fenn looked at it suspiciously.

  ‘That doesn’t mean anything,’ he said. ‘Oliver could have typed it himself.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Pritchard said. ‘ You told us when we were last here that Mr Oliver didn’t have access to your home.’

  ‘I don’t care what you say,’ Fenn said. ‘Kerry takes after her mother. Lydia would never do anything that wasn’t honest and decent.’

  He put his head in his hands and seemed deep in memory.

  ‘Is Kerry friendly with Theo Williams?’ George asked quietly. ‘Do they go out together socially?’

  ‘Of course not!’ Fenn was jerked back to the present by the horror of the suggestion. ‘I suppose the chap’s all right. He got himself into trouble in the past, though I understand that’s all over now. But he has nothing in common with my daughter. The idea’s ludicrous.’

  ‘We were in Williams’ flat just now,’ George said, ‘when Kerry telephoned him from Holland.’

  ‘That’s impossible,’ Fenn said. ‘She wouldn’t have done that. He must have been lying.’

  ‘I spoke to her.’ George said.

  ‘Then you must have made a mistake.’

  ‘No,’ George said. Fenn was fighting not to convince them but to sustain his own belief in his daughter’s virtue and perfection. Without that he had nothing. But eventually he would have to realize the truth. ‘No,’ George said. ‘I couldn’t have been mistaken. Kerry gave her name and I recognized her voice as soon as she spoke.’

  Fenn said nothing. He had heard the words but refused to accept what George was saying.

  ‘Williams was with us in the flat when the telephone rang,’ George went on. ‘Of course we asked him why Kerry would want to phone him at home. He insisted that he and your daughter were intimately involved with each other, that they were lovers.’

  ‘No,’ Fenn said. His face was white and the shock seemed to have cleared his head of all confusion. ‘He was lying to save himself. Kerry has grace and taste. She would never be attracted to him.’

  ‘In that case,’ Pritchard said cheerfully, sliding off his stool, ‘they must be business partners. There’s really no other explanation. I’m afraid, Mr Fenn, I’m going to have to ask you to let me search her room.’

  Fenn nodded and led them down a long corridor to a large bedroom at the end of the bungalow. ‘You’ll see,’ he said with one last burst of resistance. ‘You’ll see that she has nothing to hide.’ But then he retreated again into his own thoughts as if the present were too painful to bear, and although Pritchard put more questions to him he did not answer.

  The room, like the rest of the house, was modern and airy and without character. It was like the bedroom in an expensive hotel – it was pleasantly furnished and decorated but it gave nothing of its occupant away. French wind
ows led on to a paved yard and looked out over farmland. There were fitted wardrobes along one wall and a large bed with wooden spindle headboard.

  It seemed suddenly to George that he had spent all day searching through other people’s underwear, other people’s intimate lives, and he felt sickened. He longed for it all to be over so they could go home. Let Pritchard do his own dirty work, he thought, and stood next to Fenn while the policeman began to look through drawers and cupboards. He found what he was looking for quite quickly. There was a buff envelope file in her small bedside cupboard under a pile of paperback novels. There was nothing written on the outside of the file, but immediately inside there was an exact copy of the shopping list they had found in Oliver’s home.

  ‘There you are,’ Pritchard said. ‘That proves it. That’s what we were looking for.’

  ‘But it’s another carbon copy,’ George said quietly. ‘Where’s the original?’

  Pritchard shrugged. All this was a side issue. He wanted to find Oliver. Nothing else mattered much. ‘Perhaps Williams has it somewhere,’ he said. ‘We didn’t search his place that well.’

  He began to spread the other papers from the file over the bed. They were all copies of letters. Some acknowledged receipt of orders for eggs or young birds, and requested half payment in advance. Others were receipts for money paid.

  ‘I wonder where she keeps the accounts,’ Pritchard said. ‘There must be some record of the money paid out to Oliver and Williams and of the payment received.’

  He gathered the papers together and pushed them back into the file.

  ‘We’ll have to take these with us,’ he said to Fenn. ‘You understand that?’

  Fenn nodded.

  George realized that there was still a small white card on the bed. Pritchard had tipped it out of the file, but missed it when he gathered the flimsies together. George picked it up and turned it over, so he could see what was written on the other side. It was a business card: Gorse Hill Country Hotel, Sarne, printed tastefully in gold, followed by the hotel’s telephone number.

  ‘Is there any reason why Kerry would have the telephone number at Gorse Hill?’ George asked Murdoch Fenn.

  The falconer shook his head. He was too shocked to think or to care. George remembered the slip of paper they had found in Oliver’s concrete cell. That too had the telephone number of Gorse Hill written on it. They had assumed that Oliver had kept it to contact his wife in an emergency, but perhaps it had some other significance. Perhaps after all the answer to Eleanor’s death lay in Sarne.

  Pritchard took the card from George and slipped it into the file without looking at it. He turned to Fenn. ‘Has your daughter any special friends?’ he asked. ‘ Someone who may be hiding Frank Oliver?’

  ‘Kerry doesn’t have many friends,’ Fenn said. ‘She’s too busy at work.’

  ‘You haven’t a holiday home, a cottage or chalet?’

  ‘No,’ Fenn said. ‘All our profit goes back into the Falconry Centre.’

  ‘Well then,’ Pritchard said, ‘I don’t think I need trouble you any longer.’ He looked at his watch. With luck they would not be too late back after all.

  As they were leaving the bungalow the middle-aged cashier was coming down the path towards them, her grey hair blowing in the wind.

  ‘Oh Mr Fenn,’ she said. ‘You haven’t forgotten the display at half past three? The children are waiting.’

  She sounded anxious and a little irritated, like a mother whose favourite child is always late.

  ‘No,’ he said absently. ‘No I haven’t forgotten. Excuse me, gentlemen.’

  He hurried up the path away from them and as they made their way back to their car they saw him in the display field. He was a small, pathetic figure made dignified and rather sinister by the powerful bird held on his arm.

  Chapter Nine

  That morning Molly woke to a gloomy half light and the sound of rainwater gurgling in drain pipes. It was very early. She imagined George waiting on the moor for some mysterious stranger to come out of the mist, intent on stealing a clutch of merlins’ eggs. It still seemed to her that the men’s antics on Farthing Ridge would be a wild-goose chase, a lunacy. What was George trying to prove? Was he trying to exorcize his guilt for Eleanor’s death by getting soaked to the skin? What could some stranger on the moor have to do with Eleanor Masefield?

  Molly found it impossible to go back to sleep. She remembered Eleanor and wondered if her dislike of the woman exaggerated the image she conjured in her head. It seemed to her now that Eleanor had dominated her family ruthlessly. She had purposely made them dependent on her, financially and emotionally. Their home and their livelihood depended on her. The small, beautiful woman had refused to relinquish control over her daughter and grandchildren, and they had only gained freedom with her death. That seemed more real and fundamental than the cartoon-like adventures of evil falconers and the brave heroes who sat in the rain to catch them. Molly lay awake in the big cold bed and struggled to make sense of it all. It would never have been necessary before. She had always trusted George’s logic. George would have made lists, made connections. But here his judgement was clouded and the responsibility was hers. She felt like a woman who had always relied on her husband to mend the car, stranded with a puncture on a lonely road.

  Molly had told Helen, the night before, about the discussion in the Hop Pole about passports.

  ‘I’ve told my husband,’ she said. ‘He will have passed the information to the police.’

  The girl had seemed excited and intrigued and promised to tell Laurie.

  ‘And Mrs Oliver,’ Molly had prompted. ‘You should tell her.’

  ‘Of course,’ Helen said. ‘ I’m not going to school tomorrow. They told Father we could have a few days at home. So if you need any help …’

  And it was Helen, dressed in jeans and a striped shirt, who brought Molly’s breakfast.

  ‘Did you see Mrs Oliver last night?’ Molly asked. ‘No,’ Helen said. ‘I didn’t even see Laurie. They’re not on the phone. I’m going there this morning.’

  ‘Mrs Oliver isn’t here today?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Helen said. ‘But she is coming. Father wanted her to stay at home until she had some news of Steve but she wanted to come in to work. She said she was better if she was busy.’

  ‘Sit down,’ Molly said, ‘and tell me about your grandmother.’

  Helen sat and talked. Her love for Laurie, or perhaps her perceived triumph over Nan Oliver, had seemed to have given her a new strength and confidence. She spoke and moved more spontaneously. She gave her opinion without any of the old shyness. Molly had never known her so animated.

  ‘She was autocratic,’ Helen said. ‘My mother and father would never stand up to her and that made her worse. Mother was frightened of her of course, and at the same time she needed her. Mother didn’t dare sneeze without asking Grandmother first. Father wasn’t scared of her but he wouldn’t confront her because it made Mother so nervous. Eleanor pretended not to like Father, just to upset her. Eleanor said that Mother had married beneath her and that Father was petty and boring, but she didn’t mean it. She didn’t mind him being petty and boring when it came to dealing with Inland Revenue and the VAT man.’

  It seemed to Molly that Helen had watched the tension within her family and had been helpless to do anything about it. Now at last she could talk about it without making her mother even more vulnerable.

  ‘Eleanor must have been hard to live with,’ Molly said.

  ‘She was,’ said Helen. ‘ Dreadfully. The worst thing was that she always assumed she knew what was best for us. It was worse for Fanny. Grandmother was always nagging her about being overweight and not having the right sort of friends. In lots of ways it was easier for me but she still thought she knew what was best for me. She liked me. She said I was her natural successor and that I should have to take over the business. Mother and Father were too soft, she said, and Fanny was too stupid. When I left school she would tra
in me to take control. That’s what I mean. She assumed that when I left school I would want to come and work for her. When I said that I had applied to go to university she seemed astounded. She had taken it for granted I would do as she expected. It took a lot of nerve to tell her. She could be intimidating even to her favourites.’

  ‘What did your grandmother say when you told her that you wanted to go to university?’

  ‘That she supposed another three years wouldn’t do any harm and we could make a start in the long holidays. As I’ve said she just assumed that I’d come into the hotel.’

  ‘And will you?’ Molly asked. ‘ Will you work at the hotel with your parents when you’ve finished at university?’

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ Helen said. ‘And if I do it will be my decision.’

  Molly remembered the shy, mouse-like girl Helen had seemed to be before Eleanor’s death. Would it have been your decision, she thought, if Eleanor were still alive?

  ‘What will you do today?’ Helen asked. She was on her feet and had begun to collect the dirty plates.

  ‘I’ll have a quiet day here,’ Molly said, ‘and wait for George to come home.’

  Poor thing, Helen thought. How dreadful to belong to a generation which can do nothing but wait for their husbands! She left Molly alone. Molly sat, pretending to read the paper, and thinking, until mid morning, when she went to look for Veronica. Richard Mead was sitting in the office with the door open, talking on the telephone.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he was saying. ‘We’re not taking any bookings this week.’

  The person on the other end of the telephone must have tried to persuade him to allow them to stay.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated. ‘ Mrs Masefield is dead. I’m afraid we won’t be able to accommodate you.’

  He replaced the receiver, and waved to Molly.

  ‘I’m looking for Veronica,’ she said. ‘ Have you seen her?’

  ‘She’s in the conservatory, I think,’ he said and turned back to his work.

  ‘Of course,’ Veronica said, ‘Mother always said that I’d married beneath me.’