Palmer-Jones 01 - A Bird in the Hand

by Ann Cleeves

  As soon as they arrived Tina unrolled her sleeping bag on one of the mattresses and slept immediately, curled up like an animal. Molly, George and Rob sat around the stained table and talked, formally. It was a strange place for a conference. The sunny weather was over and as they had driven there had been hot, heavy showers. Now it was cooler, and through the glassless windows they watched a gusting breeze blow rain-clouds across the moon. When the moonlight shone through a break in the cloud and slanted on to the sea, the breaking waves were speckled with phosphorescence.

  So at last they began to talk about Tom French, about the good friend he had been and the good birder, because here they could talk about him without being trivial. When they had diluted a little the horror of Tom’s death with words, George said:

  “Adam Anderson’s father has asked me to find out if he was killed by one of us, a birder.”

  “Why?” Rob was not questioning Palmer-Jones’s ability to carry out Clive Anderson’s request. It was the request itself which surprised him.

  “He’s a magistrate. He doesn’t want Adam involved.”

  “Did you agree?”

  “I will do.”

  There was a pause.

  “Don’t you think I should?” asked George. He had expected Rob to be enthusiastic. He had thought it the sort of project which would appeal to him, and was puzzled by the lack of response.

  Rob became charming. “Of course. If anyone can find out who did it, you can. It seems unpleasant to think that it might have been one of us. Tom was so popular.”

  “I didn’t know him very well. I used to see him around, in Rushy, at the marsh.” He had a picture of Tom, thin almost to the point that he looked malnourished, curly hair, auburn like a girl’s. He saw him walking along the shingle bank, his telescope already mounted on its tripod on his back. It had been a familiar sight. Tom belonged to Rushy.

  “We started bird watching together.” Rob spoke softly because Molly was dozing. “ We both lived in London and used to go on coach trips run by a group of old ladies teaching in our school. He didn’t get any A-levels. He was hooked on birdwatching at Rushy even then, and used to sag off during the week even if there was nothing to see. He even went in winter. So he couldn’t get into college and when he left school he started work in some office. I think he worked for the Social Security, but he didn’t stay there for long.”

  Rob interrupted his reminiscences and nodded towards the sleeping girl in the corner.

  “Tina could tell you more about that time. Tom was into ringing too, then. She would have been very young but I think she was a trainee in the same ringing group. She was playing with ringing pliers when she was still in nappies. By then I’d started to do more trips abroad and I didn’t see so much of him. We’ve been away a couple of times together. We went to Fair Isle, and to get the albatross on Hermaness last year, and the autumn before he had a cottage on St. Mary’s where I stayed for a few days. I usually saw him when I went to Rushy. Sometimes he let me crash out in his room at the hotel, sometimes I stayed with Sally in Fenquay.”

  “Sally?”

  “His girlfriend. His first and only girlfriend, I should think. Tina was always quite keen on him. At one time she followed him everywhere, but I don’t think she got anywhere. She would have scared him. Sally’s quite different. She needed him. She’s got a little boy called Barnaby.”

  “Tom’s?”

  “Not as far as I know. She met a few of the twitchers when she was working on Scilly, I think. I know she’s seen a few good birds. Perhaps that’s why she chose to live in Norfolk. She moved to the cottage in Fenquay when Barnaby was a tiny baby. I’m not sure how Tom first met her.”

  “Were they happy?”

  “Before he met Sally, Tom was a typical, celibate, single-minded twitcher. His parents were elderly and he was an only child. He was really quite shy and I never saw him with another girl, except Tina, who hardly counts. He was used to living on his own in Rushy, and though Ella mothered him and treated him as family, he must have been lonely. When he met Sally you’d have thought that he was the only person ever to have fallen in love. He was ludicrous. He wanted everything to be perfect—all passion and romance. She couldn’t live up to it. She was pretty mixed up when she moved to Fenquay. I don’t know what had happened. She took an overdose about six months ago and ended up in hospital. Tom’s been worried about her ever since. It became a habit. He was even worried about Barnaby the last time I saw him.”

  “When was that?”

  “A few days before he died. The Wednesday, I think. That was the last time I dipped out on greenish warbler. It was his night off. We had a beer, a few beers. He wouldn’t be specific, and I wasn’t really interested, but he was worried that Sally couldn’t cope with Barnaby and asked if I thought he should tell someone.”

  “What did you say?”

  “To stop worrying and to come with me to see the scops owl near Basingstoke.”

  “Did he go with you?”

  “No, he didn’t seem very interested. He said that he would tell someone called Jenny about the baby. I don’t know who she is and I didn’t ask. I was in no state by then to give advice.”

  “Can you think of anyone who might have wanted him dead?”

  The abrupt question broke through the chat, and seemed impolite. Rob inhaled on a tiny stub of cigarette and shook his head slowly.

  “He seemed to get on with everyone. Even the locals in the village liked him. He used to take the kids out birding. He was still a hippie at heart, he still believed in peace and love, wanted the world to like him. That’s why the business with Bernard made him so miserable.”

  “Bernard?”

  “Bernard Cranshaw. He’s a school teacher. He lives in Rushy and runs the RSPB group there. He started a Young Ornithologist club. You know, he’s Mr. Birdman, the local celebrity. People phone him up when the cat has fatally injured a blue tit and he gives talks to pensioners and WI groups. He loves it.”

  “But he didn’t love Tom.”

  “It was okay at first. Tom was respected and got Bernard to show him around. But Cranshaw’s eyesight wasn’t too good and Tom had a lot more experience of anything out of the ordinary, so Tom started to find most of the good stuff. When the rest of us arrived Bernard freaked out completely. He tried to throw us off the marsh one day. Said we were disturbing breeding birds. It was September! Then all his Young Ornithologists defected to Tom—they turned up at the hotel one day and asked if he would take them out. I can’t imagine anything more deadly than dragging around the marsh with a bunch of kids, but he was really touched. He didn’t know that they’d been going out with Bernard.”

  “So how did Bernard make his displeasure known?”

  “He wrote a mad letter to all the children’s parents. I mean, it was really mad, rambling. It said that he felt it was his duty to tell them that their children were being corrupted by a ‘degenerate young man with well-known immoral and anti-social tendencies.’ Those were the exact words. I remember Tom kept repeating them He was incredibly upset. He didn’t have a lot of confidence and he was shattered that someone should dislike him so much. The letter also said that Tom was a drug addict.”

  “Was he?”

  “No. He was terrified about drugs. Booze was okay, but he wouldn’t touch dope.”

  “How did Tom find out about the letter?”

  Rob seemed preoccupied. He was looking out of the window, watching the silver sparks as the waves broke on the sand, mesmerized by the movement. There seemed to be a cold grey light and the moonlight was less powerful. George repeated his question.

  “Chris, the landlord in the Blue Anchor, told him. He and Tom were friends of a sort. It was Chris and his little boy who found the body.”

  Rob turned from the window and saw that George was making notes, despite the near darkness.

  “Still the civil servant,” he commented gently.

  “Ah, I’m getting old,” Palmer-Jones replied. “ I
can’t rely on memory any longer.”

  He got up slowly as if he wished to emphasize his point, went to his rucksack and brought out a polythene bag with two candles and a box of matches. He lit one of the candles and stuck it on to the table. They could see that Molly was fast asleep now, her head on her arms like a child at its desk. George pulled the typewritten police report out of the large pocket in his coat and read it closely. He explained to Rob what it was, but refused to give it to him to read.

  “I don’t think that would be quite ethical,” he said. “I’ve broken enough rules to get hold of it. Anyway it probably comes under the Official Secrets Act and I don’t want to get you into trouble. I’ll give you the gist.

  “He was killed by a number of blows to the head, the back of the head and the neck. The weapon is described as a smooth, heavy object. Probably cylindrical. I haven’t got the medical report, so I don’t know why they say that.”

  Rob interrupted excitedly: “Smooth and cylindrical. That could be a telescope.” It had become something of a game.

  “It’s too early to say, I think. It could have been any sort of club, metal piping, even a sturdy walking stick. They don’t think that Tom was killed exactly where he was found, but there are no cuts or abrasions to suggest that he was dragged along the ground.”

  Rob was quite absorbed.

  “If he was killed at any distance from the marsh, I don’t know how the murderer could have moved the body to the pool. It’s a long way from the road. I suppose that it might be possible to drive up the marsh track in a car—I’ve seen it done with a Land Rover. But then the body would have to be carried into the water. It sounds very risky.”

  “The report doesn’t mention tyre tracks at all. The police would have looked for them. There must have been dozens of people tramping up and down it all day, so that doesn’t mean anything. I think that it would have been possible for two people to move him, carrying the body between them, but then, as you say, that would have been conspicuous. Of course it was extremely foggy.

  “They think that he died very early in the morning—again I’ve no medical evidence for that, but I think we can accept the information. The forensic experts have enormous skill and are usually frighteningly accurate. He was certainly in the water for at least ten hours. He left the hotel at five forty, so he must have been killed between then and nine a. m., but the report places the probable time of death at between five forty and seven thirty.

  “The police seem to be concentrating their efforts on the hotel where he worked and are making inquiries locally. By the time they were called, many of the twitchers would have left the village. It was the day of the bimaculated lark, of course. I got the impression that a considerable number of people gave up and went elsewhere in the early afternoon, when the fog showed no sign of clearing. Any birder still in Rushy would have been in the White Lodge park. Apparently the police have started to compile a list of birdwatchers, and everyone will be questioned. Even you and I, I presume. It will be interesting to see how soon they get round to us.”

  He read again to the end of the report.

  “Did you know that Tom French has a conviction for possession of cannabis?”

  Rob answered with absolute certainty.

  “That’s impossible. I told you. He was frightened of dope.”

  “He appeared in court in October two years ago and received a three-year probation order. His probation officer is J. Kenning. Perhaps we’ve found the mysterious Jenny.”

  There was no phosphorescence on the sea now. The sky and the water were separate shades of grey. George brought a flask of coffee and half a bottle of scotch from his bag, and they drank to Tom, and to the greenish warbler they were about to see. Tina woke without fuss and dressed without modesty. When they left the cottage and went out into the cold morning, Molly was still sleeping.

  They found the greenish warbler after a painstaking search of all the cover in the valley. The golden orioles had gone. George had a systematic approach to bird watching, and Rob wandered on alone, impatient. George looked in every bush, checked the source of every moving twig or leaf. He was meticulous and wanted to savour the place. Tina followed Rob. She carried mist-net poles on her shoulder like a spear, and could have been some exotic tribesman tracking prey. George did not know if she were hunting Rob or the bird. When Rob found the bird it was so close that he could have reached out a hand to touch it.

  Near the head of the valley, at the end of a lane from the village, was a tiny graveyard which must have served Trekewick and the nearby area. A high stone wall surrounded it. The wall was rough and crumbling. Rob found a foothold, lifted himself up and looked over. The bird was about four feet away in a sycamore tree. His movement disturbed it and it flew into a gorse bush. Tina had seen it in flight, but George had to wait a frustrating twenty minutes for the bird to come out of the undergrowth before he saw it well.

  Tina had to catch it; it would be a ringing tick. Without explanation or asking for help, she put a single shelf net between the gorse bush and a headstone. They followed her instructions and crouched behind the wall. The bird was trapped quite quickly and she extracted it deftly from the tangle of the nylon mesh. She ringed it before letting them see it in the hand. She had very long hands, knotted and muscular like a piano player’s. She let the bird go gently and reluctantly. Throughout this process she lectured on wing length and wing formula, weight and bill size. She spoke intensely, checking occasionally that they were concentrating. When the bird had been released she folded the net, took down the poles and walked off. They watched her go. Her stealthy, sure-footed tread made no noise.

  George expected some comment from Rob about her, some explanation of her presence, but there was none, and he turned again to look at the warbler, which had not been frightened away by its ordeal.

  They spent all morning there. They both abhorred the “tick and run” type of twitcher. Twitching was about getting to know and appreciating new birds. Molly found the men and saw the bird. She was disappointed by its drabness and wandered off to look at plants.

  Greenish warbler is not exceptionally rare, but it was a weekend, there was nothing else about and a small representative crowd began to gather. They had hoped too that the golden orioles might still be there. They were predominantly men, in groups, wearing oiled green jackets and woollen hats, despite the weather. There was the occasional resigned wife and bored, tetchy girlfriend. Rob entertained them with his story of finding the bird, a story which grew more exaggerated as the morning proceeded. Adam Anderson appeared, walking down the road to the cemetery, pushing a bicycle, and did not seem at at all out of place. Palmer-Jones was curious, not surprised.

  “Have you come all the way from Surrey on that?”

  It seemed unlikely, but he could think of no other explanation. He would believe anything of the younger twitchers. He added:

  “I’m sorry, I should have telephoned you to let you know that we were coming. We could have given you a lift.”

  “That’s all right.” Adam was as diffident, as shy as ever. “The bike folds up very small. I hitch with it, and use it for the last few miles if I get stuck.”

  “Well, you can always come back with us this evening. We’ve plenty of room.”

  “Thank you very much, but I thought that I’d stay for a few days. The wind looks good.”

  “This is a tick for you, is it? The greenish warbler?”

  Adam blushed. He did not want to appear ungrateful, and he did not want to boast.

  “Well,” he said quietly, “I do need it for my year list.”

  He set up his tripod and telescope and began earnestly to study it. George looked at the boy and wondered that his father found so much to object to. It seemed so very sad that Anderson could not see beyond his prejudices. Adam must be very lonely at home. George called over to him impulsively. The boy looked round, showing an intense look of displeasure at being disturbed, hiding it quickly when he saw who was speaking. />
  “When you get home, give me a ring. I’d like to see your notes on the bimaculated lark. Perhaps you could come to supper one evening.”

  Adam looked very pleased, touchingly pleased.

  “I’d like that,” he said, and George could tell that he meant it.

  Along the coastal path, beyond the small, rocky headland, Molly and Tina were sitting together, leaning against a drystone wall, talking about twitchers. The sun was reflected from the water and it was hot. Molly was sketching a small plant with a tiny yellow flower and Tina was watching the fulmars—heavy, ugly seabirds, aeronautically perfect, carried over the edge of the cliff by invisible currents. She thought that if she had a fleyg net she could catch them. She returned suddenly to her conversation with Molly.

  “I get lonely,” she said in her strange, aggressive way. “That’s why I come on these twitching trips. You don’t know how lonely it is if you’re a woman birdwatcher. I’m not really interested in the rarities. Only in ringing.”

  Molly was concentrating on her drawing, but was very interested.

  “Do you know Rob well?” She wanted to know exactly how things were between Tina and Rob.

  “I’ve known him for a long time,” Tina said, “but he’s never been into ringing.” And with that statement he was dismissed. “Tom French and I had the same trainer, and Rob went to school with Tom.”

  “Was Tom your friend?”

  Tina thought. At least Molly, waiting for a reply, presumed that she was thinking.

  “I suppose he was a friend,” she said at last. “ He taught me a lot about birds. But he gave up ringing too.”

  She lay back in the sun, feeling with pleasure the heat on her neck and bare arms. She was watching the fulmars and drowsing, then became suddenly and momentarily irritated because not one of them had a ring on its leg. The irritation passed but she could not return to the earlier state of relaxation. She got up and walked back along the path, enjoying the vigorous movement and the wind from the sea. Rob saw her coming, a straight, fierce figure on the horizon, and waved. He was in the shadow of the graveyard and it took a while for her eyes to adjust to it. The greenish warbler was still there, in a clump of tamarisk, about fifty feet away from the people. Rob was leaning against the wall and quite unnecessarily pointing out the bird to a group of birdwatchers. She could hear him hinting loudly that if George went to fetch Molly they could get to the pub in the village before closing time. Then, she thought partly for her benefit, he gave an exaggerated mime of disbelief as a tall dark man in his early thirties approached them.