Palmer-Jones 01 - A Bird in the Hand

by Ann Cleeves

  His classroom was one of two in a terrapin hut. It was meticulously, obsessively tidy. He shut the door behind him with a feeling of relief and safety. He was teaching a second-form class for the first period and they worked well. They were still young enough to be excited by the tools and the wood, and to be frightened by him. There was a soft hum of whispered voices and the pleasant, gentle noise of scraping and drilling. He walked around slowly, giving advice, tackling problems, then sat at his desk to prepare a fifth-form exam paper. Occasionally a child would come to him for help, but generally there was an air of peace, of studied application. He looked up sharply at a loud explosive sound which suddenly shattered the peace of the classroom. The children were still working quietly. The noise seemed to have come from outside. Then there was a frenzy of sound from the classroom next door. It seemed that all the activity of the playground had been trapped in that room. He waited for the noise to abate. It did so, only to reach another nerve-jangling climax. Cranshaw strode to the adjoining door, threw it open and yelled:

  “What the hell is going on in here?”

  The room was in uproar. Desks and chairs had been piled on one side and a group of fourth formers, barefooted, dishevelled, were smiling aggressively in the space in the middle. Then, with embarrassment, he saw a teacher who had apparently been a part of the chaos. At least it was not a teacher, but a student teacher in her final year attached to the school. She seemed unmoved by the interruption.

  “Okay kids,” she said. “Sit down.”

  They did as she said and were quiet only, he thought, because they were listening intently to the conversation between the two adults. She was wearing jeans and was barefoot too. Her toenails were pink. He stared with fascination at her toenails, trying to concentrate his eyes away from the small, firm breasts under the tight black cotton shirt.

  “Sorry if we’ve disturbed you.” She grinned and he noticed a trace of cockney in her voice. “ It’s drama workshop and I can’t use the gym because they’re practising Scottish dancing. Mrs. Phillips said that it would be okay to use this room. It’s only woodwork next door, isn’t it?”

  Without a word he retreated to his side of the door. She tried to keep them quiet for the rest of the period but the peace in his classroom would not return. It had been disturbed by long pink toenails, thighs in tight jeans and a low-necked black shirt. His concentration wavered and his head ached.

  At lunchtime he had to queue in the supermarket for the items on the list he had made that morning before leaving home. His mother was seventy now, and although she managed to get out to the shop in the village she could not carry anything heavy. In the afternoon he had a free period, but another teacher had been timetabled to use his room. He hated using the staff room. He sat in a corner, rigid with unfriendliness, terrified that someone would approach him to make conversation. Later he would say angrily to his mother: “I sat there all afternoon and no one spoke a word to me.”

  He left before four o’clock, hoping to avoid a meeting with the mass of joking teachers, who often met in the staff room for coffee before they went home. They chattered like children and he despised them. Today, more especially, he hoped to avoid Mrs. Phillips and her student teacher. But in the corridor he almost tripped over the headmaster, and had to walk along with him, listening to the praise of the young man who had recently been promoted as head of Cranshaw’s department. Carrying the plastic bag of groceries, he felt foolish. At last he reached his car and then he had to prepare himself emotionally for his meeting with his mother.

  They lived together in a small, ugly house in a street behind the Blue Anchor. They rented it and Bernard Cranshaw resented paying for major repairs, so in comparison to the rest of the street it looked shabby. He was one of a large family, but his father had died, his brothers and sisters had married and he was left at home to look after his mother. Throughout his youth he had been dependent on his mother; she had protected him from the violence—and more importantly from the sarcasm—of his father, and now she was dependent on him.

  In contrast to his room at school the house was untidy, piled with papers, slides and photographs. It irritated him, but he was helpless before it. His mother left the housework to him now and once in the house he had no energy. She sucked all the energy from him, with her intense need for his attention and sympathy. Some days he tried to talk to her, to tell her about his day at school, as he would have done when he was younger, but she did not want to listen, only to be listened to.

  She started to talk when he entered the house, followed him to the kitchen, touching, almost stroking his arm to ensure that she retained his attention as he cooked their meal. Usually she talked of his father. Her bitterness towards him had not ended with his death. She was a slight woman, still vain, still attempting to make herself attractive. Every month a girl came from the village to set and dye her hair. Whenever she went out and before Bernard arrived home from work she would apply make-up to her face. Despite her thinness she ate heartily and there was some relief as they took their meal in the dingy kitchen, but even as she ate she continued to talk. Real freedom came later. But tonight he would have to postpone it.

  “Mother.”

  She seemed surprised that he had spoken, and stared at him, her pink, glossy lips a little apart.

  “Mother, I had a letter today from Kenneth Wallis. Do you remember? He used to teach with me.”

  “I didn’t see a letter.” She was insulted that she had not shared in this detail of his private life.

  “He wrote to me at school. If you remember, he was Scots. He’s teaching now in the Highlands and he’s invited me to stay with him to see some of the breeding birds there.”

  It was out now. He should have broached the subject more carefully, more tactfully. But then she would not have understood him.

  “That was kind of him,” she said sweetly, absentmindedly.

  “Then you wouldn’t mind if I went to stay with him, just for a long weekend. Mrs. Simpson would come in every day to check that you were all right.”

  She stared at him in horror.

  “Oh no,” she said. “ Oh no, you wouldn’t want to go all the way up there.”

  She pouted her face to cry and two tears washed a furrow down the powder on her face, like rain on a dirty window.

  “No, of course not, Mother,” he said.

  As he always did, he made her a cup of tea, sat in front of the television, switched on her favourite soap opera and said:

  “I’m just out to the marsh for a while, Mother. I won’t be long.”

  She did not seem to notice him leave the house.

  Every day he went out on to the marsh after tea. As he walked away from the house he could feel that his face was flushed and sticky. The breeze from the sea made him aware of it. He forced himself to breathe slowly, to relax, to forget school and his mother. As he did so he watched a small group of waders on a pool no bigger than a puddle right at the edge of the road. Then he began to walk along the boardwalk, which he had helped to build, across the marsh to the main hide. He would just sit there a while, watching the avocets.

  The avocets had only recently come to Rushy and they had young. Cranshaw had a passionate, a loving interest in them. They were his birds. He had found the nest and he had cared for them. On one occasion he had seen a group of strangers who were taking too great an interest in the birds and the nest, and had sat awake all night, hidden behind a bank of shingle, in case they had come to steal the eggs. He would have done anything to protect the eggs, to protect his birds. Now the young were paddling around the edges of the pools, feeding themselves.

  The marsh was very still. At least in the middle of the week there were few other people to disturb him. He could hear the waves moving the shingle and the sound of the wind over the reeds. It was then that he saw that the flap of the hide was open. All the jarring tensions of the day returned. Someone was in his hide, watching his birds. Did they think that the marsh was public property
, these twitchers with their dirty habits and fancy birds? Did they think he had organized and bullied the Conservation Trust to buy the marsh, to build hides for them to be used as a doss house for spiky-haired louts with safety-pins in their nostrils?

  He pushed open the door of the hide.

  “Don’t you know you need a permit to come here?”

  It was like a nightmare. The embarrassment of the drama class was exactly duplicated. The occupant of the hide was a well-dressed elderly man who, if he showed any reaction at all, showed a little distaste, a little pity, and who took from his pocket a permit which allowed him unlimited access to the hides for the rest of the year.

  George Palmer-Jones saw a man in his mid-fifties, slight, sandy-haired, with very prominent veins on his face and neck. The man seemed only just in control of himself; he was balanced on the edge of hysteria. He was shaking now and his face was very flushed. George wished that Molly was with him. He felt awkward and did not want to be patronizing. The man gave a terrible, nervous giggle, and with a visible effort regained control of himself.

  “Sorry about that,” he muttered. “Should have known. But you get all sorts here. Twitchers most of them. Got to keep an eye on them.”

  They looked in silence at the avocets. When he felt that the man beside him was steady, more comfortable, Palmer-Jones said:

  “I suppose you get a lot of strangers here.”

  The bitterness and fury seemed to flow out of the man. He stammered as the words rushed into each other.

  “They come here as if they own the place. I’ve lived here all my life. They wouldn’t find these rarities if we hadn’t put the work in. They don’t know about the meetings we had, the pressure we put on the council to stop the development … And they contribute nothing, nothing. They’re rude and dirty. They use us.”

  “Some of the twitchers care enough about the place to want to live here.”

  “We don’t want them.” He was shouting.

  “What about Tom French?” George asked. “Didn’t you want him either?”

  “No,” he shouted. “ I bloody didn’t. I know what you’re thinking and I don’t care.”

  The man hid his face in his hands. George felt dirty. He knew that he had provoked the outburst, but he listened and registered every detail.

  “You speak as if you hated him.”

  “I did bloody hate him.”

  George spoke very quietly. “ You didn’t hate him enough to kill him?”

  The man looked at him in astonishment, but he did not question George Palmer-Jones’s right to ask. The shock of the question seemed to calm him.

  “I didn’t kill him,” Cranshaw said. “ I treated him like a son when he first came to stay here. I’m not married, and he never got on very well with his family. He came to see me at my house, and asked if I could show him around the marsh. He asked if there was anything he could do to help. I was pleased. No one here has ever shared my interest. Not really. No one that I could get on with. All my friends have moved away to find work. I made an effort to include him in everything I did. Most evenings he came on to the marsh with me. I thought that he cared about it. But he brought all the others, all those twitchers who came here and laughed at me. He spoiled it for me. I hated him. But I didn’t kill him.”

  “You wrote a letter about him, didn’t you, to some of the parents in the village?”

  “It was my duty.”

  “In the letter you said that Tom French was a drug addict. How did you know?”

  “I know things about him that you would never believe.”

  “What sort of things do you know about Tom French?”

  But the man was silent and empty now, staring out of bleak, fearless eyes over the marsh. The sky was grey and overcast and the wind from the sea blew into the hide. It was quite cold.

  “My mother will be expecting me,” he said. “I must go now.”

  “I’d like to talk to you again,” George said quickly. “Where do you live?”

  “In the lane behind the Anchor,” said Cranshaw automatically. “Anyone will tell you.”

  George Palmer-Jones watched him walk away through the marsh. In places he was hidden by the tall reeds, so that all which could be seen was the heavy brass telescope which he carried over his shoulder.

  George sat for a long time in the hide. No one disturbed him. There was no sun and no sunset, but the light seeped out of the marsh until he realized that he was staring at birds he could no longer see. Bernard Cranshaw’s vulnerability had shocked him. He knew that later he would analyze the conversation, make use of the incident, but now he felt vulnerable too, as though he had been contaminated by the other man’s weakness. He longed for Molly. The sounds of the marsh were unfriendly and disturbing. It was an effort to leave the hide.

  As soon as he had clambered down the short wooden ladder to the boardwalk he heard voices. He thought that there were just two people, men, talking quite quietly. It seemed to him that the men had come from the small hide, nearer the road, and that now they were walking ahead of him towards the village. They were other birdwatchers perhaps, dedicated birdwatchers who had waited until there was too little light to see.

  On impulse, as he passed the small hide, he walked in. The flaps had been shut and it was very dark. Suddenly, quite tangibly, he was back in Afghanistan, in Kabul, where young Europeans and Americans on the hippie trail to Katmandu sat in cafés no Afghan used, sat with their beads and bells and guitars, smoking cannabis. In the hide the smell of cannabis, mixed and enhanced with damp wood and creosote, was unmistakable. He stood for a moment, taking it in, and as he did so other unrelated memories of India returned, memories which evoked the same response as the experience had done, the same astonishment that a country could live, so easily with magnificence and poverty. He was perfectly sure of his identification of the smell. Rob had smoked it occasionally in the Land Rover. He supposed that twitchers had been using the hide. He was not shocked. He was, in a way, grateful.

  The couple must have been walking very slowly, because he could hear them still ahead of him on the marsh. If he walked quickly he should be able to catch them before they reached the village. The use of cannabis was so widespread that it would probably add little to his investigation, if he were to find out who they were, but he was interested. Besides, he needed to hurry now, to keep warm. He nearly ran the last few hundred yards, which was a firm sandy track, but when he reached the main road there was no sign of anyone. To the right the street ran straight for over half a mile to the village. There were no lights and until it reached the Blue Anchor there were no houses. There was not even a barn or a shed where a twitcher might be sleeping rough. To the left the road curved sharply, towards the White Lodge hotel. Whoever had been smoking cannabis on the marsh had headed for the hotel.

  Molly was still up when he got home but she was asleep, deeply asleep in the chair in the kitchen in front of the stove. She stirred when he touched her shoulder and drank the tea he made, but did not ask what he had been doing. Only as they were preparing for bed did she remember the phone call.

  “It was a girl called Sally Johnson. She said that she was a friend of Tom’s, and she wants to talk to you.”

  Chapter Four

  Every night since Tom’s death Sally had been the victim of the same nightmare. She dreamed that she was trying to run across the marsh, along one of the narrow tracks through the reed bed. It was nearly dark. She could feel the wet rushes catching against her legs. She was pushing Barnaby, not in a pram but in a small, square, wooden cart. It was a great effort. She could feel the dampness of the fog on her face and in her throat and lungs. The fog was thick, tangible, with a smell and a taste. She did not know why she was there, and only wanted to get Barnaby home as soon as she could. Slowly she became aware that she was being followed and that she was frightened. She tried to run faster, but the cart was heavy and the wooden wheels were tangled with weed and would not move round. The hunter, for this was how she t
hought of the person who followed her, was coming closer and was calling after her. She could not breathe. She was not sure if she were moving. The marsh and the fog seemed to be invading her body and she could not fight them off. She knew that the hunter would catch her, so she stopped to face the attacker, and stooped to lift Barnaby into her arms to comfort and protect him. But Barnaby was no longer there. Sitting in the cart like a bonfire night guy was Tom, one side of his head battered and distorted, so that he stared at her with one blank, incriminating eye. In that instant she knew that she had killed him.

  She would awake, trembling. She would switch on the light, leave the safety of her bed and go to the baby’s cot as if she believed that her fear was catching and he must be troubled by it. He would be lying warm and still where she had put him to sleep. She knew that she had not killed Tom French, but at the instant of waking, in the middle of the night, the image of his body and the scent of his death were so strong that she knew, too, that in some subconscious passion she could have done it, and the dream might not be dream, but memory.

  The first letter had arrived the morning that Tom died. It was in a plain brown envelope with a second-class stamp and an indistinct date and place mark. Written in childish capitals it said only: “You are a whore.”

  It had worried her, that someone should dislike her so much to go to all that trouble, but she had thought that it had been sent by someone in the village. She was an unmarried mother and her boyfriend often stayed the night. She knew that her morals were the subject of discussion. And at that time she did not know that Tom had died.

  The second letter was delivered by hand nine days later, while she was out at the shop, late in the afternoon. In the same writing it said: “Nasty things happen to whores like you.”

  By then she knew that Tom was dead. She sat at her kitchen table, staring at the letter, while Barnaby emptied the contents of her shopping bag on to the floor. Panic made her thinking slow and confused. Looking back she remembered the sequence of her thoughts like a slow-motion film. She should phone the police … Then into her mind came the faces of the policemen who had called a week before to interview her. In their eyes had been judgement and suspicion. Perhaps they would agree with the sentiment of the letters. She should phone Tom … Then there was the sudden sick realization that Tom was dead. She would phone Jenny Kenning … That had brought some relief.