Palmer-Jones 01 - A Bird in the Hand

by Ann Cleeves

  “He didn’t see me that night at the film. They must have been late coming in, because he wasn’t there when the lights went off, and I left early to go and get things ready at the Windmill. I could see Rob Earl when I went out of the hall, and I could see that there was someone sitting next to him, but in the dark I didn’t know who it was. He would never have been able to recognize me in that light. That evening, back at the Windmill. I didn’t leave the kitchen. So you see, he might not even know that I’m here.”

  George realized that for this instant she was more concerned that Peter might have rejected her, forgotten about her, than that he was a murderer.

  “Yes,” he said. “It might be as you say. But until we can find him and talk to him we can’t find out.”

  “Why? Where is he? He hasn’t run away?”

  “Not exactly. He’s gone to Scotland to see a rare bird.”

  “Do you think he killed Tom?” She said it conversationally, breathlessly.

  “I’m sorry,” George said, wondering for a moment if he should tell her, “ I can’t tell you, until I’ve talked to him.”

  “I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I should have told you all this before. I feel better now. But I was so worried about Peter. Has it caused you a lot of trouble?”

  “Only a day trip to Scilly,” he said lightly. He continued more seriously: “When you saw Adam in Fenquay on the day of his accident, you thought he might have been talking to someone in the coffee shop. Can you remember anything about the other person? Could it have been Peter for instance?”

  She looked at him sharply, but answered honestly.

  “It could have been anyone. I think it was an older person, but I don’t know, why. I really didn’t get a good enough view. I’m sure that it was Adam, though.”

  “Will you be all right here on your own? Should I phone Jenny Kenning and ask her to come over? I’m sure that she’s a good listener.” He looked at his watch. It was three thirty. Bernard Cranshaw would soon be back from school. “ I must go now.”

  “I’m fine. Barnaby will be waking soon. I can talk to him. And I’m going out tomorrow. Ella has asked me to give her a hand at the Windmill. Sandra’s gone to a wedding. It’ll be fun and she’s going to pay me.”

  As they got up, and George prepared to go, he took her hand.

  “I don’t want to frighten you, but I want you to promise that you will be careful. Don’t let anyone into the house, not even someone you know, or someone who seems quite harmless. And don’t tell anyone that you saw Adam in Fenquay that day. That really is important.”

  “Okay,” she said, not recognizing the seriousness of his voice. She was feeling happier after her talk with George. “But don’t worry. No one ever comes to visit me.”

  As he left the house George could hear Barnaby talking loudly and incomprehensibly to himself, and rattling the bars of his cot for attention.

  They had seen the black stork. They had seen it early in the morning after their night in the signal box. At the same time George would have been in the helicopter on his way to the Scillies. Tina was nearly asleep and felt very hungry, but she shared with the others a secret elation, a deep uncomplicated joy at seeing the bird, which carried them, and her, further north, to new places and different birds.

  She had resisted at first. It was only Thursday. She could still get back in time for lectures and an important tutorial on Friday, but the others would not hear of it. It was decided that if no rarity turned up elsewhere, they would stay in the Highlands until Sunday, and see some of the breeding birds. Peter especially was excited by this. So they went to the Cairngorms. In the Old Caledonian Forest they looked for crested tit and capercaillie. The sun slanted through the pines on to the moist floor of the forest. It was moss green and boggy, and there was a smell of pines and of water. Further up the mountain they saw ptarmigan, on the bare boulder scree there were dotterel, and away over a long, narrow loch they saw golden eagle.

  Adam began to relax, became, even, good company, surprising the others with a quirky sense of humour. Tina became less pompous, stopped lecturing about statistics and theories, and started to enjoy the birds she was seeing. Peter and Rob showed off their bird watching expertise. In an easy, tolerant way they were all getting on very well.

  Each evening they made a phone call to get information.

  “It’s crazy,” Tina said defiantly. “ You wouldn’t catch me coming with you to Cornwall to see something rare.”

  “You would,” Rob said. “I can tell. You’re hooked.”

  But they never phoned Ella. Rob had wanted to. He had argued that she was the best contact there was. She got to hear of everything, but Peter said that he wanted to forget Rushy for a while. It was good to get away from it. It pleased him to think that nobody in Rushy knew where they were.

  Chapter Thirteen

  George drove slowly down the steep hill to Rushy. The village of red-tiled roofs, with its trees and gardens, seemed suddenly precarious, separated from the sea only, by the marsh and the shingle bank. As he watched, the sun disappeared to be replaced by huge, solid storm clouds, which gathered out to sea. The place became tinted by a sinister, sulphurous light, like that in a sepia photograph. The village had never looked more striking. A motorist behind him sounded his horn, and George realized with embarrassment that he was driving too slowly, blocking the narrow road. Waving apologies he drove on, down into the strange brown light and the village.

  He needed proof. Terry could have given it to him, so could Adam. Terry had been gone for nearly a week and George had begun to fear for his safety. He did not know when Adam would return. It occurred to him that it would help to look again at the marsh. He was beginning to think that he knew how the body had been moved, and a visit to the pool and the marsh track would confirm the feasibility of his speculation. He would collect Molly from the Windmill, and they could walk along the marsh track, and look at the pool on the way to Bernard Cranshaw’s home.

  But when he pushed open the door of the Windmill he realized that he had not eaten all day, and the smell of cooking was irresistible. Molly was still there, still drinking tea. She was incapable of boredom, and it was an entertainment for her to gossip to Ella, and to listen to the customers talking.

  There had been a variety of people in the place. Jack sat with her first. He was back from a morning’s fishing and described some of the technicalities of his craft. She listened, genuinely interested. Local people used the cafe, although it was a little way out of the village, and Molly listened unashamedly to the women talking. It mattered to her that the young girl with the bleached hair and the whining toddler was thinking of leaving her husband and moving in with her mother, and that the heavy, middle-aged woman with varicose veins was worried about having to go into hospital for an operation. When the women went back to Rushy to collect the children from school, to prepare tea for their husbands, there was still a small group of reed cutters and bait diggers, sitting with their backs to the birdwatchers. Their accents were so strange that although Molly listened and enjoyed the music of their speech, she could not understand what they were saying. But the birdwatchers still felt that the place belonged to them. They arrived, all day, in small groups, planning a weekend in the area, wanting to know if anything had been seen.

  “Put it on the board,” Ella would say if she heard them talking about the birds they had seen. The board was an old school blackboard, salvaged when one of the nearby village schools had closed. It was covered each day with records of birds seen in the area and rare birds seen elsewhere, with witticisms and juvenile jokes and rude pictures of birdwatchers. It was the means by which information was transferred. Each evening Ella would edit it, with a duster, censoring any items of which she disapproved, giggling despite herself.

  So when George arrived at the Windmill after his visit to Sally’s, Molly was still sitting at the counter, comfortable, unobtrusive. He felt a pang of guilt and gratitude, because he had known that she would s
till be there, because she was so reliable. He smiled at her and she smiled back to tell him that she did not mind, that in fact she had been quite enjoying herself.

  “Is there anything about, Ella?” he asked, just as all the other birders had done.

  “I don’t think that there’s anything special. But look on the board!” This last phrase was shouted in the tone of exasperation a mother uses when reminding a child to close a door.

  Obediently he read the board while she made him sausage and chips and tea. There were a couple of bluethroats at Wells, a golden oriole on Salthouse Heath, good birds, but nothing special enough to bring a group of experienced birdwatchers back from Scotland before the weekend was over. They needed a real rarity. He had an idea.

  They walked from the Windmill out on to the marsh. George took Molly’s hand and described his visits to the remand centre and to Sally’s home.

  “So that’s why she always felt so obliged to Tom,” Molly said. “It must have been horrible.”

  “It can’t have been easy, being in debt to Tom,” George agreed. He continued carefully: “ I’m beginning to develop an idea about what might have happened to Tom. My discussion with Sally helped to confirm it.” Tentatively he explained his feelings about the case. “Do you think that it could have happened that way?”

  “I think you’re right,” she said after a pause. “I don’t like it, but I think that you’re right. Why do you want to look at the marsh again?”

  “Because I haven’t properly considered the practical details of my theory. It didn’t occur to me, until I drove back from Fenquay, where Tom might have been killed. It’s too late to tell if I’m right. There will be no sign left now. But we can check if my murderer could have moved the body to the pool. If it just isn’t practically possible, I’ll have to think again. I want to find Terry’s short cut into the White Lodge.”

  The marsh pool was closer to the track than George had remembered, and the body had been found in the water nearest to the track. There was a narrow sandy footpath from the track to the pond.

  “Your idea would work very well here,” Molly observed.

  George nodded distractedly and turned his attention to the track. It was pitted with ruts, where tyres had worn two grooves in the sand and the pebbles, but between the two grooves was a relatively level area of grass. He nodded again. It would be possible. He could be right.

  They followed the track to the road, then walked along the opposite hedge, away from the village. George was looking for Terry’s short cut into the White Lodge grounds. It was, when they found it, quite obvious, and they wondered why they had not noticed it before. A small gate in the hedge led from the road into the Lodge park. Two wooden planks had been laid across the ditch to make a bridge for easy access. It must have been used quite regularly by the hotel staff.

  “So you could be right,” Molly said. “ We’ve not seen anything to disprove your theory. Do you still need to see Bernard Cranshaw?”

  “I need to talk to him to eliminate him. Practically, it’s just possible that he killed Tom. I’m certain that he wrote the letters to Sally. But I don’t think that his is the sort of madness which would lead him to kill. He just seems very depressed, but you’re the expert. I’ll be glad of your opinion. In any event he may be able to give us some information. He was out on the marsh early that morning, and he might have seen something.”

  “According to Peter Littleton, he’s mad enough to kill,” she said. “When we were at Scarsea last weekend, he told me that Cranshaw was out on the marsh taking pot shots at him.”

  “Was anyone else there when Peter Littleton told you?” he asked.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Did he say if anyone else was on the marsh when Cranshaw was supposed to be shooting? What I mean is, was there anyone to confirm Peter’s story?”

  “I don’t know,” she said quietly.

  It seemed that they had arrived at the Cranshaws’ in the middle of some domestic dispute. They could hear Mrs. Cranshaw as soon as they reached the front gate. The window was open and her words were clear and shrill. There was no anger in her voice. It was cold and relentless, the voice of a woman with a justifiable complaint.

  “You never think of me. I thought you were different from your father but you’re not. You’re just the same. After all I’ve done for you. So, you’ve even started drinking. Just like him. He never talked to me unless he was drunk, and then it was only curses. I never thought you would take to drink. I thought you would have had more consideration for your mother.”

  There was a scream, so high-pitched that for a moment they could not tell if it was a man or a woman. It was Bernard Cranshaw.

  “Shut up,” he shouted. “I can’t stand any more. Leave me alone.”

  There was the sound of breaking glass.

  Molly was too used to family quarrels to be embarrassed.

  “Come on,” she said. “If we don’t get in now, he’ll walk out.”

  George, uneasy at the intrusion, knocked at the door. A sudden silence followed the sound of his fist on the door, and they realized that throughout Bernard’s emotional outburst Mrs. Cranshaw had continued talking. Only now, with the prospect of strangers to entertain, did she stop.

  She came to the door to let them in. There was a pause before she opened the door, and Molly could see that she had used the time to repair her make-up. She wore bright, irregularly applied lipstick and there were two feverish spots of rouge on her cheeks. She had the face of a marionette.

  Molly automatically took charge.

  “We’ve come to see your son, Mrs. Cranshaw,” she said briskly. George, despite the tension of the situation, was amused at the ease with which she assumed the role of social worker. “You won’t mind if we come in?”

  It would have been impossible for Mrs. Cranshaw to refuse, but she seemed, in fact, quite pleased to see them. She followed them into the front room, where Bernard Cranshaw was sitting, and began once more to talk. Cranshaw hardly noticed that they were there. He had thrown his glass into fireplace and was watching the remains of the drink run down the tiles and into the carpet. It was obvious that he had not long been home from school. There was chalk dust on his jacket. His face was very flushed. Molly turned and faced Mrs. Cranshaw so that it was impossible for the older woman to come any further into the room.

  “Thank you very much,” Molly said. “We’d like to talk to Mr. Cranshaw on his own if you don’t mind. I’m sure you’re very busy.”

  Mrs. Cranshaw was about to argue, but Molly smiled. It was a gesture so firm and decisive that it was as if Mrs. Cranshaw had been slapped. Looking very old, she turned and left the room, giving a brief, contemptuous glance towards her son. He had begun to pick up the glass, a fumbling and ineffectual attempt to appear normal.

  “Leave that now,” Molly said gently. “We can clear that up later. We want to talk to you.” She sat on the chair next to his and with a gesture of friendship reached over and touched his arm. George, still uneasy and embarrassed, stood apart and watched.

  Cranshaw’s face was still red, and a nerve in his forehead twitched, so that his eyebrows moved in a ridiculous appearance of surprise. He had very thick eyebrows. He was breathing heavily as if he were still angry, but he was making a tremendous effort to grow calm. Molly was talking softly, about the weather and teaching, and living in Rushy, waiting for some of the tension to go, waiting until he was able to talk rationally to her. Then he interrupted her.

  “How’s Mother?” he asked. “ I must have frightened her. Shall I go and see her?”

  “She’s well,” Molly replied. “You can explain to her later.”

  “She won’t understand. She doesn’t listen.”

  “It must be very difficult to live with someone who doesn’t listen.”

  “It’s impossible. I know that I should make allowances. She hasn’t had an easy life. Father was never here. She brought me up practically all by herself. But I can’t go
on being grateful. I try to explain that I make sacrifices too, but she doesn’t listen. If it wasn’t for her I could have married. Other people have so much freedom now. These young people, the children in school, some of the teachers even, they have so much freedom and they just abuse it. It’s wicked.”

  “Is that why you wrote the letters?”

  “You know about the letters?” he asked quickly. Molly nodded.

  “I’ve been so worried about them. I knew that you would find me.” He fell silent, studying the stain on the carpet and the splinters of broken glass. George was fascinated by the conversation; he was afraid to move for fear of breaking the spell of understanding between the two. Because he knew that somehow Molly did understand this man whose moods and anxieties were, to him, incomprehensible. If he were mad, she seemed capable of bringing reason to his madness.

  “You wrote the letters,” she said, in the form of a question, “because you thought that they had too much freedom?”

  “I wanted them to pay,” he said angrily. “They hurt me so much and I wanted them to pay. He didn’t care how much it meant to me, my Saturday mornings with the children.”

  Not those letters! George screamed silently to himself. I know all about those letters. What about the others, the letters to Sally? But Molly allowed Cranshaw to continue talking.

  “They liked me, they really liked me. It wasn’t like the children at school. Some of the little ones used to hold my hand. Then he started coming with us on to the marsh. I was pleased. I was glad to have him there. But he started lecturing to me in front of the children, laughing if I made a mistake. He said that I couldn’t see properly and that I was getting old. Not in so many words, but that’s what he meant. He had no right to criticize. I saw them together on the marsh one day, him and that woman from Fenquay. She was wearing one of those dresses that you can see right through, and nothing underneath. I was in one of the hides and I could see them. They had no shame. They even had her child with them. I knew then that I had to do something about it. They weren’t the sort of people to look after the village children.”