High Island Blues

by Ann Cleeves

  ‘But he was knocked over first, then the assailant stood over him and stabbed him?’

  ‘That’s the theory.’

  ‘And your IDU. I presume they found the instrument which caused the head wound? A heavy stake with an eye at one end through which the boundary rope had been threaded.’

  It was a guess and he was showing off. He’d look a fool if he were wrong.

  Benson scowled. ‘ Someone been talking to you?’

  George shook his head. ‘I noticed that it was missing yesterday. What about the murder weapon? The thick bladed instrument? Did they find that?’

  ‘No, Mr Palmer-Jones, they didn’t find that.’ He called into the kitchen for more coffee. Outside in the road a car braked sharply. They heard high spirited men’s voices, jeers and cat-calls. Then the engine revved up and the car drove quickly away.

  George drank the strong black coffee.

  ‘Rob Earl didn’t do it, you know,’ he said.

  Benson said nothing. George thought he had gone too far but he persisted.

  ‘Why would he? What was the motive?’

  ‘As I understand it your friend was always jealous of Mr Brownscombe. He’d taken a fancy to his wife.’

  ‘That was twenty years ago! Rob’s had dozens of girlfriends since then.’

  ‘It wasn’t anyone from around here,’ Benson said stubbornly. ‘Like I said, I know these people. There are one or two who might kill a man in a fight in a bar. But not that sort of attack. Not a stranger from behind.’

  They looked at each other in silence.

  ‘Have the detectives looked into the Brownscombes’ business dealings?’ George asked.

  ‘I don’t know. You think that might be important?’

  ‘There’s a non-profit organization called the Wildlife Partnership. It’s based in Houston and the Brownscombes have done some work for it. There’s a possibility that in the UK it’s been involved in a charity fraud. Perhaps it’s not relevant but they might want to look into it.’

  ‘Sure. I’ll pass the information on. Did you discuss this with Mr Earl?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Palmer-Jones. I appreciate that decision.’

  ‘Rob isn’t a murderer,’ George said.

  Benson took a deep breath. For a moment George thought the man would lose his temper. Instead he spoke quietly. ‘Well if you tell me that, I’m inclined to believe you. But it’s not me you have to convince.’

  ‘No,’ George said, ‘but I’m grateful anyway.’

  ‘Did you ever meet Mick Brownscombe?’

  ‘A couple of times a long time ago.’

  ‘I can’t seem to get a handle on him. I mean what was the guy like?’

  ‘He was quiet, self-effacing, nervous. A country boy who often seemed out of his depth.’

  ‘Not the sort to get murdered then?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ George paused. This was Molly’s territory but he’d learned something from her over the years. ‘ The sort perhaps to be bullied and taken advantage of. A victim if you like.’

  ‘You go in for all this psychology?’

  ‘Like you, I think it’s important to know who we’re dealing with.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Benson yawned to show what he really thought of all that stuff. George took no notice and continued.

  ‘For example, it would be interesting to meet his parents. Are they coming over for the funeral?’

  ‘I don’t think they are.’

  ‘Doesn’t that strike you as odd?’

  ‘Not really. I guess they’re old and they can’t face the trip. I’m telling you,’ Benson said. ‘You’re making it too complex. In my experience murder’s the most simple of crimes. Money. Women. Revenge. What else is there?’

  Families, George thought. Fear. Failure. ‘I expect you’re right,’ he said.

  ‘So you’ll leave it to the sheriff’s department?’

  ‘I was wondering,’ George spoke slowly, ‘if I might visit Laurie Brownscombe.’

  Benson looked at him, said nothing.

  ‘I thought she might speak to me. After all, I knew her husband. We shared an interest.’

  ‘Yeah. Birds.’ The word was deliberately unemphatic but Benson made his opinion clear. Birds were for shooting. ‘But you’re not gonna talk to her about birds.’

  ‘Probably not. At least not exclusively.’

  ‘You’re pushing your luck here Mr Palmer-Jones.’

  George did not answer.

  Benson shrugged.

  ‘She agrees to see you, I can’t stop you.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Mr Palmer-Jones?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You find anything interesting, you come to tell me.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And you’re there as a friend of the family.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Mr Palmer-Jones?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You come to see me anyway.’

  ‘I’d enjoy that.’

  Benson suddenly beamed. He sat forward and set forearms, as wide as shovels, on the table in front of him. ‘ Tell me,’ he said. ‘Do you ever drink beer?’

  George smiled back.

  ‘At every opportunity.’

  ‘That’s settled then. When you get back from Houston you give me a call. You come round to my house and we’ll have a few beers. And you tell me everything that lady said to you.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Laurie Brownscombe lived in a leafy satellite town to the west of Houston. George phoned her from Oaklands before setting off in the car he had hired from the airport on his arrival. She sounded dazed and confused but not too grief stricken to take hold of the situation.

  ‘Who did you say you were?’

  ‘A friend of Rob’s. I’m staying at the Oakland’s Hotel. He asked me to come out to represent his interests.’

  ‘You’re a lawyer then?’

  ‘No. Not a lawyer. Would you mind if I visited you? The authorities have no objection.’

  She hesitated and he thought she would refuse.

  ‘Sure,’ she said at last, ‘ why not?’ And he thought that curiosity had got the better of her.

  He had been expecting someone glamorous. Like the woman described by Jason and the florist. Too much make up and designer clothes. Laurie wore jeans and a T-shirt and her sandy hair was long like a girl’s. She’s in mourning, he thought. Did I really expect her to dress up for me. He remembered Julia screaming like a demon in the woods, then playing the part of affectionate wife in the restaurant, told himself that appearances were deceptive, but still he could not reconcile the two images of Laurie Brownscombe.

  She let him into a spacious, air conditioned house. There were marble tiles on the floor. The living space was large, open plan, dotted with sofas and arm chairs. The effect was generally so bland and impersonal that it might have been an executive lounge in an airport. Only in the corner which had been turned into a study were there any individual touches: a Tucker print of a peregrine on the wall above the desk, a solid wood carving of a lapwing used as a book end on the shelf.

  Laurie went up to the carving, stroked it.

  ‘Besides his clothes and his optical gear this is the only thing Mick brought with him from England when we married,’ she said.

  ‘Who did it? It’s very good.’

  ‘I don’t know. Some friend of his.’ She turned back to face him. ‘Palmer-Jones,’ she said. ‘That’s a very English name.’

  He felt apologetic, as he did every time the double barrelled name was mentioned. It had been a pretension of his father’s. He had always hated it but hadn’t had the courage to change it while the old man was still alive. When he died it was too late. By then to have dropped either side of the hyphen would have been a foolish gesture. But it wasn’t something you could explain to strangers.

  ‘I suppose it is,’ he said.

  ‘You knew Mick?’

  ‘Not well. I t
hink I met him when he was a student. At Cley. Dungeness. Birdwatching places.’

  ‘With Rob and Oliver?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘The three of them were together when I first met them too. They were wild. I guess that’s why we got along so well.’

  But you’re not wild now, George thought. The Laurie Rob described wouldn’t have lived in this anonymous house in this respectable suburb.

  She seemed to guess his thoughts. ‘ We were young then. Things have changed.’

  ‘For the better?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure, for the better.’ She paused. ‘I know Rob thought of us as kindred spirits but I couldn’t be like him. Travelling. Living out of a suitcase. Moving from one rented apartment to another. It is like that, isn’t it?’

  ‘Pretty much.’ Though it would be more accurate, George suspected, to say that Rob moved from one girlfriend’s apartment to another.

  ‘I had enough of that as a kid,’ she said. ‘I like security.’

  ‘Mick gave you that?’

  ‘Yes he did. It was important to him too. He had a lousy childhood. His parents are still bastards. You know they’re not even coming over for the funeral? They wouldn’t come to see us wed and they won’t come to see him buried.’

  They had settled at a table in the kitchen area. There was a coffee machine on the bench. She poured coffee into a mug and handed it to George. He took it and sat down.

  ‘Do you know why I’m here?’ he asked.

  ‘You said on the telephone to represent Rob’s interests. I don’t know why.’

  ‘The detective in charge of the case thinks he killed your husband.’

  She set her mug carefully on the table.

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘They didn’t tell you?’

  She shook her head. ‘I didn’t give them any reason to think that,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t have done.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ George spoke sharply. ‘It’s not a motive they could have conjured up for themselves.’

  ‘Of course I’m sure.’

  ‘Apparently the detective thinks Rob has been infatuated with you for twenty years and when he met you again he couldn’t contain his passion.’

  ‘That ridiculous!’ But she hadn’t noticed the irony. She liked the idea. She hadn’t been so devoted to her husband that she wouldn’t have welcomed another man’s attention.

  ‘I know it’s ridiculous. That’s why I’m here.’

  She stood looking down at him, considering.

  ‘Why don’t we go outside,’ she said. ‘ Sit by the pool. There’s some shade. The kids are upstairs. They couldn’t face school this week. I don’t want them listening in to this.’

  The back garden was tidy, pleasant enough, uninspiring. George thought they probably had someone to look after it.

  ‘Tell me about your marriage,’ he said.

  Why?’ She was startled but not offended. She’s as hard as nails he thought suddenly. I wonder what made her like that. She might have confided in Molly but she’ll never tell me.

  ‘Because Mr Benson might have the wrong suspect but the right motive,’ George said, ‘and I’ve no time for subtleties. I need to prove Rob’s innocence before his group fly back to Britain.’

  ‘What do you want to know?’ She was sitting in a swinging chair made out of floral canvas, curled like a cat, her hair striped with the shadow of the awning above her.

  ‘If you were having an affair?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Never.’

  ‘What about Mick?’

  ‘I can’t be certain about that, but I wouldn’t have thought so. It wouldn’t be his style. Besides, it wouldn’t have been part of the deal.’

  ‘What deal?’

  ‘Marriage,’ she said. ‘That deal.’

  ‘Is that how you saw it?’

  She pushed against the ground with her foot so the chair rocked slightly and leant back against the padded cushion.

  ‘I’m not sure what other way there is to see it.’

  George said nothing.

  ‘It worked OK,’ she said. ‘Really it did.’

  A hummingbird came to a water bottle hung on a tree. It hovered, caught in the sunlight. They watched it until it flew away and then she started to talk. Her chair swung lazily backwards and forwards as she told her story. George listened, his eyes half shut.

  ‘I was on the road to Winnie,’ she said. ‘It could have been anywhere. I just wanted to get out of town and I had relatives round there, thought someone would put me up. Besides, it was April, and I was a bit of a birder then, though it wouldn’t have been cool to admit it. There were no sanctuaries on High Island at that time but I knew it could be good.

  ‘I was waiting for a ride, thinking it would be just my luck if the first thing that stopped was a truck with a family man inside. A good man. The sort that tells you he’s worried about you and how you shouldn’t be hitchhiking, and why don’t you just go home. Then this car stopped. I saw three guys and at first I thought: No way. Not with three guys. I mean I was pretty wild in those days but not crazy. But they were young, you know, and English and I thought: What the hell! Why not? And they were birders too, so it seemed OK.

  ‘They wanted somewhere to stay in High Island. They’d heard of it. Someone they’d met on the trip had told them about the spring warblers. You know. They didn’t have much money but they had some, so I thought of the place my aunt had and took them there. It was run-down, not grand like it is today. She was glad of the custom. And she liked them, you know. It would have been hard not to like them.’

  She stopped swinging and sat upright. Her feet were firmly planted on the paving stones.

  ‘I could have had any of them,’ she said. ‘ Even Ollie. I know he’d promised to go home to marry that girl he’d got pregnant but if I’d said to him: “Stay here with me,” he’d have done it. No question. I could have had any one of them.’

  She closed her eyes against the sun, leaned back again.

  ‘But you chose Mick,’ George said.

  ‘Yes. I chose him.’

  ‘He wasn’t the obvious choice,’ George said. ‘Was he? Why Mick?’

  He thought she wasn’t going to answer and was about to repeat the question, when she said: ‘ I knew we were two of a kind and we’d get on just fine.’ She smiled as if she realized this wasn’t any sort of answer at all, challenging him to take the matter further.

  ‘When did you set up the business?’ George asked.

  ‘About five years after we married. Mick had the skills. He’d done zoology at university. When he first got his Green Card he worked on the environmental team of an oil company based here in Houston. Then we decided to go it alone. We’re small but we’ve done OK. We worked from home at first but more recently we’ve taken premises on a small business park not far from here. It was an expense, a risk I guess, but we’ve plans for expansion and it suits us fine.’

  ‘What’s your role in the business?’

  ‘I’m a sort of general manager I suppose. I look for work, negotiate terms, do all the public relations things. Mick headed up the technical team. They do the surveying and prepare the reports. We employ young scientists on short-term contract when we need them.’

  ‘Is your work mostly oil based?’

  ‘It was at first. Surveying the route of new pipe-lines. You know the sort of thing?’

  George nodded.

  ‘We were small, no overheads. We could undercut most of the main players. And since then we’ve diversified. Now we do quite a lot of work for non-profit organizations.’

  ‘Joined the side of the angels?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘You could say that. They didn’t pay so well but Mick preferred it. And it was good for our image. Industrial companies could say: “ You’ve heard of Brownscombe Associates. You know their environmental credentials. Now they’re working for us.” We all benefited.’

  ‘What sort of work do you do for them?
’

  ‘A lot of it’s data collection. But there’s other stuff too. Fund-raising. Grant applications. I enjoy all that. A born saleswoman I guess.’

  ‘Have you heard of an organization called the Wildlife Partnership?’

  ‘Sure. We represent them. They’re a small outfit working mostly in Central and South America. They wanted advice on promotion, how to get their message across more effectively. They could have employed a public relations firm but they wanted someone who understood the science, and Mick had done work on the ground for them. They couldn’t afford much but we put together a package. It was based on the idea of shares. Getting people to invest in the future of the planet. Corny, I guess, but effective. I was going to try it out on Rob’s group but I never got the chance …’

  ‘Does the Wildlife Partnership operate in the UK?’

  ‘No. We looked into it but there were too many legal problems. In the end it wouldn’t have been worth the effort.’ She looked at him, flashed a smile. ‘You know George, there just aren’t enough rich people in Britain.’

  It would have been possible then to confront her with the Wildlife Partnership advertising material which had used Cecily Jessop’s name, but he did not think it wise to show his hand so soon.

  ‘I’d like to ask you about the time you spent together at Oaklands, leading up to the morning Mick died,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t upset you?’

  He asked the question through habitual good manners. He did not think much would upset her.

  ‘I told the deputies who drove me home,’ she said.

  ‘I’d find it helpful.’

  ‘We’d arrived at Oaklands the afternoon before. Mary Ann threw a kind of party for us that night. Mary Ann Cleary. I explained she’s a cousin. We had dinner and drinks and the boys were just talking about the weather and how amazing it would be for birds the next day. Of course it wasn’t so exciting for Mick. But he was pleased for them. He wanted it to be special. He hoped it would be good.

  ‘The next morning Rob took his party to Boy Scout Wood but we went to Smith Oaks first. There’s a shop by the entrance where you can buy the patches which allowed you into the sanctuaries. I thought you could probably pay a fee at Boy Scout too, but Mick wasn’t sure. He was always cautious. Always played by the rules.’