High Island Blues

by Ann Cleeves

  ‘Michael has never mentioned you,’ the woman said coldly.

  ‘Would he have done? I understood that you weren’t speaking.’

  ‘What do you want? Money?’ The woman’s voice was dispassionate. ‘You’ll have to discuss that with me. Wilfred’s an undischarged bankrupt. He has no assets.’

  In her befuddled state it took Molly a while to realize she was being accused of blackmail. She was trying to put together an answer when a door into the corridor opened. A man appeared in front of them, blocking their path. Molly recognized him from the description of his son. They must have been very similar. He was small and dark and he even had a nervous tic which might have been the result of a lazy eye.

  He was also, Molly saw, almost at once, very stupid. He might be a bully but he was the sort of bully who had started off as a victim. If Mick Brownscombe had not been bright enough to go to the Grammar School perhaps he would have ended up the same way.

  ‘Where have you been?’ He ignored Molly and spoke directly to his wife. ‘ There was a phone call for you. Some relative. I didn’t know what to say.’

  The nerve in his cheek twitched. He was very angry. He hated this place, these sick people, being dependent on his wife. Molly felt that at any moment he might lash out. Just throw a tantrum because he was miserable.

  ‘This is Mrs Palmer-Jones. You were expecting her.’ The conversation in the lobby, the oblique reference to blackmail, might never have taken place.

  Brownscombe looked at Molly. Like a butcher at a fatstock market selecting a beast. Then he dismissed her as unimportant. She could tell exactly what he was thinking. He was not sufficiently clever to put on a show. Whatever the rumours going round the village this woman was no threat. He had been worrying about nothing. He smiled.

  ‘You’d better come in,’ Mrs Brownscombe said. ‘Now that you’re here.’ The impulse to bring Molly to the nursing home had obviously been Wilf’s. She had disapproved of it.

  They had been standing in the corridor staring at each other. Wilf moved back through the door. The room was an office, rather overblown and grand. There was a large desk and a leather chair in one corner. Velvet curtains fell to the floor. A chintz sofa and armchair faced an ornate wood and marble fireplace. The gas fire had been lit. Mrs Brownscombe looked very much at home there. As if she had wandered down a floor in the department store from cosmetics to furniture.

  ‘Perhaps you could ask Ingrid to bring us some tea,’ she said to her husband, speaking slowly, as if he were one of her demented residents. Perhaps she was hoping to get rid of him so she and Molly could continue their conversation but he just went to the door and yelled the message to a woman in a blue uniform who was manoeuvring a drugs trolley down the corridor.

  They sat on the sofa and looked at the fire.

  ‘You wanted to see me,’ Molly said.

  ‘We’d heard you were asking after us.’

  ‘As I explained to your wife I wanted to pass on our condolences.’

  He accepted that without question. Molly looked at the woman. She hadn’t been taken in but had decided to let Molly continue.

  ‘You were a friend of Mickey’s then?’ he asked. He reached out to take a tumbler of whisky from the desk and she thought he was probably more drunk than she was. And that he was grieving. So much, she thought, for George’s theory that Wilf was for some reason involved in his son’s murder.

  ‘My husband knew him. From the old days. You know, when he was at university and he used to go birdwatching with Rob Earl and Oliver Adamson.’

  She expected recognition but the names seemed to mean nothing to him.

  ‘I remember them,’ Mrs Brownscombe said reluctantly. ‘We never met them but Michael used to write home from Brighton every week. It was always Rob this and Oliver that.’

  ‘Then he went to America with them.’

  ‘And that was a bloody stupid idea.’ Wilf could hardly contain himself. ‘Three months in America. Just on holiday. I said to him: “Work thirty years without a break like me and then you’ll deserve a holiday.”’

  ‘But he went anyway,’ Molly said easily, not making too much of it. Kids, she seemed to be saying, they’re all the same, aren’t they? Do what they want. Don’t even think of their parents.

  Wilf Brownscombe was not listening. ‘And now I’m on bloody perpetual holiday. Minder to a bunch of poor bastards who can’t wipe their own arses. And not even trusted to do that. Living off a woman. Do you realize I’ve not even got a bank account of my own?’ Molly was aware again of the anger, barely controlled, growing.

  ‘You had a row then?’ she said brightly. ‘Before Mick went off.’

  ‘Not in the end. In the end he went off with my blessing.’ He looked up at her. ‘Say what you like, I did my best for him.’ He stared back into his glass.

  ‘And then of course he got married,’ Viv said chattily. It was so unlike her to volunteer information that Molly realized she was worried Wilf would give something away. Perhaps a confidence or confession which would explain her fear of blackmail. ‘And he set up in business on his own. I understand he’s done very well.’

  ‘Yes,’ Molly said. ‘Did he tell you about his work?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Wilf answered angrily.

  ‘He was working closely with a charity before he died. What they call in the States a non-profit organization. The Wildlife Partnership. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?’

  Wilf shook his head.

  ‘But I believe you’re both very involved in charity work.’

  He seemed confused. ‘Before I was made bankrupt I was trustee of the hospice in town,’ he said. ‘ We still support it when we can. And we give to the Donkey Sanctuary in Croyde.’

  Unless they were magnificent actors, Molly thought, the Wildlife Partnership meant nothing to them. So that put paid to another of George’s theories.

  ‘Was Mick always interested in natural history?’ she asked. ‘Even before he went to university and met Rob and Oliver?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Viv Brownscombe said. ‘He’d have turned the house into a zoo if we’d let him, wouldn’t he, Wilf? We had seagulls with damaged wings, a hedgehog in a cardboard box and a sparrow that he’d rescued from the cat.’ She seemed eager to remember him as a boy and Molly realized that in her own way she was grieving, too.

  ‘We soon put paid to that,’ Wilf said. ‘We couldn’t have vermin cluttering up the place. Not in a hotel. We’d have the health people down on us like a ton of bricks.’

  ‘Wasn’t there a teacher at the Grammar School who encouraged him?’ Molly asked.

  The couple looked at each other but she couldn’t quite make out what they were thinking. Had they disliked the man, resented his influence on their son?

  ‘That’s right,’ Wilf said. ‘Butterworth. A weedy sort of chap. I could never make out what Michael saw in him.’

  ‘Does he still live locally? He might be interested to hear of Michael’s death. They might even have been in touch over the years.’

  ‘No.’ Mr Brownscombe’s answer was quite definite. ‘They won’t have written.’

  ‘But he does still live in the area?’

  ‘Well how would we know that? After all this time.’ She turned away impatiently.

  ‘Is there anyone else I should talk to? Perhaps an old girlfriend of Mick’s?’

  ‘No,’ Viv snapped. ‘There’s no one left here who remembers him now.’

  They sat for a moment.

  ‘It must have been a shock when Michael married Laurie,’ Molly said gently. ‘And not very convenient for you, Mr Brownscombe. It left you without anyone to take on your business.’

  She expected another outburst about Mick’s ingratitude, but all Brownscombe said was: ‘I daresay he did what he thought was right.’

  ‘And how do you get on with your American daughter-in-law? I believe she’s an attractive woman.’ It was not the sort of comment she would usually have made but Wilf seemed convinced by it.


  ‘So I hear,’ he said resentfully.

  ‘You’ve never met her?’ She feigned surprise.

  ‘Never got the chance,’ he muttered.

  ‘I don’t think,’ Mrs Brownscombe interrupted, ‘that this is any of Mrs Palmer-Jones’s business.’

  But Wilf was too drunk or too lost in regret to take any notice of her.

  ‘We didn’t even get an invite to the wedding,’ he said. ‘After all we’d done for him. He sent a letter afterwards telling us they were married. It was the same when the children were born. A card with their names. Not even a photo.’

  ‘Are you surprised, the way that you treated him?’ Mrs Brownscombe spoke quietly. She had not lost her temper. It was a warning: keep your stupid mouth shut. Then she smiled and there was even gold in her teeth. ‘As you’ll have gathered, Mrs Palmer-Jones, Michael and my husband never really got on.’

  ‘Will you get to the funeral?’ Molly asked.

  ‘No,’ Mrs Brownscombe said. ‘I don’t think we could face it. We prefer to remember Michael as he was. Here, as a boy.’

  The love of her life, Molly thought. The apple of her eye.

  She was woken at seven the next morning by the landlord banging on the door to tell her that she had a telephone call. He seemed to take delight in waking her. There was no phone in her bedroom so she took the call in the bar, surrounded by dirty glasses and overflowing ashtrays.

  She knew it would be George with more of his instructions. She started to complain. Her head was aching and she was not sure what to make of the Brownscombes. He cut her short.

  ‘There’s been another murder,’ he said. ‘ I’ve just found the body.’

  In Texas it would be one o’clock in the morning. Dark, but probably pleasantly warm. She had pulled a jersey over her winceyette pyjamas and still shivered. Rain lashed against the window.

  ‘The victim was a middle-aged spinster. Ineffective. Slightly batty,’ said George.

  That would almost describe me, she thought.

  ‘We believe she must have been a witness to the first murder. It’s a distraction really.’

  She could hear the impatience in his voice.

  ‘I doubt if her relatives see it like that,’ she said.

  ‘Well of course not!’ He hoped she was not going to be difficult. ‘What are your plans now?’

  ‘I thought I might try to trace a teacher of Michael’s. Someone who took him birdwatching. The Brownscombes claim Mick never had a girlfriend. Perhaps he made her up to impress Rob and Oliver. If that’s true this teacher is the only person he was close to before he left home.’

  ‘Would that wait?’ At least, she thought, he was asking her, not telling her.

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘You see this is all so untidy,’ he went on. ‘So many loose ends. So many distractions. I’d like at least to clear some of it up.’

  And then, as she had expected, there came the list of instructions. She scribbled notes on the back of a beer mat.

  ‘Well?’ he demanded. ‘What do you think?’

  She said that she supposed it all made sense.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  George spoke to Molly on the phone in the hotel lobby. When the call was finished he stood on the veranda and looked over the garden to the block of staff houses. They were brightly lit by spotlights. The Identification Unit had already arrived from Galveston. The medical examiner would be there soon, but the body of Esme Lovegrove still lay where he had found it, like a rag doll tossed away by a playful dog.

  The house was surprisingly quiet. Most of the guests were in bed when George had found the body and he had been discreet. He had walked quietly back to the house to speak to Joe Benson. There had been no drama, no screaming. Even Joan Lovegrove had accepted the news of her sister’s death with very little fuss. The authorities had given her permission to fly home but she had rejected the idea. She would stay with her sister, she said, until they could both leave. George thought she would probably be less lonely here.

  Joe Benson came up behind him and they leant over the veranda rail together.

  ‘I left my room at seven o’clock,’ George said. ‘ She wasn’t there then.’

  ‘So someone must have dumped the body, while you were at dinner. Or later while we were waiting to see if the lady showed up.’

  ‘But she wasn’t killed then,’ George said. ‘ Was she? She’d been missing all afternoon. So why take the risk of moving her? It was as if someone wanted to be sure that she would be found.’

  ‘Did you notice any of your party go missing during the evening?’

  ‘No, but people were coming and going all the time. It’s a big building and there wasn’t an organized event. Sometimes Rob Earl gives a slide show or lecture. There was nothing like that tonight. It would have been easy to slip away for half an hour.’

  ‘It might not even have taken that long if she was killed somewhere here in the woods. What about clothes? There might have been blood. Did anyone change their clothes during the course of the evening?’

  George did not answer immediately.

  ‘When I came into the bar at about seven o’clock Rob Earl was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. He’d just come in from a birdwatching trip. We discussed Esme’s disappearance then he went up to his room to put on a shirt and tie. He was gone for about twenty minutes. We had dinner together. He wouldn’t have had time to move the body, shower and change.’

  ‘No,’ Benson said. ‘I guess not.’

  ‘She must have seen something,’ George said. ‘Why else would anyone want to kill her? And if she did see something important on the day Mick Brownscombe died why didn’t she tell the detective who questioned her?’

  They stood for a moment in silence. A barn owl cried from the trees and George realized that he still needed the bird for his trip list.

  ‘She wouldn’t have been the sort to go in for blackmail?’ Benson suggested tentatively. ‘That’s not the impression I got of her.’

  ‘No,’ George said, but he remembered Joan’s words: Esme always enjoys a drama. He tried to picture Esme in conversation with the other party members. She had gone in for arch comments, teasing of a vaguely flirtatious nature, anything to draw attention to herself. She might have seen any information about the murder as too valuable to simply pass on to the detective. Then it would become common knowledge. Wouldn’t she be tempted to save it so she could make some dramatic revelation? Without realizing that it actually gave away the identity of the murderer?

  ‘I don’t understand how Esme could have witnessed some significant event without Joan seeing it too,’ he said. ‘They were always together.’

  ‘But not this afternoon.’

  ‘No. I wonder if she’d made an excuse about the heat having exhausted her. She just wanted her sister out of the way.’

  ‘She’d arranged to meet someone?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ George said. He thought of Esme, who had never grown up, with her floaty dresses, her powdered face and her hyacinth blue eye shadow. ‘It would have been a man,’ he said. ‘If a man had flattered her, pretended to find her attractive, she’d have ignored any danger and gone with him.’

  ‘So the killer’s a man? Well, Sherlock. I didn’t realize this business was so damn easy.’

  George smiled, nodded across the garden to the team of detectives.

  ‘Have they got a murder weapon?’

  ‘Nope. But I guess it’s more likely that’ll be found where she was killed.’

  ‘Any ideas?’

  ‘What do they call it in those TV series you sell us? A blunt instrument. That’s what they reckon it was.’

  ‘But not the chisel,’ George said, almost to himself. ‘I wonder why.’

  ‘You think there could be two separate killers?’

  ‘I don’t think anything at this stage.’

  But in a sense there was too much to think about. Too many strands to the investigation. The case was messy and he hated untidines
s. If he could clear up the minor mysteries, the distractions, then he might find out what lay behind the murders. He turned to Benson.

  ‘Would you give me permission to leave High Island for a few hours? I realize I’ve not made a proper statement but I’ll be back this afternoon.’

  The constable rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. It was the only sign that he might be tired.

  ‘Well I told you, it’s not my case. It’s not my place to give permission for anything.’

  ‘If I asked Detective Grant, do you think he would let me go?’

  Benson considered. ‘ No,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t think he would. He’s an ambitious man and he plays by the rules.’

  They stood for a moment in silence.

  ‘I’ve just thought of something,’ Benson said. ‘Now you won’t take this the wrong way, Mr Palmer-Jones? You won’t take offence?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Well, you’re not as young as you were.’ He paused. ‘ What with the jet lag and all I’d say you were pretty tired by now.’

  ‘Jet lag is a terrible thing,’ George said.

  ‘You can’t sleep in your own bed. The IDU wouldn’t want you going over there, disturbing their good work. We could ask Miss Cleary to find you somewhere in the main house but she’s probably asleep by now and I wouldn’t want to wake her. It can’t have been an easy time for her. Two killings in a week.’

  ‘No,’ George said. ‘We shouldn’t disturb her.’

  ‘What I suggest is that you find a motel room for the rest of the night. The Gulfway’s full. Miss Lily told me that only today. But you should find something in Winnie. I don’t think Detective Grant could object to that. You have a good sleep and be back here in the afternoon.’

  ‘Thank you,’ George said.

  Benson looked at him. ‘We old timers have to stick together.’ He was only half joking. ‘Now you take care, you hear.’

  George’s car was parked with all the others in a space which had probably once been a stable yard. It was at the back of the house close to the kitchen and there was no view from there of the spot-lit body and the IDU. The area was lit by a white security light. There were three big dustbins and he supposed that they would be searched by the detectives looking for the murder weapon and bloodstained clothing. It was unlikely that the murderer who had been so cool, slipping out from dinner to move the body, returning later to join the discussion about where Esme might be, would give himself away so easily.