Palmer-Jones 05 - Sea Fever

by Ann Cleeves

  The sudden change of question did not appear to surprise her. Shock had made her passive, responsive. She would be afraid of taking the initiative. Besides, she was used to doing as she was told.

  “About three years ago. I took a typing course straight after school; then I went to work in his office. Just as a junior at first, typing and filing. I became his personal assistant six months ago.”

  “What does that involve?”

  Again she smiled and answered the unspoken question. “Nothing smutty,” she said. “ Nothing like that. Sometimes he likes me to go to dinner with him and his clients. That’s all. He never married. In the office I’m more like a personal secretary.”

  “Did Greg ever ask you about your work?” George asked.

  Her mood changed suddenly, and she looked uncertain and resentful. “Who are you?” she demanded. “Why are you asking all these questions? You must be a policeman.”

  “No,” he said. “ I promise I’m not a policeman. I’ve been asked by Greg’s parents to find out why he died and who killed him.”

  She accepted his explanation immediately and looked up at him with fresh tears. “He never got on with his parents. He said they crowded him. I told him he was lucky to have a mum and dad who bothered about him.”

  “You can understand why they’re so upset,” George said, playing on her sentiment. “ They loved Greg as much as you did.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It must be dreadful for them.”

  “Greg did talk to you about your work, didn’t he?” George asked gently. “ Especially about the Rashwood Park complex?”

  “He said he couldn’t understand how they came to get planning permission to build on the site,” she said. “ He used to go birdwatching in the park, and he said the lake was brilliant in the winter.” She looked up apologetically. “ He told me what birds he’d seen there,” she said, “but I never could remember their names. I think it made him cross because I couldn’t get more interested.”

  “So he was surprised when Squirrel developed Rashwood Park?” George said, prompting her, trying to bring her back to the subject, wishing he had Molly’s patience for this sort of interview.

  “There were flowers, too,” she said. “Rare flowers.”

  “Did he ask you to try to find out how the company gained planning permission?” George asked.

  She nodded. “At first he thought Mr. Barnes must have bribed some of the councillors on the planning committee,” she said, “ but I brought home a report from the Nature Conservancy Council which said that there were no rare species in the site, and there was no reason to give it special protection.”

  So then George knew how Greg Franks and Duncan James were connected. Barnes had not bribed the councillors on Somerset’s planning committees, but the apparently incorruptible regional officer of the Nature Conservancy Council had. Greg had found out and had blackmailed Duncan James. The cheque in the letter Mrs. Franks had opened was one payment. The Rashwood brochure sent to Cranmers was an indication that another was required. Presumably Duncan had phoned the number on the brochure and had been summoned to Cornwall.

  Vicky got up and disappeared into a bedroom. When she returned, her face had been washed and more makeup applied.

  “Did Greg tell you what he intended to do with the information you’d given him?” George asked. “Was he planning to go to the police?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “Nothing like that.” She looked at him, a little embarrassed. “He said it would be a nice little earner. The import business was getting a bit risky, he said. He’d have to start taking more care. The new line might be more profitable. He seemed pleased with me. Soon afterwards he moved into the flat full-time.”

  “Did Greg tell you anything about this weekend in Cornwall?” George asked. “It might help me find out who killed him.”

  “He was looking forward to it,” she said. “ He told me it would be a real laugh. ‘A boat full of people who either hate me or owe me money, or both, all having to be polite,’ he said.” She looked awkwardly at George again. “ That makes him sound horrible,” she said, “but really he wasn’t. He was so clever at describing people. He would have come home at the end of the week and told me stories about them, so I would have laughed and laughed.”

  “Did he tell you any stories about them before he went?” George asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Did he tell you who was going to be there?”

  “No, he didn’t tell me anything else about it at all. But I knew he was looking forward to it.”

  George imagined Greg’s planning the weekend with a sort of gleeful mischief. Who else, he wondered, was Greg blackmailing? Who hated him and why? He tried to remember the night and day on the Jessie Ellen. There was tension, but all the details had disappeared in the elation after the petrel.

  “Did Mr. Barnes know that Greg was blackmailing Duncan James about the conservation report?” George asked.

  “I didn’t say anything about blackmail!” She felt she had betrayed Greg with her confidence.

  “But that’s what he meant,” George said seriously. “Isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose so.”

  Greg had made her happy, so she had persuaded herself he was beyond morality, manipulating people for his own amusement. And to entertain her.

  “Did Mr. Barnes know what was going on?” George asked.

  “No. Of course not. He’s a dangerous man. He wouldn’t allow anything to threaten his business.”

  “But Greg was threatening it,” George said. “Duncan James might have decided that he couldn’t take any more pressure and gone to the authorities.”

  “I don’t know if Greg ever thought about that,” she said.

  “What would Barnes have done if he’d found out?”

  “I don’t know,” she said again.

  Perhaps Barnes had found out, George thought. Perhaps one of the Jessie Ellen’s passengers had been paid by him to murder Greg. Then he thought he was being silly. Barnes was a businessman, not a gangster, and the idea that one of the people staying at Myrtle Cottage was a professional killer was laughable.

  Vicky was lost in thought, and he decided it was time to go.

  “Look,” he said, “can I get in touch with anyone to stay the night with you? A friend or a relative?”

  But he knew the answer before she replied. “No,” she said. “There’s no one.”

  He was in the gloomy hall when she called him back.

  “People didn’t realise,” she said. “ With Greg it was a game, a bluff. He didn’t do it for the money. Not really. It was the excitement, the sense of power. If the people hadn’t paid him, he would never have used the information he had against them. That’s not blackmail. Is it?”

  But she didn’t wait for an answer, and with her image of Greg reconstructed, she returned to her flat.

  George stood for a moment, collecting his thoughts under a streetlight. The street was quiet. He realised later that the car must have been parked with others outside the flats. He did not hear the noise of the engine until he had turned up the alley, and then it was so close behind him and the headlamps were so bright that there was little he could do to escape. He squeezed against the high brick wall just in time, and he thought it was a drunken driver, that he had had a close shave. It was only when the car braked sharply and backed with a sudden screech of tyres, then came at him again, that he realised he was the target of a deliberate attack. There was nothing then that he could do. The bonnet of the car caught him and threw him towards a row of dustbins stacked neatly against a wall. Just before he lost consciousness, he heard the clatter of a lid as it fell onto the alley and saw the trail light of the car as it disappeared into the main street.

  Chapter Ten

  When Claire Bingham had finished the interviews with the guests at Myrtle Cottage, Wargan called her back to Heanor and told her the investigation lacked direction. He had been speaking to an
officer from the serious crime squad in Bristol about Rosco’s previous conviction for arson. It was, it seemed, a simple act of revenge. He had been sacked from Sinclair’s boat yard and had set fire to the place on the same night. The files said that Rosco was a strange, moody sort of man. You could imagine him reacting to a difficult situation with a burst of violent temper. The court had accepted that Rosco had not known about the security officer’s visiting the place.

  “He probably did his boss a favour in the end,” the officer in Bristol said. “The place is all yuppie flats now.”

  Wargan called Claire Bingham into his office, and she felt as she always did in his presence, like a naive schoolgirl.

  “I can’t see your problem,” he said bluntly. “ Why are you making such a meal of it? One of your suspects, Louis Rosco, has already killed a man after a sudden fit of violence. All you need is to find a connection between him and the victim. You should be concentrating all your energy on that. Don’t bother with the rest of the bunch. Send them home if they want to go!”

  “But Rosco didn’t even know that Franks would be on the trip,” Claire said. She knew she sounded shrill and defensive, but she wanted, more than anything, to complete the investigation without Wargan’s help or interference. He had told her too many times that a mother’s place was with her children.

  “How do you know that?” he demanded. “ You’ve only Rosco’s word for it. Young Franks was into drug dealing, and Rosco had a boat. Perhaps they were working together. You need proof that they knew each other, that’s all.”

  He paused, and she watched him in the laborious process of thought. “Then there’s the boat,” he said. “How could an ex-con afford a boat like the Jessie Ellen? No bank’s going to lend a penny to a man like that. Perhaps he was making his money from drugs, too.”

  He smiled unpleasantly, and she was afraid for a moment that he was going to reach out and pat her hand. She hated him most when he tried to be fatherly.

  “Have Rosco in for questioning,” he said. “ If you can’t handle him, I’ll talk to him myself.”

  She was on her way to pick up Rosco when there was a phone call for her from George Palmer-Jones. George said that he was sorry, but he would not make it back to Cornwall after all tonight. There was an interesting lead which he felt he should follow. He was prepared to give her more details of his discovery, but her interview with Wargan had made her short-tempered. She said she was in a hurry and would speak to him on the following day.

  Rosco had spent the afternoon at the cottage on the shore. He had been sawing a dead elm into logs, then splitting them with a heavy old-fashioned axe and stacking them in a honeycomb against the house, aware all the time that there was a uniformed policeman in the lane watching him. When Claire Bingham and Berry arrived, Rosco had put his axe away and was pegging out washing on the line in the small back garden, though by then it was almost dusk, and there was no chance of its drying.

  Rosco was not surprised to see the car driven carefully down the lane. He was surprised it had taken them so long to come for him. He thought it was tactics. They would want to make him sweat.

  Claire walked round the cottage through the knee-deep grass to find him.

  “Mr. Rosco,” she said formally, “we’d like you to come with us to the police station to answer some questions.”

  He stood, poised in the fading light in the shadow of the trees, a peg in the hand stretched above his head.

  “Can you give me a few minutes,” he said, “ to wash and shave?” He did not know how long he would be away.

  She nodded, and she and Berry waited in the car for him because there was nowhere in the small cottage they could wait without disturbing his privacy. When he came out to them, he was wearing a clean shirt and black cord trousers. They switched on the car headlights as soon as he was at the door, and they could see him quite clearly. He was empty-handed. There was no gun dropped surreptitiously into the undergrowth between the house and the lane. That had been done hours ago.

  Back in Heanor Claire insisted on talking to Rosco herself. They sat in the bare, squalid interview room, lit by a bright neon strip light, and throughout the conversation she felt uneasy. Even when she should have been pleased by his answers, she felt she was making a mistake. But she was young and inexperienced and could not trust the instinct which told her he was not a liar.

  “Why didn’t you tell us about your prison record?” she asked.

  “It was something I wasn’t particularly proud of.” He had known it would come to this— the ugly interview room, the endless meaningless questions. All afternoon, with the saw and the axe, he had been trying to banish the memory of the last time.

  “You must have known we’d find out,” the inspector said.

  “Yes,” he said. He was looking down at the table. His face was brown, and she saw as his head bent that his hair was thinning and that the top of his head was brown, too. “ When the boy died, I panicked,” he said. “I thought it was an accident, and then all the questions started. It was like the last time. That was a terrible shock, too.”

  “But you were responsible for the security guard’s death,” she said. “You did start the fire at the boat yard?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said bitterly. “I started the fire.” He paused. “But I wasn’t responsible for young Franks’ death. I had nothing to do with that.”

  “Why should I believe you now?”

  He looked up at her, not expecting her to believe him, but wanting to explain. “I was happy,” he said. “There was no reason for me to spoil it.” Then he added, with his prisoner’s resignation and hopelessness: “I should have known it was all too good to last.”

  She imagined the superintendent’s sneering and refused to accept that he was telling her the truth.

  “Where did you get the money for the Jessie Ellen?”

  “It was a loan,” he said, “ from a friend.”

  “What was the name of this friend?”

  He shook his head. “ I can’t tell you that.”

  “Was this friend involved in the arson on the boat yard?” she asked with a sudden flash of inspiration.

  “No,” he said. “Of course not. How could he be?”

  “You could have been paid by someone else to set fire to the yard,” she said.

  “No. It wasn’t like that.” He paused, then continued. “Look, I’ve been asked questions like these before. By coppers a lot harder than you. I’ve served my sentence. Now it’s my business.”

  “No,” she said. “Now it’s my business. You’re a suspect in the investigation of a very serious case. And, as you said, now you’ve got more to lose. More than last time. This time there’s a girlfriend. And a daughter.”

  He looked up sharply, and at first she thought he would deny it. Then pride and a possessive tenderness took over. She could imagine him showing snaps of Matilda to strangers.

  “So you know about that?” he said.

  She nodded.

  “Leave them out of this,” he said. “Rose knew nothing.”

  “She knows you’ve been to prison.”

  “Yes,” he said. “She knows that. I’ve not lied to her.”

  “She means a lot to you,” the inspector said.

  “Yes,” he cried. “ She means a lot to me.”

  “You’d do almost anything to keep her.”

  “She’s not mine to keep.”

  “Then you’d do almost anything to make her yours.”

  The superintendent would laugh when he heard that on the tape, she thought. “My God, woman!” he’d say. “ You talk like a romantic novel.”

  There was a silence, and then suddenly he was shouting. “ I didn’t kill the boy!”

  A policeman outside the door looked in to see if Claire needed help. She shook her head briefly, and the constable went away.

  “When did you leave prison?” she asked with a calm formality.

  “You’ve got the records,” he said angrily. “ Yo
u know better than me.”

  “Almost four years ago to the day,” she said. “What did you do?”

  “I bought the boat in Bristol,” he said, “and I came home.”

  “You bought the boat,” she said. “Just like that!”

  “It took some time to find what I wanted,” he said, choosing to misunderstand the question. “And to sort out the loan from my friend.”

  “How much time?”

  He shrugged. “Six months.”

  “Where did you stay during that six months?”

  “With friends in Bristol. Different friends. I moved around a lot.”

  “Did you report to a probation officer during that time?” He nodded. “I was on parole,” he said. “I wasn’t going to take any risks. I couldn’t see the point of it, but I did as I was told.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “To the office in White Heath, just outside Bristol. A friend from the prison lived on the estate there.”

  “What was the name of your probation officer?” Claire Bingham held her breath, convinced for a moment that he would name Jane Pym. There were so many coincidences in this case that one more seemed inevitable. But Rosco shook his head, unaware of her tension.

  “I can’t remember,” he said. “It was a man. Young. Straight out of college. I expect there’ll be records somewhere.”

  “And when you left prison,” she asked, “did you go to stay with your mysterious friends immediately?”

  “No,” he said. “Not straight away. They couldn’t put me up straight away. The welfare officer in the nick found me a place for a while. In a probation hostel. I wasn’t there for long. There was a fire, and they moved everyone out.”

  Then there was the inevitable coincidence. Claire had discovered the link between Louis Rosco and Greg Franks which Wargan was so certain existed. She sat back in her chair and regarded the man with wonder and pity. It was as if he had convicted himself.

  “Can you remember any of the other residents at the hostel?” she asked.

  “No,” he said with indifference. “ They were mostly youngsters. I didn’t mix much.”