The Mill on the Shore

by Ann Cleeves

  ‘Why did he choose the Mill?’ George asked. ‘ Because he’d been specially happy here?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Aidan said abruptly. ‘He never said. He just gave me the commission. Now I’ll try to get it finished so I can go away and leave Meg in peace.’

  ‘Was he happy here?’ George asked.

  There was a shocked silence. Aidan looked up and met his eyes. But before he could answer Meg and the children arrived at the table with a scraping of chairs and a babble of murmured greetings. Aidan excused himself and left.

  Molly had been listening to the conversation with interest. There was, she thought, in Aidan’s attitude to Jimmy Morrissey an ambiguity. There was admiration certainly but a resentment too, a sense of impotence perhaps because he did not have the courage to stand up to the older man. Frustration. Neither did it escape her notice that Ruth watched Aidan’s departure with disappointment.

  Meg nodded to them as she sat down but seemed not to feel the need for constant conversation as she had at dinner. The children were quiet and morose and Molly wondered if there had been a family row. With some guilt she realized that the thought gave her considerable pleasure. She passed her empty plate to Jane and turned to George thinking that this coldness between them was childish. She would not allow Meg to come between them. But George, with his breakfast finished, had turned his chair to face the window and was staring at the birds on the shore. As he watched Aidan Moore appeared, silhouetted against the startling morning light and made his way slowly down Salter’s Spit. He focused the binoculars which he had brought to the table with him on a flock of waders. Molly might as well not have been there.

  If I asked him to choose, she thought, between me and the birds, I wonder which way he would go.

  The thought had not occurred to her for thirty years since the babies were young and demanding and she was working full time. George had recognized that she never had a minute to herself but still found time to go birding every weekend even if it were only to a piece of local woodland or a nearby reservoir. She had not dared to ask him to make the choice then, had seen, except in her most desperate moments, that the demand would be unreasonable. She supposed it was too late now. Perhaps Meg Morrissey had found more courage. Perhaps she had expected James to commit himself to the family and choose between the ruling passion of his interest in natural history and his love for her.

  George took the binoculars, a pair of East German Zeiss he had bought before the wall went down and the prices went up, from his eyes. But he kept the strap round his neck and she could tell that he wanted to be outside. He turned back to the room, unaware that she had been watching him.

  ‘Ready?’ he said. She nodded and followed him.

  When they were out of the Morrisseys’ hearing he said: ‘I thought I’d go to Salter’s Cottage this morning. Phil will be out but I could talk to Cathy.’

  It was an excuse to be out, walking along the shore, and they both knew it.

  ‘Why not?’ she said. She had decided to be forgiving. Meg had forced Jimmy to change and look what had happened to him. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  He looked at her with surprise, and answered carefully, afraid of being accused of bossiness.

  ‘What do you suggest?’ he said at last.

  ‘I could speak to the two housekeepers. They should have a reasonably objective opinion of James’ state of mind before he died and they’ll know as much about what went on in the family as anyone. Then I thought I’d make an appointment to see Grace Sharland, the community nurse. We need to know exactly what the medical position was.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘ Thanks.’ He was grateful because she was being so reasonable but his mind was already on the shore outside, the possibility of shore lark or lapland bunting. He hurried away before she could change her mind.

  Molly thought that there was a Victorian quality in the way Meg spoke of her domestic staff always as a couple. They had become ‘Rosie and Jane’ as if, because they were servants of a sort, they were not allowed personalities of their own. Now she saw that they were quite different in almost every way, apart perhaps from their age.

  She found them in the kitchen. The breakfast dishes had been loaded into a large industrial dishwasher which churned away in a corner and they were drinking coffee. They seemed to take her interruption for granted and were quite prepared to talk about themselves.

  Rosie had long tawny hair which she tied back in a thick, untidy plait when she was working. She had a local accent and an air of perpetual aggression which made it clear that she would allow no one to push her around. The family had come from Mardon originally – her father had worked in a factory there. He’d been made redundant when she was still at school, then they’d all had to uproot to a soulless Midlands new town which she described as ‘the pits’.

  ‘It killed the old man,’ she said. ‘He hated the work and he’d left all his mates behind. They said it was a stroke but he had nothing left to live for. Me mam’s still there but she never settled. She’s suffered from depression since I can remember but the move made it worse. And now there’s no way out. She’d not get a council house back here after all this time.’

  Rosie, it seemed, had gone to catering college because she liked cooking but starting at the bottom in some posh hotel where they mucked the food around and charged you the earth wasn’t for her. Nor sweating away in a bloody works canteen where you churned out pie and chips all day. You might just as well be on the factory floor as that. She’d wanted the job at Markham Mill as soon as she’d seen the advert. It was a chance to get back home, to the place where she’d been happy as a kid. She even dreamed of bringing her mam back some time and renting a cottage in the village for her – if ever she managed to save anything out of the pittance Meg Morrissey paid.

  All this she told Molly as they sat in the large, rather gloomy kitchen, told it almost without prompting. Astounded that anyone could be interested enough to listen so intently. She’d had a tough time, Molly could tell, seeing through the jokey presentation.

  ‘And did it live up to expectations?’ she asked, hoping that it had.

  ‘Aye,’ Rosie said cheerfully. ‘I suppose it did. We’re our own bosses at least. No one breathing down our necks all the time. Long hours, of course, but you expect that in catering. It’s not always as quiet as this. Sometimes in the summer there are three courses running at once and day visitors wanting lunch. And Mrs Morrissey throwing dinner parties for her fancy guests. Then it’s pretty hectic. But it could be worse.’

  Jane was quieter, slighter, more hesitant. She had a pretty face, dark, curly hair and an air of nervousness which disappeared slowly as she continued. She felt safer in Rosie’s shadow but could speak for herself if she had to. Her voice was southern BBC and she had impeccable manners. She’d started off at university, she said. Reading chemistry. It hadn’t been difficult to get into her provincial university – the famous girls’ day school she’d attended could get a donkey through A levels. But when she’d got there she’d seen it was beyond her. She hadn’t realized that the students would be left so much to themselves, that everyone would be so bright. She saw she’d never be able to keep up so she’d dropped out before the humiliation of failing the first year exams. She was rather proud of that, actually. She’d never said boo to a goose before. Of course her parents had been frantic. They’d both got firsts from Cambridge and it had never occurred to them that she wouldn’t get a degree. They hadn’t considered any other option for her. Her mother had been a close friend of Meg’s. They too had lived in Putney and they’d kept in touch after the Morrisseys moved. Jane had been sent to Markham Mill to give her time to sort herself out, to decide what she wanted to do with her life.

  ‘But really of course,’ she added candidly, ‘to get me out of the way. Much worse, in my parents’ view, to fail academically than if I’d got myself pregnant. They couldn’t stand the shame. What would they tell all their intellectual friends? I couldn’t
cook of course – nothing so useful – but they didn’t seem to think that would matter. And it doesn’t really. Rosie does all the difficult bits, I’m just the dogsbody.’

  They looked at each other affectionately. Molly wondered briefly if there were more to the relationship than friendship but decided it was none of her business at this stage. ‘Do you know why my husband and I are here?’ she asked.

  ‘Not officially,’ Rosie said. ‘No one tells us anything officially.’

  ‘But unofficially?’

  ‘I heard the kids talking about it. Meg can’t accept that James committed suicide.’

  ‘What about you?’ Molly said. ‘ You must have known him. Were you surprised at the way he died?’

  The girls looked at each other again. In the end it was Rosie who spoke for them both.

  ‘Aye,’ she said. ‘I suppose I am. If it had happened two years ago when I first started here it would have been different. He seemed more nervy then. Not ill as far as I could tell. Not mad any road. But anxious. I suppose he’d lost all his confidence after the accident. You had the feeling he wouldn’t go for a pee without asking Meg first …’

  She paused.

  ‘But more recently he changed?’ Molly said.

  ‘Yeah. He was much more lively. More full of himself.’

  ‘Do you know what brought that about?’

  ‘Not really. Time I suppose. If he’d had some sort of breakdown.’ But the explanation did not seem to Molly quite convincing.

  ‘And he was more confident?’ she said.

  ‘Much more confident. He went out more. He started driving again and organizing his own bird surveys up the coast. And he wouldn’t let Meg boss him around any more. He spent hours in the common room if it was quiet or in his study working on his book and she didn’t like it. She wanted him mixing with the students, especially at meal times. I heard her say to him once: “ We can charge such high fees for Markham Mill because everyone wants to meet the famous Jimmy Morrissey. You can’t hide away in here so they go away at the end of a fortnight without having caught a glimpse of you.”’

  ‘What did he say to that?’ Molly asked.

  Rosie grinned. She was enjoying the opportunity to gossip. ‘He said: “Sod off! If they want to know all about the famous Jimmy Morrissey they’ll be able to read about it soon in my autobiography.”’

  ‘So everyone knew about the autobiography?’ Molly said.

  The girls did not answer immediately. They had work to do. Jane took a scarred wooden chopping board and set it on the table in front of her. She began to peel and chop onions, carrots and leeks.

  ‘Soup for lunch,’ she said. ‘I told you I’m the dogsbody.’

  ‘So you both knew that James was writing an autobiography?’ Molly persisted.

  Rosie was weighing flour. She tipped it into a large stainless steel bowl and stood for a moment with her hands poised over it. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Everyone knew that.’

  ‘Did he ever talk to you about it?’

  ‘Once,’ she said. ‘But nothing serious. I asked him if he were going to put me in it. For a joke like. “Oh no, Rosie,” he said. “You wouldn’t want to be in it. Everyone who’s in it has got something to hide.” And then he laughed, like a kid would if he were up to mischief.’

  ‘You never saw what he’d written?’

  She shook her head. ‘I didn’t go into the study much. If he didn’t want to eat in the dining room he usually came in here to the kitchen to make himself a sandwich then took it back with him. Sometimes Meg would ask me to take in a tray to him but he didn’t really like to be disturbed.’

  ‘And you?’ Molly turned to Jane who was slicing carrots with great concentration. ‘Did you ever come into Mr Morrissey’s study?’

  Jane set the knife on the table in front of her as if it were beyond her to do two things at once.

  ‘I went in there lots of times to clean,’ she said. ‘When Florrie from the village was off with her hysterectomy I took over most of the cleaning in the Mill. But I never read any of the book. He was quite secretive about it, you know, and that wasn’t like him. Whenever I went in with the Hoover he’d shut all his notebooks in the filing-cabinet drawer. I told him he needn’t stop writing on my account. I wasn’t as fussy about the dusting as Florrie and I wouldn’t pry. “Of course not, Jane,” he said. “But it’s a journalist’s habit to protect his sources.”’

  ‘What do you think he meant by that?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I thought he was showing off, reminding me that he’d once been the editor of a famous magazine.’ She paused. ‘I did see the manuscript once when I went in to clean. He’d left it on the desk. But it didn’t mean much to me. It was open at a chart with a lot of figures.’

  ‘Did James lock the filing cabinet when he put the notebooks away?’

  ‘I hope not!’ Jane was indignant. ‘He knew I wouldn’t snoop.’ She returned conscientiously to slicing leeks.

  Molly turned back to Rosie. ‘On the day before James’ body was found you did take a tray in to him didn’t you? He didn’t come into the kitchen for a sandwich that day?’

  ‘No,’ Rosie agreed. ‘Meg asked me to take something in to him. He’d gone for a walk along the shore instead of coming in for lunch, and when she went to remind him he’d not eaten all day he sent her away with a flea in her ear. So she asked me to take in a tray.’

  ‘How did he seem then?’

  ‘Excited,’ she said. ‘Really pleased with himself.’

  ‘Did he say anything to you?’

  ‘No,’ Rosie said. ‘He hardly noticed I was there. I could see damn fine that it was a waste of good food. He’d not stop to eat it.’ That, at least, Molly thought, tied in with what Meg had told them.

  ‘Mrs Morrissey asked you to take her husband a cup of coffee that night,’ Molly said. ‘ Do you know if he drank it? Who cleaned the study the next day?’

  ‘I did,’ Jane said. ‘Usually it would be Florrie’s job but she said she couldn’t face it. The ambulance had come and taken James away. Nobody had told us he was dead but we could tell there wasn’t much hope. She tends to get a bit emotional, our Florrie, especially since her operation. So I went in, just to make sure it was tidy for Meg when she came back from the hospital.’

  ‘Had the coffee been drunk?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The mug was empty. And the glasses.’

  ‘What glasses?’

  ‘There were two glasses, smelling of whisky. James didn’t only keep his notebooks in the filing cabinet. He always had a supply of booze in there. Meg must have known but she didn’t approve. I washed the glasses up and took them to the flat where they belonged.’

  ‘So James must have had a visitor,’ Molly said, almost to herself, ‘after Meg had gone to bed.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Jane seemed hardly interested.

  ‘What about the autobiography?’ Molly asked. ‘Were the notebooks still there?’

  ‘They weren’t on the desk,’ Jane said. ‘ They might have been in the filing cabinet but of course I wouldn’t know about that.’

  She turned to Rosie with a little smile so Molly wondered suddenly if the girls shared a secret, if this whole conversation was a performance which they had prepared beforehand.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Of course you wouldn’t know about that.’

  Chapter Seven

  George walked along the shore to Salter’s Cottage. He wanted to make the most of the morning, the brilliant light. He even stopped and set up his telescope to count a flock of scoter which were bobbing in the swell beyond the spit. Even now, when he should have been engrossed in the investigation, he was hoping for something rarer. At this time of year a surf scoter or king eider was a possibility. Why can I never quite be satisfied? he thought. All this should be enough for me but I’m always wanting something more, some new bird or new excitement. Molly said he was like a spoilt kid or one of those raffish fictional gentlemen of the twenties and thirties who tried
to forget the horrors of the first war by seeking adventure. But I’ve no excuse, he thought. Jimmy would have understood this restlessness. If anything he was more easily bored than me.

  He twisted the legs of his tripod so it collapsed to a manageable size and continued along the beach. There was access directly from the shore into the Salter’s Cottage garden. Some steps had been cut out of the rock and there was a wooden gate in a whitewashed stone wall. He saw Cathy Cairns before he reached the top of the slippery, seaweed-covered steps. She was throwing rubbish on to a bonfire then she stood back to watch the smoke rise straight up in the still air. She was muffled in a heavy Berghaus jacket, her hood pulled over her head and had not heard him approach.

  ‘That’s not very environmentally friendly,’ he said. He had meant it as a joke but she looked up, startled, and backed away.

  ‘George Palmer-Jones,’ he said. ‘We met a couple of times in London.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Of course.’ It was impossible to tell if she really recognized him. He had been a guest at a dinner party she and Jimmy had given soon after their marriage, and they had had a long conversation then. He did not think he would have known her again. Then she had been striking, confident, talking about her designs and her plans for the future. Her hair had been cropped short, he remembered, almost punk. She said that things were changing and the seventies would be a great time for her. Now she looked middle-aged and ordinary. He wondered if Jimmy had, in part, been responsible for the change.

  She turned and threw another pile of garden waste on to the fire. He was still standing beyond the gate. ‘I know it’s not really eco-sound,’ she said defensively. ‘And there’s a shredder at the Mill which I usually borrow, but sometimes, with diseased wood, it’s the only way …’

  The garden was small and there were only a few misshapen trees in the shelter of the house but George did not argue. He wanted to be invited in.

  ‘Therapeutic too,’ he said.