The Mill on the Shore

by Ann Cleeves

  There was a pause and Ernie Lineham stood up. Perhaps he had heard it all before and was embarrassed by his wife’s boasting. ‘Look,’ he said awkwardly, ‘I’d best go and relieve our Linda in the shop. She works the early shift in the tannery and she only comes here to oblige. She’s got her own husband’s tea to see to. May’ll be able to help you better than me, any road.’ He nodded and disappeared. Mrs Lineham turned to them expectantly.

  ‘It must have been a shock when Nick took off for Africa,’ Molly said gently.

  ‘Not really,’ Mrs Lineham said stoutly. Her devotion obviously included the self-sacrifice of giving up his company without complaint. ‘You see he’d wanted to go to Africa ever since he was a lad. The wildlife programmes on the telly were always his favourites. You know, Zoo Watch and Johnny Morris, all the elephants and lions.

  ‘I could tell he was bright right from the start,’ Mrs Lineham went on. ‘I said to him, “You work hard, son, and you’ll be out there some day working with animals too.”’ She paused reflectively. ‘It doesn’t seem the same, does it, fish? Not so glamorous somehow. But Nick explained it all to me. Fish are just as important in the scheme of things. It’s all to do with …’ She paused again groping for the word. ‘ … the ecology.’

  ‘And he was working on fish here in Mardon too?’ George was finding it hard to contain his impatience. Molly would be prepared to sit here all night, listening to the woman’s reminiscences. She had no sense of urgency. But he needed some sign that the investigation was moving forward.

  ‘Not just fish!’ the woman said, as if George should have known. ‘He was the regional conservation officer for the National Rivers Authority. It was his job to stop the rivers getting polluted.’

  ‘Of course,’ George said. He leaned forward. ‘Did Nick leave any notes from work with you before he went to Africa?’ he said. ‘That would really be most useful to our research.’

  ‘He did,’ she said. ‘A great pile of files and paper. He made a joke about it. Half a rain forest, he said. I put everything in his old room for him. “ It’ll all be here for you when you get back, son,” I said.’

  ‘Would you have any objection if we looked through his notes?’ George said. He was allowing himself to become excited. For the first time he started to believe that this might lead somewhere. He tried to sound professional. ‘We would acknowledge his contribution of course if anything was published.’

  ‘What a shame!’ she said. ‘I’d let you have them if I could but they’re not here any more. Grace Sharland, the one I was telling you about, came here a couple of months ago.’ She paused for dramatic effect. ‘With James Morrissey, the chap who was always on the television. He asked if he could see Nick’s work. Grace had been talking about it and he thought it would help with a programme he was planning. Of course I gave him everything. He said he’d bring it back when he’d finished. He was such a nice man, older than he looks on the telly, but lovely, interested in what Nick was up to. I knew Nick would be thrilled to help. It was James Morrissey that made some of the wildlife programmes which got him started as a kid.’

  ‘And was he thrilled when you told him what you’d done?’ George asked.

  ‘No,’ she said, still surprised and disappointed. ‘ Not really. He just said: “Well I suppose it won’t do any harm after all this time. It’s got nothing to do with me any more.”’

  George wanted to go then. He thought they had got what they had come for but the woman was obviously keen to chat and Molly only encouraged her.

  ‘Why did he go to Africa so suddenly?’ Molly said. ‘ Was it because Grace broke off the engagement and he felt he needed to get away?’

  ‘Grace didn’t break off the engagement,’ Mrs Lineham said. ‘She was broken-hearted about it.’ She hesitated then ventured a mild criticism of her son. ‘I think he could have handled it better. It wasn’t kind to run away like that without a word. She deserved some sort of explanation. More than the note he left her.’

  Molly nodded sympathetically but said nothing. There was more to be told. Who else did the woman have to talk to? Her family and friends would be bored crazy with the stories of her son.

  ‘He was offered the job in Malawi before,’ Mrs Lineham said at last, ‘when the project was first thought up. They knew he’d be the best man for the job. But he’d just got the post with the National Rivers Authority then and he didn’t think he should risk leaving. There was no guarantee, you see, that he’d get it back again.’

  ‘But something made him change his mind,’ Molly said. ‘Something persuaded him to go after all.’

  There was a pause. ‘He never told me about it,’ the woman said.

  ‘But you must have guessed.’

  There was another silence. She had been carrying the burden of the information for years and the temptation to share it was suddenly too great to resist.

  ‘He came into money,’ she said suddenly. Molly remained silent.

  ‘We don’t have a lot to spare,’ Mrs Lineham went on. ‘At one time everyone on the estate used this shop. Now they all have cars and go into town …’ She was postponing the moment when she would have to put her suspicions into words. ‘But I wanted to save something for him. I thought if I put something into his building society every month it would mount up in the end. And when he came back it would be a nice surprise for him.’

  She lapsed into thought.

  ‘And when you saw the building society pass book you realized he’d been given some money,’ Molly prompted.

  The woman nodded. ‘Ten thousand pounds,’ she said. It was too much for her to contemplate. ‘ Ten thousand pounds. That would tide him over, wouldn’t it, if he came back from Africa and couldn’t find a job straight away. That’s why he decided to go.’

  ‘Where did the money come from?’ Molly asked gently. ‘Did it say in the building society book?’

  Mrs Lineham shook her head.

  ‘But you know where it came from, don’t you?’ Molly said. A clever and perceptive woman like you would know, she implied. A mother would have some idea.

  ‘I think he was paid to go away,’ Mrs Lineham said quietly.

  ‘Who would do that?’ Molly asked. George forgot his impatience and leaned forward to listen for the answer. Was this the story Jimmy Morrissey was following: the pay-off of a corrupt official? But he was disappointed.

  ‘Mr Sharland never thought he was good enough for his daughter,’ she said. ‘He was against the engagement from the start. I think he gave Nick the money to break it off and go as far away from Mardon as possible.’

  She looked up, shocked that she had given so much away but relieved because Molly did not seem horrified by the revelation.

  ‘You can’t blame him for taking it,’ she said. ‘You see what it’s like here. You can’t blame him for wanting something more exciting. Grace was a pretty enough lass but he’d dreamed of Africa all his life. He couldn’t turn down a chance like that.’

  ‘No,’ Molly said. ‘Of course not.’

  They walked out through the shop. Ernie Lineham was selling a packet of cigarettes to an elderly woman in carpet slippers. They were talking about the weather forecast. Everyone was predicting blizzards, they said. Molly thanked him for his help and they went outside. Perhaps it was auto-suggestion but George thought the air smelled of snow.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The snow started as they drove through Mardon on their way back to the Mill but at first they hardly noticed it. There was so much to sort out. Again there was the sense that they were swamped with information without any way of knowing what was important or relevant.

  ‘If there was a major pollution incident and Nick Lineham had found out, wouldn’t we have heard of it?’ Molly asked. ‘After that leak of toxic chemicals into the Camel in Cornwall the papers were full of nothing else for weeks.’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘It’s not something I know enough about. I’m not sure how easy it would be to keep a thing lik
e that secret.’ It was the ignorance which was so frustrating, he thought. Jimmy Morrissey with his background in the biological sciences would have known what to look for. ‘It would help if we could find those notes of Nick’s, but they must have been stolen with the autobiography. They’re certainly not in the study. I went through everything in there yesterday.’

  ‘But if the pollution incident was serious enough to attract Jimmy’s interest wouldn’t there have been some environmental damage?’ Molly said. ‘I don’t know – dead fish floating to the surface, a sudden build-up of algae, something like that.’ She was even more vague about the science than George.

  ‘I haven’t got a clue!’ he said angrily. ‘I need to talk to an expert. Nick Lineham must have a successor at the NRA. I’ll try to get in touch with him tomorrow.’

  The snow was heavy now and he was forced to slow almost to a walking pace. Ahead of them a gritting lorry with lights flashing was taking up almost the width of the narrow road. George flashed his lights and hit the horn but the lorry would not pull in to let him past. A shower of grit clattered against the windscreen.

  ‘What about swans?’ Molly asked suddenly.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Could swans be an indicator of pollution?’

  ‘I suppose so. Why? Are you thinking of the bird Tim found this morning?’

  ‘It’s not only that,’ Molly said. ‘Ruth told me that she came to stay with the Cairns during the Easter holidays before Hannah died. Phil found a sick swan on the shore.’

  ‘It could be a coincidence,’ George said uneasily. ‘If Phil had any worries he would have had it analysed. Unless …’

  ‘Unless?’ she said.

  He shook his head. A suspicion had been gnawing at his mind since the visit to the Linehams’, but he told himself that the idea was preposterous. At least he should discuss it with Phil before it went any further. If he could get past this bloody lorry he’d have time to call in at Salter’s Cottage and clear the matter up before dinner. It would be useful to talk to Phil anyway. Of all people he would know if any of the rivers in Nick Lineham’s patch had been polluted.

  But when they got to the cottage it was ten to seven and Molly would not let him stop. Meg would see it as an unforgivable discourtesy if they missed dinner too, she said. There was nothing to prevent George coming out after the meal and talking to the Cairns then. The cottage lights shining through the falling snow seemed to taunt him but he did as he was told and drove past. It was the first of a series of setbacks and set the tone of the evening.

  At dinner he made sure he was sitting next to Tim. It came to something, he thought, when he had to turn to a ten-year-old boy for help.

  ‘Have you ever found sick mute swans on the shore before?’ he asked.

  Tim shook his head. The memory of his lack of control that morning still upset him.

  ‘What about other species?’ George asked.

  ‘There’s sometimes a botulistic gull in the summer,’ the boy said. ‘Dad thought they picked up the infection by feeding on the rubbish tip outside Mardon. There’s nothing you can do to save them.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  Tim shrugged. ‘Some little auks were blown inland after a really strong north-easterly gale one November. We picked up one in a cattle grid by the farm up the road. But they were just exhausted. And occasionally we find oiled guillemots and razor-bills. We’re part of the beached bird survey and we get called out if there’s been an oiling incident.’

  George continued his meal in silence. There was nothing there to excite interest. It was what you would expect on any coastline in Britain. Why then had Nick Lineham been so eager to leave the country? Was it, as his mother suspected, that he was considered an unsuitable husband for a cherished daughter? The more George thought about it the more unlikely that seemed. Something had provoked Jimmy’s interest. The suspicion which had been niggling all evening grew stronger.

  As the plates were cleared and Rosie brought in cheese George found it increasingly difficult to sit still. The family talked about the weather, about the time the Mill was cut off from the main road by heavy snow and a farmer had to come with a tractor to dig them out, but the chatter seemed distant and irrelevant. Jimmy must have felt like this, George thought. He must have felt that compared to the work on his story the family were unimportant. He was convinced now that Jimmy had intended to leave Meg. It would be a tidying up too, a completion of the process which must have started when he had talked to Ruth about her and Hannah staying friends, even after the grown-ups had argued. Then another explanation of those words occurred to him and he got to his feet, although he had not finished the meal, and said abruptly that he had to go out.

  Molly telephoned Grace Sharland several times that evening. Despite the snow she wanted to speak to her and would have gone into Mardon if the nurse had been in. She was sure she could persuade Grace to talk about Nick and the broken engagement. She must know why he had disappeared to Africa. She, after all, had taken Jimmy Morrissey to the Linehams’ house to collect his notes. Or had Jimmy charmed her into doing that, without giving her a real explanation? Each time she phoned Grace was out. She left messages on the ansafone, then sat in the common room with the door open so she would hear the pay phone in the lobby if it were to ring. But the phone rang only once and then it was a well-spoken woman asking for Jane.

  ‘That’ll be Mother doing her duty,’ Jane said when Molly called her from the kitchen. ‘Checking that the black sheep’s alive and well. And not intending to embarrass her by returning to London.’

  When she had finished on the phone Jane sought out Molly in the common room.

  ‘We’re just going to open a bottle of wine,’ she said. ‘ Only cheap plonk but you’re welcome to a glass. If you hang around here there’s a danger that you’ll get invited to the flat and that’s a fate worse than death. We’ll go into Rosie’s room. Mine’s like a pigsty.’

  She took it for granted that Molly would go with her. They seemed to have taken Molly under their wing, to feel that she was a kindred spirit who needed protecting. Molly was grateful to be asked. She thought perhaps they were right and she was downtrodden too. George had rushed off without consulting her, without asking if she would like to go with him. He had tried to treat her as a partner but if there was an emergency his natural arrogance took over. Perhaps he and Meg were two of a kind.

  The girls’ rooms were at the end of a bare corridor at the back of the Mill, on the ground floor, so there was little natural light. The corridor was used to store crates of mineral water, boxes of bleach and packets of toilet paper and Molly was reminded of the Linehams’ house.

  ‘Just a minute,’ Jane said. ‘The wine’s in my room.’ She opened a door and Molly saw an unmade bed, a heap of clothes on a hard-backed chair. It was like a room in a students’ hall of residence. There were posters, a pin board covered with photos, even a pile of chemistry textbooks, dusty and unopened on the narrow window-sill. Jane saw Molly looking at them and laughed. ‘ I tried to persuade myself that if I did some work on my own I’d be able to catch up enough to go to college,’ she said. ‘Not the university of course. They’d never have me back there. But I thought some institution might be daft enough to give me a second chance. I shouldn’t have bothered. I haven’t opened one of them since I arrived.’

  ‘What will you do when you leave the Mill?’ Molly asked.

  ‘Oh,’ Jane said lightly, ‘ I don’t suppose I’ll ever leave. I’ll grow old in the service of the Morrisseys like a Victorian governess.’

  She laughed again and took a bottle of red wine from the bottom of her wardrobe. They continued down the corridor. Rosie’s room was identical to Jane’s but immaculately tidy. There were no books or posters and only one photograph: a family group shot with people who all looked very like Rosie sitting on a beach and smiling into the camera. When they went in she was sitting at the dressing table using it as a desk and seemed to be writing a letter. J
ane had knocked at the door but not waited for a reply and Rosie appeared for a moment to be irritated by the interruption. Jane seemed not to notice.

  ‘I’ve brought Molly with me,’ she said. ‘I knew you wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘No,’ Rosie said absently. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Jane said. ‘Are you busy?’

  ‘Just writing to Mum,’ Rosie said. She turned to Molly in explanation. ‘She’s ill again. Severe depression. They’ve taken her back into hospital. I feel so bloody helpless up here. I know she’d be better if we could move her back to her friends. She’d never been ill in her life until we moved away and Dad died. All they can suggest is pills and ECT …’ She was lost in thought for a moment then set the letter aside and turned to face them, determined apparently not to impose her gloom on them.

  ‘Come on then,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Where’s the wine? Why don’t you put on some music? Did Jane’s information about the lovely Miss Sharland lead to anything?’

  Molly drank the wine and shared the second bottle Jane brought from her room. In the company of the young women she felt quite at ease and for the rest of the evening she forgot the investigation.

  Ruth, too, spent the evening waiting for the telephone to ring. She sat in her room. Her mother had said that they should have a quiet family evening together.

  ‘What about a game of Scrabble before the little ones go to bed?’ she had said brightly.

  In the old days Ruth would have agreed meekly. Caitlin was the only one who had dared stand up to Meg. But since James had died Ruth thought she too had learned to be more assertive. Meg didn’t seem quite so indomitable. So tonight she had excused herself without a fuss. She was sorry, she said, but she had work to do. Then she had sat in her room with her books open and unread in front of her, staring out of the uncurtained window, watching the big flakes of snow blow against it and slide down the pane. She wondered if Caitlin were playing Scrabble and thought it would not hurt her to do her bit for once.