The Mill on the Shore

by Ann Cleeves

  ‘Yes,’ said Cedric with his precise, rather fussy voice. ‘Mr Morrissey was married to Mrs Cairns years ago and he came up to see Hannah, his daughter. He and Phil always seemed friendly enough.’

  ‘Really?’ George said, as if it were news. ‘Was that the only time he came in before he bought the Mill?’

  ‘No,’ Cedric said definitely. ‘He came in one other time. I remember because it was the weekend his lass died, the lass from Salter’s Cottage.’ His expression became mournful again. Before Caitlin had become the object of his dreams, Hannah had starred in his fantasies. He still remembered her in her school uniform climbing out of the bus which dropped her outside the pub.

  ‘Was she with him that weekend?’ Molly asked sympathetically. ‘Did he bring her here? You must have been one of the last people to see her?’

  ‘No,’ Cedric said, sad that he could not claim that distinction. ‘She never came in here. Her mother didn’t like it. She was still under age, you see.’

  ‘Right.’ There was a silence while Molly tried to think of some pretext for asking if Jimmy had been with anyone else on that occasion. Cedric interrupted her deliberations.

  ‘He was with some other chap,’ he said. ‘I’d never seen him before.’

  ‘That’s some memory you’ve got!’ Molly said. He glowed with the unaccustomed praise. He could not resist the temptation to show off.

  ‘Mr Morrissey was here first,’ he said. ‘ You could tell he was waiting for someone. He was sitting where he could see the door and looked up every time someone came in.’

  ‘Almost photographic!’ she said admiringly. ‘ I bet you can tell me exactly what the man looked like.’

  Cedric screwed up his face in concentration.

  ‘He was middle-aged,’ he said. ‘Fifty odd. Big build. Sandy hair.’

  ‘What was he wearing?’ Molly asked.

  ‘Suit and tie,’ Cedric said immediately. ‘As if he’d dressed up specially for meeting Mr Morrissey. Though I must say the suit looked as if it had seen better days. Not the height of fashion if you know what I mean. What I’d call a wedding and funeral outfit.’

  ‘So he wasn’t the sort of person who’d normally wear a suit,’ Molly said. ‘He wouldn’t wear one for work, for example.’

  ‘No,’ he said, pleased that she’d understood. ‘That’s exactly what I mean.’

  ‘Well!’ she said. ‘ To come up with all that detail after such a long time. I am impressed.’

  ‘I probably wouldn’t have remembered,’ he said modestly, ‘if it wasn’t the weekend Hannah died.’

  Molly pushed forward her empty glass and he filled it. His face lit up.

  ‘I can remember something else!’ he said. ‘ The man was carrying a copy of Green Scenes, you know, the conservation magazine. I was interested in horticulture then and I used to take it myself …’ His voice faded as he recalled a more optimistic time. There was a pause and he continued. ‘Mr Morrissey ran the magazine,’ he said. ‘It seemed a peculiar coincidence.’

  ‘Yes,’ Molly said cheerfully. ‘I can see that it would. Have one yourself,’ she said, handing him a five-pound note. She watched carefully as he poured orange juice into a glass. ‘ I don’t suppose you’ve seen that chap again?’

  This time he was less certain. ‘I don’t know, I’m not sure.’ He wanted to impress her again. ‘ You know, I think I might have seen him,’ he said. ‘Someone came in quite recently and I thought their face was familiar. But I can’t for the life of me think who it might have been.’ He looked at her pitifully, sorry to disappoint her.

  Two men in suits came into the lounge then with a lot of noise, banging the door, shouting to each other in loud Midlands accents. Molly guessed they were reps, early perhaps for a meeting in Mardon. Cedric went through to serve them and across the bar Molly heard them order whisky ‘to keep out the cold’. She set down her empty glass and climbed off the stool. She wanted to leave while Cedric was distracted. She thought he was so lonely that he would want to prolong the conversation, might even invent stories about Jimmy Morrissey to gain their attention. As it was she was convinced he had told them the truth. George stopped at the door and looked at the old man by the hearth, intending to say goodbye to him, but he turned his back to them deliberately and spat into the fire.

  There had been no fresh snow overnight but it was still too cold for a thaw and in the lane where there had been little traffic it still lay on the road. Everywhere was unnaturally quiet. There was no birdsong, no distant sound of cars or machinery, only the dense thud of their feet compacting the frozen snow. George walked quickly, already making plans for the afternoon.

  ‘Well?’ Molly said, scampering to keep up with him. She was annoyed because he did not seem more pleased. ‘Didn’t I say it was worth a try? At least we’ve got one fact now. We know that Jimmy did meet his anonymous correspondent in the pub and we know what he looked like.’

  ‘It doesn’t help much though, does it?’ George said. ‘The description doesn’t tie in with anyone at the Mill.’ He must have realized how churlish he sounded because he added: ‘ Look, it was a good idea and you handled that barman splendidly, but I don’t see that it takes us very far forward.’

  He half expected her then to accuse him of being patronizing but she said nothing. She was thinking that somewhere, recently, she had seen someone who fitted Cedric’s description of the stranger in the Dead Dog. But like Cedric she could not quite place him. She was to worry at it for the rest of the day but the elusive memory which had seemed so within her grasp on the walk back from the pub would escape her completely so she had to give up the struggle.

  In the garden of the Mill Timothy in wellingtons and duffel coat was aimlessly shying snowballs at a small, round snowman. Molly thought that he must have been waiting for them. As they approached he continued the repeated action of stooping to collect the snow, crushing it between red chilled fingers and flinging the ball away from him, but he watched them intently from the corner of his eye, waiting, she thought, for the right time to make his move. He waited until they were in the porch, taking off their boots, then he wiped his wet hands on his trousers and joined them too.

  ‘I’ve got something to show you,’ he blurted out to George. He had his hand on the man’s elbow to make sure of his attention. ‘There’s something you should see.’

  George was mentally preparing his questions for the afternoon’s interviews and was irritated by the interruption.

  ‘I’ve seen your snowman,’ he said, trying to sound kind. ‘It’s very nice.’

  ‘No!’ Timothy said. ‘It’s not that. Em made that. It’s in the schoolroom. Come and see.’

  George sighed unobtrusively. He supposed he would have to go along to see the model or the painting, whatever masterpiece the boy thought he had created. Molly would only make a fuss if he refused. He was saved, however, by the lunch bell, a large ship’s bell which hung in the lobby and which Jane was ringing by the string attached to its clapper.

  ‘Later,’ he said. ‘ Remind me to look at it later.’

  But after lunch he was worried that they would miss the appointment at the local newspaper office and he put the boy off again.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The offices of the Mardon Guardian were dusty and old-fashioned. The editor seemed to have an aversion to all modern technology and past editions of the newspaper were kept not on micro-film but in files on shelves in a long, windowless room. There was one large desk of the sort found in reference libraries and the whole procedure was supervised by a strict woman with horn-rimmed spectacles and a peculiar bouffant hair-style which might have been fashionable in the nineteen-fifties. There had always been stories, Molly remembered, of insects breeding inside the lacquered thatch, and while George read steadily through the newspapers she looked with fascination at the construction which seemed to stay in place without pins or clips, imagining an ants’ nest underneath.

  The newspaper was weekly and the s
tory of the swans took the front page headlines on and off over a period of a couple of months during the spring before Hannah’s death. ‘Massacre’ said one and even allowing for a small newspaper’s natural hype George thought the incident must have been more serious than Cathy Cairns had led him to believe. There was more here, surely, than a couple of swans with plumage damaged by cooking oil. The columns which followed were high on melodrama but short on fact. There were no numbers of casualties though there was one reference to the danger that ‘ the whole of the River Marr’s famous swan population could be wiped out’.

  A grainy photograph in a later edition showed a line of volunteers in waders passing the distressed birds down a human chain to the bank. There, apparently, they were cleaned and cared for by the RSPCA in an animal rescue centre until they were fit to be released. Again, no figures were given for the number of birds which survived this treatment, though there was an interview with an RSPCA inspector who said that the incident would be a test for the new National Rivers Authority. ‘We expect them to find the culprit quickly and for a prosecution to follow,’ he said. ‘It’s in the spirit of the new act that the polluter should pay.’

  ‘It did hit the national press,’ Molly said. ‘I remember now. May ’91. We were on holiday with Jonathan, Mary and the kids in Suffolk and it rained all week. There were pictures of the rescue on the television news. Jonathan was very sniffy about the expert they got to comment.’

  Jonathan, their son, was inclined to be sniffy about many things.

  ‘Yes!’ George said. ‘Then there was the piece in the business section of the Observer, speculating whether Mardon Wools would profit from the public’s sympathy for the swans, or whether its image would suffer through being associated with such a misfortune. Why didn’t we remember before?’

  ‘Old age I expect,’ Molly said cheerfully. ‘It was the picture which triggered my memory. And then the story went out of the news so quickly.’

  In the local paper too, it seemed, the story had soon faded into oblivion, overtaken by news of more redundancies from the tannery and a visit by the Princess of Wales to open a new wing in the general hospital. It was not until the autumn of the same year that the case came to court and then it warranted only one column on an inside page. The swan population had recovered apparently, and without pictures of dead and dying birds the story had lost its impact. The case was brought by the National Rivers Authority under the Water Resources Act against a fast food restaurant and take-away outlet known as the Flying Fish. The owner had admitted emptying his fryers into the drainage system but claimed that he had not been aware that the oil would find its way into the river.

  ‘It could happen to anyone,’ he said.

  The magistrate called for more education for local catering businesses and householders and ordered the owner of the Flying Fish to pay a five-hundred-pound fine.

  That was the end of it. George and Molly split between them the work of checking intervening copies of the newspaper but there was no further reference to water pollution in the Marr, or dying swans.

  ‘Is that it then?’ Molly said. ‘ Is that the story Jimmy was working on?’

  ‘In a way,’ he said. ‘But don’t you see, there’s been a cover-up? The chap from the chip shop probably did flush waste cooking oil down his drains and it might have had some effect, but it didn’t cause the extensive damage to the birds reported in the paper. He was made a scapegoat. Otherwise why would Nick Lineham disappear to Africa and why would Jimmy Morrissey be so keen on getting hold of his notes? Lineham must have sampled the water near the outfall where the swans were feeding. He must have known who the real polluter was.’

  ‘You know too, don’t you?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, I know,’ he said, and he explained his suspicions to her in full, whispering to escape the disapproving gaze of the hornrimmed librarian. ‘ But I’ve no proof at all. And I still can’t quite believe that it had anything to do with Jimmy Morrissey’s death.’

  They left the newspaper office and went out into the cold, grey afternoon.

  ‘We’ll walk, shall we?’ George said. He did not want to face Mardon’s unfathomable one-way system in the car and he thought the walk would clear his thoughts. He could see why Jimmy had dropped the story of the river’s pollution after Hannah’s death and why he had considered it important enough to take up again when he needed to restore his faith in himself. He could see where Aidan Moore fitted into it all. But he could not reconcile his knowledge of the people involved with cold-blooded murders. Molly too was silent. As she tried to make sense of George’s suspicions the man Cedric had described in the pub that morning came again fleetingly into her mind. She knew she had seen him, but had no idea where they had met.

  The National Rivers Authority had a smart office in a small block on the other side of the river from the town centre, close to the houses where Grace Sharland lived. They crossed the Marr by a narrow footbridge and in the darkening gloom saw the white shapes of swans further upstream. George stopped for a moment to look at them and wondered if it was only in his imagination that they seemed unusually sluggish.

  ‘You won’t want me there while you talk to the Conservation Officer,’ Molly said suddenly. ‘I’ll see if Grace Sharland’s at home and try to surprise her with the information that we know she took Jimmy to the Linehams’ house.’ If anyone knows what was going on, she thought, it will be Grace. She’s the one who links it all together.

  ‘Won’t she be at work?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Molly said. ‘ She finished early on the day I visited her before. Perhaps she works some sort of shift or flexitime.’

  But he hardly seemed to be listening and she walked off without trying to explain that she felt Grace had been under so much strain that she might not even have been at work.

  The NRA had the ground floor of the office block which was built of yellow, cheese-coloured stone with brightly painted fittings. It looked as if it had been made from a child’s construction kit. Inside there was the usual jungle of shiny-leaved plants and a secretary with a hang-dog expression who said that Sue wasn’t back yet actually from her meeting, but she definitely was expecting him and would he like to take a seat?

  He sat. There was a low table with some newspapers and magazines and he picked up a recent copy of Green Scenes. He had stopped subscribing more than a year before and it seemed to him now that the publication was even more bland and undemanding than it had been then. There was a feature on birdwatching holidays, an article entitled: ‘A day in the life of an environmentally sensitive gamekeeper’ and an interview with the new secretary of state for the environment which concentrated on the interior decoration of his home and his love of King Charles spaniels. He thought Jimmy Morrissey must be turning in his grave. Had he seen these recent issues? George wondered. That alone would have provoked him to take a stand on the pollution question. He must have felt some responsibility for his brainchild’s decline into mediocrity.

  The heavy outside door with its red, lollipop-shaped handles was swung open and a young woman came in. She was carrying a briefcase and a pile of files and seemed flustered. She exchanged a word with the secretary and joined him. ‘Mr Palmer-Jones!’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry to be late. Do come in!’

  He followed her to her office, muttering that it was quite all right but the sight of her had depressed him. He had hoped for someone organized, someone who could give him the facts he needed in a clear and orderly way, and she gave only an impression of disorder with her rushing and her armful of tatty files and the mud on her shoes. And she seemed so young to him, hardly more than a child.

  Perhaps because of that, when she sat behind her desk and asked him how she could help him, he told her the truth. He thought there would be no danger in telling her what he wanted. She seemed so young and inexperienced that she would not grasp the implication of it or see how serious a matter it was.

  ‘It’s rather sensitive,’ he said. ‘I’d like to
ask some questions about Nicholas Lineham, your predecessor. I think it’s possible that he removed sensitive information from this office and kept it at home. Did you meet him before he went to Africa?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘ He only gave a month’s statutory notice and left even more quickly than that in the end because he had holiday owing to him. There was quite a gap before I started.’ She looked at him carefully. Her face was still flushed after hurrying to get there. ‘As I said on the phone, I know your reputation and I’m flattered that you think I can help but you do realize that I have to know what this is all about before I answer any more questions.’

  He saw then that he had underestimated her.

  ‘It’s very complicated,’ he said slowly.

  ‘You’d better spell it out then,’ she said with some sarcasm, ‘ so I can understand.’

  He felt awkward. This wasn’t going as he had planned.

  ‘Do you know why Mr Lineham left the authority so suddenly?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t think there’s any mystery about it,’ she said. ‘He’d been interested in working in Africa for ages and the chance came up so he jumped at it.’

  ‘He was able to jump at it,’ George said, ‘because he was paid a considerable sum of money.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I believe he was working on a water pollution incident,’ George said. ‘He’d reached certain conclusions about the nature of the pollution, had probably identified the likely polluter. Somebody thought it would be more convenient if his findings weren’t made public. As you say, he’d always been fascinated by Africa but he was reluctant to give up the security of a permanent job with the NRA. Somebody gave him a little extra persuasion to go.’

  ‘I don’t understand why you’re interested. After all this time.’ He had her full attention. She looked out at him through a wildly permed fringe.

  ‘Jimmy Morrissey, the local naturalist, was writing his autobiography,’ George said. ‘I believe that he was approached with information about the pollution incident at the time it occurred but for a number of personal reasons he didn’t follow it up. Later he regretted it. It wasn’t a simple case, you see. There were implications of corruption. He wanted to use the autobiography to put the record straight, and, less altruistically, to signal his return to centre stage in conservation matters. I know that he went to the Linehams’ house and removed papers and records which had been kept there.’ He paused. ‘You may have seen on the news that since then Jimmy Morrissey has died. The police think he committed suicide but I don’t think that’s true. You see, all the notes and the draft autobiography have disappeared.’