Palmer-Jones 04 - A Prey to Murder

by Ann Cleeves

  ‘Look,’ he said gratefully. ‘There’s Mr Palmer-Jones. He works for the Department of the Environment as a Wildlife Act Inspector. Ask him.’

  Finally the policeman allowed Fenn and George into the enclosure and all the birds were put on portable perches in the back of the Range-Rover. The policeman cleared the people from the field, though by then the grass had been churned by their feet, and George thought there would be little to assist the forensic officers. Eleanor’s body was left, roped off, as if the police had already been there and begun their work. As Fenn had said, it was obvious she was dead, but George, stooped over her body in a vain, childish hope that it was all a mistake. Her skull had been smashed, just above one eye, and though the skin was not broken the shape of her face was quite altered. He thought for a brief moment that it was not Eleanor at all but some other woman, then he realized he was deluding himself. He had known from the beginning that no bird could have killed her. Even if, as in some melodramatic horror film, the hawk had been trained to attack humans, Eleanor would have had no reason to wander into the weathering ground. Now the head wound showed that she had suffered no accident, no heart attack. She had been murdered.

  He had always thought revenge a misguided and destructive emotion, but having seen Eleanor lying on the grass amidst the droppings, the dirty straw, the discarded pieces of fur and feather of the birds’ prey, he felt angry and violent. She was beautiful, he had admired her and she had been killed.

  He looked briefly around him for some smooth round implement which might be the murder weapon but there was nothing. He slipped away from the field and went into the house by the back door. He collected his binoculars and telescope from his room then joined the gossiping people who had been excited by the tragedy and were making their way down the drive to the lane. Mrs Masefield had had a seizure, some said. She hadn’t been herself for some time. It was those evil birds, they said. They would frighten anyone.

  As he turned away from the other people at the end of the drive he was surprized to find Molly beside him. It had not occurred to him to wonder where she was.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she asked. ‘Shouldn’t you stay here to wait for the police? They’ll want to talk to everyone who was staying at Gorse Hill.’

  ‘I want to go on to the hill,’ he said. ‘To the eyrie. I’ll speak to the police later.’

  He would have preferred to be alone. His anger persisted and he felt guilty too, and sorry for himself. It would have suited his mood to be alone on the hill, with the sun setting over the Welsh mountains, throwing long purple shadows over the heather.

  ‘It won’t do any good, you know,’ Molly said. She was almost running to keep up with him. ‘Brooding on your own up there won’t bring Eleanor back. You’re not eighteen any more.’

  She knew him too well. He had been seventeen when a close friend had been killed in the war. He had spent a night on the hill. It had been a romantic gesture, a way of saying goodbye. She was right. He was grown up now, too old for dramatic self-indulgence.

  ‘I’m not going to the hill to brood,’ he snapped. ‘I want to see if the peregrine young are still in the eyrie.’

  ‘You think they may have been stolen?’

  ‘Eleanor was convinced that someone was intending to take them,’ he said. ‘No one believed her. They all thought she was over-reacting. But if she came here this afternoon and caught someone in the act of theft, that might be a motive for muder.’

  ‘She was murdered?’ Molly said. Like most of the crowd she assumed Eleanor’s death to be an accident.

  ‘Yes,’ George said shortly. ‘She was murdered. But she wasn’t killed where her body was found. There was no reason for her to go that close to the birds of prey.’

  ‘You think she saw someone stealing the birds? Then the thief panicked and killed her?’

  ‘It could have happened that way,’ George said. His conversation with Molly was already forcing him to think more clearly and precisely. ‘Though it would have been a long way to bring her body down the cliff. And why dump it in the falconry centre weathering ground?’

  ‘To throw suspicion elsewhere,’ Molly suggested. At the moment it was more important for her to maintain the flow of conversation to prevent George slipping into depression, than to think intelligently and constructively about Eleanor’s murder.

  ‘It was a dangerous way to go about it,’ George said scornfully. ‘With all those people there.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Molly said. ‘If the murderer had transport. The field had been empty since the display and Fenn was asleep in his car. It would be possible to drive over the field to the weathering ground without anyone noticing.’

  But George was in no mood to concede the point and they walked on in silence.

  It was half past six and the heat had gone out of the day. There was a slight cold breeze. They had climbed the steepest point of the path and could look down over Gorse Hill. Smoke was coming out of one of the chimneys. In the valley there was the shadow of a cloud over the town so that it looked grey and distant, but the sun caught the red brick of Gorse Hill and made it warm and welcoming, more substantial and attractive than it really was. It alone in the surrounding countryside seemed to have life and vitality. In comparison the hill was dead. They walked on along the narrow sheep path.

  They heard the peregrines calling before they could see the eyrie. The birds were circling about the cliff making a high-pitched hekking. The call was relentless, unending.

  ‘It’s the distress call,’ George said. ‘The birds have been disturbed.’

  They walked along the sheep track which crossed the hillside until they could see the eyrie. Both birds circled above them and even with the naked eye Molly could tell the difference between them. The male was smaller, slimmer, greyer. The female was brown and heavy.

  The eyrie was in exactly the same position as it had been when Stuart Masefield had shown George the site. In the birds’ calls George imagined he could hear the man’s manic laughter. He longed for the noise to stop. He screwed his telescope on to a tripod balanced on the narrow path and looked into the eyrie.

  ‘Well?’ Molly asked. She was tired and hot from the climb and leaned against the boulder which had hidden Laurie and Helen the day before.

  ‘Someone will have to go down to the eyrie to check,’ George said. ‘But I’m sure the young birds have been taken.’

  He slung his telescope over his shoulder and they walked slowly down the hill.

  Eleanor was right, he thought, and no one would listen to her. She wasn’t mad at all. He would never touch her now, never know her and be important to her. His anger returned, blinding and senseless.

  There was a stile across the footpath where it led down to the town. As Molly was climbing it her foot slipped on a muddy step, she lost her balance and toppled backwards into a dry ditch. Mildly concerned and irritated by her clumsiness George slithered down the bank to help her up. Molly was unhurt. She stood up and brushed grass and leaves from her trousers. On the other side of the stile and separating the ditch from the open hill was a drystone wall. Molly was about to take George’s hand so they could climb together back to the track, but something about his face stopped her. He was staring at the bottom of the wall. The stones were uneven and loose in places. In a hole at the base of the wall was a dainty shoe made of cream leather. Molly was reminded of the fairy story of Cinderella. She thought that she was always destined to play the part of the ugly sister.

  ‘That was Eleanor’s shoe,’ George said. ‘This is where she was murdered.’

  Alan Pritchard was slumped in his chair, a can of beer in his hand, watching football on the television, when the telephone rang. He swore. It would be for Bethan, his wife. She came from Cardigan and her relatives saw Herefordshire as a strange and foreign land. They thought she needed daily phone calls to keep her in touch with home. Bethan was in the garden, trying optimistically to sunbathe, and the boys were away playing. The football game h
ad reached a critical point. Pritchard shouted, hoping that his wife would come in and answer the phone, but there was no response and it continued to ring, drowning the commentary on the television.

  Pritchard got out of his chair, his eyes still on the screen, and picked up the receiver.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Pritchard.’

  ‘Sorry to disturb you sir,’ said a familiar voice. ‘Something’s turned up.’

  He swore again, turned off the television set using the remote control, and listened.

  Superintendent Alan Pritchard seemed young for his rank. Perhaps he was forty-five but he looked younger. On first acquaintance it was hard to understand how he had achieved such rapid promotion. He was relaxed, easygoing, almost flippant. He seemed to take nothing seriously. But those who knew him better described a streak of stubbornness, of ambition which made him stick with a case until he got results. He had a temper too which dragged his colleagues out of apathy as he roared around the office, shouting at them in Welsh, but they never knew if the temper was genuine or a practised technique to make them work and enhance his reputation as a character.

  Alan Pritchard was known to be a great family man. He lived with Bethan and their four sons in a modern, ugly bungalow near the river to the south of the town. The river there was wide and sandy and the garden ran right down to the bank. The boys were always playing there, paddling and building dams. The garden was a mess, with bikes the children had grown out of, dens built in the bushes and deflated footballs. Inside there were dirty nappies in the bath and toys in the kitchen and Bethan big and blousy, feeding the latest baby and talking to her mam on the telephone. Alan loved it. He raged occasionally against the mess, the constant diet of take-away meals, the ruinous phone bills, but he would not have changed it. He would never have exchanged Bethan, wide and easy and laughing, for the nagging, shrewish housewives his friends described, or his boys for their soft, pink, well-behaved children.

  When he arrived at Gorse Hill Pritchard thought he had come to a madhouse. He had received a garbled message about a woman who had been attacked by a giant bird. The thing sounded like a grotesque practical joke and he could find no one to explain what had happened. He had not been told about the Trust’s Open Day and the remnants of the event confused him. Most of the stallholders and visitors had gone, but there were upended trestles on the lawn and rubbish all over the grass. The scene-of-crime team had not arrived – Sunday was the worst possible day to get officers out – and the family were no use to him at all.

  Richard Mead came to speak to him but was too concerned about his wife and daughters to talk much sense. ‘Speak to George,’ he said. ‘ He’s a private inquiry agent, Eleanor hired him. He’ll tell you what it’s all about.’ Then he had gone to phone a doctor because Veronica would not stop sobbing and there was nothing he could do to comfort her.

  So when George returned from the hill Alan Pritchard was asking for him. He was less concerned about George’s unofficial status than he might otherwise have been and was only grateful that in this confusion of birds and weeping women he had found someone who could explain what was going on.

  They had their first discussion in the conservatory. They sat among the plants on white wicker chairs. It was warm and humid and quite quiet. It was an incongruous setting to discuss a murder, George thought, far too old-fashioned and genteel. They should have been a vicar and his curate discussing sermons over tea and thin slices of Victoria sandwich. But perhaps it was an apt place to talk about Eleanor’s murder. It suited her.

  ‘I don’t understand any of this,’ Pritchard said, breaking in on George’s thoughts. He was big, round-faced. He had been a rugby player in his youth but he had drunk too much and put on weight. George thought from the beginning that Pritchard was a clever man, confident enough of his own ability and position to be informal, not to be worried about breaking a few rules, yet something about his manner irritated George. He seemed to have no sense of urgency. He was too detached. The policeman stretched in his chair and stifled a yawn. ‘ You’ll have to tell me what it’s all about.’

  But George did not answer directly.

  ‘Was Eleanor Masefield wearing both shoes?’ he asked. ‘ I didn’t notice. Perhaps I should have done. But I was looking at her face. I was rather upset.’

  ‘She was only wearing one shoe,’ Pritchard said.

  ‘Then I know where she was murdered,’ George said. ‘At the end of the lane by the barn. Just on the other side of the stile on the hill there’s a ditch. The other shoe is caught in there.’

  He had expected some immediate reaction, a flurry of activity, but Pritchard did not move.

  ‘Explain what you’re doing here,’ the policeman said comfortably. ‘It might help me to understand the background to all this.’

  Briefly and logically George explained his connection with the Masefield family, how his experience of working in the Home Office had led him to form the advice agency, the summons from Eleanor and her concern that the peregrine chicks might be stolen.

  ‘I didn’t have the opportunity to talk to her in any detail,’ George said, remembering with regret their last meal together. ‘The local Wildlife Trust held its Open Day here and she said she was too busy to discuss the peregrines until it was over. I presumed she was worried that some unscrupulous falconers were planning to steal the birds, either for their own use or to sell. Of course that’s illegal under the Wildlife and Countryside Act.’

  ‘Of course,’ Pritchard said, and smiled. He was so relaxed that he might have been in the pub, a glass of beer on the table, discussing last Saturday’s football match. George could not tell if he had even heard of the Wildlife and Countryside Act.

  ‘I’ve been on to the hill,’ George said. ‘ That’s how I found the shoe. I’m reasonably sure that the young birds have been stolen.’

  ‘You think the old lady was killed because of a few birds?’ The policeman seemed to think it absurd.

  ‘This isn’t a matter of schoolboys climbing trees and taking thrushes’ eggs.’ George said indignantly. He did not like to think of Eleanor as an old lady. ‘The birds can fetch a considerable sum on the international market. If Eleanor was suspicious, went on to the hill and frightened the thieves, isn’t it possible that one of them panicked and murdered her?’

  Pritchard shifted his large bulk in the uncomfortable wicker chair. It creaked dangerously. He seemed to be considering the matter.

  ‘What made Mrs Masefield so convinced that the birds were in danger?’ he asked.

  ‘A blue van was parked at the end of the lane for a couple of evenings. She seemed to find that worrying. Her family thought she was making a lot of fuss about nothing and the people she contacted in the conservation business didn’t take a lot of notice of her.’ He paused. ‘I had the impression that she knew something else but was too frightened to say. I thought perhaps she might be in some personal danger.’

  ‘What sort of personal danger?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ George said. He felt a little foolish. ‘Perhaps I was making too much of it.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Pritchard said. ‘Tell me about these birds.’

  ‘Peregrines aren’t very rare, though these are rather special. They had sentimental value for Eleanor because her husband was so attached to them. Inland English sites are quite uncommon and there was a peregrine at Sarne in the sixteenth century. That might make the birds more valuable to an interested falconer.’

  ‘And would …’ Pritchard hesitated and looked at his notes to check the name ‘… would Mr Murdoch Fenn be an interested falconer?’

  ‘No,’ George said. ‘Really it seems very unlikely. Eleanor invited him to come to the Open Day – she would hardly have done that if she thought he might be intending to rob the nest. His Falconry Centre is the most reputable in the country and I know his captive breeding programme is very successful. He would hardly need the birds himself and I don’t think he’d risk his reputation by selling them. Besides,
if he killed her on the hill it would surely be foolishness to put her body in the weathering ground where it would draw attention to himself.’

  Pritchard thought again, deeply, with his eyes shut, then changed the subject.

  ‘Tell me about the family,’ he said. ‘Would any of them have wanted to see the old girl out of the way?’

  George wanted to tell Pritchard that he was being offensive, that he should not talk about Eleanor Masefield in such a dismissive way, but instead he considered the question.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I presume that Gorse Hill will go to her daughter Veronica now, but I don’t think that will make any difference to the Meads’ way of life. They seemed to have a joint interest in the hotel. I suppose if Veronica or her husband had a massive debt there might be a motive for murder because Gorse Hill could be sold, but that seems unlikely. Veronica always seemed dependent on her mother and Richard Mead remarkably tolerant of his mother-in-law. There are two granddaughters and I had the impression there was some difference of opinion between them and Eleanor, but some friction would only have been natural.’

  ‘So,’ Pritchard said, ‘It looks as if it had something to do with those birds.’

  He stood up suddenly and George was surprized by the speed and agility of the movement. ‘Stay there, sir,’ he said. ‘ I want to make a few phone calls, tell my colleagues about that shoe up on Gorse Hill. Then I’ve got a feeling that you might be able to help me. I’ll get someone to bring you tea. I’ll try not to be too long.’

  Still talking he went out through a white door into the house. Through the open door the house looked cool and shadowy and George felt inclined to disobey the order. He wanted a bath and something stronger than tea. But if he were to find Eleanor ‘s murderer he would need the cooperation of the police, so he stayed, a respectable figure drowsing beside the potted palms in the evening sun.

  Pritchard returned about half an hour later. He came quickly into the conservatory.