Palmer-Jones 04 - A Prey to Murder

by Ann Cleeves

  ‘I’ve told you. Four years ago.’

  ‘You haven’t spoken to him on the telephone or written to him since that time?’

  ‘I’ve written to him asking for maintenance,’ she said bitterly. ‘But I never had any reply.’

  ‘You didn’t tell him about a pair of peregrine falcons nesting on the hill above the hotel?’

  She looked at the policeman as if he were mentally defective.

  ‘I left him because of his bloody birds,’ she said. ‘What would I want to do that for?’

  They seemed at last to believe her. The policeman turned to Laurie.

  ‘Had you arranged to meet your father this afternoon?’

  ‘No,’ Laurie said.

  ‘But you knew he would be at Gorse Hill?’

  ‘I thought he might be.’

  ‘What did your dad say to you when you saw him?’ ‘Nothing,’ Laurie said. ‘Just that he was working there and he’d keep out of our way. That’s why I wanted to see him. To tell him to leave us alone.’

  ‘How did you know he’d be at Gorse Hill?’

  ‘My brother Steve met Dad in a pub in the town earlier in the week. Steve told me he was working here. When we left Wolverhampton Dad had a job at the Falconry Centre at Puddleworth. I knew there was a falconry display at the open day so I thought he’d probably be there.’

  ‘Did he say anything else to your brother, to Steve?’

  Laurie hesitated. He knew his mother would not want Steve implicated at all, but jealousy made him vindictive.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘ He offered Steve a job.’

  The police officers looked together at Mrs Oliver. ‘Where is your other son?’ the woman asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Nan Oliver said wretchedly. ‘ He left here straight after breakfast. I haven’t seen him since. But he’s a grown man. He doesn’t have to tell us where he spends his time.’

  ‘Where might he be?’

  She gave the names and addresses of some friends. At last they seemed satisfied and left.

  Oliver’s van was found parked that evening near the station in Shrewsbury but he and Steve seemed to have disappeared.

  At Gorse Hill each of the women was isolated in her own room and seemed unable to receive strength or comfort from the rest of the family. Richard Mead scuttled between them with useless bursts of energy, but when they heard him coming they shrank away from the sound and pretended not to hear the tap on the door, the soft words of sympathy. It had become his main purpose in life to please his women and make them happy. Now it seemed he was a failure even at that.

  Since he had met Veronica she had depended on him. His friends told him, when they first married, that he was infatuated with her and that soon the honeymoon would be over. He would realize what a mistake he had made. She was too young for him. She was silly. But the honeymoon had never ended and he was still entranced by her prettiness and her trust.

  It had been no great sacrifice to sell the photographic studio, so that Veronica could move back to Gorse Hill to be with her mother. The only way to make a living was to do an endless round of tedious weddings and sentimental portraits of fat toddlers. There was only a limited market for the landscape and wildlife photographs he most enjoyed. He had not begrudged Veronica the lack of his own independence, but he hoped that she might recognize it as an expression of his love and be a little grateful. Now her rejection hurt him deeply. She seemed hardly to recognize that he was there.

  In those hours after Eleanor’s death he seemed to age. Molly was in the kitchen washing the cups and plates which remained after the Open Day, and it seemed to her that each time he returned from one of his forays upstairs, to persuade the women to eat, to drink, to talk, he seemed smaller, more grey.

  ‘You shouldn’t be doing that,’ he said once, seeming to notice her for the first time. ‘You’re a guest.’

  ‘I’m nearly finished,’ she said. ‘I’d rather be doing something.’ She dried the last teaspoon and put it with the pile of cutlery on the draining board.

  ‘What will you do about the hotel?’ she asked. He had always been calm and practical. She hoped a discussion of immediate problems might help him.

  ‘I’ve asked all the guests to leave,’ he said. ‘The police want to talk to them first, but they have all agreed to go tonight.’

  ‘Would you like us to leave?’ She thought that George would prefer to stay. She could tell he was already involved with the investigation. But if Richard Mead found their presence an additional strain they would have to go.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Mead said. At first, when Eleanor’s body had been found he had longed to be rid of the police, the spectators, the strange people wandering through the house and gardens. Now he was daunted by the thought of the family alone, fragmented in the big house. ‘ No,’ he said. ‘Please don’t leave. Not yet.’ He sat for a moment in silence, then stood up suddenly.

  ‘I need a drink,’ he said. ‘Do you want one?’

  She nodded. He needed the companionship of someone to drink with.

  ‘Poor old Eleanor,’ he said. ‘She was a bossy interfering old lady, but I’ll miss her. She had style.’ They drank in silence.

  Pritchard came into the room so quietly that they did not notice him until he was standing between them at the table.

  ‘I wanted to tell you,’ he said. ‘That we’ve taken the body now.’

  ‘I don’t know what to do about the funeral,’ Richard said. ‘ I don’t know what arrangements to make.’

  ‘Shall we leave all that until tomorrow?’ Pritchard said gently. He sat down.

  ‘We want to talk to someone called Frank Oliver in connection with your mother-in-law’s death,’ Pritchard said. ‘ Does the name mean anything to you?’

  Richard Mead shook his head. ‘Nan Oliver works for us,’ he said. ‘Is he some relation?’

  ‘Her ex-husband. He works for Murdoch Fenn, the falconer. We think Mrs Masefield frightened him while he was taking the young peregrines.’

  ‘So she was right,’ Richard Mead said. ‘We all made fun of her and she was right all the time.’

  ‘Did Mrs Masefield tell you how many young birds were in the eyrie?

  ‘Two,’ Mead said. ‘There were two chicks.’

  ‘You didn’t see anyone strange in the house today?’

  ‘No,’ Mead said. ‘But Oliver might have come in. At the end of the afternoon I was in the office counting the money for the Open Day, but I spent a lot of the day outside.’

  ‘When did you last see Mrs Masefield?’

  Richard thought. ‘At the opening ceremony I think,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember seeing her after that.’

  There was a pause. ‘I’m sorry,’ Pritchard said. ‘I’ll need to talk to the girl who found the body. Your youngest daughter. Frances is it?’

  ‘No,’ Mead said. ‘That’s impossible. She’s still lying in her room. She’s very upset.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Pritchard said, ‘but I’ll have to talk to her. Mrs Masefield can’t have been lying in that field for very long without someone seeing her. Your daughter may have seen something. We need to know. Of course you can be with her when we talk to her.’

  Richard Mead looked around him as if searching desperately for a way to prevent the policeman from disturbing his daughter. His glance fell on to Molly.

  ‘You come too,’ he said. ‘You were a social worker. You were used to this sort of thing. You can make sure they don’t upset her.’

  Molly felt awkward. It was none of her business. But she was curious too. She looked at the policeman. ‘Is that all right?’

  Pritchard shrugged. ‘Why not? If it makes Mr Mead feel happier.’

  In her room Fanny had stopped feeling queasy after the faint and was beginning to be hungry. She wondered what would happen about dinner. If she went down to the kitchen to find out her father would make a fuss. When there was a knock at the bedroom door she hoped it was her father again, with a tray of sandwiche
s and a glass of Coke, but this time he was empty-handed and he was followed by a fat man and the little lady who had been staying at the hotel. She looked at them rudely. She did not know what they wanted.

  ‘Are you feeling better, poppet?’ Richard asked, sitting beside her on the bed. She nodded. She wished he would stand up and talk properly. He was showing her up in front of these people, talking to her as if she were a baby. It was nice to feel him so worried about her, but not in front of strangers.

  ‘This is Superintendent Pritchard,’ Mead said. ‘He wants to talk to you. Can you answer some of his questions?’

  She nodded again. She was lying on the bed, fully clothed.

  ‘I’ll get up,’ she said.

  ‘Are you sure? Do you feel well enough?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said and swung her legs on to the floor. Her father helped her to her feet.

  She sat on a window seat, by the long narrow window which was at the side of the house and looked down the hill towards the town, away from the lawns where the stalls had been set out for the Open Day. Pritchard sat on the stool by the desk where she did her homework. Molly stood in the corner, just inside the door.

  ‘Can you tell me what happened?’ Pritchard said. ‘ What made you go to look at the birds?’

  There was nothing much else to do, she said. The stalls were packing up. She had seen one of the falconry displays and she had wanted to get a closer look at the birds.

  ‘Did you see anyone else in the field?’

  She shook her head. It was really boring, she said. Everyone had started to go home.

  ‘Where was Mr Fenn, the falconer?’

  ‘Sitting in his Range-Rover.’ She treated Pritchard as a teacher, whose job it was to prise the answers from her.

  ‘Did he see you?’

  She shook her head. Then she added grudgingly: ‘He was asleep. The car radio was on – I could hear talking – but he was definitely asleep. He was snoring.’ She stifled a nervous giggle.

  ‘So no one stopped you going right up to the weathering ground – the corner of the field where the birds were?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you see a blue van, an old blue van, parked anywhere nearby?’

  She thought. ‘It was driving away,’ she said. ‘I saw it before I got to the field. It was going really fast.’

  ‘Did you see the driver?’ Pritchard asked.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘If I saw him I don’t remember.’

  ‘Then you went up to the rope and saw your grandmother lying on the grass near the big hawk?’

  ‘Not straight away,’ she said. ‘I was looking at the bird. It seemed to be staring straight at me. Then I saw her.’

  She turned away from the policeman and looked out of the window. She seemed very pale and Molly thought she might faint again.

  ‘That’s enough,’ Richard Mead said angrily, jumping up from the bed. ‘Can’t you see she’s had enough?’

  But Pritchard remained seated.

  ‘She’s being very brave,’ he said. ‘And very helpful. I’m sure she can answer a few more questions.’

  Fanny turned back into the room. ‘It’s all right, Dad,’ she said. ‘Really.’

  ‘Did you speak to your grandmother during, the afternoon?’ Pritchard asked. ‘Did she say anything about going on to the hill?’

  ‘I didn’t speak to her,’ Fanny said, ‘but I saw her. I saw her go out of the front gate and up the lane.’

  ‘What time was that?’ Pritchard asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It was in the middle of the afternoon.’ ‘Where were you?’ he asked. ‘How did you come to see her leave

  the house?’

  She blushed. ‘I was at the top of the cedar tree.’

  Pritchard stood up and held out his hand towards the girl.

  ‘Thank you for your help, Miss Mead,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to

  have disturbed you.’

  She gave him a sudden beautiful smile.

  Helen was so unhappy that she could not think clearly. She lay, self-indulgently miserable, her mind blank. It was not just that she was grieving for her grandmother, though Eleanor had always liked her and been kind to her. ‘ Helen will do well,’ Eleanor had said. ‘She’s a worker.’ The comments had usually been made in comparison to Fanny, and Helen had known she was the favourite granddaughter.

  Helen had seen Eleanor’s body. She had heard Fanny’s screaming and had run with the others to the weathering ground and had shouted ineffectually in an attempt to frighten the bird away from her grandmother’s body. She had seen her grandmother, so upright and dignified in life, lying in the mud, her dress crumpled and wrinkled above her knees. The huge and powerful hawk dominated the scene. Its talons pierced the woman’s flesh and the beak pointed towards her eyes. So it was natural to be dazed and to want to erase the memory of the sight from her mind.

  What was not natural, Helen felt, was to care more about Laurie’s disappearance than her grandmother’s death. Why had he deserted her? He must have realized that she would be devastated by Eleanor’s death. She had made no definite arrangement to meet him but she had taken it for granted that she would see him before he went home. At the back of her mind there was the anxiety that there might be something suspicious in his failure to find her again. He had been behaving so oddly. That thought was so terrible that she refused to recognize it. She lay, half asleep on the bed, waiting for the pain to pass.

  When there was a knock on the door she leapt up immediately to open it. She knew it was probably her father, but hoped Laurie might be there, that at least there would be a message from him. She was surprized to see three people there – her father, the quiet little old lady Eleanor had invited to Gorse Hill, and a stranger. She stared at them for a moment, shock making her thoughts and responses sluggish.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘ Do you want to talk to me?’

  ‘This is Superintendent Pritchard,’ her father said. ‘He wants to ask you some questions.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said automatically. ‘Of course, I’ll come downstairs.’ She did not want them in her room. They sat in the conservatory. The conservatory was not really part of the house and she felt their privacy less violated there. Yet Helen realized that was ridiculous because the house was always full of paying guests. The police, somehow, were different and more intrusive. She sat opposite her father and thought how ill he looked.

  ‘I don’t think I can help you,’ Helen said.

  ‘Perhaps not,’ Pritchard said, accepting her judgement seriously. ‘But I’ll have to talk to you. There might be something, you see, which you don’t realize is important, which might help. Tell me what you did this afternoon.’

  ‘Nothing much,’ Helen said. ‘I wandered round the stalls and the exhibitions, listened to the folk music.’ She would have liked to mention Laurie, as if the sound of his name made him real, but she did not think he would want to be involved.

  ‘We think your grandmother may have been killed by someone taking the peregrines,’ Pritchard said. ‘Did you notice a blue van parked by the falcons this afternoon?’

  ‘Not this afternoon,’ she said. ‘But I saw a blue van this morning.’ She had forgotten all about it. ‘I was checking in the helpers. It was driven by a man who said he was Mr Fenn’s assistant. I didn’t realize then that Mr Fenn was the falconer. And I didn’t think there was anything suspicious about the blue van. It just seemed an odd coincidence. I should have said something, shouldn’t I? I should have warned Grandmother.’ She knew she should feel guilty, but was incapable of feeling anything.

  ‘You mustn’t blame yourself,’ her father said. ‘None of us took Eleanor seriously about the peregrines.’

  ‘Did you see your grandmother during the afternoon?’ Pritchard asked.

  Helen remembered Eleanor standing on the grassy terrace, watching her kissing Laurie.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I saw her near the tennis court where the musicians were pla
ying.’

  ‘Did she tell you where she was going?’

  ‘No,’ Helen said. ‘I didn’t speak to her.’

  In the following silence Molly cleared her throat then spoke shyly.

  ‘You were with a boy,’ she said apologetically. ‘It might not be important but he might have seen something which would help the police. Perhaps you should tell us his name.’

  Helen blushed.

  ‘Laurie,’ she said. ‘His name’s Laurie Oliver.’

  There was a stunned silence.

  ‘Do you mean Nan Oliver’s son?’ her father asked. She nodded, surprized by the reaction she had provoked. Pritchard signalled to the other adults to be quiet. He pulled his chair closer to Helen’s. The two of them could have been alone in the room.

  ‘Now then,’ he said. ‘ Tell me about this Laurie. He lives with his mam, does he?’

  He might have been a favourite uncle, teasing her about a new boyfriend.

  ‘Yes,’ Helen said. ‘Just with his mother. His parents have separated.’

  ‘Where does his dad live, then?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Helen said. ‘ I don’t think Laurie likes him. But he was here today. Laurie said he was going to meet him.’

  ‘And what did young Laurie say to his dad?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘ I’d expected Laurie to meet me later but he must have gone home early.’

  She began to cry.

  Veronica was too ill to see them. The doctor had given her a sedative. Eventually the sobbing had quietened and she had slept.

  The doctor had left instructions that she was not to be disturbed until the following morning.

  The police were out on the hill until it was too dark to work. From his bedroom window George could see them, walking backwards and forwards through the rough grass. In the shadow they seemed so close that he felt he could call to them. He should be able to ask them if they had found anything of significance and they would hear him. He even imagined that he could hear the peregrines crying still and that they were blaming him for their fruitless attempt to rear young, for the loss of their offspring.

  ‘Well,’ Molly asked. ‘What do you think? Is Frank Oliver the murderer?’