Palmer-Jones 04 - A Prey to Murder

by Ann Cleeves

  ‘Except his daughter,’ Pritchard said. ‘He had his daughter to look after.’

  ‘Yes. I’ve never met her before. I think she was abroad when I visited before. They do seem very close.’

  George was lost in memory of the lively competent man he had known before Lydia Fenn’s death. Fenn had seemed to have regained his confidence and composure with the success of Puddleworth, but the second tragedy of Eleanor’s murder had shattered his poise again. He admired Eleanor as I did, George thought. Now he really only has his daughter and his birds left to care for. I have my wife.

  Pritchard was talking again, a little impatiently.

  ‘I meant…’ he said, ‘what did you make of Oliver’s having a copy of the Gorse Hill telephone number?’

  ‘I suppose,’ George said slowly, ‘ that Nan Oliver must have been lying and she had spoken to him since their separation after all.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Pritchard said. ‘ The Olivers don’t have a telephone at home. The whole family seem more involved with Gorse Hill than I’d realized at first. Did you know that Oliver’s son and Mrs Masefield’s granddaughter are very friendly?’

  ‘No,’ George said.

  ‘I thought your wife might have told you. She discovered that little fact.’

  ‘No,’ George said. ‘She didn’t tell me.’ He felt suddenly guilty because he had excluded Molly and had so obviously resented her interest. He wished Molly were sitting beside him so he could hold her hand and make everything right. He wanted to tell her that his admiration for Eleanor had been an old man’s folly and meant nothing, that without Molly he, like Fenn, would lose his identity and reason. But Eleanor Masefield was dead and Molly would never be sure if George’s expression of love for his wife would have been so certain if the woman had lived.

  George never found out how the local police came to have keys to Frank Oliver’s house. Perhaps Oliver had given some to a neighbour.

  The house was at the end of the terrace, backing on to a canal. At the end of the road was a series of railway arches and every twenty minutes a train would go past at chimney-pot height, rattling the windows and making the light shades shudder. In the house next door a fat old lady in an upstairs window stared down at them. The window was dirty and George could see nothing of the room but it seemed to him that the woman was laughing at them.

  George was not sure whether he would be invited into the house. Oliver had stopped keeping birds of prey there some years before, so the excuse that he was a Wild Life Act Inspector no longer applied. When Pritchard pulled up behind the police car already parked close to the kerb, George stayed in his seat and made no move to accompany the superintendent.

  ‘Come on,’ Pritchard said. ‘What are you waiting for?’

  ‘I thought I might be in the way,’ George said.

  ‘No,’ Pritchard said. He nodded at the uniformed policeman who waited impassively on the pavement. ‘I’ll tell them you’re a civilian expert. That’s true, isn’t it? There might be all sorts of papers which would mean nothing to me. We might be breaking a few rules, but it’ll save a lot of time in the end. See?’ He grinned.

  ‘I didn’t help much at Puddleworth. All Fenn’s paperwork was immaculate. It was possible to trace all his British birds of prey back to captive breeding pairs.’

  ‘Ah well,’ Pritchard said. ‘ I think we’ll find things are a bit different here.’

  He ambled up to one of the constables, his big face puckered into a smile, and clapped him on the shoulder.

  ‘Good of you to come, lads,’ he bellowed. ‘Good of you to help us out. Well then, are you going to let us in? I expect you’re busy. We country chaps don’t know the sort of problems you face. You’ve got a terrible crime rate, I hear.’

  Bemused, they opened the door for him. When he and George were inside he closed the door firmly behind him so the policemen were left outside on the pavement.

  ‘Don’t worry, lads!’ he said as he shut the door. ‘I’ll drop the keys in at the station.’

  They were standing in a dark, windowless hall. There was lino, patterned like wood block, on the floor, and stairs with brown carpet directly ahead of them. The house seemed dusty and airless but not dirty. Oliver, after all, had known that he would be away for a few days. He had been in Sarne for at least three days before the murder if Eleanor’s story about the blue van was to be believed.

  ‘Where was Oliver staying in Sarne?’ George asked suddenly as Pritchard let him into the small sitting room. ‘Do you know?’

  Pritchard shook his head. ‘We’re not sure,’ he said, ‘but there was space enough for him to sleep in the van. Unless his wife put him up and isn’t telling.’

  ‘You don’t know where the van was parked?’

  ‘Not on the council estate where the Olivers live, but he’s too clever to do that anyway. We should have more news when we get back – the lads are working on that today. There wasn’t a sleeping bag in the van, or any clothes, but if he’s camping out now, lying low, he would have taken those with him.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ George said. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have asked. It was none of my business.’

  ‘I’ll tell you,’ Pritchard said, ‘ if you’re poking your nose where it’s not wanted. Now then, let’s have a look in here.’

  After the darkness of the hall the room seemed suddenly light, but it was so cluttered that the impression was soon lost. George thought that Oliver’s family could have taken no furniture with them when they went. Against one wall stood a table and dining chairs which looked as if they had been produced during the austerity of war. There was a settee and easy chair in mustard leatherette near to the gas fire and a large colour television set in one corner. On the wall furthest from the window was a unit of shelving and cupboards.

  ‘If he was nicking birds, then selling them, he must have kept some record,’ Pritchard said. He nodded towards the cupboards under the shelves which still held momentos of family life – souvenirs from Aberystwyth and Aberdeen, a photograph of thin children playing on a beach. ‘We’ll have a quick look round,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll make a start in there.’

  He led George through a glass door into the kitchen. Standing in the middle of the room he could have touched the walls on either side of him. The white distemper on the walls was peeling and there were flakes of it on the painted floor. The sink was old, made of white enamel. There was a long cupboard with a few tins of food, a box of tea bags, some powdered milk, and next to it an ancient gas stove and a refrigerator. Everything was reasonably clean and tidy but it was obvious that Oliver had not cared about the house. No rooms had been decorated, no new carpet or furniture had been bought, since Nan had left. The only unusual feature in the kitchen was a large chest freezer which took up the whole of one wall. The freezer was not switched on and when Pritchard lifted the lid it was empty.

  ‘What would he want that for then?’ Pritchard asked. ‘ I suppose it was useful with a big family and he didn’t bother to get rid of it.’

  ‘No,’ George said. ‘I don’t think it was that. When he had his own birds here he would have kept their food in it.’

  Pritchard looked surprised.

  ‘Raptors eat animals,’ George said. ‘Rabbits, mice, day-old chicks. It’s much easier to buy them in bulk and keep them frozen.’

  Pritchard raised his eyebrows. ‘I always thought falconry was a romantic sort of hobby,’ he said. ‘I saw that film – Kes – years ago and thought it was great. I didn’t expect a freezer full of corpses.’

  From the kitchen there was a back door into the garden. Pritchard had a key but the door was stiff as if it was seldom used. After transferring his birds Oliver would have had no reason to go out there. The aviaries still stood but they were rusting and full of rubbish and the grass and weeds were waist high. The place smelled of cats and the stagnant canal beyond the wire-mesh cages. There were signs of the garden that had been there before. Straggly flowers bloomed among the weeds and in one corne
r an enormous crown of rhubarb, its leaves the size of elephant ears, still survived.

  Upstairs there was nothing of interest. There were three bedrooms and a bathroom with a huge white bath stained by a dripping tap. Oliver still used the middle room which he must have shared with his wife. The bed was made and there were clothes in the chest of drawers. The largest bedroom still contained two sets of bunks for the boys and the walls and curtains were covered in brightly coloured aeroplanes. The smallest, where the girls must have slept, had two single beds, so close to each other that they almost touched. George wondered if Oliver had put up the wallpaper for his sons, if he had participated at all in the life of the family. Perhaps it had all been left to Mrs Oliver and his only role had been to give her more children. Yet the trinkets from Wales and Scotland, the photographs of the beach, showed that in the beginning at least there had been family holidays. They must have had something in common then. George found the house depressing and wished they could leave. Pritchard however, back in Oliver’s room, seemed unmoved.

  ‘We’ll leave all this to the experts,’ he said, dismissively waving his hand over the double bed with the nylon sheets, the candlewick bedspread. ‘I’ll let them in this afternoon and they can search it properly then. Let’s see what we can find in the downstairs cupboards.’

  He bounded down the stairs like a big friendly dog in search of a chocolate treat.

  At first the contents of the cupboards were disappointing. The first contained a jumble of papers as if letters, paid bills, magazines were put in there only because Oliver was afraid to throw them away. Pritchard sifted through the receipts, the forms explaining how to fill out other forms, with a thorough and delicate attention which impressed George. He seemed convinced that somewhere amid the debris they would find a clue to Oliver’s whereabouts.

  The next cupboard was more fruitful. It was almost empty and the contents were ordered as if Oliver needed to keep it tidy. The first find was a card index system in a small box which lised raptor species in alphabetical order. Each card was hand written and had obviously been amended and updated. Pritchard handed it to George.

  ‘Is this anything to do with the work at Puddleworth?’ he asked.

  George took the box and began to look carefully at the cards.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing to do with Puddleworth. It’s a list of the breeding sites of most of the rarer raptors in Britain.’ He pulled card after card from the box. ‘There isn’t only information of falcons and hawks,’ he said. ‘There’s a whole section on owls, and here’s a card on buzzard and one on golden eagle.’ He read the eagle card in detail. ‘That’s astonishing,’ he said. ‘ He’s got a record of an amazing number of Scottish breeding sites.’

  ‘Is it important?’ Pritchard asked.

  ‘It means that Oliver had access to incredibly detailed information. He must have had contacts all over the country telling him exactly where birds were breeding. There’s no proof of course that he was stealing birds’ eggs or young from these sites. He might have been selling the information to other dishonest falconers or egg collectors. But I can’t think of any legitimate reason for keeping it like this. Look – there are even Ordnance Survey map grid references. If he were just an interested birdwatcher he wouldn’t need that sort of detail.’

  ‘But it doesn’t help us find Oliver?’

  ‘No,’ George said. ‘I don’t suppose it does.’

  Underneath the card index box were a couple of files containing documents relating to Oliver’s birds at Puddleworth – registration forms, and a letter from the Department of the Environment notifying him of a Wildlife Act Inspector’s visit. Then there was a large, flat cardboard box which might once have contained a shirt. On the top in large, childish handwriting Oliver had written ‘correspondence’. Inside, there were just two sheets of paper. One, a flimsy carbon copy of a typewritten sheet, read like a shopping list, starting with six buzzard and ending with peregrine. It commented that demand for peregrine this year was limited but added that it was essential to obtain the Sarne birds for an influential overseas buyer.

  ‘I understand this,’ Pritchard said. ‘It’s a list of the birds and eggs Oliver has been asked to take. It shows he was working for a lot of different buyers.’

  ‘Yes,’ George said, ‘but I don’t think Oliver can have compiled it. Even if he had access to a typewriter at Puddleworth I don’t imagine that his typing would be as good as this. And why just keep a carbon copy if he were making the list for his own use? I think Oliver was employed as an agent by someone who sent him this list and paid him once the birds were delivered.’

  ‘We can check to see if it was typed at Puddleworth,’ Pritchard said. ‘We might still find that Fenn is involved after all.’

  He handed George the second sheet of paper in the box. ‘ What do you make of this?’

  It was a piece of lined A4 like a sheet from a student’s refill pad. It was ruled into three columns with the widest column in the middle and it was in Oliver’s handwriting. It was obviously Oliver’s response to the shopping list. It was a detailed plan of campaign. He had decided when each species should be taken and which site it should be taken from. It was set out in chronological order and in the first column was a series of dates running from the beginning of March to the second week of July. In the middle column, next to each date were the bird’s common and scientific names, followed by the exact site of the nest and notes of any wardening schemes or electronic protection. In the last column was one of two initials – either FLO or TW.

  George scanned quickly down the list, handed the paper to Pritchard and pointed to the reading for 23 May. ‘ Peregrine,’ Pritchard read. ‘ Falco Peregrinus. Sarne. Eyrie on rock face above hill path. Rope needed. No danger of disturbance. FLO.’ He looked at George, ‘ He was wrong about there being no danger of disturbance, wasn’t he? But at least we know it was him.’

  ‘We might know that he stole the peregrines,’ George said. ‘We don’t know, do we, that he murdered Eleanor Masefield?’

  ‘We’ve got bloody good circumstantial evidence,’ Pritchard boomed. ‘We found her shoe on the hill, the birds were missing, the body’s dumped near the birds where Oliver was working. All we need to do now is find the bugger and get a confession.’

  ‘I wonder,’ George said quietly, ‘who TW is. FLO is obviously Frank Oliver, but TW appears on the list more often than he does. If we could find him he might lead us to Oliver.’

  ‘You’re brilliant,’ Pritchard said. ‘Of course.’

  ‘TW is on the list to rob a merlin nest tomorrow,’ George said. ‘On Farthing Ridge.’

  Pritchard slapped George on the back. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘you and I had better go bird watching.’

  Chapter Six

  Molly spent all that day at Sarne. For the first time since Eleanor’s death she felt an itch of resentment. George had not asked her to go with him to Puddleworth, nor asked if she would mind being left in the depressing house for another day.

  Of course we take each other for granted, she thought. We’ve been married for more than thirty years. Yet she still resented his escape from Gorse Hill. Because he felt in some way responsible for Eleanor’s death, George had become involved in the search for her murderer, but he had left her in Gorse Hill with its bereaved and unhappy occupants to go on a jaunt to a Falconry Centre in Shropshire. It seemed unfair. He had pushed her tolerance too far.

  She went downstairs not knowing quite what to expect, but everything seemed much as usual. In the dining room her table had been laid for breakfast and in the hall Helen and Fanny were on their way out to walk to the high school. Their school uniform was black and the girls looked tired, drained of all colour. A girl brought her coffee and poached eggs and she ate alone in one corner of the big room. She was just finishing the meal when Richard Mead came in. Molly did not know what to make of him. On previous visits she had thought him competent, that he held the family business together and took al
l the important decisions. He had allowed Eleanor to be the figurehead but had managed perfectly well without her interference.

  It was a surprise then that without Eleanor he seemed weak and rather foolish. Now he seemed to want someone to talk to. He had given Nan Oliver some time off, he said. It must be a terrible time for her too. Would Molly mind finding lunch for herself in Sarne? Molly said that of course she wouldn’t mind, but still he would not leave her to her coffee and morning paper. She suggested in the end that he find another cup and share the coffee with her. He seemed inordinately grateful for the invitation as if he would never have had the confidence to suggest it himself.

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said, staring at her helplessly. ‘There are more guests booked in next Saturday. Should I tell them we’ve had to cancel?’

  ‘Surely that depends what you and Veronica want to do with Gorse Hill,’ Molly said. ‘Do you want to stay and run it as an hotel?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘ I should think so.’

  ‘How is Veronica this morning?’

  ‘She was still asleep when I last looked,’ he said. ‘But I suppose she’ll be waking soon.’

  He hesitated and Molly could tell that he wanted something from her. In her mood of resentment she found something irritating in the demands he made of her. She had been a social worker for long enough. That phase of her life was over. But the expression on his long face was so pathetic that she could not get up and walk away.

  ‘Is there anything I could do to help?’ she asked. Again he was childishly grateful, and her irritation returned.

  ‘Would you go up to Veronica?’ he said, all in a rush. ‘ Last night I only seemed to upset her. I don’t think she even understood exactly what happened. She’ll be calmer with you. Explain to her about Eleanor’s death. I can’t bear to see her crying.’