Palmer-Jones 04 - A Prey to Murder

by Ann Cleeves

  They were sitting in the conservatory on the white-painted wicker chairs, watching the drizzle mist the glass. They could see nothing outside. Molly had listened to Veronica’s confessions before, but never so intently. She had let the words wash over her. Now she drank coffee and nodded with the same attitude of accepting sympathy, but she was listening. ‘ It wasn’t true,’ Veronica was saying. ‘Mother knew really how lucky I was to find Richard. I never did very well at school. I only got the job in an estate agent’s office because Mother was friendly with the manager. If I hadn’t married I’m sure they would have sacked me. It wasn’t as if we had very much money, even when Father was alive. He was very extravagant. I don’t know how we managed at all. He never seemed to do any work.’

  ‘So Eleanor never approved of Richard?’ Molly said.

  ‘She didn’t approve of his family,’ Veronica said. ‘Richard’s father was a farmer, quite wealthy at one time, but he went bankrupt. He was a drunk and they never knew where he was. It must have been a terrible ordeal for Richard and his mother. His father had to go to court and everyone was talking about it. Richard’s never forgotten it. That’s why he cares so much about our girls. He never had any security when he was a child. Mother saw the bankruptcy as a great disgrace. She always enjoyed other people’s misfortune.’

  ‘What did your father think of your marriage?’

  ‘He’d given up on me by then,’ Veronica said, ‘because I wasn’t academic. I don’t think he cared very much who I married so long as it didn’t disturb him. It might have been different if I were a boy. I tried to be interested in birds of prey to please him but he thought I was too silly to understand.’

  That reminded Molly suddenly of the phone call she had taken the day before.

  ‘Who is Kerry Fenn?’ she asked. ‘Is she any relative of Murdoch Fenn, the falconer?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Veronica said. She was absorbed in herself, in her memories, her resentment of her mother and her attachment to her. ‘I think he had a daughter but I can’t remember her name.’

  ‘Someone phoned yesterday afternoon,’ Molly said. ‘A foreigner. He said it was business and that Kerry Fenn had told him to contact Gorse Hill. Perhaps I should have told George when he phoned.’

  ‘We have lots of foreign visitors,’ Veronica said absently. ‘ They come because they like the countryside. It’s so typically English.’

  Veronica was typically English too, Molly thought, with her cashmere sweater and her sensible shoes and her soft, unassuming prettiness. As she had with Helen, Molly had the feeling that Veronica was experiencing a new freedom. She was frightened of it, and would probably transfer her dependence from her mother to her husband, but perhaps he would encourage her to be stronger, more confident.

  ‘How did Fanny and Helen get on with Eleanor?’ Molly asked. Veronica poured herself another cup of coffee, sipped at it.

  ‘She and Fanny were always arguing,’ she said. ‘ Fanny’s at a difficult age of course. I’m sure she would have grown out of it. It worried Richard. He said I should talk to Mother and tell her to leave Fanny alone, but I always found that sort of thing difficult.’

  ‘And Helen?’

  ‘Mother liked Helen,’ Veronica said, and Molly thought she sensed a note of jealousy, as if she had been in competition with her elder daughter for Eleanor’s affection. ‘Mother said Helen was bright. She had high hopes for her.’

  ‘Did those high hopes include marriage?’ Molly asked.

  ‘No,’ Veronica said slowly. ‘I don’t think she would have wanted Helen to marry. She would have wanted Helen here at Gorse Hill, to be a credit to her, to be her audience, so that they could be charming together.’

  Molly looked at the vacant face, startled, surprised by the bitterness in the woman’s voice.

  Richard Mead had offered to collect Nan Oliver in the car to take her to Gorse Hill, but because of pride and a stubborn perversity she had refused and said she preferred to walk. It was just as well that she had, she thought, as she stood by the side of the lane and watched Frank, furtive and ridiculous, climb out of the dripping gorse bush. His wet hair was stuck to his forehead.

  ‘Where’s Steve?’ she asked.

  ‘He’s safe,’ he said. ‘Even if they catch him he can prove he had nothing to do with the old lady’s death.’

  She stood, legs slightly apart, staring at him, taking pleasure in his wet discomfort.

  ‘Well,’ he demanded. ‘Are you going to help me?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Why should I?’

  Then he began to talk in an earnest whisper, although there was no one at all to hear them. She knew she would help him. She owed him no favours, but if it came to a choice between him and the family at Gorse Hill she knew where her loyalties lay. He was one of her sort.

  He disappeared back into the hedge like an animal. Although she was almost at Gorse Hill she turned down the hill and returned home. Anyone peering out of the net curtains would have assumed that she had just been into town. The policeman on the street corner acknowledged her but took no real notice. He had been told to look out for Frank, not to make a note of her comings and goings. She let herself into the house and grinned for a moment, remembering Frank’s damp humiliation, as she leaned back against the front door. Then she remembered Frank’s fear, the panic in his words and the gun he held loosely in one hand. There was nothing to laugh about. The house was quiet. The young ones were at school but Laurie was still there, lying on the settee, reading one of his school books. His inactivity annoyed her. He was a grown man and he spent his time lying around like one of those pampered girls at Gorse Hill. He looked up.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting you back,’ he said. He sounded worried and she thought he must have arranged to meet Helen at the house. ‘Is there any news?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I promised Mrs Mead some clothes for the WRVS and I forgot them. I’ll be gone again soon.’

  He was so relieved that she would be away, that he would have the house to himself when Helen arrived, that he did not notice the inconsistencies in her statement. It did not occur to him that she would never have walked most of the way back from Gorse Hill just to fetch jumble for Veronica Mead. She knew it would not do to tell him about Frank. In her mind Laurie had almost become a part of the Gorse Hill family through his association with Helen. She knew she could not trust him. He wanted only to avoid unpleasantness.

  She went upstairs. In a cupboard in her room were some clothes which she had in fact promised to Veronica for the WRVS. They had belonged to her elder son before he had married and left home. She chose a pair of heavy jeans and a grey sweatshirt, some underclothes and a warm jersey, and folded them into two carrier bags. Halfway down the stairs she stopped. She went back to the bathroom, took a towel from the airing cupboard and added that to the clothes. Downstairs Laurie had put down his book and was staring blankly at the ceiling.

  ‘What’s going to happen to us all, Mum?’ he said. ‘I’m scared.’

  I have to look after them all, she thought. Even now that they’re grown up and should be looking after me. Even Frank came back to be looked after.

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ she said as she had said to him many times before, as she had said to Frank. ‘Just you see. Everything will be all right.’

  She left the house and walked down the path to the gate with a carrier bag in each hand. She walked up the hill. The rain had soaked through the coat she had bought from a catalogue two winters before and her feet were wet. She did not stop by the gap in the hedge where Frank had been earlier that morning but carried on up the drive to Gorse Hill.

  She went in through the back door and set the carrier bags down in the scullery. The kitchen was beautifully warm. She took off her coat and hung it near to the central heating boiler so it began to steam. She took a clean pink nylon overall from a drawer and put it on, doing up the buttons carefully. By then she felt more herself. She sat on the wooden chair by the boiler
and took off her wet shoes. She kept slippers for working in on a shelf in the scullery and as she walked to fetch them her stockinged feet made wet footmarks on the red-tiled floor. She thought she would wash the floor. It had not been done since before the Open Day. It would give her something useful to do and take her mind off Steve and Frank.

  She was standing on one foot in the scullery, pulling a flat black plastic slipper on to the other, when Richard Mead came in. He was worried about her, he said. She should have let him fetch her. Now she must sit down and get warm and let him make her some coffee. She said shortly that she had work to do and she would make herself a nice cup of tea later. Her employer went away, discouraged.

  Nan Oliver was washing the kitchen floor when Molly found her. She was kneeling on a folded towel, leaning forward over the cloth, so her back was flat and parallel to the floor and the overall was stretched into wrinkles across her thighs. She had almost finished and through the hall door Molly watched her sit back on her haunches to wring out the cloth, and then stretch painfully, leaning on the kitchen table to help her, until she was standing. She turned to empty the bucket of water in the sink in the scullery and saw Molly.

  ‘What do you want?’ Nan Oliver said. ‘Mrs Mead isn’t here.’

  ‘I know,’ Molly said ‘ I’ve just been talking to her in the conservatory. I was looking for you.’

  ‘You can’t come in here. The floor’s wet.’

  ‘Perhaps we could talk somewhere else. Mrs Mead knows I’ve come to see you. She doesn’t mind.’

  Nan Oliver stared with reluctant admiration at the woman. She would not give in easily. And perhaps it would be dangerous to appear too hostile. Mrs Palmer-Jones might think she had something to hide.

  ‘I’ve just made a pot of tea,’ she said. ‘We could take it into the dining room. Would you like some tea?’

  ‘Yes,’ Molly said. ‘Very much.’ She wondered why the woman had agreed so readily to see her. Veronica had said she would never persuade Mrs Oliver to talk. ‘She’s a wonder in the kitchen,’ she had said, ‘ but a very difficult woman to get on with. Sometimes I think Eleanor only kept her on because her mother used to work with the family. Eleanor liked that sort of feudal connection.’

  Mrs Oliver carried the tea into the dining room and thought that Eleanor Masefield would never have allowed one of her staff to sit there, talking to a guest. She enjoyed the thought and stretched stiff legs under the table. She poured out strong, dark tea and added plenty of sugar.

  ‘Did you like Mrs Masefield?’ Molly asked.

  Nan Oliver looked at her with shrewd pale eyes. ‘I don’t think anyone liked her,’ she said. ‘Not really. Only the men. She could take in the men.’

  ‘But you stayed on here?’

  ‘It suited me,’ Nan Oliver said. ‘There isn’t much work round here for a woman my age. They took me on when I came back to Sarne with my children. They didn’t have to do that.’

  And they paid me less than I was worth, she thought, because they knew I was desperate for work and would take anything.

  ‘You know the police are looking for your husband?’ Molly asked.

  ‘Of course I do. I’m not daft.’

  ‘Do you think he killed Eleanor Masefield?’

  ‘I know that he didn’t.’ The woman spoke with a simple certainty.

  ‘How could you know?’

  Nan Oliver paused.

  ‘He admired her sort,’ she said at last. ‘He wouldn’t do anything to hurt her.’

  ‘Her sort?’

  ‘Gentry,’ Nan Oliver said. ‘People with big houses. People who fly falcons. It was all part of the same thing for him. Frank wouldn’t mind making money out of them, but he wouldn’t do anything to hurt them.’ She spoke as if she despised his romanticism. ‘He used to say Mr Masefield was a great gentleman.’

  ‘He knew Stuart Masefield?’

  ‘Yes. He met him at Mr Fenn’s. He did some work for him every now and again. He used to come home and tell me what a lady Mrs Masefield was.’

  She was sneering at Eleanor Masefield and at her husband because he was so easily impressed.

  ‘You don’t think Eleanor Masefield was a lady?’ Molly asked.

  Nan Oliver shrugged. ‘She knew what she wanted,’ she said. ‘And she made sure she got it. I don’t blame her, but she wasn’t any different from the rest of us.’

  ‘What do you mean? What did she want?’

  ‘Money,’ Nan Oliver said ‘Power.’

  ‘Do you know something about Eleanor Masefield which you haven’t disclosed to the police?’ Molly asked. But Nan Oliver refused to say any more. She had been seduced by this woman’s gentle attention, by the feeling that Molly understood what she had to put up with. She had said too much already.

  ‘I have to go now,’ she said. ‘I’m supposed to be working.’

  Fanny slouched around the house and wished she had gone to school. The day before had been fun there. She had been the centre of attention and even the girls who usually jeered at her, or ignored her, gathered round in the cloakroom and wanted to know what had happened to Eleanor. But there had been reporters with cameras at the school gates and the headmistress and her father had decided that it would be better to stay at home for a few days. Helen did not seem to mind being banished from school. Fanny thought she was in a peculiar mood. She supposed it was because Helen was in love with Laurie Oliver. Fanny thought that if she were going to fall in love she would choose someone better than that.

  She went first to the office where her father was working, dictating letters into a machine. She had thought that with Eleanor gone he would have more time for her but he seemed busier than ever. She asked if she could help him but he said that there was nothing she could do, then waited for her to go, so he could continue working. She realized during her aimless walk around the house that she would miss Eleanor. She would no longer have her grandmother to blame for her loneliness, her fatness, her boredom. All that was her responsibility now. She supposed it might be possible to do something about it, but it seemed a daunting challenge. She sat in her bedroom and looked at her round, plump face in the mirror and wondered how long it would take her to be thin. Then she went down to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of milk and took a handful of biscuits from the tin in the larder. Mrs Oliver was not there. Her father had said she would be in later but for the moment Fanny was deprived even of the distraction of an argument with her old adversary. After the usual bustle of the hotel – the noise and banter of the staff in the kitchen, the arrival and departure of guests the house seemed altered. Everyone moved more quietly and more slowly. The life had gone out of it and Fanny knew it would never be the same again.

  She wandered back to her bedroom, switched on the television, then switched it off again. Nothing could entertain her. In the end she took Animal Farm, one of her school set texts, and sat in the window seat to read. She read in fits and starts, breaking off sometimes in mid sentence and wiping the condensation from the glass, to stare out of the window in listless contemplation.

  It was some time later that she saw Mrs Oliver. The woman left the house by the kitchen door and set off down the path towards the walled vegetable garden. There was nothing unusual in that. Mrs Oliver often went out to empty the waste bin on the compost heap or to fetch vegetables for the kitchen, but there was something about her which caught Fanny’s attention. She looked peculiar of course, but she always did. She was wearing enormous black wellingtons which Fanny had never seen before and her awful brown coat that looked like a dressing gown. In one hand she carried two carriers bags and in the other a basket. Fanny recognized the basket as her mother’s. Its contents were covered by a checked tea towel.

  For a moment it occurred to Fanny to run downstairs to follow Nan Oliver and see where she was going. The idea of this action lifted her depression, but it was cold and wet outside and she did not want the bother of changing her shoes and putting on a coat. It was too much like hard work.
Nan Oliver was probably on some boring if eccentric chore for her mother. Besides, it was nearly lunch time. She fetched a chocolate peppermint bar from a drawer in her dressing table. With a sigh she settled back to Animal Farm, but the sight of Mrs Oliver flapping up the path in wellingtons three sizes too big for her had amused her and she had lost the dreadful sense of foreboding and emptiness.

  They all had lunch together in the kitchen, even Nan Oliver and the peculiar old lady whom Helen claimed was a private detective. Fanny could not imagine anything less like a private detective. Helen had gone out and said she might not be back for lunch, so they had started without her. Fanny could tell that her father was not very pleased. Perhaps he knew about Laurie Oliver and disapproved of him too. It was good, she thought, that Helen was in trouble for once. It was just a shame Eleanor wasn’t there to see it too. Fanny had become sick of her grandmother saying complimentary things about Helen.

  There was home-made vegetable soup for lunch, which Fanny ate although she did not enjoy it much. She preferred the stuff out of a tin. But afterwards there was one of Mrs Oliver’s chocolate cakes, which were always delicious.

  As Mrs Oliver got up to clear the soup plates Fanny noticed that her feet were soaking wet. Her stockings were so wet that there was a dark tide mark which reached almost to her knees. But she was wearing wellingtons Fanny thought, and giggled at the memory. She was going to ask the woman where she had been going, but her mother handed her a large slice of chocolate cake and she forgot all about it.

  No one said very much at lunch, except Veronica whose chatter was so persistent and inane that no one took any notice of it. There was a story about the flowers in the church on Easter Sunday which Fanny had heard several times before. Only her father pretended to be interested in it. And Molly Palmer-Jones. She seemed to be interested in everything. Because Nan Oliver had been late to work and because the whole routine of the house had fallen apart after Eleanor’s death, it had been a late lunch. It had been almost two o’clock when they sat down and by the time the plates were cleared and they were sitting over the dregs of the coffee it was almost three.