by Ann Cleeves
‘When did you take the birds?’ Pritchard asked.
‘On Sunday afternoon,’ Stephen said. ‘Dad helped Mr Fenn with the display and then met me by the barn. Mr Fenn was expecting him back to put the birds away, but Dad said it wouldn’t hurt him to do it by himself for once.’
‘Was he in his blue van?’
‘Yes. He’d parked it by the barn earlier that afternoon. It was hidden by the building so you couldn’t see it from the lane. He’d told Fenn the tax was out of date and he didn’t want to leave it at the hotel.’
‘What happened when your father had brought up the peregrines from the eyrie?’
‘We got off the hill as soon as we could get rid of the old ladies. The adult birds were going wild, making a terrible noise. The ladies didn’t seem to notice but the noise really got on my nerves. I wanted to get away from there.’
‘What did you do with the birds?’ George asked quietly.
‘Dad looked after them. He had a special box for them. I didn’t have anything to do with them until I got to Dover. The woman looked after them until then.’
‘What woman?’
‘The woman who drove me to Dover. When we got there we wrapped the box in pretty paper to make it look like a present. No one asked me about it when we went through customs.’
‘Where did you meet the woman?’
‘At Shrewsbury station. She was going to come with me all the way to France, but something seemed to have gone wrong. She and Dad talked at the station. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Dad seemed to want to call the whole thing off, but she said we ought to go ahead anyway. I suppose she’d heard that the old lady had been killed.’
‘What was the woman’s name?’ Pritchard demanded. But if he were hoping to discover the Gorse Hill connection he was disappointed.
‘Dad called her Kerry,’ Stephen said. ‘ I don’t know her other name. She wasn’t much older than me.’
‘Did your father go with you to Dover?’
Stephen shook his head. ‘ We left him at Shrewsbury,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what he did then. I thought he must be going to Wolverhampton.’ He paused. ‘I was going to go and live with him,’ he said, ‘when I got back. He said there’d be more chance of a job in the town and I could work for him again, perhaps do other trips to Europe.’
‘Why didn’t you tell your mother where you were going?’ Pritchard asked sternly. ‘ She’s been worried about you.’
‘Dad told me not to. Anyway I thought I’d only be away a couple of days and she’s used to me going off for weekends with my mates. She was only worried because of what happened to the old lady;’ He was beginning to regain some of his old disagreeable nonchalance. ‘She knows I can look after myself.’
‘What happened when you got to Calais? Did someone meet you?’
‘Someone was supposed to meet me at the railway station on the Monday evening,’ he said. ‘I hung around all day. Dad had given me some food for the birds and I looked after them just like he told me. I wanted to do everything right.’
They could imagine him in the foreign land, lonely and unsure of himself, wandering around the unfamiliar streets, carrying his peculiar parcel. Perhaps he had drunk too much on the boat to boost his confidence and was feeling ill. He had never been abroad before. Stephen continued his story:
‘I got to the station in plenty of time and waited in the café, which was just as Dad described it.’
‘What was the person like?’ Pritchard asked. ‘Was he English?’
Stephen Oliver shook his head. ‘No one came,’ he said simply. ‘I didn’t know what to do. I waited for hours until the café shut.’
‘Where did you stay?’
‘With some English people,’ Stephen said, ‘who had a small hotel. Dad had fixed it up. I think he had stayed there before.’
Pritchard became excited by this, demanded details, the address, the names of the owners, but George thought it was unlikely now that Frank Oliver had left the country.
‘I didn’t know what to do then,’ Stephen said. ‘I was supposed to take the ferry back the next day. I didn’t have much money. Dad had given me some, but I didn’t have a lot to spare. I still had the birds. I thought perhaps there was some mistake and the bloke would turn up the next day. I was really knackered but I went back to the station that evening.’
‘Did the falconer turn up?’
‘No,’ Stephen said. ‘ I was getting desperate. I thought I’d cocked the whole thing up. So I decided to come home.’
‘Did you have no means of contacting your father in an emergency?’ George asked.
The boy shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘ Dad said there would be no problem. If my contact couldn’t meet me at the station he would get in touch with me at the hotel. But there was no message, no phone call. I just wanted to get home. Then on the ferry I saw the newspaper and realized the police were looking for Dad.’
‘What did you do with the chicks?’ Pritchard asked.
‘I threw them away,’ he said. ‘I was sick of the whole thing. I threw them into the sea.’
They sat in silence. Outside a drunk was being brought into the station. They could hear him shouting and swearing at the desk sergeant.
‘When you were on the hill,’ George said, ‘did you hear anything unusual?’
‘Dad thought his van was being nicked,’ the boy said, with a sudden return of memory. ‘He’d left his keys in it and he thought he heard it being driven down the lane. But when we got back it was still there.’
‘You didn’t see anyone?’
‘Only the old ladies on the hill.’
The drunk in the corridor launched into a rousing version of Onward Christian Soldiers’.
‘Where’s your father, Stephen?’ Pritchard asked. ‘Just tell us and you can go home.’
‘How should I know?’
‘Did he get in touch with you in Calais? Is that why you spent so long in France?’
‘No,’ Stephen insisted, angry and frightened. ‘I told you what happened. I haven’t heard from him since we dropped him in Shrewsbury on Sunday.’
‘Why would your father want to murder Eleanor Masefield?’ Pritchard asked.
‘He wouldn’t want to murder anybody,’ Stephen said. ‘He was happy. He said he had a good business. He enjoyed working at Puddleworth and making a little bit on the side. He wouldn’t do anything to upset all that.’
The point was so obvious and so logical that there was little they could say. George could sense Pritchard’s defeat and asked one last question, knowing as he asked it that he was unlikely to receive an answer.
‘Did your father tell you who they were all working for?’ he asked. ‘Did he say who organized his business?’ But the boy shook his head. He was exhausted. There was nothing more he could tell them.
They let him go then. There was no reason to hold him. He would be charged with theft of the peregrines and with taking them illegally out of the country. He would appear in a magistrates’ court, plead guilty and be fined. George doubted if he would pay the fine himself. It would be paid, like his other expenses, by his father’s employer.
They all left the interview room together. Mrs Oliver was still on the bench, motionless, kept awake by her anger. Pritchard sat beside her and spoke confidentially to her as if they were alone.
‘You’re lucky,’ he said. ‘We’re letting your son come home to you. If you know where Frank is, tell him we want to talk to him. We don’t think he killed Mrs Masefield, not any more. But we think he may be in danger. We can give him the protection he needs.’
She stood up stiffly to be beside her son. She ignored Pritchard and though she said nothing they could tell she did not believe him.
Chapter Eleven
George fell asleep quickly and slept deeply, but woke very early in the morning. It was just getting light and there was a clear burst of bird song from the trees outside the window. Molly was still sleeping. She lay on her back w
ith her arms outstretched, palms up, fingers curled in relaxation.
He trusted Molly’s judgement about Eleanor Masefield. How could I have been so wrong about her? he thought. He had seen her as the charming, beloved matriarch, devotedly keeping her business and the weaker members of the family together. Now it seemed they would be happier without her. Does it matter that I was wrong about her? he thought. I found her compelling, beautiful. Do I really care that she was insensitive to her family’s needs? It was what she thought of me that counted and I’ll never know that now.
He got out of bed and dressed without disturbing Molly, then went downstairs. There was a cold, grey light and a gusting wind which rattled round the chimneys. Inside everywhere was quiet. The office door was unlocked and he went in. He told himself that he was looking for evidence that someone at Gorse Hill was involved with stealing and selling falcons but that was not entirely true. He was hoping to find some relic of Eleanor, a letter, a photograph, a diary, which would justify his infatuation for her, which would re-create her as the woman he had known. The fact that the office door was unlocked led him to suppose that he had little chance of finding anything incriminating. Besides, it had been Eleanor’s place. She would have come across any records or accounts for the sale of birds which might be hidden there. But because it had been Eleanor’s place he went in and began to look around.
The room was still dark, because it faced on to the hill, so he had to switch on an electric light. It was more functional than it had been in Stuart Masefield’s day. The photographs of birds of prey remained on the walls, the shelves of dusty, leatherbound books were still there, but the stuffed birds and the eggs had gone. He wondered if Eleanor kept the books and the photographs in memory of Stuart or if she used them like wallpaper to give colour and warmth to the room. The shotguns, with which Stuart had played country gentleman with Theo Williams’ father, were still in the room, but put away discreetly in a wall cupboard.
On a desk near the window was a computer keyboard and visual display unit. Eleanor had called it ‘Richard’s toy’. He used it to keep a check on bookings, to make up the accounts and to send confirmation to prospective customers. For a moment George was excited. Surely a computer would be useful in matching requests for falcons with information of known sites. Only Richard Mead knew how to use the computer. No one else had access to it. It would be an ideal way of keeping the Falconry Centre secret. George looked at the machine warily. He had no idea how to make it work. There would surely be some codework to release the information on the agency but he dared not touch the computer. Then he realized that the idea of Richard Mead as head of an aggressive illegal business was ridiculous. Meek, mild-mannered Mead would not know where to begin. George was still confident enough in his own judgement to see that.
The other desk was Eleanor’s. He could remember it in the room when it had been Masefield’s study. George looked quickly through the drawers. The contents were jumbled and untidy as if someone had been looking there before him in a hurry. The police would have looked, but they would have been more orderly in their search. There was nothing of interest in the drawer except a copy of Eleanor’s will, which left Gorse Hill and everything else she owned to Veronica. That was as expected. He supposed the police would have been in touch with Eleanor’s solicitor already and would have seen the original.
He was about to close the drawer when he found a crumpled black and white photograph, stuck between the drawer and the back of the desk. It was of Eleanor in an evening dress. It had been taken, he guessed, just before the war. She was very young. He imagined again the grand parties there might have been at Gorse Hill, thought of women’s laughter on the frosty air, music and voices. I was in love with a dream, he thought, with a young man’s idea of glamour. He turned the photograph over. On the back was written: ‘To Stuart with all my love. Eleanor’. He took one last look at the picture of the girl then replaced it in the desk. She was beautiful, he thought. I was right, at least, about that.
He had found what he wanted and was ready to leave the room and return to bed, but he was drawn to the books. Stuart had a strange collection, he thought. All the expected works were there – Leslie Brown’s British Birds of Prey and Radcliffe’s book on the peregrine – but a complete set of the New Naturalist series stood next to a row of Beano annuals. The books seemed to be arranged according to size and visual appearance rather than subject matter. On the bottom shelf was a series of heavy, thick books, too big to fit elsewhere. There was a family bible, the memoirs of a Victorian egg collector with illustrations and diagrams and a glossy coffee-table book on heraldry and coats of arms. Next to it was a book with a similar binding to the bible, but with no title on the spine. George carefully pulled it out. As he lifted it off the shelf and on to the desk there was surprisingly little dust. He opened the pages and found that it was not a printed book at all, but an old-fashioned ledger, with a wide margin and fine, narrow lines. Stuart Masefield had used it as a diary.
The entries began in the late fifties and at first they were sketchy, with perhaps just one or two dates listed in a year. They were concerned with his search for raptors’ nest sites. The language Masefield used in the diary was exaggerated and dated and he seemed eager to portray himself as a naturalist in the Victorian tradition, but despite the falsely archaic phrasing his triumph and passion came through. He had found a golden eagle nest in the Cairngorms which was easily accessible. At the end of the summer he had walked into the eyrie and smoked a pipe there. His excitement had a feverish, childlike quality.
From the later entries in the diary it became clear that his friends in the falconry world began to prey on his vanity, and suggested that he prove his skill at nest-finding by providing them with eggs and young. George thought that the device of seeing the theft as a test or challenge of his competence could not have deceived Stuart Masefield. He was obviously unbalanced, but not a fool. He had enjoyed plundering the nests. It had given him a sense of power over the natural world, and soon it became obvious that he saw the financial potential of his actions. In the early 1970s he sold two young peregrine falcons to ‘an arab buyer’ for £500 plus expenses. In the years before his death his activities appeared to become more organized and there was the first record of his having employed an assistant. He was stealing a clutch of eggs from a goshawk nest and wrote: ‘Sent Frank Oliver up the tree. I’m not sufficiently agile for that sort of thing now’. Soon after there was a reference to Theo Williams: ‘ Theo has become indispensable. His ability to find breeding birds is astounding. I wonder now how I ever managed without him’.
George had expected the diary to end with Masefield’s death, but it was continued almost immediately in a different handwriting, in a handwriting which George recognized, because he had seen it that morning on the back of a photograph. The realization that Eleanor Masefield was running the agency was less shocking than it would have been before he had begun to read the diary. She and Stuart were close, allies and partners. It seemed only natural that she should succeed him. After her husband’s death it seemed she had been determined to continue his unofficial business and to bring to it her own ruthlessness and organizational skill. It was quite clear from the records in the diary that she was in charge of the enterprise. All the accounts were kept in the book and George was astonished by the scale of the operation and the sums of money she made each year. She imported illegal birds as well as exporting them. It was no wonder, he thought, that she had afforded an expensive car and could keep Gorse Hill so well. While Stuart had made a little extra pocket money from his adventures, Eleanor Masefield’s income was considerably boosted by the agency.
In her elegant, sloping handwriting Eleanor went on to record how Kerry Fenn had been recruited as a glorified secretary and to liaise with the foreign customers. She went abroad for her father and could always find an excuse for an extra visit. She did all the agency’s typing at home, but seemed to have little responsibility. It had been relatively easy,
Eleanor wrote, to persuade Kerry to join the team. Lydia Fenn had been a wealthy woman and after her accident Murdoch Fenn had built Puddleworth with her money. But that had all gone and the running costs of the Centre had nearly outstripped income. The money Kerry made by working for Eleanor at least contributed to the expenses of Murdoch’s beloved Falconry Centre. Eleanor had exploited Kerry’s affection for her father and his dependence on the place for his happiness.
Later, some months before her murder, Eleanor had considered the question of the Sarne peregrines.
‘While I’m reluctant to disturb the Sarne falcons – after all they were Stuart’s favourites,’ she had written, ‘I feel it would be foolish to turn down such a lucrative offer’. There followed details of the financial terms offered by a German businessman. The moral deliberations were soon over and she had concluded: ‘So long as no suspicion falls on Gorse Hill I can see nothing against it.’
Then she had made every effort to present herself as a champion of the peregrines, insisting that the birds should be protected, knowing all the time that none of the conservation groups would agree to her demands. The town must be persuaded, when the birds were taken, that she had been right all the time.
A week before her death there was an indication that someone was close to discovering her secret. ‘Impossible to stop Sarne operation now,’ she wrote. ‘Must take every step to throw suspicion elsewhere’.
And then there had been frantic efforts to persuade the family that a blue van was haunting the lane and that the birds were in danger. When the peregrines disappeared everyone would then believe that the mysterious man in the blue van had taken them. Even if, by some extreme misfortune, Oliver was arrested, he would receive a minimal fine which she would pay and there would be nothing to connect him with her. The business would thrive, and the Sarne birds could be taken the following year. The important thing was to protect herself.
