Palmer-Jones 03 - Murder in Paradise

by Ann Cleeves

  Alec had mended the lorry, and collected all the men—Stennets and Dances—and took them to the lighthouse. Sarah was the only woman there. They allowed her to come because she was new, and she had no other responsibilities—no animals at the croft or children, but some of the older men grumbled at her presence. It was felt to be not quite lucky. The lorry stopped by the school house and Alec went to the door and asked George Palmer-Jones if he would like to help. The operation depended on having enough men to cover the hill, and with Will back at school they would be short of people. In previous times the school had been closed for the Hill Gather and they had used the older boys to fill the gaps, but no one approached Jonathan Drysdale to ask for his cooperation. They were certain that he would refuse.

  It was a bright, sunny day with a gusty breeze which broke the surface of the pools on the hill, so that the reflected light scattered in all directions. There was white spume from the waves on the sea and the fulmars and kittiwakes seemed to be playing in the wind. Sandy Stennet arranged the men on the hill, meticulously checking with Kenneth Dance that he agreed with the way the men had been placed. He put George Palmer-Jones at the end of the line, nearest the west cliffs. The land was flatter there, and not so boggy. It would be easier walking, with fewer sheep. George knew why he had been placed there and it added to his sense of helplessness. He remembered the ridicule in Sylvia’s voice, and being placed at the end of the line, next to old Robert, seemed to him an added insult.

  At last Sandy was satisfied and the men began to move. There was a noise of dogs barking and men clapping and whistling to send the sheep forward. Despite his hurt pride at being given the easiest position on the line George began to enjoy himself. There was some warmth in the sun and he had the spectacular view of the cliffs and the sea. He felt close to the sky. Robert’s dog was chasing madly between them, doing their work for them. They walked slowly so that the men who had to climb the steep rise of the hill could keep up with them. George could see them still in line, like a row of telegraph poles. The island was wider here, and the whistling and calling became more frantic as sheep escaped behind them. There would be another gather, later in the month, to collect the sheep they had missed.

  Then they could see the wall and there seemed to be hundreds of sheep jostling in front of them. The sheep were usually white but there were a good number of more valuable black and brown animals among them. The noise of bleating sheep was added to that of the dogs and the men. As the sheep hit the wall some of them ran west towards George and he ran towards them shouting and waving his arms like the other men.

  As he approached the wall he saw someone walking along the cliffs on the other side of it. It was Elspeth Dance. He recognized the tangled curly hair, the fur coat. He recognized, too, the green silk scarf, which she wore around her neck and which the wind caught and blew out like a streamer.

  George waited for her at the wall. The sheep were easier to control now. They were already running down the side of the wall, and some had reached the field at Kell. He was no longer needed. When she saw him, she began to turn away as if she wanted to avoid conversation, but he climbed over the wall, proud of his agility in front of her, and he joined her in her walk back along the cliffs.

  “You don’t mind if I join you,” he said, in such a way that she could not refuse. She did not answer and seemed so preoccupied that he wondered if she had heard him.

  “Would you mind telling me,” he said, “where you found the scarf?”

  “Do you know who it belongs to?” she asked. “ My son gave it to me. He promised that he hadn’t stolen it.”

  “You don’t recognize it?” She shook her head.

  “When did he give it to you?”

  “Yesterday. He was late home from school. It was a kind of peace offering.”

  “Did he tell you where he found it?”

  “No. He wouldn’t say.”

  “It was Mary’s,” he said. “ She was wearing it at the party. Just before she died.”

  She seemed bewildered.

  “Then why did he have it?”

  “I don’t know. Would you mind if I asked him? I told the police that I was worried because the scarf hadn’t been found. It would tie up all sorts of loose ends if I could clear it up.”

  “I don’t know.” She did genuinely seem to want to help. “He’s been through a lot lately. I wouldn’t want to upset him.”

  “I would be very gentle. I have a grandson of about his age.”

  She seemed reassured. “ Very well then. He’ll be at school now, but if you meet me at the school house at a quarter to four, you can see him then.”

  He would have been happy to walk down the island with her, but she seemed to want to be on her own.

  “Could I keep the scarf?” he said before she went. “ I’m sorry, but the police may want it.”

  “Ben will be sad,” she said. “ He was so proud to have a present to give me.”

  She removed the scarf and handed it to him, then said goodbye and walked off, along the path by the cliff.

  Sarah was enjoying herself immensely. This was what island life was all about, she thought, a communal effort for the good of the whole island. She walked over the hill beside Jim and felt excited as the sheep approached the wall and were driven into the field. She joined in the cheers as the gate was closed behind them. This is better than working inside, in a hospital ward, she thought, wondering how she could ever have doubted that she would settle on Kinness. But as she walked past Kell with Jim, on her way home to Unsta for lunch, she saw Melissa’s sad, frightened face at a dark window and suddenly she was not quite so certain.

  Once Elspeth was out of sight of George Palmer-Jones she stopped, and sat on the spongy soil at the top of the cliff where the puffin holes and rabbit burrows seemed only to be held together by the roots of the thrift. She thought of the story of Ellie, her namesake, who had died by jumping over the cliff in 1925. If I were going to commit suicide, she thought, that’s how it would be. There must be an exhilaration in the act of jumping, in the speed of the air. It must be like flying. But she knew that it was impossible for her to think of dying. She had Ben to care for and he had lost enough.

  She looked at her watch. It was nearly lunchtime and her parents would be worried about her. She should try to do more for them, she thought, help in the shop. She owed them that at least. If she had married Jim, everything would have been different. She remembered the letter she had written to him from Glasgow, all the lies. It had been the kindest thing to do. But that wouldn’t have worked either. She had been right in deciding that.

  When she got back to the post office, the windows were open. She could hear her parents talking.

  “It’s not natural,” Kenneth Dance was saying. “She’s my only daughter and I love her, but there’s something wrong with her. What happened in Glasgow wasn’t natural, and nor is this wandering round the cliffs on her own all day. She should snap herself out of it. She should think of the child, after all he’s been through.”

  “We must be patient,” Annie said. “We can’t know what it was like there in Glagow with no one to turn to.”

  “She could have turned to us,” he shouted. “She had only to pick up a phone and we would have helped her. Why didn’t she do that?”

  Why didn’t I? Elspeth asked herself. She had asked the same question a hundred times. Tears began to fall down her cheeks and she had to compose herself before she went in to join her parents.

  George found it very difficult to persuade Elspeth to allow him to speak to Ben alone. She was happy for him to see Ben, but she wanted to be there, too. Ben seemed to be a peculiarly polite boy. He stood and listened patiently while the adults discussed him. The other children had run home, or up to Kell to watch the last of the dipping. At last Ben interrupted:

  “There’s no need to worry, Mummy,” he said. “I’ll be good. I won’t chatter.”

  Reluctantly Elspeth went back to the post office. They watch
ed her go.

  “She does fuss,” Ben said. “There’s no need.”

  “You gave her a scarf for a present,” George said. “Can you show me where you found it?”

  “Of course,” Ben said. Then: “It wasn’t stealing, was it?”

  “No. But it did belong to someone else. Can’t you remember seeing Mary wearing it?”

  “I do now that you’ve told me, but I didn’t when I found it. I just thought that it was pretty.”

  The boy started walking along the road towards Kell and the harbour.

  “I didn’t go straight to school yesterday after I left home,” he said. “ Mummy wasn’t there and Grandpa and Grandma are always busy in the mornings, because they have to be ready to open the shop. I played by myself instead.”

  “Where did you play?”

  “In here.”

  They had come to the derelict croft where George had heard voices the morning before. “ I came after school too, when everyone else went to watch the Ruth Isabella in. I pretend that it’s my house,” Ben said. “ I come here quite often.”

  “You found the scarf in here?”

  “Yes. In the morning. I left it here till after school.” Ben led the way in through the hole in the wall which had once been a door.

  “Was it hidden?”

  “No. It was caught on this nail. It looked as if it had been left here by accident.”

  Part of the door frame was intact and a bent nail stuck from the rotting wood, at about waist height. If someone had left the building in a hurry, George thought, they might not have noticed that the scarf was left behind. The boy stood quietly by his side. It seemed not to occur to him that he might not be believed.

  “What time did you get up on Saturday morning?” George asked suddenly.

  “Late,” Ben said, “because I was so late going to bed after the party.”

  “What time is late?”

  “I’m not sure. I’m not very good at telling the time. It was nearly dinnertime.”

  “So you didn’t go down to the beach or on to Ellie’s Head on Saturday morning?”

  “No.”

  “Did Mary tell you where she was going on Friday night?”

  “No.” He hesitated. “She was a bit bossy. I wanted to be on my own for a bit, so I hid in the toilet. I know it wasn’t very nice but she’d been chasing me around all evening. When I came out she’d gone.”

  “Had the dancing stopped for the interval when you came out?”

  “They were just stopping.”

  “Thank you, Ben,” George said. “You’ve been very helpful.”

  The boy seemed pleased.

  They walked back south down the road. They were almost at the post office when the boy touched George’s arm.

  “Mr. Palmer-Jones,” he said, “can I ask you something?”

  “Of course.”

  “When Mary fell,” he said, “ would it have hurt?”

  “No,” George said seriously.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s all right then. I didn’t like her very much, but I wouldn’t have wanted it to hurt.”

  “Did she tell you what her secret was?”

  “No, she talked about it a lot, but she didn’t tell me what it was. I did think …”

  “Yes?”

  “Oh, nothing. I’d better go in now.”

  He stood briefly in front of George, shook the man’s hand, then ran indoors.

  At Kell they had finished dipping. It had turned into something of a party. There were more lambs than anyone had expected. Some of the men had cans of beer. They stood leaning against the sheep pen laughing and gossiping. They were in no hurry to go home. James wished that they would go. He was in no mood for gossip and laughter. Years ago it had been a great day, the Hill Gather. He and Melissa had invited everyone on Kinness into their house, when it was all finished. There had been whisky and fiddle music into the evening. Now he wanted it all to be over. All the people turned Kell into a prison for Melissa. She would not come out while they were there.

  At last they began to drift away to their homes and their wives. Sarah was the first to go. She left Jim there, talking to Alec, drinking beer. George met her by the school-house gate.

  “I’ve found the scarf,” he said.

  She was surprised. She thought that nonsense was all over.

  “Where?” she said. “Was it down on the beach?”

  “No, it was in Taft, the empty croft near the road.”

  “How did it get there?”

  “If we knew that we would know who pushed Mary Stennet over Ellie’s Head.”

  “So you still think that she was pushed?”

  “Oh yes,” he said. “Now that I’ve found the scarf there’s no other explanation.”

  Chapter Eight

  The next day was colder. The wild geese came, the pink-footed geese from Iceland, and the men went out to shoot them. Jim did not go. He said that he was too busy, though Sarah thought he had stayed at home to spare her feelings. She had seen the geese flying over the house and heard them calling.

  Alec came to ask Jim to go with him.

  “I thought you wanted to start the second-cut silage,” Jim said. “There’s too much to do.”

  “You go,” Sarah said. “ I don’t mind.”

  But she was pleased when he stuck it out and insisted he was too busy.

  “You’re getting soft,” Alec jeered. “ You’ve been too long in the south. You’ll have to come to supper one night and taste what you’re missing.”

  It was a still, clear day. It’s already winter here, Sarah thought, and in my parents’ house the leaves will hardly have changed colour.

  “Can I help you?” she asked Jim. He was sitting on the wooden chair by the kitchen door, pulling Wellington boots over long knitted socks. He was in a hurry because Alec had kept him talking, and he hardly looked up.

  “No,” he said. “There’s nothing for you to do. If you’re bored you could go to see Mother. She would like to see you.”

  Robert heard the geese and watched the men go after them. Nobody asked him to go, too. Even when he was younger he was left out of expeditions like that. They had always laughed at him. He had always been left out. It was because he had no family of his own. It would be different if he had married and he had sons to the house who said: “Father, we’re off after the geese. You come with us,” or daughters to cook a goose and ask him to dinner to share it.

  He had always liked the girls and would have asked any one of them to marry him, but he knew that they would only laugh at him. Perhaps it was his leg, white and withered with polio, that made them laugh. Sometimes he wanted to show them that he was a man like other men, take the smiles off their pretty faces.

  The geese would be on the lochan at Kell. There would be no point in going that way. Now that they all had freezers in their houses there was never a bird to be given away, no matter how many they shot. It was then that he remembered the people he had seen in Taft, on the foggy morning when the lorry broke down. That information might be worth a goose, he thought, remembering the frantic, intimate whispers. Someone might give me a goose to keep quiet about that. But that would have to wait until later. Now he would bring his wood up Ellie’s Geo and begin to saw it into logs for the winter.

  He was dragging one long and awkward plank down the hill to Tain when he saw the girl from Unsta, Jim Stennet’s new wife. He thought how pretty she was. She’ll be making all the other women jealous, he thought with satisfaction. She was sitting on Ellie’s Head looking out to sea, and she did not see him. He took pleasure in watching her, without her being aware of it. Although it was so cold, she was not wearing a coat and her sweater was tight. No other woman on the island had a sweater like it, and he thought that soon they would all be searching through their mail-order catalogues to find clothes like the girl from Unsta wore. Suddenly she got up and turned to walk down the hill. She must have seen him looking at
her. He turned away quickly and limped on, dragging the wood behind him.

  Sarah had been thinking of Mary. It had been a shock to see the old man staring at her. She walked quicker than he did and soon caught him up.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  He was surprised. He had thought that she would be cross with him for staring, but she was so pretty that he supposed that she was used to the men looking at her. He accepted her offer of help immediately before she changed her mind. Usually he had to beg for assistance. Help on Kinness was only freely given to family.

  She took one end of the plank and they walked together, carrying the wood between them, towards Tain. He did not speak. She was surprised by how strong he was. Several times she had to ask him to stop so that she could rest. When they got to the house he showed her where they could leave the plank. He stood and looked at her, smiling, twisting his flat cap between his hands. It was a peculiar smile, frankly admiring, almost innocent. He was, Sarah thought, a little strange.

  “You’ll take some tea?” he asked. “ Or a dram?”

  “I’d like some tea,” she said.

  He hopped into the house, followed by his dog, and held the door open for her to go in. He was obviously pleased that she had accepted his invitation, but he was awkward now and a little shy. He showed her into a small dark room which could not have changed much since he was a child. Under the window was a square table covered with oil cloth. A black cast-iron stove jutted into the room from one wall. On shelves at either side of it were some religious books, an ugly wooden clock, an ornamental plate showing the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, and an assortment of glass animals. Two high-backed chairs made from driftwood in the island pattern stood by the stove, and in one corner was a spinning wheel. The room was tidy, but dusty. The window was dirty and allowed in little light. When Robert came in from the scullery after filling the kettle, she was still looking at the spinning wheel.

  “That was my mother’s,” he said. “ She was a fine spinner. She kept the wool as even as can be and never broke the yam.”