Palmer-Jones 01 - A Bird in the Hand

by Ann Cleeves

  “Darling, do stop being so mysterious. Tell me what it’s all about.”

  “Did you ever meet Tom French?” he asked. “He came here a few times, although I think he stayed on St. Mary’s when he was last on Scilly. He was a birdwatcher. He was murdered about a fortnight ago, in Rushy, the village on the north Norfolk coast.”

  She was not shocked. Very little shocked her.

  “I’ve probably met him. I try to see most of the rarities. The birdwatchers all seem to know me, and I talk to them, but I don’t know any names. Are you involved in it professionally?”

  “Not really. I retired last year, you know. But I was asked to find out if the murderer was a birdwatcher and I agreed.”

  “And what brings you here?”

  “Peter Littleton.”

  “Ah, of course, dear Peter. Did he know the poor boy?”

  “He was a friend. But I think there were other connections.”

  “And you’ve come here to find out what they were?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I’m not sure that I want to help you. Peter was a dear friend.” He must have shown his disappointment, his tiredness, because she grinned. “But of course I’ll talk to you about Peter. If I don’t someone else will, and the islanders don’t like him.” She smiled again, a wide mischievous smile. “When he left, it wasn’t with a whimper. They’re still talking about it. He wrote a rude, if accurate description of his wife in red paint on the post office wall. You can still see it faintly even now. And he drove Ted Baxter’s tractor into the harbour.

  “Of course they never liked him. He was an outsider and a birdwatcher too, which made it worse. He lost his temper before he went. But those were childish things, hurtful but not vicious, and Barbara provoked him. I taught her, you know. Barbara Baxter she was then. Quite a pleasant little thing. A bit simple. Not at all academic. She tried her best, but she wasn’t up to it. Of course Ted Baxter blamed me for the poor school reports. Instead of letting her go with her friends to the comprehensive on St. Mary’s where she would have been perfectly happy, he sent her to a private school on the mainland. They didn’t teach her anything useful and made her sulky.”

  “Did you see a lot of Peter Littleton?”

  “He used to come down quite often. For some intelligent conversation.” She smiled at herself. “That sounds terribly arrogant and snobbish, doesn’t it? We’re just different, Peter and I. We didn’t fit in. Ted Baxter is an intelligent man. His intelligence makes him a lot of money. But he isn’t interesting. Peter would come to see me, perhaps one evening a week. We would listen to my music, talk about books. The islanders thought it was very strange that he took so much interest in me. When he went off as he did, they almost blamed me. Very medieval, as if I were a witch who’d cast a spell on him.”

  “Did he ever mention a girl, Sally Johnson? She worked on Tresco. She would have been here two years ago.”

  “I know that there was a girl. He never told me her name.”

  “Did he tell you anything about her?”

  “For that summer he talked about nothing else. No practical details like her name or where she worked. Just about how much in love he was. Madly in love like a teenager.”

  George remembered fleetingly that Rob had described Tom’s love for Sally like that. Charlotte continued:

  “Then came the agonizing about whether he should leave Barbara. He felt he owed her something. She had given him four years on St. Agnes and he loved the place. He had decided that he would leave her, when the girl disappeared. For a while he tried to find her, but she’d hurt his pride. He thought that she’d just decided that she didn’t want to know him.”

  It was tantalizing. He knew that Peter and Sally had been seeing each other that summer, that they had fallen in love, but there was still no proof.

  “If I’m right about the identity of the girl,” George said, “she was pregnant. Did Peter know that?”

  “No,” she said, moved almost to tears. “Oh, the poor darling boy, the poor girl. He never knew. He thought that she just ran away.”

  Ted Baxter was as hostile as George had expected him to be. He was a short, squat man, built like a Welsh miner. When George arrived he was scraping the mud from his wellingtons at the kitchen door. It was teatime. He must have been impressed by George’s air of authority because he asked him, grudgingly, into the house. When George explained why he was there Baxter’s hostility became focused not on George, but on his son-in-law. The farmer made no pretence at concern about the death of a birdwatcher, but although it was obvious that his only feeling for Peter was one of obsessive hatred, his attitude to his son-in-law’s involvement in the case was ambiguous. He was worried that his daughter might, in some way, become implicated, but he was delighted that all his suspicions about Peter’s character had been confirmed. He supposed, without question, that Peter was the murderer.

  As bearer of such news, George was made almost welcome. Baxter ordered his wife to pour tea for George and in a musing, gloating way began to talk. The farmhouse was not a traditional cottage but a modern bungalow with large windows giving a spectacular view down the island to the sea. As George listened to the man talking, he looked out and thought that it was a perfect place to fall in love.

  “I was against it from the start,” Baxter said. “ She could have done better than that layabout. She was as pretty as a picture. She could have had any man she wanted. She said that he’d been to Oxford, but you would never have known, the way he dressed and talked. They let anyone into the universities now. Degrees are two a penny. He had no job when he first came here, no prospects. He was one of those twitchers, sleeping rough on the beach. He met Barbara in the Tavern. She was working there that summer. She didn’t need to work but she’d just left school, and was feeling bored. You know these young people. He got round her somehow with his smooth talking and his poetry, and his fancy ways.

  “He came to see me, respectable enough, to ask if they could get married. I can tell you I was shocked. To be fair, he was willing enough when I said to wait for a year, but she wouldn’t have it. She wanted to be married that summer, and nothing else would do. I should have been firm, told her to wait, but in the end I agreed. She’s our only daughter and maybe we spoil her.

  “It never worked out of course, not from the beginning. He was a clown. He couldn’t settle to work. I run a serious business and he never could take it seriously. All the same, I could have put up with all that, Mr. Palmer-Jones, if he’d been good to our Barbara. After they were married he hardly seemed to take any notice of her. He’d got what he wanted—her money and a home on the island here. We put them in the old farmhouse where we lived until we had this place built. It was comfortable enough—Barbara had it done out just as she wanted—but he never appreciated it. There was a garden at the back of the house, and he just let it run wild. I had to send one of my men down to clear it in the end. He took no care of the place.

  “He never took Barbara out. He spent all his free time out on the island with his binoculars looking at bloody birds. And in the evenings, when it was too dark to see, he’d have his nose stuck in a bloody book. Barbara used to come round here, just to have someone to talk to. He was mad about those birds. Crazy. Look at the way he behaved when he left here. That wasn’t the work of a sane man. Barbara’s been on tranquilizers ever since that night. She still can’t sleep properly without the tablets. That’s what birdwatching does to a man. It turns his mind, and changes him into a lunatic. I won’t have them on my land now. I can’t bear to see them.”

  “Do you know if Mr. Littleton saw any other women while he was married to your daughter?” George asked, still looking at the magnificent view, wondering if the island had worked its magic twice for Peter. Was it here that he had first fallen in love with Sally, as well as with Barbara? Because, despite the lack of proof, he was convinced that Peter and Sally had been in love. He knew that Peter was Barnaby’s father.

  “Him?”
Ted Baxter almost spat with disgust. “ He wouldn’t have had it in him. Who would have wanted another woman when he could have had my daughter? I tell you. You don’t know these birdwatchers. They don’t care about anything else except their birds.”

  “So there were never any rumours about Mr. Littleton and another woman?”

  “Rumours. There may have been rumours. There are always rumours in a place like this. There have been rumours enough about Barbara and none of them are true. Not one of them. She was a good wife to him.”

  The back door leading to the farmyard opened then, and a young woman walked in. She was wearing jeans and leather boots and a loose jersey. She had been riding. She was beautiful, in the conventional way that a model is beautiful. Her tan was too deep, her lashes too long to be natural. Her hair was windswept, but when she shook it, it settled back into its ordained shape. She raised her eyebrows at their visitor with an attempt at sophisticated curiosity, but when she spoke, the simple, friendly girl described by Charlotte Cavanagh showed through.

  “Who’s our visitor, Dad? Is there any tea in the pot, Mum?”

  George saw no sign of the strain described by Ted Baxter, the dependence on tranquillizers. She looked healthy; pampered. In middle age she would grow fat.

  “This is Mr. Palmer-Jones, my love,” said her father, as if he were talking to an invalid. “ He’s come to ask some questions about that husband of yours. You don’t have to talk to him if you don’t want to. We don’t want you to upset yourself.”

  “He’s my ex-husband, Dad,” she said. “And I don’t care at all about answering any questions. What’s he done? Been in trouble with the police again, has he?”

  The last question seemed to be a malicious attempt to bring her father to anger. She shot a defiant look at him as she spoke. But Baxter misunderstood her, and thought that she was accusing him of telling the police about Peter’s final fling on the island. He answered defensively.

  “Why are you talking about the police? I promised that I wouldn’t go to the police and I never did. And I paid off Mary at the post office so she wouldn’t make a fuss. He’s never been in trouble with the police. Not because of me at any rate.”

  “I didn’t say because of you, Dad,” she said with another failed attempt at sophistication. “ He’d been in court before he came to the island that first summer.”

  Before Ted Baxter could use this information as yet another indication of his opinion of Peter Littleton, George interrupted.

  “Did he tell you why he’d been in court?” George asked, knowing already what the answer would be.

  “Drugs,” she said flatly. “ He’d been in trouble for taking dope.”

  “Did you know that when you married him?” Ted Baxter was flushed with rage but, in an attempt not to upset his daughter, he tried to restrain his anger. “You knew he was a junkie and you married him. I’ve had a drug addict under my roof?”

  “Oh, Dad,” she said condescendingly. “ He wasn’t a drug addict. Everyone does it these days. It’s nothing-to make a fuss about.”

  Ted Baxter, luckily, seemed able to find no reply to this, and George asked:

  “Did he use drugs when you knew him, when you were married?”

  “Not much.”

  She spoke with regret, as if admitting an indiscretion. Perhaps she thought it was sophisticated to take drugs.

  “I think sometimes the birdwatchers brought him some. I know that he smoked occasionally at parties.”

  “Did you ever meet any of his friends?”

  “I certainly did,” she said petulantly. “They came to stay every spring and autumn. They made a terrible mess all over the house. There were sleeping bags everywhere. I even found one of those twitchers sleeping in the bath. I stuck it for two years and then I put my foot down. Peter brought them home for meals sometimes, usually when I was out, but I wouldn’t have them to stay.”

  “Did any of them become your friends?”

  She tried to look amused.

  “They hardly seemed to notice that I was there. They only ever talked about birds.”

  “Did you meet Tom French or Rob Earl?”

  “I remember Rob Earl. He’s the good-looking one. He looks like that old-fashioned film star … What’s his name? He was in all the westerns on the television. Rob got drunk at our wedding. I’ve heard of Tom French, but I can’t remember what he looks like.”

  “He had a party on St. Mary’s a year ago last September. Peter went to it. Did you go with him?”

  “No,” she said definitely. “I never went to any of the birdwatchers’ parties. I was never made to feel welcome.”

  George walked back to the quay the long way round, along the cliffs. The scent of gorse blossom was sweet and heavy, and the light was very clear. Gulls and guillemots, unusually lazy, sat in ledges on the cliffs, or glided below him. Further away, he could see his boat waiting for him and the boatman sitting on the sand, apparently asleep.

  He sat on the short grass and tried to evaluate the information he had gained since coming to the island. There was really nothing new, nothing tangible. He knew now that Sally had become involved with some man while she was working on Tresco, and that she had left suddenly because she was pregnant. He could have deduced that from Barnaby’s age. He had learnt that the police wanted to question her about drugs found at a party she had attended. Surely he could infer that the party had been Tom’s. It coincided exactly with the date of Tom’s court appearance. Why, then, was he so convinced that Peter and not Tom was the father of Sally’s child? Because of the way that Sally and Tom’s relationship had developed and because she had never allowed Tom to be considered the father. But he still had no real evidence of any connection between Peter and Sally, apart from the coincidence that both had been on Scilly and both had been in love. He had learnt that Peter had been prosecuted in the past for drug abuse, and that he still occasionally took cannabis. Did that have any relevance? Had he planted the drug on Tom at the party? That was aimless speculation.

  The heat was making George drowsy and muddled his thoughts. He stood up quickly and walked back towards the boat. He had wasted enough time. Perhaps the young people would be back from Scotland and he had more questions now to ask them.

  He was walking down the lane towards the quay when Charlotte Cavanagh caught up with him. She moved strongly and purposefully, like a man.

  “George, my dear. I’m so glad that you’re still here. I was afraid that I’d miss you. I’ve remembered something. It doesn’t look very good for Peter, but I suppose that I should tell you. Peter had a rival in his love for the girl. He used to laugh about it and about how slow and timid this other boy was. ‘She doesn’t even know that he fancies her,’ Peter said to me. ‘And yet he’s so lovesick that he doesn’t think about anything else. Perhaps I should leave her alone, to give him a chance. He’d be better for her than me. But I can’t do it.’ Oh George, I’m sure that the name of the boy was Tom. I’m certain of it. He was a birdwatcher and he was staying on St. Mary’s.”

  So the trip had been worth while. He had made the vital connection between Tom, Peter and Sally. They had all been together on the Scillies and they had all been in Norfolk on the day of Tom’s death. For the moment that was enough for him. In the small boat, with the breeze blowing against his face and the low sun reflected on the water, the magic of the Scillies began to work for him again and he was untroubled.

  Chapter Twelve

  Molly woke to the smell of frying bacon and mushrooms. George was home then. She roused slowly from a deep sleep, comfortable because George was back. He had not come to bed; she hoped that he had slept in the train. He had a remarkable facility for managing without sleep, but she could not understand it, and she was anxious about him. She sat up.

  The bedroom was appallingly untidy, furnished from auctions and jumble sales. Her clothes were spilling out of drawers and were piled on the unsteady wooden bedside table, which her eldest son had made in his school
woodwork class. George’s wardrobe was firmly shut and his side of the bed clear of debris, but everywhere was very dusty. Molly did not notice. It was never any different. She tried to tell, from the kitchen sounds, if George had had a successful trip. She had learnt to manage his depressions, but she still dreaded them. She dreaded them on his account because of the pain of his self-doubt, his loneliness and guilt, and on her own account, because the effort of getting through to him, to reassure him, drained and exhausted her.

  She heard footsteps on the stairs, then the door opened and George was bringing her tea. After all the years of marriage, she was still deeply pleased to see him. He opened the curtains and the sunlight almost blinded her, so that she still could not tell from his face if he was happy or disappointed. He cleared some of her clothes from the table on to the floor, then placed the tea beside her.

  “Tell me what happened,” she said. “Did you find out what you wanted?”

  “Breakfast is ready.” he said. “I’ll tell you in the kitchen.”

  He bent down and kissed her. She watched him go with relief, knowing that whatever had happened on Scilly, he was more at ease. She washed and dressed quickly, then followed him down. He had already eaten, but poured out coffee for them both.

  “Did you find anything useful?” she demanded.

  “I’ll tell you in a moment, but first have you had any news from Ella or Mrs. Black? Has Terry been found? Have Rob and the others arrived back from Scotland?”

  “No to all the questions. I phoned Ella yesterday afternoon. The police seem to be doing a house-to-house search for Terry in Rushy and Fenquay and they’re moving on to Skeffingham today, but they’ve told Mrs. Black that they’ve no warrant for his arrest. They just want to talk to him, Ella hasn’t heard from Pete, Rob or Adam at all. She’s quite hurt. She’s got the impression that they’re phoning someone else for any information about birds.”