Palmer-Jones 05 - Sea Fever Page 11

  He knew that they were waiting for him to go. Muriel Franks had withdrawn into daydreams and memories, and Dennis shuffled and looked at his watch.

  “There’s just one more question before I go,” George said.

  They both stared at him.

  “You knew where Greg would be this weekend because you opened a letter sent to him here,” George said. He tried to sound as if this were a normal thing to do. If Muriel Franks thought he was accusing her of prying, she might lie. “ Had that ever happened before?”

  She was suddenly hysterical, transferred from her sedated lethargy. Tears streamed down her cheeks, and her voice was loud and frightened. “I didn’t know what was in it!” she cried. “He had no right to be angry. It was no reason for him to leave home.”

  George looked for explanation to Dennis Franks.

  “We should have told you before,” the man said. He looked embarrassed, not by the revelation that his wife had opened Greg’s mail but by the scene she was making now. “That’s when he left home for good. It was about a year ago. He said if he couldn’t trust Muriel not to interfere in his private life, he’d have to go.” George moved from his seat to the sofa where Mrs. Franks was sobbing. He wished Molly had agreed to come with him.

  “What was in the letter you opened?” he asked, not sure how to speak to her without provoking another outburst of guilt and self-pity.

  She looked at him wide-eyed, gasping in an attempt to stop the crying.

  “It was a cheque,” she said, “ for a lot of money.”

  George showed no surprise. “Was there a letter with the cheque?”

  “No,” she said. “Not really a letter. One of those printed slips.”

  “A compliment slip,” Franks said impatiently. “She means a compliment slip.”

  “Was there a name?” George asked. “ Can you remember?”

  She shook her head. “ Something was written on it in ordinary handwriting,” she said. She wanted to please him. “I can’t remember what it said.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked. “Perhaps you could try.”

  She shook her head. “It was just one line,” she said. “A scribble.” Then, glad because at least she had some information, she added. “There was an address printed at the top of the paper. I recognized it because we’ve been there before. Not to the house, of course. We wouldn’t know anyone who lived in a place like that. But to the pub in the village. Den used to take me out for a drive in the evening if it was sunny, and we’d have steak and chips in the garden.…”

  The aimless words rambled on. George interrupted, trying not to show his impatience. “Mrs. Franks,” he said, “what was the address?”

  She looked at him in surprise, as if she thought she had already told him.

  “It was in Pemberton,” she said calmly. “ It’s a pretty village in Somerset. The house was called Cranmers. It’s right in the middle of the village, and we drive past it on the way to the pub.” Then, politely, as if making conversation to one of her husband’s business friends, she said, “ Do you know Pemberton, Mr. Palmer-Jones?”

  George said nothing, but he knew the village. He and a friend had been invited there after an education and wildlife conference to share a meal with another of the conference members. He remembered the house because of the unusual name. The friend was Gwen Pullen, the curator of the Natural History Museum, and the man who had offered them hospitality was Duncan James.

  George thought Anne James looked like the heroine of a Betjeman poem. She was long-legged, healthy, and very English. He could imagine her on the tennis courts. She would play a stylish but unshowy game, and she would not try too hard to win. He arrived at Cranmers with no clear idea what he would say to her, and when he saw her across the perfect lawn, he felt intimidated by her middle-class competence.

  It was midafternoon. He had parked in the middle of the village and walked back to the house, passing the pub where the Franks ate steak and chips on the momentous days when Dennis took out his wife. Pemberton was surrounded by low, rich agricultural land with fields which flooded in winter.

  There were black-and-white cows and black-and-white houses, and everywhere fruit trees. Cranmers was made of flat-faced stone, and it was square and more regularly proportioned than the other houses in the street. It had three storeys, and on one side there was a glass-and-wrought-iron verandah. A Virginia creeper which was just starting to change colour was climbing over one corner. The house was protected from the road by a stone wall and wrought iron gate.

  He could tell while he was still on the pavement that a children’s party was taking place in the garden. He heard the tuneless singing of “ Happy Birthday” interspersed with giggles over the wall, and the gate was festooned with coloured balloons. By the time he had opened the gate, the tea was over. A trestle table with benches on each side had been set on the lawn, but the children had run away into the orchard and were climbing trees and pushing each other on a tyre strung by a piece of rope from an apple tree. The elaborate homemade birthday cake was still uncut.

  Anne James approached him over the grass. She was wearing a sleeveless floral dress and sandals, and the courteous friendliness that comes with supreme confidence.

  “Have you come to collect one of the little monsters?” she asked. “I don’t think I’ll be able to persuade them to leave yet.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s not that.”

  She looked at him then more closely. Before, her attention had been on the brown-limbed children in the orchard, checking their safety, enjoying the fun.

  “I’ve met you before, haven’t I?” she said. “It’s Mr. Palmer-Jones.”

  “Yes.” He was not surprised that she had remembered him. She had been an attentive hostess. She would do everything well. “I worked occasionally with your husband.”

  “Duncan isn’t here,” she said. “He says he’s sorry to be away for Philip’s birthday, but I think he’s rather glad. He finds the chaos a little daunting. He’s in Cornwall, and he couldn’t have come home even if he’d wanted to. There was some sort of accident, apparently, and the police have asked him to stay.”

  “I know,” George said. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “Oh,” she said vaguely, “ Don’t you work for the police? I remembered Duncan’s saying.” She looked at him anxiously, too polite to say that George looked too old to be a policeman.

  “No,” George said. “Not the police. The Home Office.”

  “So you’re involved with the investigation into the accident?”

  He did not answer directly. “It wasn’t an accident,” he said. “ It was murder.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “Duncan is all right?” Yet, even in her anxiety, she maintained her composure.

  “Yes,” he said, “ Duncan is fine. But I should like to ask you some questions. The police will be coming to talk to you, too. I’m not here in any official capacity. There’s no reason why you should talk to me, but I’ve been asked by the parents of the boy who died to look into his death. They feel the police in Cornwall are a bit remote. I was on the boat, you see.”

  “But why are you here? I can’t help you.”

  He shrugged. “ I had to come to Bristol to see Mr. and Mrs. Franks, and this is on the way back to Porthkennan.”

  Parents began to arrive then to collect the children. George stood beside Anne James as she cut the cake and wrapped it in kitchen paper. She handed it out to them with little presents in silver paper decorated with ribbon. The adults gathered sticky and excitable children to them and drove off in expensive cars. When the lawn was empty and Lucy and Philip, shouting the last impatient goodbyes, had been released back to the orchard, Anne led him to a white garden bench in the shadow of a yew hedge.

  “Is Duncan in some sort of trouble?” she asked. She was more intelligent than he had realised.

  “I don’t know,” he said. It was hard to imagine Duncan James, upright and respectable, in trouble of any kin
d.

  “There must be something,” she said, “or you’d not have come here.”

  It was five o’clock, and in the long shadow it was pleasantly cool after the heat of the day. Somewhere in the village there was a bonfire.

  “Did he ever talk to you about Greg Franks?” George asked.

  She shook her head. “Is that the boy who died?”

  “Yes.”

  “No,” she said. “ I’ve never heard of him.”

  “He’s a birdwatcher,” George said. “A twitcher. He’s quite famous in his own circles. The police believe he was bringing drugs into the country.”

  “Duncan would never be involved in anything like that.”

  “No,” George said. “I don’t believe he would. Unfortunately there is a connection between Duncan and Franks. About a year ago a letter arrived at Greg’s parents’ house. He was still officially living at home then, though he would disappear for days, even weeks, at a time. The letter arrived during one of his frequent absences, and his mother opened it. It was a large cheque, and it was sent from this address. You say you’ve never heard of Greg, so presumably you didn’t send it. That leaves Duncan.”

  She shook her head. “ There must be some mistake,” she said. “I don’t know anything about it.”

  “You do see how it looks,” George persisted. “Franks was a known drug dealer. Duncan paid him a large sum of money. That implicates Duncan in the drugs, don’t you see?”

  “I can see how it looks,” she said, “ but it’s impossible.”

  “You can think of no other reason Duncan might have had for paying Franks?”

  “No,” she said. “ None at all.”

  He found it impossible to follow the line of questioning, and there was a pause in the conversation. In the tall trees behind the house he heard wood pigeons calling, and in the garden behind the wall there was the sound of a hose.

  “Why did Duncan go to Cornwall this weekend?” George asked at last.

  “He was tired,” Anne said. “He needed the break.”

  “I shouldn’t have thought it was his sort of thing at all. When did he decide to go?”

  “Last weekend,” she said. “ It was all rather sudden. I was pleased; I thought he could do with a holiday. There’s a lot of pressure on the sites of scientific interest in the area, and he’s been under strain for months.”

  “How did he come to hear of the trip?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” she said. “I presume it was some sort of circular. A letter came for him on Saturday morning, and later that day at dinner he said something like ‘This looks interesting. Would you mind if I went?’”

  “Did you read the circular?”

  “No,” she said. “But if you want to see it, I expect it’s still in Duncan’s office. He never throws anything away.”

  She stood up and, with a last look at the children, led him into the house. He thought it was her confidence which made her so trusting. She was so secure that she believed this relative stranger could do her family no harm. Inside it was cool, ordered, cared for, without being uncomfortably tidy. Children’s Wellingtons stood in a row just inside the door. Anne must have been picking apples, because there was a box of them, wrapped separately in newspaper, in the hall. Duncan’s study was a mess of papers and files. An open ordnance survey map was spread over the floor, and they had to step over it to get to the desk. On the desk a rack of plastic trays was spilling over with letters. “It’ll be here somewhere,” she said, working through the papers in the top tray. “It’s doesn’t look like it, but there’s a kind of system.” He watched her pile letters and bills into some kind of order. “ Here we are,” she said. “This is the telephone bill. It came on Saturday, too.”

  “What’s that?” George said, pointing to a printed white envelope.

  She opened it and pulled out a glossy brochure.

  “No,” she said. “ This is an advertisement for a new leisure complex in the county. There’s been controversy over it for years, since the original plans were proposed. It’s in the middle of Rashwood Park. Duncan supervised the environmental impact assessment. There was a lot of opposition to the project locally, but unfortunately he couldn’t find any habitat rare or important enough to stop it going ahead.”

  “Could I have a look?” George asked.

  The development company was called Squirrel, and the publicity was emblazoned with a logo of oak leaves and acorns. The complex included a four-star hotel and golf course, a health club and gymnasium. It had been open for six months, and the photographs showed scrawny middle-aged women drinking cocktails by a swimming pool. On the border of the front page, in red ink, was written a Bristol phone number.

  “Did this arrive on Saturday?” George asked.

  “Yes,” Anne said vaguely. “It must have. It was next to the telephone bill.”

  “Did you see Duncan open the circular about the Jessie Ellen trip?”

  “No,” she said, “I don’t think I did. Lucy goes to ballet on Saturday morning, and I was in a hurry.”

  “Would you mind if I kept this?” he asked, holding out the glossy booklet.

  “No,” she said. “Keep it.” Saunas and jacuzzis would not appeal to her, he thought. She would think them common.

  They stood, suddenly awkward, in the little room. He was challenging the confidence which had seen her through so far. She was starting to realise he might be dangerous. She felt George had betrayed her. She had thought he was one of her sort. Now here they were together, rifling through the private papers on her husband’s desk.

  “Look,” she said, “ I don’t like this. Perhaps I shouldn’t have talked to you. Duncan’s done nothing wrong, but I think I should have spoken to him first. You’d better go.”

  Somewhere in the house, a long way off, a child was wailing that it was hungry.

  “Yes,” George said. “ I’ll leave now. I’m sorry to have put you in a difficult position.”

  She ignored the complaining child and walked with him to the front door and waited there until she was sure he had left the garden.

  He walked back down the street to his car. A group of loud-voiced young people were sitting on the grass in the pub’s garden. At the car he paused. He looked again at the glossy brochure advertising the delights of Rashwood Hall Country Club. On an impulse he crossed the road to the public telephone box, feeling in his pocket for change as he went. He dialed the number written by hand on the brochure.

  The phone was answered by a young woman with a West Country accent.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Is Greg in?” George asked, his fingers were crossed behind his back.

  “No,” she said. “He’s away this week.”

  She was bright and chatty. She wasn’t the sort to read the newspaper or listen to the news, he thought. She didn’t even know Greg was dead.

  “When are you expecting him back?” He tried to sound friendly, not really interested but enjoying a conversation with a young woman.

  “Well,” she said, “you know what Greg’s like. The end of the week, he said.”

  “He wanted some information,” George said. “Perhaps I’d better post it to him. Could you give me the address?”

  She seemed suddenly different, not suspicious, but careful, like a child who has been warned not to give too much away. “ I think it might be best if you phoned again when he’s back,” she said.

  “I’m in Bristol tonight,” he said, jovial, fatherly. “Perhaps I could drop it in.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, meaning it but pleased, too, that she had an excuse for putting him off. “There won’t be anyone here. I’m just on my way to work.”

  “That’s a shame,” he said, “ having to work on a lovely evening like this.”

  “Well, it’s not really work. Pleasure, really. I’m personal assistant to Brian Barnes of Squirrel Development. We’re entertaining some clients at Rashwood Hall.”

  She giggled smugly. George wi
shed her a pleasant evening and said he hoped Mr. Barnes appreciated her, then replaced the receiver. He went back over the road, then to the pub for a drink. He told himself that it was because he needed change for the other phone calls he still had to make, but it was more like a celebration.

  Chapter Nine

  When George approached the entrance to the Squirrel leisure complex, he realised he had been to Rashwood Park once before. His son had been a student at Bristol University, and he and Molly had come to know the city well during his time there. They had visited Rashwood Park when they spent a weekend with him before taking him home for the summer vacation. There had been an end-of-term party, a picnic lunch, and George and Molly had been invited. It had all been rather posey and pretentious—there were girls wearing Victorian underwear, with flowers in their hair, and young men with loud voices discussing art. Molly had hated it and muttered throughout the festivity about privilege and decadence. He had found it amusing. Both had agreed that the setting for the picnic was spectacular and had encouraged extravagant posturing.

  They had driven out of the city and down the narrow country roads to the grounds of a ruined Georgian mansion which were apparently open to the public. It was a magnificent lush crumbling place with ivy-covered pillars, the empty stone bowls of giant fountains, and broken statues overgrown with honeysuckle and convolvulus. Below the houses there had been a lake with flag iris at its edge and a forest of bramble and beech beyond, and on the low ground between the lake and the house a meadow of wildflowers and long grasses. George seemed to remember that they all drank too much wine, and one of the nymphlike girls spoilt the image of purity by being sick.

  Now everything was quite different. The old mansion had been demolished. Nothing was left of the pillars and towering arches, though there were mean little arches in brick leading from the bar of the new hotel to a patio of bright pink stone. And there, in a corner, cleaned and scrubbed, was one of the statues from the old garden. The grass was nitrate-green and was being mowed again—quite unnecessarily it seemed to George—by a man sitting on a noisy machine.