Palmer-Jones 05 - Sea Fever Page 5

  Chapter Four

  Inspector Claire Bingham lived in a smart new housing estate on the hill outside Heanor. When the National Trust sold the land to meet local housing need, they had not envisaged the split-level bungalows with balconies overlooking the harbour which were finally built there, and the estate caused the Trust considerable embarrassment. The Binghams settled easily into their home. They gave dinner parties for the other professional couples who lived on the hill. They had two cars and changed the largest every year. When work allowed, Claire changed into a pink-striped leotard and jogged and stretched with her neighbours at the aerobics class in the primary school hall. Afterwards she drank coffee with them and discussed mortgage rates and house prices and the problems of being a working mother.

  On the weekend of the Jessie Ellen trip Claire Bingham was not officially on duty. She spent Saturday morning shopping, pushing Thomas in his buggy strung with carrier bags around a Heanor clogged with holidaymakers. She had expected, when she was pregnant, that Richard would do more of that sort of thing. It seemed so obvious that they had never discussed it. They were both working full-time, weren’t they? She earned as much as he did, probably more, especially as his colleagues seemed to pass on all the legal aid work to him these days. He knew she was ambitious, the first detective inspector to return to work after maternity leave in the Devon and Cornwall force. She had expected more of him. But he was as busy as she was and always seemed to bring work home. Then he pleaded domestic ignorance and incompetence.

  “You do all that household stuff better than me,” he always said. “If you’re tired, don’t bother cooking. I’ll fetch a takeaway.”

  It infuriated her that two intelligent people found it impossible to organise their lives more efficiently.

  When she received the telephone call on Saturday night asking her to wait on the quay for the Jessie Ellen, she knew that she was second choice. She always was. The other duty inspector in her division had thought nothing would come of the emergency call and had suggested that the police station should try her.

  “It’ll only be an accident,” he said. “Some drunken holidaymaker losing his footing and slipping into the water. Claire Bingham’s keen. Let her see to it. If she’s so bloody efficient about paperwork, let her fill in the forms.”

  She knew her male colleague would have been contacted first when the coastguard informed the police station about the death at sea. He was approaching retirement and had begun to take things easy. He was always passing routine work on to her.

  “I’m just a policeman after all,” he would say maliciously but without bitterness. “Not a graduate with a law degree. No accelerated promotion for me.”

  She felt sometimes that the law degree, which in the beginning had seemed so valuable, was a disadvantage. So was her accent—BBC English, with a trace of Sloane Ranger learned at public school—and the fact that her husband was a defence solicitor. Her friends from school and university thought she was mad to have joined the force. The liberals among them saw the police as state-sponsored thugs, and the snobs considered policemen to be working class morons with dirty fingernails. Only Richard, doubtful at first, had stuck by her. Now she never told chance aquaintances what work she did.

  It would have been impossible for her to explain to them that from the moment of joining the police she had felt completely at home. She was comfortable with the philosophy of service and discipline, and without the structure she would have felt insecure.

  Disapproving college friends who watched her progress from a distance blamed it all on her background. Her father had been an army officer, and before being sent away to school, she had followed him on different postings around the world. She’s scared of the real world, they said. She can’t cope without authority. They did not know that Claire’s mother had been killed by an IRA car bomb in the small town in Germany where her father was based, and that from that day Claire had seized on order, routine, and organisation as her only means of survival.

  The administrators within her station thought Claire Bingham was a brilliant officer. She was logical and tidy. She left nothing to chance. Her immediate superiors were more cautious, but they were afraid of being considered prejudiced because she was a woman. They had been told that she had a first-class mind, that she represented the future, and that caused resentment. She was too rigid, they said among themselves. She played it too much by the book. You had to be willing to take risks. She was too defensive.

  In these conversations one wise chief inspector said to give her time. She was still young, still inexperienced. She lacked confidence. She might make a good detective yet.

  Claire Bingham had no idea why the Jessie Ellen had been to sea. She had been told that it was a charter boat, and she expected the passengers to be young men out for a day’s fishing, members perhaps of some club. The disparate group which emerged from the saloon as the boat moved slowly towards the quayside shocked her. She watched a thin boy make the boat fast, then waited for them to come ashore. The first person onto the quay was Rose Pengelly. She looked exhausted, and her face was grimy and tearstained. She clutched Matilda in her arms. Claire was horrified by the irresponsibility of taking a baby to sea. What sort of woman, she thought, would expose her child to such danger?

  Then she saw the Pyms, a middle-aged couple who were respectably dressed and obviously distressed by the accident, and a tall, upright gentleman with a wife who seemed to have chosen her clothes in a jumble sale. Only then came three single men who might have been fishermen, except for the cameras and telescopes which were draped around their bodies. It was quite different from what she had imagined, and she was thrown by it. For a moment she did not quite know where to begin. It was a new experience for her. The passengers stood on the pier in a miserable group, looking for guidance.

  She pulled herself together and approached them. Sergeant Berry took the doctor onto the boat to look at the body.

  “I’m Inspector Bingham,” she said formally. “ South-West Cornwall C.I.D.; I’ll need to take statements from you all later.”

  The spare elderly man detached himself from the group. His voice was polite, but it would be hard to disagree with him. Claire knew immediately that there was something familiar about him. She had seen him before.

  “I wonder if we might go home to wait for you,” he said. “We’re all staying at the same place, with Rose Pengelly at Myrtle Cottage. It’s in Porthkennan. Perhaps you could come there to take your statements. As you can imagine, it’s been a very distressing day.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I think that might be possible, Mr.—?”

  “Palmer-Jones,” he said. “George Palmer-Jones.”

  Then she knew where she had seen him. He had been a guest lecturer at Hendon. When the others trooped miserably towards their cars, she called him back.

  “Mr. Palmer-Jones,” she said. “I just wanted to say what a pleasure it is to meet you again. You were rather a hero of mine at college actually. I read your report of the patrolling of sensitive areas even before I joined the force. At Hendon they told us you were the only civil servant really to understand what policing is about.”

  She paused, blushing, realising that she was being too effusive, unprofessional.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m keeping you from your friends. I expect I’ll see you later. The formalities won’t take long if it was an accident.”

  He looked up with disturbed, rather angry eyes. He hardly seemed to see her. She was hurt. She had hoped he would take more notice of her.

  “I shouldn’t be too certain,” he said, “that it was an accident.”

  He walked back towards his wife, then returned briefly to tell her that Greg’s car was still parked on the quayside.

  Along the harbour wall, as if from nowhere, a group of people had gathered. The news of the young man’s death must be public knowledge already. She turned her back to them and stepped carefully onto the boat. On the deck the doctor was looking at
the body with a strong spotlight.

  “We might as well move him,” he said. “They pulled him around quite a lot trying to revive him.”

  “Anything unusual?” She stooped beside him. There was a strong and unpleasant smell of fish which made her feel sick.

  “Only this.” He seemed to be talking almost to himself. “A severe blow to the back of the head. It must have knocked him out before he hit the water. That’s probably why he drowned so quickly. The water was warm. If he was a swimmer, he could have survived for ages. But I can’t see where he can have fallen and hit his head. The deck rail’s too low, and if he slipped backwards onto the deck, he wouldn’t have fallen into the water. The wound’s in the wrong place and the wrong shape for that anyway.”

  “What would you say, then?”

  He straightened slowly. “It sounds ridiculous,” he said, “ but it’s the right shape for the classic blunt instrument.”

  “Murder?” she said. “Are you sure?” Again it was so far from what she had expected when she came to the quay that she could hardly believe it.

  “Well, I don’t see how it can have been an accident, and it can’t be suicide. He’s hardly going to hit himself on the back of the head.”

  She stood up, her head spinning with the smell of fish and the exhilaration and awesome responsibility of a murder investigation. It was her case, she thought. They could not take it away from her now. She gripped the deck rail and tried desperately not to be sick.

  “Are you all right?”

  It was the doctor, thinking the idea of such violence was making her ill. She could have told him that she had come to terms with it years ago.

  “Yes,” she said. “ Fine.”

  She looked around her and caught the eye of Louis Rosco, who was still standing in the lighted wheelhouse. She nodded towards the body.

  “Can you sort this out with my sergeant?” she said. “I want to talk to the skipper and find out what all those people were doing on the boat anyway.”

  “Birds!” the doctor said.

  “What do you mean?” She looked at him suspiciously.

  “That’s what they were doing on the Jessie Ellen. They’re birdwatchers. I’m one myself. I went on the same ship three weeks ago. They got me Wilson’s petrel.”

  With that he left her alone on deck and went to talk to Sergeant Berry. Probably, she thought, about women’s weak stomachs. The pubs beyond the harbour wall were closing. There were good-humoured calls, the occasional snatch of singing. The crowd peering down at the Jessie Ellen was growing.

  Louis Rosco watched the policewoman on the deck with a mounting despair and confusion. He had thought these formalities would soon be over. Greg’s death would be put down as an accident, and there would be no more questions. Now the sight of the woman bending over the body, talking earnestly to the doctor, made him realise that this hope was quite unrealistic. She was the sort to be curious. She would want to know everything. Even the shape of her depressed him. She was angular and tall, with a sharp nose and pointed chin. Her pale hair was tied away from her face. He sensed that she was well dressed and that some men might find her attractive, but he only had an impression of order and dogged persistence. She frightened him.

  When she came to the wheelhouse door, Rosco still had no idea what he would tell her.

  “Would you like some tea?” he asked. The boy and Fat Freddy had been allowed home after a brief discussion with Sergeant Berry. “I was going to make some anyway. If you’ve got questions to ask, we’ll be more comfortable in the saloon.”

  She nodded gratefully, and he felt relieved. He showed her where to go, forcing himself to be natural and polite. But as he went to the galley to make the tea, he felt his heart racing and his breath coming unevenly in gulps.

  When he returned to the saloon, her legs were crossed, and she rested a notebook on one knee. He handed her a mug and sat on the opposite side of the table on the bench seat.

  “Was the dead man a birdwatcher?” she asked. Rosco nodded.

  “They all were,” he said. “As far as I know. I never realised until I started this business what fanatics they are.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, that they’d go to such lengths to see a few gulls and petrels. It’s not cheap to charter the boat for twenty-four hours, an there’s the tour company’s commission on top of that.”

  He felt on safe ground and was beginning to relax.

  “Where does Mrs. Pengelly come into it?” She remembered the untidy woman with the baby and could not keep the disapproval from her voice.

  Panic made it hard for him to think rationally. She was waiting for an answer, and he forced himself to speak.

  “She runs a sort of guest house,” he said. “Down at Porthkennan at the top of the valley. She has a lot of birdwatchers to stay in the spring and the autumn. After the boat trip the passengers have a few days there. It’s all organised by the company in Bristol. A package, like. The Cornish Spectacular they call it. They do four over the summer. This would be the last.”

  He thought he was speaking too much, but she seemed not to notice his nervousness.

  “Was one of the company’s representatives on the boat?”

  “Yes. Mr. Earl. He’s been on every trip. He looks after the birdwatching side of it.”

  “So he’d have a list of all the passengers?”

  “Sure to.”

  “And he’s staying at Porthkennan, too?”

  He nodded.

  “Was there anything unusual about this trip?” she asked. “ Did you notice anything different from the other three?”

  He considered.

  “They were more serious,” he said. “About the birdwatching, like. On the other trips there were one or two fanatics, but most were there to have a good time. They wanted to see the birds, but if they didn’t, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. On this one you felt it was a matter, well, of life and death.”

  “Did they see what they wanted to?”

  “Yes,” he said. “They got themselves into a right state, too. It started off like all the others. They saw Wilson’s petrels. That’s what they all came out to see. Then there was something else which really excited them. They couldn’t identify it; Mr. Earl said it must be something really rare. Perhaps it had never been seen before. That’s when we realised the boy was missing. They went to fetch him to show him the new bird, but they couldn’t find him.”

  “He wasn’t birdwatching with the others?”

  “No,” Rosco said. “ He’d been seasick in the night and still didn’t look well in the morning. He dragged himself out for a couple of hours, then went to lie down again.”

  “In his bunk?”

  “No,” Rosco said shortly. “On deck. Mostly they were birdwatching from the stern. He was up this end, where it was a bit quieter.”

  “Couldn’t you see him from the wheelhouse, then?”

  “Not directly, no. He was hidden by the saloon.”

  “But you would have noticed someone going up to him and talking to him?”

  Again the panic returned.

  “No. You don’t know what it was like when they saw that bird. It was pandemonium. They were all shouting and running about. I wasn’t thinking about anything else but getting the boat exactly where they wanted her to be.”

  Claire found the scene hard to imagine. In her experience adult birdwatchers were elderly, rather dotty women, who fed blue tits in their gardens and went for nature rambles. Most she had met were children—earnest and pretentious schoolboys. The variety described by Rosco seemed implausible. He sensed her incredulity.

  “You talk to them,” he said. “ You’ll find out then what they’re like.”

  She nodded reassuringly. She did not want to offend Louis Rosco. If Franks had been murdered, surely the skipper was the least likely to have anything to do with it. What would a Cornish boatman have to do with a young man from Bristol?

  “There was nothing el
se unusual?” she asked. “ No arguments or disagreements?”

  “Not exactly,” he said. “Not a real row. You had the feeling they were getting at each other, winding each other up, but Friday night was like that on each of the trips. They were worried, Rob Earl said, that they wouldn’t see any birds. It seemed to get on their nerves. Then there was all that fuss about lists.”

  “Lists?” She was mystified. Perhaps it was some obscure nautical term.

  “They all make a list of the birds they’ve seen. They all wanted the boy that died to tell them the number of his, but he was teasing them, leading them on. ‘You’ll have to wait and see’ he said. ‘I’ll add it up and let you know tomorrow.’”

  “It sounds very childish,” she said.

  He shrugged. “ You should see some of the fishing parties,” he said. He had an irrational desire to defend the birdwatchers. Perhaps it had something to do with Rose Pengelly.

  Claire Bingham was starting to feel impatient. She should be at Porthkennan while the other passengers were still tired and shocked. She should not give them too much time to discuss things and concoct a story among them. It was reassuring that George Palmer-Jones was with them. He would give her reliable inside information. But in a way, too, his presence only increased the pressure on her. She did not want to let herself down in front of someone so respected in the profession, someone who could possibly influence her career if he chose. Outside on the deck she heard the voices of the men who were taking away the body. It must have slipped because there was a thud and a muffled oath.

  “Are there any more parties booked onto the boat?” she asked.

  “Not this week.”

  “You do realise we’ll want to examine it in more detail? There’ll be experts to see it first thing in the morning, and there’ll be someone here all night.”

  “Why all this, then?” he asked suddenly. “Don’t you think it was an accident?”

  “No,” she said calmly. “ He was hit on the head before he drowned.”

  “Couldn’t he have done that when he fell?”