Palmer-Jones 05 - Sea Fever Read online

  There was another pause. Rose remained resolutely quiet.

  “You have another child,” the inspector said. “A baby.”

  “Yes,” Rose said defiantly. “Matilda. She’s eight months old.”

  She waited for the other, more awkward questions, but none came. At last Claire smiled and changed the direction of the conversation. She was enjoying herself. She felt in perfect control of the interview.

  “How well did you know Greg Franks?” she asked.

  “Not well at all. He stayed here occasionally if he was on his way to the Scillies, or if there was a particularly rare bird in the valley.”

  “Did he always come alone?”

  “No. I can’t remember him coming on his own before. There was usually a gang of them. Once he came with a girl.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Victoria,” Rose said. “It seemed rather inappropriate. Anyone less Victorian it would be hard to imagine. I never knew her surname.”

  “Tell me what happened on Friday night after you all arrived on the boat,” Claire asked. “In as much detail as you can remember.”

  “It’s very hard,” Rose said. “ It all seems rather a muddle, as if it was a long time ago, and I found a lot of the conversations hard to understand. I enjoy watching birds, but I’m not in the same league as Rob or Roger. I don’t suppose I have their passion.”

  “Start with the facts,” Claire said. “What did you do when you first came aboard?”

  “We stood at the deck rail for a while,” Rose said. “Then we went into the saloon. Freddy had made supper sandwiches and pasties. There was beer. Everyone drank a lot of beer.”

  “And they talked about birds?” Claire asked.

  “Of course they talked about birds. They were very tense, somehow, very anxious. Everyone’s nerves seemed on edge. They were worried, I think, that after all the effort of the trip there would be nothing to see.”

  “How could you tell they were tense? Were there arguments?”

  “There was a silly scrap between Roger and Greg about lists. Greg was just being mischievous, winding Roger up. Anyone with any sense could tell that. He implied that he’d seen more birds in Britain than Roger, but when we asked him outright how big his list was, he only laughed. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’m a world-list man myself. I’ll count up and let you know in the morning.’ It seems juvenile now, but we were all short-tempered. It was very hot in that saloon. It seemed impossible to breathe. And we’d all had too much to drink. I was afraid there might even be a fight.”

  “But there wasn’t a fight?”

  “No,” Rose said. “ I’ve just explained, Greg turned the whole thing into a joke.”

  “What else happened?” the inspector asked lightly. “Any more dramas?”

  “Jane Pym had more to drink than anyone,” Rose said. Usually she would have considered this conversation gossip and hated herself for taking part in it. Now she thought self-preservation was more important. She would tell the inspector everything she wanted, to direct the interview away from her and Louis Rosco. “She was in a foul mood when she arrived. I think she and Roger had been rowing in the car on the way down. I don’t blame her. He can’t be an easy man to live with. Suddenly, after supper, when we were in the saloon, she turned to Greg Franks and accused him of being a criminal.”

  Rose paused. I sound like one of those shop assistants in Woolworth’s, she thought, who stand talking all day, trying to create excitement out of the boring details of their lives. But what, after all, is more exciting than murder?

  “What do you mean?” the inspector asked, and Rose continued in the same gushing gossip’s tone.

  “She was really quite aggressive. It wasn’t like Jane at all. Usually she’s so quiet and controlled. You can never tell what she’s thinking. It’s her work, I suppose. ‘Don’t I know you?’ she said. Greg told her she’d probably seen him birding. ‘ No,’ she said. ‘I’ve met you at work. Have you ever been on probation?’ I thought he’d be upset, but he seemed to think the idea was hilarious. ‘Not me,’ he said in a clowning sort of voice. ‘I’ve never been caught.’”

  “What did Mrs. Pym say then?”

  “Nothing. I think she realised Greg had made a fool of her. She didn’t say anything else all evening.”

  “Whose idea was it to hire the Jessie Ellen for the sea-watching trips?”

  “Mine, I suppose,” Rose said. “Rob Earl had run a couple of trips here in the autumn, and he was keen to try a pelagic. He asked if I knew anyone. Louis had moved into the valley, and I suggested him. Rob seemed very impressed. I just introduced them.”

  “Did you know that Mr. Rosco has served a prison sentence for a serious offence?”

  “Yes,” Rose said.

  “Has he ever talked to you about it?”

  “Not in detail. He said he had never intended it to end like that. He was too gullible, he said. It had been a means to an end.”

  “What did he mean by that?”

  “I don’t know,” Rose said. “He doesn’t like talking about it.”

  “Did Mr. Rosco ever meet Mr. Franks here?”

  “No,” Rose said. “He didn’t like the birdwatchers much. He kept out of the way when they were here.”

  “Did he know that Greg Franks would be aboard the Jessie Ellen with this party? Did Mr. Earl send him a passenger list?”

  “No, he had very little to do with the passengers. He only needed to know how many there would be.”

  The inspector looked at a sheet of paper in the file. It was an indication, Rose thought, that the interview was almost over.

  “Did you like Greg Franks, Miss Pengelly?”

  “No,” Rose said. “ I thought he was cocky, irritating, rude. Some people may have found him amusing. I thought he was offensive.”

  “Oh,” the inspector said. “How did he offend you?”

  “There was nothing specific,” Rose said. “It was his manner.”

  There was a silence. The inspector gathered her papers together. “Just one last thing,” she said. “ Why did you go to the cottage on the shore last night?”

  Rose stared at her in shocked amazement, as if the woman had been gifted with supernatural powers. The inspector continued, “You did go, I presume, to see Louis Rosco.”

  Rose nodded.

  “Why?”

  “We’re friends,” Rose said. “I wanted to talk to him.” She turned sharply to the detective. “Is he all right?” she said. “ You haven’t arrested him?”

  “Why should we do that?” Claire asked.

  Rose shook her head.

  “No,” Claire said. “We haven’t arrested him. He spent the night on the boat. We’ll be talking to him later today.”

  “He wouldn’t have killed Greg Franks!” Rose cried. “What reason would he have?”

  “Miss Pengelly,” the inspector asked gently, formally, “ is Louis Rosco the father of your child?”

  Rose nodded, and Claire Bingham was left with the satisfaction of knowledge but with no clear idea of what the information added up to.

  Jane Pym had slept heavily in a blank, unnatural stupour and woke slowly to a headache and a feeling of empty nausea. She thought for a moment she was in hospital waking up after an operation, and the reality came as a disappointment. It would have been wonderful to be in hospital in a state of sympathetic dependence.

  Roger was already awake and on the telephone. He seemed to spend the whole of that day talking to seabird freaks about the red-footed petrel. He seemed to have taken possession of the bird, as if no one else was competent to deal with it, and managed to imply that he had found it and first realised its significance. When Jane emerged at last from the bedroom into the living room, he was talking in dreadful French to a professor who worked in the natural history museum in Paris. How he tracked down the home number of a Frenchman on a Sunday in August she never discovered. The arrival of the policewoman and the summons to the cool dining room t
o answer questions came almost as a relief. More than anything she would have preferred to be at work. If that was impossible, when she was called into the dining room, she was glad at least to escape Roger’s gloating descriptions, the pseudoscientific jargon of bird identification, the strictures to secrecy. If Roger mentioned Greg Franks’ death at all in these interminable phone calls, it was an inconvenience which prevented his carrying out proper research and put him at the mercy of others. She found the performance sickening.

  Claire Bingham considered Jane Pym with suspicion. She did not, like some of her colleagues, think all probation officers were seditious and revolutionary, but she was wary of them. They were usually unreliable and unpredictable. They seemed to work alone, with no authoritative superior. And then there was, between the women, an element of competition. They stared at each other across the polished wooden table, each almost a mirror image of the other, angular, intense, frowning. Both women were used to conducting interviews. They knew the rules of the game. Neither would want to lose face.

  “Why did you decide to come to Cornwall this weekend?” Claire asked.

  “My husband had booked through Rob’s company to go on the Jessie Ellen and to stay here for a few days afterwards. I decided to come with him.”

  “Do you usually accompany your husband on his bird-watching expeditions?”

  “Not usually.” She tried halfheartedly to explain. A degree of confession was expected in an interview like this. She was prepared to play the role for the inspector. “Look,” she said. “Our marriage has been a bit shaky lately. Perhaps we both expect too much of each other. I wanted to make an effort. Birdwatching means so much to him. I wanted to show him I could try to share it.” She paused. “I wish now, of course, that I had never come.”

  “How well did you know Greg Franks?” the inspector asked.

  “Not at all,” Jane Pym said, and then perhaps her interviewer’s instinct, her sense that she might have been tricked, made her continue: “At least I think I may have met him, but I can’t remember exactly where.”

  “On the Jessie Ellen you accused him of having been on probation,” Claire said.

  “It wasn’t an accusation,” Jane said. “ I just had an idea that I’d met him professionally.”

  “Surely if he’d been on probation to you, you would have remembered him.”

  “Of course, though I’ve had a lot of clients over the years. But I prepare social enquiry reports on people going to court, and there have been hundreds like that. I see them for a couple of interviews, then never meet them again.”

  “I understand that he spent a couple of weeks in a probation hostel in Bristol when he was on bail. Could you have met him there?”

  Jane remembered the big family house on the corner of the suburban road which managed to carry with it the air of an institution.

  “Yes,” she said, trying to picture Greg in the kitchen doing his turn at washing up, in one of the house meetings baring his soul. “That’s possible. I did a six-months’ stint there about four years ago.”

  “What about Louis Rosco?” the inspector asked, and then echoing Jane’s earlier words, mocking them, asked, “Could you have met him professionally?”

  Jane looked at her sharply. “ Has he been in trouble?” she asked.

  The inspector nodded. “ Why? Do you remember him?”

  “No, but there’s something about him that’s familiar. Not about him personally, but the way he talks to people he doesn’t know. He’s suspicious. Has he been in prison?”

  The inspector nodded again. “He completed his sentence in Leyhill Open Prison in Gloucestershire at about the same time as you were working in the hostel,” she said. “You don’t remember him?”

  “No,” she said, but the inspector, who was skilled at picking up these things, did not quite believe her and thought that she was being guided by a peculiar social workers’ code of confidentiality. Claire thought it did not matter. The man’s records would be available to them, and the name of his probation officer would be there. She turned back to Jane Pym.

  “How did your husband get on with Mr. Franks?” she asked.

  Jane shrugged. “ They were friendly rivals,” she said. “Roger has been birdwatching for a long time. He’s seen a lot of birds in Britain. The younger twitchers were a little envious. Greg liked to think he was catching Roger up.”

  “Did you talk to Greg Franks after he went to sleep off his seasickness yesterday on the Jessie Ellen?” Claire asked.

  “No,” Jane said. “ Of course not. What on earth would I have to talk to him about?”

  Then she sat in a calm, detached way smoking a cigarette and waited for the inspector to tell her that the interview was at an end.

  When she had spoken to Jane Pym, the inspector sent Berry to the car to radio the police station. Her superintendent had promised to contact Customs & Excise and the Drugs Squad to see if they had information on Greg Franks. But now, too, there should be more details on the Louis Rosco case. Claire did not have much faith in her superintendent’s abilities as an investigator but acknowledged that he was a good liaison man. He seemed to have friends in every force in the country. She never asked how he managed it but was willing to use the information he provided.

  Berry walked through the house and out into bright sunlight. Swallows were gathering in clouds in the valley and perching on the telegraph wire along the road preparing for the migration south. On a white bench outside the cottage Rose Pengelly was sitting, barefoot and brown legged, like a Gypsy, with the baby at her breast. Unembarrassed, he continued towards the car. In the house the phone rang. Berry thought it might be the superintendent and turned back to answer it, but Roger Pym had already picked up the receiver, and Berry heard him say to no one in particular, “It’s Tim Robertson from Madeira.”

  When the sergeant returned to the dining room, he was carrying coffee in big earthenware mugs shaped like flowerpots.

  “Miss Pengelly thought we might like this,” he said.

  “Well?” the inspector demanded, refusing to be distracted, irritated by his lack of urgency, by the time he had been away. “What have we got?”

  “Greg Franks was well known to the customs investigations department,” he said, spooning brown sugar in his coffee. “ They’re a bit upset. They were all set up for a big operation. They hoped he might lead them to the organiser. He was certainly a courier, they say. Probably a small-time dealer, too. They’re interested, of course, in all his contacts and would like to see his diary or address book if we find one.”

  “We’ve got to find a home for him first,” she said. “We know he hadn’t been living at his parents’ house for months. That’s why they hired George Palmer-Jones. We can’t trace him by his belongings because apparently they all went overboard when he did.” She drank the coffee in small, polite sips and continued thinking aloud. “Perhaps that’s the significance of the missing bag and equipment,” she said. “ Perhaps the murderer threw it away to stop anyone finding out where Greg had been living. It’s interesting that he was killed after the first serious attempt to trace him.”

  “Mr. Palmer-Jones didn’t seem to think he’d have any problem discovering Franks’ address,” Berry said. “ He told me that these twitchers all keep in touch with each other by phone. It was just a question of asking one of them for Greg’s phone number and tracing the address from that.”

  “Well,” she said, “ Roger Pym is one of these twitchers, isn’t he?

  Let’s have him in and see if he knows where Franks has been hiding.”

  Roger Pym was nervous. He talked too much and waved his arms. He insisted over and over again how upset he was by Greg’s death. He had known the boy for a long time, he said. Since he was a youngster. In fact, he thought he could take the credit for starting Greg Franks on his birdwatching career. He hadn’t actually taught Greg, but the lad used to hang around with some of his pupils at school.

  “Have you seen him around lately
?”

  “Of course. He was a serious twitcher. I see him at most of the rare birds which turn up in the country.”

  “You never met him socially?”

  “Good Lord, no! We’d have nothing in common.”

  “Your wife described you as friendly rivals. Would that be accurate?”

  A touch of annoyance, of vanity, crossed his face, and she thought for a moment he intended to contradict her, but he laughed with a forced aimability and said yes, that would probably be right. She had probably heard about their little argument on the boat. It was Greg teasing, of course. There was absolutely no possibility that Greg could have seen as many birds in the U. K. as he had. She took him through the events of the day before, and even to her he propounded the fantasy that he had found the unidentified petrel. Of course he hadn’t spoken to Greg Franks, he said. There was too much going on. He hadn’t left the deck for a moment.

  “Could you give me Mr. Franks’telephone number?” the inspector asked. “I understand that birdwatchers keep in frequent touch on the phone.”

  The question startled Pym. For the first time in the interview he was quiet. Then the words started again, fast, jumbled, nervous. No, he said, he was sorry but he didn’t have Greg’s latest number. He had the old one, of course, for his parents’ home but nothing recent.

  “Isn’t that unusual?” the inspector asked.

  “Not really,” he said. “Not now. There’s Birdline, a telephone answering service, and the old grapevine is dead.”

  “So you don’t know where he had been living recently?” she asked, though by now the young man’s address had become such a mystery that she no longer expected a positive answer.

  “In Bristol,” Roger Pym said. “I’m sure he was living in Bristol. But not his exact address. No.”

  Late in the morning the superintendent arrived. Not, Claire thought, to offer assistance, to accept some of the responsibility in a difficult case, but to check up on her and because the trip to Porthkennan would be a pleasant break from the office before he went home for Sunday lunch. He was Cornish, a great bull of a man, wide, neckless, with a big, square head. His name was Wargan.