Palmer-Jones 01 - A Bird in the Hand (23 page)

When they reached Rushy George dropped Molly at the Windmill. It was Friday and already the café was full of twitchers talking about the weather forecast, the high pressure, the east winds and the possibility of migrants.

Before leaving home George had telephoned one of his contacts in the Home Office. He was expected at the remand centre, where Dennis Shawcroft was being held in custody. So, reluctantly, he left the enthusiastic birdwatchers to their speculation, and Molly and Ella to their gossip, and drove inland towards Norwich.

He had visited many such places before, but coming across the long, grey concrete walls, the threatening notices, the floodlights, after driving down a sunny, country road, there was still a shock, a sense of unbelievable incongruity.

The gate officer was expecting him, and was friendly, told a joke. That was another incongruity: humanity in such an apparently inhuman, functional place. He was shown into a waiting room, where three men and a woman were already sitting. In the corridor outside a prisoner was ineffectually pushing a mop over the tiled floor. George smiled briefly at the other occupants of the room. The men were at home there. Two of them were solicitors, George thought, and the third, as easily identified by his leather jacket as if he were wearing a uniform, was an officer of the CID. The woman, no more than a girl, was nervous. She was reading a file intently, making notes. She could have been a young solicitor, or perhaps a social worker. She had never been inside a prison before.

A middle-aged prison officer collected them and led them across a yard to a shabby, temporary hut where all the visits took place. A group of prisoners passed them in the opposite direction, and George saw with pity that the girl blushed at the obscenities and catcalls directed at her, apparently from the whole group. He thought: Whoever killed Tom French will be sent here before the trial. And he thought of all the people involved and, in a spasm of self-doubt, he wondered if he would ever find out.

Professional visits took place in small, private rooms, out of earshot of the prison officers. George had been classed as a professional visitor. The man was waiting for him, sitting at a stained table, his head in his hands. In the ill-fitting prison clothes he seemed smaller.

As he heard the door he looked up.

“You,” he said aggressively. “ What do you want? My bloody solicitor hasn’t been to see me yet. Do you know anything about it?”

“No. I’m nothing to do with your solicitor.”

“What are you doing here then?”

“I want your help,” George said mildly. He sat at the table opposite Shawcroft and tried to make himself relaxed, receptive.

“Are you police?”

“No.”

There was a pause.

“What do you want to know?”

“I want to know about Tom French.”

“Christ!”

Dennis stood up, his hands flat on the table, and shouted, “ I’ve told them all I know about bloody Tom French.”

An officer looked in through the window to see if George needed help. George signalled gently that everything was fine. He leant back slowly and took a packet of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket. Slowly he opened it, letting the wrapping drop on to the table. He offered the packet to the angry man.

Dennis took the cigarette quickly, lit it himself, using the matches that George had thrown on to the table, and sat down. He inhaled greedily, and George knew that he was thinking that if he was quick, there might be time for another cigarette before the interview was over.

“Tell me then,” George said quietly. “Tell me all you know about Tom French. Start by telling me why you frightened Terry away when you knew that I was asking about Tom.”

“That wasn’t about Tom French. You were asking about dope. I didn’t know who you were. I hadn’t seen you then but I knew that someone had followed my mate and me from the marsh. You could have been the drug squad. I didn’t scare that loony off. I just told him not to talk to you. You know what he’s like. He could have told you anything.”

“So far as you were concerned, Tom French never smoked cannabis?”

“I’ve told you. I told you in the Lodge. No.”

“And if he had wanted to get hold of some, it would have been readily available?”

“I suppose so. At a price. But he didn’t want to. I’ve been telling you. He never touched the stuff. He was always preaching at me about it. Once he’d started he’d never let it alone. He wasn’t no saint. I’ve had to put him to bed a couple of times, he’s been that drunk. But he’d talk to me as if he was a vicar. It used to get on my nerves. And it wasn’t only me. He did it to everyone. He was kind, and he did put himself out for you, but he never let you forget it.”

Then George knew why it was done and who had done it. He did not know how or where it was done. He realized that it had been there all the time, that he could have known from the beginning. He remembered the little things—the insincerity in Rob Earl’s voice when he was describing his friend, the phrase used by Sally when they had first met, a phrase which should have been followed up. There was no triumph in knowing. He gave Dennis another cigarette.

“So if you didn’t frighten Terry, why did he run away?”

“God knows. Why did he do anything?”

Dennis was getting restless now, quickly smoking his cigarette, knowing that there was no chance of getting another. The prison officer looked through the window and tapped at his watch. They had lunch early. He was in a hurry to get the prisoners ready.

“Did you like him?” George asked, looking for the first time directly at the man. “Did you like Tom French?”

Dennis stood up, already programmed by the routine of the prison.

“No,” he said. “ I don’t know why. There was no reason why I shouldn’t. But I couldn’t stand him. I hated his guts.”

Impatiently the officer swung the door open, and George and the three men and the woman, who seemed to be almost in tears, were shepherded back to the gate, as if they, too, had been prisoners.

George drove slowly back to the coast. It was a different problem now. Before there had been a desperation to know, and that was all that mattered. Now he knew what had happened. First he had to convince himself intellectually that he was right, then he would have to do something about it. He stopped at the side of the road just outside Rushy. There was a line of birdwatchers on the shingle bank silhouetted against the sun. He looked through his binoculars to check that he was not missing anything especially rare, but they were lying back and talking.

At Fenquay, Sally asked him into the house in a whisper. She had just put Barnaby to sleep and was afraid that she would wake him. She looked strained still, and very tired.

“Barnaby’s teething,” she said, when George observed that she was not looking well.

“You’ll be worried about Peter too,” he said.

“I don’t know anyone called Peter.”

“Sit down,” he said comfortably. “ I’ll make us both some tea.”

She did as she was told, and was still sitting there when he returned. She took the mug and cupped her hands around it. She drank slowly and big, wary eyes stared at him over the rim of the mug.

“You don’t need to say anything,” he said. “Just listen and see if I’ve got it right. You went to work on Tresco. I don’t know why. That bit isn’t important. You found it difficult to settle. You’d done hotel work before, so you went to Scilly. It must have been beautiful in the spring. You would have arrived at about this time of the year. You felt out of place on Tresco and you didn’t get on specially well with the other girls in the hotel—Annie sends her regards by the way. So on your days off you explored the other islands.

“I don’t know where you first met Peter, but I would guess that it was on St. Agnes. One of the lanes there is called Barnaby Lane, isn’t it? It’s an unusual name and it reminded me of St. Agnes as soon as I heard it. Peter loved you very much. Then, towards the end of the summer, the birdwatchers began to arrive on the islands. One of them was Tom French. He took a cottage on St. Mary’s and intended to spend the whole autumn there. He was a friend of Peter’s, so you came to meet him. Tom loved you too, but he didn’t have Peter’s personality, did he? Did you even notice, I wonder, that he was so infatuated with you?

“At the end of September Tom had a party. You already knew by that time that you were pregnant. You wanted to go to the party. You, who never made a fuss about anything, got so upset that you might have to miss it that Annie gave you the evening off. Did you mean to tell Peter that evening that you were expecting a baby? What happened? I think there was a police raid for drugs. The Scilly islanders are always worried that the birdwatchers will contaminate the morals of their young people. Peter was worried. He already had a conviction for drug abuse. A second, with a stiff Cornish court, could have meant a prison sentence. He planted whatever cannabis he had on Tom. In that way he would also remove a rival from the scene.”

“No,” she said. “No, it wasn’t like that. I didn’t tell Peter about the baby, because I didn’t want to put any pressure on him to leave his wife. I wanted him to leave her for me, not for the baby. That night was my own personal deadline. If he didn’t tell me that night that he wanted to come away with me, I was going to go on my own. That’s what made it so special. He left the party before the police arrived. He was very sweet. We had a good evening. But he said that he needed more time to decide. I could understand. He took the marriage seriously, even though it wasn’t working very well.

“I knew that he’d been to court before. That night he left the party early. He’d left his coat behind, and in the coat pocket there was some cannabis. When the police came I was terrified for Peter. Of course, they wanted to know who the coat belonged to. They didn’t seem very efficient. I didn’t think that they’d check. I persuaded Tom to say that the coat was his.”

“And Tom agreed. Just like that.”

She blushed. “As you said, he was infatuated.”

“So that’s why you always felt so obliged to him. It wasn’t just that he looked after you so well through your illness. He’d been to court, been sentenced to three years’ probation, to protect the man you loved. What did he want in return?”

“I didn’t think about that then. I just wanted to stop Peter going to prison. I knew that Tom had never been in trouble before. I suppose I thought that he’d just get a fine and that Peter would repay him. He was Peter’s friend.”

“What did Peter think about all this?”

“He never knew. He knew that Tom was up in court, I suppose. But he never knew that it was his dope which put Tom there. I don’t expect he even missed his coat. He was always losing things. But I never saw him again, after that party, and as far as I know Tom didn’t see him again either.”

“But Tom did want something in return, didn’t he?”

“He never asked,” she said defensively. Then all in a rush: “ Yes, he did want something. He wanted company, affection, to be needed. All the things that most of the birdwatchers want.”

“Did he ask you to come and live here?”

“Not directly. I went to my mother in London when I left Tresco. It didn’t work out, but I waited and had the baby there. I’d written to Tom, just to thank him, and I’d said that I was fed up at home. He wrote back, straightaway, and said that he knew that there was a cottage to let in Fenquay. All that I told you about my childhood in Fenquay was true. I was so happy here. It seemed like, well, like a magic coincidence. So I moved. He seemed to take it for granted that we would be friends, more than friends. He was so lonely, and I was so depressed. I lost all my confidence after being in the hospital, and he was good for me. He took control, I didn’t have to make any decisions.”

She paused, put her cup on the floor beside her, and when she looked at George again, there were tears in her eyes.

“I did try to make him happy. But it wasn’t honest, it wasn’t real. It seemed so wonderful when he talked about the job in Bristol. I counted the weeks until he was due to start.”

“And then,” George said, “ he changed his mind, wanted to marry you, and said, if you refused, that he would try to get custody of Barnaby or have him put into care. Did you know then why he did that?”

“No,” she said. “It was awful, dreadful. I suppose I thought that he needed me too much. Or at least that he needed someone to look after. And he had grown very fond of Barnaby. He liked to make believe that we were a real family, that he was the father.”

“But in fact, just before you had your row, Tom had been to see Ella. Ella read him a letter she had just received from Peter. Peter was intending to come and live in Norfolk. Tom wanted you married and out of the way before you realized that Peter was free.”

“I didn’t know that.” She spoke quietly, sadly. “I didn’t know that Peter was here. Not until …” She hesitated.

“Not until the evening after the film at the Windmill. The night when we found Adam Anderson in the well. The night you suddenly felt ill and had to go home.”

“Yes,” she said. “ I was so confused and miserable. I didn’t want to believe that Peter could have killed Tom, but it seemed so odd seeing him there, after all this time. It seemed such a coincidence. He had been married and now he was free … I had been as good as married and now I was free. I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t been in touch with me. And then there were the letters.”

“I know,” George said gently, “another dreadful coincidence.”

“You can’t understand what it was like. Getting the letters was bad enough. Thinking that Tom’s murderer was interested in me, worrying about Barnaby. Then, before I knew that he was here, it was dreaming about Peter that kept me sane. Just to know that somewhere there was someone I could care about honestly. And then to find out that he was mixed up in all this. I even thought that he had written the letters for some mad reason.”

“Did you know that he was in Rushy on the morning Tom died, and that he didn’t let anyone know that he was here?”

“No, I didn’t know,” she said, then quickly, hopefully, trying to persuade herself as well as George: “I’ve been thinking. It is possible that he doesn’t know that I’m here. Another coincidence. He does’t know anything about Barnaby, so he wouldn’t connect Tom’s girlfriend and baby with me. Even if they mentioned my name, Sally’s not unusual.” She grinned weakly. “And in the village they call me Mrs. French. I think they mean it to be kind. They know I’m not married.