High Island Blues (9 page)

‘I’ve heard of it. Never been lucky enough to stay there.’

‘Well come and stay here now George. That’s why I’m phoning. We need you here.’

‘Seen something you can’t identify?’ As soon as he said it George knew the humour was misplaced.

Rob ignored it and continued in a clipped, shocked voice. ‘There was a fall yesterday morning. Wonderful. Everything I’d ever imagined. Birds everywhere. It was predicted by the weather so the place was crawling with birders, too.’ He paused. ‘It was chaos George. You know what it’s like. I went out with my party but people wandered off and in the excitement I didn’t try to keep them together. It wasn’t practical.’

He paused again and George realized that he wanted reassurance that he couldn’t have acted differently.

‘No,’ George said. ‘I can see that.’

‘I was trying to get to grips with a Swainson’s warbler. You know how difficult they can be, skulking at the back of a tangle of thorn bushes. I left the trail in the end and went in after it. Only I didn’t just see the warbler George. There was a body, lying face down in the dead leaves. He’d been stabbed. No one will tell me anything but I know he was stabbed. There was a hole an inch thick in his back.’

There was a brief silence before he continued more quietly. ‘ It was an old mate of mine. One of my best mates. I was in Texas to see him. Please come, George. The sheriff in charge of the case seems to think he must have been killed by one of the British party. At the moment I’m the prime suspect because I was spotted near the body. West Country Wildlife will make the travel arrangements for you. There’s a BA flight from Gatwick at ten in the morning. I’ve spoken to my boss and he’s booked you on it. It’s not good for business, you see, to have one of your leaders suspected of murder. He’ll pay for the flight.’

He stopped, apparently waiting for a response. ‘You will come George, won’t you?’

‘If this happened yesterday why didn’t you phone before?’

‘I thought they’d sort it out, catch whoever had done it straight away. This is a small town. You can’t get away with anything. But they’ve decided it wasn’t a local lunatic. They’ve decided it was me.’

‘What was the name of the victim?’ George asked.

‘Mick Brownscombe. Perhaps you remember him. We were at college together. He was a good birder. One of the best.’

George did not reply. He was wondering why he was not more surprised.

‘You will help, won’t you?’ Rob demanded, more desperately.

‘Oh yes,’ George said. ‘ I’ll be there.’

‘The officer thinks I was hiding when the Lovegroves saw me,’ Rob said. ‘ Well of course I was. But only because I didn’t want to make a bloody fool of myself. Not because I’d just thrown Mick’s body into the middle of a bush.’

George could tell that the flip talk was an act. Rob was rattled. They were sitting on the lawn outside Oaklands drinking cold beer. It was early evening and the place was quiet except for the noise of insects. Rob leaned forward, his elbows on his knees and talked to the grass.

‘We were friends for Christ’s sake. From university. We shared a flea infested lodging in Brighton and travelled into the campus every day on the same bus. Sussex University was a trendy place to be at then, George. You remember that. Full of the kids of politicians, actors and people who wrote columns for the Sunday papers. Oliver was there, too. You remember him, don’t you George?’

George only nodded. There could be questions about Oliver later.

‘He fitted in fine. He’d been to the right school. His parents had the right friends. But it wasn’t so easy for me and Mick.’

‘It was easier for you than Michael though.’ George was guessing. Lack of confidence had never been one of Rob’s problems. He was a show-off, an attention seeker. He wouldn’t be intimidated by the smart young things with their rich parents and plummy accents.

‘Yeah. I suppose so. At least I’d been around a bit.’

‘And Michael hadn’t?’

‘No. A trip to Exeter for the Christmas shopping was a major event. It wasn’t that he was poor. His folks probably had more dosh than Oliver’s. They owned a holiday centre in North Devon and a couple of hotels. The Barnstaple Mafia he called them and he wasn’t really joking. I think it was his dad who screwed him up. Mick was scared shitless of him. Scared of everything else as well when I first met him – foreign food, anyone who lived north of Bristol. And women. Boy was he scared of women!’

‘He didn’t have a girlfriend at university?’

‘There was a girl he wrote to. Someone at home. He used to talk about her occasionally when he’d had a few beers. His one and only true love. You know what you’re like when you’re eighteen. She was younger than him. He waited for her all the way through college then something must have happened, just before he came with us to the States. I suppose she found someone else. I asked him about her, teasing: “ How can you bear to leave her?” Something like that. He almost hit me. It was the only time I ever saw him lose his temper.’

‘But there was no one at university?’

Rob shrugged. ‘There might have been the occasional fumble at the back of a disco. And platonic friends he took on long walks across the Downs and poured out his soul to. But he was so slow. We were banging away like rattlesnakes and he was worshipping his little schoolgirl from afar.’

‘Yes,’ George said. ‘I see.’ His children had been young in the seventies. He remembered them in a perpetual state of exhaustion. ‘And yet you brought him to the States with you after you had left college. If you had so little in common why did you choose him as a travelling companion?’

‘He wanted to come,’ Rob said. ‘We needed someone else to share the car, share expenses, you know. We’d have taken a fourth if we could have found one.’ He paused, realized he sounded heartless, looked up, ‘I mean that wasn’t the only reason. We were friends. He could be a bit intense but we liked him.’

And he would be an audience, George thought. As he remembered it Oliver and Rob had been a double act and they would want an audience.

‘Besides,’ Rob continued, ‘we thought it would be good for him to travel.’

‘And was it?’ George asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Did America change him? Did being on the road with you and Oliver change him?’

‘I hadn’t thought so,’ Rob said, ‘until we got to High Island.’

‘And then?’

‘And then Mick shocked us all by getting the girl.’ Rob looked up again and smiled but George could tell that it still rankled.

‘Ah, yes,’ George said. ‘Laurie.’

‘She’s not here now. She went straight away. Back to Houston to be with her kids. They had two apparently. A boy and a girl. Teenagers. They’d been staying with friends. She wanted to be there to tell them …’

‘Of course,’ George said.

They sat for a moment in silence. Rob flapped away a mosquito.

‘I had to tell her Mick was dead. She turned up at Boy Scout Wood that afternoon to look for him. Someone had gone to phone the sheriff’s department but no one official had arrived. I didn’t know what to say. I just wanted to hold her but that didn’t seem right either.’

‘How did she react to the news?’

‘How do you suppose she reacted George? Someone had stuck a chisel through her husband’s heart and he’d been thrown into the underbrush to rot. She was bloody upset.’

He drank from the beer bottle, wiped condensation from his hand on to his jeans.

George ignored the outburst. ‘ How do you know it was a chisel? Have they found the weapon?’

‘No. It’s something to do with the size of the wound. The wrong shape for a knife blade. That’s what the news reports said this morning. They don’t tell us anything.’

‘Did Laurie ask to see the body?’

‘Not then. Someone from the sheriff’s department arranged for her to do that later.’

He hesitated. ‘They took Mick to the county morgue in Texas City. I suppose someone will have told his parents. I don’t even know if they’re still alive. Mick didn’t say. We really didn’t have a chance to talk at all. I suppose we both thought there’d be plenty of time.’

There was a silence. From the house behind them came the clatter of crockery and cutlery as the tables were laid for dinner.

‘Had you kept in touch with the Brownscombes?’ George asked.

‘Not really. A Christmas card the years I got round to sending Christmas cards. The odd postcard if I went anywhere special. Just to grip old Mick off. You know George. You can’t resist a bit of gloating.’

‘Did they write to you?’

‘Laurie never did. Mick kept in touch in much the same way as me. I think there were notes when the kids were born. A couple of years ago he did a trip to Attu, that mind-blowing island off Alaska, and he wrote from there. But that was just a list of birds. There was never anything personal, which was odd really when he’d been so intense before.’

‘Did you meet in that time?’

‘Never. I’ve been to Texas of course with work since we were first here together. We usually fly into Houston if we’re doing High Island and the coast. It would have been easy to fix up a meeting but I never did. I’m not sure why. I suppose I felt a bit awkward about it if I considered it at all. Mick and Laurie belonged to the past.’

‘And they never visited you in the UK?’

‘No. I didn’t realize they had come back until Laurie mentioned visiting London on business.’

‘Did she say what business?’ George asked carefully.

‘I don’t think so. What relevance could that have?’

‘Probably none,’ he said. Unless it was to use her position as consultant for the Wildlife Partnership to set up a little enterprise of her own using the same name, he thought.

‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘ Whose idea was this reunion? Not the original plan. I understand that when you were first at Oaklands you all made a commitment to get together in twenty years’ time. But who remembered about it? Who made all the arrangements?’

‘I made the practical arrangements, booked the rooms with Mary Ann, decided on a date. I didn’t see why I should have to pay for a flight when I was coming out this year anyway. But it wasn’t my idea. It was Oliver. He wrote to me and to Mick and Laurie saying: What about it? Remember the pledge? I wasn’t sure at first. I mean it’s never the same is it, going back? Then the idea started to appeal. I was curious. I wanted to see how we’d get on, the four of us.’

‘Were you surprised that Oliver suggested it?’

‘No. He’s always been the romantic one. He always had style. You know Oliver don’t you, George? We went twitching together when we were at university. He stopped chasing rarities completely when he got married. Claims to be a local patch man now, though I don’t remember him finding any good birds in Sussex. Never seen his name in the
British Birds Magazine Rarity Report!

‘Yes,’ George said. ‘I knew Oliver.’

Since Cecily had mentioned the name, memories of Oliver had become more focused. It was a sign of age, he supposed, that his long-term memory was clearer than his short. Besides, he had always had a detailed visual recall of rare birds and the events surrounding them.

He remembered a Ross’s gull for example, which had turned up on the fish quay at North Shields the day before Christmas Eve. Oliver had been there then, with Rob. The bird had been found in the afternoon and by the time George had arrived in the north-east it had been dark. He had stayed in Newcastle and arrived at the quay just after dawn to find that Oliver and Rob had already refound it. He could picture the scene now: the rosy plumage of the gull caught in the bright, eastern light, the trawlers moving out of the Tyne with the tide, men muffled in heavy coats cycling to work in the shipyards.

It seemed that the boys had hitched up to North Shields the night before and had persuaded a pub landlady to let them sleep in her bar. Oliver would have charmed her with his politeness and his indolent good looks. She would have ended up thinking it was a privilege to have them to stay.

‘I was surprised though,’ Rob was saying, ‘that Julia agreed to the reunion.’

‘Why?’

‘Julia never approved of Mick and me. We weren’t in the right social league at all. Her father was a small-time businessman who made money and she had pretensions.’ He paused. ‘Julia is the reason I don’t see much of Oliver, even when I’m in the UK. I can’t stand what she’s done to him. It’s pitiful.’ He leaned forward. ‘For instance, the day of the fall, the day I found Mick’s body, it was raining birds. Not just warblers, though you’ve never seen so many colours. They were everywhere. More like butterflies than birds. But there were tanagers, vireos, chats, thrushes. And Oliver just walked away from it. He said that Julia needed to see him, and he walked away.’

He looked at George, expecting a suitable reaction of horror. When none came he shook his head slightly to express his disbelief.

‘What time would that have been?’ George asked.

‘I’m not sure. Half-past one. Two o’clock. About an hour before I found the body.’

‘You can’t be more precise?’ George was disapproving.

‘Are you joking? This was the biggest birding experience of my life. And you wonder why I didn’t look at my watch?’

‘I suppose you all made statements to the authorities?’

‘Oliver and I have. The detective in charge of the case is a lieutenant based in the sheriff’s department in Galveston, though we haven’t met him yet. We spoke to an officer called Grant. He’s the one who’s decided I’m the murderer.’

‘And Laurie?’

‘A couple of deputies drove her home on Monday afternoon. I suppose they spoke to her then.’

‘And you were only here for one night before Michael Brownscombe was killed?’

‘Two, if you count the one in Houston. We met for a meal the evening I flew in. But we took it easy, you know. As I said before, we thought there would be plenty of time.’

‘Did he tell you anything about his business?’

‘Not much. I got the impression he was doing well.’ He paused, then remembered. ‘Oh, yes, the night before he died Laurie did try to interest us in one of their projects. She talked about some group they were representing which runs reserves in the Third World. I think she wanted a chance to sell it to my party. Get money out of them I suppose. Sign them up as supporters. I didn’t really listen. We’d seen the weather forecast and we were talking about the fall.’