Palmer-Jones 01 - A Bird in the Hand (25 page)

“Thank you very much,” Molly said. “We’d like to talk to Mr. Cranshaw on his own if you don’t mind. I’m sure you’re very busy.”

Mrs. Cranshaw was about to argue, but Molly smiled. It was a gesture so firm and decisive that it was as if Mrs. Cranshaw had been slapped. Looking very old, she turned and left the room, giving a brief, contemptuous glance towards her son. He had begun to pick up the glass, a fumbling and ineffectual attempt to appear normal.

“Leave that now,” Molly said gently. “We can clear that up later. We want to talk to you.” She sat on the chair next to his and with a gesture of friendship reached over and touched his arm. George, still uneasy and embarrassed, stood apart and watched.

Cranshaw’s face was still red, and a nerve in his forehead twitched, so that his eyebrows moved in a ridiculous appearance of surprise. He had very thick eyebrows. He was breathing heavily as if he were still angry, but he was making a tremendous effort to grow calm. Molly was talking softly, about the weather and teaching, and living in Rushy, waiting for some of the tension to go, waiting until he was able to talk rationally to her. Then he interrupted her.

“How’s Mother?” he asked. “ I must have frightened her. Shall I go and see her?”

“She’s well,” Molly replied. “You can explain to her later.”

“She won’t understand. She doesn’t listen.”

“It must be very difficult to live with someone who doesn’t listen.”

“It’s impossible. I know that I should make allowances. She hasn’t had an easy life. Father was never here. She brought me up practically all by herself. But I can’t go on being grateful. I try to explain that I make sacrifices too, but she doesn’t listen. If it wasn’t for her I could have married. Other people have so much freedom now. These young people, the children in school, some of the teachers even, they have so much freedom and they just abuse it. It’s wicked.”

“Is that why you wrote the letters?”

“You know about the letters?” he asked quickly. Molly nodded.

“I’ve been so worried about them. I knew that you would find me.” He fell silent, studying the stain on the carpet and the splinters of broken glass. George was fascinated by the conversation; he was afraid to move for fear of breaking the spell of understanding between the two. Because he knew that somehow Molly did understand this man whose moods and anxieties were, to him, incomprehensible. If he were mad, she seemed capable of bringing reason to his madness.

“You wrote the letters,” she said, in the form of a question, “because you thought that they had too much freedom?”

“I wanted them to pay,” he said angrily. “They hurt me so much and I wanted them to pay. He didn’t care how much it meant to me, my Saturday mornings with the children.”

Not those letters!
George screamed silently to himself. I know all about those letters. What about the others, the letters to Sally? But Molly allowed Cranshaw to continue talking.

“They liked me, they really liked me. It wasn’t like the children at school. Some of the little ones used to hold my hand. Then he started coming with us on to the marsh. I was pleased. I was glad to have him there. But he started lecturing to me in front of the children, laughing if I made a mistake. He said that I couldn’t see properly and that I was getting old. Not in so many words, but that’s what he meant. He had no right to criticize. I saw them together on the marsh one day, him and that woman from Fenquay. She was wearing one of those dresses that you can see right through, and nothing underneath. I was in one of the hides and I could see them. They had no shame. They even had her child with them. I knew then that I had to do something about it. They weren’t the sort of people to look after the village children.”

“So you wrote to the children’s parents and told them that Tom was a drug addict. How did you know that he had taken drugs?”

“I heard some of the birdwatchers talking about Tom French. A group of the young ones, no more than children themselves, were in one of the hides. They had the flaps open and I could hear what they were saying. He thought that he was their hero, but they could see through him, just like I did. They said that he lectured them about taking drugs, but he’d been in court for it himself. It was a sign. Don’t you see?” He looked eagerly at Molly. “ They’d given me the information I needed. It was a sign that I ought to act.”

“So,” Molly repeated, “ you wrote to the parents. But what about the other letters, Bernard, the letters to Tom’s girlfriend, to Sally Johnson? You wrote to her too, didn’t you?”

“It was for her own good,” he said wildly. “Don’t you see? That man was corrupting her. She’s a good woman, a beautiful woman. She didn’t need him, I had to warn her off.”

“But after he died, Bernard? What was the point of writing to her then?” George thought that Molly was losing a little of her social worker’s self-control, but perhaps the hint of accusation in her voice was intended.

“I enjoyed it,” the man said simply. “ I did it when Mother was in bed. It was exciting. It made me excited to think that I was writing to her.”

“Didn’t you think that she might be frightened?”

“That was all part of it. I imagined her lying in bed, frightened. Because of me.”

“But you haven’t written to her for a while now. Did you realize that it was wrong, that, it was hurting her, and that you would have to stop?”

He shook his head. “I couldn’t write to her. I had an accident and hurt my arm so that I couldn’t write. But it didn’t stop me thinking about her. I lie awake every night and think about her.”

His eyes were gleaming with the memory of his pleasure and desire. George watched with distaste, then looked at Molly, whose face expressed only interest, understanding. How does she do it? he wondered, she seems almost to be encouraging him, by sitting there so calmly and acceptingly.

“Do you like seeing people frightened, Bernard?” she said. “Other people?”

He shook his head. “It was only her. I didn’t write to anyone else. I couldn’t forget her. I dreamt about her.”

“But what about the birdwatchers? I think you like making them frightened. Didn’t you shoot at them on the marsh to make them scared?”

He laughed with sudden delight and George realized how disturbed he was. “ That’s different,” Bernard said. Then, more calmly, “ I never meant to hit them.”

Molly persisted, her voice still gentle but very firm. “When we came in, you and your mother were having an argument. You were very angry. Do you often get angry?”

“No,” he said very quickly, “not very often.”

“Perhaps when you get angry,” she persisted, “ you do things that you regret. Perhaps then you feel ashamed and you lie about it, and then it’s difficult to explain what you did and why you did it. Has that ever happened, Bernard?”

Reluctantly he nodded his head. It was as if Molly still held him in her spell. He had to tell her the truth.

George was puzzled. He was certain who had killed Tom French, so what could Bernard Cranshaw have to confess?

“Why don’t you tell me all about it?” Molly’s soothing voice broke into his thoughts.

Cranshaw mumbled now. He had become quite inarticulate. Even the gestures, the fidgeting and sniffling, were those of a naughty boy.

“The day that Tom French died …?” he began.

No, George thought, swept by a sudden panic. It can’t have been him. I can’t have been wrong. Instinct and reason had led him to the same conclusion. If he was wrong, he would lose faith in his judgement, in himself.

Cranshaw finished his sentence in a rush of words:?

“The day that Mother fell down the stairs, I pushed her. I wanted her to die.”

“Tell me about it,” Molly said.

“I was up and dressed. She got up to go to the bathroom. She saw me and started talking to me. She didn’t want me to go out on the marsh. She was standing at the top of the stairs. It seemed so easy. I pushed her.”

“And you’ve been worrying about it ever since,” Molly said. Then, with a very subjective unprofessional expression of bitterness:

“I don’t suppose that your mother would let you forget it?”

“It’s been driving me mad.” He was calmer, the nerve in his forehead was still. “You will help me, won’t you? You will help me to get away from here?”

“Of course I’ll help you,” she said. “But first I want you to help us. We want to find out who killed Tom French. Can you tell us anything about that, anything at all? It would help Sally too.”

“He was killed with a telescope,” the man said suddenly and clearly. “I found it. It was covered with blood. I didn’t touch it.”

George wanted desperately to interrupt and to take over the interview, but he felt that it was only Molly who held the man’s concentration.

“Where was it?” Molly asked. “By the pool on the marsh where Tom’s body was found?”

“No, it was in the Lodge park, quite near to the hotel, under a bush. I didn’t feel like going out on to the marsh that day. I was upset. I was looking for owl pellets. That’s how I saw it.”

So it was there, George thought. I was right. That’s where it happened.

“Are you sure that you didn’t touch it?” Molly asked. “The police searched that area very carefully, and didn’t find it.”

“Well, they wouldn’t have done,” he said scornfully. “It had gone. When I went back later that morning it had gone.”

Now George found it impossible to keep quiet. Molly had been asking all the right questions, but he could not sit and watch any longer.

“Why,” he asked in as controlled and quiet a voice as he could manage, “didn’t you tell the police about this? Or you could have told me.”

Bernard Cranshaw accepted the interruption as a matter of course.

“I couldn’t tell the police,” he said, frightened. “They would have found out about Mother. I couldn’t have had the police around here.”

He began to show signs of tension and excitement again, moving a heavy ash tray, which stood on a small, occasional table. He moved it backwards and forwards with a frantic energy, so that it scratched the table. Molly leant over and took the object from him. He subsided again into his chair, retreating from them.

“Tell me about the telescope,” George said quietly. “What kind of ‘scope was it? Did you recognize the make?”

“It was a new one,” the man said eagerly. “Not like mine. I always wanted a new one.” His face clouded over. “Mother said that it would have been a waste of money. But I would have looked after it.”

He stood up suddenly, shuffled to a cupboard in the corner, and lovingly brought out his telescope. It was solid brass and beautifully cared for.

“It was one of the new ones,” he repeated as he carried his telescope back to his chair. “One of the short ones, that you need a tripod for.”

“What colour was it?” George asked. “Was it with a tripod?”

The man shook his head.

“I can’t remember the colour. Grey or green. It was very messy. I was upset. I didn’t see a tripod.”

He seemed to lose all concentration then, and sat nursing the old brass telescope, rubbing patches of dull or tarnished metal with his handkerchief.

Molly waited with Bernard until the doctor came, but George left. Outside it was sticky and humid, and the storm clouds he had seen earlier in the day had spread, so that the sky was dark. There seemed to be no air and no light. His knowledge seemed to him an intolerable burden, but until the group of birdwatchers returned from Scotland there was nothing that he could do. Bernard Cranshaw had given his theory more weight, but he had no real proof. He started out for the village.

In the Cranshaws’ house no one spoke. It was so dark that Molly switched on the electric light. In a corner Mrs. Cranshaw sat silent, sullen and recriminating, her eyes blaming not her son, but Molly. Bernard Cranshaw had accepted the idea of a period in hospital with relief, until his mother had returned to the room, and then he had protested that she would need him. He could not leave her. For the benefit of them both Molly explained that Mrs. Cranshaw would be well looked after, but when the doctor arrived, and Molly helped Bernard into the car, his mother stayed where she was and did not say a word. Now the silence was as compulsive as the words had previously been. When, after watching the car drive away, Molly went back into the house, Mrs. Cranshaw turned her face to the wall and waited for the intruder to go away.

As George walked back to the Windmill he devised a plan.

Ella had opened all the windows and the door of the snack bar, but inside it was hot and steaming. A group of young birdwatchers stood laughing around the blackboard. George took Ella into the kitchen and spoke to her. When they returned her eyes were gleaming with excitement. She was singing loudly and tunefully.

George joined the lads and they became quieter, respectful.

“Anything about?” he asked.

A large, unkempt boy with painful acne shock his head.

“I suppose it’s getting a bit late to expect much now.”

George grinned: “ I think that the middle of June is a good time for a real rarity, for something really special.”

He looked at the debris of cameras, telescopes and binoculars on the tables. Without exception all the telescopes were short, fixed-focus models.

“Do you know if anyone has had a ‘scope repaired lately?” he asked generally. “Mine seems to be out of alignment and I wasn’t sure where to get it mended.”

There was a lot of advice about where best to have optical equipment repaired, but no useful information.

As he left he called to Ella: “Molly and I will be spending tonight at the White Lodge. Let us know if anything turns up.”

From the hotel George phoned the police station. It was an embarrassing phone call and he nearly lost his temper several times. He spoke first with a polite, rather slow-witted sergeant and then to an arrogant detective who, but for his prejudices, would have been reasonably intelligent. George, ignoring the man’s sneers about amateurs and the Home Office, explained his interest in the case.

He tried to explain that he had received some information which he was certain would assist the police in their inquiries.

The news about the telescope and its description seemed at last to force the detective to take George seriously. But when he asked where this witness might be questioned, and George gave the address of the local psychiatric hospital, he laughed out loud. He made no pretence of accepting George’s story. George had been talking to a loony. A loony might be a murderer. In fact he could tell George in confidence that their main suspect for this murder was a loony—Terry Biddle who had disappeared from the village—but no way could a loony be considered a reliable witness. With a great gesture of generosity, the detective agreed to send a constable out to the mental hospital some time the next day to talk to Mr. Cranshaw but made it clear that he would prefer to concentrate his efforts on finding Terry Biddle. Finally, he said that while a telescope was a possible murder weapon, the only forensic evidence was that it was a smooth cylindrical object. George just restained himself from shouting that he had seen a copy of the police report, and the detective rang off.