Palmer-Jones 01 - A Bird in the Hand (6 page)

“Did you see him after he had phoned?”

“Yes, I made an appointment for him to come to the office that afternoon. He was usually free in the afternoons and he sounded very overwrought.”

“What did he want?”

“It was the same unspecific anxiety about Sally’s inability to care for Barnaby. He said that she was withdrawing into herself and had refused to see him a couple of times, I tried to explain that Sally is normally a very independent person, and that she’d be feeling the need to break some of her ties with him, but he couldn’t accept that. He needed to be needed. He got very angry with me when I said there was nothing that I could do. He said that Barnaby was in real danger, and should be taken away from Sally. I said that was ridiculous. He threatened to go to the NSPCC and the social services, and to tell them things which would force them to take the baby into care. I said that if he had any real illustrations of Sally’s inability to care for the baby, he should tell me. He stormed out at that. It was quite unusual. He was generally a model client.”

“And do you think that he would have been able to persuade the social services to remove the child from his mother?”

She shrugged. “It would depend what he told them, but social workers are frightened now; there’s been so much publicity about battered children. They might be worried enough to take Barnaby into care, even if it were only for a short time. Sally wouldn’t have been able to cope with that.

“In case there was something he hadn’t told me, I went to see Sally later that afternoon. I call in to see her quite often if I’m working in Fenquay. It’s a good place to get a cup of tea. She was fine and so was Barnaby. For the first time since I’ve known her she was making plans for the future. Tom didn’t have any place in those plans, and I’m afraid it was her new independence, her new freedom from him, that had upset him.”

Jenny Kenning looked very firmly at George.

“Sally’s a very strong lady, Mr. Palmer-Jones. If she’d wanted to get rid of Tom she would have moved away or told him to clear off. She would not have needed to kill him.”

Palmer-Jones slowly drank the last of his coffee.

“She must have been very strong,” he said, “ very strong or very strange, to have listened to threats that her child would be taken away from her without responding.”

Jennifer got up abruptly. “There’s nothing strange about Sally,” she said very quietly. “ She may have responded to Tom’s threats but she did not kill him.”

They were walking out of the hotel, a little strained together, not sure how to say goodbye. George took her arm in a small gesture of apology. “Thank you for your help,” he said gently. “ Do get in touch if you think of anything else.”

“He would never talk about the offence.” She spoke suddenly, unexpectedly. “ He pleaded guilty at the court case. Some magistrates take a dim view of drug cases now, but it was a first offence and he got probation. But, ever since, he denied that he had ever taken drugs at all. He refused to discuss it. He didn’t say that he was framed or anything like that. Just that the cannabis wasn’t his.”

George watched her hurry off towards the office. She stopped once to speak briefly to a very young girl with a dirty toddler in a pushchair. He walked back to his car. Instead of taking the main road south to Norwich and London he drove west along the coast road, along the low cliffs to Rushy.

All day Bernard Cranshaw could feel his blood pressure rising. When he walked into the staff room first thing in the morning there was a sudden silence and he knew that they had been talking about him. He hated them, hated all of them, even those who pretended to be friendly. They thought that he was inferior because he did not talk about books and plays. But he taught woodwork and metal work, not English literature, and he never heard them talking about his interests. He hardly talked to them now. He had nothing in common with them, these young graduates, with their strange hair styles and fancy ideas. He had gone to teacher training college in the fifties when they would take just about anybody. There had been more like him in the school then, ordinary men who would answer you straight, who could keep a class quiet.

His classroom was one of two in a terrapin hut. It was meticulously, obsessively tidy. He shut the door behind him with a feeling of relief and safety. He was teaching a second-form class for the first period and they worked well. They were still young enough to be excited by the tools and the wood, and to be frightened by him. There was a soft hum of whispered voices and the pleasant, gentle noise of scraping and drilling. He walked around slowly, giving advice, tackling problems, then sat at his desk to prepare a fifth-form exam paper. Occasionally a child would come to him for help, but generally there was an air of peace, of studied application. He looked up sharply at a loud explosive sound which suddenly shattered the peace of the classroom. The children were still working quietly. The noise seemed to have come from outside. Then there was a frenzy of sound from the classroom next door. It seemed that all the activity of the playground had been trapped in that room. He waited for the noise to abate. It did so, only to reach another nerve-jangling climax. Cranshaw strode to the adjoining door, threw it open and yelled:

“What the hell is going on in here?”

The room was in uproar. Desks and chairs had been piled on one side and a group of fourth formers, barefooted, dishevelled, were smiling aggressively in the space in the middle. Then, with embarrassment, he saw a teacher who had apparently been a part of the chaos. At least it was not a teacher, but a student teacher in her final year attached to the school. She seemed unmoved by the interruption.

“Okay kids,” she said. “Sit down.”

They did as she said and were quiet only, he thought, because they were listening intently to the conversation between the two adults. She was wearing jeans and was barefoot too. Her toenails were pink. He stared with fascination at her toenails, trying to concentrate his eyes away from the small, firm breasts under the tight black cotton shirt.

“Sorry if we’ve disturbed you.” She grinned and he noticed a trace of cockney in her voice. “ It’s drama workshop and I can’t use the gym because they’re practising Scottish dancing. Mrs. Phillips said that it would be okay to use this room. It’s only woodwork next door, isn’t it?”

Without a word he retreated to his side of the door. She tried to keep them quiet for the rest of the period but the peace in his classroom would not return. It had been disturbed by long pink toenails, thighs in tight jeans and a low-necked black shirt. His concentration wavered and his head ached.

At lunchtime he had to queue in the supermarket for the items on the list he had made that morning before leaving home. His mother was seventy now, and although she managed to get out to the shop in the village she could not carry anything heavy. In the afternoon he had a free period, but another teacher had been timetabled to use his room. He hated using the staff room. He sat in a corner, rigid with unfriendliness, terrified that someone would approach him to make conversation. Later he would say angrily to his mother: “I sat there all afternoon and no one spoke a word to me.”

He left before four o’clock, hoping to avoid a meeting with the mass of joking teachers, who often met in the staff room for coffee before they went home. They chattered like children and he despised them. Today, more especially, he hoped to avoid Mrs. Phillips and her student teacher. But in the corridor he almost tripped over the headmaster, and had to walk along with him, listening to the praise of the young man who had recently been promoted as head of Cranshaw’s department. Carrying the plastic bag of groceries, he felt foolish. At last he reached his car and then he had to prepare himself emotionally for his meeting with his mother.

They lived together in a small, ugly house in a street behind the Blue Anchor. They rented it and Bernard Cranshaw resented paying for major repairs, so in comparison to the rest of the street it looked shabby. He was one of a large family, but his father had died, his brothers and sisters had married and he was left at home to look after his mother. Throughout his youth he had been dependent on his mother; she had protected him from the violence—and more importantly from the sarcasm—of his father, and now she was dependent on him.

In contrast to his room at school the house was untidy, piled with papers, slides and photographs. It irritated him, but he was helpless before it. His mother left the housework to him now and once in the house he had no energy. She sucked all the energy from him, with her intense need for his attention and sympathy. Some days he tried to talk to her, to tell her about his day at school, as he would have done when he was younger, but she did not want to listen, only to be listened to.

She started to talk when he entered the house, followed him to the kitchen, touching, almost stroking his arm to ensure that she retained his attention as he cooked their meal. Usually she talked of his father. Her bitterness towards him had not ended with his death. She was a slight woman, still vain, still attempting to make herself attractive. Every month a girl came from the village to set and dye her hair. Whenever she went out and before Bernard arrived home from work she would apply make-up to her face. Despite her thinness she ate heartily and there was some relief as they took their meal in the dingy kitchen, but even as she ate she continued to talk. Real freedom came later. But tonight he would have to postpone it.

“Mother.”

She seemed surprised that he had spoken, and stared at him, her pink, glossy lips a little apart.

“Mother, I had a letter today from Kenneth Wallis. Do you remember? He used to teach with me.”

“I didn’t see a letter.” She was insulted that she had not shared in this detail of his private life.

“He wrote to me at school. If you remember, he was Scots. He’s teaching now in the Highlands and he’s invited me to stay with him to see some of the breeding birds there.”

It was out now. He should have broached the subject more carefully, more tactfully. But then she would not have understood him.

“That was kind of him,” she said sweetly, absentmindedly.

“Then you wouldn’t mind if I went to stay with him, just for a long weekend. Mrs. Simpson would come in every day to check that you were all right.”

She stared at him in horror.

“Oh no,” she said. “ Oh no, you wouldn’t want to go all the way up there.”

She pouted her face to cry and two tears washed a furrow down the powder on her face, like rain on a dirty window.

“No, of course not, Mother,” he said.

As he always did, he made her a cup of tea, sat in front of the television, switched on her favourite soap opera and said:

“I’m just out to the marsh for a while, Mother. I won’t be long.”

She did not seem to notice him leave the house.

Every day he went out on to the marsh after tea. As he walked away from the house he could feel that his face was flushed and sticky. The breeze from the sea made him aware of it. He forced himself to breathe slowly, to relax, to forget school and his mother. As he did so he watched a small group of waders on a pool no bigger than a puddle right at the edge of the road. Then he began to walk along the boardwalk, which he had helped to build, across the marsh to the main hide. He would just sit there a while, watching the avocets.

The avocets had only recently come to Rushy and they had young. Cranshaw had a passionate, a loving interest in them. They were his birds. He had found the nest and he had cared for them. On one occasion he had seen a group of strangers who were taking too great an interest in the birds and the nest, and had sat awake all night, hidden behind a bank of shingle, in case they had come to steal the eggs. He would have done anything to protect the eggs, to protect his birds. Now the young were paddling around the edges of the pools, feeding themselves.

The marsh was very still. At least in the middle of the week there were few other people to disturb him. He could hear the waves moving the shingle and the sound of the wind over the reeds. It was then that he saw that the flap of the hide was open. All the jarring tensions of the day returned. Someone was in his hide, watching his birds. Did they think that the marsh was public property, these twitchers with their dirty habits and fancy birds? Did they think he had organized and bullied the Conservation Trust to buy the marsh, to build hides for them to be used as a doss house for spiky-haired louts with safety-pins in their nostrils?

He pushed open the door of the hide.

“Don’t you know you need a permit to come here?”

It was like a nightmare. The embarrassment of the drama class was exactly duplicated. The occupant of the hide was a well-dressed elderly man who, if he showed any reaction at all, showed a little distaste, a little pity, and who took from his pocket a permit which allowed him unlimited access to the hides for the rest of the year.

George Palmer-Jones saw a man in his mid-fifties, slight, sandy-haired, with very prominent veins on his face and neck. The man seemed only just in control of himself; he was balanced on the edge of hysteria. He was shaking now and his face was very flushed. George wished that Molly was with him. He felt awkward and did not want to be patronizing. The man gave a terrible, nervous giggle, and with a visible effort regained control of himself.

“Sorry about that,” he muttered. “Should have known. But you get all sorts here. Twitchers most of them. Got to keep an eye on them.”

They looked in silence at the avocets. When he felt that the man beside him was steady, more comfortable, Palmer-Jones said:

“I suppose you get a lot of strangers here.”

The bitterness and fury seemed to flow out of the man. He stammered as the words rushed into each other.

“They come here as if they own the place. I’ve lived here all my life. They wouldn’t find these rarities if we hadn’t put the work in. They don’t know about the meetings we had, the pressure we put on the council to stop the development … And they contribute nothing, nothing. They’re rude and dirty. They use us.”