Palmer-Jones 04 - A Prey to Murder (6 page)

Probably to look at her silly old peregrines, she thought. She cares more about those peregrines than she does about us.

She watched her grandmother disappear up the lane and out of sight, then climbed down the tree and went to wheedle more money from her mother. But she could not find Veronica and by half past four she was bored and wished the thing would finish. She began to prowl around the garden, watching the final rituals of the afternoon – the prizegiving for the children’s best fancy dress, the announcement of the raffle winner. Fanny was surprized that these were performed by the chairman of the Wildlife Trust and not by Eleanor.

That’ll put the old cow’s nose out of joint, she thought with satisfaction. She won’t like that.

Then at last it seemed that the event was coming to its end. Fanny wandered to the field at the back of the house where the falconry display had been held. It was in deep shadow, crushed between the house and the hill. Beyond the line of trees on one side of the field, cars were parked and some were already driving away. As she walked round the house an old blue transit van passed her. It was going so fast that it scattered the gravel so that it rattled against the brick wall of the house. She turned her face away, afraid that a stone would go in her eye, so she did not see the driver. She thought nothing of it and walked on. It was followed by a lorry full of sheep which had been used in the shearing competition. In the caravan the morris men were changing into their ordinary clothes.

Beyond the morris men, in a Range-Rover parked close by, a man was asleep in the driver’s seat, his head on his chest, so it almost touched the steering wheel. In the far corner of the field the birds of prey were still in their weathering ground on perches. Fanny went up to the rope which marked the weathering ground. The bird nearest to the rope was off its perch, though still attached to it by the leather leash. Fanny was so attracted to the bird, so held by its still, brown eye that she did not look at her grandmother immediately. Then she saw the silk pastel print of Eleanor’s dress against the green grass, and the fine limbs jointed like a puppet’s. She saw that the bird was perched on the woman’s shoulder and had torn the fabric of the dress with its talons. The sharp cruel beak was pointed towards her grandmother’s face.

She ran screaming to the man in the Range-Rover, hammering on the door and yelling to him that the birds had killed her grandmother and were pecking out her eyes. Then to her later, secret satisfaction, she fainted.

George heard the screaming. When he reached the weathering ground a crowd had gathered round the roped-off area and were staring, fascinated, at the huge bird perched on the frail and slender body of the woman. The bird, sensing the attention, stretched its wings and turned its head. The woman’s body was almost covered by the feathers. No one dared to approach the birds and a policeman, who had been at Gorse Hill to control the traffic, was clearly out of his depth.

‘Let me bring the bird out,’ Fenn was saying to him, his voice shaken and distressed. ‘The woman’s obviously dead. The red-tailed hawk couldn’t have killed her look at her head – but it’s a carrion feeder. It’ll treat her as it would any other dead body.’

Fenn was a short man. He hardly reached the policeman’s shoulder. He was white, almost incoherent with shock, and the policeman seemed unwilling to take him seriously. He was remembering rules about approaching the scene of the crime and the unwitting loss of evidence.

‘For Christ’s sake!’ Murdoch Fenn screamed, an indication at last of his hysteria. ‘If we don’t move the hawk soon there’ll be no body left for your pathologist to examine.’

He looked around wildly for a way to convince the policeman and saw George. It seemed to George that he was on the verge of breakdown.

‘Look,’ he said gratefully. ‘There’s Mr Palmer-Jones. He works for the Department of the Environment as a Wildlife Act Inspector. Ask him.’

Finally the policeman allowed Fenn and George into the enclosure and all the birds were put on portable perches in the back of the Range-Rover. The policeman cleared the people from the field, though by then the grass had been churned by their feet, and George thought there would be little to assist the forensic officers. Eleanor’s body was left, roped off, as if the police had already been there and begun their work. As Fenn had said, it was obvious she was dead, but George, stooped over her body in a vain, childish hope that it was all a mistake. Her skull had been smashed, just above one eye, and though the skin was not broken the shape of her face was quite altered. He thought for a brief moment that it was not Eleanor at all but some other woman, then he realized he was deluding himself. He had known from the beginning that no bird could have killed her. Even if, as in some melodramatic horror film, the hawk had been trained to attack humans, Eleanor would have had no reason to wander into the weathering ground. Now the head wound showed that she had suffered no accident, no heart attack. She had been murdered.

He had always thought revenge a misguided and destructive emotion, but having seen Eleanor lying on the grass amidst the droppings, the dirty straw, the discarded pieces of fur and feather of the birds’ prey, he felt angry and violent. She was beautiful, he had admired her and she had been killed.

He looked briefly around him for some smooth round implement which might be the murder weapon but there was nothing. He slipped away from the field and went into the house by the back door. He collected his binoculars and telescope from his room then joined the gossiping people who had been excited by the tragedy and were making their way down the drive to the lane. Mrs Masefield had had a seizure, some said. She hadn’t been herself for some time. It was those evil birds, they said. They would frighten anyone.

As he turned away from the other people at the end of the drive he was surprized to find Molly beside him. It had not occurred to him to wonder where she was.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked. ‘Shouldn’t you stay here to wait for the police? They’ll want to talk to everyone who was staying at Gorse Hill.’

‘I want to go on to the hill,’ he said. ‘To the eyrie. I’ll speak to the police later.’

He would have preferred to be alone. His anger persisted and he felt guilty too, and sorry for himself. It would have suited his mood to be alone on the hill, with the sun setting over the Welsh mountains, throwing long purple shadows over the heather.

‘It won’t do any good, you know,’ Molly said. She was almost running to keep up with him. ‘Brooding on your own up there won’t bring Eleanor back. You’re not eighteen any more.’

She knew him too well. He had been seventeen when a close friend had been killed in the war. He had spent a night on the hill. It had been a romantic gesture, a way of saying goodbye. She was right. He was grown up now, too old for dramatic self-indulgence.

‘I’m not going to the hill to brood,’ he snapped. ‘I want to see if the peregrine young are still in the eyrie.’

‘You think they may have been stolen?’

‘Eleanor was convinced that someone was intending to take them,’ he said. ‘No one believed her. They all thought she was over-reacting. But if she came here this afternoon and caught someone in the act of theft, that might be a motive for muder.’

‘She was murdered?’ Molly said. Like most of the crowd she assumed Eleanor’s death to be an accident.

‘Yes,’ George said shortly. ‘She was murdered. But she wasn’t killed where her body was found. There was no reason for her to go that close to the birds of prey.’

‘You think she saw someone stealing the birds? Then the thief panicked and killed her?’

‘It could have happened that way,’ George said. His conversation with Molly was already forcing him to think more clearly and precisely. ‘Though it would have been a long way to bring her body down the cliff. And why dump it in the falconry centre weathering ground?’

‘To throw suspicion elsewhere,’ Molly suggested. At the moment it was more important for her to maintain the flow of conversation to prevent George slipping into depression, than to think intelligently and constructively about Eleanor’s murder.

‘It was a dangerous way to go about it,’ George said scornfully. ‘With all those people there.’

‘Not necessarily,’ Molly said. ‘If the murderer had transport. The field had been empty since the display and Fenn was asleep in his car. It would be possible to drive over the field to the weathering ground without anyone noticing.’

But George was in no mood to concede the point and they walked on in silence.

It was half past six and the heat had gone out of the day. There was a slight cold breeze. They had climbed the steepest point of the path and could look down over Gorse Hill. Smoke was coming out of one of the chimneys. In the valley there was the shadow of a cloud over the town so that it looked grey and distant, but the sun caught the red brick of Gorse Hill and made it warm and welcoming, more substantial and attractive than it really was. It alone in the surrounding countryside seemed to have life and vitality. In comparison the hill was dead. They walked on along the narrow sheep path.

They heard the peregrines calling before they could see the eyrie. The birds were circling about the cliff making a high-pitched hekking. The call was relentless, unending.

‘It’s the distress call,’ George said. ‘The birds have been disturbed.’

They walked along the sheep track which crossed the hillside until they could see the eyrie. Both birds circled above them and even with the naked eye Molly could tell the difference between them. The male was smaller, slimmer, greyer. The female was brown and heavy.

The eyrie was in exactly the same position as it had been when Stuart Masefield had shown George the site. In the birds’ calls George imagined he could hear the man’s manic laughter. He longed for the noise to stop. He screwed his telescope on to a tripod balanced on the narrow path and looked into the eyrie.

‘Well?’ Molly asked. She was tired and hot from the climb and leaned against the boulder which had hidden Laurie and Helen the day before.

‘Someone will have to go down to the eyrie to check,’ George said. ‘But I’m sure the young birds have been taken.’

He slung his telescope over his shoulder and they walked slowly down the hill.

Eleanor was right, he thought, and no one would listen to her. She wasn’t mad at all. He would never touch her now, never know her and be important to her. His anger returned, blinding and senseless.

There was a stile across the footpath where it led down to the town. As Molly was climbing it her foot slipped on a muddy step, she lost her balance and toppled backwards into a dry ditch. Mildly concerned and irritated by her clumsiness George slithered down the bank to help her up. Molly was unhurt. She stood up and brushed grass and leaves from her trousers. On the other side of the stile and separating the ditch from the open hill was a drystone wall. Molly was about to take George’s hand so they could climb together back to the track, but something about his face stopped her. He was staring at the bottom of the wall. The stones were uneven and loose in places. In a hole at the base of the wall was a dainty shoe made of cream leather. Molly was reminded of the fairy story of Cinderella. She thought that she was always destined to play the part of the ugly sister.

‘That was Eleanor’s shoe,’ George said. ‘This is where she was murdered.’

Alan Pritchard was slumped in his chair, a can of beer in his hand, watching football on the television, when the telephone rang. He swore. It would be for Bethan, his wife. She came from Cardigan and her relatives saw Herefordshire as a strange and foreign land. They thought she needed daily phone calls to keep her in touch with home. Bethan was in the garden, trying optimistically to sunbathe, and the boys were away playing. The football game had reached a critical point. Pritchard shouted, hoping that his wife would come in and answer the phone, but there was no response and it continued to ring, drowning the commentary on the television.

Pritchard got out of his chair, his eyes still on the screen, and picked up the receiver.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Pritchard.’

‘Sorry to disturb you sir,’ said a familiar voice. ‘Something’s turned up.’

He swore again, turned off the television set using the remote control, and listened.

Superintendent Alan Pritchard seemed young for his rank. Perhaps he was forty-five but he looked younger. On first acquaintance it was hard to understand how he had achieved such rapid promotion. He was relaxed, easygoing, almost flippant. He seemed to take nothing seriously. But those who knew him better described a streak of stubbornness, of ambition which made him stick with a case until he got results. He had a temper too which dragged his colleagues out of apathy as he roared around the office, shouting at them in Welsh, but they never knew if the temper was genuine or a practised technique to make them work and enhance his reputation as a character.

Alan Pritchard was known to be a great family man. He lived with Bethan and their four sons in a modern, ugly bungalow near the river to the south of the town. The river there was wide and sandy and the garden ran right down to the bank. The boys were always playing there, paddling and building dams. The garden was a mess, with bikes the children had grown out of, dens built in the bushes and deflated footballs. Inside there were dirty nappies in the bath and toys in the kitchen and Bethan big and blousy, feeding the latest baby and talking to her mam on the telephone. Alan loved it. He raged occasionally against the mess, the constant diet of take-away meals, the ruinous phone bills, but he would not have changed it. He would never have exchanged Bethan, wide and easy and laughing, for the nagging, shrewish housewives his friends described, or his boys for their soft, pink, well-behaved children.

When he arrived at Gorse Hill Pritchard thought he had come to a madhouse. He had received a garbled message about a woman who had been attacked by a giant bird. The thing sounded like a grotesque practical joke and he could find no one to explain what had happened. He had not been told about the Trust’s Open Day and the remnants of the event confused him. Most of the stallholders and visitors had gone, but there were upended trestles on the lawn and rubbish all over the grass. The scene-of-crime team had not arrived – Sunday was the worst possible day to get officers out – and the family were no use to him at all.