Palmer-Jones 05 - Sea Fever (11 page)

“We’ve got to find a home for him first,” she said. “We know he hadn’t been living at his parents’ house for months. That’s why they hired George Palmer-Jones. We can’t trace him by his belongings because apparently they all went overboard when he did.” She drank the coffee in small, polite sips and continued thinking aloud. “Perhaps that’s the significance of the missing bag and equipment,” she said. “ Perhaps the murderer threw it away to stop anyone finding out where Greg had been living. It’s interesting that he was killed after the first serious attempt to trace him.”

“Mr. Palmer-Jones didn’t seem to think he’d have any problem discovering Franks’ address,” Berry said. “ He told me that these twitchers all keep in touch with each other by phone. It was just a question of asking one of them for Greg’s phone number and tracing the address from that.”

“Well,” she said, “ Roger Pym is one of these twitchers, isn’t he?

Let’s have him in and see if he knows where Franks has been hiding.”

Roger Pym was nervous. He talked too much and waved his arms. He insisted over and over again how upset he was by Greg’s death. He had known the boy for a long time, he said. Since he was a youngster. In fact, he thought he could take the credit for starting Greg Franks on his birdwatching career. He hadn’t actually taught Greg, but the lad used to hang around with some of his pupils at school.

“Have you seen him around lately?”

“Of course. He was a serious twitcher. I see him at most of the rare birds which turn up in the country.”

“You never met him socially?”

“Good Lord, no! We’d have nothing in common.”

“Your wife described you as friendly rivals. Would that be accurate?”

A touch of annoyance, of vanity, crossed his face, and she thought for a moment he intended to contradict her, but he laughed with a forced aimability and said yes, that would probably be right. She had probably heard about their little argument on the boat. It was Greg teasing, of course. There was absolutely no possibility that Greg could have seen as many birds in the U. K. as he had. She took him through the events of the day before, and even to her he propounded the fantasy that he had found the unidentified petrel. Of course he hadn’t spoken to Greg Franks, he said. There was too much going on. He hadn’t left the deck for a moment.

“Could you give me Mr. Franks’telephone number?” the inspector asked. “I understand that birdwatchers keep in frequent touch on the phone.”

The question startled Pym. For the first time in the interview he was quiet. Then the words started again, fast, jumbled, nervous. No, he said, he was sorry but he didn’t have Greg’s latest number. He had the old one, of course, for his parents’ home but nothing recent.

“Isn’t that unusual?” the inspector asked.

“Not really,” he said. “Not now. There’s Birdline, a telephone answering service, and the old grapevine is dead.”

“So you don’t know where he had been living recently?” she asked, though by now the young man’s address had become such a mystery that she no longer expected a positive answer.

“In Bristol,” Roger Pym said. “I’m sure he was living in Bristol. But not his exact address. No.”

Late in the morning the superintendent arrived. Not, Claire thought, to offer assistance, to accept some of the responsibility in a difficult case, but to check up on her and because the trip to Porthkennan would be a pleasant break from the office before he went home for Sunday lunch. He was Cornish, a great bull of a man, wide, neckless, with a big, square head. His name was Wargan.

“Well,” he said in his growling voice, “How’s it going?”

She shook her head. “ No one will admit to speaking to him on the boat yesterday after he went to lie down,” she said. “They all seem to have been so excited about this rare bird that they took no notice of anything. The probation officer, Mrs. Pym, thinks she might have come across him at work, possibly when he was at a probation hostel on bail. Can we check their records on that?”

“No,” Wargan said, finding apparent satisfaction in making the investigation more difficult and complicated for her. “ I phoned them this morning. There was a fire at the hostel. I checked the date of the fire with our records on Franks. It will have been while he was on bail. The place was gutted, and all their records were lost.”

“What sort of fire?” she asked. “Arson?” It was, she thought, a coincidence. Rosco had been convicted of arson.

He shook his head. “Apparently not. There was a detailed investigation, and they found it was started by an electrical fault.”

“Have you got an address for Franks yet?” the inspector asked. “No one here seems to know where he’d been living since he left his parents.”

The superintendent shook his head. “ He seems to have disappeared from all the official records about a year ago,” he said. “He hasn’t claimed dole or social security in that time, and he hasn’t paid tax or national insurance. The car he was driving was registered and insured in his father’s name. We’ll put out a press statement this afternoon and get his picture in the papers tomorrow. Someone will know where he’s been living.”

He would enjoy doing that, Claire thought. Wargan always got on well with the media. He especially liked being on local television news, smiling roguishly at the female interviewer, developing his accent so nobody could mistake him for an incomer.

Berry had been sitting apart, listening to the conversation. Now, for the first time he spoke. “What about Louis Rosco?” he said. “Is he still on the
Jessie Ellen
? Should we get a search warrant and go over his cottage before he comes back?”

Wargan shook his head. “ No need for that,” he said. “ We know that the first time Franks and Rosco met this weekend was at Heanor, and Rosco’s been under observation since then. There can’t possibly be anything belonging to Franks in the cottage. They’ve done a thorough search of the boat now and found nothing there. Rosco can go home as soon as he wants to, though I think we should have him in to the station later for questioning. He’s your most likely suspect, isn’t he? He’s killed a man once.” He nodded towards the dining room door. “I can’t imagine any of that bunch out there having the guts. Still, it’s your case.”

So a second opportunity to search the cottage on the shore was missed. When the police made a connection between Franks and Rosco, they searched the cottage, but then they were looking for drugs. By that time, the gun lying between the lumpy flock mattress and the metal frame of the bed had been moved, and they found nothing.

Duncan James spent the day outside, waiting with mounting panic for the summons to the dining room to be questioned. At least in the garden, with its open view down the valley, he could fight off the claustrophobia which had been tormenting him since he had gone below deck on the
Jessie Ellen
to sleep. His father had worked as a young man in a tin mine, and whenever Duncan thought of the working conditions he must have endured, he felt ill. Claustrophobia had dominated Duncan’s childhood and altered his life. The irrational fear of dark, damp places had been one of the spurs to his academic success. It had sent him from Cornwall to civilised inland Britain. It had made him cautious and thrifty. The tin mine represented insecurity, poverty, failure.

Now he was back in Cornwall, and the childhood fear had returned. In the bunkroom across the yard he had slept badly, and when he did drift into unconsciousness, he dreamed of drowning in dark cold water. Even in daylight in the sunny garden, the memory of the dream returned. He tried to banish it by thinking of Anne at home in Somerset with the children and, by an effort of will, maintained a degree of equilibrium and calm.

He could not remember being happy before he knew Anne. They had met at university. She had been an undergraduate, and he had been doing post-doctoral research and a little teaching. He had seen her first when he had taken a small group into some beech woods to collect fungi for identification. The colour of the beech woods and her hair and her smile still glowed in his memory. He had known even then on the first meeting that she was special. She had changed him in a month. His colleagues told him that she had made him human. Before Anne he had been notorious for his bad temper and his unwillingness to compromise. Suddenly he found a sense of humour.

Duncan did not dare ask her to marry him until she had completed her degree. Then he needed several drinks to give him the courage to make the proposal, and he had botched it with his shyness, so in the end she had proposed to him. Afterwards he had been too excited to sleep for a week. He had wandered round the university in dazed and bedraggled confusion while she made the arrangements for the wedding. If he had understood more clearly the difference in their backgrounds, it might never have taken place. In the classlessness of academic life it had not mattered. He realized that she never had to worry about money, that she had been to a boarding school, that her father had some land in the West Country, but at university everyone’s parents seemed wealthier than his had been. There had even been a certain status in being poor. He had imagined, if he thought about it, that her father was a farmer.

She bullied him once, soon after they met, to take her to Cornwall to show her where he had been brought up. It was late autumn, raining, and the weekend was a bleak anticlimax. His parents, who had been older than most of his friends’ parents, were dead, and there were no other relatives to introduce her to. He showed her the rented cottage where he had lived as a child, and she made no comment then, no comparison with her own home. It was only after they were engaged that she drove him to meet her parents in Gloucestershire, and when he saw where they lived, he thought at first she was playing a trick on him. The long drive, the acres of garden, the house so old and grand that he might have been taken there as a schoolboy on an educational visit, astounded him. There were two farms on the estate and a gamekeeper; most of the village was dependent on Anne’s father for employment. It almost wrecked the relationship. For a time he lost all his confidence in her. He thought he must have misjudged her. Because she was rich, he supposed she must be different. Then she persuaded him that was ridiculous, and at last the old happiness returned. It was only later, when they were married, that he discovered that his fear had been justified and that in some important things she
was
different.

Now, sitting in the garden waiting for the ordeal of being questioned, he tried not to blame Anne for the mess he was in. He knew it was all his own fault.

The police kept him waiting all morning, and he wondered in the heightened state of nervous panic if they had done that on purpose to frighten him. It was early afternoon when Berry came to find him. The policeman saw a large, uncoordinated man walking backwards and forwards along the overgrown path by the stream. He was dressed with an old-fashioned shabbiness, and when Berry called to him, he turned with a sad and frightened look, like a child asking a stern parent not to deal with him too harshly. When Duncan was led into the sudden shadow of the dining room, he blinked shortsightedly and peered unhappily towards the inspector. She had been disturbed by the superintendent’s visit and the fact that they still had no recent address for Greg Franks. Her superiors would see that as incompetence, and she had wondered even if she should leave Berry to complete the statements while she devoted her energy to that. She had decided in the end to stay, but her attention was still on the problem of where Franks had been living, and her questions were mechanical and routine. She could not believe that this absentminded academic could help her.

“Dr. James,” Inspector Bingham said, “why did you decide to come to Cornwall this weekend?”

“I was interested in the birdwatching element,” he said. “ I work as regional officer for the Nature Conservancy Council, but ornithology isn’t really my subject. I thought this holiday would be an excellent introduction. My patch covers the whole of the south-west peninsula, and it did seem important to learn a little about seabird identification.” He was rather proud of his answer, and it gave him confidence. Only the sergeant, sitting out of sight, half-hidden by a giant rubber plant, gave Duncan some cause for concern. He had calm blue eyes, and Duncan had a guilty sense that the sergeant could tell when he was lying.

“When did you decide to come to Heanor?” the inspector asked.

“Only last week,” he said. “It was an impulse. I had a few days’ leave to take. I was lucky there was still a place available.”

“Yes,” she said. “ I see. How did you hear about the trip?”

“I’d read about them in the natural history press,” he said. “They’re quite famous, you know.”

“Had you met Greg Franks before?”

“Not as far as I’m aware,” Duncan said. “I may have met him through my work. I come across pressure groups and representatives of natural history societies occasionally, but having met Greg, I doubt if he was involved in that kind of thing. And besides, I think I should have remembered him if I’d seen him before. He was quite an exhibitionist.”

There was a pause.

“What effect did that exhibitionism have on the other passengers?”

It was the sergeant who spoke, and Duncan found the question strangely disturbing.

“I don’t know,” he said lamely. “ Franks seemed to take a delight in annoying them, but there was a lot of conversation I didn’t understand. I hadn’t met them before, you see, so it was difficult to gauge their reactions. There was some wrangling about lists. That seemed incomprehensible to me.”

“Yesterday afternoon,” the inspector said, “when Greg Franks told everyone he was going to lie down, the others say that they were too interested in the seabird to notice what was going on. But you tell me that you’re not a birdwatcher, so you might have been more aware of other things. Did you go to see Greg during that time?”

“No,” Duncan James said. “ I quite forgot about him until later.”

“You didn’t notice anyone else move forward to the deck where he was sleeping?”