Palmer-Jones 05 - Sea Fever (18 page)

Then Jane Pym’s voice changed and became sharp and hostile, as if Claire had insulted her personally. “You can’t blame probation officers for not remembering all their clients,” she said. “If you knew how many people we see in a year. Some men only stopped in the hostel for a few days. And we do hundreds of social enquiry reports on people coming up to court. It’s a thankless enough job as it is without all this criticism.”

Claire ignored the anger. “Could one of the men who stayed in the hostel that summer have been Louis Rosco?” she asked. She was beginning to wonder if Jane Pym was being deliberately obstructive, to imagine even some form of collaboration between the woman and the two clients of the probation service. Her caseload must be full of addicts, and the opportunity of dealing in drugs would be enormous.

“Why?” Jane Pym asked suddenly. She was shocked, it seemed, out of her alcoholic blur. “Was he there?”

“So he says. He remembers the fire, so it must have been at the same time as Greg.”

“No,” Jane said slowly. “ I don’t remember. As I’ve told you, I had left before the fire. Perhaps I’d gone before he arrived.”

“Doesn’t that seem rather an odd coincidence? That three of you on the
Jessie Ellen
might have been together in a probation hostel in Bristol and no one recognised each other?”

“I recognised Greg,” Jane said defensively. “ I thought I knew him.”

“But not Rosco?”

“No!” But the idea of Louis Rosco seemed to trouble her, and she withdrew into a dispirited and unhelpful lethargy, answering the inspector’s questions with monosyllables, making it clear that she only wanted the interview to be over.

Jane was driven home by a uniformed policewoman she had never seen before, and the journey passed in silence. She was pleased. Sergeant Berry made her feel strangely and irrationally guilty, and she felt that in his presence there was a danger she would break down and confess to grave and unimagined sins. The constable dropped her outside Myrtle Cottage, then drove on down the valley to turn the car. Jane stood outside the house, breathing deeply, trying to compose herself before going inside. It was still not late, and she pictured them all there, as she had left them, sitting round the kitchen table waiting with a ghoulish excitement to find out what had happened, perhaps even to accuse her. She suspected that Roger’s offer to accompany her to the police station was caused by curiosity rather than a wish to give her support. It was a pleasant surprise when she lifted the latch on the kitchen door to find the room empty. The living room beyond was dark and quiet, too. They had been so exhausted that everyone, even Roger, must have given up waiting and gone to bed.

She sat in the dark on the rocking chair in the kitchen and began to cry.

The old woman must have been standing in the doorway for some time before Jane realised she was there. She stood, quite unembarrassed by the tears, and made no move to come into the room or retreat. When she saw Jane look up, she spoke.

“Was it quite dreadful!” she said.

“I suppose not,” she said. “ Just confusing.”

“Tell me,” Molly said.

Then the temptation to spill it all out was too much, and Jane explained about Greg and Rosco having been at the hostel, about the fire which had destroyed the records.

“I was there, too,” Jane said. “I was working in the hostel that summer. The warden was on maternity leave, and I took over. The inspector thinks it’s too much of a coincidence, and that I must in some way be implicated.”

Molly said nothing. She allowed Jane her righteous indignation. But she thought the inspector was probably right. The coincidence was incredible.

Molly went to her room then, but she could not sleep. She tried to piece together the overheard conversations, the whispered confessions, the suppressed antagonism, to make some pattern, but it was impossible. At some time after midnight there was a knock on her door, and Rose stood there, like the heroine of some Victorian bodice-ripper, in a long white nightgown and a white shawl. Her hair was tangled and untidy, and there was mud on the hem of her nightdress.

“Come in,” Molly said mildly. “ What’s the matter?”

“It’s Louis,” Rose said. She began to cry. “They’ve taken him into custody.”

“Have they charged him?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t know.”

“What happened?”

Then Rose began to talk, the words spilling out in random phrases. It was part of a declaration of love, part an explanation of her fear, and only when Molly prompted her, did it become a detailed account of what had happened that evening.

“I didn’t realise,” she said, “ how much I cared for him. I mean, I fancied him right from the beginning, from the moment he moved into the cottage and I saw him down there, working on the
Jessie Ellen
, getting her ready for the sea. I mean, I knew then that I wanted to have his baby. But that was all. I didn’t want to get involved. I’d been hurt before. Only safe, unfanciable men like Gerald Matthews for me, I thought. I told Louis that. No involvement, I said, I can’t handle involvement. He told me he’d been to prison. I wasn’t surprised. I mean, there were so many rumours in Heanor about him, I’d have been ready to believe anything. Now look at me. I’m as involved as hell.”

“What has happened?” Molly asked again. “Where have you been?”

“Down to the cottage, of course,” Rose said. “ I heard the cars go down some time ago. I thought it was the police bringing Louis home. But you should see what they’re doing there! They’re going through the cottage searching his things. They think he killed Greg Franks. I came back here and phoned the police station. They told me they were keeping Louis in custody overnight.”

She began to cry. Molly could tell that the hours of waiting for Louis to return to Porthkennan had been a terrible strain.

“You must do something,” she said. “Louis didn’t kill Greg. He had no reason to. You can help us. I know about you and George. Everyone who comes to stay talks about the Tom French murder. Please get Louis home for me.”

Molly waited until the tears and hysteria had subsided.

“Rose,” she said. “ Was Greg Franks blackmailing Louis about his criminal record?”

“No,” Rose said. “That’s why I’m so certain Louis didn’t kill him. Greg Franks was blackmailing
me.
”

“Why?”

“He had found out somehow who was Matilda’s father,” Rose said. “ He said he would tell the birding world I was screwing a convicted killer. ‘Who would want to stay in Myrtle Cottage then?’ he said. And ‘Who would trust Rosco to take them out in a boat?’”

“How did he know Louis had been convicted of manslaughter?”

“He met him in Bristol in some hostel.”

“Are you sure he didn’t approach Louis for money, too?”

“No,” she said. “I think he was a bit frightened of Louis.” She paused. “Gerald knew something was going on,” she said. “ He hated Greg and made me promise not to have him here again. But I couldn’t turn him away. I didn’t know what he would do.”

“Did Gerald ever confront Greg? Tell him to keep away?”

“No,” Rose said scornfully. “He wouldn’t have the guts.”

Then Rose, wallowing in her muddled emotion, began to plead with Molly again to do something to free Louis so he could be returned to her. But Molly made no promise, and it was only when she had the phone call from the hospital that she decided to take more direct action.

When the superintendent discovered the link between Rosco and Franks, he was jubilant. That was enough to keep Rosco in custody at least overnight, he said. In the meantime they would have a look at his cottage. If they could find any illegal substances, it would all be over. But the search of the cottage on the shore ended up as a farce. No one had considered that there might not be electricity, and the lanterns they found were beyond them to operate.

They plundered the place, like burglars with torches, feeling through the drawers of the heavy old chest in the bedroom, stacking tins of soup from the kitchen cupboard in the middle of the floor. Berry lifted the mattress on the bed and felt the frame beneath, and his fingers came away scratched by rust. There was no gun.

Although it was very late when Inspector Bingham returned to the house in the smart new estate on the hill, Richard was waiting up for her. She could tell immediately that he was angry and that in the hours of waiting he had stoked the fury with distant wrongs and imagined hurts.

“Where the hell have you been?” he demanded. “I’ve been worried stiff.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. It was much better, she had discovered, to apologise immediately. Sometimes an apology was enough to satisfy him, and he would become calm and gracious. “I should have phoned.”

Tonight, however, the apology was insufficient. He had obviously been waiting, brooding on all the things he would say to her when she got in, the painful home truths it would be good for her to hear.

She had hardly walked through the door when he began his lecture.

“It’s a matter of priorities,” he said, so quickly that she knew the sentence had been rehearsed. “ I mean, I don’t expect to come first—I’m only your husband after all—but what about your son? You haven’t seen him for days.”

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “We’ve taken someone into custody. It should be over soon.”

But that still wasn’t good enough. All the old niggling criticisms, which at another time she might have found amusing, were dragged into the row. There was the lack of ironed shirts, her failure
ever
to cook anything that hadn’t come out of a microwave or a freezer, the drawer in his chest full of odd socks.

“Didn’t you realise that Mrs. Newby’s on holiday this week?” he demanded. Mrs. Newby came in twice a week to dust and Hoover and empty the dishwasher. “ The house is collapsing around us. And damm it! I had a meeting of the round table, and I couldn’t go.”

Then she was joyously and rewardingly furious. He was like a little boy, she said, deprived of some treat. Why did men never grow up? Was he incapable of ironing shirts and cooking meals? And when it came to priorities, she happened to think that catching a murderer was a little more important than the bloody round table. She stormed to the bedroom and fell suddenly and deeply asleep. When he came to bed some time later to make his peace with her, to make love to her, she was so exhausted that he could not wake her. It was only much later that the sound of the telephone’s ringing disturbed her. She picked it up half-asleep, hardly aware of where she was, and some unfamiliar voice informed her that George Palmer-Jones had been the victim of a hit-and-run accident and was in a Bristol hospital.

George was rescued by a woman with a passion for foxes. She lived in a basement flat in the house nearest to the alley and put out food for them. Each night she would sit in the dark watching the foxes come into the small backyard to pick fussily at the chicken bones and leftover meat she laid out for them on the dirty flags. She claimed she could easily recognise individuals. Sometimes they were too hungry for her delicacies and went straight to the bins left out in the alley. Then she would leave the flat and go out into the yard to look at them there. She led a nocturnal existence, staying awake late into the night and not getting up until lunchtime.

So, when she heard the clatter of dustbins late that night, she thought it was her foxes and went out immediately to see them. The sight of the man, obviously injured, lying where the animals should have been playing confused her. She had little contact with people. She did not know what to do. When he opened his eyes and looked at her, she felt trapped.

“Are you ill?” she called from a safe distance. She was still wearing her carpet slippers. George, lying in pain with his head close to the ground, could see them.

“I think you should call an ambulance,” he said.

Glad then for permission to return to the safety of her flat, she sauntered away. Her son had paid for her telephone, and she rarely used it, so it was with some difficulty that she was connected to the ambulance service. When the call was over, she felt quite proud of herself and waited, still in the dark, to watch for the flashing lights and noise of the ambulance. With all that commotion she was sure her foxes would not return that night.

George woke up in hospital from a deep sleep that had more to do with tranquilisers and painkillers than peace of mind, to the antiseptic smell of the ward and two women on chairs by the side of the bed. Molly had insisted that Claire Bingham be told of George’s injuries. It must, she said, be relevant. George had decided to stay in Bristol for another day because of a promising lead to the enquiry. Nothing trivial would keep him in the town. The weather map showed there was a big storm brewing, and only something important would keep him from the seawatching.

Wargan had given his blessing to Claire’s trip to the city, more, she thought, because he hoped she would make a fool of herself than because he believed anything could be achieved.

“Go if you like,” he said. “But I can’t see that it’s relevant.”

“Palmer-Jones was working for the Franks family,” she said. “And now he’s the victim of a hit-and-run accident.”

“We’ve got our man,” he insisted. “We’ll take him out to the cottage and search it properly by daylight.”

“You’ll have to charge him soon,” Claire said, but Wargan was convinced that they would have evidence to convict him by the end of the day.

The ward sister regarded the group round Palmer-Jones with suspicion and hostility. Usually visitors would not be allowed on the ward in the morning. Only the inspector’s warrant card had persuaded her to let them in at all. Now they were huddled together in serious conversation, blocking the way of the domestic staff, causing jealousy and resentment in those patients whose relatives had been turned away. Once she went up to the group and vented her anger.

“You can’t stay much longer,” she said. “ Mr. Palmer-Jones has had a nasty shock. He’s not a young man anymore. Besides, the doctor will be here to see him soon.”

But the women took no notice of her, and the conference, the sharing of information and ideas, continued. George sat up in bed, looking quite unfamiliar in hospital pyjamas. His face was badly bruised.