Palmer-Jones 05 - Sea Fever (23 page)

When Barnes made his phone call to Cornwall, no one listened to the conversation. It had taken longer than the police had expected to have the monitoring of his calls approved. The deputy chief constable had, for some reason, not been keen.

Barnes spoke to the housekeeper who cared for his house there. He tried to speak with something of the grace of the landed gentry and imagined himself, as he was talking, in his country uniform of Barbour jacket, hunter Wellingtons, and cloth cap. It reminded him of what he had to lose.

He had a favour to ask, he said. It was rather urgent, or he would not consider troubling her. He knew her husband’s business took him to Porthkennan. Could he please take a message to a business contact there?

“Just ask him to phone me,” Barnes said. “Tell him it’s vital. A matter, actually, of life or death.”

Smiling, he replaced the telephone receiver.

As soon as it was light, the birdwatchers emerged from their cars and vans and went onto the low headland to look at the sea. The short grass sloped into fingers of rock, so it was possible with care to climb to the water. There was no shelter on the exposed headland, and they huddled into the rock to get some relief from the wind. Soon it became clear that the night of cramped discomfort, the walk through the cold and wet, had been worth suffering. Thousands of sea-birds were blown close to the shore. By nine o’clock they had seen all the species of skua ever recorded in Britain. The birdwatchers squatted in huddles and peered occasionally through binoculars towards the horizon. They shouted above the wind to alert the others to especially exciting birds. By lunchtime they were cold and hungry, but no one dared leave the headland for fear of missing something spectacular. They knew birdwatchers would talk about September third for years. They would be envied for being there.

They were surprised when George Palmer-Jones refused to join them on the headland. He was feeling his age a little, he said. It must have been the accident. If he was feeling stronger, he might join them later. He took a chair into the enclosed front porch of the cottage. Through the glass he had a view down the valley, and he had his binoculars with him. Old George is being a bit optimistic, the birdwatchers said, if he thinks he can seawatch from there. Rose fussed around him and brought a rug to tuck around his knees and cups of tea. Only Molly knew he was tense and alert, and that it was all part of the plan.

The night before, when the others began to go to bed, Rosco had gone back to the cottage on the shore. George had stood up, too, stretched, and offered to walk down the lane with him. He needed the exercise he had said when Rosco seemed surprised. He was stiff after the car journey and could do with the walk. It was very late when he returned to Myrtle Cottage.

On the morning of the storm Rose fretted about Louis and wanted to go to see him.

“It can’t be safe,” she said. “Look at those waves, and it’s not high water yet. He should be up here with us.”

But Molly persuaded her to leave him alone.

“Louis knows what he’s doing,” she said. “If there’s really any danger, he’ll come back. Besides, you’ve enough to do here.”

That was true. Rose’s instinct to mother them all had returned. While Matilda played on a rug on the kitchen floor, she made soup in a vast pan. She thought the birdwatchers on the headland would need feeding when it was all over. So she stood in the kitchen peeling vegetables, pretending that her tears were caused by onion skins or tiredness. But when Molly went in to offer help, the tension was suddenly too much for her.

“The police think Louis killed Greg Franks, don’t they?” she cried. “ Why don’t they arrest him and take him back to Heanor? What sort of game are they playing?”

“It’s no game.” Molly said.

By late morning it was raining heavily. There was a sudden downpour which flooded the drains and turned the lane into a river. Soon it became clear that even if the police had wanted to get to Porthkennan for Rosco, the journey would have been impossible.

With an echoing crash that might have been thunder, the chimney of the old tin mine at the top of the valley toppled like a pile of children’s building bricks, and the road was blocked by rock and rubble. A farmer who lived up the lane brought the news that they were cut off.

“It’ll take them days to dig us out,” he said with gloomy satisfaction. His Wellington boots spread mud over the kitchen floor. “ There’s nothing we can do about it. The fall brought the phone lines down, too.”

He made them switch on the local radio, and they listened, fascinated, to the stories of wreckage and destruction. All the boats left in Heanor harbour had been smashed against the harbour wall by freak gusts of wind, said a disc jockey, with the same forced jollity with which he announced the latest hit. Rose thought that at least the
Jessie Ellen
, which had been winched up to a slipway while the police scientists tested for traces of heroin, would be safe. That gave her some comfort. The farmer, with his talk of flooded fields and financial disaster, gave her none, and they were glad when he went at last.

In the wind Jane Pym felt closer to Roger than she had for years. As they walked into the full force of it down the headland, Roger put his arm around her and pulled her inside his jacket. She carried his tripod over her shoulder as she had done when they were students. They stumbled together over the flattened heather.

“You don’t have to come if you don’t want to,” he said. “You can wait with Rose if you’d rather. She won’t mind.”

“No,” she said. “ I’m enjoying it.” In the wild weather the differences between them seemed insignificant, and she felt that they could face any trouble together.

“Look,” he said. “ There are some things I wanted to tell you …” But by then they had reached the relative shelter provided by the rocky crevices. He was drawn immediately into the nearest huddle of birdwatchers, who wanted to gloat about what they had already seen. He released his grip on her and absently reached out for the tripod, which he began to make secure on a flat slab of rock. The moment of intimacy was lost. She thought she was a fool to have been taken in by it.

For the rest of the day he gave his attention to the admiring birdwatchers, who wanted to hear again the story of the new petrel, and to the sea. She might not have been there, and when she slipped away, he did not notice.

Rob Earl and Gerald Matthews walked together to the headland at first light, before the storm had reached its peak. As they walked past the cars parked at the end of the lane, Gerald twitched disapprovingly and muttered about the irresponsibility of people who should know better. Some had misted windows because the occupants were still sleeping. In others men were climbing stiffly from sleeping-bags, swearing at the cold, at Rose Pengelly who had refused to give them shelter in her home.

Rob Earl seemed not to notice the cold. He was wearing a frayed jersey with holes at the elbow and a thin denim jacket but no coat. He had not shaved since he had arrived in Cornwall and looked dark and dirty but rather glamorous. In contrast Gerald, wrapped in coat and scarf, seemed unadventurous, something of an old woman. He spoke, too, in petulant, shrewish bursts.

“I’m not sure I did the right thing in packing in the job with the electronics firm,” he said. “Look where I am now! No prospects, no future, not even any friends to speak of. At least if I’d stayed in Wiltshire, there would have been a real income. I’d have been able to afford holidays, a decent car. It’s time I settled down. I’m too old for this sort of thing.”

Rob Earl was preoccupied. At another time he might have put Gerald down with sharp and haughty sarcasm, but he seemed not even to hear. He stalked on ahead, his telescope already fixed to its tripod, balanced on his shoulder, like some space-age weapon of destruction.

In the bunkroom at Myrtle Cottage Duncan James was preparing to leave. The message from Barnes had been given to him earlier. It had come quite unexpectedly, delivered by the man who brought the milk to the valley and who was the husband of Barnes’ housekeeper. The man came to the bunkroom, and when James was alone passed on the message in a stage whisper and with a wink, as if he believed some multimillion-pound deal depended on his discretion. The ridiculous secrecy and the message itself gave Duncan the same symptoms of sweating, breathlessness, and terror as if he had been trapped in a cramped, dark space. He felt he had to escape. With shaking hands he took his clothes and folded them, taking an obsessive interest in the exact geometric shapes they formed, in setting them neatly in the suitcase. In this ritual disposal of his clothes he managed to keep his panic at bay, but as soon as the task was complete, it returned and swamped his reason. He opened the bunkroom door, and the tunnel of wind which swept around the building caught it and banged it against the wall, so he felt that everyone must know he was there. He shut it with difficulty and went into the house. From the kitchen he could hear the familiar clatter of women’s voices, and he was reminded of the security of home. He saw George Palmer-Jones, apparently asleep, on the porch, his binoculars unused around his neck. Duncan had an impulse to go to him, to tell him everything, and ask for his help, but the older man’s stillness made him unapproachable. Instead, he went quietly to the telephone.

In the conversation with James, Brian Barnes was more persuasive and less gentlemanly than he had been when speaking to his housekeeper. He reminded James of the offences he had already committed, of the big house in Somerset which had been bought largely with Squirrel corporation money. At last he spoke with some brutality of James’ children.

“But I couldn’t do it,” James said. “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“If you’re desperate enough, you’ll find a way,” Brian Barnes said. “And by now you should be desperate.”

He replaced the receiver before James could reply, and when James tried to phone Bristol again, it was impossible to get through. Soon after, he heard the farmer stomping into the kitchen with the news that the valley was cut off and the phone lines were down.

The sky was so overcast and the windows of the cottage so small and low to the ground that inside it was almost dark, but Rosco did not bother with the lamps. He sat in the shadow in the old bentwood chair which had once been his father’s and waited, his gun cradled like a cat on his knee.

By early afternoon Rosco began to realise that whatever he had promised to George Palmer-Jones, it would be impossible for him to remain where he was. It would be dangerous, suicidal. The shingle and boulders which protected the cottage from the water at high tides were already shifting with the force of the waves. The whole beach was creaking, and he imagined the foundations of the cottage moving, as if there had been a earthquake. Besides, he had lost faith in Palmer-Jones. It had been easy to believe him the night before when they had walked down the lane together. It had been flattering to be treated as important by such a respected gentleman, and he had agreed with some pride to George’s proposal. Now nothing had happened, and Rosco felt let down. He wanted to be in the warm kitchen in Myrtle Cottage, with the windows misted from the heat of cooking and Rose laughing and the baby on his knees reaching out to touch his face.

He set the revolver carefully on the chair where he had been sitting and began to prepare for evacuation. He had said nothing to George about the revolver. He had obtained it almost by chance from a man he had met in prison soon after his release. He had kept it because he knew instinctively that no one who had ever had dealings with Brian Barnes could consider himself quite safe. He never envisaged himself using it but kept it as a talisman, a charm against evil. In the hours of waiting it had been a comfort. Now, because he no longer believed George’s story and thought the only danger he faced would come from the police, he set it aside. He pulled a navy canvas bag from the cupboard under the sink and began to throw things into it. There was not much that he felt worth taking: a favourite jersey which Rose had knitted for him when she was first expecting the baby and which had been airing on a makeshift line in the kitchen, the few important papers he had, an insurance policy, his passport. Then he remembered that there was a photograph of his mother in the drawer in the bedroom, and he went to fetch that.

He did not hear the door of the cottage being opened though he noticed when he was in the bedroom that the noise of the wind had suddenly diminished. The birdwatchers on Porthkennan Head were aware of the moment of stillness, too. Suddenly they could speak to each other without having to shout, and they could breathe more easily. Perhaps it’s all over, they said. Perhaps it’s blown itself out. But the period of calm was only brief. It lasted perhaps for fifteen minutes; then the storm continued more ferociously than ever. And even when the wind had stopped, the momentum of the waves was unstoppable. It was still not quite high tide, and they fell with relentless power onto the rocks where the birdwatchers were sitting, so the men had to move back onto the grass and set up their telescopes there. Perhaps it was the sound of water which prevented Rosco hearing the door of the cottage being opened, or perhaps he was not sufficiently on his guard. It took him longer than he expected to find the photograph of his mother, but he continued to look because it was inconceivable now that he could leave the house without it. He discovered it at last, without a frame, trapped behind the drawer.

When he went back into the room, the figure, anonymous in anorak and hood and boots, was standing just inside the door, as if only just arrived, but his gun was missing from the chair and was in her hand. He stood across the room from her, still clutching the photograph and thought that Palmer-Jones had been right.

“So it
was
you,” Rosco said. “ You know, I couldn’t remember.”

“You wrote me a letter,” she said. “It was on my bed last night.”

“Yes,” he said. “I took a chance, but I wasn’t sure.”

Jane Pym took down her hood with her free hand, still holding the gun in front of her. Rosco could see that she was finding the revolver too heavy for her hand and that she held her arm rigid, so it was shaking. He had an impulse to tell her that unless she relaxed, she was bound to miss. Instead, he tried to remain calm. He walked back to the chair by the window and saw a wall of grey water break over the boulders nearest to the cottage. If I can keep her talking long enough, he thought, we’ll both be drowned. That seemed a more attractive way to die than to be shot by a middle-aged neurotic woman. Only then did he wonder what had happened to George Palmer-Jones and think that he had some responsibility to get at the truth.