Palmer-Jones 05 - Sea Fever (6 page)

Rose Pengelly found Greg, and she had stopped looking for him. Throughout the search she was calmer than the others. She searched the cabins carefully but without their panic. Then Matilda, who had been sleeping in a carrycot in the saloon, woke up, and Rose said she would have to attend to her. She would need changing. She would be hungry. She took the baby to the deck at the stern of the boat. It was midafternoon, and that was the only part of the boat still in sunlight. Louis was already steering the boat back towards land. She put a rug on the deck and sat there, feeding the baby, quite content it seemed, despite the disappearance of the young man, quite self-contained.

When she screamed, Louis got to her first. He could not tell what was wrong with her. Her mouth was open with horror, but she could not speak. He could see nothing out of order. The baby was still feeding with muffled murmurs of delight. The rubby dubby bag, now almost empty, still attracted a stream of petrels and gulls.

Rose pointed to the rubby dubby bag.

“Look,” she said at last.

Louis reluctantly left her. By now the others were coming from below in response to her scream. He stood at the stern rail and looked down at the bag. Something had become entangled with the rope, and as the floating bag bounced over the waves, so did the piece of flotsam. He saw a shoe first. The foot apparently was caught in the rope. The rest of the body sank at times under the water, then arched out of it as the
Jessie Ellen
moved over a wave. This was what had made Rose scream.

Louis shouted tersely to the boy to cut the engine and began to pull on the rope which attached the rubby dubby bag to the stern rail. He had to pull gently. Any jerking might disentangle the shoe and send the body back into the water. When it was almost to the level of the deck, he paused to take a breath but would not let the others help him. He motioned them away. It was only when Greg was within reach that he called to them. Then they tried to haul him aboard by hand. The skin was wet and slippery, and they were worried that the clothes might tear or come off. At last they got him onto the deck. Louis turned him over and pumped his back. Water trickled from his mouth. Then Louis tried mouth to mouth resuscitation.

Molly, helpless and incompetent, saw the attempt to revive the boy as a tasteless performance. Louis must have known from the beginning that it would fail. Perhaps he thought the others would be even more disturbed by the young man’s death if he did not try.

George was horrified that he was reminded once again of the day at Holywell Pond. The seawater had smoothed the black hair around Greg’s face, so he looked again like an animal, a stoat, and on his face there was the same smile of defiant victory.

Inspector Claire Bingham lived in a smart new housing estate on the hill outside Heanor. When the National Trust sold the land to meet local housing need, they had not envisaged the split-level bungalows with balconies overlooking the harbour which were finally built there, and the estate caused the Trust considerable embarrassment. The Binghams settled easily into their home. They gave dinner parties for the other professional couples who lived on the hill. They had two cars and changed the largest every year. When work allowed, Claire changed into a pink-striped leotard and jogged and stretched with her neighbours at the aerobics class in the primary school hall. Afterwards she drank coffee with them and discussed mortgage rates and house prices and the problems of being a working mother.

On the weekend of the
Jessie Ellen
trip Claire Bingham was not officially on duty. She spent Saturday morning shopping, pushing Thomas in his buggy strung with carrier bags around a Heanor clogged with holidaymakers. She had expected, when she was pregnant, that Richard would do more of that sort of thing. It seemed so obvious that they had never discussed it. They were both working full-time, weren’t they? She earned as much as he did, probably more, especially as his colleagues seemed to pass on all the legal aid work to him these days. He knew she was ambitious, the first detective inspector to return to work after maternity leave in the Devon and Cornwall force. She had expected more of him. But he was as busy as she was and always seemed to bring work home. Then he pleaded domestic ignorance and incompetence.

“You do all that household stuff better than me,” he always said. “If you’re tired, don’t bother cooking. I’ll fetch a takeaway.”

It infuriated her that two intelligent people found it impossible to organise their lives more efficiently.

When she received the telephone call on Saturday night asking her to wait on the quay for the
Jessie Ellen
, she knew that she was second choice. She always was. The other duty inspector in her division had thought nothing would come of the emergency call and had suggested that the police station should try her.

“It’ll only be an accident,” he said. “Some drunken holidaymaker losing his footing and slipping into the water. Claire Bingham’s keen. Let her see to it. If she’s so bloody efficient about paperwork, let her fill in the forms.”

She knew her male colleague would have been contacted first when the coastguard informed the police station about the death at sea. He was approaching retirement and had begun to take things easy. He was always passing routine work on to her.

“I’m just a policeman after all,” he would say maliciously but without bitterness. “Not a graduate with a law degree. No accelerated promotion for me.”

She felt sometimes that the law degree, which in the beginning had seemed so valuable, was a disadvantage. So was her accent—BBC English, with a trace of Sloane Ranger learned at public school—and the fact that her husband was a defence solicitor. Her friends from school and university thought she was mad to have joined the force. The liberals among them saw the police as state-sponsored thugs, and the snobs considered policemen to be working class morons with dirty fingernails. Only Richard, doubtful at first, had stuck by her. Now she never told chance aquaintances what work she did.

It would have been impossible for her to explain to them that from the moment of joining the police she had felt completely at home. She was comfortable with the philosophy of service and discipline, and without the structure she would have felt insecure.

Disapproving college friends who watched her progress from a distance blamed it all on her background. Her father had been an army officer, and before being sent away to school, she had followed him on different postings around the world. She’s scared of the real world, they said. She can’t cope without authority. They did not know that Claire’s mother had been killed by an IRA car bomb in the small town in Germany where her father was based, and that from that day Claire had seized on order, routine, and organisation as her only means of survival.

The administrators within her station thought Claire Bingham was a brilliant officer. She was logical and tidy. She left nothing to chance. Her immediate superiors were more cautious, but they were afraid of being considered prejudiced because she was a woman. They had been told that she had a first-class mind, that she represented the future, and that caused resentment. She was too rigid, they said among themselves. She played it too much by the book. You had to be willing to take risks. She was too defensive.

In these conversations one wise chief inspector said to give her time. She was still young, still inexperienced. She lacked confidence. She might make a good detective yet.

Claire Bingham had no idea why the
Jessie Ellen
had been to sea. She had been told that it was a charter boat, and she expected the passengers to be young men out for a day’s fishing, members perhaps of some club. The disparate group which emerged from the saloon as the boat moved slowly towards the quayside shocked her. She watched a thin boy make the boat fast, then waited for them to come ashore. The first person onto the quay was Rose Pengelly. She looked exhausted, and her face was grimy and tearstained. She clutched Matilda in her arms. Claire was horrified by the irresponsibility of taking a baby to sea. What sort of woman, she thought, would expose her child to such danger?

Then she saw the Pyms, a middle-aged couple who were respectably dressed and obviously distressed by the accident, and a tall, upright gentleman with a wife who seemed to have chosen her clothes in a jumble sale. Only then came three single men who might have been fishermen, except for the cameras and telescopes which were draped around their bodies. It was quite different from what she had imagined, and she was thrown by it. For a moment she did not quite know where to begin. It was a new experience for her. The passengers stood on the pier in a miserable group, looking for guidance.

She pulled herself together and approached them. Sergeant Berry took the doctor onto the boat to look at the body.

“I’m Inspector Bingham,” she said formally. “ South-West Cornwall C.I.D.; I’ll need to take statements from you all later.”

The spare elderly man detached himself from the group. His voice was polite, but it would be hard to disagree with him. Claire knew immediately that there was something familiar about him. She had seen him before.

“I wonder if we might go home to wait for you,” he said. “We’re all staying at the same place, with Rose Pengelly at Myrtle Cottage. It’s in Porthkennan. Perhaps you could come there to take your statements. As you can imagine, it’s been a very distressing day.”

“Yes,” she said. “I think that might be possible, Mr.—?”

“Palmer-Jones,” he said. “George Palmer-Jones.”

Then she knew where she had seen him. He had been a guest lecturer at Hendon. When the others trooped miserably towards their cars, she called him back.

“Mr. Palmer-Jones,” she said. “I just wanted to say what a pleasure it is to meet you again. You were rather a hero of mine at college actually. I read your report of the patrolling of sensitive areas even before I joined the force. At Hendon they told us you were the only civil servant really to understand what policing is about.”

She paused, blushing, realising that she was being too effusive, unprofessional.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m keeping you from your friends. I expect I’ll see you later. The formalities won’t take long if it was an accident.”

He looked up with disturbed, rather angry eyes. He hardly seemed to see her. She was hurt. She had hoped he would take more notice of her.

“I shouldn’t be too certain,” he said, “that it was an accident.”

He walked back towards his wife, then returned briefly to tell her that Greg’s car was still parked on the quayside.

Along the harbour wall, as if from nowhere, a group of people had gathered. The news of the young man’s death must be public knowledge already. She turned her back to them and stepped carefully onto the boat. On the deck the doctor was looking at the body with a strong spotlight.

“We might as well move him,” he said. “They pulled him around quite a lot trying to revive him.”

“Anything unusual?” She stooped beside him. There was a strong and unpleasant smell of fish which made her feel sick.

“Only this.” He seemed to be talking almost to himself. “A severe blow to the back of the head. It must have knocked him out before he hit the water. That’s probably why he drowned so quickly. The water was warm. If he was a swimmer, he could have survived for ages. But I can’t see where he can have fallen and hit his head. The deck rail’s too low, and if he slipped backwards onto the deck, he wouldn’t have fallen into the water. The wound’s in the wrong place and the wrong shape for that anyway.”

“What would you say, then?”

He straightened slowly. “It sounds ridiculous,” he said, “ but it’s the right shape for the classic blunt instrument.”

“Murder?” she said. “Are you sure?” Again it was so far from what she had expected when she came to the quay that she could hardly believe it.

“Well, I don’t see how it can have been an accident, and it can’t be suicide. He’s hardly going to hit himself on the back of the head.”

She stood up, her head spinning with the smell of fish and the exhilaration and awesome responsibility of a murder investigation. It was her case, she thought. They could not take it away from her now. She gripped the deck rail and tried desperately not to be sick.

“Are you all right?”

It was the doctor, thinking the idea of such violence was making her ill. She could have told him that she had come to terms with it years ago.

“Yes,” she said. “ Fine.”

She looked around her and caught the eye of Louis Rosco, who was still standing in the lighted wheelhouse. She nodded towards the body.

“Can you sort this out with my sergeant?” she said. “I want to talk to the skipper and find out what all those people were doing on the boat anyway.”

“Birds!” the doctor said.

“What do you mean?” She looked at him suspiciously.

“That’s what they were doing on the
Jessie Ellen.
They’re birdwatchers. I’m one myself. I went on the same ship three weeks ago. They got me Wilson’s petrel.”

With that he left her alone on deck and went to talk to Sergeant Berry. Probably, she thought, about women’s weak stomachs. The pubs beyond the harbour wall were closing. There were good-humoured calls, the occasional snatch of singing. The crowd peering down at the
Jessie Ellen
was growing.

Louis Rosco watched the policewoman on the deck with a mounting despair and confusion. He had thought these formalities would soon be over. Greg’s death would be put down as an accident, and there would be no more questions. Now the sight of the woman bending over the body, talking earnestly to the doctor, made him realise that this hope was quite unrealistic. She was the sort to be curious. She would want to know everything. Even the shape of her depressed him. She was angular and tall, with a sharp nose and pointed chin. Her pale hair was tied away from her face. He sensed that she was well dressed and that some men might find her attractive, but he only had an impression of order and dogged persistence. She frightened him.

When she came to the wheelhouse door, Rosco still had no idea what he would tell her.