The Mill on the Shore (7 page)

‘Where did he see the nurse?’ George asked. ‘Here or in the study?’

‘In his study. He spent most of the day there.’ She stopped suddenly as if remembering. ‘He did come out at lunch-time to go for a walk along the shore,’ she said. ‘Towards Salter’s Cottage. He probably called to see Phil. It was a Saturday so he would have been there.’

‘Were your husband and Mr Cairns friends?’ Molly asked. ‘They didn’t find the situation awkward?’ Although they shared a wife, she almost added but there was no need. The question was understood.

‘Of course not.’ Meg’s voice was sharp. ‘ Why should it be? We’re civilized adults.’

‘Didn’t you feel any reluctance about moving here so close to James’ first wife?’

‘None at all. Phil and Cathy are happily married. We’d all become rather good friends actually. We first saw the Mill when we came to visit them for a weekend.’

Like Meg’s perfect family it was too good to be true, Molly thought. In her career as a social worker she had never known separation or divorce without bitterness.

‘Whose idea was it to take on the Mill?’ she asked.

‘It was a joint decision,’ Meg said firmly. ‘We both fell in love with the place as soon as we saw it.’

‘But James must have seen it before then,’ Molly said, ‘when he came to collect Hannah for access visits.’

‘Of course he had seen it before.’ Meg allowed her voice to become impatient. ‘But that was before his accident. His attitude to everything changed then. He realized that he couldn’t cope with the stress of running
Green Scenes.
Starting our own field centre in the Mill seemed a practical alternative.’

‘Did he realize or did you realize?’ Molly asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘People who are under stress find it hard to step away from it, to admit that they can’t cope. I wondered if you had to persuade James to consider resignation.’

Meg hesitated, unsure whether criticism was implied in the statement, defensive.

‘I told him I was worried about him,’ she said at last. ‘
Green Scenes
was going through a turbulent time. The board was very demanding. James was a fighter. It would never have occurred to him to change the magazine’s policy without a battle. I showed him that there was an alternative. Once he’d grasped that he didn’t need any persuasion.’

They sat for a moment in silence. It was plausible, George thought. Just. If James had lost all his confidence after Hannah’s death he would be susceptible to Meg’s suggestions. He thought Molly was being too hard on Meg, that she should be more sympathetic.

‘So James went to see the Cairns at lunch-time and he saw the community psychiatric nurse in the afternoon,’ he said gently, intending to bring the interview to a conclusion. ‘And the rest of the time he was working alone in the study?’

‘So far as I know,’ she said. ‘He may have gone down to the schoolroom to see if any of the children were there. He did that occasionally if he’d come to a break in his work. He liked to see them then.’

‘You don’t mind our talking to the children?’

‘I don’t mind anything,’ she cried, ‘so long as it helps find out what happened.’

‘I’m sorry,’ George said, ‘to have to ask all these questions. I expect the police went over the same ground.’

‘No,’ she said. She sounded exhausted. ‘The police assumed from the beginning that James had killed himself. They sent a man called Porter, whose attitude I found very offensive. Once he heard that James had been treated for depression he stopped asking questions. He just gave up. It’s discrimination, isn’t it? James should be treated in death like everyone else, not dismissed as a madman.’

‘Where did James keep his pills?’ George asked, prompted by her talk of his illness. ‘ Here in the flat or in the study?’

‘Here,’ she said. ‘In the bathroom. There’s a cupboard where we keep all our medicines. They’d have been in there.’

‘So he’d have had to fetch them specially?’

She nodded.

‘He could have done that easily I suppose without your knowing. For example, while you were all at dinner?’

She nodded again.

‘Do you lock the flat when no one’s in it?’ he asked.

‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘What danger could there be here?’ She stirred in her chair and seemed to be trying to find the energy to move. ‘I expect you’d like to see his study,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you.’ ‘No,’ George said. He felt sorry for her. ‘Tomorrow will do.’

And he and Molly left her sitting by the dying fire with the pile of mending still at her feet.

The pub in Markham Law was called the Lord Nelson but was known to the locals as the Dead Dog, because of a stuffed terrier in a glass case which stood on a shelf behind the bar. Ruth did not like going to the pub much. She had the feeling that most of the regulars resented their presence. It was like gate-crashing a private party, if you could call such a sombre gathering a party.

They always sat in the public bar. Rosie and Jane saw that as a sort of political statement. They said only yuppies went in the lounge, though Ruth thought that in Markham Law yuppies were pretty thin on the ground. In her experience the lounge bar was inhabited by pleasant middle-aged couples out for a drive from Mardon or students from the Mill who had escaped for the evening. She suspected they would be better company than the public bar regulars, who were without exception unfriendly and miserable.

The room was long and narrow with a brown linoleum floor and brown varnished tables. It was usually heated by a calor gas heater in one corner and the smell of its fumes always caught at Ruth’s throat when she walked in. She would recoil from the smell and from the stares of the old men who spent all evening at the table next to the heater. They must have known who she was – she knew most of them by name – but whenever she entered they glowered as if she were a stranger. Once she had plucked up courage and shouted: ‘Hello, Ron!’ to a retired farm worker who helped occasionally in the garden at the Mill but he had ignored her. Since then she had crept into the pub and sat on the bench nearest to the door pretending to be invisible.

Not all the regulars of the Dead Dog were old. There was Florrie Duffy’s son who worked in the tannery in Mardon and came with his biker friends because they had been banned from all the pubs in town. The atmosphere of the Dog seemed to affect them. They caused no trouble there but sat in a gloomy silence, their leather-clad elbows on the tables, steadily swallowing beer, as unwelcoming as the old men playing cards.

Rosie and Jane had breezed into the place as if they owned it right from the beginning. They drank pints in straight glasses and kept their own darts behind the bar. Young women had never behaved like that in the experience of the Dog regulars, especially well-spoken young women like Jane. They should have been in the lounge making a glass of lager and lime last all night. But since their first appearance the attitude of the drinkers had softened. They admitted that ‘ those girls from the Mill’ were all right. They recruited them into the pub darts team and let them play cribbage if they were short-handed. But their suspicion towards Meg’s daughters remained.

Tonight Ruth felt her usual reluctance as she entered the bar. She would have refused to go despite her mother if Aidan had not asked to join the party. If anything it would be worse tonight because they would be curious about James’ death. They might even have heard of the Palmer-Jones’ arrival at the Mill – Florrie saw it as the main responsibility of her post as cleaner to pass on information about the Morrisseys to her friends. The regulars of the Dog weren’t known for their sensitivity and Ruth imagined probing questions about her stepfather’s suicide and a discussion about her mother’s sanity.

Caitlin, she saw, would make an exhibition of herself as she always did when she was released from her mother’s supervision. She was in Morticia mode, wearing a long black, closely fitting dress which almost reached the floor. She had already made her way to the table where the bikers sat and draped herself round the neck of Florrie’s son Malcolm.

‘Go on, Malcolm,’ she said. ‘ Buy me a drink.’

He stared in front of him, hardly seeming to notice she was there.

‘Can’t,’ he said at last. ‘You’re under age.’

‘Cedric won’t mind, will you, Cedric?’ she said and pranced towards the bar. ‘You don’t know how old I am, do you, Cedric? You could always say I look eighteen.’

Cedric was the only son of the owners of the Dog, an overweight and pimply man with a nervous disposition. In the village he was considered rather odd. Partly it was his name which had made him a figure of fun since he started infants’ school, partly it was his sheltered upbringing. He had gone away once to college to study horticulture and landscape design, but there had been some crisis or breakdown in the first month and his doting parents had brought him home. They had vowed never to subject him to such stress again. He worked for them in the pub but only doing the light work. There would be no lifting of barrels for Cedric.

Caitlin teased him dreadfully because he was an easy target. She pointed out that his hands were shaking when he pulled the pints and commented on his acne. Yet she held a fearful fascination for him. He knew she would torment him but he looked forward to her occasional visits to the Dog with a mixture of fear and erotic excitement.

‘I don’t know,’ he said now in answer to her question. Then, bravely: ‘I don’t suppose anyone need know. What do you want?’

‘An orange juice,’ said Rosie firmly. ‘You know what your mother’s like, Cat. If she thinks you’ve been drinking she won’t let you out with us again. And I’m not prepared to get into bother by lying on your behalf.’

‘Oh well,’ Caitlin said, giving in gracefully. ‘An orange juice then, Cedric. And a bag of crisps. I know how to live dangerously.’

She smiled at him sexily and waited for him to blush.

The five of them sat at the table by the door. Ruth wondered why Aidan had come – he looked tense and ill at ease. Her only experience of romantic love came from nineteenth-century novels and she hoped for some dramatic declaration of affection from him. She had no idea how to go about the business of showing him that she was interested in him.

‘Well,’ Rosie said, breaking in on her thoughts, ‘ what do you think of Sherlock and Watson? I must admit that they’re not quite what I expected. They hardly inspire confidence, do they?’

‘You shouldn’t underestimate George,’ Aidan said. ‘He might have retired but he’s no fool. There was a case in Norfolk a few years ago when a young birder died … The police didn’t have a clue but he sorted out what happened.’

‘So he really is a great detective?’ Rosie said. ‘Well, I’ll take your word for it but I’m not convinced.’

In the awkward silence that followed the bikers got up as a group and clattered out. There was a clanking of chains and a pounding of steel-capped boots then the roar of their motorbikes as they sped away to find fun elsewhere.

‘I think Mum’s off her head,’ Caitlin said. ‘She’s done some pretty weird things in her time but this beats them all.’ She turned to Ruth for support. ‘Well?’ she demanded. ‘Don’t you think the idea that James was murdered is preposterous? He could be a moody bastard but you can’t imagine that anyone would want to
kill
him.’

‘No,’ Ruth said. ‘Of course not.’ But she wondered immediately if that were true. There had certainly been times when she had wished him out of her life.

‘Why don’t we change the subject?’ It was tactful Jane who hated a fuss. Caitlin took no notice.

‘But I
want
to discuss it,’ she said. ‘It’s so bloody frustrating being kept in the dark. Mother won’t tell us anything. She says there’s nothing to tell until Mr Palmer-Jones has made his report. If that’s true why did she ask him here in the first place? What made her suspicious?’

Rosie and Jane looked at each other. Ruth caught the look and envied their friendship. She had never been that close to anyone of her own age. Meg’s philosophy of educating her children at home had made that sort of easy relationship impossible. There had been Hannah of course. Ruth had always thought of Hannah as a kindred spirit, but they hadn’t seen each other that often, only during the school holidays. And she was almost a relative so it hardly seemed to count. Rosie and Jane had quite different backgrounds: Rosie had a mother she described as ‘barking mad’ and had been in and out of children’s homes during her teens, Jane came from a wealthy family and a posh school. Yet now they were so close that they communicated without speaking. Ruth looked across the table at Aidan and wondered if they would ever be that intimate but he seemed preoccupied and took no notice of her.

‘Well?’ Caitlin demanded again. ‘Is anyone going to tell me what it’s all about?’

‘The autobiography has disappeared,’ Rosie said. ‘Meg didn’t tell you that?’

Caitlin shook her head.

‘She thinks it’s a peculiar coincidence,’ Rosie went on. ‘You can understand her point of view.’

‘Who’d want to read James’ boring autobiography?’ Caitlin said extravagantly. ‘It was all trips down the Amazon and how I saved the rain forest for mankind.’

‘How do you know?’ Aidan Moore asked. ‘ Did you get to read it?’

His voice was light but Ruth was struck by the notion that the question was desperately important to him. Caitlin could not have noticed his anxiety or she would have strung the story out. She just shrugged.

‘I didn’t read all of it,’ she said. ‘ I couldn’t have coped. Did you see how long it was? But he showed me bits he was specially proud of. Or he read them out loud to me.’

‘What else was there?’ Aidan asked carefully. ‘ Besides the piece on the rain forest?’

‘Oh God, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘There was a chapter on the setting up of
Green Scenes
called something pompous like “The Moral Dilemma – private interest or public good”. He gave me that the day before he died but it was so tedious that I put it back in the study without reading it. I hoped he wouldn’t ask me questions on it and catch me out. He would have been livid. But in the end he didn’t have the chance, did he?’