Palmer-Jones 05 - Sea Fever (13 page)

He drove through the town centre and out to the suburbs beyond. There was a cemetery lined by dusty trees, and the only colour was on a flower stall outside the gates. It was a bank holiday weekend, and respectable citizens would be decorating, cleaning the car, or in caravans on the Welsh coast. The pavements and the roads were still almost empty, although the sun was shining and it was hotter than ever.

Muriel Franks opened the door to him. She was wearing a candlewick dressing gown and fluffy blue slippers. Her mouth was slightly open, and her face was grey. For a moment she seemed not to recognize him; then she considered him with a flat, expressionless stare.

“It’s you,” she said, and he could not tell what she thought about his appearing on the doorstep. “I thought it would be the police again. You’d better come in.”

She stood aside, and he walked ahead of her into the stuffy sitting room. Dennis Franks sat in one of the large soft armchairs. He, too, looked exhausted, but he seemed sustained by a vague and undirected anger. When George came in, he stood up.

“You’ve got a nerve,” he said, “ coming here after what’s happened.”

“I thought you might like to talk to me,” George said. “ I was on the boat when Greg died.”

“They won’t bloody tell me what happened,” Franks said with helpless fury. “They say there were suspicious circumstances. I don’t know what that means.”

He turned towards George in a threatening way, his chin thrust forward, hoping perhaps for an excuse for the relief of violence but not quite able to see it through. When he spoke again, it was with a confused desperation.

“What have you done?” he demanded. “ You went to Cornwall to send my son home, and now he’s dead.”

Muriel Franks, who had followed George into the room and was sitting, crumpled, on a corner of the sofa, began to cry.

“I’m so sorry,” George said, but he knew the words were inadequate, and his sympathy only seemed to refuel Franks’ anger.

“What did you say to him?” the man cried. “Did you frighten him into jumping from the boat?” Then, because of his lack of control over his wife’s tears illustrated his lack of control in the whole unbelievable situation he added, “Have you seen what this is doing to Muriel?”

George was becoming angry himself, with the police who seemed to have left the couple without any real information, with all their questions unanswered.

“Didn’t the police tell you that they believe Greg was murdered?” George said.

“I’ve told you!” Franks cried. “ They wouldn’t bloody tell me anything. I want to know!”

Muriel Franks looked up, bewildered and unhappy, startled by the noise of his voice, and her words were so inappropriate and irrational that the two men stared at her for a moment in silence. “He was such a good little swimmer when he was a boy,” she said. “I told the police that.”

At last Franks sat beside her. “Why don’t you go and lie down?” he said gently. “You must be tired.”

But she shook her head and remained where she was.

“I’m afraid the swimming wouldn’t have helped,” George said. He felt Muriel deserved an explanation. “ The police think he must have been unconscious when he reached the water.”

“How!” Franks demanded.

“There’s a head wound,” George said, “which can’t be explained by Greg’s falling.”

“Are you telling me that someone hit our lad on the head and no one stopped him? What the hell were you all doing?”

“We were all on deck birdwatching,” George said. “Greg had been seasick and was lying down on his own.” He knew how unlikely the explanation sounded. It was impossible to describe the noise and excitement of that time on the
Jessie Ellen.

“I don’t understand it,” Franks went on raging at the mystery, the uncertainty. “ It seems a strange do to me. I want to know what happened.” He turned to George. “ I hold you responsible,” he said. “I was paying you. You owe me an explanation.”

“You do realise,” George said, “that there’ll be a police investigation. The detective in charge of the enquiry seems very competent.”

“I want you to find out what happened,” Franks said. It was something to hold on to. “I’ve no control over the police. You’ll be my man. I’ll be paying you.”

“I’ll be my own man,” George said, stung at last to retaliation, “whoever pays the bill. If I agree to help you, it’ll be to find out what happened to Greg. And I’ll do it my way.”

Franks moved over to the window and stared out into the empty street. A woman pulling a fat corgi on a lead walked past and peered in through the net curtains with a malevolent curiosity.

“All right,” he said. His life had been ruled by certainty, the figures of profit and loss, the routine of production. In his own way he had been a powerful man. At least with George’s intervention in the case, he would have the power of involvement and information. Without that he would be lost. “On your own terms, then. But I want to know what happened to him. I want an explanation I can accept.”

“You’ll have the truth!” George said. “I won’t concoct an explanation just to satisfy you. If I can’t find out how he came to fall, you’ll have to accept it.”

Franks nodded, but the idea of a continuing mystery seemed to terrify him.

“What will you do?”

“You’ll have to leave that to me,” George said. It would hardly inspire confidence if he admitted he had no idea.

Muriel, who had been curled up like a child in the corner of the sofa, her dressing gown wrapped around her bare feet, watching them in a daze of grief, suddenly stirred.

“I wish there was something I could do,” she said. “ It’s the waiting for news that’s so hard …”

George felt she still had not grasped what had happened. He thought some well-meaning doctor had given her a sedative, and her mind wandered between dream and reality. It was as if she believed Greg might walk in through the door any moment.

“You could talk to me about Greg,” he said. “That would help.”

“What good would that do!” Franks said. “I’m not paying you to sit on your arse in our front room. The police have been here all morning with their questions.”

George ignored him. “Did the police ask you about drugs?” he asked her.

The woman nodded. “I told them Greg was a good boy,” she said. “He’d never do anything like that.”

“Did Greg ever have visitors here?” George asked.

“No,” she said. “ When he was living here, I told him to bring his friends home more. I would have liked to meet them. But he never did.”

“What about phone calls?” George’s voice was soft and coaxing. “Were there any of those?”

“Oh,” she said, and she almost laughed. “There were always phone calls. You know what it’s like with birdwatching. Wanting to know what was about and where to go. Even when he had left home, they still phoned here.”

“Did you take messages for him?”

“Sometimes,” she said. “Not often. I don’t think they trusted me. If Greg wasn’t in, they said they’d phone back.”

“Did you get any names?” George asked. “ Did he have any special friends?”

She was a lonely woman, he thought. She had no life of her own. It was possible that she had lived vicariously through Greg, cherishing his friends as her own, taking an interest in all their activities.

“They didn’t talk to me,” she said sadly. “Not really. Just asked for Greg when I answered the phone. Sometimes I asked him about them, and he’d tell me. There was a Mr. Pym who used to phone sometimes. He was a nicely spoken gentleman. Greg said he was a teacher at the high school on the heath. ‘You want to keep in with him,’ I told Greg. ‘That’s the class of friend you need.’”

“And did Greg keep in with Roger Pym?” George asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “ Not lately. When Greg was a lad, before he could drive, I think Mr. Pym took them out birdwatching at the weekends a couple of times. To the reservoirs. Chew Valley Lake. You know.”

“Them?” George asked. “ Who else went on these trips, Mrs. Franks?”

She shrugged. She did not know. Lads from school, she supposed. Greg had always been one for keeping himself to himself.

George thought Greg must have been keeping his private life secret for years if the only name she could remember was of a man who had taken her son birdwatching when he was still a schoolboy.

“Did Greg have a girlfriend?” George asked.

Her eyes filled again with tears. The reality of Greg’s death had overwhelmed her once more. She was realising that there would be no wedding, no daughter-in-law, no grandchildren.

“He went out sometimes with girls,” she said. “I heard him talking to them sometimes on the phone, arranging to pick them up. I saw him with one in town last year, just after Christmas. It was Saturday afternoon, and I’d been to the winter sales. He didn’t see me. She was a real beauty. Tall and blond, like something you’d see on the front of a magazine. And the clothes she wore! He never brought her home. I expect he was ashamed of us.”

Dennis Franks had been standing by the window with his back to the room during the conversation. Now he turned around and glared at George.

“What do you think you’re doing with all these questions?” he said. “ This won’t do any good. You know who was on the boat with you. You should be talking to them, not to us.”

“I’ll be doing that, too,” George said. He allowed Mrs. Franks to shrink back into the comfort of the sofa and directed the next question to her husband. “ Your son always had a lot of money,” he said. “Didn’t it occur to you to wonder how a young man could have achieved such an income?”

“I thought he was doing well for himself,” Franks said proudly. “A chip off the old block, I thought. A businessman. I built my company up from nothing, too.”

“How did you think he made his money?”

“Buying and selling, he said when I asked him.”

“You must have realised it was likely that he was involved in something illegal.”

“I didn’t know that,” Franks said defensively. “So maybe it was all pound notes, I thought. Maybe he’s not telling the taxman everything. We all do a bit of that, don’t we? I broke a few rules when I started out. Still do, probably, but I’ve got a good accountant.”

George would have said, rather pompously, that he considered tax evasion as much a crime as theft or burglary, but Franks was continuing, “Besides, I’d not seen the boy for months. I don’t know what he’d been up to recently.”

There was a silence. A lone bus rumbled past the window. George was reminded of his last visit to the house, when he had been tempted by the prospect of Cornish seabirds to sacrifice his judgement and reason. The result had been a new seabird for the world and a murder. He had not needed Dennis Franks to tell him that he had responsibility in the case.

He knew that they were waiting for him to go. Muriel Franks had withdrawn into daydreams and memories, and Dennis shuffled and looked at his watch.

“There’s just one more question before I go,” George said.

They both stared at him.

“You knew where Greg would be this weekend because you opened a letter sent to him here,” George said. He tried to sound as if this were a normal thing to do. If Muriel Franks thought he was accusing her of prying, she might lie. “ Had that ever happened before?”

She was suddenly hysterical, transferred from her sedated lethargy. Tears streamed down her cheeks, and her voice was loud and frightened. “I didn’t know what was in it!” she cried. “He had no right to be angry. It was no reason for him to leave home.”

George looked for explanation to Dennis Franks.

“We should have told you before,” the man said. He looked embarrassed, not by the revelation that his wife had opened Greg’s mail but by the scene she was making now. “That’s when he left home for good. It was about a year ago. He said if he couldn’t trust Muriel not to interfere in his private life, he’d have to go.” George moved from his seat to the sofa where Mrs. Franks was sobbing. He wished Molly had agreed to come with him.

“What was in the letter you opened?” he asked, not sure how to speak to her without provoking another outburst of guilt and self-pity.

She looked at him wide-eyed, gasping in an attempt to stop the crying.

“It was a cheque,” she said, “ for a lot of money.”

George showed no surprise. “Was there a letter with the cheque?”

“No,” she said. “Not really a letter. One of those printed slips.”

“A compliment slip,” Franks said impatiently. “She means a compliment slip.”

“Was there a name?” George asked. “ Can you remember?”

She shook her head. “ Something was written on it in ordinary handwriting,” she said. She wanted to please him. “I can’t remember what it said.”

“Are you sure?” he asked. “Perhaps you could try.”

She shook her head. “It was just one line,” she said. “A scribble.” Then, glad because at least she had some information, she added. “There was an address printed at the top of the paper. I recognized it because we’ve been there before. Not to the house, of course. We wouldn’t know anyone who lived in a place like that. But to the pub in the village. Den used to take me out for a drive in the evening if it was sunny, and we’d have steak and chips in the garden.…”

The aimless words rambled on. George interrupted, trying not to show his impatience. “Mrs. Franks,” he said, “what was the address?”

She looked at him in surprise, as if she thought she had already told him.

“It was in Pemberton,” she said calmly. “ It’s a pretty village in Somerset. The house was called Cranmers. It’s right in the middle of the village, and we drive past it on the way to the pub.” Then, politely, as if making conversation to one of her husband’s business friends, she said, “ Do you know Pemberton, Mr. Palmer-Jones?”

George said nothing, but he knew the village. He and a friend had been invited there after an education and wildlife conference to share a meal with another of the conference members. He remembered the house because of the unusual name. The friend was Gwen Pullen, the curator of the Natural History Museum, and the man who had offered them hospitality was Duncan James.

George thought Anne James looked like the heroine of a Betjeman poem. She was long-legged, healthy, and very English. He could imagine her on the tennis courts. She would play a stylish but unshowy game, and she would not try too hard to win. He arrived at Cranmers with no clear idea what he would say to her, and when he saw her across the perfect lawn, he felt intimidated by her middle-class competence.