Palmer-Jones 04 - A Prey to Murder (16 page)

‘This is Mr Palmer-Jones,’ he said. ‘He’s a Wildlife Act Inspector. I don’t understand about these bloody birds so he’s sitting in on the interview in case I need him. Can you arrange for some tea? And find out all there is to know about Williams.’

Pritchard and George stood for a moment in the corridor and watched Williams through the interview room door. It seemed to George that he seemed surprisingly at home there.

‘Has he got a record?’ he asked.

‘As long as your arm,’ Pritchard said. ‘But all spent convictions and mostly as a juvenile. He came from a very respectable family and they threw him out when he first got into trouble. That was in the early sixties and work was easy to find. He moved around a lot, mixed with a lot of nasty customers, usually got caught. Then he came back like the prodigal son and hasn’t been in trouble since. Apparently they think a lot of him in the district.’

‘He’s not been involved with the police at all?’

Pritchard shook his head. ‘He’s not even had a parking ticket for his precious car,’ he said. ‘ He’s done a lot of charitable work in Puddleworth and the surrounding area. He’s never hidden his record, in fact he’s made quite a feature of it in the publicity. You know the sort of thing – he reformed and became successful, so with a bit of help so could all the other bad lads in the town.’

‘Do you think he’s reformed?’ George asked.

‘Perhaps,’ Pritchard said. ‘ Or perhaps he just got clever and changed his field of operation.’

They went in. Theo Williams was sitting upright on the plastic chair with his palms flat on the table before him. The cuffs of his jacket had slipped back over his wrists, so they could see the gold watch and gold cuff links. He might have been born in the country, George thought, but there was something of the city wise boy about him. He was about forty, round-faced, fleshy. He took great care of himself.

Pritchard sat on the other side of the table from the man. George took the seat in a corner where a constable had been sitting before they came into the room.

‘Now,’ Pritchard said. ‘Tell me about Frank Oliver.’

‘I’m sorry, Superintendent,’ Williams said. ‘I’m afraid there must be some mistake. I haven’t seen Frank Oliver for weeks.’ In his time alone in the interview room he had composed himself and decided to be polite. It was clever, George thought, to admit to knowing Oliver.

‘Who was in your car this morning, Mr Williams?’

‘I don’t know, Superintendent. Really, I don’t know.’ He gave a little gesture of helplessness as if to show that he was devastated that he could not supply Pritchard with more information. ‘I picked up a hitch hiker on the way from Puddleworth. I was going to take him all the way to Shrewsbury. Perhaps he got fed up while I went for a walk.’

‘You told Mr Palmer-Jones there was no one in the car.’

Williams smiled and showed the gold in his teeth.

‘I don’t like officials,’ he said. ‘I think they should mind their own business. It was an instinctive reaction to lie.’

‘Do you usually walk on the hill in this weather so early in the morning?’

‘I’m interested in birds of prey, Mr Pritchard,’ Williams said. ‘I’ve been studying merlins in this area for many years.’

He smiled again.

‘How well do you know Oliver?’ Pritchard asked. ‘He’s a falconer,’ Williams said. ‘A very good falconer.’ He flexed his fingers. He had long, woman’s hands. ‘ I work quite closely with falconers. I prepare skins of birds of prey for exhibition. We met through Mr Fenn at the Puddleworth Centre.’

‘Tell me about your interest in taxidermy,’ said Pritchard. ‘ How did that begin?’

‘My father was a gamekeeper,’ Williams said. ‘ I grew up learning about wildlife and the countryside. Then when I was at borstal we had a talk from a local taxidermist. I was hooked. When I got out I was taken on as an apprentice at a big place in north London. I started off scraping elephants’ trunks and preparing rhino feet umbrella stands, but I loved it. Eventually I had my own workshop in the craft centre at Puddleworth. I can tell you, Superintendent, that without my interest I might be a hardened criminal by now.’

Pritchard leaned forward across the table.

‘I think you and Oliver were partners,’ he said. ‘I think you had trouble getting dead birds to stuff so you started taking them from the wild. Then you found that Oliver was doing the same thing but he was selling the birds to falconers so you went into business together, sharing your information.’

‘That’s slanderous, Mr Pritchard,’ Williams said. ‘ I’ve a lot of powerful friends. I hope you’ve some evidence for those allegations.’

Pritchard ignored the interruption and continued: ‘Then Oliver cocked up your nice little scheme, didn’t he? He was stealing the Sarne peregrines – a special order because of their historical significance – when someone frightened him. He lost his head and killed an old lady. That was very careless.’

‘You’re being ridiculous, Superintendent,’ Williams said. ‘You can have no reason to suppose that Oliver and I had any business connection. We’re acquaintances with a similar interest, nothing more.’ He sounded supremely confident, but he had taken a cigarette from a packet and lit it with a kind of nervous desperation.

‘Can’t we?’ Pritchard said. ‘How do you think we knew where to find you today?’

The policeman looked apologetically at George. ‘Look,’ he said expansively, ‘I don’t care about these birds. It doesn’t matter to me. I’m not going to pursue that line of inquiry if you help me. I want to find a murderer. Tell me where Frank Oliver is and we can all go home.’

But Williams had become tight-lipped and stubborn.

‘I’m sorry, Superintendent,’ he said. ‘I can’t help you. Now if you’ve nothing to charge me with I think you should let me go. I’m a busy man.’

George could tell that Pritchard was in a difficult position. Williams was a prominent man in the community – parish councillor, chairman of the Rotary club, school governor. Without substantial proof it would be hard for him to detain the man. Williams sensed triumph and began to rise to his feet. Then there was a knock at the door and a constable passed a slip of paper to the superintendent. He looked at it blankly, then beckoned George to follow him into the corridor.

‘I don’t understand a word of this,’ he said. ‘Does it mean anything to you, George?’

George looked at the paper. It was a message from the RSPB Regional Officer.

‘I told you,’ he said, ‘that the RSPB warden didn’t see Mr Williams at the merlins’ nest and that the eggs weren’t in his possession when Lewis found him. This note says that Lewis has found the eggs in a rucksack behind the drystone wall by the track.’ He looked through the glass door at Williams, ‘I don’t think a natural predator would be clever enough to hide the eggs in a rucksack,’ he said.

‘That’s all very well,’ Pritchard said. ‘ But what does it all mean?’

‘It means,’ George said, ‘that you have sufficient evidence to charge Mr Williams with wilful disturbance of a schedule one species and theft of its eggs.’

Pritchard beamed and opened the door into the interview room.

‘You’d better sit down Mr Williams,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be a long day.’

Williams’ taxidermist workshop was part of a craft centre in some converted farm buildings in Puddleworth village near to the green. Williams had been bailed on the charge under the Wildlife and Countryside Act. He had agreed, reluctantly, to allow his car to stay at the police station to be fingerprinted, and had accepted Pritchard’s offer of a lift home. He had steadfastly refused to answer any further questions about Oliver and maintained his story that he had picked up a hitch hiker on his way to Shrewsbury. When Pritchard had asked permission to search the workshop, Williams had said smoothly that he was a decent citizen and he would do all he could to assist the police. Of course they could look round the workshop. He had nothing to hide. He hoped they would be discreet. He had a living to make.

There were eight different units in the craft centre built round the cobbled farmyard. Each had a large semicircular window displaying goods for sale and a workshop behind, where the public could watch work in progress. The place was attractive and well-advertised and at the weekends it was very busy. People came out from Wolverhampton and Birmingham to spend an afternoon in the country and to buy the over-priced goods. Upstairs, in the main building, above the pottery and the stripped pine furniture, there was a café selling wholemeal quiche and home-made cakes and a shop full of arty gifts.

The centre had few visitors that afternoon. The day was overcast, though the cloud had lifted so that they could see the long bank of hills to the west which towered above the village, restricting the horizon. To the east was a wood, then the flat plain to the city, but there was no view from the centre.

Pritchard parked his car under the dripping trees in the car park by the road and they walked to Williams’ workshop. On the way past a unit where two women designed and hand-knitted sweaters, Williams was accosted by one of the occupants. She ran out into the yard and held on to his arm. She was tall, with very long, black hair twisted into individual curls. She wore black stretch trousers and one of her own creations – a large mohair sweater in a geometric black and red design.

‘Theo,’ she said in a painful Birmingham accent, ‘I’m glad I’ve caught you. I want to talk to you about this evening’s meeting.’

It seemed that the craft centre was run by a management committee of the workshop owners and she wanted his support for a proposal of her own.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said brusquely. ‘ You can see I’m busy. I can’t stop now.’

The hand held more tightly to his jacket sleeve. ‘ It’s no good running away, Theo. When you took over the workshop you agreed to participate in the committee. We’ve got to discuss it now.’

It was the sort of argument a married couple might have, George thought. He suspected there was some greater intimacy between them than that they shared the running of the centre. She seemed to have some claim on him and to be afraid of losing him.

‘That’s all right, sir,’ Pritchard said. ‘We don’t want to disturb you more than we can help. Give us a key and we’ll let ourselves in. You can join us when you’ve completed your business with this young lady.’

Williams looked at him angrily, but gave him the key. Pritchard and George walked on. The woman dragged Williams into her shop and continued to talk to him.

The whole of Williams’ shop window was arranged as a woodland scene. There were dead leaves on the floor, and branches and a hollow log formed a background. Against this the mounted birds and animals were set in a display. There were a fox, a pheasant and a group of partridges. Pritchard stared at it with a child’s curiosity.

‘Who would want to buy that sort of thing?’ he asked.

George shrugged. ‘Some people find them attractive. There seems to be a market, especially among people involved in country sports.’

Pritchard unlocked the door into the display area. More stuffed birds stood in glass cabinets. Most it seemed were not for sale, but were waiting to be sent back to the sportsmen who had provided the skins for mounting. Pritchard’s colleagues had already been into the place to look for Oliver’s fingerprints and there were a series of muddy footprints on the red quarry-tile floor. Williams’ workshop was behind a low, hinged counter, so he could speak to anyone who came into the shop and they could watch him working. He would sit at a wooden bench against one wall and the tools of his craft were set out there. There was a faint smell of chemicals, of borax and wood wool. Williams was in the process of mounting a buzzard. The viscera had been removed and the skin was rolled up, turned inside out around the buzzard’s head like a strange collar. A piece of wire had been stuck into the bone at the base of the bird’s skull and at the other end, into the bone at the base of the tail. The wire was wound round and round with wood wool to recreate the bulk of the bird’s body. Its head was stuffed with cotton wool. Another wire had been twisted at right angles to the first. When the skin was unrolled, this would support the wings.

‘Williams must have been called away suddenly,’ George said. ‘He would never have chosen to leave the skin like that. He’s in the middle of a very delicate operation.’

Pritchard went up to the workbench, fascinated. The bird’s feet were still there. A wire from the body would go through the hollow legs into a wooden block, so that eventually the buzzard would stand in someone’s collection. There were scalpels, a wad of cotton wool and reels of wire of different thickness.

‘What’s to stop Williams killing wild birds, mounting them and selling them?’ Pritchard asked.

‘A taxidermist is supposed to have a licence showing the origin of each bird he sells,’ George said, ‘ but I’m sure there are ways round that.’

‘Let’s see what else he’s got here,’ Pritchard said. ‘We need the names and addresses of other people who might be harbouring Oliver.’ He moved restlessly around the small room, opening cupboards and pulling out drawers, but found nothing to interest him.

George wandered into a scullery behind the workshop, where there was a stainless steel sink and draining board and a large freezer. Inside, as he had expected, was a pile of frozen corpses. There were a badger and a fox and several tawny owls but most were gamebirds: woodcock, snipe and red grouse. There was also a small male peregrine, very grey and fine. George wondered if it were some falconer’s favourite bird which had met with an accident, or if it had been taken from the wild. He presumed there were records somewhere to show its origin. Williams had seemed very confident that they would find everything in order. He closed the freezer lid.

Pritchard called from the workshop: ‘let’s go upstairs and look round his flat before he comes back. We might have more luck there.’ George followed him slowly up the dark, narrow wooden stairs.

The flat was small and furnished in a fussy, almost feminine way. Williams might have chosen the design from a popular women’s magazine. He had obviously taken care with the decorating and in choosing the furniture, but the place felt impersonal, as if it were hardly lived in. George thought that Williams had not the confidence to choose what he really liked and probably did not feel at ease there himself. He would be more relaxed in the workshop downstairs. The bedroom was just big enough for a double bed and a pine wardrobe. The living room had a glass-topped table and two upright chairs and a small settee with flowered cream covers. There were spot lights and an expensive stereo system. Pritchard sat at the table and began to look through the address book he had found near the white, push-button telephone.