Palmer-Jones 04 - A Prey to Murder (17 page)

‘What would you like me to do?’ George asked. He was feeling tired. He wished he had his own transport so he could return to Gorse Hill. This was police constable’s work. He could be using his time more effectively.

‘Look for a shotgun,’ Pritchard said distractedly. George might have been one of his subordinates. During the day he had lost the attitude of polite deference he had assumed at the beginning of the inquiry. ‘He’s got a shotgun licence apparently but I didn’t see the thing downstairs and the lads who were here earlier didn’t mention it.’

There were not many places to search. Under the bed George found a pile of pornographic magazines. The wardrobe was only just big enough for the profusion of clothes. In a drawer under the wardrobe he found a passport which showed that Williams had made regular trips to Europe and Scandinavia. He carried it through to the living room and showed it to Pritchard.

‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘It’s possible that Williams was making legitimate business trips, but he might be illegally exporting some of the birds he and Oliver took. It could explain the conversation between Oliver and his son in the Hop Pole. Perhaps they were hoping to recruit Stephen as a courier.’

‘Perhaps they were,’ Pritchard said. ‘But it doesn’t help us to find Oliver.’

The phone rang, interrupting his depression. With a sudden optimism he leapt to his feet. ‘Perhaps they’ve found him,’ he said. But when he answered the phone he showed no great happiness. He listened, answered briefly and replaced the receiver.

‘That shopping list of birds which we found in Oliver’s house was typed on the machine in Fenn’s office,’ he said. ‘ They asked Fenn to type them a sample.’

‘So it could have been typed by Oliver,’ George said. ‘It seems unlikely.’

‘I still think Fenn is implicated,’ Pritchard said. ‘It’s too much of a coincidence to think he knew nothing about it. Williams and Fenn are practically neighbours and Oliver works there. Fenn must have had some idea what was going on. I wouldn’t be surprised if he knows where Oliver is. He’s probably behind the whole organization.’

‘Perhaps,’ George said. He found it hard to reconcile Pritchard’s image of Fenn as a ruthless criminal with his knowledge of the man. It seemed to him that Fenn was too nervous, too sad to organize the theft and sale of the birds of prey. Yet the modern, well-equipped Falconry Centre had been paid for somehow, and Fenn had been obsessed with his dream of founding a place where he could show his birds to their best advantage.

Outside, they heard the grating Birmingham accent of the knitwear designer, still reluctant to let Williams go.

‘You will be there, Theo,’ she said. ‘It’s a very important meeting.’

They did not hear Williams’ reply, but soon after the door of the shop banged and there were footsteps on the stairs.

‘You’ve made yourselves at home then,’ he said unpleasantly as he came into the living room. The conversation with the woman seemed to have irritated him beyond reason.

‘Yes sir,’ Pritchard said. ‘Thank you very much for your cooperation. We won’t hold you up much longer. We’ll let you get back to that bird downstairs. I’ve just a few more questions. Where’s your shotgun?’

Williams seemed surprized by the question.

‘Wasn’t it in the car?’ he asked sharply.

Pritchard shook his head. ‘Was it in the car when you went out this morning?’ he said.

Williams seemed unsure how to answer. ‘I thought it was,’ he blustered. ‘Perhaps I was mistaken.’

‘If you gave it to Oliver,’ Pritchard said, ‘you’re more of a fool than I thought.’

‘I didn’t give anything to Oliver, Superintendent. I’ve already told you. I haven’t seen him for weeks.’

But he seemed worried, anxious.

‘Of course,’ Pritchard said. ‘Oliver might have taken the gun without your permission while you were walking on the hill.’ He paused and turned to Palmer-Jones. ‘I had an idea this morning,’ he said, ‘that Oliver was carrying something.’ He returned his gaze to Williams. ‘ We’re going to catch him eventually,’ he said. ‘If he’s armed with your shotgun when we do you’re going to be in real trouble.’

George thought for a moment that Williams would speak. The logic of Pritchard’s argument seemed to have frightened him. But a deeper fear, or stubbornness, prevented him.

‘I’m not listening to these fairy stories,’ he said. ‘I’ve work to do.’ But at the top of the stairs he paused. He wanted them out of his home. ‘Are you ready to leave?’ he asked.

Pritchard seemed reluctant to go. He was walking up and down the small room as if he hoped to gain inspiration from the stuffed tawny owl on the window sill, the photograph of the peregrine on eggs above the mantelpiece.

‘Yes,’ he said in the end. ‘We’ll pass on these addresses to the local lads and then we’ll go back to Sarne.’

With any luck, he thought, he would be home by the boys’ bathtime. He loved the riotous ritual of bubbles, splashing, the boys in the tub together as wriggling and slippery as tadpoles. He gave the room a final glance and Williams started heavily down the stairs.

George was last out of the room so when the phone began to ring, he turned back to answer it. He had expected it to be another message for Pritchard and was surprized when he heard a woman’s voice, expressionless as a machine. There was an overseas reversed-charges call, she said, from a town in Holland for Mr Williams. Was he prepared to take it? George put his hand over the receiver and shouted to Pritchard. The operator repeated her question. Yes, George said. Yes, he was prepared to accept the call. Pritchard took the receiver but held it so that George could listen too. Williams, confused and indignant, muttering about the invasion of his privacy, came back up the stairs and into the room. George recognized the voice at the end of the telephone at once, but could not place it until the young woman gave her name.

‘Hello, Theo?’ she said, clear and strident as if she were standing outside the Falconry Centre shouting to some recalcitrant schoolchild. ‘This is Kerry. I’ve decided to keep out of the way for a bit until the fuss dies down. We don’t want the police to make any unfortunate connections between us.’ There was a pause. She was obviously expecting some response. ‘Theo?’ she said, a note of anxiety in her voice. ‘Are you there, Theo?’

‘I’m sorry, Miss Fenn,’ Pritchard said. ‘ Mr Williams isn’t at home at present. Perhaps you’d like to talk to us.’

Kerry Fenn swore at him and the phone went dead.

The car park at the Falconry Centre was full. The press reports of an elderly lady pecked to death by a giant hawk had done nothing to frighten visitors away. The people came in droves and there was a queue outside the aviary where the red-tailed hawk was kept. When George and Pritchard asked at the turnstile to speak to Mr Fenn, the cashier thought they were reporters and would not let them through without paying. She had the untidy appearance and high moral tone of a vicar’s wife.

‘Mr Fenn’s very distressed about what happened to Mrs Masefield,’ she said, ‘but the police have made it quite clear that her death had nothing to do with the Puddleworth birds of prey. I think you should leave him alone.’

Pritchard paid his two pounds and said nothing. It seemed unlikely now that he would be back in Sarne in time to bath the boys. He thought again of Williams’ reaction to Kerry Fenn’s phone call. The man had begun to sweat, so that the round, highly coloured face had seemed glossy, plastic like a mask.

‘Tell me,’ Pritchard had said, ‘about your connections with Kerry Fenn. Does she employ you and Oliver? She mixes in all the right circles, doesn’t she? She typed the shopping list of birds and gave it to Oliver, so you would both know exactly which species to take.’

But Williams had smiled suggestively, so that the plastic mask turned into a leer.

‘My only connection with Kerry Fenn is purely personal, Superintendent,’ he said. ‘I can give you details of that if you want me to, but I think it might shock your elderly friend here.’

And he had stuck to his story that his relationship with Kerry was physical. She had fancied him, he said. She had a Lady Chatterley fantasy. What was he do to? They had kept it secret because her father would have disapproved. It seemed more likely to Pritchard that the fantasy was Williams’ but the taxidermist would not change his story, and as they left he gave them a triumphant smile.

They found Fenn in the office of his bungalow. He looked grey and tired. He saw them through the window coming down the path from the Centre and got up to meet them at the door.

‘I’m busy,’ he said. ‘Kerry usually does the books but she’s away. I’m not so good with figures as she is.’ But the attempt to refuse them entry was half-hearted and he sighed and let them into the house. ‘I can’t give you very long,’ he said. ‘I‘m doing a display at half past three.’

The three men stood uneasily in the hall.

‘Shall we go into the kitchen?’ Pritchard said gently. ‘We’ll be more comfortable there.’

Fenn led them into the big kitchen and they perched ridiculously on high stools by a built-in bar, like three garden gnomes.

‘Would you like some coffee?’ Fenn asked, but Pritchard shook his head.

‘What do you know about Theo Williams?’ he asked.

‘He’s a taxidermist based in the village here,’ Fenn said. ‘He has rather a good reputation. He prepared some of our displays in the visitors’ centre.’

‘Is he interested in birds of prey?’

‘He seems to be. His father was a gamekeeper. Theo used to go out with him and learned from him, I suppose. He’s not a falconer.’

‘Are Williams and Oliver friendly?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think they particularly like each other but Williams comes here occasionally to talk to Frank Oliver.’ Fenn paused. ‘I don’t suppose it matters,’ he said, ‘that Oliver’s got himself into more serious trouble now but I used to think they might have had some business connection. Williams used to go shooting with his father when the old man was still alive. He probably sees some of the schedule one birds of prey as fair game and I expect Oliver has been able to find a market for the mounted skins.’

Pritchard turned helplessly to George.

‘I’m afraid,’ George said, ‘the business connection between Williams and Oliver is rather more serious than that.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Fenn said. ‘ I don’t understand you.’ He stared out of the window as if he had lost interest in the conversation. Throughout the conversation George felt Fenn’s attention wandering as if he were a very old man or a child.

‘Oliver and Williams work together,’ George said. ‘They steal eggs and young birds of prey from the wild to sell to falconers. We’re sure now that some of the birds were smuggled abroad for sale. That’s why Oliver was on the hill at Sarne on the day of Eleanor’s murder.’

‘I see,’ Fenn said absently. ‘Yes. I see.’

‘We don’t believe Williams and Oliver are working alone,’ George said. ‘ We think they’re employed by someone with a greater organizational skill, someone perhaps who has legitimate business abroad.

‘I can understand that,’ Fenn said, showing for the first time that he was following the line of George’s argument. ‘Neither Frank Oliver nor Williams is very bright.’

George paused, hoping perhaps that Pritchard would take over the explanation, but the policeman motioned for him to continue.

‘Where is your daughter, Mr Fenn?’ George asked.

‘Mm?’ Fenn looked up, startled from his daydreams by the question.

‘Where is Kerry?’ George repeated.

‘Oh she’s in Holland,’ he said. ‘We’re hoping to import some birds from a centre there.’

‘Does she go abroad quite often?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She’s good at that side of things and she seems to enjoy it. I’m very lucky.’ Still he did not grasp the implication of the questions. ‘What has Kerry to do with Theo Williams and Frank Oliver?’

‘We think she may be employing them,’ George said. ‘We think she finds the buyers for the birds. She has met influential falconers here and abroad. As you’ve said she’s good at organization. She tells the men what to steal and disposes of the eggs and young when they’re delivered.’

Fenn began to laugh, a sad, wracking, crazy laugh which shook his body like a cough.

‘She’s a girl,’ he said, ‘a pretty, sweet girl. You’re mad.’

Pritchard took the flimsy shopping list of birds from a file. ‘This was typed on the machine in your office,’ he said. ‘ We found it in Oliver’s house.’

Fenn looked at it suspiciously.

‘That doesn’t mean anything,’ he said. ‘Oliver could have typed it himself.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Pritchard said. ‘ You told us when we were last here that Mr Oliver didn’t have access to your home.’

‘I don’t care what you say,’ Fenn said. ‘Kerry takes after her mother. Lydia would never do anything that wasn’t honest and decent.’

He put his head in his hands and seemed deep in memory.

‘Is Kerry friendly with Theo Williams?’ George asked quietly. ‘Do they go out together socially?’

‘Of course not!’ Fenn was jerked back to the present by the horror of the suggestion. ‘I suppose the chap’s all right. He got himself into trouble in the past, though I understand that’s all over now. But he has nothing in common with my daughter. The idea’s ludicrous.’

‘We were in Williams’ flat just now,’ George said, ‘when Kerry telephoned him from Holland.’

‘That’s impossible,’ Fenn said. ‘She wouldn’t have done that. He must have been lying.’

‘I spoke to her.’ George said.

‘Then you must have made a mistake.’

‘No,’ George said. Fenn was fighting not to convince them but to sustain his own belief in his daughter’s virtue and perfection. Without that he had nothing. But eventually he would have to realize the truth. ‘No,’ George said. ‘I couldn’t have been mistaken. Kerry gave her name and I recognized her voice as soon as she spoke.’

Fenn said nothing. He had heard the words but refused to accept what George was saying.

‘Williams was with us in the flat when the telephone rang,’ George went on. ‘Of course we asked him why Kerry would want to phone him at home. He insisted that he and your daughter were intimately involved with each other, that they were lovers.’