The Mill on the Shore (21 page)

He took another gulp of air and launched himself over the shingle towards his car. George watched him go.

They were waiting for him in the living room of Meg’s flat. He was reminded rather of an audience waiting for the show to start. There was no shock or excitement, hardly any conversation. Molly must have passed on the news of Aidan Moore’s death. He had met her in the lobby on her way back from Rosie’s room when he had come into the Mill to phone the police. She must have told Meg and arranged to gather everyone together. They must all know by now that Aidan was dead, could have seen the police in the spotlights through the window if they had bothered to pull back the heavy curtains, but they seemed blank and unengaged. They did not want to think of the tragedy until he was there to make sense of it for them. When he came into the room they looked at him expectantly as if he would have all the answers.

Only Emily and Tim were absent. They must have slept through the fuss. Rosie and Jane were there, sitting together on the floor, leaning against the wall. They looked tired and ill at ease and it occurred to him that they had never been invited into the flat before. They had been there to clean but not like this, as guests of the family. Rosie must have been preparing for bed. For the first time he saw her with her hair out of its plait and she looked quite different with it loose about her shoulders.

Caitlin was curled at the end of the sofa, her bare feet tucked beneath her. She was wrapped in a striped towelling robe and her hair was still wet from the shower. She watched him as he entered the room and her eyes became bright and feverish, as if she could hardly wait for what he had to say.

What is wrong with them all? he thought. Don’t they care that Aidan’s dead? Then he saw that Ruth was crying. She made no sound but tears were rolling down her cheeks. The family were staring at him and did not notice and it was left to Molly to try clumsily to comfort her.

‘Well?’ Caitlin said. ‘What’s happened, George? What’s going on?’ She ran her tongue round the outside of her lips.

‘Aidan’s dead,’ he said angrily. ‘ Drowned.’

‘When?’ Meg demanded. ‘When did it happen?’ Like everyone else in the room George’s presence had made her more attentive and alert.

‘Some time before high water last night. The police think he was cut off by the tide.’

‘No!’ Meg said. ‘Not Aidan! He knew the shore like his own back garden.’

‘Did anyone see him yesterday evening?’ George asked quietly. ‘I know he went to the pub in the village with Ruth straight after dinner. But later? After that? He must have been killed before this morning’s high water. When was that – six? Six thirty?’

‘I saw him last night,’ Jane said. ‘He was using the pay phone in the lobby.’

‘What time was that?’

She shrugged. ‘ Nine. Half past. Perhaps even later than that.’

‘Did you hear what he said?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t think he wanted to be overheard. He turned his back to me and he was speaking quite quietly. I think I had the impression that he was making an appointment or arranging to meet someone. This morning when Ruth said he’d intended to leave I presumed he’d been calling a taxi.’

‘Wouldn’t you have heard a taxi arrive?’

‘Not necessarily if he’d been waiting up on the road.’

‘Did you see where Aidan went when he finished on the phone?’

She thought for a moment. ‘He went out,’ she said. ‘ Yes, he definitely went out. I remember because when he opened the front door there was a blast of cold air and I thought why would anyone want to go out on a night like this? I didn’t know then that he was thinking of leaving.’

‘Didn’t he give any explanation for going out in the dark?’ George asked.

‘I don’t think he saw me,’ Jane said. ‘ By then I was on my way to the kitchen.’

‘He didn’t go upstairs first?’

‘No. I don’t suppose he needed to. He was still wearing his coat after coming in from the pub.’

‘Are you sure he made the phone call?’ George asked. ‘ It wasn’t an incoming call which he answered?’

‘It might have been,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t remember.’

‘Did you see which way he went?’

She shook her head. ‘I didn’t take much notice.’ She paused. ‘He just seemed to disappear into the darkness.’

‘Did anyone see him after that?’ George asked. ‘Did you see him come back?’

They stared back at him in silence.

The room where Aidan Moore had always slept was on the first floor. It was bigger than the other single rooms with a polished wood floor and a large window. An easel was still propped against the wall but otherwise it was empty and bare. The bed had been stripped and there were no curtains.

‘Meg asked Rosie and Jane to start spring-cleaning,’ Molly murmured. ‘They must have been in here this morning. They’d have assumed like everyone else that Aidan left early without telling anyone.’

‘Not much point worrying about fingerprints then,’ George said. He pulled open the wardrobe door. There were no clothes on the metal clothes-hangers but a large rucksack stood on the floor and a portfolio of watercolours and sketches was leaning against the wall.

‘So he did intend to leave,’ George said. ‘He was already packed and ready to go. If he’d left all his stuff where Rosie and Jane would have seen it they’d have called the alarm earlier.’

‘Is that significant do you think?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It could just be coincidence.’ He lifted out the rucksack and set it on the bed. ‘I’m more interested to know why he decided to leave yesterday. He obviously wasn’t happy at the Mill but he’d put up with it for this long. What happened recently to make him change his mind?’

‘Ruth thinks it was her fault,’ Molly said.

George shook his head. ‘He must have known for ages that she had a crush on him. He didn’t have much else of a love life, did he? You’d think he’d have welcomed her advances, not run away from them.’

‘He was very shy,’ Molly said.

‘Not so shy that he couldn’t act as Jimmy Morrissey’s snoop on the water pollution story,’ George said.

‘Do you think that’s relevant?’

‘It’s another coincidence, isn’t it? If Jimmy was killed to stop the story getting out … Perhaps somebody recognized Aidan, realized that he was here all those years ago asking questions …’

‘And you think Aidan was murdered too?’

‘I don’t know!’ he said. ‘Isn’t that the problem? We don’t even know where to look.’

He picked up a small plastic book which turned out to be a compact photograph album and flicked through the pages. Aidan’s own family hardly seemed to feature, there was one snap of a middle-aged couple who might have been his parents. The other pictures were all of the Morrisseys. There were Ruth and Caitlin as children, swinging from a climbing frame in a leafy garden, the whole family standing outside the Mill before construction had started, with Jimmy, leaning on his stick, looking miserable. And at the end of the book there was a posed photo of all the
Green Scenes
staff, with Aidan himself looking very young and Christabel Burns looking over her spectacles out at the camera.

George carefully folded up Aidan’s belongings and replaced them in the rucksack. He took the album and stood by the window and stared out. The scene was still lit by spotlights but there was no sense of urgency. A group of men stood caught in the bright light drinking coffee which they poured from one large Thermos. The tide was out. Two men appeared on the shingle carrying a stretcher. The body was lifted on to it and carried unceremoniously away.

George turned back to the photo of Aidan’s parents. Porter, presumably, would have arranged for them to be informed. Would they want to come here and see where their son had died? At least they would be spared the indignity of this – the joking policeman who only wanted to be home, the scramble with the stretcher over the shingle. Suddenly the lights went out. The portable generator must have been switched off. The faint hum which had penetrated even the double glazing had stopped. The men cleared the rest of their equipment and left, swearing as they tripped. Then there was silence and the shrouded moonlight reflected in the mud.

‘What did Aidan see,’ George asked almost to himself, ‘that frightened him so much?’

‘Perhaps he wasn’t frightened,’ Molly said. ‘Or not so much that he decided to leave. Ruth said that he had important things to do. Perhaps he had made up his mind that Jimmy’s story had to be told after all. We’ve only his word that he never read the autobiography. He was painting the jacket so Jimmy could have consulted him …’ She stopped abruptly and fetched the portfolio from the wardrobe, opened it up and spread the paintings and drawings over the floor.

They saw the jacket design develop from a pencil sketch to a completed painting, from a few grey lines which set the Mill in the landscape to a detailed watercolour. The final version was the last in the series and differed from the rest in the foreground, lying on the shingle of Salter’s Spit, was a mute swan. Its feathers were delicately drawn and it was obviously dead.

Ruth woke with the same detachment as she had experienced at James’ memorial service. If anything she was more numb, more clear-sighted. She thought nothing could touch her or hurt her again. Is this what it’s like to be ill, she wondered, what they mean by a breakdown? She remembered newspaper stories of a battered wife who had killed her husband. After years of putting up with bruises and beatings she had planned, quite calmly, to stab him. The judge had been unusually sympathetic and had found her guilty only of manslaughter. The defendant was not in her right mind when the crime was committed, he said. The women had been battered not only by fists but by an excess of emotion. Her calm was unnatural, a reaction, an illness. That’s what’s happened to me, Ruth thought, a touch melodramatically. I’ve been emotionally battered too.

At breakfast Meg tried to fuss over her. The night before Ruth would have welcomed the comfort but today she could not stand it. She was not even sure the concern was genuine.

‘Leave me alone!’ she said, too sharply, so Meg looked at her oddly as if she thought her daughter might be ill or mad too. ‘I’m fine. Really. Fine.’

I should get away, she thought, but where would I go? She had long ago lost touch with her old friends from Putney. She went to the schoolroom and read Thomas Hardy. The uncompromising bleakness of
Tess
suited her mood.

Molly saw that Ruth needed help but was not sure if it was her place to offer it. Besides, George was making his own demands. He needed reassurance, to be convinced that he wasn’t a miserable failure. He felt responsible for Aidan’s death, was wallowing rather in self-pity.

‘Of course we’ll sort out what happened,’ Molly said. They were in their room with its view of the shore. The tide had already washed away the traces of the police presence the night before: the scuff marks in the sand, discarded sandwich wrappers. ‘ We’re close to it already. You’re right about one thing though. We need some facts. We need to know exactly what Jimmy’s story was
about.
That’s the only way to find out who was implicated.’

‘The local newspaper might be a place to start,’ he said, allowing himself to be distracted. ‘There might be an environment correspondent with specialist knowledge. At least we can look in the files for a story about pollution involving mute swans.’

‘You’re sure the swans are important?’ Molly asked.

‘Certain. Cathy Cairns had her tale about discharged cooking oil too well prepared. And then there was Aidan’s painting. Jimmy hadn’t asked for the Mill to be on the jacket because he was specially fond of it. The Mill and the dead swan were there for a purpose. To shock. And as a pointer to the revelation inside.’ He paused. ‘I’ll get in touch with Nick Lineham’s successor at the National Rivers Authority too. It’s their responsibility to monitor water quality …’ He left her staring out of the window and went to phone.

The woman on the switchboard at the
Mardon Guardian
said that they kept copies of all past issues, and that they were available to the public by appointment. He made an appointment for two thirty that afternoon.

The conservation officer at the NRA was a woman, young by the sound of her voice, certainly pleasant.

‘I’ll be tied up for most of the day,’ she said. He had given his name and she had recognized it. She said she had read his papers in the
Ibis.
‘ I’m free late this afternoon. Why don’t you come to the office then?’

George returned to Molly in their room. He was restless and impatient because he could not follow up the leads immediately. What would they do for the rest of the day? In this mood he could not stand meeting the detective, with his cocksure certainty that Jimmy was a depressed lunatic and Aidan an incompetent fool. He had to find an excuse to be away from the Mill.

‘Why don’t we start from the beginning?’ Molly said patiently. ‘From where Jimmy started.’

‘What do you mean?’ He suspected that she might be trying to humour him. She was jollying him along as if he were a child.

‘How did it start?’ Molly said. ‘We know that Jimmy had an anonymous letter which disappeared with the autobiography. Aidan was sent to make enquiries and to meet the correspondent in a pub. He’s dead so we can’t ask him what it was about. Then Jimmy had a phone call from the same man and similar arrangements were made. Isn’t that what Christabel Burns said?’

‘Yes,’ George said. He considered Molly with respect. He thought she seldom had such clarity of thought. ‘Christabel said it was all very theatrical. “He’d be carrying a copy of
Green Scenes
under his arm.” He paused. ‘If it was a man …’

‘If we can find that anonymous correspondent,’ Molly said, ‘we’d know what Jimmy knew.’

‘We’ve no way of tracing him.’

‘Wouldn’t Jimmy arrange to meet the person in a place he knew? He’d been here before, to Salter’s Cottage, to see Hannah. Wouldn’t he have suggested that they meet in a pub close to here, somewhere he could find easily?’

‘The Dead Dog!’ George said. ‘You think they met there?’