Palmer-Jones 01 - A Bird in the Hand by Ann Cleeves Page A

absentmindedly.
    “Then you wouldn’t mind if I went to stay with him, just for a long weekend. Mrs. Simpson would come in every day to check that you were all right.”
    She stared at him in horror.
    “Oh no,” she said. “ Oh no, you wouldn’t want to go all the way up there.”
    She pouted her face to cry and two tears washed a furrow down the powder on her face, like rain on a dirty window.
    “No, of course not, Mother,” he said.
    As he always did, he made her a cup of tea, sat in front of the television, switched on her favourite soap opera and said:
    “I’m just out to the marsh for a while, Mother. I won’t be long.”
    She did not seem to notice him leave the house.
    Every day he went out on to the marsh after tea. As he walked away from the house he could feel that his face was flushed and sticky. The breeze from the sea made him aware of it. He forced himself to breathe slowly, to relax, to forget school and his mother. As he did so he watched a small group of waders on a pool no bigger than a puddle right at the edge of the road. Then he began to walk along the boardwalk, which he had helped to build, across the marsh to the main hide. He would just sit there a while, watching the avocets.
    The avocets had only recently come to Rushy and they had young. Cranshaw had a passionate, a loving interest in them. They were his birds. He had found the nest and he had cared for them. On one occasion he had seen a group of strangers who were taking too great an interest in the birds and the nest, and had sat awake all night, hidden behind a bank of shingle, in case they had come to steal the eggs. He would have done anything to protect the eggs, to protect his birds. Now the young were paddling around the edges of the pools, feeding themselves.
    The marsh was very still. At least in the middle of the week there were few other people to disturb him. He could hear the waves moving the shingle and the sound of the wind over the reeds. It was then that he saw that the flap of the hide was open. All the jarring tensions of the day returned. Someone was in his hide, watching his birds. Did they think that the marsh was public property, these twitchers with their dirty habits and fancy birds? Did they think he had organized and bullied the Conservation Trust to buy the marsh, to build hides for them to be used as a doss house for spiky-haired louts with safety-pins in their nostrils?
    He pushed open the door of the hide.
    “Don’t you know you need a permit to come here?”
    It was like a nightmare. The embarrassment of the drama class was exactly duplicated. The occupant of the hide was a well-dressed elderly man who, if he showed any reaction at all, showed a little distaste, a little pity, and who took from his pocket a permit which allowed him unlimited access to the hides for the rest of the year.
    George Palmer-Jones saw a man in his mid-fifties, slight, sandy-haired, with very prominent veins on his face and neck. The man seemed only just in control of himself; he was balanced on the edge of hysteria. He was shaking now and his face was very flushed. George wished that Molly was with him. He felt awkward and did not want to be patronizing. The man gave a terrible, nervous giggle, and with a visible effort regained control of himself.
    “Sorry about that,” he muttered. “Should have known. But you get all sorts here. Twitchers most of them. Got to keep an eye on them.”
    They looked in silence at the avocets. When he felt that the man beside him was steady, more comfortable, Palmer-Jones said:
    “I suppose you get a lot of strangers here.”
    The bitterness and fury seemed to flow out of the man. He stammered as the words rushed into each other.
    “They come here as if they own the place. I’ve lived here all my life. They wouldn’t find these rarities if we hadn’t put the work in. They don’t know about the meetings we had, the pressure we put on the council to stop the development … And they