Palmer-Jones 04 - A Prey to Murder by Ann Cleeves

birds, they said. They would frighten anyone.
    As he turned away from the other people at the end of the drive he was surprized to find Molly beside him. It had not occurred to him to wonder where she was.
    ‘Where are you going?’ she asked. ‘Shouldn’t you stay here to wait for the police? They’ll want to talk to everyone who was staying at Gorse Hill.’
    ‘I want to go on to the hill,’ he said. ‘To the eyrie. I’ll speak to the police later.’
    He would have preferred to be alone. His anger persisted and he felt guilty too, and sorry for himself. It would have suited his mood to be alone on the hill, with the sun setting over the Welsh mountains, throwing long purple shadows over the heather.
    ‘It won’t do any good, you know,’ Molly said. She was almost running to keep up with him. ‘Brooding on your own up there won’t bring Eleanor back. You’re not eighteen any more.’
    She knew him too well. He had been seventeen when a close friend had been killed in the war. He had spent a night on the hill. It had been a romantic gesture, a way of saying goodbye. She was right. He was grown up now, too old for dramatic self-indulgence.
    ‘I’m not going to the hill to brood,’ he snapped. ‘I want to see if the peregrine young are still in the eyrie.’
    ‘You think they may have been stolen?’
    ‘Eleanor was convinced that someone was intending to take them,’ he said. ‘No one believed her. They all thought she was over-reacting. But if she came here this afternoon and caught someone in the act of theft, that might be a motive for muder.’
    ‘She was murdered?’ Molly said. Like most of the crowd she assumed Eleanor’s death to be an accident.
    ‘Yes,’ George said shortly. ‘She was murdered. But she wasn’t killed where her body was found. There was no reason for her to go that close to the birds of prey.’
    ‘You think she saw someone stealing the birds? Then the thief panicked and killed her?’
    ‘It could have happened that way,’ George said. His conversation with Molly was already forcing him to think more clearly and precisely. ‘Though it would have been a long way to bring her body down the cliff. And why dump it in the falconry centre weathering ground?’
    ‘To throw suspicion elsewhere,’ Molly suggested. At the moment it was more important for her to maintain the flow of conversation to prevent George slipping into depression, than to think intelligently and constructively about Eleanor’s murder.
    ‘It was a dangerous way to go about it,’ George said scornfully. ‘With all those people there.’
    ‘Not necessarily,’ Molly said. ‘If the murderer had transport. The field had been empty since the display and Fenn was asleep in his car. It would be possible to drive over the field to the weathering ground without anyone noticing.’
    But George was in no mood to concede the point and they walked on in silence.
    It was half past six and the heat had gone out of the day. There was a slight cold breeze. They had climbed the steepest point of the path and could look down over Gorse Hill. Smoke was coming out of one of the chimneys. In the valley there was the shadow of a cloud over the town so that it looked grey and distant, but the sun caught the red brick of Gorse Hill and made it warm and welcoming, more substantial and attractive than it really was. It alone in the surrounding countryside seemed to have life and vitality. In comparison the hill was dead. They walked on along the narrow sheep path.
    They heard the peregrines calling before they could see the eyrie. The birds were circling about the cliff making a high-pitched hekking. The call was relentless, unending.
    ‘It’s the distress call,’ George said. ‘The birds have been disturbed.’
    They walked along the sheep track which crossed the hillside until they could see the eyrie. Both birds circled above them and even with the naked eye Molly could tell the difference between them. The male was