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

smaller, slimmer, greyer. The female was brown and heavy.
    The eyrie was in exactly the same position as it had been when Stuart Masefield had shown George the site. In the birds’ calls George imagined he could hear the man’s manic laughter. He longed for the noise to stop. He screwed his telescope on to a tripod balanced on the narrow path and looked into the eyrie.
    ‘Well?’ Molly asked. She was tired and hot from the climb and leaned against the boulder which had hidden Laurie and Helen the day before.
    ‘Someone will have to go down to the eyrie to check,’ George said. ‘But I’m sure the young birds have been taken.’
    He slung his telescope over his shoulder and they walked slowly down the hill.
    Eleanor was right, he thought, and no one would listen to her. She wasn’t mad at all. He would never touch her now, never know her and be important to her. His anger returned, blinding and senseless.
    There was a stile across the footpath where it led down to the town. As Molly was climbing it her foot slipped on a muddy step, she lost her balance and toppled backwards into a dry ditch. Mildly concerned and irritated by her clumsiness George slithered down the bank to help her up. Molly was unhurt. She stood up and brushed grass and leaves from her trousers. On the other side of the stile and separating the ditch from the open hill was a drystone wall. Molly was about to take George’s hand so they could climb together back to the track, but something about his face stopped her. He was staring at the bottom of the wall. The stones were uneven and loose in places. In a hole at the base of the wall was a dainty shoe made of cream leather. Molly was reminded of the fairy story of Cinderella. She thought that she was always destined to play the part of the ugly sister.
    ‘That was Eleanor’s shoe,’ George said. ‘This is where she was murdered.’
    Alan Pritchard was slumped in his chair, a can of beer in his hand, watching football on the television, when the telephone rang. He swore. It would be for Bethan, his wife. She came from Cardigan and her relatives saw Herefordshire as a strange and foreign land. They thought she needed daily phone calls to keep her in touch with home. Bethan was in the garden, trying optimistically to sunbathe, and the boys were away playing. The football game had reached a critical point. Pritchard shouted, hoping that his wife would come in and answer the phone, but there was no response and it continued to ring, drowning the commentary on the television.
    Pritchard got out of his chair, his eyes still on the screen, and picked up the receiver.
    ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Pritchard.’
    ‘Sorry to disturb you sir,’ said a familiar voice. ‘Something’s turned up.’
    He swore again, turned off the television set using the remote control, and listened.
    Superintendent Alan Pritchard seemed young for his rank. Perhaps he was forty-five but he looked younger. On first acquaintance it was hard to understand how he had achieved such rapid promotion. He was relaxed, easygoing, almost flippant. He seemed to take nothing seriously. But those who knew him better described a streak of stubbornness, of ambition which made him stick with a case until he got results. He had a temper too which dragged his colleagues out of apathy as he roared around the office, shouting at them in Welsh, but they never knew if the temper was genuine or a practised technique to make them work and enhance his reputation as a character.
    Alan Pritchard was known to be a great family man. He lived with Bethan and their four sons in a modern, ugly bungalow near the river to the south of the town. The river there was wide and sandy and the garden ran right down to the bank. The boys were always playing there, paddling and building dams. The garden was a mess, with bikes the children had grown out of, dens built in the bushes and deflated footballs. Inside there were dirty nappies in the bath and toys in the kitchen