Palmer-Jones 05 - Sea Fever by Ann Cleeves

asked.
    Rose shook her head.
    “No,” Claire said. “We haven’t arrested him. He spent the night on the boat. We’ll be talking to him later today.”
    “He wouldn’t have killed Greg Franks!” Rose cried. “What reason would he have?”
    “Miss Pengelly,” the inspector asked gently, formally, “ is Louis Rosco the father of your child?”
    Rose nodded, and Claire Bingham was left with the satisfaction of knowledge but with no clear idea of what the information added up to.
    Jane Pym had slept heavily in a blank, unnatural stupour and woke slowly to a headache and a feeling of empty nausea. She thought for a moment she was in hospital waking up after an operation, and the reality came as a disappointment. It would have been wonderful to be in hospital in a state of sympathetic dependence.
    Roger was already awake and on the telephone. He seemed to spend the whole of that day talking to seabird freaks about the red-footed petrel. He seemed to have taken possession of the bird, as if no one else was competent to deal with it, and managed to imply that he had found it and first realised its significance. When Jane emerged at last from the bedroom into the living room, he was talking in dreadful French to a professor who worked in the natural history museum in Paris. How he tracked down the home number of a Frenchman on a Sunday in August she never discovered. The arrival of the policewoman and the summons to the cool dining room to answer questions came almost as a relief. More than anything she would have preferred to be at work. If that was impossible, when she was called into the dining room, she was glad at least to escape Roger’s gloating descriptions, the pseudoscientific jargon of bird identification, the strictures to secrecy. If Roger mentioned Greg Franks’ death at all in these interminable phone calls, it was an inconvenience which prevented his carrying out proper research and put him at the mercy of others. She found the performance sickening.
    Claire Bingham considered Jane Pym with suspicion. She did not, like some of her colleagues, think all probation officers were seditious and revolutionary, but she was wary of them. They were usually unreliable and unpredictable. They seemed to work alone, with no authoritative superior. And then there was, between the women, an element of competition. They stared at each other across the polished wooden table, each almost a mirror image of the other, angular, intense, frowning. Both women were used to conducting interviews. They knew the rules of the game. Neither would want to lose face.
    “Why did you decide to come to Cornwall this weekend?” Claire asked.
    “My husband had booked through Rob’s company to go on the Jessie Ellen and to stay here for a few days afterwards. I decided to come with him.”
    “Do you usually accompany your husband on his bird-watching expeditions?”
    “Not usually.” She tried halfheartedly to explain. A degree of confession was expected in an interview like this. She was prepared to play the role for the inspector. “Look,” she said. “Our marriage has been a bit shaky lately. Perhaps we both expect too much of each other. I wanted to make an effort. Birdwatching means so much to him. I wanted to show him I could try to share it.” She paused. “I wish now, of course, that I had never come.”
    “How well did you know Greg Franks?” the inspector asked.
    “Not at all,” Jane Pym said, and then perhaps her interviewer’s instinct, her sense that she might have been tricked, made her continue: “At least I think I may have met him, but I can’t remember exactly where.”
    “On the Jessie Ellen you accused him of having been on probation,” Claire said.
    “It wasn’t an accusation,” Jane said. “ I just had an idea that I’d met him professionally.”
    “Surely if he’d been on probation to you, you would have remembered him.”
    “Of course, though I’ve had a lot of clients over the years. But