Chapter Fifteen

The next day they all sat on the lawn behind Sally Johnson’s cottage. Sally was supposed to be resting and lay back on an ancient, precarious deckchair. The bruises on her neck were starting to show, but she did not appear to be ill or upset.

Barnaby sat on her knee. He was very quiet and held her tight. That night he had not slept. He was sucking his thumb.

The others were sprawled on the grass. Rob was lying on his back in his usual pose of total relaxation. Tina sat with her hands around her knees. She looked tense, tired, but she had been ringing early that morning with George’s friend. Peter sat at Sally’s feet, not touching her, not even looking at her very often. George and Molly were a little apart from the rest.

There was a sense of sadness, of shock, but also of excited curiosity. It reminded George Palmer-Jones of a funeral. The relatives are mourning the loss of a person they knew well, but are eager to hear the contents of the will.

Only Molly seemed utterly depressed, empty. She had gone to the police station with Adam and had been up for most of the night. It was she who spoke first, breaking through the conversation about Tina’s ringing expedition.

“You mustn’t hate him,” she said. “It wasn’t Adam. Not the Adam we all knew. He heard voices. They told him to kill Tom and try to kill Sally.”

There, was a pause. Molly was remembering the night in the police station.

“Tell us all about it, George,” Sally said gently. “ I don’t understand what happened. Why should he have wanted to kill Tom? Tom was always kind to Adam. They didn’t even know each other very well.”

The others were relieved. No one had wanted to bring up the subject for fear of distressing Sally, but they had all wanted to know. They all wanted to talk about it.

“Of course he’s mad,” George said. “ Whatever long words Molly may use to describe him, he’s mad. That’s why I took so long to realize what had happened. I was looking for a real motive, a strong motive, but there wasn’t one.

“Adam killed Tom because he didn’t like him. Sally told me, when we first met, that Tom was patronizing towards the younger birdwatchers and that they resented it, but I was shamefully obtuse and I didn’t follow it up. I always knew that Adam was disturbed—he was always too controlled and calm—and I knew that he was very frightened, but I thought, as you know, that he was frightened of someone else.

“All Tom’s birdwatching acquaintances tried to be kind about Tom, everyone said how generous and likeable he was. It was only when I interviewed Dennis Shawcroft, one of the chefs at the White Lodge, that I had an objective impression. Then I realized how much someone as disturbed and insecure as Adam would be affected by his attitude. It took me all that time to see that the motive might have been one of pure dislike, fuelled by Tom’s insensitivity.