A Pitying of Doves (21 page)

D
anny
Maik stood next to Guy Trueman at the window of his hotel room, looking down into the square below. A small group of people were making their way across the pavement, dressed in mottled greens and browns, carrying binoculars and scopes. Probably headed out to Titchwell, Maik guessed, where a report of something called a Black-winged Pratincole had sent Jejeune haring off earlier that morning.

“Tell me something,” said Trueman, watching the procession, “these birders, this business with the camo gear? They're not expecting the birds to start opening fire on them, are they?”

“Probably more concerned with being surrounded on all sides from elevated positions, I imagine.”

“Ah, well, if they're going to let the birds gain a tactical advantage like that, all the camo gear in the world isn't going to help them, is it?”

The levity over, Trueman turned to Maik in earnest. “So, what do you want, Danny? You made it sound important.”

“Did I? Need to clear up a couple of things, that's all.” Trueman noticed that Danny hadn't exactly denied it was important. “I never did ask you,” said Danny, “why the Mexicans?”

Trueman shrugged. “You know how it is in our business. Somebody knows somebody. I saw a bit of action in Central America. Brushed up on my Spanish. Made a couple of contacts.”

He turned from the window and took a seat on the room's only chair. Maik had the choice of the bed or to remain standing. He chose the latter. “A diplomat's military records are sealed, but I understand Santos was in the Mexican army for a time,” said Maik conversationally. “I wonder if he ever saw any action in Central America.”

Trueman eyed him cautiously. “He never struck me as the type. Lots of people do military service, Danny, but as you and I know, not all of them turn out to be combat material. He was more the sort to go home and record his feelings in a journal, if you ask me.”

Maik nodded and noted something down in his book. “The problem is,” Jejeune had said, “everything we know about Santos has come through the Mexican Consulate. What we really need is some independent information, someone who knew Santos and could offer another perspective.”

Another perspective
. One that might explain why he was trying to steal doves from the sanctuary that night. Nobody could talk about Santos as a potential suspect; that much had been made clear in the directive that had come down from on high. But the chief constable's office couldn't prevent their DCIs from thinking things, much as they would like to. And if Domenic Jejeune wasn't in the habit of thinking out loud very much, well, then it made those moments when he did so all that more noticeable. Maik had fancied he had heard a clock ticking in the background somewhere during the pregnant pause that had followed.

“Okay,” he had agreed finally. “No guarantees, but I'll ask him.”

Back in the present, Trueman was making a point. “Listen, Danny,” he said, “this Santos was everything they're saying he was — loyal, faithful, honest. No criminal record, not even a breath of scandal or suspicion about him.” He looked at Maik frankly. “You can tell your DCI he's barking up the wrong tree. That kid had nothing to do with any of this.”

It occurred to Maik that it would be easier to offer such an emphatic denial if you knew who
did
have something to do with it. But Danny didn't feel like pushing it just now, especially with the other tricky ground he still had to cover with his ex-CO.

”It's a long drive up from London, especially in that traffic, that time of night. Tiring. You must have slept like a baby after you got here.”

Trueman looked puzzled. “Awake at oh six hundred, as usual.” A momentary pause passed between the two men, like the space between heartbeats. “Am I a suspect, Danny? In Jordan Waters's death?”

“I just need to know where you were that morning. You arrive in Saltmarsh, and somebody who took out one of yours dies soon after. You know I've never been one for coincidences.” Whether Trueman realized it or not, it was a measure of Maik's esteem for the man that he had furnished even this much of an explanation for his line of questioning.

Trueman gave a sigh, trying for amusement and not quite making it. “On the morning Jordan Waters died, I was in this very room, watching the picturesque seaside village of Saltmarsh come to life. Pretty sight, too, dawn breaking over the boats in the harbour, gulls flying about all over the place, the early risers setting out their stalls.”

“And after?” Maik was letting the act of writing notes in his book take up all of his attention.

“After? Bloody hell, Danny! I made myself a coffee on that machine there, and settled in to read the paper until I could hear sounds of movement next door.” Trueman nodded toward the wall. “Hidalgo's an early riser too, and he likes to get a start on the day as soon as his feet hit the floor.”

Danny was still making his meticulous notes, staring down at his page. He said nothing. “As it happened,” said Trueman peevishly, “there was an early-morning call; some diplomatic crisis brewing back at the consulate. As soon as the chauffeur had Hidalgo in the car, and they were safely on their way, I went downstairs to have breakfast. I suppose I could have ordered room service, but I wanted to make sure I had an alibi in case my old sergeant came by to ask me if I had murdered anybody that morning.” The angry smile did nothing to disguise the bitterness in his voice.

Maik finished writing and looked up from his notebook. He treated Trueman to an entry from his slender repertoire of expressions, but it was so enigmatic that as far as the other man was concerned it might have been regret, contempt, or just about anything in between. Nevertheless, when Trueman spoke again, some of the terseness had gone from his voice.

“If that was your idea of role play, I can tell you, the job's already yours,” he said. His tone softened further still. “That's why I need you, Danny. I know you won't go missing in action when the dirty work needs to be done. You won't be afraid to ask the hard questions.” He looked at Maik steadily. “Let's face it, all this …” he spread his hands; an expansive gesture that encompassed the room, Saltmarsh, perhaps even Maik's life itself, “… playing second fiddle to the force's pin-up boy, while your DCS flits around putting up the bunting in case the TV cameras show up, it's not really your scene, is it, Danny? You need something to stretch you, put you at the pointy end of the action every now and then.”

Danny seemed to find a spot on the wall behind Trueman's shoulder on which to rest his gaze.
The trouble is,
he thought,
the more I get stretched these days, the harder I'm finding it to rebound to my original shape.

“I thought you liked DCS Shepherd.”

“I do, Danny, I do. She's a smart woman with impeccable taste in men, and she's good company. And her ambition has got nothing to do with me, as long as it stays separate from our relationship.”

“Is she the reason you're still here?”

“What's that look for? It's just a couple of unattached people having a bit of fun. It's what adults do. Women like Colleen Shepherd, or that nice Constable Salter, they're what we need, Danny, battered old bastards like us. Somebody who will take us for what we are, and be okay with it. Women who understand what we have done, the baggage we carry. Somebody to nurse us through our dark nights, when the memories come, eh? You should try letting your own guard down a little some time. You'd be surprised what can happen.”

A thought seemed to be playing behind Danny Maik's eyes, but if Trueman was waiting for the sergeant to give voice to it, he was disappointed.

Trueman looked at Maik seriously. “Hidalgo wasn't down here to sample the delights of a day on the beach at Cromer, Danny. He was here to see the assistant chief constable. If that boy of yours keeps trying to implicate Santos in his bird cage murders, sooner or later the guano is going to hit the fan.”

“If there is nothing to it, Jejeune will let it drop. This DCI is not the kind of bloke to wrap it up and put a bow on it just to get a pat on the back from the Home Office.”

“Whether he's right or he's wrong, all I'm saying is, if your boss keeps trying to tie this to the Mexicans, somebody's going to rock his world. Hard. No matter how much juice he thinks he has in Whitehall, it's nothing compared to the amount of pressure a foreign country can bring to bear on the British Government. We both know what happens to people who play with hand grenades, Danny, and I'm telling you, you don't want to be anywhere in the blast radius when this one goes off. There's going to be a lot of casualties. Come with me, into private security; leave them to sort it out — Hidalgo, Shepherd, Hillier.”

“And Jejeune?”

“He's a big boy. There's nothing you can do to stop this. You're a brave soldier and a loyal one. One of the best I ever served with. But you were smart, too. You always knew when the time had come to stop defending a lost cause and get out and save your own arse. It's why you're still here and so many of those other poor buggers we served with aren't. Listen to me, Danny, not as your ex-CO but as a comrade in arms. You need to get out while you still can.”

A faint breeze from outside stirred the curtain beside the open window. Somewhere a car horn sounded, and from far away a gull issued a haunting plea for Danny to listen to Trueman's advice. Maik tucked his notebook in his pocket, and with one final enigmatic glance at his former commanding officer, he opened the door and left.

“Y
ou
're a hard man to find, Dr. Nyce,” said Danny Maik.

“That's generally the idea of a retreat,” said Nyce. His tone was testy, but nowhere near as self-assured as it had been in the past. The sergeant's considerable frame filled the doorway of the small cottage, and it took a moment before Nyce realized the sergeant had not come alone. “Well, I suppose you'd better come in, since you're here.” He stepped aside and allowed Maik and Jejeune to duck in through the low opening.

The cottage was small, even by the parsimonious standards of north Norfolk accommodations. It seemed to consist of two rooms only — a cramped bedroom tucked away at the back, and this one, a combination living room and kitchen. A stone fireplace was flanked by a pair of dilapidated armchairs with a low coffee table between. One of the two windows in the front wall sat above a simple wooden desk and chair, while farther along the wall the other window looked down onto a steel sink with a single tap. A row of low wooden shelves ran all around the walls, many of them showing gaps where their contents, books and journals, had once been. These now sat in untidy piles on the coffee table, the desk, the floor. It looked like some ragged 3-D plan of a city Nyce was envisioning for the future. Items of clothing lay strewn around the room, fighting for surface space with mugs half-f of cold tea. Nyce himself looked haggard, his eyes red-rimmed from lack of sleep, his cheeks covered with the unchecked growth of a few days' beard. All indications were that the carefully ordered world of dashing David Nyce was casually falling apart at the seams.

“So how come you chose to hide out here?” asked Maik pleasantly. “All that book learnin' getting too much for you?” Jejeune could see that Maik sensed a vulnerability in Nyce here, one that might be fruitfully exploited by a little needling, perhaps. Unless, of course, Maik was just enjoying himself.

“I'm not hiding. Merely treating myself to a bit of hermitage. There is a difference.
Hiding
carries connotations of guilt.”

Jejeune looked around the room. He could see no telephone, no computer, no television. A pair of propane lamps stood on the desk, and there were a few candles placed strategically around the room. He crossed to the small sink in the corner and turned on the single tap. Running water, just. Cold, but it meant that somebody could live here for a few days if they chose to. Jejeune bent to peer out of the window above the sink. A long, unbroken vista of flat farmland stretched away from the cottage. On their way here they had passed a small heath clad in gorse and low shrubbery. Along with the cliffs on the far side of the cottage, the area would provide habitat for a wide diversity of bird species, especially here in north Norfolk. He said as much to Nyce now, and the other man nodded.

“I used to come here when I was a birder, spend a couple of days up here at a time, if I could get away with it. I had my route all planned out, followed it religiously, same one, twice a day. Saw all manner of species.” He paused suddenly and gazed into the middle distance, as if trying to peer back into a time that had long since disappeared.

“How do you mean, when you were a birder?” asked Maik. “That licence plate —
AVES
— I thought …”

“I am an ornithologist now, Sergeant. I study birds only in the context of conservation. They are my subjects. Your DCI will understand the difference. I'm afraid for me the enjoyment of the pastime has long since disappeared. In fact, I suppose that's true of most things. Sad to say, but there you are.”

He took a seat on the couch, leaving the men to stand awkwardly where they chose.

Jejeune began to wander about the room. He dragged his hands casually along the rough whitewashed interior of the walls. “Stone walls do not a prison make,” Oscar Wilde had written of his incarceration in Reading Gaol. But according to Wilde, in order to take them for an hermitage, one needed a mind innocent and quiet. Jejeune suspected Nyce's mind was a very long way from either.

“The bicycle against the wall outside, you use that to go to the shops, I take it,” said Jejeune.

Nyce's failure to respond didn't seem to trouble the inspector and he lapsed into a silence of his own again. One of the many things that bothered Maik about this case was that most of the time he didn't know exactly where he stood. In the past, the sergeant and his DCI had settled into a nice routine. He would do the heavy lifting early on, while Jejeune just pottered around the room, listening. Then, at some point, when he had covered the standard questions, Jejeune would step in and take things off in the direction he actually wanted them to go. Maik didn't always like it, but at least he usually knew where he was. But with this case, Jejeune was in and out like a fiddler's elbow, questioning one minute, the next slipping off into a thoughtful silence, then back into the fray again. It was the birding angle that was doing it, no doubt. But it was still disconcerting. In Maik's experience, the most productive interviews happened when the police officers, at least, knew what was supposed to be going on.

“We were wondering how your car might have come to be stolen,” said Maik conversationally. “Those new Jags have pretty sophisticated alarm systems, or so I'm led to believe.”

“It wasn't armed, I'm afraid,” said Nyce meekly.

“You didn't leave the keys in it, as well, by any chance?” Maik had probably just about managed to keep the sarcasm at bay, but Nyce picked up on the tenor of the question anyway.

“Cars
can
be hot-wired, you know,” he said tersely. “Happens all the time, apparently. The result of insufficient police vigilance, I suppose.”

“Not these new ones. Not without expertise far beyond the scope of a few teenage joyriders out here in Saltmarsh, anyway.”

“Jordan Waters is dead,” said Jejeune with an abruptness that brought everything else to a stop. He was standing on the far side of the room, near the sink, but he was looking directly at Nyce as he spoke, watching for a reaction.

Nyce spent a long time staring at his hands, not speaking. “Will the charge be murder?” he asked finally. His voice was small and distant.

Both Jejeune and Maik fixed him with a stare. “We're still trying to establish exactly what happened, but we believe it was murder,” said Jejeune carefully.

The two detectives continued to stare expectantly at Nyce, but he didn't look up from his hands. Although he appeared deeply troubled by the news, he said nothing. He tented his elbows on his knees and rubbed his forehead with his hands. When he did finally look up, for the most fleeting of moments, both Maik and Jejeune had the impression he was going to confess. But Nyce seemed to gather himself at the last moment. “He killed Phoebe.”

Was there something behind Nyce's words, some attempt at justification? Or was it just an academic, clarifying the facts so he could come to terms with the situation?

“Our investigations are proceeding on that basis,” said Jejeune carefully, “but until we know what happened at the sanctuary that night …”

“Oh, he killed her,” said Nyce, his voice shaking with emotion. “Whether you can prove he was there that night or not, whether you have evidence that it was him who pushed her onto the branch, Jordan Waters killed her. And for what? His greed and his tawdry, money-grabbing little schemes.”

Tears began to roll gently down Nyce's cheeks and he did nothing to check them. “That poor child. All she wanted to do was to make the world safe for her birds. But he couldn't let her do that, he had to destroy her, take away everything with his criminal filth. He deserved to die.”

“No,” said Jejeune quietly, “he didn't.”

“It was justice. Jordan Waters killed Phoebe, and for that he paid with his own life.”

They were close now, Maik could feel it; a few more seconds. Let him talk and it would all be over. And yet, here it was again, this strangely connected disconnect between Nyce and Phoebe Hunter. It was as if something was duelling with his sense of guilt, trying to convince him that he had been justified in his actions. But Nyce's reaction lacked the palpable viciousness, the outrage, that might lead to an act of vengeance. Whatever the reason David Nyce had hunted down Jordan Waters and killed him, it wasn't to avenge Phoebe Hunter's death. Maik was convinced of it.

Nyce rubbed his eye sockets angrily with the heels of his hands, leaving dark smudges around his eyes.

“Forgive me,” he said, recovering himself a little. “Embarrassing really. Look, as you can see, I've got a lot of work, so if you have no further questions, I'd rather like to be left alone now to get on with it.”

Despite himself, Maik almost felt sorry for Nyce, here in his solitary existence, no one to award his full marks to, no one to bludgeon with his searing intellect. A solitary man on a lonely stage playing to his invisible audience. “If you're sure there's nothing else you'd like to tell us.”

“What? No, nothing that comes to mind.”

“Very well, then,” said Jejeune politely. “Please let us know if you plan to move from here, relocate back to town or anything like that.”

“Oh, I have no intention of leaving, Inspector. You may rest assured of that.”

O
utside the cottage, Maik and Jejeune stood shoulder to shoulder on the edge of the cliff. A gunmetal grey sea moved uneasily under a bank of low clouds. “Storm's coming,” said Maik. He let his eyes play over the sea. “We should bring him in. He's ready.”

Jejeune shook his head. “No, I don't think he is. Not yet.” There were other questions he could have asked in the cottage, questions of plagiarism and sexual misconduct, but in Nyce's current state of mind, denial was the only defence he could have mustered and he would have used it, constructing a fortress of angry indignation against the charges. Like Maik, Jejeune could sense there was something hidden, something that lay tantalizingly below the surface, like an object half-buried in the sand, just beyond the reach of their outstretched fingertips. It was this, this secret, this hidden truth, that was keeping Nyce from confessing. And until they could discover what it was, the detective doubted Nyce would be willing to admit to anything.

Below them, a Common Gull glided past, riding the air effortlessly. When Nyce was pursuing his boyhood birding here, it might have been a Fulmar. But time and the elements had crumbled the cliffs and taken away the strange, tube-nosed seabirds' nesting habitat. The Fulmars had moved on, and were rarely seen in these parts anymore.
That's what time does,
thought Jejeune
. It slowly erodes what used to be, until one day you look around and find there's no longer anything about your past life that remains.

The wind picked up, buffeting the two detectives. Maik was right. A storm was coming. It would produce excellent birding later, as the onshore winds drove the migrating flocks out of the skies and stacked them up along the estuaries and coastlines to wait out the worst of the weather. But for once, Jejeune wasn't too concerned about the birding forecast. He had other things on his mind. The two men turned away from the sea and headed toward the car in silence.