A Pitying of Doves

by Steve Burrows

  “Well, this could hardly be more awkward, could it?” said Lindy brightly. She had a way of confronting difficult situations by accelerating into them with as much force as possible, hoping, perhaps, that they might just disintegrate on impact. It was such a wonderfully optimistic approach to life’s problems that it never failed to make Jejeune’s heart glow a little.

  “I do hope you parted on good terms at least,” said Lindy, passing around plates and napkins. She seemed determined to underline the fact that this situation was complete happenstance, and had no intention of letting it ruin a perfectly good dinner party.

  “I believe we did,” said Eric. He turned to Pritchard. “I think we both simply decided that a life of desperate, unrelieved loneliness was better than seeing each other anymore.”

  Pritchard’s laugh was a beautiful, musical thing, and she accompanied it with a playful toss of her hair. The tension gone, an air of grateful relaxation settled over the room. A bell dinged somewhere behind a closed door and Lindy got up to attend to something in the oven. When she returned, the two men were hovering on either side of Pritchard, peering at something on her iPhone. It was the earlier bird sculpture, now fully painted.

  “Still no?” she said to Jejeune.

  He shook his head. “Not with those cinnamon wing linings.”

  “A clue, then. Think Canada.”

  “The national bird?” ventured Eric.

  Jejeune shook his head. “Canada doesn’t have one. We have provincial birds. For Ontario, it’s the Common Loon.”

  Lindy held up a hand. “I’m saying nothing.”

  “It’s called a Great Northern Diver over here,” Pritchard reminded him. “I can’t always understand why they change the names of some birds from one place to another, but with that one, at least, I can see their reasoning.”

  Dom did the honours once more with the wine bottle. As he leaned over to pour, Lindy saw Carrie Pritchard do that ear-curl thing with her hair. Carrie the bird sculptor, thought Lindy, dedicated to conservation, conversant in birding matters. Dom’s identikit woman. Another bell from the kitchen stopped her pursuing the thoughts any farther.

  Lindy returned this time with a platter of potted Cromer crab with caper sauce, served on a bed of samphire. Lindy’s embrace of all things Norfolk included the cuisine, and she rarely missed a chance to trot out an authentic Norfolk recipe when they were entertaining. However, past experiments hadn’t always worked out exactly as planned, and while this dish at least looked palatable, Domenic would still approach it with a certain amount of caution.

  Pritchard got the conversation ball rolling by quizzing Domenic on his latest sighting. If that was what you could call it. “What is this I hear about a possible Baillon’s Crake out in Carter’s Marsh? A record, I note, you have not reported to the rare bird hotline.”

  “There was a suspected double murderer in the area,” said Jejeune simply. “Encouraging birders to come out there didn’t seem the most responsible course of action.”

  “Oh, Dom, I think you should at least have invited Carrie.” Lindy at her most mischievous could assume an expression of such wide-eyed innocence that only those who had seen it before could detect the undercurrents. Carrie Pritchard didn’t know Lindy very well, but from the way Eric lowered his eyes and smiled slightly into his wine, Jejeune suspected that Lindy’s editor had seen her act before — likely many times.

  “So you didn’t mention it to any of the local birders at all?” pressed Pritchard.

  Jejeune looked guilty. “I emailed Quentin Senior.”

  Carrie made a face. “And what did Quentin say? That he would abandon his birding tour group in the middle of the Steppes and hop on the first plane home?”

  “He asked if I had ever heard a Marsh Frog.”

  “And?” Carrie Pritchard scrutinized Jejeune’s face intently.

  “It wasn’t a Marsh Frog,” he said simply. “He also pointed out that Baillon’s Crakes normally call at night. It was daylight, early morning, when I heard this one, but it was quite foggy and overcast.”

  Carrie Pritchard considered Jejeune’s account in silence. “You should at least submit a report,” she said finally. “Now that access to Carter’s Marsh is open again, it would be up to others if they wanted to check it out, but I think at least they should have the option.”

  Jejeune’s agreement was so nonchalant it caused Lindy to cast him a glance. From what she was hearing, this Baillon’s Crake was potentially a very rare find, and yet he didn’t seem overly bothered about having it recorded. But Domenic could be like this about his birding at times. Just before they moved up here, he had been part of a group of a dozen or so birders who had seen a bird tentatively identified as the U.K.’s first wild Azure-winged Magpie. By all accounts, it was an astonishing record; one of which he should have been extremely proud, but she doubted if he had even mentioned it to the birders out here. He seemed almost embarrassed by it, as if he felt that he hadn’t really earned the sighting, merely being present when other, better birders had found it. The irony was, of course, that as someone who was appearing on the news almost nightly at the time, giving Britain updates on the case involving the Home Secretary’s daughter, Domenic’s word had lent particular credence to the claim, which was still in the process of being verified by the British Birds Rarities Committee. And now, here he was again, nonchalantly shrugging off a record of a Baillon’s Crake. Perhaps Quentin Senior had shaken his confidence in his identification, after all, or perhaps the previous year’s Ivory Gull rejection had left a tang of distrust of the local Rare Birds Committee, of which the scrupulous Carrie Pritchard was once the secretary.

  “Interesting lot, birders,” said Eric. “A couple of my close friends in Hong Kong were extremely keen. I never really saw the appeal myself, but they were always threatening to take me out and show me the error of my ways. I sometimes regret that I never took them up on their offer. Any pursuit that can arouse that kind of enthusiasm is clearly worth a closer look.”

  That comment reflected so much about Eric, thought Lindy. Regardless of whether he had any interest in birding himself, he still wanted to understand what it was about it that others found so compelling. It was this kind of curiosity about life, this embrace of human enthusiasm in all its many forms, which had first attracted Lindy to work for him, despite many other offers. It was a decision that she never regretted, even if the day-to-day machinations of life at the magazine could sometimes drive her mad.

  “So, Eric,” said Lindy, with an energy that suggested she was prepared to shift the conversation on from birding with a front-end loader if necessary, “I take it you haven’t been man enough to admit your mistake to them yet?” Both Pritchard and Jejeune turned quizzical looks on Eric.

  “I allowed someone to use the word overexaggerate in a piece this week,” he said simply.

  “What’s wrong with overexaggerate?” asked Pritchard.

  “It’s redundancy,” said Lindy bluntly. “Exaggerate about covers it, don’t you think? Did you ever hear of anyone underexaggerating?”

  “Redundancies have their place,” said Eric reasonably. “Look at Proust. Remembrances of Things Past. It could hardly have been Remembrances of Things in the Future, could it? But I think you’d agree Remembrances of Things hardly has the same ring to it.”

  “It’s called logomachy, isn’t it?” said Domenic, in an apparent effort to remind the others that they weren’t the only ones who had taken some English courses at university. “A dispute over words.”

  “Never heard of it.” Lindy took a flamboyant swig of her wine. “Are you sure that’s a real word?”

  “Cited by none other than Samuel Johnson, in his dictionary,” affirmed Jejeune.

  “This would be the same Samuel Johnson who claimed a tarantula bite could be cured by music, then? Not to mention his surreal definition of the boramez: a vegetable lamb?” Lindy looked around at the others. “God knows what they must have been putting in the ale at t
he Cheshire Cheese the day he came up with that one.”

  “Wasn’t it Johnson who defined a penguin as a fruit, too?” asked Eric.

  Pritchard nodded. “I believe he also thought swallows hibernated in the mud in winter,” she said, piling on good-naturedly. “I’m not sure he’s an entirely reliable source, Domenic.”

  Jejeune gave them all a look that suggested he had slipped his learning into a mental box labelled SELF: ITEMS FOR THE FUTURE HUMILIATION OF, and firmly closed the lid.

  “Great word, though, regardless,” said Eric, belatedly coming to Jejeune’s rescue. He turned to Lindy. “You’ll certainly be hearing it at the office from now on. After all, logomachy is a lot more polite than any of the other words I can think of to describe our editorial meetings.”

  As the meal drew to an end, Pritchard began to gather the empty plates. “I’ll give you a hand washing them if you like,” she said to Lindy. “We can do them the old fashioned way, at the sink, so you don’t have to empty the dishwasher in the morning.”

  “Oh, surely that’s not necessary,” said Jejeune with an enthusiasm that caused Lindy to cast him a glance. “I can give Lindy a hand with that later on.” But even if Domenic seemed unnaturally keen to spare Ms. Pritchard’s delicate artist’s hands from the ravages of dishwashing soap, Lindy’s past experiences told her that such help from him rarely materialized. One call from the station and Domenic would be gone, leaving all his good intentions in the sink alongside the pile of dirty dishes.

  “If you insist, Carrie,” said Lindy. “You two go off and do your male bonding thing, and we’ll discuss all the ways we could improve men if only they would listen to us.”

  Jejeune and Eric rose and carried their wine glasses outside. She watched them go; two men so much alike in their layers of complexity and their dark corners. There weren’t many men around with such qualities. David Nyce was another, from what she had heard, which made Carrie Pritchard somewhat of a collector of men like this. “Let’s get to those dishes, Carrie,” she said briskly.

  The men stood on the porch, side by side, not speaking. A single pool of light from the kitchen window fell at their feet, but in front of them stretched only the vast canvas of the sky, black and grey, with ragged clouds scudding on the winds, as if they had been dragged across the night to polish the twinkling constellations beyond. Jejeune closed his eyes for a moment and felt the salty tang of sea air on his face, carried in by the night breeze.

  Eric lit a cigarette and took a long drag, savouring it as if it was something he had been waiting a long time to do. “I thought our girl acquitted herself pretty well tonight. Carrie can be a pretty formidable female presence in a room, but Lindy certainly held her own in there.”

  Dom hadn’t realized Lindy had become shared property, but he took Eric’s comment in the spirit it was intended. For his own part, he had seen a couple of stutter steps, one or two out-of-place comments from Lindy, who normally hit her social marks with unerring accuracy. He could think of no reason why Carrie Pritchard’s presence should have made her uneasy; himself, yes, but not Lindy.

  Eric took another long, luxuriating pull on his cigarette. “I suppose I really should give these up,” he said, holding the cigarette in front of him and staring at the tip, glowing red in the darkness. “One of our journalists has just done a story on the cigarette industry in the U.S. Did you know cigarettes cause about one death per million smoked? At about one cent in profit for every cigarette sold, that fixes the value of a human life to a cigarette maker at a rather neat figure of ten thousand dollars.”

  Jejeune held up his wine glass, allowing the moonlight to filter through it in a liquid glow. “I’m sure alcohol has a terrifying kill ratio, too, if one bothered to analyze the stats.”

  “Yes, somehow not quite so quantifiable though, is it?” Eric laughed and shook his head. “Makes me wonder sometimes about the world we live in, where the value of a human life can be fixed so precisely on a balance sheet. Still, I suppose you come across people all the time in your job who place an even more dubious value on human life.”

  Jejeune smiled to acknowledge the comment, but said nothing. He turned to watch the two women through the kitchen window. They were standing side-by-side at the sink, Lindy washing and Carrie thoroughly drying as Lindy handed each item to her. They chatted easily, unaware of Domenic’s gaze — at them, at the counter, at the dishes and glasses piling up on it, each one clean, polished, and without a single fingerprint on it.

  28

  Shepherd stalked out to the parking lot with a short leather jacket on, heels clicking on the cobbled surface. She was seething; her complexion still flushed with a mix of anger and humiliation, her jaw muscles tweaked with vexation.

  “It’s not just one thing, you understand, Colleen. It’s the gradual accumulation; the injuries to your constable, the involvement with Hillier, this business with the canine unit.”

  Peter Albrecht, the newest in a long line of assistant chief constables she had dealt with, had spread ample hands before him on her desk and studied them instead of looking her in the eye. He was a career desk jockey; more used to conducting his business over chilled Chablis and starched white tablecloths in refined clubs. The kind of copper who wouldn’t know a piece of hard evidence if it came up and kicked him in his bony backside.

  “I’m sure I don’t need to articulate to you what the concerns are. Or where they are coming from. But you are obviously going to be held accountable for the actions of your staff.”

  The fact that he had come down here, to her office, was a sign of some kind of concession in the power pyramid that was the North Norfolk Constabulary these days, she supposed. But it was no compensation for the message he brought with him. He had looked up, making eye contact finally. “We wouldn’t want to lose you, Colleen.” He had actually said that, the lanky, feckless cretin. However, the very fact that he had mentioned it at all was an acknowledgement that they were prepared to do exactly that, if this case was not resolved with the speed and, more particularly, the result they desired.

  Jejeune had followed Shepherd outside after she had crooked a finger at him in her march past his office, and he was standing expectantly now, looking at her over the top of Nyce’s green Jag.

  “In the car, Domenic. We’re going for a ride.”

  “In this? It’s material evidence?”

  “They only want a scraping of the paint, for God’s sake,” said Shepherd irritably. “Apparently Norwich Central can’t get a transport unit up here until tomorrow, so I said we would save them a trip and take the Jag down there to them. Jump in. We can talk on the way.”

  Jejeune blanched. He had experienced numerous trips with DCS Shepherd behind the wheel, and they had been interesting enough without her being so obviously upset. He had secured his seat belt before she rounded the sleek green front of the vehicle and slid behind the wheel.

  “Still, chain of evidence and everything,” said Jejeune uncertainly. “I’m not sure the CPS will be too happy.”

  Shepherd flipped on her sunglasses, grabbed the wheel, and turned her head to face him. “Well, they can just bugger off then, can’t they?”

  She pressed the starter and the engine leaped to life with a throaty roar. There was a slight lurch as she slipped the clutch and sped out of the parking lot into Saltmarsh’s late-morning traffic.

  “We’ll take the scenic route, blow the cobwebs away. A high-performance job like this shouldn’t be sitting around for as long as it has been.”

  Although Jejeune was a more than competent driver himself, he had never quite come to terms with being a passenger on the left-hand side of the road. At least when Lindy was driving, though, he had the chance to scan the hedgerows and fields for birds. With the DCS behind the wheel, the north Norfolk countryside was flashing by in such a blur he would have been hard pressed to spot a racing pigeon.

  “So Domenic, do we need to talk about why you refused the canine unit?” She was giving her drivin
g the utmost attention, eyes locked on the road ahead, arms extended in speed control mode. “It didn’t come from Danny Maik, by the way, in case you were wondering.”

  Jejeune wasn’t, but he could not help admiring the way that even in her annoyance she was careful to preserve the harmonious relationships of her team, so carefully assembled under her personal direction.

  “I couldn’t take the risk that the birds would be harmed.”

  It was enough to get Shepherd to fire a sidelong glance at him. “You don’t think there’s just the slightest chance that your hobby is compromising your professionalism?”

  Not my hobby, he thought. Other things, maybe, but not that.

  “Not the Baillon’s Crake,” he said, “the doves. They are the only connection between everybody in this case — Phoebe Hunter, Santos, Waters, Obregón … even Maggie Wylde. The Socorro Doves are the magnets that draw everyone together. If they were killed by the dogs, or escaped in the chase, all those connections would disappear. Besides, Waters was long gone. He wasn’t about to hang around to give Nyce a second chance.”

  Shepherd wondered whether the last part sounded just a little bit like someone trying to convince himself of something. “I see,” she said after a long pause, giving the distinct impression that, in this case, seeing wasn’t necessarily believing. “Then let’s leave that aside for the moment. Anything come of your conversation with the Faculty Conduct Chair? Presumably you were waiting for just the right moment to tell me you had gone to see him.”

  Shepherd afforded herself another quick glance over at Jejeune, but the DCI could see only his own reflection in her dark glasses.

  “He was very careful not to make any accusations,” said Jejeune, “but the word plagiarism did come up. Apparently, the early papers are much more sophisticated than Nyce’s later ones, which is a pretty clear flag. I mean, presumably nobody gets less intelligent the longer they spend in an academic institution.”