A Tiding of Magpies

by Steve Burrows

  At least this trip wasn’t the result of an outsized ego. Jones, to his credit, had no illusions about his own importance. He simply refused to sign off on anything until he had subjected every finding to a seemingly inexhaustible series of tests and verifications, to eliminate any possibility that he could be wrong. To get him to part with information any earlier was going to require somebody to come down and pry it from his grasp. For somebody, read Danny.

  The stairwell was well-lit, but Maik was still unprepared for the glare of ultra-bright fluorescence that flooded the lab as he entered. It seemed to bounce off the pristine steel surfaces like a pulse of energy. A shiny pink skull showed through Mansfield Jones’s wispy hair as he bent over a body on the examination table. Maik couldn’t be sure, but he thought he heard a quiet murmuring as the M.E. went about his work. If so, it ceased as soon as he became aware of the sergeant’s presence.

  Jones straightened as Danny approached, drawing himself to his full height, a good couple of inches taller than the sergeant. The height only exacerbated the cadaverously thin frame and added to the man’s overall sense of frailty. He offered Maik the sort of guarded welcome the sergeant had come to expect. “You’re feeling well yourself, Sergeant?”

  Not least among the things Maik dreaded about these visits was the M.E.’s solicitous inquiries into his well-being. Perhaps there was a need for Jones to connect to the living, but Maik still felt there was something vaguely unsettling about a forensic pathologist asking after your health. It didn’t help that Jones himself hardly looked to be in tip-top condition. His skin seemed to have a particularly sickly pallor. Perhaps it was just the relentless glare of the overhead lights, but it wasn’t the best sign when you were working in a morgue and you weren’t the healthiest-looking person in the room.

  “As well as can be expected, I think is the phrase, Doctor.” Maik regretted the words as soon as he said them. His comment opened the way for other, more pointed questions.

  “I’d heard you were prescribed a fairly strict diet after your health scare. I trust you’re still managing to stay on it.”

  Maik greeted the reference to his earlier heart condition with all the tolerance he could muster. “Doing what I can. The job doesn’t always make it easy. You know how it is, irregular hours and such.”

  Jones looked into Maik’s face, as if to read something in it. “Your health should be of paramount importance these days. A cavalier approach may well have been understandable as a younger man, but we experience great changes as we get older.”

  “Like becoming less tolerant of medical advice, for example?” asked Maik, as pleasantly as he could manage. Jones himself was a devoted vegetarian. The sergeant could understand how an M.E. might veer in that direction, after the things he must see during the course of any given day, but Maik had once been on a survival course that consisted of eating roots and leaves for a week. He didn’t know if Jones’s diet was actually going to extend his life much, but he was fairly sure it would make it seem like an eternity between meals.

  “At this stage, there’s really not very much I can tell you with any certainty, I’m afraid.”

  “Any information you could offer would be most welcome,” said Maik. “Even if we get height, build. It could all help to narrow the field for a potential match from missing persons.” With anyone else, such an explanation would have been unnecessary, but with Jones, Maik always felt strangely compelled to justify the reasoning behind even the most straightforward statements.

  “I’ve taken some of the bone measurements, but I’d prefer to complete them all before I make any calculations. One set of results so often informs the other, you see.”

  “I understand,” said Maik, more indulgently than he felt. “How about location? Do you have any indication of where the victim might have been shot?”

  “Indeed I do. At the base of the skull.”

  A sigh seemed the safest outlet for Maik’s frustration. For both of them. “The physical location, Doctor. SOCO have not recovered a casing from the pit, or any evidence that one was previously dug out of the soil. We don’t think the man was shot in the pit.”

  “Ah, my apologies. Your question, you see. Perhaps if you tried for a little more precision …” Maik’s expression seemed to hurry Jones on. “There was no evidence to suggest the victim was moved from another location. Are SOCO absolutely sure? Just because they didn’t find the casing doesn’t mean it’s not there. I’d remind you that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

  “Let’s call it a premise we’re working on.” Maik tried for another smile, but they seemed to be getting harder to come by.

  “I can confirm the two wounds are consistent with a rifle bullet,” offered Jones. The gentleness with which he turned the charred head to indicate the two sites seemed to Maik to go some way beyond simple concern for preserving the evidence. The M.E. noticed his expression. “I doubt it would be possible to do this job effectively if one wasn’t prepared to consider them as people, Sergeant.”

  Maik wondered what the man could have been murmuring to this person from which virtually all evidence of human existence had been stripped. Solace? Apology? Perhaps even a prayer? He realized there was a great deal about Mansfield Jones that he didn’t know. But now was not the time to begin that particular journey of discovery.

  “Calibre, by any chance?”

  “The wound matches a .22 subsonic hollow point, possibly around forty grains in weight.”

  Maik nodded thoughtfully. It was very light for a human target, though it would prove effective enough at close range. It meant it was still possible the weapon had been chosen specifically for the job. It might be an important point.

  “Two wounds,” confirmed Maik.

  “Through and through, I believe they call it where the DCI hails from. Though quite why it’s necessary to repeat the word, I’m not sure. Saying a bullet passed through a body is clear enough, surely. I don’t have much tolerance for redundancy,” said Jones redundantly.

  Maik regarded the M.E. carefully. He was struck by the loneliness of the man’s situation down here, where he squirrelled away gossip about other people’s modified diets and dwelt on redundancies. What a terrible wilderness he must exist in, thought Maik, surrounded by his uncertainties. What did you hold on to as your anchor? What could you trust?

  “And you’re sure,” Maik hesitated, “confident, shall we say, that cause of death was a single bullet to the back of the head?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “You said there was an entry wound and an exit wound,” said a calm voice that seemed to come from somewhere outside Maik’s body. “You’re saying you believe someone could survive a bullet passing through the skull like that?”

  “No. But I can’t say for certain that the wound was pre-mortem.”

  Maik stretched his neck from the confines of his collar, like a man developing a heat rash. “And why might anyone want to shoot a dead man in the back of the head, Doctor?”

  “Why indeed, Sergeant? It’s extremely unlikely, I’ll admit. But I couldn’t say categorically that it didn’t happen.”

  There was a long moment of silence as Maik digested this idea. “But you would be prepared to concede the victim was shot once in the back of the head, at some point.”

  “It’s the most plausible explanation for the wounds.”

  “The Brno CZ is a .22-calibre rifle. I don’t suppose …”

  “Without the shell casing, it is impossible to say definitively if the bullet came from that rifle.”

  Given that it looked like he might not be getting much more ballistics information from Jones, Maik considered what else he could remember about the Brno CZ. It was a rimfire rifle. Single load. Beyond that, nothing.

  “For a hollow point to make it all the way through like that, it would indicate the shooter was close, wouldn’t it?”

  “It could,” conceded Jones, dragging the last word out to emphasize the conditional nature
of his response.

  “Okay, thank you, Doctor. I think that’s all for now,” said Maik, extending a hand as he prepared to leave. “If you’ve been able to recover all you can of the serial number digits from the rifle, I’d be prepared to have a guess at the rest of them.”

  “No need. I treated the surface with an etching reagent. It’s known as ‘raising’ the number. All the digits became legible. I’ve already run the serial number against the gun registry database.” He handed Maik a sheet of paper. “The registered owner is one Jakub Kowalski. The address is local, as you can see.”

  “There’s a person of that name on the missing persons database,” offered Jones, since Maik suddenly appeared incapable of speech. Jones had come up with the name of the gun owner, and he’d still begun their conversation by informing Maik there really wasn’t very much he could tell him? Just what must constitute definitive information for this man hardly bore thinking about.

  “Jakub Kowalski,” Maik said finally. He looked down at the charred form on the table. “Is this him, do you think?”

  “Unfortunately, there’s no longer any way of telling whether this man ever even handled a firearm, let alone owned one. However, now that we have a name, it would be helpful to compare the victim’s dental work with Mr. Kowalski’s charts, if his dentist can provide them.”

  Helpful? For anybody else, it would decide the matter beyond question. And yet, for Dr. Mansfield Jones, perhaps it really would be only one more marker on his path towards some unattainable certainty.

  “I’ll see what I can find out,” said Maik. He felt he should offer something more, perhaps try to draw some connection between the work Jones did down here in his abstract, isolated world and the rest of the policing community. But he suspected his efforts would be misunderstood, at best, and possibly even be taken as patronizing. In the end, he decided there was little to be gained by trying to convince a man of the value of his work if he couldn’t see it for himself.

  “Well, if there’s nothing else, I’ll get back upstairs. I’ll make sure any information from the dentist is passed on to you as soon as we receive it.” And with that, and one final forced smile, Maik took his leave of Jones and went off to rejoin the world of the pseudo-living.

  6

  Perhaps it was the sunshine that gave DCS Colleen Shepherd’s office such a welcoming air as Jejeune entered. The golden light was flooding in through an east-facing window that looked out over a flat tract of farmland. The hedgerows along the boundaries of the fields were beginning to acquire a greyish haze that would soon explode into a full cloak of green. Only the faintest of breezes seemed to be moving them. The earth looked rich and fertile, ready to receive the first of the year’s plantings. Reminders of their rural setting were never far away for the officers of the Saltmarsh Division, and like many of them, Shepherd seemed to embrace the fact, eschewing window blinds so she could enjoy the full vista of the north Norfolk countryside whenever she chose.

  Shepherd’s demeanour held plenty of sunshine, too, and she offered her DCI a pleasant smile as he approached her desk, indicating with an open palm that he should take a seat. It was to be an amicable meeting, then. In the past, when relations between them had been less cordial, they had stood either side of this desk, facing each other like gladiators.

  “Eric tells me migration season is just about upon us. The time of year the birds come to you, for once.” Her partner’s growing obsession with birding was one of the few conversation topics they had been able to retreat to during their recent troubled times. Now, Shepherd seemed to be signalling that it would be a building block in the renewal of their relationship. “I take this to mean you’ll not be gallivanting off on any more foreign birding trips any time soon?”

  “Spring migration along the north Norfolk coast is about as good as it gets. I can’t imagine why a birder would want to be anywhere else.”

  She nodded. “If Eric’s staying local, too, perhaps this means I’ll actually get to see him now and again. So, this awful case at the construction site,” she said, initiating the abrupt shift of topic for which she was renowned. “We have a name, I understand — the registered gun owner.” She consulted her notes. “One Jakub Kowalski.”

  “It’s a Polish name.”

  “Well, that will save me checking with the Scottish police, then,” said Shepherd with heavy sarcasm. She had long ago come to realize that Jejeune’s occasional condescension was unintentional, but it was nonetheless irritating for all that. “The victim, we think?”

  “There is a missing person’s report on file, but we’re still waiting for confirmation. Or otherwise.”

  “Dr. Jones is being his usual contrary self, then?”

  Jejeune wanted to correct her. The word implied deliberate obstructiveness, whereas according to Maik, Jones was merely cautious — overly so, perhaps, but not with any malicious intent.

  “Your first stop will be to talk to the local Polish community, I suppose? They’ve quite a large presence in the area, what with all the agricultural labour out here for itinerant workers. I’d imagine they keep fairly close tabs on each other.”

  Jejeune hesitated slightly. “There’s a mother on record. She lives at the same address as the missing man.”

  Shepherd nodded thoughtfully. It was always the most difficult visit, the one advising a parent that a body was possibly their child. The despair mingled with the uncertainty, the grief with the hope, so that the information sat like an open wound, waiting for the kind of closure only certain knowledge could bring. Sometimes, it never came.

  “Sergeant Maik will be going with you?” Jejeune’s nod was all the assurance she needed that the visit would be handled as well as it possibly could. “Is there anything I should know about? He seemed out of sorts at the briefing. It’s not like him,” she said. “His nose is not out of joint because Lauren Salter has finally decided to take her sergeant’s exam, is it? To be honest, it’s about time, though for the life of me I can’t see why she’d feel the need to take a leave of absence to study for it. It’s not an unduly arduous test, is it Domenic? They don’t ask you to come up with ten positive points about your DCS, anything like that?”

  Jejeune forced a smile that suggested on his own list of the DCS’s talents, her wit might not come at the top. He shrugged. “I’m not sure he finds working with Dr. Jones all that easy.”

  “I can see his point. I sometimes wonder if there isn’t something else behind Jones’s reticence. Caution is all very well, but with the arsenal of forensic equipment at his disposal, I’d expect a little more than a series of singularly non-committal remarks.”

  “I think he’s just wary of issuing information before it’s been confirmed. He wants to establish what is known, and what is not known, as clearly as possible.” Jejeune both understood and appreciated an approach like this. Like Jones, he knew it is in those empty spaces, those silences between the facts, that the truth is to be found.

  He looked past Shepherd at the fields. On occasion he’d seen Curlews from this window. On one glorious late-autumn morning, he had seen a Pallid Harrier. He couldn’t remember what they had been discussing, but he had been sitting, so he presumed it must have been a friendly meeting. What he did remember was the bird’s long V-shaped wings and its curious flight pattern, bouncing skyward as if tugged by an invisible string. That, and the glorious deep-orange of its underparts, caught by the early morning sun as it banked to avoid the pursuit of a building of Rooks. He had resisted the urge to race from the room, but he had followed the bird’s flight across the fields with such intensity that Shepherd had simply abandoned her sentence and waited for him to return to her.

  The DCS shifted slightly in her chair, and the movement brought him back to the present. She picked up a sheet of paper that had been lying on her desk and pushed it across to him. “The Met would like to interview you about a past case.” She paused and looked at him. He would not need to be told which one. “It was inevitable it would co
me up, Domenic. Ray Hayes was released on an unsafe conviction, over questionable handling of evidence. You must have known they’d want to have a look at all the other cases that passed through the division around that time. There’s no suggestion they’ll be looking into your own conduct. They’re simply hoping you’ll be able to verify everything that went on at the time, as documented. They want to reassure themselves, and everybody else, that all the i’s were dotted and t’s crossed in this case. Especially in this case.” She saw his look. “I understand there are aspects of it you’d prefer not to revisit, but perhaps it may even help.”

  To look again, she meant, at the death of a young man, for which Jejeune had never forgiven himself. To look again at a verdict he had never quite trusted, at evidence he now had reason to doubt. And to know that controlling this review would be the man who had overseen Jejeune’s meteoric rise through the ranks, and could just as effectively ensure his fall. If Domenic Jejeune shared Shepherd’s view that revisiting the case might somehow be beneficial, his expression failed to show it.

  “They wanted you to go down to London for a couple of days, but I’ve told them I can’t spare you at the moment, so they’ve decided to send somebody up here. Clearly, they want this thing wrapped up as quickly as possible. Better for all of us, I suppose. A few days, I’m promised, at most. And I’ll make it clear that your current investigations are to take priority.” Her eyes searched his face for a moment. “Nothing for us to worry about, is there, from a procedural standpoint?”