A Tiding of Magpies

by Steve Burrows

  “They might as well be married,” said Jejeune with a smile.

  Lindy lay a palm against Jejeune’s chest in lieu of the words she was having trouble finding. Eventually, she managed to raise lightness from somewhere. “Talk about anthropomorphism! And poor old Daisy wouldn’t even get a ring.”

  13

  Des Gill clearly hadn’t expected Detective Chief Inspector Domenic Jejeune to be standing at the front of the Incident Room as she entered. Perhaps her research had prepared her to look for him at the back, perched on a desktop somewhere, his feet resting on a chair in front of him. She seemed taken aback to find herself standing directly opposite him.

  “Oh, sir … Inspector Jejeune.” She extended a tiny hand. “Great to meet you. Really. I mean, terrif. I can’t tell you how much I’ve been looking forward to this.” She shook her head. “Sorry, that doesn’t sound right. I mean your work, sir; they had us review some of it as case studies when I was in training. Sorry, I don’t mean to embarrass you.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” said DCS Shepherd, who was standing beside Jejeune. “He’s heard it all before, haven’t you, Domenic?”

  If he had, Jejeune’s expression suggested he was no more comfortable with hearing it this time around.

  “Well, I’m sure Domenic will give you his full cooperation, Constable Gill, as long as we remember he is working on an open murder inquiry at the moment.” She gave the Empowered Investigator a short smile that contained no discernible message. “Shall we begin?” she asked Jejeune, ending the awkward staring contest that had ensued between the inspector and his admirer.

  The attendees settled quickly as the trio at the front of the room broke up, and Shepherd took it upon herself to get the ball rolling.

  “Sergeant, I haven’t seen any paperwork yet from Dr. Jones officially declaring cause of death. You were down there. Is he prepared to agree it was the gunshot to the back of the head?”

  “Perhaps.” Maik raised his eyebrows at the roomful of people looking at him. “He can’t rule out the gunshot being post-mortem.”

  “He’s seriously suggesting the victim could have been killed by a method yet to be determined, then shot, then burned?” asked Holland incredulously. “Just how dead does he think the killer wanted this bloke to be?”

  “There’s no chance he might want to change his mind?” Shepherd asked the sergeant.

  “Unfortunately, I think he’s happy with the one he’s got. We are getting closer to an ID, though,” he said, mainly because Shepherd was distinctly looking as if she needed some good news. “Dr. Jones requisitioned the dental records as soon as we gave him the name of Kowalski’s dentist. He says the dental work is an exact match, but he wants to check something else before he signs off.”

  “What on earth does he want to check?” asked Shepherd with exasperation. “If the dental records match, there can be no other interpretation of the facts, surely.” She set her fists on her hips like a gunslinger. “The bloody man’s impossible. I take it he knows that, in the absence of witnesses, his findings are likely to be the best leads we’re going to get on this case?”

  “I did point that out,” said Maik testily. “He seems to have taken this to mean he needs to scrutinize the evidence even more carefully than usual.”

  Shepherd drew in a breath. “Domenic, please tell us you’re at least following some leads that don’t require Dr. Jones’s seal of approval.” She looked at him, not so much to elicit some details, but almost as if to ensure he didn’t offer one lead in particular. At least, not yet. She fed him an opening, to guide him in the right direction. “You went to see Curtis Angeren. Anything there?”

  From Maik’s vantage point, he could see how Jejeune’s uneasy shuffle could have been taken as mere preparation to address the DCS’s question. The only person who knew differently watched with interest as Jejeune turned to ask the room a question. “As I understand it, we had no family history on Paulina Kowalski, just the basics: address, driver’s licence, national insurance number?”

  Maik saw a couple of smirks in the room at the inspector’s reference to the card’s formal name, which no native would be likely to use.

  “That’s correct, sir,” confirmed the sergeant. “With itinerant EU citizens who move here, it’s often a case of back-filling the record whenever one of the agencies comes across new information. It can leave a lot of holes.”

  “So, I wonder where Mr. Angeren found out that Jakub was Mrs. Kowalski’s only child.” Jejeune raised his eyebrows in Maik’s direction, but everyone in the room knew there was only one explanation that made sense. Angeren found out at the same time Jejeune and Maik did — when Mrs. Kowalski told them, at her house, on the day a person with a boom mic came to visit.

  “If we are thinking it was Angeren who was behind that attempt to listen in,” said Shepherd, “that would certainly tie him in after the fact, but I don’t see that it connects him to the murder itself.”

  “He made the connection for us,” said Holland. “He’s the one who denied it, before we even knew which way was up on this case. Now I ask you, is that the action of an innocent man?” Holland flicked a look in Des’s direction, but she was making a note in her Moleskine journal, so it was impossible to tell if she’d registered Holland’s detective wizardry or not.

  “The problem is,” said Shepherd, “if we’re taking him at face value, he says nobody collected on his contract to kill Kowalski.”

  “If we’re taking him at face value, he says he didn’t offer one,” observed Maik.

  Shepherd’s look towards the sergeant wasn’t one of gratitude. But other challenges awaited her. She drew the deep breath of someone aware that once she’d plunged in, she might not be surfacing for a very long time. “Now, the inspector has a theory,” she told the room, “that this may be something to do with the bounty hunting of some birds.” She turned to Jejeune. “Have I got that right, Domenic?” she asked with just enough dubiousness to assure the rank and file she hadn’t completely taken leave of her senses.

  She hadn’t got it right, but it was close enough to offer Jejeune a springboard for his explanation. “The person we believe to be Jakub Kowalski was found with a weapon beside him that he used to hunt ducks under government licence. Ruddy Ducks,” he added, though he didn’t know quite why. He doubted anyone else in the room would have the slightest interest in the birds’ identity. “They are an invasive species and a decision was taken to eradicate the population.”

  “Not a shoot-on-sight policy, though, is it, Domenic?” prompted Shepherd.

  “The government has licensed a small number of highly skilled hunters to kill any birds reported to the hotline. They pay a bounty on a per-bird basis. Jakub Kowalski was one of the hunters licensed to kill these birds.”

  “Sorry, sir, but this connects to the murder how, exactly?” If Holland’s respectful tone came as something of a surprise, most people in the room recognized its cause. It was sitting right next to him, still making notes in her Moleskine.

  “Among the very few things Mansfield Jones is prepared to concede,” said Danny Maik, “is that the wound in the skull could have been made by a hollow-point .22.”

  Shepherd looked across at Jejeune, but it was clear he wasn’t going to raise any objection. Nor, it seemed, was Tony Holland, who was still engaged in trying to prise Gill’s attention from her note-taking. The DCS had decided on a discreet distance, as she often did with Jejeune’s more obtuse theories. But her natural policing instincts wouldn’t permit her to stay silent when such an obvious point needed to be raised. “That’s a large calibre to kill a duck, Sergeant. Surely, a .17 would be enough to get the job done. I’m assuming the only reason these hunters are using bullets at all is because the spread of pellets from a shotgun might indiscriminately kill other birds if one of these ducks was in amongst them.”

  Maik nodded. Do no harm, he thought. Even when killing. “There are some new .22s out there that are very quiet,” he said ma
tter-of-factly. “A hunter might use one if he didn’t want to scare away other birds, perhaps if there was another one in the same flock he also needed to kill.”

  “I could accept the use of the same ammunition as a viable connection between the murder and this duck cull,” said Holland magnanimously. “But I’m afraid I’m still missing the connection as to how this might have got him killed.”

  The thought of what Lauren Salter might have made of Holland’s newly-acquired public school etiquette almost made Maik smile. At this rate he was going to have to consider banning Des Gill from future briefings, just so they could all get back to some semblance of normalcy. Predictably, however, Jejeune handled Holland’s question with his usual quiet courtesy.

  “It was a very controversial scheme on a number of levels. Not only were scientists in disagreement over its effectiveness, people were opposed on ethical grounds. And then, of course, there’s the cost involved.”

  “To kill a few ducks, Domenic?” said Shepherd from the sidelines. “Really?”

  “In the early phase of the project, tracking and killing the birds was easier, but even then it cost the government over four and a half million pounds to kill the first six thousand.”

  Shackled by decorum for so long, Holland’s natural instincts suddenly burst forth. “Bloody hell, that’s seven hundred and fifty quid a bird!” he said. “I’m in the wrong business.”

  “The problem is,” continued Jejeune, “as the number decreases, the cost of tracking individual birds goes up incrementally. Now that they are down to the last few, it’s costing the government around three thousand pounds per bird.”

  “Three grand to kill a single duck?” said Holland. “That’s ridiculous.” A thought seemed to occur to him. “Hey, perhaps the killer was just somebody who was upset about the size of the duck bill?” He gave a wide grin and spread his hands to the room. “What can I say, it’s a gift.”

  Maik’s expression suggested that if so, it was one better kept wrapped. “Kowalski had been granted permission to enter a site called Tidewater Marsh to hunt for the birds,” he said. “We can’t be sure whether he found them or not, but he never put in a claim, which suggests he either didn’t locate them, or he was dead before he could apply for his bounty. Either way, that seems to be the last time anyone saw him. So for now, that’s where we’ll be concentrating our efforts.”

  “Well,” said Shepherd, encompassing everybody in the room with her gaze, Des Gill included. “I suppose this represents progress of a kind. To reiterate, then, we can let the inspector have a look at this duck business, but Curtis Angeren remains very much our main focus. We tread carefully, however. A lot of good people have tried to take on Angeren over the years, my predecessor included. There’s a reason only one of them is still around these parts. Angeren is intelligent, vindictive, and relentless. Once you’ve made an enemy of him, he’ll make it his business to destroy you. So we wait until we have good cause — very good cause — before we make any moves in his direction.” She turned to look at Maik. “And let’s get somebody downstairs to have a chat with Dr. Jones, see if we can hurry him along a bit.”

  Maik’s look had barely made its way across to Holland when the constable held up his hands. “Ah, might be a problem there, Sarge. Me and the doc had a bit of a run-in a while ago. He insisted on giving me details about what would have been happening to Darla’s body as she died. He wanted to reassure me she wouldn’t have suffered any pain. I imagine he thought it might help, but I wasn’t ready for it at the time and I let him know it.” He shrugged. “I’ll get around to apologizing at some point, but in the meantime, I doubt he’d be best pleased to see my grinning mug down there.”

  Maik recognized that Holland’s ability to talk about the death of his former girlfriend in such matter-of-fact terms was an important step towards his recovery. His compassionate leave had given him the time to reconcile himself once again to the world and to find a way to function in it. Maik knew it was now just a matter of constantly moving forward, day by day, one foot in front of the other. In time, the loss would settle into the dust of Holland’s past, become a part of it; never forgotten, but no longer the debilitating morass of darkness it had been before his leave. In the meantime, in an effort to insulate himself from any genuine emotions, he had wrapped himself once again in his carefree playboy persona, albeit a more brittle and transparent version than before.

  Maik didn’t doubt, though, that Holland was right about his present relationship with Jones. The well-meaning M.E. would have been bewildered and wounded in equal parts by Holland’s angry response, and now he would almost certainly want to avoid anything to do with the constable. Maik realized that the job of visiting Jones had fallen to the only other person available. He drew in a resigned breath. “I don’t suppose anybody’s got any aspirin.”

  Shepherd shook her head. “Perhaps there’s some in Lauren Salter’s desk. Have you got a headache, Sergeant?”

  “Not yet.”

  Shepherd sighed with exasperation. “Oh, for God’s sake. Leave it to us. The DCI and I will go down there and see what Jones is playing at. Come on, Domenic.”

  As they left, Maik wondered if Jejeune might find the opportunity while the two of them were together to tell the DCS the one other thing that had come up during the Angeren interview. Namely, that Ray Hayes was now back in the picture.

  14

  “We’ll take the stairs,” announced Shepherd. “Do us good to get a bit of exercise.” The DCS was never shy about including others in her initiatives. It was part of her leadership skill set, Jejeune supposed. It was harder to opt out of something when you weren’t given a choice. She pushed open a door leading from the corridor and began descending the narrow stairwell, the clacking of her high heels echoing overloud off the walls. Jejeune fell into step behind her.

  “So what do you make of Our Lady of the Abbreviations?” asked Shepherd over her shoulder. Jejeune was surprised by the question. From his perspective, Shepherd seemed to be doing all she could to keep Constable Gill out of his orbit; this most recent intervention a case in point.

  “I haven’t had the chance to form much of an impression yet,” he said guardedly. “She has a reputation for thoroughness, though.” If he was sending Shepherd the message that he’d done some research on Gill since her arrival, it would be no more than the DCS would have expected.

  “You know, the more I think about this review, the more I wonder if I’m missing something. The thing is, Domenic, for the life of me, I can’t see who this is meant to serve. I’ll accept that a deathbed confession wasn’t the most satisfactory of resolutions. But since a confession precluded the presentation of any evidence, an unsafe verdict doesn’t come into it. So again, just who is this review hoping to satisfy?”

  Behind his DCS, Jejeune said nothing. He wasn’t ready to let his own misgivings about the case see the light of day. But Shepherd detected their existence anyway. She stopped on the landing and turned to look at him. “Tell me honestly, Domenic,” she said, fixing him with the kind of stare that would give him no alternative, “is there any reason to suspect Gill will uncover something?” She searched his face carefully. He could be maddeningly inscrutable at times, and she’d never entirely worked out to what extent it was intentional. Even his normal expression was disconcertingly blank. When it became clear he was waiting for more from her, she continued. “I understand why everybody was in such a hurry to draw a line under the case,” she said reasonably. “The Home Secretary’s daughter had been through a lot, the entire family had. Nobody wanted this thing dragging on. As soon as they had their confession, it was inevitable they’d want to roll it up as quickly as possible. But that’s how things get missed.” She examined him with the same stare as before.

  Jejeune looked around, at bare whitewashed walls, the concrete steps, the metal railing. Whether by design or not, Shepherd had chosen her territory well. Surrounded by the ambient noise of office commerce, or other human traffic
, he might have kept his silence. But here in the cold, stark emptiness of this stairwell, suspended between the vague uncertainties of the Incident Room above and the world of Mansfield Jones’s irrefutable facts below, there no longer seemed to be anywhere for Jejeune to hide his doubts.

  “It always seemed to me the investigators didn’t have much interest in probing too deeply. If they found an explanation that fit, they settled for it.”

  “I presume you’re talking about that business with the bird? The Magpie.” She nodded shortly. “I remember that. To tell you the truth, I’d half expect you to have been the one proposing it.”

  “I wasn’t involved in closing out the case. As soon as Carolyn Gresham was returned to her family, I was moved….”

  Yes, she thought, and if you would hesitate to use the word ‘up,’ no one else would. Moved … to a DCI posting with the North Norfolk Constabulary, where you have consistently and spectacularly proved your worth ever since.

  “But the Magpie had been coming to the property on a regular basis, though, hadn’t it? It was a plausible enough explanation, that it would have taken the pin.” She made a face. “Never been much of a fan of Magpies, if I’m being honest,” she said. “They’ve always seemed a bit shifty to me, all that thievery and such. The criminal class of the bird world, I suppose.”

  But Jejeune had retreated into silence. And perhaps now, she shared his unease that, as insignificant as the disappearance of the pin itself undoubtedly was, the cavalier manner in which it had been handled could be a troubling indicator of the way the investigation was wrapped up. Including one aspect in particular.

  “How about the confession, Domenic?” she asked. “Ever any doubts there?”

  The sudden introduction of the topic took Jejeune off-guard. It crossed his mind that perhaps this was Shepherd’s intention. He shrugged. “Any time a case is closed on a deathbed confession, there are bound to be questions left unanswered. But nothing that stood out. As I say, though, I wasn’t involved by that time. DI Laraby handled it. He insisted. He —”