A Tiding of Magpies

by Steve Burrows

  Jejeune nodded approvingly. “The members of your community did all this?”

  “The materials, paint, window glass, wood, these were all provided by an anonymous donor.” Her smile left the men in no doubt about her own suspicions. “But the labour and the decoration, yes, this was all done by them.”

  People milled around the building freely, giving it an air of quiet industry. The detectives recognized most of them from the marshes. They were gathering beside a set of lockers lining a corridor, busily kitting themselves up for another day of removing the Frankenweed from Tidewater Marsh. The girl led the men into a comfortable room at the front of the building. A tray of tea was waiting, but before they could pour, Sikorski appeared in the doorway. “My sincere apologies for making you wait, gentlemen,” he said. “There are many ways to help people, but so little time to do so. Anyway, welcome to Wawel. This is the name the people have given this place. It is named after a castle of great importance in Poland’s history. Come, let me show you around.” He led the way to the entrance of the large hall and spread his arms proudly.

  “Behold the work of our family. The carpentry, the plumbing, electrical. Everything. The local Polish community has over a thousand years of combined life experience. Among these people we have tradesmen, builders, artisans of the finest kind.”

  “Any of them know how to use a firearm?” asked Maik.

  “Some,” admitted Sikorski unguardedly. “A couple have served in the army. Others were hunters. Even I did some hunting as a youth, until I discovered where my heart lay in this world. Often it is this way, is it not? We begin on one path and find ourselves going in the opposite direction later on.”

  They passed a stack of thin mattresses propped against the wall of the corridor. “In the farming season, some of our members find it more convenient to sleep here, rather than return to their homes each night,” Sikorski explained. A man approached the Count and spoke to him briefly. Sikorski unlocked a wooden cabinet on the wall, taking a key from a hook and handing it to the man. “We keep a spare set of keys to the padlocks for the lockers,” he told the detectives, “but this is only in case they forget their own. We consider these lockers to be their property. We have no right to enter them.”

  Maik looked at the group, readying themselves for another day of backbreaking manual labour. “I thought I read somewhere they were trying to find a natural predator of some kind to control invasive weeds,” said Maik.

  “Ah, yes, sergeant, but my own studies have given me a healthy skepticism about the wisdom of introducing such non-native predators. The question too often becomes Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”

  “Who polices the police?” Maik translated to the surprise of everyone, himself included. “I had an old CO who was fond of a Latin quote or two,” he explained meekly. “We found a couple of military police stealing supplies from the NAAFI one time.” He still seemed slightly stunned to discover the phrase had stuck with him.

  Sikorski nodded. “You are exactly right, Sergeant,” he said, without a hint of condescension. “It may be possible to bring in natural controls, but who will control them? If we do not consider how we will restrict the spread of the introduced predator, police them, as you say, we may face an even greater ecological catastrophe.”

  Jejeune nodded sadly. “I hear the cane toads in Australia now number one and a half billion.”

  “From an initial cohort of one hundred and one,” said Sikorski sadly. “And expanding their range across northern Australia at a rate of sixty kilometres per year. We have learned lessons from disasters like this, but my concern is that we have not learned them all. Until we have, the safest approach is to dig out the invasive weed by hand.”

  He led the men along the corridor and they entered a narrow alcove with a single wooden bench running around the three sides. High in the wall opposite was a single stained-glass window. Beneath it a small altar had been set up. The entire room was painted bright white, except for the red pilasters in the corners. Although they were only decorative, they gave the space a grandeur far beyond its size.

  “Our chapel,” said Sikorski. He indicated a small alcove in each side wall, in which there were statues. “Two of Poland’s five patron saints,” explained Sikorski. “Saint Stanislaus is the saint of community. St. Adalbert is the saint of charity.”

  “Are these statues particularly expensive, sir?” asked Maik. “Only that’s a fairly impressive metal grille you have on the door. Same with the larger windows, I notice.”

  Sikorski looked at Maik with genuine regret. “I would leave Wawel open for all to enjoy. But some members of our community store valuables in their lockers. So when there is no one here, we must bar the doors.”

  “Jakub Kowalski had a locker here, didn’t he?” asked Maik. Sikorski’s eyes dimmed slightly. “Your tense confirms what I had suspected. He was the man found at the construction site?”

  “His mother didn’t tell you?”

  “It is not the way of this family. And she has not been in to help with the record keeping for many days.” Sikorski shook his great white head slowly. “Her son chose not to be of this community, but he was from our homeland. He will not be mourned, but there will be sadness for the family.”

  “Can I ask when was the last time you saw him?” inquired Jejeune.

  “Here, at the marsh. It was on a Tuesday afternoon, two weeks ago. He came to take his rifle. You know about his role in the Ruddy Duck eradication programme.” Sikorski had not phrased it as a question. “He came here hunting a pair of them.”

  “Did he find them?” asked Maik.

  Sikorski lifted his hand. “There are many small backwaters here. He had not located them by the time the rest of us left for the day.”

  “There is restricted access to this land,” said Jejeune, “so someone from the group here must have told him about the ducks.”

  “This seems likely,” said the Count. He smiled. “The last thing I said to him was at least he was following the old ways, hunting during the new moon. The rural people in Poland believe it is always better to hunt ducks then. When the moon is full, the birds are too active at night. They sleep during the day and you cannot find them.” He smiled again. “It was a joke, but Jakub Kowalski had no time for babskie gadanie from the Polish countryside. Old wives’ tales. Like here, they are the repository of the nation’s superstitions.”

  Possibly, thought Maik, but that isn’t to say you couldn’t find a few truths amongst them.

  “May we take a look in Jakub Kowalski’s locker?”

  “If his mother will permit this. But you will have to ask her which one it is. I don’t know. I hope you will allow me to preserve the privacy of the others by not checking all of them to find out.”

  Maik nodded. “Fair enough. But if she returns to work before we speak with her, perhaps you could ask her yourself.”

  He looked across at his DCI to see if he had any more questions. He did, but not about the locker. “If Jakub Kowalski didn’t find the Ruddy Ducks, they could still be around. Perhaps one of the workers has seen them.” Jejeune pulled a phone from his pocket and approached the group at the lockers. “This is a Ruddy Duck,” he told them. “I’m wondering if any of you have seen one here recently?”

  They gathered round and peered in at an image on his phone. In turn, each offered a regretful shake of the head. Maik and Sikorski drew up to the group. When Jejeune finally swivelled the phone around in their direction, Sikorski gave a hearty laugh. “This is not a female Ruddy Duck. It is a Common Scoter. Look, there is no eye stripe.”

  Jejeune smiled sheepishly and tucked the phone away. He thanked the workers and turned to Sikorski. “We’ll leave you to get on with your work,” he said. “Thank you for the tour. It’s an impressive set-up you have here.”

  “You were not expecting this, I imagine, from our modest exterior. We keep it this way deliberately. It is not the Polish way to flaunt our presence. But to see Wawel in all its glory, you
must return here in two days’ time,” Sikorski told them sincerely. “You shall be my guests when we celebrate the feast day of Saint Stanislaus. There will be music, dancing, food. You have seen the bones of this building. Then you will see its soul.”

  The men promised to make it if they could.

  As they passed the mounds of harvested Frankenweed on their way out to the Mini, Maik noticed Jejeune checking his phone. “Might want to think about getting a new app, sir, if that one’s going to make mistakes like that.”

  “I think this app’s fine, Sergeant,” said Jejeune. His faint smile told Maik all he needed to know. The sergeant had never met a birder yet who could have resisted correcting Jejeune’s mistaken identification. But only Sikorski had risen to the bait. Which meant only Sikorski could have alerted Jakub Kowalski to the presence of the ducks here. As the two men walked along side by side, another Latin phrase from Maik’s classically educated CO came to mind: Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses, thought the sergeant ruefully. If you want people to think you’re clever, it’s better to keep your mouth shut.

  19

  The stationary figure stood out against the great downhill sweep of the empty fairway like a buoy in a green sea. Maik and Jejeune made their way down the edge of the fairway. From the tangle of leafless bushes and trees, thin trills of native birdsong floated towards them: Wrens, Blackbirds, Chaffinches. Jejeune could identify no spring visitors among the calls yet, though he expected to hear them any day now.

  Curtis Angeren turned as the two men approached. He seemed to have been contemplating something in the fringe of trees, and turned to do so again now. “Just imagining the changes this old elm must have seen over the years,” he said as the detectives came alongside. They stood beside him, regarding the large tree at the edge of the rough. The bark was deep-grooved and gnarled with age, but the bare branches rose into an impressive crown and the mass of healthy-looking buds suggested it would soon be out in its full, spreading splendour. “They tell me a stand of these used to line the driveway coming up to the club at one time. Of course, we lost them to that disease, didn’t we? I hear you’re having the same trouble with the ash trees in your country, Inspector.”

  “Yes, with the emerald ash borer,” said Jejeune.

  Angeren nodded thoughtfully. “From Asia, am I right? Like that birdwatching kit of yours.” He flashed a mirthless grin at the detective. “I was just about to have a stroll up to the clubhouse. Perhaps we can discuss whatever it is you came to see me about on the way.”

  Jejeune walked beside Angeren, while the sergeant stayed a couple of paces behind. From his vantage point, Maik eyed the man carefully. About the time that beautiful stand of elm trees was disappearing, Curtis Angeren was making a name for himself as a rising star of the far right on university campuses across the country. After a series of run-ins with various police forces, he gradually morphed into that most dangerous of enemies: the one clothed in respectability. Curtis Angeren may have long since reinvented himself as a legitimate property developer, but both his political affiliations and his radical views had survived the transition intact. And now here he was, full circle, once again helping the police with their inquiries.

  “We’d like to talk to you about a breakin at Paulina Kowalski’s,” said Jejeune.

  The developer offered a sad head shake. “The mother of the dead man? Never rains but it pours for some people, doesn’t it? I do hope she wasn’t home at the time.”

  Maik came up to walk beside them. “There’s a line of thought that it might have been a couple of men from your organization,” he said.

  “There are a lot of men in my organization, Sergeant. I don’t condone any illegal action, as I’m sure you know. But if I’m to have a word with them, I’m afraid you’ll have to identify them to me first.”

  “If we identify them, it won’t be you having a word with them. Impersonating a police officer is a custodial offence.”

  Angeren stopped and they waited while he went through his elaborate cigar-lighting ritual again. They noticed he hadn’t bothered to offer them one this time. He still had all the time in the world, he was telling the detectives, but he didn’t intend on spending it with them.

  He looked along the fairway and puffed on his cigar. “It’s a lot of work, this place,” he said. “But I’m proud to be doing my little bit toward preserving what’s left of the English countryside.”

  Jejeune wasn’t sure if overlaying pristine habitat with sand traps and half-kilometre swaths of what Lindy called green concrete would be most people’s idea of conservation, but he suspected it wasn’t the countryside part of things Angeren was most interested in preserving anyway.

  The developer began walking again and Jejeune fell into step beside him. As before, Maik hung back a couple of steps. He seemed to prefer putting a bit of distance between himself and Curtis Angeren. The scent of freshly mown grass carried to Maik on the light spring breeze, and the gentle sun warmed his shoulders. It occurred to him what a pleasant walk this could have been, under other circumstances. “Those men who forcibly entered Mrs. Kowalski’s house,” he said from behind them, “they had a good rummage round. Any idea what they might have been looking for?”

  “None at all. Did he have anything worth stealing?”

  Maik saw Jejeune look across at Angeren and leave his eyes on him for a long time, as if deciding whether to pursue something. The developer kept looking straight ahead as they walked. In the end, the DCI decided against it.

  Angeren took an exaggerated draw on his cigar. “One of the great English traditions, a round of golf. At least it used to be. God knows what the game’ll look like in a few years, if people like those at the Saltmarsh Club have their way. Not enough we’re losing our jobs to foreigners. Now they’ve got to take over our hobbies, too.” He cast a glance in Jejeune’s direction. “A look of disapproval, Inspector? From what I’ve seen, your own pastime doesn’t seem to draw a particularly diverse crowd, if you get my drift.”

  “Not diverse enough, no, but there are encouraging signs. The numbers are building slowly.”

  “Ah, that’s how it starts, see. The numbers build, and then one day you look around and you realize there’s no room left for the ones who were here in the first place, people like us, the ones who belong here.”

  “I’m Canadian,” he reminded Angeren.

  “Indeed you are, Inspector. But your situation is hardly typical, is it? I mean, it’d be hard to make a case that you’re over here keeping somebody out of a job. I can’t see any of those lead-arsed halfwits down the Met filling your shoes, can you? No, I’m all for bringing in overseas talent, as long as it’s merited. I’d go so far as to say you’re an asset to this country, you and your type.”

  The clubhouse came into view at the top of the rise. Angeren paused again to look back down the pristine expanse of green they had just come along. “Know what I think of when I see this? Jerusalem. And did those feet in ancient time, walk upon England’s green and pleasant land?”

  It was perhaps to be expected that Angeren would cobble together the parts of Blake’s poem that suited him. Jejeune wondered what sort of reception the Holy Lamb of God would really have received if Angeren and his associates had been there to witness the arrival of another foreigner on their shores.

  From their vantage point, they could see the elm, standing tall at the edge of the fairway. Angeren indicated it with the butt of his cigar. “It was a foreign species that killed off our elms, wasn’t it? Heavy price we pay, sometimes, for not protecting ourselves against those from other parts.”

  “Invasive species are a problem for all countries, Mr. Angeren,” said Jejeune reasonably. “The British Isles has exported its fair share.”

  “You’re talking about the Acclimation Societies. That was during the colonial period, when people were immigrating to new places. There were sound economic reasons for those introductions.”

  “I’m not sure what economic benefits Eurasian Starlin
gs offer,” said Jejeune. “A man named Eugene Schieffelin released one hundred of them into New York’s Central Park in the early 1890’s, solely because starlings are mentioned in Henry IV, Part I. It was part of a plan to introduce all the birds that appear in Shakespeare’s plays. Far from benefitting from that introduction, North America is now dealing with a starling population well in excess of two hundred million birds.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with starlings,” said Angeren defensively. “Lovely little birds. The Americans should be glad to have them.”

  Behind the men, Maik shook his head slowly. It was a waste of time trying to reason with people like Angeren. They always had the facts at hand to support their worldview. Like his list of shortcomings in Asian optics, all carefully researched and ready to be trotted out at a moment’s notice.

  “I’ve got to be on my way,” said Angeren, “but it’s always a pleasure exchanging ideas with a man of intelligence, Inspector, even if we can’t see eye to eye on things.” Angeren extended a hand to Jejeune. The DCI suspected it was no accident Maik found himself just too far away for a handshake of his own. As the developer turned to leave, a final thought seemed to strike him. “Nothing further to tell me about who killed Jakub Kowalski, I suppose?”

  “Your request to be informed about developments in the case has already been denied, Mr. Angeren,” said Jejeune formally. “We won’t be revisiting that decision.” He was slightly puzzled that the man had returned to the subject. He didn’t seem the type given to chasing lost causes.