A Tiding of Magpies

by Steve Burrows

  He knew from experience that Lindy’s repertoire when she was angry could include a fair amount of pyrotechnics. It was only when she was afraid that she got so calm and reasonable. But he’d done what he could now. She had not been receptive to what he was saying, but it would be important later that he had once brought up the subject. Not much would bring Lindy any comfort when things unravelled, but it would help a little for her to know he had at least tried.

  40

  “It’s not bad, this one,” said Holland, as he crossed the room and approached Maik’s desk. “So who’s this, then?”

  While he wasn’t exactly taken in by Holland’s sudden interest in Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, Maik indulged him and provided the information anyway. When the constable sidled up to a topic this way, it invariably meant the real one wasn’t going to be much to Maik’s liking. Holland lifted a pencil from the desk and absently twirled it around with his fingertips. Maik had no more information to offer about the music drifting between them, but Holland seemed reluctant to move on. The two of them had engaged in similar standoffs a number of times, and both knew what came next. This time, though, Maik got the sense it would be something beyond the usual request to overlook one of Holland’s transgressions. For one thing, the constable’s interest in “Nowhere to Run” had started the moment Domenic Jejeune left the room. For another, Holland had left a long, trailing look on the DCI as he departed.

  “Des was on to something, Sarge, before they stopped her investigation. And I think the DCI knew it. Did you ever notice how jumpy he seemed around her? His eyes never left her when she was in the room; no looking out the window for birds, like when we’re talking to him. He was always just lasered on to her. He closed the physical distance, too, any chance he got, as if he wanted to be close enough to intercept her, if she started taking a conversation somewhere he didn’t like.”

  Maik wondered if Holland realized just how much he’d learned from his DCI over the years. He raised a cautioning hand. “Before we go any further,” he said carefully, “you might want to have a think about this. Because whatever it is, there can be no rolling it back once it’s started. You know that.”

  Holland didn’t spend much time without some sort of smile on his face. His serious expression now suggested he’d already spent all the time thinking about it he needed to. “A corvid — that’s a bird family, you know, Crows, Jays, like that. And Magpies.”

  Maik had been prepared for the conversation to go in a number of directions, though perhaps not this one. He let his surprise show, but he didn’t say anything. Holland was holding all the conversational cards at the moment and Maik was content to let him play them as he chose.

  “Des said she’d been talking to somebody about a corvid. I thought she was joking, but she wasn’t. Only she didn’t go to Mansfield Jones, or some other wonk in the police department, where there might be some official record of her inquiry. She went to Quentin Senior.”

  “You spoke to him?”

  “A casual chat. No alarm bells.”

  Maik couldn’t imagine how Holland could engineer a casual conversation with such an unlikely partner as the leading bird expert in Saltmarsh. But for reasons he couldn’t have explained, he found himself prepared to take Holland at his word.

  “She wanted to know about Magpie behaviour,” said Holland, “like whether one would be likely to move around much in a strong wind. You know, say the kind you might get coming in off the sea. Senior’s opinion is that it’d likely hunker down and stay put. Apparently, they’re not very strong flyers.”

  Maik waited. Des hadn’t struck him as the birding type, but her questions could just have been a way to find another connection with a DCI she so obviously admired. Only Holland was a good police officer, and he would have already considered that possibility. So there would be more. Martha Reeves had reached the end of her quest for somewhere to hide now, and Maik waited as the silence built between the two men.

  “She timed the run we made that day, when we went down to the Essex coast. She tried to disguise it, but I mean, with Big Ben on her wrist, you’d have to have been half blind not to notice. That’s the reason we went on this otherwise meaningless detour to the Met.”

  “Meaningless?”

  “We pulled into the car park and she was in and out of the building within five minutes. No bag, no laptop, no papers. She couldn’t possibly have had time to say more than a quick hello to anybody, let alone a serious chat about anything.”

  “I take it she didn’t tell you why she wanted to stop there?”

  He shook his head. “No, but I think I know. It was because the Met was a starting point for a journey she needed to retrace. From the third-floor office of Sergeant Domenic Jejeune out to Lonely Oak Point.”

  The name hadn’t meant anything to Holland at the time, but he could see it did to Maik. He saw the recognition flicker in his sergeant’s eyes, but he drove the point home anyway. “It’s where he saw his bird, Sarge, this Magpie thing.”

  Maik spent a long time looking at the constable, though Holland had the impression Danny would have continued staring at the same space even if he had got up and walked away. The safe haven of his Motown songs seemed a long way off now. When Maik finally spoke, his voice was as empty as Holland had ever heard it.

  “Tell me what you know.”

  “You know why it all fell apart between Jejeune and his ex-boss, Laraby, right?”

  Maik didn’t think Holland was fishing. He was fairly sure the constable had the whole picture by now. But he would let him tell him anyway. Holland had drawn up a chair and was sitting beside Maik. He had a blank notepad in front him to diagram his points.

  “Jejeune had come up with a way to pinpoint the hostages’ location, only it would take a lot of calculations. I don’t know, but I’m guessing it had to do with the triangulation of sounds.” He paused, but Maik wasn’t offering anything. “Anyway, the answers came back from the lab at eight o’clock in the morning and Laraby said he went directly into Jejeune’s office to tell him they had their location, but Jejeune wasn’t there. He claimed Jejeune had already buggered off to try to find this bird, and that’s why everything went pear-shaped on Foulness Island later, because nobody knew where he’d got to, and they couldn’t reach him by phone. Only, Jejeune insisted he was still in the office at the time Laraby said he’d come by, and for a good fifteen minutes after. The inference was that Laraby must have sat on the information, probably just as a way to try and screw Jejeune over a bit, and when he finally did take it over and found Jejeune had gone, he decided to lie about it to cover his own arse.”

  Maik nodded. “The thinking being, Laraby was trying to make Jejeune’s life difficult because he was still angry about the way he had been bumped off the negotiations with the kidnapper in favour of a junior officer?”

  “His protégé at that,” said Holland. “Nobody ever said as much, but yeah, that’s the way the brass must have seen it. In fact, the only way Laraby was able to save his career was because he was the one who brought in Canby’s deathbed confession. Anyway, the thing is, the first info on this bird is supposed to have been posted at seven thiry-nine.” Holland made a face. “Not a quarter to, you’ll note, or half past: seven thiry-nine. That’s the thing with these birder types, see, they’re obsessed with details. I mean, you and me, we see some bird in a tree and that’s what we’d say, if we bothered to mention it at all. But with this lot it’s found at seven thiry-nine GMT, in a mature oak tree, grid reference so and so, winds south to southwest, barometer descending. I’m surprised they don’t throw in the shipping forecast.”

  Maik’s look encouraged Holland to get on with it.

  “The upside for us is that we have an exact timeline to work with. At 7:39 some geezer posts a photo on his Facebook account of some strange bird he’s seen while he was strolling on the clifftop earlier that morning. He’s not a birder, and he has no real interest in them, but he decides he’ll ask around anyway. Any
body know what this is? I just saw it at Lonely Oak Point. Somebody shares it and it finds its way onto Jejeune’s page. And, of course, he knows right off what it is: Iberian Azure-winged Magpie. So off he goes to find it, which he duly does. And he’s already there and on hand to point it out to a few other people when they show up. But here’s where things get a bit sticky. We can’t know for sure when he saw the Facebook photo for the first time. He claims it was at 8:15, which is when he left to drive out and take a look for the bird. But really, he could have seen the photo and left the office well before that.”

  Maik bowed his head thoughtfully. Holland knew his sergeant recognized this wasn’t just him having a go at Jejeune personally. It was where the facts led them.

  When Maik spoke, it showed him that the sergeant was following along just fine. “I suppose these wonderful records the birders have tell us when it was last sighted?”

  “At 9:09. Three people in the group saw it flying away, an hour and a half after it was first reported.”

  “Lasted about as long as a Norwich City cup run, then.”

  But for once, it was Holland pointedly ignoring the humour and wanting to get on with things. “That’s fifty-four minutes after Jejeune says he saw the photo on his Facebook page.” He leaned forward and pulled up a map on Maik’s laptop. “These are the directions posted on the rare bird sightings page that day, for people coming from London. There’s absolutely no doubt it’s the fastest route. These guys were in a serious hurry to get out there. Somebody even phoned the MoD to see if they could get permission to cross their lands, but it was denied. The range was closed for military exercises.”

  Maik traced the route on the screen. East on the A13, turn off at the sign for Wakering, down along the coast road, and then a long swing back north again and out to Lonely Oak Point.

  “Des and I followed that route that day, Sarge. The run took us exactly one hour and fifteen minutes. She didn’t set any land-speed records, but she didn’t exactly dawdle either. She knows how to handle that MGB. Now as a copper, Jejeune is aware of the dangers of high-speed driving through populated areas, but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. These birders are one finch short of a flock at the best of times. For the chance to see a lifetimer, or whatever they call them, we can assume he’s going to get a bit of a wriggle on. So say we shave ten minutes off Des’s time, down to an hour five.”

  “It’s a tricky business, judging road travel times,” said Maik. “There can be lots of variables — road conditions, repairs, weather.”

  Holland looked at his sergeant, understanding his resistance, expecting it even. He waited, not wanting to tell Maik, not wanting to have to. But Maik wouldn’t cross the distance to him. “I did the run myself, Sarge. In the Audi, full on, top end, a clear run all the way.” He paused to give the sergeant one more chance not to make him tell him. But Maik didn’t take it. “Fifty-nine minutes. I’d be prepared to say that drive couldn’t be done faster than that. Certainly not by somebody driving a Range Rover.”

  The silence was as profound as any Holland could ever remember in this room. It seemed so deep, so infinite; he could have believed it would go on forever. He’d sensed the reluctance from the beginning, the pulling back from the information instead of leaning into it, searching for the details, the way Danny Maik usually did. But as the sergeant looked at him now, with his eyes holding all the sadness of one of his Motown songs, Holland could see that he accepted the truth. Whatever the young sergeant may have claimed in his official statement, by the time Marvin Laraby came in at eight o’clock that morning to bring him the information about the kidnap location, Domenic Jejeune’s office was already empty.

  41

  Domenic Jejeune entered the cafeteria and spotted Mansfield Jones immediately. He was sitting alone at a corner table, with his back to the room, staring out the window. Outside, a small pond had been set up in an effort to beautify a vacant patch of ground behind the station, but its maintenance had long been neglected, and now only a sord of Mallards drifted through the dense mats of New Zealand pigmyweed that coated the surface of the water.

  Jejeune approached the table and hovered over the plastic chair opposite the M.E. Protocol required him to ask if it was being reserved for anyone, but in reality there was little chance that it was. Jones offered it with an outstretched hand.

  “I was just watching these ducks,” he said as Jejeune took a seat. “Trying to see what makes birds so endlessly fascinating for some people.” He didn’t say if he was being successful, but from his tone, Jejeune suspected not. He leaned back in the plastic chair and craned around for another look at the Mallards. On the grass surrounding the pond, a quarrel of House Sparrows was bouncing around, picking at seeds. Jejeune checked to be sure that there were no Tree Sparrows amongst them. There weren’t.

  “There is no requirement to report a sighting of these particular ducks, I take it?”

  Jejeune snapped his head around to find Jones with a faint smile on his lips. “A police station is no place to try to keep secrets, Inspector. These Ruddy Ducks bring all the usual ails of invasive species, I suppose? Outcompeting the native ducks for resources — food, breeding territories, habitat?”

  Jejeune shook his head. “That isn’t why the government is trying to exterminate them. It’s being done to protect the genetic purity of the White-headed Duck population. Ruddy Ducks are cross-breeding with them to the extent that it’s feared pure White-headed Ducks might disappear altogether, leaving only hybrids.”

  “This hybridization, is it easy to spot in birds?”

  “In this case, only through plumage characteristics and beak shape. But it can vary in other species. Hybridization between the Blue-winged Warbler and the Golden-winged Warbler back home in Canada couldn’t be more diagnostic. On the other hand, between some species it is only detectable at the genetic level.”

  “Deception sets its own rules,” said Jones simply. “It’s what makes the pursuit of truth so treacherous.”

  Jejeune watched as the M.E. shuffled a puce-coloured mix of unidentifiable ingredients around his plate with his fork. He wondered if it was the sickly yellow light from above that made it look so unappealing. Jones noticed his stare. “Vegetarian ragout,” he said. “It’s the healthiest choice on offer in here.”

  It may well have been, but for Jejeune it helped if food at least appeared edible. He would freely admit he wasn’t the best cook in the world. Lindy said she could never be sure whether the feeling she got after eating one of his meals was indigestion or survivor guilt. But at least his creations looked faintly appetizing. If this was what Jones ate on a daily basis, it went a long way to explaining his undernourished appearance.

  And yet, as Jejeune had recently learned, even foods that looked okay could pose hazards.

  “I’m told that people who eat game birds killed with lead shot have much higher lead levels in their body,” he said conversationally.

  Jones looked up, letting some of the greenish puree drip from his fork. “Surely the shot is removed when the bird is dressed?”

  “Anything visible is, yes. But microscopic flakes remain, and it’s these that are ingested. How significant would the health problems be from something like that?”

  Jones laid his fork down again and pushed away his plate, apparently unable to find sufficient comfort in the health benefits of the ragout to overcome his gag reflex. “Lead is a systemic toxin. Exactly how a small continuous intake might impact the body, I couldn’t say without further research, but any excessive intake of lead is unequivocally going to be detrimental to a person’s health.”

  “Permanently detrimental?”

  “I don’t know.” Though he hadn’t worked with Jejeune for very long, Jones had already come to appreciate that the detective was unlikely to seek someone out in the police cafeteria to introduce a topic of conversation unless it was significant in some way. “I’ll look into it.” He looked at the detective frankly. “I’m told that you are
struggling with this case, Inspector. And I’m told that this is my fault, because I am failing to confirm the necessary facts. But I suspect facts would not help you quite as much as other people may think.”

  Jejeune regarded Mansfield Jones carefully. In the fluorescent light, the M.E.’s skin had taken on an even more unhealthy pallor than usual. He was right in the wrong way, as Lindy sometimes said. It was not the missing facts that were troubling Jejeune. It was those he already had.

  “You no longer have any doubt, do you, Dr. Jones, that the person in your morgue, the body, is Jakub Kowalski?”

  Jones pushed his plate off to one side so he could set his arms on the table. He leaned forward slightly. “Dental records are as reliable as DNA, Inspector. The dental profession is aware that records may be called upon to identify a body, as in this case. As a consequence, they are among the most meticulously kept of all medical records. There are a number of regulations and protocols in place which cover the storage, transfer, and release of records, making it extremely difficult to tamper with them. Cosmetic work could re-create someone else’s current chart, but the remaining teeth would still reveal the person’s previous dental history. I checked the teeth of the corpse in my mortuary against the chart of Jakub Kowalski. It matches. I also checked with the dentists who were listed on the charts, and they verified they had performed what little work Mr. Kowalski had done, on the dates noted. It was Mr. Kowalski’s body that was burned in that pit, Inspector. Of that, I no longer have any doubt.”

  Jejeune was silent for a moment, considering the M.E.’s words.

  “I presume this helps,” said Jones eventually.

  Jejeune looked up at the man and smiled. How to tell him that, for once, certainty was no help at all? Because all the facts he had, all he was now certain of, made no sense. They didn’t fit into any pattern of human behaviour he had ever come across. Truths he was once utterly convinced of seemed to be disintegrating around him. His solution must be wrong, though he didn’t see how it could be. It was the only explanation for what had happened, the only thing that fit. Mansfield Jones’s infallible facts and Jejeune’s evidence now all pointed in the same single direction. If the M.E.’s axiom was that facts would lead you to the truth, then Jejeune was already there. Because he knew now that he had seen certainty before, somewhere it should not have been, in the eyes of someone who should have welcomed doubt. And certainty like that could come from only one place.