A Tiding of Magpies

by Steve Burrows

  “Perhaps not, but you did believe them. And that is why you took your son’s rifle from his locker, and the ammunition from your house. Then you found an opportunity where you were sure you would not be observed, and you killed Jakub Kowalski with a single rifle shot to the back of his head. I don’t think you killed him at the construction site, although that would have been easier for you. Moving the body must have been difficult. But you knew you ran the risk of raising suspicion if you’d asked him to meet you somewhere so deserted and remote, especially late at night.”

  Eric watched the reaction of the woman. There was none.

  “Once you put the body in the pit, you threw the rifle in and set the body alight. I believe you did all that. You planned this murder meticulously, and carried it out exactly. For a long time, I couldn’t believe a mother could be capable of such depravity. To plan such a killing so coldly, and to subject the body to such terrible defilement afterward, that seemed inconceivable. Especially since all the while, I believed you truly did love your son; you cherished him just as you said you did, and you would have sacrificed your own life to save him. Still, I thought I had my answers, everything I needed to give me the picture of what happened. Except for one thing.”

  Eric looked at Paulina Kowalski, but she had eyes only for Jejeune. They were locked onto him now, burning into his face.

  “Why set fire to the body?”

  Jejeune waited for an answer.

  “You left a rifle beside the body with a recoverable serial number on it. For somebody who’d gone to this level of planning, that wasn’t a mistake. It was a deliberate act. You wanted Curtis Angeren to know who was in that pit. And yet the body was burned to disguise the identity. The two facts couldn’t both be right. But they were. And the truth was right there in between them the whole time, wasn’t it?”

  “You were correct, Inspector,” said the woman coldly. “No mother who loved her son as I loved mine could ever commit such acts. I did not kill my son. I could not do this. I swear to you. This is the truth.”

  Jejeune looked at the woman for a long moment. “When I first came to see you in this hospital, the doctor commented on the extremely high levels of lead in your body. Were you aware of them?”

  She nodded. “And the reason, I told you. We were poor, we ate what my father and Jakub shot. There were always lead flakes in the birds we ate. We cleaned them as well as we could, but we knew we could not get them all.”

  “Lead is a systemic poison. In humans, it’s stored in the bones for decades, and high amounts are released into the blood of pregnant women. These reach the fetus at a time critical to the development of teeth and salivary glands. They would stay in your child’s system throughout his life. But the teeth of the body we recovered didn’t show any signs of high lead levels at all. The corpse is Jakub Kowalski, the dental records prove that. But it is not your son.”

  The scraping of Eric’s chair as he sat forward scarred the silence. But he made no apology. He continued leaning forward, looking at Jejeune, at the woman, at them looking at each other.

  “You have access to the records of the entire Polish community in this area,” Jejeune told the woman, in the same matter-of-fact tone he had used throughout. “Jakub Kowalski is a common name, perhaps the most common Polish name. I’m sure you had at least a couple of prospects to choose from. As long as you had a man of the approximate age and build of your son, the rest of the details could just be left swirling around in the sketchy, incomplete records on file.”

  Paulina Kowalski sat still, staring straight ahead now. She was wary, but she was not afraid. From the sidelines, Eric could only look on with fascination. Whatever was going on between these two, it was mesmerizing.

  “Sometimes, even knowing the truth is not enough, is it, Inspector? As you say, Jakub Kowalski is dead. His dental records say this. I will confirm all the details you will ever be able to uncover. I will say they match my son’s history exactly. You need evidence of what you claim, and there is none. There is no evidence left to discover, no witnesses, no proof.”

  “You are correct. I have no evidence of any of this and no way of getting any.”

  Eric stirred uneasily in his chair. Even though he’d never seen Jejeune in action before, he had heard enough to expect something special. But telling a suspect you did not have enough evidence to charge them, admitting you could never get such evidence, was madness. It was telling them they would never be prosecuted for the crime they had committed. That they had got away with it. They were free.

  Anyone with the intelligence to plan a murder as meticulously as Paulina Kowalski had to understand Jejeune had no case as long as she remained silent. The detective had already explained that he had absolutely no other avenues to follow. If it was as obvious to Eric that the investigation was at a dead end, Paulina Kowalski must surely know that, unless she voluntarily admitted to something, she would never be charged.

  “Mr. Chappell is here to officially record the closure of this case,” Jejeune told the woman, and at the same time, Eric himself. “At the moment, the facts I am prepared to confirm are that the deceased’s name is Jakub Kowalski. I do, however, have sufficient grounds to believe this person is not the same Jakub Kowalski who went missing shortly after witnessing an illegal act on the shoreline near the Whitehaven Golf Club. I have found no evidence to suggest this second Jakub Kowalski has come to harm, and can only conclude that he is alive and well somewhere.”

  Paulina Kowalski’s face had gone ashen. It tightened now into anger, fury. “You cannot say this. This dead person is my son.”

  “No, Mrs. Kowalski, he is a stranger who you killed because he had the same name as your son, an innocent person whose body you desecrated because you wanted Curtis Angeren to believe your son was dead. Those are the facts, Mrs. Kowalski. And, for once, it is the truth, too.”

  “Angeren will start looking for my Jakub again if you report this. You know him; he will not stop until he finds him.”

  “This man you killed was someone’s son, too, Mrs. Kowalski, even if, as I suspect, you chose him specifically because he no longer had any family to mourn for him. He deserves justice.”

  She was weeping now, and she spoke as if she had not heard Jejeune’s words. “Angeren has powerful friends. He has contacts, resources. He will find my Jakub one day. And then he will kill him. You cannot allow this to happen.”

  “I cannot prevent it. But you can.”

  There was only silence.

  “If you confess to killing Jakub Kowalski, I will ask Eric to report exactly this. Your confession will be sealed and I will make sure both the coroner’s report and the official police statement make reference to the victim by name only. If people choose to infer that he was your son, no one will correct them. Your confession would mean there will be no trial, no evidence given in public; in short, no way for Curtis Angeren to find out the person you killed was not your son.”

  After a long moment, Eric withdrew a notepad from his bag and clicked his pen. The simple sound seemed to stir Paulina Kowalski from her thoughts. There would be no clacking of laptop keys, no pings from notification apps. Perhaps it was comfort of the old ways that finally encouraged Paulina Kowalski to begin speaking.

  50

  The Beast was parked in a gravel siding at the end of the low, narrow bridge that had brought them over to Foulness Island from the mainland. The two detectives were leaning against the leeward side of the vehicle, which was rocking in the buffeting wind. Maik was scouring the landscape while his DCI looked down at his phone. “I wanted to check messages here because we’ll lose the signal as we head further onto the island,” he said. “There’s a text from Lindy. The garage has called to say they’ll drop the car off for her at Wawel, since she can’t get in before they close.” He shut the phone off and returned it to his pocket. “That helps. It means there’s no need to rush back.”

  A sudden gust of wind kicked the landscape to life, tousling the grasses, sett
ing the reeds trembling in the marshes. The wind had moulded this place, shuffling shingle beds along the shorelines and swirling silt deposits to change the course of the tidal inlets. On a map of this area, the coastline seemed to disintegrate into a series of ragged fragments Jejeune knew to be a network of small islands and interconnected waterways. It was a landscape of barren, raw beauty that crept into a person’s psyche and filled their spirit.

  “Plenty of birds coming in,” said Maik, nodding towards a quicksilver finger of water that traced its way inland. Jejeune looked up as a flock of Brent Geese swirled over the marsh before settling beside it as gently as falling snow. They would be heading for the eelgrass that grew along these margins of isolated marshland, fuelling up in preparation for their northward migration.

  “I always enjoyed the birding here,” said Jejeune, his voice tinged with sadness. “I came quite a few times, before …” He paused for a moment, and brightened. “In fact, I saw my first U.K. Short-eared Owl just over there.” He pointed, but Danny didn’t look in that direction. He doubted the bird would be there now, and he doubted even more he’d ever be coming back to Foulness Island to try and find it himself.

  Maik and Jejeune wandered among the ruins of the old house. The central block and the two wings retreating perpendicularly from it were all constructed of the same rough-hewn stone, worn and textured by decades of exposure to the elements. Maik settled onto a low wall in an area where the bulk of the house deflected the worst of the winds. Jejeune joined him. In front of them, scattered debris littered the boulder-strewn courtyard — broken fence rails, upturned troughs, bales of hay twined with rusted wire.

  “This the one the girl was kept in?” Maik asked, pointing to the right-hand wing.

  Jejeune nodded. “She used to look out to see Monte’s handwritten messages, held up in that window opposite.” He indicated the window in the far wing. “The ones encouraging her to be strong, to hold on.”

  An iron grate was still in place over the nearest window, but the black paint had been peeled off by the elements over the years and the metal was now rusted and pitted. A steel pin that had once been silver lay on the window ledge beneath the grate. How scared she must have been, thought Maik, held alone in this cold, stone-walled building, staring out through the black bars at the freedom that lay on the other side of them, wondering if she would ever know it again. How scared until Monte, her former boyfriend, her co-captive, her saviour, had come to remove this pin and set her free.

  Maik turned to Jejeune. “How long have you known?” he asked.

  “Known?” The DCI continued to stare at the window. “I suppose not until I spoke to Carolyn the other day. I wasn’t sure I remembered what she’d said to me on the Broomway, until she confirmed it. But I’ve had doubts for some time.” He looked up and smiled at Maik. “Tell me two things you know about Magpies, Sergeant.”

  Maik had long ago given up trying to decode his DCI’s non-sequiturs. Patience was the key. Patience and compliance. Danny shifted his position on the wall and gave his big shoulders an easy roll. “They’re clever, and they steal shiny things.”

  “Magpies are very intelligent, as a matter of fact. It’s probably why the University of Exeter decided to test them in the first place. But do you know what their studies found? No evidence whatsoever that they are attracted to shiny objects. In fact, they seem to be nervous of them.”

  “Are they sure? There’s an awful lot of folklore that would suggest otherwise.”

  “Think about it. The only place a Magpie would take an object once it’s stolen it is to its nest, like the Bowerbirds in Australia. Want to guess how many shiny objects have ever been discovered in Magpie nests? None.”

  Maik pushed out his bottom lip thoughtfully. It had always been an iffy premise that the Magpie had taken the missing lynchpin from the other window. But it was plausible, just barely. After all, the kidnapper wouldn’t have left the window unsecured while he went away. He’d have pinned it shut, just as he did with the girl’s window. And it was hardly likely the boy would have stopped to pick it up as he was clambering out. So if no lynchpin was found at the boy’s window, a Magpie taking it was as convenient an explanation as any, especially to a couple of investigators who were in a hurry to shut the case down anyway. He said as much to Jejeune now, and the inspector nodded.

  “Especially as a Magpie had been seen here. Not to mention they already had a confession. In my experience, people don’t tend to look too hard at other possibilities when they think they already have all the answers. I doubt it ever occurred to them that there might not have been a lynchpin at all, that the window had never been locked in the first place.” Jejeune shook his head. “I’m not criticizing anybody. I’m not claiming I had the answers back then, either.”

  Maik looked at him carefully. No, he thought, but you had questions. You always had questions. Pale sunlight played over the tableau of discarded items in front of them, laying down patches of yellow light. “Carolyn Weller thinks he used the Broomway to get on and off the island, those times when he left her.”

  “I think she’s right. Except when he brought her over. He would have used a boat. Stolen here on Foulness and left waiting on the shore of the mainland, so he could return it to its owner here as soon as he’d finished with it. He wouldn’t steal one again after the first reports of the kidnapping. He wouldn’t want to raise any suspicion.”

  “How did you know they’d try to escape along the Broomway?”

  “When I got back to the car after seeing the Iberian Magpie, the reception began coming in as I drove. I was getting texts that the Tactical Unit had made their hard entry after all, and there was no one in the house. With the task force blocking the route to the road, the Broomway was the only way they could have gone. I was closer to Wakering than Foulness Island, much closer, so I turned around and drove straight to Wakering Stairs to go out onto the Broomway from that end.”

  “Did it occur to you that the kidnapper might still be with them, and that he might be armed?” There were times when Maik’s tone conveyed as much as his words. More even.

  Jejeune shrugged. “I just knew those two young people would be out there, somewhere on the Maplin Sands, and the fog was coming in. I knew I had to get to them if I could.”

  “Still, it could have turned out bad for you.”

  Jejeune said nothing. He simply continued to stare out to sea.

  Maik bowed his head a little and nodded slowly. “Worse, I meant.”

  Both men sat quietly for a few moments, letting the wind fill the silence. It was a constant presence out here, a feature of the landscape as real as the grassy tussocks it teased into manic dances or bowed into submission with its force. It swept low across the treeless terrain, washing over everything, seeking out those who might try and find shelter. The constant, unrelenting white noise of its passing would be enough to drive a man insane, thought Danny, if he spent long enough out here.

  “Just curious, sir. What was it about what she said to you, out there on the flats, that got you thinking?”

  “She commented on the way I spoke. I didn’t register it at the time, and afterward I suppose I just convinced myself she meant my words. Eventually, I just forgot all about it. Until I saw her again and realized she was talking about my accent. Monte had told her a Canadian was coming for them.”

  Maik smiled. “But how did he know? Not from any TV. No light, cold food, no heaters. There was no electricity in that house.”

  Maik paused. “Does she know?”

  The inspector shook his head. “I think she could, if she let herself. If she allowed herself to think about that time, I’m pretty sure she’d realize there were coincidences, a lot of them, that can’t be explained away by the version of the truth she wants to believe.”

  Maik gave a short nod. The coincidences had been what alerted him, too, in the beginning. Of all the people that have ever been kidnapped, he couldn’t imagine many were held at a place they were int
imately familiar with from their childhood holidays.

  “So what was his plan, do you think? Was he just going to stash the money somewhere and then try to get back with the girl after it was all over? The happy couple, once again?”

  Jejeune shook his head. “I don’t think so. It’s hard to believe now, but apparently Carolyn Gresham was a strong-willed woman once. Confident, assured. I’m pretty sure he would have known it was over for good between them. No, I think Monte Harrison saw the money as his severance package, and setting himself up as one of the kidnap victims meant he’d be able to go off and spend it somewhere without ever coming under suspicion.”

  “So after collecting and hiding the ransom money, his plan was to come back here and wait for them both to be rescued.”

  Jejeune nodded. “It would have been easy enough to convince the investigating officers he knew nothing about the kidnapper. After all, Carolyn Gresham said the same thing, and she was telling the truth. Once he’d done that, he’d have been in the clear.”

  “Only you worked out where they were being held, which left him with two options. Stay and play the victim when the ETF arrived, or run with the girl, and hope he could collect some sort of reward from Gresham.”

  “He had saved him one hundred thousand pounds, and rescued his daughter. I imagine the Home Secretary would have been more than generous, if not quite to the tune of the full ransom. All they had to do was to make it to the end of the Broomway and Monte Harrison could have cashed in.”

  Maik looked out at the sea. He thought about his next question for a long time. Not because it troubled him, but because of the trouble it might bring to others. “So do things stay as they are, then?” he asked finally. “As Shepherd advises?”

  Jejeune watched as a cluster of Turnstones swooped in and began picking their way among a carpet of glistening, sea-washed pebbles. They moved quickly, meticulously going about their task, untroubled by the wind or the pounding surf or the emptiness of the landscape. It shouldn’t stay here. If it did, an innocent man would be forever blamed for a crime he didn’t commit. His son would grow up believing his father was a kidnapper, his wife that he was a criminal. But if the detectives revealed their findings, what, then, of Mrs. Harrison’s truth, a woman whose only consolation was her son’s bravery and his happiness? Was truth a weapon to bring more suffering to someone who was already mortally wounded? And what of Carolyn Weller, who held the memory of her once and forever lover so close, giving her daughter his name in his honour? Or of Sir David Gresham, whom the nation and his colleagues had rallied around so valiantly during his anguish, and celebrated with him so joyfully upon the return of his daughter. Would the truth be welcomed by any of them? No, it would harm these people more than the lie they had now. Things shouldn’t stay as they were. But they would.