A Shimmer of Hummingbirds

by Steve Burrows

  Again, Salter flicked a glance at the DI, but there was more information to be gleaned while Welbourne was still in her state of ignorance. “Did all of the IV League members feel the same way?”

  “The financial return was obviously Erin Dawes’s major concern, but I believe she did also appreciate the inherent value of forests.” Welbourne stooped to pick away a remnant of grass that had become entangled around one of the saplings. It seemed like a futile gesture in the face of these winds, but Salter understood it for what it was, the need to nurture something you cared for.

  “What inherent value?”

  “Ecosystem services, Inspector. Climate regulation, flood control. Not to mention the sheer sense of inspiration and fulfillment one feels when surrounded by a stand of mature trees. Surely, the spiritual nourishment one receives from a forest far exceeds any economic value.”

  “I’m sorry, you’ve lost me.” Laraby’s smile came just soon enough to reassure Welbourne that perhaps there was a soul in there somewhere after all. “And the others?”

  “Robin seems as unconcerned about this as about most matters of consequence in his life, to be frank. Personally, I felt his contribution to be the most valuable of all. To give us the opportunity, through the use of his land, to re-establish an unbroken swath of forest, to link these two ancient remnants once again.” Welbourne stared off into the distance at the thought. “Magnificent.” She tossed her head slightly, sending her wispy hair swirling in the wind once again. “Gerald expressed the gravest reservations about the project, though, of course, he did eventually come round.”

  “What reservations might those have been, then?” asked Laraby, stirring with interest.

  “Drones. He’s vehemently opposed to them.”

  “But he agreed to invest in the project despite this?”

  Welbourne gave the two detectives a narrow smile. “Gerald Moncrieff never met a pound he didn’t like, Inspector. The projected returns on offer overwhelmed any philosophical objections he might have had. I won’t stay invested, myself, you understand. I’m not a fan of the stock market. I believe there are times when you have to ask yourself just how much bother you are willing to go to in order to get extra money that you don’t really need. But I am glad that I have been able to help such a worthy project in its early stages.”

  Laraby turned to stare at the sea, steadying himself against the blustery wind. He seemed mesmerized by the waves, racing toward their ceaseless suicide against the boulders at the base of the cliff. Salter knew he was preparing himself, not just to deliver the news, but to sense the first reaction, the unguarded response, before anything could sweep in to mask it. She prepared herself, too, watching Welbourne’s thin face carefully.

  Laraby turned to Welbourne. “Can you think of any reason Erin Dawes would not have gone through with the purchase of the options in the Picaflor project?”

  “None at all.” She drew her head back slightly. “What on earth do you mean?”

  “Ms. Welbourne, the investment was never made.”

  Unless acting was high on the list of subjects they taught at Welbourne’s finishing school, her surprise was genuine. And profound. She brought a slender hand up to her mouth. “This is dreadful news. Simply awful.”

  “As I’m sure the death of Erin Dawes was to you,” said Salter, continuing to watch the woman’s face carefully.

  “What? Yes, of course.” Her mind seemed to be reeling, unable to take in the news. ”But to lose this opportunity…. So the reforestation project on Robin’s land has been abandoned?” She looked distraught, even as she fought to retain her dignity, as her breeding seemed to demand.

  “I believe Dr. Amendal was able to make other arrangements for test sites,” said Laraby. “So you never asked to see the investment documents?”

  She shook her head numbly. “It’s not what one does, is it, check up on one’s business partners? Erin Dawes assured me the investment would be made by the deadline, and I would hold the agreed share options in the project. I gave that side of things no more thought.”

  What sort of a world did these people live in, wondered Laraby, where a fifty-thousand-pound investment was on the side of things to which someone gave no more thought. “We were wondering whether Ms. Dawes’s decision might have anything to do with her relationship with Robin Oakes.”

  Salter had never had the benefit of finishing school acting classes, so there was no question the surprise she showed was genuine. Nobody she knew at the station was wondering about this. She looked at Laraby, but he was focused on Welbourne.

  At first, the woman said nothing. Laraby waited patiently, seemingly oblivious now to the raw winds that buffeted the air around their heads. Welbourne found something across the fields that captured her attention. On the horizon, a single tree stood like an ominous black scarecrow, silhouetted against the white sky. But other than that, there was nothing of interest that Salter could see.

  “Were they involved in a sexual relationship, Ms. Welbourne?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “But it’s possible?” pressed Laraby. “You couldn’t rule it out?”

  Salter felt vaguely uneasy. It was quite a distance from putting words in a person’s mouth in an interview to doing it on a witness stand, but once you had started on that path, you had already taken the most important step.

  Welbourne was silent, weighing the inspector’s question. “Anything is possible, I suppose. Robin’s casual relationships have been well-documented by the press.” Welbourne softened her face into the kind of smile that did nothing at all for her own appearance. “But really, I have to say, Erin Dawes was hardly Robin’s …”

  “Class?”

  “Type, Inspector. She and Robin did not have what I’d call compatible personalities. He has raised indolence to an art form. She was, shall we say, animated. They spent most of their time defending their approaches to life. If there was any physical attraction between them, they kept it very well hidden.”

  She seemed to consider her remarks and turned a little to allow her look to add weight to her comments. “I refuse to believe Robin can have been involved in Erin Dawes’s death, Inspector. That is what you’re implying, isn’t it? It’s unthinkable. You should know I trust Robin Oakes utterly. I have always found him to be an honourable person, of impeccable background.”

  “If he ever applies for a job with the police services, perhaps I’ll come to you for a character reference,” said Laraby testily.

  “You don’t understand, Inspector. Robin Oakes could never have committed a crime like this. He’s simply not that …”

  “Type?” offered Laraby. “Thank you, Ms. Welbourne, you’ve been most helpful.” The inspector delivered the words with finality, but there was a resonance to them that Salter suspected Amelia Welbourne would not find particularly comforting.

  “Humbling, wasn’t it, Constable?” said Laraby as they made their way back between the rows of white stakes. “You stand before that sea, and you think, it’s been doing this forever. You wonder what difference a policeman can make, when you see the timelessness of it all.”

  It had not been the comment Salter was expecting. She had been waiting to hear Laraby banging on about being blown halfway to Wales, and brass monkeys with missing parts. Instead, here he was philosophizing about one police officer’s place in the grand scheme of things.

  “Why Oakes, sir?” she asked. Had they missed something, Salter and Danny Maik and the rest, something that had pointed Laraby toward the celebrity photographer? With Jejeune, such questions were par for the course. But ever since he’d been here, DI Laraby had a knack for making you feel like you were all on the same page, all part of the same investigation. For him to hone in on a suspect out of the blue like this seemed out of character somehow.

  “Robin Oakes lied to Sergeant Maik and me, Constable. And when somebody lies to a police officer, it’s because they are guilty of something. Now perhaps it’s just me, but I can’t think
of many things I’m going to be willing to lie about at the expense of giving myself an alibi for the time of a murder.”

  “Welbourne seems to genuinely believe he’d never be involved in anything like this.”

  “I’m sure she does. But it’s all very well issuing blanket assurances based on somebody’s family tree. Me, I’m a touch harder to convince. These people are not racehorses, Constable. Their bloodlines make no difference to me.”

  Laraby paused at the car and took one last look back across the fields, the wind making his eyes water. The distant grey shape of Amelia Welbourne was still making her way slowly along the coastal path.

  “Hard to believe that forest was lying there all that time under the sea, isn’t it, Constable?”

  Salter knew what he meant. An entire forest, lying for millennia just offshore. And no one knew. No secret was too big to hide, if you chose the right place to conceal it.

  15

  Marvin Laraby stood at the front of the incident room, surveying all before him with an air of calm self-assurance. There was a lot to like about Laraby’s approach to life. You got the sense of a man who had taken the occasional look in the mirror and come to terms with what he had seen. Maik had once heard DCS Shepherd, who seemed to have an Americanism for every occasion, describe someone as being comfortable in his own skin, and the phrase seemed to suit Laraby particularly well. Of course, it helped that there was something to feel comfortable about. They were making progress — in Laraby’s view, anyway, if not quite as much, perhaps, in anybody else’s.

  They were listening to the reports from the teams that had been checking Dawes’s contacts. Since it had been agreed that the breakin had been committed by someone who had visited Dawes’s home previously, a random attack had been discounted. But the accountant’s limited social circle meant the detectives had been able to approach things systematically until, one by one, the acquaintances of Erin Dawes were definitively eliminated as suspects. The number of people who had the opportunity to kill Erin Dawes, let alone motive and means, was dwindling with every new report.

  Laraby nodded contentedly as the last of the teams reported their conclusions. “Okay, listen people, this is good work. Stellar. Well done, everyone.”

  The general stirring had an unmistakable undertone. Laraby’s praise seemed to linger in the air all the longer because the group was not accustomed to hearing it. Shepherd eased herself up from her post by the doorway. Such was the wave of good feeling Laraby’s input had created, it seemed almost churlish to dwell on the negatives in the investigation. But motive was going to be key, and to this point, as far as Shepherd could tell, they were nowhere near establishing one. There seemed to be little doubt now that it had been Dawes’s plan all along to embezzle the IV League funds. One hundred and fifty thousand pounds had been withdrawn from the group account two days before the investment deadline. Now the money was nowhere to be found. But that was where the logical side of things fell off a cliff. First, no one could come up with a good reason, or even a moderately bad one, for why Dawes would have stayed around so long, when it was unquestionably just a matter of time before her crime was discovered. And neither Shepherd nor the rest of the Saltmarsh Serious Crimes squad had needed any big-time Charlie from The Smoke, even one who seemed to be morphing into a decent bloke before their very eyes, to point out that, if somebody had taken your money and hidden it, killing them was not the way you went about getting it back. As motives went, Welbourne’s and Moncrieff’s were about as weak as they came. The problem was, they were not just the best ones the investigating officers had at the moment, they were the only ones.

  “I don’t suppose there was anything in her safe that might lead us to where that money is?” Shepherd asked.

  Laraby’s expression suggested what he thought the likelihood of that might be. “I mean, I get that she didn’t go to the same upper-crust universities as the rest of the IV League set, ma’am, but expecting her to keep incriminating details like that around the house is not giving her much credit. That money is racking up double digit interest somewhere a lot warmer than north Norfolk, and the details will be stored on a cloud server somewhere we can’t get at them.” Laraby turned to Maik. “That said, I haven’t seen an inventory of the safe’s contents yet. Think you could get me a copy, Sergeant?”

  Maik pulled out his phone and murmured into it. “Nobody seems to have one to hand,” he said. “It’ll take them a couple of minutes to locate one. They’ll run it up to us as soon as they do.”

  “Nothing on the mug yet?” Laraby made it a personal inquiry to Maik, but the sergeant simply shook his head.

  “Erm, I looked into that bird plaque,” said Salter to fill the awkward void. “Apparently, it is accurate, after all. The bird is a Golden Oriole. They’re rare enough in these parts, but they have been seen in Norfolk on the odd occasion.”

  She looked as though she might be regretting bringing up the idea in the first place, but Laraby was having none of that. “Worth a try, though, Constable, just the same,” he said, nodding. “Nothing wrong with following your heart once in a while. Now, what do we know about this other member of the IV League. Gerald Moncrieff?”

  “He’s made a small fortune by turning part of his property into a shooting estate, apparently. He does have a couple of hunting-related citations in the past.” Salter handed Laraby a sheet of paper. “And, we have a car like Moncrieff’s on CCTV moving toward Dawes’s cottage late afternoon on the day she died,” said Salter. “No sign of it returning. The thing is, it’s a pretty popular model, a BMW X5.”

  “Right in our window, though. And I can’t imagine a peaceful little village like Saltmarsh is exactly a hotbed of vehicular activity after the lights go down.” He looked at Maik. “We should make him our first stop this morning.”

  “The financial checks didn’t throw up any surprises,” said Salter. “Oakes’s finances tend to wobble a bit, but he is an artist type, after all, and you know what they’re like with money. But he seems to have a fan, some billionaire in America who’s an avid collector of his work, so he’s doing all right at the moment. The other two are as solid as a rock. That’s not to say they aren’t going to miss fifty grand, but it’s not going to send either of them into the poorhouse, either.”

  “I thought the landed gentry were all on their uppers,” said Laraby, “donating their properties to the National Trust left, right, and centre to avoid paying all those inheritance taxes and such.”

  “It’s true that many families have had to give up their properties. But the IV League members have all managed to stay on their ancestral estates, albeit in what they call “reduced circumstances.” Like Oakes, for example. He lives in that gatehouse, now that the original manor house has gone. But the prestige is still there. These days, a couple of hundred acres and a granddad who’d been a local magistrate is enough to get you a mention in Burke’s Landed Gentry.”

  “Reduced circumstances,” repeated Laraby with heavy sarcasm. “Get me a tissue, will you, somebody. I’m starting to well up here with the tragedy of it all.”

  DCS Shepherd stirred. “The press will obviously be looking to play up the societal angle on this one, Inspector. Working-class accountant inveigles herself with the rural aristocracy and then embezzles from them.” She looked at Laraby frankly. ”We won’t be going anywhere near that with our inquiries, I take it? I wouldn’t like to think this case is going to turn into A Tale of Two Classes.”

  Laraby stretched his neck a little, as if trying to free it from the confines of his collar. “I don’t generally conduct my investigations for the convenience of the media, ma’am.” He gave his broad shoulders an easy shrug. “But I’ll keep it in mind.”

  “Anybody else on our radar?”

  “The doctor, Amendal,” said Salter. “He’s got some temper on him. I don’t quite know why, but it sounds like that land of Oakes’s was very important to his work. I doubt he took the news that he wasn’t getting it too well.”


  Laraby shook his head slightly. “He’s just a young man in a hurry.” He smiled at the room. “I was a bit like that once. Thought I knew it all, and got a bit testy when I couldn’t get the world to listen to me. We can have a look at him, if you like, but I doubt we’re going to find any malicious intent there.”

  “The broker, Connor James. There’s something not quite right there.” Maik’s sudden contribution from the side of the room, after so much measured silence, caused Laraby to snap his head around. “He’s worked with a lot of high-profile clients in the past — footballers, recording industry types. You’d think there’d be wall-to-wall pictures of him with them, especially on a boat where he does all his meeting and greeting.”

  “Why? Because he’s some unsophisticated yokel who suddenly finds himself moving in their circles? Come on, Danny.”

  “Because it’s part of the package,” said Maik evenly. “Look who I know, look who trusts me with their business dealings.” Maik paused, but when it became clear nobody else was going to say it for him, he added the final piece himself. “Plus, James lost money on this deal himself. Quite a bit, if those option yields are as high as expected. And unlike Moncrieff or Welbourne, he had no reason to wait and see if his money was ever coming back again. He was never going to see those profits whether Dawes was dead or alive.”

  Laraby considered the idea for a moment before nodding. “Fair enough. I don’t see it myself, but we can have another chat with Mr. James, if you like.” He paused. “I’ve been having a think myself, as it happens. These arguments Oakes is reported to have had with Dawes. There’s only two things that cause that kind of open hostility between a man and a woman: money and sex.”

  “And since Oakes wasn’t contributing any money to the Picaflor project …” said Salter.

  “We know Oakes has a reputation in this area,” said Laraby. “We also know Dawes wasn’t the type to stand for any nonsense. My guess would be an advance that was rejected. The Robin Oakeses of the world have been bending the hired help over the parlour tables for generations. They don’t get to hear the word no very often. I imagine it came as something of a shock.”