A Shimmer of Hummingbirds

by Steve Burrows

  Laraby was outside before Salter could even draw breath again. By the time her mind had stopped reeling, the rear lights of the minicab had long since disappeared into the cold, dark night.

  30

  “Harpy Eagle. A report of a nest on the other side of the reserve. Quickly, Inspector. We need to get there before first light. The others have already gone on ahead.”

  Jejeune had already been awake when Thea’s urgent knock had come at his door; his troubled sleep broken by a spiralling kaleidoscope of images and imaginings. But the banging had still startled him, coming as it did a full two hours before their scheduled breakfast time, and so insistent. He dressed rapidly while Thea waited outside his room, issuing terse messages through the door. “We need to take the bike, so bring only your pack and your bins. You can leave everything else until we return.”

  Jejeune emerged from his room into a dark night already heavy with the building humidity. Daylight was still not even a suggestion in the sky, and the quiet stillness that hung over the forest told him they were approaching the envelope, that sliver of time when the nocturnal creatures were retreating to their lairs while the dawn predators were still yet to emerge. He climbed on the back of the bike and held on as Thea throttled away from the clearing at high speed.

  They weren’t able to maintain the pace for long. As they drove deeper into the forest, the uneven trail began to rise, slightly but steadily, and Thea spent much of her time easing the front wheel around the large rocks that loomed in the headlight.

  “There have been reports of a Harpy in these parts before, but until a ranger located the nest, we had no way of finding one. This might be the best chance you will ever have to see this bird, Inspector, but we must be there before it leaves for its morning hunt. If we miss it, we have no idea how long it will be before it returns.”

  Jejeune tapped Thea’s ribs lightly to let her know he had heard her remarks and acknowledged the truth of them. A Harpy Eagle, the monkey hunter: the bird had been beyond his wildest hopes for this trip. Its immense power and secretive ways made it a creature of almost mythical status; a prize few birders would ever get to see. The excitement was beginning to build within him, and he knew the discomfort of a dusty bike ride on a long, uphill track would fade into insignificance the moment he set eyes on the bird.

  They had been riding for about twenty minutes when they crested a small rise. Thea slid the bike to a stop and switched off the light. All around them, the darkness was total. Without the light, they could not see a hand before their faces. She switched on a small flashlight and played it across the ground in front of them, picking up a small trail that disappeared into the vegetation. “On foot from here, around to the other side of the hill. Not far, maybe ten minutes. The others will be waiting for us. They have a scope.”

  She motioned for Domenic to lead, and he set off, following the faint white trail painted by the light shining from behind him. Insects darted in an out of the beam, their buzzes and trills gradually becoming audible as his ears recovered from the thrum of the bike’s now silent engine.

  They had managed a good pace, picking out a series of trails through the vegetation, the occasional scuffing of a boot on a tree root the only disturbance to the rhythm of two sets of footfalls padding over the soft leaf cover. Only the metronomic click of nighttime insects accompanied them. The steady swishing of the vegetation as they brushed past suggested the trail was getting narrower, but Thea’s beam was unwaveringly fixed on the track ahead of them, so there was no way of knowing for sure. Jejeune thought they were under the canopy most of the time. Once or twice the air stirred about him, or a small breeze, in a way that made him think they had emerged into a clearing. But soon the air would close in again, warm and still, without even a breath of movement to stir the leaves. The night felt heavy, close, and Jejeune was sweating slightly as they walked.

  “Would this be a lifer for you, too?” he asked over his shoulder.

  “Yes.” Thea also sounded a little breathless, anxious even. But conversation was difficult at their pace, and Jejeune was not inclined to slow up. The prize on offer was too important.

  They had been travelling for so long, daylight would surely only be a few minutes away by the time they joined the others, thought Jejeune. He felt the surge of excitement again at the possibility of seeing this magnificent bird. He wondered if Traz had ever seen a Harpy before. He tried to remember if they had ever talked about it. He couldn’t recall, but it didn’t matter. A sighting of a Harpy Eagle wasn’t something you would get blasé about. His friend would be as charged up as Jejeune at the prospect that awaited them, whether he had seen one before or not.

  Thea seemed to be falling back slightly, the light from her flashlight barely reaching in front of Jejeune now. He turned to see if she needed any help, but all he could see was a shadowy outline behind the beam.

  Domenic Jejeune took only two more steps, but it was two too many. He knew, a heartbeat before it happened. He felt the spongy undergrowth give way, a little more than usual. He felt his foot travelling deeper, continuing down. He knew, but it was too late. By then, his entire weight had already come forward and his other foot had followed through and found nothingness. He fell through the opening with an explosion of rushing earth and debris and twigs. Leaf litter confettied around him, spiralling in the air, and a cascade of dirt and branches rained in on him as he hurtled down through the darkness.

  Jejeune didn’t know how long he had been unconscious. The sky above the pit was light now, and the day’s warmth was already beginning to saturate the air around him. He was dazed, and he felt weak, as if the strength had been wrung out of him. He rolled to his side, but as he tried to stand, his left ankle gave way and he collapsed in agony. He dragged himself to the side of the pit and rested his back against the smooth dirt of the wall, gingerly touching his leg to test for pain. A sprain from the fall, but not a break. The fall. He looked around, confused. The floor of the pit was littered with twigs and leaves, and he found his hair and clothes were, too. A poacher’s pit — one large enough and deep enough for wild boar, or deer even. The amount of debris that had fallen in after him suggested the opening had been well covered by vegetation. Even in daylight, it would have been unlikely he would have spotted it. He waited silently for a moment, listening to the forest. He felt tired. He could feel the weariness tugging on his consciousness, threatening to drag him under. He fought it off, knowing he needed to listen for Thea’s calls. But only the sounds of the forest filled the morning air, the clicks and trills of insects and the dawn chorus of birds already building.

  Jejeune fumbled for his pack and his fingers closed around his water bottle. But he could tell, even before he pried open the lid. It had been full when he left the lodge. He remembered filling it the night before, as was his habit every night on this trip. Now it was empty. And then he realized. Through the confusion, and the throbbing in his head, and the weariness, the truth came to him. He had been in here long enough for anyone who was looking to have found him. So there would be no calls from Thea. She would not be coming to help him. Nor would anybody else.

  When he awoke again, it was hot, stiflingly, overwhelmingly hot. From the far side of the pit there was a rank odour of rotting flesh. A large bird of some kind, a guan, perhaps, or even a currasow? It was impossible to tell now; just a mass of matted feathers and dark, dried flesh. A victim of the forest’s harsh justice? Or bait perhaps, left to draw a foraging predator into this trap.

  How long would a trapped animal survive in here, he wondered. He knew no creature would be able to last long in these conditions without water. Already, it was a craving for him, his tongue thick, his lips dry. He reached for the sides of the pit to ease himself up to a standing position again. The lip of the pit was too high to reach. His fingers carefully searched the smooth walls for footholds. He knew dark spaces were the haunts of many dangers in the rainforest. Scorpions and tarantulas lurked in such places, waiting out the heat of
the day, but still ready to strike at anything that came their way. But he found no crevices, no niches that would give him any purchase to climb. His ankle was throbbing, and the effort of standing was more than he could manage, so he slumped back against the wall and carefully stretched his leg out in front of him to ease the pain. He tipped his head back, feeling the cold earth of the wall against his scalp, and gazed up. With the sun climbing ever higher in the sky even the shade from the corners of the pit was shrinking away little by little. Soon, there would be no escape from the relentless heat. He looked at the fetid mass of feathers and desiccated flesh on the far side of the pit. One day. Perhaps two? But surely no more.

  31

  It was a crisp morning, the air cool and clean, the pale blue sky open and high. Off to the east, a watery sun was pouring its light into the stands of trees, and their shadows climbed the boundary wall of Oakham Manor like dark vines. Maik and Laraby were in the Mini, and when they eventually arrived at the stone archway leading to Robin Oakes’s property, they expected to find a parked police cruiser. The officers had instructions not to enter. Yet. The car’s back seat would have been empty on the way to the property. Maik and Laraby expected it would be occupied when it left.

  Laraby was in high spirits, and with good reason. It wasn’t every day you arrived at the station, fresh from your full English, with an extra slice of fried bread, to find the answer to your prayers sitting in the reception area.

  “Young lady would like a word, sir.” The desk sergeant had smiled at the woman, and her father seated beside her, to show them there was no disrespect intended. The young lady looked nervous, like an animal that had been captured and wasn’t sure what was going to happen to her. Laraby had seen a hundred like her, a witness who had maybe seen something, but, you know, it might not mean anything, so I’m sorry if I’m wasting your time. He gave them both a broad smile and kept his gaze on them as he said, “Then I think it’s tea for three in my office, Sergeant, if you wouldn’t mind.” He ushered them ahead of him with his hand. “Why don’t we go on through.”

  Only it hadn’t been a waste of his time. Even before the soft knock announcing the arrival of the tea, Laraby had surmised that much. He took the opportunity to invite Danny Maik into his office; the one with Domenic Jejeune’s name on the door, and asked the woman casually to repeat her statement. Softly, softly, in case she picked up on how significant it was, and started to enter the land of make-believe just to please them.

  Laraby had his back to them, gathering the tea from the tray. “This is Gillian Forsyth, Sergeant. She’s just got back from a holiday in Malta. All right for some, eh? The thing is, the night before she left, Miss Forsyth had a nasty incident happen to her. She didn’t report it at the time, being keen to get away on her hols and all. But now she’s back, and she’s been hearing on the news about this shocking business with Ms. Dawes. So she thought she’d better come in and have a chat.” Laraby turned, a cup and saucer in each hand, and passed them out. “So you were saying this was around five o’clock, just about twilight. And the street lights were on?”

  “Yes,” said the young woman confidently. “And all the lights in the cottages, too.”

  “But not that one,” her father said. “She remembers that distinctly.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Laraby reasonably. “But your daughter is going to need to tell us all this herself. Just the way it is, I’m afraid.” There was no room for compromise in the smile he gave to the man. “Why don’t you just run over it again for the sergeant, Miss Forsyth, as far as you’d got with me, and we’ll pick it up from there?”

  So she did. She told Danny how she’d been walking along the lane that night when a man had burst from the cottage, the one with no lights — a sidelong look at her father — and run into her. At her, actually, knocking her down and giving her a nasty bang on the back of her head when she hit the lamppost.

  It was a better account this time, as Laraby had suspected it would be. She’d left out the minor details, the weather, her reasons for being there at that time, and such. Now the account was clean and clear, like a bright, shiny diamond.

  “Interesting, eh, Sergeant? How’s your tea, by the way, Miss Forsyth? Can I call you Gillian? Enough milk?”

  “I understand it was getting dark,” said Maik, “and that it must have been a bit frightening, to say the least, to have this man running toward you like that, but did you get any sense of him? His build? His size?”

  “As a matter of fact, she thinks she did. Sorry …” Mr. Forsyth looked down into his tea, to avoid Laraby’s admonishing stare.

  Maik and Laraby tried their most benign looks out on Gillian Forsyth. This, if it came off, was treasure. But it couldn’t be rushed, cajoled, suggested. It needed to come from the witness’s memory banks pure and unblemished. It would never be like this again. With every subsequent retelling something would change, a detail, an embellishment, an uncertainty.

  “Tallish. His build was hard to tell. He was wearing a brown leather jacket, the kind with a corduroy collar. A cap, too, but I think his hair was longish. The thing I did notice, though, was the moustache. The ends twirled up a bit, like a villain in those old films, only perhaps not that, you know …” She twirled the ends of an imaginary moustache with her fingers. “And he had a goatee.”

  Maik was impressed with Laraby’s response. He knew the DI wouldn’t be able to get them out of the room fast enough, but he was the model of professional courtesy as he eased them toward an officer who could take the woman’s statement down on paper. The ishes wouldn’t be his favourite part, tallish, longish, but the rest was more than enough to satisfy him.

  Beside them, along the boundary wall to Oakham, the bare branches of the trees criss-crossed the sky like netting. Strands of wispy white cloud had begun to drift across the pale blue background, high and distant. Under such a great, wide sky, everything in the landscape appeared smaller, diminished.

  “Oh, I remembered who that group was, by the way.”

  Maik looked over in anticipation.

  “The Village People.”

  The wheels of the Mini had returned from the grass verge to the road surface by the time Danny looked over again. He saw Laraby with a mischievous grin on his face and his arms raised, palms upward. “Altogether now, Sergeant. It’s fun to stay at the …”

  A genuine smile spread across Maik’s stony features. And why not? They had an eyewitness identification of a murder suspect, Laraby was turning out to be not bad company, and, for once, the sun was shining. It came as something of a shock, but Danny realized he was enjoying himself.

  There was a metallic spangle of light far up ahead; some bit of metal off the cruiser, reflecting in the flat morning light. Or perhaps not. It seemed to be moving toward them in erratic spurts, wavering from side to side, dancing on the air. Maik realized what it was, just as Laraby raised his hand to point. They had both seen enough of them recently. But there was no time to avoid it. The drone hurtled toward the windscreen of the Mini and smashed into it with a juddering force, shattering the glass into a spiderweb of cracks. Maik’s involuntary flinch took the Mini off the road for the second time in as many minutes. Only this time it didn’t come back. The small wheels found the boundary ditch, and the car somersaulted over the wall, bouncing off its roof. The front end catapulted viciously downward and slammed into the trunk of a massive oak tree with a force that sent a shudder throughout the forest. By the time the trees had come to rest, inside the car, there was no movement at all.

  It was as if the crash had shocked the world into inertia. Apart from the hiss of steam from the Mini’s ravaged radiator, the only sound was the tick of hot metal. Danny regained consciousness to find Laraby slumped over beside him. He squirmed around to free up an arm and stretched it out so he could lay a finger on the carotid artery of the inert form beside him. The sudden tap on the driver’s side window startled him. Danny reached across to open it.

  “Danny. You okay?” the
man asked, gasping for breath. As crew chief of the Saltmarsh Emergency Services Team, Tom Cavendish had worked with the police on many occasions. He had recognized the Mini as Maik’s and sprinted the last hundred metres to the crash site.

  “I’m okay. The DI’s out. Strong pulse, though. No blood that I can see.”

  “Let’s get you out of there, and we can get one of our lads in to help remove the DI.”

  But that didn’t make much sense to Maik, and a Danny Maik who’d just been catapulted twenty metres off the road and brought to a sudden stop by an oak tree wasn’t a man to argue with. He was here, in the car, he was able, and he would help with the transfer of the DI from the Mini.

  Two other rescuers were working on the passenger door of the car, but the impact had twisted the frame. It took the additional force of Maik reaching across the still-unconscious form of Marvin Laraby and pushing from the inside before the door finally gave way and swung open. Maik unclicked the seat belt and eased the slumping torso of the DI toward the rescuers. There was a sound like a groan as they twisted Laraby’s body slightly to drag his legs clear, but by the time they had loaded the DI onto the gurney and wheeled it away, Maik had still seen no signs of consciousness.

  Once he had managed to unfurl himself from the driver’s seat, Danny himself proved more unsteady than he thought, reeling slightly and resting against the dented bodywork of the Mini. He was led off toward the road by one of the rescuers. Whether it was part of the plan or not, he was not given the opportunity to look further into the damage to his car.

  He looked out toward the dappled edges of the glade, where the crisp white light filtered through the tree trunks. “It was a drone,” he said. “Black. About half a metre across. Have our lads look around for it, will you?”

  Simultaneously, calls came from either side of the search perimeter, and each officer supporting one of Danny’s arms moved off in a different direction, leaving him swaying uneasily in a clearing a few metres from the wreckage. He hoped the calls meant they’d found the drone, even if the two separate directions suggested it had disintegrated on impact. With luck, there would at least be enough left of one piece to identify a serial number. Right about now, Danny Maik was thinking he would be extremely interested to know who that drone belonged to.