A Shimmer of Hummingbirds

by Steve Burrows

  “I thought Super Mario wore overalls,” said Salter, earning a laugh from the others.

  “Seriously, well done, Danny,” said Laraby sincerely. “I mean it. Brilliant.”

  He patted the sergeant on the back again. It was a lot of physical contact for Danny Maik, thought Salter. But for once the sergeant didn’t seem to mind.

  Liquid reflections shimmered on the water surface beside the small group. Laraby looked into them for a moment and became suddenly earnest. “Most likely. I’ll be leaving it to Sergeant Maik to handle things from here on in …” Again, the look was to Shepherd. “Don’t get me wrong, this was a team collar in every sense. But I think he’s earned it.”

  No one disagreed, even if it seemed to Salter that there might be more to it than that. Acknowledging James’s guilt meant Laraby had to concede that his little class war with Oakes was over. As hard as it might be for him to watch the fall of a man who had dragged himself up from working-class background, the DI was going to have to accept that Robin Oakes and all the rest of those rural aristos he held in such contempt were in the clear on this one. And that might just be easier for DI Marvin Laraby to do from a distance.

  “So, what do you say, Danny?” asked Laraby heartily. “Ready to see this one through to the end?”

  Maik shrugged modestly. “Please yourself.”

  Laraby managed one final glance at DCS Shepherd. “I just have.”

  42

  “Sergeant,” said Jejeune, “I can barely hear you. Wait while I try to find a stronger signal.”

  Traz had retired to a discreet distance after handing Jejeune his phone. He pointed now to a spot near the hotel lobby’s revolving glass doors where he’d had success finding a stronger signal before. He hadn’t recognized the number when it displayed, but the gravelly English voice had been unmistakable.

  “You closed the case?” asked Jejeune, putting a finger in one ear against the traffic noise coming from the street outside.

  “A man named Connor James. He’s not saying much, but we’ve got all the physical evidence we need.”

  “So you’re satisfied?” It was their code. Was there anything troubling Maik, any pieces that didn’t fit?

  “More than I was,” admitted Maik. “I can’t say I was ever particularly taken with our first choice.”

  “Robin Oakes?”

  The first part of Maik’s reply disappeared in a burst of static, but he was still speaking when the signal returned. “… flying a drone around a Barn Owl, trying to acclimatize the bird to it so he could follow it and get some pictures from above while it was hunting.”

  Jejeune’s grip tightened on Traz’s phone. “I hope he’s been reported to the authorities. I can text you a number, if you like.”

  “No evidence, I’m afraid, other than his word. Now James is in custody, I doubt Oakes will be keen on repeating what he told us. Your own trip going okay, sir?”

  It was Maik telling Jejeune the affairs of Saltmarsh Constabulary were no longer a topic for discussion, at least, not until he returned. He wasn’t sure how much the sergeant knew about the real reason for his visit to Colombia. Jejeune had taken great care to exclude him from as many of the details as he could. He prized Maik’s loyalty greatly, and would not knowingly put him in a situation where he would have to make a difficult decision, if questions were asked in an official cap­acity. But some level of openness was called for now.

  “There’s a chance things could be resolved.” His mind went to the grainy, disembodied image he had spoken to via the Justice Department’s video screen. How long, now, would it take for the relevant authorities to reach a decision? He tried to imagine how he would react if Mariel came to offer a confession, especially one with such profound ramifications. Would he listen, dispassionately, and hear the sheer, unguarded honesty that would convince him of the truth of her statement? Or would he be distracted, instead, by her appearance, her smooth skin and long grey hair? By her glittering outfit, and her thready philosophy, and her talk of hummingbirds with four wings and a forest with a broken heart? His eyes caught the strangeness of the scene outside — the bright sunshine, the busyness of the human traffic along the street, the frenetic activity of a Bogota afternoon. He realized it must be late in the U.K., and with a jolt of awareness he realized Maik would not have called at this hour just to update him on their progress in the case. Or to inquire about his.

  “Anything else, Sergeant?” he asked guardedly.

  Maik had gone quiet, realizing Jejeune was on the right wavelength now. “You asked to be kept informed, sir,” he said, reaching for his formal tone.

  Jejeune’s stillness seemed to reach across the miles. From the glass-fronted lobby of a Bogota hotel to the quietness of a deserted Saltmarsh Police Station, where only a desk lamp kept Danny Maik from the darkness, nothing moved.

  “Informed?”

  “About Ray Hayes.”

  Traz was up and moving, approaching Jejeune across the lobby, reading the alarm in his friend’s face, sensing trouble.

  “He’s out.”

  The bright lights of El Dorado International Airport shone down on the bustling activity beneath them with the relentlessness of the Colombian sun. Now that his first flush of panic was over, Jejeune had come to terms with his concern, knowing he could do nothing more. He had booked his flight and made it to the airport. The departures board assured him the plane would be leaving on time. Beside him, Traz stood with his hands in his pockets, looking as well groomed as always, despite their frantic drive through Bogota’s rush hour traffic.

  With nothing to do but clear customs, it was time to reassure his friend that he was settled, back in control and ready to accept he was helpless to affect matters until his flight landed in the U.K. Lightness was the key.

  “You have to promise me you won’t try to hook up with Thea again after I’m gone,” he said.

  Traz was ready to meet him on this safe ground, where the demons of emotion might not venture. “The woman tried to kill my best friend. In some cultures, that’s considered a bad omen. No,” he said, with a theatrical sigh, “I fear it’s all over between us. Still, as they say in those romantic movies, at least we’ll always have … parrots.”

  “I think that might be Paris,” said Jejeune, rewarding his friend’s efforts with a smile. Through the large windows of the airport, the detective saw a pair of Black Vultures circling lazily against the blue sky. “Your friends,” he told Traz, pointing.

  Traz smiled, but there was sincerity in his eyes when he looked back at Jejeune. “I just think we should give them a little respect. They’re important …”

  He stopped short. And then Jejeune knew. It was not phantom tracks in the mud that had led Traz to him in the forest that day, not magic realism, or the supernatural sleuthing powers of Jim Rockford. It had been these, the chulos, painting his position on the ground with their dark crosses as they circled, waiting for Jejeune to cross the line between life and death; the thinnest line of all.

  He looked back to see his friend choking back emotion at the memory. They both bore scars from this trip, he realized. They had been through so many things together. It was hard to know how to thank someone who had done so much for Jejeune’s family, even before they had ever come to Colombia.

  “They are going to fast track your new passport, I take it?” asked Jejeune.

  “A couple of days. I’ll be fine hanging out at the hotel. I could use a little down time.”

  “Besides, the St. Lucia authorities should know the procedure by now. This isn’t the first time you’ve lost a passport, is it, Traz? You reported one missing, along with your driver’s licence and a credit card, about a week after Damian made it safely away from St. Lucia and back into Canada.”

  Traz stared at Jejeune, not smiling, not doing anything. “It’s not a good idea to check up on your friends, JJ, not unless you’re prepared to deal with what you find. That’s your flight they’re calling. You’d better get going. Say
hi to Lindy for me. She’s going to love that basket and candle set. Trust me. I’m never wrong.”

  “Damian was never the best at saying thank you, so just in case, I’ll say it for him. Thank you. Traz. For everything.” Jejeune extended his hand. “It’s been, you know …”

  Traz nodded. “Yeah, me too.”

  43

  From the air, London looked like a sepia photograph. A tapestry of monochromatic slabs fanned out across the land, robbed of their light by the bank of low cloud that hovered over the city. From this height the river was a shiny grey cord, weaving its way between the blocks on either side.

  Jejeune had spent most of the flight thinking about Lindy. Only now as the pilot banked the plane for approach and the colourless landscape of London tilted into view did he think about the country he had just left. Bright sunshine had accompanied his take-off, and in order to round onto their flightpath out over the ocean, the plane had performed a slow curl over the Sierra Madres. Jejeune had looked down over the wooded hillsides and the vast, pristine valleys between the peaks. So much wilderness. Would it be preserved, or would it one day look like this, a grey wasteland of human sprawl? Or would the answer lie, as in most conflicts between conservation and development, in some compromise between the two, vaguely unsatisfying to either party, perhaps, but the best one could hope for in a world where humans and nature were forever destined to collide.

  Danny Maik was waiting at the arrivals gate when Jejeune emerged. He had a spare jacket over his arm. “It’s been cold here,” he said. “And I wasn’t sure how much time you’d had to look at the weather reports.”

  Jejeune took it with gratitude and slipped it on over his light sweater. The two men walked to the car park, engaging in only the lightest of conversation. There were many things they needed to discuss, but none of them were suitable for a busy airport terminal.

  Jejeune stopped in surprise as they approached the vehicle. Jejeune’s Range Rover, nicknamed The Beast by Lindy, sat in the parking space, shining from a fresh wash.

  “Lindy was kind enough to lend it to me a couple of days ago. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Where’s the Mini? Having the speakers repaired?”

  Maik gave a dutiful smile. The volume at which Maik played his Motown songs when the men travelled together was a constant source of comment from the DCI. “I’m having some work done on it.”

  It was typical of the men’s relationship that neither would mention their recent traumatic experiences to the other. They were events in each man’s life, neither of which affected any case they were working on. What need was there to bother the other person with the details?

  Maik extended a set of keys, but Jejeune refused. “You’d better drive. I didn’t get much sleep on the flight, and anyway, I’m not sure my ankle could handle the clutch.”

  Maik nodded and climbed behind the wheel as Jejeune went round to the passenger side. “How do you like it?” asked Jejeune, as Maik manoeuvred the vehicle toward the parking exit.

  “Reminds me of the three-tonner I once drove in the army,” he said. But whether that was a good thing or not, Jejeune wasn’t able to tell.

  They waited until they were on the motorway, slowly inching their way around the periphery of Britain’s capital, before they ventured into the territory they needed to visit.

  “Miss Hey … Lindy, she’s busy with her appearances, I suppose?” Maik’s tone was innocuous, but his meaning was clear enough.

  “I haven’t told her I’m coming home yet. I wanted to talk to you first.”

  “About Hayes?”

  Jejeune was quiet for a moment, his eyes watching the slow crawl of traffic around them. “Hayes wants his victims to know he’s coming for them. He builds up to it. In the past he’s always given two warnings. The first you could write off as an accident; the second removes most of the doubt. The moment we show him we think the explosion could have been something more than an accident, he’ll move again. Any police presence, a protection detail, anything like that would tell Hayes we’re on to him. It would almost certainly increase the danger to Lindy.”

  Maik had gone very quiet. His hands were still as they gripped the steering wheel and he was staring straight ahead. “It’s not been much,” he said, “driving by your place on my way home. Not stopping in, mind. And a uniform strolling past the magazine’s new offices a couple of times a day. They’ve moved into a shopfront on the high street temporarily. There’s a bakery nearby. It’s not a stretch that the lad would be popping out for a custard tart now and then.”

  “Since?” Jejeune’s voice was tight with tension.

  “My chat with DI Laraby. A few days.”

  Jejeune rubbed his forehead. He was tired. The Range Rover had a formidable heating system and Maik had it set on high, probably to protect his DCI’s tropically-tempered bones from the cold English weather. But the warmth was dragging him toward sleep and making his mind swirl. How could he be ungrateful to his sergeant for caring so much about Lindy that he had put her in danger?

  “We need to find Hayes.” It was a vapid statement, unnecessary. But it was all he could muster at the moment.

  “There’s no sign of him,” said Maik. “But I’ve kept the inquiries informal to this point. We could use official channels, but …”

  But the chances of keeping their inquiries off Hayes’s radar went down a lot. Jejeune looked out at the traffic again. In the next lane, a yellow truck was now one vehicle ahead of them. It had been more or less beside them since they had entered the motorway’s slow crawl. All this time, all this distance, and being in different lanes had made no difference at all to either one’s progress.

  “You won’t need to drive past the cottage on your way home anymore,” he said thoughtfully, “and if you tell your uniformed officer to lay off the custard tarts for a while, it will break the pattern. If Hayes has been watching for a reaction, he might think we’ve decided to write the explosion off as an accident after all. He will come again anyway, but it might give us a little time.”

  Maik inched the Range Rover ahead, concentrating on the traffic. The heat and the silence in the car began drawing Jejeune toward sleep again. He laid his head against the window, feeling the coolness against his scalp. He wanted to sleep, needed to, but he knew if he succumbed now, his internal clock would be out of sync for that much longer. And he needed to be fully turned around as soon as possible. With Ray Hayes now back in his life, time was a luxury Domenic Jejeune no longer had.

  He cranked the window down slightly, letting in a thin sliver of cold air. “Why don’t you put on some music, Sergeant? Something upbeat.”

  Maik didn’t need to be asked twice. Laraby’s introduction of Thelma Houston to his thinking had given Danny licence to expand his horizons a little. Even if the Isley Brothers weren’t with Motown when they recorded “Who’s that Lady?” the band was at least a child of the studios. And if the DCI wanted something upbeat to keep him awake, then Ernie Isley peeling the paint off the studio walls with his guitar work was just the ticket.

  Jejeune stirred to life, as Maik had suspected he might.

  “See lots of birds over there?” asked the sergeant.

  “Plenty. You?”

  The two didn’t share standing jokes, but Maik’s exaggerated aversion to birding was probably as close as they came.

  “I did see the Barn Owl on Oakes’s property, presumably the same bird he was trying to film with that drone.”

  “I still have trouble believing anybody who professes to care about wildlife could bring themselves to do that.”

  “From what I’ve read online, there is some evidence that birds of prey have become habituated to the presence of drones.”

  Even in his sleepy state, Jejeune managed a look of contempt that suggested Oakes would not have received quite the sympathetic hearing that Laraby had predicted.

  Jejeune thought for a long time. “Can I ask, what was it that had you looking at Oakes originally for t
he murder?”

  “For me, it was because he lied about being at home at the time of the murder. We know why now, but back then all we had was his eyes telling us he wasn’t where he said he was.”

  “And for DI Laraby?”

  “I think it was probably his family’s listing in Burke’s Landed Gentry.”

  Jejeune smiled. Maik had a nice line in irony when he chose to use it.

  “Are you any closer to a motive for Connor James?”

  It was conversation more than professional curiosity, Maik realized. But if he wanted to give his honest, unguarded opinion to anyone about this case, there would probably never be a better opportunity than in the middle of this slow-moving traffic with an uninvolved detective of Jejeune’s abilities sitting beside him.

  “There are a couple of contenders. Dr. Amendal is the one who ruined his reputation, but it was Dawes’s fault the investment wasn’t made. Ultimately, she’s the one responsible for his loss of standing in the investment community. On the other hand, when the earnings statement came out, he found out exactly how much she had cost him. You don’t have to be in James’s company very long to understand how much money means to him.” Maik moved his big shoulders slightly. “Some combination of the two?”

  “But he still claims he’s innocent?”

  Maik nodded. “And he does it well.”

  “He’s a salesman,” said Jejeune. “It’s his job to be convincing. What is he saying about why he tried to escape? It’s not the action of an innocent man.”

  “He said he intended to come back in on his own terms, with proper legal representation. Negotiating from a position of strength, he called it.” Maik looked across at Jejeune. “He grew up in a rough neighbourhood — inner city. He says as far as he’s concerned, once the police have got someone in their sights, they stop looking for anybody else.”