A Cast of Falcons

by Steve Burrows

  15

  The men followed el-Taleb along a short corridor without speaking. Maik was used to his DCI’s silences, but in a way he wasn’t quite able to define, this seemed different somehow. He seemed genuinely distracted. Troubled even.

  They arrived at a door and el-Taleb entered after knocking. “Ms. Weil,” he announced formally, “the detectives from the North Norfolk Constabulary.”

  Catherine Weil stood up from behind a desk and came around to greet them. “Come in.” She turned to el-Taleb. “You won’t be staying, I take it?”

  The frisson of tension between them was impossible to miss, and el-Taleb turned on his heel without speaking. As she watched him leave, Maik took the opportunity to take in Catherine Weil. Although she was almost as tall as the two men, she held herself upright, making no apology to the world for her height. She was very slim; skinny, Maik might have called it in his day, though there was probably a politically correct term for it these days. Her long red hair cascaded down to her slender shoulders in loose ringlets, framing a delicate face that drew its beauty as much from her bearing as her features. Like her one-time colleague, whose death they had come to discuss, Maik guessed Catherine Weil was probably somewhere midway between his own age and Jejeune’s. It was a time of life that promised such wonderful rewards — years of education and life experience to guide you, and plenty of energy and enthusiasm still to apply them. In Catherine Weil’s case, at least, Maik thought sadly, if not, any longer, in Philip Wayland’s.

  Weil closed the door on the sound of el-Taleb’s retreating footsteps and turned to face them. Her ice-blue eyes were at once startling and hostile.

  “I’m not quite sure how they think I can help you,” she said curtly. “I already told Constable Salter everything I can remember about the night Philip died.” She pointed out a window that looked onto the stand of trees beyond the fence. “I saw him on the public footpath. He was walking into the woods. It must have been almost exactly seven o’clock, because I finished my report right after and dropped it off at Taleb’s office on my way out, noting the time on the front cover: seven minutes past seven.”

  She engaged the men frankly with her stare. Her directness was a quality Maik might have been able to admire if it wasn’t tinged with this note of defensiveness. Did she think they were here to challenge her account? Perhaps they were, but not in the way she might have anticipated.

  “We do already have your witness statement on file,” said Maik easily. “Though, of course, if anything else about that night has come to mind, we would be interested in hearing about it. Your statement is of particular importance, since, as far as we can tell, you would have been the last person to see Mr. Wayland alive.”

  “I’d say that’s highly unlikely, Sergeant, unless Philip’s killer had his eyes shut when he attacked him.” Catherine Weil didn’t smile.

  And that’s what you get for using clichés on clever people, thought Maik. He flashed a look at Jejeune, who was standing beside him. If the DCI was paying attention to the proceedings at all, he was doing a good job of disguising it. He was staring out the window, in the direction of the woodlot. Wherever Jejeune’s mind was, it was certainly too far from here to be of any use.

  “We’re actually here to learn a bit more about Philip Wayland’s work,” said Maik, in a tone that suggested he had already recognized he was going to have to frame his questions carefully. “Can you explain what he was working on when he was here?”

  “Even if I was allowed to discuss it, which I’m not, I doubt I could cover it in the time we have,” said Weil. “The overview is that Philip was leading a project to explore viable industrial-scale technologies for storing the carbon produced during industrial processes.”

  “As an alternative to having them released into the atmos­phere. All this work you’re doing here, then, it’s all to do with climate change,” said Maik.

  “The methodology for capturing greenhouse gases has been around for almost a century,” said Weil. “A chemical affinity exists between carbon dioxide and ammonia, for example, which can be exploited. But there are new processes, too, for improving the capture of CO2. You can burn it in pure oxygen instead of air, or turn it into a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen.”

  Maik looked at his DCI, to see whether he was taking this all in, but Jejeune’s eyes remained fixed firmly on the great outdoors. Maik had fallen into the trap before of thinking his DCI wasn’t paying attention, only to have him home in and seize upon something that had been said. But Maik sensed this wouldn’t be happening this time. Somewhere between the car park and this office, something had taken hold of the DCI’s mind and would not let go. Something beyond that window. Maik let his gaze drift out to the same distant point as Jejeune’s. It was a soft Norfolk day, the kind of day when the subdued light playing on the fields could be mesmerizing. But even so, he could see nothing worthy of so much of the inspector’s normally mercurial attention.

  Weil waited patiently for Maik to return his gaze to her. “And this carbon capture, this was Philip Wayland’s area of expertise, too?”

  “No, Sergeant, that would be mine. Philip was concerned with what happens to the carbon once we’ve captured it. The storage part.”

  Maik looked across at his DCI again. This had gone far enough. Casual disengagement was one thing, but he had no intention of being the one who stood at the front of the interview room later to explain all this, being corrected every five words by Lauren Salter, or Tony Holland, or anybody else who had even a faintly better grip on this stuff than he did. Which, let’s face it, would be just about anyone in the room.

  Weil’s eyes moved uneasily between the two men until Jejeune seemed to finally notice the silence that had fallen over the interview.

  “The Old Dairy project is exploring methods of piping the carbon beneath the North Sea, I understand,” said Jejeune, drawing his eyes from the window, with a noticeable reluctance, to fasten them on Weil.

  “I can’t go into the details, obviously, but yes, I can confirm the plan involves receiving the carbon into one central holding facility and then piping it into undersea caverns that exist from when the oil was extracted from them.”

  “Even though the international community has deemed this an unacceptable practice.”

  She inclined her head slightly, as if to acknowledge the inspector’s familiarity with the subject. The movement set a ripple of light shimmering down her ringlets. “Wikipedia wisdom, Inspector?” she asked ironically. “The process is frowned upon at present, but until the various nations can get together and sort out the messy business of international maritime law, there’s unlikely to be any binding restrictions against it. In the meantime, we are exploring ways to stabilize the carbon enough to store it this way. Believe me. It will happen.”

  “But surely, even if it does, the construction of the undersea pipeline necessary to transport the carbon out to those caverns would be catastrophic for the local marine environment,” said Jejeune.

  Weil nodded. “Philip was working on ways to mitigate the damage, but, yes, he was extremely concerned about that aspect of the plan. We all were … are.”

  Jejeune nodded thoughtfully. “I’m wondering where Mr. el-Taleb fits in, if carbon capture is your area, and storage was Mr. Wayland’s.”

  “That’s a fine question, Inspector. You’re not the first to wonder what possible benefits a man with his background can bring to a project like this.”

  Both Maik and Jejeune stared at her. “He’s not a CCS specialist?”

  “Aeronautics. He came here as Prince Yousef’s personal helicopter engineer.” A look of amused contempt flashed in her ice blue eyes. “Done well for himself, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Any particular reason Prince Yousef would appoint someone with that background to run a project like this?”

  Weil shrugged her narrow shoulders. “You’d have to ask him. I’m sure he has his reasons.”

  “I wonder why it isn’t Mr. el-
Taleb speaking to us today. He seems extremely proud of the Old Dairy project. People so intimately connected with something can rarely pass up the opportunity to tell others about it.”

  Weil eyed Jejeune warily. “He tries not to sully himself with the details of the day-to-day operations.” She allowed a slight look of distain to brush her features. “He has other skills. It was felt best that I speak to you because I know most about Philip and the work he was doing here.”

  “You were working late, I understand, the night you report seeing Mr. Wayland enter the woods.”

  Report, noted Maik, with interest.

  “A data set Taleb wanted,” said Weil, her expression also showing interest in the DCI’s line of questioning. “Last minute rush. Panic stations, as usual.”

  “Not much time for looking out the window, then.”

  The accusatory tone in Jejeune’s flat delivery was impos­sible to miss. Maik managed to hide a look of surprise, but not without some effort. Jejeune was rarely anything but courteous in these interviews.

  “The view from this office doesn’t let you see the path approaching the woods. You would have a space of, what, five seconds between the time someone came into view and the time they disappeared into the woods? And at just that time, you looked up to see Philip Wayland.”

  Jejeune left a long, unblinking stare on Weil, while Danny Maik looked on with something approaching disbelief. What the hell was he playing at? Catherine Weil was a bright, accomplished woman. Surely Jejeune could see she wasn’t the type to stand being pushed around like this.

  Weil crossed her arms, holding them so high on her chest she almost seemed to be hugging herself. She would feel the cold, this one, thought Maik, irrationally. She’d be the type with a blanket wrapped around her when she sat on the sofa watching TV.

  “I can hardly help the fact that mine is the only statement that gives Prince Yousef an alibi for the time of the murder, can I? I mean, it’s your job to find corroboration, not mine.” She looked at them both challengingly. “Look, you don’t know me, so I’ll spell it out for you. If you think I would say something to protect any of this bloody lot, then you are very much mistaken.” She turned away and walked to the window, where she stood defiantly with her back to them.

  “Did you like Philip Wayland personally?”

  Something in Jejeune’s tone made Weil turn from the window.

  “Yes,” she said. “I did.”

  “You identified his body. Why was that?”

  Weil gave another slight shrug, her arms still folded high.

  “They said Xandria Grey wasn’t up to it,” she said simply. “I had met Mary and Jack, Philip’s parents, a few times. They’re nice people; they didn’t need to see their son … that way.”

  Jejeune looked as if he might be ready to ask another question, but if he was, in the end, he decided against it.

  “Thank you for your time, Ms. Weil,” he said. “We’ll be in touch when we need to speak to you again.”

  Not if, noted Maik. And he was fairly sure Catherine Weil had registered the word, too. But by now Jejeune had retreated once more into his thoughts, and it was left to Danny to wrap up the proceedings.

  “I’ll make a point of reassuring Mr. el-Taleb that you broke no confidences,” Maik told her, earning a condescending look as his reward.

  “That won’t be necessary, Sergeant. He’s well aware of everything that goes on here. Just in case you haven’t already worked it out, Abrar el-Taleb is seriously, seriously good at what he does.”

  Just what that was, Maik couldn’t have said. But although he had not known Catherine Weil long, she didn’t strike him as the kind of person whose language would tend toward high drama all that often. If she was doubling her seriouslys, it was her way of telling them that they would need to watch Abrar el-Taleb very closely. Possibly even very, very closely.

  Maik was resting the considerable bulk of his frame on the front wing of his Mini, waiting while Jejeune returned to the building to leave a business card, in case either el-Taleb or Prince Yousef found the time among their encumbrances to slot in a meeting with the North Norfolk Constabulary. From the car speakers floated the sound of Marvin Gaye and Kim Weston locked once again in the lighthearted back-and-forth duet he had terminated so abruptly earlier: It takes two. If it was investigating this crime they were referring to, he would have been hard-pressed to disagree. He would be the first to admit he had been making precious little progress on his own. But if this morning’s interviews were anything to go by, for once the presence of DCI Jejeune didn’t seem to hold the promise of much improvement. The oversight with the card, normally unthinkable, was par for the course for today. It had been one of Jejeune’s less impressive performances, to put it mildly. There had been a number of missteps: this business about fawning over el-Taleb, or antagonizing Weil before finally reeling her back in. The DCI’s normally assured questioning, too, had seemed awkward, abrupt even. But perhaps the one thing that bothered Danny Maik the most about today’s performance was something that Jejeune had not done. Right from the moment he had revealed the presence of Gyrfalcons on the property, he had been waiting for his DCI to invent some spurious reason to go and take a look at them. But he had not. In fact, Jejeune had made no reference to the Gyrfalcons at all. And in a long list of questions about the DCI’s behaviour since the call from Scotland, for Maik, this was perhaps the most puzzling of all.

  16

  Lindy didn’t look into the living room as she came through the front door of the cottage. First, she laid her car keys on the small hall table, shrugged off her jacket and shoes, and gave her long blond hair a good ruffle with her fingers. And perhaps this was why she was so startled; the fact that she had already been in the house for a time, doing these casual, private things, and all the while a man had been watching her, the man now sitting easily in the comfortable armchair, Dom’s armchair, beside the fireplace. He made no move to get up, and offered her nothing but an awkward grin.

  “Oh, hello,” said Lindy, recovering herself slightly and deciding on nonchalance until she could get some sense of how some other, more strident response might play with this intruder.

  “Hi, I’m … I’m a friend of Dom’s, Domenic’s. He’s just gone down to the store. He said he wouldn’t be long.”

  “I didn’t know Dom had any friends,” said Lindy, keeping it light, but feeling in her pocket for her mobile phone. Certainly no friends she had never met whom he might feel comfortable about leaving alone in their cottage . Alone with her.

  Lindy kept herself between this stranger and the doorway behind her. He didn’t seem threatening; in fact, he had made no move toward her at all. She thought she had pretty good radar for predatory behaviour, but all the same, it was obvious from his unease that this was no normal friend of Dom’s.

  The man seemed to pick up on her uncertainty. “I can leave if you want, until he comes back. If it’s, you know, better.”

  There was something vaguely familiar about him, thought Lindy, as if she had seen him somewhere, like in an old photograph, perhaps. No, not that. Something more ethereal, more undefined…. Whether this feeling would have been enough to stop her backing out of the house and going for help, she didn’t get the chance to find out, because at that moment, the sound of Domenic’s Range Rover pulling up outside fell between them like a guilty secret, leaving them staring at each other awkwardly in silence. And then, suddenly, Domenic was standing in the hallway, looking, perhaps, the most uneasy of them all.

  “You’ve met,” he said finally. “I guess we all need to have a chat.”

  The noise of the paring knife on the cutting board seemed overloud. Lindy had retreated to her cooking chores, her safe haven when she was trying to work out difficulties, when even a walk along the clifftop path beside their home wouldn’t be enough; when her troubles were so great even north Norfolk’s famed coastal winds couldn’t carry them away. Domenic was standing behind her, hovering, close enough to lay a
hand on her shoulder, but knowing it would be the wrong thing to do. It would be interpreted as intimacy, a request for forgiveness. And he knew he wasn’t entitled to that. Yet.

  “So, any news on the award?” He tried to make the inquiry nonchalant, but in the taut atmosphere in the kitchen, it seemed awkward, crass even. To be blatantly ignoring the immense gulf that lay between them made Dom’s attempt at small talk sound exactly what it was: desperate.

  They were alone. Damian had gone to grab some north Norfolk air, as he had put it when he slipped out. So now it was just the two of them, Domenic and Lindy, and a graveyard of lies and deceit. Domenic looked out the kitchen widow, at the unbroken blue vista of the North Sea, stretching out beyond his field of vision in all directions. Was he hoping for something from it? A way to handle this? All it offered him was its gently undulating presence, its assurance that, no matter what turmoil their relationship was facing, the sea would remain constant, as unmoved by human frailties as it always was.

  It had not been the words. There had not been many of those. It had been the look in her eyes, the one that told him she knew. That Damian was the real reason for his trip up to Scotland, perhaps the only reason; that he had known about it before he left but had failed to trust her, actively decided not to trust her. It was a look that almost made him wince with pain.

  “I didn’t want to do this without telling you. Any of it. It’s just that it’s—”

  She slammed the knife down on the counter and spun around.

  “Oh please, Dom, please don’t say ‘it’s complicated’.”

  The phrase had become Lindy’s pet hate recently, so much so that she had even started to vent her frustration at the TV screen. “No, it’s not, you halfwit,” she’d told some hapless actor recently. “Quadratic equations are complicated. Having an affair with your best mate’s wife might be a lot of things, but there’s nothing ‘complicated’ about it.”

  Jejeune paused now, chastened. His opening gambit, and he had been so far off the mark. He searched around for a new beginning. Lindy leaned back against the counter and folded her arms. “You told him I’d agreed, or at the very least that we’d talked about it.”