A Cast of Falcons

by Steve Burrows

  “When the sailors are ready to go back on board, the volunteer escorts them back onto the ship.” Damian shrugged. “Now if the volunteer’s mind is on other things, like maybe counting some bills in an envelope, maybe he forgets to check whether the number of people accompanying him back on board matches the number of passes the coastguard has issued. And if the captain doesn’t report anybody missing …”

  The younger man’s eyes stayed resolutely on the water, but in profile, Damian could see Domenic’s jaw muscle tightening.

  “You can’t plug every gap in every system, Domenic. If people want to break the law, they will find a way. And if there aren’t any gaps, they’ll make some. That’s how the world is. You do what you can, but you’re not going to stop every crime or catch every criminal.”

  “You need to tell me everything you know about Gyrfalcons and Kazakhs, Damian. Everything.”

  Damian paused for a long moment, as if something out on the sea had caught his attention. The two boats? Their lights were drawing together slightly across the vast expanse of darkness, as they headed for the harbour. Was the left one closer to land? Perhaps, but it was impossible to tell, really.

  “You got there,” said Damian finally. “You’re obviously as good as they say you are.”

  Domenic didn’t give any credit to Tony Holland. He needed Damian to be in awe of his skills, his ability to find the truth. It would make him think twice about holding things back.

  “Jack de Laet hired me to guide him to some Gyrfalcons. He had buyers in Kazakhstan, people who would take the birds and wouldn’t particularly care where they came from.”

  Damian paused. A long time ago, Domenic wouldn’t have needed any reassuring that he wouldn’t be involved in wild bird trafficking. But now, he wasn’t sure where the boundaries of their relationship fell. Like the distance between the boats on the dark surface of the water, they seemed uncertain, undefined. Now, he felt the need to hurry into an explanation.

  “I thought the best way to prevent him from doing any damage was to be close to him. So I agreed to lead him. He was offering good money, and it seemed a pretty safe bet that we’d never find one anyway.”

  “I thought Gyrs reused their nests forever?”

  Damian nodded. “If they’re not disturbed. Researchers have carbon-dated some nests in Greenland to over a thousand years of continuous use. One has been used for two and a half thousand years. But I know of some old sites that have been out of use for a long time, even though they look good. And if I ever saw a Gyr carrying food or nesting material, we would head in the opposite direction.”

  “You didn’t think De Laet would catch on?”

  “You’re good at what you do, Dom. Give me a little credit, too. Even if we had trapped a bird, it would have escaped, somehow. Do you really think I would ever have let him take a bird from the wild?”

  Domenic took a sip from his coffee, now barely warm. He thought for a while. “What’s De Laet’s connection with the Old Dairy facility?”

  Damian shrugged. “I never heard him mention Norfolk. As far as I understood it, he dealt with the Kazakhs directly.”

  “How?”

  “Email draft box. Communication method du jour for international criminals. You set up an email account, give somebody else the sign-in details and then just leave messages in the draft folder. They can be written and read by either person, but nothing is ever sent. It’s untraceable.”

  Domenic stared out over the sea thoughtfully. The cloud had begun to gather and the once-radiant moon was now no more than a memory of light, the faintest suggestion of translucence behind a curtain of deep grey. So what brought De Laet here, he wondered silently. And what did it have to do with Philip Wayland’s death?

  “It was all pretty leisurely at first,” said Damian. “We’re out in Northern Labrador looking for birds. If we don’t get one today, we’ll get one tomorrow. And then everything changes, and we’re off to Iceland, to find a white Gyr as fast as we can. We’re halfway there, and De Laet gets a message. A white bird has been spotted in Scotland, and it seems to be on territory. So it’s full steam ahead, and Scotland, here we come.”

  “And if you weren’t able to get it, this white Gyr?”

  “We didn’t talk about that possibility much,” he said. “But it was the only time I ever saw Jack de Laet worried, about anything.”

  “So he went from a leisurely pursuit to a panic on the basis of this one message. And as soon as he lands he gets a call from a pay phone in Saltmarsh.”

  Damian shrugged, his eyes still watching the drifting ballet of the clouds across the dark night sky. The lights of the boats didn’t appear to be moving, and yet they seemed closer to shore, as if they were somehow dragging the land out across the vast black expanses of nothingness to meet them. Damian seemed unable to draw his eyes away from the scene before him.

  “I can’t go back to a Colombian prison, Dom,” he said quietly.

  “Can you be a fugitive for the rest of your life?” Domenic asked sadly.

  He fell silent, but Damian was shaking his head, smiling, to show even in his silence that his little brother had it all wrong, as he always seemed to, when they were together. “I’m not looking to get out of this. I’m guilty. I need to pay for it. But for what I did, they would send me to La Tramaćua, perhaps even La Modelo. A foreigner in there? Carrying my kind of baggage? There are times when the phrase ‘a fate worse than death’ is not hyperbole, Domenic, believe me.”

  Domenic let his look linger on his brother, the grey-black curtain of the clouds behind him. He felt moved almost to weeping by his helplessness.

  “You would get segregation. They wouldn’t want the hassle of a foreign government bringing up human rights issues.” But perhaps there was something in his tone that told his brother even Domenic recognized the hollowness of his response.

  Damian shook his head. “Foreigners are like currency in those places. Someone would find a way to get to me. It would be worth a couple of months’ extra rations, maybe a carton of cigarettes. You have to understand, Domenic. If you let them send me there, it’s capital punishment.”

  The wind chime jangled suddenly in the freshening breeze, startling them both. The cloud was rolling landward now in great swirling bands. The moon’s silky trail had gone, and the only lights on the water were the tiny pinpricks of the two boats. “I want you to broker a deal for me, Domenic. I want to do my time in a country with no possibility of extradition to Colombia. I figure I’m looking at a few years in a reasonable criminal system. Culpability but no intent.”

  Domenic listened without speaking. This was vintage Damian. Setting the agenda, telling the justice systems of the world what was fair, what they should be allowed to charge him with, what he was prepared to pay for his crime. “And St. Lucia? Is that off your list of preferred destinations, too?” he asked with something approaching bitterness.

  Damian shook his head. “None of that is true. I never hurt anybody. The guard was lazy. He needed a story to cover himself with his superiors.”

  “Did anybody else interview him?”

  “You don’t understand, Dom,” said Damian earnestly. “I’m not trying to find a way out of this. I’m guilty. I did it, what the Columbians are saying. And I’m prepared to pay the price. I just can’t do it the way they want me to.” He turned from the sea and leaned his elbow on the railing. The wind tousled his dark hair. He looked at Domenic now, his eyes burning with intensity. “I’ve thought it all through. We can spin it that you talked me in. It would be a coup for you.” He held up a hand. “I know that doesn’t matter to you, but the point is, you wouldn’t be compromised. This time here, it never happened. I contacted you out of nowhere. You convinced me to turn myself in and I did. To you. The Colombians would have to accept it, if they knew there was no chance of ever getting me back. I would still be in prison. They could still claim it as a victory for their judicial system. Justice for the victims.”

  Yes, this
was the old Damian, thought Jejeune sadly, working the angles, looking for the ‘spin,’ trying to make something from nothing, to make explanations appear out of thin air. As if he believed people could be made to see things his way, the world according to Damian Jejeune, by sheer force of will, because he wanted it to be so, needed it to be so. Perhaps they could.

  The two boats had finally made it into the harbour. The one that had been farthest out had arrived first, but there was really nothing in it. It had not even been a contest. The competition had not existed anywhere but in one distracted man’s imagination. Jejeune looked at his brother in the ghost of the moonlight. He believed Damian was sorry. He was always sorry for the trouble he brought, for the turmoil and the disquiet. But that didn’t mean that he wouldn’t be bringing more.

  34

  It was as if the sun’s rays had shattered on the canopy, spilling only tiny shards of light down through the treetops onto the forest path below. The filtered light gave the glade a strange, unearthly quality; dappling the pathway like a trail of gems that led away into the shadowy interior of the forest. On either side, a dense green curtain of undergrowth gripped the edges of the path, clinging on as it traced its serpentine route. A soft vesper of wind tousled the tops of the tall pines, but there was no other sound beyond the soft rush of air through the branches. There was no birdsong, no chattering of squirrels or chirping of insects.

  Domenic Jejeune’s footfalls were muffled by the carpet of pine needles. He walked along the pathway without haste, noting the common birds that flitted amongst the shadowy undergrowth — Robin, Chaffinch, Blackbird. A Greater-spotted Woodpecker flew lazily across the path and landed on a dead snag. He paused to watch it for a moment, not even needing to raise the bins from his chest to see it wheedling its way through the bark; in it, around it, under it. He smiled. It was such a common sight now, this bold, busy bird, but still one he found rewarding.

  Far back through the screen of trees beyond the bird, he could see the high fencing of the Old Dairy compound. He knew the Gyrfalcon facility was off down the hill on the far side of the path, though he could not see it from here, or from anywhere in this stand of trees. It seemed inconceivable now, with all that he had learned, that Jack de Laet’s death was not connected with Darla Doherty’s in some way, but he could not find a link. Nothing he could think of, no pathway he could trace, brought the two events together. Even if both De Laet’s and Doherty’s deaths were accidents, as he believed they were, there would be something, some tenuous thread tying the two realms together; he remained convinced of it. And he’d find it, if he had enough time. But that, he knew, was by no means certain.

  He watched the shifting patterns formed by the filtered light on the ground. He was in Ullapool again, sitting across the breakfast table from Iron McLeod, watching the patterns on the tablecloth as the sun streamed through the lace curtains. The Scottish detective was filching his breakfast toast while he wondered idly whether there was deeper significance to the book, something Jejeune had forgotten to mention. There hadn’t been then, and there had been a kind of innocence to Domenic’s denial, even if there were shadows of doubt behind it. But not now.

  And suddenly it was DCS Colleen Shepherd doing the asking; Jejeune standing uncomfortably in front of her doing the explaining. He had been approached in the bar at Ullapool. He had convinced Damian to give himself up and he had agreed to come back to process it in Norfolk.

  “And why not in Scotland, Domenic?” the ghost of Colleen Shepherd asked him now, over her gold-rimmed spectacles.

  Because he wasn’t certain about the legal system up there; perhaps there were provisions that could create difficulties.

  “And the side trip to Aberlour, where you and your brother were seen taking the air at the Craigellachie Manor, living it up over a curry and a couple of single malts?”

  One last fling of freedom before he brought him in.

  The phantom Shepherd treated him to a steely gaze from beneath those exquisitely manicured eyebrows. But she would let it go. She would let it all go up to this point. But not beyond.

  He could not help his brother. Domenic had tried to come to terms with it, tossed through a sleepless night, but he knew he could not. And that meant Damian would be on the move again, soon. He thought about what would happen if Shepherd found out Damian had been here, in his home, and had managed to slip away, fade into the ether from whence he came, without the police of the North Norfolk Constabulary ever being able to lay a glove on him?

  There would be silence, then a call to a couple of uniformed officers to escort Domenic to an interview room. Shepherd wouldn’t want to do it herself. She wouldn’t want anything more to do with him. There would just be a look of devastation in her eyes as he left, at the betrayal of her senior DCI; the person she had indulged so often, into whom she had invested so much, poured so many of her own career hopes and dreams. But there would be no forgiveness. Understanding, maybe, of the primordial ties between siblings that could cause someone to do such a thing. But not forgiveness. That would come only from Domenic’s family; his aging parents back home in Ontario and his sister, Suzette. And Danny Maik? He would want to handle the arrest, as difficult as it would be for both of them. He wouldn’t want Domenic Jejeune subjected to the accusatory glances, the contempt of the other officers. So he would process the arrest himself. That would be a form of forgiveness in itself, Jejeune supposed.

  The cracking of a twig in the undergrowth seemed overloud in the heavy silence of the forest interior, and it startled him. Jejeune casually raised his bins and scanned the area but he detected no signs of movement. He listened to the ringing, ponderous emptiness of the forest. But there was something else, a suppressed idea that reached him, like a distant echo, across the stillness; something about time, about Swallows, about Gyrfalcon nests, about a leather satchel. Something that was there, yet not there.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a shadow of movement. A figure, a human, tall and moving away, about to disappear around the bend at the far end of the path. Something about the person was familiar. The height? The build? He began moving toward the figure, even as it continued to draw away from him. The gait? The clothing? The satchel slung over the shoulder? What was it that was so recognizable? And then he realized: Wayland. The person he was looking at was Philip Wayland.

  He quickened his pace along the path. He was about to call out, but for some reason thought better of it. The figure seemed to sense his approach anyway, even at this distance, and turned toward him slightly. Now Jejeune did call out, and the man froze. But he did not turn back. He risked a flashing glance in Jejeune’s direction as the DCI called again, but then he took off and began running away down the slope, abandoning the trail for deeper cover. Jejeune crashed after him, scattering the fronds of thigh-high bracken as he headed up over a rise to cut off the man when he rounded a bend in the trail. Too late. He crashed through the undergrowth, mirroring the other man’s awkward, loping gait to compensate for the uneven ground and the dense, tangled foliage. The man broke off into deeper cover still, plunging down a steep hillside, farther into the darkness of the forest. Jejeune was closing now, pursuing him at full speed. The other man redoubled his efforts, both men half-falling down the steep slope, urged on by their momentum as they hurtled downhill. Jejeune found the breath to shout for the man to halt, identifying himself as a police officer, but that only seemed to spur his target on. Jejeune hit the bottom of the ravine seconds after the man, too late to lunge for his ankle as he fought for purchase on the steep, wet slope on the far side. Jejeune followed him up, scrabbling for hand holds, dragging himself up the slope by exposed tree roots, even as the soles of his city shoes slid from beneath him. With one last lung-bursting effort he crested the slope and collapsed to his knees at the top. He looked up to see his quarry in the same pose a couple of metres away. Now it was about recovery. Jejeune raised himself to one knee, the breath still pounding in his chest, his lungs fighting for ai
r as he lunged forward from his half-crouch, reaching out for the man just as he began to rise. Again, Jejeune missed his grip, but the force of him striking the man’s legs sent him crashing to the ground again, where he slid and tumbled back into Jejeune. They grappled as the man tried to get back past Jejeune, striking the detective full in the face with his leather bag, sending him flying, spinning back through the debris and undergrowth. Jejeune felt the salty wetness of blood on his lips. He reached out a flailing arm to trip the man as he passed, knocking him sideways into the ravine again, Jejeune holding on this time, even as he was dragged along. They both slid back down the steep bank, skidding and tumbling until finally they came to rest with a jolt at the bottom. The man was on his back, Jejeune half-lying on top of him. The DCI peeled himself off the man, leaving him red-faced and gasping for breath, both the fight and the flight now knocked out of him.

  It wasn’t Wayland. In truth, the wide-eyed man lying on his back staring up at the forest canopy bore little resemblance to the carbon storage researcher. The similarity was in the build, the height, even the clothes, the same olive green coat and dark trousers. It was the appearance from a distance that might fool someone, that had fooled Jejeune.

  “I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong,” said the man, sitting upright finally. “I only came to see the site where that man Wayland was killed.”

  Jejeune said nothing. He sat with his elbows on his knees, letting his chest rise and fall rapidly as he tried to bring his breathing under control, picking absently at brambles and twigs caught in his clothing.

  “I was just curious, that’s all. I mean it could’ve been me.”

  Jejeune stilled his laboured breathing. He looked across at the man, waiting for an explanation.

  “I was here, that night, at about the time they’re saying Wayland was killed,” he said. “For all I know, it might’ve been me who got topped instead.”