A Siege of Bitterns

by Steve Burrows

  The DCS’s face softened; the precursor to the nurturing side she was about to show. Maik wondered if this ability to display a greater emotional range had anything to do with the increasing numbers of female officers he was seeing among the senior ranks these days. Certainly, he could never have switched personas this quickly. Not that he had another one to go to, anyway.

  “Because Cameron Brae was such a well-known TV personality, the pressure to solve this case will be intense,” continued Shepherd, “but I am certain I have assembled one of the finest squads in the country here. If you do your jobs efficiently, professionally, competently, just like you do them every day of the week, I’m convinced we’ll get a result. Now, I’m sure the chief inspector doesn’t want to let you go without some well-chosen insights. Domenic?”

  Jejeune raised an eyebrow.

  “Words to the wise? A few pearls of wisdom to help them on their way.”

  The assembled crowd gazed at Jejeune expectantly, a few sharing his palpable sense of unease as he walked toward the front of the room and took his place before them. When he spoke it was as if he was giving voice to inner thoughts, drawing them up from within, as if they needed expression out here, in the light of day, to become fully formed ideas. It was not at all the performance of a man they had all seen so at ease in front of the television cameras.

  “A sixty-two-year-old man was taken out of his house, led to the end of his garden, and hanged. His last thoughts would have been of the family he would never see again, the things he had left unsaid, the work left undone. He would have died afraid and alone.”

  Jejeune paused for a long moment. Just as the silence was about to become uncomfortable, he spoke again, his voice steadier now, measured and deliberate.

  “We can’t change any of that. We can’t hope to undo any of the damage that’s been done by this crime. All we can do is find the person who did it and bring that person to justice. If we are being honest with ourselves, it is a ridiculously inadequate response to a horrific crime like this, and in the big picture, our success or failure won’t really change anything. Not for the family, or for those who admired the man and his work. They will have some closure, some sense of justice, whatever that means, but their loss will still be there, their despair, whether we find the killer or not. So we are doing this for ourselves, really. And we do it because it’s the only thing we can do. It’s the only response we have.”

  A stunned silence settled over the room. Holland leaned back in his chair and whispered out of the side of his mouth to Salter again. “Blimey, I thought I was at Agincourt for a minute there.”

  A muscle twitched in DCS Shepherd’s jawline. She obviously didn’t feel Jejeune had channelled the ghost of Henry V either, and judging from the eerie stillness in the room, the assembled crowd was as bemused by the speech as she was. Still, they placed their loyalties in some surprising people, this lot. They thought the world of Sergeant Maik, who seemed to Shepherd to have all the personality of a granite wall. All it would take was one flash of brilliance from Jejeune, one insight, one bit of inspiration, and they would see what all the fuss was about. Then watch that whiteboard fill with accolades. But she was forced to admit, judging by the dumbfounded looks on their faces, that moment might be some way off yet.

  6

  The house felt different. Daylight had opened up the rooms, revealing the high cathedral ceilings and flooding the hallways with light. But the oppressive sadness that had shrouded the rooms had also gone. With the new day, the house seemed to be quietly regaining its equilibrium. It was as if the inhabitants had tacitly recognized that it was this, the pattern of chores and duties, the day-to-day business of carrying on, that would gradually guide them back toward normality.

  Maik waited in the hallway while Nancy the PA went off to see if her boss was up to receiving visitors. Despite himself, he was still bristling at his exchange with Jejeune before he had left to come here. Not so much the request itself, odd as it was, but more the way he had put it. Seeing the sergeant in the front lobby, Jejeune had only one thing to say as he hurried by with his battered hardback in his hand: “See if Brae made a habit of discussing his weight with people. And if you could be subtle about it.”

  Subtle? Maik was so flustered by Jejeune’s remark that he had been uncharacteristically curt in his reply, so much so that even the desk sergeant had looked up. “And what will you be doing, while I’m busy being subtle?”

  “Me?” Jejeune brandished the book in the air. “I’m off to see a man about a bird.”

  And with that, he was gone. The desk sergeant had raised an eyebrow in Maik’s direction, but it didn’t look as if Maik was in any mood to entertain witticisms about birdwatchers as he barged out the door.

  Nancy returned and led Maik down the hallway to the sitting room. He found Mandy Brae in the same chair her stepson had occupied the night before. She smiled a meaningless smile at the sergeant and motioned him into the room, thanking Nancy politely, which was apparently how people like this dismissed their PAs.

  “Would you like some breakfast, Sergeant? There are some things in the kitchen. Nancy made them for me, but …”

  Maik declined, pausing awkwardly at the end as he considered how he should address her. Ma’am seemed ridiculously antiquated for a woman who was still, despite what some blond police constables would have you believe, barely into her thirties. And yet Mrs. Brae also seemed inappropriate for a woman who had walked the red carpets of the world under a stage name of Mandy Roquette. But Ms. Roquette? Maik wondered why it suddenly meant so much to him to get it right. She had just lost her husband. What further assaults from the world did he imagine he was trying to protect her from?

  The old soldier in Maik was always more comfortable on his feet, but with his subject sitting hunched in the chair beneath him, it made for an intimidating setting for an interview. He opted for distance, and strolled away to rest an elbow on the mantle. Music was playing softly in the background, languid saxophone phrases laid over a satin-smooth rhythm section. It seemed oddly out of place. In Maik’s experience, the bereaved usually chose to bear their burden in silence; afraid perhaps that a familiar song might distract them from the business of mourning. But Maik could sense that music was a safe haven for her, perhaps the only thing that could help her through this time.

  “We are obviously aware of your husband’s environmental activism, his opposition to certain projects, for example. Would you know if he was involved in anything like that at the moment?”

  She shrugged. “My husband was always on the lookout for anything that might hurt the environment. That didn’t always make him popular with the local developers and business owners, not that he gave a toss about that, of course. But as far as I know, there was nothing recently.”

  She brushed a strand of dark hair away from her face. Without the pancake show business makeup, her skin was unnaturally pale, but it was immaculately smooth, and even in her grief, her delicate, China-doll features exuded a fragile beauty.

  “How about his work at the university? Can you tell me anything about your husband’s current area of research?”

  “Pretty much the same as always. I think. It varied quite a bit. Birds, marshes, that kind of thing. We didn’t really discuss it much, to be honest.”

  Maik wrote without comment. The music floated in the background of the silence that had settled between them. “Junior Walker,” he said. “Haven’t heard him in a while.”

  “A Motown man, Sergeant?”

  Maik nodded. “The early stuff especially. Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye. Nothing to touch it, in my opinion.”

  She smiled wistfully. “Mine too. I grew up with it. My dad had an amazing collection; still does. I sang along to all of them when I was a kid. The Supremes, Martha Reeves, Mary Wells. Remember her? Those duets with Marvin Gaye?”

  Maik shook his head slowly. “Voice like an angel, that girl. ‘What’s the Matter with You Baby,’ ‘Once Upon A Time.’”

>   “‘Once Upon A Time.’ God, I’d forgotten all about that one.” She began rocking slowly from side to side, hugging her sweater tightly around herself, murmuring the words to the song, barely audible. She tilted her head and looked up at Maik. “Certainly puts ‘Party Animal’ in perspective, doesn’t it?”

  “Your music brought a lot of pleasure to a lot of people,” said Maik simply.

  She sighed. “Where does it come from, Sergeant, all the bad stuff in life?”

  Maik looked at her for a long moment as a wave of sadness swept over her. Pragmatism. The life raft that would save them both. “Would you know if your husband had started working on anything new recently, or if he was planning to?”

  She looked vaguely puzzled as Maik drew her back into the present. “He had so many things on the go, articles, ideas for the TV show. It was always hard to know exactly what he was working on at any given time. I mean, we talked about his work now and then, of course we did, but he spent a lot of evenings out. He said he was working at the university. When he came home, well, we had better things to do than compare careers.”

  Maik made another note in his book. In the background, Junior Walker had given way to Stevie Wonder. For once in his life, he wasn’t going to let sorrow hurt him.

  “Jamerson at his best,” she said, catching Maik listening. “That’s who I was going to be, when I grew up. The female James Jamerson.”

  Maik was confused for a moment. By the time The Roquettes had struck it big, they had onstage backing musicians, so the girls were free to concentrate on jumping around the stage in those elaborate dance routines. But now he remembered that,

  in the early days, they had played the instruments themselves. So she was the bass player? Maik allowed himself an inward smile. It was nice to have goals, but looking to be the next James Jamerson, king of the Motown session players, was aiming a touch high, to put it mildly. They listened in silence for a few moments.

  “While it’s more likely that this was in some way related to your husband’s professional life, it could have been personal.” Maik made a stab at looking uncomfortable at the line of questioning.

  “Did you ever see my husband interviewing somebody, Sergeant? What would somebody call you, by the way, if they didn’t want to keep calling you ‘Sergeant’?”

  He told her.

  “One of his guests said it was like being drowned in treacle. He just used to question them and question them, and question them some more. But it was just his thing. And he was always polite. He was never sarky or vit … what’s that word?”

  “Vituperative,” said Maik, surprising himself. Perhaps not, he thought, but he was sure such an approach could be irritating, for all that. He had seen Brae’s show once or twice on TV when he had been flipping through the channels. Once, he remembered, he had watched him dismantle a guest’s arguments strand by strand until there was nothing left but clichés that sounded as hollow and forced as they undoubtedly were. Brae had brought about the meltdown with such gentle probing, such polite questioning, that a viewer could have genuinely believed that he was innocent of any ulterior motive. But in light of what Mandy Brae was saying, Maik recognized the performance now for what it had been, as meticulous and systematic a destruction of a person’s point of view as you could wish to see. Impressive, certainly, but hardly the way to make a raft of new friends.

  “I know what you’re thinking, that he must have been a pain to live with. But Cameron saved his performances for the public. When we were together, he could be really great. Clever, funny, charming. He was a complex man, for sure, and no doubt some people found his ways a bit off-putting. But privately he was different. He was just really, really nice.”

  A discrete tapping on the door preceded Nancy’s unbidden entrance. “Beverly Brennan has just telephoned with her condolences. Quite the parade today, I must say. Still, I suppose it wouldn’t do to have the papers find out the local dignitaries hadn’t even been in touch with the resident celebrity in her moment of distress.”

  Maik looked toward the PA, but it was Mandy Brae who offered the explanation. “Your DCS came by early this morning, and one or two other of the town worthies. Nancy feels I haven’t been exactly warmly received by the community since I moved here. Personally, I couldn’t care less, but that kind of thing seems to matter to Nancy, doesn’t it, love?”

  “Did you mention the watch?” asked Nancy.

  Maik raised an eyebrow.

  “My husband’s Rolex. I bought it as a gift. I don’t think he ever really liked it, but he wore it to please me. It’s missing. We think the … person must have taken it.”

  Maik made a note in his book while he collected his thoughts. This was no robbery, but perhaps the killer just couldn’t resist a piece of high-end jewellery on offer. He noted down the details as Mandy Brae dictated them.

  “I wonder, Sergeant, could we put off anything else until later?” asked Nancy. “Ms. Brae’s publicist is coming in soon, and she needs to get prepared.” Nancy turned to Mandy. “And perhaps a few minutes rest, too.” She was back in her role as Mandy’s protector. So where did that leave him?

  Mandy flashed Maik a faint look of resignation. “We never even got to chat about whether Dennis Edwards outdid David Ruffin on ‘I’m Losing You.’ Still, perhaps next time. You will come back to keep me updated, won’t you, Danny?”

  It’s the distance, he decided, that invisible gap that stars keep between you and them. That’s what sets them apart, the space they have reserved for themselves, as if it could offer some kind of protection from the real world. Mandy Brae exuded vulnerability, a frailty that made Maik want to guard her against … what exactly? But it didn’t matter. Whether she had put them on a first name basis or not, he knew he would never be allowed to get that close.

  “Er, just one more thought. Sometimes, in these cases, if someone has been receiving threats, they won’t say anything to their family, for fear of worrying them. But there are other signs. Had anyone commented on your husband looking ill recently? Losing weight, perhaps? Not eating?”

  “I don’t think so.” She turned toward Nancy and then back toward Maik. “As far as I know he was about the same weight as always. I’m sorry, I don’t know. Perhaps I should have paid more attention.”

  A wave of sadness seemed to sweep over her again, as if Maik’s question had been a reproof. Subtlety be buggered. He wasn’t going to make a young widow cry because she thought she had been a negligent wife. That was all Jejeune was going to get, whether he liked it or not. He stood up abruptly and closed his notebook.

  “If we need anything else, we’ll be in touch.”

  “Goodbye, Danny. Perhaps you should bring your Motown collection next time. We could sit down and have a good old reminisce about happier times, eh?”

  “There’s an idea,” he said.

  But it won’t bring them back, he thought. I know. I’ve tried.

  7

  Jejeune wheeled his Range Rover into the parking lot of the Titchwell Marsh reserve and pulled up near the railing. A birder in olive-green jacket and trousers was standing beside a car with its boot open, dismantling a spotting scope. He cast a critical look at Jejeune’s binoculars as the detective approached him.

  “You’ll be needing a scope if you’ve come for the Red-necked Phalarope.”

  “I’m looking for Quentin Senior.” Jejeune inclined his head toward the reserve. “Is he out there?”

  “Not sure. It’s a big area,” said the man. There was a shimmer of movement in the bushes above the man’s car. Jejeune looked up reflexively.

  “Bullfinches,” said the man without bothering to look up.

  “Isn’t that Senior’s car?” Jejeune began to reach for his warrant card.

  “No need for that. I know who you are. You could try the Island Hide overlooking the freshwater marsh. He might be there.”

  “Is that where the Phalarope is?”

  “At the back,” said the man, slamming the boot
shut and getting into his car hurriedly. He had pulled out of the car park by the time Jejeune reached the entrance to the reserve.

  The gravel along the pathway crunched beneath Jejeune’s shoes; the only noise in an otherwise quiet marsh. A gentle breeze stirred the tall grasses on each side of the path, but Jejeune detected little bird life. It was mid-morning, and the early period of feeding activity had subsided, but he remained alert. In this part of the country, a rarity could appear at any time.

  About a hundred yards along the main path, Jejeune turned off and followed a trail along a grassy berm. In the distance, he could see other similar pathways, separating the water into lagoons of various sizes. Water levels and vegetation varied from cell to cell.

  The trail ended at a low wooden hide. The door opened outward and was offset from the line of the horizontal wooden slats that served as viewing windows. Anyone opening the door to enter or leave the hide could do so without offering a backlight through the viewing windows that might startle the birds on the marsh beyond. At the far end of the hide, a man was sitting on a low bench, staring intently through a pair of battered binoculars. A telescope stood ready at his side. He was probably a little beyond sixty, heavily built, with a luxurious white beard and full head of pure white hair, worn long and shaggily to his collar. His florid features spoke of a life spent outdoors, meeting Norfolk’s salt air and keening onshore breezes head on. He looked up and smiled at Jejeune as he entered. Jejeune smiled, too. As a spot for a quiet interview, he could hardly have chosen a better place.