A Siege of Bitterns

by Steve Burrows

  And perhaps he wouldn’t. But it wasn’t Jejeune’s style to take cover behind some bluster about insubordination. And they were going to have to know about the link soon enough.

  “The same three species — Sanderling, Knots, and Dunlin — are disappearing from Great Marsh, too,” said Jejeune. “Cameron Brae would have recognized the pattern from when he did his original survey of Largemount’s property. I think he became convinced that Great Marsh was being affected by the same contaminant as Lesser Marsh.”

  Salter’s eyes widened. “My God, he would have been livid if he suspected that Largemount had polluted his precious Great Marsh as well.”

  “Enough to confront him, threaten him, get into a life-and-death struggle with him?” Jejeune raised an eyebrow. “Yes. But Alwyn’s data from the Great Marsh monitoring station doesn’t support that. In fact, it shows no pollution flowing in from Largemount’s land at all.” He looked at her evenly. “Let me know when you’ve identified those substances, will you, Constable. We’ll see if that sheds any more light.” His picked up a paper and began reading again.

  “You know,” said Salter flatly, causing Jejeune to look up again. “I expect to have to look for motives for criminal activities, but not for why my DCI is assigning me my duties. You’ve got me doing one thing, Tony doing another, and you’re in here doing God knows what, and it’s pretty obvious you don’t want anybody else to get the big picture. You trust us enough to do the work, but not enough to tell us why we’re doing it? Frankly, sir, it’s insulting. You’re not the only one who wants a result here, you know. We’re from this area, and these were local people who died, people we knew. My dad used to see Cameron Brae down at the post office, when he was buying his newspaper and dad was getting his tobacco. Peter Largemount used to give generously to the local fair; my son won a bike he had donated one year. Don’t you think we’ve got a right to be involved? This is not just about getting a case closed, so we can all get our picture in the Police Gazette and then go on about our business. This is about our community. You can’t shut us out of this just because you want to solve it all by yourself, because you think you bollixed it up first time around. You’ve got officers here who are interested, really, truly interested in the outcome. I know we don’t all have them fancy college accents or that ever-so-clever way with words you might be used to down in The Smoke, but we’re not as thick out here as you seem to think we are, either. It wouldn’t hurt to rely on us now and again to do our jobs. It’s not right to make us sit at our desks looking at mouldy old reports without knowing why, all because you’re too bloody stubborn to ask for help. It’s selfish and it’s self-indulgent and it’s … it’s wrong.”

  She was angry at herself for having gotten flustered, but she knew the overall message had gotten through. She hadn’t had enough experience with this new boss to be able to read his reaction. Was this cold, quiet, almost eerie stillness how he normally took personal criticism? Normal or not, it was very unnerving. Should she have kept her counsel? Not over this. Lauren Salter, Detective Constable first-class, wasn’t about to let anybody tell her she couldn’t be trusted. Not at any price.

  “I’ll keep it in mind, Constable. Was there anything else?”

  Jejeune drew some papers toward him, but not the file he had been reading when she had entered. He had closed that and pushed it away when she had begun speaking, Lauren remembered. A witness statement. The handwriting, she thought. She had recognized it. As she should have; she had seen it often enough. What was Jejeune doing reviewing that statement, of all of the ones he had on his desk? My God, it’s not us you don’t trust at all, is it? Her hand was halfway toward her mouth before she managed to stop it. She didn’t think Jejeune had noticed.

  She stood outside Jejeune’s office for a long moment, leaning against the closed door, breathing normally to calm herself. She could imagine Jejeune inside, just the other side of the door, with the file open again, his head bent over the contents, studying them carefully, trying to decide if the flimsy handwritten statement before him actually constituted a viable alibi for DCS Colleen Shepherd or not.

  39

  “Barbeque? The DCI?” Jejeune heard a familiar voice saying as he entered the station “Hardly. He thinks a griller is something you find in a zoo.”

  “Eh up, Gaffer’s here. Well, mine anyway.” The desk sergeant slipped a wink to someone half hidden behind the door, out of Jejeune’s sight.

  “Need your keys, Dom,” said Lindy. “You wanted me to drop The Beast in today, remember?”

  Apparently not. She was going to take it in to the local garage to have them fix the squeak on the Range Rover’s wheel. In the city, Jejeune might not have even noticed it, but out here, where he always drove with his windows down whenever he could, the sound had become too much of a nuisance to be ignored. But Jejeune had forgotten this morning when he left home, and he realized now that he still needed the Range Rover today, after all, so her trip had been in vain. His apology was fulsome and genuine.

  “Not a problem, darling.” She held up a battered enamel mug. “The sergeant here makes a mean cuppa, and we’ve been having a great old natter, haven’t we, Sarge? We’ve been comparing bosses. I have to say, compared to you, Eric seems like an absolute dream to work for.”

  The sergeant looked suitably abashed, but Jejeune offered a smile to show Lindy’s comments hadn’t struck any vital organs. He thought about Lindy and her relationship with her boss. Did it make any difference to her who was sharing a bed with Eric, the illiterate halfwit editor, capitalize as necessary? Did she know, or care, or even give it a thought? Why then should he have to entwine himself in the private life of DCS Shepherd? Why did he have to worry about who she might have been sleeping with? Why did the intimate details of her life have to become part of his?

  The sergeant gathered up Lindy’s mug and set it on the counter next to its twin. Lindy gave Jejeune a playful peck on the cheek and swept out of the station with a jaunty swing of her hips, jangling her key ring as she went. The sergeant watched her go with a broad smile.

  “Lovely girl,” said the sergeant, whose name Jejeune remembered as being Coulter. “Reminds me of my daughter. Same devil-may-care outlook. She’s up at Norwich, doing Social Studies, though what she’s going to do with a degree like that, I don’t know.”

  Jejeune smiled to himself. Lindy Hey, Goodwill Ambassador to the masses. A trip to Afghanistan and by the third cup of tea the Pashtun warriors would be falling all over themselves to lay down their weapons before her.

  “Gave me a start, mind, when she came in. I saw that blond hair and I thought it was that politician, Brennan, again. Not a way you’d want to start the day, eh? Not after the last time.” Emboldened by Jejeune’s smile, Coulter thought he would try his luck. “Any news on when we might be seeing Sergeant Maik again, sir? Very popular around here is Danny. A lot of people are asking after him.”

  “Nothing, I’m afraid. I’m sure it won’t be too long.”

  Jejeune’s features had closed, ready to shut off the topic if the sergeant was foolish enough to try to raise it again. But instead, a strange expression of understanding spread over Coulter’s face.

  “Ah well, no news is good news, I suppose.”

  Jejeune went on to his office. He closed the door and sat down. He needed to think.

  He had spent the morning at a beach. He had no idea which one, just some open stretch of coastline reaching out into the sea. An unbroken mantle of soft grey clouds was sitting low over the water. Only on the horizon was there a glimmer of light, a faint blue band of promise. The beach was deserted, not another soul on the vast, wide expanse of sand that stretched out in front of him. Having come from the city, it never ceased to amaze Jejeune that you could be that alone in the world. He walked along the beach, feeling the satisfying softness as the sand gave way beneath his slow, deliberate strides. He ventured as close to the tide line as he dared, the white noise of the waves breaking on the shingles. A set of
paw prints ran along the sand, with an unbroken line in between. A small dog, dragging a stick in its mouth. Always the detective, even if, these days, he wasn’t a very good one.

  Jejeune’s path became blocked by a narrow tidal creek carrying its silty cargo out to the sea. On each side of it were shallow lagoons and rock pools. When the tide washed in they would teem with new life, but at that moment they looked barren and empty. Jejeune looked inland, back to where the dark smudge of Corsican pines marked the edge of the coast road. He traced the creek’s sinuous course back to where it emerged from a tidal salt flat, and watched the water for a long time as it eddied and churned, meeting the incoming tide in an erotic swirl of water, the fresh intermingling with the salty in a turbulent, roiling dance, until it was no longer possible to tell one from the other.

  He looked out at sea, at the motion, the colour, the light. A Black-headed Gull swooped in and settled on a piece of driftwood a few feet away. Picture complete, thought Jejeune. For him, a landscape by itself, no matter how beautiful, seemed an empty thing. It needed a flicker of life, a tiny quiver of existence, to validate it, to confirm that other living things found a home here, too.

  Side by side, they looked out over the sea, the man and the bird, two beating hearts in this otherwise empty landscape, with no connection beyond their desire to be here, at this time. Was it the birds that attracted him to places like this, he wondered, or the solitude, the absence of demands, of expectations? But if Jejeune was unsure of his own motives, he knew this bird would have a purpose in being here. Nature always had her reasons.

  He chanced a sidelong glance at the bird, now settled to his presence. It had already completed its summer moult, crisp clean feathers having replaced the ones abraded by the harsh demands of eking out a living on this wild, windswept coastline. The gull stayed for a long moment, allowing Jejeune to rest his eyes softly, unthreateningly, upon it. And then, as if deciding it had allowed him enough time to appreciate its beauty, the bird spread its wings and effortlessly lifted off, wheeling on the invisible air currents, drifting away over the sea toward the horizon.

  Dark under the wings. Not a Black-headed Gull, then, a Little Gull. It wasn’t a mistake he would have normally made. He put it down to distraction. Still, it was a novice’s error. A Little Gull. But not a little gull, right, Lindy? Jejeune turned and looked at the roiling water, the salt and the fresh coming together. He stood up and began swiftly retracing his steps back along the beach toward his car. Perhaps he wasn’t such a bad detective, after all.

  And that was why, now, back in the quiet of his office, he had to think.

  40

  Danny Maik wheeled his Mini into the car park and got out. He looked up at the steep incline before him. Once he would have taken it without a second thought, his progress constant and his posture upright as he mounted the slope without even breaking a sweat. Now he had to consider things more carefully, pace himself, possibly even stop for a break halfway up. It was not a thought that filled him with joy.

  He was panting heavily when he crested the rise, and doubled over for a moment to catch his breath. But the view when he straightened up was spectacular. You didn’t have to climb very high in north Norfolk to get a commanding view of the surrounding landscape, and on this rise he could see for miles.

  “Greetings, Sergeant,” said Quentin Senior, looking over his shoulder. He was standing at a scope set up to survey the coastline to the east. He would have been able to watch Maik arrive and track his progress up the rise, if he had chosen to. Maik had no idea if he had or not.

  “Come out to do a spot of birding? Or are you back at work. Pursuing inquiries, as they say?”

  “Not yet. I just thought I’d come out for a breath of fresh air.”

  “You could hardly have chosen a better place, could you?” Senior indicated the vista in front of them. A vale fell away to his left, and in the early afternoon sunlight it presented a scene of picture-book tranquility. Checkerboard fields rolled off toward the horizon, dappled shades of green and gold as far as the eye could see.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it? Hard to believe it didn’t always look like this. After the war, the government needed to move to large-scale agriculture, you see: wheat, barley, potatoes, celery. Feed the masses in the post-war peace. So they decided to make the fields bigger, three times the size of what they once were. They tore out eight thousand miles of hedgerows in East Anglia. Understandable, I suppose, but a damned shame, just the same. Imagine it, eight thousand miles of pristine hedgerow habitat lost, just like that. It’s a wonder the Dunnocks survived at all. Hedge Sparrows, they used to call them. Lovely little things; feisty, lots of personality.” He paused to duck down and look through the scope again. “I hear you’ve been spending a fair amount of time chatting to our members since you’ve been off. Learn anything interesting?”

  Maik shrugged. “Mostly that birders are just like the rest of us. Some good, some bad.”

  “And most of us somewhere in between, eh, Sergeant?”

  “Something like that. From what I hear through the grapevine though, it does look like you can reassure the local birders that their records pose no threat to anybody else.”

  Senior straightened up again and turned to face Maik. “I’m sure they’ll be most relieved to hear it.” He took a slow sweeping look out over the fields again. “I wonder what it’ll all look like in another generation. You know they’re expecting half a million new people in East Anglia in the next decade. Where are they going to put them all?” He shook his head ruefully. “So what of the cases, Sergeant? What does your grapevine say about them?”

  “I believe the inspector has some solid leads on Peter Largemount’s murder.”

  “Really? And on Cameron’s?”

  “That one is still wide open, as I understand it,” said Maik, looking straight into Quentin Senior’s face. “Although Peter Largemount’s own motive appears too weak now. Not even as good as a four-hundred list.” Maik gave a flat smile, but there was no real mirth in it.

  “The four-hundred list, it’s also out of the running?”

  “That’s the general feeling, yes.”

  Maik drank in the scene before him. It was a landscape in constant motion. The sea, the trees, the gently rocking grasses. It was such a pretty place to have to conduct such prosaic business.

  “That day you dropped off that list to Brae,” said Maik, “the Monday before he was murdered. You said he was still asleep.”

  “Once a policeman, eh Sergeant? Yes. At least I assumed so. There were no lights on.”

  “Cameron Brae was a notoriously early riser, always had been. You must have been there very early.”

  “Indeed I was.”

  “Where were you going at that time in the morning?”

  Maik’s questions were becoming more abrupt now, lacking his usual preamble or polite couching. It was as if he sensed he was nearing the end of something, and he just wanted to get there. Either that or he was just beginning to tire of the whole process.

  As if to counterbalance Maik’s haste, Senior took a slow look over the surrounding land once more. He was silent for a long moment. “My father worked on those hedgerows. Ripping them up, casting them aside, burning them. Perhaps some of your relatives did, too. I do sometimes wonder if that’s not why I followed the course I did. Righting past wrongs, a bit of penance, as it were. I was going out to Feltham Bog, Sergeant. I had heard a report of a Cetti’s Warbler. A remarkable absentee from my year list, to that point.”

  “Rarity, is it?”

  “Yes and no. They are fairly reliable at Strumpshaw Fen, but they are few and far between otherwise. I would say it’s a sought-after bird, yes. This one would have saved me the trouble of going all the way out to Strumpshaw, so I thought I would try to see it while it was still around.”

  “Can I ask how you heard about it, this Cetti’s Warbler? Was it on one of those rare bird alerts?”

  “D’you know, I can’t remember. Pro
bably a bit of tittle-tattle in one of the hides, I should think.”

  “Plenty of other birders out there looking for it, were there?”

  “I didn’t see anybody,” said Senior, after not very much reflection at all.

  “Nobody? A bit strange that. You’d have thought there’d have at least been a couple of other birders out there after it, if it’s as rare as you say. I imagine my boss would have been there, for example, if he’d have heard about it.”

  “There may have been some people on the far side, of course. It’s a big area. Have you ever been to Feltham, Sergeant?”

  Maik hadn’t, but he knew it well enough. It was a place where somebody could lose himself quite easily. You could spend all day there, and nobody would ever know. Or vice versa.

  “So did you ever see it, this bird?”

  Senior gave his great white head a shake. “No. They can be elusive little devils when they’re not singing. Still, I’ve seen one since, so no harm done. That’s the way it is with birding sometimes. You might miss something at the spot you expect to find it, only to catch it later somewhere completely unexpected.”

  “You know, it’s a funny thing, that’s just the way it is with policing, sometimes,” said Maik.

  Senior raised himself and gathered his belongings. He took a final look out toward the sea. “That’s Cley over there,” he said, pointing. “Cley next the Sea. You can tell by the shingle banks. Locals put ’em up in an effort to stop the sea’s inexorable march inland. But the banks themselves are being driven inland by about a metre a year. Next the Sea, indeed.” Senior shook his great head sadly. “Trying to tame nature. Will they never learn? I wish you the best of luck with your investigations, Sergeant. When you return to your duties, of course.”

  Maik said nothing, simply nodding in reply to Senior’s raised hand. He watched the rambling figure of Quentin Senior disappear down the slope, still robust, but now favouring a hip or a back that was starting to protest against a lifetime negotiating the uneven landscapes.