A Pitying of Doves

by Steve Burrows

  “She seems to have thought about little else.” Jejeune waved a few sheets of paper from his desk. “She logged over seven hundred hours of research time during her last eight-week spell over there. That’s more than twelve hours a day, seven days a week.”

  Lindy drew back and shot him a glance. Lindy had seen his modus operandi on enough investigations to recognize that his interest in Phoebe’s efforts was going far beyond his usual thoroughness. Checks of what he called the “background noise” were part of what had earned Jejeune his reputation. Armed with the small details of the person’s life, Domenic had more permutations to try, more information to fit into his theories, as he tried to piece together the larger picture. But it never took him this long to review one aspect of a victim’s background. His interest in Phoebe Hunter’s research was about something more than merely finding a reason for her murder. Lindy suspected that she knew what that might be, and if she was right, she knew that Domenic’s scrutiny of Phoebe Hunter’s research methodology was a long way from being over.

  “Fancy a walk before dinner?”

  They often went for an early evening stroll along the bluffs near their cottage, but it was usually Domenic who proposed it, when he had finished work for the day. It might just have crossed the mind of a Domenic Jejeune less absorbed in Phoebe Hunter’s field notes, too, that there was a forced casualness to Lindy’s sudden suggestion.

  By the time he pushed his chair back from the computer and stood up, arching his back to relieve the stress, Lindy was already waiting at the door, wearing a light cardigan.

  They walked slowly along the path, side by side, shoulders occasionally touching like boats bobbing on gentle swells, both immersed in their own thoughts. Along the edges of the narrow clifftop path, small knots of early spring flowers, common daisies and yellow hop trefoils, poked their heads tentatively between the pale tussocks of grass. It would be a while yet before Lindy’s favourites, the sea pinks — thrift as the locals called them — emerged. Out over the sea, the call of a Kittiwake pealed through the soft evening air.

  “You never mentioned how the migration watch went the other day,” said Lindy. “I usually get chapter and verse but this time, not a dicky bird. Word, Dom,” she offered to Jejeune’s puzzled expression. “Rhyming slang. Remember, your crash course with Robin?”

  “Ah.” Jejeune and Lindy had hosted a dinner recently for Robin and Melissa, friends of Lindy’s from college. Robin was an affable East Ender who had delighted in introducing Jejeune to the colourful world of cockney rhyming slang. But dicky bird, for word, hadn’t been among the lessons. Jejeune was pretty sure he would have remembered that one.

  “So? How was it?”

  “Wonderful,” said Jejeune simply.

  Lindy knew that Domenic chose his adjectives carefully, and he was using this one in the literal sense: full of wonder. Wonder at the swirling flocks of birds flying by, at the thought of the vast distances they had travelled — from Africa and beyond — and at the mechanisms of nature that set them on their way, and guided them, in ways that humans could, even now, only barely understand. How much more wonderful, then, might it be for someone with Domenic’s interest in birds to study them on a full-time basis? To continue the research that Phoebe Hunter had been working on when she died? Lindy knew Phoebe Hunter’s project represented everything Domenic would have wanted to do, in another life. She couldn’t imagine he was seriously considering pursuing it now, but when you were as unsettled in your career as Domenic Jejeune was, even dreams could be dangerous.

  “Where did you go?” asked Lindy, more to drive away other, more troubling thoughts than because she had any real interest. “Did you take that same stretch of the coastal path you usually do?”

  Jejeune nodded “Burnham Overy to Brancaster Staithe, and then inland to the Downs.”

  Lindy shook her head. “Blimey, Robert Frost wouldn’t have made much of a birder, would he? No road less travelled with you lot. Why do birders always follow the same route when they go somewhere?”

  Jejeune hadn’t really thought about it, but as usual there was some truth to Lindy’s observation. He shrugged. “There’s always a temptation to try a new path when you go to a place you’ve been before, but there’s a pull, a tension that seems to drag you to the places you’ve already had success. Birders can remember the exact tree, the exact branch where they saw a good bird. If you saw it there once …”

  “You see a bird on a twig and then five years later you expect the same bird to reappear in the same spot? You know you birders are all mad, right? The lot of you. Certifiable.”

  Jejeune smiled at Lindy’s exasperated expression and raised his binoculars to watch the Kittiwake carving the air with its graceful, effortless glide. Once, he would have automatically announced what the bird was, but he had stopped doing that lately. Perhaps he was waiting for Lindy to ask, or perhaps he had simply come to terms with the fact that it really didn’t matter to her.

  Lindy began walking slowly along the path again, head down, as if measuring her progress. Domenic fell in beside her.

  “Melissa says there are some pretty good deals to St. Lucia coming up,” she said with studied nonchalance. “They have endemics there, birds not found anywhere else.”

  “That’s my definition of endemics, too,” said Jejeune guardedly. The demands of their respective careers meant that holidays required some advance planning, and Lindy had made no secret of the fact that she had already started the process. Apart from being cockney Robin’s better half, Melissa was also, by the strangest of coincidences, a travel agent.

  “I know that friend of yours from college is down there. The one with the strange name. I thought it might be nice for you to see him again.” Lindy tried one of her smiles on him, but Jejeune’s initial caginess had been replaced now by something else she couldn’t quite identify. For a man who supposedly wasn’t exactly in love with his job, it could be remarkably difficult sometimes to get him to consider taking a break from it. But this time, there seemed to be even more resistance than usual. All she knew was the destination had suddenly become a little more distant.

  “C’mon Dom, it would be nice to go somewhere warm.”

  “It’s warming up here,” said Jejeune.

  “It’s spring in north Norfolk, which means it’s slightly less cold and grey than winter in north Norfolk. I’m talking about proper sunshine. Caribbean sunshine.”

  Jejeune shook his head slightly. “There’s a lot going on right now. Maybe we could talk about this later?”

  It sounded like a reasonable enough request, unless you knew Domenic Jejeune. Then you realized this was about as close as his Canadian politeness ever came to letting him slam the door on an idea completely. Lindy drew the cardigan around her and turned to stare out to sea, letting the breeze tousle her hair.

  “Well, just promise me you’ll think about it, when you’ve finished with this case.” She turned to him. “Do you really think it’s about somebody wanting to steal a few doves?”

  A while ago, she might have phrased it differently; told him how preposterous the idea was, how ridiculous. But Domenic had posited other unlikely birding connections in another case, and they had proven to be eerily accurate. That knowledge stopped her now from being too quick to disregard what seemed, on the face of it, a ludicrous theory. She suspected it would stop a lot of other people, too.

  “It’s called a pitying,” said Jejeune. “A pitying of doves. And yes, I think it’s related.”

  “But you don’t think it was this woman, Maggie Wylde?”

  Jejeune shook his head slowly. “No.”

  Lindy sighed. This was how things were now. Dom would tell her just enough so that they could chat about the case, bounce around a few ideas, but she wasn’t going to be privy to all the details. It had been different once, when they first met, and she was reporting on his investigation into what had come to be known as the HomeSec’s Daughter Case. But once he had gotten — they both had
gotten — their big breaks, things had changed. He had been promoted, she had taken another job, and they had hashed out a new set of rules of engagement over laughter and spaghetti and a couple of bottles of Chianti on the back porch. And chief among those new rules was that she wouldn’t ask anymore, and he wouldn’t tell. Suspects, lines of inquiry, the internal workings of Domenic Jejeune’s labyrinthine mind — all off limits until he had solved the case. And even for the celebrated Chief Inspector Jejeune, the evening of the third day was a bit early for that.

  “She did call, though, this woman, and accuse the sanctuary of having her birds. Perhaps it could just be as easy as it looks for once,” said Lindy reasonably.

  “Occam’s razor?”

  Lindy’s look of surprise seemed to please Jejeune. He recounted Salter’s reference at the sanctuary. Lindy arched an eyebrow. “My, my, if the North Norfolk Constabulary keeps indulging in heuristics, they’re going to do irreversible damage to my notion of the thick local copper. Come on, dinner will be ready.”

  They turned to begin making their way back along the path to the cottage, crunching up the gravel to the porch, where the storm lantern bounced in the freshening breeze and the wind chimes dripped their music into the evening air. They paused for a moment, looking out over the water. An afternoon rainstorm had rolled out toward the horizon, leaving the sky a mottled mosaic of Monet shades, a blue-grey ephemera shot through with shafts of light. Lindy smiled. If anything would keep Dom from trekking to Africa to measure isotopes in bird feathers, it would be this: these skies, this sea, the glorious unfettered openness of the north Norfolk coastline. And the birds.

  “I’m sure you’ll solve this case soon,” she said. “I mean, if it wasn’t this Maggie Wylde person, there can’t possibly be that many other people who would be interested in stealing Turtledoves from a shelter, can there?”

  “No,” said Jejeune. He paused, as if hesitant to give further voice to his thoughts, even out here, where only nature and his partner could hear. “But I think there were at least two.”

  7

  Whether by design or happenstance, the incident room at the Saltmarsh police station was at the opposite end of the corridor from DCS Shepherd’s office — far enough away that the occupants could usually hear the early warning system of the DCS’s heels power-walking their way toward them. But today, Shepherd wasn’t here to check up on them. She was on tour guide duty, marching her charge through the facilities herself, solicitous hand on elbow, while she rhapsodized over her team and the latest technological advancements that had allowed her station to become one of the most forward-thinking and innovative in the country.

  Her audience of one was a tall man, lean and fit, with quick eyes. He seemed to know instinctively when to express a keen interest and where a bright smile of appreciation would do.

  Danny Maik was standing in his customary position at the front of the room, conducting a survey of the progress on the case, when the door opened. To say that the interruption took him off guard would be no small understatement.

  “You wouldn’t know it,” said Shepherd, “but the man perched on the desk at the back is actually the one in charge here. Chief Inspector Domenic Jejeune, this is Guy Trueman. Guy is head of external security for the Mexican Consulate. Señor Hidalgo has asked him to act as liaison, get us what we need in terms of information.”

  Jejeune crossed the floor quickly and shook the man’s hand. He was immediately drawn to Trueman’s easy self-assurance and warm smile. But no amount of warmth was going to completely disguise the man’s steel core.

  Shepherd turned toward Maik and extended an open palm, “And I understand you already know …”

  “Danny Maik,” supplied Trueman. “Yes, DCS, the sergeant and I are well acquainted. Aren’t we, Danny?”

  He gripped Maik’s extended hand warmly, resting his other hand on the sergeant’s elbow. Between other men, the greeting might have morphed into a shoulder hug, but even if the group did not yet know Guy Trueman, they were familiar enough with Danny Maik to know it was unlikely, to say the least. Nevertheless, it was clear that the sergeant was genuinely pleased to see Trueman, and the onlookers were treated to the rare sight of a sincere Danny Maik smile as he turned to address them.

  “Major Trueman was my commanding officer,” he said. “I count myself lucky to have served under him.”

  “You know, the first time I saw this man, he was up before me on charges,” announced Trueman to the room at large. “Insubordination, of all things.”

  “Please do go on,” said Shepherd. Like many in the room, she was enjoying this momentary peek into the sergeant’s guarded past. It was rare to find Danny Maik in any kind of revealing situation, and she was keen to exploit the moment.

  “About that Latin quote, wasn’t it, Danny. Remember?”

  “Dulce et decorum est, Pro patria mori,” said Maik. “It is a sweet and noble thing to die for one’s homeland.” If he had to be reminiscing about this incident at all, his look seemed to say, about the last place he wanted to do it was in front of his fellow police officers. But Trueman was clearly a man comfortable on the big stage, and Maik had apparently decided, with an effort of will that was almost visible, that the best way to get this over with was to try to enter into the spirit of the thing as much as his dignity would allow.

  Trueman nodded. “It was a favourite of Danny’s old staff sergeant,” he told the audience. “He used to greet all the new recruits with it. Only this time, Danny insisted on adding his own bit — ‘But it is sweeter to live for the homeland, and sweetest to drink for it. Therefore, let us drink to the homeland instead.’”

  Maik shrugged. “It’s from an old drinking toast. I just didn’t want the kids thinking it was okay to go off and get themselves killed just because some Roman poet said so.” He was clearly uncomfortable being reminded that he had ever shown anything approaching disloyalty toward a superior officer, and everyone in the room realized that it would have to be a formidable individual indeed who had earned Maik’s respect to the point where he would allow them to take such liberties as this.

  “So there he is before me,” said Trueman, “and I’m thinking to myself, ‘I’m supposed to discipline the man. Trouble is, they tell me he’s one of the best soldiers in the unit, and what’s more, I agree with him.’”

  “So what did you do?” asked Shepherd. She turned to Maik, but he left Trueman to supply the answer himself.

  “Issued a blanket ban on quoting classical literature on base,” announced Trueman, “and as a punishment, I set Sergeant Maik the task of having the men in the unit write their own poems about army life. We read them out loud to each other in my office over a couple of beers. Remember, Danny? Laughed till the tears rolled down our cheeks.”

  The two men drifted to a place of memories from which the others were excluded until Trueman brought them back to the present brightly. “Sergeant Danny Maik,” he said, as if he could not quite believe it. “Still driving everybody mad with that Motown music of yours, I suppose.”

  “Night and day,” confirmed Tony Holland from the front row, emboldened by the casual familiarity of the moment to add a theatrical eye roll.

  “Right,” said Shepherd in a way that was designed to suggest to one and all that, nice as Danny’s reunion with his old army comrade had been, it was time to get down to business again. “Perhaps you can bring us all up to speed, Sergeant.”

  Jejeune’s wasn’t the only face to express surprise at Shepherd’s willingness to discuss the case in front of their guest. They all understood her obvious desire to show they were making progress, but when the consulate’s liaison officer was getting information at the same time as the investigating officers, it might be time to point out that it was supposed to be the consulate sharing information with the police, rather than the other way around.

  “There seem to be four possible scenarios,” began Maik tentatively, flicking a glance in Jejeune’s direction as if to say, that suggest
themselves to us mere mortals, at least. But if Jejeune, now perched impassively on the desk at the back of the room again, had at first appeared set to make a contribution, he seemed to think better of it. Maik took a heartbeat to register Jejeune’s expression and moved on. “The first possibility is that it was burglary gone wrong. The victims stumbled in and it all went haywire from there. Second is that the girl, Phoebe Hunter, was the target and Santos was just an unlucky witness who had to be dealt with. Killed,” he corrected himself. “Third, vice versa, and number four,” Maik paused significantly, “is that someone went there with the intention of killing them both. So far, we’ve found no evidence of any connection between the victims, and nothing to suggest anybody even knew Santos was going to be at the sanctuary, so we’re concentrating on the first two theories, that either it was a burglary, or it was Phoebe Hunter the killer was after, especially since we have a suspect calling to threaten her the day before.”

  Like the others, Lauren Salter had picked up on the inspector’s reluctance to discuss matters of evidence in front of an outsider. But this particular outsider was held in high esteem by Danny Maik, and that was good enough for her.

  “There’s a fingerprint and a partial palm print on the filing cabinet that don’t match any of the others in the sanctuary. The thing is, they could belong to Maggie Wylde. Her prints aren’t on file with us.”

  Shepherd pinned Jejeune with a look that seemed to ask just when he was planning on getting around to telling them his views on that theory. “I believe the inspector has some misgivings about Margaret Wylde as a suspect,” she said.

  The silence of disapproval is perhaps the most eloquent silence of all. Jejeune’s audience looked at one another uneasily. Maggie had disappeared immediately after the crime, and they all knew that sudden flight was about as clear a sign of guilt as you were likely to get in the early stages of a murder inquiry. And that was without even considering the fact that she had called and threatened one of the victims the day before the murder.