A Pitying of Doves

by Steve Burrows

  Jejeune had already left the incident room by the time Danny Maik delivered his considered wisdom on the subject; the sergeant clearly not deeming it necessary to include the inspector in his explanation. “It’s got a nasty feel to it, looking at other Mexicans, especially before we’ve even explored any other leads. Like we’re suggesting this is a problem between foreigners, and we’d rather wash our hands of it.” Maik spread his hands. “At least, the DCS is concerned that’s how the Mexican Consulate will see it, if it gets back to them.”

  And so, by the time Shepherd returned from her lunch at The Boatman’s Arms to deliver her fire and brimstone state of the union, pointing out that, while they may indeed follow the Obregón link, they would have to tread very carefully indeed, or risk this blowing up into a major diplomatic incident, Tony was already nodding knowingly as if to say, I’m glad somebody is finally pointing out the facts of life to this poor naïf sitting beside me. And when the time came for the DCS to conclude her address by driving home her point with her customary sledgehammer subtlety that there was to be no discussion about Mexican suspects within earshot of the public, the media, or other interested parties, for which please read Mr. Guy Trueman, she didn’t need to say, the suitably chastened Constable Salter felt about as isolated and alone as she had ever felt in this department.

  “So where’s DCI Twitcher, then?” asked Holland, sipping his tea. “Morning briefings beneath him now, are they?”

  Maik was standing at the front of the room holding a sheet of paper, ready to begin the meeting whenever the DCI arrived. He checked a chunky wristwatch. “The briefing is not due to start for another couple of minutes. Detective Chief Inspector Jejeune, as he is to you, will be here. Anybody hear how his interview with Carrie Pritchard went? Did he get anything interesting?”

  “Possibly more than he bargained for,” said Salter archly, “if the rumours about her are true.”

  “Carrie Pritchard? The woman who does those bird carvings?” asked Holland, stirring with interest. “Perhaps I should interview her next time. We seem to have this connection, older women and me. The last one I was with kept saying how much more stimulating my company was compared to the crowd she usually hung around with.”

  “Really?” said Salter. “What was her name, Jane Goodall?”

  Maik looked like he was already about to put an end to any further discussions about Tony Holland’s cross-generational conquests when the entrance of Jejeune and DCS Shepherd abruptly did it for him. He recognized Shepherd’s presence here as evidence of her agitation; a sign that she couldn’t leave them alone to get on with things. As was the fact that she had gone to the trouble of getting advance copies of the medical examiner’s report.

  “The ME found something interesting, I see,” she said, nodding at the sheet in Maik’s hand. “A puncture wound in Santos’s neck?”

  “From a large-bore syringe, they think,” said Maik. “The wound was hidden by the collar of his sweater, which is why the officers on the scene missed it.”

  Shepherd made a face that suggested that this did not in any way mean she would be exonerating them for this oversight. “Embolism to the brain,” she said, “a nasty way to go.”

  Both she and Maik waited for some sort of response from Jejeune, who was standing beside them reading the ME’s report for himself. But he apparently had nothing to say. He really could seem maddeningly disconnected from events at times.

  “Anything on the fingernail yet?” A tiny fragment of fingernail had been found in the fabric of Phoebe Hunter’s baby-blue top, torn away as her killer shoved her back onto the branch.

  Salter fielded the inquiry. “No matches in our DNA database. But uniforms might have a lead on wild Maggie. They’re off down to Yarmouth to check it out now. As soon as they bring her in, we’ll have her typed and see if it’s hers.”

  Shepherd nodded and turned to Jejeune. “Speaking of DNA testing, I’ve had Procurement bending my ear about frivolous requests. Priority codes are there for a purpose, Domenic, and bird feathers rank somewhat lower than human tissue on that scale. I understand they have farmed the work out to a local lab.”

  “But it could be a long time before we hear anything from an outside lab,” objected Jejeune. “DNA sequencing involves a lot of steps. There’s extraction, purification, staining, separation, sequencing. They all take time, and in between, an independent lab might put the samples aside to take on other work.”

  Somebody’s been doing their homework, thought Maik. Despite his constantly rising opinion of the inspector, he realized not even Jejeune would be likely to carry this kind of information around in his head. He wondered why he would have found it necessary to look into the process of DNA testing so deeply, when, really, it was only the results that they were interested in. But regardless of the reason, it was exactly the wrong time to be delivering a lecture like this to Shepherd, and it was a sign of the frustration Jejeune was feeling that he failed to recognize this.

  “I’m sorry, Domenic, but wise use of resources is a departmental mantra these days, and I’m afraid I just can’t see myself standing before the assistant chief constable trying to justify the use of highly sophisticated police equipment to test bird feathers.” She offered him a placatory smile. “I’m sure you’ll get your results soon enough.”

  She turned to the room in general. “Right, well I’ll leave you to get on with it then, unless there’s anything else I should know. Anything on the fingerprints on the filing cabinet, for example. I assume we have already tested the volunteers to see if they belong to any of them?”

  The assembled crowd looked at one another sheepishly, making it clear that the report wasn’t going to make happy listening for the DCS. It was no surprise to anyone that Tony Holland rushed into the breach. He had a rare skill for reporting events in a way that simultaneously suggested that he had not been involved, and that if he had, things would have turned out immeasurably better.

  “The volunteer system seems to have operated on a drop-in basis, ma’am. They were on first-name terms only, if they ever even saw each other. No insurance clearances required, so no need for any records. Nobody seems really sure of who was there and who wasn’t, let alone how they could be contacted.”

  “For God’s sake,” said Shepherd, barely keeping her temper in check. “Is that what you people expect Guy Trueman to be taking back to the Mexican Consulate as evidence of our progress? Find out who these people were and get them printed. And do it quickly.”

  If this was leaving them to get on with it, Maik couldn’t imagine what it would be like if she decided to take an active interest. But just as she did appear about to leave, finally, Jejeune’s question stopped her in her tracks.

  “I wonder,” he said, so quietly Maik could barely hear the words, though he was only a few feet away. “Have we checked the prints against Ramon Santos?”

  The silence was so profound, for a moment it seemed as if Jejeune’s question had taken away the group’s collective powers of speech. Anger darkened Shepherd’s features. Trying to open locked filing cabinets suggested only one thing, and it was very much at odds with a status as an innocent bystander.

  “It’s the rental car,” said Jejeune simply. “Santos tucked it away round the back of the building, even though there were plenty of spaces by the side and even at the front.”

  “Perhaps he was just ashamed of it. If I had to drive one of Saxon’s pieces of crap around town, I would be, too,” said Holland. He had noted Shepherd’s expression and clearly decided now might not be a bad time to become her attack dog.

  “It’s quite obvious he didn’t want people to see it, Domenic,” said Shepherd, her voice registering the strain of keeping herself in check. “But there could be any number of reasons. A discrete business meeting. An anonymous donation.” She spread her hands in an appeal for reason.

  “Then why bring a car at all? It was a nice night, ten minutes’ walk from the hotel. He was fit and healthy. The only explan
ation is that he was intending to take something from the sanctuary when he left, something that he couldn’t afford to be seen carrying down the street.”

  Shepherd sighed irritably, as if she found Jejeune’s inclusion of the word only particularly galling. “I thought we were looking at shelter volunteers and former employees,” she said, “this business about relocking the cage and what-not. And now, all of a sudden, you think Santos was there to steal the birds? You’ll have a reason, of course, why a senior Mexican diplomat would want to break into a shelter to take a couple of birds you could find just about anywhere in Norfolk.”

  Her tone suggested she didn’t particularly want Jejeune to offer one.

  “Santos and Phoebe Hunter were killed in that cage, and birds were taken from it. I think those birds were the specific target of both Santos and the person who killed him. Beyond that, I don’t have any answers at the moment.”

  Until now, Shepherd had been doing a serviceable job of keeping her emotions in check, obviously unwilling to berate Jejeune in front of the others. But it was clear that he wasn’t going to leave this line of inquiry alone just because it might make people uncomfortable. She spun on her heel, unable to contain her rising anger any longer. “Domenic, a word, please. My office.”

  Jejeune followed her from the room. Their departure left a vacuum that Tony Holland was only too eager to fill.

  “Somebody needs to call his girlfriend and tell her to get her needle and thread ready. She’s going to be sewing a couple of things back on after Shepherd’s finished with him.” He didn’t sound too dismayed at the prospect. “You realize what he’s saying,” Holland continued, addressing the room at large. “Not only did Santos go to the shelter with the intent of stealing those birds, ’cause that wouldn’t be bizarre enough. No, in this case there was a second person who came in, and this person killed Santos, killed two people, in fact, so they could steal the birds instead.”

  Holland slipped into a contented silence and Salter resumed her study of Maggie Wylde’s case file, leaving Maik to mull over this new development. Despite Holland’s obvious delight at Jejeune’s situation, it was hard to disagree with the constable’s point. It was doubtful that there was one person in the country who would want to steal Turtledoves, let alone two. And as for such a theft being a viable motive for murder, even for the sometimes unconventional theories of Domenic Jejeune, this one seemed a bit of a stretch. And yet, Danny Maik had seen the inspector pull solutions like this out of the air before, and be right, so he wasn’t prepared to write anything off just yet. He doubted DCS Shepherd was, either. And that, no doubt, was contributing to her mood just now; the thought that Domenic Jejeune’s nightmarish scenario might just have some merit.

  10

  Colleen Shepherd stared carefully at the two men. Guy Trueman had perched his lean ex-soldier’s frame on the corner of Danny Maik’s desk and the two men were engaged now in easy conversation. How similar they were, she thought, these men who could reach out and make the world do their bidding, instead of having it drag them around on its whims, as it seemed to be doing so often with her these days.

  Things had moved even faster than Shepherd had anticipated once she and Jejeune had gotten back to her office. The DCI’s steadfast defence of his position concerning Santos’s involvement had resulted in a moment’s indecisive silence followed by a curt, if polite, dismissal. It had taken less than fifteen minutes from the time of her call to the Deputy Assistant Commissioner for Sir Michael Hillier’s office to call and ask for Domenic Jejeune to be sent over first thing in the morning. And, the minister’s secretary had added, it would be appreciated if neither the inspector nor anyone else at the station mentioned Jejeune’s suspicions in the meantime.

  Shepherd regretted having to send Domenic to the headmaster’s office like this, but the directive from the DAC had been clear. Any attempt to link the crime back to the Mexican Consulate was to be reported immediately. The murder of a diplomat was sensitive enough without the senior investigating officer claiming that Santos may have been in some way complicit in his own death. Shepherd would have thought Jejeune would have been astute enough to see that for himself. Now, it would be up to Sir Michael Hillier, MP for Norfolk North, to explain the Home Office’s point of view, presumably in terms that even the celebrated Domenic Jejeune would find impossible to ignore.

  Maik noticed Shepherd watching them. Before Trueman’s arrival, she had addressed the troops informally, making her point in terms that left no room for misinterpretation: the Obregón’s were now fair game, but the name of Ramon Santos was not to come up under any circumstances as being on the sharp end of their investigations. Maik knew that on the numerous occasions the DCS had catalogued the admirable qualities of the team she had assembled here at the North Norfolk Constabulary, loyalty was always near the top of the list. She had used the word more than once in her address this morning. But if she had to be down here now, shadowing Guy Trueman to make sure no one got close enough to whisper in his ear or pass him a clandestine note, then the quality she so prized among her team wasn’t loyalty in any way that Danny Maik understood it.

  Tony Holland shut off his phone and addressed the room. “They’re bringing Maggie Wylde in now,” he said. “She was in a clinic in Yarmouth. Apparently, she had an episode when she was down visiting her sister.”

  “I thought you had contacted all the relatives,” said Maik to Salter. It seemed inconceivable that she could have missed such a rudimentary check. He knew she had been doing everything possible to contribute to the case since she left Phoebe Hunter’s flat, even staying beyond the time she normally left to make her son, Max, his evening meal. Maik could have told her that regret wasn’t something you could erase with an increased workload, but he wasn’t normally in the habit of offering unsolicited advice, and besides, he found those most in need of it rarely took heed anyway.

  Holland delivered Salter’s confirmation for her. “She asked everyone the same two questions: Was Maggie there? Had they seen her recently?” He turned to Salter. “But by the time you called the sister’s house, Maggie had already been taken into care, so, literally, she wasn’t there. And by recently, she apparently thought you meant within the previous ten minutes or so.” He shook his head. “And this is supposed to be the sane sister?”

  “Have we heard anything from Inspector Jejeune yet?”

  Shepherd had been asking Maik, but again Tony Holland was first in with the response. “Still slumming it over at Hillier’s office, as far as we know, ma’am. Probably into the second bottle of sherry by now.”

  Shepherd regarded Holland dubiously, as if unsure of his information, or perhaps his motives. “Yes, well, I hope he gets back soon. I want to be able to question Maggie Wylde as soon as we get her in here.” She turned to Maik. “Perhaps you should get the ball rolling, Sergeant. If she is our killer, I want this thing wrapped us as quickly as possible.”

  It wasn’t a request, but Maik wasn’t a man to undertake inadvisable actions just because a superior was getting twitchy. Jejeune would be the best person to interview Maggie, and Maik would do what he could to see that the interview was delayed until the inspector got back.

  “Probably best to let Constable Salter handle the preliminaries before we move on to the questioning proper,” he said. Danny had long ago realized that in policing, as in most things in life, the more people who were involved in a process, the longer it took. And he was fairly confident that with the right sort of coaching, Salter could string out Maggie Wylde’s initial booking for as long as he needed her to.

  A slight commotion in the corridor announced the arrival of Maggie Wylde. All eyes turned to the doorway as two officers escorted a frail-looking woman into the room and settled her in a chair at Salter’s desk, directly across from the constable.

  At first, Maggie Wylde seemed bewildered by the booking process. From time to time, a spark of realization seemed to jolt within her, as if she was awakening to her surroundings.
But then she would be gone again, retreating into her detached monotone as she confirmed the details for Salter, speaking in a quiet voice, at times so low that the detective constable had to lean forward to catch her words. Yes, her husband had worked at Victor Obregón’s private aviary. Yes, after Obregón had disappeared, the family had let Norman Wylde stay on. He had worked there until his death, the night of that terrible storm.

  Later, the inquiry put it down to guilt: Salter’s feeling that if she had followed up on Phoebe Hunter’s original complaint about Maggie, she might somehow have been able to prevent the later events. That was why she was so willing, eager even, to put Maggie at her ease. In itself, the actual breach of protocol was nothing, really. They had all done it, letting somebody put something on the desk between them — a book, a pair of gloves. With her bag up there on the desk where she could see it, Maggie would feel more comfortable, perhaps less disoriented by the strangeness of the police station and its constant hum of unfamiliar activity. That’s what the review board settled on, and for all anyone knew, perhaps that was the truth.

  The official report stopped short of assigning any blame to Detective Constable Lauren Salter, though it went to great lengths to point out, in its dispassionate, damning tone, that things should have been handled differently. Perhaps. But the report was authored by a review committee ensconced in the comfortable womb of an administrative block somewhere. And review committees were detached, disinterested, self-important entities concerned with ideal situations and optimum responses. Lauren Salter, on the other hand, was a human being. And human beings make mistakes. Having the bag where it was meant that when Maggie reached into the side pocket, the detective constable couldn’t even see what Maggie had pulled out, much less react, until it was too late.