A Pitying of Doves

by Steve Burrows

  “So how come you chose to hide out here?” asked Maik pleasantly. “All that book learnin’ getting too much for you?” Jejeune could see that Maik sensed a vulnerability in Nyce here, one that might be fruitfully exploited by a little needling, perhaps. Unless, of course, Maik was just enjoying himself.

  “I’m not hiding. Merely treating myself to a bit of hermitage. There is a difference. Hiding carries connotations of guilt.”

  Jejeune looked around the room. He could see no telephone, no computer, no television. A pair of propane lamps stood on the desk, and there were a few candles placed strategically around the room. He crossed to the small sink in the corner and turned on the single tap. Running water, just. Cold, but it meant that somebody could live here for a few days if they chose to. Jejeune bent to peer out of the window above the sink. A long, unbroken vista of flat farmland stretched away from the cottage. On their way here they had passed a small heath clad in gorse and low shrubbery. Along with the cliffs on the far side of the cottage, the area would provide habitat for a wide diversity of bird species, especially here in north Norfolk. He said as much to Nyce now, and the other man nodded.

  “I used to come here when I was a birder, spend a couple of days up here at a time, if I could get away with it. I had my route all planned out, followed it religiously, same one, twice a day. Saw all manner of species.” He paused suddenly and gazed into the middle distance, as if trying to peer back into a time that had long since disappeared.

  “How do you mean, when you were a birder?” asked Maik. “That licence plate — AVES — I thought …”

  “I am an ornithologist now, Sergeant. I study birds only in the context of conservation. They are my subjects. Your DCI will understand the difference. I’m afraid for me the enjoyment of the pastime has long since disappeared. In fact, I suppose that’s true of most things. Sad to say, but there you are.”

  He took a seat on the couch, leaving the men to stand awkwardly where they chose.

  Jejeune began to wander about the room. He dragged his hands casually along the rough whitewashed interior of the walls. “Stone walls do not a prison make,” Oscar Wilde had written of his incarceration in Reading Gaol. But according to Wilde, in order to take them for an hermitage, one needed a mind innocent and quiet. Jejeune suspected Nyce’s mind was a very long way from either.

  “The bicycle against the wall outside, you use that to go to the shops, I take it,” said Jejeune.

  Nyce’s failure to respond didn’t seem to trouble the inspector and he lapsed into a silence of his own again. One of the many things that bothered Maik about this case was that most of the time he didn’t know exactly where he stood. In the past, the sergeant and his DCI had settled into a nice routine. He would do the heavy lifting early on, while Jejeune just pottered around the room, listening. Then, at some point, when he had covered the standard questions, Jejeune would step in and take things off in the direction he actually wanted them to go. Maik didn’t always like it, but at least he usually knew where he was. But with this case, Jejeune was in and out like a fiddler’s elbow, questioning one minute, the next slipping off into a thoughtful silence, then back into the fray again. It was the birding angle that was doing it, no doubt. But it was still disconcerting. In Maik’s experience, the most productive interviews happened when the police officers, at least, knew what was supposed to be going on.

  “We were wondering how your car might have come to be stolen,” said Maik conversationally. “Those new Jags have pretty sophisticated alarm systems, or so I’m led to believe.”

  “It wasn’t armed, I’m afraid,” said Nyce meekly.

  “You didn’t leave the keys in it, as well, by any chance?” Maik had probably just about managed to keep the sarcasm at bay, but Nyce picked up on the tenor of the question anyway.

  “Cars can be hot-wired, you know,” he said tersely. “Happens all the time, apparently. The result of insufficient police vigilance, I suppose.”

  “Not these new ones. Not without expertise far beyond the scope of a few teenage joyriders out here in Saltmarsh, anyway.”

  “Jordan Waters is dead,” said Jejeune with an abruptness that brought everything else to a stop. He was standing on the far side of the room, near the sink, but he was looking directly at Nyce as he spoke, watching for a reaction.

  Nyce spent a long time staring at his hands, not speaking. “Will the charge be murder?” he asked finally. His voice was small and distant.

  Both Jejeune and Maik fixed him with a stare. “We’re still trying to establish exactly what happened, but we believe it was murder,” said Jejeune carefully.

  The two detectives continued to stare expectantly at Nyce, but he didn’t look up from his hands. Although he appeared deeply troubled by the news, he said nothing. He tented his elbows on his knees and rubbed his forehead with his hands. When he did finally look up, for the most fleeting of moments, both Maik and Jejeune had the impression he was going to confess. But Nyce seemed to gather himself at the last moment. “He killed Phoebe.”

  Was there something behind Nyce’s words, some attempt at justification? Or was it just an academic, clarifying the facts so he could come to terms with the situation?

  “Our investigations are proceeding on that basis,” said Jejeune carefully, “but until we know what happened at the sanctuary that night …”

  “Oh, he killed her,” said Nyce, his voice shaking with emotion. “Whether you can prove he was there that night or not, whether you have evidence that it was him who pushed her onto the branch, Jordan Waters killed her. And for what? His greed and his tawdry, money-grabbing little schemes.”

  Tears began to roll gently down Nyce’s cheeks and he did nothing to check them. “That poor child. All she wanted to do was to make the world safe for her birds. But he couldn’t let her do that, he had to destroy her, take away everything with his criminal filth. He deserved to die.”

  “No,” said Jejeune quietly, “he didn’t.”

  “It was justice. Jordan Waters killed Phoebe, and for that he paid with his own life.”

  They were close now, Maik could feel it; a few more seconds. Let him talk and it would all be over. And yet, here it was again, this strangely connected disconnect between Nyce and Phoebe Hunter. It was as if something was duelling with his sense of guilt, trying to convince him that he had been justified in his actions. But Nyce’s reaction lacked the palpable viciousness, the outrage, that might lead to an act of vengeance. Whatever the reason David Nyce had hunted down Jordan Waters and killed him, it wasn’t to avenge Phoebe Hunter’s death. Maik was convinced of it.

  Nyce rubbed his eye sockets angrily with the heels of his hands, leaving dark smudges around his eyes.

  “Forgive me,” he said, recovering himself a little. “Embarrassing really. Look, as you can see, I’ve got a lot of work, so if you have no further questions, I’d rather like to be left alone now to get on with it.”

  Despite himself, Maik almost felt sorry for Nyce, here in his solitary existence, no one to award his full marks to, no one to bludgeon with his searing intellect. A solitary man on a lonely stage playing to his invisible audience. “If you’re sure there’s nothing else you’d like to tell us.”

  “What? No, nothing that comes to mind.”

  “Very well, then,” said Jejeune politely. “Please let us know if you plan to move from here, relocate back to town or anything like that.”

  “Oh, I have no intention of leaving, Inspector. You may rest assured of that.”

  Outside the cottage, Maik and Jejeune stood shoulder to shoulder on the edge of the cliff. A gunmetal grey sea moved uneasily under a bank of low clouds. “Storm’s coming,” said Maik. He let his eyes play over the sea. “We should bring him in. He’s ready.”

  Jejeune shook his head. “No, I don’t think he is. Not yet.” There were other questions he could have asked in the cottage, questions of plagiarism and sexual misconduct, but in Nyce’s current state of mind, denial was the onl
y defence he could have mustered and he would have used it, constructing a fortress of angry indignation against the charges. Like Maik, Jejeune could sense there was something hidden, something that lay tantalizingly below the surface, like an object half-buried in the sand, just beyond the reach of their outstretched fingertips. It was this, this secret, this hidden truth, that was keeping Nyce from confessing. And until they could discover what it was, the detective doubted Nyce would be willing to admit to anything.

  Below them, a Common Gull glided past, riding the air effortlessly. When Nyce was pursuing his boyhood birding here, it might have been a Fulmar. But time and the elements had crumbled the cliffs and taken away the strange, tube-nosed seabirds’ nesting habitat. The Fulmars had moved on, and were rarely seen in these parts anymore. That’s what time does, thought Jejeune. It slowly erodes what used to be, until one day you look around and find there’s no longer anything about your past life that remains.

  The wind picked up, buffeting the two detectives. Maik was right. A storm was coming. It would produce excellent birding later, as the onshore winds drove the migrating flocks out of the skies and stacked them up along the estuaries and coastlines to wait out the worst of the weather. But for once, Jejeune wasn’t too concerned about the birding forecast. He had other things on his mind. The two men turned away from the sea and headed toward the car in silence.

  34

  “Useless, that Saltmarsh library!” Tony Holland slapped his bag down onto his desk.

  “What’s up, Tony?” asked Salter. “All the colouring books checked out again?” She looked across at Holland and smiled. Their periodic spats notwithstanding, they had presented a more or less united front in the past against the varying moods and whims of the North Norfolk Constabulary’s upper echelons. She knew part of the tension between them this time had been that, if ever there had been a case primed to blow up in their faces, it was this one. And, as always, it would have been the lower ranks — the Lauren Salters and Tony Hollands of the policing world — that would have suffered the most. Fortunately, though, if the rumour mill was to be believed, they had new DNA evidence that linked Waters to the sanctuary murders, and Nyce’s conviction in Waters’s death was little more than a formality. Things looked to be resolving themselves nicely in the cases, despite Jejeune’s efforts to complicate matters.

  “There’s not a single Mexican phrasebook anywhere in that library,” said Holland peevishly, continuing his earlier complaint. “They’ve got everything else — German, French, Italian.”

  Maik made a small tutting noise. “Probably Spanish, too, I imagine,” he said, pointedly avoiding eye contact with Salter, who was discreetly covering her mouth with her hand. “That’s how it is in these parts,” continued Maik. “Too little contact with the outside world, see. Mention foreign culture to most of this lot and they think you’re talking about Greek yoghurt. Who were you planning on speaking Mexican with, anyway?”

  “Now that this case is just about sorted, I thought I would tell Luisa Obregón I’d be willing to look into her husband’s disappearance again. On my own time, of course. See if I can provide her with a bit of closure.”

  “That case is as cold as Obregón himself undoubtedly is,” said Maik. “If he had wanted us to find him, we would have done so by now. He took himself off somewhere so we couldn’t prove suicide. He wanted his family to get the insurance money.”

  “Still …”

  “Never mind still, Constable. You’ll want to be bringing your towering intellect to bear in the investigation of more recent cases, like this open one before us. There’s still plenty to be done — putting Nyce at the Waters murder scene, for one thing. Since he doesn’t seem particularly inclined to do it himself, it looks like we’re going to have to do it for him. Inconvenient, I know, but that’s the life of a village copper sometimes.”

  Salter had recovered her composure enough to look at Holland. “Luisa Obregón is not one of your starry-eyed community service temps, Tony. If she suspects even for a minute that you’re using her old man’s disappearance to get her into bed, she’s going to give you some closure of your own, probably with one of her threshing machines. Not to mention that her son likely wouldn’t take very kindly to your intentions.”

  Maik nodded his head sagely. “A man without fear is a dangerous prospect, young Holland. Your warrant card wouldn’t even make him think twice. You want to be giving that family a wide berth.” It was clear that, whatever jocularity had gone on before, Maik was deadly serious now. He wasn’t offering this as a piece of advice; it was an order.

  Any response Tony Holland was intending to make was stilled by the sudden entrance of Domenic Jejeune. He looked harried and a little more ruffled than usual. Normally, no matter how much was going on around him, the DCI exuded an air of calm, as if he could retreat to some distant inner core and observe everything like a spectator, perched on one of the desks at the back of the room. It was where he headed now, as the reason for his discomfort followed him into the incident room in the person of DCS Shepherd.

  She was elated, and made a point of ignoring Jejeune’s obvious discontent as she informed the rest of the investigating team assembled in the room exactly how she felt. They had a match between Jordan Waters’s DNA and the broken bits of fingernail under Phoebe Hunter’s lapels. It put Waters not only at the scene, but with his hands on the actual body of the victim. Add to that a syringe covered with Waters’ fingerprints and traces of Ramon Santos’s blood on the needle, and the laboratory’s earlier DNA test results of the birds’ feathers, both recovered from the wreckage of Jordan Waters’s transit van, and you had your classic three-point tie between the suspect and victims. Unequivocal evidence didn’t get much better than that in murder cases.

  “All we need now is to secure David Nyce for Waters’s death and we can all go home and get a good night’s sleep.” She looked around the room expectantly. “I take it we aren’t quite there yet.”

  “No, ma’am, but we are getting closer,” said Maik. “For the first attempt on Waters’s life, at least. The onboard EDR in Nyce’s Jag shows that after leaving his home address that morning, the car went to Stiffkey, where it was stationary for a while before taking the road to Carter’s bridge, registering a collision, and ending up in the pub car park where we found it.”

  “What’s at Stiffkey?” she asked. Both she and Maik had pronounced it Stewkey as the locals did, and she could tell from Jejeune’s expression that he was remembering Holland’s uncontrolled mirth when the inspector had first given the word its phonetic pronunciation.

  “Waters’s grandmother had a house there. It’s derelict now, but somebody mentioned that Waters had taken lady friends up there on occasion.”

  “Another graduate from the Tony Holland Academy of Romance,” said Salter. “You must be so proud.”

  Holland’s smile said he would let her have these pops, what with her being just back from sick leave and all. Despite her misgivings, she was obviously making some progress in getting over her guilt over Maggie Wylde, especially now that matters seemed to be resolving so clearly in other directions.

  “I never even thought about his granny’s place,” said Holland. “It’s barely standing now. But if Phoebe Hunter had ever mentioned those rumours to Nyce, he might have thought to look for Waters there.”

  “Which is why he was able to locate Waters so easily when we couldn’t, you mean?” said Shepherd, a touch more indulgently than might have otherwise been the case if they weren’t all so buoyed by these new developments. “Well then,” she said brightly, “let’s get Nyce in and wrap this up. Unless you have any contributions to make, Domenic?”

  It was over, he knew. They had their killers, and they had their motives, however weak and incomplete they seemed to him. Any other unanswered questions would be swept away as soon as the case was declared closed. But he couldn’t allow that yet. They were so far from the truth.

  “I believe Constable Salter has some info
rmation on the doves in Obregón’s aviary,” he said. It was irrelevant now, he knew, but it would buy him some time to come up with an objection to delay the closure of the case. “Constable?” he invited.

  Salter shuffled through a sheaf of notes on her knee and sighed, like someone not knowing where to start. “The dove species you saw at the aviary are all part of something called a nested clade,” she said. “But two of them, the Eared Doves and the Mourning Doves, are also part of something else, called a superspecies.”

  “Come with a cape and mask, do they?” asked Holland to some general laughter from the rest of the room. But Salter was not about to be sidetracked. Since Jejeune had approached her and asked her to take on this research, she had put in a lot of effort, and for a time it had looked like it might have been in vain. Even if this stuff was all gibberish to her, she was grateful to be given the opportunity to present it. “There’s a third species that’s also a part of this dove superspecies,” she said. “Socorro Doves.”

  She concentrated on Jejeune, studiously avoiding all the other eyes on her, including Shepherd’s. “Honestly, sir, when you asked if I had any interest in biology, I thought you meant helping Max collect tadpoles so he could watch them grow legs. None of this makes the faintest bit of sense to me.” She offered a smile. “Even without the painkillers, I doubt I’d be able to understand it.”