A Shimmer of Hummingbirds

by Steve Burrows

  “I’ll be having a word with him about his telephone manner,” said Laraby, “especially to a woman, but beyond that …”

  “So you are going to pay him another visit?” confirmed Shepherd from the doorway.

  Whether Laraby had been intending to or not, it was clear now that he would be.

  “I’ve been promised you’ll be getting those DNA results from the cup in the kitchen any time now,” she said. “We got voluntary swabs from everyone to compare the result to?”

  “Except for Moncrieff,” said Laraby. “He refused point blank.”

  Salter peered at her tablet. “I don’t see a consent form from Connor James here, either.” She looked up inquiringly at Laraby.

  “I never got around to asking him,” he said cagily. “If there’s no match when the results come back, I’ll request a sample. My guess, though, is that it isn’t going to be necessary.”

  “You suspect Moncrieff?” Shepherd’s tone was wary. The path might be heading where she suspected, but it didn’t mean she liked it.

  But Laraby shook his head. “I know there’s a lot of inbreeding in these upper class types, but I don’t think even Gerald Moncrieff would be stupid enough to draw attention to himself like that, if he was guilty. Much easier to make up some story that he had been there before. Cover yourself that way.” He looked at them all. “That sample is going to belong to Oakes. I’d put money on it, if I had any.”

  Their silence was its own request for elaboration. “I think Oakes and Dawes were in a relationship. My guess is she put a stop to it, perhaps because she was tired of seeing that dopey playboy grin of his, perhaps because she was planning to do a runner with the IV League cash. Either way, he goes round there to talk her back into his bed. They have a nice cup of tea, but she refuses to co-operate. Must have been a bit of a blow to his ego, I imagine, especially from a commoner like Dawes. The old red mist comes down and he kills her.”

  The silence persisted, but it wasn’t disapproval; it was the sound of police officers considering a scenario. They were back in Jejeune country, and nobody was feeling particularly comfortable about it. Deductions based on patterns they didn’t see, supporting evidence a mere afterthought. Laraby gave them a heartbeat or two and then continued. “It’s the pillow. There was a heavy statue, that bird one, right to hand. A panic killing, someone who breaks in to find her sitting there, that would have been the weapon of choice. But a pillow? It’s how you’d kill someone you once had feelings for, or possibly still did.”

  From the doorway, Shepherd drew a small breath. “We’ll see,” she said, “but remember, Inspector, this is about a person taking the life of another person. Classes, and titles and stations in life aren’t going to be a part of it. Clear?”

  “You’re preaching to the choir here, ma’am,” said Laraby. “You’ll never find a person keener to make sure rank and privilege don’t affect the outcome of a case. As far as I’m concerned, the law’s the same for all of us, and anybody who breaks it needs to pay the same price.”

  Maik recognized it wasn’t exactly the message Shepherd had been sending, and he suspected Laraby knew it, too. But the DI simply clapped his hands together to get the group’s attention one last time. “Right, we’ve got a few new angles to explore, a few more gaps to fill in, so let’s get to it. Good work again, everybody. Well done all round.”

  The meeting broke up with the usual low murmurings and gathering up of materials. The drab, über-functional decor of the Incident Room made it a place few people wanted to linger any longer than absolutely necessary, and within a few minutes only Shepherd and Maik remained. Shepherd left her gaze on the DI for a long moment as he disappeared down the corridor. When she turned around, Maik was staring at her from across the room.

  “I know, Sergeant. I know. But a lot of people aren’t too keen on the aristocracy. I can’t say I have much time for them myself, truth be told.”

  Maik didn’t answer, but Shepherd had not expected he would. She knew Maik was no more comfortable than she was when somebody brought any kind of pre-held convictions to an investigation — social, political, or otherwise. It was too easy to slip into the trap of seeing all the evidence through the prism of your own prejudices, of making things fit, selecting the convenient interpretation. If you tried hard enough, you could usually find evidence to support your points, but that didn’t mean they were necessarily right. That’s why police forces generally liked to let the evidence tell them who the guilty party was. It was a bit more dependable than relying on personal preferences.

  She crossed the room and sat in one of the chairs opposite Maik, folding one leg across her other knee so a nylon-clad shin faced directly at him. This was a different DCS to the one he had seen around here recently. Her ongoing troubles with DCI Jejeune had seemed to be taking a toll on her. She had become more withdrawn, less self-assured. It had winnowed its way into her physical presence, too. Colleen Shepherd was a person who took pride in her appearance, and a crisp, well-dressed look had been the norm for a long time. But to Maik’s eye, the standards had been allowed to slip a little recently. Now the polish was back, the hair and makeup immaculate, the neat, professional business suit with the silk blouse undone that one extra button. Whatever had caused this resurgence, the DCS Shepherd of old had returned. And that was good news for everyone, even if it almost certainly meant an uptick in the number of supportive visits to the Incident Room briefings.

  A young constable who’d been subbing in for the desk sergeant during the recent staff shortages appeared in the doorway behind Shepherd.

  “You need me?” she asked, half rising in anticipation.

  “I was looking for DI Laraby. He asked to be informed as soon as we received anything back on the DNA off that cup found at Erin Dawes’s cottage.”

  “He’s just left.”

  The constable hesitated slightly, his eyes flicking uncertainly from Shepherd to Maik and back again.

  “I think you can assume the information will be safe with us,” said Maik patiently. “Is the person in the system?”

  “Not in the criminal database, but amongst the voluntary donors. The DNA is from Robin Oakes.”

  Shepherd raised a manicured eyebrow in Maik’s direction. “As I remember,” she said with more than a hint of irony, “he even said he’d put money on it.”

  “If he had any,” said Maik.

  25

  A breeze drifted through the vegetation, stirring the palm fronds and setting the leaves of the wild coffee plants aflutter. Jejeune and Traz were sitting on the banks of a stream, directly across from a small waterfall that traced its way over the rock face in a series of silvery trails. Only the sounds of the forest came to them: the wind in the treetops, the soft coo of White-tipped Doves, the steady, rhythmic ticking of cicadas. In the deep woods around them, shards of light filtered through the canopy and fell in tiny bright patches among the vegetation, but here in the open, the waters danced in the vibrant tropical light pouring down from the blue sky overhead.

  Jejeune flicked a pebble into the water in front of him, watching the circles spread until they were swallowed up by the gentle churning beneath the waterfall. He flicked in another small stone, the tiny splash like a wound in the skin of the calm water, instantly healed. If only, he thought.

  “Green-fronted Lancebill.” Traz pointed as the colourful bird danced in and out of the sparkling waters like a tiny fragment of wind-blown ribbon. He raised his bins and tracked its erratic flight until it disappeared from view. It was a good bird, a prize any hummingbird seeker would covet, and Traz allowed himself a contented smile. Jejeune appeared to have barely noticed it.

  “I should be there with her,” he said, as if continuing an earlier conversation, although he had not spoken since the two friends sat down.

  “I’m fine, Dom,” Lindy had told him, “really. It was just an old oil drum with a bunch of chemicals somebody had fly-tipped in the alley. Some kid probably chucked a ciggie away and t
hat was all it took. The last thing I remember is seeing these towers of flame, like cathedral spires, outside the window, and then bam, I’m on the kitchen floor with a plaster dust facial, and Eric has a new side entrance to the office. And then Danny Maik is calling me ma’am and lifting me up as if I were a rag doll. And that’s about it.”

  Except that wasn’t “about it.” There was a thready quality to Lindy’s voice when she spoke about the incident that made Domenic wince. And there had been something else, too, throbbing behind their breezy, let’s-pretend-everything-is-normal conversation. Lindy had a secret, something she had wanted to tell him but in the end had decided not to. But before he could press her, or find some other way to approach it, she had pleaded tiredness and stayed on the line only long enough to secure a promise from him that he wouldn’t cut short his trip.

  “I believe you asked her if she wanted you to come home, did you not?” said Traz. “And her reply was…?”

  “That she’d be so angry with me if I did, she wouldn’t even come to the airport to pick me up.”

  “There you are then. Lindy’s a lot tougher than you give her credit for, JJ.” Traz thought for a moment. “It’s good, though, how much you care about each other. It must be nice to have something like that. Who knows, perhaps I could still have something similar with Thea, if you stop turning me into Traz the Ripper.” He smiled. “Listen. You want to let Lindy know you’re thinking about her, why don’t you FedEx her a gift?”

  Jejeune gave it some thought. ”She loves magic realism. I could send her a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel from here, his homeland.”

  “Yeah. Because nothing tells a woman she’s in your thoughts quite like a book titled Love in the Time of Cholera.” Traz shook his head sagely. “Take it from me, my friend, you send her a Marquez book, you’d better make it One Hundred Years of Solitude, cause that’s likely what you’ll be looking at when you get home.”

  “What do you suggest, then?”

  “Simple. What’s the one combination no woman can resist?”

  Jejeune shrugged. “I don’t know. Chocolate shoes?”

  Traz pointed at Jejeune and nodded. “Okay, the other one. Baskets and candles, man. I’m telling you. Think about it. How many of each does Lindy have around the house right now?”

  “To the nearest hundred?”

  Traz slapped his thigh. “There you go, then. You get her a nice handcrafted Colombian basket, stick a few candles in it, and she’ll feel better in no time. Trust me on this, my friend. I’m telling you, when it comes to gifts for women, I’m never wrong.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Jejeune told him.

  For a few minutes the men sat in silence, shoulder to shoulder, the quiet hiss of the rainforest ringing in their ears.

  “I saw it, Traz,” said Jejeune quietly, “in the sky that evening. The fire Lindy was trapped in. Cathedrals of flames, that’s how she described them. That’s what I saw.”

  Traz shook his head slowly. “Every day our brains are bombarded with a constant stream of images, ideas, sounds. We never dwell on most of them, but occasionally someone says something, or does something, or shows you something, and that tiny fragment snags on some past memory, and you think, Hey, I’m supernatural. There’s nothing going on here in the rainforest, JJ. No magical realism, no mysterious, mystical happenings. Lindy tells you she saw flames. You saw a flame-coloured sunset. You put one and one together and got three. Lancebill’s back,” he said suddenly.

  This time Jejeune was moved to track the bird through his bins as it made its quicksilver forays beneath the tumbling waters, its aquamarine tail coverts flashing in the sunlight. He watched the bird until it tired of its water games and sped off into the forest once again, leaving nothing but a memory.

  “You know what I’m wondering? Who got Graumann the rest?”

  Traz drew his eyes away from the waterfall and looked at his friend.

  “There are fourteen endemic hummingbird species in Colombia. Damian’s job was to find Graumann five — the last five endemic hummingbirds. That’s what Armando said. So any guesses who got him the other nine?”

  “You can’t know that for sure, Dom. Besides, what sense does that make? If Mariel had already led him to nine, why quit there. Think about some of the birds she’d already found for him. The Santa Marta Sabrewing, a hummingbird that even some of the local guides think is a myth. And the Blue-bearded Helmetcrest. It’s a three-day horseback ride up a mountain, camping out overnight in single-digit temperatures, to reach the Espeletia fields where that bird lives. Does that sound to you like somebody who’s going to bail halfway through the job?”

  “No. It doesn’t.” Jejeune paused as if weighing his next words carefully. “And that’s why I need to talk to Damian. I need to find out what happened before he arrived on the scene.”

  Somewhere deep in the forest, the plaintive, falling whistle of a Black-throated Trogon reminded them there were other lives going on, other hearts beating in this world.

  Traz shook his head slowly. “You can’t, JJ.”

  “I know it’ll compromise what you and Lindy have been trying to do. I understand that. You’ve been trying to protect me, and I appreciate it. But it’s gone beyond that now. This is important. I have to speak to him.”

  Traz looked at his friend, fixing him with his gaze. “You don’t get it, do you? He won’t talk to you, JJ. You think this whole ridiculous charade is Lindy’s idea? These are Damian’s rules. If anyone tells you how to contact him, he goes dark and that’s the last we’ll ever hear from him. He knows you’re here in Colombia looking into it all. He can’t help that. But he won’t allow you to put your career at risk by contacting him. Not again.”

  Domenic didn’t argue. He knew what Traz was telling him was the truth. Even if Domenic could convince him to give up Damian’s contact details, his brother would never allow him to get close enough to risk being arrested for aiding and abetting a fugitive.

  “What’s this all about anyway, JJ? Five birds, fourteen, what’s the difference?”

  “Have you got that book with you, your copy of the second edition?” Jejeune asked.

  Traz fished it out of his pocket and handed it over wordlessly. He sat in silence, watching the waterfall, but the lancebill did not return. Momentary chances. Blink and you missed them. The story of birding; the story of life. Domenic riffled from page to page through one section of the guide: Hummingbirds. He closed the book decisively; a man who’d just confirmed something he already knew.

  “People were already saying Damian wasn’t up to this task. You’ve known him a long time, Traz. How would he react to something like that?”

  “He’d set out to prove them wrong. Damian would want to jam it right in their face as quickly as he could.”

  “Four of the birds Graumann was after are within a day’s drive of the Bogota area, in pretty accessible areas. So why go for the Chiribiquete Emerald first? You have a chance to get four of the five birds on the list within a couple of days of taking over. It was a situation tailor-made for Damian to prove his doubters wrong. Instead, he heads straight for the hardest target, the one with the greatest chance of failure, the most difficult access.”

  Across the valley beyond the clearing, vast tracts of forest covered the land in every direction, dappled green and shimmering in the afternoon heat. From here, the forest looked pristine, untouched, unexplored. How many hundreds of birds were out there? How many thousands?

  “I can’t help you talk to Damian,” Traz said finally. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t help you.”

  26

  A low sun struggled over the horizon, bringing with it a flat Nordic light from the east. The fields on either side of the road looked parched, as if the cold had sucked all the colour from the vegetation and left only dry bones behind. The grasses moved in the wind like the white flames of some ghostly prairie fire. The sunshine hadn’t made any noticeable difference to the temperature, but it made the crisp coldness o
f the air more invigorating, somehow; a welcome respite from the overcast greyness that had enveloped the coastal lands for the past few days.

  The sunshine, though, hadn’t made it inside Maik’s Mini. It had been clear from Laraby’s grudging greeting as he got in that he thought today’s trip was a waste of time. Amendal had left some nasty messages for a woman who had later been murdered. It needed clearing up. But Maik knew the DI’s suspicions were setting like concrete around Robin Oakes now, and anything that took him away from the task of proving the man’s guilt was going to be seen as nothing more than an irritating distraction.

  Maik turned up the music against the silence from the passenger seat. A thought struck him. “It wasn’t this group you were trying to remember, was it? Smokey Robinson and The Miracles? They had a long string of hits.”

  Laraby turned from the window to reject the suggestion with a thoughtful expression. “No. This other group was pretty big, though. There was about half a dozen of them, I remember that.”

  Maik fell silent again. Six? It was a big number for a Motown group. He should have been able to pinpoint it easily. He felt frustrated at not being able to come up with the answer, but he gave up racking his brain as the large white dome hove into view.

  Once inside, Maik was struck by the absence of noise. There were a number of drones aloft, a couple flying in formation, others at various altitudes, all seemingly very much on a prescribed flight pattern. But the only sound was a faint hum, one that built slightly and then receded as an individual drone flew past. He thought back, and realized now he had never heard the approach of the other drone, the one that had almost struck him, until it was right next to his head. The thought made him look around cautiously, but all the airborne machines were safely manoeuvring over the grid-wired interior.