Gently Where the Birds Are

by Alan Hunter

  A Panda car waited at the turn to Grimchurch, which lay at a distance from the main road. Aspall introduced a Police Constable Campsey, a fresh-faced man with a handsome moustache.

  ‘Your beat is Grimchurch . . .?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘Any incidents here lately?’

  ‘Not what you might call incidents, sir. I did one of the residents for a traffic offence.’

  ‘Any dubious characters?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that, sir. They’re a good class of resident at Grimchurch. A lot of them are retired, with a bit of money. Then there are business and professional people.’

  ‘Quite a nice neighbourhood.’

  ‘Yes sir. A lot of them come here for the birds.’

  ‘For the what?’

  ‘The birds, sir. We’ve got a big sanctuary at Grimchurch.’

  Gently shrugged to himself – it checked! They were way out with the birds. A lot of people here would have excellent cameras, and likely one with a warped sense of humour. Perhaps even . . .

  ‘Who was your traffic-offender?’

  ‘The vicar, sir. He ran into a bread van.’

  ‘A young man, is he?’

  ‘No sir. He’s given up driving since the accident.’

  They drove on, the Panda leading, across a heathland fringed with birches, then through pines, where the bracken was yellow-green, and by a farm that looked out over marshes. A square flint church-tower appeared ahead.

  ‘This is the village, sir,’ Aspall said. ‘Not much left of the place, these days. It slipped into the sea a long time back.’

  There wasn’t much left: just a bit of street with brick-and-flint-built cottages and houses, set at the foot of a wooded slope, with a view of marshes, beach and sea. The houses, though modest, looked well cared for. The largest stood at the end of the street. Opposite was a pub, The Fisherman’s Rest, and near by a lane departed to the beach. But it was a subdued, bereft-seeming place, with no one strolling in the street. The church, tucked away round a bend, seemed to have been added as an afterthought.

  ‘Is this the whole of it?’

  ‘Just about, sir. There are one or two houses on their own.’

  And on their own they would certainly be, if this was the soul and focus of the parish.

  ‘Let’s get on.’

  Aspall signalled to Campsey, and the two cars turned up a gradient by the pub. Almost at once they emerged from trees to pass under the bland stonework of monastic ruins.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘The Priory, sir.’

  A crumbling west-front overhung the roadway. Flint and freestone, it was pierced by a great window and by two point-arched doorways. Bullocks stared at them from the ruins: nettles and ragwort grew from the stones. Behind, turf sloped to a rim of vegetation, below which spread a grey sea.

  ‘Which is the wood . . .?’

  Aspall pointed. The wood flanked the grounds of the Priory to the south: a long reef of auburn trees, cut off abruptly at the cliff edge.

  ‘And the sanctuary?’

  ‘That’s further on, sir, at the other end of the cliffs.’

  ‘So you’d pass the wood going to it from the village.’

  ‘Yes sir. But you wouldn’t go through the wood.’

  They drove a bendy road through fields and approached the wood at a sharp corner. Here a lane bore off left, and into the lane Campsey turned. It ended within a few hundred yards, beside a shut-up-looking cottage; and from the lane-end stretched the track that passed through the trees, towards the sea.

  They got out and stood weighing it up.

  Even now, there seemed plenty to doubt. The photograph had been taken in full sun, while what they saw here was dulled by mist. Many more leaves must have fallen from the trees, giving the wood a more open aspect, while a group of fly agaric fungi, some big as plates, had not been recorded in the photograph. Then there was the cottage . . .

  ‘Who lives in that?’

  ‘A young lady called Stoven, sir,’ Campsey supplied. ‘They tell me she writes poetry, but she’s quite a nice young person, sir.’

  ‘Does she live alone?’

  ‘Yes sir. Came to live here at Easter.’

  ‘Where’s she from?’

  Campsey shook his head. ‘She isn’t local, sir. That’s all I know.’

  Gently took out the photograph and they advanced slowly along the track. There was little that was readily identifiable about the tall trees bordering it. Oaks, turned a copper-auburn, elms, dusted with yellow-gold, beeches russet or copper-red, maples alight with glowing lemon: if the photograph had been in colour there would have been no problem in lining it up. As it was, the situation was classic: they couldn’t see the wood for the trees.

  ‘Gather round, please.’

  They gathered obediently.

  ‘Now . . . each one concentrate on a single feature.’

  Silently they gazed from photograph to trees, then back again from trees to photograph.

  ‘Perhaps this bough, here . . .’ Aspall hazarded.

  ‘Those trunks, sir . . .’ Warren muttered.

  But it was Campsey who came up with something definite: ‘Sir, I’d say that bush was a guelder rose!’

  ‘Can you see one?’

  ‘Yes sir. About twenty yards on your left. It’s lost its leaves now, sir, but I reckon it’s the one.’

  They moved up to the bush. When it was leaved, it could well have been that featured in the photograph. And from this spot, though still vaguely, other components began to fall into place. Give or take a few feet, and they were standing where the body had lain . . .

  ‘Let’s see what we can find in these leaves.’

  They spread out and began to search. Campsey armed himself with a stick, and shortly the others followed suit. But for what were they searching . . .? Bloodied leaves? The rain on Tuesday had taken care of them, while if the ‘blood’ in the photograph had been coloured glycerine, the hoaxers would probably have removed all traces . . . Crime or hoax, out here there’d have been time to do the job properly.

  Aspall touched his elbow: ‘Sir . . .’

  He’d been searching along the side of the track. Teasing the leaves aside with his stick, he had uncovered a faint indentation.

  ‘Do you reckon that’s a tyre mark, sir?’

  Gently viewed it: not impossible.

  ‘It’s just in this one spot, sir, like it might be if the car had parked here.’

  ‘Then there should be three more to match it.’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  Aspall went to work again. He uncovered two more credible indentations: where the third should have been was a root. Well . . . so perhaps a car had parked there! Sergeant Scott had come courting this way, too. And perhaps the indentations were an accidental feature, being wistfully seized on by a hopeful policeman . . .

  ‘Sir . . .’

  This time it was Campsey, who had been prowling behind the bushes. What he’d found was a little tab of aluminium that presumably meant something to someone, somewhere.

  ‘Do you recognize it?’

  ‘No sir. But it was lying on top of the leaves.’

  Gently sighed and found an envelope for it and solemnly marked it with identification.

  It was getting dusk now, and piercingly chill. Soon they would have to call it off anyway. But having, alas, identified the spot, he couldn’t avoid going through all the motions. Tomorrow there’d have to be a full-scale search and interviews with dozens of those nice people, while the photograph circulated innumerable police stations and negative report sheets collected in files . . .

  In the fading light he walked up the track to the limit of the trees. The track ended appropriately at nothing: a fall had gouged out the cliff face below it. A slide of ninety feet of ochreish sand delta’d out on the beach beneath, old barbed wire hung across the gap, a yawing signboard warned: Danger. A track that went nowhere . . . except to a sea concealed in mist.

 
‘Sir!’

  It was Aspall again. The three of them were standing in a group; they were staring down at something, and Aspall’s voice had an edge of excitement. Gently hastened back.

  ‘Well . . .?’

  ‘There, sir!’

  He had to strain his eyes to see it. Partly trodden into the earth was a small, brass cylinder: a spent round of ·22 pistol ammunition. He stared at it distastefully.

  ‘Mark the spot . . .’

  Suddenly, their charade had become real.

  Or had it . . . quite?

  Even though Campsey found the bullet directly afterwards: it had lodged in the bark of an oak opposite, simply waiting to be collected?

  Because – and this was what had bothered Gently all along – how could one account for what had happened there? Given facts, one could usually form a picture, but in this case the facts remained inscrutable.

  The shooting, for example! It had been at close range, and the victim must have been aware of his danger. Yet apparently he hadn’t as much as turned his head, let alone ducked or tried to knock up the gun.

  Had he been blindfolded? An execution . . .?

  Then there’d been the photograph, a few seconds afterwards!

  And the posting it from Eastwich, leaving a clue dangling that in effect had led the police straight to the spot . . .

  Almost, you were driven to labelling it a hoax, though the shell and the bullet offered silent contradiction. Yet couldn’t they have been a plant too, an ingenious flourish to an essay in police-baiting . . .?

  They tramped sombrely back to the cars.

  ‘You’ll want the usual action, sir?’ Aspall enquired.

  Gently hesitated, then shook his head. ‘No. We’ll give it twenty-four hours.’

  Aspall also paused, before nodding. ‘It’s a tricky one, sir.’

  ‘I’m glad you appreciate it.’

  ‘Yes sir. What I reckon this case needs now is a body.’

  Gently grunted. ‘That’s for tomorrow! What it also needs is a witness.’ He gestured to the cottage. ‘I make that two hundred yards from where a gun was fired on Saturday.’

  ‘Let’s pay a little call, sir.’

  But the cottage was unlit, and the chimes within echoed hollowly. A glance through the window of the garage established that the car, if there had been one, was absent.

  ‘She was here yesterday, sir,’ Campsey said. ‘I saw her in the lane as I drove by.’

  ‘Has she friends in the village?’

  ‘I daresay, sir. But I couldn’t tell you who.’

  Could she have skipped . . .? The cottage looked so forlorn in the frost and gathering twilight: dull red brick, without ornament, and pantiles on which the leaves were collecting.

  ‘Keep an eye open for her, will you?’

  ‘Yes sir,’ Campsey said. ‘She’s often about in the village. I don’t reckon she’s far away.’

  They drove back to Eastwich with their lights cutting the mist. No one said much. Gently confining himself to outlining familiar routine. By the morning they’d know a few things about guns and perhaps have some useful pointers from Campsey. Then they’d move in . . . twenty-four hours before they officially treated it as murder.

  On his desk, when he got back to town, he found a memo from the Assistant Commissioner: Congratulations – keep it moving!

  He crumpled the note into his waste bin.

  CHAPTER THREE

  BUT IN THE morning they knew only a little more than they had done the evening before. Nobody in Grimchurch held a gun permit, and the barrel-prints on the bullet were not on record. Of the latter the report had hazarded: Possibly fired from a target-pistol, against which Aspall had checked on the local gun clubs and found none that used pistols closer than Chelmsford. Campsey, meanwhile, could only report that Miss Stoven had not returned to her cottage.

  ‘All a bit negative, sir,’ Aspall conceded, as they discussed it in his office. ‘Though if the gun used was a target-pistol, I’d say it favoured the idea of a hoax.’

  ‘Target-pistols can kill too.’

  ‘Oh quite, sir. But somehow it gives it an amateur flavour. Perhaps laddie only dreamed up the idea when he found he could borrow a gun.’

  Gently shrugged. Nothing was impossible. And of course, he didn’t have to borrow it locally.’

  ‘That’s right, sir. We were thinking it was odd, him risking posting the photograph from Eastwich. More like he’d come from town.’

  ‘Him and a colleague.’

  Aspall nodded, his eyes calculating. ‘Somehow they’d got to know about Grimchurch, and reckoned that was the place for the job.’

  All on the basis of a guess from the lab . . .! Almost, Aspall was seeing those two young men – a couple of students, like as not, with Marx and McLuhan in their pockets.

  ‘And where does Miss Stoven fit into this?’

  ‘Well, they could be friends of hers, sir.’

  ‘And yet they would do it on her doorstep?’

  Aspall said nothing. But he wasn’t discouraged.

  In one respect at least today was a brighter prospect than yesterday. After some hesitation, the sun was glimmering through the mist. And by now that photograph would be going the rounds, perhaps throwing up names to be checked out, while an artist’s impression of the subject was being hawked around Grimchurch.

  If only one could take the business seriously!

  But Aspall had put his finger on it: no body.

  ‘Who have you got out there?’

  ‘Warren and six men, sir. One of the men is a dog-handler. But I had a photographer out earlier and the prints have just come in.’

  He produced them: a painstaking record of the scene with the shell and bullet represented by markers. The photographer had also had a try at the indentations, but only one of them showed up clearly.

  ‘Come on then. We’d better show our faces.’

  Aspall rose with a show of alacrity. No doubt he was still engrossed by his comfortable, if diaphanous, theory.

  A minibus and a van were parked in the lane by the cottage, and down the track they could see Warren in conversation with the dog-handler. He came up as they got out.

  ‘Nothing to report yet, sir.’

  So far they’d found a cache of rusted tins, a bald tyre and the carcass of an antique refrigerator.

  ‘How much ground have you covered?’

  ‘Most of the wood, sir. We’ll be through there in an hour.’

  ‘Take in the foreshore and the grounds of the Priory. What’s the other way?’

  ‘Heath, sir.’

  ‘Cover that too.’

  Warren went. From the depths of the wood they could hear faint rustlings and cracklings. For the rest, a great peace hung over the scene. Grimchurch had yet to wake up to their activities.

  ‘Where do you reckon the girl could have gone, sir?’

  Aspall was eyeing the cottage with a certain frustration. It presented a more attractive picture this morning, in the mild, misty sunshine. The garden was neat. A hedge of fuchsia still hung with crimson and blue blossom, and behind the cottage rose two huge elms, their twining boughs naked of leaves.

  ‘People do go off on trips.’

  ‘It’s a bit coincidental, sir.’

  ‘No doubt Campsey will get a fix on her.’

  ‘A pity we can’t get a look in the cottage.’

  Was he expecting to find the body in there? Perhaps it wasn’t such a far-fetched notion. If indeed there had been a body down the track, then the cottage was the handiest place of concealment. And then the occupant and her car go missing . . . Yes, the cottage might bear inspection.

  ‘Let’s take a look round.’

  ‘You bet, sir.’

  Aspall led the way through the wrought-iron gate. Crazy-paving stretched to the porch with, on either side, small lawns and rose beds. One of the latter had been freshly forked: Aspall stared at it with interest. But the roses had clearly not been disturbed and were, in fact,
still blooming. Gently rang, to hear again the chimes sound unanswered. He tried the door: locked. A letter caught in the slit was a telephone account. Meanwhile Aspall had peeked round the back.

  ‘Sir! Come and look at this.’

  He was gazing at a kitchen garden backed by a few leafless fruit trees. There were rows of cabbages, some runner beans caught by the frost and awaiting clearance, two rows of spinach intercropped with radish, and a newly made seed bed. The latter was staked with two canes, on one of which was spiked a seed packet.

  ‘Broad beans my eye – who sets them in November?’

  ‘Read the directions on the packet.’

  Aspall did – and grunted. The broad beans were earlies.

  ‘All the same, sir, it could be a blind . . . that bed is about the right size.’

  ‘We’ll bear it in mind.’

  ‘In the Red Farm job, sir, chummie planted a tree over the body . . .’

  There was nothing else for them in the garden. The kitchen door was secure like the other. Peering through windows, they could see a neat interior, pleasantly furnished, but no bodies. It was indeed an innocent cottage, where a solitary young lady might scribble her poetry: in a bookcase Gently could recognize Robert Gittings’ Keats, and near it a run of Georgian Poetry.

  They were still peering through the windows when a quick exclamation made them turn. A tall young man in a zip-up jacket stood regarding them with indignant eyes. He wore a pair of binoculars slung across his chest and a Pentax camera hung at his side. His face was red as he demanded angrily:

  ‘What the hell are you doing at the Dryad’s cottage?’

  His tone, though hectoring, carried an overtone of apprehension. He was a pleasant, square-featured young man, with nose a little snub, and frank eyes. He had slightly curled, warm-brown hair and a sturdy, active bearing. His feet were shod in muddy Dreadnoughts; he couldn’t have been older than eighteen.

  ‘At whose cottage?’ Gently asked mildly.

  ‘The Dryad’s – Ka Stoven’s!’

  ‘Are you keeping an eye on it for her?’

  ‘Never mind about that. What are you doing here?’

  ‘We were hoping to talk to her.’

  ‘Yes – it looks like it! Prowling round the back and staring in the windows.’