“Let’s take a drive, you and me,” he said to Holland.
“Where to?”
“Hull. We’re going to find out where Steven Baker, of 44 Larkin Street, was going with all that TBT in his truck.”
“I already told you, Traffic questioned him. He wouldn’t say.”
“That’s because they didn’t know the right way to ask,” said Maik, holding the door open for Holland and following him out the door. He looked back at Salter, immersed in her paper swamp once again. “You know what to tell the DCI if he asks.”
She nodded. “I know. On inquiries. Asking questions the right way.”
43
Under the bank of heavy grey clouds, the dark water seemed to trap the light, drawing it in to its murky depths. The fringe of dry reeds around the edge of the marsh stirred restlessly in the wind. From the top of the rise, it was the only movement the men could see. Maik sighed with irritation. His drive back from Hull had been a trying one, as most long journeys with Holland for company tended to be. But there were nuggets of information from the interview that led him to believe he was on the right track. He hadn’t had time to discuss them with Jejeune yet. The call to join the DCI out here had come as soon as he had returned.
By the time Maik arrived, Jejeune had already dismissed Alwyn’s arm’s-length protection, a young constable who looked like he might have trouble protecting someone from a strong breeze. Surely even someone as self-absorbed as Alwyn must have sensed a shadow by now. But according to the constable, the professor had been as cautious as ever when he left his home that morning. All indications were that he was still unaware of his protection, and still feeling vulnerable. Maik could live with that.
The detectives saw Alwyn as soon as they descended to the water’s edge. He was standing a little way from the shore in knee-high water, wearing a heavy green fisherman’s jacket and thigh waders. He was facing away from them, bending over to examine a tall, tube-like contraption suspended in the water. The light reflected off its metallic surface with a dull glint. If the man sensed the presence of the two detectives, he gave no hint, but when he had finished entering his data, he tucked his small hand-held device into the overlarge pocket of his jacket and straightened to look directly at them.
“We need to ask you some questions, Professor,” called Jejeune across the water surface. Alwyn waded toward the shore but stopped, still in the water, a few feet from the men standing on the bank.
“Couldn’t this have waited until I got back to the lab? You seem to have no qualms about dropping in there unannounced, Inspector, but I really must protest about you tracking me down in the field. Data of this type is extremely time-sensitive. I must insist on being allowed to continue my work here.”
Maik had his hands in his pockets and his collar turned up. Jejeune could tell he didn’t want to be here. But just at that moment, Jejeune couldn’t think of any place in the world he would rather be.
“We’d like you to tell us what happened when Cameron Brae realized you had falsified the data from that monitoring station there.” Jejeune nodded toward the gunmetal tube in the water.
Alwyn half raised a hand before letting it fall to his side again. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Jejeune continued as if the other man had not spoken. “Scientific data is, as you like to point out, irrefutable. The data should have convinced a trained scientist like Brae that there was no contamination coming from Largemount’s property. Yet instead of simply accepting that, he still tried to telephone Largemount, to confront him. Why would he have done that, unless he knew the data you had given him was false?”
Maik felt the anger begin to rise within him. So that’s why they were here, he thought, standing on this forlorn windswept stretch of mud; to arrest the one man he had written off from the start, about the only one he had felt was incapable of killing Brae. This condescending little mongrel? And his DCI couldn’t find it within himself to confide in him before now, so Maik might, just for once, not feel like he was the last man in a two-man race, never seeing anything but the back of his DCI’s heels disappearing over the hill in front of him.
Alwyn tried something resembling a contemptuous laugh, but it didn’t quite come off. “And you came to this ridiculous conclusion how, exactly, if I may ask?”
“Because my sergeant told me.”
Despite his anger, Maik looked surprised.
“He compared the two sets of monitoring results from this station, the ones you sent to Brae.” He turned to Maik. “You said the results were the same. And as I said before, you always say what you mean, Sergeant. Not similar, or close, but the same.” He turned back to Alwyn, who was now backing away slightly. “But they couldn’t have been the same, could they? Not in one particular category, anyway.”
Alwyn waved a hand ineffectually. Jejeune’s casual familiarity with his area of expertise seemed to be having the desired effect. “I’m afraid marsh hydrology is a good deal more complex than simply comparing columns of numbers. To trust it to a … well, no offence, Sergeant, but there are a great many nuances that lie well beyond the reach of the layman.”
Jejeune sensed Maik tensing next to him. His temper, never far from the surface, had been even less predictable than usual since his return to duty. Lashing out at inferior intellects may well have been Alwyn’s form of defence when put under pressure like this, but it was not a course of action Jejeune would have advised where Danny Maik was concerned. Not today.
“You never told Brae that Largemount wasn’t responsible for the contamination at Lesser Marsh, did you?” said Maik slowly. “If he had known that, he would have realized Largemount couldn’t possibly have stopped the pollution, even if he had wanted to. So you let Brae think Largemount had it all under control. It was the only way you could have gotten him to agree to the deal. He would have never signed on if he thought the contamination was going to continue.”
“Was that really my duty, Sergeant? Peter Largemount claimed he was responsible. If I had not been so well versed with the subject matter, I might well have believed him myself. If I am guilty of anything, it is merely of keeping my suspicions to myself.”
Jejeune wasn’t sure if it was Alwyn’s admission or his attitude of amused detachment that Maik found so antagonistic. But his face had darkened. The DCI hadn’t intended for things to go this way, but he decided to wait, now, to see what further results Maik’s anger might produce.
“You know, I’ve seen a thousand like you,” said Maik, moving forward until the water was lapping around his shoes. “Nasty little chancers, ready to do anything to get ahead. So where was all your concern for the facts then? Having a day off, were you, from your pursuit of truth in its pure, untarnished form? You didn’t seem to have any trouble finding the truth when it came to telling Mandy Brae she wasn’t bright enough to understand her husband’s work.”
Maik stepped closer, and Alwyn took an unsteady step back into the water.
“It was Brae’s success you couldn’t stand, wasn’t it? His fame, his marriage. It was eating you up.”
“Jealous? Of his silly little TV show and that pretentious fool of a wife? A woman with barely enough sense to learn a few dance moves? How dare she think that with a few quick conversations she could take her place at the grown-ups’ table. Please don’t imagine the rest of us are so easily beguiled by her, even if it is obvious how you feel about her yourself.”
Jejeune watched as Maik continued to advance on Alwyn, circling the professor, stalking him, making him retreat, stumble backward, splashing the water around both of them as he did so. Alwyn looked across to him, a fellow intellect to connect with in the face of the sergeant’s aggression. Maik had closed the gap between himself and the professor now. The water was lapping around his shins, soaking his trousers. Alwyn retreated further in the face of his relentless approach. He was shaking his head, backing away, until the water reached the tops of his waders. That stare. Danny Maik, eyes a
s cold as a November rain. Alwyn tore his eyes away and looked to Jejeune again. Surely he, as the senior man, should bring a stop to this, introduce a sense of control, of sanity.
“Couldn’t you see how much she cared for him?” asked Maik. “Couldn’t you see how much she wanted to be a part of her husband’s world, how important it was to her to understand? She came to you for help. That poor lost girl. She came to you for help and you crushed her. You dismissed her, like you dismiss everybody who is that little bit slower than you, that little bit less well-educated. And then, even afterward, even after you had killed her husband, it wasn’t enough. You sent her the watch, to cause her more pain, more sorrow. Didn’t you? Didn’t you?”
Maik’s anger filled the marsh. His face was dark, the sinews in his thick bull neck twisted like lariats, his eyes cold with fury as he leaned into Alwyn’s face.
And then, there it was. Finally. In Alwyn’s eyes, at the mention of the watch. The guilt Maik had been looking for. Jejeune saw it too, the merest flicker of acknowledgement. But it was enough. Now it was time to end this. He moved forward to the edge of the marsh, ready to call Maik back in, to calm things down. But he was already too late.
Afterward, Jejeune wasn’t sure. Perhaps Alwyn had already lost his footing. Perhaps Maik’s lunge was just a reaction to that. At the time it was just a flurry of action; Maik’s sudden grab, Alwyn’s half-raised arm and his stumble, the water splashing up around the pair of them as they came together, Alwyn fighting to retain his balance. And then Maik, standing over the professor as he lay on his back, flailing around in the water with his arms outstretched, half submerged, with his heavy, saturated clothing dragging him under. Maik, with his hands on Alwyn’s jacket and then off, empty, held above his head like a sinning footballer. Never touched him. Honest.
Alwyn’s face disappeared beneath the water, a foamy trail of air bubbles running like a white scar across the dark surface. Jejeune saw Maik reach under the water and grab the front of Alwyn’s jacket once again, wondering, uncertain, just for that split second, about his intent. And then Maik hauled the professor up, fighting the weight of the wet clothing, the panic of the man, the pull of the water. Alwyn’s breath exploded from him with a gasp, but his body remained limp. Maik held him just above the surface, fighting his own balance. The professor’s rag doll body was splayed backward from Maik’s grasp, fingertips still in the water. He was spluttering and coughing, choking for breath.
Maik staggered once more, trying to retain his balance and keep hold of Alwyn’s jacket. Even from here, Jejeune could hear the mud sucking at Maik’s shoes as he dragged the limp, half-submerged body of Alwyn to the water’s edge. He dumped him on the ground and staggered over to a dry area farther up. He sank down to the ground heavily and sat with his arms resting on his knees, his head bowed between them, his upper body heaving with strain.
Alwyn choked and then rolled heavily onto his side, coughing out a stream of dirty water. He lay still for a long moment. Jejeune waited patiently until he had recovered sufficiently to pull himself up to sit on a rock at the water’s edge. He was leaning forward, hands on knees, his wet clothing clinging to him like guilt. He was whimpering slightly; shock probably, thought Jejeune. Water dripped from his lank hair and face as he sat, head bowed, staring down into the water, the dark, non-reflecting water. He seemed to find nothing of comfort there.
Jejeune approached him.
“It was the bittern, wasn’t it?”
“That bird?” Maik looked up, still breathing heavily.
“No, Sergeant, not the bird. The water. The mix of salt and fresh, it’s called bittern. Cameron Brae had no way of verifying the results the professor had sent him, but he knew that, after the storms we had recently, all that sea water flooding into the marsh would have diluted the salt content. Especially in the morning. Those results, the bittern, the am. bittern, one from before the storm surge, one from after, those readings at least should have been significantly different. But as you said, they were the same.”
The reeds rattled as a renegade breeze passed through them like the hand of a ghost. In a moment, there was silence on the marsh again. Alwyn was shivering slightly, his teeth chattering and the skin around his lips turning faintly blue. He spoke to the ground again, his voice barely audible.
“A stupid oversight,” he said sullenly. “I told you, Cameron was extremely bright. I would have never deliberately underestimated him. I knew I couldn’t send him the real results so I simply reran the previous report and tinkered with a few readings. But as you say, I neglected to alter the salinity levels.” He shook his head. “Stupid. Unforgivable, really.”
Alwyn’s voice was dull and lifeless. The resistance had left him now, completely, stripped away layer by layer until only the truth was left. He had been prepared to deny things as long as he was the one who held all the facts, but it was clear now that Jejeune had them, too. There no longer seemed any point in denying anything. A violent coughing fit overcame him, seeming to rack his frail body to the core.
“Brae realized that you must have known right from the start that the pollution was continuing. Every monitoring record you took from here must have confirmed it.”
Alwyn nodded weakly and wiped tears from his eyes with the back of his hand. Jejeune knew they were the result of the coughing fit. The professor wasn’t the weeping kind.
“He came to see me after he got the results. He was incandescent with rage, screaming about how I had betrayed him, stood by while we allowed an ecological catastrophe to unfold. He said he was going to confront Largemount, to demand that he pay for the bioremediation, to clean up the contamination and restore the marsh to health.”
“But bioremediation processes on this scale would cost hundreds of thousands of pounds,” said Jejeune.
“And that’s why you killed him.” Maik’s voice was as cold and flat as the overcast sky. He was standing beside Alwyn now, heedless of his mud-caked shoes and waterlogged trousers, hovering over the small shivering form, as dangerous and as threatening as ever. “Because Largemount would have to take that money from somewhere, and your funding would have been the obvious place to start.”
Alwyn shook his head, looking up at Maik. “Still, Sergeant? Even now you fail to understand? Cameron said if Largemount refused, he would go public with the details of our original deal, expose him, expose all of us. But it was already too late to help the marsh, you see, even if Largemount had agreed to pay. Cameron seemed to think if we just stopped the pollution, turned off the tap as it were, and employed some biological remedies, the marsh could revert to the way it was in a few seasons. But for salt marshes, bioremediation can never be fully effective. The systems are far too interconnected. What corrects one issue inevitably exacerbates another. The only way is self-attenuation, the slow, gradual process by which the marsh heals itself. It has to go through the cycle, you see, of self-cleaning. For a wetland system as complex as this one, it will take decades. To all intents and purposes, Great Marsh is a dead zone in waiting. The worst, much worse, is still to come.”
“You told Brae that?” asked Jejeune, watching Alwyn’s face closely.
Alwyn nodded abstractedly. His teeth had begun to chatter again and his skin was beginning to show pale blotches. They would need to get him away from here soon, out of his wet clothes and into some warm blankets. Soon, but not yet.
“Cameron refused to accept it, of course. For all his so-called expertise on marshes, it turns out he had a surprisingly simplistic view of their ecosystems, after all. We argued for a few moments more, but then he left, abruptly. But I swear to you, Inspector, Cameron Brae was alive when he left my house.”
“Perhaps so,” he said thoughtfully, “but not the last time you saw him. Correct?”
Nothing moved in the marsh; not the light of the grey sky, not the dark surface of the water. For one brief, elastic moment, everything ceased. There was no wind, no sound, no birdsong. The men, the marsh, all of nature waited. Jejeun
e was anxious to get this over with now, to have it ended and to move on, away from this marsh, this desolate place with its dark, still water and its fading reeds and its end-of-life feel. Jejeune waited to see if Alwyn would begin on his own. He would not.
“Let’s take it from the moment you arrived at his house, shall we, Professor?” said Jejeune patiently. “On the night Cameron Brae died.”
44
“Suicide, Domenic. Really? We’re sure?” DCS Shepherd put her elbows on the desk and buried her head in her hands. “God Almighty, what a mess. How the hell did you not see it before?”
Jejeune ignored the question. “Brae was dead when he got there. Alwyn went to the house first, to the study. Then he went out into the garden and found the body. After that, it was just a matter of putting on the chains and the sack and removing the ladder.”
“Did he say why he did it?”
“He claims he wanted to spare the wife the knowledge that her husband had committed suicide. Not this wife, the first one, Kathleen. A murder would seem more heroic, somehow, he said, less like an admission of guilt. A more likely explanation is that he wanted to deter people from looking into the possible reasons Cameron Brae might commit suicide in the first place. Being responsible for polluting Great Marsh would have been high on most people’s list. Alwyn couldn’t afford the closer scrutiny of everything — the runoff from Largemount’s land, the original survey — that would have resulted if Brae’s suicide was investigated too closely.”
“Please don’t tell me we missed Alwyn’s prints in the study.”
“No, but he doesn’t deny being there. He says he went to recover the monitoring results he sent to Brae. There would have been a suicide note, probably written in red ink. It almost certainly laid out the details of their original deal with Largemount. Alwyn claims he saw no note, meaning he has destroyed it, most probably. He would have panicked when he saw it, and gotten rid of it, even before he really realized what he was doing.”
A Siege of Bitterns Page 27