I sat at one of the cafe tables and looked slowly through the tabloid that an earlier customer had left wedged under the sauce bottles. My coffee cooled before me. The paper was full of horror and disaster. I couldn’t remember when I’d last read one, last paid attention to the world beyond my own. I was absorbed, looked up only when the sun was blocked out by a looming figure, felt a familiar hand on my shoulder.
‘Tom.’
He was grinning, although it was hard to see his face with the sun behind him. He sat down abruptly, his smile still wolfish and pleased with himself. ‘You were completely oblivious there.’
‘You shook him off then?’
‘I think so.’ He threw a couple of small metallic objects onto the table. I could see black streaks on his fingers, a small accumulation of grime under one short nail. ‘Tyre valves.’ He laughed.
We headed back to the car and drove back against the gathering traffic in silence. Only the Land Rover, complaining through the gears, was doing any talking and I let the racket of the engine be my excuse, after a few shouted remarks, for lapsing into quietness. I was still turning over the question of how David had known where I was going, uneasy about it.
I’d tried raising it again with Tom but he didn’t want to know. ‘Don’t you think it’s a bit odd, though, him being there?’ I’d asked as Tom had sat down at the cafe and started fiddling with the sauce bottles, eager to be off. He was restless, wound up, not listening, the whole table shuddering with the vibration of his foot against the table leg.
‘Well, he’s stuck now.’
‘Yes, but how did he know to come here?’
‘Manda, come on, I’ve managed to move the Land Rover. Let’s go home.’ He resumed jigging the table with his foot, deliberately now, making my cup clatter on the saucer. I grabbed it before it rolled off and broke. But I couldn’t let the question go, turned it over and over, feeling I was missing something, but unsure of what. I’d told nobody but Tom that I was going down to the south coast, not a single soul. The firecrest sightings were public knowledge, but why this bird, this sighting, today, now?
‘Let’s go,’ Tom repeated, standing up. He wasn’t looking at me any more and I had a feeling I’d done something wrong, missed some vital cue. I didn’t know the rules of this game. I didn’t know how to play it, what to take for granted, what had to be asked, what had to be said. Something had shifted between us, somewhere between the shingle beach at Sandwich and the dark woods at the bay. For a moment we had linked hands and run laughing together and it had felt as though that meant something. But now I didn’t know. And Tom didn’t take my hand now, didn’t laugh, just led the way to the car in silence, his hands thrust into his pockets. I trailed behind him, wondering what I was letting myself in for. I couldn’t recapture the happy bubble of expectation with which I’d started the day, but I couldn’t quite work out why.
‘Penny for them?’
David had said that too. I shook my head. ‘Nothing,’ ignoring his raised eyebrows and settling into my seat, letting the brisk clatter of the engine fill the silence as the miles rolled out ahead of us. The empty roads and sense of freedom of the morning had gone, replaced by a growing tension as we snarled up in traffic, or roared through brief gaps between the jams. My nose and forehead prickled with early sunburn, the price of a day spent peering upwards, even in an English spring. But the prickling went beyond that. And when I finally, with an effort of will, set the question aside and turned to Tom, he just seemed like another insoluble problem to consider. Instead I let my mind wander over the birds we had seen and must have lapsed into a doze, lulled by the rocking motion of the car. When I woke, it took me a moment to notice that we had stopped, that we had arrived at my house, and that Tom had said something to me that I had missed. He was smiling as he tried again.
‘I asked if I could come in for a coffee.’
‘Oh . . .’ I shut my eyes and tried to visualize the state of the house. Too many late nights at work, and blank days at the weekend, finding it hard to summon the energy to do anything, had taken their toll. And when I opened them again, he was looking away, frowning.
‘Sorry, forget it,’ he said.
‘No, Tom, I was just. . .’ The words sounded feeble the minute I uttered them. ‘Of course you can come in.’
‘It really was just coffee, you know,’ he said. ‘It’s been a long day.’
‘I know that, yes, please, come in, Tom.’ But the moment had obviously passed, and he was turning the ignition.
‘Forget it,’ he said, and when I protested some more. ‘I said, forget it. It was just coffee, OK?’
I climbed out of the car, scrambling to get my stuff, putting my head back in through the open window. ‘Tom
‘Forget it. I said, forget it. Forget I spoke, OK? Just forget it.’ He lifted his hands off the wheel in frustration, seemed to check himself, and placed them back down again, turning to look at me, his face blank. ‘Go on, go in.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘It was a great day.’ But he was shaking his head, looking away from me, preparing to pull away. I had to step back or be choked by exhaust fumes. I waved, but he just gunned the engine, roaring up the street, and I let my hand drop back down by my side in defeat. ‘It was a great day,’ I said quietly to myself. It was just that I had let myself ruin it. My binoculars hung heavy on my neck as I trudged up the path, glaring at Mrs Next Door who was peering at me through her sitting-room curtains. I pulled off the itching woollen hat, freed at last, as I scratched my scalp, two-handed, letting my hair stand up on end where it would. As I fished for my front door keys I pulled out instead the two little tyre valves, darkly gleaming.
But that wasn’t to be the only gift I got, I found. The next morning a dunnock’s body lay broken on my front doorstep. A cat’s offering, maybe, although I had no cat. The breeze blew through its soft brown and grey feathers. I picked it up and found I couldn’t throw it away, couldn’t cast it off among the tea bags and rotting food in the rubbish bin. The eye had barely dulled and it stared up at me accusingly, a dark circle. As I shifted it in my fingers the head swung down, the neck broken, its beak a slack gape. It weighed nothing in my hand as I brought it in and laid it down gently on the kitchen table. It was only as I left the house a second time and felt the ghosts of its feathers against my palms that I felt my skin crawl with a sudden dread. All day I found myself absently wiping my fingers against my legs, and when the screen blanked and I let my mind run free for a moment I could see only the swing of that limp and broken head as it dangled from my hand.
TAWNY OWL
Strix aluco, family ‘Strigidae’
That was the night I first started hearing the owl. The call came floating in on the cool night air as I sat upstairs in the spare room, working on my computer. I had gone to bed at eleven but only to lie awake, my mind still churning with half-formed worries. I was haunted by the thought of the dead dunnock and finally I gave up all hope of sleep and went downstairs to look at it again. The bird lay on the kitchen table where I had left it, substantially unchanged, still beautiful even in death. Close up it was possible to see all the subtle colours in its feathers, the browns and the greys. The feet were curled, clenching nothing, the legs retracted under the wings. I picked it up and gently spread out one wing, realizing just how little there was of it, mostly air and feathers. I set it down again, resolving to bury it in the morning.
‘It was a cat,’ I said to myself out loud, but the words sounded thin to me, and as insubstantial as the bird itself. Id never been able to despatch an injured bird with a swift twist of the neck, however distressed it was. Their scrabbling panic infected me and when I’d found a cat-caught sparrow in the garden, its wing torn and dragging, I’d had to ask Gareth to deal with it. He and Tom had spent their teenage years netting and ringing birds for surveys and he knew how to handle them. He picked the bird up and enclosed it in his hands so it calmed and didn’t struggle but seemed to sit and wait for its fate, resigned an
d trusting. Then with one sharp movement it was done, the bird gone, the body whisked away. The cat had taken a visible toll then, but this bird seemed superficially unscathed, only the now-dulled eyes and the gruesome flop of the broken neck marring its perfection. Whatever had killed it had been swift and sure and unhesitating; the bird alive and perfect one moment, gone the next.
The thought did nothing to calm my fears. Heading back upstairs, I realized I was still too keyed up to sleep. Instead, I went to the computer and, opening the spare-bedroom window a little to let the night air in, started hardening the security on the website. This I could do. Changing passwords, changing settings, increasing the logging levels and setting up scripts to alert me to intrusions – all things that I could do as surely as Gareth could handle a struggling bird. An hour flowed past like water and when the owl call came, eerie and strange amid the diminishing rumble of traffic, I was just finishing up, my equilibrium restored, tired with the pleasant weariness of a job well done. As I stretched out my back and neck, the owl hooted again, closer. It was definitely a tawny. They are the ones that sound the way owls are supposed to, a haunting noise like something from another world. I leaned forward towards the window and listened again. It seemed to be coming from the area of the gravel pit. That made sense. There were trees there to form a roost, plenty of long rough grass for mice and voles. Leaving the computer to shut itself down, I hurried downstairs and back into the dark kitchen. The moon was up, competing with the reflected glow of the street lights, and the owl would be able to see everything as clear as day. Flying on silent wings, what it couldn’t see it would hear, and still itself remain invisible. But the fact that it was calling told me it had other things on its mind, other owls, and that meant I had a chance of approaching close enough to get a light on it and have a look.
I left the back door on the snib and grabbed my spotlight, pulling on Gareth’s jacket over my pyjamas and shoving my feet into my shoes without stopping to tie the laces. The owl was still calling from the open ground around the gravel pit. I made my way down the deserted street and into the relative darkness of the trees. Beyond them the moon had won out over the street lights and it lit up the rough grass. The surface of the water shimmered silver in the breeze. I scanned quickly through the trees but could make out nothing that could be the compact rounded body of a tawny owl.
In the dim and unfamiliar light the world seemed different, the trees looming much larger. The traffic had all but gone and I could hear only the continuous whisper of the wind through the fresh spring leaves of the trees. Then that too died down and the world went quiet. A burst of noise – a car door slamming, voices raised in exclamation, dropped keys, curses, laughter – came as a series of retorts, and then was gone. In the trees there was a brief rearrangement of the roosting birds – pigeons and rooks calling sleepily, then crashing through the leaves with a clapping of wings. My eyes, adjusting to the gloom, could see the whirl of bats over the water, their cries silent to my ears.
When the owl called again, I stood stock still to listen, turning my head through the sound, willing my ears to tell me the direction of the call. I peered into a different tree, the light of the spot burning through the moonlight. Nothing. I snapped it off. Owls can pinpoint a noise as soft as a scuffling mouse blindfolded. Not me. I felt the human limitation of my senses. A passing dog had spotted me and growled softly, peering into the shadows where I stood until it was tugged on by its oblivious owner, impatient to be home. I was cold, suddenly tired, beginning to feel conspicuous standing out in the middle of a suburb in an old waxed jacket and untied shoes. Slowly I worked my way around the pit, seeing only sleeping birds, hearing only the occasional car on the motorway through the trees, its lights sweeping through the branches and throwing everything around me into sharp relief. My spotlight had started to fade by the time I decided to give up. I hadn’t heard the owl calling for a while and I was beginning to worry that someone would call out the police. As I trudged back, stumbling a little on the uneven path, I felt a bone-deep weariness and a chill, my bed suddenly seeming like a longed-for haven.
I slipped in through the back garden. The first thing I heard was a soft staccato bumping, wood against wood, then a loose rustling, a shifting of paper. The back door was open slightly, banging against the jamb in the renewed breeze. Inside, papers had blown around the kitchen – opened post and stacks of stuff brought back from work, dumped on the counter for later consideration and then forgotten. I looked around, unsure of what among the chaos was due to me, and what could be signs of an intruder. Plates and dishes were still piled in the sink where I had left them, my bag and coat were still lying where they’d been dropped. A trail of kicked-off shoes marked out my usual path from the front door to the fridge. An unfolded map of Berkshire covered half the table next to the remains of my meal. Nothing obviously disturbed. I should clean up, I thought wearily; tidy, sort, read, clean, throw things away. It all seemed so pointless. Crossing into the dark sitting room, I checked that the red eye of the television standby light still glowed reassuringly above the flashing green 12:00 on the video. My mobile charger winked yellow. No sign of any intrusion there. Moving up through the familiar spaces of the house I checked for my computer, the printer, scope and spare binoculars. Everything fine. I sat on the edge of the bed and reasoned with myself. I’d left the door unlocked, that was all, and the wind had caught it. Nothing was gone, no sign of any disturbance. It was fine. And I was tired. Every bone in my body wanted sleep, to sink down into the depths of the bed and dream of nothing. But something was tugging at the back of my mind, something missing, something that had gone. I could feel the tension in my scalp, fighting against the heavy pull of sleep. Something I had picked up recently, handled, something I was going to do something with. The bird. I ran downstairs, snapped on the kitchen light and blinked in the harsh glare. It had disappeared.
I sat up half the night, clinging to the comfort of Gareth’s old jacket, wondering what to do next. Even once I had gone to bed I lay awake, unable to stop the endless cycling of my thoughts. Headlights from passing cars scoured the ceiling, illuminating stray bits of the room, shadows jumping out in sharp relief. Zannah would tell me to call the police, I knew, but there was no way I could do that and face their disbelief. I closed my eyes and tried to summon sleep, alternating between tiredness and fear. Each time I started to drift off, I would jolt awake, heart hammering, thinking I heard a sound, some stealthy movement in the quiet house below.
The passing cars got fewer and stopped altogether as the small hours marched on towards morning. I stared into the murky darkness of the bedroom and listened to the quiet. At some point, as dawn began to filter through the curtains, I did sleep, I must have done, for I was back in the police station, reciting my story, with the soft muffled rhythm of the kitchen door banging behind me, trying to make them understand. The bird lay limp and tiny on the table between us, spotlit, the rest of the room full of shadows. Their eyes were full of hard suspicion, their questions harsh and insistent. ‘Why did you kill it?’ they asked me, over and over, turning aside my denials. ‘Why did you kill it? Why did you kill her?’
I woke to the clatter of bin men and broad daylight, long after I should have been up, and got in late for work. The disturbed night had left me keyed up and with a false sense of alertness, light-headed with tiredness. I was still loading up my email when the phone rang, the help-desk line. Janet had disappeared upstairs to make some coffee and the support guys were habitually late starters, rarely rolling in before ten. I could have let the call go to voicemail but I was wearing Janet’s patience thin these days, so I grabbed the phone, not concentrating, wondering if Janet would have thought to get me a coffee while she was up.
‘Support line, hello.’ I tucked the phone under my chin as I simultaneously flicked through the day’s crop of junk mail and stretched over to my own computer to see what was in my inbox. I felt an almost reckless sense of clarity.
‘Hello?’ sa
id a quavery voice down the line. ‘Is that IT?’ I recognized the voice immediately. One of the older professors, long since officially retired, who haunted his old labs and taught a few graduate students here and there.
I tried to concentrate, focusing on where I was and what I was doing. From somewhere I managed to pull out my work voice, my best help-desk manner. I could see out of the corner of my eye that my email was taking an age to open, usually a sign of trouble as servers splurged out error messages, filling up my inbox.
‘I’m sorry, Professor, I didn’t catch that last bit.’ He had been talking while I had drifted, my mind skittery with lack of sleep.
Janet came back as I was listening to his explanation, carefully balancing two mugs on a tray. I mouthed my thanks at her and dragged her phone onto my desk, still making encouraging noises as I sat in front of my PC. The coffee was instant, black and bitter, scorching my tongue, delivering a kick to the stomach. ‘Loading 347 of 2560 messages,’ the progress bar said. ‘Loading 348 . . .’ I didn’t mind. I felt invincible.
‘. . . and now it’s doing the thing where the little hour glass goes up and the little blue boxes get stuck and it says 99 percent completed and it doesn’t move.’
I sighed. I knew the problem. He called with the same one every couple of weeks. The only way to sort it out was to go into his computer myself and disentangle it for him.
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