The Birdwatcher (11 page)

Finally, he heard the clinking of empty milk bottles on the front step outside; then the creaking stairs, taps turned on in the bathroom, teeth brushed. A toilet flush.

He waited until her light was off, then tried to count to a thousand, but he lost his way in the two-hundreds. He recited the Lord’s Prayer. He counted his teeth with his tongue.

In the end he decided his mother must have fallen asleep, so he put on his slippers and his parka, opened the door to his bedroom and crept downstairs.

For a while he stood in the hallway. Something about the house was different, he realised, now it was just the two of them. It wasn’t just that they ate meals in front of the TV now Dad wasn’t around, either. Some invisible quality was different. Even the air was lighter, easier to breathe.

The crowbar was under the stairs where his dad had always left it. Billy took it, went to the kitchen, turned the key in the back door and yanked at the bolts. Unable to shift the top one, he carefully lifted a stool, placed it by the door and stood on it.

The bolt was stuck. He tugged. Then shifted his weight so he could push. This time it shot across, loudly. Billy tottered on the stool, but didn’t fall. Heart jittering, he stood, listening for footsteps from upstairs. Silence. His mother had not woken.

The back garden was oddly warm tonight. In the moonlight, he tucked the tip of the bar under the edge of the manhole cover, just as he had spied his father doing from his bedroom window.

It was a hell of a weight to shift. His father had made it look so easy.

The first time, the jemmy slipped and the manhole cover thumped back down again. ‘Oh crap,’ he whispered to himself. He looked up, waited a few seconds to see if a light came on, but none did.

He forced the steel rod back under and lifted. When it was high enough, he peered down into the blackness.

It was too dark to see anything down there.

Fergie had said the gun had killed two men before his father. Maybe they were not so different, his dad and him, after all. The idea made him feel nauseous.

He was reaching down inside the manhole when a light came on in the kitchen.

Oh shit. Billy dropped the jemmy down into the manhole and let the cover drop back down. The kitchen door swung back.

‘Billy McGowan. What in hell’s name are ye doin’ out here in the cold at one in the morning?’

SEVEN

The next morning the weather broke. The rain stopped and a cool low sun turned the sea slate blue. South spent the morning with three other coppers combing as wide an area as he could but they found nothing more. He noted two firecrests and he was sure he’d heard the thin call of a redwing, but hadn’t been able to see it.

No rough sleepers, though. The sight of police everywhere would have been enough to put them off. The inquiries at the night shelters in the region hadn’t turned up anything so far.

He headed back in just before midday, legs stiffening from the cold, and was boiling a kettle when DS Cupidi arrived, talking on her mobile phone. She reached past him and took her pack of ground coffee from the shelf.

When she ended the call she said, ‘They’ve got fingerprints on the bottle fragments. And possibly on the axe handle. Almost certainly DNA too.’

He understood the appeal of a murder investigation. Unlike most policing, the sort he was used to, the objective was a clear and simple one. With luck there would be a match. Old-fashioned fingerprints were often quicker to match than DNA results, which could take several days, and these days pretty much any rough sleeper’s records would be somewhere on the PNC database.

‘Any luck with the shelters?’

‘Nothing yet. I’ve got a list of soup kitchens and food banks from Social Services,’ said Cupidi. She held out a bit of paper. ‘Would any of your lot go to those?’

‘My lot?’

‘The rough sleepers we saw yesterday.’

South scanned the list. ‘Maybe. Mostly not. There’s a food bank in Lydd too,’ he said. ‘It’s not on the list. That’s the nearest one. But the type of users you see here don’t use food banks. They’re too far outside of the system for that.’

She took the paper back from him and frowned at it. ‘What about users?’ she asked. ‘Pound to a penny the killer was on drugs. Any dealers round here?’

He put down a half-drunk cup of tea and reached for his coat.

They started at Wiccomb caravan site. ‘Careful how you go here,’ said South. ‘She doesn’t like police much.’

‘Her and me both. You think she’ll know anything?’

‘She’ll know something. It’s whether she’ll tell us . . .’

The caravan was in the middle of the static site. It was a luxury model with a brand-new Audi A3 parked outside. ‘How much do you reckon that car’s worth?’ said Cupidi.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Around seventy grand,’ said Cupidi. ‘I don’t suppose whoever owns that sleeps out much.’

Chained to a propane canister, a Dobermann and a Staffordshire had worn the grass bare in an arc in front of the caravan. The dogs started barking the moment South stepped out of the car.

The chains tensed and clanked. Behind the main window, the nets twitched. She was in.

‘Judy. It’s Sergeant South. I need to speak to you.’

The door stayed closed.

‘Judy. I just want a word.’

South had the sense they were being watched, not only by whoever was in Judy Farouk’s caravan, but by most of the other residents too. No one showed their face though. They were used to Judy here. They had learned not to interfere.

The caravan park was looking scrappy. Foxes had torn open bags of rubbish, scattering the debris over the grass. One mildewed caravan close to Judy’s had been unoccupied for years, its door wide open. A wheelless car sat up on bricks.

Six years ago, this had been a nice place. Elderly people who wanted to live by the sea had retired here. Then Judy’s family moved in. In the first few years there had been a serious assault and a couple of arsons, one resulting in a death. An elderly man who’d kept budgerigars had been burned alive in his static home. A few days before his death, he had complained to the police about drug dealing on the site. South had interviewed him. They had raided Judy’s caravan. Nothing was ever found. And then came the fire. Again, nothing had ever been proved. Nobody could ever explain why the victim would have been keeping petrol inside his static home.

In the next few months, those who could afford to moved off the site. The others, who had put all their retirement money into buying a plot here, kept quiet.

‘I’m not going away, Judy. We’ve got all day.’

Still nothing.

‘We’ll be inside the car whenever you’re ready to switch off Jeremy Kyle and talk to us.’ He returned to the passenger seat.

‘How long is this going to take?’ asked Cupidi.

‘Ten minutes. Maybe twenty. She always comes out in the end. She likes to piss us off a bit, but she knows that as long as we’re out here, she’s not doing any business. None of her customers are going to come anywhere near with a cop car outside.’

They waited, engine running.

‘Your daughter said she wanted me to take her birding.’

Cupidi looked at him and frowned. ‘Birdwatching?’

‘When she was getting out of the car last night. She asked me if she could go out with me one day.’

‘Are you serious?’ said Cupidi. She dug in her handbag for a cigarette. ‘You think she’s trying something on?’

‘Maybe she just likes birds. People do. Why would she ask that?’

In the rear-view mirror, South noticed a white SUV drive onto the site, then brake a little way off just by the site office, with its sign:
PROPANE refills £35 with cylinder ONLY no exceptions
. Then it slowly reversed, turned and left the caravan site. South smiled. Judy would have seen it too. A lost customer, he guessed.

He opened his notebook and wrote down the registration number.

‘You have good eyes,’ Cupidi said, looking in the rear-view mirror on the passenger side. ‘I couldn’t make that out from here. Maybe I need to get tested.’

‘Birdwatching,’ he said. ‘See what make it was?’

‘No.’

Cupidi got out, walked to the car bonnet and sat on it, smoking a cigarette while the dogs went crazy, barking at her. All the time, she just stared back at them, occasionally flicking ash.

Judy never kept drugs in the caravan. She did her dealing here on the site, but to collect, the buyer would have to drive to meet some spotty teenager in a flat somewhere a couple of miles away. She changed the teenagers regularly. They were never around long enough to get caught, and if they were they never admitted any connection to her.

Cupidi walked towards the caravan, cigarette in hand and squatted down right in front of the dogs, just beyond the stretch of their chains. The dogs tugged and pulled and growled and snarled, pawing at the earth, but the gas cylinder they were tethered to wasn’t shifting.

‘Careful,’ said South, from the safety of the car.

The fact that her face was inches from them infuriated the dogs. After a minute staring at them, she took a pull on her cigarette, then blew smoke right into their faces.

A second later the caravan door tugged open. ‘Don’t you dare treat my dogs like that.’

Cupidi stood and looked at the woman standing in the doorway of the caravan. She was in her forties, dressed in sweats, a towel around her neck, though the weight she carried made South suspect she hadn’t taken any exercise in a long time. ‘You must be Judy,’ Cupidi said.

‘And who the frig are you?’ Judy’s eyes flicked over towards the campsite entrance, as if to see who else was around.

‘Get your dogs under control and I’ll tell you,’ said Cupidi, calmly.

South sat in the front of the car; Cupidi was in the back with Judy.

‘I don’t know why you think I would know anything about it,’ she said.

‘We’re just making inquiries. There were three men and two women. We believe that at least one of them may have witnessed something important.’

Judy’s thickly floral perfume filled the car. ‘Don’t know any of them.’

‘We think the person who killed him was drug- or alcohol-dependent.’

Judy made a face. ‘I’d help you,’ she said. ‘Only, I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Any new people around?’

Judy did a deliberately poor impression of someone trying to rack their brains. ‘No. Can’t think of anyone. Finished now? Only I’ve got some daytime TV to watch.’

Cupidi took out a card. ‘You know the score. If you hear anything, please get in touch. We’d appreciate the help.’

‘Cupidi. Funny name. You an immigrant?’

‘No. Are you?’

‘My dad was. Hard workers, immigrants. Not like most of the people round here. I’m thinking of moving, being frank. Can’t stick it here.’

‘Alleluia,’ said South.

‘Maybe move down the road. I like the look of Dungeness. You live there, don’t you, copper?’

South blinked. How did she know that? He reached up and adjusted the rear-view mirror; in it, she was smiling back at him.

‘It’s no secret, is it? I keep my eyes open, that’s all.’ She looked away. ‘Case you wondered, I walk the dogs there every morning. It’s nice. I wouldn’t mind one of those places, actually. I could see myself retiring there. Bunch of weirdos and misfits. I’m sure I’d like it there, don’t you think?’

‘I’d make bloody sure you didn’t,’ said South quietly.

‘And one of them’s just come empty, then, you say?’

‘Fuck off, Judy.’

‘That’s not nice,’ she said. ‘I’ll remember that.’ From the back of the car, she glanced around the caravans. ‘We done?’ People ducked away behind their nets.

South said, ‘If this man is one of your customers, you’d be better off without him, that’s all.’

Farouk shrugged. ‘And I haven’t got any idea what you’re talking about.’

Waiting for a gap in the traffic at the gates, Cupidi said, ‘Well, she’s a charmer, isn’t she? Do you think she did know something?’

‘I know her,’ said South. ‘She’ll never say anything to your face. But she’s in business. She doesn’t want some psycho junkie messing things up for her. It’s always worth poking the stick in the hornet’s nest.’

They drove away down the rutted track. ‘I’ve been thinking. What if Zoë is actually interested in birds?’ said Cupidi. ‘I sometimes don’t know her at all.’

‘It’s not that outlandish,’ said South. He rubbed his eyes.

‘Did you manage any sleep last night?’

‘Not much, be honest.’ He couldn’t stop thinking about what Cupidi had said yesterday about rage; the kind of anger that made you unable to stop what you were doing.

‘It shakes you up,’ she said. ‘A thing like that. Maybe you should take some time off.’

‘You weren’t saying that to me yesterday,’ he said.

‘Yesterday I needed you,’ she said. ‘And you did well.’

He looked at his watch. He was due at the Neighbourhood Panel meeting in fifteen minutes. He would be late; he should call ahead to let them know. It was always so hard to find a date everyone could make. They met quarterly. It was the kind of ordinary inconsequential policing he was used to. There would be tea and digestives. Sometimes one of the women brought cake. It was provincial and utterly normal. It wasn’t like Serious Crimes. The things it achieved were simple and undramatic, but they made a difference.