The Birdwatcher (24 page)

He looked out of the window. He could break a leg, dropping from up here.

‘Come on, Billy. God’s sake. Come out of there.’

He got into the bath and lay down, staying as quiet as he could.

‘Billy?’

Mum rattled the doorknob, yanked it back and forth. It was bolted. There was no way she’d get in without breaking the lock.

‘Are you there?’

He heard her saying to Fergie. ‘He won’t come out.’

‘You sure he’s in there?’

It would all come out now, he thought. Ferguson had figured it out. He knew what he had done. He was a good policeman. For the first time since his father had died he started to cry.

In the white of the bath he felt a huge sadness overwhelm him. He would be taken away from Mum and put in prison. It’s not so much the prison he minded. It would just be a children’s prison, not a real one. But that would be the end of it. He tried not to make any noise as he gulped down air.

‘He’s gone,’ said Mum. ‘I can’t see him. He’s jumped out of the window.’ She must be looking through the keyhole.

He could hear Fergie running downstairs, yanking open the front door and hurrying outside. ‘You think he jumped from up there?’ His voice came up from below. ‘Where would he have gone? One of his pals?’

‘I’ll get my coat,’ his mother said.

He heard her rummaging, then the front door slamming. And then the house was quiet. They had gone to look for him.

THIRTEEN

The redwings were starting to come through in larger numbers now. He sat in his police car at Greatstone and watched some brent geese passing far out at sea. The swallows were still going south in numbers, later than usual this year. Nothing was reliable. Something was broken.

He was supposed to be briefing neighbourhood PSCOs about data protection but he cancelled it, and instead drove to the locations where the white car had been photographed. Then he tried to guess where the car would have come from. At Sandgate, he drove around, peered into driveways and looked at parked cars. He was surprised at how popular white was as a colour for SUVs.

With the light starting to fade, he drove up Blackhouse Hill to the golf course, to get a better view of the land around him. The club was quiet, a few people were sheltering from the wind in the clubhouse. He counted five white four-wheel-drives just in this car park alone.

The bird was moving through low scrub by the first hole: small, and brown. His first thought was a chiffchaff, but were its legs paler than usual? He reached inside his glove compartment and pulled out his binoculars.

Stepping out of the car, he leaned on the open door and started to focus on the bird.

‘I didn’t know you played,’ a voice behind him said.

He lingered a little while longer on the bird before he turned.

It was Councillor Vinnie Sleight, dressed in just a white shirt, despite the cold.

‘I don’t,’ he said.

By the time he looked back, the bird had disappeared. He lowered the binoculars.

He pulled out his notebook and wrote in it: ‘
Warbler. Dusky/Rabbes??
’

‘Got your eyes on one of those immigrants, Bill?’

‘They come over here, with their foreign ways,’ said South.

‘Don’t joke about it, Bill. Enough people take it seriously round here.’

‘You’re not one of them?’ said South.

‘I got where I am through hard work,’ said Sleight. ‘I don’t begrudge anyone else who makes their money that way. I read in the papers the murderer killed himself.’

South turned to Sleight again. ‘Committing suicide isn’t necessarily an admission of guilt.’

Sleight said, ‘Well, you looking for anyone else?’

South shook his head. ‘Nope.’

‘There you go,’ said Sleight. ‘Good riddance. Is there something worrying you, Bill? You look a bit stressed.’

‘Do you know who owns any of these cars?’ said South, pointing to three of the closest cars, a Land Cruiser and a pair of almost identical Range Rovers.

Sleight shook his head. ‘Want me to ask?’

‘What about that one?’ A white Qashqai.

‘That one?’ He smiled.

‘Yes.’

‘That one’s mine. Who wants to know?’

‘Just looking for a car that’s been driving around with illegal plates,’ said South, looking at Sleight.

Sleight frowned and looked at the other cars. ‘One of these, you reckon?’

‘I don’t know,’ said South.

‘That would be a bit of a shocker round these parts, wouldn’t it? This is a golf club, after all.’ He laughed. ‘Come to dinner sometime, Sergeant,’ said Sleight, turning towards the long low black clubhouse. ‘My boy’s back from Cambridge. Great lad. You ever met him?’

‘When?’ said South. ‘What about this weekend? I’m free.’

‘I’ll talk to my wife,’ called Sleight, across the tarmac. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

South turned round and scanned the distance again. He waited there for another twenty minutes, watching people swing at balls, but the bird didn’t return.

Darkness fell. He drove around the local lanes, exhausted from not sleeping and grateful that it was almost the end of his shift. But then the radio blurted, ‘Serious RTC on A259. Junction of Guldeford Lane and Folkestone Road.’

He put on the blue light automatically. Less than a quarter of a mile away, he would probably be the first responder. The worst job of all. If it was a serious traffic accident there would be blood and pain.

As he approached, South added the siren. The traffic was already backed up to the east, drivers leaning heads out of windows. There was always a risk someone would try a U-turn as he approached.

Just as he had guessed, he was the first there. Drivers were standing by their vehicles, dazed, unsure of what to do; this is what accidents always looked like in the first few minutes, he told himself. The far side of the sharp corner, the Subaru was trapped under a scaffolding lorry. The air was still thick with a smell of burnt rubber from tyres that had braked too late.

At odds with the stillness, the crashed car was booming loud music; a thick, pulsing bass.

‘He was going way too fast.’ The driver of the lorry was a young man dressed in a high-vis vest.

Frowning, South pushed past him towards the matt black car, trying to understand how the accident had happened. He had seen many crashes; this one made no sense to him. It was as if the car had been moving so fast it had somehow forced itself under the safety bar under the side of the lorry, tipping the vehicle sideways slightly. Scaffolding poles had spilled onto the verge. But that was physically impossible. A car would have to be travelling at a ridiculous speed to do that.

The music continued as he jogged towards the car, all synthesisers and stop-start drums. Bystanders stared at him. The whole front of the car was wedged under the oncoming lorry’s central section, only leaving the rear of the vehicle accessible. Tinted windows made it impossible to see inside from the back.

‘I was changing the tyre,’ said the man. ‘It was up on the jack. Fluke he didn’t kill me.’

He could see it now. A blind corner; an idiotic place to try and fix a broken-down truck. The lorry would have already been lifted high enough to raise the side bars away from the road, allowing an oncoming car to force itself beneath it. The driver could lose his licence and probably his livelihood; he wouldn’t be surprised if he served time, but now was not the time for that.

‘Give me your tools,’ shouted South. ‘Quick.’ You had to take charge; to be decisive. Civilians could not cope with situations like this. Given a task, the driver rushed to find a large spanner for South.

In those seconds he understood that this is what he did. He wasn’t a copper who took on murder cases, delving into other people’s lives; he was an ordinary copper who got stuck in to simple situations like this where something needed doing, where one person’s action could make some sort of difference. Ugly as the scene was, this was the job he understood, not the one the death of his friend had dragged him into.

Inside the car, his feet still sticking outside of the back window he’d smashed, South heard the other emergency vehicles starting to arrive. The interior stank of hot oil and petrol. The entire back seat of the car was taken up with pulsating speakers which left little space for him to squeeze his body through. As he looked down for a second, he saw the driver’s head, lying face down in the footwell. The man had been cleanly decapitated. South looked back up again straight away, stifling the urge to vomit.

The girl in the passenger seat had her head pressed against the lorry’s side bar, which had smashed the front window. An inch more and her neck would have been snapped. The first thing she said was, ‘Nicky? That you?’

By now, South had wriggled forward another foot, lying along the length of the car, still trying to push himself towards her. Her head was completely trapped, he realised, between the metal and the headrest. Luckily, perhaps, she couldn’t twist her head to see the carnage at her right-hand side.

‘Don’t move,’ he shouted above the music. ‘We’ll get you out of here.’

‘I can’t fucking move. Nicky? Are you OK?’

‘Does it hurt?’

‘But I’m fucking cold though,’ she said. ‘C’n you get me a blanket?’

She couldn’t look down either, which was fortunate. As he inched forward he saw that her body had been crushed into the front of the car. The engine had been forced back into the footwell. Fresh blood soaked her legs. Unless paramedics could reach her quickly, she would not have long to live. Even if they moved her now, he guessed she would die soon.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked. He heard men, shouting behind him.

‘I’m not saying nothing. Fuck sake. Get me a blanket.’

Finally he found the button on the stereo and pressed it. The silence was good.

‘Hey, I liked that,’ she said quietly, and then closed her eyes and suddenly started to scream, a loud, high note, as if the pain had only just hit her.

He took a last look and began to scramble back out to brief the firemen and paramedics who were behind him now and to allow them into the vehicle.

By the time he’d finished organising traffic control, she was dead. It took them another hour to tug the vehicle clear. On the girl’s ruined lap, a paramedic found her blood-soaked passport in a clutch bag and handed it to South. She had been just eighteen. The young always carried passports these days, he knew, to show they were old enough to buy alcohol.

When, wearing blue gloves, he peeled apart the bloody pages under the glare of an emergency light, he saw the girl lived in his area. He called the name and address through to control, feeling that he was being pursued by something dark and obscure.

South sat in his car watching the men and women measure the skid marks on the road and take photographs while the recovery lorries waited. Distorted metal shapes threw long shadows in the darkness. And all the while, the generator that lit the wreckage purred away to itself in the blackness.

Nobody talked much. It was like that on days like these. It was a bad job that needed doing. They didn’t clear the site till after one in the morning.

His mother and Fergie had left the house, thinking he’d jumped from the window.

He dressed, quick as he could. There were no clean socks so he put on a dirty pair from the laundry, taking another old pair as spare. He stuffed everything in a rucksack. Two jumpers, jeans, T-shirts, woollen gloves, a cagoule, his binoculars. Downstairs in the kitchen he found an unopened packet of digestives and, just before he unbolted the back door, remembered the torch from under the sink.

And then he was out the back door. He didn’t dare head down through the estate. They’d already be looking for him there. So he threw the rucksack over the fence and pulled himself up it, fingers raw on the wire.

He landed badly, pitching face first into the brambles. Thorns stung his palms and face. He got up slowly, disentangling himself. It was no good just pulling against them. They would rip your skin open. From there he didn’t stop, taking the steep route straight up the hill to the east, fading light behind him.