The Birdwatcher (8 page)

Billy shook his head, curling his lower lip down.

‘Nobody hanging around in the street outside?’

‘No.’

‘No unusual cars.’

‘Nope.’

‘Think, Billy. Think really hard. Because we’ve asked everyone and no one else in the street was out and about that night. You were the only person out there at that time. You’re the only person who can help me.’

Billy squinted at the car, the way you did when you were trying to pretend that it was real. From his trouser pocket, Ferguson pulled out a packet of Spangles and offered one to Billy. It was a new tube. Billy took one between finger and thumb.

‘No. I didn’t see no one.’

For a while Fergie said nothing, then, weirdly, he reached out his arm towards Billy; Billy flinched back, but Ferguson’s hand kept coming towards his face and just when Billy thought he was going to try and touch him or something weird, he just lifted the fringe away from Billy’s forehead and said, ‘That’s a nasty cut you got there.’

Before he could stop himself, Billy lifted his fingers to the scab that hid at his hairline. ‘Nothing much,’ he said.

‘Who did that to you?’

‘I fell,’ said Billy. ‘On the stairs.’

‘Yeah?’

‘The other day,’ said Billy.

‘Sure about that?’

Billy carefully unwrapped the sweet, put it in his mouth and nodded, conscious that the copper was staring at him.

‘One more thing. You told the Inspector you got home at nine fifteen? That would make sense if it was the news, and all.’

Cautiously, Billy nodded.

‘Yet nobody called the police until . . .’ Sergeant Ferguson took out a notebook and flicked through it. ‘Gone ten, when your mammy got home. That’s a long time to be on your own with your dad . . . you know. Like that.’

Billy spun the wheels of the car.

‘Are you sure?’

Billy sucked on the sweet.

‘Sit down here, Billy.’ Ferguson patted the bed next to where he was sitting. ‘I got a feeling about you, Billy McGowan. You’re a good lad. I’ve got a feeling you’re not saying everything. You have your reasons, most like, but I promise you this. Anything you tell me is between the two of us. Cross my heart and swear to die. This isn’t me as a copper. This is me as a friend of your mammy’s. A special friend I hope. I got a lot of time for your mother. Her and me go way back. She was always the best-looking girl round here. Still is. Did you know me and her used to walk out, when we were at school?’

‘You never?’

Ferguson grinned. ‘True. Before she met your dad. She and me were close, back then. Real close.’

Billy considered for a little while.

‘Your mum. She’s special, Billy. I think a lot of her. I promise I’ll never do anything to hurt her. Or you. I just want to find out who did this to your father. That way I can keep you both safe.’

Billy concentrated even harder on the car. All this talk about his mother was embarrassing.

Ferguson said, ‘See, I don’t believe a boy like you would have just stayed in the room with his dad, like that. Not all that time. Not for almost an hour.’

Billy didn’t answer. He just spun the wheels of the car round and round for a while as Fergie sat there next to him, watching, like he knew something.

FIVE

The Search Adviser turned out to be a tall woman in her thirties who wore her glasses on a string around her neck.

‘All this area is just scrubland?’ the woman said, peering at Cupidi’s map.

‘Twelve square miles of it,’ said South.

‘Christ on a bike,’ she said.

‘Precisely.’

She handed out gloves and explained that, because of the openness of the land, they were going to circle anti-clockwise around the house, walking in a line. ‘Me too?’ said South.

‘I want you there, just in case,’ said the woman. ‘I don’t know this area.’

‘He was already at the crime scene,’ said Cupidi. ‘He could contaminate it.’

‘Right,’ the woman said. She dug around in a carrier bag and brought out another coverall, overshoes and mask. ‘You’ll have to put them on then. Just in case. And keep your distance, OK?’

She explained they should make a note of what they found – anything from clothes or gloves to any litter that the killer might have discarded, as well as anything that might have been used as the weapon. Once the pathology report came back they’d have a better idea of exactly what they were looking for, but that could take days.

Wind hummed in the telephone wires as it drove the rain in from the east. Standing in the rain, South watched as they walked around Bob’s house. The rain was sometimes at their backs, other times straight in their faces. The advantage of the landscape was that little was hidden. In long grass or wasteland you could only afford to be a couple of yards apart at most. Here the line spread out thinly, pausing only for officers to poke sticks at clumps of gorse that grew where it could. The ground around here was pitted with rabbit scrapes.

‘Here!’ A woman constable shouted, raising her arm.

An old fence post, lying on its side. It looked too large and unwieldy to kill a man with. A SOCO, clad from head to toe in white like South, ran over and started photographing the object, flash-lighting up the stones around.

‘OK,’ said the search leader, shouting above the wind. ‘Keep going.’

They closed up the gap in the line and moved on. Once they had trudged around Bob’s house twice they came to the power station’s perimeter fence. There were notices fixed regularly along the length of it:
Nuclear Installations Act 1965. Licensed Site Boundary
.

From behind the fence came a constant, deep noise, a bit like a kettle starting to boil. You didn’t even notice it if you lived here. At the wire, they turned around. Now, instead of doing circles, they began doing C-shapes, first one way, stopping when they reached the perimeter, then the other way, each arc wider than the last.

Now the circle was large. Each arc was taking thirty or forty minutes. A few more sticks and a short, rusty metal bar had been found, tagged and photographed, but none of them showed any signs of being used to kill anyone, or having been put there recently. South was used to being out here when it was like this – he liked to be out in any weather – but the other policemen looked tired already, blinking in the rain and hunching into the weather. The uninterrupted wind slowed them, making their muscles stiffer.

‘What do you reckon about the new girl, Sarge?’ a constable to his right called, from a clump of broom he was prodding with a stick.

‘Sergeant Cupidi?’ South shouted back over the noise of rain on his waterproofs.

‘Bit pushy, in’t she?’

‘Kind of.’

They had reached the houses and huts on the far side of the road now.

‘Do we need to do the bins?’ the coppers complained.

It was already getting dark by the time they reached The Pilot. Inside the lights were on. Afternoon drinkers were standing at the bar.

‘You know the publican?’ the Search Adviser asked.

‘Of course.’ It was the pub where visiting birders gathered to discuss what they’d seen.

‘Tell him he can’t chuck anything more in those bins,’ she said. ‘I’ll get them sealed and SOCO can do them later.’

A drinker noticed the policemen fanning out in the car park, came to the window, pint in hand, and watched them as they methodically worked the ground around the pub.

‘Bastard,’ said one copper. ‘Just doing it to taunt us.’

‘Fuckin’ soaked, I am. Supposed to be waterproof, this coat. My arse.’

The light was going. There wouldn’t be much point continuing for much longer.

‘Look busy. Here comes Jesus.’

South looked up. A police BMW was driving towards them, lights on full beam. It would be the Chief Inspector coming back to join them for the afternoon meeting. The car paused by the pub car park and lowered an electric window.

Inspector McAdam was sitting next to the Chief Inspector in the back seat. He leaned across the larger man and asked, ‘Have they found anything, Bill?’

‘Don’t think so, sir.’

‘This meeting is in your house, I gather, Bill.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The window wound back up and the car moved on. The search leader blinked in the rain, checking her watch, and shouted, ‘Ten more minutes, then all back inside.’

From the pub, the line of police officers was moving southwards, across the road. The beach was wide here. There was so much debris at this time of year it was hard to know what to pick up. A few locals had tried to preserve the old sheds that housed the fishing boats’ winding gear, nailing fresh wood on to stop them from falling apart, but mostly the weather was taking them now.

South wandered away from them towards the beach. In the lee of one of the sheds South saw the blackened stones from where a fire had been. He remembered the rough sleepers he had seen that morning.

They had left the place in a mess. The shingle was littered with blue Tennent’s Super cans, torn cardboard strips and a broken bottle.

The drinkers had long gone. They would be sleeping it off somewhere. South squatted down. The fire had burned out, turning the shingle a grey-ish pink. The ash had washed away into the stones. In a circle around the coloured shingle, the half-burnt sticks and planks.

Leaning over to shelter himself from rain he pulled out his notebook. ‘
3 men, 2 women?
’ he’d written. ‘
10.10 a.m. No rain.
’

It was all to do with the birding. Writing everything down: the time, the place, the weather conditions, the look of things; it was a discipline all birders worked to acquire. When he’d started he’d used Alwych All Weather notebooks, like all the birders did. Over a year or so, he would slowly fill a book with the record of everything he saw and where he’d seen it. It was as much about birds as a record of a life. But somehow, as a copper, he began to find it more natural to use the smaller police books instead of the Alwyches. It wasn’t just that they fitted more easily into a pocket; but somehow it was the deliberate blurring of a practice.

He leaned down, took his eyes off the book and peered instead at the pieces of unburnt wood, circled like a child’s drawing of sunrays around the ash. Most were old weathered pieces of flotsam they’d picked up. One half-burnt stump looked newer. A paler, heavily varnished new wood. A gust of wind hit him just as he realised, with shock, that he was looking at an axe handle, the sort you’d buy in any tool shop.

‘Here,’ he said.

A gust of rain carried his voice away.

He remembered the tremble of Gill Rayner’s arm by his side. Now he looked closer at the axe handle: was there something dark smudged on it?

It could just have been soot. But there was also something caught in a crack at the unburnt end; he knelt, leaning as close as he could. It looked like a single, human hair.

Quickly he took off his cap and held it over the stump of wood, to protect it from the steady downpour.

For the first time he noticed the label on the broken bottle. It was Balvenie. A single malt. He shouted again, ‘Here.’

The other coppers were already too far away.

‘Here,’ he screamed, waving his free arm. Rain was in his hair, already trickling down his neck and into his shirt. His whole body was shivering.

‘Quick.’

From between the sheds and shacks, the sound of boots on stones. From all around, coppers were running towards him now, wind and wet in their faces.

On the doorstep, the Inspector said, ‘I know what things are like, Mary. The way things are round here.’

‘Ye don’t,’ his ma said, staring past him.

Billy waited in the kitchen. Sergeant Ferguson hung back, too, until the Inspector was gone.

‘He means well, I suppose,’ said Ferguson.

Across the road, Mrs Chandler peeked out from behind her nets at them.

‘He’s scared there’s going to be more of this. What’s happened to this place, Mary? When we were kids it was never as bad as this.’