A Pitying of Doves (13 page)

T
he
sound of raised voices reached the detectives even before they rounded the corner, causing them to quicken their pace, as police officers do when they sense some disturbance to the equilibrium of daily life. Halfway down the street, David Nyce was standing on his doorstep conducting a strident discussion with a man in a business suit below him on the pavement.

“Well, there are obviously a number of recourses open to you. Feel free to pursue whichever of them you see fit. In fact, why not give all of 'em a try; perhaps develop some sort of ranking system for them. For now, though, I've given this matter all the time I am prepared to give it, so I suggest you just toddle off and let me get on with my day.”

The man turned on his heel and brushed angrily past the detectives as they approached. A glimmer of familiarity airbrushed Danny Maik's memory as he passed.

“Ah, the rozzers,” said Nyce, noticing them for the first time. “Wish you could have been spared such an unedifying spectacle, but that's the way some people apparently prefer to conduct their business these days.” He gestured for the two men to come inside.

“Anything we should know about?” asked Maik.

Nyce affected a shrug. “Disgruntled parent, unhappy that his little darling is not quite the intellectual giant he, and she, imagined she would be. University signals the death knell of so many dreams, I find. They come here, fresh from being the stars of their little village schools, heads filled with notions that they can achieve anything, that the world is theirs for the taking, only to be shown that they are really no more than just average, not really special at all.” Nyce gave a contemptuous sneer. “Hard to take, I suppose — all those hopes and ambitions disappearing into thin air like that. But it's hardly my fault, and I have no intention of letting anyone take out their frustrations on me.”

“Nevertheless, sir, until we're sure what went on at the sanctuary, I would suggest you avoid antagonizing the locals as much as possible.”

“Really? Pity. A bit of a hobby of mine, as it happens.” Nyce settled behind his desk. “So, more questions? About Turtledoves again? Or sparrows. Can't help you with murder, I'm afraid. Not really my field at all.” He gave a thin smile that neither of the detectives matched.

The room had undergone a transformation since the last time they were there. Books and magazines lay open everywhere, strewn about untidily as if someone had desperately been searching them for information.

“Carrie Pritchard said Phoebe Hunter was surprisingly successful in getting support for a plan for set-asides for Turtledoves,” said Jejeune.

Taking the lead again?
thought Maik. Pity there couldn't be a birding element in all their cases, if DCI Jejeune was going to show this level of engagement.

Nyce offered Jejeune an indulgent smile. “Ah, been chatting to old Carrie, have you? Well, she certainly has her talents, the delightful Ms. P., but keeping her finger on the pulse of the Saltmarsh community is hardly one of them. Artist type, you see. Need I say more? Barely function in the real world, can they, let alone keep abreast of its various doings? What is she suggesting, that one of the local farmers might have had a touch too much cider one night and finished poor old Phoebe off because we were going to pinch a little corner of his land?” Nyce shook his head emphatically. “Absolute tosh.”

“So you don't think the set-aside proposal would have posed a threat to Phoebe Hunter?” asked Jejeune with the sort of careful tone that Maik had learned to pay particular attention to.

“Why should it? I have spent much of my time — time I won't get back, I should add — in the company of the leather-necked sons of the soil in these parts, and I can tell you quite categorically, if there is one thing they like more than a government handout to grow their agro-chemicals, it is the prospect of a bung that will allow them to sit at home and do nothing instead.”

Outside of Jejeune and his girlfriend, Maik could think of no one locally who could not trace some farming lineage in their family background. It crossed his mind that if Nyce ever reported receiving death threats, they were going to need more memory on the computers at the station to store the list of potential suspects.

“Besides, it was far from certain that I was going to give the project the go-ahead.”

Jejeune looked surprised. “What was the delay? Most of those agreements were reached weeks ago, in some cases, months. I mean set-asides worked well enough for the Linnet and Corn Bunting in these parts,” he said reasonably.

Nyce nodded. “Indeed, but the jury is still very much out as to whether it would work for Turtledoves. We also could not say with any certainty that a set-aside would not have a negative impact on some as-yet-unidentified ecosystem within the designated areas. It was simply not good science to proceed at this time. We need to follow, in a word, the golden rule of conservation.”

“Do no harm,” said Jejeune.

Maik couldn't get over the impression that Jejeune was continually looking for a chance to impress Nyce with his background in all this stuff. Though why his DCI should care one way or the other about the opinion of a patronizing tool like Nyce was beyond him. The phone rang but Nyce ignored it, letting it go to voicemail, and reaching over to turn the volume to silent.

“So you and Phoebe Hunter disagreed about these set-asides then?” asked Maik, anxious to make something approaching actual progress in their investigations amid all this birding talk.

“No, Sergeant,” said Nyce, reaching deep for some inner level of condescension, “the student lacked sufficient knowledge in the subject to fully appreciate her supervisor's position.”

“Getting back to Carrie Pritchard for a moment,” said Jejeune. “I was wondering if you could shed any light on the conflict that appears to exist between her and Luisa Obregón.”

Maik allowed himself a faint smile. It was no accident, he was sure, that Jejeune had happened to ask this of a person who would delight in the disagreements of others and be more than ready to report on them.

“Whole thing stems from when the Obregón's aviary was destroyed by the storm of '06,” said Nyce confidently. “Luisa Obregón refused to supply the local birders with a list of the birds she'd lost.”

Maik looked faintly puzzled.
Why would birders care what species had been in Obregón's aviary?
He asked the question aloud, to see who wanted to field it.

It was his boss. “Without a stock list from Obregón, every time a rarity showed up for months afterward, no one could be sure if it was a wild bird, in other words, a legitimate rarity, or an escapee,” said Jejeune.

Nyce nodded. “Full marks, once again, Inspector. Obregón's lack of co-operation was seen as sheer bloody-mindedness and caused a great deal of resentment in the birding community as a whole. Made Carrie's job as recorder for the Rare Birds Committee hell, I can tell you.”

“But there must be more to it than that,” said Maik. He looked at the others uneasily. What Jejeune and Nyce were describing sounded like the material for a dispute at a birdwatching society meeting, but hardly something to fuel a feud as deep as this one seemed to go.

“My, my, the North Norfolk Constabulary does have some swifties in its ranks, doesn't it? Any more like you two down there and you'll be able to enter a team in University Challenge. Yes, Sergeant, there is more to it. A few weeks after the storm, a Mourning Dove was sighted in Hunstanton. It had no bands and no signs of feather abrasion — the usual tell-tales for captive birds. The sighting was just far enough away from the aviary to raise the possibility that this was a wild bird. As you can imagine, there was a fair amount of optimism that it would be accepted as a legitimate record. Nevertheless, as Rare Bird Recorder, it was still Carrie's job to check for the possibility of an escape, and after a short time she came back to declare definitively that Luisa Obregón's aviary stock had included Mourning Doves, and the sighting, therefore, could not be validated. Disappointed a lot of prominent birders in this area, I can tell you — Quentin Senior and Cameron Brae among them. Only, as soon as she made the announcement, up pops Luisa Obregón to categorically deny she had ever confirmed one way or the other whether her aviary had contained Mourning Doves. Furthermore, she claimed she had never even been contacted by Carrie about it. Whatever the truth of it, it was egg-on-face for Carrie, I'm afraid.
Molto
embarrassment, and a quick vote off the Rare Birds Committee. Carrie, as you will have already surmised, is not a woman to take that sort of thing lying down. From that moment on, the relationship between the two women went downhill on a bobsled. I daresay it hasn't hit bottom yet.”

Maik greeted Nyce's report with a stony silence. Nyce's mobile sounded, but he turned it off without checking it. Jejeune flapped an academic paper he had picked up from a side table.

“This paper, the copy we found at Phoebe Hunter's flat had your name crossed out and hers written in as lead author.”

Nyce rolled his eyes dramatically. “Oh, God, Inspector, please don't tell me I have to walk you through the tedious world of academic publishing. She'd done some good work on that paper, and I decided to give her some recognition: the lead credit. Only some idiot at the journal got the wrong end of the stick and put me on as lead instead. Force of habit, I suppose. Anyway, I told Phoebe to change it and send it back, along with a nice note asking them if they could possibly manage to get it right this time. Speaking of which, those other papers of Phoebe's, they will be released soon, I take it? I can't understand the delay. I mean, presumably they're not evidence.”

“Is there any reason they should be?” asked Jejeune.

“Damned if I know. You're the detective.” Nyce spread his hands to indicate his desk. “As you can see, I've got quite enough to do tidying up her mess. Can't be doing your job for you, as well, can I?”

The chirrup of an incoming email sounded from Nyce's laptop, but again he ignored it. “Apologies, Inspector.” Nyce tried one of his underused smiles. “I'm under a bit of pressure at the moment.”

Jejeune hesitated for a second before asking, “Did Phoebe ever mention anyone in particular she may have been close to at the sanctuary?”

The sudden interest in Nyce's expression was in such marked contrast to his earlier ambivalence that it would have been impossible to miss it. “You suspect she was killed by one of the volunteers?” He seemed to consider the prospect briefly, before shrugging. “She may have mentioned one or two of them now and again in passing, but I doubt she would have come down in favour of anyone in particular. Not good with the big questions, our Phoebe. Her generation seems to struggle so much with the kinds of decisions our own took as a matter of course, don't they, Inspector?”

Maik would have put Nyce closer to his own generation than to Jejeune's, but he supposed when you were in the habit of preying on younger women, a bit of self-deception about your age came with the territory.

“There is an unidentified print from the scene,” said Maik. “I wonder if you would you mind coming down to the station with us to be fingerprinted? So we can officially eliminate you from our inquiries.”

“I hardly think so,” said Nyce with a distainful laugh. “You have noticed my desk, I take it? Do you have any idea how incredibly inconvenient it would be for me to leave and go down the station at the moment?”

“Yes,” said Maik simply. “I do.”

With another man he might have pointed out that it would help move the search for Phoebe's killer forward, but Nyce was intelligent enough to fully appreciate the consequences of his actions. Yet Maik simply couldn't accept that Nyce was as disconnected from Phoebe Hunter's death as he was trying to act. What the connection was, the sergeant couldn't say, but judging from Jejeune's own measured silence, the inspector had sensed it, too.

“Thank you, Dr. Nyce. If anything else comes to mind, let us know,” said Jejeune abruptly, bringing the interview to a close on his own terms, as he always did.

N
yce had not walked them to the door this time, so the men were alone as they stood on the pavement admiring his shiny green toy. But Jejeune suspected from his sergeant's expression that Maik's mind might be elsewhere.

“Everything all right?”

“That man who Nyce was arguing with,” Maik said slowly. “I've just remembered who he is. He might well be a disgruntled parent, but he's also chair of the university's Faculty Conduct Committee. I wonder why Dr. Nyce failed to mention that. Perhaps it just slipped his mind,” he said with a slight smile. “You know, what with all this pressure he's under and everything.”