A Pitying of Doves (5 page)

“I wonder,” said Jejeune, stepping firmly on Nyce's attempt to bring the interview to a close, “is there any specific identifier that researchers might use to tell Turtledoves apart? House Sparrows have those black bibs, for example, but I'm not aware of anything like that with Turtledoves.”

Nyce nodded slowly. “Ah, those black bibs,
varying in size according to a sparrow's rank within the flock, thus making individual birds easily identifiable
.” Nyce seemed to be reciting something from memory. “Field observer's dream, those bibs are. With Turtledoves…?” He shook his head. “There's hardly any variation in the plumage at all. Size possibly, in males, but generally, assuming they haven't picked up any distinguishing features — missing eyes, broken toes — Turtledoves are more or less physically homogenous. Means they all look the same,” Nyce confided in the same stage aside for Maik's benefit. He checked his watch. “Look, I really have to get on with some work here. If there is anything further, perhaps an email might suffice?”

Nyce walked them to the door and opened it for them. The detectives paused on the top step for another appreciative look at the Jaguar. “Writing the definitive university text on
Con Bio
does have its benefits,” said Nyce, affecting a modesty that was rusty with lack of use.

“Interesting number plate, that,” said Maik.

“AVES? It's Latin for birds. I take it you don't share your boss's obvious interest.”

“More of an '
ave not,
truth be told,” said Maik dryly.

The two detectives left Nyce on the top step and walked away from the house in silence.

T
hey were some way along the street before Jejeune finally spoke. “Tell me, Sergeant,” he said quietly, “how many female graduate students do you imagine Dr. Nyce has supervised over the years?”

“Pretty boy, recognized authority in his field and a celebrated author to boot? Dozens, I should imagine. They would seek him out in droves.” Maik paused for a moment on the pavement and smiled to himself. “And now you're going to ask me for how many of those would he be able to tell us the colour of their bedroom walls.”

Jejeune smiled. There was apparently something to be said for home-spun wisdom, after all. He looked across at his sergeant. Danny Maik didn't seem to be suffering any lasting wounds from the good doctor's antagonism. Like Jejeune, he would have already recognized that if you could get a couple of coppers looking at each other, they might just forget to focus on you.

J
ejeune
was sitting at his desk in the study, staring intently at his computer screen, when Lindy came in.

“I trust that's not porn,” she said. She came around behind him and saw a grainy picture of rock-strewn ground displayed on the screen.

“It's a live feed from one of the cameras Phoebe Hunter set up in Burkina Faso to monitor Turtledoves. I did just see a couple of Bronze Munias mating, though,” conceded Domenic, “if that counts.”

“Pornithology, maybe?” said Lindy. She leaned in over Domenic's shoulder, the scent of that wonderfully fragrant shampoo she used hovering between them. “It looks like a pretty desolate place. She must have really loved her work to put up with conditions like those.”

“She seems to have thought about little else.” Jejeune waved a few sheets of paper from his desk. “She logged over seven hundred hours of research time during her last eight-week spell over there. That's more than twelve hours a day, seven days a week.”

Lindy drew back and shot him a glance. Lindy had seen his modus operandi on enough investigations to recognize that his interest in Phoebe's efforts was going far beyond his usual thoroughness. Checks of what he called the “background noise” were part of what had earned Jejeune his reputation. Armed with the small details of the person's life, Domenic had more permutations to try, more information to fit into his theories, as he tried to piece together the larger picture. But it never took him this long to review one aspect of a victim's background. His interest in Phoebe Hunter's research was about something more than merely finding a reason for her murder. Lindy suspected that she knew what that might be, and if she was right, she knew that Domenic's scrutiny of Phoebe Hunter's research methodology was a long way from being over.

“Fancy a walk before dinner?”

They often went for an early evening stroll along the bluffs near their cottage, but it was usually Domenic who proposed it, when he had finished work for the day. It might just have crossed the mind of a Domenic Jejeune less absorbed in Phoebe Hunter's field notes, too, that there was a forced casualness to Lindy's sudden suggestion.

By the time he pushed his chair back from the computer and stood up, arching his back to relieve the stress, Lindy was already waiting at the door, wearing a light cardigan.

They walked slowly along the path, side by side, shoulders occasionally touching like boats bobbing on gentle swells, both immersed in their own thoughts. Along the edges of the narrow clifftop path, small
knots of early spring flowers, common daisies and yellow hop trefoils, poked their heads tentatively between the pale tussocks of grass. It would be a while yet before Lindy's favourites, the sea pinks —
thrift
as the locals called them — emerged. Out over the sea, the call of a Kittiwake pealed through the soft evening air.

“You never mentioned how the migration watch went the other day,” said Lindy. “I usually get chapter and verse but this time, not a dicky bird.
Word
, Dom,” she offered to Jejeune's puzzled expression. “Rhyming slang. Remember, your crash course with Robin?”

“Ah.” Jejeune and Lindy had hosted a dinner recently for Robin and Melissa, friends of Lindy's from college. Robin was an affable East Ender who had delighted in introducing Jejeune to the colourful world of cockney rhyming slang. But
dicky bird
, for
word
, hadn't been among the lessons. Jejeune was pretty sure he would have remembered that one.

“So? How was it?”

“Wonderful,” said Jejeune simply.

Lindy knew that Domenic chose his adjectives carefully, and he was using this one in the literal sense: full of wonder. Wonder at the swirling flocks of birds flying by, at the thought of the vast distances they had travelled — from Africa and beyond — and at the mechanisms of nature that set them on their way, and guided them, in ways that humans could, even now, only barely understand. How much more wonderful, then, might it be for someone with Domenic's interest in birds to study them on a full-time basis? To continue the research that Phoebe Hunter had been working on when she died? Lindy knew Phoebe Hunter's project represented everything Domenic would have wanted to do, in another life. She couldn't imagine he was seriously considering pursuing it now, but when you were as unsettled in your career as Domenic Jejeune was, even dreams could be dangerous.

“Where did you go?” asked Lindy, more to drive away other, more troubling thoughts than because she had any real interest. “Did you take that same stretch of the coastal path you usually do?”

Jejeune nodded “Burnham Overy to Brancaster Staithe, and then inland to the Downs.”

Lindy shook her head. “Blimey, Robert Frost wouldn't have made much of a birder, would he? No road less travelled with you lot. Why do birders always follow the same route when they go somewhere?”

Jejeune hadn't really thought about it, but as usual there was some truth to Lindy's observation. He shrugged. “There's always a temptation to try a new path when you go to a place you've been before, but there's a pull, a tension that seems to drag you to the places you've already had success. Birders can remember the exact tree, the exact branch where they saw a good bird. If you saw it there once …”

“You see a bird on a twig and then five years later you expect the same bird to reappear in the same spot? You know you birders are all mad, right? The lot of you. Certifiable.”

Jejeune smiled at Lindy's exasperated expression and raised his binoculars to watch the Kittiwake carving the air with its graceful, effortless glide. Once, he would have automatically announced what the bird was, but he had stopped doing that lately. Perhaps he was waiting for Lindy to ask, or perhaps he had simply come to terms with the fact that it really didn't matter to her.

Lindy began walking slowly along the path again, head down, as if measuring her progress. Domenic fell in beside her.

“Melissa says there are some pretty good deals to St. Lucia coming up,” she said with studied nonchalance. “They have endemics there, birds not found anywhere else.”

“That's my definition of endemics, too,” said Jejeune guardedly. The demands of their respective careers meant that holidays required some advance planning, and Lindy had made no secret of the fact that she had already started the process. Apart from being cockney Robin's better half, Melissa was also, by the strangest of coincidences, a travel agent.

“I know that friend of yours from college is down there. The one with the strange name. I thought it might be nice for you to see him again.” Lindy tried one of her smiles on him, but Jejeune's initial caginess had been replaced now by something else she couldn't quite identify. For a man who supposedly wasn't exactly in love with his job, it could be remarkably difficult sometimes to get him to consider taking a break from it. But this time, there seemed to be even more resistance than usual. All she knew was the destination had suddenly become a little more distant.

“C'mon Dom, it would be nice to go somewhere warm.”

“It's warming up here,” said Jejeune.

“It's spring in north Norfolk, which means it's slightly less cold and grey than winter in north Norfolk. I'm talking about proper sunshine. Caribbean sunshine.”

Jejeune shook his head slightly. “There's a lot going on right now. Maybe we could talk about this later?”

It sounded like a reasonable enough request, unless you knew Domenic Jejeune. Then you realized this was about as close as his Canadian politeness ever came to letting him slam the door on an idea completely. Lindy drew the cardigan around her and turned to stare out to sea, letting the breeze tousle her hair.

“Well, just promise me you'll think about it, when you've finished with this case.” She turned to him. “Do you really think it's about somebody wanting to steal a few doves?”

A while ago, she might have phrased it differently; told him how preposterous the idea was, how ridiculous. But Domenic had posited other unlikely birding connections in another case, and they had proven to be eerily accurate. That knowledge stopped her now from being too quick to disregard what seemed, on the face of it, a ludicrous theory. She suspected it would stop a lot of other people, too.

“It's called a pitying,” said Jejeune. “A pitying of doves. And yes, I think it's related.”

“But you don't think it was this woman, Maggie Wylde?”

Jejeune shook his head slowly. “No.”

Lindy sighed. This was how things were now. Dom would tell her just enough so that they could chat about the case, bounce around a few ideas, but she wasn't going to be privy to all the details. It had been different once, when they first met, and she was reporting on his investigation into what had come to be known as the
HomeSec's Daughter
Case
. But once he had gotten — they both had gotten — their big breaks, things had changed. He had been promoted, she had taken another job, and they had hashed out a new set of rules of engagement over laughter and spaghetti and a couple of bottles of Chianti on the back porch. And chief among those new rules was that she wouldn't ask anymore, and he wouldn't tell. Suspects, lines of inquiry, the internal workings of Domenic Jejeune's labyrinthine mind — all off limits until he had solved the case. And even for the celebrated Chief Inspector Jejeune, the evening of the third day was a bit early for that.

“She did call, though, this woman, and accuse the sanctuary of having her birds. Perhaps it could just be as easy as it looks for once,” said Lindy reasonably.

“Occam's razor?”

Lindy's look of surprise seemed to please Jejeune. He recounted Salter's reference at the sanctuary. Lindy arched an eyebrow. “My, my, if the North Norfolk Constabulary keeps indulging in heuristics, they're going to do irreversible damage to my notion of the thick local copper. Come on, dinner will be ready.”

They turned to begin making their way back along the path to the cottage, crunching up the gravel to the porch, where the storm lantern bounced in the freshening breeze and the wind chimes dripped their music into the evening air. They paused for a moment, looking out over the water. An afternoon rainstorm had rolled out toward the horizon, leaving the sky a mottled mosaic of Monet shades, a blue-grey ephemera shot through with shafts of light. Lindy smiled. If anything would keep Dom from trekking to Africa to measure isotopes in bird feathers, it would be this: these skies, this sea, the glorious unfettered openness of the north Norfolk coastline. And the birds.

“I'm sure you'll solve this case soon,” she said. “I mean, if it wasn't this Maggie Wylde person, there can't possibly be that many other people who would be interested in stealing Turtledoves from a shelter, can there?”

“No,” said Jejeune. He paused, as if hesitant to give further voice to his thoughts, even out here, where only nature and his partner could hear. “But I think there were at least two.”