A Pitying of Doves (6 page)

W
hether
by design or happenstance, the incident room at the Saltmarsh police station was at the opposite end of the corridor from DCS Shepherd's office — far enough away that the occupants could usually hear the early warning system of the DCS's heels power-walking their way toward them. But today, Shepherd wasn't here to check up on them. She was on tour guide duty, marching her charge through the facilities herself, solicitous hand on elbow, while she rhapsodized over her team and the latest technological advancements that had allowed her station to become one of the most forward-thinking and innovative in the country.

Her audience of one was a tall man, lean and fit, with quick eyes. He seemed to know instinctively when to express a keen interest and where a bright smile of appreciation would do.

Danny Maik was standing in his customary position at the front of the room, conducting a survey of the progress on the case, when the door opened. To say that the interruption took him off guard would be no small understatement.

“You wouldn't know it,” said Shepherd, “but the man perched on the desk at the back is actually the one in charge here. Chief Inspector Domenic Jejeune, this is Guy Trueman. Guy is head of external security for the Mexican Consulate. Señor Hidalgo has asked him to act as liaison, get us what we need in terms of information.”

Jejeune crossed the floor quickly and shook the man's hand. He was immediately drawn to Trueman's easy self-assurance and warm smile. But no amount of warmth was going to completely disguise the man's steel core.

Shepherd turned toward Maik and extended an open palm, “And I understand you already know …”

“Danny Maik,” supplied Trueman. “Yes, DCS, the sergeant and I are well acquainted. Aren't we, Danny?”

He gripped Maik's extended hand warmly, resting his other hand on the sergeant's elbow. Between other men, the greeting might have morphed into a shoulder hug, but even if the group did not yet know Guy Trueman, they were familiar enough with Danny Maik to know it was unlikely, to say the least. Nevertheless, it was clear that the sergeant was genuinely pleased to see Trueman, and the onlookers were treated to the rare sight of a sincere Danny Maik smile as he turned to address them.

“Major Trueman was my commanding officer,” he said. “I count myself lucky to have served under him.”

“You know, the first time I saw this man, he was up before me on charges,” announced Trueman to the room at large. “Insubordination, of all things.”

“Please do go on,” said Shepherd. Like many in the room, she was enjoying this momentary peek into the sergeant's guarded past. It was rare to find Danny Maik in any kind of revealing situation, and she was keen to exploit the moment.

“About that Latin quote, wasn't it, Danny. Remember?”

“Dulce et decorum est, Pro patria mori,”
said Maik. “It is a sweet and noble thing to die for one's homeland.” If he had to be reminiscing about this incident at all, his look seemed to say, about the last place he wanted to do it was in front of his fellow police officers. But Trueman was clearly a man comfortable on the big stage, and Maik had apparently decided, with an effort of will that was almost visible, that the best way to get this over with was to try to enter into the spirit of the thing as much as his dignity would allow.

Trueman nodded. “It was a favourite of Danny's old staff sergeant,” he told the audience. “He used to greet all the new recruits with it. Only this time, Danny insisted on adding his own bit — ‘But it is sweeter to live for the homeland, and sweetest to drink for it. Therefore, let us drink to the homeland instead.'”

Maik shrugged. “It's from an old drinking toast. I just didn't want the kids thinking it was okay to go off and get themselves killed just because some Roman poet said so.” He was clearly uncomfortable being reminded that he had ever shown anything approaching disloyalty toward a superior officer, and everyone in the room realized that it would have to be a formidable individual indeed who had earned Maik's respect to the point where he would allow them to take such liberties as this.

“So there he is before me,” said Trueman, “and I'm thinking to myself, ‘I'm supposed to discipline the man. Trouble is, they tell me he's one of the best soldiers in the unit, and what's more, I agree with him.'”

“So what did you do?” asked Shepherd. She turned to Maik, but he left Trueman to supply the answer himself.

“Issued a blanket ban on quoting classical literature on base,” announced Trueman, “and as a punishment, I set Sergeant Maik the task of having the men in the unit write their own poems about army life. We read them out loud to each other in my office over a couple of beers. Remember, Danny? Laughed till the tears rolled down our cheeks.”

The two men drifted to a place of memories from which the others were excluded until Trueman brought them back to the present brightly. “Sergeant Danny Maik,” he said, as if he could not quite believe it. “Still driving everybody mad with that Motown music of yours, I suppose.”

“Night and day,” confirmed Tony Holland from the front row, emboldened by the casual familiarity of the moment to add a theatrical eye roll.

“Right,” said Shepherd in a way that was designed to suggest to one and all that, nice as Danny's reunion with his old army comrade had been, it was time to get down to business again. “Perhaps you can bring us all up to speed, Sergeant.”

Jejeune's wasn't the only face to express surprise at Shepherd's willingness to discuss the case in front of their guest. They all understood her obvious desire to show they were making progress, but when the consulate's liaison officer was getting information at the same time as the investigating officers, it might be time to point out that it was supposed to be the consulate sharing information with the police, rather than the other way around.

“There seem to be four possible scenarios,” began Maik tentatively, flicking a glance in Jejeune's direction as if to say,
that suggest themselves to us mere mortals, at least
. But if Jejeune, now perched impassively on the desk at the back of the room again, had at first appeared set to make a contribution, he seemed to think better of it. Maik took a heartbeat to register Jejeune's expression and moved on. “The first possibility is that it was burglary gone wrong. The victims stumbled in and it all went haywire from there. Second is that the girl, Phoebe Hunter, was the target and Santos was just an unlucky witness who had to be dealt with. Killed,” he corrected himself. “Third, vice versa, and number four,” Maik paused significantly, “is that someone went there with the intention of killing them both. So far, we've found no evidence of any connection between the victims, and nothing to suggest anybody even knew Santos was going to be at the sanctuary, so we're concentrating on the first two theories, that either it was a burglary, or it was Phoebe Hunter the killer was after, especially since we have a suspect calling to threaten her the day before.”

Like the others, Lauren Salter had picked up on the inspector's reluctance to discuss matters of evidence in front of an outsider. But this particular outsider was held in high esteem by Danny Maik, and that was good enough for her.

“There's a fingerprint and a partial palm print on the filing cabinet that don't match any of the others in the sanctuary. The thing is, they could belong to Maggie Wylde. Her prints aren't on file with us.”

Shepherd pinned Jejeune with a look that seemed to ask just when he was planning on getting around to telling them his views on that theory. “I believe the inspector has some misgivings about Margaret Wylde as a suspect,” she said.

The silence of disapproval is perhaps the most eloquent silence of all. Jejeune's audience looked at one another uneasily. Maggie had disappeared immediately after the crime, and they all knew that sudden flight was about as clear a sign of guilt as you were likely to get in the early stages of a murder inquiry. And that was without even considering the fact that she had called and threatened one of the victims the day before the murder.

Unable to avoid discussing it in front of Trueman without appearing to have something to hide, Jejeune went over the same ideas he had expressed in Shepherd's office. He had barely finished speaking before Salter rushed in.

“Sir, with respect, you don't know Maggie. It would be just like her to do a bit of tidying up afterward, locking the cages and such.” She looked around the room, seeking support for her claims.

“It isn't just that,” said Jejeune carefully. He drew a breath, as if readying himself for an inevitable battle. “The records indicate there were thirteen doves at the sanctuary, in six different cages. The cage from which the two doves were taken, the one where the bodies were found, was at the far end of the corridor. I think whoever took the doves targeted the ones in that cage specifically.”

“Surely that points even more squarely at Maggie,” said Salter, still aggressively defending her ground.

“The problem is,” said Jejeune, “BTO confirmed none of the birds at the sanctuary were banded.”

Salter and the others looked puzzled, but off to Jejeune's side, Maik slowly nodded his head. “And according to David Nyce, Turtledoves have no distinguishing features.”

“So?” Salter was louder now, belligerent, not least because she was aware that she was missing the point, and doing so in front of her DCS and Maik's old army pal.

“So how could Maggie have known which ones were hers?” asked Maik reasonably. “You've seen those birds, Constable. Could you tell one from the other?”

“So she just grabbed a couple of birds, any birds.” Salter's tone was strident, her frustration increasing to the point that it now threatened to get the better of her judgment.

“Then why go all the way to the end of the corridor instead of just taking the pair nearest the door?” asked Jejeune.

He seemed to be completely unaware of the effect each blithe rebuttal was having on Salter.
This is the downside of Jejeune's detachment,
thought Shepherd,
his inability to see, no, to appreciate the passion that cases sometimes aroused in others — like detective constables who felt that by ignoring a young girl's telephone call, they were somehow responsible for her death.
To Jejeune, Salter's objections were just academic problems, to be considered and answered. He didn't seem to understand that Salter
wanted
it to be Maggie,
needed
it to be, so that by bringing her to justice, she could somehow absolve herself of her error and gain her own forgiveness. Most of the people in the room could have told her things didn't necessarily work like that, but Constable Salter didn't seem to be in any mood to listen to this, or any other, counsel.

“Maggie Wylde was involved. I know it.”

Her certainty seemed to cut through the anger, the frustration, so much so that Maik finally stirred.

“And how might you know a thing like that, Constable?” he asked calmly.

She spun the computer monitor on her desk around toward the room. “Because her old man worked for the Obregóns, that's how.” She stood up and turned on Jejeune. “Unless you want to try to
clever
us all out of that, too.” she said. “So if nobody minds, perhaps I'll just get on with the job of finding her.”

When the eyes in the room returned from watching Salter's angry exit, they fell universally upon Shepherd. Those used to dealing with the DCS on a regular basis might have noted the slight tensing of her frame and the working of her jaw muscle, but her outward appearance otherwise gave nothing away. Her voice, too, when it came, was as light as a spring breeze, and betrayed no trace of any internal agitation she might have been feeling.

“It's a stretch,” she said carefully, “but we can have a look into it. Sergeant, perhaps you can fill the inspector in on the details. In the meantime, we must be getting on. I am taking Guy for a bite to eat at The Boatman's Arms, but you know what that place is like. If we don't beat the lunchtime crowd, we'll be waiting an hour to get a table. Ready, Guy?”

She ushered Trueman from the room with undisguised haste.

As soon as they had left, Holland looked around the room. “Blimey, what's up with her? I've whipped suspects off to the cells with more ceremony than that. I half-expected her to put her hand on his collar next.”

Jejeune, too, had watched the hurried departure with interest, no doubt putting Shepherd's discomfort down to the fact that all the disharmony had been played out in front of their visitor. But Sergeant Maik knew differently.

“Victor Obregón was a prominent local resident,” he told Jejeune cautiously. “He went missing, be about eight years ago now. Left a wife and a son. No signs of foul play; a walk-off, we think. Among the things he left behind, in addition to his family, was the largest private bird aviary in north Norfolk.”