The Birdwatcher (15 page)

South wound up the lead to the vacuum cleaner and put it away under the stairs. South avoided going out with first-timers. You never managed to see very much if you spent your time pausing to identify every last bird. He wasn’t sure if he even wanted to go out today. But the idea of going out with a teenage girl was even worse.

A steady drizzle fell as they sat in one of the hides on Burrowes Pit. She wore one of his raincoats with a pair of borrowed binoculars and a copy of the
Collins Bird Guide
open on her lap.

When she wrote, her tongue stuck a little way out of her mouth. He had given her a fresh police notebook and she was writing in it with a lilac biro.

‘Shelduck. That’s twelve,’ Zoë said.

Waders and waterfowl were always a good place to start, especially when the light was so poor. They were bigger and the markings were more pronounced, which made them easier to identify. Even with that, for a teenager, he had to admit Cupidi’s daughter was doing surprisingly well. She seemed to be genuinely interested.

‘It’s a cool bird,’ she said.

‘Yes. It is.’

‘It would make a nice tattoo,’ she said.

On a day like this he should normally be on his own somewhere, instead of sitting here in the hide, next to an elderly couple with a Thermos and sandwiches and biscuits, who just stared out of the lookout as they chomped and slurped. They didn’t seem to be doing any actual bird spotting at all.

He scanned the huge pool but saw nothing that he wouldn’t expect to see there. Birdwatching was like being a beat copper. You spent your days looking for anomalies. Things that were just a little different. An open window in an empty house; a man lingering too long by the edge of a platform. That’s what got you excited.

‘It freaks me out round here,’ said Zoë. ‘It’s so dark at night. You ever seen
Saw
?’

The old couple fidgeted.

South changed the subject. ‘What does your mum think about you getting tattoos?’

‘Not keen.’

She lifted up the binoculars South had lent her. He had lent her boots too. They were two sizes too big, but she’d turned up in a pair of canvas sneakers.

‘She said she left London to keep you out of trouble.’

Zoë scowled. ‘That’s so embarrassing.’

He was just trying to make conversation with a teenager; but of all people, he knew better than to open up the past. ‘Don’t talk about it. It’s OK.’

‘No. It was nothing to do with me.’ The old man dropped his plastic teacup on the floor of the hide. It spilled onto the boards. ‘Everyone wants to know why we moved down here and she’s too chicken to say the real reason. It’s not fair to blame me all the time.’

The old couple were packing up their lunch into a backpack.

‘She’s just chatting shit. It’s lies. I should tell Social Services, reckon. Don’t you think that’s wrong?’

‘Were you in trouble?’

She shook her head. ‘Want to know the real reason we had to leave London?’

‘No. It’s none of my business,’ said South.

‘The real reason is she had an affair with her Detective Chief Inspector and he was bloody married.’

‘You shouldn’t be telling me this,’ South said.

‘She shouldn’t be telling people that we left London ’cause I’m some kind of delinquent. Anyway, he said it was going to mess up his career if it came out. Awkward.’

Lowering the binoculars, Zoë started leafing through the bird book.

‘And now I never hear the end of it. Her going on about how it was her that had to leave because she was a woman. She didn’t have to have it off with him, did she?’

The old couple pushed past them to the door of the hide, the man grumbling as he left.

‘Good riddance. They weren’t even proper birdwatchers,’ she said.

Her first time out and she was already judging others. She’d fit in fine; he smiled to himself.

‘I hate the people round here,’ Zoë said. ‘You excepted.’

He smiled.

‘I think Mum’d look real sexy with a tattoo. Don’t you?’

Fortunately, before he had a chance to offer an answer, she pointed to a bird on the page and said, ‘Golden plover.’

‘Where?’ South lifted up his binoculars, interested for the first time.

‘By them other birds,’ she said, pointing.

The lake was crowded with wildlife. It took a while for him to see where she meant. A wader was standing by the edge of some blackthorn bushes about thirty yards away. He focused his binoculars further into the distance.

‘Where did you move here from, then?’ she asked.

‘Northern Ireland.’

‘Wow. That’s miles.’

Why had he told her that? He never told anybody where he’d come from.

‘Is that what your accent is, then? Irish.’

‘I tried hard enough to lose it when I was in school. The other kids took the mickey.’

‘I know what you mean,’ she said. ‘I hate the other kids round here. They’re vile.’

‘Have you been in any more fights?’

She shook her head. ‘I’m trying not to. For Mum’s sake.’

‘It wasn’t like I tried to lose my accent. It’s just at some point you have to fit in, don’t you?’

‘Why? I don’t mean to. I’ve never wanted to fit in.’

‘It’s not a golden plover. It’s a green sandpiper,’ he said, getting the bird into focus.

‘Oh,’ she said, disappointed.

‘No. It’s good. As a matter of fact, this time of year, much less common,’ he said.

‘Really?’

‘We’ll tell them up at the observatory. They make a note of all the unusual birds. We’ll tell them you saw it first, then.’

‘Thirteen.’ She grinned. She found the bird in the book and quietly read the page, then, tongue between her lips, she wrote the name in her notebook and underlined it twice. ‘I’ll catch you up, easy. She bring you here after your dad died?’ she said.

‘I suppose my mother wanted to start again,’ he said.

‘Same,’ she said.

‘Your father died?’

‘No. I just meant my mum wants to start over.’

He was tempted to ask more about why; it was unlike him to want to pry into other people’s stories. They were losing what little light there was already.

‘What did your dad die of?’ she asked.

He pretended not to hear. Focused on the sandpiper in his glasses, bobbing up and down by the side of the water.

By the end of the day, when her mother came to pick her up, Zoë had identified twenty-six birds, all named and neatly recorded in her book.

He went to work early on the Monday to finish the witness statement forms he’d failed to complete last week. They were experimenting with hot desking, which meant that you had to get there early if you wanted one of the computers that worked properly. By a little before 8.30 he’d completed the first, so he stopped, made himself a cup of tea and went to join the Monday morning briefing.

DS Cupidi was sitting on a desk talking to one of the young women constables. She stood up and came over to where South was standing at the back of the room. ‘Thanks for yesterday,’ she said. ‘Bizarrely enough, she enjoyed herself, I think.’

‘She was great,’ he said.

‘Really?’

‘Any luck finding your homeless person?’

She shook her head.

‘No. It’s doing my head in. He seems to have vanished. It’s weird. We’re still waiting for a fingerprint or DNA match, though. Maybe that’ll get things nailed down.’ These things could take a long time, even in a murder inquiry. ‘Did you take down Gill Rayner’s number? I’ve been trying to call her but the constable must have taken the number down wrong. Number unobtainable.’

‘No. I thought you had it.’

‘I’ll get someone in the Met to go and knock at her door,’ said Cupidi. ‘Maybe Zoë could come out with you another time, then?’

‘I’d like that,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t anywhere near as bad as I thought it would be.’

‘Charming.’ She went to fetch a coffee from the machine.

‘Oi, oi,’ said one of the constables, when Cupidi was out of earshot. ‘She’s got her eye on you, ask me.’

‘Fuck off,’ said South, joining the rows of seated officers. The briefing started. Cupidi updated everyone on the Rayner case, but there was nothing South didn’t already know.

‘Anything else going on?’ asked the inspector.

‘Chemists,’ said one sergeant. ‘Three of them in one weekend. Two in Ashford, one in Peasmarsh. Methadone tablets. Bottles of the stuff too. Temazepam. Diamorphine. All the usual.’

‘Druggies,’ said another copper.

‘Obviously.’

‘Is this a statistical anomaly or is something going on here?’ said the inspector.

‘Any CCTV?’

‘Loads. Going through it now.’

‘Anyone know of anyone new in the area?’

There was a groan. There were always new people in the area.

At the back of the room, South frowned, wrote the details in his notebook. ‘Anybody heard anything about Judy Farouk?’

People turned in their chairs, looked at him.

‘Only, she seems to have disappeared. She just vanished sometime last week; Wednesday, maybe. Left her dogs behind. I was thinking. Might be a connection? If they can’t buy their drugs from her . . .’

People were already standing, putting on their jackets. ‘Good point, Bill,’ called the sergeant, above the noise. ‘If one of you hopeless lot could turn drug dealer till she’s back, it might keep the crime rate down for us.’

There was a laugh. South sat in the room until all the others had left. Nobody was sure why she had gone; nobody seemed that concerned. It was like the disappearance of summer cuckoos and nightingales; something far away in Africa was causing it to happen, but exactly what was obscure.

It was one of those long busy days when the hours flew past without anything much being achieved. Just before he left his desk a constable handed him a message. A woman had called, complaining that children had broken into the old Army Cadet Force hall in New Romney. He called, took down her address and promised to get one of the Community Officers to call on her.

Driving home in his own car, on an impulse, he took a detour to the east. Nayland’s Farm was at the end of a long, straight single-track road that flooded in winter. Halfway down the road a lorry rattled towards him, headlights glaring and South had to reverse back into one of the road’s muddy passing points. The lorry sped past, spattering his car in mud.

South began to regret the decision to come. He was hungry; he hadn’t had time to eat a proper lunch. He could have been home by now cooking himself something, but he was almost there now, so he drove on.

The farmyard was little more than a lorry park these days, every inch of the old dairy now covered with trucks and trailers. A massive Scania truck had its cab tipped forward and its engine exposed.
Dacre’s of Lydd, Kent
, it said on the cab door. The place smelt of old grease and engine oil. South picked his way through the tall vehicles, past a garage where a Land Rover sat on jacks above a dirty pit, towards a converted brick shed that served as the office.

Through the glass door he could see Christy Dacre, a weighty, pink-faced man in his early sixties, watching a small TV in the corner of the room. South knocked. Dacre beckoned him in, lifted the remote and switched off the TV.

‘Sergeant South,’ he said cautiously. ‘On your own?’

‘Just me.’

‘Right.’ He seemed to be taking this in, evaluating it. Finally he smiled. ‘D’you like a tea? I was just about to have a cup. No?’

The yard outside was quiet. ‘What do you know about Judy Farouk?’

‘Judy who?’ Either because the folds of fat on his face made it hard, or through lack of care, Dacre shaved badly. Tufts of untouched white hair lingered on his chin. His sleeveless shirt was unironed.

‘You know who I mean, Christy.’

Dacre held up his hands, smiled again. ‘Just kidding, Sergeant. Everyone round here knows that one. Doubtless wishes they didn’t, know what I mean?’

They called it logistics these days, but Dacre had been a lorry driver most of his life. In lean years, he kept the company afloat by bringing drugs across the Channel, stowed in his lorries. When two of his lorries had been caught at Folkestone loaded with heroin, Dacre had avoided prosecution by successfully insisting he’d known nothing about it. Two of his drivers had been jailed, younger men who had little to lose; the rumours were that Dacre had paid them or threatened them to keep their mouths shut about his involvement. The CPS had said there was not enough evidence to proceed with the prosecution.

‘She has disappeared,’ said South. ‘I want to know why.’

‘Disappeared? You must be terribly upset about that.’

‘Devastated,’ said South. ‘What do you know about it?’

The expression on Dacre’s face was like that of a child wrongly accused of dipping his finger in the jam. ‘Why would I know anything about that, Sergeant?’