The Birdwatcher (26 page)

That evening, he cooked the Tesco Finest Chicken Korma with Pilau Rice for supper and picked at it. After the gore of last night’s accident, he had no appetite.

The new set of keys was on the table beside him; yesterday he had had the lock changed. He took one off the ring and went to put it in the kitchen drawer where he had kept the spares. Instead of replacing it he picked out Bob’s spare; they had exchanged keys a year ago. Leaving the meal unfinished, he took Bob’s key and walked down the track towards Arum Cottage.

From a distance, the empty house was just an absence of light, the gables showing black against the dark grey night sky.

The police had long gone; the house was lightless and dead. Bob had had a security lamp by his front door, but it didn’t come on as South approached the small porch. The electricity would have been cut off.

He unlocked the front door and pushed against a pile of post. Inside he shone his torch around the room. He went through the letters. There was nothing special about them: circulars about clothing and pensions. He placed the pile neatly on the kitchen sideboard.

The floor was still a mess. There were books lying, split-spined, on the floor; a pile of china from a broken mug. The forensics team had left the house as they had found it. Where did Bob keep his keys? He didn’t know. He started looking in cupboards and opening drawers but didn’t find any spares. Had he hallucinated someone coming to his house? Or had whoever killed Bob taken his keys too?

After half an hour he gave up just looking for the keys, frustrated at not being able to find any sign of where Bob had kept them. In the kitchen, he removed cans from the shelves and shook them, looked behind jars of chutney and jam, but there was nothing unusual, nothing hidden. In the living room he peeled back the carpets and looked behind the pictures to see if anything was concealed there, but he found no secretive stashes of letters or photographs that would have explained who Bob had been.

He had trusted Bob, but the man who he had thought was his friend had lied to him, not just about his sister, but about everything.

In the living room, the box Bob had been found in had been removed. The computer, too, had gone from the study. The police had not brought it back.

He moved to Bob’s bedroom and peered under the bed, then lifted the mattress. Nothing. He opened one wardrobe door and went through the pockets of Bob’s jackets and found only grocery receipts and safety pins. He pulled hats from the shelf and felt his way around the corners.

Then he opened the other wardrobe door and saw a small row of dresses and scarves. Her clothes.

Holding the torch, he stared for a second, then pulled out two dresses and laid them on the bed.

For a second, he wondered if they were even hers at all. They had to be, but these were not the dowdy woollens he had seen her in that first time here, or even the plain but unflattering thing she’d worn at the supermarket. These were expensive, sophisticated, feminine; long pale dresses with spaghetti shoulders, or cool black cocktail numbers.

In the dark, he lifted one up and tried to imagine her in it. These were special clothes; clothes for dressing up in. Like Bob, she had kept this part of herself hidden. She had worn them for Bob; he had kept her hidden, deceiving his friends. He wondered if he had ever really even been his friend at all.

He hung the dress back on the hook and returned to the living room. The place was a mess; searching through it, he had added to the disorder that the Scene of Crime men had left.

Bob would have hated it. He had been a tidy man.

‘Tough,’ he said, out loud. He felt an urge to yank what remained from his shelves.

He wondered if it was just anger he was feeling at Bob for deceiving him, or jealousy for his relationship.

He shone the torch onto his watch. It would be eleven soon.

The study offered the best view of the route towards the Coastguard cottages, to South’s own house. He lowered the blinds halfway and sat in Bob’s chair.

The radio on Bob’s desk didn’t work without electricity, but he found a small transistor radio in the bathroom, and listened to the midnight news.

He wrapped himself in the duvet he had taken from Bob’s bed. It was a double. There had not been a duvet on the bed in the spare room. It had not been made up for a visiting sister.

Birding made you patient. A good birder should be able to sit still for hours, just watching. The trick was not to think too much. It was like a marksman lowering his heart rate to steady his aim. South had learned to empty his mind; leaving his eyes staring, ready to register any movement, any change in the picture. But it wasn’t so easy here. He kept seeing Bob’s battered corpse. He kept hearing the woman in the car, screaming as she died.

An hour passed; he listened to a business programme on the radio without really hearing any of it.

He kept watch, but nothing happened. If someone had come to his house in the early hours of the morning they had not come back tonight. Beyond the fence, the power station rumbled. For years there had been talk of closing it, but it still remained open. Now, just as the migrating patterns were changing, the sea was too. Since Fukushima, there had been a fleet of lorries coming to bring shingle to build the bank of stones around it higher.

The same day as he stole the paint from the garage where his father worked, he woke in the night.

There was someone on his bed.

He sat up, heart racing.

‘Shh.’ The smell of sweat and beer and whisky.

His dad, he realised.

‘Ye OK, Billy?’

‘Was asleep,’ said Billy.

The room was black. The street lights must have gone off outside.

‘Where’s Mum?’

‘Asleep,’ said his father. He stayed there a while longer, then said, ‘Did you say anything to her?’

Billy said, ‘What about?’

‘Don’t fuck about. It was you, wasn’t it? Brought me the stew?’

Billy didn’t answer.

‘Did you say anything to your mother? About visiting me in the garage tonight?’

Billy considered this for a minute. Then he made the only answer he felt he was allowed. ‘I don’t know what you’re on about, Dad,’ he said.

Billy’s eyes adjusted to the darkness.

‘Right,’ Dad said eventually, but he didn’t shift.

And when Dad finally reached out to him, Billy flinched backwards, assuming his father was going to hurt him, but all he did was ruffle his boy’s hair and say, ‘Good lad.’

Good lad?

Billy wanted to get up and run to his mother, who was asleep just across the corridor, but he didn’t. He was not a good lad. He hadn’t told her anything about what he had seen. He had kept it to himself because he didn’t know how to begin to say any of it.

So he just lay there, the weight of his father pressing down on the mattress.

SIXTEEN

Cupidi phoned as he was letting himself back into his house the next morning. He looked at his watch. Eight thirty. He had woken, head on Bob’s desk, neck stiff.

‘What?’

‘What are you doing today?’

‘It’s Sunday. I’m off today.’

‘Did you have any plans?’

‘Plans for what?’ He blinked. ‘Are you asking me out?’

‘No. I have to work,’ she said.

‘Oh.’

The night had been a long one. He couldn’t shake a growing sense of fear. What of, he wasn’t sure. He had watched the track leading to the cottages but seen no one.

She was saying, ‘I had been planning to take Zoë shopping in Canterbury as a reward for having a better week at school. But I can’t now. I was wondering . . .’

‘What? You want me to take her shopping?’

‘Birdwatching.’

‘Thank God for small mercies. But honestly? I don’t think it’s appropriate.’

‘Appropriate?’ She snorted. ‘I’m just asking you to look after my daughter for a couple of hours.’

‘Weren’t you tearing a strip off me for sticking my nose into your business last time I saw you? But now you need a bit of help . . .’

‘That was work,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t anything personal.’

‘Seems like everything’s work. Maybe you should actually be spending some time here with her. She’s on her own down here.’

‘And you’re an expert in parenting now, are you? I’m bloody doing my best here. But something has come up and honest-to-God I have to work. It’s not bloody easy, you know? Besides, this is something she wants to do.’

‘She does?’

‘Believe it or not. I wouldn’t ask unless . . .’

Though he’d usually spend a day like this out of doors, today he felt like doing nothing at all. He remembered the look on Zoë’s face as she had slammed the door the last time he had seen her.

‘William? You there?’

He scratched his chin. ‘Has she got any decent wellies this time?’ he asked.

Probably because he was bruised and angry, that day he took Zoë inland, up the muddy banks of the Rother, up to Wet Level.

Birders didn’t go there much, mostly because there weren’t that many birds. He rationalised to himself that this was a kind of test. If she wasn’t really keen, she’d soon lose interest there, he reckoned. But maybe he was just taking his foul mood out on her; trying to kill her enthusiasm for birds once and for all.

A damp grey day and there wasn’t much around anyway. A couple of anglers grunted at them, sat on the bank, huddled over their rods, but apart from that the place was still and quiet, except for the occasional roar of a motorbike on the Rye Road.

‘I can’t see anything,’ she complained, tramping behind him.

‘It’s like that, sometimes.’

She would give up soon; ask to be taken home. There was not much cover in this flat land. As he predicted they saw nothing. Sometimes he wondered if what you saw depended on your frame of mind. The birds were a manifestation of how you felt.

He had been looking for birds ever since he was a young boy. Gradually he had ticked off all the regular species. Now it was about looking for rare migrants, birds blown out of their way by storms. What was the point? Right now, on this flat, grey day, he was thinking: maybe Cupidi was right to laugh at him. It was a ridiculous occupation for a grown man. Birding had always been his one safe place. He had been doing it because there was nothing else in his life. And there was nothing else in his life because he had never let anyone in. And he didn’t feel very safe any more.

‘Did you bring anything to eat? I’m hungry.’

‘No. Did you?’

At least she was quiet, after that. He kept his pace, hearing her trudging a few footsteps behind him. When they’d gone about a mile, he said, ‘Here then.’

South stood with his binoculars in hand, scanning a small copse. There was little to see apart from a few chaffinches, blue and long-tailed tits and a pair of collared doves.

‘Mum said you grew up in Northern Ireland.’

‘Did she?’

‘She said you were there when all that business was going on. What was it like?’

He focused his binoculars on some sloes, trying to see if any birds were feeding there. All he saw was a blackbird, scuffing up leaves beneath the bush.

‘Ireland,’ she said again. ‘What was that like? It must have been mad.’

‘Another world,’ he said.

‘Did you see bombs going off?’

‘Heard them. Saw the smoke. Everyone did. It was like that. Didn’t happen much. Hard to understand, now.’

‘I don’t know how people could do that sort of thing to each other. Did you ever see any dead bodies?’

‘If you talk, we’ll never see any birds,’ he said.

‘So-rry,’ she said, like she wasn’t at all. ‘Only, there aren’t any, far as I can see. Except the same ones we see in our garden.’

‘There,’ he said, handing her his binoculars. ‘Treecreeper.’

All she said was, ‘Small, isn’t it?’ She watched it, and he wished he’d remembered to bring a second pair with him. ‘Seriously, though. Did you see any dead people?’

He looked at her. ‘A couple.’