The Birdwatcher (28 page)

And as he walked in the darkness, stumbling sometimes as the land began to rise in front of him, he put it all together, everything that had happened in the last few days. In the blackness it became vivid.

Two days before the 12th of July, the day before his father was killed, Billy knocked on Rusty’s door.

A Monday evening after school. ‘Can Rusty come out?’

His brother Stampy was there in the kitchen, smoking cigarettes without anyone bothering him for it because Mr and Mrs Chandler were both at work. The brother walked to the door and shouted up the stairs. ‘Rusty? Little Billy from across the road’s here for you.’

‘Can I have one of your fags?’ asked Billy.

‘Bog off and buy your own.’ Stampy wore denim baggies and had a Rod Stewart haircut. On anyone else they’d have looked stupid.

‘Only asking.’

‘Only telling you to get lost,’ said Stampy, affably enough.

‘Can I see your new jacket? I heard it’s ace.’

‘It’s at the cleaner’s.’

Rusty arrived at the kitchen door. ‘Coming out?’ said Billy. ‘I got something we can do.’

‘What?’

‘Better not say.’

‘Very
Twilight Zone
,’ said Stampy.

‘Don’t mind,’ said Rusty. ‘Nothing else doing.’

‘Don’t you go getting into trouble,’ said Stampy, and he pulled out a pair of cigarettes for them. One each.

‘Thanks.’ Billy grinned, sticking his inside his jacket for later. Sometimes Billy wished he had an older brother too, even with the Rod Stewart hair.

‘Well?’ said Rusty, when they were outside.

Billy opened his jacket wider and pulled the can of spray-paint out a little way.

Rusty’s eyes widened and he said, ‘Superb. What we going to do with it?’

And Billy led the way down to River Street where that dank path took him to the back of the old lock-ups that stood between the river bank and the street.

There, like an invitation, was a long, even, bare brick wall. What was great was that in winter you would be able to see it from the car park on the other side of the river, but right now it was hidden by all the trees. Nobody would see until the leaves dropped.

‘Me first,’ said Billy. ‘Then you, OK?’

Rusty nodded. ‘What you going to paint?’

Billy popped the cap off the paint and stood in front of the wall, shook the can and thought of Mrs Creedy and the naked bosoms of Suzi July. And then he started. First thing he realised was that if you held the can too close the paint dribbled. And as he stretched higher, as the can angled, the paint sprayed wider and thinner, which actually looked OK. The plastic chemical tang of the paint and the heady smell of solvent filled the air. By the fourth letter he was getting the hang of it, angling the can to give the letters a kind of style. The bottoms of the letters widened like flared trousers.

Billy stood back. Fuck Fuck Fuck, he thought. Fuck his dad. Fuck everything.

In bright Flamenco Red the letters spelled FUCK. The K looked great, but the other letters weren’t as good, so he wrote it again. Twice. And, thinking of last night in the garage he sprayed another word: CUNT. Rusty laughed.

‘Cunt,’ Rusty said the word out loud.

It felt great.

‘Won’t sneak, will you?’

‘Bog off. Come on,’ said Rusty. ‘You said I could have a go.’

‘My paint,’ said Billy. SHIT was his first S. Some letters had a great shape for spray-paint, he decided.

‘It’ll run out,’ complained Rusty.

Billy shook the can, listening for the small ball bearing they put in to keep the paint mixed pinging around inside the metal. ‘There’s loads.’

PRICK. He stood back and added an S for good measure.

‘I’m bored. I’m going.’

‘Here then.’ Billy finally handed over the can, and when he did, Rusty noticed how his right hand was red from where the paint had bounced back off the wall. ‘The Red Hand of Ulster,’ Rusty said, giggling.

‘No surrender,’ shouted Billy, all deep-voiced.

They moved up a few yards to where there was fresh wall, and Billy stood, smoking Stampy’s cigarette with his red hand while Rusty held the paint can, squinting at the bare brick wall. ‘What shall I write?’ Rusty asked.

‘I don’t care. Write whatever you want.’

When they got back to Rusty’s, Billy tried washing the red off with hot water but it wouldn’t shift. He tried Fairy Liquid, then Vim, which made his skin itch.

Stampy came in. ‘Billy, what’s that on your hand?’

‘We been painting.’ Rusty held up the can.

‘Shut up,’ said Billy.

‘Where did you get that?’

‘Filched it,’ said Billy.

‘You’re too young to go nicking stuff.’

‘Well I did, matter of fact.’

‘Any left?’

‘Quite a bit,’ said Billy.

Stampy grabbed the can out of his brother’s hand and shook it. ‘C’n I have it?’

‘It’s mine,’ said Billy.

‘Go on.’

‘Why?’

‘Shh!’ said Stampy, holding his finger to his lips.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘You’ll see.’ Stampy grinned.

Billy looked at him, half nervous, half excited.

‘I’ll give you another fag if you like,’ said Stampy.

From somewhere, far off, the sound of flutes. A pipe band was rehearsing, all high notes and snare drums, and straight-backed old men in bowler hats. It was marching season. Billy felt a tingle of excitement in his spine. Fuck all that. Fuck it all.

SEVENTEEN

The doctor prescribed Ativan.

He didn’t trust the pills, so didn’t even bother picking them up from the pharmacy. Back at home, he was boiling a kettle for a Thermos of tea when Eddie knocked on his door.

‘Heard you were off sick. I’ve got something that’ll cheer you up. Come on down the beach, Bill, quick. There’s a pomarine skua,’ he said, fingering his binoculars.

Standing next to him was his girlfriend, pierced nose and coloured mittens, one of the women who regularly took part in the sea watches. She said, ‘We were worried about you. We’ve not seen you around.’

South stood in his porch, not inviting them in. ‘No. I’m just taking a break . . .’

‘Pomarine skua offshore,’ said the man again. ‘Want to come and take a look?’

He shook his head. ‘You’re OK.’

Eddie blanched. ‘I just left the beach to come and tell you about it,’ he said, offended. ‘Don’t you want to come and look at it just for a bit?’

‘I don’t think so, really,’ South said. ‘I’m sort of busy.’

‘What about sometime this week? I wanted to check your numbers against mine.’

‘Maybe,’ said South.

Through the window, he watched the couple trudging back to the beach, bemused. When they had disappeared over the shingle bank, he finished making the tea, put it into his small backpack and put it into his car.

He was driving past the lighthouse when he noticed Curly running up the beach towards the road, waving. South stopped, winding down the window. ‘Got something to show you.’ Curly grinned.

South got out and followed him back down the beach, past rusting cables and old abandoned nets. Curly had winched the Plymouth Pilot up the beach and had piled beer crates against the side of the hull.

‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Look.’

South climbed up onto the crates and peered over the edge of the fibreglass boat.

‘See?’

It was wet in the bilges; that meant that some of the blood hadn’t dried properly. It was still lividly red against the white fibreglass of the hull.

‘Fish blood?’ said South.

‘You’d have to catch half a ton to leave that much in a boat.’

‘Someone fall in there, and cracked their skull?’

‘Hopefully,’ said Curly. ‘The boat was nicked. Reckon you can get a sample and do a DNA thing? Find out the cunt that nicked it.’

‘That’s assuming it’s the criminal’s blood,’ said South quietly.

He turned and called down to Curly, ‘What date did your boat disappear?’

‘Thursday, last week.’

‘So it was stolen on either Tuesday or Wednesday night, yes?’

‘Suppose.’

That was the week Bob Rayner had been killed. Below, Curly was rubbing his hands together. ‘Reckon you’ll catch him?’ Wednesday would have also been the night Judy Farouk disappeared.

‘Was there any diesel in the tank when the coastguard found it?’

‘The tank was empty and the tiller was lashed straight. Cunts had just let it go until it ran dry.’

He stood, looking down at the pale red against the whiteness of the fibreglass. He remembered Cupidi saying, ‘You want there to be a connection. But there isn’t.’

The flat marsh offered little shelter but today there was a thin mist hanging over the land. He left the car parked in a lay-by and walked back up the lane towards Puddledock Sewer. There was no easy route to get to it, but he had found he could push his way backwards through dead blackthorn and bramble to reach the field edge that ran parallel to the water. The marshes around here had been drained five hundred years ago, leaving these silty waterways between the fields.

The farmer had ploughed close to the edge, so there wasn’t much left to walk on. South followed the winding waterway northwards. At a curve, the dead winter grass had been flattened from when he had been here on previous days. He unfolded a small tarpaulin from his backpack and laid it onto the same place on the steep riverbank, then lowered himself onto it, leaving his head just above the top, looking over the parapet of land towards Nayland’s Farm.

Three hundred yards away there were three high-sided vehicles parked up in a row on the concrete of the farmyard; as far as he could remember they had been there, in the identical position, last week. He focused his binoculars. There seemed to be power lines held up on poles, running into the back of lorries. Why?

Flocks of lapwings rolled in the sky. Somewhere behind him, some mammal was splashing. Vole probably. He ignored it. Cold seeped into him; he didn’t mind. He stayed, just watching the farm. Nothing happened.

The days were short already. He wore full thermals under his waterproofs. If you lay still for long enough, you’d see things no one else did. The light was going when the white car appeared, driving down the long track towards the farm.

That night he walked back over to Bob’s house; there was dry wood stacked outside in a lean-to on the north side of his house. He grabbed an armful and took it with him inside.

The stove was an expensive one; some Swedish model. The Scene of Crime team hadn’t found anything significant, but at least they had cleared out the ashes, in their search for anything that Bob’s killer might have tried to destroy.

He found some kindling in the basket next to the stove and lit it, watching the flames take hold. While the fire was still warming, he started going through the books, still trying to discover some sign of who the real Bob had been. He yanked out hardback books looking for any names inscribed on the endpapers, or slips of paper tucked inside, but found nothing. He piled the books untidily on the floor. They were mostly novels he had heard of, but had never read. He searched through the shelves too for books that might have come from Bob’s childhood, but saw nothing. There was nothing.

He went back to close the fire down. The flames slowed. Heat began to fill the room.

He returned to the shelves. At one side, there were half a dozen books of poetry. At first he thought they were all the usual collections – Wordsworth, Shakespeare’s Sonnets,
The Oxford Anthology of English Poetry
– but one volume was further back than the rest, spine facing in. He pulled it out. It was the work of a South American poet.

This book had a dedication. It was the first – the only – aberration he had found. It was a simple heart drawn in pencil and in the centre, the number 142.

He turned to the page. There, on page 142, a verse had two lines underscored in the same pencil:

I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,

in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

It was a short, passionate love poem, just four verses long. He read it twice, thinking of the woman he had seen in the supermarket, the woman whose clothes were in Bob’s closet.

The wood in the fire would last for a few hours, until it had burned itself out, warming the small house, keeping it dry.

The night passed. He woke in Bob’s chair, body stiff from the cold, the radio chattering out the morning’s news. That morning, avoiding Eddie, he made himself sandwiches and tea and headed off again with his binoculars.

Birdwatching had taught him to believe in patience; the longer you looked the more you could see. But in the evening he returned again to Bob’s house, tired from sleeping poorly the night before, from straining his eyes in the low winter light.