The Birdwatcher (3 page)

‘He had told me his sister was coming to visit.’

‘You knew the poor cunt?’ said the constable. ‘Christ. Sorry, mate.’

South nodded. When he had his suit, gloves and shoes on, he followed Cupidi to the door. ‘How come he gets to call you Bill?’ she asked.

‘He never asked me which I preferred.’

Black-headed gulls dove and wheeled. Shrubs shivered in the wind. Police radios chattered to themselves.

‘Are you going to be OK, William?’ This time she spoke quietly, out of earshot of the other man.

This was his last chance to duck out of it. He could plead mitigating circumstances and go and sit in the car and have nothing further to do with the investigation.

But the front door was wide open. Cupidi went through it. South took a breath and followed her inside.

The interior of the little house was unrecognisable. Books had been yanked from the shelves, drawers spilled onto the floor, cupboards emptied.

Like most of the buildings here, it was not much more than a chalet that sat on the shingle; a living room and kitchen, a bathroom and two small bedrooms. The forensics team were busy in each of the rooms, but South’s eyes were drawn to the photographer who was leaning over a blanket box under the living-room window. A flash lit up the room. Others were kneeling examining the walls. For spatters, he guessed. Another man was methodically spraying the floor with some chemical that would reveal where blood had been. Oh Christ.

South stepped forward. Something cracked under his feet; startled, he looked down. Just dried pasta; jars from the kitchen had been spilled.

Cupidi was introducing herself to the Scene of Crime Officer standing next to the open box. ‘You’re new round here, aren’t you?’ the man said.

‘First week. I moved down on Saturday,’ said Cupidi.

‘Welcome to the job, then.’ He waved his arms around the room.

‘Thanks a billion.’

South watched her as she approached the open box; he noticed the small jerk of her head as she saw what was inside. The Crime Scene Officer had paused in his work too and was scrutinising her, as if checking she was up to the job. She looked at the dead man for a while, then beckoned. ‘William. Do you recognise him?’

South hung back.

‘It’s OK. His sister already identified him,’ said the forensics man. ‘His name is Robert Rayner.’

‘All the same, can you come and take a look?’ said Cupidi quietly, looking up. South had been in this room many times and thought of himself as an observant man, but he had never really noticed the blanket box before. From where it was positioned, in the small window bay, the pine chest must have been used as a seat. There would have been a cushion on top of it, he supposed, or a rug. He tried to remember.

Bob Rayner had been a nice man, a good man who cooked badly but dressed well. He did sponsored bike rides for cancer and had volunteered at the local lifeboat station. Last summer he saved a tourist girl from drowning on the beach, though he hated anyone talking about it and refused to allow the papers take photographs of him afterwards. He wasn’t one of the rich ones who were moving in around the headland, who employed fashionable architects to remodel their fishing huts, but who only used them a few weeks a year, blocking the narrow roads with their wide cars. He was one who had come to stay here all year round. It took a sort of person. Apart from a few weekends, this was a quiet place. Most who lived permanently on the headland were private people like South who relished the isolation.

South approached the open box slowly.

‘You’ve seen dead people before?’ said Cupidi.

The first thing he saw was Bob’s head. At first it puzzled him. He thought there must have been a mistake. It didn’t look like Bob at all. It was the wrong shape. Too big, for a start.

It took him a second to realise that the head was swollen to almost half its size again, and dark with crusted blood that had filled the eye sockets, covering them. Every inch of skin was discoloured. An ear seemed to be missing; in its place just scab, gristle and clot.

South walked closer. The naked body was every colour imaginable. The whole of Bob’s skin above the waist seemed to be bruised. It was like he was wearing a suit of orange, red, purple, black, brown and yellow. His groin was dark from bruising.

Whoever had killed him had beaten him repeatedly, brutally. He had become meat. The violence was written all over his body.

It seemed absurd. Such a peaceable, gentle, quiet-spoken man. Now this thing – it wasn’t even Bob – was being measured and photographed, picked over with tweezers and evidence bags.

‘What kind of weapon?’ Cupidi asked.

‘Too early to say. Something heavy though.’

‘Nothing found at the scene?’

‘No.’

There was no blood on the wood of the box. He had been dumped inside after he was dead, South thought, looking in horror at his friend. Poor Bob. Poor, poor Bob.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Cupidi.

‘What?’

Even if he was still looking at the dead man, he could feel Cupidi’s eyes on him, scrutinising him. ‘It’s a shock to you, isn’t it? You’re upset. Do you need a minute to yourself?’

Why did he resent that consideration, right now? Probably because it wasn’t really kindness at all. She would be thinking how she had lucked out; if he knew the dead man that well, he’d be even more useful. She couldn’t help it, though. It was the job. She was protecting an asset. He shook his head. ‘No. I’m OK.’

He backed away, but even from where he was standing, he could see one hand. The other was somewhere underneath the rest of the body. The fingers on the hand he could see were broken, lying at unlikely angles, as if he had been trying to protect himself with it at some point during the beating.

‘Repeated blows,’ said the forensics man, as if he could hear what South was thinking.

‘How many would you say?’ asked South.

‘Not my department, really. Hundreds, easy.’

Cupidi said, ‘Either somebody really had it in for him, or we’re looking for someone mental. Or both.’

‘That’s the kind of brilliant insight they teach you at the Met, is it?’ said the forensics man.

‘William? What do you say? Had he pissed anyone off?’

‘That’s the point. He wasn’t the sort to annoy anyone. He was the sweetest man you could meet. You barely noticed him, most of the time,’ South said. ‘He was just . . . just a lovely man. That’s all.’

Cupidi turned to South and asked, ‘What did he do for a living?’

South felt suddenly exhausted. He wanted to sit down, but you couldn’t do that at a crime scene. He tried to think about what he knew. ‘He was retired. Used to be a school teacher,’ he said.

‘Subject?’

‘Um. English, I think. I’m sorry. I can’t remember exactly.’

‘Wife?’

South shook his head. ‘Single,’ he said, and realised he could not remember asking Bob about that. But he must have, surely? Was he divorced? Separated? He didn’t know.

‘What about a lover?’

‘Look around,’ he said. ‘No photographs. There was no one in his life apart from his sister. No kids, either.’

He watched Cupidi do a complete methodical turn, looking around the room and the debris on the floor. Most people had family photos somewhere; a small gold-framed picture on the mantelpiece or sideboard. Rayner had nothing.

‘I suppose I must have always assumed he was gay,’ said South. ‘You know, from that generation that didn’t talk about it? Or just not interested. I thought it was a generational thing, you know? Not talking about your personal life. He was a few years older than me. I never saw anyone. He never talked about anyone either.’

‘Was that odd?’

South shook his head.

‘I mean, I’d find it strange, if it was me,’ Cupidi said. ‘You never asked?’

‘No.’

‘Men are a mystery to me,’ she said.

‘I suppose that’s what I liked about him.’

It wasn’t that they hadn’t talked a lot over the couple of years South had known him, but Rayner never invited any questions about his personal life. And in return, Bob Rayner never asked South about his life either. As far as South went, this had been a perfect arrangement. They had talked about what was in front of their eyes; the weather, the state of the shacks and houses, the height of the shingle on the beck, how to clean fuel filters on a diesel engine and, of course, the birds. Bob Rayner had been eager to learn.

‘Sign of forced entry?’ Cupidi was asking the Crime Scene man.

‘We haven’t found any. The door was open when the woman arrived, far as I know.’

Someone Bob Rayner knew? Someone they both knew, maybe? ‘Take a good look around, William,’ said Cupidi. ‘You notice anything different about the room? Anything missing?’

He’d never really paid a lot of attention to what was in Bob Rayner’s house. It was easy not to because though it was unusual outside, the inside was perfectly normal. There were hundreds of books. Novels mostly. Dickens, Austen, a couple of Booker winners. Some nature books. A few books of prints by painters like Picasso and Chagal, the sort you’d find in any middle-class English house. On the walls, an oil painting of some ducks, a framed nineteenth-century map of South Kent.

The drinks cabinet door was open, he noticed. ‘He always had a single malt. There’s nothing there.’

‘Good,’ she said, making a note. ‘Take your time. What about valuables? Do you know where he kept them?’

He looked at the floor. Many of Bob’s books were ruined, face down on the floor, pages crumpled. Bob would have hated it; he was always such a neat man.

He needed to concentrate, but it was not easy. It took him a second or two, looking towards the hallway, to realise that the hook by the front door was empty. He scanned the floor around it. ‘His binoculars are missing, I think.’

‘His binoculars?’ She nodded, made another note. ‘Anything else?’

South shook his head. ‘What about the bedroom?’

The bungalow had been built long before the two vast nuclear reactors had obscured the view to the west, the first in the sixties, the second twenty years later. The master bedroom would have had a great view once, looking out at the huge expanse of shingle. Bob had always slept in the smaller of the two bedrooms, the one with the window looking away from the power station. The other, facing the reactors, had been his spare bedroom and office.

The wardrobe doors were open, drawers half pulled out. Papers were scattered by the bed. There were pairs of socks, too, all over the floor.

‘Maybe he came back and disturbed a burglar,’ said South.

They looked into the second bedroom. Again, the drawers of a filing cabinet had been left open. A technician was fingerprinting the drawer handles.

‘Or someone who wanted to look like a burglar,’ she said. ‘We’ll come back when Scene of Crime are done, and go through all this.’

‘We?’

‘Don’t worry. I’ll arrange cover.’

‘You can try,’ he said. ‘There won’t be any cover, though. Don’t know what it was like in the Met, but there’s barely enough of us left down here to cover a weekday, let alone a weekend.’

‘The timing of this isn’t exactly brilliant for me, either. I was hoping to find my feet a little before something like this turned up.’ She sighed. ‘You never know. We may be able to get the worst of it wrapped up in a couple of days, if we’re lucky. I’m going outside for a cigarette,’ she said. ‘When you’re done in here, come outside and tell me if you found anything else missing.’

For a while he watched the forensics man. It was careful work, trying to tease the slightest smudge into a clue. They would have to progress methodically through the whole house like this. It would be a while before DI McAdam and his team would be able to go through Bob’s belongings to try and figure out what had been taken.

Outside, a man in a white coverall and facemask was going through the green bin, carefully taking out its contents and placing them in clear plastic bags. Cupidi was leaning her elbows against the bonnet of the CID car, talking on her phone. ‘Half an hour,’ she was saying. ‘Can the DI make that?’

As South approached, she finished the call, pulled out a packet of cigarettes from her shoulder bag and offered one to him. He shook his head and looked at something behind her head. Pulling out his police notebook, he wrote down ‘
Juv Arctic Pom/Skua?
’ and the time.

She said, ‘Anything?’

‘Just making a couple of observations,’ he said. It was swooping at a herring gull, just at the shoreline, trying to steal its catch. As usual, he thought about telling Bob about it, then he remembered with the kind of stupid shock that happens at times like this, that Bob was dead. Bob would have liked seeing the bird.

‘I’ve noticed. You’re someone who takes notes. That’s good.’ She nodded. ‘So? What else can you tell me about Mr Rayner?’

South tucked the book back inside his vest. ‘He arrived about four years ago. He bought the cottage outright. I didn’t have much to do with him at first. A lot of the people round here keep themselves to themselves. Only he was into birds, or was learning to be, so I used to see him out on the reserve. Old gravel pits. He was there every day. He wasn’t experienced, not at the start anyway, but he had all this gear. Eighteen-hundred-pound binoculars. We started talking.’