The Birdwatcher (40 page)

‘London’s not our place,’ she said.

They spent the night asleep on a bench in Victoria Station waiting for the first coach to Dover. It was in the morning that Billy saw the copy of the
Daily Mail
, lying on the bench next to them. In smaller letters, next to the headline ‘TORIES ATTACK LABOUR’S JOB RECORD’:

TWO RUC KILLED BY IRA SNIPER

And the photograph of two men. One of them looking like any other copper, the other with his hat slightly cocked, and a half-smile on his lips. Beneath it, the caption: ‘
Sergeant John Ferguson.
’

All the way to Dover, the other passengers watched Mum crying, embarrassed by her noise. She didn’t stop for an hour. She tried to keep her voice quiet, but occasionally another howl escaped her and people pretended to concentrate on their newspapers or knit. An Indian man with a beard gave her a purple handkerchief and told her she could keep it.

The details in the newspaper were slim. They had been on patrol in a car on the edge of a town when a sniper shot the driver, Sergeant John Ferguson, dead. The other man was killed as he tried to leave the vehicle. That’s all they said. The IRA claimed responsibility for the attack.

‘We going to go back for the funeral?’

‘Never going back to that place,’ she said, and held the purple cloth to her eyes.

And soon Billy started too, like he had never cried before. And now he had started, he found he couldn’t stop.

‘Don’t cry, Billy,’ said Mum.

‘I liked him,’ he said, which was true. It was not just that that made him cry, though. Without him, this secret was his to keep forever. It was going to be with him always, now. But she didn’t know that. This cold stone was going to be inside him for ever.

But she thought he was just crying for Fergie and she put her arm round him and hugged him so tight he felt his bones were going to break.

The first operation was later that morning.

When he woke, face singing with the pain, he too had a copper sitting next to him.

‘Sorry, mate,’ said the young policeman sheepishly. ‘Orders, you know?’

‘You’re OK,’ said South. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

Cupidi came to visit every day. On the third day she brought Zoë. She leaned across him and kissed his good side.

‘Don’t flinch.’ She laughed. ‘I’m really pleased to see you.’

‘I made a cake,’ said Cupidi.

‘It’s horrible,’ said Zoë. ‘She’s a terrible cook.’

‘Did she put a file in it?’

‘Don’t joke. You won’t have to serve time. I’m sure of it.’

The doctors had done their work. He would be discharged tomorrow. The Northern Ireland police were flying over this afternoon to take him back over there. They did things differently there.

‘I mean, they won’t really put you in prison, will they?’ said Zoë. ‘Not after what you did. Not after what your dad did.’

‘Yes. They probably will.’

‘So unfair,’ said Zoë.

‘That’s great news about Bob’s house,’ said Cupidi, trying to change the subject; if he did go to prison, it would not be easy. Nobody liked a copper in prison.

‘Yes, isn’t it?’ They had finally read Bob’s will; he had left everything to South. Rayner had no relations. So Arum Cottage was now his. It felt like an apology of sorts; proof that, for all the deceit, they had been friends.

‘Will you sell it?’

‘I don’t think so. I’d like to live in it, when I get out.’

Cupidi looked away. ‘Zoë’s right. They wouldn’t dare give you a custodial sentence. Your dad was a monster.’

‘They still might.’

‘What about your own house?’ Zoë asked.

‘I don’t know yet. Sell it or rent it. I’ll need the money now.’ He had been served notice. He would be off the force by the time he came out. ‘I don’t want to live there any more. I think I prefer the cottage.’

‘Want me to keep an eye on it?’ Cupidi said. ‘Just in case?’

‘That would be good. Curly and Eddie said they’d keep an eye on it too. I’ll tell Eddie to let you have a key.’

‘Just thinking. Can
we
rent his house, Mum?’ said Zoë. ‘The one he’s in now. Much better than that poxy house we’re living in here.’

‘Jesus, I’d hate it there,’ said Cupidi. ‘All that bloody nature everywhere.’

‘Oh, Mum. It would be great. Please?’

‘What are you going to do now, anyway?’ said Cupidi, adding, ‘When you get back . . .’

Nobody knew when that would be. It could be months, or years. ‘I don’t know,’ said South. His career in the police was over. There would be a dismissal hearing, but it was a foregone conclusion. ‘I’m not really worried. I can manage from the rent on the house, I guess. Something will come up.’

Cupidi went to fetch tea from the machine.

He said to Zoë, ‘You going birding again?’

‘Course,’ she said. ‘I’m up to sixty-one already. Will catch you up, easy.’

‘There’s a guy lives at Dungeness,’ said South. ‘His name’s Eddie. I’ve told him all about you. His girlfriend is a birder too. He says the three of you should go out.’

‘Cool,’ she said. She looked down at the floor. ‘It’s like, I’ll watch them for you while you’re away. The birds. I’ll write about them, maybe.’

‘I’d like that very much,’ he said. ‘You seen a redpoll?’

‘No.’

‘There’s some there now, Eddie says.’

‘Maybe Mum and me can go there after . . .’ She tailed off, reddening.
After the police have come to take you away
, she must have been going to say.

Cupidi saved her embarrassment by returning with two cups of tea in paper cups. ‘Turns out, Sleight was big in drugs in the nineties, or so we think,’ she said, sitting back down in the plastic chair. ‘He ran clubs in North Kent when all the ecstasy boom happened. He was around at the same time people were making hundreds of grand. Never arrested, though. We guess that he got away with it. Married his childhood sweetheart . . .’

‘Gill?’

‘Gail. But Sleight wanted to go respectable, so bought a posh new life for them, moved into scaffolding, big house in Sandgate for her. There’s no indication of where the money came from.’

‘And hired a personal tutor to teach his son.’

‘That’s right. He didn’t want Cameron growing up like he’d done.’

‘Bob,’ said South.

‘Yes, Bob was the tutor. Cameron says Bob lived with them for almost eight years. Cameron was home-educated. The deal was, if Bob got Cameron into Oxford or Cambridge Sleight would give him a hundred grand on top of what he’d already earned.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Bob kept his part of the bargain.’

‘What a snob,’ said Zoë.

‘A control freak,’ said Cupidi. ‘He wanted a perfect family and that’s what he got. They had to be it, whether they wanted it or not.’

A nurse came in to take his temperature and blood pressure. She stood by the bed saying nothing.

‘So he’d have known Judy Farouk from the old days when he was a dealer?’ asked South as the nurse strapped the cuff around his arm.

‘We think so,’ said Cupidi. ‘It would make sense. Bob and Gail or Gill had fallen in love. When Cameron went to university, Bob used the money Sleight had given him to buy a place so they could still be together. What she didn’t know was that Judy Farouk lived so close. We know for a fact she had been on the drug scene back then. We reckon she knew Sleight from those days. She must have spotted them together, recognised Gail, and gone and told Sleight about it.’

‘Sleight would have hated that.’

‘Imagine it. Having that drug dealer tell you your wife is having an affair. Confronting him with the fact that everything he’d built up was a lie.’

‘Is that why he killed her?’

‘We don’t know. I don’t think she was stupid enough to try to blackmail him.’

‘No. During the siege, he said it wasn’t blackmail. Maybe she thought she’d get him on her side. Maybe it was just because they were old mates.’

Cupidi nodded. ‘Either way, Cameron said he noticed his dad had changed when he came back from university. Went from being his usual Jack the Lad self into being violent and angry. He saw him assault Gail one day. Slapped her. When Cameron tried to intervene he beat him as well, and blamed him for being too close to Bob, too. Didn’t like to let her out of his sight any more. He was screaming at her, threatening her. She was scared of him. They both always had been, by the sound of it. He killed Bob, then made it look like Fraser did it. And he fooled most of us, too. What was Fraser even doing there?’

‘I think he might have been looking for me, but I don’t know. He might just have been unlucky. He always was, I suppose. Can you prove Sleight killed Judy Farouk?’

‘That was easy. Her DNA is all over the back of his Audi. And it was her blood in your friend’s boat. We think he must have killed her not long after we saw her. When Bob turned up dead, she would have known it was Sleight. Like I said, he was a control freak. He controlled his wife, his son, everything. If Judy knew about Gail and Bob’s affair . . . He didn’t want anything out of his hands, so I think that he killed her, stole the boat and dumped the body at sea.’

The nurse left the room.

‘I think he’d seen us in the car outside her caravan. Maybe he thought I was on to him from the start.’

‘That would make sense.’

‘How?’ asked Zoë. ‘How did he kill Judy?’

‘It’s hard to say. The autopsy suggests he strangled her.’

‘Poor woman,’ said Zoë.

‘She was a thug,’ said her mother. ‘She got what she deserved.’

‘Nobody deserves that.’

‘Maybe not.’

He sat up in bed, shifted a pillow.

‘How’s school?’

‘Shit still,’ said the girl.

‘Don’t use that word,’ said her mother.

‘I’m getting through it, though. I’m picking biology A level. I like it. The teacher’s OK, too. Maybe do zoology at college.’

‘What about you?’ said Cupidi. ‘You and your father. You never said why.’

‘Maybe he doesn’t want to talk about it,’ said Zoë.

‘It’s OK,’ said South.

So, lying in the hospital bed, with the sutures on the side of his face starting to itch beneath the dressing, he tells them about Mr McGrachy and Donny Fraser and the white bird and the red paint, all about the Sergeant in the peaky hat and the flappy trousers. And he tells them how he shot his father on the night of the 11th of July and how he got away with it because Sergeant Ferguson loved his mother.

They listen without interrupting until he’s finished. And it’s great to get it all out, because he has not been able to tell anyone the whole story before. ‘What happened to the policeman – Ferguson?’ asks Zoë.

‘He died. He was murdered, as a matter of fact.’

‘God,’ says Cupidi. ‘By the UVF?’

‘No,’ says South. ‘It was an IRA sniper. Nothing to do with anything except he was a policeman. He was just unlucky. Dead unlucky. In those days people there died all the time.’

‘So he died thinking your mother had killed your father?’

‘I assume so,’ says South.

‘And that he’d saved her,’ says Cupidi.

‘Yes. And he did save her, really.’

‘Amazing,’ says Zoë.

‘Unprofessional,’ says Cupidi.

‘Who cares? He was fantastic,’ says Zoë.

‘Yes,’ says South. ‘I think he was.’

‘He sent someone to prison for something they didn’t do,’ says Cupidi.

They sit together in silence by the bed. The Northern Ireland police will be arriving soon from the airport to take him away. Cupidi thinks they will go easy on him because he has been a good copper all his life and because he was so young when he killed his father and it is all such a long time ago.

He is not so sure. He deserves to go to prison, not so much for what he did to his father as what he did to poor Donny, though he is frightened of it. Either way, he thinks it’s wiser to assume he will not be back by the time the birds come again.