The Birdwatcher (21 page)

‘Can’t breathe,’ whispered Billy.

‘There’s people saying I killed your father now. Jesus, Billy. What sort of fucken stuff have you been spreading about me?’

He released Billy’s collar. The path was dark, overhung with brown bramble stems that had never been cut back. Behind the weeds, there were red-painted words on the brick wall: ‘FUCK’, ‘SHIT’ and ‘CUNT’.

Billy had a vision of himself, lying still in the cold river water. ‘You can’t touch me. Mr McGrachy said so.’

‘That right?’

‘I’ll tell Mr McGrachy on you.’

‘I don’t see McGrachy running to help you now. Is it right your mammy is courting Fergie?’

‘No. She’s not. She can’t stand him. She’s always telling him to leave us alone.’

‘We seen him hanging round your house, Billy. So tell me. What did you say to Sergeant Ferguson?’

‘Nothing.’

He grabbed Billy again and dragged him down the path to where there was a gap in the trees. Billy tried to scream, fingers clawing at his collar, but only a squeak came out.

Donny said, ‘I don’t want to do this, Billy. I like ye. I just want the truth.’

Billy was like a baby rabbit when hawks dive, unable to move his own limbs for fear. Donny kicked Billy’s left leg hard so that Billy went down on one knee, Donny still clutching him by the neck. He yanked him down towards flowing water.

‘You’ll tell me, Billy.’

And before he knew it, Billy’s head was being pushed underneath the cold water. He tried to arch his back against Donny’s weight, but Donny was too strong for him.

It was only a few inches deep at the edge of the river, but the front of his face was being forced down into it. The water was murky brown and perishingly cold. It invaded his nose and mouth as he tried to scream. He sucked it in instead of air and his lungs convulsed.

Panic now. He wriggled and slithered but could not get free; he was going to die.

And then Donny pulled him out.

Spluttering and coughing, covered in brown mud.

‘Well?’

The coughing wouldn’t stop. His lungs hurted from the water.

‘All I said . . .’ Billy croaked. Water dripped from his wet hair.

‘What? I can’t hear you.’

‘All I said was that some people wanted to ask me questions about my dad. Swear to God I never told him nothing about a gun.’

Donny nodded. ‘You better not be fibbing. I tell you, Billy. That fucking Ferguson is a menace. You know? I thought I was going to be put away for murder, for a second.’ He pulled out a cigarette and lit it. ‘I don’t mind saying I was pretty fucken scared. Nobody’s telling me anything any more. It’s nuts round here. What about you? You going to be OK?’

Billy nodded.

He offered Billy a drag on his cigarette.

‘Something weird is going on. Even McGrachy is treating me strange, now. He won’t talk to me. Like even he thinks I done something. I had to be sure you didn’t try and dob me to Ferguson.’

‘I know.’

‘’Cause I never did nothing to harm ye.’

Billy nodded.

‘No hard feelings?’

‘You’re OK.’

‘Good lad.’

Billy handed back the cigarette.

‘Your dad was a strong man,’ said Donny, taking a drag. ‘I looked up to him. We all did, us lads. I’m the last man that would have killed him. When all this started, when the Taigs started all the Brits Out shit, he took a stand. He wasn’t afraid to fight back. I thought he was cool, you know. His sideburns and his cars. Really fucken cool. McGrachy’s an old fucker, but I wanted to be like your dad, you know?’

‘Right,’ said Billy.

‘But it’s serious now. People are killing each other every day. And your dad’s dead. And every day I’m wondering if I’m next.’ He took another deep suck. ‘Some days I wake up and I think the whole thing is a fucken mistake. I just want to go off and have a pint and smoke some dope, know what that is?’

Billy nodded.

‘I’m all peace and love, truth to tell. But I can’t now, know what I mean? Leave it to me, I wouldn’t harm a fly. Even a Taig fly. I haven’t killed anybody yet, swear to God. And I’m scared of the day I’m going to do that. Honest, I am.’

He turned and headed up the narrow alley, back up to the pavement.

Billy stood shivering, snivelling. There was blood dripping onto his school shirt from something in the water that must have cut his head. Broken glass or an old tin can, maybe.

All the way home people stared.

ELEVEN

His head hurt and his mouth was dry.

He remembered the body swinging. He remembered the wine.

He was in underpants, lying in a sleeping bag on the bed in a room so small that his feet were beneath a desk. He sat up and banged his head on a bookshelf above his head.

A book tumbled down.
Basic Concepts in Criminology
. He stood slowly and replaced it on the shelf between a 2010 copy of
Blackstone’s Operational Manual
and
Tactical Counter-Terrorism
. Cupidi was the sort of copper who read the books you were supposed to read.

The bed he had slept on was a chair that they had, with some difficulty, unfolded last night. He remembered limbs touching awkward limbs as they had both struggled to tuck the foot of the bed under Cupidi’s desk.

His clothes were folded over the back of an office chair. Only when he was pulling his trousers back on did he remember the rip. He looked down at his leg. Pale hairy flesh showed above his shoe.

Downstairs, Zoë was spreading margarine on sandwiches.

‘What time is it?’ he asked.

‘Seven. Shit. I’m going to be late. The bus round here takes forever. It’s like the five miles from nowhere, this place. I hate school.’

‘Where’s your mother?’

‘Gone. Work. Want a sarnie?’ she said.

‘Already? What time did she go?’

‘Don’t know. I don’t think she actually sleeps. She’s a vampire. There’s tea,’ she said, putting the margarine back in the fridge. When she turned round she saw his legs and started laughing. ‘You can’t go out like that.’

He looked down at his leg. ‘I’ll be fine,’ he said.

She wrapped the sandwiches in a carrier bag and stuffed them into her backpack. ‘You going birdwatching this weekend?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can I come?’

He stared at her. She had no idea of the weight hanging over him right now. Why should she? ‘There’s a youth group. You should join them,’ he said.

She looked stung. ‘I don’t want to be in a bloody youth group.’

She left via the back door, slamming it behind her in anger.

At around eight, he pulled up at the Cadet Force hall. A mist hung over the flat land. Though there was still police tape across the doors, there was no sign of any policemen there. Which probably meant they weren’t treating it as an important crime scene. Just a suicide.

He looked at his watch. He would need to go home. He would be late on the morning rota, but he needed a change of clothes, plus he hadn’t even brushed his teeth.

The gates were still open. He backed his car up a little, then drove it slowly inside the fence. A small lane ran alongside the hall, then curved away towards the right, where he had seen the mobile phone mast.

At the steel legs of the mast, the pitted tarmac ran out and the lane became a muddy track, heading north, parallel to the main road. South got out and squatted down in front of the car. There was a hint of tyre marks heading along the track. Probably someone from one of the telecoms companies. Rain had made the ruts indistinct.

Leaving the car, he turned and walked back to the hall’s rear door, out of which Fraser’s corpse would have been wheeled last night. There was an untidy pile of Chinese takeaway trays left at the doorway. The body baggers and forensic team would have worked here until late. He lifted the single strand of police tape that had been put across the door and entered the hall.

Walking slowly around the empty room, his feet crunched on broken glass, echoing on the hard bare walls. The wooden stepladder was still there, lying on its side now though.

There were many more homeless people around here than there had been when he first started the job. He was used to finding their lairs.

Lying against the wall was a single blue polythene bag. Squatting by it, he hooked one finger and raised the bag. A nylon pullover. He sniffed at the top of the bag and smelt woodsmoke and old nicotine. It would have been Fraser’s, he guessed. Because they weren’t treating the scene as anything but a suicide, the forensics team had not bothered with it.

He stood and looked around. Then walked the rectangle of the hall, stepping over broken glass and splinters of wood.

It did not feel right. Was that because of his own history with the man? Or because, to him, this didn’t look like where a homeless man had chosen to kill himself?

Apart from the single pullover, there were no signs of blankets or improvised pillows; there were no blackened sticks of old fires. It did not look like Fraser had even slept here. There were no other possessions. Homeless people carried their lives in plastic bags. There should be more than just a single item of clothing. Tellingly, no empty bottles; and no signs of defecation.

He was searching a side room when he heard a car pull up into the back lane, then footsteps. Someone was walking up the side of the hallway. He ducked behind the wall, out of sight. There was no longer any door to hide behind; it had been removed from its hinges.

He listened. Now whoever it was was coming in through the open door.

South was quiet. The footsteps moved to the middle of the room and stopped. South peered out of the empty doorway. A young man with cropped black hair and a green bomber jacket had entered the hall and was looking up at the rafter from which Fraser had hung.

After inspecting it for a minute or so, the man lowered his head to look around him, hands in the pockets of his jacket. Just as South had done a minute ago, the man started to walk slowly around the room, as if looking for something. The man was definitely younger; though South was fit, he always liked the odds to be clearly on his side. And though he had his uniform on, South’s stab vest and baton were in his police car boot. South pressed himself back against the wall.

The footsteps were moving again. As quietly as he could, South edged back towards the doorway to see what the man was doing. Brushing the wall, he knocked loose plaster. It fell to the floor.

‘Who’s there?’ shouted the man.

Shit. South stepped out. ‘Police,’ he shouted. ‘Don’t move.’

‘Christ in a bucket. You gave me a shock. What the hell are you doing here?’

‘I was going to ask the same.’

And when the man pulled his hands out of his bomber jacket, South saw he had a pair of blue cleanroom gloves on.

‘You’re SOCO?’ said South.

‘DS Cupidi said there was no one on duty here,’ said the Scene of Crime Officer. ‘Jesus. You almost gave me heart failure.’

‘Cupidi sent you?’

‘What are you doing here, officer, didn’t you see the tape?’

‘I’m the officer who found the body.’

‘You have no bloody right to be inside here, dressed like that,’ said the SOCO, looking him up and down.

‘I assumed you were no longer treating it as a scene of crime. There was no one here.’

‘Well maybe we are.’

South stepped out of the doorway. ‘Why did she tell you to come?’

‘Cupidi? She called me this morning and asked me to take a look to see if there was anything to confirm a suspicion of foul play. Just to make sure we did everything to rule it out.’

‘She did? And?’

‘Give me a bastard chance. Just got here.’ He looked down at South’s trousers and said, ‘Is that what passes for regulation uniform these days?’

The officer had started moving around the room again. When he saw the bag he picked it up and, just as South had, sniffed it. Then he upended it and tipped out the jumper.

‘Anything in that room?’ he asked.

‘Not that I saw.’

‘Like looking for a contact lens in the snow.’ The man looked around. ‘Nightmare, really. I mean, for one, this is not exactly the kind of place where you could tell whether there’s been a struggle or not, is it? Or signs of forced entry.’ He leaned down and picked up a piece of broken glass, then dropped it again. ‘Ask me, not much point in wasting my time treating this as a murder scene until the results of the autopsy. And I bet they’ll say suicide.’

South said, ‘So you don’t notice anything odd?’

‘No.’ The man stopped. ‘What?’

‘If he was dossing here, wouldn’t you expect to find something more than just a jumper in a bag?’

‘That’s because maybe he wasn’t dossing here, was he? Maybe he just came here to top himself,’ said the Scene of Crime man, unimpressed.

South left him to his work and made his way back to his car. Scenes of Crime men were trained to look at what was there, South told himself, not what wasn’t.