The Birdwatcher (23 page)

‘Tell Fergie who did it to you.’

‘I can’t.’ It was the day after Donny Fraser beat him up. They were in the front room again.

‘Yes you can,’ Mum was saying. ‘You have to. For me. If somebody’s been hurting you, I have to know who it is.’

She had seen the blood on his shirt. She knew something was going on.

Ferguson, too, sat there, like he knew everything. Billy couldn’t ever remember seeing Sergeant Ferguson out of uniform before. He was wearing an Aran cardigan and brown cords, as if he was trying to look like a normal person on a Saturday. There were leather tassels on his shoes, too; it all made him look like he’d walked out of a knitting catalogue.

His mother had cried when Billy had come home yesterday; big splodges of mascara on her cheeks.

‘That’s it. I’m leaving this place,’ she was saying now. ‘My mind’s made up.’

‘I know why you need to go,’ said Ferguson, quietly. And he looked first at Mary, then at him. ‘I can help. But we’ve got to tidy up a few things first.’

‘Will you get whoever did this to him? He won’t say.’

‘I know who did it,’ said Ferguson. And for a second Billy wondered if he meant he knew who had beaten him up or who had killed his father and his heart stopped. ‘I just need a wee word with the lad.’

Mum said, ‘I just want to go now. Only we can’t leave this dump unless the bank agrees to the loan.’

‘Leave us alone a minute, will you, Mary? I need to talk to the lad in private.’

His mother hesitated. ‘I don’t know.’

Ferguson said, ‘Please. Please trust me. I only want to do you good. Swear to God.’

Billy said, ‘I don’t want to talk to you. Why should I? I got nothing to say.’

‘Can’t you talk to him in front of me? Aren’t you supposed to do that?’

He looked straight at Billy, all serious. ‘I’m not talking to him as a policeman, Mary. I’m talking to him because I’m your friend. The only real one you have.’

He knows
, thought Billy.
He knows what I did. He knows about the gun. He knows everything.

‘You’re looking really strange, Fergie,’ Mum was saying. ‘Is something wrong?’

‘You know why. I care about you.’

Billy stood.

‘Where are you going, Billy?’

‘Bog,’ he said.

‘It’s called a toilet,’ said his mother.

‘I need to go,’ he said.

‘I’ll just be a minute. Will you leave the two of us together?’

‘OK then. I’ll be in the kitchen,’ she said.

When she’d shut the door behind her, Fergie said, ‘I heard McGrachy was looking for something.’

‘I was upstairs. I didn’t hear anything.’

Fergie knelt down, close to Billy. ‘I’m about to do something terrible, Billy. Something I don’t want to do. You can help me out here.’

That was it. He would be arrested now.

‘Where did your daddy keep his gun, Billy?’

See? Fergie had worked it all out.

‘I got to go. I’m busting,’ he said, and leaped up and ran up the stairs.

Billy had never felt sadness like this before. He had collected what he wanted from the bedroom.

He knows what I did. He has worked it out because he is a policeman. That’s what policemen do, like on the telly. And now he will tell Mum
.

‘Billy? Are you OK?’ said Fergie. His mother was there too, outside the toilet door. And Billy could not bear for her to know what he had done.

‘I’ll be right down.’

He opened the bathroom window wide; looking down to the lawn, he thought he would ruddy break a leg, jumping from here.

TWELVE

He wasn’t hungry.

His head still ached. He tried frying a mackerel but when he looked at it, its opaque stare unsettled him. He put the cooked fish back in the fridge.

After washing up, he checked his email. There was one from the WPC with the red hair and birthmark on her face: ‘
Here you go. Hope it makes sense xx
.’

It was a spreadsheet of dates, times and locations going back ninety days. He’d never used the ANPR number plate recognition system before; the depth of the data was an eye-opener. Effectively it recorded the movements of every car in Britain, using data from automatic cameras, some at the roadside and some on police vehicles. The list contained details of sightings of the registration he’d written down at Wiccomb caravan site, ordered by date. Only when he printed it out did he realise how long it was; it came to twelve pages. He made himself a pot of tea and sat at his table crossing out all the entries from around Durham. He was left with just eight sightings in the South East, all of them within four days of each other. Two of them were taken by a camera on the Littlestone Road, one of them was taken by a police vehicle on the approach to Ashford, and five were taken by a single camera on the A20, ten miles away.

What did that tell him? It was presumably someone local. And whoever it was had used the fake plates on only four days.

Was it someone buying drugs from Judy Farouk? It wasn’t out of the question, though Farouk’s clients were not usually the sort who drove in SUVs. A supplier maybe?

Sometime before midnight he put on a jacket and trainers and went out into the night. A run would help stop the thoughts that buzzed around his head. Maybe he could tire himself out enough to get a good night’s sleep.

As he left the door, he took care not to look back at the nuclear plant. Staring towards the glare of lights ruined any chance of night vision. Instead, he jogged down to the sea and turned right along the track above the beach.

The sea was black and still. Beyond the nuclear plant he turned inland. At this time of year the nights were quiet. The toads had begun to hibernate. Far off, there were tawny owls, hooting. He ran on up the track parallel with Dengemarsh Sewer.

After half an hour, he lay down on the shingle, panting, and watched the stars moving slowly around the sky.

Bob Rayner had not been who he claimed to be; nor had his sister. It was a shock to find the man he had thought was his friend had as much to hide as he had. Why had Bob come here, to this place at the end of England? He tried to remember anything he had ever said about his past life, but came up empty.

A sigh of a breeze moved through the dead reeds around him. This was a flat land. He had been born with hills around him, but he had liked the flatness. The uninterrupted landscape hid nothing. He had imagined it a more honest place. Like him, Bob had brought his secrets with him here, though. He felt if he could understand what it was that Bob had been hiding, he would understand why he had been killed.

His back was cold; he should start moving again. By the time he turned round at Denge Farm, making his way to crunch along the shingle beach, it was almost two in the morning.

Now the lights of the power station were ahead of him; even a mile away they glared so brightly that they extinguished the stars above him. It was never fully night here. Lit by the industrial glare of the reactors, the scrubby plants cast long shadows across the shingle.

When he rounded the corner of the power station to join the concrete path that led to his house, he noticed a movement to the east. He stopped and squinted into the darkness. There. Someone was down on the beach, close to one of the remaining fisherman’s lock-ups about a hundred yards away.

Conscious that the light was now behind him, silhouetting him, South crouched down and walked off the path, circling round towards the shed.

It was a man. When he was close enough, he saw someone removing something from the open shed, putting it inside a sports bag.

He called out, ‘Police. Who’s there?’

The man turned. ‘Jesus. You give me a shock, Bill.’

‘Curly?’

‘Only me.’

‘What are you doing here, this time of night?’

‘I could ask the same. Bloody hell. Good news about the boat, though,’ Curly said.

‘What news?’

‘They found it. Didn’t nobody tell you?’

‘Nobody tells me anything,’ said South. ‘Is it OK?’

‘Not too bad. A few bumps and scratches, apparently.’

‘Did they catch them?’

‘No. Just found the boat, that’s all.’

‘Where did they find it?’

‘Way out in the Channel. Hastings lifeboat pulled it in. Coastguard spotted it floating about two miles offshore on Monday evening. I’m going up there tomorrow on the tide to pick it up. If the engine’s going OK, I’ll motor it back. If not it’s going to cost me a few bloody bob in haulage. I was just trying to find the spare key for the engine.’

‘Funny,’ said South. ‘Stealing a boat and then just abandoning it.’

‘Kids, I expect. Hope they bloody drowned themselves. Reckon I’ll still get insurance for the damage they done? Bill? You OK? You look like you need a good night’s sleep, man.’

‘I do.’

South walked away towards his house.

He lay in bed, still awake, listening to the hum of the nuclear power station. It was always loud. He wasn’t sure he could get to sleep without its constant roar.

Tonight, though, the hum seemed to be coming from inside his head.

Donald John Fraser.

When he rolled over, his father was sitting on the chair next to him, forehead smashed open. As South lay there, unable to move, his father turned to speak to him.

He tried to scream, but no voice emerged from his throat.

His father raised his finger to his lips.

The second time South tried to scream, his own voice woke him. He sat up with a start, panting, and looked around the dark room.

Nothing but the low roar of the nuclear power station.

But then, from below, the sound of a door closing. Had that been part of his dream?

Now he was fully awake, eyes wide, struggling to make sense of the darkness around him.

If it had been a real sound, had it come from a neighbour’s house, or his own? The noise had sounded too precise, too clear, to have come through brick walls.

Swinging his body off the bed, he reached for something he could use as a weapon, but his nightstick was downstairs, along with the baseball bat he kept by the front door.

He stopped at the top of the stairs and strained to hear. Nothing. Then, quietly as he could, he descended.

At the bottom he stopped again and listened.

Still nothing.

He switched on the light; the sudden brightness hurt his eyes.

There was no one. He was the only person in his house.

He didn’t believe in ghosts; he lived alone and was used to simple explanations for noises in the dark. He had imagined it, just as he had imagined his father. But then he realised there was something subtly different in the room. A smell; the lingering fragrance of citrus. A woman’s perfume? Was he imagining that too? Or was that real?

He went to the kitchen, poured himself a glass of water and then, as an afterthought, checked the kitchen door. It was locked.

He was about to go upstairs to bed when he decided to check the front door for good measure. It was one of those new, UPVC doors. The handle should have been firm; it wasn’t. It dropped when he pressed down on it and realised, with a shock, that the front door to the house had been unlocked.

Had he forgotten to secure it, last night, before going to bed? He tried to remember. Locking himself in for the night was such a normal part of his life, and had been for so many years, that he didn’t even notice himself doing it any more. But never before had he left the door unlocked.

He opened it now and a wave of cold air rushed at him. Picking up the baseball bat, he stepped outside in bare feet. The lights of the reactor blared.

About seventy yards away, walking calmly towards the beach along the concrete path that ran alongside the power station’s security fence, was a figure. He was too far away to see it clearly; just a black shape, silhouetted against the lights.

He stood to see if the shape would turn and look back, but it didn’t.

It could be anyone. All sorts walked here, alone, during any time of the day.

Afterwards, he walked around his house trying to see if anything had been taken, or moved, unable to return to bed.