The Birdwatcher (32 page)

As a policeman he had been inside a few teenage girls’ rooms. He was used to the outsize stuffed toys piled on a bed, or the mess of knickers and moulding food on the floor, apologised for by the parents. Zoë’s room was surprisingly neat; bare, even.

What he wasn’t prepared for was the walls. They were covered in drawings of birds. He recognised some of the images. They had been copied, painstakingly, from the
Pocket Book of British Birds
he had given her.

They were just plain pencil drawings, but in some ways they were better than the ones in the notebook. She was a natural. His own drawings, the ones he had surrounded himself with as a child, had been awkward and shaky. He had always been frustrated at never being able to capture the character of each bird. Zoë’s were confident. Her lines were strong. She understood the shape of the bird, how the feathers lay, the whole feeling of motion that each bird had. What birders called the ‘jizz’.

Among them, there was a shelduck, a green sandpiper, dated from weeks earlier, copied from the book she had kept on her lap in the hide. But there was another, of lapwings in flight. That cannot have been from a book. She had caught the peculiar swept back curve of the raised wing; the chaotic nature of their flock. It was all in there, captured in simple lines.

His drawings had been more than just a way of seeing birds. They had been about making his own world. Hers must be the same, he supposed. And then he remembered Sergeant Ferguson looking at his own drawings in much the same way, and gulped in air.

His phone vibrated. A text message from Cupidi: ‘
Five minutes away.
’

The girl on the bed was fast asleep already, fully clothed. He switched off the light.

Cupidi came downstairs red-eyed. ‘Was she on something?’

South stood in the hallway, whispering back. ‘She just wanted to talk to someone, that’s all.’

‘And why didn’t she want to talk to me?’

‘I can’t say. She made me promise not to tell you.’

Cupidi looked first stung, then shocked. ‘Oh Christ. She’s not pregnant, is she?’

‘It’s nothing that bad,’ said South. ‘Trust me.’

‘I hate it,’ she said. ‘I don’t even know you, really.’

‘She has her reasons. I promise. And she loves you a lot, you know. She’s pretty extraordinary, you know that?’

She stood there stiffly. ‘Thank you for bringing her home.’

‘Right,’ he said. Then, ‘Did I do something wrong at some point? You seem really pissed off with me.’

She didn’t answer.

‘I can take her birding, if you like. She enjoys it.’

‘I don’t think so.’ She went to open the door. ‘I think it’s best if she hangs out with people her age more.’

‘You’re joking, aren’t you? That’s what she was doing tonight.’

‘I’m tired,’ she said, holding the door open for him. ‘I’m very grateful for you bringing her home, but you have to leave now.’

Like he was a stalker or something. And he drove back home in the black night, muttering to himself, angry, as the first ice of the year glittered on the road ahead.

Billy walked into morning.

The early farmers were up, picking up churns and dumping them at the gates.

Nobody paid him any attention. He was invisible. The land rose and he started to climb, first stony track and eventually slender footpaths dotted with sheep shit, black dots on the grey soil.

Halfway up Tornamrock, he was scanning the sky as the early light began to pick out the shapes of the mountains around him. The binoculars were heavier than they had ever been before. It seemed a struggle to lift them to his eyes.

There was no shelter here. He would have liked to have made it round to the south side of the mountain, so that he wouldn’t have been so visible from the roads below, but first the night walk and then the climb had exhausted him and he was only taking a few steps at a time now before having to stop. His stomach hurt; he tried to remember when he had last eaten.

If he stood for too long the cold began to seep into him, and he wasn’t sure that if he sat he’d ever get up again, so he kept on, but slower and slower.

As the sun nudged up he could see how little progress he was making now. He would have liked to have found a better place, but this would have to do. He collapsed onto the coarse grass to get his breath back.

When he finally sat up, there was a buzzard over the col towards Rocky Mountain, circling slowly in the rising air. It felt good to rest for a while.

The huge ache that had followed him ever since he killed his father was always there. It was something he could talk to nobody about because there were no words for it.

His mother would be crying but it was best for him to go completely.

Further out he saw another buzzard, then, towards the west, a peregrine. He was too tired to even care about them.

It was still summer. With the light, the mountains were coming alive. Bees were already searching for heather. Wood ants scurried around him.

He scanned to the south and thought he saw movement; something pale flying low. His heart jumped, but the bird was half a mile away and the shivering meant he found it hard to twist the focus. Frustrated, he lay on his stomach and, with what seemed like a huge effort, managed to steady the lenses on a rock. But as the damp from the earth seeped into his jumper he only saw a third buzzard; it was not even a barn owl.

The moment he sat up, the shivering started again, worse this time because his chest was cold from lying on the wet ground.

Crouching, he panned across the sky again from left to right and back again, struggling to stay awake.

He didn’t deserve to see the snowy owl, anyway.

The drizzle started to fall again and the cold began to drain his last energy. It was calming. The colder he became, the smaller the ache seemed to be, as if it were moving into the distance.

He thought he saw an ouzel, but couldn’t be sure and realised he didn’t really care.

He had come here to see the owl, but maybe that didn’t matter at all either. LUCKY BLOODY POPE.

Below, the pale buzzard was still there in the dark of the unlit valley. It had perched on a dead tree.

The pink sunlight was slowly making its way down the hillside towards it. But when it hit the bird for the first time, he noticed something strange and beautiful.

It was a buzzard, not an owl. And completely white. A pure white, tinged salmon pink by the first light.

For a second, he couldn’t believe it. Thinking it was just his tiredness, he closed his eyes, scrunched them tight, then opened them again.

But when he looked, the bird had gone. He traced the hillside looking for it. Where was it? He had lost it.

He moved the binoculars cautiously left and right, looking for a hint of motion but the bird had vanished.

TWENTY

It was the first night he had not camped out at Bob’s house in days. He woke early, feeling angry, ineffectual and dirty. The last one, at least, he could do something about. He had not showered or shaved the previous day; he had gone straight out to see the body the lifeboat had brought in, then gone to lie by the edge of a muddy river.

He ran a bath and lay in it, trying to make sense of everything that had happened yesterday. It was as if Cupidi had changed into a different woman. Before, she had been friendly, now she was hostile; on the dockside she had been frosty, and at her house curt and dismissive, even though he had brought her missing daughter home.

Nothing made sense: Bob’s murder; Judy Farouk’s disappearance; Donny Fraser’s death. If it was Farouk’s body, and if Fraser had been killed, then three acts of violence had taken place within days of each other. He was sure the killer had deliberately made only a half-hearted attempt to conceal Bob’s body, but the other two murders – assuming they
were
murders – had been meticulously covered up, so meticulously that the police didn’t see the connections he did. But then they didn’t know that Donny Fraser had not killed his father.

South got out of the bath and stood in front of the steamed-up bathroom mirror. Is it just that he wanted to believe that Fraser hadn’t killed himself? Because, in some way, if he did, it was South’s fault? By letting Fraser go to prison for a crime he had not committed, he asked himself, had he created the monster that had killed his friend?

Wiping the condensation, he looked at his face and tried to see the faint line of a scar where his father had hit him, but couldn’t.

He picked up his razor and shaved. On a whim, he took the bottle of aftershave he had bought in Tesco’s out of the box and unscrewed the lid.

When he splashed it on his cheeks, relishing the sting of it, his nostrils were assailed by a sharp, chemical smell. But there was something familiar about it. For a second he couldn’t place it.

Citrus. Then he stood there looking in the mirror, open-mouthed.

It had not been a woman’s perfume in his house that night. It had been a man’s aftershave that he had smelt. Alongside the tang of chemicals, there was a faint smell of orange. Of some kind of spice, too. He looked at the bottle: ‘Instinct’. And the man had been Gill Rayner’s other lover, or husband, or son. He was the man she had bought the aftershave for. Suddenly he felt tantalisingly close to the woman Bob had loved.

Had Bob known about this other man? Had she been cheating on Bob, too? Or had she been cheating on the man whose aftershave South was wearing now?

He was standing naked, trying to fathom what this meant, when the doorbell rang. When he opened his front door, wrapped in just a towel, Eddie was standing there, grinning, holding his spreadsheets.

‘I know you’ve been busy . . .’

‘Not now,’ South snapped.

‘Sure. Shall I come back when you’re dressed?’

Looking at Eddie, all hopeful, South almost said yes, but then he changed his mind. A thought had occurred to him. ‘No.’

‘When, then?’

‘Another time.’ He went to close the door, then opened it again. Eddie was still there, a worried look on his face. He said, ‘Look, Eddie. I am sick of just looking at things. All we do is look. Do you understand?’

From the hurt expression on his face, it was clear that he didn’t, but South closed the door on him anyway.

There was at least one thing he could do, he realised, if not for himself, or for Bob, or Donny Fraser.

He hadn’t switched on his computer for a week. He opened a browser, found all the local taxi firms and started working his way through them, phoning each one up.

‘No, it’s nothing serious. I need to find the address a driver picked a young woman up from the night before last . . . No, she hasn’t made a complaint. It’s nothing like that. I just need to speak to the driver.’

He gave each dispatcher his mobile contact and his warrant number and then set about reading through the unanswered emails. The HR department had mailed to say they required a second letter from his GP if he was going to have any more time away. He wouldn’t bother. It was driving him crazy not working; tomorrow he would declare himself fit again and turn up for work.

He dressed and switched on the radio for the news, which he listened to as he made himself a fried egg sandwich. Lorries were queuing on the M20 again because of another strike at Calais, another young immigrant had been found dead after trying to hide on a Eurotunnel train.

He was thumping tomato ketchup onto his sandwich out of a bottle when the third item was read out. It was about the body they had recovered from the sea that week. ‘Kent Police confirm that the body belonged to 43-year-old Judith Farouk.’ Nothing else; nothing about who she was.

But he had been right about that after all.

He considered calling Cupidi, but what would be the point? They would be working on it now, at last.

Instead he walked over to Bob’s house to light another fire there. Somebody had to look after the place.

There were new letters behind the door. He stacked them up and put them with the others. He should probably shut the water off. If it got any colder it would freeze and the pipes might burst.