A Tiding of Magpies Read online

  A Tiding of

  MAGPIES

  PREVIOUS BIRDER MURDER MYSTERIES

  A Siege of Bitterns

  A Pitying of Doves

  A Cast of Falcons

  A Shimmer of Hummingbirds

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Steve Burrows has pursued his birdwatching hobby on six continents. He is a former editor of the Hong Kong Bird Watching Society magazine and a contributing field editor for Asian Geographic. Steve now lives with his wife, Resa, in Oshawa, Ontario.

  A Tiding of

  MAGPIES

  STEVE BURROWS

  For Tom, and for Diana,

  who both chose to join their stories with ours

  And for Steve, Randy, Stacey, and Shannon,

  who really had no choice in the matter

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  55

  The Eurasian Magpie

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My thanks to Kirk Howard and the rest of the team at Dundurn, with special mentions to my publicist Michelle Melski, and my editors, Allison Hirst and Jenny McWha. I am extremely grateful for the continuing advice and guidance of Bruce Westwood, Michael Levine, and Meg Wheeler at Westwood Creative Artists. In the U.K., the overwhelming support of Oneworld’s Juliet Mabey, Jenny Parrott, and Margot Weale reassures me that the Birder Murders couldn’t be in better hands, while in the U.S., Becky Kraemer’s energy and enthusiasm have already made her a valuable addition to the team.

  On the home front, my sincere thanks go to fellow author and soccer teammate, Steve Lloyd, who passed on the details about a great setting. I’ll never complain about his passing again! I am particularly grateful to Mike Burrows, who, at very short notice, gave the text his usual expert scrutiny and suggested a number of improvements. The birder who stopped me at Point Pelee to share some entertaining collective nouns will note that one of them made it into this book, even if I couldn’t find room for the funnier one.

  And finally, as always, my love and thanks go to my wife, Resa, for her inspiration and unfailing encouragement. Resa has offered her predictions for the Birder Murder series for so long now, we have come to consider it as her right. Some readers might think I should claim this role for myself. However, I just don’t think I could bring myself to claim Resa’s right.

  PROLOGUE

  The hunter was closing in. It had pursued them relentlessly, silently stalking them as they ran, splashing water all around them in their panic. Now it was here; a menacing grey curtain, hovering over the surface of the water, ready to take her. To add her to the victory it had already claimed.

  She didn’t know how long she had been standing out here, hunched against the dampness and the cold. She had stopped moving when Monte left, just as he told her she should. I’ll check ahead. Better you wait here. Now, she was frozen in this place. She couldn’t go back, she knew that. But her mind wouldn’t allow her to take even one step forward. The hunter was waiting. The hunter that had taken Monte.

  The inexorable approach of the fog had gradually shut down her senses. First, the horizon had dimmed to nothingness, then the waters around her had faded from her sight. Now, even the air itself seemed to have gone. Only this deep, impenetrable greyness remained, surrounding her, filling her world. The sounds had disappeared, too, sucked up into this void until there was nothing. No foghorns, no bird calls, not even the soft lapping of the waves around her feet. It was as if all the voices of the world had ceased. Only the echo of silence surrounded her now. And the terror that came with it.

  She felt the life slowly ebbing from her body. She could sense the wet patches on her skin where the thin dress was sticking to it; feel the dampness in her hair and on her bare arms and legs. There were water droplets beneath her eyes, too, and on her cheeks. But those were different. Those had been for Monte, when she could still weep. Now she couldn’t even raise a single sob for him. She had no tears left.

  The waves washed over her shoes. The water was deeper than before, cold and cruel. Tide’s coming in fast. We got to keep moving. But she couldn’t. She could only stand here, with the fog and the sea all around her.

  It was time. She would sit down and let the rising sea gather her in. It would be a relief, from the terror, the sorrow, the uncertainty. She wondered where she would be found when the fog lifted and the light returned to this place. Perhaps someone would discover her on the distant shore, lying peacefully on her side, looking like she was only sleeping. Perhaps she would drift with the tide and be found miles away, days from now. Perhaps her body would never be found at all. Her poor parents; they would never know what had happened to the daughter they loved so much and who had never really loved them enough in return. The thought pierced her heart with sadness. And it made her stay standing. Not to fight — there was no longer any point — but just to stave off the inevitable, to hold back the insidious creeping advance of death for a few moments more.

  The water was at her ankles now. Her feet were aching and the dampness seemed to be seeping inside her. The air was getting colder, but she had stopped shivering. Her body had nothing more to give. Now it was just a matter of time. I’m sorry, Monte. I can’t do this anymore. For it to end like this, after all she had gone through, all they had both gone through, in the past few days. Once, she had believed it would all end well. Monte’s notes had said so. Hold on. Be brave. We’ll make it.

  But they hadn’t. You didn’t make it, Monte. And you left me out here alone, far from the shore, with the sea all around me, coming in to claim me, while the fog hides its sins.

  Perhaps it would have been better to end it the way Monte had, pushing on into the unknown, the unknowable. But she knew she didn’t possess that kind of courage. So she would wait. It would be over soon. Like him, she would simply disappear into the fog. Or the water. She had heard splashing once, before the swirling grey blanket had stolen the sounds from her. But there had been no calls. Monte had gone without crying out. It was his way. Be brave.

  She didn’t know why she looked up. For so long her eyes had been cast down, towards the water she could only feel, towards her feet that had gone numb inside her shoes. But when she stared ahead, a shape coalesced in the fog, slightly darker than the surrounding greyness, almost human in form. And then she saw the arm, extended in her direction as the shape advanced towards her, through the fog, across the water. Sounds were coming from the form, but she couldn’t make them out. She was frightened, confused. It seemed so lifelike, this apparition, she wanted to believe it. The cruelty of her hope stung her. The arm had almost reached her now. It looked real; flesh and blood she could grasp onto. The sounds, too,
started to distill into meaning, penetrating the awful silence of the fog.

  “Are you alone?”

  She nodded, still unsure if this spectre was real.

  “There’s no one we should wait for?”

  She shook her head dumbly. It was a real voice. She knew that now. But it sounded strange, the words odd and distorted.

  “We have to start moving. We don’t have much time.”

  And then she realized what it was about the voice, and tears started to roll down her cheeks. “It’s you. Monte said you would come for us. He knew you would.”

  “Take my hand,” said the voice. “It’s over now.”

  She reached to take the outstretched hand.

  1

  Perhaps it was the frame that focused the scene so clearly. Through the single diamond of the chain-link fence, the objects seemed thrust towards the viewer in sharp relief: blocks of shattered concrete, shards of broken piping and twisted metal, mounds of bricks and plaster. Everywhere, debris and rubble littered the hard-packed earth in a silent, still-life tableau of destruction.

  The spring sun was already high, casting shadows that turned the site into a checkerboard of light and dark. Ridges of hardened earth lay across the ground like healed scars, wounds of an earlier life, when metal blades and heavy industrial tyres had moved over the terrain like an army of mechanized invaders, gouging the history of their passing into the landscape as they went.

  On the far side of the site, a row of scrubby poplar trees traced the boundary. Each cast a narrow finger of shadow, and sunlight fell in bright patches onto the ground between them. Beneath the trees lay the tangled remains of a collapsed fence. A few sparse weeds, dust-covered and water-starved, dotted the hard, stony ground. Pale-yellow flowers trembling uncertainly on thin stalks of washed-out green provided the only splashes of colour.

  In the midst of this bleak landscape, caught between the shade of the trees and the bright sunlight, two men stood side by side, heads bowed like mourners at a graveside. At their feet was a shallow pit.

  A black-and-white bird leapt onto the top of a mound of earth near the far end of the pit, flicking its long tail and tilting its head to one side as if in curiosity.

  “That’s four. Perhaps that means it’s a boy,” said Sergeant Danny Maik flatly.

  Detective Chief Inspector Domenic Jejeune looked across at him, puzzled.

  “Magpies,” said Maik. “That one is the fourth I’ve seen since we arrived.”

  “And that makes it male?”

  Maik moved his head slightly. Jejeune knew so much about the big picture of English life now, but there were still these small pockets that had escaped the Canadian DCI. Local lore, references to a shared English past of which he had no part; childhood memories, nursery rhymes, like this one.

  “Magpies: One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy …” There was more to the rhyme, but now that Jejeune was nodding his understanding, Maik saw no need to continue.

  Jejeune watched the Magpie as it hopped boldly over the ground. He had seen a pair sitting motionless in the lower branches of one of the poplars as they arrived. The birds had been flitting around a lot since then. Perhaps the sergeant had seen four individuals, but it was more likely he’d seen only those two in various locations. A momentary image of another Magpie flickered across Jejeune’s memory. Another Magpie; another death. His mind recoiled from the thought and he turned his attention to the bottom of the pit.

  A man in blue coveralls knelt beside a fire-blackened corpse. He looked up and pointed to the nearby rifle and the photographer above nodded to indicate he had already captured the image of where it lay in relation to the body. The medical examiner slid the rifle to one side and swivelled the charred head slightly to examine it.

  Maik seemed unwilling to watch the proceedings. He looked around and his attention was drawn to a plant that appeared to be growing directly out of a crack in a concrete block near the edge of the pit. Slender clumps of colourless flowers dangled at the end of the arching stems. “It’s surprising anything could grow in a place like this,” he said.

  “Buddleia,” said Jejeune. “It’s an invasive. From China, I think. A lot of alien plant species are more resilient and adaptable than native ones. They tend to thrive in these areas, where the resources are poor.”

  Jejeune’s mind didn’t seem to be on his words as he spoke, even though he was staring directly at the sprig of vegetation. Life sought out every advantage in its fight for survival. It clung on tenaciously, desperately drawing the faintest threads of sustenance from its surroundings. Had the life in the bottom of this pit fought so hard to hold on to its existence? The thought only seemed to magnify the callous brutality of the crime that had taken place here.

  “It looks like the M.E. is about to wrap up his preliminary examination. He seems very thorough.”

  “You’ve not had the experience of working with Dr. Jones before, have you, sir?”

  Jejeune noticed Maik had not described it as a pleasure.

  Dr. Mansfield Jones scrabbled up out of the pit and made a note on his hand-held tablet. “Male,” he told the detectives, without looking up.

  Four for a boy. Jejeune stared down into the excavated pit. He was fairly sure the charred body they were looking at was an adult. But Maik was right, of course, it was a boy. Someone’s boy. Everybody was someone’s child.

  “There’s still some residual heat,” said Jones. “The burning occurred no more than twenty-four hours ago.”

  “So the body has been here no more than a day?” Jejeune caught something in Maik’s expression that could have been a guarded warning. But against what?

  Mansfield Jones looked at the DCI directly. “All I would be prepared to say is the body was set alight within that timeframe.”

  Jejeune nodded. Logic suggested either the person had been killed here and the body set alight, or a corpse had been transported here and put into the pit to be burned. But the M.E. had a point. There was no way of ruling out the possibility that the body had been left in the pit earlier, possibly much earlier, than when it was set alight. Jejeune couldn’t immediately come up with a scenario where such actions made any sense, but it wasn’t outside the bounds of possibility.

  “Was an accelerant used?”

  “Petrol.” Jones inclined his head towards Jejeune again.

  “Gasoline, I believe you’d call it. A great deal of it, as a matter of fact.”

  “More than would be needed to burn the body?”

  “Far more.” Jones looked back at the hole. “The entire pit was doused with it.”

  Maik’s expression showed his surprise at Jones’s willingness to provide so much information. Reluctantly, perhaps, but he was still volunteering it. Except that volunteering wasn’t quite the right word. Jejeune’s style of questioning was leaving the M.E. little alternative but to answer.

  Jones began to peel off his latex gloves, bending his thin, overly tall frame awkwardly as he did so, in order to tuck his tablet under one arm.

  “Is there anything else you can tell us?” asked Jejeune. “I saw you turning the head.”

  Jones allowed himself a slight nod of acknowledgement. “There are single entry and exit points near the base of the skull.”

  “A bullet?” Maik’s eagerness to pursue the information overcame his earlier caution. “From the rifle?”

  Jones drew up to his full height again and settled his gaze on the sergeant. “The wounds are consistent with bullet trauma. Fired from what, I couldn’t say at this stage.” He turned to encompass them both in his next statement. “I’d prefer to deliver my findings after I’ve had time to examine this person in my lab. I’m sure you can appreciate they’ll be of more value to your investigation than hasty conclusions offered in the middle of a construction site.”

  Maik appeared to accept the M.E.’s point, though judging from his expression, appreciate might not have been Jejeune’s way of putting it.

 
The two men watched as Jones packed up his mobile examination kit and headed out across the rubble-strewn site to his car.

  In the lower branches of the nearby poplar tree, one of the Magpies was preening its blue-black feathers carefully. It raised its head to survey the landscape, looking first one way and then the other; a disinterested sentry at this place of death. Jejeune watched the bird for a moment and then looked beyond it, at the crowd gathered near the chain-link fence.

  Maik followed his DCI’s gaze, and his thoughts. Beyond the members of the Saltmarsh Serious Crimes squad gathered here, the person with the most interest in this examination would be the one who had left the body in this pit. Perhaps that person was in this crowd. It was unlikely; most killers would have done all they could to put a healthy distance between themselves and this place long before the body was discovered. But killers were as individual as their crimes, and there were those amongst them who revelled in observing the responses to their acts. Watching as the body was recovered and the police pondered over the situation would be a draw that might prove hard to resist. Perhaps he should have uniforms round up all the onlookers, thought Danny, a surprise sweep on the pretext of asking if anyone had seen anything prior to the police’s arrival. Get them in an interview room and look for signs — wariness, agitation, evasiveness — signs that shouldn’t be there in an innocent person. But if Danny’s mind was now racing ahead, drawing lines between dots that didn’t even exist, his DCI seemed to have gone the other way. Domenic Jejeune had withdrawn into a silence that suggested he was already on his way back into the past, where they would need to start if they were going to solve this case.

  “How long has this site lain undeveloped?” he asked.

  Maik thought for a moment. “Eight, nine years. It’s been a brownfield site. Used to be heavy industry here; they had to wait until they were sure all the contaminants had cleared from the soil before they were allowed to begin redeveloping it.”