A Dance of Cranes, page 19
He stared at Maik frankly, awaiting an explanation for the question. But Maik was as good at missing non-verbal cues as anybody else when he needed to. “Is there any chance one could have been seen anywhere in the area recently?”
Senior allowed himself a small chuckle. “A Pied Kingfisher? Not the slightest, Sergeant. A sighting like that would have lit up the local rare-bird lines like a fireworks display.”
“How about farther afield?”
Again, Senior smiled, though still in kindness rather than contempt. “News of a Pied Kingfisher anywhere in the U.K. would raise the kind of ruckus the likes of which the birding community would have rarely seen. Not only would it be the bird of a lifetime for many, it’s a spectacular little creature in its own right. Charismatic, colourful, a delightful hovering display before it plunges; it’s the type of rarity even the general public would take the trouble to come and see. Can I ask, Sergeant, is someone reporting that they’ve seen one?”
“Not in so many words. Someone mentioned the National Bird of Hong Kong, that’s all. I just thought I’d ask.”
Senior gave Maik the same dubious look as before. “An amateur someone or a professional someone?”
“Amateur, but one who’d been around someone who knew his stuff, I would say.” The two men didn’t have many mutual acquaintances that fit the description; in fact, just the one. Maik wondered if part of him had wanted to tell Senior all along, desperate to coax out that bit of extra effort that he’d just been convincing himself could be so dangerous.
“I haven’t seen Miss Hey since the inspector went away. I miss our discussions. She always defends her positions with such passion. She’s doing well, I trust?”
Controlled expressions were Maik’s stock-in-trade, but he was forced to work hard at this one. “So, she couldn’t have seen a Pied Kingfisher?”
Senior shook his head. “But then, non-birders have a tendency to be a touch, well, imaginative, in recalling the details of birds they’ve seen. Once had a chap give a note-perfect description of a Blue-winged Pitta he’d just seen flying over Blakeney Freshes.”
Maik understood the inference, if not the reference. “Eyewitness accounts,” he said, shaking his head ruefully.
“Exactly,” said Senior. “He’d gone on the web, found the image, and then convinced himself that was exactly what he’d just seen.” Senior held up one of his mottled, calloused hands. “I’m not for a minute suggesting there was any malice in it. Nor, indeed, in Miss Hey’s claim. But she didn’t see any Pied Kingfisher around these parts, Sergeant. Or anywhere else. Though if that was what she believed she had seen, it’s hard to imagine what she might have mistaken it for. There aren’t all that many black-and-white birds of that size. Greater Spotted Woodpecker perhaps?”
Senior was welcome to mull over the problem as long as he wanted, but Danny wasn’t going to wait around while he did so. His lack of success here meant that he needed to look elsewhere for something that was going to lead him to Lindy. He thanked the man and bade him goodbye.
“Please pass on my best wishes the next time you run into Ms. Hey,” said Senior. “I do hope we’ll be seeing her around these parts again soon.”
“Let’s hope so,” said Maik. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to match Senior’s smile.
He was halfway along the gravel path when he heard the older man calling out to him. He turned to see Senior looking in his direction, eyes shielded against the high sun. “You might ask Eric Chappell, Sergeant,” he called over the distance. “He spent several years in Hong Kong. He wasn’t a birder when he was there, of course, but even he might have noticed something ubiquitous enough to be considered the national bird.”
Chappell! Of course. He should have been Maik’s first stop. It was why Senior had looked so puzzled when he’d first asked. Why wouldn’t Maik have started with a man who’d lived in Hong Kong? He gave his head an angry shake, grateful Senior had gone back to his study of the Painted Bunting and could not see the gesture. Detective Sergeant Danny Maik was going to have to be at his best to get the answers he needed. Stumbling around in this fog of remorse wasn’t going to do anybody any good, least of all Lindy. It was time to put his guilt aside and get on with the job of finding her.
31
The shock of Hayes’s revelation made Lindy physically sick. She felt the sourness rising in her chest and bent forward, arms still tied to the chair behind her. But the dry retching produced nothing, only a watering of the eyes that Lindy was determined to fight back, lest the man should take them as a sign of some kind of victory. Why had Domenic done this to her, sacrificed their relationship — worse, pretended to sacrifice it, in order to save her, without ever once letting her have any say in the matter? The stupid, selfish, arrogant bastard.
“Nice touch,” said Hayes in a self-congratulatory tone, “the objectification. It’ll add a bit of urgency to proceedings. If I’ve already dehumanized you, it’ll be easier to kill you when the time comes. That’s the way he’ll read it.” Hayes shook his head. “Conventional thinker, our Sergeant. Easy to manipulate the emotions of somebody like that. And from there, it’s just a short step to controlling them completely.”
Lindy lost the battle with her own emotions and her welling eyes overflowed, sending silent tears down her cheeks. They tracked to the corners of her mouth where she could taste their salt with the tip of her tongue. She tried to shake them away angrily.
Hayes considered her carefully, as if her sorrow was some curiosity at a funfair. “I suppose it’s the lack of trust that hurts the most.” His tone suggested he was not particularly interested in receiving an answer. “Doesn’t say much for a relationship, does it, especially when this business concerns you as much as him. That’s the way he is though, DCI Jejeune. Always has to be the one making the decisions. Always has to be the brightest person in the room. I don’t suppose it’s ever occurred to him that there could be somebody out there who was cleverer than he was. And now here we are. I imagine it’s going to be quite the shock to his system when he finds out, don’t you?”
Through her tears, Lindy regarded Hayes carefully. Who was he, this man who seemed to have no emotions of his own, yet understood everybody else’s so well? It was exactly what was hurting, the knowledge that Domenic didn’t trust her enough to confide in her, to let her in on his decision, his plan, any of it. “Why are you doing this?” she asked, drawing a deep breath to stem the flow of her tears. “What do you want?”
“Well, the bookmark for a start, obviously,” said Hayes flatly. “It’s the only piece of physical evidence that could tie me to an attempted murder.” He looked at her. “Yours,” he said. “Without it, the police can’t make their case against me. So, you know, given that, I thought it might be handy to have it back.”
“The birds on it, are they cranes?”
Hayes nodded. “It looked like the sort of thing that would mean a lot to him. I guessed it would hurt him all the more, that way, when he realized I had taken it. I used to like that bookmark a lot. I even managed to get it into the prison with me. Somebody stole it from me in there.” He shook his head. “Shocking, eh? Getting so you can’t trust anybody, these days. Know the piece, do you?”
“I bought it for him. I wanted him to go to a dance, but he said only if it was a dance of cranes. I had a jeweller friend of mine make it for him.” She looked sad at the memory, and perhaps at something else. “He never told me it was missing.”
“Seems to me your relationship was riddled with deception. Perhaps that’s something you’ll want to take up with him when he shows up.”
Deception, thought Lindy, or just protection, another misguided attempt to safeguard her feelings? Either way, the man seemed to share Lindy’s certainty that Domenic would come. Even if their breakup had been genuine, Domenic would have returned to save her. She knew it as surely as she had ever known anything. But if this man wanted the bookmark for a start, what came next? She thought she knew. “Whatever Domenic arrested you for,” she said, “he must have been sure of your guilt. Not simply convinced by the evidence; that’s never enough for him. He has to know, to be certain.”
“Prison is no place for a man of intelligence,” said Hayes as if he hadn’t heard her. “At first, I tried to fit in.” He pointed to the string of colourful tattoos on his neck. “Pathetic, I know, but things don’t go well in there for those who like to show they’re too good for general pop.” He shook his head ruefully. “Try as I might, though, I never really could settle into it. It just wasn’t for me.”
Lindy might have pointed out that a man of intelligence would have stayed away from activities that would put you in prison in the first place, but her close association with Domenic’s cases had shown her often enough that intelligence and criminal behaviour were not mutually exclusive. Far from it, in fact, as this man sitting across from her perhaps proved.
“So, why risk going back, just to get revenge on a man who was only doing his job?”
Hayes shook his head again, and for the first time Lindy saw some glimmer of genuine emotion in his eyes. “Oh, I’m not going back.” He took a moment to fasten his detachment back in place, but Lindy had seen a glimpse of what lay behind the curtain now, and she knew that Hayes recognized that, too.
“All right, enough chit-chat. I’m going to stretch my legs. When I get back, we’ll set a few rules. If you decide you want to follow them, we should be able to pass the time pleasantly enough. If not,” he shrugged, “then I’ll keep you strapped to that chair with a gag in your mouth, and you’ll stay that way until Jejeune shows up.”
Lindy stared at the closed door for a long time after Hayes left. He had spoken so matter-of-factly about killing her. It was as if he had managed to disconnect himself entirely from any trace of human feeling. How could you survive in that condition, she wondered, how could you even function if you didn’t have a single thread of humanity to tether you to this world? But she had no doubt this man was capable of doing anything that suited him, and she knew he would do it without a heartbeat of remorse. She knew, too, that Hayes had meant it when he said he wasn’t going back to prison. But if Domenic was coming here, Hayes’s arrest was one of only two possible ways things could end. It was the other one that was scaring her now.
As promised, Hayes had imposed the rules as soon as he returned from his walk. Lindy would be allowed to move freely around the living room, but she couldn’t go within three metres of the doors, or Hayes himself. She could go into the kitchen where food items and the electric kettle sat on a countertop, but she was not allowed to open any of the drawers or cupboards. Fridge, yes, stove, no. If he needed to leave the room for anything, she would be required to secure her ankle to a radiator with a lock and chain until he returned, when she would be released, providing she hadn’t tried anything in his absence. The rules were a masterpiece of manipulation, she recognized. Though they didn’t represent freedom in any real sense of the word, they allowed Lindy enough liberty that she would find herself weighing the risks of losing it, even as she hated herself for doing so.
Under the rules, Lindy would also have been free to watch television. But she found herself unable to draw her eyes away from Hayes, watching him from her chair or as she moved restlessly around the room. He seemed unperturbed by the scrutiny. “We can talk, if you like,” he said without looking up from the book he was reading. “I can’t promise the intellectual cut and thrust of those chats you’ll have with the women in your office, discussing the intimate details of your reproductive systems and such over a latte,” he said sarcastically. “But we might still be able to cover some interesting ground. Like that article you wrote last year, for example, the one about repeat offenders in the prison system.”
“You read that?”
“Without moving my lips,” said Hayes. “I read most things you write. Nearly half of prison inmates will re-offend within a year,” he quoted. “In some individual prisons, the number is seventy-five percent. It’s clear that a regimen of communal meals and visits by the prison chaplain is not an entirely successful formula for resetting an offender’s DNA back to some earlier, more law-abiding time.” He nodded. “Well-researched, competently written. Left nobody in any doubt as to what you thought of the prisons’ efforts to reinstall some semblance of usefulness in all those lost causes.”
“That isn’t what I said,” protested Lindy. “I don’t think they’re lost causes.”
“If the purpose of prison truly is rehabilitation, it’s hard to make a case that the best way to achieve it is by surrounding prisoners twenty-four hours a day with people so devoid of morality and conscience that they’d kill a cellmate for a packet of cigarettes,” Hayes quoted again. “No false modesty, please. You should be proud of yourself, holding up a mirror to society like that, allowing it to see the flaws in its reasoning, the abject failure of its stated goals, the utter futility of the entire penal system, in fact.”
“That wasn’t the purpose of the piece,” said Lindy defensively.
“Attracted a lot of attention in the prisons, that article did,” said Hayes in his same flat, disinterested tone. “In fact, I’d go so far as to say it was where all your troubles started. That’s the problem with making sweeping generalizations about a world you know nothing about, you see. You’re going to attract attention to yourself, and not all of it good. Not to worry, though,” he said over-brightly. “The time for settling accounts will be here very soon.”
Lindy was in the kitchen making tea when she looked out to see Hayes had fallen asleep. His head was lolling to one side, his book resting on his chest. She set down the tea quietly and stood still for a long moment, staring at the front door. She was closer to it than Hayes, and she knew it was secured only by a simple deadbolt from this side. Ten steps, probably half as many seconds. She could run, but could Hayes? Was he one of those wiry, whippet-like creatures that had a turn of speed? He could overpower her if he caught her, she knew that. She remembered the raw power of his grip when he had dragged her from the boot of her car. Her desperation, her fear, would be no match for somebody who was prepared to use as much force as necessary to subdue her. And then what? He was from a prison culture that didn’t entertain appeals for a second chance. Would he just follow through on his threat, remaining deaf to her reassurances and her pleas, as dispassionate and disinterested as always as he cinched the ropes tight around her and jammed the gag in her mouth? Or would he end it there, on the driveway, decide he had no more use for her, now that Domenic had already been lured back to him with the bookmark? Five seconds. Ten steps. When she looked back at Hayes, his eyes were open. He was staring at her. And now, they both knew that as long as she was here, she wouldn’t be entertaining any more thoughts about escaping. Whatever was going to happen when Domenic arrived, Lindy would be here to witness it.
32
Even with the canoe above his head, Domenic had been able to detect the gradual greying of the skies. The temperature had dropped noticeably in the last hour, and the wind was beginning to pick up. Mercury-coloured clouds had begun a slow, ominous roll towards them, dappling the flat landscape beneath with dark swatches of shadow.
“Break,” announced Damian as they approached the edge of a watery slough. “A short one though. We have to press on before that storm hits.”
Domenic slumped down beside the canoe and looked around him at the low, empty terrain in which they found themselves. What were they doing here? he wondered. They were aliens in this place, humans like himself and Damian and Annie Prior. What part did they play in the ecosystems of this park? This wasn’t their home. It belonged to the animals, the plants, the elements. And perhaps, too, to people like Gaetan Robideau and the rest of the Dene, who understood this land, who were a part of it. His brother seemed to read his thoughts.
“Why did you come here, Domenic?”
“To the park, you mean, or to Canada?”
“Okay, let’s start with that one.”
Domenic shifted uneasily. “A man called Ray Hayes has been targeting Lindy. He was a former arrest of mine, and he was convicted on the basis of evidence I uncovered. He got out on a technicality and now he’s looking for payback. I thought if I could remove myself from the scene for a while, he might back off, and we’d have a chance to re-arrest him.”
“And?”
“It hasn’t happened.”
“This is what Roy’s helping you with?”
“I asked him to have some forensic tests run on a bookmark. It was left in Lindy’s car the last time Hayes made an attempt on her life.”
“You think it belongs to this guy Hayes?”
Domenic shook his head. “It belongs to me. Hayes stole it off my desk when I brought him in for questioning once.”
“Did the tests turn up anything useful?”
“One print. Hayes.” Domenic shrugged. “But it wouldn’t be enough for a conviction, even if we could find him.”
Damian nodded slowly. “It must have been a hard decision for you and Lindy, to agree to being separated like this,” he said sincerely. “Even if you were prepared to put up with it, neither one of you could have known how long this thing might stretch on. That kind of uncertainty can test a relationship. Still, I suppose there was no other way you could have handled this.”
“There wasn’t.”
“I’m sure she gets it, though, Domino. I’m sure Lindy understands that it had to be this way. So what’s the next step, now that you can’t find Hayes? What happens when you go back? It doesn’t sound like you two can just pick up where you left off, in the hope that this maniac eventually loses interest?”
