A Cast of Falcons (20 page)

B
ehind
them, the north Norfolk countryside bent away to the horizon, the landscape dotted with only a few signs of human habitation: a church spire, a couple of isolated cottages, the ruins of an old abbey. But it was toward the sea that the three men were facing. From their vantage point high on the hillside, the vast unbroken sweep of the North Sea glittered beneath the morning sun like a carpet of jewels. Along the ragged edge of the coastline, a string of golden beaches stretched out; pristine, unsullied, unpeopled.

“They're going to destroy it all, you know,” said Niall Doherty, with a small shake of his head. “They'll dredge it out, tear up the sea bed to lay their pipes, build their maintenance facilities along the shoreline. By the time they've finished, there'll be nothing left of the coastline we're looking at.”

Neither Jejeune nor Maik said anything. They knew that it was true, at least in part. Even if the carbon was captured farther inland and transported out here to the coast, there would need to be a processing centre, to prepare the gas for its journey, via a vast pipeline network, to the storage caverns offshore.

A light wind tousled Doherty's thin grey hair as he cast another sad look over the coastline. “It's not just the present they‘ll destroy, either, or the future. It's the past they'll be taking away from us as well. This was a place of prosperity once. Shipments of Norfolk wool went all around the globe from those wharves down there.” Doherty pointed at a cluster of buildings just visible in the distance, huddled along the banks of the Saltmarsh River as it wended its way across the flat estuary to the sea. His gnarled hand betrayed the slightest of tremors. “What will be left of that heritage, once they've finished? It can't be allowed to happen,” he said quietly. “It won't.”

There was a thread of steel in Doherty's voice, a blend of reason and indignation. It was the sound of quiet, determined opposition, of a willingness to resist.

“There's another protest planned in a few days, I understand,” said Maik. “Perhaps, after what happened last time, it would be safer if you were not there.”

Doherty shook his head. “They'll have moved on, the troublemakers. No more interest in this coastline than that lot over there.” Doherty flung his bony hand in the direction of the Old Dairy, barely visible atop the sun-gilded fields that swept down the slope just the other side of the boundary hedge.

“You have a perfect view of the surrounding area from this vantage point, Mr. Doherty,” said Jejeune. “How long had you been out here?” He didn't need to stipulate when; neither Doherty nor Maik would misinterpret the question.

Doherty shook his head slowly. “At least twenty minutes. What I can say for certain is nobody went up and down those hills. Not until I saw Mr. Taleb appear from over there.”

“Did you make a point of being here when the prince's Gyrfalcons are flown?” asked Maik.

“Those birds, their flights, it was the only contact I had with my daughter since she left to work at that place.” He shook his head. “You can't see the mews itself. It's too close to the hedgerow, kind of tucked-in, like. But I could see the birds flying every so often, most days, so I'd know my Darla was down there.”

A blur of movement flashed across the field far below. It could have been a bird, but if it was, it was the fastest one Maik had ever seen.

Doherty seemed to read his thoughts. “Over a hundred and thirty miles an hour, Sergeant. The fastest bird in the world, in straight flight.”

Maik looked first at his DCI and then back to Doherty. The older man was of an age to be confused by the U.K.'s half-baked efforts at metric conversion.

“Would that be kilometres, sir?” he asked politely. “That's quick enough, but a hundred and thirty miles would be well over two hundred kilometres an hour.”

“Miles, Sergeant,” said Jejeune, not taking his eyes off the aerial acrobatics below.

“It'll be the prince himself who's flying them,” Doherty said, “now that my Darla's …” His jaw twisted as he fought for control.

As Doherty had said, neither the handler nor the facility itself was visible from this position, both hidden in the area where the ground dipped down to the hedgerow that marked the boundary between the two properties. Only the Gyrfalcon could be seen, a grey blur scarring the air with its flight, twisting, arcing, setting itself each time for a scintillating horizontal pass. The three men watched in silence as the Gyrfalcon built its momentum, until finally everything merged, millennia of evolution climaxing in a flight of such power and precision and speed that Maik could do nothing but shake his head in wonder.

“
Yarak
,” said Doherty, “that's what they call it in the Middle East, when the bird's in a perfect flight.”

“If it makes you uncomfortable, sir, I could go and have a word with them.”

“Leave them be, Sergeant. Those birds need to fly,” said Doherty, still watching. “It was instinct, that's all. If there is something bad in all this, and I don't say there is, not for certain, but if there was, it'd be people you'd be looking at, not birds. People who got my Darla to fly them day and night.”

“Why would they do that?” asked Jejeune.

“No reason I can think of,” said Doherty, with a sad shake of his head. “You might try to train a wild one that way, but the prince would never have wild birds in his cast. Falcons are like people. The high and mighty don't much care to mix with the riff-raff.” He shook his head again and watched the bird make a final pass before it disappeared beneath the hedge line, its flight done for the day.

“You want to see a sight; you should come up here when the white one is flying. I haven't seen it recently, mind you,” he said, “but the way Darla would get it to bank. Caught the light something wonderful. Like a white angel, it was. It would take your breath away.”

“I can imagine,” said Maik. He had expected a contribution from his DCI, but when he looked over, Jejeune was staring at Doherty with a strange, troubled expression.

“The prince has a white Gyrfalcon in his cast?”

Doherty nodded. “Beautiful bird. Pure as the driven snow. I've seen it down there plenty of times, though, as I say, not lately.”

“Since when?” Neither Maik nor the other man could have missed the urgency in Jejeune's question.

“I couldn't say.” Doherty shrugged. “A couple of weeks anyway.”

Jejeune thought for a moment. “Did Darla ever mention a man named Jack de Laet to you?”

“We weren't talking, Inspector. Not for months.” There was regret in Doherty's voice.

“You've never heard the name, or heard Darla talk about people from out of town, foreigners, interested in the birds?”

“Kazakhs?” asked Maik, just to show that, however determined Jejeune might be to keep him out of all this, he was not prepared to go quietly.

The inference was clear. No one could pursue an interest in the prince's Gyrfalcons without Darla Doherty's co-operation. Niall Doherty shook his head firmly. “My Darla thought the world of those birds. She would never let anybody near them that wasn't supposed to be there.”

“I'm told this De Laet could be a persuasive man, Mr. Doherty,” said Jejeune softly. “I know it's difficult …”

But the older man was emphatic. “You're wrong, Inspector. My Darla would never be a party to anything like that. Never.”

His vehemence swept over the detectives like a wave. There was a certainty to the denial that was compelling.

When Maik turned back to Doherty, the older man was staring down at the coastline. “We used to gather samphire from down there, Darla and me, when she was a girl.” He called it
samfer
, in the local way. “There used to be an old man who would come by and collect it, too, with a horse and cart. He'd sell it in newspaper cones. Had a song — ‘Samfer, long and green'. ” Doherty sang softly, his thin voice wavering back across the years. He continued to stare out at the sea for a long time, at the mercantile past of the north Norfolk coast that had been swallowed by the centuries, at the generations lost to time, as the rest of the world moved on, without even noticing their passing. “They'll walk away, one day. You know that? Tear up our shoreline and then, when it no longer suits them to be here, they'll be gone.”

“The Old Dairy project has invested a lot of time and money in this operation,” said Maik. “What makes you think they won't be in it for the long haul?”

“Mongstad, in Norway. You've likely never heard of it, Sergeant, but it was the largest carbon capture and storage facility in the world at one time. It's closed now. Abandoned. Longannet, in Scotland, too. If they can walk away from projects as big as those, it will happen here, too, eventually.”

Jejeune looked at his watch and motioned to Danny Maik. Fishing, the inspector had called it. Go out to see Niall Doherty and drop a line in the water, see if anything bit.
Had it?
wondered Maik, letting his look linger on his DCI.
Perhaps.

Doherty was looking across the hill on his property, at an invisible place, far beyond the lapwings and gulls and crows gathered there. “I'll spread her ashes here,” he said, as much to himself as the others. “She may have left me once, but as the folks round here say, Norfolk chickens always come home to roost.”

T
hey left Doherty on his hillside, staring out over the sea. Jejeune was quiet as they made their way back to their cars. The silence confirmed he was on to something, but that knowledge didn't help to quell Danny Maik's anger. But he would hold his tongue for the moment, in case the DCI had anything to tell him, after all.

“You saw those birds in the facility, Sergeant,” said Jejeune eventually. “Any one in particular stand out?”

Why the hell can't he just ask what he wants to know?
thought Maik. Why did he always have to go around things like this, as if he didn't quite want you to know what he was thinking? In his frustration, Maik decided to match his DCI's obtuseness like for like. “I'm no expert, but they all looked the same to me. If I had to guess, I'd say they were all the same species.”

He tired of the game, and added. “And colour.”

He looked at Jejeune as they walked across the uneven ground, challenging him to ask. Could he have missed it? Was he colourblind? Something in his look seemed to get through, and his DCI nodded, accepting the report. There had been no white Gyrfalcon in the mews when Danny Maik was there.

They walked in silence again for a long time. Maik realized Jejeune wasn't going to offer him any information. If he wanted to know anything, it would be up to him to ask. He stopped as they approached the parked cars and turned to Jejeune.

“Jack de Laet,” Maik said. “If I was going to be pulling names out of the air, I'd probably start with something a bit less exotic. Was this the man from Scotland? You said he could be persuasive, as if he might not be anymore.”

Jejeune nodded slightly to acknowledge Maik's perceptiveness.

“I think De Laet recruited Darla Doherty to help him get a falcon he intended to sell to somebody from Kazakhstan. I believe De Laet had an order for a wild white Gyrfalcon, but he couldn't capture one, so he convinced Darla Doherty to supply the white bird from the prince's collection instead.”

Maik nodded to himself but said nothing. If Jejeune knew the name, knew this Kazakh connection, why didn't he say anything to Holland? Why shut him out like this? Why shut all of them out?

“I'm just wondering, sir, how we came up with the name, how we know he's tied in to anything down here?”

There was a long pause. Maik could hear birds in the trees, and the faint hum of traffic from the road that ran past the front of Doherty's property. Still, Jejeune waited. He seemed torn, struggling within himself, wrestling with a decision he needed to make. It was a long time before he spoke. “There's nothing official, Sergeant.”

It was the first time he'd ever fallen back on the phrase, and it resonated with Maik in a way few of the DCI's comments had before. “Nothing official,” confirmed Maik quietly.

“There seems to have been a phone call made to De Laet … from Saltmarsh. It makes sense that it would have come from Darla Doherty.”

Maik said nothing as the two men walked to their separate cars in silence. He watched Jejeune drive off, but sat in his Mini for a long time, not even turning on his music, for once. In his mind, he was replaying the phone call from Iron McLeod, the DCI's reference check, as he had jokingly put it at the time. There was plenty in McLeod's gravelly accent that might have been difficult to make out, but not the words Maik was thinking about now. They rang out as clearly as when he had first heard them. “I know your man's got a stellar reputation,” McLeod had told Danny over the miles, “but if he pulls anything out of this one, he's going to have to be a bloody miracle worker. The body has nothing on it to give us any clues at all. No documents, no wallet. No phone.”