Part of the Silence

Jack’s heart always sank slightly when he saw Sara. She was an adequate police constable, but that was the point. Adequate was functional; it wasn’t inspiring. She was nice enough, though irritating as hell, he tried to stop himself thinking. Be charitable, he told himself. Who knew what was going on in Sara’s life? As he knew only too well, you never knew what lay behind the mask.

“Good. Thanks.” He was about to ask if he’d missed anything, but for once Sara was ahead of him.

“Abbie wants to see you. She’s in her office.” Sara pulled a face, as though she and Jack were in cahoots, and Abbie was the bad guy, which she wasn’t. It was inappropriate—and typical of her—but Sara and Abbie were chalk and cheese. Jack pretended not to notice.

“Right,” he said, surprised. Abbie was here? He hadn’t seen her much since her promotion to detective constable. Then, “Thanks.”

He wandered through the door into the familiar corridor. There were half a dozen small rooms along it, but these days, only three of them were used as offices. Devon and Cornwall was a huge area to cover, but even so, policing levels had shrunk to their lowest ever.

Outside one of those offices, he could hear Abbie talking on the phone. After knocking quietly, he pushed the door open and watched her face light up.

She held the phone away from her face. “Give me a minute. I’ll be right with you.”

Leaving her to it, Jack carried on to his office. It was a luxury to have his own, due only to the fact that he’d been a detective chief inspector until a major restructuring was carried out and a number of police stations closed. It had happened as his personal life imploded, meaning he hadn’t wanted to move away. In short, Josh’s death had granted him privileges he detested. No one wanted to be treated differently because their son had died. In the same way, he hadn’t wanted everyone’s sympathy. It was nothing to do with them. Everyone died at some point. Yes, it was tragic when it happened to a teenager, more so when it could so easily have been avoided. Jack swallowed. He couldn’t let himself go there. The bottom line was, you got on with it. You didn’t have a choice.

As he sat at his desk, it was as though he hadn’t been away. The memory of Spain had already merged into his past. He switched on his laptop just as there was a knock at his door.

“Jack?” It was Abbie. “How are you?”

She was alluding to more than his holiday, Jack knew that. In spite of his efforts to keep his private life to himself, word had got around, but he didn’t want to talk about the end of his marriage. “Hey. Good. Thank you. I wasn’t expecting to see you here. I’m guessing there’s more than the usual going on.” By the usual, he meant the odd break-ins or traffic accidents that occurred, which didn’t merit the presence of a detective constable.

Abbie nodded, coming over to his desk and taking a seat, as she placed a file in front of him. “Afraid so. A brutal attack that almost killed a woman, and a missing three-year-old child—her daughter.”

There was to be no gently easing back into work, then. Jack took the file. “Is she local?”

“We think so.” Abbie hesitated. “She has amnesia. What she does remember isn’t reliable. We’ve found her ex-partner, who was somewhat unsympathetic. He said they weren’t in touch and he didn’t even know about the daughter. So far, only one woman has recognized her. But we’ve managed to locate where we think she was living, and we’ve just found her mother. She’s flying over from Italy. Apparently, she lives there. . . .”

Jack was frowning. “Forensics?”

Abbie shook her head. “That’s the thing. They haven’t been able to find any trace of a child in that house. It starts getting more complicated, because—”

She was interrupted by a knock on the door.

“Sorry to interrupt . . .” It was Sara. “We’ve just had a call. Someone’s found a body in the middle of a field.”

Jack got up. “I’ll go. Are you coming?” He glanced at Abbie.

“I’m due at the hospital.” Looking at her watch, she got up. “I should have left. I’ll catch up with you later.”

* * *

Maybe the absence of the quiet Monday morning Jack had hoped for wasn’t such a bad thing. It meant his head was filled with work, instead of his train wreck of a marriage. Sara’s directions took him along the main road to Wadebridge, then along narrower roads toward the coast.

He passed the single track he’d driven down to walk Beamer last night, then carried on through the handful of cottages that was Port Quin, then up the twisting bumpy road, until he came to another police car pulled up in a turnout.

Parking on the bank, he watched the officer in the other car get out. It was PC Pete Underwood. He got out of his car, relieved. Underwood was thorough and reliable. But there were so few of them these days, you almost always knew who you’d be working with.

“Do you know where we’re going?” He addressed Underwood as they climbed the stile into a field.

“I think so. The guy who called in was working on one of the farms. A David West. He’s a contractor. He was cutting maize with another farmworker when they saw this woman running across the field. She’d come up from the coast path. I think we should head over there.” He pointed in the direction of the coast.

They walked in silence across the field. It sloped steeply. Winter grazing for sheep, Jack was thinking. The surroundings were breathtakingly beautiful: the fields edged with stone walls, the sun on the faded straw of neighboring stubble fields, soon to be turned to brown earth when plowing started. Ahead of them, endless miles of cerulean sky and sea.

As they crossed into the next field, the land flattened out. “I reckon that’s them.” Underwood pointed to one of the stubble fields, where a couple of giant forage harvesters had parked near each other.

“It must be. There’s nothing else around here.” Jack picked up the pace, feeling the wind on his face. As they got nearer, he could make out three people. Two men and a young woman, who watched them as they drew closer.

“Jack Bentley.” Holding out his police badge, Jack glanced at his colleague. “This is PC Underwood. I understand you’ve found a body?”

“She found it.” One of the men nodded toward the woman.

“Can you show me where?”

She hesitated, then nodded. “It’s over there.” She pointed toward the remaining area of uncut maize, then started walking. Jack followed.

“What were you doing here?”

“I was walking. On the coast path. I live a couple of miles away. I quite often walk here. Only it was windier than I expected, so I decided to head inland.”

“The footpath is . . . ?” Jack was querying what had brought her so far off the beaten track.

“Oh God, the footpath’s way over there.” She flapped her arm somewhere indiscriminate. “But I knew something wasn’t right. That’s why I came over.”

“What do you mean?”

She stopped in her tracks, spun round to stare at him. “It’s the birds. Look at them.” Jack followed her gaze to above the uncut maize, where the birds were circling, every now and then dropping down and disappearing into it. “It’s as if they’re following the plow—only there is no plow.” She shook her head and carried on walking.

“At first, I thought there must be a dead animal. A large one, like a deer, that had been shot but not killed, and had run into the maize before dying there,” she added.

She sounded matter-of-fact, but then, if you lived in the countryside, you were constantly reminded of the impermanence of life. The pattern of the seasons, the preying of foxes, the slaughter of farm animals.

He watched a large crow swoop down, dropping below the tops of the tall spikes of maize, before it reappeared. Briefly, it flew toward them, before veering away, but not before he could see something hanging from its beak. Straining his eyes, he tried to make out what it was as it flashed momentarily in the sun.

“Did you see that?” The woman stopped for a moment. “It looked like a pendant.” She carried on walking.

Jack had thought so, too. But as he watched the bird, the crow dropped it. His eyes fixed on where he thought the object had fallen, Jack ran across the field.

“Can you see it?” The voice came from behind him—the woman had followed him. “It must be here somewhere.”

It would be a miracle if they found it—it was the proverbial needle in the haystack—but then a few feet away, a metallic glint caught his eye. Reaching down, he held it dangling from his fingers.

“Good work.” The woman looked impressed.

As they walked back toward where the body was, he wondered where the other attack had taken place. He’d have to read up on it as soon as he got back to the station. A maize field was a perfect environment in which to hide a body—seasonally almost impenetrable, especially now, while the crop was taller than he was and just about to be consumed by monstrous forage harvesters, which devoured everything in their path. If the woman hadn’t seen the birds, the harvesters would have gone through, leaving nothing. The thought stopped him in his tracks.

“You might have been hurt.” He was addressing the woman, who, once lost in the maize, would have been invisible to the drivers of the forage harvesters.

She shrugged. “Well, I wasn’t. I think it’s this way. It’s where most of the birds are.”

Upon glancing up, he saw that she was right. The maize was dense around them as they found their way through, pushing aside the woody stems, every now and then glancing up at the birds circling above. Up close, Jack was astonished at how many there were.

In front of him, the woman stopped suddenly. “It’s just through there. I’ll wait here.”

Apprehension had replaced her previous air of self-assurance. Understandably, he thought as she stood back to let him pass her. Jack nodded. “Of course.”

Just a few yards on, the maize started to thin out. Then, as he glanced sideways through the leaves, he saw a hand.