‘What if they don’t come back?’ asks Jimmy. ‘You could spend the rest of your life trying to catch them.’
‘Vultures aren’t built to fly far.’ The old eccentric doesn’t take his eyes from the computer screen. ‘They’re lazy scavengers. They ride the thermals mainly. Until they get a whiff of food, then zoom.’ He smacks his hands together. ‘Besides, Wiltshire is the only habitat they know. Their natural home now.’
‘Lots of army activity around here,’ warns Jimmy. ‘I hope they don’t get shot down.’
‘No problem. Here they come,’ says de Wale excitedly.
The vultures swoop down low over the Range Rover and settle in the field about a hundred metres in front of the two men. Instantly, they start to forage. Senses bristling, they flutter and land a few feet away and nudge the earth again. The smaller of the two skips to the side and hammers his beak into rutted tracks two hundred metres from the remains of the barn.
Jimmy watches with mixed emotions. He’d hoped for more. Something spectacular like when sniffer dogs go crazy and start whimpering and digging as though they’re trying to find a short cut to Australia. But the vultures don’t provide any such show. They lazily forage for almost an hour and don’t venture out of the field next to the torched barn. Jimmy is feeling pretty dejected. He checks his watch. ‘Let’s call it quits. It was worth a shot.’
‘I’ll get a treat and clap them in,’ says de Wale.
‘Okay.’ Jimmy glances at the laptop screen while the buzzard master goes to get some dead mice out of a sealed sandwich box. The computer has been recording the birds’ flight paths using the GPS. Plotting lines on a grid. But these lines go pretty much straight up and down the field, almost as though they’d been mowing a lawn or ploughing crops.
It is a thought that he can’t shake. Strange creatures. Why would they do that? He goes back to his car. Roots in the boot until he finds some spare evidence bags and then climbs over the stile that leads to the field. Jimmy lines himself up with the pecking buzzards and starts to collect samples. Soil samples.
It is a long shot, but if he is right, the vultures have found what remains of Tony Naylor.
The missing man’s body has somehow been pulped and spread like muck across the open field.
97
Megan puts two glasses of wine down on the pub table that separates her and Gideon. It’s a schizophrenic kind of place. Half bistro, half old-fashioned boozer. Crab cakes and dominoes. Rocket salad and pork scratchings.
‘Thanks.’ He pulls the glass towards him but doesn’t drink. He’s got things on his mind. Things he wants to say. ‘Do you remember when you came to my father’s house, I told you that I thought he’d killed himself because of this secret society, the Followers of the Sacreds?’
She nods apprehensively, worrying about his mental health. ‘Yes, I remember. This was the secret organisation you said he mentioned in his diaries.’
Gideon detects the scepticism. ‘Do you think I’m crazy? All screwed up with grief and trauma?’
‘No.’ She tries to be sympathetic. ‘You’re certainly not crazy. But I do think you’re very stressed out.’ She leans forward and speaks quietly. ‘Gideon, it might well be that your father was involved in some kind of secret organisation, but I doubt it had anything to do with his death.’ She flinches at the thought of what she’s about to say. ‘I’m sorry, but in my experience people take their own lives for a lot of highly personal reasons, and it’s never about membership of some private club or other.’
He shakes his head and shifts the glass nervously around the table. ‘The man who broke into my father’s house and set fire to the place belonged to this group.’ He leans closer. ‘And this isn’t a scout group I’m talking about. This is something bad.’
Megan slips into her more official interview mode. ‘You might believe that but you can’t prove it, can you?’
‘I know it,’ says Gideon. He puts a fist to his heart. ‘In here, I know it.’
‘In law that’s not enough.’ Megan can see he’s hurting but there’s nothing to gain from letting him delude himself. ‘Don’t you think that if your father was in such a society, such a close brotherhood, then some of them would have turned up today to show their respects? There was no one there. No one but you and me.’
The comment stings. ‘Maybe they didn’t know about it. It wasn’t in any newspapers.’ He has another thought. ‘Maybe they chose to stay away.’ He looks at her icily. ‘Perhaps they expected the police to be there.’
She sees what he’s driving at. ‘That’s not only why I came.’
‘No, of course not.’ He realises it sounded bitter. ‘Sorry.’ He finally takes a drink of the wine. Sour apples. He has no taste or appreciation of anything at the moment. ‘I had a builder round the other day, said he’d heard there’d been a fire and wanted to help fix the damage. He told me he’d done work for my father, so I ended up letting him in to do a valuation. Next thing I know he’s upstairs poking around.’
She puts her glass down. ‘Did he take anything?’
‘Didn’t have time but I found him in my father’s private room trying to look through the diaries I showed you.’
She’s not sure what he means. ‘Your father’s private room? You mean his bedroom?’
‘No. The room next to it. He had built a secret area at the end of the landing. That’s where he hid all his journals. If you didn’t know it was there, you’d never spot it. But I’d left the door open.’
Megan wonders for a moment whether he’d accidentally let a con man or another burglar into the house, someone sizing the place up for antiques. ‘This builder, did you get his name?’
‘Smithsen, Dave Smithsen.’
She digs out a pen from her bag and writes the name on a beer mat. ‘Do you want me to check that he really is a builder?’
‘No need. I went to see him. I asked him outright if he was involved in the Followers with my father. He denied it.’
Megan takes a long look at the tired and grief-stricken man across the table. Hidden rooms. Secret sects. Builders that he mistakes for prowlers. The guy is sick. Paranoid. She wouldn’t be surprised to learn he’s suffering from some form of post-traumatic stress.
‘Gideon, I think you’re reading too much into all this. You’re all churned up and need some time to get closure on your father’s death, the break-in and the attack on you. You’ll get respite when we lock someone up, and hopefully that will be soon. We’re running face-analysis data on the phone photo you gave us and we’ve got word out with our informants on the streets.’
He nods.
Megan sees it’s not enough. ‘We’re taking all this seriously. I promise you.’
‘No, you’re not,’ he snaps. ‘My father took his life because of something that this group was doing. Something awful. And you’re not taking it seriously at all. You’re just concerned with the damned break-in and no doubt your crime figures.’ He slugs down the rest of his wine and stands. ‘Thanks for the drink and coming out here. I’m going to go. Need to get some fresh air. Be on my own.’
98
Megan thinks about everything Gideon said as she drives back to Devizes. She’s sure his fears and paranoia are unfounded. He’s just mixed up and stressed out. By the time she’s back at her desk, she has a simple plan to banish any nagging doubts and prove there’s nothing in any of his accusations.
She hits the phone and uses her network of contacts to get the direct line of Professor Lillian Cooper, Head of Haematology at Salisbury District Hospital. The professor is a close friend of someone she knows. Megan dials the medic’s number and manages to coax out of her the result of the blood tests Gideon had taken when he was kept overnight following the fire.