The Birdwatcher Read Online Free

known him, but Rayner never invited any questions about his personal life. And in return, Bob Rayner never asked South about his life either. As far as South went, this had been a perfect arrangement. They had talked about what was in front of their eyes; the weather, the state of the shacks and houses, the height of the shingle on the beck, how to clean fuel filters on a diesel engine and, of course, the birds. Bob Rayner had been eager to learn.
    ‘Sign of forced entry?’ Cupidi was asking the Crime Scene man.
    ‘We haven’t found any. The door was open when the woman arrived, far as I know.’
    Someone Bob Rayner knew? Someone they both knew, maybe? ‘Take a good look around, William,’ said Cupidi. ‘You notice anything different about the room? Anything missing?’
    He’d never really paid a lot of attention to what was in Bob Rayner’s house. It was easy not to because though it was unusual outside, the inside was perfectly normal. There were hundreds of books. Novels mostly. Dickens, Austen, a couple of Booker winners. Some nature books. A few books of prints by painters like Picasso and Chagal, the sort you’d find in any middle-class English house. On the walls, an oil painting of some ducks, a framed nineteenth-century map of South Kent.
    The drinks cabinet door was open, he noticed. ‘He always had a single malt. There’s nothing there.’
    ‘Good,’ she said, making a note. ‘Take your time. What about valuables? Do you know where he kept them?’
    He looked at the floor. Many of Bob’s books were ruined, face down on the floor, pages crumpled. Bob would have hated it; he was always such a neat man.
    He needed to concentrate, but it was not easy. It took him a second or two, looking towards the hallway, to realise that the hook by the front door was empty. He scanned the floor around it. ‘His binoculars are missing, I think.’
    ‘His binoculars?’ She nodded, made another note. ‘Anything else?’
    South shook his head. ‘What about the bedroom?’
    The bungalow had been built long before the two vast nuclear reactors had obscured the view to the west, the first in the sixties, the second twenty years later. The master bedroom would have had a great view once, looking out at the huge expanse of shingle. Bob had always slept in the smaller of the two bedrooms, the one with the window looking away from the power station. The other, facing the reactors, had been his spare bedroom and office.
    The wardrobe doors were open, drawers half pulled out. Papers were scattered by the bed. There were pairs of socks, too, all over the floor.
    ‘Maybe he came back and disturbed a burglar,’ said South.
    They looked into the second bedroom. Again, the drawers of a filing cabinet had been left open. A technician was fingerprinting the drawer handles.
    ‘Or someone who wanted to look like a burglar,’ she said. ‘We’ll come back when Scene of Crime are done, and go through all this.’
    ‘We?’
    ‘Don’t worry. I’ll arrange cover.’
    ‘You can try,’ he said. ‘There won’t be any cover, though. Don’t know what it was like in the Met, but there’s barely enough of us left down here to cover a weekday, let alone a weekend.’
    ‘The timing of this isn’t exactly brilliant for me, either. I was hoping to find my feet a little before something like this turned up.’ She sighed. ‘You never know. We may be able to get the worst of it wrapped up in a couple of days, if we’re lucky. I’m going outside for a cigarette,’ she said. ‘When you’re done in here, come outside and tell me if you found anything else missing.’
    For a while he watched the forensics man. It was careful work, trying to tease the slightest smudge into a clue. They would have to progress methodically through the whole house like this. It would be a while before DI McAdam and his team would be able to go through Bob’s belongings to try and figure out what had been taken.
     
    Outside, a man in a white coverall