The Birdwatcher’s Empty Chair
The hide at Corren Marsh smelled of damp wool and old tobacco, the wooden walls worn smooth by decades of elbows leaning in just the same way. Agnes Lorne arrived at half past seven, as she always did on the morning of the Wading Bird Count, and found four folding chairs arranged around the observation slit, a thermos of tea already breathing steam into the cold air, and no sign of Gerald Finch.
That was wrong. Gerald was always first.
Agnes set her binoculars on the ledge and looked out across the reed beds. A grey heron stood motionless in the shallows, one leg lifted. The water was the colour of old pewter.
“He rang me last night,” said Ron Buttle, arriving behind her with mud on both boots and a notebook under his arm. “Said he wasn’t well. Stomach.”
“Gerald has never missed the count in nineteen years,” Agnes said.
“People get stomach bugs, Agnes.”
She poured herself a cup of tea and said nothing more.
The count proceeded without Gerald, though his absence sat in the hide like a fourth person. They recorded eleven species. Ron tallied the numbers in his notebook with a blunt pencil, frowning at each entry. By nine o’clock the light had sharpened and the marsh had come alive with the thin piping of dunlin moving through the sedge.
It was as Agnes was scanning the far bank that she noticed the wellington boots.
A pair of green Hunters, standing upright in the reeds at the marsh’s western edge, perhaps three hundred metres out. Too upright. Boots left in a rush are never that neat. She watched them for a full minute through the binoculars. They did not move.
“Ron.”
“Mm.”
“Look at the western bank. Just left of the alder.”
He looked. A pause. “That’ll be where Gerald stores his kit sometimes. He has a dry bag out there.”
“Does he store his boots as well?”
Another pause, longer this time.
Agnes was already pulling on her waterproof.
She found Gerald Finch sitting on an upturned crate behind a wall of reeds, wearing two pairs of socks and no boots, eating a sandwich wrapped in greaseproof paper. He looked up at her without particular surprise. His face was wind-reddened, his grey hair pressed flat on one side from sleeping against something hard.
“You’d better come in from the cold,” Agnes said.
He looked at the sandwich. Then he looked at her. “I suppose you were going to find me eventually.”
He had been there since the previous afternoon, he told her, once they were back in the hide and Ron had poured him a cup of tea with hands that could not quite keep still. He had not been avoiding the count. He had been avoiding the village.
“Specifically,” Agnes said, “Hayward’s hardware shop.”
Gerald set down the cup. “How did you know?”
“You were the only person other than Martin Hayward with a key to the stockroom. Martin told the parish council it was just the two of them. When the padlock was cut last Thursday and three thousand pounds’ worth of equipment went missing, the police looked at Martin. But Martin’s delivery log showed he was in Truro.” She folded her hands in her lap. “That left one other name.”
“I didn’t take anything,” Gerald said. His voice was entirely level, the kind of level that costs a great deal to maintain.
“I know you didn’t.”
Ron looked up sharply.
“Gerald,” Agnes continued, “what did you see?”
The reeds moved outside. The heron called once, a flat, prehistoric sound that carried across the water and faded.
Gerald had come by the shop on Thursday evening to return a borrowed drill. He had seen, through the stockroom window, two men loading a van. He had recognised one of them as the nephew of the town councillor who had been pushing for Hayward’s lease to be reviewed. He had understood immediately what it was meant to look like, and he had understood just as immediately that he was the only witness, that his key made him a suspect, and that the man he had seen had a temper well known to anyone who had lived in Trevannon long enough.
He had panicked. He had come to the marsh because it was the only place he knew well enough to disappear into.
Agnes nodded slowly. “You should have rung the police straight away.”
“I know that now.”
“You should ring them this morning.”
“Yes.”
“And Gerald.” She picked up her binoculars. “You should tell them what you saw. All of it. People who keep quiet to stay safe very rarely manage either.”
He nodded. His hands, around the tin cup, had finally stopped shaking.
By ten o’clock, Gerald had made the call from Ron’s mobile phone, speaking in a quiet, careful voice while Agnes and Ron looked out at the marsh and noted, in the log, a late-season greenshank moving through the shallows near the western reeds. Agnes wrote the entry herself, in her small, precise hand, the same hand that had corrected thirty years of her pupils’ work.
The green boots were still standing where Gerald had left them. She would remind him to retrieve them on his way back.
Some things, she thought, simply needed to be collected before the tide came in.
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