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CHAPTER ONE

It was a warm May evening, a Saturday, and a small boy was playing with a home-made model boat at the edge of a pool. The land was flat; water and reeds and marsh stretched to a shingle bank and beyond that to the North Sea. Everything was quiet and the village seemed a long way off. The sun was low, so when the boy stood up to reach across the water with a stick to untangle his boat from the reeds, the long shadows made him look very tall. He was playing very intently, and his father, dozing with a paper in the sun, watched and only smiled as the boy waded into the pool until the water began to spill into his wellingtons, poking further into the reeds with his stick.

The boy watched a lot of television, liked American thrillers, and it was with certainty that he had turned to his father, his Norfolk voice not showing excitement, even if he felt it, to say:

'Dad, there's a body in the marsh.'

His father rose to look, not believing, still dazed by the sun. When he saw the figure, surrounded by rushes like an animal in its nest, disgustingly, obviously, dead, he could think quite calmly:

He did not need to look at the face to tell that the young man lying in the shallow water at the edge of the pool did not belong to the village, because on the mud beside him, the strap still around his neck, lay a pair of binoculars.

'Dad,' said the boy again, very quietly. 'It's Tommy.'

Tom French had known that something would happen on that Saturday, that it would be a special day. He had planned it, prayed for it. He had planned it the day before, as he listened to the shipping forecast on his radio. He had decided then that he would go out early onto the marsh, well before he was due to start work at eight. He knew that he often made plans to get out early, but that he rarely carried them through. More often than not he was shaken awake by Dennis, the breakfast chef at the White Lodge. Tom had no incentive to get up for work: he was employed as vegetable chef, but worked as kitchen porter, cleaner, sometimes even as waiter. He hated the White Lodge. It kept him away from the marsh. He lived in a tiny room at the back of the hotel. In the mornings he would move silently about the kitchen, boiling water, setting tables, while Dennis, huge and tattooed, swore at the waitresses and sang Led Zeppelin loud. Often hungover, sometimes still drunk, Tom would move in a dream. Only between breakfast and lunch, as the kitchen grew hotter and the noise of singing and pans louder, would he begin to become alive. Then he would regret his failure to get out onto the marsh before work.

But on the Friday night he knew that he would go the next day. He was a twitcher, and as he listened to the shipping forecast he knew that he would go. He claimed that he had given up twitching, retired because of his work and his commitment to Sally. But he was still a twitcher. At one time he had travelled all over the country to see rare birds. He collected the sight of them as other people collect stamps or train numbers, but the pleasure in the rarities was not only in the collection, in the addition of a species to a list, but in the beauty of the birds themselves, in the delicate differences between them. He told himself, and other people, that for him birdwatching was an aesthetic, almost a spiritual, experience. He did not travel far now to see rare birds, but his passion for them was as deep as it had always been.

It had begun when he was a child, living over his parents' grocery shop in Kentish Town. He could remember vividly his first awareness that the world was inhabited by anything other than humans. He had been seven and a half, and he and some other boys had broken into a derelict house, still frightening and empty after the war, but showing no actual sign of bomb damage. There was only one piece of furniture in the house: a wooden cupboard which stood in the corner of the living room. Inside it was a stuffed kestrel. He had known that it was a bird, but he had never before seen a bird like it. It had fascinated him and he had fought off the other boys for possession of it. He had taken it to his schoolteacher who had named it, magically, and had introduced him to the local natural history society, where she made him a junior member.

Birdwatching became a secret passion, shared only with other birdwatchers. He could never have admitted at school, especially at his grammar school, what he did at weekends. As it was, he never quite belonged there. It was a relief to find other people who were as interested, as fanatically interested as he was, and he spent more and more time watching birds or travelling to see rarities. His only close friends were birdwatchers.