An upmarket mystery — a naturalist reads a museum the way he reads the wild.

Dr Elias Travers has spent twenty years in the rainforest of Suriname, studying rare animals and, just as closely, the people around them: who touches, who dominates, who deceives. On the one rock in the river where a satellite phone can find the sky, he learns that his mentor, Professor Shaw, has died late at night among the collections of a small New York natural history museum.

Everyone agrees it was an accident. Elias does not. A gemsbok skull, from the antelope that gave Europe the unicorn, has been wiped clean of dust, and its horns put back the wrong way round. Then his own signature turns up on papers approving the removal of valuable specimens, and the naturalist becomes a suspect.

Behind the book. The gemsbok is an oryx of the southern African desert. Seen side-on, its two long, straight horns can line up as one, and travellers’ tales of such animals are among the roots of Europe’s unicorn. The museum in the novel is invented; the habits of the people in it are not.

Read the opening

Chapter 1 · Call

The insect chorus cut out just before sunrise.

That was how the forest worked. Eight hours of one sound, so constant it became part of the dark and the damp and the hammock strap, and heard only when it stopped. The silence began at the river and spread. An animal had come down to the water.

Elias did not move. He lay watching the light come in under the edge of the tarp, thin and cool, and the cloth above him went from black to green. Nearby the mist was lifting off the river. After a while the chorus came back from the same side, at first a few insect voices, then all of them. A tapir, from the weight of the one splash. It had waded in, drunk, and gone back up the bank.

He was damp, not cold. Grit in the seam of his left sleeve had been rubbing a graze on his elbow for a few days. Today they would be going downriver to the signal rock, where whatever the world had sent him in a fortnight would be waiting. It would keep. New York was nearly three thousand miles north, and made more noise than anywhere on earth, and nobody who lived there heard any of it.

The river ran quieter than people expected. Deep water coursed by almost without sound. What the Coppename had to say it whispered at the edges, against roots, and against the hull of the boat pulled up below the hide, which knocked now and then because the water had dropped in the night. On the far ridge the howler monkeys started. They were not loud, but the roar had weight, like an outboard two bends downriver.

Just after six, with the light not yet down to the understory, birdsong. Forty-one called. Two notes first, quiet, drawn in on the breath, so low that anyone much farther off would not have known they were there. Then the three notes. The first two rose and the third went up, broke, and came down. It came at a volume he felt in the bones of his skull, like standing too close to a struck bell. Thirty feet away. Forty-one had called from that perch every morning for a week.

He did not look up. There was nothing to look at. He had only ever seen forty-one once.

He lifted the field recorder hanging on a cord around his neck. “Oh-six-nineteen. Four-one, perch A17 again, call two and three. No change.”

There was also a paragraph he owed the journal, the abstract at the front for scientists who could not be bothered to read the full paper.

“Screaming piha. Lipaugus vociferans. Gray, thrush-sized, the color of the middle of the forest, which is where it lives, so nobody sees it. One of the loudest birds alive, a chainsaw from a bird that weighs less than a deck of cards. The males call from the same perches for years, and each has his own voice. The females come and listen and choose. Nobody has ever seen what happens after the choice is made.”

“Hori-nanga,” said Iwan, from the hammock, with his eyes shut. Elias laughed.

Iwan was twenty-six, dark-skinned and lean as a paddle, with a scar through one eyebrow that lifted it. He always looked about to disagree with something.

In the understory, in the dark, came the flock that mattered. Antwrens, greenlets, a woodcreeper working the trunks, a dozen kinds and every one of them the color of bark. Elias listened as they sorted themselves out, the way other men listened to a dinner party, noting who spoke first, who gave way, who was allowed to interrupt.

Then the alarm. One hard falling note, to his left, forty feet, at head height. Every other sound in the flock stopped. A bird dropped through the leaves. A single wingbeat, a scuffle, the click of a bill closing on an insect.

Not a hawk. The flock was talking again in seconds. Somewhere to his left a gray antshrike was eating a katydid that had not been his.

“Oh-six-fifty-two,” Elias said to the recorder. “Antshrike. False alarm. Third time this week.”

It came again ten minutes later, and this time the flock did not come back.

Something hit the leaves low down to his right, hard enough to shake them. A bird screamed, a thin torn sound that went on too long, and then the whole understory went up at once. Every kind of bird in the flock was shouting, rattles and chatters and scolds. Under the noise he could hear the scream getting weaker. He did not need to see it. A forest-falcon, the kind that sits in the dark of the understory and waits for a flock to come to it. The scream stopped. A hawk left a silence behind it that lasted. After a long time, somewhere down toward the river, the falcon called. One hoarse note, over and over, like a man out in the trees calling a single word to someone who did not answer.

He listened for the antshrike. It did not call.

He lifted the recorder. “Oh-seven-twenty. Forest-falcon. Took the antshrike.” He listened a moment longer. “Flock dispersed.”

* * *

By eight Iwan had the boat in the water, and two bends down the signal rock stood in full sun.

It rose out of the river, a gray hump the size of a car, bare of trees. Nowhere else for miles did the sky come all the way down to the water, and nowhere else would the satellite dish work. Iwan held the boat against the stone with one hand in a crack. Elias climbed up with the dish in its bag, a white slab no bigger than a laptop, propped it against his boot facing the sky, and waited for it to find a satellite. It took its time, and he watched a heron work the far bank while it did.

The phone woke in his hand. Three messages, sent over nine days and delivered together, the oldest first.

A New York number. He pressed play and held the phone to his ear, and turned his head a little, to bring his good ear round. The line had been bad wherever Shaw called from. Every few words it dropped a syllable and the voice came back a half-second later, as though it had to be fetched. It did not matter. He had heard that voice every few months for twenty years, on bad lines like this one, and across restaurant tables in Paramaribo when Shaw came by on his way to somewhere else. He would have known it through a wall.

“It’s Gerald,” Shaw said, and laughed, the short warm laugh he always put in front of anything he wanted. It did not last. “I need you here. In New York. Not next month—now, this week, whatever it costs, I’ll make it right.” The line dropped a syllable and gave it back. “There’s something here I need your eye on. Yours. Nobody else’s will do, and I can’t say more on this line.” A breath. “I wouldn’t ask if there were anyone else. Please come.”

That was all.

Gerald Shaw had found him the grants, written the letters, and flown down every year to buy him dinner and argue about his methods. Whenever one of Elias’s papers came out in Ibis, Shaw rang to tell him what was wrong with it. He had given and given. He had never once asked for anything. He was asking now, and he had said please. It was the old feeling, the one only Shaw produced, of being gently scolded by someone entirely on your side.

He was still smiling when he opened the second.

It came from his brother, Wade. A video first, forty seconds long. He had to shade the screen with his hand to see it. A local news clip. A New York street at night under blue lights. Police tape strung along an iron fence. An ambulance at the curb with its back doors open and nobody hurrying. A woman with a microphone said that a senior figure at the Delafield Museum on Washington Square had died in what police were describing as a tragic accident.

Under the video, a voice note.

“Eli.” His brother’s voice, from the kitchen on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. A screen door, a radio, laughing gulls. “That’s your professor, ain’t it. On the TV. The one who come and got you.” A pause long enough for the radio. “I’m sorry, bud.”

Wade had never written anything down in his life.

Elias sat down on the rock. The stone had been in the sun for an hour and the heat came up through him. On the far bank the heron struck, came up with nothing, and went still again.

The third message was two days old, from a number he did not know. A woman’s voice, low and even, a voice that finished its sentences.

“Dr. Travers, this is Adele Shaw. We have not met. I am Gerald’s wife, and I am sorry to tell you this in a message. Gerald died two nights ago, at the Museum. They say it was an accident.” A pause, chosen. “The funeral is one week from today. He would have wanted you there. So would I.”

He played Shaw’s again. He did not need the words. He wanted the voice, which he would not hear again. Halfway through, he had the feeling he got when a bird he knew by heart called with one note out of place. He listened for it, and it was gone.

Five days, then. Two of them on the river, one in Paramaribo, a night in the air. It could be done, if the river let him.

* * *

Back at camp Iwan went to the fire, and Elias kept walking, along the ridge path to the hide. The heat came down through the canopy and lay on everything, and the birds that had sung at dawn sat in the shade with their bills open. He sat on the edge of the hammock where he had lain that morning, with the tarp above him gone pale in the glare.

He had a procedure for most of what the forest could do to a man. Fever, snakebite, a flooded camp, a boat lost on the rapids. He knew what to do first and what to do after it. He had nothing for this. He sat with his hands on his knees and waited. For twenty years, every few months, the line would open and Shaw would say his name, and for an hour there would be someone at the other end who knew exactly what he was doing and why it mattered. The only man who read every word he wrote and told him what was wrong with it.

He had been saving a question for their next dinner on the Waterkant. Whether Shaw had ever met anybody who had seen screaming pihas mate. Nobody else would know where to begin. Now there was nobody to ask. Every call had begun the same way. Before anything else, before the laugh, before the weather in New York or what was wrong with his last paper, Shaw would say his name. Elias. Then It’s Gerald. Then the laugh. Shaw used names the way other men used handshakes. He had once told Elias, over dinner in Paramaribo, that he had never forgotten one in his life.

Elias took out the phone and played it a third time.

It’s Gerald.

He stopped it there. No Elias first.

* * *

Hendrik’s outboard came up the river in the middle of the afternoon, a fuel boat riding low and in no hurry. Elias heard it two bends down, long before Iwan did.

Hendrik ran fuel up the Coppename from Witagron. He was a Kwinti, one of the Maroon people of the river, whose ancestors had walked off the Dutch plantations three hundred years ago and gone upriver where nobody could follow them. He was as wide as one of his own drums, darker than Iwan, and had a gold tooth in front that caught the light a moment before he said anything unkind. He was going back down before dark, and Elias would be in the boat.

Elias packed for two weeks. Two shirts, the old boots in the bag and the good ones on his feet, the recorder, and the letter Shaw had written for him at nineteen, on Museum paper, to whomever it might concern in Suriname. He carried it where other men carried a photograph. He packed slowly and in order, and it helped, as counting helped. He folded one shirt twice before he noticed.

Another boat engine came up from downriver, too fast for the water. Hendrik straightened from his fuel drums. Nobody else moved. The boat came around the bend and in hard against the bank. Five of them, Brazilians, garimpeiros from the wildcat gold diggings, and a Maroon boatman at the tiller who did not look at anyone. Shotguns across the thwarts. Machetes. The one nearest the bank held his weapon with a tremor in both hands, from the mercury they burned off the gold. The man in the bow was shouting good afternoon.

Elias did not stand. “Do you always come up the river this fast?” he said to the boatman, in Sranan.

The boatman, who had not looked at anyone, almost smiled. “Only when the porknockers are paying,” he said. Porknockers were what the river called the gold men, who worked the river banks for themselves with a pan and a shotgun.

They wanted fuel, a starter cord for the outboard and the radio, and said they were going back down to Witagron. They got the cord and one jerrycan of Hendrik’s, and paid for neither. They went off round the bend laughing. Elias knew what those men would have done if he had been alone. Iwan had watched him the whole time, and not the boat.

The river had dropped again in the day. A bar of sand had come up below the landing where none had been last week, pale and new, marked along its edge by an animal that had come down in the night to drink. Iwan carried the bag down and put it in the bow. He did not say anything until it was in.

“The count,” he said.

“Back within the month,” said Elias. “Keep the microphone on forty-one. If I’m late, run it yourself. The dish and the phone are in the tent.”

Iwan nodded and looked upriver, not at him. “Those men. They weren’t going to Witagron. They went farther up.”

“There’s nothing up there for them.”

“There’s the ridge,” Iwan said.

The ridge was the point of all of it. Five dry seasons of counts, every male by voice, were the reason the government kept it on the list of places the miners were not allowed to go. Without the count it was only forest, and forest with gold under it.

Elias looked upriver for a while. “If they come back, give them whatever they ask for and take the boat down to Witagron. The birds will keep.”

“The count won’t.”

“Then it waits.”

Hendrik pulled the cord and the outboard caught at the third try. The noise of it covered everything. Elias could hear nothing past it.

They swung out into the current. Elias sat in the bow facing back, which was not the way anyone sat in a boat, and watched the camp go small. The tarp, the smoke, the drying line with nothing on it, and Iwan on the sand with one hand up, not waving, just up. Then the bend took them away. Under the engine, too faint for anyone else in the boat to hear, forty-one called again.

Two days to Paramaribo. One in the air to New York. He would land the night before they buried Gerald Shaw, who had never in his life forgotten a name, and had left out his.

© Rae Campbell. All rights reserved.