Tuesday, 10 February
The eight vehicles of the stranded convoy stood in the light of the rising moon, the cold blue streak of dawn in the east as raw and unwelcome as the scream of an alarm clock. Shaw had slept for three hours in the CSI back?up van. He’d been a poor sleeper since childhood. So he was used to waking up in the dark.
But he wasn’t used to waking up anywhere that wasn’t home. Lena, his wife, said he was a homing pigeon, always circling back towards the loft. The contrast with his father was, as always, stark. Jack Shaw had liked working nights, sleeping at St James’s when a case was on, living the job. So his father’s life had been a secret from him; one of the reasons he’d been drawn to the same career, to find out, in little ways, what his father’s life had been like, to see how closely the real world snapped into place beside the one he’d imagined.
So when he’d woken in the CSI van he felt a familiar frisson of anxiety, the loss of something just beyond his understanding. He thought about texting home, but knew it was too early. And there’d still be no mobile signal. The night before he’d relayed a message through St James’s, telling Lena he’d be out overnight. But he wanted to hear her voice.
Shaw tried to think of the day ahead as separate from that which had gone before. Day Two: a time to take stock, step back, let the adrenaline fade. But the intensity of the images from the previous evening were too strong to dismiss: the blood?caked mouth of the man he’d pulled out of the sea; the crumpled figure at the wheel of the pick?up truck, impaled. The buzz was still electric, an intensity of consciousness, which made Peter Shaw feel very alive. He suppressed the excitement, aware that this was a drug to which his father had become addicted, the living of a life through the deaths of others. He’d wondered if that was why his father had made just that one rule: that his son could do anything with his life except become a policeman.
Shaw craved his own drug: the surge of endorphins, the rush of blood, the certainty of well?being that came with pushing himself to run, to swim, and to run again. He checked his map. The coast road was almost exactly a mile away. He set the stopwatch going on his wrist and began to run, despite the lightweight boots he wore, and when he found his footing secure in the crisp deep snow, he opened up into a wide, easy pace. The lights of the road came into view all too quickly and he slowed to a halt: 4 minutes 43 seconds. His body cried out for him to carry on, to push himself until his bloodstream pumped
He bent double, his palms in the snow, then straightened. His mobile buzzed, picking up text messages he’d been unable to receive overnight within the dead zone on Siberia Belt. He scrolled down: three from Lena, all pictures. His daughter in bed, a book folded over her head where it had dropped from her hands as she fell asleep, a snowman on the beach in front of the house, and one of Lena — cowering out of the wind on the veranda, taken by his daughter.
He jogged back along Siberia Belt, looking steadily ahead, imagining the cars the previous night, edging their way through the snow towards the sharp right?hand turn just before Gallow Marsh Farm. He rounded the bend and saw the stranded convoy. Each car and van sealed with signed plastic tags on the door handles and boots — except the Alfa, where he could see the CSI team still at work, the gentle buzz of a forensic vacuum within. The victim’s truck was hidden within a SOC tent, lit like a Chinese lantern. Ahead, the pine tree still blocked the road, but beyond it stood a fire rescue vehicle, and behind that an ambulance, blue lights silently flashing. Both emergency vehicles were parked in a lay?by Shaw had not noticed before, built to allow cars to pass each other on the narrow track.
The sound of a chainsaw serrated the silence and amongst the pine’s branches Shaw could see movement, the last of the snow falling from the needles.
Tom Hadden, the force’s senior crime scene investigator, was buried within, while a fireman cut wood on
‘Anything?’ asked Shaw, knowing he could leave the pleasantries aside.
Hadden struggled to turn his head amongst the pine branches. ‘Well. I’m pretty sure it’s a tree.’
Shaw pressed in amongst the pine needles, which released a wave of pungent scent. ‘How’d she come down?’
‘Three blows,’ said Hadden, reaching forward, parting branches to reveal the trunk, neatly severed by a series of axe blows. ‘Instant roadblock. I’d say it wasn’t the first time our woodman had swung an axe.’
Shaw recalled George Valentine’s summary of the crime: on one hand a disregard for leaving clues — the victim left to die in the cab, now the axe marks — combined with the complete absence of footprints.
‘Anything else I should know now?’
Hadden extricated himself, a kneecap clicking as he did so. ‘Pathologist is still at work,’ he said. ‘I think we’ll leave her to it, don’t you?’
The pronoun told Shaw all he needed to know. There
Edging past the pick?up they came to the Alfa, and Shaw noticed a small flag marked with an ‘A’ below the driver’s window.
‘Ciggy butt — menthol,’ said Hadden, not stopping. ‘Common brand.’ Shaw leant in at the Alfa’s open window. The interior smelt of money: soft leather and scent. A child’s picture was stuck on the dashboard, a girl with long hair, the ashtray bristled with dog?ends soiled with lipstick.
Behind that the old man’s Corsa. For the first time Shaw noticed the car had been vandalized: scratched lines, crossing, peaked like a hat, an angry inchoate scrawl.
‘They’re fresh,’ said Hadden. ‘A month old, maybe less. My guess is a diamond cutter — see how deeply the metal is scored. Nothing casual.’
They walked on. ‘Time of death on the victim, Tom?’ asked Shaw, smiling, the perfect teeth in a surfer’s grin. He’d never been surprised by the fact that in ten years of CID work he’d failed to get a straight answer to that question. He didn’t expect one now.
Hadden removed a pair of thin forensic gloves with theatrical care and his eyes closed. ‘Not my area, clearly — as you well know. Pathologist is the expert on that and she’s with the body — but you’ll get less of an answer from her than you will from me. I took her to the body last night; that’s the only time I’ve seen the victim. So — outside temperature was freezing, inside the cab perhaps twenty degrees or more. Temperature gradient like that
Shaw checked his watch. The CSI team had arrived at 9 p.m., the pathologist at 9.45. So death occurred somewhere between 4.45 and 7.45 that evening. The convoy had come to rest at around 5.15. Given that dead men don’t drive, that meant the victim died between 5.15 and 7.45.
But no footprints except Holt’s, and he didn’t have the time to deliver the fatal blow if Baker?Sibley’s evidence was sound. Shaw shook his head. He was missing something. He forced himself to lower his shoulders, releasing his neck muscles.
Shaw looked back up the line to the tent over the victim’s truck. ‘Prints in the victim’s vehicle?’
‘Yeah — it’s like a sweet?shop counter. We need to input them all, get them on the database. You don’t get many crime scenes with this many potential murderers in situ. We need to mix and match, see what comes up.’
Shaw tried to empty his head, switching crimes, trying not to make any assumptions which might derail the investigation before it had even started. ‘Anything from the beach — the corpse in the raft?’
‘Standard make, beach?shop inflatable — we’ll check it out, but one of the uniforms said his kids had one. Argos sell them as well. Nothing else in the thing with him — except a pint or so of blood. We presume it’s his blood — but it’s just that at the moment. A presumption. Nothing
Shaw pressed his thumb and forefinger on either side of the bridge of his nose. Finding the yellow oil drum seemed like a distant memory. ‘I need to see inside the truck cab,’ he said.
‘Sure.’ Hadden smiled. ‘I’ll leave you that pleasure. She’ll have an ID once the jacket’s off, with luck.’
Hadden set off for the beach, Shaw for the tent over the victim’s truck. He approached it slowly, making sure his footfalls gave due warning of his approach. Dr Kazimierz was a woman who didn’t suffer fools gladly, and thought almost everyone was a fool. She worked in silence, and valued it in others. And she worked alone, even in a crowd.
The first thing he saw was that the body was still in place. Dr Kazimierz held the head up by the chin, looking into the eyes, the chisel still in place in the left socket. For a second Shaw saw the scene differently, two lovers perhaps, folding together their personal spaces. Then she leant forward and, with a pair of tweezers, removed something from an eyebrow. She held it in the light of a torch she’d taped to the headrest: a hair. She pocketed it in a clear plastic evidence bag, quickly sealing and signing the sticky label.
She looked up, ready to dismiss whoever had interrupted her. But when she saw Shaw she nodded, the merest hint of an acknowledgement. Then she cut a short length of tape, using the sticky side to lift a series of particles from the victim’s overalls.
Shaw wondered what Justina Kazimierz had looked like in her youth. He imagined a school photograph perhaps, a face not yet overwhelmed by heavy middle?European features, dark brown eyes showing off her olive skin. He’d been to her fiftieth birthday party at the Polish Club in the North End, an occasion marked by blood sausage and iced vodka with all the subtlety of lighter fuel. She’d danced then, with her husband, a diminutive man with delicate hands, light rapid steps despite her sturdy build.
Shaw circled the vehicle, squeezed between the tent and the bodywork. The tax was up to date, the registration plate the right year for the model, the tyres almost new. The paintwork was off?white, with a signwritten panel: Fry amp; Sons, Builders, followed by a Lynn telephone number and a website address. The tailgate was chipped and scraped in places, with rust showing in the hinges. The tarpaulin had been folded back to reveal several sheets of plasterboard, some insulating board and a bundle of wooden wainscoting.
Returning to the front of the vehicle, Shaw found the pathologist sitting on a camp stool. Plastic evidence bottles were arranged in groups on a collapsible table, glass phials laid in a plastic box, a black briefcase open to reveal a line of tools, torches, tapes and camera lenses.
Through the windscreen the dead man’s head could be seen, thrown back now, the chisel protruding up as if it had been an arrow that fell to earth.
‘How’s your eye?’ she asked, taking Shaw by surprise.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget the worst might happen.’
Embarrassed by the intimacy, he looked through the truck’s windscreen at the victim. ‘How do you think he died?’ he asked, and they both laughed. In Shaw’s experience corpses fell into two distinct categories: those which echoed the human life that had recently fled, and those which seemed effortlessly to acquire the status of cold meat. This one, he reflected, was already on the butcher’s counter.
‘Wallet? Papers?’ he asked, pushing the image aside. ‘I’ll have to cut through the clothes to get to the pocket,’ she said. ‘I need help; you’ll do.’ Even though she looked away, Shaw knew that the honour had been calculated, even if it had been so ungraciously bestowed. When he’d first met Justina Kazimierz Shaw had put her brutal rudeness down to unfamiliarity with a new language. That was a decade ago.
‘Now. Here,’ she said, indicating a bulge at chest level beneath the overalls. ‘We need this?’ It was his call. They could remove the body, get it back to the lab and cut the clothes off there. Doing it this way risked destroying evidence, but gave the inquiry a vital head start if they could get an ID. He knew what his father would have done, which made him hesitate.
‘Go ahead,’ he said at last, holding the cloth taut as she
Harvey Ellis
Carpenter/plasterer/builder
Two telephone numbers: a landline and a mobile. A Lynn address: a block of seventies flats on land reclaimed from the estuary.
On the flip side of the compartment was a picture. A boy, age impossible to guess, the hair shaved clean of a white skull, a feeding tube to the nose. And the kind of smile that’s for other people. Shaw turned to look at the photo hanging from the rear?view mirror, the family shot. Same kid, just less of his life left to live.
Dr Kazimierz had seen something else. The corpse’s right hand had fallen to the side as they’d cut into the fabric of the overalls, revealing six inches of skin above the wrist. She could see another wound, a cut leading to a puncture near the crook of the elbow, blood caked in the sleeve itself. ‘Looks like he managed to ward off one blow at least,’ she said.
Shaw thought about Holt leaning in at the Vauxhall window. One blow unseen, perhaps, but two?
‘The distribution of blood on the victim is the first
‘All of which means?’
‘I think he bled on his back — and was then placed in the van where death occurred. Also, at some point he emptied his bladder — there are traces of urine in the clothes. But there’s none on the seat. Again — points to the lethal attack taking place somewhere else.’
‘Outside the van?’
‘Clearly. The chisel’s shaft caught the ocular bone and fractured it, then sheared off into the soft tissue at the rear of the eye, then into the anterior lobe of the brain,’ she said, snapping off the forensic gloves. ‘I think he lost a lot of blood then — blood that is not at the scene. Then he was put in the driver’s seat, where he died.’ Shaw imagined the impact of the chisel blade, the internal crunch of the bone giving way, the painless thrust into the brain.
‘So,’ said Shaw. ‘To sum up. I’ve got a murder scene with no footprints and no blood.’
‘Least you’ve got a corpse,’ said Kazimierz.
Shaw parked the Land Rover in its usual slot beside the lifeboat station, triggering a security floodlight. The building was wooden, a throwback to the fifties, with Dutch gables. Beside it stood the new building, steel, with blue metal beams exposed. He unlocked the side door and slipped into the darkness.
The hovercraft sat on its deflated rubber skirt like a cat in a basket. His eyes constructed it out of the shadows and the ambient light seeping in through the high double?glazed windows. She was perfect for working out on the sands, up the shallow creeks and over the mud flats of the Wash. Shaw sniffed the air: detergent, engine oil and polish. He reached out and flicked a single switch, bathing her in light, the paintwork polished to a deep orange patina, the two rear fans gleaming in silver and black. He felt a rush of excitement and a sense of being home. The adrenaline made him want to run, so he locked up quickly and set off along the beach in the half?light of dawn.
The clouds out at sea delayed the moment when the sun would break free and start the day. The sands stretched ahead of him. In winter nothing moved here but the sand. A mile distant he could see home: a low wooden building with a long veranda, behind it a stone cottage, beyond that the old boathouse, beach stones strung over the felt roof to keep it down in the storms. Lena had
A busy year. Lena was organized, businesslike in pursuit of an ambition. The stone cottage was watertight now, the cafe stripped pine with an Italian coffee machine gleaming like a vintage motorbike, the boathouse converted to sell everything the sporty London beach crowd wanted: surfboards to wetsuits, hang gliders to sailboards. The exterior wooden panels of the cafe had been painted alternate yellow and blue. Shaw could see the flag hanging limply from the pole over the shop: a silver surfer on a blue sea. His seven?year?old daughter’s discarded summer swimsuit hung on a hook by the outside water tap, bleached by the rain.
He sat on the stoop, planning a dawn swim in the winter wetsuit, trying to focus only on the forthcoming rush of icy white water. But two things gatecrashed his mind: if Sarah Baker?Sibley’s daughter was alone at home to whom had she passed the phone when her mother asked her to? And then there were the spark plugs in the pick?up’s door pocket. Rusted. Spent. But Harvey Ellis’s cab had been otherwise neat. Unless the truck was rarely used — an unlikely scenario — then the plugs had not been in an engine for several months. He saw the tiny metal question mark of the spark plug’s contact points. Corroded, black, scarred by the constant electrical explosions of years bringing an engine to life. But if they hadn’t been recently taken out of an engine — which the lack of into an engine? And why would anyone plan to do that?
He squinted at the sun, then heard the thudding steps of his daughter running down the corridor which linked the cottage and the cafe. He smiled, turning, prepared for his other life.
George Valentine’s toast rack was almost empty, the charred crumbs scattered over the plastic tablecloth of the police canteen. He held his coffee with both hands, trying to disguise the tremble in his fingers. Toast, no butter. It was what George Valentine called ‘solids’, and it would have to keep him alive until he found a chip shop before going to his bed. He touched the half?finished packet of cigarettes in his pocket, tired of finding proof that he was a weak man.
Peter Shaw stood by the canteen’s plate?glass window, drinking bottled mineral water and looking across the tumbled rooftops of the old town towards the sea. He’d been on time, to the minute. At home he’d cleared ice from the gutters, snow off the veranda where it had blown in off the beach, then ferried coffee to Lena, who had been up early with Francesca because they wanted to collect driftwood on the beach to decorate the surf shop before school. He’d held a weathered plank up to the wooden door of the old boathouse as Lena hammered it into place.
She was five feet two, slim, compact. Her hair was cut short, angular, rising from her scalp like a surprise. At rest her face was melancholy, although the line of the lips always hinted, at least to him, of a smile. A slight cast in the right eye, the imperfection he had noticed first. Her
‘So, George Valentine?’ She’d smiled, watching her husband closely, but he didn’t answer. Shaw had told her about his new partner, the dishevelled, chain?smoking toper. ‘I can see the funny side,’ she said, her smile widening.
‘You’ve never met him,’ said Shaw, looking out to sea.
‘You mean he wasn’t at the wedding?’
They both laughed at their oldest joke. No one had been at the wedding, least of all Shaw’s father or his onetime partner George Valentine. Lena’s family was troubled, dispersed, in an almost constant state of family warfare which ruled out any kind of concerted action. Shaw’s family just didn’t want to come. His father was already ill, already dying. Shaw hadn’t been surprised by his father’s prejudices, but he’d been saddened by his mother’s. Lena had tried to forgive them, pretended that she had, but she knew it was a day in her life she couldn’t have again, and they’d taken some of the joy out of it.
‘You should give him a chance, you know. It’s ten years, Peter — more.’ ‘Unforgiving’ — it was a trait she’d identified
‘He might surprise you,’ she said. ‘You surprised me.’ He picked up his tea and looked at her, knowing he didn’t have to ask.
‘I thought you were just a copper.’
‘I am just a copper,’ he said. He looked at his watch. ‘Nearly high tide — I’d better get moving.’
She stood back, admiring their work, refusing to let him go.
‘It’s a murder inquiry,’ he said. They both knew what that meant: the late nights, the calls, the pressure to be seen at St James’s. ‘It won’t last for ever,’ said Shaw. ‘But I can’t take her swimming tonight — sorry. I’ll text if things change.’
‘It’s OK. I’ll do it.’ Lena tried to hide her dis appointment that he would still apologize for his career, as if it hadn’t been his choice. ‘There’s an order today,’ she said. ‘The new wetsuits, kites, and a pair of sand yachts. I’ll be busy.’
‘You need help?’
She shook her head, annoyed, because he wasn’t in a position to give any help. She pointed out to sea where someone was already on a sailboard, a splash of twisting orange off the beach at Old Hunstanton. ‘I’m fine.’
She hadn’t taken her eyes off the sea. ‘Why would someone do that, Peter?’ He’d filled her in on the events of the night before: the stranded convoy, the body on the raft. ‘Bite into your own flesh? Why?’ She put down the hammer to take up her mug of coffee, watching their daughter on the high?water mark collecting more wood.
Why bite into your own flesh? Shaw hadn’t had an answer for her then, and he didn’t have one now, an hour later, looking out over the snow?laden rooftops of Lynn from the canteen at St James’s.
The reek of frying grease lay like a duvet over the Formica tables and the huddled figures of the early shift at St James’s. Valentine stood, joining Shaw by the glass, watching boats threading out along the geometrically straight channel of the Cut, heading for open water. Below them a stream of red tail lights was already flowing into the multistorey shopping?centre car park. Much of the snow had melted but the rain still fell, the brief dawn sun long buried in clouds the colour of steel wool.
‘Well, we’ve both slept on it. Fresh ideas?’ said Shaw. He’d already filled Valentine in on everything he’d learned out on Siberia Belt that morning with Tom Hadden and Justina Kazimierz.
‘Ellis — the pick?up?’ asked Valentine, already used to Shaw’s methods. No fuzzy edges, no casual assumptions.
‘Yup.’
‘Well — could be any fucker.’
Shaw took a deep breath, but Valentine didn’t give him the chance to get in.
‘So we should do the obvious,’ he said quickly, straining his neck forward, massaging his fingers into the narrow are footprints at the scene — they’re Holt’s. Be fucking stupid to ignore that.’
Shaw stiffened, deciding to ignore the inference. ‘Let’s get someone out to double?check Baker?Sibley’s statement — let’s see if it’s possible,’ said Shaw. ‘She said she didn’t take her eyes off him, but let’s kick the tyres, make sure. And while we’re at it, check out the daughter too. She was supposed to be home alone, but we heard her mum ask her to pass the phone over. Who was that to?’ He tipped the water bottle back, his Adam’s apple bobbing as the liquid drained away. ‘Anything else?’
‘I need to go outside,’ said Valentine.
‘We’re on the tenth floor,’ said Shaw.
Valentine shrugged.
Shaw followed him down the canteen, pushed open an emergency exit and stepped out on to the fire escape. Dog?ends were scattered at their feet, stuck between the metal meshing.
The temperature took the breath away, but not so effectively as the view. Below them cars crept along in the rush?hour traffic.
Valentine lit up in a single fluid movement. ‘Eight vehicles — one of ’em is a security van with eighty thousand quid in it,’ he said. ‘So that’s what it’s about — box it in, get the money, leave ’em stranded.’
‘Bit of a long shot.’
‘Not if you’ve got a man on the inside.’ He paused, relishing the moment. He’d been at his desk by five, a crisp wedge of fifty?pound notes held by an elastic band making his raincoat pocket bulge. It had been a good night not to go home. A good night to visit the house
‘Overtime,’ he said, producing a slim brown file from the inside pocket of his raincoat. ‘You were right. Security guard’s got form.’ He took a breath, knowing a long sentence was coming. ‘At least he didn’t play silly buggers and try to give us a false name. Jonah Shreeves he is: lives out at Cromer. I checked the electoral roll. Shares the property with a Mary Ellen Shreeves.’
‘And he’s known to us, is he?’ asked Shaw, enjoying the euphemism.
‘Known? He’s virtually fucking family,’ said Valentine, coughing. ‘GBH six years ago at Sheringham.’ He ploughed on, not reading now. ‘Broke his girlfriend’s arms, one by one, then her jaw. Hospital for a month. She’d threatened to go to the police after he’d robbed her grandmother. Cuffed her round the head. She was eighty?six, the granny. He’s been out eighteen months.’ He let the dog?end fall, and it slipped through the mesh. ‘Nottingham, nothing off for good behaviour. Before that the term recidivist could have been invented for him: robbery, muggings, violence in all forms, often uncontrolled. Left alone he’d probably beat himself up.’
‘So that’s the theory?’ asked Shaw. ‘They box in the security van and they’ve got someone on the inside too. Although one suspects we’re dealing with an IQ in single figures here — because we’re going to suss chummy out, are we not? Soon as we check the records.’
‘Maybe,’ said Valentine, knowing Shaw was right, excitement ebbing out of the day. They went back inside, leaving the rattle of the rush hour behind.
Shaw took another mineral water from the cold cabinet. ‘OK — and the body on the beach?’ he asked, changing tack.
Valentine ran his fingers through the condensation on the plate?glass window. Below he could look down on the yard at the back of one of the garages in the old town, a heap of car chassis, tangled metal. ‘The lab’s got a passport out of the clothing but it soaked up so much seawater they can’t open it — it’s in the drying cabinet. Could be six hours — more.’
‘It’s a start — and we need one. They’re setting up the emergency incident suite downstairs, George. Murder inquiry. By the end of the day it could be a double murder inquiry when we find out what killed the man in the raft. We’ve got eight DCs — plus any calls we like to make on manpower from squads and beat. I’ve got them checking the statements now — back?up calls, double?checks. And there’s four civilians for the phone bank. Brief them, get them up to speed. I’ll talk to them tonight. We’ll split them up into teams then, nominate some lead players. But you’re right. Let’s do the basics first. What about the widow?’
‘Family liaison have got someone at Ellis’s flat.’
‘OK. First post?mortem internal autopsy is six tonight. But Justina’s going to walk us through an external this afternoon on both bodies. At the Ark.’
‘They found the axe in the drink, about ten foot from the victim’s truck and the pine tree. Looks like zero on forensics, but they’re trying to match the blade with the marks on the tree.’
‘Right,’ said Shaw.
‘Uniformed branch got round to the owner of the Mondeo late last night,’ said Valentine. ‘He doesn’t own a snakeskin steering?wheel cover. Never has.’
Shaw thought about that, filed it away. It was one of the things he loved about police work; the constant pressure to remember every detail at a level which didn’t make it impossible to remember your own name.
‘So where’s the kid behind the wheel?’
‘Looks like he made it down to the road,’ said Valentine. ‘The vodka probably saved him,’ he added, delighted to highlight the life?saving qualities of alcohol. ‘A lift on the coast road?’
‘Or he met up with whoever put the AA sign out.’ Shaw shivered, a delayed reaction to the icy?cold water in which he’d swum that morning. ‘Let’s try and fix up the security firm for interview late morning. We’ll do the Chinese restaurant first. I’ll meet you downstairs in an hour — meanwhile, get the team up and running. And we need something for the radio, local TV, the evenings. Bare outlines, George — a few juicy details, but let’s hold most of it back. Next of kin still to be informed, etc., etc. Let’s think about a TV appeal tomorrow if we’re no further forward.’ Shaw put a hand to his bare throat. ‘And let’s
‘You?’ asked Valentine, trying to keep the question neutral.
‘Boss wants a word,’ said Shaw, stealing the last piece of toast from the rack.
Detective Chief Superintendent Max Warren kept a tidy office on the third floor. He was a Londoner who’d come north with a reputation for tackling street crime in the capital. He’d played rugby until settling for weekends at the golf club, but his face was still dominated by a serially broken nose. For a man who had once succeeded in projecting a tangible sense of menace, Shaw was always surprised how slight he was, a narrow neck on narrow shoulders, the loose skin mottled with liver spots. Warren had arrived fifteen years earlier to administer an injection of adrenaline into the sleepy West Norfolk Constabulary. But the operation had back?fired — allowing several gallons of sleeping draught to flood back into the superintendent’s veins.
Shaw didn’t sit and Warren didn’t ask him to, merely eyeing the spot where Shaw’s tie should have been.
‘Keep it simple, Peter,’ he said. ‘It’s not a puzzle. It’s two nasty murders on the same night.’
Shaw thought about pointing out the assumptions behind that summary but let the moment pass. Warren was firmly of the school that felt police officers needed university degrees as much as they needed a diploma in tap?dancing. So smart?arse backchat was best avoided.
‘DS Valentine’s got a good nose for low life — unsurprisingly: let him use it. I expect him to make a major
On the wall behind Warren’s desk was a framed line?up of uniformed officers at Hendon — the Met’s training college. Warren was centre?stage. Shaw’s father was on the row behind.
‘Dad always rated him,’ said Shaw, forcing himself to be fair.
Warren ignored the comment. ‘I’d like a position check on the inquiry daily. From you. OK?’
‘Sir.’
Warren looked up over half?moon glasses, studying Shaw’s face. ‘Your eye?’
‘Robinson says ten days,’ said Shaw. ‘Chances are good.’
Dr Hugh Robinson was the force’s senior medical adviser. ‘Right,’ said Warren. ‘But what the fuck does he know, eh?’
‘Sir.’
That was it. Shaw, wordlessly dismissed, left Warren reading the morning papers, the Financial Times spread across his blotter. He remembered what his father had always said about DCS Warren — that he’d end his days in a bungalow at Cromer, chasing kids who stole gnomes from his rockery. But then his father had been jealous of Warren’s rapid rise and the aura of New Scotland Yard.
Shaw cleared his calls, reviewed his budget for the
‘The Emerald Garden, Jubilee Parade, Westmead Estate,’ said Shaw, getting in. ‘And remind me — why do we think Stanley Zhao’s worth a visit?’
Valentine pretended to watch the traffic, working on an answer.
‘The Chinese community…’ he said carefully, ‘is involved in cockle?picking on the sandbanks. The bloke washed up on Ingol Beach may have died of many things — but natural causes isn’t one of them. It’s just worth a second look. Playing the odds. Percentages.’
Shaw raised an eyebrow, turning to watch as a gritter lorry swept past, the salt sizzling as it spilt across the road. He let Valentine drive in silence while he worked through a sheaf of papers from the murder team — calls they’d made, information gathered so far on the members of the snowbound convoy. He rifled through until he got to the file on Stanley Zhao.
DC Mark Birley, a former uniform branch man bumped up for his first CID case, had conducted a phone interview with the secretary of the Burnham amp; District Round Table, Zhao’s regular Monday night customer. Shaw flicked through a transcript, impressed by Birley’s meticulous questions and annotated answers, as Valentine swung the Mazda through the rush?hour traffic.
They got to Westmead in ten minutes. It was clear that Jubilee Parade was one that had been rained on with some persistence. At one end was a pub called the Red, White
As Shaw and Valentine pulled up the gently falling rain turned suddenly to sleet, then a peppering of snow. The Emerald Garden was in the middle of the parade, a takeaway only, bare floorboards visible through the mesh covering the glazed door. Stanley Zhao opened up for them. He didn’t seem surprised to see them. He didn’t seem anything to see them. Shaw tried not to let the word inscrutable form in his head.
Zhao led the way into the kitchen through a hanging curtain of blue beads. Spotless woks dotted a bank of gas rings, and a set of chopping boards was criss?crossed with a lifetime’s worth of knife wounds. The only smell was Jeyes’ Fluid.
There was one other knife wound. Zhao had a scar running from his hairline to his cheek, via an eye socket. Shaw had missed it the previous night in the half?light inside the Corsa. Zhao’s eyes blinked meekly behind metal?rimmed glasses, and when his lips parted he revealed a line of identical teeth, each one as white as toothpaste. He stood with his back to one of the kitchen’s metal tables, and Shaw thought he’d been right about his height: six feet two, possibly three.
Mr Zhao knew why they were there. He handed Shaw his passport, and a Xeroxed copy of a birth certificate. ‘I have been asked before,’ he said, by way of explanation.
Shaw flicked the passport open. Born Kowloon 1959. Married Hong Kong 1991. Cook. No distinguishing marks.
Shaw raised his eyebrows and touched his own cheek. Zhao pointed at the passport. ‘Inside,’ he said. And it was. A clipping from the Lynn News for 2006. ‘Takeaway owner knifed by burglar.’ Zhao touched the scar. He’d been in Lynn a year, he said, straight from Hong Kong, and he hadn’t expected crime to be so bad.
‘Did they get him?’ asked Shaw. ‘The burglar.’
‘No.’
‘You should get the passport updated,’ said Shaw, handing it back.
They heard a footfall upstairs, and then the distant mosquito?buzz of a radio.
Shaw apologized if Zhao had been asked the questions before, but they were tying up loose ends, following procedure. Zhao smiled as if he believed them.
‘Remind me,’ said Shaw, trying to recall the details of DC Birley’s interview with the Round Table. ‘Why were you on the old coast road at five o’clock last night?’
Valentine began to walk round the kitchen, inspecting
Zhao’s story was a carbon copy of the one he’d given Valentine at Gallow Marsh Farm. He delivered a large takeaway dinner to a meeting of the Burnham amp; District Round Table every Monday evening. The order never changed: fourteen chicken chow meins, a vegetable chow mein, ten portions of prawn toast, one of vegetable spring rolls. They met in the village hall at Burnham Overy Staithe. He had a contact number. Shaw remembered the warmth in the van, the fug of soya and sunflower oil.
‘It’s a long drive — but good customers, a big order,’ added Zhao.
‘Please,’ said Shaw, playing for time, looking around. ‘Finish your breakfast.’ On a side table stood a large porcelain cup, the light green liquid inside it giving off a thin scent. Beside it was a white plate, a fork, and the remains of an omelette, a brown smear on the china. A bottle of Daddies Sauce, catering size, stood on the counter.
Valentine took over. ‘You saw the other drivers stranded on Siberia Belt, Mr Zhao, at the farmhouse? Did you recognize any of them? Customers perhaps?’
Zhao shook his head, tucking in a stray piece of omelette at the corner of his mouth. ‘People all look the same to me.’ Valentine didn’t miss the joke, but he didn’t smile either. Finished, Zhao picked up his plate and took it to a metal sink.
‘Do you mix much within the Chinese community here in Lynn, Mr Zhao?’ asked Shaw, aware that the question was as subtle as the Daddies Sauce. There were two
It was pretty clear which one Shaw meant.
‘We live here, on the Westmead,’ said Zhao. ‘My wife was born here. I mix with my own community.’
‘Staff?’ asked Valentine.
‘Three.’
‘Also Chinese?’
Mr Zhao cleaned his already spotless fingers on his white apron.
Shaw stepped in. ‘I’d appreciate it if you’d give DS Valentine the details. Names, addresses. I’m sorry, we’ll need to see their papers too. And one more formality… A driving licence?’
Zhao raised both hands, palms up, as if nothing would be easier, but Shaw detected for the first time the hard, angry set of the man’s jaw.
‘A moment,’ he said, opening a door into a corridor, then closing it gently behind him. They heard his footsteps on carpeted stairs, then the creak of floorboards above. The door Zhao had closed swung back again and through the opening they heard drawers being pulled out, banged shut. Shaw walked quickly into the corridor beyond. To the left the stairs rose, boxes on each step. To the right the corridor led to a door, half open. He looked in: a
Valentine stood behind him and tried the other door in the corridor. It opened and they stood together looking in. A child’s bedroom: bright yellow wallpaper dotted with Looney Tunes characters — Daffy Duck, Road Runner. A cot rested in pieces up against one wall. A mobile hung, ships, fishes and lighthouses in wood. Shaw wondered if the child had an inflatable raft for the beach.
But perhaps a child didn’t live there. A single metal collapsible bed was made up with grey blankets. On the coverlet a magazine. Porn: Das Fleisch. Sean Harper, plumber’s mate, would approve. Three copies, all different dates.
They heard footsteps too late and met Zhao in the corridor.
‘The door was open — we wondered where you were,’ said Valentine, taking a laboured breath. ‘Whose room?’ he asked, making a virtue out of being caught.
‘Gangsun. My nephew,’ said Zhao, closing the door and forcing Valentine to step back. ‘He works the late shift at weekends and sometimes he sleeps, goes home next day.’
‘Likes reading, does he?’ asked Valentine, a sneer disfiguring his face.
‘Young man — lonely, I think. A wife in Kowloon.’ Shaw made a cursory examination of Zhao’s driving licence. They heard a key turn in the front door and a man joined them: Chinese, swollen eyes, twenty years of
‘And him?’ said Valentine, nodding at the other man. ‘My brother,’ said Zhao. ‘We open at noon; Edison cooks.’
‘You’ll tell him what we need. Papers, passport, driving licence,’ said Valentine, making it clear it wasn’t a question.
‘Of course.’
‘We interviewed the Round Table secretary this morning, Mr Zhao,’ said Shaw. ‘He said the takeaway meal has been a standing order for — what — eighteen months?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Mr Beddard — I’m right with the name? He said the order was for six o’clock.’
Zhao was aware now that he was being led somewhere he might regret going.
‘So you would have been early — twenty minutes or more.’
‘The insulated boxes keep the food OK,’ he said, too quickly. ‘Sometimes I get places early, take a break in the van. Smoke. My vice.’
He seemed very keen to own up to an everyday vice, thought Shaw. He tried to imagine it, the takeaway van parked outside Burnham Overy Staithe Village Hall, engine running, Mr Zhao enjoying a well?earned cigarette, light spilling out on to the snow.
‘Mr Beddard says you’re often late,’ said Shaw.
‘In winter, people eat early. I drop off three or four times, it gets late.’
‘And Edison stays here cooking — with the others?’
‘Yes.’
‘So who’s the other man? Mr Beddard says that a couple of times you’ve been with a friend. Always — almost always — he said that was when you were late.’
‘Sometimes Edison is bored — he comes for the ride,’ he said, his voice slightly louder.
‘But in winter people eat early — so it must be too busy for Edison to leave the kitchen, right?’
Zhao cracked the window open. ‘Like your job, take?away food, Inspector,’ he said, and Shaw sensed the syntax had been deliberately muddled to help blur the clarity of the answer. ‘Never know when busy.’ He shrugged. ‘Not busy.’
‘Mr Beddard says the other man — your friend — is not Chinese, Mr Zhao.’
Zhao rubbed his face, then drew two circles in the air. ‘Mr Beddard’s eyes are not good. Always someone else signs for the food; he can find never his glasses. Who knows what he sees?’
Shaw caught Valentine’s eye. Enough, for now. But they’d be back. ‘Let’s make a start, DS Valentine, please. Names, addresses, any papers to hand.’
He turned to Zhao and tried out his most in sincere smile. He didn’t like it when people lied to him, especially when they didn’t seem to care if he knew.
Dr Kazimierz answered her mobile on the first ring.
‘Sorry, Justina, it’s me. Anything I should know?’
‘It’s early,’ she said, but the icy formality was short of full blast. ‘The chisel had a nine?inch blade — the point actually fractured the inside of the skull at the back of the head. Blood group’s AB — which helps, yes? Bad news — Tom says no prints on the weapon.’
Shaw thought about the blood group. It was a break. AB covered just four people in a hundred. He heard a tap being turned, water gushing.
‘And there was a tattoo on the chest: Royal Anglians. Otherwise that’s it for now.’
‘So, a soldier once?’
Silence. Shaw heard the sound of coffee now, a filter machine chugging.
Shaw rang Tom Hadden in the CSI unit office. Hadden didn’t like being indoors, under the artificial lights which made him look so pale, and Shaw imagined him working briskly through the paperwork so he could get back out to the scene at Ingol Beach.
‘Couple of things,’ he said, and Shaw heard the metal locks on his forensic briefcase snap shut. ‘The Morris Minor 1000.’
‘The old biddy’s?’
‘Yeah. Marijuana.’
‘Pardon?’
‘George asked me to look in the glove compartment. Brown, Moroccan, top quality. Must have blown her pension on it. She’d got a pouch stuffed with it — but there were fibres all over the floor. A regular little pot?head, in fact.’
‘Two favours,’ said Shaw, beginning to shuffle the limpet shells he’d arranged in a line on the dashboard. ‘Can you check the plugs in the Vauxhall Rascal — the ones in the engine as well as the ones in the door pocket. And can you take a dental mould from the apple on the dashboard — check it’s Ellis’s lunch.’
‘That’s a long shot,’ said Hadden, aware of Shaw’s reputation for painstaking police work. A visual assessment of the apple against Ellis’s teeth had looked like a good match. Dental matches took time, cost money. They’d have to put the work out to the Forensic Science Service. ‘OK,’ he said.
Shaw looked up and saw Valentine splashing out of
‘And the man on the beach?’ asked Shaw, as Valentine stretched the seatbelt, fired the ignition, listened to the engine race, then die.
‘There are some documents but I’ve got them in the dry heater — give me an hour…’
‘Passport?’
‘An hour,’ he said. ‘We got a hat — black wool. It could be his. Washed up about five hundred yards to the northwest. No name tag, but there are hairs. We can get a match if they’re his. Nothing else on the high?water mark except the drum of chemicals — that’s gone back to the yard at St James’s They’ll get us a fix on the contents, but if you want to trust my nose I’d say sulphuric acid. When we got the lid off it smelt like a thousand rotten eggs with a gangrene sauce.’
‘Thanks for that image,’ said Shaw. ‘Speak later.’ Valentine fired the engine again, which coughed and then roared. The snow was falling steadily now, tempering the bleak greyness of the Westmead Estate.
‘You asked Tom to check out the Morris Minor glove compartment?’ said Shaw. ‘Pot — brown Moroccan.’
The DS popped a mint, crunched it immediately. ‘Blimey,’ said Valentine. ‘Takes all sorts. I’ll check her out.’
‘And Zhao? What d’you think?’
‘I think he’s dicking us about.’
‘The real question,’ said Shaw, ‘is what is he dicking us about about. Illegals? Smuggling fags? VAT fraud? Porn?
He checked his watch: 10 a.m. They had an appointment at North Norfolk Security at eleven and it was a half?hour run to Wells?next?the?Sea and the company’s headquarters.
The snow was draining the light out of the sky, leaving the day stillborn. The grey monolith that was the twenty?one?storey tower block at the heart of the Westmead Estate was just visible above them, the top lost in low cloud. Snow flecked the north?east face of the flats, clawing at windowsills and downpipes. They could hear a helicopter hovering over the traffic on the ring road.
‘We’ve got twenty minutes,’ said Shaw, and he knew he couldn’t stop himself now, couldn’t leave the scab of the past unpicked. He turned in his seat so that he was facing George Valentine and realized there was another reason he found his company so unsettling. It was the fact that Valentine knew more about Shaw’s own father than he did. That all those hours Jack Shaw should have been with his family, he’d been in an unmarked police car, just like this battered Mazda, with George Valentine.
‘I’d like to see the scene of crime,’ he said.
‘Siberia Belt?’
‘No. Dad’s last case. Your last case. I’ve never seen the spot where you found him — the child. I’d like to see it now. It’s close — yes?’
Valentine too knew it would come to this. In fact if it hadn’t come to this he’d have wondered what kind of son Peter Shaw was. He put a dry cigarette between his lips and clenched his teeth. ‘It’s close,’ he said.
Mid?morning and the Westmead Estate was coming to life: low life. An elderly man in carpet slippers shuffled along a covered walkway between two blocks of flats hugging a dressing gown, a copy of the Daily Express and a single can of white cider. A woman, dressed neatly in a see?through plastic raincoat and matching hat, poured milk into a line of saucers by some waste bins, her feet lost amongst a clowder of cats.
Shaw followed George Valentine through the precinct, across a triangle of open ground covered in snow, turned past a line of lock?up garages and then between a pair of the five?storey blocks which dotted the estate. Above their heads an aerial walkway linked two sets of concrete concertinas. A piece of rope dangled, two trainers strung from the end, out of reach.
Vancouver House, the estate’s central block, stood alone on a tarmac island: a giant gravestone without an inscription except for the jagged multicoloured graffiti on the concrete pillars which held it clear of the ground. Shaw thought the scene almost exotic — the wastelands of Sarajevo perhaps, the sound of a mortar about to fall from hills hidden in the mist. Ramps ran up to stairwells and lifts, leaving the dark space beneath the block as a car park. Steam billowed from heating ducts along each of the twenty floors and trailed from overflow pipes, as
They cut straight across the waste ground, then ducked into the shadows of the car park, threading a path through the pillars, passing a burnt?out VW, and skirting a huge pool of rainwater stained with oil in which two seagulls fought over a packet of chips.
Valentine felt colder once they were in the shadows. He stopped, looking around, waiting for his eyes to shift into night vision, filling his lungs now he had the chance. He’d been back many times, so that looking around was like viewing a favourite film clip. ‘Used to be a park here — back in the fifties. Marsh in summer, ponds in winter. That’s why they put the flats up on pillars. Didn’t work: the place reeks of damp. Keep wallpaper on the walls for a year, you get a fucking certificate.’
‘How’d you know?’
Valentine took out a cigarette, ran it under his nose, deciding then he’d left it too long to give up. ‘Grandparents. Dad’s side. They moved ’em here when they took down the houses on Dock Street — 1971.’ He spat into a puddle. ‘Didn’t live a year, either of them.’
Shaw knew when they’d found the spot. He had a press cutting at home with a picture of the scene that first morning. A pillar behind painted in black?and?white warning stripes, a staircase leading up, a sign showing a green figure climbing steps, two women standing where the press photographer had put them, tissues pressed to their mouths. And a lift entrance, the doors battered aluminium, lights above in the shape of up and down arrows, inexplicably unbroken. And a security phone in
Valentine kicked the pillar. ‘Here.’ He thrust his hands in his pockets and closed his fingers around the dice on his lighter.
‘Dad always said he thought the bloke was stupid.’
‘Mosse,’ said Valentine. ‘Robert James Mosse.’
‘Right. Dad reckoned he must have panicked — to dump the kid here, under the flats. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. If you’d got the body in the car, why not go somewhere? He could have taken it out on the marshes, Dersingham Woods. We’d still be looking.’
Valentine glanced down at his black slip?ons, refusing to be drawn.
The bare facts of DCI Jack Shaw’s last case had never been disputed. Jonathan Tessier, aged nine, had been found dead at three minutes past midnight on 26 July 1997. He was still dressed in the Celtic kit he’d put on that morning to play football on the grass triangle by the flats. He had been given?1 to buy chips for lunch: 40p change was in the pocket in his shorts. There was no evidence at the scene, or in later medical and forensic examinations, that he had been sexually assaulted. But he had been strangled with a ligature of some sort, the condition of the body pointing to a time of death between six and eleven p.m.
DCI Jack Shaw and DI George Valentine were the first CID officers at the scene. The body had been found by a nurse, parking after her late shift a few feet from the boy’s corpse. She said she’d seen a car drive off quickly — a Volkswagen Polo, she thought — as she got out of
DI Valentine had radioed an alert on the damaged car to all units. A squad car on patrol found a Polo abandoned on the edge of allotments at Wootton just after two that morning, the front offside headlamp shattered, the engine warm. A police computer check identified the owner as Robert James Mosse, a resident — like Jonathan Tessier — of Vancouver House. Back at the scene the body had been removed, revealing a glove beneath, black leather, with a fake fur cuff. Jack Shaw and George Valentine went to Flat 8 on the first floor of Vancouver House, where they confronted Bobby Mosse, a 21?year?old student reading law at Sheffield University, at home during the summer vacation.
Here the accounts of the night diverge. Jack Shaw and George Valentine’s statements dovetailed: they maintained that they showed Mosse the glove in a cellophane evidence bag before obtaining his permission to search the flat. They conducted the search and failed to find the other glove. Mosse, in contrast, swore in evidence they showed him the glove, minus any protective bag, only after the search. His mother, who also gave evidence, agreed with her son’s version of events and added that at one point DI Valentine had reversed the fingers of the glove, turning it inside out, and looking inside.
Mosse said his car had been stolen that evening, a crime he himself had reported at half?past midnight, a fact verified by the duty desk at St James’s. He had been at the LA Confidential on the small screen, whereas he’d seen The Full Monty on the main one. They’d walked in because it was a nice evening and it’s difficult to park near the cinema. He had a torn ticket for the performance. His film had finished first and he had strolled home. Mosse always parked his car on an open?air car park a few hundred yards from Vancouver House because vandals caused a lot of damage in the underground car park. But he was still worried about the Polo — and that night he’d gone to check on it after his mother had got home and before going to bed. He found the car gone, and phoned the police from the flat.
The smashed glass at the scene was matched to pieces found still clinging to the rim of the headlamp of the abandoned car — Mosse’s car. In terms of material evidence, this was as good as fingerprints. He was arrested, taken to St James’s and held overnight. A preliminary analysis of skin tissue found in the glove pointed to Mosse. Usherettes at the cinema were unable to recall him in the audience that evening. It had been a packed house. Mosse was charged with murder at 3.30 on the afternoon of his first day in custody. He denied the charge. Bail was refused.
Police records showed Jonathan Tessier had been cautioned on three occasions for vandalism — twice for scratching the paintwork of parked cars. The prosecution planned to suggest that Mosse had found Tessier preparing to damage the Polo, and an attempt to administer summary justice had spiralled out of control. Hence they would be
Shaw looked around, as if he might find it now, more than a decade later.
The court case itself had been a one?day wonder. They’d made a crucial mistake, Shaw and Valentine, by taking the glove to Mosse’s flat.
Mosse’s defence team reviewed the forensic evidence in the final days before the case was to open in the Crown Court. His barrister considered the error grave enough to bring it to the judge’s attention in his opening address. Mosse’s mother kept her flat clean, an upright vacuum stationed in the hallway like a sentry, but even the cleanest surfaces collect a thin veneer of household dust — its composition varying between 62 and 84 per cent decaying human skin. That was how Mosse’s DNA had got on the glove, maintained Mosse’s defence team. The two detectives had been in the flat with it for nearly forty?five minutes. More than enough time for the unbagged evidence to be contaminated.
The prosecution was forced to concede that the glove was the only physical evidence which linked Mosse to the scene of the crime. There was, of course, abundant forensic evidence of Mosse’s presence in the car, but nothing that proved he had driven it from the car park
The case against Bobby Mosse was thrown out shortly after lunch on the first day. The judge’s closing remarks were brief, but he had time to suggest that the slipshod police work which had compromised the prosecution case left open the possibility that the contamination of the evidence might have been deliberate.
So Mosse walked free owing to a procedural error — evidence found at the scene should be bagged, tagged and remain in the custody of the scene?of?crime team until booked into the evidence room at St James’s — signed in by the duty sergeant. But Jack Shaw had been too angry to think straight. And George Valentine thought he was too good a copper to have to follow the rule book. That was the ex planation Shaw wanted to believe. But the judge’s barely veiled suggestion that the pair had attempted to fabricate the evidence nagged at him like an aching tooth.
Outside the court Mosse posed for press pictures under the wheeling seagulls on the quayside. Shaw had often tried to imagine what his father must have felt that day: the defeat, the injustice perhaps, the impotency. Or was it more complicated than that? Resigned, perhaps, to his fate because he had faked the evidence? Shaw didn’t know knew — was a child?killer. Was that how his father’s world had worked? George Valentine’s too?
If they did frame Mosse then they’d paid a heavy price for it. His father was dead within the year. George Valentine was knocked down a rank and sent out to the sticks, a one?way ticket in his hand. And Peter Shaw had paid for it too: the memory of the father he’d idolized marred by the worst slur of all: bent copper.
‘I never understood why Dad was so angry about it,’ said Shaw, looking at Valentine. ‘Mum said it got under his skin, right from the start. But he’d done kids before — that schoolboy strangled by his father in the North End in the seventies. But it didn’t get to him — not like this.’ Shaw dragged a boot through the puddle, sending a swash of water out over the pockmarked concrete.
Valentine took out his wallet, flicking it open, holding it up for Shaw to see.
The details of the Tessier case had never registered with Shaw at the time. He’d been at Hendon, with the Met. He’d met Lena. He was building his own life. So he’d never really looked at the child’s face — other than a smudged black?and?white thumbnail which had appeared in the nationals in London when the body had been found. But now there it was, in colour, pin?sharp. And he could see why his father had taken the case personally:
Jonathan Tessier’s face had found a place in George Valentine’s wallet, where his own family snapshot should have been. Shaw couldn’t imagine what it was like being that obsessed with a crime a decade old, but he could understand it, because Valentine’s career had nearly ended beneath Vancouver House that night just as suddenly as his father’s.
Hiding his emotions he handed the wallet back to Valentine without a word. ‘You’ve been back before,’ he said, wishing now that he hadn’t asked to see the spot.
‘Sure,’ said Valentine, lighting up, the sudden flare warming the cold interior. Shaw watched him draw the nicotine into his narrow chest. A car bounced down the ramp and accelerated across the tarmac before braking in a neat circle, the smell of burnt rubber instantly acrid. Valentine licked his lip where the cigarette butts had made it sore.
‘And Mosse?’ asked Shaw.
‘Life of crime,’ he replied, smiling. ‘Solicitor, down at College Lane, the magistrates courts. Married, two kids — boys; Citroen Xsara Picasso, detached house at Ringsted. A conservatory, carriage lamps, crazy paving. A cat called Zebra.’
‘But otherwise you’re not bothered,’ said Shaw. Valentine gave him a rare direct look. ‘I’m bothered.
Shaw envied Valentine that promise, if it had ever been made.
And he stored away the slight, after all these years; the knowledge that if his own father had been innocent of fabricating evidence why hadn’t he asked his son to clear his name?
‘You had your own career,’ said Valentine, reading his mind. ‘Mine was over. I had the time. I’ve had the time.’
‘And?’
‘And we’re right back where we were on that night. Your dad and I knew for a fact that Bobby Mosse killed that kid. We didn’t need the forensics on the glove to be sure. If you’d been there that night you’d have known too. He was cool all right; cool as an ice?cube. But the mother was a wreck, and she really struggled to get her story straight. Then when we showed him the glove he nearly lost it — started shaking, threw up in the loo. Said he was upset — well, yeah, I guess he was. Upset he was gonna get nicked.
‘He was guilty as sin. Trouble is, I still can’t prove it. Twelve years going fucking nowhere. Story of my life.’ He spat in the puddle and walked away, fading into the shadows.
Out on Styleman’s Middle, the sandbank three miles off Ingol Beach, five cockle boats came in to land. The snow, falling from the north, melted as it touched the sands. Crews disembarked, pencil?grey outlines working in a bank of falling snowflakes, bristling with rakes and buckets and forks. One worker carried a navigation light, a red beacon in the gloom. Otherwise the view was grey: the dark line of the horizon separating the grey clouds from the grey sea. Sometimes a seagull wheeled, a tiny white tear in the monochrome canvas. The tide, edging out, revealed the surface of the sandbank; the deep trenches left by yesterday’s cockle?pickers had been sucked smooth by the sea, but the lines remained. And a single bucket, filled to brimming with the fine, gritty sand; a moat at its base washed deep by the ebb and flow of the waves.
Duncan Sly, gangmaster, joined the men to haul one of the boats hard into the bank. A big man in a seaman’s donkey jacket, a blue cap covering thinning hair on a skull like a cannonball.
He spotted the cockle?picker’s bucket. Leaving kit on the sands was a crime. Once the tide was over them they usually got sucked down, gone for ever. ‘It better not be one of ours,’ he said. He’d know if it had been left by yesterday’s gang because they marked all their gear: not
The pickers didn’t watch; they were cocooned in the cotton?wool world which helped them live through the pain in their backs, the numbing boredom. The snow fell on them, heavy now, cutting down visibility like a shutter. They’d been on Styleman’s Middle for less than five minutes and most had looked at their watches once already. Spread out in twos in the mist, each within sight of the others for safety, they began to dig.
Ten feet from the bucket Sly realized what he was really seeing: not sand piled high to form a dome, matted with seaweed, but a face, the distorted oval of an open mouth, the head tilted back sharply, a small green crab on the left cheek like a beauty spot. He saw that the head was not the only part of the body which had emerged from the sand: there was a foot, in a deck shoe, and to one side a hand clutching a shred of green seaweed. He took a step forward, almost falling, and saw the seawater pooled in the mouth beyond the sand?encrusted teeth, the dark coagulated red of a split in the lips. He sank to his knees ready to scream. But then came the double shock, as unexpected as the first, and he spilt bile onto the sand.
From the air Styleman’s Middle was an island, ribbed with sinuous lines of sand, like a giant fingerprint. What light there was came between showers of sleet, the low clouds pearlescent, the sea a choppy green. The police Eurocopter came in low from the north, then turned to trace the waterline in a tight circle. Onboard traffic cameras recorded the view below. At the east end a group stood by the cockle boats, scuffed footprints leading away a few hundred yards to an object on the sand: from the air a bucket, a fishing buoy, driftwood.
As the whirling blades slowed Shaw and Valentine jumped down, followed by two uniformed officers they’d rescued from a traffic survey on the quayside. Shaw landed nimbly on one foot, then transferred his weight quickly to both. Valentine landed two?footed, juddering, and nearly pitched head?first. The sand was surprisingly hard and gritty, sparkling with crushed shells. They all walked quickly to the group by the boats and the two PCs began threading scene?of?crime tape in a wide arc round the beached boats, a cordon to keep the people in. The chopper rose, slewed sideways and wheeled towards Lynn.
Fifty yards off the sandbank the Harbour Conservancy’s launch was approaching at speed. It pulled a sudden circle as it skimmed into shallow water, and drifted towards
‘Tom,’ said Shaw, shaking hands. ‘I’ll lead the way — let’s keep a yard off the path trodden. I don’t know how long we’ve got until the tide rubs all this out, but however long it is, it’s getting shorter.’
They set out in line, Valentine at the tail, leaving one of the PCs to stand with the cockle?pickers. Shaw counted his steps. He’d got to a hundred when he stopped, then looked up, prepared to be dispassionate in the presence of death. But he hadn’t expected this: the sand?filled mouth set in the skewed O of a silent scream; the rest of the victim’s body, except for the single foot and hand, unseen, imprisoned in the sand. The corpse was lying in its sandy grave, the head protruding, but thrown savagely back.
He forced himself to observe, to stay out of the scene he was a witness to. Most corpses say something: revenge, lust, greed, anger. This one was mute; just a victim, almost sucked out of sight for ever.
Shaw could see that all previous footprints had stopped ten feet short of the victim. None had circled. He looked back along the path they’d made to check that no footprints left the track. Then he took in the horizon; to the west the distant shoreline of Lincolnshire, the hills still white. To the east he knew Ingol Beach was only three miles distant, the low white line of the coastal hills just visible.
‘Right. Let’s do our jobs,’ said Shaw. ‘And let’s do them quickly.’
Hadden’s men walked to one side and quickly erected the lightweight SOC tent over the corpse. White, flimsy, it buckled slightly in the light wind when they lifted it into place, sinking the posts at each corner.
‘Is Justina coming?’ asked Shaw, following Hadden into the tent.
‘On the next boat,’ said Hadden. ‘She was over in Ely. We’ll work our way out from here but it looks like he’s had at least one tide wash over him — so don’t hold your breath.’
They both smiled: grim humour.
The skewed O, screaming for air.
Shaw knelt on the sand six feet from the head, looking at the face, wishing his wounded eye had healed. Without stereoscopy his vision was flatter, less vivid. Hadden mirrored him, kneeling behind. Twelve o’clock and six o’clock. The air in the tent was suddenly close, making Shaw loosen the zip at his throat.
‘The sand’s engrained on the skin,’ said Hadden. ‘In the hair. And…’ He stopped, bile rising in his throat as a small crab scuttled from the hairline, over the cheek, dropping into the pool which had formed like a moat around its neck. ‘Male. Forty? Clothing — what we can see is a polo shirt; that might be a badge on the turned collar. A gold chain round the neck.’
The light in the tent was a pale white, making the dead man’s skin look like meat dripping despite a tan.
‘I’d guess he drowned, got washed on to the sand bar; the weight of the corpse begins to take it down through the sand after a tide or two. Another six hours and he’d have gone for ever.’
He stood, a knee joint cracking. ‘But there’s something else — on the back of the head.’
Shaw walked round, respecting his circle in the sand. The hair was parted at the crown, showing the scalp. Shaw took two strides forward and knelt. Hadden joined him and with a metal spatula parted the hair where blood had congealed. A wound, the colour of a maple leaf in the fall. No bone showing, but the flesh ruptured, rucked. Shaw bent closer and smelt the seawater in the man’s clothes, and the first hint of decay, the sweet aroma of evaporating sweat.
Valentine brushed aside the flaps to enter the tent. ‘Nothing on the sand,’ he said. ‘Chopper’s coming in with more manpower.’ He caught Hadden’s eye. ‘Your office radioed — they’ve got a portable generator from the lab.’
Shaw studied the victim’s face. The skin, as dead as pork rind, was tanned lightly, the features narrow and fine with the red double claw marks of a pair of spectacles on the bridge of the nose. The hair was well cut, short but with a foppish fringe which dragged down over one eye. Given time, Shaw could bring that face alive, iron out the swelling to the left side where the blow had fallen, lift the cheekbones, repack the features which had been stretched out in the terror of the victim’s final minutes.
Shaw stood, thinking that he’d missed that. ‘Justina will want to see him in situ.’
‘Low tide’s in two hours,’ said Hadden. ‘This isn’t a high point — it could be under water in five, six, possibly less. We’ll have to lift him then?’
It was a question, but there was no doubting the answer. If they let the tide wash over again the corpse might not be there next time, sucked down perhaps, or lost in the folds of sand. Even if they marked the spot they might lose him: heavy objects drifted in the liquid sand; wrecks wandered, sinking, resurfacing.
Valentine stepped outside, his radio crackling. Shaw left Hadden in the tent and went back to the cockle?pickers.
Duncan Sly, the gangmaster, stepped forward to meet him, taking charge, displaying authority. His skin was like burnt leather, a smoked kipper, the product of a lifetime spent in the wind and rain. Despite a slight stoop which had come with age he was still the biggest man in the group — six one perhaps, but broad, a barrel chest, with fists that looked lifeless, just hanging from the arms. The seaman’s blue jacket was new, the lapels uncurled.
Sly’s account was straightforward. The five cockle boats were from Shark Tooth, the shellfish company that ran Gallow Marsh Farm’s oyster beds.
‘The sand was clean on the lee shore when we landed — no footprints, nothing. We keep an eye out for that, in case another gang’s been working our patch. And
Shaw buttoned up his coat and bent down to retrieve a razor shell from the sand, as sharp as a cut?throat. He considered the coincidence that Shark Tooth owned Gallow Marsh Farm and ran the cockle boats, and filed it away with the other things that worried him.
The pickers stood around an impromptu fire: driftwood off the sandbank, old newspapers from one of the boats, and something else glowing on a bed of pebbles. ‘Coal?’ asked Shaw, knocking the charred wood with his boot.
‘Always bring a bag,’ said Sly. ‘It’s bitter out here late afternoon, we take breaks.’
Despite the warmth from the blaze they all stood stiffly. Sly thrust his hands out almost into the flames, then back into the pockets of his jacket. ‘We should work, otherwise it’s a wasted day.’
‘A few questions,’ said Shaw, shaking his head. ‘Then we’re going to have to ask you to go back to Wootton. This is a crime scene, we need to secure it. It’s the third unexplained death in the area in twenty?four hours, Mr Sly. It may be a while before you can work here.’
Shaw saw glances exchanged. Besides Sly there were ten of them, two to a boat with Sly presumably in the larger one — a smart inshore fishing smack which had dropped anchor about twenty feet out. It sat at an angle now, beached, the radio mast tilting towards the moon which had appeared in a clearing blue sky. Six of the men were ethnic Chinese, standing together, smoking the same brand of cigarettes, looking everywhere but at Shaw.
No one spoke.
‘You can smoke now,’ said Shaw. Valentine’s hand jerked towards his pocket, then pulled back.
‘Any idea who the victim might be, Mr Sly?’ Shaw asked.
Sly shook his head, watching the flames. ‘I didn’t get close enough. I didn’t want to.’
Valentine nudged a pebble into the fire with his black slip?on. ‘Anything unusual out here in the last few days? Any other pickers? Boats?’
‘This is our pitch, everyone knows that,’ said the man in the duffle coat. His voice was high, thin, but didn’t lack confidence.
‘Sorry — and who might you be?’ asked Valentine, with enough edge in his voice for them all to look up.
‘Andy Lufkin.’
‘So nothing?’ persisted Shaw. ‘Nothing unusual?’
‘Someone’s been dumping waste in yellow oil drums,’ said Shaw. He let Sly poke some more driftwood into the fire. ‘What have you seen?’
Sly took a deep breath. ‘We tend to keep our heads down.’
That sounded like a euphemism, Shaw thought. ‘Turn a blind eye?’ he said, a sympathetic pain suddenly running through the wound beneath the dressing.
‘Mind our own business,’ said Lufkin. Shaw wondered if he kept bouncing on his toes to try and look taller.
‘How about a child’s inflatable raft — a boat, in bright green colours?’ asked Shaw.
‘This weather?’ said Lufkin, and bit his lip.
‘Yes. This weather. Perhaps that’s what killed the bloke inside.’
They heard the thudding progress of a motor launch, hitting waves. Shaw could see Justina Kazimierz in the prow, letting saltwater spray her face.
Then Shaw’s mobile buzzed. A text message from DC Fiona Campbell at the hospital.
‘HOLT’S TALKING,’ it read.
They took the Eurocopter to the pad on top of the A amp;E department. Shaw radioed for the Land Rover to be brought there, then spent the rest of the flight with his forehead pressed to the window. He’d left Hadden and the CSI team working against the clock. Valentine had briefed the murder team back at St James’s and they were checking missing persons. But for now Shaw needed to focus on John Holt. He could see how the murder on Styleman’s Middle might be linked to the body in the raft — smuggling perhaps, trafficking, rival gangs fighting for a pitch. But if there was a link to the murder of Harvey Ellis in his pick?up truck then it had eluded him. Two violent killings within a few miles, and a few hours, demanded that Shaw searched for one. And Holt was his key witness.
As they swung round in low cloud over the roof of the hospital Shaw tried to re?focus on the line of cars in the snow that night. Harvey Ellis in the lead vehicle, John Holt in the Corsa behind Sarah Baker?Sibley’s Alfa. He quickly re?read the statement Baker?Sibley had made when re?interviewed that morning. Yes: she’d watched Holt go forward to the pick?up truck. But had she taken her eyes off him? No. Not for a second.
But that didn’t mean John Holt was not important. He
Holt’s room was hospital?hot — a cloying dry warmth suffused with the aromas of disinfectant, custard and stewed tea. The metal bed, the ubiquitous NHS bedside cabinet, the single seat, the grey linen washed a thousand times. As a doctor checked John Holt’s temperature Valentine tried not to touch anything, aware that his life would probably end one day in a room like this. He took a deep breath, trying to force air into shrivelled lungs, then retrieved the packet of cigarettes out of his raincoat pocket and dropped it in the bin.
The doctor finished, thrusting her hands down into the pockets of her white coat. She looked like she’d been on her feet for a week, dank hair held up in a Caribbean headscarf. ‘Ten minutes,’ she said to Shaw. ‘No more. No arguments, please. He thinks he’s as strong as an ox…’ Holt laughed, eyes owlish behind the heavy black?rimmed spectacles, his white hair lifeless, stuck to his scalp in the hot still air of the room.
On a chair beside the bed sat a robust woman, upholstered, grey hair too thin to hide the dome of the skull beneath. Respectable was the word that seemed to sum her up — but then Shaw remembered Holt’s address, the dockside slum. They’d clearly fallen on hard times.
Mrs Holt looked at her hands, then at her feet. ‘He’s not well. It was a dreadful night — his blood pressure’s really bad. He had a haemorrhage so he’s lost a lot of blood.’ Shaw could see the broken blood vessels in the old man’s nose and a bloodstained wodge of cotton wool. ‘He’s not been well for a long time,’ she added.
Martha Holt flushed. ‘Michelle’s our daughter — she’s worried about her dad. She wanted to make sure he stayed in hospital until he’s well. He’s sixty?eight this year — we both think he should take it easy.’
‘My daughter thinks I’m going to die on her,’ said Holt. ‘Worried she’ll have to pay a bill for the first time in her life.’
‘John,’ hissed his wife. She turned to Shaw. ‘Families,’ she said, smiling thinly.
‘My wife’s too forgiving,’ said Holt.
Shaw wondered if he always talked about people as if they weren’t there.
Valentine began asking questions. It was his interview, Shaw had said on the way up in the lift. Step by step the DS tried to find out what the witness had seen, what he’d heard, what he’d felt. So far the interrogation was faultless.
Sweat gleamed on Holt’s upper lip. ‘Michelle lives in Hunstanton,’ he explained, the voice healthier than his body. ‘With Sasha — my granddaughter. I was driving over to finish pruning some trees — they cast shadows on Sasha’s window when the moon’s out. It’s frightening in winter. She’s had nightmares.’
‘A regular visit?’ asked Valentine. ‘Couldn’t your daughter prune the tree?’
He laughed. ‘Michelle’s unwell.’ He said it in a way which made them understand he didn’t believe it. ‘She gets an
Martha Holt stiffened, but didn’t interrupt.
‘I’m retired, Sergeant. Ill?health. This heart of mine,’ he said, tapping a hand on his chest. ‘Although I can still get up a set of stepladders. But I had to close down the business. Dizzy spells on hundred?foot scaffolding isn’t a very bright idea, is it? There’s no real routine. But like I said, I’d been over on Sunday to trim the sycamore — but Sasha said to leave the magnolia because she likes to climb the branches. But then Sunday night she had a nightmare — the shadows again. So I went back on Monday to finish the job.’
Martha Holt touched a card on the bedside table. A piece of folded A4 paper, a child’s picture of a house. Beside it another card, more expertly drawn, of a black cat curled on an Aga.
‘That’s hers,’ said Holt, catching the movement. ‘That’s my Sasha.’ He touched the first card, ignoring the second. He rubbed his arm where a drip had been fed into the vein.
‘You live in town?’ asked Valentine briskly, keen to get the besotted grandfather off his favourite topic.
‘Quayside.’ He held the DS’s gaze while his wife watched her hands.
But it wasn’t the quayside. The quayside was renovated warehouses looking out over the water, rabbit hutches for the upwardly mobile at London prices. Devil’s Alley was a world away, just round the corner.
‘Is that where the car got vandalized?’ asked Valentine.
‘Right.’ He held his hand to his forehead, confused, trying to focus. ‘I went along the quay, then out by St Anne’s to the ring road. Just past Castle Rising the AA sign was out on the road so I turned down the track. Came up behind that woman.’ There was no mistaking the note of dislike. ‘Well spoken, in a hurry. She thought I should check if we could move the tree. She wasn’t worried about the driver, mind you. She didn’t seem to care about anyone else — she just wanted to make her next appointment. Like the whole world has to stop for her.’
‘And in the cab you found…’ prompted Shaw.
Holt shrugged. ‘The driver.’ He let his fingers drum an annoying rhythmless tattoo. ‘And the passenger.’
Shaw and Valentine locked eye contact, and in the silence they could hear the Rolex ticking.
‘Let’s take them one at a time,’ said Shaw quickly. Valentine took out his notebook.
‘Driver was a young man,’ said Holt. ‘Nervous type, said he was doing some work at Hunstanton — a bit of extra, he said. That’s exactly what he said — I’ve got a good memory, you see.’
His wife nodded dutifully.
‘He said the tree was too heavy to move so I went back to reverse out.’
‘Nervous type?’ pressed Shaw, trying to slow him down.
‘Yes. He had a tape on… Well — or one of those CD
Shaw raised a finger. ‘And the passenger?’
‘Young girl. Twenty?odd, I reckon. I think she’d hitched a ride.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘I asked where they were going and she said she was heading for Cromer. “Heading”, that was the word. I think she was trying her luck, you know — seeing where I was off to. But as I said, no one was going anywhere for a while. She said she had a job, that she was an artist. Bubbly type. She had a bag, like a knapsack, on her lap, and she sort of hugged it when she said that — like she had something in there.’
‘What kind of knapsack?’ asked Valentine.
Holt looked at the DS, his eyes shifting out of focus behind the glasses as if he was seeing it again: ‘Multicoloured, yellow and black patches, with a kind of drawstring. Not very big.’
‘This girl — was she good looking?’ asked Shaw.
‘I think so, yes.’ Holt re?focused on a point just above his toes. ‘I didn’t get that good a look because I had to bend down to see in the cab — my back’s not what it used to be.’ He paused. Shaw thought it wasn’t a hopeful sign,
Shaw gave him some time, trying not to push too quickly for information. ‘How did she seem? You said Ellis — that’s the driver by the way, Harvey Ellis — you said he was nervous. Was she?’
‘No — bit excited if anything. Flushed.’
‘Any accent — was she a local girl, d’you reckon?’ asked Valentine.
‘No. I’d guess the Midlands, you know — sounded like she had a bad cold.’
They laughed and Mrs Holt withdrew her hand from the counterpane.
‘How did he die? The driver,’ countered Holt, suddenly, the tone of voice wrong, as if he were asking a question at a supermarket checkout.
‘Someone pushed a chisel into his eye socket, into his brain,’ said Shaw. ‘Although I’d like you to keep that to yourself at the moment — we’re not giving the details out to the press.’ Martha Holt looked at her husband, but his face just froze.
‘Who would do that?’ he asked, blinking behind the glasses.
‘How about a leggy blonde?’ said Valentine, coughing up some phlegm.
They stood.
‘Mr Holt, it would be really helpful if we could put
Holt shrugged. ‘Soon as you can get your artist, Inspector, I’m happy to help.’ He smoothed down the counterpane.
‘I’ll be five minutes,’ said Shaw.
He was four. Shaw always kept his basic kit in the back of the Land Rover in a black attache case: a sheaf of high?quality cartridge paper — Bristol, with a slight pink tint, and a rough texture like skin. Then pencils, woodless plastic?coated leads, chisel?point, and a range of H, F and B hardnesses. A piece of J?cloth for blurring, a set of tortillions — cone?shaped sticks made from compressed paper used to blend graphite lines to produce a smooth finish. Erasers, eraser shields, brushes and pastel chalk sticks. Shaw had studied art at Southampton University. He’d always drawn as a kid, an only child’s escape, encouraged by his mother. What his father didn’t know was that the course at Southampton offered a year out in forensic art at the FBI’s college in Quantico, Virginia.
He opened his dog?eared copy of the FBI Facial Identification Catalog. Over the years he’d added to the basic catalogue. Thousands of mugshots compressed by category: bulging eyes, broken noses, pouting lips, lantern jaws, providing the basic building blocks for composite imagery. He’d added his own, cut from newspapers, brochures, and magazines. There was also a recorder for the cognitive interview, so that later he could reconstruct the order in which the witness had accessed their memory. Recall first, then if that failed them, the catalogues for
Twenty minutes later Shaw had the basics of the face established.
‘I’m not much good, am I?’ said Holt. ‘I just can’t see her face. Not clearly.’
‘You don’t have to — the memory’s not like that. You’ll see her in flashes, we just have to wait for them. Each time try and take something new from the image. Don’t force it. It’ll come.’
And it did. They talked about that night, about the snow, about walking forward in the icy wind. Slowly Holt’s memory gave up its secrets. Another twenty minutes and they were done. Shaw was pleased. The face looked out at him: dominated by the wide arched eyebrows, the small mouth with too many teeth.
Holt had closed his eyes while Shaw worked, sketching in the features, adding a light source from the right to add the 3D effect.
‘Oh — yes, yes, that’s her. That’s terrific.’ Holt sat up, holding the sketch book.
There were other last?minute changes. They darkened the hair at the parting, lowered the ears, added a shine to the teeth as if they’d been polished.
Finished, Shaw fetched the ward sister and she counter?signed the sketch, with Holt and Shaw. They used a date stamp off the ward desk, the hospital motif underlaid by the symbol of a ship at sea — the Lynn badge. Shaw gave it to Valentine, who bagged it in cellophane and signed it as evidence received. He’d book it in with the desk at St James’s, then they’d use photocopies.
Sitting in the Land Rover, Valentine looked at the sketch through the clear envelope, trying not to let his admiration for the skill of the artist show.
‘Next step?’ he asked.
‘TV, papers. Posters too — along the coast. Let’s give it all we’ve got. She’s either a killer, or she knows who is. So let’s find her.’
The Ark was a converted chapel across the street from St James’s, a red?brick shed in the shape of the living?quarters on a child’s model of Noah’s boat. For nearly a century it had been home to one of the nonconformist sects. But the church had sold up in the sixties and moved out to the ring road. West Norfolk Constabulary had been the purchaser, and, despite the constraints of a Grade II listing, had quickly renovated the Victorian structure to house the force’s principal forensic laboratory. This had freed up space in the main building, where the force was struggling to deal with a crime wave brought about by the influx of East Enders to the new estates. Not that the newcomers brought with them any crimes that the locals hadn’t tried. It was just that there were more of them.
Most of the town’s 200,000 inhabitants had no idea what went on behind the Ark’s freshly sandblasted walls and bottle?green and cream stained glass. Now, in the falling snow, lights shone from the savagely sharp lancet windows.
Shaw and Valentine sat in the Mazda, parked in one of the spaces reserved for CID at St James’s, waiting for the hour to strike. Being early for an appointment with Dr Kazimierz was a crime second only to being late. They had six minutes to kill. The news that Harvey Ellis had picked up a hitch?hiker, and that she was in the truck and…’ he said, letting the world slur along, ‘and she stuck her thumb out at dusk for a lift off a truck on a lonely road. He thinks the hitch?hiker’s up for it; she isn’t.’
He stopped, watching the snow, and his shoulders rose with a breath. ‘He pushes his luck, she’s sat on the passenger side with the toolbox between them. She’s scared, he makes a move, she flips the top, grabs a tool, and goes for his eye.’
‘Then she disappears, not a trace,’ said Shaw, shivering as he watched a uniformed PC running across the yard, the snow clinging to his back.
Valentine blew his nose, took a quick breath. ‘If Harvey Ellis was murdered, and if the murderer isn’t John Holt — then the killer left without leaving tracks. That’s a fucking fact. There’s no way round it — so you can’t use that fact to rule anyone out, can you?’
Shaw’s father had always said that George Valentine should have made DCI before any of the rest of them. But there’d been just too many rough edges.
‘But there’s two other corpses with no apparent link to your amorous driver,’ countered Shaw. ‘One on the beach — and then a few hours later our friend out on Styleman’s Middle.’
Hadden’s team had recovered the body from the sands an hour before full tide slipped over his grave. No forensic evidence had been found at all on the sands: no sign of
The Mazda’s heater was pumping out warm dust into the car and Valentine sneezed, prompting a series of metronomic sniffs which Shaw tried hard to ignore.
The clock at St Margaret’s on the Tuesday Market struck the hour and they got out, ducking through the snow towards the chapel’s double doors. Inside they pushed open a heavy perspex hinged screen into the main body of the old chapel. A low metal partition divided the room, continuing in glass up to the vault of the wooden roof. The windows spilt underwater light into the echoing space. The floor at this end was the original parquet, polished to reflect the stained glass, and on it stood three rows of lab tables, centrifuges, a computer suite, and a small conference area to one side beside a bank of sinks along one wall. Tom Hadden’s team ‘hot?desked’, so there were no offices as such. A filter coffee machine coughed its way to the end of its cycle and Dr Justina Kazimierz emerged from the area beyond the partition to refill her cup. Valentine was already at the machine, helping himself. The pathologist worked on contract with the West Norfolk force but she’d been on enough cases in the last ten years for the Ark to have become a second home.
‘Tom’s back out at Ingol Beach,’ she said. ‘If you want coffee, help yourself,’ she added pointedly, but Valentine just sipped noisily from the mug.
Shaw saw that here, on familiar ground, she moved lightly, reminding him of her canteen dance. She led them into the second room beyond the partition. A single stone
Shaw could see a foot showing on the nearest table and he thought the stone angel’s flesh had a more appealing colour. Valentine gulped coffee, the shock of the caffeine failing to overcome his anxiety at being in the mortuary. He didn’t like death, it marked the end of the game, the moment when there was nothing left to gamble with, let alone on.
Their footsteps grated on the concrete floor, which was criss?crossed with aluminium gutters so that the room could be sluiced. Each dissection table was in polished steel. Mobile surgical lights provided an almost unbearable blaze of electricity over each occupied table, driving away shadows where shadows should be.
Dr Kazimierz leant on one of the tables, her weight on one leg, the other shoe raised behind her so that she could tap the concrete with the toe.
‘OK. I said I’d walk you through what we’ve got. That was before the latest on Styleman’s Middle. So I’ve got even less time than I thought. I’ll start the internal autopsies with the first victim tonight — bit later than I thought — seven thirty. Be prompt.’
‘We appreciate it,’ said Shaw.
‘Right. Let’s start with the latest, shall we? Not much to say.’ She swished a plastic sheet back from the first table. The man from Styleman’s Middle had been unfolded,
‘So no prizes,’ she said, sliding on forensic gloves. ‘A blow to the head here…’ She placed both hands on the skull, turned it to one side, revealing the bruised wound. Shaw’s stomach shifted at the plastic sound of a click from the neck. Valentine took a step back. ‘This would have resulted in unconsciousness certainly — perhaps for several hours,’ she said. ‘Weapon? Wound’s odd — considerable force, but a cushioned effect. A blunt instrument wrapped in something, perhaps — or a rubber mallet, one of those you use to knock in tent posts? The prints are difficult to lift because of the saturation of the skin — but I’ve got a set. We’ll check them on records. Clothes are expensive. The polo shirt is interesting — it appears to be much older than the trousers, shorts, socks. Tom can do some more work on that. I’d say 1970s. The badge on the collar is Royal Navy.’
‘Just that,’ said Shaw. ‘Not a ship?’
‘No — just the badge.’
Shaw looked at the face, trying to memorize the features. The neatly layered hair, the unblemished skin, the fine bones, the unscarred fingers, the burnless tan. He might have been handsome, he’d certainly had money. Royal Navy — that rang a bell, a ship’s bell, but he couldn’t place it.
‘Other than being dead he’s a healthy specimen,’ added the pathologist. ‘He’s taken a whack around the liver, but nothing too serious. We’ll need to get the lungs out to be
Dr Kazimierz went to move on.
‘Can you get me a set of shots?’ asked Shaw. ‘Black and white, frontal?’
She filed the request in her head, then let the lab assistant who’d been working at one of the computer screens draw the plastic sheet back over the body. Shaw liked the gesture, a nod to the value of life, even when someone had succeeded in brutally destroying it with a single blow.
‘This is much more interesting,’ said the pathologist, her fingers interlaced, then free, then laced again.
The corpse from the child’s raft was as pallid as it had been when Shaw had dragged it ashore on Ingol Beach. The shadow of a tan perhaps, but one that had faded since an English summer. He lay as if asleep, the white sheet drawn up halfway across the chest, both arms extended down and over the plastic. A crusader, laid to rest in stone. Shaw had noted the muscular physique on the beach, but here, under the laboratory’s unforgiving lights, it was even more apparent that this man’s body may well have been his business. The shoulders were wide and muscle tissue largely obscured the angle where the neck met the flesh of the shoulder blades.
Dr Kazimierz stood, contemplating the face, a smile on her lips.
‘You’ve got a passport?’ said Shaw. ‘Prints?’
She touched a small metal cabinet where a red light winked. ‘The paper’s virtually disintegrated so Tom’s
Shaw studied the face of the victim again. The hair was black and thick, dark stubble on the chin and neck, blood vessels broken in the nose and cheeks. The brown eyes were flat and fish?like, the nails on the fingers and feet grimy despite the scrubbed skin. There was a signet ring on the right hand. A black stone with a carved surface. Shaw bent closer, trying to see it clearly.
‘It’s the figure of a man,’ said the pathologist. ‘With a dragon’s tail.’
‘Chinese?’ asked Valentine. He sniffed, aware that some chemical in the room was attacking his sinuses. The presence of the corpses on the mortuary tables was making it difficult for him to think. He needed something inanimate to focus on. The pathologist slipped the ring off the finger and dropped it in a metal dish. Valentine prodded it with a wooden spatula.
‘You’ll get a picture of it, ‘ said Kazimierz.
‘Cause of death?’ asked Shaw, turning back to the body.
Beside the table stood a spot lamp and a large magnifying glass mounted on a flexible arm. ‘Here.’ She lit the lamp by switch and poised the glass over the wound on the arm. ‘It’s a match for his teeth, by the way, so it is his bite.’
Shaw and Valentine leant in together, the DS retreating just in time to avoid a collision.
Two interlocking sets of teeth marks — the top and bottom sets — had come together to lift the skin. The wound was an inch deep at its heart, revealing the muscle
Shaw was unsettled that he’d missed it at the time. ‘And here,’ said the pathologist, resetting the lamp and glass.
Another little colony of pustules, perhaps six inches from the wound, further up the arm.
Shaw saw again the toxic yellow oil drum and readjusted the dressing on his eye. ‘A burn — chemicals?’
She shrugged and took a phial from her lab coat. A few drops of an almost colourless liquid, perhaps slightly blue, lay within. ‘I got this out of the wound and we did run all the industrial tests… but it turns out to be organic. Analysis of the organs may give us more. I’ve got some samples from the drum for comparison and we’ll run it through the spectrometer. But my guess is it won’t be a match. Do you know what I think this is?’
They shook their heads like schoolchildren.
‘Venom.’
‘A bite, then,’ said Shaw. ‘And he knew, didn’t he? So he tried to suck it out, stop it getting into his bloodstream.’ He imagined the pain, the panic which would make a man drive his own teeth into his flesh. ‘From what?’
‘Certainly nothing native to the British Isles. There are two small fang marks at the centre of the lesion, so I’d say a snake. But which one? That’s more difficult.’
‘Are there any databases for this sort of thing?’
‘Ill try London Zoo. And Traffic, the wildlife charity.’
‘Maybe,’ said Shaw.
‘I should tell Hadden,’ said Valentine, searching for the radio in the raincoat over his shoulder. ‘He’s got people out on the beach.’ Above them they heard snow sloughing off the roof, thudding on to the cars parked up in the lee of the old chapel.
‘But it won’t be alive,’ said the pathologist. ‘Whatever it is. The venom that killed him is tropical. Ten minutes in zero temperatures would be enough to kill whatever animal bit him.’
‘But then if he’s smuggling it in — and there may be more than one — he’d have it in something to keep it alive,’ said Shaw. ‘That’s what we need to look for, George. A canister, something that would retain the heat.’ Shaw’s skin crept.
Valentine retreated to the office beyond the partition. Shaw stepped back from the corpse, trying to get the death in perspective. They heard the clock at St Margaret’s chime the half hour. The pathologist took it as a cue to move on.
Harvey Ellis lay on the final table, the ruptured eye black, disfigured. Shaw noted that in death the narrow face appeared adolescent, resembling that of his son Jake, the child pictured on the photo in the victim’s wallet. It was difficult to see Harvey Ellis as a father of three when he looked more like their elder brother. The shroud was drawn up to his Adam’s apple, both feet exposed, a label attached to one of the toes.
She pulled down the shroud revealing the military tattoo in blue and red: a castle on a many?pointed starburst in silver. The badge of the Royal Anglians. ‘And the defence wound.’ She pulled the shroud down further and picked up the right arm.
‘So our modus operandi stays the same?’ asked Shaw. ‘Yes. I’d say so. He died from the stab wound in the eye socket with the chisel, having fought off one earlier thrust. I think he just about bled to death on his back, or certainly with his upper body twisted down, then he was moved to the truck seat. As I said, there isn’t enough blood at the scene. I’d say we were three to four pints short of a full measure. But death occurred in the sitting position, and that’s where rigor set in.’
‘He had a passenger,’ said Shaw. ‘A girl. Any trace — hairs, lipstick, a kiss? Any traces of semen on the victim?’
She thought about that for thirty seconds, more, walking slowly round the table. ‘No one told me that,’ she said.
‘We just found out,’ said Shaw quickly.
‘OK. No, absolutely not, no traces at all. Which doesn’t mean she wasn’t there, of course. I’m looking at the body. The cab’s not a pristine environment. It’s a working one. There’s something like thirty sets of prints on the fascia inside. CSI will check them all out. But on the body, or near the body, nothing really intrusive. And no prints on the murder weapon.’
She pulled off the forensic gloves. They looked at Harvey Ellis’s face.
‘You think he attacked her?’
She walked to a desk under one of the lancet windows and returned with a clear envelope. ‘Silver. A single word — Grace.’
‘Right,’ said Shaw. He wasn’t looking forward to meeting Grace Ellis.
Shaw led the way out through the swing door into the laboratory beyond. Valentine was sitting with his feet up on one of the computer tables, his eyes closed. The pathologist coughed and his eyelids slowly opened.
‘And this may not help either,’ she said. On one of the desks beside a computer was a vacuum cupboard containing a single glass dish holding a half?eaten apple. Valentine made an effort to look interested. Forensics wasn’t his forte. People committed crimes. It was all about getting to grips with people.
‘Tom said you wanted to make sure the apple was the victim’s last supper,’ said Kazimierz. ‘Not so.’
‘Someone other than Harvey Ellis ate this apple?’ asked Shaw. ‘Don’t suppose you can tell me if it was a leggy blonde, can you?’
‘Given proper funding.’
Valentine peered through the glass at the apple. ‘And you can tell that — just from that?’
Kazimierz’s back stiffened. ‘I’d put my reputation on it, Detective Sergeant Valentine.’ The inference was masterful. She had a reputation worth the bet.
‘Back to Siberia Belt,’ said Shaw, as the Mazda pulled out of the shadow of the Ark and slipped into the traffic sweeping past on the inner ring road. It was his father’s golden rule — if in doubt, go back to the scene of the crime. Walk the job, don’t talk it. Shaw held a hand to the dressing over his eye, feeling his pulse behind the bruised lid.
‘Everything’s changed,’ he said, as Valentine tried to get the hot air vent to clear the windscreen of condensation. ‘There’s a passenger in the murder victim’s vehicle, but she’s gone. There’s an apple in the murder victim’s vehicle, but it’s not his. The corpse on the beach is involved in some form of illegal trade in wildlife, and that’s gone too. It wasn’t a simple inquiry to start with.’
Shaw decanted the shells from his pocket and ran eight along the dashboard. The Mazda came to a halt at a set of traffic lights by the soaring Gothic spire of St Anne’s. A branch of Curry’s had a dozen TV sets in the window, each showing the local news. Shaw’s sketch of Harvey Ellis’s female hitch?hiker flashed up. They studied it until the car behind beeped as the lights changed.
Out of town they joined the coast road near Castle Rising Castle, the snow?topped Norman keep visible over the trees of the park. It wasn’t yet dusk, but already there was more light in the fallen snow than the sky. Ahead
Siberia Belt was windswept and looked deserted until they got round the bend. Ahead they could see some of the vehicles still on site, a CSI forensic tent pegged over one.
‘Come on,’ said Shaw, getting out. ‘Talk me through it, George.’
Valentine got out, braced against the icy breeze. They walked along the bank, Valentine listing the eight vehicles from the tail end of the line, starting with the Mondeo.
‘By the way — for the record.’ He stopped, tapping his toe on the spot. ‘The Morris. I checked out the old dear first thing this morning. Early?stage Parkinson’s Disease. The weed helps, apparently. I said she should see a doctor about painkillers. She said she had.’
He shrugged, moving on, listing each vehicle.
Tyres crunched and they looked back at the farm track to see a white van at the junction. It flashed its lights once and they saw Izzy Dereham, the tenant farmer, at the wheel, two men squeezed onto the passenger bench beside her. A wave, and she pulled out, heading down to the coast road.
Just four vehicles were left of the original convoy on Siberia Belt — the plumber’s Astravan, the security van, Stanley Zhao’s Volvo and John Holt’s Corsa. Shaw slapped his hand on the roof of the Astravan. One of Tom
She flicked off the vacuum and lowered the mask. ‘We’re expecting him — he’s bringing drinks.’ She smiled but Shaw could see that her lips were blue, the temperature in the van low enough for her breath to hang between them.
‘We’re walking the line,’ said Shaw. ‘It’s all been dusted?’
‘Sure. It’s signed off — help yourself. But exteriors only, please. Don’t open any doors.’
They heard the vacuum again, a whine as high?pitched as birdsong from the marsh. As they passed John Holt’s Corsa Valentine stopped, studying the vandalized paintwork.
‘Tom says it’s a proper job — a diamond cutter,’ said Shaw.
Valentine ran a finger along one of the lines. ‘It’s a picture,’ he said, shaking his head. Shaw stood at his shoulder, thinking he might be right, but he couldn’t see it. Valentine took his battered notebook and sketched the six savage cuts which made up the scrawl. He had an idea what they might be, but he kept it to himself.
They walked on past the butchered pine stump, the crime?scene tape still attached, flapping in the breeze like a Buddhist prayer flag.
‘Let’s get a clear picture,’ said Shaw. He tried to imagine it, conjuring up the scene from his memory, the cars steaming in the moonlight, white and red light splashed on the snow.
Valentine sniffed, brushing the back of his hand across the tip of his nose. ‘She could have got out the seaward side — the passenger side, a single print perhaps, lost under a drift? We could have missed it. There was plenty of wind about, even if there wasn’t much snow. Then the helicopter landed and covered the lot anyway.’
Shaw walked to the edge of the deep dyke which ran the length of Siberia Belt on the seaward side. He stood on the brink and let a snowball fall at his feet. ‘Where’d she go from there, George? If she jumped the ditch we’re looking for a runaway teenager with an Olympic long?jump gold medal. Plus she’d leave prints on the far side on the flat sand and we know it was untouched. If she gets in the ditch she can only go as far as the sluice that way.’ He pointed south. ‘And we know there were no prints there. And if she went that way,’ he pointed north, ‘there’s another sluice blocking the way after fifty yards and there was no sign of any prints there either. If she’d stayed in the water for just ten minutes, maybe less, she’d never get out. Hypothermia. There was two degrees of frost, if the dyke wasn’t full of tidal water it would have been solid ice. We’ve got to do better than that.’
Valentine stamped his feet. Left, right, left, right. ‘OK. She was hidden,’ he said. ‘On the back of the truck under the tarpaulin. We didn’t see her and she got out when the CSI team arrived. They wouldn’t know she wasn’t one of the witnesses. She just walks out once the place is
Shaw clapped three times, the sound muffled by his gloved hands. Perhaps that was the key to unlocking Valentine’s skills: wind him up first. ‘That’s the best idea either of us have had since all this started.’ It was just about the only idea they’d had since they’d found Harvey Ellis’s body. ‘But… I stayed with the body until Hadden’s team arrived. I signed over to him. Then I moved back to the Alfa and waited there. When we got reinforcements from St James’s I put one on duty at the rear of the pickup. He was still there at dawn. Paul Twine — the graduate entry.’
‘He’s on the team.’
‘He checked IDs — he looked at mine and I chaired his appointment panel for God’s sake. By that point the CSIs had a forensic tent up. They’d booked the tipper load — I saw the manifest: plasterboard, building supplies and a tarpaulin. No leggy blonde.’
Valentine sighed. ‘I’ll talk to Twine, make sure. It’s a long stint on the same spot — perhaps he slipped off for a Jimmy.’
The wind blew in off the sea, a fresh shower of snow closing down visibility to a few yards. Then, just as suddenly, it cleared and a gash of blue opened up at sea.
When they looked south again they could see a figure walking towards them. A minute later Tom Hadden was with them, shaking a flask. The three of them stood in a close triangle passing round a cup of sweet tea the colour of estuary mud.
Hadden ran a hand back through his thinning strawberry?blond hair. ‘Yeah. I’ve seen a marsh harrier, and a seal — large as life, just off the beach there.’ He smiled. ‘But no. Routine, you’ll have a full report tomorrow first thing. But I can’t think there’s anything relevant, which, given the fact we’ve got a murder victim on the scene is relevant in itself.’
Hadden leant back, closing his eyes to think.
‘We think the victim had a passenger in the pick?up,’ said Shaw. ‘A girl.’
Hadden opened his eyes, the whites slightly bloodshot. ‘There’s plenty of spare prints — could be her.’
‘But nothing else on the passenger side?’
‘I’ll double?check,’ he said.
Valentine smiled. ‘There were ladders on top of the Corsa. Fifteen?foot extent — right?’
‘Yeah,’ said Hadden, remembering he’d put that in his initial report, in the fine print. ‘So what?’
‘Prints, blood, anything?’
‘I did them myself back at the Ark. Clean as whistles.’
‘The idea being?’ asked Shaw.
Valentine shrugged. ‘Nothing that makes any sense.’ Hadden laughed. ‘I think one of the witnesses might have noticed the killer building a bridge out of ladders to get to his victim.’
‘Like I said,’ said Valentine, taking a breath. ‘Doesn’t make sense.’ But if they were looking for a way the killer
Shaw could see it too. ‘But one more check — just for us?’ he asked Hadden.
‘OK. Sure.’
‘Anything on the spark plugs?’ asked Shaw.
‘Got ’em here.’ Hadden patted the pockets of his all?weather jacket, retrieving a plastic envelope containing a pair of spark plugs. Hadden looked drawn, sleepless, the freckles along his forehead joined up in blotches on the pale skin. ‘Reckon they’re a year old — more. Perfectly serviceable but the contacts are well worn. We sent them down to the vehicle pool and they reckon — judging by sight — that they’d run for another year, maybe longer.’
‘Right. So not new?’
‘No way. The others — the ones from the inside of the cab — they’re shot. We tried them in one of the squad cars. They wouldn’t spark if you put five million volts through them.’
‘So that was part of the plan,’ said Valentine. ‘To fake a breakdown.’
‘But he didn’t need to, did he?’ said Shaw. ‘Because the tree was down — chopped down.’
Valentine shook his head. ‘Right. Belt and braces? A change of plan?’
‘Or two plans,’ said Shaw.
Traffic control radioed them back before the news had got through to the murder inquiry room: the van which had crashed at Burn Bridge was one of North Norfolk Security’s — the company that owned the vehicle stranded on Siberia Belt. There was a single fatality. The RTA unit was in attendance, the road closed for the night. The company’s MD was en route to the scene.
‘He’s saved us the trip to his place,’ said Valentine.
At the RTA checkpoint Shaw flashed a warrant card and they trundled forward to within fifty yards of the bridge; a graceful concrete arc with steel safety railings. The sun had set, leaving behind a wound in the sky. The river flowed inland, seawater filling the maze of creeks and ditches so that the mirror?like surface seemed to fill the world to the brim.
The van had crashed through the metal barriers but its rear wheels had become entangled in the sheared metal, so that it hung now, swinging slightly, the windscreen pointing down into the water. Except there wasn’t a wind?screen. The driver hadn’t been wearing his seatbelt and on impact had been thrown through the glass. His broken legs were snagged behind the wheel so that he too hung down, his arms reaching towards the water, a snapshot of a diving man.
Amongst the police cars and emergency vehicles was a
The RTA unit had an inflatable in the water, a floodlight already set up on the bank. As they got closer Shaw could see what was left of the driver’s face, lacerated beyond recognition. Blood dripped from the man’s hands, carried off by the flowing river below. Valentine hung back, chatting to the senior fire officer with the RTA unit.
‘Do we know who he is?’ asked Shaw of a uniformed inspector in a reflective jacket. Shaw knew the officer vaguely. Ex?CID, close to retirement, with an attitude problem that age had done nothing to mellow.
He shrugged. ‘Let’s get him down first,’ he said. ‘He falls in the water we could lose the body. What’s it to you?’
‘Could be something, or nothing,’ said Shaw, happy to keep him in the dark. He searched his memory for the inspector’s name. Jennings, that was it. He’d worked with Shaw’s father in what he suspected both would have called the good old days.
There was no doubt what had happened. The BMW had been overtaken by the van, touching 80 mph. It had hit the black ice in the shadow of a line of poplars which guarded the approach to the bridge. The witness said the driver had nearly regained control but had just clipped the railings, ricocheting to the opposite side, smashing through before being snagged by the ruptured metal.
A black sports car crept towards them from the checkpoint. ‘This should be the owner of the security firm,’ said Jennings. ‘He might have an ID for you.’
The man who got out certainly looked like he owned
‘I’ll have a word,’ said Shaw, before Jennings moved. Valentine joined him.
The MD’s name was Jeff Ragg. Well fed and tall, his face looked as though it had been soaking up moisture in a bucket all day; the features heavy and bloated, the fingers too, holding a cigarette with a gold band above the filter.
‘It’s been a long day,’ said Ragg, implying he didn’t want to talk. The voice was silky, like a recorded message on a cinema?ticket line. But he couldn’t look at the corpse for more than a second.
‘Can you identify the driver?’ asked Shaw.
‘It’s Jonah. Jonah Shreeves,’ said Ragg. He drew on the cigarette and let the smoke sting his eyes.
Shaw thought of the last time he’d seen the security guard, behind the wheel of a van identical to this one on a snow?choked Siberia Belt.
‘You can’t see the face,’ said Valentine. He ran a hand inside his raincoat to comfort his stomach. No, you couldn’t see his face, not for the blood and bone.
‘The van’s missing from our compound and so’s Jonah. He’s my son?in?law. I don’t have to see his face.’ Ragg gave them a cold look, as icy as the frozen reeds on the riverbank. Shaw tried to gauge his emotions; a mixture perhaps of anger and resignation, both unsullied by grief. ‘Part of the family until three o’clock this afternoon,’ he added. ‘I rang him out on the round and told him you lot wanted a word about what happened on Siberia Belt. Then he went home, that’s their home — I bought it for them — and threw some clothes in a bag, left a note for my daughter Mary.
‘He had a criminal record,’ said Shaw. A seagull screeched and fell on the hanging body, pulling clumsily at the hair.
Ragg’s eyes narrowed and he bought himself some time by taking a step closer to the water. The van creaked as it swung slightly in the tidal breeze. ‘I didn’t know.’
‘No CRB check? That’s standard, isn’t it?’ asked Valentine, failing to hide a note of disbelief.
‘She trusted him,’ was all Ragg said. ‘She said it was an insult to check him out. Now we know why.’
The RTA unit had got steel cables round the van and were preparing to winch it back to the road. The vibrations set the corpse jiggling, the blood?red hands dancing like a marionette’s.
‘She had to marry someone,’ added Ragg. ‘With a kid on the way. If he was gonna be in the family he might as well be on the payroll and do some fucking work.’ He turned his back on the body of his son?in?law and looked out to sea where dusk was gathering on the horizon. ‘What was on his record?’
‘He nearly killed his girlfriend. He’d robbed her grandmother, and she wanted to turn him in. Broke her arms. But there were others,’ said Shaw. ‘Your daughter. Did he…?’
‘No. Nothing. If he had I’d have killed him. He knew that.’
‘Why d’you think he did a runner?’ asked Shaw. ‘Because if you’d told me about his past I might have
Valentine coughed, the cold air beginning to make his lungs ache.
‘It’s possible, Mr Ragg,’ said Shaw, ‘that the vehicles on Siberia Belt were diverted off the main road in order to set up a robbery — the contents of your security van being the target. Could Shreeves have been involved? The inside man?’
‘It crossed my mind,’ said Ragg. ‘We operate all along the north Norfolk coast, have done for fifteen years. There are plenty of black spots for mobile signals but most of them are out on the beaches or the marsh. There’s just a few stretches of road. My vans never use them. We don’t have radios, so the mobile signal is crucial. Even the worst black spots can usually pick up something if you walk around a bit searching for the signal. But not Siberia Belt — there’s no signal on that stretch for about three miles. It’s the worst black spot on the coast. Which is why the regular drivers never use it. Ever.’
‘So maybe he was involved?’ pressed Shaw.
‘I love my daughter, Inspector, but she’s not the world’s best judge of character. I told her to wait when she met Jonah — give it a year. But she wouldn’t. I said she’d regret it one day. She’s at home now, doing exactly that.’
The van on the bridge shuddered and they heard a joint crack in the swinging corpse. A leg had broken and Valentine looked away as the bone appeared, the shattered end glimpsed through the shredded overalls.
‘I should be with her,’ said Ragg. ‘As for Jonah, if he was involved I think he’s paid the penalty, don’t you?’
A single blue balloon hung from the door handle of Flat 34, The Saltings, North End; the home of Harvey Ellis. From the third?floor balcony they could see over the rough lots to where a footpath was lit by a single lamp. In the dark the snow seemed to have its own glow, as if neon tubes had been sunk within. As Shaw knocked he pushed from his mind the vision of Jonah Shreeves’s corpse hanging below Burn Bridge. It seemed very likely that Shreeves had met his death fleeing the certainty of his exposure as a violent criminal who lied his way into both a job and a marriage. They might never know if he’d been part of a conspiracy to stage a robbery on the isolated coast road. A plan frustrated, perhaps, by the sudden snow storm.
Harvey Ellis’s death had been no less violent than that of Jonah Shreeves — but in Ellis’s case they had a murderer still to find. Shaw squared his shoulders and knocked again, a triple crack. Valentine looked at his shoes, trying to remember the last time he’d worked a thirteen?hour day. He felt shattered, almost dizzy, but good too — like he had a career again. As they waited the only sound was the swish?swish of the ring road, and somewhere a washing machine rocking in its final phase.
Footsteps within, sharp and workmanlike, coming closer on the lino. A woman who introduced herself as
Grace Ellis was on the sofa holding her small daughter. An older boy sat at a Formica table with homework in front of him — an exercise book with special grid lines for maths. He’d been crying, and there wasn’t a mark on the paper. Shaw noted the glass of water in front of him and the frayed collar of the boy’s white shirt. He could see his father in his face — the large features crowding the narrow skull, the small, compact build. Valentine accepted tea in a mug and took a dining?room chair for a seat. Shaw stood, leaving the armchair free in front of the electric fire.
Mrs Ellis stared at the TV which wasn’t on, her knees pressed together, until Mrs Tyre prised the toddler from her arms and let her play on the carpet. The boy left his books and knelt, spinning toys for his sister.
Shaw estimated Grace Ellis’s age as late twenties, early thirties. She had what looked like natural blonde hair falling to her shoulders, and the kind of thin stretched skin which reveals the veins beneath, the bones of the forehead and cheeks threatening to break through the papery surface. He tried to conjure up Harvey Ellis’s face — the adolescent features — and thought what a fragile couple they’d been.
‘The blue balloon on the door…?’ asked Shaw. Grace shook her head, put a hand out for a mug of tea, then took it back. ‘It’s for Jake.’ She thought about that. ‘He’s got leukaemia and there’s an appeal — it was Harvey’s idea. Jake’s mad about birds of prey — always
Shaw thought about the plastic eagle hanging in the pick?up’s cab. ‘It’s a start,’ he said.
Valentine was reluctantly impressed by Shaw’s skills at talking to people, putting them at ease. He wondered what Shaw would say if he told him it was a skill his father had also mastered. ‘Where’s Jake now?’ he asked, his lips suddenly coming into contact with the tea bag floating in the mug.
‘The Queen Victoria,’ said Grace Ellis. ‘We go every day.’ She looked up at a clock on the mantelpiece. ‘At six. We’re late.’
‘I’ll arrange for a car to take you,’ said Valentine, putting the mug down quickly, unable to face another encounter with the wayward tea bag.
Shaw left her some silence. Then they filled in the missing life: Ellis was local, primary school in the North End, then GNVQs at the college. He’d been a boy soldier, the TA, and he still played football most weeks for an army side. Jake and his brother Michael used to go and watch. That was Harvey’s big passion — although Match of the Day and listen to his music in the truck. Prog?metal, loud.
‘I can’t stand it,’ she said, nodding at a CD rack by the fireplace. She looked at her watch. ‘I’m going to have to tell Jake.’
‘The illness must have been a blow,’ said Shaw, trying to get her to talk. ‘When was your son diagnosed?’
‘Eight months ago. Wasn’t a blow, exactly. Well, course it was.’ She pushed hair out of her eyes. ‘But Harvey said it had saved us all. Made us a family. That we’d make the most of Jake, knowing he’d be gone one day. He’s right. We didn’t get that chance with Harvey, did we?’ Anger in her voice now.
‘But Jake’s very ill now?’ asked Shaw, knowing the question was a euphemism.
She was bright enough to see that. ‘There’s not much time. A few months. Maybe weeks.’ She looked at the children. ‘Harvey said that if Jake left us…’ She stopped, and Michael smiled at her. ‘No — when — he left us, then we’d still be a family. But I said it wasn’t fair. Harvey said it was fair — that we’d got Michael and Peg and that had been a bonus because I’d had a difficult pregnancy with Jake and they said I couldn’t have any more. So we’d had our luck. And anyway, life isn’t fair, is it?’
A cutting from the Lynn News was fixed with Blu Tack to the wall above the tiled mantelpiece, next to a football line?up. A picture of Jake in bed at the hospice, a headline: ‘Eagle appeal takes off with?100 donation.’
‘Not everyone thought the appeal was good news,’ she said. ‘Money’s short round here. Five grand is a lot for a treat. Some people are like that. But we wanted him to have the memory.’
Valentine stood, pretending to study the team photo. ‘Anyone ever threaten your husband, Mrs Ellis? You? The family?’
She shook her head. ‘People said things, in the street. Every time I got my purse out I could feel people watching, thinking, Is that Jake’s money? But no — no one ever said they would hurt Harvey.’
‘How much have you got?’ asked Valentine. ‘For the appeal?’
‘About two thousand, a few pennies more. It’s hard going.’
‘Could we have a picture of Harvey, Mrs Ellis? It would be a big help for our inquiries,’ asked Shaw. She nodded, relieved to have a task, and went out to the kitchen where they heard her sifting through a drawer.
Mrs Tyre rested a hand on Michael’s head, her fingers busy, keeping time to an unheard tune. Shaw’s mobile buzzed and he scrolled down to find a picture from Lena: Francesca in the council pool at Lynn, both hands on a bright red swimming hat which meant she’d passed to
Grace Ellis came back into the room with a set of photos.
‘Thank you,’ said Shaw. ‘That’s a big help. We’ll let you get on now.’
She saw them out into the corridor in silence. Shaw waited for the lounge door to close. ‘Mrs Ellis, I’m sorry, one more question.’
He produced his artist’s impression of the hitch?hiker. ‘Do you know this woman?’
She took a tissue from her sleeve and dabbed at her nose. She studied the image. ‘No. I don’t think so, no.’
‘OK.’ He zipped up his jacket. ‘Just for the record. I have to ask. Your marriage, there must have been a lot of strain with Jake’s illness. How were you coping?’
She’d heard him but she didn’t understand. Valentine held his breath, shocked that Shaw had the bottle to ask now, on the first day she was a widow.
‘What?’ she said. ‘We just coped, together.’ She looked around, as if searching for a translator. ‘And when it was over, we were gonna cope with that.’
Shaw smiled, Valentine pocketed his notebook and they slipped out through the front door, trying not to let the cold in.
In the murder inquiry room at St James’s a Christmas tree still stood by the window. A pair of handcuffs hung from one branch, scene?of?crime tape wrapped in a spiral up to a star made from a tin ashtray. Beneath it were three crates of beer bottles where the presents should have been, all now empty, and all originally care of the landlord of the Red House, the CID’s regular watering hole, a back?street boozer with a quiet snug bar and a remarkably law?abiding clientele.
The team stood in a circle, letting the phones ring, ready for Shaw’s briefing. He stood, his feet spaced to match his shoulders, his voice as confident as his body language. In his hand a set of black?and?white prints from the morgue. Beside him a bottle of mineral water. The silence was respectful: they all knew Peter Shaw, and his reputation for fast, smart, exhaustive police work. And they knew he always kept his distance. Even as a young DC he’d always managed to draw a sharp line between friendship and the often excessive camaraderie of the CID.
But there was admiration, especially for his skills as a forensic artist. Until now these had been exhibited in a series of classes for recruits, and articles in the force magazine. This was the first time anyone had seen him in action on a live case. Three A?frame easels had been
‘Right. Let’s keep it short and simple,’ said Shaw. ‘We have three violent deaths. Two are clearly murder victims. But first — our man in the raft.’ He flipped back the sheet of paper to reveal a large mug?shot of the man they’d found on Ingol Beach taken in the morgue.
‘Passport ID, George?’
‘Terence Michael Brand, birthplace King’s Lynn. Aged thirty?one,’ said Valentine.
‘So,’ said Shaw. ‘Brand was poisoned, possibly a snake bite.’
‘Sir…’ It was DC Fiona Campbell. ‘Just on Brand,’ she said, standing, all six foot two of her, shoulders rounded and slightly stooped, trying to look smaller than she was. She’d come straight on to the force five years ago from school, just like her father, a DCI in Norwich, had done before her, despite having the academic qualifications to go to just about any university.
‘His name was on the national database. Address in Nuneaton. Local police got a squad car straight round. Looks like our man. He’s known to them. Various scams, never violent, but plenty of victims. All to finance his hobby, apparently.’
‘Hobby?’ asked Valentine.
‘Surfing. He’s got a job poolside at the municipal baths — a lifeguard. But the contract’s flexible and he disappears here and there for a few weeks chasing waves — Cornwall, Australia one summer.’
‘Nothing else?’
‘Two things. He was due up at Lynn Magistrates end
Shaw recalled the cockle?picker’s face: the childlike curly blond hair crammed under the woollen hat. He caught Valentine’s eye, and they exchanged a nod. That put the cockle?pickers at the heart of the smuggling operation.
‘And?’
‘Currently he’s away for a month. He lives with his aunt, his father’s sister, a rented flat near the station. She could ID him but she’s housebound. He’s never said who he stays with, and she hasn’t asked. She says that’s how they get along. She says he takes his wetsuit. Left a forwarding address in Lynn — she says he’s got friends here.’ She flicked the piece of paper in her hand. ‘The Emerald Garden Chinese takeaway.’
Shaw made an effort to see the links clearly: Stanley Zhao at the wheel of his Volvo on Siberia Belt, the food going cold in the back, while Brand’s body floats in to Ingol Beach.
‘OK. George and I will make a second visit to Stanley Zhao. It was obvious he was lying; now we know what he was lying about. And let’s keep the link with Lufkin up front — that’s a direct link between the raft and the cockle?pickers. Either way Brand could be the key. You don’t need to be a mathematician to work out the chances that Brand’s death is unconnected to our two murders. But you need to be a copper to know they might not be. So let’s not tangle ourselves up with theories until we’ve done the legwork.’
Outside they heard a bottle smash in Greyfriars, the
Shaw touched the dressing on his wounded eye. ‘OK. Next: the body on the sands, on Styleman’s Middle. Let’s call him Styleman for now.’ He flipped back the next sheet of paper and there was an audible intake of breath. Shaw had taken Justina’s morgue shots and ‘reanimated’ the face, sketching in a random expression on the features — an understated laugh, just revealing the teeth, lifting the facial skin, deepening the crow’s feet. He’d used the tortillion to give the skin lustre, and then 3D lighting to give it substance. It was a face with as much life as any in the room, and seemed about to turn to look at its creator.
‘Earlier tonight, George and I attended the internal autopsy.’ Valentine fought not to conjure up the image that had made him retch: the lungs held up to the light. ‘There was water in the airway and stomach, and the lungs were swollen, so death due to drowning — but the wound to the back of the skull was traumatic. He’d have been out cold by the time he hit the water.
‘Jacky — I want you to concentrate on this.’ DC Jacky Lau was ethnic Chinese, a tough operator with links well established in the local community, and an ambition to become West Norfolk’s first female DCI. She was short, compact, but you’d never call her petite. She’d joined the force late, in her mid?thirties, chucking in a job with her father’s taxi firm. Outside the job her life was stock?car racing, and a series of boyfriends she’d dragged along to , all with leather jackets, tattoos, and engine oil under their nails.
‘Is he local? Or is he a floater from up the coast? Let’s do a check with all forces — Lincolnshire, Tyneside, Northumberland — even Lothian and Borders. But if he’s one of ours then my guess is it’s something to do with the sands. We need to know what’s going on out there. That’s got to be what this is about. Is it linked to smuggling? Let’s dig away at the cockle?pickers.’
In his memory he saw the bone?white yacht slipping into the creek the night Harvey Ellis died. A blue clam motif on the sail. He’d sketch it, see if Lau could find the yacht along the coast.
‘Let’s get copies of this face along the docks, the marinas, see if we can get an ID,’ he said. ‘We need background, context, that’s your job. Check everything.’
DC Campbell dropped her chin and smiled. They’d had a sweepstake before the briefing, trying to guess how many times Shaw would use the word ‘check’.
‘And finally,’ said Shaw. The last evidence board. A photo of Harvey Ellis, cut from the family shot his wife had provided, smiling into the sun with the sea behind, the water dotted with swimmers. CSI shots of the inside of the victim’s pick?up. A close up of the dead man, slumped forward on the wheel.
‘Last case — but this is where we sink the resources in the next twenty?four hours. We have a firm ID — we can do some solid work here. But it’s not easy. At the moment this case makes the Murders on the Rue Morgue look like a traffic offence.’
‘According to forensics,’ said Shaw. ‘Harvey Ellis died sometime between 4.45 and 7.45 p.m. The convoy pulled up at around 5.15. Ellis was driving the first vehicle — with him was a hitch?hiker. John Holt talked to him. Sarah Baker?Sibley saw him moving about in the truck — saw someone moving about in the truck anyway. He switched to the radio from the CD about seven — according to Baker?Sibley again. I found him dead at eight fifteen. The snow around the vehicle is untouched by another human footprint. Oh — and there’s a half?eaten apple on the dashboard — but Ellis didn’t eat it. The hitch?hiker’s disappeared and the pathologist says Ellis didn’t die in the cab. If anybody can make sense out of all of that I’d like them to speak up, right now.’
He let the silence linger.
‘Could Holt have done it?’ asked Campbell.
‘We can’t rule him out but it looks very unlikely. He couldn’t have known the woman in the Alfa — Baker?Sibley — wasn’t watching him. Did he really risk two thrusts through the open window? She says his hands never came out of his pockets. And no blood on his clothes? And someone was still playing with the radio and CD ninety minutes later. Plus — the evidence tells us he didn’t die in the cab.’
Another silence.
‘We know someone was out to divert traffic on to Siberia Belt,’ said Shaw. ‘The two AA signs were put out, at either end, and then taken back in. The AA is sure it’s
‘The question is — who was the target? Ellis? There’s a pair of blown spark plugs to hand. If he’d put them in the engine he’d be going nowhere. Was that the plan? To use the pick?up to block the road? If so, why’d they change the plan? Either way it’s a trap — we just can’t be sure Harvey Ellis was the fly. If he wasn’t — who was? The security van?’
He unscrewed the top of the water bottle and drank half of it. ‘OK. We’re nearly done,’ said Shaw. ‘We better stop soon before everyone explodes with anxiety about the approach of closing time.’
Valentine pretended to laugh with everyone else. He really could do with a drink.
‘But…’ added Shaw, ‘we also need to find two missing people. First. Ellis’s passenger.’
Shaw flipped the picture of Harvey Ellis back over the board to reveal his sketch of the hitch?hiker Holt had described. ‘We’ve got this out to the media now, as you’ll have seen. This is John Holt’s best guess. Female, young. Sexy. She said she was heading for Cromer — let’s check that. She’s our first priority. She could be our killer.
‘Then there’s the runaway kid in the stolen Mondeo. Perhaps he’s the backstop, put there to make sure no one can get out. Because the Mondeo’s the last car. What do we know about the kid? He’s just stolen a car. He’s drunk the best part of a bottle of vodka — if you think the best part is the bit with the alcohol in it. He’s not very good
‘And there’s this rubber?stamp thing on the back of his hand. BT. Do we check with them?’ asked Campbell.
‘Telecom?’ said Shaw.
‘It wasn’t anything fancy,’ said Valentine, shaking his head. ‘Kind of thing you get on your hand at a nightclub.’
‘We need to find this witness. He’s important. So let’s think of ways to find him, shall we?’ said Shaw.
They heard footsteps in the corridor and the double doors swung open. Tom Hadden held a single sheet of computer paper, a tracing across it like a read?out from a seismograph.
Under the neon light he looked ill, his eyes pink, matching the strawberry?blond wisps of hair above his ears. Hadden always reminded Shaw of a laboratory rabbit, pink ears, pale flesh under thin white hair, and the eyes set back, as if glimpsed under ice.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘Go ahead — just winding up,’ said Shaw. ‘Anything?’
‘Yeah. Fred Parlour, the plumber. He hit his head on the door of the kid’s Mondeo. We did all the checks. The blood on the door is Group O, as is Parlour’s. But there was a smudge on Parlour’s overalls… here.’ He put his right hand over the left thigh of his cords. ‘It’s not O. It’s AB — same as the victim.’ He held up the print?out.
One of the DCs clapped slowly.
‘Is that definite?’ said Shaw.
‘Well, it’s more likely you’ll be hit by a meteorite on the way home, Peter, than this blood belongs to someone other than Harvey Ellis.’
Everyone started to talk but Shaw raised a hand. ‘Tom. Thanks.’
‘Unfortunately…’ Hadden was looking at the printout. ‘It’s never that easy. I can match the blood, no problem. But the smear isn’t just blood. There’s something else and I can’t ID it, not 100 per cent. Spectrometer says it’s organic. The nearest match I’ve got is bone.’
‘Ellis’s eye socket was chipped,’ said Twine. ‘The pathologist’s report mentioned fragments.’
‘Yes,’ said Hadden. ‘But not fragments of sheep bone.’
Valentine snapped a pencil.
‘As I said, I haven’t got it exactly right. But it’s an animal bone. Possibly more than one. Anyway, you’ll have it in writing in the morning.’ He was already retreating through the doors. ‘I’ll be in the Ark if you want me.’
There was a moment of silence as the doors banged shut. Shaw took a deep breath.
‘OK. That could be the breakthrough we don’t deserve. On the other hand it might not be — so let’s keep our heads. We do the legwork tomorrow. George and I will deal with Parlour.’
Valentine cracked the joints in his left hand. ‘He’s got the victim’s blood on his trousers.’
There was a silence that made all the other silences sound like the Hallelujah Chorus.
‘And carrying a dead sheep,’ added Valentine.
The murder team dispersed quickly to the Red House. Shaw had told the team not to get excited about Hadden’s forensic evidence. But it hadn’t worked. He could feel the almost palpable rush of adrenaline. He didn’t blame them for their optimism. Parlour had lied. He’d sworn he hadn’t gone further forward along the line of cars than Holt’s silver Corsa. But at some point that night he’d got very close indeed to Harvey Ellis. He’d be on a murder charge by lunchtime unless he could talk his way out of it. And Valentine was right — not for the first time. Their job was to catch a killer, not solve some arcane forensic puzzle. They could work out how he’d done it later. But in the end Shaw knew that if they got him in front of a jury then they would need all the answers to secure a conviction. In the end they’d have to work it out.
Shaw said he’d see them there. He wouldn’t, and they knew it, knowing the DI would slip home. But this night, for once, they were only half right. Shaw knew he should go home, sleep well, and prepare for the crucial interview. But first there was something he had to do. Something which, if he’d really had faith in his father, he would have done many years before. He’d avoided even thinking about the Tessier case for a decade, probably — he could admit it now — because he was afraid of what he might find. Doubting his father’s honesty seemed safer than trying
He walked down the back stairs to the ground floor. St James’s had been built in 1926, on the ruins of the old city walls. Permission had been granted for the demolition of a row of Victorian lock?up shops. The problem was what was under the lock?up shops. At that precise point on the old medieval walls the original builders had dug deep to create a series of underground magazines for the storage of gunpowder. Semi?circular vaults, in local clay brick, linked like a tube train. Four carriages in all, each nearly sixty feet in length.
But it was for the last two that Peter Shaw was bound. The custody sergeant let him into the corridor that led to the stairs and the overnight cells. A drunk sang from the first, the voice light and tuneful. At the end of the corridor was an iron door, painted gloss black, with the single word RECORDS in copperplate script.
The door, unlocked, swung easily inward on oiled hinges. Here the barrel roof of the old cellar had been left in its original state, spotlights illuminating the intricate work of the medieval builders, studded now with a network of discreet piping which provided a state?of?theart sprinkler system. The room was full of black metal shelving, stacked with file boxes, the rows arranged like a library. In each row stood a dehumidifier.
A man at a desk sat obscuring the chair which presumably was supporting him. He had agricultural bones from which hung enough weight for two people. Even seated
‘Peter,’ he said, standing, inadvertently heaving the desk forward. ‘Sir.’
‘Timber.’ They shook hands, laughing.
Shaw thought Sergeant ‘Timber’ Woods looked his age, which must have been sixty?six. Woods had retired a year earlier after a lifetime of unblemished, if uninspired, service. He’d been asked back to cover the late shift at the records office, a sinecure demanding only diligence. West Norfolk had switched to computerized records in 1995. But the St James’s budget had yet to find the extra cash to transfer the backlog. Access to information and data?protection legislation demanded the files be kept, preserved, and made available to any member of the public completing the necessary paperwork — as well as for CID and uniformed branch inquiries. So nearly three thousand case box files, bound back copies of the local papers, stenographers’ notes and scene?of?crime evidence boxes had been saved — the collective memory of West Norfolk Constabulary stretching back to 1934.
‘So.’ Woods mashed a tea bag in another mug. ‘George Valentine,’ he said, smiling. ‘Jack would’ve laughed.’
Shaw had known Timber Woods all his life. He’d been one of the few of his father’s friends not to fade out of the picture after the Tessier case and Jack Shaw’s hurried retirement.
‘We went out to the Westmead,’ said Shaw. ‘George and
I. I’d never seen the spot, where they found the kid.’ He paused.
Woods picked up the mug, effortlessly enclosing it within his fist. ‘We spent three years on the beat together — Jack and me — and we broke a few rules, cut a few corners, but I never saw him plant anything, Peter. That’s a rule he didn’t break, wouldn’t break. If you played by all the rules you didn’t get to nick anybody. He was a good honest copper. I don’t know why you can’t just accept that.’
‘Doesn’t mean I don’t want to, does it?
Woods looked at the spot where Shaw’s tie should have been. ‘He’d have been proud of you.’
‘He didn’t want me to be a copper.’
‘He wanted you to have a life. He just didn’t think you could have both,’ said Woods, hiding a frayed cuff. ‘He’d still have been proud of you.’
‘Is there a box for the Tessier case?’
‘A file?’
‘No. A box — a scene?of?crime box.’
Woods took some keys from a metal drawer and led the way down the room. The door set in the far wall was iron, fireproof, the black paint peeling. He reached inside and flicked a switch, a solitary light bulb illuminating the final cellar beneath an identical brick roof.
Open wooden shelving this time, metal boxes, navy blue, stacked in lines, each secured with a small padlock, each with a card inserted in a groove. Shaw turned one to the light:
ATKINS. June 1974.
DI R.G.WILLIS. CN 778/8
TESSIER. July 1997.
DCI Jack Shaw. CN 1399/3
They each took a handle, lugging it to a wide table, scratches polished into the surface. Woods unlocked the box and tipped back the lid. Dust rose like a final breath.
There wasn’t much inside. Shaw held up a plastic bag containing a single black leather glove. The label was in Jack Shaw’s writing. Date. Time. Place. Countersigned by DI George Valentine.
‘And there we have it,’ said Shaw, wanting to believe. Another cellophane bag. Items of clothing cut from the body in the morgue. A football top — Celtic — and a pair of white shorts. Pants, socks (odd, both football, but one green one white), a pair of football boots with the studs removed, and a red sweatshirt. Another held the contents of the shorts pocket: a 20p piece, two 10p pieces, a single wrapped Opal Fruit. A third bag had been set aside for a scrap of paper covered in oil stains.
Shaw held it up to the light. ‘Chip paper,’ he read off the label. ‘Beef dripping — those were the days, eh, Timber?’
Next was a glass phial, empty now apart from a dirty tidemark, but the label said it had held water and oil from
‘The original forensics report will be with the file,’ said Woods, nodding as if the question had been asked. ‘But this is a copy.’ There was an envelope attached to the inside of the box lid, and he slid out a sheaf of papers in close type. ‘You often get those empty tubes with these old cases. Nothing left after a standard set of DNA tests in those days.’
‘I’d like to book the box out.’
Woods heaved a ledger round. ‘Got a bit of spare time, have you, Peter? A coupla murders would keep most DIs busy.’
‘Can’t sleep,’ said Shaw, laughing.
‘Your dad was the same,’ said Woods, locking up.
‘I’d like the box and the copy of the lab reports taken over to forensics — Tom Hadden’s attention. Get a signature there as well, OK?’
Woods checked the entry. ‘You know what this place used to be?’ he asked, looking round.
‘No idea, Timber.’
‘Before we had to bring the records down it was cells
‘So everyone says. But that’s not how it’s supposed to work, Timber.’ Shaw couldn’t keep the edge of anger out of his voice. ‘I’m supposed to be convinced by the evidence. So.’ He tapped the evidence box. ‘Let’s see what twelve years’ worth of advances in forensic science can tell us, shall we?’
They walked back into the records room. ‘I’d like the file too,’ said Shaw, closing his good eye, resting it now that the tiredness was blurring his vision.
Woods took a big breath. ‘The file on Tessier’s out.’ Shaw stopped and looked at his heavy, fleshy face. ‘Who…?’
‘According to the book it was George Valentine,’ said Woods. ‘You two should talk to each other.’
An hour later Shaw was walking back along the line of the dunes towards The Old Beach Cafe. Despite the hour Lena was still working, that day’s delivery of stock spread out on the wooden floor of the old boathouse shop: wetsuits spreadeagled in lines, a rack of swimwear, and a brace of new surf boards encased in bubble wrap.
She was in a tracksuit, her hair pulled back in a stylish knot.
‘Did you have a run?’ said Shaw, sitting in a wicker chair by the racks of beach shoes.
‘Just down to the sea at dusk while Fran was reading.’ Shaw glanced at the baby monitor Lena still left on when she worked in the shop. Fran was old enough now to
‘Drink? I heard the latest on the radio.’
She fetched a wine bottle, the cork eased out, and two small glass tumblers.
‘George Valentine told me something I didn’t know about Dad,’ said Shaw, holding the wine up to the light. It looked like blood. He drank it quickly and helped himself to a second glass.
Lena knelt, spreading out one of the wetsuits, testing the seams. Shaw’s family was not a subject they ever discussed. When he’d come back from London after his year with the Met he’d brought Lena with him. His mother had tried to see past her skin, but Jack Shaw couldn’t even do that. The atmosphere at home was toxic in the aftermath of the Tessier case. Jack Shaw had taken early retirement to protect his pension. Which meant the Tessier file was closed. The subject was never mentioned, but had permeated his father’s bitter last year of life. It hadn’t been the best moment to ask him to embrace an inter?racial marriage. The clash marked the final break between father and son. Lena couldn’t believe so little could be said as a family tore itself apart.
‘He said Dad asked
‘And has he?’ she asked.
‘No. And I don’t think there’s any chance he ever will.’ Shaw thought about what he was going to say next, knowing it revealed a cynical side to his mind which Lena hated. ‘Which raises two questions. Did Dad really ask him to clear his name? If it’s a genuine question it’s a kind of proof in itself, isn’t it? And second. He’s taken the file on the Tessier case out of the records at St James’s. Why? Perhaps there’s something in it that incriminates them both.’
Lena stood, holding up a new suit, a sky?blue wave picked out on the stippled black chest.
‘But if Jack did ask him?’
‘Then I suppose I could try to help,’ said Shaw. ‘Should try to help. If we could prove Mosse was the killer it would lift the cloud over the case — not entirely, of course, even if Mosse is guilty it doesn’t mean they didn’t plant the evidence. But it shifts the probabilities. They didn’t follow the rules that night, nobody’s going to rewrite that. But if Mosse is the murderer then it’s odds on it was his glove, and that it was bagged when they took it to the flat.’
‘How are you going to prove he was the killer?’ she asked, ever practical.
‘I’ve got the forensics — the original box. Valentine’s a good copper, in fact he’s a bloody good copper…’
Shaw stopped, realizing that Valentine had earned the compliment. Lena just smiled, knowing how difficult he found it to admit he’d got someone wrong.
‘A bloody good copper,’ he said again. ‘But forensics aren’t his strong point. I’ll get Tom Hadden to run through, see if they missed anything. Or I can put it up to Warren, see if he’ll look at the file at least.’
‘Good. Do that. Don’t stew in it, Peter. You don’t know what happened, so find out. If you don’t trust either of them implicitly then it’s all you can do.’
Implicitly?’
It was one of her favourite words, but only because it hid what she really wanted to say. Faith was the word she was thinking about. ‘Maybe,’ she said, toying with a simple silver cross at her neck.
‘But I don’t, do I? So there’s no point in pretending.’
‘And what do you feel about that?’ she asked, smiling, balancing a toolbox on her hip.
Shaw dropped his chin on to his chest and gave her a weary look. ‘Feel?’
She pulled up another chair and put her feet up on his lap. ‘Yes. Feel.’
He massaged her foot, bending the toes down to flex the instep. ‘Let’s go to bed.’