Death

THIRTY-FOUR

Wednesday

Wells’ lifeboat station was at the end of a straight mile of sea wall which led directly out to sea from the town quay. The beach stretched beyond, a vast yellow undulating plain, an early morning August crowd of several hundred reduced to isolated dots. Lifeboat crewman Tug Coyle was still missing. Peterborough CID had contacted his wife who said she had received her monthly support payment from Tug’s solicitor, but there had been no call from her ex-husband, which was rare. The coming Thursday was his regular monthly date with his son. Usually he’d call to fix up time and place: often the town cinema, or the stock-car racing arena, or a fishing trip in summer. Coyle’s car — a battered Vauxhall van — was not outside his flat or beside the lifeboat station.

Shaw put the Porsche in an empty slot marked for RNLI crewman. As soon as he swung open the door he could smell the salt, hear the distinctive shouts of children playing out at the water’s edge. The heat was already building, yesterday’s thunderstorm a distant memory. The air over the modern corrugated iron roof of the lifeboat house buckled in the sun’s rays, an anchored mirage. From the outside the building had all the charm of an MFI out-of-town showroom, painted in corporate shades of grey and orange. But inside the Aran-class boat gleamed. Half a dozen tourists were already up on the walkway which gave a view inside the boat’s hi-tech cabin.

Valentine arrived and spread some A4 sheets on to the flat glass top of a display cabinet containing medals. Ignoring a sign he lit a Silk Cut. They’d talked this through the night before after coffee. If Shaw was right about the killer’s motives then there was a genetic link between the murderer and both the teenage burglar and one of the thirty-seven demonstrators the inquiry team had interviewed who would have been up at Docking Hill on the day of the planned wind farm protest. The sure-fire way to catch their killer was to put the thirty-eight DNA profiles on the database and wait for the link to appear. But that would take several days. And they didn’t have several days. So they’d try to do it on paper, by interview. They were dealing with close family relationships: near family, so it wasn’t an impossible task — it just needed some painstaking work.

‘So far?’ asked Shaw.

‘So far nothing,’ said Valentine, sifting the papers. ‘But Paul seems to know what he’s doing. The whole team’s on it flat out. He says it’ll take twenty-four hours — maybe more. But we’ve set up a fast track too, seeing if we can find a link between our Garry Tyler — the burglar — and Joe Osbourne.’

He held up a head-and-shoulders print of a teenager: cropped hair, belligerent stare. ‘This is Tyler by the way, care of Wells’ nick. Jackie Lau’s going out to see the kid’s mother over lunch. That’s our best bet. Paul talked to Tilly Osbourne and she says she can’t recall any Tyler’s in the family, but hey, they’re not that kind of family and she’s a teenager. Why would she care?’

They climbed a short spiral metal staircase into the mess room. News of a crewman missing had brought several lifeboatmen into the station. Shaw recognized most of the faces. No one had seen Tug Coyle for forty-eight hours. He had been due on a standard watch that morning at six but hadn’t reported in, having missed two shifts the day before, one the day before that. There’d be a disciplinary hearing; if there wasn’t a copper-plated excuse, he might be thrown off the crew.

They asked to see Coyle’s locker and one of the senior crew opened it up: spare boots, gear for the lifeboat, roll-up tin, torch, two heavy RNLI sweaters, two pairs of camouflaged trousers, and a programme for the Norfolk Arena, featuring rally cross and speedway. Valentine took the key, relocked the locker, and asked them to leave it that way.

The deputy coxswain was a man called Petersen, Navy-clean, with eyes that looked as if the sun had bleached the colour out of them. He showed Shaw Coyle’s rota: eight six-hour shifts a week, plus any back-up shifts he could make. Available on call 24/7 except for an eight-hour gap on Thursday afternoons when he took his son out.

‘Broken marriage,’ said Petersen, shrugging.

When asked he said that Coyle was popular but not particularly sociable. They went back downstairs to the boathouse and Petersen nodded at the portrait on the wall of Tug John’s. ‘You know he was his grandson? Difficult act to follow. Didn’t help giving the kid the nickname, did it? Like he was supposed to be right there in the old man’s footsteps. I knew Johns, and frankly I thought he was pretty unpleasant. Kind of skipper in the Navy you’d go a long way to avoid. Bit of a tyrant. You couldn’t tell him anything. If you’ve done it, he’s done it, only he’s done it better. Coyle was better than that. But, you know, if we could see ourselves. .’

The doors of the boathouse were open so they were looking down the ramp at The Cut, the tide flowing out and a yacht sliding past, East Hills on the horizon.

‘There is one thing,’ added Petersen. ‘One of the crew comes from a family in the town that owns one of the huts — way out the end. Tug used to sleep over some nights rather than driving back to Lynn. Illegal, but like nobody’s counting, and there’s plenty that can’t afford the local house prices anymore. Give me a sec I’ll get you the key.’

They stood together out on the sand, not far from a family encamped round a hole full of children. Both their mobile’s buzzed with an identical incoming text. It was Paul Twine up at the incident room: CSI had phoned from The Ark, the lab result on Joe Osbourne’s DNA had arrived. Negative — no match with Sample X. They’d sent a uniformed officer up to the hospital to give Osbourne the good news in person.

‘Negative!’ Valentine held his phone at arm’s length and thought about lobbing it into the sea.

‘How does that work?’ He spat in the sand. ‘Coyle, the ferryman, does a runner, but it’s not Joe Osbourne out on East Hills. So who the fuck was out on the island?’ He looked skywards and his neck cracked. ‘Are we back to Grieve and Roundhay?’ His voice had risen with frustration: ‘And if we’re back to them why the fuck has Coyle pissed off?’

Shaw just stood in the sand, rooted, feet in his own shadow, like he wasn’t going anywhere.