Death

THIRTY-NINE

Thursday

A helicopter whoop-whooped over the woods above Creake, the pilot briefly holding his position, so that the aircraft hung against the blue sky like a hawk. Beneath it trailed the thermal-imaging camera, like a miniature torpedo. Shaw could see it through the branches of the cedar tree which grew from the ruins of the Warrenner’s Lodge. The outdoor incident room was busy, all the phone lines in use as the search for Tug Coyle was stepped up. They’d got one bit of news: Interpol had some sightings from two Belgium ports — a single mariner, a small yacht. They’d asked the local police to check it out. Excitement was like lightning in the air, waiting to crackle. With the chief constable’s press conference timed for four that afternoon they all knew that with one more push, and one more stroke of luck, they could get their man. Shaw was even more convinced in the brash sunlight of day that that man was Tug Coyle, with Ruth Robinson a willing accomplice.

But even if they caught Coyle that didn’t mean they had a case. They needed the evidence to make sure the murder charges stuck in court. A decent defence lawyer would attack the DNA evidence, try and insinuate that the police had contaminated the sample, either by accident or design. A guilty verdict required a direct forensic link between the killer and the cyanide pills. The search of the Robinson’s attic had drawn a blank. Their best chance still lay out in the woods. Or, more accurately, beneath the woods.

A uniformed constable appeared at the door of the ruin.‘Sir. DC Twine would like a word — he’s up on the edge of the field, beyond the sunflowers. He said it was urgent.’

As they climbed the slope the helicopter swung overhead, a single Day-Glo arm signalling from the open door. Twine was kneeling on the grass, unpacking a ground-floor plan of what looked like an ambitious garden shed. A single room, an antechamber; but then Shaw saw the narrow almost vertical staircase entrance, and a long tunnel leading away.

‘We got this from the MoD, its a generic plan of the style of one of the hundreds of these dugouts built along the South coast in 1939, but they said it would be close to anything put in by sappers here.’ Twine, usually a picture of controlled efficiency, was struggling to keep excitement out of his voice.

‘This is what we’re looking for underground,’ he said, switching his eyes to Valentine’s face, then back to Shaw. ‘It’s effectively a miniature Nissan hut. So heavy-duty corrugated steel, a curved roof, sunk under the earth. Entry’s through this hatch, which is double-locked in iron, then down about fifteen feet in a series of high steps which are concrete. The emergency exit tunnel is also held in place beneath a curved roof. Steel again.’

‘And they’ve found it?’ asked Shaw.

‘Maybe.’ Twine had a plastic see-through overlay with the outline of the dugout in superimposed in white: box-like, with the escape tunnel as a kind of tail. ‘This is exactly to scale,’ he said, putting it to one side.

Then he spilt out a set of aerial pictures. ‘They took these on the first run after dawn. This is what we’re interested in,’ he said, stabbing one of the images with his Mont Blanc, edging the see-through outline into place on top of it with his other hand. Nestling beneath the tree canopies there was something where Twine was pointing — a blurred yellow, just shading to orange. The shape had no hard edges, no real architectural form, but it did have a single trailing tail. The match with the overlay was close — not perfect, but close.

‘I’ve just sent a team up with a map,’ said Twine. ‘And I’ve asked for dogs.’

On cue they heard barking from down on The Circle and the squad appeared, three handlers, three dogs, cutting straight across the open meadow, through the sunflowers and into the woods, the Alsatians straining ahead. They set off in pursuit, catching the dogs up when they reached the open space with the lightning tree. Unleashed, the dogs plunged on, heading down hill towards the stone folly set above the Old Hall estate. The trees began to thin out — no longer pine, but the original oak and birch. Ahead they could hear barking and somewhere unseen the insistent buzz of police radios. Finally they entered a clearing — gorse and bramble cut back so that the dogs could sniff the earth. Three uniformed officers in fluorescent bibs were already digging. One offered Shaw an Ordnance Survey map on which Twine had marked the spot with a red cross. Shaw noted that it was less than 300 yards from the glade where they’d found Holtby’s burnt corpse.

‘Looks like it’s been years,’ said Valentine, craning his neck to see into the hole they’d dug. The earth was compacted, hard, with a yellow-clay layer, undisturbed. The air of palpable excitement was dissolving fast. This didn’t look like their killer’s lair. It looked like an archaeological dig. The dogs, ears down, circled aimlessly.

‘The trapdoor entrance should be just below the surface, but they’re down two feet already,’ said Twine. He looked at Shaw, avoiding the moon-eye. ‘Could be it was just filled in after the war. .’

Shaw walked off into the trees, checking his mobile, trying to hide his disappointment behind pointless action. The UK Border Agency had sent him a text confirming that the Irish Garda had added Tug Coyle to the list of individuals who should be stopped at airports and ports. He rang the chief constable’s secretary and left a message for O’Hare. He’d email a brief for the presser as arranged but they were making rapid progress in the inquiry. He planned to use the press conference to help launch a nationwide public appeal for information in their efforts to track down a prime suspect. The secretary asked him to wait and relayed the message into a meeting. She had a message for Shaw when she got back: the chief constable would take the press conference.

Texting DC Campbell in the incident room he asked her to put together a rough press release on the hunt for Tug Coyle and arrange for a decent picture of him from the RNLI records to be sent to St James’ for the attention of the press office. Then he rang the force’s chief press officer, an ex-Fleet Street tabloid crime correspondent who’d come to Lynn to prepare for retirement, and filled her in on developments.

Then a single, jarring sound made Shaw’s heart skip a beat — the clash of metal on metal. He ran back to the dig. The trapdoor they’d uncovered was iron, badly corroded, set in a flaking concrete frame.

‘These doors were all counter-weighted,’ said Twine. ‘There’d be a wire along the ground to a tree, or a wood pile, or something they could find easily — then just a handle, camouflaged. Idea was if they were being followed they couldn’t afford to be discovered struggling with the trapdoor — it had to be up, down, and no sign, in seconds.’

They looked at the rusted trapdoor in the pit. ‘That was seventy years ago,’ said Valentine. They put a pickaxe through the eggshell thin iron and the door lifted, the hinges turning to dust. The hole beneath was deep, apparently featureless, a concrete coffin on its end. Shaw caught the scent of the trapped air escaping. It smelt like history — decades of damp and dark. The brief flare of hope, already fading, guttered out.

‘OK,’ said Shaw, taking a torch from Twine. ‘Follow me down, Paul. We might as well check this out.’

‘I was going to call St James’ — get an engineer out, check it’s safe?’ offered Twine.

‘Right,’ said Shaw. That was sensible. But despite the clear evidence the dugout had been unused for more than half a century Shaw felt impatient. Why wait? They needed to get this over and put all their resources into finding Coyle.

‘It probably collapsed long ago,’ said Shaw. ‘I’ll check it out; you stay here.’

With a hand on either side Shaw lowered his six-foot frame into the hole then, as his toes sought the floor he let himself drop, his blood freezing for just one heartbeat while he was in mid-air. The impact of his fall raised dust. The downward stairwell led out of the vertical shaft and was narrow, so he turned side on, and edged towards the first step. He approached each following a routine he’d developed shortly after losing the sight in his left eye. Without 3D vision steps could be lethal, especially as often the banister post in domestic stairs was not on the bottom step, but the penultimate step. So he put his foot on each edge and let the toes rock over it, before stepping down to the next.

He heard Twine drop in the well behind him. The dust flowed down the steps, heavier than air, settling round Shaw’s boots where he could see some amber earwigs manically trying to find cover. The smell was extraordinary, a kind of visceral rot, a fundamental decay. Lifeless but for the scurrying insects. Eight spiral steps down brought Shaw to an iron door, locked with a padlock and chain, corroded so badly they’d become one piece of metal.

Shaw asked for lock-cutters and the request went back up the line. The lock-cutters came back within thirty seconds with Twine. Shaw felt the sweat the DC had left on the cold metal. He clamped the mechanical jaws on either side of the U on the padlock. When the steel gave the door fell away from him, the old hinges shattering, so that he found himself just staring into the black outline of the entrance, peering into a profound darkness.

And then he knew. Because there was nothing stale about the air which brushed his face. His heightened sense of smell unpacked the traces threaded together: paraffin, certainly; then stale bread and, most pungent of all, ground coffee.

Until now the light from above had been enough, filtering down the stairwell. But here they were beyond the final turn in the staircase so that only the faintest trace of illumination spilt beyond the threshold. Shaw flicked on the torch, covering his eyes for a second against the glare. The beam was narrow and clogged with the dust billowing into the room.

As the air cleared he noticed three things: the floor was concrete but freshly swept; one of the iron bunks set against one corrugated wall had a pillow; and on the single narrow metal seat against the far wall sat Tug Coyle, tied into the chair by a rope across his chest, his head tipped back to reveal the fleshy throat. Shaw knew he was dead because of the ugly angle at which one of his feet touched the floor, turned violently on to its outer edge, sole inwards, the other straight out, extended to the extreme limit, so that he could see the pale lifeless skin of the leg. The percussion of the falling door still echoed in the small space and Coyle’s head fell back, his teeth clashing, as if biting at the air.