Death Toll

34

Holkham Drive was a grand place to die. Originally it had led from the portico of Holkham Hall down through the woods to the dunes and the beach beyond. Victorian picnic parties would have ridden down in carriages to eat out on tartan rugs. Somewhere in the pine woods it was said the royal family had had a beach hut. Now it led to a car park, a hut which sold refreshments in summer, and the notice boards outlining the birds that could be seen amongst the pines or out at the water’s edge, where seals basked. Midweek, in winter, it was a mile of deserted track, a foot deep in snow, the road barred, leading into the pines where the shadows were dark and green.

At the top, by the main road, there was a ticket kiosk, closed up for the winter. Shaw and Valentine drove past, thudding over the sleeping policemen, through the barred gate, heading for the cluster of police and emergency-vehicle lights down by the trees. The snow clouds had gone to reveal a moonless night sky of stars. Most of the light came from the snow on the fields. As Shaw got out of the car he heard deer bolting from the woods. He imagined that the beach beyond the protective barrier of pines would be a landscape of white surf because he could feel, through his feet, the rhythmic thud of the breakers falling.

Valentine got out of the Porsche while Shaw made a further request for back-up to St James’s. Behind them, on the track, they could see Tom Hadden in one of the forensic unit vans, edging through the snow. Valentine stood in the night air, leaning on the car, oddly elated that there was a chance they’d found Voyce, even if they’d found him too late. The skin on his fingers stuck to the Porsche’s roof, a sudden ice seal forming between flesh and supercooled metal. He pulled his hand back, as if from a burn, and gave up on the Silk Cut he’d been ready to light since they’d left St James’s, slipping it into his pocket.

DC Jacky Lau walked towards them, a silhouette against the crime-scene lights. Without the sunglasses Shaw thought her face betrayed tension, the jawline set hard, the eyes catching the electric light.

‘You found him?’

‘No, sir. One of the foot units. It’s taken a bit of time to sort it out. PC who stumbled on him, on a track, thought it was roadkill — and believe me, it’s an easy mistake to make. It’s off in the woods, no one goes there in winter, as I said, but this isn’t far from where the car freaks saw the lights. There’s an estate cottage up by the road and they sometimes see the odd car. Lovers’ lane, apparently, if you’re desperate.’

She was walking now, leading them into the woods.

‘They’ve seen nothing for weeks. But on Tuesday night, when the lights were spotted, there was a storm blowing. So they wouldn’t have heard.’ Shaw recalled the sea spray at Hunstanton, washing over the front.

Hadden walked past them with a woman Shaw didn’t recognize — both were in SOC suits, and they had a collapsible forensic tent between them. A line of crime tape led deeper into the woods. Then they were there — an open area through which ran a partly metalled track. Two uniformed PCs stood by something in the frozen mud, their boots lit by torches held down.

They waited while Hadden put the tent up: thirty seconds of practised craft. A light went on in the tent, illuminating the neat square, and Shaw thought of the Chinese lantern he’d lit with Fran on the beach that summer when they’d camped out in front of the cafe. They’d watched it rise to a single point of light, then flicker and die: a vision of freedom. But here in the woods all Shaw could smell was the dampness of the rotting earth.

This moment, when Shaw would have to lift aside the plastic sheeting to enter the tent, was one that always troubled him, because it reminded him that he did have a choice. He could walk away instead. The urge got stronger every time. He fought it.

Roadkill was right. Jimmy Voyce’s body had been crushed diagonally across the torso, from the right shoulder to the left hip, leaving the head and legs uninjured. The corpse had been squashed down into the snow, which still dusted the remains. Valentine was struck by the lack of blood. He was always struck by the lack of blood, because his imagination always painted the most lurid crimson scene. The head was looking up, and but for the tent he’d have been staring into the canopy of pines.

Hadden was down on his knees. ‘Looks like a hit and run.’ He straightened up. ‘Looks like. But I don’t think it is.’

Valentine studied Hadden’s box of tricks — forensic gear in a suitcase, an ordered clinical array of brushes, jars and tapes.

‘Here,’ said Hadden, indicating Voyce’s left leg, just above the ankle. There was a graze, cut deep, with the blood showing in stipples.

‘The vehicle’s gone over him and the tyres cut down through the ribcage, crushing the vital organs, but the legs are clear of that, so this injury, on the leg, was inflicted before the impact.’

Hadden pushed Valentine to one side and they saw that he’d been standing next to a grid in the forest road, like a gutter drain. When the wind dropped, and the trees stopped whispering, they could hear water gurgling through the iron cover.

Hadden took out a map — Ordnance Survey, in high detail. He checked it against a hand-held GPS. ‘I think we’re actually on a bridge here,’ said Hadden. ‘A shallow bridge over the sluice which drains the marsh.’ He folded the map under his arm. ‘Notice the alignment of the leg with the pre-mortem injury — it points back to the grid. Also …’ He lifted the leg and manipulated the knee. They heard a crunch of shattered cartilage. ‘Knee’s dislocated, well — that’s an understatement. It’s pretty much severed at the joint. Know what I think?’

He lifted the top drawer of his toolbox clear and took out a piece of nylon rope about four feet long.

‘Justina will give you the official version — but here’s a fact.’ He closed his eyes tightly, so that the lids vibrated. ‘You hit a human body with a vehicle — any vehicle — and it can’t inflict an injury like this. One chance in a thousand, perhaps — no more. That’s because when the body is hit, it begins to travel with the vehicle, which minimizes the trauma. That won’t save your life, but it does mean the injuries are limited. In other words, the impact is all over in a split second. After that the body’s effectively stuck to the vehicle. That has not happened here. What we have here is a vehicle hitting someone who couldn’t move. In this case, a glancing blow, otherwise the leg would have been severed.’

He looked down at Voyce’s body. Shaw realized that in places he could see through the corpse to the roadway below.

‘He was tied in place?’ asked Valentine. He didn’t mean to whisper, but his throat had constricted because his body was thinking about being sick.

‘Well, that’s my guess. He was certainly tied …here.’ He placed a finger in a green forensic glove on the friction burn on the leg. ‘And it’s possible the other end of the rope was looped round the grating of the drain cover.’

‘Why?’ asked Shaw. ‘Why tie him down — then run him over? If you can tie him down you could hit him, put him out, then finish him off with the car.’

‘Punishment — like an execution?’ offered Hadden.

‘Or interrogation,’ said Shaw. ‘You tie him to the grate. Then ask your questions. Turn the car headlights on, then ask again. Then finish it.’

‘Either way it’s a cool bit of work,’ said Hadden, using the rope from the toolbox to test his theory. ‘Professional. A contract killing?’

Shaw shook his head. ‘No — that’s what he wants us to think,’ he said. He thought about Bobby Mosse’s calculated part-confession in the dunes the night before. He’d set the scene. Voyce was mixing company with the Tulleys, people who could do something like this. People who did it for a living.

‘This kind of impact would buckle the car bumper — do other damage?’ asked Shaw.

Hadden was nodding. ‘Maybe. Certainly there’d be blood, bone, tissue stuck to the vehicle.’

Shaw thought about Voyce’s car, burnt out, down the coast. They needed to double-check for structural damage. It was a hired car, they’d have a record of existing bumps and scrapes.

Then he thought about Bobby Mosse’s black BMW. A powerful machine, a lethal weapon. Even a glancing blow would have killed Voyce if he’d been tied to the drain cover. If Mosse had used the BMW he’d have cleaned the vehicle. But Shaw knew just how tenacious trace forensic evidence could be. He jogged to the Porsche and pulled a U-turn, then made a call on his mobile while he waited for Valentine to catch up. On the coast road they hit 90 mph, the marshes a blur on the offside, Jacky Lau’s Megane struggling to keep up, and out at sea, falling across the pin-sharp star fields, a meteor, as if the sky was falling in.