Death Toll

5

Max Warren sat behind his desk, fists bunched on his blotting pad like a pound of butcher’s sausages. Shaw recalled what his father had said about Warren when the ex-Met high-flier had arrived at St James’s from London in the early 1990s: that he’d end his days in a bungalow at Cromer, chasing kids away from his garden gnomes. And it was true that the passing years had obscured the tough streetwise copper who’d been posted to north Norfolk to revitalize a sleepy seaside constabulary. He’d gone to fat, his neck slowly expanding to fill the gap between shoulder and jaw, and the once-vital sense of anger which had driven him to patrol the night streets with his men during the gang wars of the mid-1990s had turned in on itself, leaving him tetchy and impatient for the haven of retirement which was now just a few years away.

‘Right. First things first, Peter. This cemetery stiff — what’s the story and is it worth a DI’s valuable time?’ Valentine stiffened, noting that he, a lowly DS, apparently had no valuable time to waste.

Shaw touched his tanned throat where his tie should have been. ‘It’s probably a twenty-eight-year-old murder. If we get a few breaks we might get close to the killer — but that’s a long shot. There are some interesting forensics — including a wallet which Tom’s drying out so we can look inside. I’d planned to give it forty-eight hours. Then we’ll scale down if we’re nowhere.’

Valentine leant forward, relieving the stress on his back, trying not to think he wanted to cough. He couldn’t help but admire Shaw’s manipulation of his superior officer. Valentine guessed Warren was planning to give them a week — Shaw had under-cut him, which would mean Warren would back off, and they could manufacture a ‘breakthrough’ if they wanted to keep the investigation going. Not for the first time he recognized in Peter Shaw something that he lacked himself — the ability to discern the petty politics that dominated life for the top brass and to use it to his own ends.

Shaw slipped the forensic sketch he’d made on to Warren’s blotter. ‘That’s our victim.’

‘Bloody hell,’ said Warren. He looked up at the neon strip above his desk, the wooden chair creaking beneath him, and spoke to the ceiling. ‘I don’t have to tell either of you that if the words “race crime” appear in the local rag then our lives will be a continuous sodding nightmare; so can we try and avoid that?’

Shaw nodded. ‘George thinks there may be a GI link, sir. So we may have to get the military involved too. It’ll hit the press tomorrow — TV as well.’

Warren smiled, a gesture that did not signal good humour but had developed as a kind of facial grammar, indicating a change of subject.

‘Whatever,’ he said. ‘Just get it cleared up, or move on. Now. We know why we’re here — the Tessier case. Three months ago I gave you clearance to take it forward. Since then I’ve heard nothing from either of you. Now you want to see me. Why?’ He tipped forward, then looked at his watch. ‘The short version, please — I’ve got the chief constable’s finance committee at ten. I’d love to be late, but then I’d like a pension, too. So just get me up to speed.’

Shaw stretched out his legs, crossed them at the ankles and took a breath.

‘You know the basics of the case, sir. But for the record …’

The case. The one crime that bound Shaw’s life to that of George Valentine, like a sailor lashed to a raft. The case of nine-year-old Jonathan Tessier. His father’s last case.

The bare facts were undisputed. Jonathan Tessier, aged nine, had been found dead at three minutes past midnight on the night of 26 July 1997. He was still dressed in the sports kit he’d put on the previous morning to play football on the grass triangle by the flats in which he lived on the Westmead Estate in Lynn’s North End. He’d been strangled with a ligature of some sort, the condition of the body pointing to a time of death between one and seven hours earlier, between 6.00 and 11.00 p.m. on the 25th. DCI Jack Shaw had attended the scene, with the then Detective Inspector George Valentine. They were St James’s senior investigative team, with a record going back nearly a decade including a string of high-profile convictions — notably a clutch of four gang murders on the docks in the summer of 1989 and a double child murder in 1994.

On that night in 1997 they quickly ascertained the facts of the case so far: the boy’s body had been found in the underground car park beneath Vancouver House — a twenty-one-storey block at the heart of the Westmead Estate — by a nurse, parking after her late shift at the local hospital. She said she’d seen a car drive off quickly — a Volkswagen Polo, she thought — when she’d got out of her Mini. The fleeing driver had failed to negotiate the narrow ramp to ground level and clipped one of the concrete pillars, spilling broken glass from a headlamp on to the ground.

DI Valentine had radioed an alert on the damaged car to all units. A uniformed PC on foot patrol in the North End found a Polo abandoned on the edge of allotments at just after two that morning, its offside headlamp shattered, the engine warm. A police computer check identified the owner as Robert James Mosse, a law student aged twenty-one who, like the victim, was a resident of Vancouver House. He was studying at Sheffield, but home for the summer vacation. Back at the scene the body had been removed, revealing a single glove below the corpse: black leather with a fake fur lining. Jack Shaw and George Valentine had gone to the first-floor flat Mosse shared with his mother to interview him.

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 permission to search the flat. They conducted the search and failed to find the matching glove. Mosse, in contrast, agreed in evidence they had shown him the glove, but only after the search. He also maintained that the glove had not been contained in a bag of any nature, but simply handed to him. His mother corroborated her son’s version of events, adding that at one point DI Valentine had reversed the fingers of the glove, turning it inside out to display the fur lining inside. Both she and her son denied ownership of the glove. The other glove was never found.

Mosse said his car had been stolen that evening, a crime he himself had reported earlier, as verified by the duty desk at St James’s. He had been at the cinema alone. His mother had accompanied him to the same complex but they had opted for different films: she went to see LA Confidential on the small screen while her son had watched The Full Monty on the main screen. Mosse had produced a half-torn cinema ticket as evidence. His film had finished first and so he had walked back to the flats. His car had been parked outside on the street because there’d been a spate of vandalism in the underground car park and he’d been worried about the Polo, which was second hand but in good condition. He’d found the car gone and phoned the police from the flat.

Overnight 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. Three pieces were later found to be exact matches — as good as fingerprints in terms of material evidence. Staff at the cinema were unable to recall Mosse in the audience that evening, despite the fact that the auditorium had been only a quarter full. The cinema ticket did not specify the screen, and Mosse’s mother said she had thrown away her own ticket stub. Mosse was charged with the murder of Jonathan Tessier at three thirty on the afternoon of the 26th. Bail was denied at a hearing the following day. Analysis of skin residue found in the glove was ordered through the Forensic Science Service, an agency of the Home Office. The report estimated that there was a chance of only one in three billion that the residue came from anyone other than Mosse.

The trial began in October. The case was thrown out of Cambridge Crown Court at the first recess on the first day. The judge agreed with the defence’s claim that Jack Shaw and George Valentine had made a basic error in taking forensic evidence from the scene to the suspect’s flat, and then compounded that error by exposing the forensic evidence to potential contamination. In dismissing the charges he went further, suggesting that, given the apparently flagrant disregard for police procedure shown by the detectives involved, he was unable to ignore the possibility that they had deliberately falsified the evidence. While the defence accepted that the glove had been found at the scene — a forensic officer confirmed the item was under the body — it was possible they’d taken it to Mosse’s flat to expose it to dust and skin residue. The shadow was cast, and would always be there.

‘And that’s where this case should have rested,’ said Warren, cracking his fingers and wincing as the force helicopter swung over the building towards the St James’s rooftop helipad. But the case hadn’t rested there, and Warren knew that as well as they did.

Following a decade of exile in north Norfolk, the demoted George Valentine had been reassigned to the serious crime unit at St James’s two years ago. It was his last chance to regain the rank he’d lost. His superior officer was DI Peter Shaw — the son of his former disgraced partner. Between them, sometimes acting in concert, sometimes alone, they had tried to build again the case against Robert ‘Bobby’ Mosse. Three months ago they’d made a major breakthrough in the case and Warren had reluctantly given them clearance to push on — to try one last time to get Robert Mosse back in the dock. It was a decision that still rankled, because he was as aware as they were that he’d had little choice.

Shaw stood and walked to Max Warren’s window, then he turned to face his superior officer, effortlessly in control.

‘As you know, we made some progress last year. Since then we have been waiting for one last development to fall into place before coming back to you. We now believe we understand the motive behind this crime. I’d like to get you up to speed now, sir, briefly.’

Warren glared at them. ‘Just get on with it.’ A bead of sweat appeared on his forehead, catching the light.

‘The key, sir, to what really happened on the night Jonathan Tessier died lies in a road-traffic accident a few days earlier, just after midnight, on the edge of Castle Rising. The spot is a lonely T-junction. A speeding Mini shot out across the intersection and hit a Ford Mondeo. There is CCTV footage of the accident, although it’s very poor quality. There were kids in the Mini. They got out and examined the wreck of the other car, then they drove off. A motorist came upon the scene thirty-five minutes later and called an ambulance. Both passengers, two OAPs, were dead. The driver was seriously injured. There is evidence on the CCTV that at least one of the passengers was alive when the joyriders left the scene.’

‘Bastards,’ said Warren, interlocking his fingers. ‘So?’

‘Well, we now believe that Robert Mosse was at the wheel of that car. His passengers were the other three members of a group who had — over a period of several years — meted out rough justice on the Westmead Estate. A gang, if you like. Mosse had left the Westmead the year before to go up to Sheffield to study — but he was back for the summer holidays and we believe he’d linked up with his old mates for a night out on the town. One member of that gang — probably Alex Cosyns — looked inside the wrecked Mondeo that night and retrieved a puppy from the back seat. We’ll never know why: maybe it was the one thing he thought he could do to make things right — other than doing the decent thing, which would have been to ring 999.’

‘So he was a dog lover — big deal.’

Shaw held up both hands. ‘The key to this is that one of the victims in the Mondeo was Jonathan Tessier’s grandmother. The dog was hers. Jonathan was fond of his grandmother — but fonder of the dog. After the accident he pestered his parents to have the dog — a request they couldn’t meet. They told him the dog had died in the accident. The investigating team had kept the truth under wraps — a detail they’d use to weed out false witnesses and crackpot confessions. And I think they were troubled by the detail too — because it didn’t, and doesn’t — seem to fit the picture.’ Shaw got up and walked to the window.

‘Go on,’ Warren said, forced to push his chair back and swivel it to see Shaw clearly.

‘OK,’ said Shaw, turning to face them. ‘So, the gang drove off in the car that night from Castle Rising. Every uniformed officer on the force was out looking for a two-tone damaged Mini. The CCTV didn’t give us a plate number, so that’s all they had to go on. We now know that Cosyns’s family owned two of the lock-up garages on the Westmead — numbers 51 and 52. Last September, as you know, inside those lock-ups, George and I discovered the rusted body of a two-tone Mini — partly resprayed an industrial yellow. It’s undoubtedly the car from the accident. The paint they used for the respray came from a factory where three of the gang worked — Askit’s Engineering. Flecks of yellow paint were found on Jonathan Tessier’s clothes and there are traces of the same paint still on the rusted Mini in the lock-up. There was also a single paint fragment from the Mondeo on Jonathan’s football shirt. Two pieces of unique forensic evidence, sir, which link the crash to the murder.’

Shaw perched on the window ledge.

‘This is what we think happened on the day Jonathan died. It was three days after the crash at Castle Rising. He was playing football on the grass below the flats, sent out for the day because his grandfather was with his parents — in the middle of a breakdown in the aftermath of his wife’s death in the hit-and-run. Someone boots the ball off the pitch and it bounces off down past some shops, out of sight. Jonathan wanders after it and never comes back. He was bored, anyway, because he didn’t like football and he’d only been told to go out for the day so that his grandfather could grieve with his daughter.

‘We think Jonathan ended up down by the lock-up garages on the edge of the Westmead. We think that somehow he stumbled on the missing puppy. Maybe one of the gang was taking it for a walk — after all, our press statements hadn’t mentioned the dog, so the gang probably thought we weren’t going to be bothered about a missing terrier when two people had died in the crash. Or maybe it just got out of the lock-up, I don’t know. But what I do know is, as soon as that boy saw the dog, sir, he was dead.’

Shaw let the silence stretch so that all they could hear was the tap, tap of Warren’s secretary typing on her keyboard.

‘No one could have stopped that child going home and telling his parents he’d found the dog. We can be pretty sure Jonathan never left the lock-up alive. It would have been impossible for the gang to let him leave: the only thing he wanted in life was the puppy. If they gave it to him the police would be at the lock-up within hours. So they couldn’t give it to him, and they couldn’t let him tell anyone he’d seen it. They could have told him it wasn’t his grandma’s dog, but he wouldn’t have believed them. They could have tried a bribe, but it wouldn’t have worked, and they knew it.’

The door opened and Warren’s secretary put three cups and a cafetiere of coffee on the desk. Shaw poured, added sugar for Valentine, milk for Warren, taking his own black and unsweetened.

Shaw let the silence re-establish itself. There was absolutely no doubt now that he had Warren’s full attention.

Shaw sat down. ‘For nearly fifteen years Robert Mosse, and the rest of them, thought they’d got away with it,’ said Shaw. ‘Two members of the gang left Lynn: James Voyce emigrated to New Zealand and Chris Robins moved to the Midlands and a life of petty crime that deteriorated into mental illness. Alex Cosyns stayed. And we know now why, in part, he did stay. Subtly but persistently he milked Mosse for cash. Mosse is clearly in a vulnerable position. He has a thriving career in the law, a position that makes him a prime target for blackmail. The gang were all fans of stock-car racing — speed and cars is what brought them together — and Mosse set up a team under the name “Team Mosse” about ten years ago. Cosyns was his only driver. In effect, he bankrolled Cosyns’s hobby. And we think that, over the years, he’d been giving him money as well.’

Warren slapped his fist down on the desk. ‘Hold on. This is nonsense. How could Cosyns have blackmailed Mosse? He could have come to us, told us the truth, but then he’d have been in the dock too. Doesn’t add up, Peter.’

‘Well …no. Not completely. But consider this: Mosse’s career is over if there is any hint of scandal. He’s up for the Bar this year. He’s got a lot to lose. Plus, we don’t know which of the gang killed the child. What if it was Mosse, and only Mosse? That changes things.’ Shaw thought about that. ‘No — it transforms things. And remember, this is a gentle, persistent, form of blackmail, not the usual one-off demand. A grand here, a grand there. Worth it, surely, from Mosse’s point of view, for a quiet life? But I agree — Cosyns would still have been facing some very serious charges if he’d informed on Mosse. No, there’s something else at the heart of this relationship. We just don’t know what it is yet.’

Shaw sipped the coffee, holding it just below his mouth so that the steam played on his lips.

‘What we do know is that, as soon as George and I started to come close to the truth, Mosse decided he needed to improve his security. By this time Robins was in a secure psychiatric unit not far from here — near Sutton Bridge. As you know, Robins took his own life last May by cutting his wrists with a pocket knife — a brand-new one. He had a visitor shortly before he died. One of the orderlies recalls the face — and says it could have been Mosse.’

‘“Could have been” isn’t good enough,’ said Warren. ‘We’ve already been through this — ’

‘So that was Robins out of the way,’ said Shaw, pressing on. ‘As you also know, I found Cosyns dead in the lock-up garage last September when we found the Mini.’

Warren slopped coffee into his cup and struggled with a tube of sweeteners. Shaw couldn’t stop an image from that day surfacing — Cosyns lying under the exhaust of his stock car, its engine running. He’d tried to revive him but had been attacked by an unseen assailant. He’d have died right there if George Valentine hadn’t turned up at the scene, having trailed Mosse’s BMW to the lock-ups. It was an unpalatable fact, but he owed Valentine his life.

‘Mosse had ample time to stage Cosyns’s suicide,’ he continued. ‘There is no evidence that Cosyns had any reason to kill himself. There is, however, evidence that Cosyns was force-fed narcotics prior to the “attempt” to take his own life.’

Warren leant back in his chair, the legs creaking. ‘But we can’t stick it on Mosse, can we? Otherwise we wouldn’t be here.’

‘Doesn’t mean the fucker didn’t do it. Sir,’ said Valentine, shifting his weight on his thigh bone to ease the pressure on his bladder.

Warren gave Valentine a look which constituted a written warning.

‘I beg your pardon?’

Shaw raised a hand. ‘You’ll recall that Mosse says he went to the lock-up that evening after the stock-car racing at the Norfolk Arena to talk about the performance of the car Cosyns had driven that day. He’d won. Mosse says he wanted to enter the car at a meeting in Peterborough the following weekend. All explicable as part of “Team Mosse”. Then he left. He said Cosyns was depressed about the failure of his marriage and the continuing financial burden of the regular maintenance payments he was being forced to make. He admits giving?1,000 to Cosyns shortly before his death as a favour. He admits he’d done it before. He says they were friends. More than that — family.’

Shaw finished the coffee. ‘So: a gang of four. Guilty of murder. Two dead.’

‘So where’s the third man?’ asked Warren, hooked now by the narrative, despite himself.

‘Voyce arrived back in the UK from New Zealand three months ago,’ said Valentine. His bladder ached like a bad tooth now and his craving for nicotine was making the saliva drain from his mouth.

‘Since then we’d lost him,’ added Shaw. ‘Until two days ago, when he checked into the Novotel on the bypass here in Lynn.’

He’d deliberately left this new information until last and he could see that Warren was furious that he was being manipulated.

‘Why wasn’t I informed about this?’

‘It’s taken us that long to be sure it’s our man. We had an alert out with all the hotels, B amp;Bs, the lot.’

Warren looked from Shaw’s face to Valentine’s and back again.

‘The Auckland police tell us that Voyce is married, with one child,’ said Shaw. ‘He’s a garage attendant — pump man, cashier, low-end mechanics. Earns a pittance. His wife works at the local supermarket. It’s pretty clear he could do with a bit more money. My guess …’ Shaw looked at his hands, then at Valentine. ‘Our guess is that’s why he’s back here — to tap Mosse, just like Cosyns did. We think he knew Cosyns was getting cash out of Mosse, and we’re pretty sure he now knows he’s dead — which might explain the three months lying low before making his move and coming back to Lynn.

‘I don’t think he can afford to go home empty handed. We reckon he’s been biding his time, coming up with a plan, and now he’s ready. As far as we know he hasn’t made contact with Mosse yet. We propose round-the-clock surveillance. If he makes a move on Mosse then his life will undoubtedly be in danger. We can bug Voyce’s hotel room, maybe his car, and hope that Mosse incriminates himself on tape.’

Warren reached for the cafetiere, then shook it, annoyed that only the dregs remained. ‘So. You think that’s smart …Police entrapment with a corpse as a possible first prize?’

Shaw looked through Warren, focusing on a point just behind his head, a technique his father had used to effect on his only son. ‘With respect, sir. If we’re right — and we are — Mosse is responsible, either solely or collectively, for the deaths of at least four people: Jonathan Tessier, the elderly passengers left to die at Castle Rising and Alex Cosyns. He also very probably assisted the suicide of Chris Robins. And there are …’ he searched for the words, ‘other consequences of this man’s perjury.’

Shaw thought of the last time he’d seen his father, lying propped up in a hospital bed after a third, massive, stroke, his face already undergoing the process which would transform it into a death mask.

Valentine shifted in his seat. It was a measure of the degree to which he’d buried his emotions for the last thirteen years that the simple fact that they might at last bring Robert Mosse to justice had made his eyes flood.

Warren looked at his watch, frustrated to find that so much of his life seemed to be about stopping one thing he didn’t like doing in order to start something he didn’t like doing even more. He went to a mirror on the wall and set his peaked cap straight, but Shaw calculated that his superior officer was carefully considering what he said next.

‘All right. I’ll give you ten days. You can peel off the manpower from the murder unit. Then that’s it. Case closed. If it’s not wrapped up by then, I’ll burn the sodding file myself.’

He stood and looked at Shaw, some of the belligerence which had once made him such an effective police officer returning. ‘I am making you, Peter, personally responsible for Voyce’s safety. Screw up and you will look upon George’s career as a sparkling success. The highlight of your working week for the next twenty years will be lecturing on speed awareness courses to spotty boy-racers. And I’m still expecting a result on the body in the cemetery. Now, get out, both of you.’