Death Watch

Tuesday, 7 September

Two hours after dawn, and low tide in Morston Creek; no view except the mudbanks, oystercatchers planting webbed feet in the sticky ooze. The boat nosed its way through the maze of creeks out into Blakeney Channel. The sky was stretched-blue, dotted with clouds which would later billow into chimneys of heated, moist air. But the morning was cool still, the smell of the tidal waters salty and fresh.

Shaw sucked the sea air in like a drug. He’d had a call from DC Twine in the murder room at 5.30: a body had been spotted by a fishing smack on a sandbank in the Wash. Tom Hadden had gone out on the Harbour Conservancy launch with his night-duty CSI officer. He’d texted Twine to say there was a link with the Judd murder – no details. Shaw didn’t need to go to sea himself – but he was awake, and he had his father’s mantra: if you can see it for yourself, see it for yourself. And if he was losing sleep, he didn’t see why DS Valentine shouldn’t too.

The tourist boat Albatross broke into open water, following a channel marked by buoys past the small craft moored in the shallows. Hadden had called out anyone on the CSI payroll who wasn’t tied up on the Judd inquiry. Half a dozen of them sat morosely in the boat

Twine had the bare details from the crew who’d spotted the body. The Kittyhawk had landed three men at sunrise on Warham’s Hole, a stretch of sand the size of a football pitch. Basking seals had scattered as soon as they’d come ashore, to retrieve a string of crab pots which had broken loose during the night. When the seals were gone something was left: one of those industrial bags, incredibly strong, used on building sites to carry rubble, or sand, or hard core. It held assorted rubbish – tin cans, oil drums, and what the Kittyhawk’s captain reported as ‘human remains’.

Valentine sat, pulling his raincoat up to his ears. ‘Here it comes,’ he said, looking up at the sky. The rain began to fall in drops the size of paperweights, leisurely, then in a frenzy, turning swiftly to hailstones which stung the flesh. Visibility dropped to twenty feet, the air white with plummeting ice, the hailstones lying in the boat and in the folds of Shaw’s all-weather jacket. They chugged on, the summer boat trip suddenly transformed into a snapshot from some Antarctic expedition. Valentine felt ice-cold water beginning to insinuate itself down his neck. He thought about the coke fire in the Artichoke; the intensity of the heat on the palms of his downturned hands.

The blue sky appeared overhead even before the hailstones had stopped falling. Then the sun broke through, and Shaw saw that they were there – fifty yards off the Albatross heads appeared in the sea, disappeared, like fairground targets.

‘There,’ said Valentine, pointing at two figures on the far lip of the sand working beside a grey bag, long and narrow like a deflated balloon. The spot had been marked by the Kittyhawk with an orange distress buoy.

In two feet of water Shaw stepped overboard. The seals, mildly inquisitive of the floating boat, panicked as the humans stepped ashore, shuffling towards the sea, trapped, it seemed, in sleeping bags. Within a minute they’d deserted Warham’s Hole.

The CSI team jumped ship and unloaded a mobile SOC tent and lights. Shaw led the way about eighty yards across the ribbed sand – hard, crystalline, surprisingly solid. Beside the asbestos-grey bag Hadden had laid out its contents in military rows: about thirty tin cans, some metal tubs which had once held machine oil, and three black bin liners – one of them torn – to reveal more rubbish, mostly discarded food wrapping. Shaw could see a cardboard pizza box and a plastic curry tray. All that was left in the bag, which had been stretched open, was a corpse on its side, one hand thrown backwards, the fingers of the hand stiff and swollen, the arm extended like a waiter’s offering a salver of champagne glasses.

Hadden was examining a piece of nylon rope which had been threaded through the four handles of the bag. Shaw could see where the rope was still kinked by the memory of the knot.

Hadden nodded. They were all thinking the same thing. The sack, weighted down with the rope attached to an anchor or lead weight.

‘If the knot hadn’t slipped we’d have never seen chummy again,’ said Shaw. ‘He’d have been fish food within the week. How long’s he been in, Tom?’

‘Rigor’s still apparent,’ said Hadden. ‘So – given the water’s not that warm – forty-eight hours? Maximum of forty-eight – maybe less, Peter.’

Shaw still couldn’t see the face. But he could see the victim was male, white, middle aged, wearing jogging pants and a sweatshirt, the head shaved. The skin showed all the signs of immersion, puckered and swollen, but was otherwise intact, free of feeding marks. There was a washed-out bloodstain on the sweatshirt chest. Hadden used gloved hands to lift the material, revealing a gunshot wound.

‘Justina needs to tell you about this,’ he said. ‘But if you want an amateur’s opinion, I’d say this killed him. It’s very close to the heart.’

‘Calibre?’ asked Shaw.

‘Nine millimetres – a handgun. Difficult to tell range, Peter. He’s been in the water too long for any residue to be left on the skin. But it’s not point-blank. I can’t say any more.’

Shaw leant in. He couldn’t smell anything except an intense aroma of the sea, like oysters on a bed of ice. He noted acne on the body’s exposed neck. ‘It’s not Blanket,’ he said. ‘Height and weight are wrong.’

And one detail he didn’t see first time – only three

‘This is why I called…’ said Hadden, handing Shaw an evidence bag. Inside was a plastic charity wristband. Valentine had seen Shaw wearing one in the spring – red and blue, with RNLI printed on the ring. Shaw turned it to catch the early slanting sun and saw that three letters were stencilled in the white plastic.

MVR.

Shaw thought about that – about what kind of organization would have charity bands made, and issue torches with the letters on as well. Silently he decided that he needed to make a personal visit to the hospital vehicle pool.

‘The band’s luminous, by the way,’ said Hadden. ‘If that helps.’

Shaw handed Valentine the bag. ‘Can we see the face – you’ve not turned him over?’

Hadden called up one of his team, who took a set of pictures. Then Hadden took hold of the dead man’s shoulder, Shaw his thigh, and they rolled him over, the dead arm flailing.

The face was almost perfect – untouched. The lips were blue, a light stubble on the chin, the nose slender and almost feminine. There were only two things missing.

The eyes.