Death Wore White

Tuesday, 10 February

The eight vehicles of the stranded convoy stood in the light of the rising moon, the cold blue streak of dawn in the east as raw and unwelcome as the scream of an alarm clock. Shaw had slept for three hours in the CSI back‐up van. He’d been a poor sleeper since childhood. So he was used to waking up in the dark.

But he wasn’t used to waking up anywhere that wasn’t home. Lena, his wife, said he was a homing pigeon, always circling back towards the loft. The contrast with his father was, as always, stark. Jack Shaw had liked working nights, sleeping at St James’s when a case was on, living the job. So his father’s life had been a secret from him; one of the reasons he’d been drawn to the same career, to find out, in little ways, what his father’s life had been like, to see how closely the real world snapped into place beside the one he’d imagined.

So when he’d woken in the CSI van he felt a familiar frisson of anxiety, the loss of something just beyond his understanding. He thought about texting home, but knew it was too early. And there’d still be no mobile signal. The night before he’d relayed a message through St James’s, telling Lena he’d be out overnight. But he wanted to hear her voice.

Shaw tried to think of the day ahead as separate from that which had gone before. Day Two: a time to take stock, step back, let the adrenaline fade. But the intensity of the images from the previous evening were too strong to dismiss: the blood‐caked mouth of the man he’d pulled out of the sea; the crumpled figure at the wheel of the pick‐up truck, impaled. The buzz was still electric, an intensity of consciousness, which made Peter Shaw feel very alive. He suppressed the excitement, aware that this was a drug to which his father had become addicted, the living of a life through the deaths of others. He’d wondered if that was why his father had made just that one rule: that his son could do anything with his life except become a policeman.

Shaw craved his own drug: the surge of endorphins, the rush of blood, the certainty of well‐being that came with pushing himself to run, to swim, and to run again. He checked his map. The coast road was almost exactly a mile away. He set the stopwatch going on his wrist and began to run, despite the lightweight boots he wore, and when he found his footing secure in the crisp deep snow, he opened up into a wide, easy pace. The lights of the road came into view all too quickly and he slowed to a halt: 4 minutes 43 seconds. His body cried out for him to carry on, to push himself until his bloodstream pumped

He bent double, his palms in the snow, then straightened. His mobile buzzed, picking up text messages he’d been unable to receive overnight within the dead zone on Siberia Belt. He scrolled down: three from Lena, all pictures. His daughter in bed, a book folded over her head where it had dropped from her hands as she fell asleep, a snowman on the beach in front of the house, and one of Lena – cowering out of the wind on the veranda, taken by his daughter.

He jogged back along Siberia Belt, looking steadily ahead, imagining the cars the previous night, edging their way through the snow towards the sharp right‐hand turn just before Gallow Marsh Farm. He rounded the bend and saw the stranded convoy. Each car and van sealed with signed plastic tags on the door handles and boots – except the Alfa, where he could see the CSI team still at work, the gentle buzz of a forensic vacuum within. The victim’s truck was hidden within a SOC tent, lit like a Chinese lantern. Ahead, the pine tree still blocked the road, but beyond it stood a fire rescue vehicle, and behind that an ambulance, blue lights silently flashing. Both emergency vehicles were parked in a lay‐by Shaw had not noticed before, built to allow cars to pass each other on the narrow track.

The sound of a chainsaw serrated the silence and amongst the pine’s branches Shaw could see movement, the last of the snow falling from the needles.

Tom Hadden, the force’s senior crime scene investigator, was buried within, while a fireman cut wood on

‘Anything?’ asked Shaw, knowing he could leave the pleasantries aside.

Hadden struggled to turn his head amongst the pine branches. ‘Well. I’m pretty sure it’s a tree.’

Shaw pressed in amongst the pine needles, which released a wave of pungent scent. ‘How’d she come down?’

‘Three blows,’ said Hadden, reaching forward, parting branches to reveal the trunk, neatly severed by a series of axe blows. ‘Instant roadblock. I’d say it wasn’t the first time our woodman had swung an axe.’

Shaw recalled George Valentine’s summary of the crime: on one hand a disregard for leaving clues – the victim left to die in the cab, now the axe marks – combined with the complete absence of footprints.

‘Anything else I should know now?’

Hadden extricated himself, a kneecap clicking as he did so. ‘Pathologist is still at work,’ he said. ‘I think we’ll leave her to it, don’t you?’

The pronoun told Shaw all he needed to know. There

Edging past the pick‐up they came to the Alfa, and Shaw noticed a small flag marked with an ‘A’ below the driver’s window.

‘Ciggy butt – menthol,’ said Hadden, not stopping. ‘Common brand.’ Shaw leant in at the Alfa’s open window. The interior smelt of money: soft leather and scent. A child’s picture was stuck on the dashboard, a girl with long hair, the ashtray bristled with dog‐ends soiled with lipstick.

Behind that the old man’s Corsa. For the first time Shaw noticed the car had been vandalized: scratched lines, crossing, peaked like a hat, an angry inchoate scrawl.

‘They’re fresh,’ said Hadden. ‘A month old, maybe less. My guess is a diamond cutter – see how deeply the metal is scored. Nothing casual.’

They walked on. ‘Time of death on the victim, Tom?’ asked Shaw, smiling, the perfect teeth in a surfer’s grin. He’d never been surprised by the fact that in ten years of CID work he’d failed to get a straight answer to that question. He didn’t expect one now.

Hadden removed a pair of thin forensic gloves with theatrical care and his eyes closed. ‘Not my area, clearly – as you well know. Pathologist is the expert on that and she’s with the body – but you’ll get less of an answer from her than you will from me. I took her to the body last night; that’s the only time I’ve seen the victim. So – outside temperature was freezing, inside the cab perhaps twenty degrees or more. Temperature gradient like that

Shaw checked his watch. The CSI team had arrived at 9 p.m., the pathologist at 9.45. So death occurred somewhere between 4.45 and 7.45 that evening. The convoy had come to rest at around 5.15. Given that dead men don’t drive, that meant the victim died between 5.15 and 7.45.

But no footprints except Holt’s, and he didn’t have the time to deliver the fatal blow if Baker‐Sibley’s evidence was sound. Shaw shook his head. He was missing something. He forced himself to lower his shoulders, releasing his neck muscles.

Shaw looked back up the line to the tent over the victim’s truck. ‘Prints in the victim’s vehicle?’

‘Yeah – it’s like a sweet‐shop counter. We need to input them all, get them on the database. You don’t get many crime scenes with this many potential murderers in situ. We need to mix and match, see what comes up.’

Shaw tried to empty his head, switching crimes, trying not to make any assumptions which might derail the investigation before it had even started. ‘Anything from the beach – the corpse in the raft?’

‘Standard make, beach‐shop inflatable – we’ll check it out, but one of the uniforms said his kids had one. Argos sell them as well. Nothing else in the thing with him – except a pint or so of blood. We presume it’s his blood – but it’s just that at the moment. A presumption. Nothing

Shaw pressed his thumb and forefinger on either side of the bridge of his nose. Finding the yellow oil drum seemed like a distant memory. ‘I need to see inside the truck cab,’ he said.

‘Sure.’ Hadden smiled. ‘I’ll leave you that pleasure. She’ll have an ID once the jacket’s off, with luck.’

Hadden set off for the beach, Shaw for the tent over the victim’s truck. He approached it slowly, making sure his footfalls gave due warning of his approach. Dr Kazimierz was a woman who didn’t suffer fools gladly, and thought almost everyone was a fool. She worked in silence, and valued it in others. And she worked alone, even in a crowd.

The first thing he saw was that the body was still in place. Dr Kazimierz held the head up by the chin, looking into the eyes, the chisel still in place in the left socket. For a second Shaw saw the scene differently, two lovers perhaps, folding together their personal spaces. Then she leant forward and, with a pair of tweezers, removed something from an eyebrow. She held it in the light of a torch she’d taped to the headrest: a hair. She pocketed it in a clear plastic evidence bag, quickly sealing and signing the sticky label.

She looked up, ready to dismiss whoever had interrupted her. But when she saw Shaw she nodded, the merest hint of an acknowledgement. Then she cut a short length of tape, using the sticky side to lift a series of particles from the victim’s overalls.

Shaw wondered what Justina Kazimierz had looked like in her youth. He imagined a school photograph perhaps, a face not yet overwhelmed by heavy middle‐European features, dark brown eyes showing off her olive skin. He’d been to her fiftieth birthday party at the Polish Club in the North End, an occasion marked by blood sausage and iced vodka with all the subtlety of lighter fuel. She’d danced then, with her husband, a diminutive man with delicate hands, light rapid steps despite her sturdy build.

Shaw circled the vehicle, squeezed between the tent and the bodywork. The tax was up to date, the registration plate the right year for the model, the tyres almost new. The paintwork was off‐white, with a signwritten panel: Fry & Sons, Builders, followed by a Lynn telephone number and a website address. The tailgate was chipped and scraped in places, with rust showing in the hinges. The tarpaulin had been folded back to reveal several sheets of plasterboard, some insulating board and a bundle of wooden wainscoting.

Returning to the front of the vehicle, Shaw found the pathologist sitting on a camp stool. Plastic evidence bottles were arranged in groups on a collapsible table, glass phials laid in a plastic box, a black briefcase open to reveal a line of tools, torches, tapes and camera lenses.

Through the windscreen the dead man’s head could be seen, thrown back now, the chisel protruding up as if it had been an arrow that fell to earth.

‘How’s your eye?’ she asked, taking Shaw by surprise.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget the worst might happen.’

Embarrassed by the intimacy, he looked through the truck’s windscreen at the victim. ‘How do you think he died?’ he asked, and they both laughed. In Shaw’s experience corpses fell into two distinct categories: those which echoed the human life that had recently fled, and those which seemed effortlessly to acquire the status of cold meat. This one, he reflected, was already on the butcher’s counter.

‘Wallet? Papers?’ he asked, pushing the image aside. ‘I’ll have to cut through the clothes to get to the pocket,’ she said. ‘I need help; you’ll do.’ Even though she looked away, Shaw knew that the honour had been calculated, even if it had been so ungraciously bestowed. When he’d first met Justina Kazimierz Shaw had put her brutal rudeness down to unfamiliarity with a new language. That was a decade ago.

‘Now. Here,’ she said, indicating a bulge at chest level beneath the overalls. ‘We need this?’ It was his call. They could remove the body, get it back to the lab and cut the clothes off there. Doing it this way risked destroying evidence, but gave the inquiry a vital head start if they could get an ID. He knew what his father would have done, which made him hesitate.

‘Go ahead,’ he said at last, holding the cloth taut as she

Harvey Ellis

Carpenter/plasterer/builder

Two telephone numbers: a landline and a mobile. A Lynn address: a block of seventies flats on land reclaimed from the estuary.

On the flip side of the compartment was a picture. A boy, age impossible to guess, the hair shaved clean of a white skull, a feeding tube to the nose. And the kind of smile that’s for other people. Shaw turned to look at the photo hanging from the rear‐view mirror, the family shot. Same kid, just less of his life left to live.

Dr Kazimierz had seen something else. The corpse’s right hand had fallen to the side as they’d cut into the fabric of the overalls, revealing six inches of skin above the wrist. She could see another wound, a cut leading to a puncture near the crook of the elbow, blood caked in the sleeve itself. ‘Looks like he managed to ward off one blow at least,’ she said.

Shaw thought about Holt leaning in at the Vauxhall window. One blow unseen, perhaps, but two?

‘The distribution of blood on the victim is the first

‘All of which means?’

‘I think he bled on his back – and was then placed in the van where death occurred. Also, at some point he emptied his bladder – there are traces of urine in the clothes. But there’s none on the seat. Again – points to the lethal attack taking place somewhere else.’

‘Outside the van?’

‘Clearly. The chisel’s shaft caught the ocular bone and fractured it, then sheared off into the soft tissue at the rear of the eye, then into the anterior lobe of the brain,’ she said, snapping off the forensic gloves. ‘I think he lost a lot of blood then – blood that is not at the scene. Then he was put in the driver’s seat, where he died.’ Shaw imagined the impact of the chisel blade, the internal crunch of the bone giving way, the painless thrust into the brain.

‘So,’ said Shaw. ‘To sum up. I’ve got a murder scene with no footprints and no blood.’

‘Least you’ve got a corpse,’ said Kazimierz.