Death Wore White

Mid‐morning and the Westmead Estate was coming to life: low life. An elderly man in carpet slippers shuffled along a covered walkway between two blocks of flats hugging a dressing gown, a copy of the Daily Express and a single can of white cider. A woman, dressed neatly in a see‐through plastic raincoat and matching hat, poured milk into a line of saucers by some waste bins, her feet lost amongst a clowder of cats.

Shaw followed George Valentine through the precinct, across a triangle of open ground covered in snow, turned past a line of lock‐up garages and then between a pair of the five‐storey blocks which dotted the estate. Above their heads an aerial walkway linked two sets of concrete concertinas. A piece of rope dangled, two trainers strung from the end, out of reach.

Vancouver House, the estate’s central block, stood alone on a tarmac island: a giant gravestone without an inscription except for the jagged multicoloured graffiti on the concrete pillars which held it clear of the ground. Shaw thought the scene almost exotic – the wastelands of Sarajevo perhaps, the sound of a mortar about to fall from hills hidden in the mist. Ramps ran up to stairwells and lifts, leaving the dark space beneath the block as a car park. Steam billowed from heating ducts along each of the twenty floors and trailed from overflow pipes, as

They cut straight across the waste ground, then ducked into the shadows of the car park, threading a path through the pillars, passing a burnt‐out VW, and skirting a huge pool of rainwater stained with oil in which two seagulls fought over a packet of chips.

Valentine felt colder once they were in the shadows. He stopped, looking around, waiting for his eyes to shift into night vision, filling his lungs now he had the chance. He’d been back many times, so that looking around was like viewing a favourite film clip. ‘Used to be a park here – back in the fifties. Marsh in summer, ponds in winter. That’s why they put the flats up on pillars. Didn’t work: the place reeks of damp. Keep wallpaper on the walls for a year, you get a fucking certificate.’

‘How’d you know?’

Valentine took out a cigarette, ran it under his nose, deciding then he’d left it too long to give up. ‘Grandparents. Dad’s side. They moved ’em here when they took down the houses on Dock Street – 1971.’ He spat into a puddle. ‘Didn’t live a year, either of them.’

Shaw knew when they’d found the spot. He had a press cutting at home with a picture of the scene that first morning. A pillar behind painted in black‐and‐white warning stripes, a staircase leading up, a sign showing a green figure climbing steps, two women standing where the press photographer had put them, tissues pressed to their mouths. And a lift entrance, the doors battered aluminium, lights above in the shape of up and down arrows, inexplicably unbroken. And a security phone in

Valentine kicked the pillar. ‘Here.’ He thrust his hands in his pockets and closed his fingers around the dice on his lighter.

‘Dad always said he thought the bloke was stupid.’

‘Mosse,’ said Valentine. ‘Robert James Mosse.’

‘Right. Dad reckoned he must have panicked – to dump the kid here, under the flats. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. If you’d got the body in the car, why not go somewhere? He could have taken it out on the marshes, Dersingham Woods. We’d still be looking.’

Valentine glanced down at his black slip‐ons, refusing to be drawn.

The bare facts of DCI Jack Shaw’s last case had never been disputed. Jonathan Tessier, aged nine, had been found dead at three minutes past midnight on 26 July 1997. He was still dressed in the Celtic kit he’d put on that morning to play football on the grass triangle by the flats. He had been given £1 to buy chips for lunch: 40p change was in the pocket in his shorts. There was no evidence at the scene, or in later medical and forensic examinations, that he had been sexually assaulted. But he had been strangled with a ligature of some sort, the condition of the body pointing to a time of death between six and eleven p.m.

DCI Jack Shaw and DI George Valentine were the first CID officers at the scene. The body had been found by a nurse, parking after her late shift a few feet from the boy’s corpse. She said she’d seen a car drive off quickly – a Volkswagen Polo, she thought – as she got out of

DI Valentine had radioed an alert on the damaged car to all units. A squad car on patrol found a Polo abandoned on the edge of allotments at Wootton just after two that morning, the front offside headlamp shattered, the engine warm. A police computer check identified the owner as Robert James Mosse, a resident – like Jonathan Tessier – of Vancouver House. Back at the scene the body had been removed, revealing a glove beneath, black leather, with a fake fur cuff. Jack Shaw and George Valentine went to Flat 8 on the first floor of Vancouver House, where they confronted Bobby Mosse, a 21‐year‐old student reading law at Sheffield University, at home during the summer vacation.

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 his permission to search the flat. They conducted the search and failed to find the other glove. Mosse, in contrast, swore in evidence they showed him the glove, minus any protective bag, only after the search. His mother, who also gave evidence, agreed with her son’s version of events and added that at one point DI Valentine had reversed the fingers of the glove, turning it inside out, and looking inside.

Mosse said his car had been stolen that evening, a crime he himself had reported at half‐past midnight, a fact verified by the duty desk at St James’s. He had been at the LA Confidential on the small screen, whereas he’d seen The Full Monty on the main one. They’d walked in because it was a nice evening and it’s difficult to park near the cinema. He had a torn ticket for the performance. His film had finished first and he had strolled home. Mosse always parked his car on an open‐air car park a few hundred yards from Vancouver House because vandals caused a lot of damage in the underground car park. But he was still worried about the Polo – and that night he’d gone to check on it after his mother had got home and before going to bed. He found the car gone, and phoned the police from the flat.

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. In terms of material evidence, this was as good as fingerprints. He was arrested, taken to St James’s and held overnight. A preliminary analysis of skin tissue found in the glove pointed to Mosse. Usherettes at the cinema were unable to recall him in the audience that evening. It had been a packed house. Mosse was charged with murder at 3.30 on the afternoon of his first day in custody. He denied the charge. Bail was refused.

Police records showed Jonathan Tessier had been cautioned on three occasions for vandalism – twice for scratching the paintwork of parked cars. The prosecution planned to suggest that Mosse had found Tessier preparing to damage the Polo, and an attempt to administer summary justice had spiralled out of control. Hence they would be

Shaw looked around, as if he might find it now, more than a decade later.

The court case itself had been a one‐day wonder. They’d made a crucial mistake, Shaw and Valentine, by taking the glove to Mosse’s flat.

Mosse’s defence team reviewed the forensic evidence in the final days before the case was to open in the Crown Court. His barrister considered the error grave enough to bring it to the judge’s attention in his opening address. Mosse’s mother kept her flat clean, an upright vacuum stationed in the hallway like a sentry, but even the cleanest surfaces collect a thin veneer of household dust – its composition varying between 62 and 84 per cent decaying human skin. That was how Mosse’s DNA had got on the glove, maintained Mosse’s defence team. The two detectives had been in the flat with it for nearly forty‐five minutes. More than enough time for the unbagged evidence to be contaminated.

The prosecution was forced to concede that the glove was the only physical evidence which linked Mosse to the scene of the crime. There was, of course, abundant forensic evidence of Mosse’s presence in the car, but nothing that proved he had driven it from the car park

The case against Bobby Mosse was thrown out shortly after lunch on the first day. The judge’s closing remarks were brief, but he had time to suggest that the slipshod police work which had compromised the prosecution case left open the possibility that the contamination of the evidence might have been deliberate.

So Mosse walked free owing to a procedural error – evidence found at the scene should be bagged, tagged and remain in the custody of the scene‐of‐crime team until booked into the evidence room at St James’s – signed in by the duty sergeant. But Jack Shaw had been too angry to think straight. And George Valentine thought he was too good a copper to have to follow the rule book. That was the ex planation Shaw wanted to believe. But the judge’s barely veiled suggestion that the pair had attempted to fabricate the evidence nagged at him like an aching tooth.

Outside the court Mosse posed for press pictures under the wheeling seagulls on the quayside. Shaw had often tried to imagine what his father must have felt that day: the defeat, the injustice perhaps, the impotency. Or was it more complicated than that? Resigned, perhaps, to his fate because he had faked the evidence? Shaw didn’t know knew – was a child‐killer. Was that how his father’s world had worked? George Valentine’s too?

If they did frame Mosse then they’d paid a heavy price for it. His father was dead within the year. George Valentine was knocked down a rank and sent out to the sticks, a one‐way ticket in his hand. And Peter Shaw had paid for it too: the memory of the father he’d idolized marred by the worst slur of all: bent copper.

‘I never understood why Dad was so angry about it,’ said Shaw, looking at Valentine. ‘Mum said it got under his skin, right from the start. But he’d done kids before – that schoolboy strangled by his father in the North End in the seventies. But it didn’t get to him – not like this.’ Shaw dragged a boot through the puddle, sending a swash of water out over the pockmarked concrete.

Valentine took out his wallet, flicking it open, holding it up for Shaw to see.

The details of the Tessier case had never registered with Shaw at the time. He’d been at Hendon, with the Met. He’d met Lena. He was building his own life. So he’d never really looked at the child’s face – other than a smudged black‐and‐white thumbnail which had appeared in the nationals in London when the body had been found. But now there it was, in colour, pin‐sharp. And he could see why his father had taken the case personally:

Jonathan Tessier’s face had found a place in George Valentine’s wallet, where his own family snapshot should have been. Shaw couldn’t imagine what it was like being that obsessed with a crime a decade old, but he could understand it, because Valentine’s career had nearly ended beneath Vancouver House that night just as suddenly as his father’s.

Hiding his emotions he handed the wallet back to Valentine without a word. ‘You’ve been back before,’ he said, wishing now that he hadn’t asked to see the spot.

‘Sure,’ said Valentine, lighting up, the sudden flare warming the cold interior. Shaw watched him draw the nicotine into his narrow chest. A car bounced down the ramp and accelerated across the tarmac before braking in a neat circle, the smell of burnt rubber instantly acrid. Valentine licked his lip where the cigarette butts had made it sore.

‘And Mosse?’ asked Shaw.

‘Life of crime,’ he replied, smiling. ‘Solicitor, down at College Lane, the magistrates courts. Married, two kids – boys; Citroën Xsara Picasso, detached house at Ringsted. A conservatory, carriage lamps, crazy paving. A cat called Zebra.’

‘But otherwise you’re not bothered,’ said Shaw. Valentine gave him a rare direct look. ‘I’m bothered.

Shaw envied Valentine that promise, if it had ever been made.

And he stored away the slight, after all these years; the knowledge that if his own father had been innocent of fabricating evidence why hadn’t he asked his son to clear his name?

‘You had your own career,’ said Valentine, reading his mind. ‘Mine was over. I had the time. I’ve had the time.’

‘And?’

‘And we’re right back where we were on that night. Your dad and I knew for a fact that Bobby Mosse killed that kid. We didn’t need the forensics on the glove to be sure. If you’d been there that night you’d have known too. He was cool all right; cool as an ice‐cube. But the mother was a wreck, and she really struggled to get her story straight. Then when we showed him the glove he nearly lost it – started shaking, threw up in the loo. Said he was upset – well, yeah, I guess he was. Upset he was gonna get nicked.

‘He was guilty as sin. Trouble is, I still can’t prove it. Twelve years going fucking nowhere. Story of my life.’ He spat in the puddle and walked away, fading into the shadows.