Death Wore White

‘Back to Siberia Belt,’ said Shaw, as the Mazda pulled out of the shadow of the Ark and slipped into the traffic sweeping past on the inner ring road. It was his father’s golden rule – if in doubt, go back to the scene of the crime. Walk the job, don’t talk it. Shaw held a hand to the dressing over his eye, feeling his pulse behind the bruised lid.

‘Everything’s changed,’ he said, as Valentine tried to get the hot air vent to clear the windscreen of condensation. ‘There’s a passenger in the murder victim’s vehicle, but she’s gone. There’s an apple in the murder victim’s vehicle, but it’s not his. The corpse on the beach is involved in some form of illegal trade in wildlife, and that’s gone too. It wasn’t a simple inquiry to start with.’

Shaw decanted the shells from his pocket and ran eight along the dashboard. The Mazda came to a halt at a set of traffic lights by the soaring Gothic spire of St Anne’s. A branch of Curry’s had a dozen TV sets in the window, each showing the local news. Shaw’s sketch of Harvey Ellis’s female hitch‐hiker flashed up. They studied it until the car behind beeped as the lights changed.

Out of town they joined the coast road near Castle Rising Castle, the snow‐topped Norman keep visible over the trees of the park. It wasn’t yet dusk, but already there was more light in the fallen snow than the sky. Ahead

Siberia Belt was windswept and looked deserted until they got round the bend. Ahead they could see some of the vehicles still on site, a CSI forensic tent pegged over one.

‘Come on,’ said Shaw, getting out. ‘Talk me through it, George.’

Valentine got out, braced against the icy breeze. They walked along the bank, Valentine listing the eight vehicles from the tail end of the line, starting with the Mondeo.

‘By the way – for the record.’ He stopped, tapping his toe on the spot. ‘The Morris. I checked out the old dear first thing this morning. Early‐stage Parkinson’s Disease. The weed helps, apparently. I said she should see a doctor about painkillers. She said she had.’

He shrugged, moving on, listing each vehicle.

Tyres crunched and they looked back at the farm track to see a white van at the junction. It flashed its lights once and they saw Izzy Dereham, the tenant farmer, at the wheel, two men squeezed onto the passenger bench beside her. A wave, and she pulled out, heading down to the coast road.

Just four vehicles were left of the original convoy on Siberia Belt – the plumber’s Astravan, the security van, Stanley Zhao’s Volvo and John Holt’s Corsa. Shaw slapped his hand on the roof of the Astravan. One of Tom

She flicked off the vacuum and lowered the mask. ‘We’re expecting him – he’s bringing drinks.’ She smiled but Shaw could see that her lips were blue, the temperature in the van low enough for her breath to hang between them.

‘We’re walking the line,’ said Shaw. ‘It’s all been dusted?’

‘Sure. It’s signed off – help yourself. But exteriors only, please. Don’t open any doors.’

They heard the vacuum again, a whine as high‐pitched as birdsong from the marsh. As they passed John Holt’s Corsa Valentine stopped, studying the vandalized paintwork.

‘Tom says it’s a proper job – a diamond cutter,’ said Shaw.

Valentine ran a finger along one of the lines. ‘It’s a picture,’ he said, shaking his head. Shaw stood at his shoulder, thinking he might be right, but he couldn’t see it. Valentine took his battered notebook and sketched the six savage cuts which made up the scrawl. He had an idea what they might be, but he kept it to himself.

They walked on past the butchered pine stump, the crime‐scene tape still attached, flapping in the breeze like a Buddhist prayer flag.

‘Let’s get a clear picture,’ said Shaw. He tried to imagine it, conjuring up the scene from his memory, the cars steaming in the moonlight, white and red light splashed on the snow.

Valentine sniffed, brushing the back of his hand across the tip of his nose. ‘She could have got out the seaward side – the passenger side, a single print perhaps, lost under a drift? We could have missed it. There was plenty of wind about, even if there wasn’t much snow. Then the helicopter landed and covered the lot anyway.’

Shaw walked to the edge of the deep dyke which ran the length of Siberia Belt on the seaward side. He stood on the brink and let a snowball fall at his feet. ‘Where’d she go from there, George? If she jumped the ditch we’re looking for a runaway teenager with an Olympic long‐jump gold medal. Plus she’d leave prints on the far side on the flat sand and we know it was untouched. If she gets in the ditch she can only go as far as the sluice that way.’ He pointed south. ‘And we know there were no prints there. And if she went that way,’ he pointed north, ‘there’s another sluice blocking the way after fifty yards and there was no sign of any prints there either. If she’d stayed in the water for just ten minutes, maybe less, she’d never get out. Hypothermia. There was two degrees of frost, if the dyke wasn’t full of tidal water it would have been solid ice. We’ve got to do better than that.’

Valentine stamped his feet. Left, right, left, right. ‘OK. She was hidden,’ he said. ‘On the back of the truck under the tarpaulin. We didn’t see her and she got out when the CSI team arrived. They wouldn’t know she wasn’t one of the witnesses. She just walks out once the place is

Shaw clapped three times, the sound muffled by his gloved hands. Perhaps that was the key to unlocking Valentine’s skills: wind him up first. ‘That’s the best idea either of us have had since all this started.’ It was just about the only idea they’d had since they’d found Harvey Ellis’s body. ‘But… I stayed with the body until Hadden’s team arrived. I signed over to him. Then I moved back to the Alfa and waited there. When we got reinforcements from St James’s I put one on duty at the rear of the pickup. He was still there at dawn. Paul Twine – the graduate entry.’

‘He’s on the team.’

‘He checked IDs – he looked at mine and I chaired his appointment panel for God’s sake. By that point the CSIs had a forensic tent up. They’d booked the tipper load – I saw the manifest: plasterboard, building supplies and a tarpaulin. No leggy blonde.’

Valentine sighed. ‘I’ll talk to Twine, make sure. It’s a long stint on the same spot – perhaps he slipped off for a Jimmy.’

The wind blew in off the sea, a fresh shower of snow closing down visibility to a few yards. Then, just as suddenly, it cleared and a gash of blue opened up at sea.

When they looked south again they could see a figure walking towards them. A minute later Tom Hadden was with them, shaking a flask. The three of them stood in a close triangle passing round a cup of sweet tea the colour of estuary mud.

Hadden ran a hand back through his thinning strawberry‐blond hair. ‘Yeah. I’ve seen a marsh harrier, and a seal – large as life, just off the beach there.’ He smiled. ‘But no. Routine, you’ll have a full report tomorrow first thing. But I can’t think there’s anything relevant, which, given the fact we’ve got a murder victim on the scene is relevant in itself.’

Hadden leant back, closing his eyes to think.

‘We think the victim had a passenger in the pick‐up,’ said Shaw. ‘A girl.’

Hadden opened his eyes, the whites slightly bloodshot. ‘There’s plenty of spare prints – could be her.’

‘But nothing else on the passenger side?’

‘I’ll double‐check,’ he said.

Valentine smiled. ‘There were ladders on top of the Corsa. Fifteen‐foot extent – right?’

‘Yeah,’ said Hadden, remembering he’d put that in his initial report, in the fine print. ‘So what?’

‘Prints, blood, anything?’

‘I did them myself back at the Ark. Clean as whistles.’

‘The idea being?’ asked Shaw.

Valentine shrugged. ‘Nothing that makes any sense.’ Hadden laughed. ‘I think one of the witnesses might have noticed the killer building a bridge out of ladders to get to his victim.’

‘Like I said,’ said Valentine, taking a breath. ‘Doesn’t make sense.’ But if they were looking for a way the killer

Shaw could see it too. ‘But one more check – just for us?’ he asked Hadden.

‘OK. Sure.’

‘Anything on the spark plugs?’ asked Shaw.

‘Got ’em here.’ Hadden patted the pockets of his all‐weather jacket, retrieving a plastic envelope containing a pair of spark plugs. Hadden looked drawn, sleepless, the freckles along his forehead joined up in blotches on the pale skin. ‘Reckon they’re a year old – more. Perfectly serviceable but the contacts are well worn. We sent them down to the vehicle pool and they reckon – judging by sight – that they’d run for another year, maybe longer.’

‘Right. So not new?’

‘No way. The others – the ones from the inside of the cab – they’re shot. We tried them in one of the squad cars. They wouldn’t spark if you put five million volts through them.’

‘So that was part of the plan,’ said Valentine. ‘To fake a breakdown.’

‘But he didn’t need to, did he?’ said Shaw. ‘Because the tree was down – chopped down.’

Valentine shook his head. ‘Right. Belt and braces? A change of plan?’

‘Or two plans,’ said Shaw.