Death Wore White

Back at St James’s Shaw ran up the steps while Valentine waited for the antiquated lift. He pushed open the fire door and saw ahead the long corridor which led to the murder incident room. A woman, with a pail and mop, had stopped in mid‐distance, hands on hips. Suddenly a reinforced glass door thudded open and DC Twine was running towards him. Policemen never run, that’s standard basic training, unless it’s to save life.

Twine skidded to a halt on the damp lino.

‘Officer down,’ he said. ‘Out at the hostel – it’s Fiona.’

Twine drove Shaw, commandeering a squad car on the forecourt, Valentine’s Mazda in the rear‐view. The rush‐hour streets were wet and splashed with the jagged colours of the town: traffic lights, headlamps, bright shopfronts, pedestrians turned away from the sea wind. The workers’ hostel in the North End was tucked away in the warren of terraced streets that once was home to the town’s fishing community. It had been the district’s Co‐op, and the distinctive red‐brick façade was still decorated with vine leaves and an inlaid picture in a pale sandstone of a dairymaid carrying a yoke through a meadow. Graffiti covered it now: a curled indecipherable moniker in soot‐black.

An ambulance, sirens screaming, tagged on to the

They brought Fiona Campbell out on a stretcher. Even under the amber street light Shaw could see she was as pale as a Goth. A paramedic was pressing a bandage to a wound at her shoulder, a single knife‐cut from the clavicle up towards the neck, the flesh hanging open to reveal a white, chipped bone. She was doused in blood on her left side, her own hand a sticky glove of arterial red.

Shaw placed a hand on her forehead. Fear had made her eyes unnaturally bright. ‘You can take tomorrow morning off if it helps,’ he said. As he spoke blood oozed to fill the trench of the wound. Valentine hung back. The paramedics slid her into the back of the ambulance, set up a drip and pulled off in a cloud of sirens.

‘She had a uniformed PC with her apparently,’ said Valentine, stepping forward, his face a colourless mask.

‘Where?’

‘In the building.’

The shop area of the old Co‐op had been left as a storeroom: tea crates, furniture, the old marble counter stacked with loo rolls, catering packs of detergent and light bulbs. A uniformed PC sat on a stool, holding a plastic bottle of water. Even from ten feet away Shaw could see he was shaking.

Valentine spoke to Shaw’s ear. ‘PC Darren Cole. It’s his beat – local community liaison officer. First tour of duty. He’s not having a good day.’

The PC nodded, but said nothing.

‘Darren. You need to tell me.’

The PC went to unscrew the top of the water bottle but thought better of it. Vomit covered his reflective tunic. ‘We went in – down there.’ He looked to a single metal door – Shaw guessed it was the original entrance to the Co‐op’s cold store. ‘We searched the place. There’s some drugs – and cash: fifty‐pound notes, hidden under the Czech’s mattress. A lot of money – thousands.’

Shaw took the water bottle, removed the cap, and gave it to him. He drank, almost half, then handed it back. ‘Fiona told them we wanted to talk, down at St James’s,’ said Cole. ‘Most of them said OK. They’d been drinking, but not as much as the Czech. He said he wouldn’t go.’ The PC wiped his sleeve across his mouth. ‘Like, never. Fiona tried to talk him round while I got the rest out into the van. They took a bottle with ’em. I said they couldn’t have it, but they took it anyway.’

A bead of sweat ran to the end of Cole’s nose. But it was cold in the old shop, and Shaw noticed a bucket full of ice under a damp patch.

‘When I went back in Fiona had sat down with him – there’s a table. He said he wasn’t coming because he was going to kill himself. He’d got a knife, a butcher’s knife. He cut his wrist.’ Cole gagged. ‘Fiona went to stop him and he just…’ He couldn’t find the words. ‘He just chopped at her, like she was jungle, you know? I grabbed her – she was on the floor – and dragged her in here. I locked the door, then I called St James’s. Officer down.’

The door was like a ship’s – iron, riveted, with a heavy‐duty handle. Shaw turned the key, leant on the handle and heard a pop, as if entering an airlock. The corridor beyond was tiled, a line of blood smeared down the centre where Cole had dragged Fiona Campbell through to the old shop. On each side there were shelves. Old tin boxes rusted in the corners.

Shaw got to the second door when he heard the air pop behind him and he turned to see Valentine, an unlit cigarette in his mouth, a folder in his hand, his eyes drawn down to the arterial line.

‘George,’ he said.

They stood together at the inner second door. ‘This was in Fiona’s car,’ said Valentine. ‘She’d picked up the men’s records from Shark Tooth. Cole says the one they haven’t got down the station is this one…’ He held up the file. ‘Bedrich Fibich,’ said the DS, reading. ‘Forty‐two‐year‐old from Prague. A teacher, family back home. Papers list him as a labourer. He’s been in England since last summer.’

‘What is this place?’ asked Shaw.

‘I asked in the crowd – old bloke said it used to be an abattoir for all the Co‐ops in town.’

Shaw pushed the second door open and the hinges screamed. A line of camp beds ran down a room. Storage heaters hadn’t taken the chill off the white‐tiled walls; lots of the tiles were cracked, and Shaw wondered if the engrained black stains were dried blood. He couldn’t stop

The room’s brutal past was impossible to obliterate, but the men had tried. The walls were covered in random pictures: the castle in Prague, a centrefold with her legs splayed, a snapshot of a young man standing on a river bank holding up a silver fish, a family wedding. And they’d brought their own smells: sweat and stale tobacco, cheap deodorant and whisky. There was a gas stove, a single garlic sausage hanging from a nail. No windows, just grilles in the roof and beyond them reinforced glass stained green by moss.

Bedrich Fibich was sitting behind a large table facing down the room, like a lonely Christ at a deserted Last Supper. There was nothing on the table except a bottle of whisky and a single glass; but a pool of blood had spread out from Fibich’s clasped hands to form an almost perfect circle. His eyes were shut, and Shaw wondered if he knew anyone else was in the room. Gravity seemed to have attacked his face, pulling down the folds of skin, the heavy eyelids, the bottom lip.

Shaw walked to the table and pulled out a metal chair, its legs squealing on the tiled floor. He heard Valentine’s soft steps behind him, then to one side, and then he came into peripheral vision, standing with his back to the tiled wall, just within a lunge of Fibich. Shaw could see the single knife wound in the Czech’s left wrist.

‘We should get you to a doctor,’ he said.

Fibich opened his eyes. They were blue but the colour was lifeless, like a vein glimpsed through thin skin. ‘No.’

Valentine took half a step forward and Shaw heard saliva glug in his throat. But Shaw raised a hand from his wrist, enough to hold him there, well within striking range.

The blade of the knife reflected the light, the bottom six inches smeared with blood. Fibich held it in his hand with the point at Shaw’s face, ready to thrust.

‘Why? You don’t have to die,’ said Shaw.

Fibich seemed to stir, rolling his shoulders, wincing as the movement reopened the gash in his wrist. ‘She won’t have me back. Not after what we did. I had to explain the money, why I was coming home. She said I should stay away, that I was a stranger to them now.’

‘She? Your wife?’

He looked at Shaw for the first time. So this was why he was dying, because he was an exile in his own land. But what had he done? Shaw had a shrewd idea. If Sarah Baker‐Sibley had called Colin Narr that Monday night and told him Jillie had been abducted he would have organized a rescue. Had he sent a boat out to intercept James Baker‐Sibley’s yacht? Had Fibich been aboard?

‘That’s the bit I don’t understand,’ said Shaw. ‘Why did the man on the yacht have to die? Narr sent you out there to get his girlfriend’s daughter back, didn’t he? But why did her father have to die?’

Fibich turned his wrist to examine the wounds. ‘So good to be rich,’ he said. ‘Other people take all your risks.’

Fibich tried to focus on Shaw’s face. ‘The man on the yacht tried to pay us to leave him – to leave them, the daughter too.’ He stopped, and Shaw wondered if he was thinking of his own children.

‘He said we could be rich if we let them go. That was a big mistake. We took her anyway. He did not want her hurt, so he did not fight. I rowed her ashore. When I return we beat the truth from him. A desperate man, he fought too hard. So we hit him too hard. But he told us where the money was before he died. Thousands of pounds, all in cash. Then we threw him overboard.’

His head rocked back and he closed his eyes. Above them a line of hooks were still embedded in the roof where the carcasses had once hung.

‘I deserve to die here,’ he said.

‘You said “we”. Who was in charge, who else was there, Bedrich?’

Fibich’s eyes spun out of focus. ‘The little man,’ he said. ‘The little man without pity. Lufkin.’