Death Wore White

4

Thursday, 12 February

Burnham Market lay tucked up in the snowy hills of north Norfolk, the rooftops as white and crisp as on any Christmas card. In the police station Shaw and Valentine waited for Sarah Baker?Sibley’s Alfa Romeo to pull into the car park. Jillie Baker?Sibley, it appeared, held the key to what had happened that night on board the Hydra. But the leading question now, as Sarah Baker?Sibley was led into the interview room, was where was she?

‘I asked for your daughter to attend for interview,’ said Shaw, adjusting the dressing on his eye.

A PC brought tea. Sarah Baker?Sibley sat at a table, knocking out a menthol cigarette from a fresh pack. She looked around, her shoulders rolling slightly in the chill air. Through the window she saw a fox break cover in the high hillside above the town, running over the bare furrowed earth, suddenly clear against the snow.

Shaw sensed that the elaborate display of insouciance was a mask. Her face was puffy and she kept trying to rearrange her mouth, trying to hide an emotion very close to fear.

‘She’s on a sleepover. Clara’s — her best friend. A house at South Creake. I’ve phoned and left a message.

Valentine pulled up a chair, the legs scraping on the bare wooden floor. He’d spent three years at Burnham Market and had taken hundreds of dreary statements in this room. The stench of institutional cleaning hung about the place, the only decoration a Day?Glo poster in yellow for Neighbourhood Watch, a burglar in black slipping through an open window, and a no?smoking sign nailed to the door. Being back made him realize just how much he’d hated those ten lost years. ‘Can I have the address, Mrs Baker?Sibley?’ he asked, taking a note. He told Shaw he’d organize a squad car to check it out, leaving the door open when he went.

Shaw leant against the single heavy iron radiator which cracked and thudded with the strain of the hot water dribbling through clogged pipes. ‘You don’t mind?’ asked Shaw, nodding at the tape. ‘And you don’t want a solicitor? Only, the last time we spoke…’

She shook her head and lit the menthol cigarette. Shaw pointed to the no?smoking sign.

‘Jesus.’ She stubbed it out in a saucer that had been left on the table.

‘Did you tell your daughter she was expected for interview?’

‘Yes, yes of course I told her. What’s this about?’ she said, checking her watch. ‘I open at ten. Sharp. I’ve said all I’m saying about Colin Narr, so, as my daughter would say, Inspector Shaw, let’s not even go there.’

Shaw stood, switched a shell from his trouser pocket

‘Have you any idea why the Hydra is moored at Morston Creek, Mrs Baker?Sibley?’ he asked.

Valentine had come back and he watched her face as she heard the question. She managed to construct an expression of mild curiosity.

‘I have no idea. My husband’s movements are of no significance to me, Detective Inspector.’

‘You said you were divorced, I think?’

‘Did I? Good, that’s right. Legally, emotionally, spiritually, and — until you informed me otherwise — geographically. My husband lives on Kythera, a Greek island. He has a flat in the City, as I think I told you only yesterday. My happiness soars with every mile that stretches between us.’

‘And Jillie?’

‘What about Jillie?’ The chin came out, the eyes hardening protectively.

‘When does she see her father?’

‘My husband is not allowed to see his daughter. There’s a court order to that effect.’ She touched the damp dogend in the saucer. ‘My husband killed our first child, you see, so he’s not getting another chance.’

Snow fell against the window and the silence was so deep Shaw thought he could hear the muffled impact of the flakes.

‘How?’ asked Valentine, taking Route One.

‘James always wanted a boy, someone he could leave

‘Thomas was none of those things. But that didn’t stop James. He took him to Greece, on the Hydra. They camped on the mainland, a few miles across the strait, and James taught him how to sail the little wooden dinghy she carried. Then he sent him out to sea one day. Thomas was thirteen — Jillie’s age. This was three years ago. Jillie was with me at our villa. James told Thomas he had to make the crossing. A halcyon day — that’s what the Greeks call it. Hardly any wind. Thomas got hot and decided to go for a swim. He just jumped in. He’d never been on his own before, so he didn’t think. There was no way back onto the boat, you see, and he couldn’t climb the sides.’

She sipped the tea, the cup steady.

‘I found the body. It was extraordinary, actually, because the boat, when they found it, was ten miles along the coast but his body had floated back to our house. We had a stretch of beach and I saw something from the house — I was by the phone waiting for news, James was out in the Hydra, searching the coast. I waded in. It was summer, so the body had begun to decompose. I didn’t know it was him — not for a certainty — until I was a few feet away. It’s not something I’m going to forget. And it’s something Jillie can’t forget. I didn’t see her but she followed me into the water.

‘I burnt the dinghy after the Greek police had finished the inquiry. There were scratch marks all round it, cutting into the wood.’

‘An accident then,’ said Shaw.

She ignored him. ‘I took Jillie home. James led his own life, there was another woman. He didn’t contest the divorce. But he did try to get custody of Jillie.’ She laughed. ‘The court threw that out. Then, last month, he tried to take her back,’ she went on. ‘She’d been down to London to see her grandmother — that’s my mother — and she’d got back to Lynn early. She rang me for a lift. She rang her father to chat. They used to talk.’ She pushed the saucer away. ‘She’d forgiven him, you see. Something I didn’t think he deserved. I was late; James was in town — he still has business interests here, although he never trusted me enough to tell me what they were. He drove to the station. He was flying back to Greece that afternoon; his company has a private jet, there’s a landing strip on the island but no customs. Why didn’t she come? He said it would be a new life for her.’ She arched her pencilled eyebrows. ‘There’s a pool — heated.’

She crossed her legs. ‘There’s no choice now, you see.’

‘Choice?’ asked Shaw.

‘A girl will have to do. James’s…’ She searched for a word, enjoying herself. ‘James’s ability to have children is restricted. A medical condition affects his fertility, and that gets worse with age. We did try for a third, but it was impossible. So it’s Jillie who’ll inherit. And she’s a tomboy really — he always wanted that. So she’d love to go with him, Daddy’s little cabin boy.’

would have gone?’ asked Valentine.

‘That’s immaterial. Because that’s when I turned up. They were sat in James’s BMW. I got her out of the passenger side but James came round. He hit me. Quite hard, actually. So I hit him back. Harder. There was a witness — a taxi driver on the rank. Jillie screamed, and he tried to get her back in the car. It was quite a scene.’

She forced herself to smile and Shaw guessed she’d relived it many times.

‘I pressed charges, assault. ABH. He was sentenced to six months, suspended. And James was banned from seeing her, or from coming within ten miles of Burnham Thorpe. So if he’s at Morston Creek he’s broken the court order — I hope you’ll take the appropriate action. The judge made it clear he would go to prison if he breached the conditions.’ Nobody said anything so she went on. ‘We’ve been very happy ever since,’ she said, dispensing with another unasked question.

‘He must love his daughter,’ prompted Shaw. ‘Actually, I think his feelings towards Jillie are irrelevant, Inspector Shaw. He needs her. She’s his immortality. She’s the vehicle for his wealth, a receptacle for his money.’

Shaw produced an evidence bag from the holdall: clear plastic with the sheaf of long hair curled within.

‘He tried again, didn’t he?’ asked Shaw, standing at the table, his fingertips splayed on the Formica surface.

She tried to touch the hair through the plastic.

‘We found the hair on the Hydra, Mrs Baker?Sibley.’ She ran a nail along her bottom lip. ‘Yes,’ she said, looking at the tape. ‘I think I need that solicitor now, Inspector Shaw.’

She sat.

‘Do you have a picture of your husband, Mrs Baker?Sibley?’

She laughed, her head thrown back.

Shaw took a file from the desktop and, flicking through, found the animated sketch he’d made from the corpse retrieved from Styleman’s Middle. He placed it neatly before her, put the saucer on a corner as a paperweight.

‘Is that James?’

She looked at it and Valentine could see the calculations going on behind her eyes. She took a cigarette out of the packet and just held it in her hand. ‘Unless he’s got a twin brother.’ She tried to set her lips in a line but failed.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Baker?Sibley, but this man’s body…’ Shaw tapped the drawing, ‘was found on Styleman’s Middle — the sandbank a few miles off Ingol Beach — on Tuesday. I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to see if you can identify the body later today. There is evidence your ex?husband was attacked on board his yacht. I’m sorry.’

Valentine watched as the blood drained from her face, leaving a livid patch of blusher exposed, like a death mask.

‘He’s dead?’

‘Three o’clock,’ said Shaw. ‘St James’s. And then we’ll need to talk again. I’d like Jillie to be there.’

‘Of course.’ She’d worked it out now. ‘I’ll make a

‘Sure.’

Outside a car alarm pulsed. She placed both palms on her face and stretched the skin back, lifting the wrinkles out of her neck.

‘Yes. He did try again. Which I find hard to believe because generally he’s a coward, I think, and if he’d been caught — even just talking to her — he’d have gone to jail. Jillie said he was waiting outside the school in his 4x4 the night I was stranded out on the coast road in the snow. She said he just wanted to talk, that he’d get her home, so she got in. I’d told her a hundred times to text me if her father turned up. But he persuaded her to listen to what he had to say first. He drove her to Morston and said that if they wanted to they could catch the tide. He stopped in the village and posted some letters, then drove down to the quay. She wouldn’t have to go back to school, that’s what he told her. They could take the Hydra over to Ostend — he’d done it before with her when she was young. He said he’d bought a property on the Turkish coast. There’s an International School in Smyrna; they wouldn’t ask questions if he paid the fees. They’d disappear. Even if the police found them he had the money to tie it up in the courts. He said it’d be like Jarndyce and Jarndyce. She’s done Bleak House at school — she thought it was funny. So she said yes.’

‘She told you that when you phoned from Gallow Marsh Farm?’ said Valentine.

‘Yes. I called her mobile. She told me what had happened, said she’d decided to go with her father. She

‘But you rang a second time,’ said Shaw, looking out at the snow, a hawk over the hedgerow.

‘James answered. He said they’d sort it out together. That I wasn’t to come after them and that if I went to the police I’d never see her again. That’s why I told you she was at home. He said if I kept quiet then he’d work something out, I could see her abroad. Which was nice of him,’ she added, not smiling. ‘I could hear Jillie crying in the background. I think she realized then that it wasn’t a game. That we might not see each other again.’

‘Did you go after them?’

‘I didn’t need to. Your squad car dropped me home. I went inside, got changed and set off for the creek — it’s only a mile. I met Jillie coming up the lane. She said James had rowed her ashore. She’d told him she wanted to go home, to me. She said he’d cried when she said goodbye — which is sweet, isn’t it?’

DC Mark Birley knocked, came in. ‘Squad car says Mrs Baker?Sibley’s daughter isn’t at her friend’s house.’ Birley’s new shirt was too long in the arm so that he had to keep readjusting the cuffs. Shaw wondered if he’d kept his uniform, still hanging in a cupboard at home.

‘Mrs Baker?Sibley?’ asked Shaw.

She stood. ‘I’ll check her other friends. The school.’

‘We’ll give you an hour,’ said Shaw. ‘Then we’ll put out an alert. We need to find her.’

Anger flashed across her mother’s eyes. ‘I know that. Christ — I know that.’ She took one last look at the sketch

It was only after Valentine had walked her to the car park that Shaw realized her perfume still dominated the interview room: an astringent citrus. Shaw watched as she drove the Alfa out into the street, the gravel screeching as she made the turn, wrestling with the steering wheel.

‘It makes sense,’ said Valentine from the door. ‘The diversion on to Siberia Belt, the mobile black spot, everything. All set up to stop Sarah Baker?Sibley picking Jillie up, and then stranding her out of mobile contact long enough to get to sea.’

‘Let’s get out to the scene, see if it works on the ground.’

‘Mark wants a word,’ said Valentine, nodding down the corridor towards the front counter.

The DC was filling in the station logbook. He gave Shaw a black plastic box, about the size of a brick, and flipped open the hinged top. Inside was a porous pad. In the lid was a stamp. He pressed it into the ink, turned his hand over, and printed a neat BT on his skin, just like the one Valentine had seen on the skin of the driver of the Mondeo, and just like the one on Jillie Baker?Sibley’s narrow wrist.

‘We’ve had some luck,’ said Birley. ‘Forty?one tickets were sold for the dance. Security for the disco, and the running of the bar, was handled by a private company…’ Birley checked a neat note, ‘called SoundEvent, based in Lynn. The parish council chairman is Rod Belcher — he’s outside if you want a word. He says his son went and he said there was no trouble. The bar was beer and lager

Birley worked a finger inside his shirt collar, easing the material away from his neck. ‘So: forty?one names, twenty?nine blokes. I’ve got the lot. One of them has to be our runaway driver.’

He unfolded a file and arranged the snapshots. Birley had dragooned two uniformed PCs from Burnham to help build the photo gallery. He laid them out in rows, then stood back, admiring his work. Valentine studied the faces. Then he did it a second time, but it was just for show. ‘Nope. ’Fraid not.’

Birley blew out his cheeks. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

‘Our kid got in for nowt,’ said Valentine.

‘How?’ said Birley, looking at Shaw.

‘You said the parish council chairman had a son?’ asked Shaw.

Birley searched the faces, found the one he was looking for, and stabbed it with his index finger. ‘Gerald Belcher — known to his friends as Gee.’

‘It’s not him,’ said Valentine. ‘Believe me.’

‘There was someone else at that disco, Mark. We need to find him. Let’s speak to Gee’s dad. He’s here?’

Birley outlined their problem with the photos but Belcher couldn’t help. His son was a regular at the discos, which were monthly, and he was sure there was no one there who was a stranger.

‘Bit of a mystery,’ said Belcher, checking a mobile. ‘You never go?’ asked Valentine, his head wreathed in cigarette smoke.

‘No. Well, sometimes. But kids at this age are best left to themselves. There’s been no trouble.’

‘We’d like a word with Gee,’ said Birley. ‘Just to double?check.’

‘OK,’ said Belcher, ditching the cigarette and getting back in the car. The dashboard bristled with the calm, sophisticated telemetry of a?45,000 motor car. The engine purred into life. The finish was teak, a SatNav unit attached to the windscreen, the seats in tan leather. Valentine reached in and turned the ignition key, killing the engine, because around the steering wheel there was a snakeskin cover, the design unmistakable — black chevrons on a silver background.

Jillie Baker?Sibley could hear the traffic in the sea mist but she couldn’t see the pus?yellow headlights until they were thirty yards away; the cars whispering past, the drivers bent forward, trying to see something where there was nothing. Fossdyke, the ancient Roman bank which kept the sea back off the land, stretched out into fog ahead of her, like a drawbridge over an unseen gorge.

She was getting colder, her arms held awkwardly at her sides, her jaw aching with the effort of not shivering. Any warmth she’d gathered overnight was bleeding away. She’d slept in the shed at the bottom of Clara’s garden, wrapped up in a picnic blanket, with a paraffin lamp on. Her friend had got her soup in a flask and a microwaved stick of garlic bread.

At dawn she’d crept out and left a note.

Thanks. Don’t tell them. I’ll write.

J. x

She picked up her first lift on the coast road, round Lynn, and west towards the Midlands. The mist had cleared for an hour and she’d seen the horizon. To the north, reclaimed land ran to the shore of the Wash, a patchwork of mathematical fields dusted with snow, a power station the only feature, catching the sunlight like

The icy wind had made the legs of her jeans flap. ‘Fuck it,’ she’d said to herself, wishing she hadn’t forgotten how to cry. In her pocket she clutched a key, but its power to still her rising panic was fading. Alone, stranded, she felt an almost overwhelming urge to scream.

She’d got a lift, finally, from a truck to Sutton Bridge where the old mechanical swing bridge loomed, a giant’s Meccano set crossing the grey waters of the Welland. The mist closed in again beyond the town, curling over the thirty?foot?high bank like dry ice. Grey cottages built on the wide dyke came and went, but they saw no one. Villages dripped in the damp cloud which had fallen on the world.

Then another truck: Luxembourg plates, a single silver container. She’d answered the driver’s questions.

Where was she heading? The M1.

Was this the right way? It was the right way. Shouldn’t she be in school? She was sixteen.

Where would she go when she got to the M1 — north or south? To the airport.

Did she have a ticket? Did her parents know?

She said she needed to get out at the next roundabout. He said that it would be best to go to a police station, they could check she was OK. She said she’d tell them he’d tried to rape her, in a lay?by, that he’d used his weight to lie on top of her, that you couldn’t hear her screams because of the traffic thundering by. He didn’t see her cut a thin line along her cheekbone with a fingernail.

They drove to a service station in silence and she got out at the exit. Standing on the grass verge she’d spat on his windscreen. That made her feel better, in charge, powerful. Empowered. She liked that word.

He’d pulled away and she’d watched the tail lights fade in the mist, the world around her a shifting jigsaw of grey and white.

The car that picked her up was a black Jag.

It went past once. Then she heard it brake. She didn’t notice it going back the other way, or hear it pulling an unseen U?turn. When it coasted out of the gloom the second time its tyres crunched in the kerb on broken glass and she recognized the umbrella furled on the back seat.

She took a step back, looking around as if trying to find a way off the bank. But the field below was a milk?white pool of mist, weaving its way between wooden posts.

The passenger side window came down electronically. She shook her head, but then she got in.

A POLICE — NO ENTRY sign blocked the way forward on Siberia Belt.

‘Weird,’ said Shaw. ‘Tom said he’d have it wrapped up by last night. Why are they still here?’ He got out and stamped in the snow while Valentine struggled into his raincoat. They heard a marsh bird’s call, like fingers down a blackboard. Walking, Valentine smoked doggedly, while Shaw tried to set in order, in his own mind, everything that they’d learned.

He’d left DC Birley to interview Rob Belcher and his son Gee about the whereabouts of the BMW — and the snakeskin wheel cover — on the night of the blizzard on Siberia Belt. DC Campbell was told to get a unit down to the cockle?pickers’ hostel in the North End and round them up for interview. But the big breakthrough was Sarah Baker?Sibley. Her statement would provide a cornerstone for the inquiry; laying out the foundations of the plan her ex?husband had so meticulously laid to abduct his daughter. Luring her mother into the mobile black spot, and then bottling her up like a spider in a jar for the crucial hour it would take to spirit Jillie out of the country. The sudden snowstorm had all been to the good, turning the lid on the jar ever tighter.

But to achieve that James Baker?Sibley had to put in place a conspiracy. How many? Two on Siberia Belt — Ellis

Valentine slipped on the ice, his arms flailing to keep his balance, the black slip?ons skating. The sharp right turn in Siberia Belt was still two hundred yards away. So they plodded on.

And then there were James Baker?Sibley’s killers, thought Shaw. What if Jillie’s mother had used her second telephone call from Gallow Marsh to reach someone other than Jillie and her father? Sarah didn’t really need to phone him back at all. She knew what he planned, and as far as she knew her daughter was going to go with him. What she really needed was to stop her. What better friend to call than Colin Narr at Shark Tooth? All roads led to Narr, and to the cockle?pickers Fiona Campbell was assembling for interview.

They reached the turn in the track and, once round the corner of the high flood bank, they saw ahead a single SOC tent, lit within.

His radio buzzed so he took the call. It was DC Twine in the murder incident room. They’d made progress in tracing the teenager at the wheel of the Mondeo on Siberia Belt. According to parish council chairman Rodney Belcher his BMW, and its distinctive steering?wheel cover, were in use on the night of Harvey Ellis’s murder — but not by him. The Belchers’ eighteen?year?old neighbour, Sebastian Draper, was teaching Belcher’s son Gee how to drive. By way of payment they let him have use of the BMW on occasional weekday evenings when Belcher was up in the City. Draper was on a gap year, waiting to go up to Oxford to read maths in September. Responsible, sensible, polite — according to Belcher. Draper’s father had refused to allow his son to answer questions when DC Lau had called, until the family solicitor was present. An interview had been arranged for the morning at St James’s. Lau could have arrested him, but Twine had counselled caution. Shaw agreed. They knew where he lived and nobody was doing a moonlight flit from a million?pound address.

Other news: John Holt had discharged himself from hospital, and was under surveillance, and Jake Ellis — Harvey Ellis’s son — had died overnight at the hospital, his mother at his side. The Lynn News was reporting a

Valentine relayed the messages and then stowed the radio.

‘Perhaps that’s Harvey’s pay?off for playing his part in the abduction,’ said Shaw. ‘Baker?Sibley said James stopped off in Morston to post letters — let’s try and trace the trust. But if it’s the Swiss they’re good at hiding money.’

Shaw turned on the spot. Late afternoon: a grey sky loaded with snow, pinned up above their heads in folds, like a dreary circus tent. Siberia Belt had been churned up by vehicles, the ruts frozen.

‘So we know a bit,’ said Shaw. ‘At last.’

They both ducked their heads as a fresh squall of snow blew into their faces.

‘What we don’t know is what happened out here on Siberia Belt. Why did Harvey Ellis die? Obvious scenario: he loses his nerve, one of the other members of the conspiracy kills him. So — who was the backstop? The kid in the Mondeo? Sebastian Draper. But he goes out and steals a car first? I know he’s going to Oxford but he can’t be that stupid. But is there another credible suspect? I can’t see it. Shreeves — in the security van. I guess it’s possible. Was that why he was so keen to start a new life somewhere else?’

Shaw led the way forward to the lit SOC tent. ‘Let’s see what’s keeping Tom’s boys out in the cold.’

‘Ah,’ he said, straightening his back. Around his neck hung several hundred pounds’ worth of binoculars. Shaw guessed he’d been planning a quiet hour after the final vehicle had been towed off Siberia Belt, scanning the marshes and beach for waders. ‘I’m glad you’re here, Peter — George. I’m afraid this isn’t going to make things any easier.’ He smiled, but they didn’t smile back.

‘This is the spot where our friend in the security van, God rest his soul, was parked on Monday night.’

Hadden knelt and threw a switch on a light gun held in a tripod before killing the overhead halogen bulb. The light was infra?red, and the effect made Valentine’s eyes swim out of focus. Shaw saw a liquid stain on the ground, glowing faintly like his daughter’s Halloween mask.

‘Luminol?’ asked Shaw.

‘Yup. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you what that means. Blood — might not be human of course — but blood. And lots of it; it’s soaked in — so several pints. Just the right amount.’

Shaw hugged himself in the cold, relieved at last to find an answer to part of the puzzle. This must be where Harvey Ellis had begun to bleed to death, before his body underneath the security van?’ he asked.

‘Lucky find, actually,’ admitted Hadden. ‘One of the uniformed PCs was told to do a quick fingertip along the line once we’d cleared the bank.’ Hadden held his fingers up. ‘Red smudges.’ Hadden crouched, getting his face as close to the earth as possible. ‘And there’s something else.’

Shaw mimicked his position, looking across the brightly lit patch where the blood had soaked in. ‘Footprint?’

‘Yup. Deep — given it’s frozen earth. Three centimetres. Just one — we can’t find anything like it anywhere else on the bank.’

‘One footprint — in the blood?’ asked Valentine.

‘Yes. A boot, actually. Steel toecap. We’ve got a cast — here…’ He rummaged in the holdall and produced a lump of plaster with the imprint of the boot. ‘This helps,’ said Hadden, tapping the heel, which held the imprint of a fern, like a stencil.

‘Odd,’ said Shaw.

‘Yes. Reckon it’s a burn mark. Perhaps he stepped into the edge of a bonfire when the fern was burning and it’s left its outline. Anyway, distinctive, that’s the main thing. Good as a fingerprint.’

He slid the cast carefully back in the bag. ‘It’s not the victim’s boot, by the way — that’s a visual assessment but it isn’t going to change in the lab.’

‘Why just one footprint?’ asked Shaw.

‘Well — blood’s warm, hot when fresh. So three pints of it — perhaps more — would melt the frost out of the earth. So the foot sank in here — but not anywhere else,

‘Which means the footprint was in the blood, not the other way round?’

‘Could be,’ said Hadden, closing his eyes. ‘Yeah — it’s a sound scenario. I’d work with it.’

‘So…’

‘So… we’ve got all the shoes from Monday night. We’ll see if we can track down a match. But if you’re looking for the place where Harvey Ellis began to bleed to death then this is it. There are no scatter marks in the cab — no blood particles at all as far as we can tell. Blow like that, blood would shoot… see?’ He crouched again. The glowing puddle of blood was shapeless except for a single plume, like a wisp of pampas grass, which shot forward in an elegant curve.

‘The fact the blood splatter is a parabola helps. I’d say he was stabbed in the eye, then toppled sideways, that’s why you get the pattern.’

Valentine nodded, seeing it happen, feeling the familiar nausea in his stomach.

‘Another puzzle,’ said Hadden. ‘There’s no blood trails or drag?marks. I’d say he was lifted or rolled into something here — tarpaulin, plastic sheeting, God knows, and then taken to the pick?up. Like I said, the earth was frozen, so maybe that’s why there’s so little evidence on the ground. That’s all a working hypo — so don’t quote me.’

‘Could the blood have dripped through from the van above?’ asked Valentine.

Hadden shook his head but said: ‘I’ll check it out for the record, but no way — it’s a sold?on Securicor van, it’s

Shaw held the conundrum, unsolved, in his head. ‘So the victim was found in the driving seat of his truck — thirty feet away from the spot where he virtually bled to death. Nearly three hours before he was found dead he’d driven his own van over the same spot. That’s not possible.’

‘I just do the science, Peter,’ said Hadden, flicking off the light. ‘I need to finish up.’ They took the hint, backing out into the snow.

‘One step forward, two steps back,’ said Shaw. ‘What’s the step forward?’ asked Valentine.

‘We know how the dog got Ellis’s blood on its snout.’

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 facade 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.’

Fiona Campbell had undergone an emergency blood transfusion at the hospital and an operation to reconnect severed arteries in her neck. Bedrich Fibich had been taken to the same hospital. He was alive when they put him in the ambulance outside the old Co?op, but dead when they took him out on the forecourt by A amp;E. Shaw sat in the Mazda outside the Co?op with Valentine, who smoked beside the open driver’s window. Lights poured through the murky windows of the old shop facade. Three uniformed PCs ferried personal effects out to a black van: clothes, letters, a fishing rod.

Shaw shared the silence with Valentine, aware of a subtle tilt in their relationship. He’d taken the decision to go into that room and confront Bedrich. Valentine could have hung back, let him run the risks alone, but he’d chosen instead to share the danger, and the sight of the spreading blood.

Valentine was concentrating on not being sick. He’d gone into the room because he felt he should. Whatever he thought of Shaw he was his partner, and as such he deserved the back?up. When he’d seen Fibich’s blood spreading towards the edge of the table he’d changed his mind, but by then his legs had gone, so he leant against the wall. He’d fainted standing up for a second, an image of Jack Shaw on his deathbed flashing across his memory,

‘Let’s take Lufkin at dawn — tomorrow,’ said Shaw, checking his watch. ‘And let’s go mob?handed too — with forensics. Tonight we need surveillance on him in case he does a runner.’

‘I’ll sort it,’ said Valentine.

‘We need to tie up loose ends tonight. Narr’s the key: Fibich virtually admitted he’d sent them out to get Jillie back. Narr is Lufkin’s boss too — they’re close, we know that. But before we go for Narr we need more evidence. Fibich is dead. Lufkin’s a pro — he won’t talk, not straight off, anyway. Out on the sands that leaves Sly — the gang?master. We know there’s no love lost with Lufkin. We think he’s honest. Let’s see if he’s got a tale to tell.’

Valentine turned the key, thinking that if Shaw wanted a chauffeur he should bloody well hire one.

Sly’s houseboat was moored behind Boal Quay. There was an abandoned creek, an old bend in the river by?passed by the main channel which spewed into the estuary. A crescent of houseboats stood moored to a raised jetty. Each had a small hut on dry land, a gangway across the mud, access to a power point and a standpipe. It was home to a menagerie of misfits, some of the boats fashioned into fantastic shapes: one, the superstructure an old single?decker bus laid on a steel hull, another incorporating a Reliant Robin. In between the New Age fantasies there were boats from a more stately era — an old Cambridge college boat, with a veranda like a Victorian railway?station platform; an old steam tug off the set of The African Queen; a wooden 1930s minesweeper in Atlantic grey.

The heavy scent of rotting wood and putrid mud was cloying. Sly’s home was a wooden barnacle on a steel hull, portholes lit, a washing line on the forward deck hung with a single pair of overalls. Moored alongside was a metal?hulled inshore fishing boat with an open deck, a mast bristling with sonar, GPS, radomes, a fish?finder aerial and floodlights. Shaw recognized it as the one they’d seen anchored off Styleman’s Middle on the morning they’d found James Baker?Sibley’s body.

They were only halfway across the gangplank when Sly appeared. A deck light flooded them in white, catching falling snowflakes. Shaw was struck again by Sly’s size — the barrel?chest, the ham fists. On board his floating home he’d lost the awkwardness that had been apparent out on Styleman’s Middle. He raised a hand to his side, without looking, and clicked the light off at a switch, then ran the hand down to find a latch so that he could swing the double doors into the cabin wide open. He pulled a blue seaman’s cap off his cannonball head.

Inside they could see the winter?red glow of a potbellied stove.

‘She’s new,’ said Shaw, ducking inside, wrapping himself in the sudden woody heat. ‘The fishing boat alongside.’

‘Refurb,’ said Sly, shutting the doors. ‘I’ve done a lot of the work. The engine’s giving me gyp. Which isn’t funny, ’cos it’s my livelihood now.’

Shaw let him tell them what he wanted to tell them.

Sly took a handful of wooden staves from a basket by the door and fed them into the pot?bellied stove.

The room was simple, furnished with just a few chairs and a single oval table in scratched mahogany. A bookcase filled the prow end. The portholes were brass, a skylight above was crated with snow. As Sly tried to find glasses Shaw looked at some of the framed prints: a map of the Falkland Islands, a picture of a tanker in the Suez Canal, one of Sly — a young man of twenty perhaps — arms round two other sailors outside a bar somewhere hot, in shorts, tattoos on their arms. He was the biggest of the three; the torso muscled like meat, the neck as wide as the thighs.

And an old leather football in a glass case, a hand?painted legend in white: ‘RFA Winners: 1971/2’.

Sly gave them glasses with a shot of vodka in each. ‘We heard you had a fight with Lufkin last Christmas. What was that about?’ asked Shaw.

‘Drink,’ said Sly, tipping back the glass. ‘Too much of it. He’s only little, it goes to his head.’ Shaw guessed Sly was a man who’d relied all his life on his power to physically intimidate. Now, with the advance of age, he’d been unable to adapt. He moved with a slightly arthritic limp.

‘We’ve been asking around, Mr Sly,’ said Shaw, studying a chart laid on the table — the Wash sands out to the navigation light on Roaring Middle. ‘And there seems to

Sly ran the back of his hand across his lips. ‘Maybe.’ They heard a burst of sparks fizzing out in the darkness and through the porthole saw flames lick up from a fire. Out on the mud there was an island of grass and a bonfire burnt; in the shadows men moved.

‘That’s the social club,’ explained Sly.

Valentine hadn’t taken his eyes off Sly. ‘And Lufkin’s got the boss on his side right? That’s Colin Narr?’

‘And Colin Narr’s been there for years,’ said Shaw. ‘So how come your face doesn’t fit now all of a sudden?’

Sly shrugged. ‘Too old to cut it. It’s a young man’s game.’

Shaw’s temper had run its course. When he spoke, his voice had an edge like a rusty saw. ‘Mr Sly, I’ve just left Mr Fibich — you know Bedrich?’

Sly didn’t move a muscle, his glass cradled in his hand.

‘We went to pull him in at the hostel down in the North End. He decided he didn’t want to come, so he stabbed a police officer, then dragged a meat knife across his wrists. He’s dead. Someone will have to tell his wife, his kids. It’ll be someone like me. We wanted to talk to him about the man you found out on Styleman’s Middle. A man by the name of James Baker?Sibley.’

They heard wood crackling out in the dark, a surge of intoxicated laughter.

‘And we want to ask you the same questions,’ finished Shaw, setting the drink on a ledge below a porthole.

‘Mr Sly, you seem to be labouring under a misconception,’ said Shaw. ‘It’s immaterial to me on whose watch these crimes took place. You were out there. You’re out there every day. You’re in charge. I want some answers. Did you have anything to do with Mr Baker?Sibley’s death?’

Sly took a decision, tipping what was left of the alcohol down his throat. ‘No. I liked James, we’d known each other for many years. He was my boss.’

‘In what sense?’ asked Shaw, the edge still in his voice.

‘In the sense that he owned Shark Tooth.’

‘What?’ said Valentine, flicking his notebook open and closed in irritation.

‘Why doesn’t everyone know that?’ asked Shaw. ‘Silent partner,’ said Sly. ‘That’s the way he wanted it. Same as his dad. I did the job for him too before he died. The money’s offshore. Commander Baker?Sibley set it up in the nineties. I was in the Falklands with him. Narr ran the business — but I reported over his head, straight to the family.’

Valentine sniffed. ‘What about the other shareholders?’

‘They’re in for the local knowledge, expertise, influence. They hold the licences. But James bankrolled it. I was his eyes and ears. And I didn’t like what I saw, and I didn’t like what I heard.’

‘Right. You knew — of course you knew. That Lufkin and Narr were smuggling, maybe dumping the toxic

‘Sure. He had interests all over — Greece, south of France, Hungary… the last thing he wanted was the police crawling over some two?bit scam. So yeah — he wanted it stopped. But in life there’s what you want, and there’s what you get.’

‘Why didn’t he just chuck Narr out — Lufkin too?’

‘Like I say — Narr’s important, he knows the business, the licences are in his name. Chuck him out, you ain’t got a business.’

‘So why didn’t you tell us it was James’s body when you found it on Styleman’s Middle?’

‘I saw a lot of dead men in the Falklands,’ said Sly. ‘They all look the same. Like meat.’ He bowed his head, knowing that wasn’t good enough. ‘I needed time to think. Time to work it out.’

‘And you worked it out. Then you did nothing.’

‘That’s your job. I’m out of it.’

‘We need some help,’ said Shaw. ‘I don’t think Colin Narr was on the yacht when James died. But I think he sent Lufkin out there. I need to make that link.’

‘I don’t want to be part of this,’ said Sly. ‘Can you promise me that?’

‘I can promise you only one thing, Mr Sly. That if you don’t tell us what you know I’ll make sure you’re charged with perverting the course of justice. This investigation was severely hampered by our failure to ID the body on Styleman’s Middle. That’s down to you.’

Sly slugged the vodka back and refilled his glass. ‘Take the ferry across at West Lynn. Take it tonight. Half?way across there’s a small trawler in mid?stream, the Skolt.

They stood on the steps of St James’s — Shaw and Valentine — feeling the frost on the air. A bus went past, empty, the condensation on the windows cleared in circles by passengers already safely at home. It had been a good day: they knew why the convoy had been diverted down Siberia Belt. They knew how James Baker?Sibley’s plan had been foiled, and they knew why he’d died. HM Coastguard had located the Skolt and towed it back to Boal Quay, where it was being examined by one of Tom Hadden’s CSI units. But Hadden had brought them up to speed quickly on the most promising development — a gash on the port side where the trawler had been in collision with a smaller vessel. The paint was white. Yacht white.

A good day. And so Shaw couldn’t deny it to himself any more: as a partner George Valentine had proved to be worth his weight in filter tips. He’d already contributed more than his fair share to the investigation. He was a good copper, inspired even, when the moment was right. Shaw wasn’t the textbook pedant everyone liked to paint him as, but he knew his limitations, so having Valentine around made him feel a lot more confident about solving the final mystery: finding Harvey Ellis’s killer.

But the Tessier case stood between them. Shaw might admire Valentine’s unpredictable skills, he might feel sorry implicitly. Did he have a right to let a decade?old question mark hang over the DS’s career? No. But it did. And it hung over his father as well. The Tessier case was unfinished business: worse — business they kept pretending didn’t exist. The elephant in the locked room. He knew Valentine’s bitterness went back to those twelve lost years of his career. Shaw couldn’t give them back. But he could do something about the Tessier case.

Shaw stamped his feet on the icy steps. ‘I need the file on Jonathan Tessier,’ he said.

Valentine looked at his black slip?ons, his toes beginning to go numb in the cold.

‘Why?’

‘I just do, George. By the morning. And while we are on the topic, I think you might have talked to me about taking it out. It’s my father’s reputation too, not just yours.’

‘Jack’s dead.’ Valentine bit his lip, looked at his car keys in his hand, the gold on the green dice catching the electric light. He forced himself not to apologize for saying it. ‘I don’t get an explanation, then?’ he said. ‘I just hand over the file. My career, my life, but you take the decisions.’ He spat in the snow. ‘You’re an arrogant fucker, sir.’ Valentine had been wanting to say that since they’d been put together as partners. He wondered if Peter Shaw had even thought what it was like for him, taking orders from his former partner’s son; a snotty?nosed kid when he was first made up to DI.

neither of us is going to have anything more to do with the case. It goes to Warren: he decides. That’s the right thing to do. And that’s what’s gonna happen. You like it — great. You don’t. Well, then fuck you. George.’

Valentine shook his head. Did Shaw really think anyone at St James’s was going to reopen this case? They buried it once. They were the last people likely to dig it up. That’s how the top brass kept their uniforms and shiny buttons: by making sure someone else always carried the proverbial can.

‘I want the file back, George. This isn’t the end of it — but I need the file back.’

Valentine looked around.

‘By morning.’

‘Yeah, right,’ said Valentine, putting a cigarette on his bottom lip.

Shaw stepped inside his personal space, close enough to smell the nicotine engrained in the raincoat. ‘I want the case reopened,’ he said, his voice vibrating like a reed. ‘Just like you do. But we’re the last people who can do that. You and I have an interest in this case which makes anything we do suspect in front of a jury. It’s all going up the line. I want you to understand that. For us, the case is over.’

Valentine stuck his head forward, the weak chin grey with stubble. ‘This case will never be over,’ he said.