At Death's Window (21 page)

T
here would be a last thunderstorm to mark the death of the Indian summer. Then, perhaps, winter would be with them, without an intervening autumn. As Shaw walked along the beach from Old Hunstanton towards the café a single flash of lightning caught his eye to the west; a dull pulse of lambent electricity, and then the almost imperceptible rumble of thunder.

Walking: usually he ran, a small rucksack high on his shoulders. Tonight he carried a long wooden box, expertly made in Tom Hadden’s laboratory at the Ark by one of the junior assistants. It had two hemp rope handles, and was about the size of a street bollard, and something like the weight. Stopping, the sweat springing from his hairline, he switched hands and hoisted it once again across his back.

As he plodded along the sand Shaw reviewed the latest developments in the Mitchell’s Bank case. Tom Hadden had called from the Ark to tell him that the prints lifted from the water bottle found in the public bin at Burnham Marsh were a match for Michael Connor, a small-time Lynn thief. Connor’s wife, Grace, a nurse at the Queen Elizabeth, said he’d left home twenty-four hours earlier, in the family’s Mondeo, to visit family in Fermoy, County Cork. She didn’t know which ferry route he’d taken. The Border Agency, using CCTV footage, located the vehicle on the Cairnryan–Larne service. This one fact told Shaw all he needed to know; the choice of this circuitous route – via Scotland to Northern Ireland – suggested a man who didn’t want to be followed. The police in Belfast, and the Gardai south of the border, were on alert for the vehicle.

Arresting Connor could break the case wide open. A small-time thief, facing a conspiracy to murder charge, would have every incentive to tell CID exactly what had happened at Burnham Marsh the night Stefan Bedrich died. Connor might even be persuaded to divulge the identity of the fourth burglar. Meanwhile, they planned to re-interview Whyte following a brief appearance at Lynn Magistrates Court, where he was due to be remanded in custody in the morning. The one loose end was young Seb Todd. Geoff Wighton’s wife Louise was in a stable condition in hospital but they had been unable to get the ex-copper to a phone to check the teenager’s account. There was little, if any, evidence that the youngster was involved in Bedrich’s death; but it was a tiresome loose end nonetheless.

Shaw lifted his eyes to the distant café, resting the box for the last time, preparing to enter his other world. Lena was pacing on the sand, not her usual zigzag amble with a cup of coffee, but a measured, measuring step. Engrossed, jotting entries in a fabric-covered notebook, she didn’t look up until Shaw was a few feet away.

He let the box down gently. ‘Present,’ he announced. ‘You’ll never guess.’

Fran ran out from the café with the dog at her heels.

Lena looked mildly annoyed, as if interrupted in a vital task. This was always a difficult moment: the homecoming. She often felt that Shaw simply crashed back into their lives, disrupting plans, demanding attention. There were moments when she wondered how he would react if she turned up with Fran in the CID room.

Shaw sensed the tension. ‘What’s with the notebook?’ he asked, leaving Fran and the dog to examine the mysterious box.

Lena pushed her hair away from her wide forehead and made herself smile. ‘What’s in the box?’

‘Why don’t we look inside?’ asked Shaw, and then sent Fran to get a toolbox from the shop.

‘I was pacing out the area where we could put tables,’ said Lena, when they were alone. ‘A decent picnic table’s a hundred and twenty pounds. We could start with twenty – two lines of ten – a rope swung between metal poles, just to make the point, that if you want to sit down it would be nice to buy a drink. No heaters. But maybe blankets? Something colourful, picnic patterns, just left on the seats.’

Shaw whistled. ‘How many of those will be left after a Bank Holiday Monday?’

Lena looked quickly out to sea, and Shaw guessed she’d broken eye contact to hide a flash of irritation.

‘None. Because I won’t put them out on a bank holiday. End of season, early season, just to give people the idea that maybe they could sit outside. It works, Peter. I’ve checked it out, collected the data.’

‘How many people per table?’

‘Four, six. We don’t have to go for picnic tables. You don’t see many of the over-sixties using them, do you? Have to swing your leg round, inveigle yourself into the seat. It’s tricky. Maybe round tables – metal – with metal seats. Then you could take eight.’

‘A hundred and sixty people.’

‘Yes. On ten days in a year? Less? Most nights it’ll still be just you and me.’ She spread her arms wide. The beach was deserted. ‘Best Indian summer for years. Perfect sunset at the only east coast resort with a west-facing beach, and I can see three people, Peter – excluding us. Man with a dog a mile away towards Holme, and a couple to the south, and they’re walking
away
from us. I’ll have to pay your lot for crowd control officers at this rate.’

Shaw forced himself to say what he felt: ‘When I’m here I like that it’s a lonely place. I think people come here
because
it’s a lonely place. I can see the irony – that if they all come, they’ll destroy what brought them here in the first place. It’s just how I remember it. Just me, Dad, Mum, the sea. Sorry. It’s important.’

Fran dragged the toolbox the last ten feet, leaving a trail in the sand.

Shaw prised the lid off the box with three sharp blows of hammer to chisel and then he and Fran took out the handfuls of shredded paper. He slipped his hands under something long and heavy and raised it up over his head, so that they could both see it clearly against the evening sky.

‘What’s
that
?’ asked Fran.

Lena had her hands on her hips, squinting, trying hard not to commit to joy or puzzlement.

‘It’s a thunderbolt,’ said Shaw, with the full surfer’s smile. ‘Well – that’s how I like to see it. It’s fulgurite – a natural mineral. When a lightning bolt hits sand it turns the loose grains into this solid stone. But you know – what does it look like? It looks like Thor’s thunderbolt, and in a way it is.’

About five foot long, it had a blunt end – marking the surface impact of the lightning – and then tapered to a point, but not smoothly, but with lots of smaller points, as if it were an icicle of heat. The surface was a strange desert-brown, slightly bubbled, with lots of small spikes.

Fran said it looked like it was made of sand.

‘It is – sort of,’ said Shaw.

‘No, Dad, sand full of water, like that trick you can do when you pick up a handful from a rock pool and then let it drip down on to hard sand and it forms a fairytale castle.’

They spent an hour trying to decide where they could put it in the café, and eventually decided on getting a glass cabinet built so that it could be mounted above the bar. Shaw fired up the barbecue with driftwood Fran had collected and they grilled sausages, the fat spitting. Lena, slightly bored with the summer barbecue routine, fetched some calamari from the fridge. Out at sea clouds were building, so that the sunset was brief.

Shaw’s phone rang with a rare, sudden, five-bar signal.

‘George.’

‘Hi. Wighton’s still in the hospital with his missus. She’s coming home overnight so he couldn’t talk. Just a text – said he’d be at a house in Anmer first thing if we wanted a word. The Vineyard. By the bowling green. Seven o’clock.’

‘Great. I’ll do it. Anything else?’

‘Maybe. The motorcyclist’s still in intensive care. It ain’t looking good. But Tom says there’s a print on the plastic wallet containing the five thousand quid they found on him.’

‘We couldn’t be that lucky. Not Stepney’s?’

‘We could. He’s lifting them now, then he can check with the database. But think about it, Peter. Without the intervention of a heart attack we’d have got nowhere near this joker. He’s a professional. The bike was stolen in Greenwich three days ago. Plates changed. The scene of crime in the fish shop at Burnham is spotless. Job done, he goes and gets his money off Stepney. Why should Stepney worry about his prints on the dosh?’

‘I’ll be at St James’ by nine,’ said Shaw.

He cut the line and went back to the barbecue.

It was dark by ten, and Fran had homework, so that left them alone on the beach, lying on the sand, leaning on a rolled-up windbreak. Heat radiated still from the sand, and he threw a few bits of coal on the driftwood fire.

‘You like shopping,’ said Shaw. ‘Ever been in Murano’s? It’s some kind of posh glassware place in Burnham Market.’

Lena pulled a face. She hated shopping, as Shaw knew, and most of all she loathed Burnham Market, with its relentlessly upmarket exclusivity and the way it seemed to reflect the monoculture of the white monied classes. She’d have swapped it anytime for half an hour browsing along Ridley Road Market in Hackney.

‘I’ve looked in the window. Glass. Bowls, jewellery, ornaments.’ This last word was one of their shared hatreds. The café, and the shop, but most of all the cottage itself, were free of anything which might count as a knick-knack.

‘Very cold, isn’t it, glass? Give me wood any day. At least it weathers, changes with time. Glass is repellent, really, the way the surface of it never changes, and then one day –
smash
! If it doesn’t bend it’ll break. I like to see time pass.’

Shaw sipped his wine and watched the tide beginning to edge up the deserted beach.

V
alentine, studying the map of Brancaster Marsh, experienced a wave of nausea. His near sight was fading, which was straining his eyes, but it was more the texture of the convoluted channels, creeks and ditches which crowded the chart that induced a sense of disorientation. He held it at arm’s length as if that might help. The intricate maze-like pattern reminded him of a cross-section of a human brain, one of Justina Kazimeirz’s forensic samples, perhaps, laid casually in its aluminum tray, a micron thick, cut by one of the pathologist’s gleaming circular saws.

Valentine was the only human being in sight and he didn’t like it one bit. The town was his landscape, the crowded pavements, the crawling cars, the short-cut alleyways. Here, with a view of the sea barred by the coastal dunes, the only thing that moved was the sky. It was full of birds, some flying north, others flying south, the meeting of these two vast migrations a great swirl over his head, as if some god had stirred the sky. The noise of the birds was overwhelming. They were barking; Valentine knew that wasn’t the right word, but that’s what it sounded like to him. Barking.

The DS’s Mazda blocked a narrow track leading away from a house, the lone sign of human habitation on the marsh: four-square, naval architecture, with stout brick chimney stacks and a golden weathervane in the shape of a ship under sail. All the windows were open and since he’d turned the Mazda’s engine off – and the migrating birds had moved on – he could hear a series of domestic sounds from within: a hoover, a spin-dryer in its final cycle, drainpipes in flood. From the two upper windows duvets hung out in the warm air. A brewing thunderstorm expected overnight still threatened, although there had been a light rain at dawn, and so the tarmac steamed gently in the sun.

He tried to look and act like himself, but was aware that a stray hand kept rearranging his thinning hair, and that he strained to stand up straight, trying to minimize the effect of the stoop that allowed his head to hang forward on his neck. Aftershave, applied by the handful, was making his eyes water. A teenager once again, he thought, in the loos at the Roxy, preparing to launch himself on to the dance floor.

After ten minutes his resolve fled and he lit a cigarette.

He’d no sooner smelt the gust of sulphur on the air from the match when the front door opened and Jan Clay skipped down the path: not quite a girlish playground step, but certainly joyful, excited. The sight of her made his spirits soar.

‘Found the house then?’ They both considered the building, and Valentine noticed the name for the first time, etched in brick over the door: MARSH VILLA.

‘Can I have one?’ she said, nodding at the cigarette he’d tried to cup in the back of his hand.

‘You don’t smoke,’ said Valentine.

‘You’d be surprised what you don’t know about me, Georgie. It’s not a habit. But I enjoy one.’

She let the sun’s heat play on her skin as she took in the nicotine. ‘You didn’t phone.’

‘Oh. Sorry.’ Now he was confused. They’d had an Italian meal. She said she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life with a copper who had a drink problem. Had he missed something?

‘I’d like to go out again if you want. I enjoy …’ She opened her eyes and looked at him. ‘This.’ She shrugged and they both laughed. ‘It’s just that you can’t judge a marriage from the outside, can you? I didn’t want you to think it had been idyllic. Peter didn’t drink because he had a problem. It
was
the problem. And he despised the job. Coppering. Which was cynical of him, and depressing. You love it, don’t you?’

Valentine looked away, out over the marsh, ashamed to think he’d never admitted that, even to himself.

She looked at his black slip-ons. ‘Didn’t I say boots in the text?’ she asked.

‘These will have to do.’ They were already caked in mud.

Setting off down a narrow path beside the muddy channel she led the way inland. Once they were off the flood bank they were too low to be able to see ahead; as if they’d fallen into a sunken maze. They passed a rotting set of landings with three moored boats, one a wreck, the other two bristling with sonar. Then over a narrow bridge made out of railway sleepers to another channel, with a line of small boats beached in mid-stream. The tide was out so the vessels here were just lying in the glistening black mud. Two minutes along the path and they crossed a stretch of marsh reeds to a third channel.

‘How the hell do you know the way?’ asked Valentine, failing to disguise the strain moderate exercise put on his lungs. His turn-ups were full of grass.

‘I’ve done for the woman who owns that house for five years. One morning a week. I’ve got another one over in the village and this saves me twenty minutes’ plodding on the road. Then I can pick up the bus. I never did drive. Peter did that. Which looking back on it was unforgivable of him, considering he was permanently half-cut – if not worse.’

There was one boat here in the third channel, clinker built, with brass portholes.

Jan stopped, hands in pockets. ‘Like I say, I like coppers, police stations. It’s weird, isn’t it? How you can be at home somewhere. When Peter died they said I could come past if I wanted, have a cuppa. So I take them some chips, just for a break when I’ve got a shift at the Mariners. I saw the poster up with that boat you’re after. I reckon this is her. Can’t be many with that name on this coast.’

Valentine had no idea if it was the right boat. He called up the poster image from his mobile phone.

‘Bloody hell, Jan.’

The cockpit was covered in a green tarpaulin which you could unbutton. Inside the wheel and controls gleamed.

‘She’s beautiful,’ said Jan, walking to the prow to read the name:
The Limpet.
‘Someone loves it. It’s been hosed down. Polished. It’s spotless.’

Valentine thought about that. A boat, lying in a muddy creek, crabs clawing at the timbers, but sparkling in the sunlight.

‘I better get our forensic boys out.’

‘What d’ya reckon, Georgie? How does the
Limpet
fit in?’

‘Maybe the killer used it to dump Bedrich’s corpse on Mitchell’s Bank. We don’t know where he died. Maybe he died on-board – in the cockpit, or below. Blood, mud, fingerprints. But she looks too clean to me.’ He bent down and looked through one of the cabin windows. It looked like a London club in there, with dark wood panels, books, an elegant cushioned bench, a polished stove. ‘Once he’d snared Bedrich’s body to the buoy perhaps he just kept going. Get rid of the evidence, take the boat somewhere lonely, and get it clean. Anyways, I owe you.’ He filled his lungs: ‘What you doing tonight?’

Jan smiled and walked away along the grassy towpath trailing a hand, as if she wanted to take Valentine for another walk. But she wanted him to look back at the boat. The
Limpet
lay at an angle, leaning into the bank. They could see the hull clearly, and the dark blue stripe that marked the Plimsoll line, below which the hull had been painted a brilliant white.

‘The hull’s spotless too. Not a mark,’ she said. ‘It’s been cleaned like you said, but not yesterday, or the day before. High tide was four hours ago. Sea water always leaves a film of salt, a little mud, some scurf. There’s nothing. Your man – if it is a man – has been here in the last three hours. Maybe less.’

Valentine was on the mobile. ‘You should be on the force,’ he said, swearing at the faltering signal.

‘I’m glad you said that, Georgie. I was going to break it gently when the time was right.’ She took a breath, before looking him directly in the eyes. ‘I’ve applied to join the police training scheme. Mature entrant. I tick boxes. There’s a medical, a few tests, but I’ve been led to believe – that’s the phrase they use –
led to believe
that my application will be successful. Are you going to be all right with that, DS Valentine?’