The Skeleton Man (37 page)

In the middle of a heavy snowstorm, eight cars stand on a lonely Norfolk coast road, as night draws in. A fallen pine tree stops them from going forward, the snowbound road prevents them going back.

Two hours later no car has moved – but one driver has met a violent end. Except no one has had the means or the opportunity to commit the murder, and there are no incriminating footprints in the snow.

For Detective Inspector Peter Shaw and Detective Sergeant Valentine it is an extremely puzzling case – made all the more disturbing by the distorted corpse that washed up on the beach only hours earlier. A man who appears to have died from a human bite mark on his arm…

Read on for a taster…

The Alfa Romeo ran a lipstick-red smear across a sepia landscape. To one side snow flecked the sand and dunes at the edge of the crimped waters of The Wash, a convoy of six small boats caught in a stunning smudge of purple and gold where the sun was setting. To the landward side lay the salt marsh, a weave of winter white around stretches of dead black water.

The sports car nudged the speed limit and Sarah Baker-Sibley watched the first flake of snow fall on the windscreen in the middle of her field of vision. She swept it aside with a single swish of the windscreen wipers and punched the automatic lighter into the dashboard, her lips counting to ten, the cigarette held ready between dry teeth.

Ten seconds. She thrummed her fingers on the leather-bound steering wheel.

It was two minutes short of five o’clock and the Alfa’s headlights were waking up the cat’s eyes. She pulled the lighter free of the dashboard. The ringlet of heated wire seemed to lift her mood and she laughed, drawing in the nicotine enthusiastically.

She turned up the heating to maximum as a spiro-graph of ice began to encroach on the windscreen.
The indicator showed the outside temperature at 0°C, then briefly -1°C. She dropped her speed to 50 mph, and checked the rear-view mirror for following traffic: she’d been overtaken once, the car was still ahead of her by half a mile, and there were lights behind, but closer, a hundred yards or less.

She drew savagely on the menthol cigarette, swishing more snowflakes off the windscreen. Attached to the passenger-side dashboard by a sucker was a little pink picture frame enclosing a snapshot of a girl with hair down to her waist, in a school uniform complete with beret. She touched the image, as if it was an icon, and smiled into the rear-view mirror; but when she saw the lipstick on the filter of the menthol cigarette, and the imprint of her thin dry lips, her eyes filled with tears.

Rounding a bend she saw rear lights ahead again for a few seconds. And a sign, luminous, regulation black on yellow, in the middle of the carriageway, an AA insignia in the top-left-hand corner.

An arrow pointed bluntly to the left – seawards down a narrow unmetalled road.

‘Sod it.’ She hit the steering wheel with the heel of her palm, then brushed a tear from her eye. Ahead, the road ran straight for a mile but there was no traffic either way.

She slowed and looked at her watch: 5.09pm.
Throwing her head back she let the smoke dribble out of her nose, as if the day had delivered its last fatal blow.

Looking in the rear-view again she saw that the following car was close, so she put the Alfa in first, and swung it off the coast road on to the snow-covered track. The headlights raked the trees as she turned and fleetingly lit a figure, stock-still, dressed in a full-length dark coat flecked with snow, the head turned away. Then the lights swung further round and she saw a road sign.

Ahead, immediately, were the tail lights of the car in front. There was a sudden silence as a snow flurry struck; muffling the world outside. For the first time she felt afraid, haunted by the sudden image of the lone figure, behind her now, somewhere in the dark. The wind returned, thudding against the offside, fist-blows deadened by a boxer’s glove. She searched the rear-view mirror but there were no lights behind, no trace of the figure following. The tail lights ahead were still visible; warm, glowing and safe. She pressed on quickly in pursuit.

Detective Inspector Peter Shaw stood on the waterline as the snow fell. He tried to smile into an Arctic north wind. The seascape was glacier-blue, the white horses whipped off the peaks of the waves before they could break. A sandbank offshore was dusted white with snow – icing sugar on marzipan. As quickly as the snow flurry had come, it was gone. But he knew a blizzard would be with them by nightfall, the snow clouds massed on the horizon like a range of mountains.

‘Dead water,’ he said, licking a snowflake off his lips. ‘So it should be here. Right here.’ He tapped his boot rhythmically on the spot, creating a miniature quicksand inside his footprint, and zipped up his yellow RNLI waterproof jacket. ‘We’ll have to wait.’ Waiting was something he found it impossible to do well. He wanted to run, along the water’s edge, feel his heart pounding, blood rushing, the intoxicating flood of natural painkillers soaking his brain. Standing still was a form of torture. He needed the
runner’s high
.

Detective Sergeant George Valentine stood six foot down wind, his face turned away from the sea. He stifled a yawn by clenching his teeth. His eyes
streamed water. An allergy – seaweed perhaps, salt on the air, or just fresh air. Valentine looked at his feet, black slip-ons, oozing salt water. He was too old for this: five years off retirement, rheumatism in every bone. He blew into his hands and smelt a hint of nicotine from his fingernails.

The setting sun broke free of the clouds for a moment at the death and in a splash of light out at sea Shaw counted six cockle-pickers’ boats, heading in for Lynn. He scanned the ruffled seascape with a telescope raised to his good eye. The iris was blue, as pale as falling water; the other was covered by a dressing, secured with a plaster across the socket, the inflamed red edges of a fresh scar just visible beneath. ‘A bright yellow drum, right? Mustard, like the other one.’ He put a finger to the wound, a plain wedding band catching the light. ‘And floating a foot clear of the water. So where is it?’

Shaw’s face mirrored the wide-open seascape; the kind of face that’s always scanning a horizon. His cheekbones were high, as if some enterprising warrior from the Mongol Horde had wandered off to the north Norfolk coast, pitching his tent by the beach huts. The skin on his forehead was tight, tanned and unlined. He stood with his feet squarely apart, matching the width of his shoulders, as if he owned the beach.

DS Valentine looked at his watch. He’d bought it at the Tuesday Market in Lynn for one pound and was pretty sure the word ROLEX was fake. Its tick-tock
was oddly loud, but the second hand had stopped. He shivered, his head like a vulture’s, hung low on a thin neck. He tried to keep his mouth shut because he knew his teeth would ache if they got caught in the wind. Shaw, who studied faces as closely as George Valentine studied the odds at Newmarket, thought his DS’s bore a remarkable resemblance to a whippet’s, the lines around his lips – the
striae
– turning his mouth into a small snout.

A radio crackled and Valentine retrieved it from the shapeless raincoat. He listened, said simply ‘Right.’ Fumbling it back inside the folds of the coat he retrieved a tube of mints, popping one, crunching it immediately. ‘Coastguard. They lost sight of the drum an hour ago. The water’s churning up with the tide.’ He shrugged as if he knew the moods of the ocean. ‘Not hopeful.’

‘We’ll wait,’ said Shaw, running a hand through close-cropped fair hair. ‘An hour. The tide’ll turn.’

They stood together, one looking south, the other north, wondering how it had come to this.

Shaw and Valentine, North Norfolk Constabulary’s latest investigative duo. Some joker in admin, thought Shaw, some old lag who knew the past and didn’t care about the future. They needed a new partner for Shaw, who at thirty-one years of age was the force’s youngest DI, the whiz-kid with the fancy degree and a father once tipped to be the next chief constable. And they’d come up with George Valentine – a living relic of a different world, where crooks were villains, and
coppers gave hooligans a clip round the ear. A man who’d been the best detective of his generation until one mistake had put him on a blacklist from which he’d never escaped. A man whose career trajectory now looked like a brick returning to earth.

Shaw walked down to the water’s edge and let the next wave leave white bubbles on the toecap of his boot. Valentine followed reluctantly, popping another mint, the fingers on his right hand phlegm-yellow from cigarette stains. Half a mile east Shaw could see a clump of trees marking the point where the creeping dunes had come to rest for a lifetime, a row of low hummocks thirty foot high. Gun Hill. Just below the crest were the cracked remains of a military emplacement, the metal fittings for an Ack-Ack gun in the concrete, snow in the rusted grooves. He’d stood there a decade ago with his mother, watching his father’s ashes blow away into the beach grass.

Detective Chief Inspector Jack Shaw. Shaw had been proud of his father, proud to follow in his footsteps, proud he’d defied him by joining the police: the one career Jack Shaw didn’t want for his only son. They’d loved the beach; father and child. It was the only place where his father could forget the job. The only place where they’d shared the same world.

‘Let’s get up there,’ said Shaw, pointing at the hill. ‘Get some height.’

Valentine nodded without enthusiasm. Water welled in his eyes and he sniffed. ‘I think I’m allergic…’ he
said, taking as big a breath as he could into his damaged lungs, ‘to something.’

‘It’s fresh air, George,’ said Shaw.

Valentine wondered if that was Peter Shaw’s idea of a joke. He dabbed his nose, the physical need for nicotine almost tangible. He’d had a sense of humour once, but he was tired of being laughed at, even if most people didn’t do it to his face.

Out at sea the sandbanks had all gone but Shaw could just see the cockle-pickers’ boats in the purple gloom of the sunset, rising and falling on the swell. Valentine looked inland, along the curve of the high water mark. ‘There,’ he said, taking a bare hand reluctantly from his coat pocket.

A yellow metal oil drum, on its side now, rolling in with the waves.

‘Let’s go,’ said Shaw, already jogging; a compact, nearly effortless canter. He got there a minute before Valentine, the older man’s arthritic amble making his sallow skin redden alarmingly.

The lid of the drum was rusted and crinkled so that the contents had begun to seep out. From six foot you could smell it, the edge of ammonia almost corrosive. The liquid spilling down the side was Day-Glo green, the paint of the drum blistering on contact.

‘Get the coastguard. The boat could be out there – and they’ll have dumped others,’ ordered Shaw.

Six weeks earlier three drums had come ashore on Vinegar Middle, a sandbank just off the coast near Castle Rising. Shaw had been on the early shift at
St James’s Police HQ in Lynn – his daughter Francesca played on the beach sometimes, so he’d taken a parental interest. Plus he’d been out on the lifeboat that week, searching the creeks for the toxic drums, so he knew what he was after. When he got down on the beach there was a five-year-old poking a stick into the top of the drum where it had ruptured.

Shaw had told her to drop the stick but he couldn’t keep the urgency out of his voice, the note of command. Reading a child’s face wasn’t a textbook exercise. He’d spotted the sudden fear, but missed the anger. The kid didn’t like being told what to do, so she’d waved the stick in Shaw’s face as he’d grabbed her, pulling her clear of the liquid pooling at her feet. She hadn’t meant to do it, but the single thrust as Shaw bent down had caught him in the eye.

He touched the dressing, moving it slightly to relieve the pressure. The chemical had proved a mystery: an unstable mix of residual sulphuric and nitric acid, the by-products of some poorly monitored manufacturing process. A ‘class eight’ substance: highly corrosive, with a ferocious ability to attack epithelial tissue. Skin.

Shaw had checked out the costs of legal disposal through a landfill site: nearly £200 a barrel, plus a carriage charge of half as much again. Far better to get a trawler skipper to dump the drums at dusk. Most had probably sunk, but some had air trapped beneath the lid, making them float in and out of the coastal creeks with the tides.

‘And call St James’s,’ said Shaw, wondering if George Valentine ever did anything without being prompted. ‘They need to get a chemical team out to make this safe and get it off the beach. We better stay till they get here. Give them the grid reference.’ Shaw read out the numbers from his handheld GPS.

As Valentine worked on the radio Shaw squatted down, picking up ten butter-yellow limpet shells and placing them in a line on the sand. ‘We could do with a fire,’ he said, out loud. The breeze was dropping; a frost in the air now that night was falling.

He imagined the brief dusk, the fire on the high water mark, and felt good. Pocketing the shells he began collecting flotsam, a beer crate, a few lumps of bog oak, the dried-out husk of a copy of the
Telegraph
, then turned with his arms full.

Which is when he saw something else in the waves. The beach shelved gently out to sea on Ingol Beach, so even though it was a hundred yards away it was already catching the bottom, buckling slightly, flexing in the white water. An inflatable raft, a child’s summer plaything in Disney colours. Shaw stood for a few seconds watching it inch ashore. Thirty yards out it ran aground, snagged.

Valentine watched his DI pulling off his boots and socks. ‘Jesus,’ he thought, looking around, hoping they were still alone, hoping most of all that he’d stop at the socks. When he’d come back to St James’s he’d asked around, knowing Peter Shaw was back on the force. At the wedding he’d been Jack Shaw’s
best man. So he’d seen his only son grow up, in fact he was pretty sure he’d changed his nappy. The last time he’d seen him had been at Jack Shaw’s funeral, a twenty-one-year-old fresh out of police college. So he’d tried to get an update, the word amongst the ranks. And he’d discovered three things he thought he wouldn’t like: the crisp white ironed shirt (always tie-less), the smart-arsed degree, and a reputation for checking everything: twice.