Death Toll

by Jim Kelly

  He’d been brushing in the tonal shadows, adding art to the science, when Lena had wandered down the connecting corridor and stood at the door in a short silk nightdress the colour of antique silver. They’d kissed and stood back from the easel, Shaw holding her waist close, so that he could feel their hips touching.

  ‘A brother,’ she’d said, and they’d laughed. Lena’s own skin was darker than the tone he’d chosen for the victim: Jamaican brown, though not so lustrous as it would be in the summer months, when it picked up a distinct bronze tint.

  ‘The pills – in the bathroom?’ he’d asked, looking her in the eyes, one of which had a slight cast.

  ‘Oh, yeah – for Fran. We’ve got to try each one – see what she’s allergic to. One a week.’

  Their daughter had been allergic to milk at birth – but the reactions, once violent, had dimmed over time. Then, suddenly, the previous September, she’d had a full-blown anaphylactic reaction to a pot of yoghurt.

  ‘It’s the milk – right?’ asked Shaw, aware that there was too much aggression in his voice, which betrayed the guilt he felt for being absent that day, out on a case. No – that was self-delusion, out on the case, his father’s last, unsolved, murder inquiry, the case that seemed to run through his life like letters through seaside rock.

  ‘No, Peter, it isn’t the milk,’ said Lena, failing to hide her anxiety. ‘She still has a slight sensitivity to it but now there’s something else, probably something benign, and when you put the two together you get the reaction we got. So it’s milk plus X. We just don’t know what X is. It could be anything in the yoghurt I gave her. Flavourings, colourings – the usual stuff. So we’re trying them out. Till we find out, she has to keep off real milk. It’s back to soya and rice substitutes.’

  Her shoulders had sagged and Shaw had guessed she was thinking about the first few months of Fran’s life – the endless vigilance required to make sure a small child didn’t ingest anything containing milk.

  He hugged her too hard. ‘OK.’

  ‘Handsome,’ she’d said then, nodding back at the picture. ‘Innocent.’

  ‘Interesting word,’ said Shaw, adding shadow beneath the broad chin. ‘Why innocent?’

  ‘It’s a presumption – the dead are innocent, aren’t they?’

  They’d chatted for a while over fresh coffees before going to bed. An hour together before the day began. When Shaw had walked back into the café to retrieve the sketches at dawn he’d stopped six feet from them, aware that he’d recreated someone who had once been alive. The face of this man who had died so violently looked at him over the twenty-eight years separating that last terrifying moment from this one.

  ‘All you need is a name,’ said Shaw out loud. Then he’d held out his hands, as if pleading before a jury, laughing at himself. ‘And justice.’

  And now, sitting in Max Warren’s office, he looked again at the sketch. The adrenaline of the murder inquiry had dispelled all tiredness, despite the lack of sleep, but he did feel that nauseous buzz, his blood rushing with the effects of several doses of strong coffee.

  He handed the frontal view to Valentine, who took it, then held it out at arm’s length.

  ‘Get it out for me, George. Usual suspects – TV, radio, Lynn News. We’ll give it twenty-four hours and if nothing bites, let’s go for posters – five hundred will do.’

  Valentine pushed his bottom lip forward. ‘Reckon the Old Man will pay up? Posters cost a fortune.’

  In the outer office Max Warren was finishing his dictation.

  ‘He won’t know until it’s too late,’ said Shaw, flicking over the sketch pad to work on the side view.

  Valentine rubbed his eyes, feeling a gritty resistance. He hadn’t slept after leaving St James’s either. It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted to – he’d walked into South Lynn by the towpath until he’d reached the ruins of Whitefriars Abbey, then turned into the network of streets in which he’d been born, married and widowed, and where he still lived. The cemetery in which they’d found their victims that night was less than half a mile away. He’d considered returning there, but thought better of it. Instead, he’d walked to the church of All Saints and stood before his wife’s headstone:

  JULIE ANNE VALENTINE

  1955–1993

  Asleep

  The stone was mottled with moss and the inscription partly obscured by the charity lapel stickers he’d stuck on it. He added wood green animal shelter, thinking how, like him, she’d hated dogs. It always annoyed him, that cloying euphemism – Asleep. He wondered who’d chosen it, because it hadn’t been him. But then he’d walked through her death, and the funeral, as if it had all been happening to someone else.

  On the corner of Greenland Street he’d stopped outside an old shop. His house was in sight, but he often lost the will to go home at this precise point. The old shop’s double doors were glass and curved gracefully. Within was a second door, with a fanlight, from which shone a green light. And a sign hung from a hook up against the glass. Chinese characters, but ones that Valentine could pronounce.

  Yat ye hoi p’i

  The game is on, the game is open

  He’d looked up and down the street, then knocked twice and waited; then twice again. A man had quickly opened the door, and Valentine had slipped in like a cat. Inside, enveloped in the scented warmth, the man they called the sentinel had taken his raincoat. Valentine had held on to his wallet, keys and mobile. The den was on three floors, but he always went down to the basement for fan-tan. He’d taken a glass of tea from the pot set on a table in the hall – there was no alcohol at the house on Greenland Street – and that suited him well, because he’d always liked to enjoy his vices serially.

  In the basement room were a dozen men sitting on high stools around the gambling table. There was a room to one side for smoking, but Valentine never went over the threshold.

  On the table he’d bought £60 worth of chips and put £5 on the number 2. The dealer had swirled a pile of golden coins and covered them with an ornamental lid. Then the sharing out began – in little collections of three – until only three or fewer were left. On the table sat two coins. Valentine had picked up his winnings and bet again – this time on 1. An hour later he’d won £30. He’d taken a break, going upstairs to drink more tea, then returning to stand on the edge of the circle of light which blazed down on the fan-tan table. His bladder had been aching so he’d slipped out of the basement door into the yard. There had been ice in the toilet pan, and as he’d stood there he’d felt that his life was raw, and that he’d never wanted it to be like that – he’d sought warmth, but it had been denied him.

  He’d cashed his winnings and walked out into the street, the snow falling steadily now, muffling the noises of the town at night. Sleep had become a distant dream. He’d walked briskly past his house. In the next street there had been a single light in the bedroom of number 89 – his sister Jean’s. He didn’t see her much. He told himself he didn’t like her husband, but the real reason was that she was an echo of his past, because she’d been a good friend to Julie, and so a reminder of what might have been. But he found the light comforting because he liked to know she was still here, in the streets where they’d all grown up.

  He’d walked on down to the quayside. Greyfriars Tower provided the only light in the sky, a lighthouse in a gentle snowstorm. He’d checked his watch: 2.30 a.m. The St James’s canteen opened at 5.30 a.m. and the thought of a cooked breakfast made him feel better about the day to come. He’d zigzagged towards the tower through the Old Town, past the Jewish Cemetery where the fine blown snow lay in the chiselled Hebrew inscriptions. When he’d reached St James’s he’d taken the curved steps two at a time and breezed past the front desk, where the duty sergeant had nodded once before returning his attention to the previous day’s Daily Mail.

  He’d gone back to his desk in the open-plan CID room and swung open the window to smoke. Then he’d flicked through a shelf of reference books until he’d
found what he was looking for …Old Lynn – A Social History.

  The Flask appeared once in the index.

  Of South Lynn’s whaling past, little is left except in the street names. The dockside for the whaling fleet was on Blubber Creek, now just a grassy, reedy, inlet off the Nar, opposite the end of Explorer Street. The only physical reminder of this once lucrative trade is the Flask – the pub named for one of the fleet’s most famous ships. The building is much altered but the main structure is still the timber-framed inn set up on the edge of the flensing grounds in 1776, possibly on an older site. It very soon fell into the hands of the Melville family – wealthy merchants who had moved south from Boston, Lincolnshire. Originally called the Jetty, the pub was renamed to mark the £6,000 profit made by the Flask when she returned to port at the end of the whaling season in 1848. Court records show that an action was brought against the Melville family because of the stench of blubber boiling in the vats on open ground for more than six weeks as the eleven ‘fish’ aboard were rendered. In 1885 the building was renovated after one wall collapsed in a storm. In the 1950s the pub became famous as one of the last outposts of the sea shanty. Local choirs were recorded – preserving for posterity Lynn’s unique tradition of whaling songs. Ralph Vaughan Williams came to the pub on several occasions in the summer of 1947. Several of the songs Vaughan Williams recorded in his notebook were to reappear in his later works: particularly A Sea Symphony and Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1. In 1976 the neighbouring houses were demolished, leaving the building to stand alone with the help of steel buttresses. In the 1980s the Arts Council funded further recordings of the Whitefriars Choir. A documentary film was produced in 1993 and shown on Anglia TV – called The Song of the Sea.

  Valentine had checked the date of publication: 1995.

  He’d stood, stretching, wishing it was dawn. Shaw’s office was to one side, behind a glass partition. On the desk Valentine had spotted a set of forensics reports. He’d let himself in, sat in Shaw’s seat and flicked through them. There was no new relevant information from Hadden’s team – just a set of pictures of the evidence removed from the victim’s clothing, including a single shot of the pocket knife, opened out to reveal all the blades and tools. There was a handwritten note from one of Hadden’s assistants to say that the wallet was in a precarious condition and would have to be dried in a vacuum before any attempt was made to prise it open.

  Valentine had seen Twine using a Swiss Army knife to cut open a package in the CID room a week earlier so he’d gone to the young DC’s desk and slipped open the top drawer. The knife, glinting, had caught the light. But it wasn’t a match to the one in the grave, although that was clearly a forerunner of the modern iconic model.

  Back at his own desk he’d gone online and found the home page for Victorinox, the makers of the Swiss Army knife. He clicked the ‘History’ link. The knife was first produced for the Swiss military in the late nineteenth century after it was discovered that its men were being supplied with German-made models. In an ironic twist, by the time of the Second World War German soldiers were carrying them because they were so much better than the ones with which they were issued. American infantrymen – obsessed with collecting souvenirs on the long march from the D-Day landings to Berlin – would often pick the pockets of their dead enemies. The knives they collected were taken back to the US and fired up the market for what became known as the Swiss Army knife. There was a picture of one of the wartime knives, and it was a direct match for the one retrieved from the cemetery.

  Valentine had smiled, thrown open the window and enjoyed another Silk Cut. Lynn had plenty of GI connections – there were two US air bases within twenty miles, and during the war one of Lynn’s cinemas – the Pilot – had been a popular haunt for GIs and local girls. He’d retrieved the social-history book and found a picture of the Pilot: couples in a queue along the pavement, the GIs in smart uniforms, all smoking, the girls – some of them – daringly cheek-to-cheek with black partners.

  The only problem was the age of the victim: between twenty and twenty-five in 1982. But then he looked again at those couples cheek-to-cheek, and thought about the children to come.

  5

  Max Warren sat behind his desk, fists bunched on his blotting pad like a pound of butcher’s sausages. Shaw recalled what his father had said about Warren when the ex-Met high-flier had arrived at St James’s from London in the early 1990s: that he’d end his days in a bungalow at Cromer, chasing kids away from his garden gnomes. And it was true that the passing years had obscured the tough streetwise copper who’d been posted to north Norfolk to revitalize a sleepy seaside constabulary. He’d gone to fat, his neck slowly expanding to fill the gap between shoulder and jaw, and the once-vital sense of anger which had driven him to patrol the night streets with his men during the gang wars of the mid-1990s had turned in on itself, leaving him tetchy and impatient for the haven of retirement which was now just a few years away.

  ‘Right. First things first, Peter. This cemetery stiff – what’s the story and is it worth a DI’s valuable time?’ Valentine stiffened, noting that he, a lowly DS, apparently had no valuable time to waste.

  Shaw touched his tanned throat where his tie should have been. ‘It’s probably a twenty-eight-year-old murder. If we get a few breaks we might get close to the killer – but that’s a long shot. There are some interesting forensics – including a wallet which Tom’s drying out so we can look inside. I’d planned to give it forty-eight hours. Then we’ll scale down if we’re nowhere.’

  Valentine leant forward, relieving the stress on his back, trying not to think he wanted to cough. He couldn’t help but admire Shaw’s manipulation of his superior officer. Valentine guessed Warren was planning to give them a week – Shaw had under-cut him, which would mean Warren would back off, and they could manufacture a ‘breakthrough’ if they wanted to keep the investigation going. Not for the first time he recognized in Peter Shaw something that he lacked himself – the ability to discern the petty politics that dominated life for the top brass and to use it to his own ends.

  Shaw slipped the forensic sketch he’d made on to Warren’s blotter. ‘That’s our victim.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Warren. He looked up at the neon strip above his desk, the wooden chair creaking beneath him, and spoke to the ceiling. ‘I don’t have to tell either of you that if the words “race crime” appear in the local rag then our lives will be a continuous sodding nightmare; so can we try and avoid that?’

  Shaw nodded. ‘George thinks there may be a GI link, sir. So we may have to get the military involved too. It’ll hit the press tomorrow – TV as well.’

  Warren smiled, a gesture that did not signal good humour but had developed as a kind of facial grammar, indicating a change of subject.

  ‘Whatever,’ he said. ‘Just get it cleared up, or move on. Now. We know why we’re here – the Tessier case. Three months ago I gave you clearance to take it forward. Since then I’ve heard nothing from either of you. Now you want to see me. Why?’ He tipped forward, then looked at his watch. ‘The short version, please – I’ve got the chief constable’s finance committee at ten. I’d love to be late, but then I’d like a pension, too. So just get me up to speed.’

  Shaw stretched out his legs, crossed them at the ankles and took a breath.

  ‘You know the basics of the case, sir. But for the record …’

  The case. The one crime that bound Shaw’s life to that of George Valentine, like a sailor lashed to a raft. The case of nine-year-old Jonathan Tessier. His father’s last case.

  The bare facts were undisputed. Jonathan Tessier, aged nine, had been found dead at three minutes past midnight on the night of 26 July 1997. He was still dressed in the sports kit he’d put on the previous morning to play football on the grass triangle by the flats in which he lived on the Westmead Estate in Lynn’s North End. He’d been strangled with a ligature of some sort, the condition of the body pointing to a time of death between one and seven ho
urs earlier, between 6.00 and 11.00 p.m. on the 25th. DCI Jack Shaw had attended the scene, with the then Detective Inspector George Valentine. They were St James’s senior investigative team, with a record going back nearly a decade including a string of high-profile convictions – notably a clutch of four gang murders on the docks in the summer of 1989 and a double child murder in 1994.

  On that night in 1997 they quickly ascertained the facts of the case so far: the boy’s body had been found in the underground car park beneath Vancouver House – a twenty-one-storey block at the heart of the Westmead Estate – by a nurse, parking after her late shift at the local hospital. She said she’d seen a car drive off quickly – a Volkswagen Polo, she thought – when she’d got out of her Mini. The fleeing driver had failed to negotiate the narrow ramp to ground level and clipped one of the concrete pillars, spilling broken glass from a headlamp on to the ground.

  DI Valentine had radioed an alert on the damaged car to all units. A uniformed PC on foot patrol in the North End found a Polo abandoned on the edge of allotments at just after two that morning, its offside headlamp shattered, the engine warm. A police computer check identified the owner as Robert James Mosse, a law student aged twenty-one who, like the victim, was a resident of Vancouver House. He was studying at Sheffield, but home for the summer vacation. Back at the scene the body had been removed, revealing a single glove below the corpse: black leather with a fake fur lining. Jack Shaw and George Valentine had gone to the first-floor flat Mosse shared with his mother to interview him.