Death's Door

by Jim Kelly

  ‘I called the MoD last night, told ’em to send us what they could on these units by email,’ said Valentine. ‘But yeah, they’re for real. Well, they were for real. This coast was heavily fortified – you saw those bronze rails up in the woods above The Circle, by the folly? They’re gun rails, and there’s loads more. Coastal defence. They thought that if the Germans are coming, they’ll come this way. Long, flat, desolate coast, with the road open to the capital. It was our Normandy, waiting to happen.’

  Valentine’s normal listless tone had gone and for the first time Shaw thought that for his DS the Second World War wasn’t just a distant memory. For his generation, and Shaw’s father, it was a backdrop to their lives, because their parents had lived through it. Perhaps that was why he seemed more energized by the discovery than Shaw.

  ‘And who, exactly, is it that says there was one of these units at Creak?’ Shaw asked, trying to think straight, while the road took a vicious double-hairpin bend at Burnham Overy Staithe, sneaking past The Hero – a pub in Chelsea-set blue, with a signboard showing Nelson.

  ‘Nobody – not officially,’ admitted Valentine. ‘It was popular wartime gossip. They had engineers up there but they were probably building the gun emplacement by the folly. They’d do that, because it makes sense.’ He turned half in the seat to look at Shaw’s profile: ‘They’d put the dugout near something else military so they could cover their steps. There’s no point a platoon of sappers turning up to build a secret underground base, is there?’ He stopped, dragging air into his lungs, disguising the breath. ‘This way, if anyone was seen approaching the spot people would think they were going to the gun, or the pillbox, or the lookout, or whatever it was they’d built above ground, nearby. The rumour was strong enough that when English Heritage took over at the Warrenner’s Lodge a few years ago they did do a survey as part of a maintenance programme. They found fuck all, except a shadow of a brick warren, most of it plugged with clay.’

  ‘Names – do we know who’s in these units?’

  ‘Local volunteers and they all signed the Official Secrets Act – and they were paid. But the documentation was all-central, and all of it was destroyed in ’46. A few people broke cover in the eighties and nineties – MoD bloke said they had some cuttings. But basically they kept quiet – it’s like Bletchley Park. They took it seriously; a secret’s a secret. They chose people who could keep a secret. So names are going to be tough.’

  Shaw nodded, letting him talk on. He’d never heard Valentine say so much.

  ‘But we know what the Auxunits were like – the people who ran the network were commandos; they wanted people who knew the local terrain and who could survive on the run: gamekeepers, farmers, field workers. You had to be fit too – so that means they looked at the emergency services. Most were reserved occupations, so there were young men about – police, fire brigade, coastguard. And anyone who could use a gun, so they recruited at shoots, hunts, clubs.’

  ‘And every one of these units got six of these cyanide pills?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘Yeah, MoD guy said that was standard practice for anyone working behind enemy lines, which is where they would have been if the invasion had rolled over them. Kind of insurance policy. If you thought you were gonna get caught, and tortured, at least there was a quick way out. That was in everyone’s interests.’

  They swung past the end of The Row, the terrace street on which Arthur Patch had lived for nearly half a century. A thin line of smoke still rose from the ruin of the house, and the rest of the street still looked empty. The Porsche climbed the steep hill beyond the village until the Docking Hill wind farm filled the horizon, the vanes of the three giant mills turning lazily. Shaw put the Porsche up on the verge.

  They could see the usual group of demonstrators by the gates, where they’d set up a vigil – a circle of candles – for Paul Holtby. Killing the engine Shaw heard a thin dirge on the air being sung by the crowd. Catching sight of the candle flames he thought of Holtby’s skin-white face, smoke pumping out of the ash, and Hadden’s chilling description: human candle.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  DC Lau walked towards the Porche from the direction of the wind farm’s gatehouse. Leather trousers, leather jacket, open to reveal a crisp white collarless shirt. Wrap-around reflective sunglasses hid her eyes. Shaw thought the effect was designed to radiate brisk, sexless, efficiency but the walk was strangely sinuous, almost a cat walk.

  Shaw threw the door open and put a booted foot up on the dashboard.

  Lau nodded a greeting, taking the time to squat down so that she could catch Valentine’s eye as well. ‘We’ve got statements,’ she said, her voice free of any hint of her Chinese descent. ‘But they’re pretty much the awkward squad. Talk about blood out of a stone. They seem to think Holtby’s been murdered by a worldwide conspiracy – US corporates bankrolling the wind farm, CIA, us. Paranoid stuff. We’ve spoken to Holtby’s aunt at Morston. She’s pretty sure he’d have been at Morston on the beach in 1994. You know, that’s a guess given it was eighteen years ago. But odds on he was there. A big family, they didn’t go anywhere else, just let the kids run wild.’ She smiled. ‘Sounds great.’

  ‘Biog?’ asked Shaw.

  Lau painted the picture they’d put together of Holtby: local rich kid, absentee parents in the City, a degree from York University in history, student activism, then the eco-warrior circuit. Justina had emailed a preliminary autopsy report from The Ark. The scenario was provisional, but clear. The trap had brought Holtby down, a cyanide pill had been administered while he was alive – the casing was in his lower gullet – then the body had been abandoned to the approaching overnight fire. Something in the rucksack had accelerated the heat next to the body – so far they’d found chemical traces of phosphorous. ‘Tom thinks it might be a flare – you know, like an Olympic torch or something,’ she added, shrugging.

  ‘OK,’ said Shaw, kicking open the door. ‘Suggests he was up there after dark – or expecting to be up there after dark. Any idea why?’

  Lau slipped on reflective sunglasses. ‘They’re all playing dumb on that, but I think they know. The Osbourne girl might talk. She said she wanted to see you, sir. Alone.’

  Tilly Osbourne stood away from the group, by the security fence of the wind farm, watching the nearest turbine, the sixty-foot blades slicing through the air like the sharpest of knives. She had her fingers meshed through the wire, her face pressed against the latticework.

  As Shaw approached on the tufted downland grass she turned her head. The tears were drying on her face, which was puffy, with the surface tension of a week-old party balloon. ‘How’s your Dad?’ he asked.

  ‘Ill. It’s the stress. He doesn’t really deal with emotions – not properly. But he’s comfortable, the drugs are working, he’ll be home soon.’ It seemed to be the thought of home that made her eyes fill with tears, so that she looked away. ‘It’s a man thing, right? Not talking.’

  She straightened her back and looked up into the sky, an oddly adult mannerism for a teenager. ‘Once you get used to secrets – collecting them – it’s addictive.’

  Shaw wondered who she was talking about: her dead mother, her father, or herself?

  She stared through the wire at one of the turbines marked by a six-foot-high letter B in black stencil on the silver, elegant, tower of steel.

  ‘Paul’s death. It’s linked to Mum, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘It has to be. But I don’t understand why.’

  ‘Why linked?’

  She shrugged and almost smiled and Shaw caught the ghost of a resemblance to her mother, or at least to the woman he’d seen smiling for the photographer in the Fleet Street studio. ‘I’m eighteen years old – I’ve lived here all my life, in the village. Once, when I was little, there was a car crash by the pub and someone died. But that’s it – eighteen years, one death, an accident. Now three in a few days. Mum, Paul and that old bloke up on The Row. You don’t think Mum’s death was an accident, do you? I don’t know why, bu
t you think someone else was there. At the end. And there’s still people on The Row – people in white suits. So something’s going on.’ She smiled. ‘There’s not much to do up here but talk. We do conspiracy theories by the dozen.’

  She watched the blade turning. ‘If I tell you what I know about Paul, will it help?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘It wasn’t Dad – at the end, with Mum,’ she said. ‘I know that. We talked, last night, at the hospital.’ She pressed her fingers on either side of the bridge of her nose. ‘And it wasn’t Dad out at East Hills. I’d know.’

  ‘OK. If he’s telling the truth we’ll know soon because we’re checking his DNA, so there’s nothing to worry about.’ Shaw waited a beat: ‘If he’s telling the truth, which means we still need to know who it was, Tilly. Who killed that lifeguard and who was with your Mum. Who brought her that pill, who helped her take it – and in the end made her take it.’

  Shaw gave her a brief summary of the autopsy findings on her mother.

  Shocked, she released her fist from the wire, like a plant opening in time-lapse photography, and showed him that in one of her palms she held a key. In the sunlight it was almost too bright, as if it was emitting energy, not reflecting it. Then she told him what they’d planned. ‘It was so exciting,’ she said, and the smile flared again.

  A construction company had moved on to the Docking Hill site in April to build a canteen and a new office block by Turbine C. The work had required a replacement computer system, designed to monitor wind speeds and the inclination of each turbine blade. The workmen had been given access to each of the three giant turbines, the other on-site facilities, and the generating block. One of the labourers was young and had been to school with one of the female demonstrators. Sweethearts, briefly, they’d drifted apart.

  The demonstrators had watched this young man each Friday, blowing his wages in the quayside pubs at Wells. One night, in June, they made sure he met the girl again. By the end of the night he was lying in a back alley, head foggy with a mixture of alcohol and prescription sedatives. In his pocket were his work keys. Three of the keys were marked A, B and C. None were missing, but if he’d looked hard he’d have seen traces of Blu-Tac in the teeth of B.

  The plan had stalled there. It was no good having the key to the turbine if they couldn’t get into the compound. As soon as the SOUL campaign had begun a security firm had been hired to patrol the perimeter. The gates in the fence were individually computer locked – opened only by a sequence of numbers changed daily. The group favoured a mass demo by the gates, then trying to break through into the compound so that they could occupy Turbine B – get up to the gondola at the top, unfurl a banner, and see how long it took the security firm to get them out with a TV crew training its telescopic lens on their every move. They’d take up some flares as well, so they could be seen after dark. ‘A light of protest,’ said Tilly, smiling for the first time. ‘That’s what Paul said.’

  That was the plan, and they’d set the date a month ago, and it had been timed for today. The chances of it working, however, were extremely slim. The compound was patrolled by dogs. The security firm was mob-handed most mornings. Pushing and shoving would turn into a brawl, the police would be called, and they’d all end up in cells at St James’. Nobody really thought they’d make it to the turbine, let alone the gondola aloft. ‘Then Paul called me on Saturday. He’d heard about Mum, so he said he was sorry. But there’d been a change of plan and he wanted my help. Would I help?’ She looked directly at Shaw. ‘I said yes, because I thought it would give me something else to think about, and stop me brooding about Mum. And if I felt better, I could help Dad feel better too. I’m in charge of media for the group, for SOUL, contacting papers, radio. It’s what I do at college. So it was up to me.’

  Holtby, she said, had a new plan. He’d found a way into the compound. Overnight, on Sunday. Once he was in he’d get to the gondola at the top, and unfurl the banner at precisely eight o’clock the next morning. It was Tilly’s job to make sure pictures got to the media. She should take some herself, some on video camera, but best of all wait and see if the plan had worked and then get one of the TV companies out as fast as she could before the security guards worked out how to get him down the turbine steps. If he could stay up all day he’d light a flare after dark. That would shine for miles, like a beacon.‘I thought he’d found someone on the inside,’ she said. She looked through the wire again as the vanes on Turbine B began to turn. ‘Then, yesterday, nothing. No sign of him, and he wasn’t answering his mobile. We thought the guards had caught him, but there was no sign. Now we know where he was.’

  ‘Tilly . . .’ Shaw put a hand on her shoulder but she didn’t take her eyes of the slowly turning turbine. ‘We’ll talk to the company, and the security firm. But you’re right, I don’t think Paul died because he was planning to embarrass an energy company that wants to build wind farms. I think he died because he knew something about East Hills. Just like your mother.’

  Her lower lip fell, showing small white teeth. She shook her head, as if trying to brush away the idea.

  ‘Did you ever talk to him about East Hills? Your mum had been asked to attend for the mass screening and interviews – you knew that. Did you mention that to Paul?’

  She dabbed at her face as if she was crying, but her eyes were dry and wide, trying to remember. She shook her head. ‘Dad said – about East Hills. That Mum was upset, that it brought back horrible memories. He’d told me about it before because some years she was bad – on the anniversary, like she couldn’t forget it. And she never came to the beach – not ever.’

  ‘Right, but did you talk to Paul about any of this?’ Shaw noticed that despite the heat she’d started to shiver.

  ‘No. No, I don’t think so. A bit,’ she contradicted herself. ‘Yes. We spend hours up here like I said so we just talk – so yes, I did mention it. He said he remembered it.’ She turned to Shaw, as if the memory was a letter and she’d just ripped it open. ‘Yes, he did. He took dirty pictures, didn’t he, the lifeguard? Paul said he remembered the gossip. He was only a kid.’

  Shaw stepped closer and lowered his voice. ‘Paul spent the summers out at Morston, Tilly. He may have seen the killer that day in ’94. Did he say he’d seen anything?’

  Tilly’s eyes were blank. ‘No.’

  Shaw said she’d have to make a statement but she could do it in private – back at the house in Creake. He would have gone then but she reached out a hand and touched his arm. Shaw was shocked by the gesture because they seemed such a cold family: not cold, isolated – each from the other, and all of them from the world.

  ‘I know it doesn’t seem like it,’ she said, ‘but we loved Mum. She knew she was unfair – to me, to Dad. That she blamed us for the way her life had turned out. She said that. She just couldn’t stop herself. When she spoke all the bitterness came out. The depression. So sometimes we’d just sit, holding each other and not say anything. They were the best times.’

  She smiled, and Shaw responded with a mirror-image, because it was the first time anyone had said anything sympathetic about Marianne Osbourne, and the idea that she’d tried to love her family brought her alive for Shaw, far more than the flickering film of her Fleet Street photo shoot.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The village of Creake was drenched in summer holiday sunshine, the shadows crowding back into the woods which encircled the Norfolk-stone cottages. Shaw swung the Porsche past a line of terraced houses and slowed to negotiate the tricky T-junction by the church with its circular tower in flint, and a graveyard spilling over a low wall. The local pub – The Ostrich – was set back, a long medieval range painted white, with black beams and window casements in eggshell blue. Ahead of them they watched a squad car carrying Tilly Osbourne, going up to The Circle to give her statement at the incident room.

  Valentine let his eyes slide over the scene outside the pub – half a dozen picnic tables crowded with families, and a garden to
the side, packed with lunchtime tourists. He thought, just for a moment, of suggesting an early lunch, brunch, a late coffee break, whatever. But he knew Shaw better than that. Lunch would be c/o the St James’ mobile canteen on the green up at The Circle: a cheese salad, fizzy water.

  The brief high Valentine had enjoyed the night before, a result of Jan’s company, and their clandestine visit to the museum, had dissipated. A day of routine enquiries loomed. They’d be down to Morston to check out Holtby’s flat, or back to The Ark for his autopsy, or conducting endless local interviews in a no-doubt doomed attempt to find the location of the elusive wartime dugout and its lethal cyanide pills. Valentine experienced a fleeting moment of despair, realizing how much of his life he spent wishing he was somewhere else. And his early morning interview with the chief constable overshadowed the day, like a bad dream. In contrast, another image didn’t help – DCI Jack Shaw, Peter’s father, walking across a bar with a pint in each hand, sunlight catching the beer in the glasses.

  Shaw stopped the car, pulling over sharply into a lane beside a Londis supermarket. ‘Come on, George. I’ll buy you a drink.’ He’d been planning to visit the incident room, brief the team, but his head wasn’t clear. There was a pattern here now – putting aside the original murder of 1994 they had three deaths, a single motive, a rationale. They had a prime suspect – Joe Osbourne – and they had his DNA sample at the lab. Tilly’s belief that her father was innocent sounded to Shaw like wishful thinking. She’d lost her mother – what else did she have to believe in? He wanted to pause, take stock; make sure they were on firm ground before taking the next step.