Death Ship

by Jim Kelly

  ‘This is a century ago—’

  ‘Sure. But, like, people die every year in Flanders – digging up old bombs. Chemistry’s tricky – that’s why I need the tuition – but basically the insides – the explosives – they turn to soup. Sometimes it’s soup that won’t go bang. But sometimes it does. The Belgians, they have squads of experts, full-time and everything. I went with the school, to the trenches, so I know.’

  ‘And this is history. This is fact?’

  ‘That raid, the first, it killed four people, injured sixteen, in Lynn – right here. I did a project for school. They said there were spies here and they used car headlights to guide them in – but, like, that doesn’t work, because this was daylight. They were two hundred feet up, and freezing to death, so it wasn’t pin-point or anything. Grandad said it was dead important because it was about terror, about causing panic. A terrorist attack. And it worked. There were loads of crazy stories, like the airships were operated from a secret base in the Lake District – yeah, right …’

  Valentine studied the map. ‘Three bombs? All on the beach?’

  ‘That’s where it’s tricky. Accounts differ – that’s what it always says when nobody knows the truth, right? A lot of people said they saw three fall in the sea. But I’ve checked and it was high tide – see? So they could have fallen in the shallows, gone in the water, and then the sand. The commander turned south – tracking the coast – so I guess they all fell in a line. I’ve got books, stuff – take what you need. These are eleven-hundred-pound bombs,’ he added, collecting a pile of books under one arm. ‘I’ve got to go to school now.’

  On the step Guy looked up and down the street as if it was all new to him. ‘Grandad, before he died, he ordered this car and it was just left here, outside. Hired it, I guess. Mum and Dad were out. I helped him get down the path. We went to this village, in Suffolk, where they shot down a Zeppelin – not the L3; this is later. Three of the crew survived, but one died in hospital. They booed the others, as they took them away in an ambulance. Grandad said that was shameful. They used bits of the wreckage to make stuff – ashtrays, cigarette boxes, stuff like that.’ Guy held up the front door key and Valentine saw that the fob was metal and marked L48. ‘We drove to the church,’ said Guy, turning the lock. ‘They’d buried them all in the same plot, the Germans, and there was a kind of memorial: To A Very Brave Enemy. The grave was dug by the local women, but the sexton said the bodies were gone. That upset Grandad. He said that dying in a foreign land was bad enough, without being dug up. But the sexton said that all the Zeppelin crewmen killed in the raids were reburied somewhere in the north, together. The German government wanted it done that way, and they’d found this bit of land which was rocky, with pine trees, and it looked like Germany, like home. I know why we went on that trip,’ said Guy, looking at Valentine. ‘Well, I know now. In the car coming back – it must have cost a fortune, right? – Grandad said when he died, he wanted to be buried at St Andrew’s, with Grandma, and would I visit. I do.’

  Valentine thought of Julie, and her grave at All Saints’, a dank mossy square of graveyard surrounded by an old sixties housing development.

  ‘Good lad,’ he said.

  FIFTEEN

  Shaw slipped from the world of air into the world of water, and noted the dramatic shift from the sharp, treble soundscape of the beach to the muffled bass track of the sea. Despite the blood pumping in his ears, he felt the piston strokes of the marine engine on the divers’ boat, an unhurried mechanical heartbeat.

  Oxygen bubbles fizzed in a cloud, each miniature globe of gas catching the sunlight that cut directly down into the murky soup of the North Sea. Most of all, he felt the cloying density of water, as if he’d been embedded in a salty treacle, slippery but resistant. Countering this sense of confinement was the sudden loss of weight, gravity diminished to a mild sense of magnetic resistance, no more than the mere thought that up and down existed still.

  He kicked his flippers once, twice, and cut downwards, aware that almost immediately there was an implosion above his head as one of the other divers tipped backwards off the bulwark of the inflatable, followed by another. The percussion reached his own ears like thunder, immediately followed by the sizzle of oxygen.

  Shaw swam down in a vertical spiral, circling the anchor chain that had been pitched over the side from above.

  The seabed, quickly visible, lay beneath him as a blanket of ribbed sand. The pre-dive briefing had stipulated a depth of seventy-five feet. Visibility, after the calm, stormless spring, was nearly fifty feet. Descending, Shaw could see now that the sandy bed was overlaid with a chaotic crisscross design, the legacy of generations of inshore fishing with trawl nets and pots, so that it resembled a classroom blackboard, the scrawled hieroglyphs of former years just visible. Here, well below the depths where surface waves moved the water, the sands were disturbed only by skittering crabs, a hundred of which were within sight, studding the seabed like rivets, set in oddly mathematical lines, as if organized for an invasion of the beach. Across this submerged desert, the stub-like rotten stumps of the old pier marched in parallel lines, thirty feet apart, westwards out to sea.

  The visibility was striking: Shaw felt the briefing estimate was in fact an underestimate. Oddly, this Aegean-like clarity seemed to increase with depth. The soupy brown murk of the upper layer was like a lid on a crystal, almost glass-like transparency below. Shaw was aware of the science behind this phenomenon of layering, the tendency of water to separate into horizontal planes due to differences in salinity and temperature. Between the two zones – the soupy upper murk and the glassy depths – a mirror-like membrane glistened.

  The sunlight from above drilled down in shafts of gold, catching shoals of small fish, hanging in bowls like marine mistletoe. A single eel, as thick as an arm, crossed the seabed in a series of alien, sideways inscriptions of the letter S. Above, descending, the two following divers left behind a pillar each of expelled breath, holding between them the dark, dolphin-like form of the underwater camera.

  Below, on the seabed, a red light flashed where a marker had been left by the previous dive team. They’d moved out from the beach in hundred-yard zones, discovering quickly three fragments from the device, each one of which had created its own miniature crater. On the final sweep, just over 260 feet out from the low-water mark, they’d discovered a diver’s torch, discarded on the seabed.

  Shaw touched down by the flashing marker, noting the torch, still in situ, and looked seawards. Although he’d been briefed about their second discovery, the sight still held a visceral shock: the silhouette of a distant diver hung in the water, frozen still, embedded in the sea, like some exotic insect caught for ever in amber or jet, the falling, refracted light from the surface playing across the figure so that it seemed to shimmer, as if treading water.

  Shaw executed three rapid dolphin kicks, bringing himself within ten feet of the diver, whose right foot was connected by a nylon blue rope to one of the old pier’s footings, a knot tied through a hole which had once held a wooden peg. Arms stretched towards the surface, the chin up, the diver’s clear face mask reflected the light of the distant surface. The free-floating left foot had lost its flipper, the foot obscured by a gorgon’s head of crabs, interlocked in a nightmare of articulated limbs and claws. Around the body, a hazy miasma of rotting flesh hung like a shroud.

  Shaw felt a slight pressure at his back and realized the current, immobile during the period of dead water between the tides, was about to turn, flooding out. The victim swayed on its lanyard. Shaw saw the image before him as an inverted execution: the hangman’s victim dangling in the water, drawn up towards the sky.

  He forced himself to paddle to within a few feet. The shoulder of the wetsuit sported a single emblematic Dutch flag. One of the diver’s gloves, on the right hand, was missing, leaving swollen pale fingers, stiff and strangely inhuman. A single crab clung to the thumb. Shreds of skin floated free from the puckered flesh. Had it been from
these dead fingers that the diver’s bag had slipped, freed perhaps by the shock wave of the beach explosion?

  Forcing himself to study the flesh of the hand, he noted a gold signet ring and a red diver’s watch with Roman numerals. Of the hidden human face, the only visible features were a bearded, heavy jaw. The face mask and mouthpiece were in place, but the eyes were lost behind a trapped bubble of oxygen.

  Circling, Shaw had little doubt they’d found the missing Dutchman, Dirk Hartog. On the dead man’s back was a single oxygen tank, marked with the logo of Hunstanton Marine.

  Shaw tried to energize the scene: seeing a struggle perhaps, the air pipe ripped away, an oxygen cloud enveloping the thrashing figure. The hair, which swayed to and fro, was infested with small scavenger fish. A jellyfish, the size of a cricket ball, had attached itself to the left ear.

  The two other divers arrived with the underwater camera and a floodlight blazed, the scene lit in lurid binary contrast, shadow and glare. Circling, Shaw allowed the sluggish current to edge him closer to the dead man’s face, so that he could peer through the bubble trapped behind the mask. The flesh was bloated, the eyes almost closed, the natural symmetry of the features in life cruelly lopsided in death, so that only one dead iris caught the light. The mouth gaped, the jaw bone extending to breaking point – and possibly beyond, so that the line of the skull seemed distorted by dislocation.

  Shaw tried to imagine what would have happened to the body if undiscovered: the flesh eaten away, the bones encased in the suit, the skeleton moored to its wooden pillar, the skin dissipated in the muddy, sluggish seawater, the human molecules dissolved in the vast chamber of the Wash. One day, perhaps, a shred of wetsuit might have washed ashore, but nothing more.

  A dolphin kick took Shaw out of the circle as the other two divers rotated around the victim with the camera, the shifting shadows giving a fresh illusion of movement, as if the dead man danced on a leash.

  The image felt like an intrusion, and so Shaw turned away, to look further out to sea, along the line of the shorn pillars of the old pier. The gloom seemed to stretch into the heart of the sea, but there was no sign of the construction rig, or the great concrete caisson on the seabed, all of which must lay half a mile west. But could he hear a mechanical pulse? The great pumps, perhaps, squeezing air into the caisson. In contrast to the suspended, bloodless victim, the sea itself seemed to have gained a heartbeat.

  SIXTEEN

  Probationary PC Jan Clay parked her blue-and-white squad car inside the port gates on an acre of concrete that ran down to the side of the Alexandra Dock. A container ship, unloaded and high in the water, threw a narrow inky shadow over the quayside, but the rest of the scene lay baking in blinding light.

  Clay slipped on dark glasses and adjusted her chequered neck scarf in the side mirror of the car. One of the many things she hated about the port in the summer was this quality of heat appearing to radiate from the very ground. There wasn’t a blade of grass in sight, just concrete and red brick, and a giant metallic grain silo that seemed to buckle in its own private mirage.

  Even a rat, following the old train lines sunk in the cobbles, seemed overcome by the deadening effect of the vertical sun, its progress an aimless ramble, nosing at lumps of old sugar beet that had fallen from trucks by the loading bay.

  Clay’s cork-heeled shoes clipped smartly on the tarmac as she made her way down the main dock road. She’d been in uniform for just fourteen months, but she had already begun to put in place various aspects of her own style, an approach to the job based on careful, studious preparation. She’d noted that turning up to interview people in the squad car was never as effective as arriving on foot. The car seemed to create a barrier between police and public, while also providing a clear early warning to anyone with something to hide that awkward questions were coming soon. Clay was also aware that the emerging elements of her approach to coppering were, invariably, the opposite to those of her husband. The car, for George, was a haven, a cradle, which he rarely left unless he had to. George was quite capable of conducting vital interviews with key witnesses from his battered Mazda: window down, elbow on the door ledge.

  The dock road was deserted, leading down to the Fisher Fleet, a narrow, deep muddy cut in which the trawlers lay waiting for high tide to lift them up, and out, into the arrow-like channel that led to the sea. The smell was distinctive: a subtle blend of rotting fish, baking mud, and marine fuel. A dog, lashed to a rail, barked at Clay from the hot steel deck of a dredger. Settling back down as she passed, it put both its front paws in a dry water bowl.

  Salt’s, the wholesale fishmonger, comprised a front shop and a warehouse, which appeared to have been built from broken-down old ships’ boards. The interior was a surprise: gleaming white sinks held silver fish, a row of spotless fridges humming along one wall.

  The fishmonger was hacking at a cod with a chopper, cutting through the plastic spine with short sharp blows.

  Clay went to speak, but her throat caught on the hint of blood in the air. The resulting cough didn’t startle the fishmonger who spoke with his back to her. ‘One moment. I’ll be with you.’

  When he did turn round, his hands were covered in fish blood and tiny glinting scales.

  Joe Salt was Esther Keeble’s brother. As soon as he saw Clay’s uniform, the jaw set, and he promptly explained that he didn’t have much time, as one of his big wholesale customers would be on site soon.

  ‘Won’t take a moment, Mr Salt. I’m sure you’re as keen to find out why your sister should act as she did; it’s hardly in character, is it? A very caring woman.’

  CID had drafted in uniformed branch to check on all of Keeble’s relatives. The clear danger facing the inquiry was that the accused would get to trial and at the last moment change her plea. Without her own brief admission to police, the DPP had a potentially precarious case. Would the defence team offer manslaughter, banking on the unpredictability of juries, in order to sway the Crown to accept a deal? If they sought psychiatric reports, Keeble might escape justice entirely.

  The key problem was the total absence of a known motive.

  So far the life revealed by these inquiries appeared blameless. Esther Keeble had spent her life being a dutiful wife to George – the holder of an RNLI bronze medal for bravery – and working as a volunteer at the cottage hospital in Hunstanton, and at the children’s ward at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Lynn. Why would such a woman turn to random murder?

  After a few preliminary questions Clay ventured an observation. ‘She must have liked kids.’

  Salt had the face of a man who spent his life under artificial lights. He rubbed his cheeks now, as if to conjure up some colour in the skin. ‘She was the big sister,’ he said, his voice softening. ‘Four brothers, all of us with kids, grandkids. It’s a tribe really – you should see us at Christmas. I’ve got four, and they’ve got seven. She loved it. And she helped bring us up. So you’re right. She lived for kids.’

  In the silence they heard something plop into the water outside, setting the dog off in a mad spasm of barking.

  ‘But none of her own,’ offered Clay.

  ‘Nope.’ Salt folded his arms.

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘I don’t know. We were close, we all were, but there’s some things you can’t ask.’

  Clay tried several other tacks, probing the Keebles’ perilous financial position, which explained their damp, drafty prefab on Empire Bank. ‘They worked hard all their lives. Good people. Was she bitter, do you think?’

  ‘Bitter enough to try and poison a six-year-old she’d never met, you mean. I think we’re done here, don’t you, Constable?’

  Clay put her official West Norfolk Constabulary card on the counter.

  ‘Anything occurs to you, please ring. We’re just trying to understand. Have you visited?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘What did you think?’

  ‘I don’t think she understands.’

  Outside, Clay
stood on the quayside looking down at the boats that lay at angles in the mud. A rope opposite supported two rats, trying to get past the metal vermin shield.

  An idea, as murky as the water in the muddy channels of the Fisher Fleet, made her skirt Salt’s shop and put her head through the open door of the warehouse behind. Despite the old tiled roof and the dilapidated wooden structure, the interior was, again, spotless: tiles freshly hosed down, fish boxes stacked high.

  Along each alleyway, traps were set at regular intervals.

  She took a picture with her phone and then peered inside the plastic cage, noting the innocent white powder within.

  SEVENTEEN

  ‘Like this, I think, at the moment of the attack,’ said Dr Justina Kazimierz, the West Norfolk’s resident pathologist, the centrepiece of her own forensic tableau, as she took on the shape of the stricken diver. A sturdy fifty-five-year-old, she nevertheless retained the ghost of a more childlike grace, stretching out both her arms ahead of herself, her hands carefully cupped to reduce drag, while lifting one leg to extend it backwards, pointing the toe of her flat shoe, like a ballerina. ‘The head back, the air pipe in place. Then I think the assailant strikes …’