Death Ship

by Jim Kelly

  She leant forward and lifted the right foot of the corpse as it lay on its metal mortuary table. Outside the Ark’s lancet windows, night had fallen, but here within the old chapel the halogen lights blazed, depriving the corpse of the comfort of shadows. On the wall above, the single stone angel covered its face with its hands, as if it couldn’t bear the sight below.

  ‘The assailant rips the oxygen pipe away, and then as the victim tries to escape to the surface, he – or she – grips the foot …’

  The sound of broken bones creaking in flesh seemed to bring a new depth of bleak grief to the autopsy suite. Valentine concentrated hard on the ticking hands of the clock on the wall. Shaw stepped forward, bending his knees to get closer to the foot, which was pale, but distinguished by the marbling effect of death, with blue veins splayed like a river system across the skin.

  ‘The bones broken here are many,’ she said. ‘The leg, just here, the ankle, the talus fractured, the cuboid also, four cuneiform bones, all of the phalanges.’ As she spoke, she ran her hand confidently over the surface of the limb. An incision had been made in the side of the foot, and without warning she flipped the limb quickly, so that a wound opened to reveal the flesh within. ‘Here – the extensor tendons are ruptured, the Achilles broken …’

  The members of the murder team were all present. DS Mark Birley, the CCTV expert, perched casually on an unused dissection table. ‘So we’re looking for someone strong, active, even an athlete, or a labourer, a bodybuilder?’

  Dr Kazimierz dismissed the idea with a flick of the wrist. ‘No, no. You misunderstand. Listen, please …’

  The pathologist had been in the UK for more than ten years, but the linguistic patterns of her native Poland were still powerful. Shaw suspected she employed this trait to keep her emotional distance from those around her, and to maintain a crisp, detached persona. Perhaps, in a subconscious way, it helped her draw a boundary between her own life and the dead with whom she worked.

  ‘I am not saying that the assailant uses this force. No – this force comes from our victim: he struggles, he twists, but always he is trapped here.’ She held the ankle up one more time, before setting it down gently, like a china cup.

  Shaw walked to Hartog’s wetsuit which had been hung on the stone wall. The image of the victim, suspended in the strange prism of seawater, attached to the seabed by a nylon rope, seemed to lurk on his retina like an indelible stain.

  ‘The loop, you see,’ said Kazimierz, quickly reaching out to take the heel-strap of the suit in her hand as Shaw held it up. ‘This, I think, is the key. The killer holds on to this, the victim struggles, but buoyancy – and the desire for oxygen – impels him to ascend …’ She looked up into the beautiful curved beam roof of the old chapel. ‘But to free his foot he must descend. This proves an impossible contradiction, certainly once panic has struck.’ She stretched the heel loop out, then let it go with a crack.

  ‘He drowned?’ asked Shaw. ‘No other wounds – abrasions?’

  ‘None. Just the foot. Yes, drowned certainly, in seawater.’

  ‘Time?’ asked DC Twine, the only member of the squad taking notes, using his trademark Montblanc fountain pen.

  ‘A wide window,’ said the pathologist. ‘The sea temperature varies. Perhaps between a week and two weeks. The deterioration is marked, and the action of crabs, fish – it is obvious. The bound foot was tethered to the wooden pile, but tight enough to hold the bone in place even after the flesh is gone. So for ever he is here, unless, or until, he is found.’

  Kazimierz walked to the head of the table and considered the victim’s face. ‘We lose much here,’ she said, moving the head from side to side to exhibit the skull. Most of the CID squad studiously stared at the tiled floor. Shaw focused on the exposed bone, the teeth revealed by the missing lips, and decided he’d been right to insist the whole squad attend. It was often too easy to think of murder in a surreal or metaphorical sense. Here, the reality of death was overwhelming, the irrefutable evidence of decay present in every inch of exposed flesh and bone.

  ‘Is it our missing Dutchman?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘An appendectomy here is a match,’ she said, indicating a livid abdominal scar. ‘The flesh of the fingers is gone. Otherwise, yes, a good fit with the medical file. But Tom has better …’

  She tapped briskly on the glass wall that divided the old nave of the chapel into two halves, the autopsy suite here at the east end, the forensic laboratory to the west.

  Hadden brushed his way through the plastic strip curtain in the glass wall and placed a silver ring beside the victim’s head. ‘This was on the right hand, still on the bone of the index finger. The hallmark is Dutch – luckily for us, they have a different assay system, so we know the date of manufacture: 1974. And the place – the city of Harlingen, an old port on the North Sea. I rang Rotterdam and they made inquiries with the family – such as it is. His ex-wife says she bought it for him on his twenty-first birthday.

  ‘Other than that, I can’t help. Locard’s principle is not a great deal of use to us here. At most crime scenes the killer leaves a trace of themselves behind, and takes with them something from the victim. There is an exchange of evidence. But that’s in the world we live in, which is full of air. This victim’s been hosed down by millions of gallons of salty water. Several tides have been and gone. It would have been less effective, from the killer’s point of view, if he had run him through a car wash.’

  Hadden retreated into his own kingdom, but Shaw followed.

  Two members of the SOCO team were working at desktop PCs and didn’t look up. Stills taken from the dive unit’s underwater camera were illuminated on a whiteboard.

  ‘He wants a word,’ said Hadden, indicating a desk where Captain Wharram, head of the bomb disposal unit, sat examining a series of marine charts. ‘I’m not sure it’s good news.’

  Wharram stood to shake hands and then produced an iPad from inside his flak jacket. Two touches brought up an image in grainy black and white: ‘This is the L3, the Zeppelin that undertook the first successful raid on the British mainland in 1915. I had little choice but to pass on this theory to our archive unit at Catterick. They didn’t waste any time. It is true that the airship passed over the beach on that raid, and it is certainly reported that it might have dropped three bombs, which did not explode. We should have gone back in the records. But it’s a century ago.’

  Wharram’s fingernail, which had been bitten back to the quick, tapped at the tablet screen. ‘Anyway, to cut to the chase, our junior historian appears to have solved the mystery, while simultaneously creating another.’

  ‘It’s a one-hundred-year-old bomb?’ said Shaw. ‘Really?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. Look …’ Weighting a corner of the chart down with a coffee cup, he tapped the iPad again and called up a picture resembling the final slurred few inches of an old-fashioned fax: black-and-white images, made up of dots and dashes in spectrum rows.

  Shaw got close, then stood back, trying to see the image held within the chaotic binary snapshot.

  ‘What we’d like to see here are images that indicate two bombs still on the beach. That would give us a neat, crisp solution to our problem. Three Zeppelin bombs, one already reduced to smithereens. However, if you orientate yourself using these two lines here – see the double dots? that’s the old pier – you’ll see that we have three images: here, here, and here. These are fairly large metallic objects about eight to twelve feet down in the sand. They are still in the sand.’

  ‘Three?’ said Shaw.

  ‘Indeed. Three plus our mystery device. Sorry.’

  Shaw had been on his feet for fifteen hours, and he felt his head swim, so he pulled out a seat.

  ‘So that creates various problems, I suspect, for both of us,’ said Wharram. ‘My priority is to get a team on the beach tomorrow to see if we can locate these objects. Then we have a set of choices. They’ve been in the sand for a century and done nobody any harm. But can we really
leave them there, given that the eyes of the world are upon us? I doubt it. So, we either try to disarm them in situ or blow them up. Frankly, the second option is already the outright favourite.’

  ‘Christ,’ said Shaw. ‘So we still don’t know anything about the original explosion?’

  Wharram shrugged. ‘Well, given what we do know, about its depth and shiny metallic casing, I think it makes a lot of sense to set it aside from these three electromagnetic traces. They’re a century old. But that leaves our initial explosion unexplained. My gut reaction is we’re dealing with something non-military, and modern, but I don’t have the science to back that up. Sorry.’

  Shaw stood. ‘How long will you need the beach closed?’ he asked.

  ‘A week? Ten days. I’d say sorry, but I suspect you’re fed-up with the word.’

  ‘Great. Don’t suppose you’d like to tell the chief constable?’

  EIGHTEEN

  St James’ at night was a second home for Valentine. In the years after Julie died, he’d thrown himself into the job, and he’d often work into the night, slipping out before closing time for a drink at the Artichoke, and then returning to plough on, reading statements, into the small hours, before curling up on one of the spare beds in the basement cells, until the canteen started cooking breakfasts at six. Tonight he was heading for the Red House with the rest of the squad for a late pint, as Jan was on a late shift. But he never left the building without touching base – checking his in-tray, emails, and voicemail.

  The note was from Paul Twine and stuck to his PC screen: This came up on trawl through members of Leander Club. On his desk lay a manila file, one of the old ones from the records kept in the basement, too old to be transferred across to the new digital system.

  A single newspaper cutting fell out. From the typography, Valentine placed it as the Lynn Express, one of the local papers.

  FISHERMAN KILLED TEENAGER

  WHILE DRUNK AT WHEEL

  A forty-three-year-old Wells’ fisherman had five times the legal limit of alcohol in his blood when he knocked a teenager off his bike, killing the nineteen-year-old.

  James ‘Tad’ Atkins, of Windmill Way, Docking, pleaded guilty to causing death by dangerous driving at Peterborough Crown Court yesterday.

  Atkins, a ship’s engineer with Wells Marine Services, had been drinking in the Mariners’ Arms on Christmas Eve.

  Witnesses told the court he had consumed eight pints of beer, and several spirits at an impromptu party with workmates.

  Driving a company van, he left the pub at closing time to drive the six miles home.

  At the junction of the Docking Road and the B1220 at Brancaster he knocked Josh Ridding, of Creake Close, Titchwell, off his bike.

  George Pilling, an eye witness, of Roman Way, Brancaster Staithe, was walking his dog and saw the accident. He told the court that the van had not stopped at the give-way signs, but had crossed the coast road at around 60 mph, colliding with the bike and flinging the boy into the roadside ditch.

  Defence counsel for Mr Atkins said his client had stopped immediately and tried to help the boy, but he had died at the scene from multiple injuries.

  The court heard that Mr Atkins had lost his job as a result of the accident and that his marriage had broken up. He recognized that his behaviour had been unacceptable. He had written the boy’s parents a letter of apology and condolence.

  Atkins was jailed for three years.

  Mr Martin Ridding, the victim’s uncle, read a statement on behalf of the family after the verdict outside court: ‘Mr Atkins has robbed us of our wonderful son. Nothing can bring him back, but we are gratified to see that the court has seen fit to send his killer to gaol, although we feel the sentence is pitifully short. Even in this brief time, however, we hope that he will endure the solitude in which to reflect on what he has done.’

  Valentine couldn’t help thinking there was something vindictive about the last line of the family statement. His own personal contact with Tad Atkins had lasted less than twenty minutes in his poolside office at Flume!, but he felt he knew enough to judge the man’s regrets as genuine. The law had sent him down for three years. The degree to which he suffered in solitude was down to his own conscience. As the statement said, nothing was going to bring young Josh Ridding back to life.

  And what did that feel like: walking, breathing, waking up, knowing you’d wiped out an entire life in a fleeting second of irresponsible speed?

  NINETEEN

  The Graveyard Club, brightly lit but always deserted, had become Shaw and Valentine’s private joke, and a secret place. The small cemetery that surrounded All Saints’ Church lay less than a hundred yards from Valentine’s front door, and half a mile from St James’, at the epicentre of the DS’s compact, urban world. His first wife, Julie, lay buried by the church’s west front.

  Entering through the unlatched gate, Valentine searched his raincoat pocket for his latest offering – a battered 1970 half-crown he’d kept for luck in his desk – and placed it on the narrow sill of the gravestone. The grave itself was crowded with urban flotsam, collected from the pavements of the town: a series of chestnut-brown conkers, a discarded dog’s collar, and an iron rivet he’d found on the riverbank amongst the wreck of a houseboat.

  ‘Mind if I join in?’ asked Shaw, placing a smooth ironstone pebble beside the coin. As a child, he’d known Julie Valentine, a kind, still figure on the edge of the exciting world inhabited by his father. She’d once taken a ten-year-old Shaw down to the beach while the men drank whisky, celebrating the end of a tough case.

  ‘Help yourself,’ said Valentine.

  They retreated to a bench, and Shaw opened two bottles of Estrella using a bottle opener on the Porsche keyring.

  Since his second marriage, Valentine’s visits to All Saints’ had been less regular, but the spot still exerted an oddly magnetic attraction, especially after dark. During their last case Shaw had tagged along one night, in the small hours, and they’d both found the spot ideal for discussing the case, or, more pertinently, their inability to make any sense of it. The Graveyard Club had been born.

  ‘We’ve reached the point where things are supposed to start making sense,’ said Shaw, watching a bat swoop out of the shadows and circle a stunted cypress tree.

  The graveyard lay bathed in white light from a security lamp. The church looked cowed, its stained-glass windows obscured by security grilles. By the locked doors someone had lined up six bottles of Special Brew on a war memorial as if preparing a shooting range.

  ‘Has to make sense, does it?’ asked Valentine.

  ‘Let’s give it a try, George, shall we? The CC will want a briefing in the morning. It would be nice to have some kind of narrative arc, a story to tell, even if we have to make it up.’

  Valentine drank from his bottle, a sharp Adam’s Apple bobbing, then he spat in the grass.

  Shaw took the lead. ‘Two cases. First, the pier – an escalating litany of crime from graffiti, to arson, and now, possibly, a bomb – or at least a shiny, metallic explosive device placed a few feet below the surface of the sand. So – for now – we have to take seriously the idea that it was indeed part of the pier campaign. It’s the only way forward. So, progress?’

  Valentine stretched out a thin thigh until it cracked. ‘Jackie Lau’s confident we’re going to be able to trace the post on the Blue Square website. Not that that’s a red-hot lead – I reckon it’s just some lentil freak jumping on the bandwagon. The watches – the Leander Club – that’s much more likely to get us somewhere. We’ll do the roll call tomorrow morning, first thing. Atkins, the pool manager, is the only one who knows what’s coming. All we need is one to be missing. Anyone says theirs is at home, we’ll get a warrant.’

  ‘I’d say I’d lost it.’

  ‘Yup. But it’s a start, right – and they’re expensive watches. So you’d expect an insurance claim.’

  ‘OK. And Atkins says he never had a watch?’

  On the walk
from St James’, Valentine had filled Shaw in on the pool manager’s criminal record. ‘That’s what he says. And he’s not on the list, which I double-checked with the watch company.’

  ‘Right. But he’s got a criminal record,’ said Shaw. ‘Does that help us? He got drunk, he drove a car, he killed a kid.’

  ‘And he’s a supporter of the anti-pier campaign,’ said Valentine. ‘First question, how’d he get that bloody job? One minute he works on trawlers, as a mechanic; next minute he’s an ex-lag who lands a nice little office, pension, and the rest, care of the local council. I’ll kick the tyres – see if anything smells bad.’

  Somewhere close a car alarm began to throb in the silence.

  ‘The team’s all over the STP campaign,’ said Valentine. ‘That’s our best chance, Peter. Got to be. Nutters, fellow travellers. Might be a link to animal rights, according to Mark. They’ve used explosives – there’s several cases on the file. Mostly fire bombs, but, you know, it’s not beyond them.’

  A car’s headlights raked the churchyard, flickering as the beams shone through the old iron railings.

  ‘Then there’s the Hartog case,’ said Shaw. ‘Missing man becomes murder victim. We need to up our game. What do we know? A loner, on holiday, with ashes to scatter. Any progress on that?’

  ‘Amsterdam contacted the ex-wife. She says his mother died over the winter.’

  ‘Why come here to scatter her ashes?’

  Valentine shrugged.

  ‘Anyway, we know he’s looking for something, probably the Cala, or something related to the Cala. Is that where he wants to scatter the ashes – over the wreck of the Cala? Now that this is murder, we need to try harder on finding a record of that ship. Sorry, I need to try harder. I’ve contacts at Lloyd’s; I’ll ring in the morning. Maybe there’s a Dutch link? I’ll call Interpol, see if they’ve got a missing ship that fits the bill.’ Shaw took a cool pull at the Spanish beer. ‘He’s murdered two hundred yards off the beach, presumably by another diver, and his body’s tethered to the old pier footings. His dive bag washes up after the explosion. Your starter for ten, George. Are our two cases related?’