Death Ship

by Jim Kelly

  Keeping his chin on the sill, his eyes down into the sea, Marc took a picture to capture the light-filled, azure shallows, the pale sand of the seabed just visible now, in sinuous ribs.

  Marc’s talent for photography was in part a facility to recognize patterns. There were some below now, which he captured on film: the parallel ranks of the waves, the crisscross divergent lines created by the wind buffeting the surface, the network of the gulls, a lattice work of interlocking, swooping paths.

  The twin lines of the old pier emerged, like some subterranean railway track, and he framed a shot, knowing his father would appreciate the geometry of the composition. Then a waterskier crossed his field of vision, and finally, just before the shallows really began, a shape that was almost an echo of a shape – little else but three lines, two of which promised to come together in a prow, the other a link, suggesting a brace against the curves. He took a snap, considered the ghost-like image, then posted it, forgetting it immediately as the miniature armada of protestors’ boats passed beneath, a riot of placards and hooters, sirens and flags. And then, finally, matching now the onward crash of the breaking waves, they were over the beach and the teeming crowds on the esplanade, and Marc heard the band playing the theme tune from 633 Squadron.

  FORTY-FIVE

  The helicopter dropped Shaw and Valentine back on the beach in front of Surf!, drawn to the giant fluorescent H in the sand like a hovering hawk on an invisible gyre. PPC Clay stood on the edge of the circle, holding on to her neat chequered cap, as the down blast ripped at her trousers and tunic.

  Clearly, succinctly, she told Shaw of her visit to Alice Banks, and that the box of Milk Tray was on its way to the Ark for chemical analysis.

  Valentine considered the sea, trying to look unimpressed.

  ‘Where’s Esther Keeble now?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘Bedford Prison.’

  ‘So what are we saying?’

  Clay removed an imaginary blond hair from her eye. ‘That the sister-in-law was the intended victim, that Esther was just the means to an end, and that George was the killer.’

  ‘Motive?’ asked Shaw. ‘It’s still a mystery, just a different mystery. Get Esther transferred back to us, Jan. Then organize a car to bring her out to Empire Bank, to the house. We’ll meet her there. I want you there too. This afternoon, if we can do it. And Jan …’ She’d begun to walk away, eyes already on her phone. ‘Great work. You’ve made George’s day, but no doubt he’ll tell you that later.’

  From the south they heard the buzz of the esplanade PA system, and the jangle of the fairground music, as the crowds regained the beach, now cleared of any danger.

  Clay walked away along the shoreline, trying to find a spot to pick up a decent telephone signal.

  ‘Let’s get a brew, George,’ said Shaw, heading for Surf!.

  Leo D’Asti, Lena’s business partner, brought them a cafetière and saffron cakes, telling Shaw that Lena and Fran had got away on time for their flight.

  Valentine sat patiently, watching a couple sip white wine in glasses blushed with condensation.

  ‘Next move?’ asked Shaw. ‘I don’t care what Ring says; someone just tried to kill him – specifically him. Why?’

  ‘Coram’s the key,’ said Valentine, regretting the black acrid coffee, because it seemed to reawaken a visceral need for nicotine. ‘He must have suspected this morning we were on his tail. He lied about the Calabria. Maybe he was prepared to kill to make sure we never found out the truth. Ring’s right: it’s piracy – at least it was in 1953. Now – who knows? But there’s a law of the sea, right? Must be.’

  ‘Well, inside territorial waters it would be any number of things, George – hijacking, assault, whatever. Outside, it’s got to be international law, which is pretty much beyond my pay grade, and unless something’s very wrong, yours too. It’ll be a UN charter, something like that. I need to take advice – which is shorthand for I’ve got no real idea. But you’re right that Coram’s at the heart of this. There’s something out there he doesn’t want anyone to find: the truth about the Calabria. Somehow the pier, or the building of the pier, threatens to reveal that secret. This isn’t really about stopping the pier. It’s about keeping that secret.’

  Clay appeared by the table, holding her mobile out as if it were an exhibit in court. ‘St James’ just sent a text – they couldn’t reach you. Tad Atkins has just been found up at the pool. There was an issue with the water quality, so they closed it down for the day, drained the water out. He climbed to the high board and jumped. Environmental health officer, a woman, found him half an hour ago. She’s on the way to hospital – shock. It’s not pretty.’

  ‘Guilt,’ said Valentine, not unkindly, but as if it was a suggestion that might offer an excuse. ‘He’ll be Coram’s man – got to be. And he’ll have guessed we’d tracked down the watch to him.’

  ‘Indeed, Coram’s man,’ said Shaw. ‘One of many, I suspect. Let’s check every inch of the pool and Atkins’ flat for a suicide note. Then we go back to Coram himself. And this time, no warning we’re coming. We know he lied. We need to confront him with that, but not just that. Let’s dig a bit deeper on Coram’s associates – especially Craig, the third man on the Lagan. While we’re at it, let’s get a warrant for the Old Lookout. The next time we interview Edward Coram, I want to nail him.’

  ‘There’s something down by the water,’ said Clay, pointing along the coast, to the foot of the cliffs.

  A group of people stood on the edge of the famous rock pools, where the tide was just beginning to splash white water over the seaweed-covered hogsback boulders. A woman emerged from the group, a hand to her mouth, dragging a small child away so violently that the little girl couldn’t keep her feet and was hauled up the beach like a sack.

  By the time Shaw reached the spot, it had formed a curved shape, like a sickle moon, with a rock pool at its centre. The tide was still exploring the spot, like a tongue searching for a filling.

  At first, during the second it takes to match shapes to words, Shaw thought a dolphin or a seal had become trapped amongst the rocks. Pale, smooth, curved: the body lay curled in a strangely foetal ball, a limb encased in a wreath of green seaweed. Then he noted the tightly curled hair, the reaching, articulated bones of a human hand, the sand imprinted on the calf muscle of the right leg, the white trunks emblazoned with a Flume! motif.

  Kersk lay face down, his back white in the flat noon sunshine.

  Shaw knelt in the wet sand, turning the body over by the shoulder, feeling the coldness of the flesh and a hint of immobility, or stiffness, in the joints. The skin, marbled with blue veins, seemed solid and heavy, so that Shaw was astonished at how difficult it was to drag him on to dry sand, a hand under each armpit.

  Valentine ushered the crowd back as Shaw administered a series of rapid chest pumps. It felt, and indeed was, utterly futile. Once, at university, where he’d volunteered for the lifeboat at Calshot, he’d helped haul a tourist out of the current in the Solent. Three of them had got him on to the beach, and as Shaw had applied a violent, downward, rhythmic pressure, he’d actually been able to feel the man’s blood pulsing round the body, and had watched the colour return to his face, and then the flickering, miraculous flutter of the eyelids.

  This felt different in a profoundly disturbing way. Theo’s flesh felt solid, as if the blood had set in his arteries and veins. No hint of air troubled his lips as Shaw savagely compressed his lungs. The corpse – and Shaw had no doubt that it was now a corpse – appeared profoundly airless. The strangest aspect of the body was the placid face, and most of all the eyes, which were open in mild surprise, although one was full of seawater and Shaw could not bring himself to brush it dry.

  It was the face of a man who had not expected to die.

  The sickle-shaped crowd parted, and as Shaw stood, he saw that Valentine held the hand of a young woman, but she pulled free and ran towards the body of her lover.

  FORTY-SIX

  Ava told t
hem Theo’s story: a tale of love, but not just between them.

  Kersk was, in fact, Ukrainian, from Sevastopol, not Romanian, and he had a childhood sweetheart called Oleysa. Ava had once found two pictures amongst Theo’s things when she’d moved in and started taking the washing to the launderette: one showed them crushed into a passport photo booth, their faces pressed together; the other was a shot taken in the sea, both of them pointing towards a pod of dolphin fins, breaking an oily grey surface, a distant warship a shadow on the horizon.

  Oleysa was Russian, her father in the navy based in the port, her mother a chambermaid at one of the hotels on the golden strand that had once catered for the Soviet elite, flocking to the Black Sea Riviera from freezing Minsk or desolate, ice-locked Archangel. They’d met aged fourteen, swimming off the beach in summer.

  Theo had told Ava all of this when they’d first met, trying to make it sound as mundane as the rest of the family history, just the kind of biographical detail a boyfriend would tell a girlfriend on the first night they spent together: fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, cousins and old girlfriends – he was comfortable sharing it all.

  ‘Sometimes, in his sleep, he’d say her name,’ said Ava, her eyes on the sea, as Shaw poured her more coffee. She hadn’t shed a tear as yet, and her eyes were bright, even eager. ‘Sometimes there was an email too, and I’d hear it ping, and he’d slip outside on to the balcony, or go down to the yard, and I stole a look once, and saw his face, lit by the screen, and the way he seemed to drink in the glow.’ She took in a sudden gasp of air then, as if she’d forgotten to breathe.

  Theo’s story was the story of his generation, the Ukrainians displaced by the Russian invasion. They’d imprisoned his father, a merchant who’d traded European textiles into Russia, as his father had done, and his father, from a wooden warehouse on the waterfront embellished with a frieze of bears and eagles.

  Theo, just seventeen, had received a letter telling him he had been conscripted into the army of the new autonomous republic of Crimea – a puppet state of the Kremlin. Oleysa and her family moved to a new secure compound by the docks. The lovers were forbidden to see each other.

  Once, when he had drunk too much vodka at the Flume! Christmas party, he’d told Ava about their last meeting. They’d said goodbye in the water off the beach, at midnight, swimming away from each other in the moonlight. It seemed to Ava like an impossibly romantic parting, and she’d despised its childish perfection, and Theo too, for the crass insensitivity of reliving it now. Realizing too late he’d said too much, he never mentioned Oleysa again.

  The Kersks’ mercantile business was sold, and Theo’s father was deported to Kiev. But there was to be no such an escape for Theo: his army papers arrived, a time and place was stipulated, and he would be taken by truck to a new training facility to the north. His father, with forty-eight hours of liberty before his exile, converted part of the sale price of the business into dollars. Theo was smuggled aboard a Greek coaster bound for Istanbul, where he hid himself within the great Syrian diaspora, migrating across Europe by train and on foot. In Macedonia he purchased false papers, emerging in Germany as Theo Kersk, born in Galati, Romania. As a registered EU citizen, he entered the UK by ferry at Hull, and began searching for work, moving down the East Coast from town to town, until he reached Hunstanton.

  ‘Tad gave him a job, although I think he suspected his papers were false. He never said, but I think Theo confided in him. I don’t know that, but I felt it. It’s odd that water – just the love of it – can bring people so close, and perhaps he was a father figure.’ She sipped the coffee. ‘I think he told him too much.’

  At last a tear fell, and Shaw wondered if it was that small betrayal – that Theo had shared his secret – which had released her grief.

  ‘Tad made him do stuff. Theo said that if he refused, Tad would have no choice but to go to the police. If that happened, they’d send him back, and he’d lose me. So he did what he had to do. That’s what told me: that it was blackmail. Setting the fire, out there. I think he deliberately botched it, so that no one would be hurt. Then Tad told him to follow the Dutchman, the one looking for his father’s ship. He was sniffing around, asking awkward questions, and Tad wanted him scared off.’ She shook her head, as if trying to dislodge a memory. ‘He followed him out on a dive one evening. It was easy for Theo, of course, because he could free dive, so there was no kit, no gear, no clumsy oxygen tanks. The idea was to frighten him: intimidate him. It all went wrong. When he came home, he had bruises, a knife wound here.’ She ran a slender fingertip across her hip. ‘Theo didn’t mean to kill him, but he said that the Dutchman panicked, thrashing wildly, and so Theo just held on until he was still.

  ‘He lay in my bed and cried for him. After that, there was no going back. Tad told him that if he didn’t sabotage the diving chamber, the truth would be out, that the immigration authorities would know all about his false papers. Today was supposed to be the end of it. One last task, Tad had promised. And a kiss – I got a kiss this morning, which was rare, and now, of course, I see it for what it was: a goodbye kiss, and a betrayal.’

  Valentine, who’d been using the landline in the café, joined them, pulling out one of the beach chairs, folding his raincoat carefully on his lap. ‘St James’ have got witness support to send a car,’ he said. ‘They can take you home, Ava, and they’ve got a call through to your mum …’

  But Ava hadn’t finished her story. ‘Theo lied, you see,’ she said. ‘I don’t think it was blackmail at all. Tad’s like a father to him; he wouldn’t have told the police. Theo was paid, you see, in euros. I found these.’ She had a beach bag, and she unpacked it now: a swimsuit, a towel, a book, sun lotion, a neat packed lunch – sandwiches, crisps, two apples. ‘We were going to meet on the beach when he came ashore. A celebration. To mark the end of it. I’d have asked him then myself, but now I never will.’

  She held out an airline travel wallet, with a ticket inside, issued by British Airways, in the name of Oleysa Oboyan, one way from Istanbul to London, Gatwick. There was an addressed envelope, torn open, but ready to post, with an address in Cyrillic. ‘Inside there was money, in euros, and the note gives her the name of a ship and a time. The flight arrives Monday next week. I wonder when he would have told me. If he would have told me. So now I’ll never know what I was. I know what I’d like to do, but you won’t let me. I’d like to send the letter, and the money, and the ticket, and then I could go to Gatwick, and I could meet her at the barrier and tell her that we’re both alone now.’

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Valentine trundled the Mazda past the entrance to the South Beach caravan park and for the first time they noticed Beach News, the shop George Keeble had run for nearly forty years. An out-of-sync neon sign flashed 24 Hours and the window was full of videos and lurid magazines. A wire-mesh guard covered the door, and a security camera hung from a frayed cable over a new sign which read Tattoos.

  A security prison van stood on Empire Bank, outside the Keebles’ bungalow. The driver, in a scruffy uniform, leant on the bonnet, smoking, while Esther Keeble enjoyed the sun, sitting in her own front garden on a whitewashed bench, a small old-fashioned suitcase set neatly to one side.

  ‘They wouldn’t tell me where George died,’ she said to Shaw, standing stiffly, her voice betraying again that subtle hint of determination. ‘I don’t understand. It’s cruel. I just want to know.’

  Valentine produced a set of keys and let them inside. The hallway smelt of pizza and the now ageing, ingrained reek of nicotine.

  She stood in the doorway, surveying the room, no doubt noting the gas fire, set to one side to reveal the empty flue where her husband’s suicide note had stipulated he’d hidden the rat poison: proof, if they needed it, of George Keeble’s guilt.

  She seemed reluctant to cross the threshold. ‘I knew he wouldn’t cook,’ she said. ‘They deliver, of course,’ she said, picking up a pizza box. ‘Otherwise, he’d have gone for fish and chips. George l
iked his food. We had this joke – I suppose. I’d bring in the plates, and he’d be sitting at the table and he’d hold his knife and fork vertically in his hands, ready to eat. We always laughed. So what’s that – once, twice, three times a day for a lifetime. Maybe we didn’t laugh, but there was always a smile. Do you know where he died, Sergeant?’

  ‘They found him in his chair, Mrs Keeble. Just here. We’re sorry for your loss.’

  The office swivel chair, stuffed with cushions, still held his shape.

  Through the front window they saw PPC Clay pull up in a blue-and-white patrol car. Valentine watched as she reached over the seats to take a plastic bag from the back seat.

  Shaw asked the security guard to make tea in the kitchenette while they gathered around George’s chair, all reluctant to take a seat – any seat – in case one of them was left with the office swivel. Valentine felt he’d been inveigled into some grim, sick version of musical chairs.

  Shaw pointed at the forensic evidence bag Clay had brought in from the car.

  She held it up, and they could all see the box of Milk Tray. Shaw took it carefully and placed it on the mantelpiece beside a framed picture of George Keeble receiving a medal outside the lifeboat house at Old Hunstanton. Shaw’s eye lingered on the image, noting the familiar glint of the RNLI’s bronze medal, and the date: 14th June 1953.

  ‘PC Clay will explain,’ prompted Shaw, and Valentine noted the pointed omission of the P for probationary.