At Death's Window

by Jim Kelly

  Thunder rolled over them from a bank of clouds which had formed as if by black magic right over their heads. Scenarios flashed like newspaper headlines before Leo’s eyes: all of them dead, the children saved but him dead, and worst of all – all of them dead except him.

  He checked his watch: thirty-one minutes had passed since the woman had waved from Gun Hill.

  ‘OK,’ he said, and this time his voice was an odd half-octave too high so that all the children looked at their father. ‘Let’s just have a plan. First of all – Lucilla.’ He forced himself to look at her. She was still clutching a see-through plastic bucket full of the murky outlines of muddy crabs. ‘All this water is pouring in – see? It’s flooding down towards the village. You can swim. When the time comes I’ll take your coat and wellies, and you need to just float away. Let the tide take you in, Luce – all right, sweetheart? Don’t fight it – float until you come aground, like a bottle with a message in it.’

  Lucilla’s eyes flooded with tears. ‘What message?’

  ‘Just get yourself safely on dry land and then find someone as quickly as you can.’

  He turned away because she didn’t move a muscle in response. ‘Paulo,’ he said.

  The boy had his head buried in his father’s waterproofs. ‘I can’t swim,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ said Leo. ‘That doesn’t matter. People float. You can’t stop yourself.’ He forced himself to chuckle. ‘Honestly, once your feet leave the bottom you’ll bob like a cork. Just stick with me and Cornelia.’

  The waves had been breaking just out to sea, beyond the gap, but now one didn’t break, it rolled over the submerged sandbar at the harbour mouth and carried on, so that they all had to step forward, accommodating the sudden swell. Cornelia screamed.

  The wave went on to break in the reeds beyond them.

  ‘What about the man, Dad?’ asked Paulo.

  They all had their back to the floating corpse, but Leo had been stealing glances. Because of the rigor and the tethering rope holding the feet down, the body was upright as it rose in the pit of the channel, and the outstretched hands and arms were now sticking up out of the water, the head appearing then disappearing with each wave. The heavy skull flopped on its shattered neck. It was an unnatural sight, and disturbing, because it looked as if the man was striving to rise out of the flood – like one of those nuclear missiles, bound for the sky, or a God of the deep ascending, like Poseidon.

  A fresh wave broke around them and Leo pulled them all to him, his plan disintegrating. He was too scared to pray, so he just kissed Cornelia’s hair.

  Which is how Peter Shaw first saw the D’Asti family – a circle of silent figures, half submerged, in mid-stream, the man bending down with that strange bird-like pecking motion which signals a kiss. The picture was etched on his retina thanks to a blinding flash of white lightning.

  THREE

  Flyer was doing twenty-six knots – close to top speed – and had just cleared Scolt Head, so that Overy Creek now opened out to view, a tumult of choppy milky-green water. The emergency call, made thirty-two minutes earlier via the police control room at Lynn, had come from a domestic landline on Burnham Overy Staithe, at the Hero public house. It reported a family of three, knee-deep, apparently stranded on a sandbar. At a distance of a hundred and fifty yards Shaw could see that the male adult was holding a small child, so that made four. Using the hovercraft joystick he reduced power to the two rear propellers, and dipping the port ailerons brought Flyer round in a wide arc to approach the family against the tide.

  The earpiece in his helmet buzzed: ‘Target sited fifteen thirty-one hours. Sea state moderate. Over.’

  With a four-man crew Flyer still had room for six passengers. Henderson, the navigator, had charts open in the cabin. His voice was next on air: ‘Targets standing. Water here now four foot to four foot six. Touch down not on. Repeat: not on.’

  Shaw now had the Flyer facing north, seawards, edging towards the stranded family. The water surface was exceptionally difficult to navigate. A sharp on-shore wind had blown up as soon as the waves had started clearing the submerged sandbank at the harbour bar. The sea was pitted with troughs and white horses, the spray blowing free in the air. The dashboard gave Shaw a sea temperature reading of ten degrees Celsius – closer to the summer average than the winter; a factor which had probably saved this family their lives. The adult male – presumably the father – was waving with his free hand and holding a child with the other. The two other children were holding on to his legs.

  Shaw’s single eye scanned the seascape ahead. The big danger was plow – running the superstructure of the hovercraft into an oncoming wave. This could pitch them all forward violently and it would cut the speed drastically, possibly spinning Flyer off course. A touchdown was impossible, so he’d have to bring the hovercraft alongside and hold her position in moving water.

  He weaved through the oncoming waves, increasing the speed to twenty-eight knots, searching for that crucial moment when he could achieve a dynamic equilibrium, matching the forward thrust of the engines against the force of the floodwater funnelling into Overy Creek from the open sea.

  The two standing children had their heads pressed against their father’s leg, a free hand over exposed ears, trying to cut out the noise. Even with his flight helmet on Shaw could hear the high-pitched whine of the twin turbo-diesel engines. Increasing the power incrementally, he edged the hovercraft forward until he was ten feet from the family. Henderson joined crewmen Griffon and Cotteril at the rail, and they each reached out over the inflated sponsons to grab a child – the youngest last, straight from her father’s arms.

  As soon as his children were safe something cut out in Leo D’Asti’s nervous system: his right knee gave way, the leg folded, and he slipped into the current, so that Shaw was just able to glimpse his head as the body swept past on the port side. Despite the noise of the engines he heard the man call out as he slipped past on the port side: ‘Help me, please.’

  Shaw swung Flyer round in pursuit.

  There was a flash of lightning and an immediate thunderclap. The bolt shook the instrument panel and the intercom buzzed with static. Henderson brought the children into the cabin and strapped them quickly into a low steel bench with bucket seats. Shaw kept his eyes fixed on the man ahead in the water, swimming, his head ducking, arms floundering. His torso position was very upright so that his head was clear of the water, and Shaw guessed that his legs might be deadweights, dragging him down.

  Full throttle, with the wind behind, he reached thirty knots, telling Griffon and Cotteril to get a light rescue net to the side and to cast it when they were alongside. Shaw lost sight of the man’s bobbing head and then saw the net cast against the blue-black sky.

  ‘He’s missed it,’ Griffon said on the intercom.

  Henderson was on the prow, his boots up against Shaw’s windscreen, so he was able to lunge out with a rescue pole and hook. D’Asti surfaced once, thrust an arm out and caught the loop. With his safety harness attached to the forward rail, Henderson was able to lean out over the water, lifting D’Asti by the shoulder and swinging him over the sponson, where Cotteril and Griffon gathered him in.

  ‘Swimmer secure,’ said Henderson.

  They took him down the side and on to the rescue deck. In his side mirrors Shaw saw the man’s face: blue, stretched but unnaturally animated. He swung round in the pilot’s seat to face the children. ‘Your dad’s safe. See?’ All three twisted in their seats to look through the glass along the deck. Their father lay like the dying Nelson in the arms of Cotteril and Griffon, but they already had a bottle of water to his lips, which would revive him.

  Shaw took Flyer on an elliptical path towards the coastal dunes below Gun Hill and ran her up the slight incline of the beach, cutting the engine before the forward motion was spent, allowing the hovercraft to sink into its skirts. The silence, the knowledge that they were off the water, was like a magic spell on the D’Asti family.


  Within minutes they were all sitting together in a huddle with hot drinks, under a single blanket.

  The father kept saying he was sorry: ‘Really. It’s crazy – I know what it looks like. Some idiot dad taking his kids crabbing in a tidal surge. But it wasn’t like that.’ He stopped, tears welling up in his eyes. ‘We’d have been back on the bank in time but we saw a body – out on the sand. So we had to see. And then it was too late.’

  Shaw had his eye on the sonar, tracking the electric storm as it drifted along the coast. ‘A man’s body?’ he asked, swinging round in his seat.

  The children chimed in, agreeing with their father. The windscreen was covered in sea spray so Shaw set the wiper going and the scene cleared. The cloud cover was almost complete and late afternoon light made all the greys bleed into the inky blacks.

  ‘He was tied down to a weight, something under the mud. Right on top of the big bank,’ said Leo. ‘As the water came in he sort of stood up. Last time I looked you could still see his arms. There …’

  Shaw unclipped the locks on the windscreen and tilted the glass out so that they had a perfect, uninterrupted view. A grey world of rippled sea, low hills and the reeds.

  A hundred yards distant Shaw could see something. He took the binoculars mounted on the dashboard and used them to hone in on the spot with his good eye, over the water.

  He saw two hands, streaked with black mud, held aloft, as if in surrender.

  FOUR

  The Silent Lawyer stood beside the floodlit medieval London Gate, the old entrance through the walls into the port of Lynn from the south. King’s Lynn to the outside world; Lynn Regis for centuries – the dusty, down-at-heel capital of West Norfolk – gateway to the northern coast. By way of welcome the pub sign showed a man lying in a coffin, still decked out in his courtroom finery of black frock coat, white lace collar and dusted wig. The gate itself, a massive double bastion of brick faced with ashlar stone, was bathed in the amber glare of a floodlight set up in the town cemetery, just beyond the old walls. The spikes of the portcullis showed as shadowy teeth in the narrow archway.

  Lynn could be a rough town, and the London Road was its roughest street. Pubs like the Silent Lawyer had a standing order with the glaziers: every Sunday morning they’d send round a van, plate glass stacked to the outside gantry, to repair the damage from Friday and Saturday. A reputation for Wild West saloons glamourized the neighbourhood’s seedy urban problems: prostitution, alcohol and street crime. Further down the road the pubs had no windows at all, just blackout boards.

  DS George Valentine had lived off the London Road most of his life. These were his streets and his pubs, which was why he’d agreed to meet in the Silent Lawyer. There was one window seat, to the back of what had once been the public bar, commanding a view of the two doors to the street. In position at least twenty minutes early, with a pint of IPA, he’d sat and considered the rest of his Saturday night: cards in the Artichoke, a curry, Match of the Day.

  Gordon Lee, chief reporter of the Lynn Express, was on time. As the frosted-glass door swung open Valentine heard the maritime clock on St Margaret’s chime the hour; the medieval clock face showed stars and the moon, and indicated the turn of the tide, and although Valentine hated water, and especially seawater, it had helped regulate his life for the best part of half a century.

  Lee was a Londoner, part of the great sixties exodus from the East End – early fifties, bald, short, bustling, almost heroically awkward. As he advanced on Valentine his trailing raincoat caught a glass which fell to the floorboards and smashed. Five minutes later the barman had swept up the shards and Lee was sitting with a pint in front of him, a whisky chaser in his fist.

  ‘Cheers,’ he said, downing the spirit then readjusting the pint on its mat. ‘Thanks for showing up. Like I said, we need to talk.’

  Valentine had known Lee since his first days on CID in the seventies. Their equally lacklustre careers had tracked each other like falling stars. Looking at him now, Valentine had to remind himself why he actually liked the journalist. When Valentine’s wife had died of cancer, aged forty-two, very few people had bothered to knock on the door of the house in Greenland Street, even though they all must have known that he was inside and alone. That first night Lee had called, and insisted he walk to the Red House on the corner. No story, no agenda, just an hour talking about nothing. It had pretty much saved George Valentine’s life.

  ‘So, Gordon, if I understood your message, you’ve had a letter from some bloke who won’t give his name about some burglaries on the coast?’ asked Valentine, looking away to the flat-screen TV to catch a corner being taken at the Emirates on Sky Sport. ‘Did you really need to drag me down the pub on a Saturday night for that? It’s my keep fit class, and I never miss it.’

  The implicit irony in this remark was obvious. DS Valentine was fifty-eight, a lifetime smoker, who if required to run a mile would have clocked a time nearer four hours than four minutes. His skull was like a hatchet blade, oddly two-dimensional, so that if he moved his chin a little left or right, his head presented a different aspect; it swung back now to Lee, bored with the TV.

  Lee put a cigarette between his teeth. ‘It’s a bit tastier than that, George. Shall we take the air?’

  The yard was concrete with a brand-new picnic table which held an umbrella branded CANCER RESEARCH.

  Valentine took a light from the reporter.

  ‘Like I said, George. Letters. Note the plural. Same bloke, three times. Well, same writing. Otherwise anonymous.’

  ‘Who they from?’

  ‘Very funny, George.’

  Lynn CID was currently engaged in a major inquiry into thirteen related break-ins along the north Norfolk coast – all at second homes. So far there had been a complete, and successful, media blackout on any details. Nothing had leaked out. The decision to keep the whole thing under wraps had been personally authorized by the chief constable. When Valentine had got Lee’s text stating that the paper had been tipped off about this mini crime-wave, he’d talked the implications through with his boss, DI Peter Shaw. The best way forward, they decided, was a chat over a pint. Privately, they had both lobbied the chief constable to lift the media blackout anyway. Shaw had put his views in writing in a private note to the chief constable’s office. Gordon Lee didn’t know it yet, but this was one of his lucky days.

  ‘Just so we understand each other,’ said Valentine. ‘I’m not confirming we’ve had any burglaries, OK? I’m just listening. You’re just talking.’

  ‘Three letters so far, George. Weird stuff – I can’t let you see ’em. Bartlett’s on some kick about reader confidentiality.’

  Bartlett was the editor, newly appointed, a whizz-kid from Liverpool, barely old enough to vote. Early retirement was Gordon Lee’s favourite subject of conversation as a result. He had Valentine’s complete sympathy. One of the less attractive features of growing old was being told what to do by children.

  ‘Weird in what way? Green ink? Rhyming couplets?’

  ‘Political. The writer claims the burglaries are politically motivated. That this is all just the start of a violent campaign aimed at second homeowners. Apparently they leave slogans daubed in the houses – GO HOME, RICH SCUM – I don’t know, stuff like that. It’s a fucking good story, George – you know that as well as I do. Bartlett wanted to just print them, running a story on the front. I said I’d have a word first. I owe you that.’

  Lee’s inherent decency did not preclude him operating as a seasoned hack. There was no way the paper would run the story without some form of corroboration – or denial – from the police. Equally, there was no way that Valentine, or any official police source, could deny the allegations in the letters. The burglaries were politically motivated: fact. At least this way they got to control the story.

  They went back inside and Lee bought the second round. Valentine noted that he didn’t treat himself to a chaser.

  A group of underage drinkers was playing pool on a blue t
able. Otherwise, the bar was empty, save for a man at the bar with two Alsatians on leads, dribbling through muzzles.

  Valentine put a folder on the table and extracted a brown envelope containing an A4 scene-of-crime picture. It was stamped with a reference number and date, and signed by the head of the St James’ forensic unit, Tom Hadden, and the chief investigating officers, DI Peter Shaw and DS George Valentine. The sight of his own signature made Valentine pause. Taking in a quick lungful of air he nearly choked on the thin thread of skunk he detected. Looking round the bar he found the source – one of the kids playing pool had a spliff rolled behind one ear.

  He put one finger on the print, the nail clipped and clean.

  The picture showed a large sitting room in a period cottage. There was evidence of attempted burglary: the drawers of two tallboys were pulled out, sheets hanging out of one. Several ornaments on the mantelpiece had been knocked over, and there was smashed crockery on the carpet. The picture over the fire – a landscape of Holkham Beach – hung at an angle.

  But the most striking feature of the room was the slogan written on the wall in what looked like a spray-can red, over two lines:

  GO BACK TO YOUR

  FIRST HOME

  ‘And this,’ said Valentine, producing a second picture. This was an outside shot of what looked like a Victorian rectory, surrounded by extensive gardens. One of the windows on the frontage had been smashed and the wooden sash was broken. Daubed in black under this window on the whitewashed plaster was the slogan:

  BANKERS GO HOME

  ‘And – the final exhibit.’