At Death's Window

by Jim Kelly

  This was a garden wall, about sixty yards of weathered local brick, running in front of a medieval farmhouse painted pink. The letters, in black, were about a foot high, all capitals, and as neat as a schoolteacher’s instructions for homework:

  THIS HOUSE COULD BE HOME TO FIVE LOCAL FAMILIES – NOT A COUPLE WHO TURN UP TWICE A YEAR

  A sheet hung from one of the house’s upstairs windows.

  Lee held the picture up to the light. ‘This is a photocopy, right?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Copied where?’

  Smart question. Photocopiers were as individual as fingerprints.

  ‘A print centre off the ring road. It’s not traceable.’

  ‘Quality’s crap.’

  ‘You’re not getting originals. They’ve gone to the Home Office.’

  Lee drank the rest of his pint but he didn’t take his eyes off Valentine: ‘What’s in this for you?’

  ‘Control. If the story’s going to break we’d like it to include certain facts. Primarily – and you’ll see this if you read the file – we have a description of one of the burglars from an eye witness. It’s hardly compelling, but it’s a start. We need publicity, Gordon. This crowd know what they’re doing. We’ve had nearly fifteen break-ins and no forensics. The only way we’re going to catch them at this rate is luck. That’s not a very convincing Plan A, is it?’

  ‘Why the blackout up to now?’

  Valentine got the third round.

  Back in his seat he filled his lungs. Forty cigarettes a day for thirty years had taken its toll on George Valentine. Long sentences were getting harder to finish. ‘The chief constable wanted the existence of these slogans, left at the scene at the burglaries, kept under wraps. You can see his point of view. These slogans are being left for publicity. Note the absence of any obscenity: they could run in any paper, on TV, anywhere. That’s the point. It’s a political campaign. The chief constable takes exception to being used.’

  Lee made a face. ‘Why hasn’t someone locally seen the slogans and broken the story?’

  ‘They’ve all been inside buildings, or on private land, and in each case they’ve been whitewashed over or removed, admittedly with the owners’ consent, but not many people are willing to deny a police request, especially when they’re trying to deal with the emotional impact of having their home violated.’

  ‘Good story,’ said Lee. ‘Doesn’t matter which side you’re on. There’s six thousand second homes in the circulation area – at an average of three hundred thousand pounds a pop. A lot of businesses would close down without incomers. On the other hand, there’s plenty of people who don’t mind having a good moan about the Chelsea set, right? Coming up here, taking our homes. They’re like Poles with money.’

  He played with a new cigarette. ‘What they pinch then? Usual stuff?’

  ‘Sure. Jewellery, art, computers, gadgets, mechanical stuff, white goods. Booze. Anything they could sell on.’

  ‘And the chief constable orders a blackout on the lot just because he doesn’t like being dicked about? Really?’

  Valentine leant forward over his pint, his hatchet-like head extended forward on his neck like a praying mantis. This was the bit that really had to be off the record.

  ‘Between you and me, Gordon …’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. We never talked.’

  ‘The chief constable’s problem is Wales. Specifically, Wales in the seventies. You’ll recall that Welsh nationalists bombed nearly two hundred properties in an effort to make the principality a no-go area for the English – particularly the London rich. They objected to the English getting Welsh water, taking away their language, and then buying up property. Max Warren, chief constable, thinks if we let the story run we’ll have copycat burglaries, vandalism, arson. Do I need to paint the picture further?’

  ‘Sounds like Warren could do with an introduction to the real world,’ said Lee. ‘This is north Norfolk – not Kurdistan. Does he really think there’s a People’s Front of North Norfolk out there? What’s their ultimate goal – independence, with a capital in Little Pisspot? Mind you, I don’t understand most of the locals, so presumably they do have their own language. George – this is fantasy.’

  ‘Fantasy? Maybe. I didn’t tell you this, but you might like to look back at Warren’s CV. The chief constable was a DC in the Met in 1969. On the first of July that year he was seconded to Caernarvon for the investiture of the Prince of Wales. As you can imagine, the security was tight. At five-thirty a.m. that day a bomb went off near the railway station – two Welsh nationalists were killed planting the device. It’s one of those startling facts which gets forgotten. Violent Welsh nationalism died out, so we’ve airbrushed the history. But it did happen. DC Warren was detailed to organize clearing the scene. It was – according to press reports – a butcher’s shop on a railway line. Fantasy, or nightmare?’

  The pool player with the spliff miscued and the white ball jumped from the table, crashing to the bare boards, accompanied by an ironic cheer from the spectators.

  Valentine took out his mobile and put it on the tabletop. He was on call, the noise levels were rising, and he didn’t want to miss a text.

  ‘Warren came up here for a quiet life from the Met twenty years ago,’ he said. ‘They eventually made him CC because the bloke they really want is tied up with the Home Office in Northern Ireland – he’ll be free in two years. Warren’s keeping the chair warm. He wants a quiet life. He wants a knighthood. Only one thing can ruin that rosy scenario – this fucking story. This story, and its implications – which have not been lost on the Home Office either, it has to be said.’

  Lee looked blank, so Valentine spelt it out.

  ‘Who is north Norfolk’s most high-profile second homeowner, Gordon?’

  Lee’s eyes went out of focus, then snapped back to look the DS in the eye. ‘Oh, fuck. Right. Got it.’ He actually licked his lips, as if he could taste that front-page byline.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Valentine. ‘Her Majesty. Not so much second home as fifth, I think – or maybe sixth. It’s an interesting take on the whole question, of course – the country house. Nobody complained about them when they employed a hundred servants below stairs. And not just HM. Part of the Sandringham Estate has just been refurbished to provide a new home for Prince William, his wife Kate and their baby George.’

  ‘Anmer Hall.’

  ‘Correct.’

  Anmer was a one-horse village in the hills just north of Brancaster Staithe. The house was a late Georgian pile with an indeterminate number of rooms which the royal couple had indicated was inadequate for a family of three by proposing an extension.

  Guarding Anmer Hall and making sure its new occupants led a carefree life was Max Warren’s number one policing priority.

  Valentine’s mobile danced a tight circle on the Formica tabletop.

  The text read: Murder Inquiry. SOCO leaving Boal Quay in 15 minutes. Shaw.

  Valentine read it three times while Lee studied the pictures.

  ‘I have to go, Gordon.’ He pushed the pint away.

  Lee held up a hand. ‘One question. Same question. Why me?’

  ‘I need you to tell Bartlett a lie about the origins of the story. These pictures were sent to the Home Office. They’ve asked to be kept abreast of developments, which is clearly adding to the pressure on the chief constable. Havelock’s still on the Guardian, yes?’

  Steve Havelock had been a junior on the local rag before heading south for Fleet Street.

  ‘I want you to tell the newsdesk that you used contacts at the Guardian to get through to the Home Office. Back channels – whatever you call it. That’s the deal. The details, the photocopies, all came from the Home Office, via the Guardian. I don’t want my name to appear in the list of possible sources, let alone the probable ones.’

  As Valentine left he put his CID business card on the blue baize of the pool table by the elbow of the kid with the spliff.

  FIVE

&
nbsp; They put up the scene-of-crime tent on Mitchell’s Bank at nine-thirty p.m. that evening: a cube of white light in the darkness of Overy Creek. It looked as if a giant’s Chinese lantern had come to rest on the north Norfolk coast. At low water Mitchell’s Bank would no longer be an island, but linked by a damp, muddy path to the shore. Shaw had decided almost immediately that they couldn’t wait that long. Even as the tidal waters closed over the tethered victim he’d used the RNLI radio to put a message through to the Ark – West Norfolk’s forensic laboratory, at the St James’ HQ in Lynn. They had six hours in which mud, beach and reed would be exposed, before the next tide began to turn. They couldn’t afford to let the night pass.

  The police launch arrived on the scene shortly after dark. Shaw had flown Flyer back to Old Hunstanton. The D’Asti family were taken to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Lynn, care of a flying doctor helicopter trip from the beach in front of the lifeboat house. The father was suffering from shock and would remain overnight, while his wife was driving up from London to be with the children.

  Shaw returned to the scene of crime in the RNLI’s Atlantic 75 – an inshore fibreglass rescue boat. When he rounded the point by Scolt Head he could see that the waters had retreated enough to allow Hadden’s team to put up the forensic tent at the summit of Mitchell’s Bank. The night was moonless, clear and cool, so that the sandbanks and channels, the dunes and reeds, seemed to be illuminated solely by the wheeling planetarium of the stars, revealing a world of nearly-sea, threaded with nearly-land. The scene ahead of Shaw’s boat appeared to shimmer and change with each minute of the slowly falling tide, revealing sandbanks, islands, cockle beds, the brown, fibrous stumps of an ancient wood and the bones of a shipwreck under Gun Hill.

  Shaw cut the twin Yamaha seventy-five horsepower engines and let the boat skim up the leading edge of Mitchell’s Bank. He wore a full winter wetsuit and a safety helmet with a headlamp. His passenger wore a gabardine raincoat, black synthetic slip-ons and a lifebelt; DS George Valentine was not in his element. His discomfort levels had peaked when Peter Shaw had handed him a wetsuit outside the lifeboat house. George Valentine wasn’t even comfortable in his own skin.

  While Shaw ran a mooring rope to a black-and-white marker buoy, Valentine sat watching, immobile, until a match flared and the cigarette smoke drifted in the night like a ghost.

  ‘When you’re ready, George.’

  Shaw was scanning the scene, his feet set wider than his shoulders. His father, Jack Shaw, a DCI back in the seventies, had teamed up with a young DI called George Valentine. In ten years as the force’s crack detective unit they’d made a name for themselves – before it all came tumbling down with their last, ill-fated case. Shaw Senior had bequeathed his son a handful of working maxims, indispensable to the up-and-coming detective. Rule Number One: memorize the scene of crime, everything you can see, all you can touch, smell and hear, so that for the rest of the inquiry you can carry it around with you, as accessible as the family photo in your wallet. When his father had died, an invalid in the wake of the case that had broken his body as well as his spirit, Shaw had cleaned out the bedside table in the family home and found his wallet. It was no surprise to find he’d hadn’t carried a family photo.

  Valentine put a foot on the sand and the water welled up and over the lip of the slip-on. His first full step produced an obscene noise as water squirted out of the shoe in a series of miniature fountains. The DS swore under his breath, expertly keeping his cigarette in position in the left-hand corner of his mouth. He wasn’t happy. He didn’t like the seaside, hated boats, couldn’t swim, and had been looking forward to Match of the Day. He’d grumpily given Shaw a résumé of his interrupted meeting with the reporter. They’d agreed that the chief constable could be safely kept in the dark until the story broke. In fact, he could stay in the dark after the story broke.

  The DS’s raincoat flapped around his narrow thighs. ‘Where’s that?’ he asked, pointing at lights reflected across the water.

  ‘Burnham Marsh – nearest village.’

  ‘I thought we got the call from Burnham Overy Staithe?’

  ‘We did. That’s back inland along the towpath …’

  Shaw pointed directly south where they could see another cluster of lights a mile distant.

  ‘Burnham Marsh is much smaller – and the only way you can get there from here is by boat. Unless you want to pick your way over the sands at low tide. It’s a dead end. Pretty, picture-postcard and all that, but about as much life as a dead whelk.’

  Shaw was going to dismiss the thought of Burnham Marsh but he had long learned that Valentine had a genius for spotting the obvious.

  ‘However, now you mention it, George, we better think about house-to-house. If and when you can get a signal on the mobile let’s get the team together in the morning on the quayside at Burnham Marsh. Mobile incident room – the full works. I think we can be pretty certain our victim didn’t die of old age given D’Asti’s statement.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Get Paul Twine, in fact – he can be point.’

  ‘Point’ was a key position in any murder inquiry. The officer chosen had to act as a central gateway for all information. It required a first-class brain, an ability to work without sleep for long periods, and excellent organizational skills. Twine, a graduate-entry fast-tracker, was the obvious candidate.

  Valentine looked at his feet. ‘I sent Paul a text when I had a signal, before we left the lifeboat station, back at Hunstanton. He’s sorting the incident room now. Team will be on the road by six.’

  Shaw took a deep breath but couldn’t quite make himself say sorry. Before being busted down a rank – after becoming embroiled in Jack Shaw’s last, disastrous case – DI Valentine had a spotless CV boasting more murder inquiries than Shaw’s did GCSEs. Shaw really did need to learn to trust his right-hand man.

  ‘I’ve got Fiona and Mark too,’ said Valentine. ‘We’ll knock on a few doors early on. Most of ’em will be second homes anyway; it’s not like anyone’s got work to go to in the morning.’

  Shaw’s torchlight beam lit Valentine’s face. The DS’s skin was sallow, slightly grey in natural light, as if cigarette ash had caught in the folds.

  ‘I know a lot of people with money are crooks, George. But be careful. Some of them worked for their money. It’d be pretty dull up here on the coast without the Chelsea pound.’

  ‘Sir.’

  Shaw gave him an old-fashioned look. He’d known George Valentine for thirty years. He’d worked with him for six. He was a friend of the family, if a cantankerous one. The ‘sir’ dripped with irony.

  They approached the forensic tent, following a line of flags set on a path left by the SOCO team. As Shaw pulled aside the flap to enter, his heartbeat picked up. The sight of death was always a solemn moment, because Shaw felt the victim, despite death, still had the same rights as the living. Seeing the corpse as a mere assemblage of forensic evidence was the first step to the kind of corrosive cynicism that had produced George Valentine. And Shaw’s father. It was a fate he had promised Lena he would do everything in his power to avoid. For him the dead were owed urgency and respect.

  Inside they found two men: one dead, still held in the stiff pose of a diver, caked in the drying face-pack mud, while at his head knelt Tom Hadden, head of West Norfolk’s forensic science unit: strawberry blond, but losing his hair, with a slight lesion on his forehead where a skin cancer had been removed two years before. A former Home Office specialist based in Whitehall, Hadden had come north to escape a messy divorce, and to indulge a passion for coastal bird watching. It occurred to Shaw that he’d probably stood on Mitchell’s Bank before, watching the migrating geese fly over in D-Day formations.

  ‘Peter, George. Make yourselves at home.’

  Shaw prowled around the narrow space. If he did stand still he moved his head rapidly from side to side, a technique he’d learnt during occupational therapy after he’d lost the sight in his eye. The skull movement allowed his brain to
get a series of images of the same objects, from different angles, through a single lens, helping his brain build a three-dimensional picture. He was a human blackbird, eyeing an emerging worm before the kill.

  Valentine held his snuffed out cigarette between thumb and finger, fishing a plastic evidence bag out of his raincoat. His eyes were focused on a point about three feet in front of his nose, anywhere in fact that was not the victim’s face. We all have an appointment with death, but George Valentine suspected his was closer than most. Fear of death did not haunt him. He’d stood over a hundred murder victims in a thirty-year career in CID. It was just the thought that if his own death came now even he would have to judge his life a failure.

  Hadden watched Valentine stash the cigarette. ‘Next time I do an autopsy on a lung cancer victim I’ll give you a bell, George.’

  ‘Don’t bother, Doc.’ Hadden wasn’t a medical doctor and disliked the appellation, which encouraged Valentine to use it. ‘What’s the point, anyway? I could give up then find myself like this bloke. I’m only guessing, but I don’t think the immediate cause of death is a daily intake of forty Silk Cut.’

  Hadden was using a metal spatula to lever the dead man’s head from left to right. The bones of the spine grated slightly and Valentine looked up at the stretched white polyester ceiling. In the autopsy room back at the Ark – the force’s forensic lab – he always watched the clock when they opened up the corpse. Here he had nothing to rest an eye on – just four white walls, a white ceiling. The way in which his eyes just slipped off the reflective surface was beginning to make him feel sick.

  ‘OK. You’ll want to know when he died, Peter, and – as ever – I won’t be able to tell you. Justina might, but only after an autopsy. A guess? Rigor’s passing. The water temperature is ten degrees centigrade. I think he’s been dead at least twenty-four hours.’

  ‘Why’s he like that – stretched out?’ asked Valentine, licking his upper lip, wishing he could have that cigarette back.

  ‘If the body was here, on this spot, twenty-four hours ago, then the intervening tide would have lifted him off the mud. His feet are roped to a lead net weight. We’ll get it out once we move the corpse. Once underwater his limbs have floated up, the arms, the hands, reaching up, as it were, for the surface. Rigor set in then – hence the diver’s position. It’s wearing off now.’