At Death's Window

by Jim Kelly

  Warren had no neck, plump butcher’s fingers, and a chest admirably suited to the chief constable’s uniform. He’d come north from the Met in the 1990s to help clean up West Norfolk after a series of PR disasters – one of which was the failure of Shaw’s father, in partnership with George Valentine – to secure a conviction in a high-profile child murder case. The judge had implied that the pair might even have been tempted to plant evidence during the investigation, a suggestion that had ended Jack Shaw’s career and led to Valentine’s banishment to rural policing for a decade. Shaw Senior and Valentine were the problem then, and Max Warren had been the answer.

  Jack Shaw, bedridden with the cancer that had finally killed him, had once told his son that it gave him some lingering pleasure to imagine Warren in retirement, guarding his bungalow garden in Sheringham from raids launched by local kids with an eye on his gnomes. It was a cruel caricature, but there was no doubt Warren, who’d arrived tough and streetwise, had rapidly gone to bureaucratic seed. Jack Shaw’s name had ultimately been cleared of any corruption – as had George Valentine’s – but Shaw’s father had died under a cloud. Warren, by contrast, was looking forward to his own parking space at the golf club, marked with simple understatement: Sir Max.

  Shaw didn’t sit down. He’d made that mistake once before and learnt his lesson.

  ‘Take a seat, Peter. But first off, shut the sodding door.’

  Warren sat like a Buddha, his perfectly ironed shirt pressed up against the edge of the desk.

  ‘I’ve got twenty minutes before I have to get a train to London. Meeting with the Home Secretary at seven-thirty tomorrow morning. A brief update would be delightful. I’m presuming we have a murder inquiry on our hands.’

  There was a tapping at the window as pigeons flew in, crowding along the ledge. Shaw recalled that the collective noun for pigeons was a ‘kit’, but he decided this item of trivia was unlikely to brighten the chief constable’s day.

  Shaw had learnt one thing from his father: how to avoid being intimidated by authority. He took a deep breath. ‘I wanted to see you because I don’t think it’s feasible to keep a lid on the second-homes story, sir. The murder at Overy Creek is almost certainly linked to a series of burglaries at Burnham Marsh. Not a few houses, sir; the entire village – seventeen properties. Political slogans have been left in several.’

  Shaw had decided on this tactic in order to make it quite clear, when the story broke in tomorrow’s local paper, that he and Valentine were innocent of the leak.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ said Warren, his neck reddening instantly. ‘Tell me. The murder’s linked – you’re sure?’

  ‘No. Not sure. As I said – almost certainly linked. I’d like to proceed with building an ID picture from a statement we have from a witness – a woman who saw one of the burglars up close. I’d like to interview her, see what other facial details she can recall beyond the bald outline she’s given. That would give us a good start with the media – the face, in three-D.’

  Warren had started stubbing one of his black brogues against his desk so that the surface of a cup of tea he had before him filled with concentric rings.

  ‘There has also been a development. An escalation,’ Shaw added. ‘The burglars left a threat. Next time, they implied, arson is on the menu. I’m sure the expression “come home to a real fire” needs no further elaboration from me, sir.’

  ‘Oh, shite,’ said Warren, standing up so quickly his chair toppled over.

  He left it lying on the carpet and went to the window, pushing one side open and lunging at the pigeons.

  Abandoning the birds, he turned back to Shaw. ‘This is not going to happen here. Not on my watch, Peter. They’re bluffing.’

  ‘If you say so, sir.’

  ‘Don’t be fucking cute, Peter. Anyway, things are slightly out of our hands on the media front. Bob Bartlett asked to see me last night at his office, impertinent little tosser that he is. The paper’s got the story, pretty much. If he wanted to he could run it tomorrow. The upshot is I’ve offered him the lot – pictures, interviews, the works. Entire thing done up in sodding wrapping paper like a Christmas present. It’ll run a week tomorrow. That gives you a week to catch the bastards. Once we arrest someone Bartlett can run the stuff next edition – but at least we don’t look like a bunch of pricks. You can have any manpower you want; forensic budget is yours to blow.’

  Shaw didn’t move a muscle.

  ‘Would you like to know why I have taken this course of action, Peter?’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Bob came to me with these,’ said Warren. He flipped open a manila file on his blotter, then splayed a set of black-and-white photocopies with his fat fingers. They were the scene-of-crime pictures from several of the earlier break-ins where slogans had been left on walls.

  Shaw tried to look interested and shocked, but given he’d passed these same prints on to Valentine to leak to the paper in the first place he was struggling not to look smug.

  ‘Source?’ he asked.

  ‘Good question.’ Warren put a finger on the nearest black-and-white forensic picture. ‘I hope and trust the Marsham Street “fingerprint” – if I can call it that – means what it appears to mean: that this is a problem for the smarmy public school bastards who comprise most of the sodding Civil Service. Either way, it is extremely urgent that we resolve this case. By urgent I mean within days.’

  ‘And the rag’s going to keep it, is it? Not flog it to Fleet Street?’

  The thought of this story on the front page of the Telegraph, copies left beside members’ chairs in the Carlton and the Reform, and the Commons tea rooms, prompted Warren to cover his face in his hands. Shaw got the strong impression the chief constable was making a conscious effort to regulate his breathing.

  ‘Yes. I told Bartlett that we were close to an arrest and that any publicity would endanger the operation. I said if he went ahead tomorrow, as he planned, I would make a statement to the effect that he’d blown our chances of catching the Chelsea Burglars. And, as I said, I offered him the inside track and plenty of official quotes from me, not to mention a paragraph from the Home Secretary herself. That did it. He can smell a media award. He’s an ambitious little bastard.

  ‘That leaves us seven days. I wanted a month. It was as good as I could get. Apparently the source is a London hack with contacts in the Home Office, works for the Guardian. He’s prepared to hold off until a week on Tuesday – not that it’s a blistering national scoop. Not yet, anyway. But if one of these jokers does light a fire, who knows? TV, nationals, radio. We’ll be up to our fucking armpits with the scum.’

  Shaw didn’t respond. Warren’s skin colour was high. Shaw was no doctor but even he could diagnose a blood pressure problem. Perhaps he wouldn’t live long enough to see Buckingham Palace.

  ‘Is George pulling his weight on this?’ asked the chief constable. ‘Do you need a decent DS to bolster the team?’

  ‘There isn’t a better DS on the force,’ said Shaw. It was the loyal thing to say, and it was the truth, so he put some genuine feeling behind the answer. Valentine and Warren had what could only be described as a strictly professional relationship. They hated each other with a passion. Valentine had a way of looking through the chief constable which was tantamount to insubordination.

  ‘Also,’ continued Shaw, ‘this is George’s manor – he spent ten years out at Wells. He knows every village, every farmhouse.’

  ‘Every pub.’

  ‘He’s pulling his weight, sir, every last ounce of it.’

  Shaw smiled. The reference to weight was a sly one. Warren was sixteen stone and gaining. If anyone on the force wasn’t pulling their weight it was the chief constable.

  ‘Right. No excuses then. What happens next? Is the victim one of the burglars?’

  ‘Too early to say. Although there is some circumstantial evidence. That’s down to George, by the way. Victim had an old credit card in his shirt-front pocket. One side worn. Apparently
it’s standard equipment for burglars – you run it down the door jamb and it can spring a lock. One movement.’

  Shaw sliced the air with his right hand as a chopper.

  ‘I’m going to split the inquiry into two,’ he said. ‘It’s just possible the murder is not associated with the burglaries. We have to keep an open mind. So one half of the team looks for the killer – concentrating on the victim, CCTV, suspects, the samphire trade. I think you’re aware of the background on that …’

  Warren nodded.

  ‘If it turns out the dead man is a samphire picker then maybe he was killed by local low-life from Lynn. There’s a bunch of ex-East End thugs on the patch. We know where they live. We’ll pull them in and get some warrants.

  ‘However, I think it’s much more likely the murder and burglaries are linked,’ Shaw continued. ‘Maybe the thieves fell out – over the spoils, or over politics. Perhaps the village wasn’t entirely empty that night and the victim is a resident, or someone who came upon the burglars by accident: a delivery man, a gardener, a tradesman.

  ‘So while one half of the team concentrates on Mitchell’s Bank and the victim, the other half looks for the burglars. George and I will monitor both halves of the inquiry and wait to see if they meet in the middle.’

  ‘Don’t wait too long, Peter. Your father’s career ended thanks to one irritating case. I for one would be very sad to see it happen again.’

  Shaw considered reaching across the chief constable’s desk and grabbing his golf club tie, although odds-on it was of the irritating clip-on variety. Instead, he considered the reality of the situation. If this case hit the press unsolved it was Warren’s career that might end in ignominy. Keeping it out of the media had been a poor decision. It begged the big question: why had the news blackout been ordered? There was no doubt Warren could come up with answers to that question. The fact that he had tried to sweep an embarrassing case under the carpet might be overlooked. But what if a fire was the next step? What if someone got hurt?

  Shaw was perfectly happy to leave the chief constable to wrestle with such issues.

  ‘I’d better get to work then, sir,’ he said, standing, mustering his best surfer’s smile. ‘Give my regards to the Home Secretary.’ He breezed out, leaving the door open.

  SIXTEEN

  ‘The CCTV suite was in the basement of St James’, an annexe to the old records room. This had been Mark Birley’s lightless kingdom for the last twelve hours. Given that Birley spent most of his spare time outside, either on the training field or on the rugby pitch, this represented a kind of torture. To alleviate the physical tension he’d brought a gizmo that he could fit across the door jamb which allowed him to do pull-ups. Batches of one hundred did the trick, with the occasional one-fifty to get his heart thumping.

  Early on that morning he’d sat down and rung the National Trust to request a download of the digital film from the Gun Hill webcam. The camera was live twenty-four hours a day, although the night-time footage was never checked. A copy was kept on the server at the Trust’s headquarters. A team from Essex University who were trying to put a number on the grey seal population for the North Sea had open access to the footage.

  Within an hour Birley had a downloaded digital version covering the three days up to and including the seventeenth of October, and for the eighteenth.

  After one hundred pull-ups he sat down to view his first one-hour section. He stuck to daytime footage and viewed it at four times ‘real time’, stopping and starting to note boats, walkers, bird watchers, kite flyers, and pretty much anything else that moved. He created an online log.

  The night-time footage required a different level of concentration. He developed a technique for watching this footage at a higher speed. The webcam’s single static view encompassed four navigation lights in the channel – two green and two red. To this could be added three constant security lights which shone from separate properties on the quayside at Burnham Marsh, and the general light pollution from Burnham Overy Staithe – a combination of several lights, and occasional passing traffic on the coast road. If he sat, alert, directly in front of the CCTV main screen, he could watch the image at ten times the normal speed. Any new light would create a visual blip – an obscured light would flash.

  A brief, fluttering interruption was almost certainly a bird – either in flight close to the light source, or crossing in front of the webcam lens on Gun Hill itself. Atmospheric disturbance – rain, hail, mist – was the second most likely cause. In the run-up to the night of the murder there had been several storms, including violent downpours of hail, which had obscured all lights. With the onshore storms, gusts of wind of up to fifty mph created waves which rocked the navigation lights, interrupting the light beams.

  On the night of the seventeenth of October – the night the victim died – the weather was calm. The lights were largely constant. Birley sat, drinking espresso in double measures, watching the eight hours of night-time film at ten times normal speed. He watched it three times with one hundred pull-ups between each sitting. On the third run-through he’d seen one of the Burnham Marsh lights blink out. He’d missed it first time, and second time, because it wasn’t actually a blink at all. It went out, stayed out for about five seconds then came back on. He isolated the footage to a few minutes either side of this single incident, creating a length of film thirty minutes long in real time. Watching this he noted that both the navigation buoys in the channel also blanked out for almost exactly the same time interval: to be precise, 5.6–5.8 seconds. The three light breaks ran serially from west to east – first the security light, then the green light, then the red light.

  There was only one explanation. A boat, unseen, was moving, without lights, across the webcam picture from the village towards the open sea. The on-screen clock timed this mysterious voyage at between 2.06 a.m. and 2.18 a.m. The length of the boat and its constant speed meant that each time it interrupted the light source it did so for almost exactly the same length of time.

  Birley tried to think clearly about what he’d found. If he’d identified a boat leaving Burnham Marsh then it meant that the daytime film must show it entering, not leaving. So he sat down and logged all the boats entering between Gun Hill and Scolt Head that turned west towards Burnham Marsh. Some of the yachts, and all the small fishing boats, had large painted registration numbers – mostly indicating that their home ports were Lynn, Cromer, Boston or Grimsby. Most left on the next available tide.

  Except one, which had arrived on the morning of the seventeenth of October. At a speed of eight knots it had slipped under Gun Hill at 10.36 a.m. The cabin area was covered and so he couldn’t see the man – or woman – at the wheel. And it undoubtedly had a wheel – no doubt in pine, with brass fittings, to match the rest of the boat: a classic sloop, sails furled, wooden, polished, immaculate. Whoever was at the helm knew their way around Overy Creek. The boat turned sharp to port then followed the buoyage towards Burnham Marsh, passing an inundated Mitchell’s Bank fifty yards to the north. The static webcam image lost sight of the boat as it began to thread a way through the small yachts moored off the staithe.

  Which raised one last possibility – the boat was still at Burnham Marsh. Birley had a file of shots taken from the staithe at Burnham Marsh that morning. All the vessels shown in the shallows were yachts. No sight of the sloop.

  Which left one logical conclusion.

  Finally, he got the best image and magnified it. There was no ugly painted registration on the side, but there was a nameplate: brass by the look of it, but even at times twenty he couldn’t read the name. He tried times thirty and the screen disintegrated into a jumble of pixels.

  He copied the image and attached it to an email for Peter Shaw, with copies to Valentine and Twine.

  Sir,

  This boat came in from the open sea on the morning of Friday, 17 October. There is no daylight record of it leaving on the webcam and it’s not in the harbour now. The night-time footage shows a
vessel leaving – without lights – at 2.00 a.m. on the morning of 18 October. The speed is constant, so I don’t think it is possible that it stopped long enough for the body of the victim to be offloaded. It could, however, have been dumped from the moving vessel. I’ve found boats like it online – apparently it’s a ‘carvel’ in shape, and I can just about make out the rig at the back – that’s an auto-pilot. Prices start at £150,000 for such a vessel, and then go upwards. Bad news is there’s no registration and no discernible name. I’ve emailed the pic to the harbour masters along the coast.

  Mark

  PS. Final thought. Is there a boathouse at Burnham Marsh?

  SEVENTEEN

  ‘The Ark, West Norfolk’s forensic lab and mortuary, was in an old nonconformist chapel behind St James’. The exterior was disfigured by a large extractor pipe in aluminium which rivalled the original Victorian bell tower. Inside, the simple nave was divided by a wooden half-partition, with glass completing the wall up to the wooden rafters. Tom Hadden’s kingdom – the forensic suite – consisted of half a dozen ‘hot desk’ bays, a small, windowless photographic lab, and a full-length ballistic tube for firing and analysing bullets. Beyond the partition lay three fully equipped mortuary bays. The wooden partition was low enough to reveal if any of the tables was occupied. Valentine’s eye caught the unmistakable clay-grey of dead flesh.

  There was very little of the original church architecture left within the interior except for a single stone angel, in a niche in the end wall above the mortuary tables, which held its hands to its face, weeping, as if unable – like George Valentine – to consider the bodies of the dead, laid out so coldly below.

  There was a sharp tap on the partition: a diamond ring striking the glass. Dr Justina Kazimeirz, the pathologist, was beckoning them into her world. Mid-fifties, stolid, a Polish immigrant who’d arrived in the eighties and eventually applied for citizenship. At first Shaw had put her brisk rudeness down to difficulties with the language, but Kazimeirz was simply impatient with the faults of others. She’d mellowed slightly since the recent, untimely death of her husband, Dawid. In the final months of his illness she’d taken a cottage in the dunes behind the Shaws’ café at Old Hunstanton and become a friend of the family. This friendship had been created, as they often are, by one casual, unplanned visit. The pathologist had left her husband sitting in the dunes on a dull winter’s day and gone swimming, suited up, beginning an obsession with what the trendy magazines now called ‘wild swimming’. The sleek black suit had been undermined by a swimming hat of blue with white daises on it like floral barnacles. As she walked, heavy-legged, out of the surf Shaw had met her with a flask of hot sweet tea, and then taken the couple back to meet Lena and Fran. The swim became a ritual, the tea routine.