At Death's Window

by Jim Kelly

  TWENTY-NINE

  Shaw turned the Porsche down the narrow alleyway into the St James’ police pound and parked next to the Mazda. Valentine had gone ahead of him with Clem Whyte in tow. Shaw hurried inside and found himself in the middle of a chaotic media photo-shoot. Acting DS Fiona Campbell was dressed for the part in a light blue suit, white blouse, and the kind of make-up she usually avoided. She’d been persuaded to stand in the middle of the car park holding up what looked like a plastic test tube and a brightly coloured card. Flashbulbs ignited like fireworks as she ignored shouted commands to smile. The press – two TV crews and four newspaper photographers – were edging closer, trying to get the photogenic Campbell in the same shot as the test tube, with Greyfriars Tower as a backdrop.

  Campbell had emailed Shaw overnight with the details of her next move in the hunt for the source of lethal adulterated cocaine being sold on the streets of Lynn. The inquiry so far had drawn an almost total blank. Those dealers they had identified had refused to divulge the principal supplier. Arnold Smith-Waterson, aka Gutter, was unable to give them any coherent testimony. He was still undergoing medical treatment for necrosis, but an initial psychiatric report indicated in addition a raft of mental health issues related to drug abuse. They would attempt one more formal interview, then he would be handed over to the force’s psychiatric assessment unit. Meanwhile, the drug had started to appear back on the streets. The pure white cocaine was still bulkier thanks to the addition of Levamisole. Seizures so far showed that eighty-two per cent of the local supply contained Levamisole.

  In desperation Campbell had gone to the chief constable and persuaded him to bankroll a high-profile media launch. She’d bought 1,000 drug test kits from a US charity to distribute on the street. Each one contained a survey card, to be returned to the police, plus a simple litmus test designed to reveal the presence of the adulterant. Each kit cost four pounds. At least three teenagers had been hospitalized in the last three days suffering from a variety of infections linked to poor immune systems; a significant side effect of a low white blood cell count. One had necrosis of the toes. While the test tube kits might not help them catch the supplier, the police could at least be seen to be limiting the lethal effects of his product.

  Shaw nodded at Campbell, then ran up the stairs to CID, where he met Valentine coming out of Interview Room Three.

  ‘I’ve organized tea. He keeps saying he can explain. What do you think?’

  ‘Let him stew. We need to brief the team.’

  The sense of excited focus in the CID room was tangible. Valentine had spoken to Birley and told him they’d made an arrest on a specimen charge of burglary and he needed to assemble the team and alert Twine at Burnham Marsh. There were a dozen DCs waiting for news, all armed with coffee or unlit cigarettes. Nothing put buoyancy under a copper’s career like a successful murder inquiry. They could all look forward to a significant ‘bounce’ if this one ended with a conviction. All they had to do was remember that it wasn’t in the bag – yet.

  ‘OK,’ said Shaw, edging his boots as wide as his shoulders, taking command. ‘Let’s untangle a few knots.’

  He accepted a takeaway Costa Coffee cup.

  ‘We’ve got our suspect, Clem Whyte, in the interview room. He’s clearly now the centre of the inquiry. So far he hasn’t said a word. I propose leaving him to stew for a few hours, then packing him off downstairs to the cells overnight. George and I will tackle him at nine-thirty a.m. tomorrow – with his lawyer present.

  ‘Why is he our suspect? What do we know? He’s a political activist, a full-time housing officer, and he knew Stefan Bedrich, our victim. His van was seen outside Tines Manor on the night the Chelsea Burglars raided the house. It is pretty clear he is lying about several things. I don’t propose to get involved in sorting that out until we have more facts.’

  He sipped his coffee with a fluid movement of arm and wrist.

  ‘We do have the outline at least of something that makes sense. Whyte’s our slogan writer. Bedrich is, perhaps, a thief. Let’s say they’re both members of the Chelsea Burglars. There’s a falling out on the night – we don’t why but it’s not difficult to see where tensions might arise – and as a result Bedrich ends up dead. They use the boat to dump the body out on Mitchell’s Bank. When the body is found Stepney thinks he’s under attack. Why? For now let’s assume Bedrich is one of his samphire pickers. First, his van fleet gets vandalized. Now one of his men is dead. He hits back, and Shrimp Davies is the victim. Which would leave us right where we are now. Two dead.

  ‘What we need to do today is very simple. Whyte says he wants to talk but we need to prepare for the worst: that he’ll clam up and not open his mouth until the lawyer’s got to him, and then not at all. A conviction – for burglary, and possibly murder – will rely on forensic evidence and other testimony from witnesses, accomplices, family and friends. We need to build this case as if Whyte was dead. Tom will get the team into the flat, the van, and Whyte’s home. You’ll have to stand off until the science is over – then get in there and use your eyes. We also need to crawl all over Bedrich’s past: family, ties, cash, passport, the lot.’

  He took another swig of the coffee, inviting questions.

  ‘The gang sounds improbable – a Polish migrant worker and a Labour Party do-gooder. How did that happen?’ asked DC Lau, unzipping a leather jacket with its own go-fast stripes.

  ‘Hypothesis has to be that Whyte organized the burglaries and left the slogans as part of a campaign against second home ownership,’ said Shaw. ‘He provided transport. I think he set it all up. Somehow he recruited burglars – if Bedrich is typical, he went to the migrant communities, in search of the desperate. He’s a housing officer so it’s not like he couldn’t get to these people. They’re his customers.

  ‘But you’re right, Jackie, it doesn’t quite add up. If you really wanted to leave slogans to be seen, why burgle the houses – why not daub them on outside walls? OK, it delivers a threat. Maybe the next step was arson. If it’s a meticulous campaign, and that’s what we would expect from the way in which the burglaries were planned, then perhaps it was always going to be incremental. In the end we couldn’t have ignored it forever, and – as I pointed out to the powers that be – the downside of hushing it up was always that when it did break – does break – it has a lot more impact. I think there’s something we don’t know – let’s hope whatever it is isn’t a game-changer.’

  ‘And Bedrich’s death?’ asked Lau.

  ‘Not premeditated, certainly – in the sense that it was unplanned on the night. Did the burglars fall out with Whyte? Was there a fight? Once Bedrich was dead did Whyte come up with Plan B – to dump the body and make it look like a spat between samphire pickers and London thugs? He spends a lot of his time on the coast, mostly with the locals, so there’s no way he didn’t know what was going on out on the marshes. It had to be top of anyone’s list of gossip topics. All he needed was a boat. Which reminds me – any news on the Limpet? The posters are great, by the way.’

  Mark Birley waved a sheet of paper. ‘It’s been seen up and down the coast this summer. But as of now there’s nobody has any idea where it is. One oddity. Coastguard at Wells said he does a tour with the RNLI out to the wind farms once a week, checking out security. Said he was out there last month when he was pretty sure he saw the Limpet at dusk alongside a trawler. He didn’t get the fishing vessel’s name but he’s pretty sure the registration was OZ.’

  ‘For?’

  ‘Oostzaan. It’s a small Dutch port.’

  Which didn’t fit into any of their scenarios. Why would a trawler leave a small port on the far side of the Channel and navigate the North Sea, only to meet a coastal sloop at dusk among the ghostly turning wind farms of the north Norfolk coast?

  ‘OK. That adds something else we don’t understand. It makes finding the Limpet our number one priority. Let’s see if we can line up Crimewatch, the BBC national news – anything we can. We have to find
that boat.’

  THIRTY

  Holme Beach, on a late evening in October, made the deserted stretch of sand in front of the Shaws’ café at Old Hunstanton look like St Tropez. Two miles of stunning coastline, untroubled by a tea hut or a waste-paper bin or red flag. Just untroubled. Shaw had been walking for forty-five minutes and he didn’t appear to be getting anywhere: the vast vista of open sand just seemed to open up, again and again, as if he was walking into some endless seaside desert.

  Shaw needed the sea air. He’d spent seven straight hours at his desk at St James’ as the team struggled to build a framework of compelling evidence ahead of interviewing Clem Whyte. It had been the longest day yet in the inquiry: an endless litany of computer checks, phone calls, briefings and statements. At seven he’d sent the team home, confident they’d made significant progress. Leading by example, he’d shut down his computer and headed for the Porsche. Valentine had taken the rest down to the Red House for what he described as a ‘full debrief’.

  What had they learnt in seven hours?

  Stefan Bedrich was a twenty-six-year-old former sheet-metal worker from the Gdansk shipyards. An apprentice at sixteen, he had joined the OPZZ trade union and become embroiled in left-wing politics. In 2008 he had met Lidia Dmoch, an artist from the steel city of Katowice. They were married in 2009 and a daughter was born in 2012. There was no work in the Polish shipyards and Stefan, desperate to provide for his new family, had come to the UK at the beginning of 2013 on a short-term contract to work at a shipbuilder’s in Boston, Lincolnshire.

  In April he’d discovered that he – and the rest of the 150-strong workforce – had been made redundant over the loss of a major order to Russian competitors. The Boston Job Centre had recommended that he move to Lynn and attempt to secure a job in the Alexandra Dock. Unsuccessful, Bedrich had begun a series of part-time seasonal jobs – including, that summer, nine weeks aboard a small fishing boat out of Lynn picking samphire on the coast as part of John Jack Stepney’s burgeoning business empire.

  Then fate ripped Stefan Bedrich’s life apart. In July Dmoch was killed in a road traffic accident in Gdansk outside the couple’s one-room flat. DC Twine had got Interpol to locate and translate a brief transcript from the court proceedings held within twenty-four hours of the accident. Dmoch, aged twenty, had been waiting for a bus in a torrential downpour. Her daughter was sleeping in a pushchair under a hood. A bus – route number 56a – had mounted the pavement and killed her instantly. The pushchair, carried 150 yards under the bumper of the bus, was crushed, but the child recovered unharmed. Charged with driving while under the influence of alcohol, the driver was sentenced to eighteen months in prison. Temporary custody of the child – Kasia – was awarded to Dmoch’s parents, resident in Katowice. Stefan was informed of the accident by a priest from the Polish Club in Lynn, following a telephone call from the consul in Peterborough. His wife’s funeral had already taken place.

  Flying home he’d made one attempt to take Kasia from his in-laws’ house in Katowice, but he’d been stopped by local police. In order to regain custody of his own child he’d have to present a court with evidence of income, residency, and details of a suitable house or flat. Poland offered no opportunities, so he’d returned to Lynn and his temporary job of samphire picking. The Polish ‘captain’ who was Bedrich’s direct employer had told detectives earlier in the inquiry that the Pole had not been seen since the end of the picking season, but that Bedrich, he’d said, had talked of returning to Gdansk. He was one of the six pickers still on the team’s wanted list. Interpol had been asked to track him down via his in-laws.

  Valentine had visited Clem Whyte’s wife, Diane, to inform her of her husband’s arrest and to search the family home. The request to enter the house was refused. A warrant would be obtained overnight. Warrants would also be requested for John Jack Stepney’s home on Balamory and for Highlife. Two teams would make simultaneous visits at seven the next morning.

  The excitement of the chase, the sense of closing in on the killer of Stefan Bedrich, was palpable. Ahead Shaw glimpsed his goal: a single set of brick chimneys rising from the pines on Holme Point. The tension in Shaw’s muscles was unbearable, the need to expend energy irresistible, so he broke into a jog, then a run, and pounded northwards towards his destination.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Holme beach had been famous once, if only briefly. In 1998 a teacher called John Lorimer found a Bronze Age axe head in the mud on the water’s edge. Archaeologists descended, and in their turn discovered Sea Henge, a wooden circle of split-oak surrounding an upended tree trunk, the whole ghostly geometry emerging from the sand at low water. Tree-ring analysis revealed that the wood had been felled in the spring of 2049 BC, a fact Shaw found impossible to believe in its bizarre precision. Hundreds came to see the ‘Stonehenge of the Sea’ – then others came to cart it off to a museum in Lynn, so the neo-Pagans arrived to try and stop them, ensuring worldwide TV coverage. Then everyone went away. Forever.

  Shaw strained his good eye to look ahead. A sand devil – a spiral of dust caught in a miniature tornado – danced in the mid-distance. Reaching the five-bar gate on the lane that led inland to the village, Shaw continued north. Ahead now, just half a mile away, lay the high sandy pinewood hills of Holme Point – the blunt, subtle curve where the coast began its long, slow-motion turn to the east, breasting the North Sea, leaving the great sandy waste of the Wash in its wake.

  Within fifteen minutes he was in the shadow of the first pines, picking up a path which led up the slope. The sand was deep, damp, cloying underfoot. The evening felt suddenly late, as if darkness might fall in minutes. The first sandy ridge was marked by a small clearing where a bench had been set to look out to sea. A metal plaque said the seat stood in memory of Victoria Murano – GLASSMAKER.

  Shaw paused, his good eye scanning the water’s edge, until it reached a series of raised razor-like ridges – the cockle-beds where Sea Henge had been exposed by the waves. He’d come that final day with Lena and watched from the dunes as the bulldozer carried the great oak trunk away, the Druids howling, clawing at the wheels. It had been an oddly affecting moment for both of them. Shaw said he felt that some of the spirit of the place had been permanently diminished, the mystery stripped away. He couldn’t help thinking that their plans for the café might do the same to his beach, as if they too planned some form of desecration.

  The house came into view, the chimney pots showing first, as Shaw climbed over the upper ridge, then the whole building came into sight, a strangely inappropriate suburban villa of the 1920s, with a glass conservatory on three sides. An air of mild dilapidation added to the sense of abandonment, except for what looked like a brand-new burglar alarm on the north-facing, sea-facing wall.

  Sonia Murano, the diocesan restoration expert, was working under the glass of the conservatory on the east side, using what was left of the light from the west. Absorbed, she didn’t seem to hear Shaw’s approaching footsteps, although all the windows and doors were open. He stood for a moment in the doorframe, knowing that now, however subtly he signalled his presence, she’d be startled.

  ‘Ms Murano?’ he said.

  She took a sudden step back and one hand went to her heart, although she didn’t make a noise.

  ‘Yes. Oh, hello. It’s you,’ she said, smiling.

  Shaw revised his estimate of her age down from thirty-five to thirty. The smile was warm, almost a full beam, but Shaw was convinced that she had used it to disguise the fact that she wasn’t pleased to see him. Perhaps she guarded her privacy, but Shaw felt the wariness signalled something closer to anxiety, or even fear.

  ‘I didn’t expect …’ She curled a hand in Shaw’s direction. ‘I thought they’d send a constable. Or DS Valentine. It’s not that important. Sorry.’

  She stood her ground and it was clear she wasn’t going to invite Shaw into the actual house.

  ‘It’s no problem. DS Valentine asked me to pop in. I live down the beach – at th
e Old Beach Café. It’s a pleasant walk.’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ she said, although Shaw was pretty certain he’d never seen her in the café or the shop.

  ‘It’s just it’s all become rather urgent,’ he said. ‘The man who we think damaged the glass is ill – a result of adulterated cocaine. He’s also mentally fragile, a fairly acute case. I think if we could find out why he was doing this we’d know more about the drug dealers – the supplier. It is quite possible someone else will die as a result of taking this stuff. So we thought we’d move quickly. DS Valentine said you’d found something of interest in the glass?’

  He was still poised on the threshold.

  ‘Of course. Stupid of me.’ Her shoulders fell, defeated. ‘Come in.’

  She went to get her notebook. Shaw was left to consider the view from the conservatory windows: a hundred yards of close-cropped grass, dotted with rabbit droppings, then the edge of the trees. No sight of the sea, or the beach. It seemed like a crime to him, to build so close to the water’s edge, but on the wrong side of the ridge. It was as if the house sat, sheltering, with its back to the waves.

  Murano came back with a large sketch book and opened it out, carefully clearing a space by moving aside several pieces of stained glass, each wrapped in tissue.

  ‘Great house,’ said Shaw. ‘What’s that?’

  Through the sash window in the wall he could see into a further workshop, set around a large metal range below a wide brick-built chimney breast.