by Jim Kelly
Lena was inside serving an elderly couple tea and soda bread. His wife’s exaggerated good humour in talking to her last two customers of the day told him the long summer season had worn her down. Fran, bored with the adult world, played out on the water’s edge, her spidery form reflected in a mirror-like sea. Shaw was attempting what they liked to call the ‘full relax’ – a large glass of white wine, his feet up on the wooden verandah. He’d brought a spare glass with him in the hope that Lena would join him, but he suspected she would just clear up, get the working day done, and then start on supper.
Geoff Wighton had been charged with a specimen drugs offence and taken to St James’. They’d interview him in the morning, or possibly the next day. A full assessment of the forensics was unlikely to be complete before the weekend. Privately, Hadden had told the CID team that he’d managed to extract a full blood sample from the wood around the trapdoor. The hunt for the murder weapon would include a second fingertip search of the marshy edge of Overy Creek. Initial results from Wighton’s house were equivocal: a full autopsy was planned for the next day at the Ark. The Limpet was under tow back to Boal Quay, where it would be taken out of the water for a dry-dock examination.
Shaw had enjoyed a brief conversation with the chief constable in which he’d suggested they break the media blackout on the Chelsea Burglars asap, given that they could now name two suspects under arrest: Whyte and Connor (apprehended in a B&B outside Warren Point, Northern Ireland, by a sharp-eyed police constable who spotted the Mondeo’s licence plates), and had one suspect in the morgue: Stefan Bedrich. Reporting restrictions would radically reduce the media’s ability to ramp up the second-homes story, given that charges were about to be laid. Shaw could deflect questions about Bedrich’s killer by asserting that an arrest in the murder inquiry was imminent. Warren had agreed; no doubt overjoyed that he could now tell his wife that their dual elevation to the status of Lord and Lady was back on track.
Shaw sipped his wine. For the rest of the day he was prepared to leave his mind blank, to let his eyes drink in the light. A sense of well-being seemed to blossom, filling the wide-open space around him.
The only problem was that line of footprints across the mud, leading towards Mitchell’s Bank. If Stefan Bedrich hadn’t made them, who had?
His phone rang and the screen said simply: CC.
‘Sir.’ He fought the urge to stand up.
‘Peter. Private call. Look, this is entirely in the form of a heads-up. My office has received a complaint of police harassment. You’re in the frame, although George gets an honorary mention. Needless to say, we take this kind of thing seriously.’
Shaw didn’t say a word.
‘Yes,’ said Warren, as if answering a question that hadn’t been asked. ‘Name of Murano – Pietro Murano. He came in to St James’ and saw Bill Troutman.’
Troutman was one of Warren’s two assistant chief constables, a former DCI who’d once worked with Shaw’s father. He was widely referred to throughout St James’ as ‘Uncle Bill’.
‘As I say, we’ll have to deal with this by the book, but Bill said he was a total prick. In fact he took time out to check him out on records and he is known to us. Two incidents of domestic violence back in the early eighties. Dealt with by family division, but still, you get the picture. Apparently he thumped his wife about. She thumped back. As I say, it never made the courts but it looks like a messy domestic.
‘Anyway, he says you’ve been harassing his daughter. Doctor’s report says she is currently unwell – nerves, anxiety attacks. She’s already done her duty, he says, by making a full statement. He wants you to keep away. Unless there’s an overwhelming operational need, I can’t help thinking that’s a good idea.’
Shaw sipped his wine. ‘OK.’
‘Good. You’re a fucking good copper, Peter. Don’t let bastards like this grind you down. Anyway – paperwork starts Monday. Least you know.’
‘I appreciate the call.’
That was it. So much for the ‘full relax’. The complaint was an irritation at best, unless Murano intended to fabricate details about the interview Shaw had conducted at Holme House. Her father’s reaction was wildly disproportionate. Was it his reaction, or his daughter’s? Why was the Murano family so touchy?
He took a swig of wine and then realized what he’d missed. Keen to get the chief constable off the line, he’d let that one, throwaway remark slip past:
She’s already done her duty, he says, by making a full statement.
What statement?
He rang Paul Twine at the incident room and asked him to access the CID database and enter the name Sonia Murano.
Ten seconds. Fifteen seconds.
‘Here it is,’ said Twine. ‘Oh, yeah. She was the witness in the Chelsea Burglars case – the one who caught sight of one of the gang. Only a glimpse. What did she say? Here: jet-black thick hair, beard, moustache, sideburns. Ruddy outdoor skin. Heavily muscled arms. Blue waterproof jacket, trainers, jeans. Not much to go on. Address was Holme House. Sir?’
‘Hi. Right. I missed that. OK, Paul, can you send me the statement?’
‘She was interviewed at Wells’ nick. There’s a transcript. I can send that?’
‘Please.’
Shaw let his arms hang limply, feeling blood rush to his heart, leaving his skin cold. He’d missed something here, at the heart of the case, and the thought of exploring it, uncovering its ramifications, made him feel physically sick.
Most of all he felt a righteous anger. But for the chief constable’s embargo on using the media, he would have read Murano’s original statement. Then he would have interviewed her to try and extract more detail for a forensic ID picture. At Quantico, at the FBI school, he’d been taught the techniques required to tease from a witness those fragmentary crucial images that made a face live. Memory didn’t come and go in completed, framed images. It was like a ball of string. If you could latch on to a loose thread you could shepherd a witness backwards in time, to the moment when the image was real. All that would have been possible if he’d been allowed to build his forensic portrait.
The brutal fact was that he was blaming Warren for his own failings. He should have read the original statement.
By the time Shaw was sitting at his desk in the cottage the email and attachment from Twine had reached his inbox. He feathered the slats on the blind so that a little of the evening light fell across his desk, but the laptop screen glowed in shadow.
Statement of Sonia Maria Murano. Recorded by tape Ref 568/12/10. Case officer DC Mark Birley. Transcript by secretarial pool R5.
Can you describe to me the events of the night of the seventeenth of July this year?
‘I was alone in the house, Holme House.’
Is that unusual?
‘No. It’s unusual at night. I was working and hadn’t noticed the time passing. The house is really a workshop – and it’s where I grew up – but I live in a flat over my shop in Burnham Market. My father’s still alive but he now lives in London. If he comes to visit he stays at Holme. My mother died in 2004. She lived there in the final years of her illness, after the divorce. I never sleep there – it’s quite … er, isolated, spooky really. But the glass oven’s there so I’m happy to work all day if I have to, alone.’
Go on.
‘It was past nine, the light just suddenly went. The trees block the sunset anyway. It’s a very shadowy house. I heard a vehicle on the road and we’re the only place anyone could be visiting – unless they want to walk on the beach, and then they’re supposed to leave their car down at Holme and walk. I went to the scullery window to see if they were going to park and then walk. If they do that I’ve got a little notice I can put on their windscreen – nothing threatening, just please don’t park here, it’s a private house.
‘I saw four men getting out of a white van.’
Was your car there?
‘No. I’d left it down at Holme and walked that morning because it’s so beautiful. I
enjoy it. And it gives me time to think about the work. I was designing and I had lots of colours in my head so I decided I wanted the fresh air. So no car. They must have thought the place was deserted because they were talking loudly, and they had rucksacks, and crowbars and torches. Once the car lights went that was all I could see, the torchbeams.
‘There’s a security light on the back of the house and that was on, so I think they missed the fact that the conservatory light was on too, where I was working.
‘I didn’t panic. I checked my phone but there was no signal – there hardly ever is. I did think about going out the back into the woods. If they’d seen me I didn’t think I could outrun them. I’m strong, but they looked young, fit – at least, three of them did. There was an older one, much smaller. I heard a few snatches of what they were saying and I got the definite impression they’d been drinking.
‘I heard the sound of wood splintering and thought I should try and keep out of the way. There was a cupboard under the stairs where I used to hide when I was a child. The door is a wooden panel and it blends in with the rest, the handle’s flush with the wood. So I got in there.
‘They were in the house about twenty minutes. I could hear them upstairs, the furniture being moved around. They must have been disappointed because most of the house has been moth-balled since Mum died. Then I heard crying. It had all gone very quiet and I thought they’d gone at first, but then I heard this sobbing – very close.
‘It’s very difficult to listen to another human being in distress and not respond.’
Tape stopped to allow witness to drink water.
‘I opened the cupboard door an inch and saw a man kneeling in the hallway in front of the window – our window. I should explain. It was a life’s work, for my mother, to restore this window. Medieval glass, from St John’s at Burnham Marsh. When she was a child the church was still in use and it was this window that inspired her, she was a great glassmaker. After the storms in the eighties a lot of the glass was lost, and then vandals smashed more. She wanted to rebuild it – mostly with glass she’d fired herself. The diocese has a plan to restore the window to its original glory.
‘That’s the words they always use, isn’t it? Original glory. After she died I carried on. I was very close to finishing, after twenty years of craftsmanship, the work of mother and child. It was extraordinary. More than that, it provided a link back to her, and back to my childhood, which was very happy until my parents split up. A link back to how it had once been.’
Witness requests brief break in interview.
‘The man kneeling in front of the window was the only one I saw clearly at all. As an image, in my head, the overwhelming feature is how black his hair was – it’s a cliché to say jet-black, but this was very close, almost a blue-black, like pencil lead. A stubble beard and moustache, and here …’
Can you describe it for the tape?
‘Sorry. Sideburns. Black sideburns – but stubble again. He was wearing a sweatshirt top with the sleeves cut away so that you could see his muscles. I didn’t see his eyes – I’m sorry I didn’t because I might have understood then why he did what he did.’
And clothes?
‘A waterproof zip-up jacket – blue, I think, and jeans and trainers.’
Please, carry on.
‘He was sobbing, as I said. And I could hear the others – out the front, shouting for him to hurry up. He got to his feet, took a crowbar out of his rucksack and attacked the window. It’s the right word.’
Would you like to stop?
‘No. I want this over. He flew at it – a frenzy. The window’s about fifteen feet tall so there were some bits of glass he couldn’t reach but he destroyed most of it. It rained down – glass falling, so that it covered the floor. The noise was infernal, just unbearable. The shattering. I couldn’t watch for a moment and then when I did look again I saw he was being dragged away by the others.
‘I saw his eyes then. That’s what I was focused on. I didn’t have any time to notice the others. I’m sorry about that. I’m not very useful, am I? But his eyes were very dull – very defeated. Almost blank of emotion except that I did think, for a moment, that I detected a look of envy. It doesn’t make sense, any of it. I’m sorry.’
Go on.
‘I don’t remember much more but one of the others had a spray can and I thought that was odd. I only saw his back but he spelt out LOCAL HOMES FOR LOCAL PEOPLE on the wall, the can hissing. He was in such a hurry you could hardly read it. Then they were gone.
‘For a few minutes I just waited. At the time I told myself I was listening to see if they might come back. All I heard was the sea and some wood pigeons. I think that really, inside, I was hoping for a miracle, that when I did come out and stand in front of the window it would be complete. That the window of St John’s would be untouched.
‘I took the first step – not looking at the window at all – but I knew the truth because the glass was all over the floor. Each step I took it broke underfoot.
‘To destroy such beauty is evil. I hope he finds his own hell, and that there’s no colour, or light, or beauty there.’
Tape ends.
Shaw stood immediately, realizing he’d been holding himself totally still, so that his bones creaked as he stretched.
The corridor to their bedroom had bare polished boards, and the walls were panelled and painted white. On Lena’s side he opened the bedside drawer and took out what he knew he’d find there: a Bible.
It took him a few minutes to find the right chapter.
Now Herod had arrested John and bound him and put him in prison because of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, for John had been saying to him: ‘It is not lawful for you to have her.’ Herod wanted to kill John, but he was afraid of the people, because they considered John a prophet.
On Herod’s birthday the daughter of Herodias danced for the guests and pleased Herod so much that he promised with an oath to give her whatever she asked. Prompted by her mother, she said, ‘Give me here on a platter the head of John the Baptist.’ The king was distressed, but because of his oaths and his dinner guests, he ordered that her request be granted and had John beheaded in the prison. His head was brought in on a platter and given to the girl, who carried it to her mother.
FORTY-SIX
Shaw sat on the bed rereading the story of John the Baptist until the sound of fat raindrops made him look to the window. Outside the sun still shone, dashes of icy rain cutting through the beams. Running through the house, out on to the sands, he found Lena and Fran watching the storm at sea: thunder rolled, high-altitude winds tore the clouds into shreds. Warm air buffeted them, making their eardrums creak.
‘This could be it – the end of the summer at last,’ said Shaw.
‘Look!’ shouted Fran, pointing both arms out to sea.
A rainbow spanned the beach, the spectrum sharp and clear, including a vibrant green. Lena, laughing, shrugged herself out of her shorts and T-shirt to reveal a white bikini. Fran, already in her costume, joined her mother in a screaming run towards the water’s edge.
Lena looked over her shoulder and shouted: ‘Come on!’
Shaw realized he was still holding the Bible. Looking at the black cover, the gold-copperplate title, he sensed – a half second before it struck – the falling thunderbolt. The world turned silver, crackling like kindling, then the thunder cracked right over his head.
The coast, the dunes, the sky – all of it now appeared in black and white. Lena, clutching Fran in the shallows, shouted something he couldn’t hear because his ears were still echo chambers of torn air. She pointed north, along the beach, then started to haul her daughter back out of the water.
Shaw looked where Lena had pointed and saw a narrow chimney of smoke rising from the dunes.
Lena arrived, Fran trying to pull her back. ‘The lightning touched down, Peter. Along at Holme. There …’
‘Let’s get back in the water,’ shouted Fran.
‘Best stay out till the lightning moves on,’ said Shaw.
‘Beautiful too,’ said Lena. ‘The lightning that came down was blue, Peter. If I close my eyes I can still see it.’
Rain began to fall then turned to hail, and the air temperature plummeted. Ice pellets bounced on the roof of the shop and the café.
Lena covered Fran’s head with her hands. ‘We’ll take cover,’ she said.
‘Go. Get warm. I’m going to check it out,’ said Shaw, waving to Fran.
The force of the hailstones falling made him dip his head, but he ran on, through a grey world of hail, sand and dunes.
After ten minutes he climbed the nearest high dune. As he stood, soaked, hailstones in his hair, his heart creaking inside his ribcage, the storm edge passed overhead, a scrap of blue sky revealed in its wake.
Thirty seconds later the vista was complete, from the red and white cliffs at Hunstanton in the west to Holme Point and the pine woods to the east. The storm had cleared the beaches, except for a distant trio of horses being halter-led back to the stables. In the mid-distance, among the ridged dunes, a single figure knelt in one of the dry basins scooped out by the high tide. Something was lost, because the figure’s hands were on the ground, mapping it out, feeling the surface. To one side, sticking out of the sand, was a spade.
Shaw was twenty feet away when he saw it was Sonia Murano, but by then she’d looked up and he couldn’t have abandoned his approach, even if he’d wanted.
She didn’t stand, but sat back on her heels. While she’d been working, searching the sand, her face had been animated, even joyful, but now there was no disguising the sudden rigidity, and a look of genuine, startled fear.
There was a dull echo of thunder from inland.
Beside Murano lay a rucksack, the top flap open, to reveal a pile of round stones. It was the final image that, combined with the rest, seemed to fuse into a picture with a single clap of intellectual lightning.
‘I missed the obvious,’ he said. ‘I’ve always known its other name. Talk about in plain sight.’