Death Wore White

by Jim Kelly

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Death Wore White

  Jim Kelly lives in Ely, Cambridgeshire, with his partner, the writer Midge Gillies, and their daughter. He is also the author of The Water Clock, The Fire Baby, The Moon Tunnel, The Coldest Blood and The Skeleton Man, all featuring journalist Philip Dryden. The series won the 2006 CWA Dagger in the Library award for a body of work giving ‘the greatest enjoyment to readers’. The Water Clock was also shortlisted for the CWA John Creasey Award for best first novel and The Fire Baby for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year.

  Death Wore White begins a scintillating new series, featuring DI Peter Shaw and DS George Valentine.

  To find out more about Jim Kelly and other Penguin crime writers, go to www.penguinmostwanted.co.uk

  Death Wore White

  JIM KELLY

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  First published 2008

  Copyright © Jim Kelly 2008

  All rights reserved.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re‐sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-141-90901-1

  For Bob

  Acknowledgements

  There are three women without whom this book would not have reached publication: Beverly Cousins, my editor, who has again brilliantly spotted what works, and what doesn’t; Faith Evans, my agent, for her gifted interventions on character and style; and my wife, Midge Gillies, for providing a touchstone service on how to unravel knots in the plot.

  Trevor Horwood has again been our talented backstop, providing meticulous copy‐editing. Jenny Burgoyne was again the backstop’s backstop, to great effect.

  In addition, I owe a continuing debt to a team of advisers who have been generous with their time and expertise: Alan Gilbert on forensics, Martin Peters on all things medical, Paul Horrell on all things motorized – including an exquisite essay on spark plugs. Michael and Brian Houten took time to help me get my hero’s passion – running – just right. Allen Frary at Wells RNLI advised on boats and the dangers of boats, Eric Boyle on the chemistry of toxic waste, Chris Pitt at the RSPCA put me on the right track to discover the shadowy world of animal trafficking. And regarding that world, I have relied on the help of Ken Goddard, Director of the National Fish & Wildlife Forensics Laboratory in Ashland, Oregon.

  I have benefited hugely from two excellent textbooks: Forensic Art and Illustration by Karen T. Taylor, and Crime Scene by Richard Platt.

  The novel is set in King’s Lynn and along the north Norfolk coast. I have played with the geography and nomenclature of the area to enliven the language and avoid inadvertent libel. All characters, establishments and organizations are fictional, and I should point out specifically that the West Norfolk Constabulary does not exist. I hope that I have captured the genuine spirit of detection, without burdening the reader with the day‐to‐day minutiae of working in the modern CID.

  1

  Monday, 9 February

  The Alfa Romeo ran a lipstick‐red smear across a sepia landscape. Snow flecked the sands at the edge of the crimped waters of the Wash. To the landward side lay the saltmarsh, a weave of winter white around stretches of cold black water. And out at sea a convoy of six small boats were caught in a stunning smudge of purple and gold where the sun was setting.

  The sports car nudged the speed limit as Sarah Baker‐Sibley watched the first flake of snow fall on the windscreen. She swept it aside with a single swish of the wipers and punched the lighter into the dashboard, her lips counting to ten, a cigarette held ready between her teeth.

  Ten seconds. She thrummed her fingers on the leather‐bound steering wheel.

  It was two minutes short of five o’clock and the Alfa’s headlights were waking up the catseyes. She pulled the lighter free of its holder. The ringlet of heated wire seemed to lift her mood and she laughed to herself, drawing in the nicotine.

  A spirograph of ice had encroached on the windscreen, so she turned the heating up to maximum. The indicator showed the outside temperature at 0°C, then briefly –1°C. She dropped her speed to 50 mph and checked the rear‐view mirror for following traffic: she’d been overtaken once – the vehicle was still ahead of her by half a mile – and there were lights behind, but closer, a hundred yards or less.

  She swished more snowflakes off the windscreen. Attached to the dashboard by a sucker was a little picture frame holding a snapshot of a girl with hair down to her waist, wearing a swimsuit on a sun‐drenched beach. She touched the image as if it were an icon.

  Rounding a sharp right bend she saw tail lights ahead again for a few seconds. And a sign, luminous, regulation black on yellow, in the middle of the carriageway, an AA insignia in the top left corner.

  DIVERSION

  Flood

  An arrow pointed bluntly to the left – seaward down a narrow unmetalled road.

  ‘Sod it.’ She hit the steering wheel with the heel of her palm. Slowing the Alfa, she looked at her watch: 5.01 p.m. She had to pick her daughter up at 5.30 outside the school. She was always there, like clockwork. That was one of the big pluses of owning her own business: she kept her own time. And that’s why she always took the old coast road, not the new dual carriageway, because this way there were never any traffic jams, even in the summer. Just an open road. Once, perhaps twice, she’d got caught up at the shop and phoned ahead to say she’d be late. Jillie had walked home then, but Sarah didn’t want to let her down. Not tonight, when snow was forecast. She’d make it in time, even with the diversion, as long as nothing else delayed her.

  Looking in the rear‐view again she saw that the following car was close, so she put the Alfa in first and swung it off the coast road onto the snow‐covered track. The headlights raked the trees as she turned the car, but she failed to see that they fleetingly lit a figure, stock‐still, dressed in a full‐length dark coat flecked with snow, the head – hooded – turned away. But she did see a road sign.

  Siberia Belt

  Ahead were the tail lights of the vehicle she had been following. There was a sudden silence as a snow flurry struck, muffling the world outside. The wind returned, thudding against the offside, fist blows deadened by a boxer’s glove. She searched the rear‐view mirror for the comforting sight of headlights behind. There were none. But the tail lights ahead were still visibl
e: warm, glowing and safe. She pressed on quickly in pursuit.

  2

  Half a mile away Detective Inspector Peter Shaw stood on the beach as the snow fell, trying to smile into an Arctic north wind. The seascape was glacier‐blue, the white horses whipped off the peaks of the waves before they could break. Offshore a sandbank was dusted with snow – icing sugar on marzipan. As quickly as the snow flurry had come, it was gone. But he knew a blizzard would be with them by nightfall, the snow clouds already massed on the horizon like a range of mountains.

  ‘Tide’s nearly up,’ he said, licking a snowflak offhis e off his lips. ‘So it should be here. Right here.’ He tapped his boot rhythmically on the spot, creating a miniature quicksand inside his footprint, and zipped up his yellow waterproof jacket. ‘A bright yellow drum, right?’ he asked. ‘Mustard, like the other one. Floating a foot clear of the water. So where is it?’

  Detective Sergeant George Valentine stood six foot downwind, his face turned away from the sea. He stifled a yawn by clenching his teeth. His eyes streamed water. An allergy – seaweed perhaps, or salt on the air. Valentine looked at his feet, black slip‐ons oozing salt water. He was too old for this: five years off retirement, rheumatism in every bone. They’d got the call from HM Coastguard an hour before: toxic waste, spotted drifting inshore off Scolt Head Island.

  Six weeks earlier three drums had come ashore on Vinegar Middle, a sandbank just off the coast near Castle Rising. Shaw had been on the early shift at St James’s, the police HQ in Lynn – his daughter Francesca played on the beach sometimes, so he’d taken a parental interest. When he got to the scene there was a five‐year‐old poking a stick into the top of the drum where it had ruptured. Shaw had told her to drop the stick but he hadn’t been able to keep the urgency out of his voice, the note of command. Reading a child’s face wasn’t a textbook exercise. He’d spotted the sudden fear, but missed the anger. The kid didn’t like being told what to do, so she’d waved the stick in Shaw’s face as he’d grabbed her, pulling her clear of the liquid pooling at her feet. She hadn’t meant to do it, but the single thrust as Shaw bent down had caught him in the eye.

  The injury was covered by a dressing, secured with a plaster across the socket, the inflamed red edges of a fresh scar just visible beneath. He touched it now, moving it slightly to relieve the pressure. The chemical had proved a mystery: an unstable mix of residual sulphuric and nitric acid, the by‐products of some poorly monitored manufacturing process. A ‘class eight’ substance; highly corrosive, with a ferocious ability to attack epithelial tissue. Skin.

  ‘So where is it?’ Shaw asked again. Standing still like this was a form of torture. He wanted to run along the water’s edge, feel his heart pounding, blood rushing, the intoxicating flood of natural painkillers soaking his brain – the runner’s high.

  He raised a small telescope to his good eye, the iris as pale and blue as falling water, scanning the seascape. Shaw’s face mirrored the wide‐open sea; the kind of face that’s always scanning a horizon. His cheekbones were high, as if some enterprising warrior from the Mongol Horde had wandered off to the north Norfolk coast, pitching his tent by the beach huts.

  DS Valentine looked at his watch. He’d bought it for £1 and was pretty sure the word ROLEX was fake. Its tick‐tock was oddly loud. He shivered, his head like a vulture’s, hung low on a thin neck. He tried to keep his mouth shut because he knew his teeth would ache if they got caught by the wind.

  A radio crackled and Valentine retrieved it from the shapeless raincoat he was wearing. He listened, said simply, ‘Right.’ Fumbling it back inside the folds of the coat he produced a tube of mints, popping one, crunching it immediately.

  ‘Coastguard. They lost sight of the drum an hour ago. The water’s churning up with the tide.’ He shrugged as if he knew the moods of the ocean. ‘Not hopeful.’

  Shaw ran a hand through close‐cropped fair hair. They stood together, one looking south, the other north, wondering how it had come to this: Shaw and Valentine, West Norfolk Constabulary’s latest investigative duo.

  Some joker in admin, thought Shaw, some old lag who knew the past and didn’t care about the future. They needed a new partner for Shaw, who at thirty‐three years of age was the force’s youngest DI, the whiz‐kid with the fancy degree and a father once tipped to be the next chief constable. And they’d come up with George Valentine – a living relic of a different world, where cynical coppers waged a losing war against low life on the street. A man who’d been the best detective of his generation until one mistake had put him on a blacklist from which he was struggling to escape. A man whose career trajectory looked like a brick falling to earth.

  It was their first week as partners; already – for both of them – it seemed like a lifetime.

  Shaw looked around. He’d played on this beach as a child. ‘Let’s get up there,’ he said, pointing at a low hill in the dunes. ‘Gun Hill. Get some height. We might see it then.’

  Valentine nodded without enthusiasm. He turned his back on the sea wind, looking inland, along the curve of the high‐water mark. ‘There,’ he said, taking a bare hand reluctantly from his coat pocket.

  A yellow metal oil drum, on its side now, rolling in with the waves.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Shaw, already jogging; a compact, nearly effortless canter.

  The lid of the drum was rusted and crinkled so that the contents had begun to seep out. From six feet he could smell it, the edge of ammonia almost corrosive. The liquid spilling down the side was Day‐Glo green, the paint of the drum blistering on contact.

  ‘I’ll get the Coastguard,’ said Valentine, breathless, digging out the radio. ‘The boat could be out there – they’ll have dumped others.’

  ‘And call St James’s,’ said Shaw. ‘They need to get a chemical team out to make this safe and get it off the beach. We better stay till they get here. Give them the grid reference.’ Shaw read out the numbers from his hand‐held GPS.

  As Valentine worked on the radio Shaw squatted down, picking up ten butter‐yellow limpet shells and placing them in a line on the sand. ‘We could do with a fire,’ he said out loud. The breeze was dropping, a frost in the air now that night was falling. He imagined the brief dusk, the fire on the high‐water mark, and felt good. Pocketing the shells, he began collecting flotsam, a beer crate, a few lumps of bog oak, the dried‐out husk of a copy of the Telegraph, then turned with his arms full.

  Which is when he saw something else in the waves. Ingol Beach shelved gently out to sea, so even though it was a hundred yards away it was already catching the bottom, buckling slightly, flexing in the white water. An inflatable raft, a child’s summer plaything in Disney colours. Shaw stood for a few seconds watching it inch ashore. Thirty yards out it ran aground, snagged.

  Valentine watched his DI pulling off his boots and socks. Jesus! he thought, looking around, hoping they were still alone, hoping most of all that he’d stop at the socks. Shaw waded on, the jolt of the iced water almost electric, making his bones ache.

  There was something in the raft, something that didn’t respond to the shuffle and bump of the waves. A dead weight. When he saw the hands – both bare – and the feet, in light trainers swollen with seawater, he knew it was the body of a man: the black hair on the hands, a chunky signet ring. He felt his pulse suddenly thump in his ears as his body reacted to the sight of death. The atavistic urge to flee, to run from danger, was almost overwhelming. And there was the sensation that time had stopped, as if he’d been caught in the middle of an accident, unfurling around him in agonizingly slow motion.

  He forced himself to observe; to step out of the scene.

  Dead – but for how long? Less than forty‐eight hours. The arms and legs were askew, locked in ugly angles, so rigor had yet to pass.

  He put a hand on the side of the raft to steady it, his fingers gripping a raised handle at the prow. Jeans, a T‐shirt, a heavy fur‐lined jacket only half on, leaving one arm free. The limb was thick, knotte
d with muscle, the hidden shoulder broad. In the bottom of the boat there was an inch of swilling bloody seawater.

  Valentine met him on the dry sand, and they pulled the raft round so that what was left of the sunset caught the dead man’s head; unavoidable now, lifeless, despite the movement of the waves. The human face: Peter Shaw’s passion, each unique balance and imbalance of features as individual as a fingerprint. He noted the bloated, profound pallor, like cold fat, with almost iridescent tinges of blue and green. A young man, stubble on the chin, the eyes half‐open but flat, lightless, one eyelid more closed than the other. The lateral orbital lines – crow’s feet – deeply scored, as if he’d spent a lifetime squinting in the sun. The muscles beneath defined the skin like the surface of a piece of beaten metal. But it was the mouth that drew Shaw’s attention. The lips, uneven lines, were peeled back from teeth which were smeared with blood.

  ‘Shit,’ said Valentine, turning, taking three steps and vomiting into the sand.

  He came back, dabbing at his lips. ‘Sight of blood,’ he said, avoiding Shaw’s eyes. He might be a copper with thirty years’ experience, but it hadn’t helped him get used to being in the company of the dead.

  Shaw tried to reanimate the victim’s face in his mind as he’d been trained to do. He tightened up the jaw, balanced the eyes, replaced the graceful bow of the lips. Not a cerebral face, a muscular face.

  It was Valentine who first saw the mark on the arm. The seawater had washed it clean and so it bled no more, but there was no mistaking the shape: a bite. A human bite. The teeth puncturing the skin deeply, viciously driving into the sinew and muscle, almost meeting in a crisp double incision.

  3