Death Wore White

by Jim Kelly

  ‘I should tell someone,’ she said, implying that he’d have to do. ‘The old guy in the Corsa behind me – that hideous little car…’ She let the smoke circulate fully before ejecting it through her nose. ‘I think he’s dead.’

  6

  The tarpaulin over the body on the beach was now stiff with frost. Control had radioed to say the CSI unit was still an hour away, maybe more. Nothing moved on Ingol Beach except the tide, inching out. Valentine had taped off the toxic‐waste drum and lit it with one of the portable floodlights, then he’d gone down on his knees, his thin trousers soaked, fingertip‐searching the high‐water mark.

  Shaw told him he’d seen the cars trapped behind the fallen pine tree up on the track. Had the driver crashed? Did anyone need medical help? The coincidence made Shaw uneasy: the violent unnatural death on the sands, the fallen pine on Siberia Belt almost within sight. ‘OK,’ he said, refolding the map. ‘The scene’s secure. There’s only one road in and that’s blocked. We’re done here for now. We’ll leave the floodlight on. Let’s see if we’re needed on Siberia Belt.’

  Valentine followed, glad to be putting distance between himself and the unseen corpse. The sight of blood made him feel the earth wasn’t solid enough to stand on. Which made him want a pack of cigarettes, which he didn’t have, so he spat in the snow instead.

  They crossed the frosted sands until they reached a dyke which separated Siberia Belt from the beach, bridging it where a sluice gate stood, the cogs and levers of the iron mechanism choked with ice. Approaching the convoy from the south, Shaw got to the Mondeo first, but waited for Valentine to catch up. A lone figure, following Shaw’s footsteps, his narrow bird‐like head down. Breathless, the DS stopped when he reached Shaw, then nodded at the Mondeo. ‘Latest model, SatNav as basic.’

  Valentine could hardly speak for lack of breath. Emphysema, thought Shaw. Fluid filling his lungs. If he’s given up smoking, he’s given up too late. Shaw didn’t need a SatNav to know Valentine’s destination.

  The bass note of a stereo system thudded from behind the misted windows of the car.

  ‘Check it out,’ said Shaw. ‘I’ll go along the line, see what the problem is up ahead.’ A group stood beside the third car from the front of the line, lit by the interior light spilling from the open driver’s door.

  Valentine bridled at the peremptory tone, trying to get used to the fact that DI Shaw was the boss, not the kid in short trousers he’d once kicked a football with on the beach. It would be easier if Shaw could lay off the checklist philosophy. That’s what they called him at the station. ‘Check‐It.’ Check this, check that, check every bloody thing. Mr Politically Correct. Mr Rule Book. And Valentine knew where all that had its roots. He knew why Peter Shaw was so keen to show the world he was the perfect copper: it was because his father hadn’t been, that’s why. And because his father’s partner hadn’t been either. Jack Shaw and George Valentine had lashed up their last big case. Big time. What had the judge said? Slipshod.

  Valentine used one foot to ease the black shoe off the other and, leaning against the Mondeo, poured out some water before putting it back on.

  Shaw reached the Morris Minor and turned back with fresh instructions: ‘And this,’ he called. He placed his palms together and put them beside one cheek, tilting his head as if laying it down on a pillow. An elderly woman was asleep in the car, the windows slightly frosted on the inside, a tartan rug to one side where it had slipped off her body. Shaw could see her face: there was a smile on the thin lips and her hands were held slightly up from the quilt like a child’s.

  The door of the Mondeo opened before Valentine could tap on the roof. The teenager stood, leaning on the door. ‘We getting out of here?’

  Valentine shrugged. ‘What’s up?’ He nodded forward to the group by the silver Vauxhall Corsa.

  ‘What bastard cares?’ The young man bounced on his toes and Valentine noticed that he kept putting his hands in his pockets and then taking them out, then rubbing them on the backside of his jeans.

  ‘This one.’ Valentine flipped out his warrant card. ‘Why are you on this road, sir, can I ask?’

  The kid took a step back and laughed inappropriately. ‘Diversion. There’s a sign down on the coast road – floods it said.’ His accent had flattened out: he’d gone up three socio‐economic classes and moved thirty miles closer to London. He looked ahead. ‘Then this happened.’ He put his hand on the car door and then quickly removed it as if the metal were too cold to touch, but Valentine had seen a mark on the top of his hand, the bluish remains of a stamp in the shape of a circle enclosing two letters: BT.

  On the dashboard lay a mobile phone.

  ‘Yours?’

  ‘Shine,’ said the kid. ‘Two megapixel camera; hundred and fifteen grams; six point seven hours talk time.’

  ‘Right. But does it work?’

  The kid shrugged. ‘I was gonna walk back to the road,’ he said.

  Valentine shook his head. ‘A mile, and it’s treacherous.’

  ‘It’s one point three miles,’ he said. ‘I clocked it.’

  ‘Just stay here, OK?’ Valentine was running out of patience. ‘We’ve radioed for help but it’ll be a time.’ He took an extra breath and ran an eye over the Mondeo’s purple paintwork – spotless. On the back seat was a blanket, a picnic basket, a shooting stick and a Frisbee. The steering wheel had a cover, black and white chevrons: an animal skin, snake perhaps. He walked on, but turned and memorized the registration number. He had a good memory, if he could be bothered to use it. The kid had annoyed him. It always did: a teenager out in Daddy’s car.

  Shaw was behind the plumber’s van now, and through the heated rear window and the grille he’d seen a young man in the passenger seat reading a magazine. He came alongside, noticing for the first time the paw prints in the snow between the footprints, and tapped on the driver’s window, then opened the door.

  ‘Police,’ he said, putting his knee on the driver’s seat and looking at the magazine. ‘May I?’ He took it. It was German, an illegal import at the nastier end of the hard‐porn market. He held his head slightly to one side so that he could focus on the picture.

  ‘Name?’ said Shaw.

  The man shrugged. ‘Das Fleisch,’ he said, mangling the words. ‘They got Turkish blokes on site, they bring them in from Frankfurt.’

  ‘Your name.’

  ‘I found it, the last job this morning. Building site down in the Arndale, in the Portakabin where I brewed the tea. There was loads. Worse…’

  Shaw waited. He studied the young man’s face. Noted the premature hair loss at the temples, the acne scars, and the pronounced dimple in the chin – the mental fovea.

  ‘Sean Harper. That’s my boss,’ said the young man, nodding forward to the group standing in the pool of light. ‘Fred.’ He grinned as if this was the ultimate character reference.

  ‘I’ll keep this, Mr Harper,’ said Shaw, folding the magazine inside his jacket.

  ‘Like – it’s not a crime.’

  ‘Well, it is actually,’ said Shaw. ‘We’ll talk about it later.’

  ‘You go out?’ asked Harper, pointing at the RNLI lifeboat motif on the lapel of Shaw’s jacket, trying hard to smile.

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘That’s cool,’ said Harper, watching his magazine disappear from sight. ‘I’ve thought of it… you know? Volunteering.’

  For the first time Shaw noticed the blanket behind the seats ruffled into a swirled nest of tartan. He paused, sniffed the air, expecting to detect the tell‐tale stench of dog, but the van was clean and neat, the overpowering odour that of the strawberry‐scented air freshener stuck on the dashboard.

  ‘You should,’ said Shaw, not smiling.

  Next in line was the revamped Securicor van. The driver refused to open the window until he saw the warrant card pressed up against the glass, then he cracked it an inch.

  ‘Any trouble?’ asked Shaw, knowing he’d seen the man before – in the dock of
the magistrates’ court. The crime? He searched his memory but couldn’t pinpoint the case. Something violent, he knew that. Something violent with his hands, in pursuit of cash. Why then, Shaw asked himself, was he sitting guarding a van full of the stuff? He was twenty‐five to thirty, dark good looks marred by a narrow nose which had been broken and badly reset and which only just managed to separate his eyes, the eyebrows almost meeting at the bridge. He had a halfhearted moustache and designer stubble.

  ‘You got a control desk to contact?’ asked Shaw.

  The driver found his voice. ‘We don’t have radios – and there’s no signal on the mobiles.’

  Shaw stepped back, looking along the line of vehicles. ‘Get my DS to radio through for you – there’s enough chaos after the storm without half the force out looking for you and your bars of gold. What is in the back?’

  The guard checked a clipboard. ‘Cash. We do corner shops, the supermarkets on the estates, wholesale fish market down on the docks. About eighty thousand – not much more, anyway.’

  ‘Sit tight,’ said Shaw, wondering if his employer knew about the criminal record. He approved of rehabilitation, but putting the alcoholic behind the bar was asking for trouble.

  Ahead he could see the Corsa’s two nearside doors open, two figures standing back, watching Shaw. One, a man in overalls, waved and placed a hand on his heart, patting a quilted jacket. Shaw raised a hand.

  ‘Problem?’ he shouted.

  The man pointed inside the Corsa, patted his chest again. ‘Heart.’

  He moved quickly past the next car – a Volvo, an old model estate, a hand‐painted sign reading ‘The Emerald Garden’ on the rear window. The distinctive aroma of soy sauce was laced with petrol fumes. No driver, no passengers.

  An elderly man lay tilted back in the Corsa’s front seat. Shaw guessed he was sixty‐five, perhaps seventy. He had heavy spectacles, with black plastic rims, and thin white hair stuck to his skull. His face was the colour of the streaks in Stilton cheese, saliva catching the light at the corners of his mouth. Vomit covered his chin and the front of the heavy jacket, a slimy eggshell‐blue. Shaw picked up the strong scent of pine needles but couldn’t see the air freshener.

  A woman in a yellow jacket stood back, smoking. Kneeling, the man in clean blue overalls held the sick man’s hand, his neat face screwed up with anxiety, a small wound on his forehead still wet with blood. A Jack Russell lay under the vehicle, its nose rummaging at the man’s foot.

  ‘Like I say, heart attack, I reckon,’ said the man in the overalls. ‘Don’t suppose you’ve got a mobile signal? You stuck too?’

  ‘I’m a policeman,’ said Shaw. ‘We’ve radioed. Can I see, please?’

  He bent down and found that another man was on the passenger seat. Chinese features, his knees drawn up beneath him. ‘Can’t find a pulse,’ he said, the consonants dulled by his accent.

  Shaw took out a pocket knife and cut the tie which had become fiercely knotted at the man’s throat. Then he pulled both sides of his heavy oversized jacket and shirt apart, the buttons popping clear. He turned the collar away from the neck and noticed a name tag: RFA. He leant in close to the man’s face, putting a hand to his forehead. He knew instantly that the man was alive: the drops of water in his eyebrows were warm, and although his lips were blue and didn’t move they were moist with the breath that was passing between them, like the draught under a door.

  He backed out and shouted to Valentine, who was down on his haunches by the Morris, talking through the driver’s window.

  ‘George,’ he shouted. Valentine stood slowly, one hand on the Morris for support. ‘Get a chopper. Medical emergency – cardiac arrest, male about sixty‐five years of age. They’ll see us from the air, tell ’em to come down on the seaward side – it’s flat sand under the snow.’

  Shaw ducked back into the Corsa and, feeling inside the man’s pocket, he found a wallet with a driving licence in a plastic see‐through compartment. John Blickling Holt. Born 30 December 1941. An address was given on Devil’s Alley, King’s Lynn. Shaw knew it well: a narrow cobbled street running down to the quay, reeking of fish and the tide. Mostly poor, run‐down warehouses, a warren of Medieval buildings.

  The man on the passenger seat said he was called Stanley Zhao. Even folded on his knees Shaw could see he bucked the racial stereotype by being the best part of six feet tall. He looked fifty, but his hair was still as black as a penguin’s feathers. Shaw told him to stay in the Corsa, run the heating at half blast and sound the horn if Holt came round or got worse.

  Shaw shut the door and straightened his back, bringing his face up level with the roof rack, the two sets of ladders strapped up neatly with webbing. The woman in the yellow coat and the man in the blue overalls stood between him and the first two vehicles in the convoy.

  ‘My name’s Baker‐Sibley; Sarah Baker‐Sibley,’ said the woman. ‘I need to get a message to my daughter. I should have picked her up from school – St Agnes’ Hall – and I’m worried. I’m always there on time – or I ring. She won’t have Clara with her – that’s her best friend. She has a clarinet lesson after school,’ she added. ‘She’ll walk home. She’ll try to walk. Two miles, she’s done it before and she has a key, but never in winter… in this,’ she said, looking out over the snowfield. ‘She’s thirteen. So she won’t think twice about trying.’ She laughed, then dropped the half‐finished cigarette and fumbled for the packet. ‘I’m sorry – can I see your warrant card again?’

  ‘My colleague DS Valentine will take the details, Ms Baker‐Sibley,’ said Shaw, holding his warrant card slightly too close to her face for comfort. ‘He can radio ahead.

  ‘This your Alfa?’ Shaw asked her, walking forward. ‘I’d stay put for now,’ he added when she didn’t answer. ‘And the vehicle in front?’

  ‘The man who’s ill went forward and checked when we first got stuck,’ she said. ‘The driver hasn’t been out. Perhaps he’s getting some sleep; he had some horrendous racket at full blast to start with.’

  The radio still played, but the volume was now low, the sound reedy.

  Looking forward along the causeway Shaw could see an unsteady line of footprints weaving its way to the pick‐up truck beside partially filled tyre tracks, the return line an uncertain attempt to retrace the same steps. Paw prints, crisper, zig‐zagged between the tracks. The observation window in the rear of the cab still showed a light within. The pick‐up’s headlights burnt yellow, and Shaw guessed the battery was low. He walked forward, the hair on his neck bristling as a breeze took his skin temperature down a degree. Something moved in the sky and he looked up in time to see a meteor fall, a flashing line of silver that died before it reached the sea.

  The truck was wide enough to block the track almost completely, leaving just the narrowest of paths down the driver’s side. Shaw held on to the side and took the chance to lift the tarpaulin cover to see the load beneath: plasterboard, sheets of it for cheap walls.

  Leaning forward he grasped the door handle, breaking the silence with his voice for the first time.

  ‘Hello? Police.’

  He turned the handle and swung the door open, stepping forward quickly to get a grip on the stanchion. He was less than two feet from the driver and it took him three seconds, perhaps less, to know that he was looking at a corpse.

  7

  The sight of death. For Shaw the shock was no less profound for being the second time he’d faced it in a few hours. If anything the sudden sense of living in a slow‐motion world was even more pronounced. He felt his fingertips tingle as the blood rushed to his heart.

  ‘Crime scene,’ he said to himself, reassured by the calm resonance of his own voice. ‘Let’s stick to the book. He’s dead, so there’s no hurry, no imperative but observation.’ He stood outside himself, watching himself follow procedure. His voice sounded good. Very good. But despite the sensation that he’d taken control a persistent thought intruded, like the buzzing of a fly around a wound: what would
his father have done? An odd sensation: missing someone who’d hardly been there.

  ‘Don’t look for links,’ he told himself, thinking of the body still freezing under the Land Rover’s spotlight down on Ingol Beach. ‘Let’s take them one at a time.’

  He looked at his hands, checking. ‘Gloves,’ he said, double‐checking.

  The radio signal was weak, the volume hardly audible now, but he leant in none the less and turned the radio off, leaving himself some silence in which to think.

  His training had been repetitive but clear: there were procedures to follow, and a single broken rule could destroy vital evidence.

  So: first, secure the scene. He stepped out, looking back along Siberia Belt to where Valentine was taking a note from the woman in the Alfa Romeo.

  ‘George.’ He said it as calmly as he could, but Valentine was experienced enough to pick up the coded charge of adrenaline. He looked up sharply. ‘Make sure everyone stays put. And get that dog on a leash. Crime‐scene rules. Then come forward – to the Alfa. Wait for me there.’

  Now, observations. The corpse. First, the face. From a kneeling position Shaw could look up at the victim, the chin resting on the chest, a pair of off‐white workman’s overalls buttoned high with a white T‐shirt beneath. The skull was slight, almost child‐like. The features – eyes, lips and eyebrows – were large and seemed to crowd the face. The nose was small, snub and under‐developed. He checked the skin at the ankles and hands. Hypostasis, the telltale pooling of blood after death, was incomplete. The man was small – a guess, five foot six or seven.

  The cause of death was brutally obvious: a thin‐necked chisel projected from the dead man’s left eye socket. Shaw touched his own wounded eye, feeling his pulse in the blood behind the retina. The chisel had been forced in up to the hilt of the rounded wooden handle. There was remarkably little blood, but blood there was: a rivulet, now congealed, ran from the caked eye socket across the cheek to the neck and shoulder, and then behind the body, pooling on the seat. Rigor had begun to set in; both hands were held palm up, showing signs of soil stains, one with grass under the fingernails, fingers stiff. The head was bare, the close‐cropped cranium vulnerable, but unmarked.