Death Wore White

by Jim Kelly

  ‘More coffee?’ she asked, pushing mousey hair off her forehead.

  ‘I’m sorry – we’re in the way, Mrs Dereham,’ said Shaw.

  ‘Well – yes. Yes you are, Inspector.’ She kicked the empty washing basket. ‘But I guess you’d rather be at home…’ She put her hands on her head, closing her eyes, resting, and Shaw watched her breasts rise under the rough shirt she wore. Beautiful? Yes: the body beneath unhidden despite the clothes. ‘It’s Izzy, by the way.’

  ‘Izzy,’ said Shaw.

  ‘Look. I have to get down to the beach,’ she said. ‘The oyster beds; the storm will have rocked the cages. Oysters are money, Inspector, big money. Unfortunately, I just manage them. But I do need to check. Is that OK?’

  ‘Sure. Just keep off Ingol Beach.’

  ‘My daughter’s asleep upstairs. Natalie. I’ve explained you’re here. She won’t be a problem.’

  When she left the cold air blew in, making the fire crackle.

  They checked their mobiles on the tabletop, the signal bars blank.

  ‘So what happened on Siberia Belt tonight?’ asked Shaw.

  It was a rhetorical question, but Valentine didn’t spot it. He checked his notes. ‘The first squad car up Siberia Belt said there was no trace of the detour sign that all of the drivers swear was on the corner when they left the main road. The diving unit back‐up came from Cromer to the other end of Siberia Belt and there was no sign at that end either. But the junction’s opposite a cottage and the owner swears he saw a no‐entry sign there at around the right time, but he didn’t see it put up, or taken down. So that’s it – diversion at one end, no entry at the other, then both disappear.’

  ‘What about the AA?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘Nope. Same with County Highways, RAC, traffic control. No one put a sign out.’

  Shaw poured more coffee. ‘So it’s a trap for the victim. They get him off the road, he never gets where he’s going – unless it was the cemetery, of course.’ He looked into the fire, thinking of the victim’s truck, the single line of footprints there and back.

  ‘There’s one thing that works,’ said Valentine. ‘Holt. The old bloke in the Corsa. He goes forward. How long does it take? A single blow, then he leaves him to bleed to death.’

  ‘Where’s the murder weapon?’

  ‘In the coat – it’s big enough.’

  ‘True. He could have had an accomplice under it, and a getaway car. But the Baker‐Sibley woman’s statement is clear – he kept his hands in his pockets. He didn’t lean in. She watched him.’

  ‘She could be wrong.’ Valentine shrugged. ‘Maybe she looked away, it only takes a second. Then chummy bleeds to death – slowly. Death throes, that’s what you saw from the hill, what she saw through the back window.’

  Shaw undid the top button of his shirt – he never wore a tie. ‘But there’s a plan. We know someone put out the signs, then took them back in. Meticulous, premeditated. Then the killer takes a chance like that? That the witnesses are looking the other way when he strikes? Makes no sense.’

  ‘I’m just saying it’s all that works,’ said Valentine, his jaw set.

  ‘It is. Which is another good reason for keeping a round‐the‐clock watch at Holt’s bedside – so fix it. But let’s not get too excited. There’s no trace of blood on Holt. Not a drop. However, he is the last person to see the victim alive, so we need to interview him as quickly as possible. We’ll start the spade work in the morning,’ added Shaw. ‘We need to re‐interview them all – check for inconsistencies, backgrounds, look for links. Check again. Anyone else?’

  Valentine tipped back the coffee cup, letting the last gritty granules fire up the taste buds on his tongue. ‘The runaway kid. Why run? And why run then? St James’s is on to the Mondeo’s registration – should be an hour, less.’

  ‘But he’s not a killer, is he?’

  Valentine stretched his arms aloft, the joints cracking. ‘We won’t get anything tonight.’ Shaw stood. ‘Let’s touch base first thing. We’ll need to come back in daylight anyway – I’ve told them to keep the vehicles in situ until then. But the fact is that even by daylight the problem is still the same: we’ve got a murder scene with no footprints in and no footprints out.’

  Valentine flapped his raincoat in front of the fire. ‘Let’s find a motive. Worry about footprints in the snow later…’

  There was a silence again. Shaw remembered something his father had said about George Valentine. That when it came to the textbook he worked backwards: he found the criminal first, then the evidence which linked them to the crime. Had there been an unspoken inference: that if he couldn’t find the evidence, he’d make it up?

  ‘Right – anyone else?’ asked Shaw.

  Valentine rubbed the pouched skin below his eyes. ‘The Chinky in the takeaway Volvo?’

  Shaw winced at the casual racism, wondering if Valentine had said it deliberately. As far as his DS was concerned PC was something you stuck on your desk and didn’t want to use.

  ‘The victim in the inflatable floated in off the sands,’ said Valentine, wiping his nose with a grey bundle of cotton. ‘That’s the cockle‐pickers’ territory. OK – there are Lynn‐based gangs out there, legit operations, but we know the Chinese run them too, and run most of the dodgy ones.’

  Shaw went to speak.

  ‘Perhaps they’ve got something going, the Chinese… people smuggling?’ Valentine continued.

  Shaw shook his head. ‘One guy on a raft and he’s European. We had illegals coming in last year, but the trade’s dried up since the Coastguard started patrolling the Wash. That’s stopped it – and stopped it dead.’

  ‘OK,’ said Valentine. ‘Ciggies, then; drugs? We don’t know what the bloke on the beach might have had in that raft before he died. So there’s a welcoming party, one of the cars that’s stranded on Siberia Belt. Just because there’s a detour sign doesn’t mean none of them wanted to be there.’

  Shaw was listening now.

  ‘So they get snarled up in the snow,’ said Valentine. ‘An argument about what to do. Low life, falling out. Do we stay, do we run? Who’s got the money?’ He stopped, hauling up his ribs to draw air into his lungs. ‘Do we get paid? We know the score with these people. It’s all sweetness and light until the shit flies, then they tear each other apart. Someone gets the chisel for their trouble.’

  Shaw’s back stiffened. ‘And then the murderer disappears without leaving a footprint. How does that work?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ said Valentine, checking his watch. Completeness wasn’t one of his concerns. He was a detective, not a train‐spotter.

  Two doors led out of the kitchen. One into the hall and to the living room beyond, the other into a makeshift office. They could hear a woman’s voice: Sarah Baker‐Sibley. Each witness had been offered one call on the landline, and they could hear her talking; the speech pattern oddly modulated, tiredness perhaps, blended with stress. Valentine had got a message through to her daughter’s voicemail via the control room at St James’s while they were out on Siberia Belt. Three messages, in fact: stay at home; check the security lights were on; pizza in the fridge.

  ‘God,’ they heard her say, stressed out. ‘OK, OK. Look, pass me over…’

  They heard the phone go down on the hook suddenly so Valentine opened the door to usher her back to the living room. But she’d picked up the phone again. ‘I’m sorry – we got cut off. Do you mind?… I need to ring again.’ She was desperate, and Shaw knew that no one could have stopped her making a second call. The tyranny of children.

  Valentine shrugged. ‘Then the car’s ready, OK? You’ll be home in twenty minutes,’ he said, closing the door.

  Shaw pressed his forehead against the cold glass of the kitchen window. A line of taxis was edging through the farmyard gates.

  They heard footsteps on ice outside the door. It was Izzy Dereham, back from checking the oyster beds. ‘Storm’s turned a couple of the frames,’ she said, walking briskly to the
sink, scrubbing her hands.

  ‘Is that your van? The white Ford in the barn?’ asked Valentine.

  ‘Sure. We run the oysters in it.’

  ‘Where?’ pressed Valentine.

  ‘Shark Tooth.’ It was one of the town’s newest com panies, commercial shellfish mainly, having started out running boats for tourists to catch North Sea dogfish, based up the coast from Lynn at Wootton Marsh.

  ‘They own this place,’ said Dereham. ‘I’m just a tenant. But you know, I’ve got plans…’ She looked up to where her child was sleeping. ‘Bit of arable, dairy herd, it could be a decent farm this… but the quick money’s in the oysters.’

  ‘Your husband?’ asked Shaw, knowing instantly it was the right question.

  ‘Patrick died.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Shaw touched the picture over the fireplace taken on a farm. Something crossed Izzy’s face, an expression so fleeting as to be subliminal. Grief thought Shaw, and something else, expertly hidden.

  ‘I was born there – up the coast,’ she said. ‘That was our farm, before the bailiffs moved in.’

  The door to the back room opened and Sarah Baker‐Sibley came through. She was going to say something but the phone rang behind her. Valentine went through to answer.

  ‘I’ve finished,’ she announced, and Shaw noticed the hard edge to her voice. ‘My daughter’s at home, she’s fine.’ She tried to look relieved but didn’t get her face right. Shaw wondered what was wrong. ‘Thank you,’ she added, slipping out under cover of a smile.

  Valentine appeared at the door, covering the mouthpiece on the phone. ‘It’s St James’s. Bad news. I got them to match all the car regs. They did a cross‐check with the day diary. The Mondeo – reported as stolen by the owner at 7.30 p.m. tonight.’

  It was late and Shaw was tired, almost too tired to let the thought take shape. Valentine shuffled the papers on the kitchen table, looking at the CSI pictures, setting apart the shots of the Mondeo. A stolen car, so they might never find the young driver.

  ‘Thought so,’ said Valentine, spinning one of the CSI prints round so that Shaw could see. It was an interior shot of the Mondeo. ‘The kid does a runner,’ he said, his voice suddenly animated. ‘Panics when he knows we’ll nab him for the theft. But he makes sure he takes something with him…’

  ‘What?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘A snakeskin steering‐wheel cover. Chevrons, black and white. Distinctive.’ He pressed a stubby finger into the shot, leaving a greasy print.

  9

  The cobblestones along St James’s glistened like pebbles on the beach. Police HQ was a curved brick 1960s block with civic pretensions, the single Victorian blue lamp salvaged from its predecessor down in the old town. The snow was turning to sleet, then rain, sheets of it thrown in off the sea falling through the floodlight that still played on Greyfriars Tower, a medieval stump which stood in waste ground opposite St James’s. Under the styleless portico of police headquarters, held up by four square brick pillars, two uniformed constables manhandled a half‐naked youth towards the doors, the young man’s knotted back a riot of illustration: an anchor, a dancing girl, a military badge.

  Valentine sniffed the pungent kick of meths on the night breeze and walked down towards the quay. He’d got a lift back into town with a CSI unit, and the trip had woken him up. The pub sign outside his local, the Artichoke, swung in the rain, no lights within. He stood for a moment beside Captain George Vancouver’s statue on the waterside. This was where he’d always had a cigarette, the last one before home. He took a double lungful of night air, his shoulders aching with the effort. A day without cigarettes had left him feeling no better, no worse.

  He considered the bronze statue, wondering what the explorer would have made of the condom someone had hung from his outstretched finger. In the glistening mud below a crab scuttled, leaving a complex hieroglyph in its wake.

  Staring into the mud, he thought about the old girl in the Morris in the line of cars on Siberia Belt. Nice woman, old money. He’d helped her out of the car and then she said she’d forgotten her glasses. He offered to get them out of the glove compartment but she’d said not to bother, her voice edging just too high to be natural. They’d take her car into the pound tomorrow, so there was no hurry. He’d find out what she didn’t want him to see. And one other thing that kept snagging his brain. The ladders on the Corsa’s roof. He’d get the CSI report on those. Check the length.

  He walked over the narrow wooden footbridge which crossed the Purfleet and made his way along the King’s Staithe to the maze of terraced streets he’d lived in all his life. He stopped on the corner of Greenland Street. The central heating at home would be off. He hadn’t understood the timing mechanism when his wife was alive, and the secret had died with her. She’d been buried in the churchyard at All Saints’ and sometimes he went by on the way home. Not tonight. A cat sat in the middle of the road like a fur hat, its eyes as green as the paper dragon set in the fanlight of the end house: once a shop, its downstairs window curved around the corner gracefully, a door set within the arc. Behind the glass a handwritten sign in Chinese characters.

  He knew the sound they made. Yat ye hoi p’i.

  Here, on the corner of a rain‐soaked street, a warm light shone: a green light, shining through a paper lantern. Walking forward, he looked left and right and knocked quickly twice, then paused, then twice again. He heard footsteps and felt happy for the first time that day.

  10

  Tuesday, 10 February

  The eight vehicles of the stranded convoy stood in the light of the rising moon, the cold blue streak of dawn in the east as raw and unwelcome as the scream of an alarm clock. Shaw had slept for three hours in the CSI back‐up van. He’d been a poor sleeper since childhood. So he was used to waking up in the dark.

  But he wasn’t used to waking up anywhere that wasn’t home. Lena, his wife, said he was a homing pigeon, always circling back towards the loft. The contrast with his father was, as always, stark. Jack Shaw had liked working nights, sleeping at St James’s when a case was on, living the job. So his father’s life had been a secret from him; one of the reasons he’d been drawn to the same career, to find out, in little ways, what his father’s life had been like, to see how closely the real world snapped into place beside the one he’d imagined.

  So when he’d woken in the CSI van he felt a familiar frisson of anxiety, the loss of something just beyond his understanding. He thought about texting home, but knew it was too early. And there’d still be no mobile signal. The night before he’d relayed a message through St James’s, telling Lena he’d be out overnight. But he wanted to hear her voice.

  He’d got up quickly, trudging through the snow in the dark to the mobile canteen to re‐read the witness statements, drinking a pint of bitumen‐strength coffee. Others came for hot soup, tea and coffee too, but little was said. Everyone was tired, looking forward to seeing the sun. But that moment was still an hour away, more.

  Shaw tried to think of the day ahead as separate from that which had gone before. Day Two: a time to take stock, step back, let the adrenaline fade. But the intensity of the images from the previous evening were too strong to dismiss: the blood‐caked mouth of the man he’d pulled out of the sea; the crumpled figure at the wheel of the pick‐up truck, impaled. The buzz was still electric, an intensity of consciousness, which made Peter Shaw feel very alive. He suppressed the excitement, aware that this was a drug to which his father had become addicted, the living of a life through the deaths of others. He’d wondered if that was why his father had made just that one rule: that his son could do anything with his life except become a policeman.

  Shaw craved his own drug: the surge of endorphins, the rush of blood, the certainty of well‐being that came with pushing himself to run, to swim, and to run again. He checked his map. The coast road was almost exactly a mile away. He set the stopwatch going on his wrist and began to run, despite the lightweight boots he wore, and wh
en he found his footing secure in the crisp deep snow, he opened up into a wide, easy pace. The lights of the road came into view all too quickly and he slowed to a halt: 4 minutes 43 seconds. His body cried out for him to carry on, to push himself until his bloodstream pumped like a central‐heating system. But he had to stop, and he felt his temperature rising inside the waterproof jacket.

  He bent double, his palms in the snow, then straightened. His mobile buzzed, picking up text messages he’d been unable to receive overnight within the dead zone on Siberia Belt. He scrolled down: three from Lena, all pictures. His daughter in bed, a book folded over her head where it had dropped from her hands as she fell asleep, a snowman on the beach in front of the house, and one of Lena – cowering out of the wind on the veranda, taken by his daughter.

  He jogged back along Siberia Belt, looking steadily ahead, imagining the cars the previous night, edging their way through the snow towards the sharp right‐hand turn just before Gallow Marsh Farm. He rounded the bend and saw the stranded convoy. Each car and van sealed with signed plastic tags on the door handles and boots – except the Alfa, where he could see the CSI team still at work, the gentle buzz of a forensic vacuum within. The victim’s truck was hidden within a SOC tent, lit like a Chinese lantern. Ahead, the pine tree still blocked the road, but beyond it stood a fire rescue vehicle, and behind that an ambulance, blue lights silently flashing. Both emergency vehicles were parked in a lay‐by Shaw had not noticed before, built to allow cars to pass each other on the narrow track.

  The sound of a chainsaw serrated the silence and amongst the pine’s branches Shaw could see movement, the last of the snow falling from the needles.

  Tom Hadden, the force’s senior crime scene investigator, was buried within, while a fireman cut wood on the far side. Hadden was civilian branch, a former government scientist with the Home Office. He’d taken early retirement, moved up to the coast alone, leaving a divorce in north London. He’d brought his bird‐watching binoculars with him, and one of the best brains in the country in forensic science. He was fifty‐five, red hair now turning strawberry blond, his face obscured by freckles and lesions. He’d had some ops for skin cancer, Shaw knew, and he always looked healthier in the dark. He had a curious habit of closing his eyes when answering a question he thought was important.