Death Wore White

by Jim Kelly

  ‘Anything?’ asked Shaw, knowing he could leave the pleasantries aside.

  Hadden struggled to turn his head amongst the pine branches. ‘Well. I’m pretty sure it’s a tree.’

  Shaw pressed in amongst the pine needles, which released a wave of pungent scent. ‘How’d she come down?’

  ‘Three blows,’ said Hadden, reaching forward, parting branches to reveal the trunk, neatly severed by a series of axe blows. ‘Instant roadblock. I’d say it wasn’t the first time our woodman had swung an axe.’

  Shaw recalled George Valentine’s summary of the crime: on one hand a disregard for leaving clues – the victim left to die in the cab, now the axe marks – combined with the complete absence of footprints.

  ‘Anything else I should know now?’

  Hadden extricated himself, a kneecap clicking as he did so. ‘Pathologist is still at work,’ he said. ‘I think we’ll leave her to it, don’t you?’

  The pronoun told Shaw all he needed to know. There was only one female pathologist working regularly with West Norfolk: Dr Justina Kazimierz; and it would indeed be best to leave her to finish her work in peace.

  Edging past the pick‐up they came to the Alfa, and Shaw noticed a small flag marked with an ‘A’ below the driver’s window.

  ‘Ciggy butt – menthol,’ said Hadden, not stopping. ‘Common brand.’ Shaw leant in at the Alfa’s open window. The interior smelt of money: soft leather and scent. A child’s picture was stuck on the dashboard, a girl with long hair, the ashtray bristled with dog‐ends soiled with lipstick.

  Behind that the old man’s Corsa. For the first time Shaw noticed the car had been vandalized: scratched lines, crossing, peaked like a hat, an angry inchoate scrawl.

  ‘They’re fresh,’ said Hadden. ‘A month old, maybe less. My guess is a diamond cutter – see how deeply the metal is scored. Nothing casual.’

  They walked on. ‘Time of death on the victim, Tom?’ asked Shaw, smiling, the perfect teeth in a surfer’s grin. He’d never been surprised by the fact that in ten years of CID work he’d failed to get a straight answer to that question. He didn’t expect one now.

  Hadden removed a pair of thin forensic gloves with theatrical care and his eyes closed. ‘Not my area, clearly – as you well know. Pathologist is the expert on that and she’s with the body – but you’ll get less of an answer from her than you will from me. I took her to the body last night; that’s the only time I’ve seen the victim. So – outside temperature was freezing, inside the cab perhaps twenty degrees or more. Temperature gradient like that makes estimating the time of death difficult. The rigor had set in, but was short of complete. Two to five hours is a good working hypothesis. But that only holds if the body was inside the cab for that period: outside, much longer.’

  Shaw checked his watch. The CSI team had arrived at 9 p.m., the pathologist at 9.45. So death occurred somewhere between 4.45 and 7.45 that evening. The convoy had come to rest at around 5.15. Given that dead men don’t drive, that meant the victim died between 5.15 and 7.45.

  But no footprints except Holt’s, and he didn’t have the time to deliver the fatal blow if Baker‐Sibley’s evidence was sound. Shaw shook his head. He was missing something. He forced himself to lower his shoulders, releasing his neck muscles.

  Shaw looked back up the line to the tent over the victim’s truck. ‘Prints in the victim’s vehicle?’

  ‘Yeah – it’s like a sweet‐shop counter. We need to input them all, get them on the database. You don’t get many crime scenes with this many potential murderers in situ. We need to mix and match, see what comes up.’

  Shaw tried to empty his head, switching crimes, trying not to make any assumptions which might derail the investigation before it had even started. ‘Anything from the beach – the corpse in the raft?’

  ‘Standard make, beach‐shop inflatable – we’ll check it out, but one of the uniforms said his kids had one. Argos sell them as well. Nothing else in the thing with him – except a pint or so of blood. We presume it’s his blood – but it’s just that at the moment. A presumption. Nothing on the tide‐line, except your barrel of toxic waste. He’s been dead a while, by the way. Twenty‐four hours, perhaps more.’

  Shaw pressed his thumb and forefinger on either side of the bridge of his nose. Finding the yellow oil drum seemed like a distant memory. ‘I need to see inside the truck cab,’ he said.

  ‘Sure.’ Hadden smiled. ‘I’ll leave you that pleasure. She’ll have an ID once the jacket’s off, with luck.’

  Hadden set off for the beach, Shaw for the tent over the victim’s truck. He approached it slowly, making sure his footfalls gave due warning of his approach. Dr Kazimierz was a woman who didn’t suffer fools gladly, and thought almost everyone was a fool. She worked in silence, and valued it in others. And she worked alone, even in a crowd.

  The first thing he saw was that the body was still in place. Dr Kazimierz held the head up by the chin, looking into the eyes, the chisel still in place in the left socket. For a second Shaw saw the scene differently, two lovers perhaps, folding together their personal spaces. Then she leant forward and, with a pair of tweezers, removed something from an eyebrow. She held it in the light of a torch she’d taped to the headrest: a hair. She pocketed it in a clear plastic evidence bag, quickly sealing and signing the sticky label.

  She looked up, ready to dismiss whoever had interrupted her. But when she saw Shaw she nodded, the merest hint of an acknowledgement. Then she cut a short length of tape, using the sticky side to lift a series of particles from the victim’s overalls.

  ‘I’m done in five,’ she said, bagging the evidence. ‘Exterior’s clean now if you want to circle.’

  Shaw wondered what Justina Kazimierz had looked like in her youth. He imagined a school photograph perhaps, a face not yet overwhelmed by heavy middle‐European features, dark brown eyes showing off her olive skin. He’d been to her fiftieth birthday party at the Polish Club in the North End, an occasion marked by blood sausage and iced vodka with all the subtlety of lighter fuel. She’d danced then, with her husband, a diminutive man with delicate hands, light rapid steps despite her sturdy build.

  Shaw circled the vehicle, squeezed between the tent and the bodywork. The tax was up to date, the registration plate the right year for the model, the tyres almost new. The paintwork was off‐white, with a signwritten panel: Fry & Sons, Builders, followed by a Lynn telephone number and a website address. The tailgate was chipped and scraped in places, with rust showing in the hinges. The tarpaulin had been folded back to reveal several sheets of plasterboard, some insulating board and a bundle of wooden wainscoting.

  Returning to the front of the vehicle, Shaw found the pathologist sitting on a camp stool. Plastic evidence bottles were arranged in groups on a collapsible table, glass phials laid in a plastic box, a black briefcase open to reveal a line of tools, torches, tapes and camera lenses.

  Through the windscreen the dead man’s head could be seen, thrown back now, the chisel protruding up as if it had been an arrow that fell to earth.

  ‘How’s your eye?’ she asked, taking Shaw by surprise.

  ‘We’ll know soon enough – it depends on the chemical type, apparently. It’s still sealed. There’s nothing they can do but wait. Nothing I can do. We’ll know when they take the stitches out of the lids. But they’re hopeful – very hopeful.’

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget the worst might happen.’

  Embarrassed by the intimacy, he looked through the truck’s windscreen at the victim. ‘How do you think he died?’ he asked, and they both laughed. In Shaw’s experience corpses fell into two distinct categories: those which echoed the human life that had recently fled, and those which seemed effortlessly to acquire the status of cold meat. This one, he reflected, was already on the butcher’s counter.

  ‘Wallet? Papers?’ he asked, pushing the image aside. ‘I’ll have to cut through the clothes to get to the pocket,’ she said. ‘I need help; you’ll do
.’ Even though she looked away, Shaw knew that the honour had been calculated, even if it had been so ungraciously bestowed. When he’d first met Justina Kazimierz Shaw had put her brutal rudeness down to unfamiliarity with a new language. That was a decade ago.

  ‘Now. Here,’ she said, indicating a bulge at chest level beneath the overalls. ‘We need this?’ It was his call. They could remove the body, get it back to the lab and cut the clothes off there. Doing it this way risked destroying evidence, but gave the inquiry a vital head start if they could get an ID. He knew what his father would have done, which made him hesitate.

  ‘Go ahead,’ he said at last, holding the cloth taut as she cut down with a pair of scissors. The fabric parted to reveal the top edge of a wallet held in a shirt pocket. A single cut with a scalpel opened the pocket so that the wallet could be lifted clear. She held it in a gloved hand and transferred it to the evidence table outside the vehicle, slipping it into a large forensic envelope, then opening it. They could both read a business card in a cellophane compartment.

  Harvey Ellis

  Carpenter/plasterer/builder

  Two telephone numbers: a landline and a mobile. A Lynn address: a block of seventies flats on land reclaimed from the estuary.

  On the flip side of the compartment was a picture. A boy, age impossible to guess, the hair shaved clean of a white skull, a feeding tube to the nose. And the kind of smile that’s for other people. Shaw turned to look at the photo hanging from the rear‐view mirror, the family shot. Same kid, just less of his life left to live.

  Dr Kazimierz had seen something else. The corpse’s right hand had fallen to the side as they’d cut into the fabric of the overalls, revealing six inches of skin above the wrist. She could see another wound, a cut leading to a puncture near the crook of the elbow, blood caked in the sleeve itself. ‘Looks like he managed to ward off one blow at least,’ she said.

  Shaw thought about Holt leaning in at the Vauxhall window. One blow unseen, perhaps, but two?

  ‘The distribution of blood on the victim is the first problem. Here…’ She used a wooden pointer from her overall pocket to indicate the ruptured eye socket. ‘The blood has pooled here, and here…’ She lightly tapped the collarbones on either side of the small depression below the Adam’s apple. ‘Then it flows over the shoulder and under the body. There is some blood on the seat, and in the footwell – and that’s slightly scuffed by the way.’

  ‘All of which means?’

  ‘I think he bled on his back – and was then placed in the van where death occurred. Also, at some point he emptied his bladder – there are traces of urine in the clothes. But there’s none on the seat. Again – points to the lethal attack taking place somewhere else.’

  ‘Outside the van?’

  ‘Clearly. The chisel’s shaft caught the ocular bone and fractured it, then sheared off into the soft tissue at the rear of the eye, then into the anterior lobe of the brain,’ she said, snapping off the forensic gloves. ‘I think he lost a lot of blood then – blood that is not at the scene. Then he was put in the driver’s seat, where he died.’ Shaw imagined the impact of the chisel blade, the internal crunch of the bone giving way, the painless thrust into the brain.

  ‘So,’ said Shaw. ‘To sum up. I’ve got a murder scene with no footprints and no blood.’

  ‘Least you’ve got a corpse,’ said Kazimierz.

  11

  Shaw parked the Land Rover in its usual slot beside the lifeboat station, triggering a security floodlight. The building was wooden, a throwback to the fifties, with Dutch gables. Beside it stood the new building, steel, with blue metal beams exposed. He unlocked the side door and slipped into the darkness.

  The hovercraft sat on its deflated rubber skirt like a cat in a basket. His eyes constructed it out of the shadows and the ambient light seeping in through the high double‐glazed windows. She was perfect for working out on the sands, up the shallow creeks and over the mud flats of the Wash. Shaw sniffed the air: detergent, engine oil and polish. He reached out and flicked a single switch, bathing her in light, the paintwork polished to a deep orange patina, the two rear fans gleaming in silver and black. He felt a rush of excitement and a sense of being home. The adrenaline made him want to run, so he locked up quickly and set off along the beach in the half‐light of dawn.

  The clouds out at sea delayed the moment when the sun would break free and start the day. The sands stretched ahead of him. In winter nothing moved here but the sand. A mile distant he could see home: a low wooden building with a long veranda, behind it a stone cottage, beyond that the old boathouse, beach stones strung over the felt roof to keep it down in the storms. Lena had taken the leasehold on the Old Beach Café a year before: a dream priced at £80,000. No access road, no mains electricity and accounts that showed an annual trading loss of £2,000. The stone cottage and boathouse were part of the deal. Both listed, both dilapidated.

  A busy year. Lena was organized, businesslike in pursuit of an ambition. The stone cottage was watertight now, the café stripped pine with an Italian coffee machine gleaming like a vintage motorbike, the boathouse converted to sell everything the sporty London beach crowd wanted: surfboards to wetsuits, hang gliders to sailboards. The exterior wooden panels of the café had been painted alternate yellow and blue. Shaw could see the flag hanging limply from the pole over the shop: a silver surfer on a blue sea. His seven‐year‐old daughter’s discarded summer swimsuit hung on a hook by the outside water tap, bleached by the rain.

  He sat on the stoop, planning a dawn swim in the winter wetsuit, trying to focus only on the forthcoming rush of icy white water. But two things gatecrashed his mind: if Sarah Baker‐Sibley’s daughter was alone at home to whom had she passed the phone when her mother asked her to? And then there were the spark plugs in the pick‐up’s door pocket. Rusted. Spent. But Harvey Ellis’s cab had been otherwise neat. Unless the truck was rarely used – an unlikely scenario – then the plugs had not been in an engine for several months. He saw the tiny metal question mark of the spark plug’s contact points. Corroded, black, scarred by the constant electrical explosions of years bringing an engine to life. But if they hadn’t been recently taken out of an engine – which the lack of oil suggested – then were they destined to be put into an engine? And why would anyone plan to do that?

  He squinted at the sun, then heard the thudding steps of his daughter running down the corridor which linked the cottage and the café. He smiled, turning, prepared for his other life.

  12

  George Valentine’s toast rack was almost empty, the charred crumbs scattered over the plastic tablecloth of the police canteen. He held his coffee with both hands, trying to disguise the tremble in his fingers. Toast, no butter. It was what George Valentine called ‘solids’, and it would have to keep him alive until he found a chip shop before going to his bed. He touched the half‐finished packet of cigarettes in his pocket, tired of finding proof that he was a weak man.

  Peter Shaw stood by the canteen’s plate‐glass window, drinking bottled mineral water and looking across the tumbled rooftops of the old town towards the sea. He’d been on time, to the minute. At home he’d cleared ice from the gutters, snow off the veranda where it had blown in off the beach, then ferried coffee to Lena, who had been up early with Francesca because they wanted to collect driftwood on the beach to decorate the surf shop before school. He’d held a weathered plank up to the wooden door of the old boathouse as Lena hammered it into place.

  She was five feet two, slim, compact. Her hair was cut short, angular, rising from her scalp like a surprise. At rest her face was melancholy, although the line of the lips always hinted, at least to him, of a smile. A slight cast in the right eye, the imperfection he had noticed first. Her body was made up entirely of curves, bisecting, crossing, running in harmony. The word sensuous was hers to keep. Francesca had the essential template of her mother’s face – the high forehead, steep, falling from the thick black hairline. His forensic art tutor w
ould have called it their ‘lifelong look’ – the one element of the face that anchored the rest, the one facet that would stay with them both to death. In summer Lena’s skin was Jamaican black, with the depth of a glazed pot. In winter a greyness undercut the lustre, so that strangers thought she was ill.

  ‘So, George Valentine?’ She’d smiled, watching her husband closely, but he didn’t answer. Shaw had told her about his new partner, the dishevelled, chain‐smoking toper. ‘I can see the funny side,’ she said, her smile widening.

  ‘You’ve never met him,’ said Shaw, looking out to sea.

  ‘You mean he wasn’t at the wedding?’

  They both laughed at their oldest joke. No one had been at the wedding, least of all Shaw’s father or his onetime partner George Valentine. Lena’s family was troubled, dispersed, in an almost constant state of family warfare which ruled out any kind of concerted action. Shaw’s family just didn’t want to come. His father was already ill, already dying. Shaw hadn’t been surprised by his father’s prejudices, but he’d been saddened by his mother’s. Lena had tried to forgive them, pretended that she had, but she knew it was a day in her life she couldn’t have again, and they’d taken some of the joy out of it.

  ‘You should give him a chance, you know. It’s ten years, Peter – more.’ ‘Unforgiving’ – it was a trait she’d identified in him long ago, and one she knew now he’d never be able to shake off.

  ‘He might surprise you,’ she said. ‘You surprised me.’ He picked up his tea and looked at her, knowing he didn’t have to ask.