Death Wore White

by Jim Kelly

  The smashed glass at the scene was matched to pieces found still clinging to the rim of the headlamp of the abandoned car – Mosse’s car. In terms of material evidence, this was as good as fingerprints. He was arrested, taken to St James’s and held overnight. A preliminary analysis of skin tissue found in the glove pointed to Mosse. Usherettes at the cinema were unable to recall him in the audience that evening. It had been a packed house. Mosse was charged with murder at 3.30 on the afternoon of his first day in custody. He denied the charge. Bail was refused.

  Police records showed Jonathan Tessier had been cautioned on three occasions for vandalism – twice for scratching the paintwork of parked cars. The prosecution planned to suggest that Mosse had found Tessier preparing to damage the Polo, and an attempt to administer summary justice had spiralled out of control. Hence they would be prepared to accept a charge of manslaughter. Mosse still denied the allegation. A further analysis of the skin residue was ordered through the Forensic Science Service, an agency of the Home Office. It reported that there was a chance of only one in three billion that anyone other than Mosse could have shed the skin within the glove. Mosse continued to deny that the glove was his, as did his mother. The matching glove was never found.

  Shaw looked around, as if he might find it now, more than a decade later.

  The court case itself had been a one‐day wonder. They’d made a crucial mistake, Shaw and Valentine, by taking the glove to Mosse’s flat.

  Mosse’s defence team reviewed the forensic evidence in the final days before the case was to open in the Crown Court. His barrister considered the error grave enough to bring it to the judge’s attention in his opening address. Mosse’s mother kept her flat clean, an upright vacuum stationed in the hallway like a sentry, but even the cleanest surfaces collect a thin veneer of household dust – its composition varying between 62 and 84 per cent decaying human skin. That was how Mosse’s DNA had got on the glove, maintained Mosse’s defence team. The two detectives had been in the flat with it for nearly forty‐five minutes. More than enough time for the unbagged evidence to be contaminated.

  The prosecution was forced to concede that the glove was the only physical evidence which linked Mosse to the scene of the crime. There was, of course, abundant forensic evidence of Mosse’s presence in the car, but nothing that proved he had driven it from the car park that night. Moreover, several fingerprints were found in the vehicle which matched neither Mosse, his mother nor any other regular user of it. This, the defence would argue, suggested the presence of an unknown third party – the real killer, in fact. Finally, the defence claimed that the prosecution had no direct evidence to support its suggested motive, and could not disprove any element of Mosse’s alibi.

  The case against Bobby Mosse was thrown out shortly after lunch on the first day. The judge’s closing remarks were brief, but he had time to suggest that the slipshod police work which had compromised the prosecution case left open the possibility that the contamination of the evidence might have been deliberate.

  So Mosse walked free owing to a procedural error – evidence found at the scene should be bagged, tagged and remain in the custody of the scene‐of‐crime team until booked into the evidence room at St James’s – signed in by the duty sergeant. But Jack Shaw had been too angry to think straight. And George Valentine thought he was too good a copper to have to follow the rule book. That was the ex planation Shaw wanted to believe. But the judge’s barely veiled suggestion that the pair had attempted to fabricate the evidence nagged at him like an aching tooth.

  Outside the court Mosse posed for press pictures under the wheeling seagulls on the quayside. Shaw had often tried to imagine what his father must have felt that day: the defeat, the injustice perhaps, the impotency. Or was it more complicated than that? Resigned, perhaps, to his fate because he had faked the evidence? Shaw didn’t know the truth, couldn’t be sure of the truth, because his father had always kept him out of his world. A black‐and‐white world, with no shades of grey. He knew his father was an honest man by his own reckoning. What he didn’t know was whether he counted as dishonest framing a suspect whom he knew – just knew – was a child‐killer. Was that how his father’s world had worked? George Valentine’s too?

  If they did frame Mosse then they’d paid a heavy price for it. His father was dead within the year. George Valentine was knocked down a rank and sent out to the sticks, a one‐way ticket in his hand. And Peter Shaw had paid for it too: the memory of the father he’d idolized marred by the worst slur of all: bent copper.

  ‘I never understood why Dad was so angry about it,’ said Shaw, looking at Valentine. ‘Mum said it got under his skin, right from the start. But he’d done kids before – that schoolboy strangled by his father in the North End in the seventies. But it didn’t get to him – not like this.’ Shaw dragged a boot through the puddle, sending a swash of water out over the pockmarked concrete.

  Valentine took out his wallet, flicking it open, holding it up for Shaw to see.

  The details of the Tessier case had never registered with Shaw at the time. He’d been at Hendon, with the Met. He’d met Lena. He was building his own life. So he’d never really looked at the child’s face – other than a smudged black‐and‐white thumbnail which had appeared in the nationals in London when the body had been found. But now there it was, in colour, pin‐sharp. And he could see why his father had taken the case personally: the blond hair cut short, the wide trusting face, the blue eyes pale enough to be tap water. He was looking at an echo of his childhood self. Was that why his father had acted the way he had that night in 1997? In anger at the murder of a child who looked so much like his only son?

  Jonathan Tessier’s face had found a place in George Valentine’s wallet, where his own family snapshot should have been. Shaw couldn’t imagine what it was like being that obsessed with a crime a decade old, but he could understand it, because Valentine’s career had nearly ended beneath Vancouver House that night just as suddenly as his father’s.

  Hiding his emotions he handed the wallet back to Valentine without a word. ‘You’ve been back before,’ he said, wishing now that he hadn’t asked to see the spot.

  ‘Sure,’ said Valentine, lighting up, the sudden flare warming the cold interior. Shaw watched him draw the nicotine into his narrow chest. A car bounced down the ramp and accelerated across the tarmac before braking in a neat circle, the smell of burnt rubber instantly acrid. Valentine licked his lip where the cigarette butts had made it sore.

  ‘And Mosse?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘Life of crime,’ he replied, smiling. ‘Solicitor, down at College Lane, the magistrates courts. Married, two kids – boys; Citroën Xsara Picasso, detached house at Ringsted. A conservatory, carriage lamps, crazy paving. A cat called Zebra.’

  ‘But otherwise you’re not bothered,’ said Shaw. Valentine gave him a rare direct look. ‘I’m bothered. Jack was bothered too. Before he died he made me promise I’d clear our names, get Bobby Mosse behind bars.’ He ditched the cigarette in the puddle. ‘So that’s another failure.’

  Shaw envied Valentine that promise, if it had ever been made.

  And he stored away the slight, after all these years; the knowledge that if his own father had been innocent of fabricating evidence why hadn’t he asked his son to clear his name?

  ‘You had your own career,’ said Valentine, reading his mind. ‘Mine was over. I had the time. I’ve had the time.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And we’re right back where we were on that night. Your dad and I knew for a fact that Bobby Mosse killed that kid. We didn’t need the forensics on the glove to be sure. If you’d been there that night you’d have known too. He was cool all right; cool as an ice‐cube. But the mother was a wreck, and she really struggled to get her story straight. Then when we showed him the glove he nearly lost it – started shaking, threw up in the loo. Said he was upset – well, yeah, I guess he was. Upset he was gonna get nicked.

  ‘He was guilt
y as sin. Trouble is, I still can’t prove it. Twelve years going fucking nowhere. Story of my life.’ He spat in the puddle and walked away, fading into the shadows.

  15

  Out on Styleman’s Middle, the sandbank three miles off Ingol Beach, five cockle boats came in to land. The snow, falling from the north, melted as it touched the sands. Crews disembarked, pencil‐grey outlines working in a bank of falling snowflakes, bristling with rakes and buckets and forks. One worker carried a navigation light, a red beacon in the gloom. Otherwise the view was grey: the dark line of the horizon separating the grey clouds from the grey sea. Sometimes a seagull wheeled, a tiny white tear in the monochrome canvas. The tide, edging out, revealed the surface of the sandbank; the deep trenches left by yesterday’s cockle‐pickers had been sucked smooth by the sea, but the lines remained. And a single bucket, filled to brimming with the fine, gritty sand; a moat at its base washed deep by the ebb and flow of the waves.

  Duncan Sly, gangmaster, joined the men to haul one of the boats hard into the bank. A big man in a seaman’s donkey jacket, a blue cap covering thinning hair on a skull like a cannonball.

  He spotted the cockle‐picker’s bucket. Leaving kit on the sands was a crime. Once the tide was over them they usually got sucked down, gone for ever. ‘It better not be one of ours,’ he said. He’d know if it had been left by yesterday’s gang because they marked all their gear: not just the buckets, but the rakes, the sieves, shovels and sacks. A single shell emblem in blue, a clam, like a pilgrim’s badge. If it was their kit there’d be a fine – everyone’s wages would be £20 short that day. He set out to retrieve it.

  The pickers didn’t watch; they were cocooned in the cotton‐wool world which helped them live through the pain in their backs, the numbing boredom. The snow fell on them, heavy now, cutting down visibility like a shutter. They’d been on Styleman’s Middle for less than five minutes and most had looked at their watches once already. Spread out in twos in the mist, each within sight of the others for safety, they began to dig.

  Ten feet from the bucket Sly realized what he was really seeing: not sand piled high to form a dome, matted with seaweed, but a face, the distorted oval of an open mouth, the head tilted back sharply, a small green crab on the left cheek like a beauty spot. He saw that the head was not the only part of the body which had emerged from the sand: there was a foot, in a deck shoe, and to one side a hand clutching a shred of green seaweed. He took a step forward, almost falling, and saw the seawater pooled in the mouth beyond the sand‐encrusted teeth, the dark coagulated red of a split in the lips. He sank to his knees ready to scream. But then came the double shock, as unexpected as the first, and he spilt bile onto the sand.

  16

  From the air Styleman’s Middle was an island, ribbed with sinuous lines of sand, like a giant fingerprint. What light there was came between showers of sleet, the low clouds pearlescent, the sea a choppy green. The police Eurocopter came in low from the north, then turned to trace the waterline in a tight circle. Onboard traffic cameras recorded the view below. At the east end a group stood by the cockle boats, scuffed footprints leading away a few hundred yards to an object on the sand: from the air a bucket, a fishing buoy, driftwood.

  As the whirling blades slowed Shaw and Valentine jumped down, followed by two uniformed officers they’d rescued from a traffic survey on the quayside. Shaw landed nimbly on one foot, then transferred his weight quickly to both. Valentine landed two‐footed, juddering, and nearly pitched head‐first. The sand was surprisingly hard and gritty, sparkling with crushed shells. They all walked quickly to the group by the boats and the two PCs began threading scene‐of‐crime tape in a wide arc round the beached boats, a cordon to keep the people in. The chopper rose, slewed sideways and wheeled towards Lynn.

  Fifty yards off the sandbank the Harbour Conservancy’s launch was approaching at speed. It pulled a sudden circle as it skimmed into shallow water, and drifted towards land side‐on. Tom Hadden and a two‐man CSI team jumped clear and waded ashore, each loaded with a large canvas rucksack, the poles of a forensic tent protruding from one.

  ‘Tom,’ said Shaw, shaking hands. ‘I’ll lead the way – let’s keep a yard off the path trodden. I don’t know how long we’ve got until the tide rubs all this out, but however long it is, it’s getting shorter.’

  They set out in line, Valentine at the tail, leaving one of the PCs to stand with the cockle‐pickers. Shaw counted his steps. He’d got to a hundred when he stopped, then looked up, prepared to be dispassionate in the presence of death. But he hadn’t expected this: the sand‐filled mouth set in the skewed O of a silent scream; the rest of the victim’s body, except for the single foot and hand, unseen, imprisoned in the sand. The corpse was lying in its sandy grave, the head protruding, but thrown savagely back.

  He forced himself to observe, to stay out of the scene he was a witness to. Most corpses say something: revenge, lust, greed, anger. This one was mute; just a victim, almost sucked out of sight for ever.

  Shaw could see that all previous footprints had stopped ten feet short of the victim. None had circled. He looked back along the path they’d made to check that no footprints left the track. Then he took in the horizon; to the west the distant shoreline of Lincolnshire, the hills still white. To the east he knew Ingol Beach was only three miles distant, the low white line of the coastal hills just visible.

  ‘Right. Let’s do our jobs,’ said Shaw. ‘And let’s do them quickly.’

  He began to circumnavigate the corpse, etching a line in the sand with his boot. ‘George, organize one of the uniforms to walk the water’s edge, double‐check no one’s landed since high tide.’

  Hadden’s men walked to one side and quickly erected the lightweight SOC tent over the corpse. White, flimsy, it buckled slightly in the light wind when they lifted it into place, sinking the posts at each corner.

  ‘Is Justina coming?’ asked Shaw, following Hadden into the tent.

  ‘On the next boat,’ said Hadden. ‘She was over in Ely. We’ll work our way out from here but it looks like he’s had at least one tide wash over him – so don’t hold your breath.’

  They both smiled: grim humour.

  The skewed O, screaming for air.

  Shaw knelt on the sand six feet from the head, looking at the face, wishing his wounded eye had healed. Without stereoscopy his vision was flatter, less vivid. Hadden mirrored him, kneeling behind. Twelve o’clock and six o’clock. The air in the tent was suddenly close, making Shaw loosen the zip at his throat.

  ‘The sand’s engrained on the skin,’ said Hadden. ‘In the hair. And…’ He stopped, bile rising in his throat as a small crab scuttled from the hairline, over the cheek, dropping into the pool which had formed like a moat around its neck. ‘Male. Forty? Clothing – what we can see is a polo shirt; that might be a badge on the turned collar. A gold chain round the neck.’

  The light in the tent was a pale white, making the dead man’s skin look like meat dripping despite a tan.

  ‘Any thoughts?’ said Shaw.

  ‘I’d guess he drowned, got washed on to the sand bar; the weight of the corpse begins to take it down through the sand after a tide or two. Another six hours and he’d have gone for ever.’

  He stood, a knee joint cracking. ‘But there’s something else – on the back of the head.’

  Shaw walked round, respecting his circle in the sand. The hair was parted at the crown, showing the scalp. Shaw took two strides forward and knelt. Hadden joined him and with a metal spatula parted the hair where blood had congealed. A wound, the colour of a maple leaf in the fall. No bone showing, but the flesh ruptured, rucked. Shaw bent closer and smelt the seawater in the man’s clothes, and the first hint of decay, the sweet aroma of evaporating sweat.

  Valentine brushed aside the flaps to enter the tent. ‘Nothing on the sand,’ he said. ‘Chopper’s coming in with more manpower.’ He caught Hadden’s eye. ‘Your office radioed – they’ve got a portable generator from t
he lab.’

  Shaw studied the victim’s face. The skin, as dead as pork rind, was tanned lightly, the features narrow and fine with the red double claw marks of a pair of spectacles on the bridge of the nose. The hair was well cut, short but with a foppish fringe which dragged down over one eye. Given time, Shaw could bring that face alive, iron out the swelling to the left side where the blow had fallen, lift the cheekbones, repack the features which had been stretched out in the terror of the victim’s final minutes.

  ‘He’s never picked cockles for a living,’ said Valentine. ‘Never picked anything for a living – unless it’s horses. Indoor clothes,’ he added.

  Shaw stood, thinking that he’d missed that. ‘Justina will want to see him in situ.’

  ‘Low tide’s in two hours,’ said Hadden. ‘This isn’t a high point – it could be under water in five, six, possibly less. We’ll have to lift him then?’

  It was a question, but there was no doubting the answer. If they let the tide wash over again the corpse might not be there next time, sucked down perhaps, or lost in the folds of sand. Even if they marked the spot they might lose him: heavy objects drifted in the liquid sand; wrecks wandered, sinking, resurfacing.

  Valentine stepped outside, his radio crackling. Shaw left Hadden in the tent and went back to the cockle‐pickers.