Death Wore White

by Jim Kelly

  They left Holt asleep on a pile of pillows.

  Sitting in the Land Rover, Valentine looked at the sketch through the clear envelope, trying not to let his admiration for the skill of the artist show.

  ‘Next step?’ he asked.

  ‘TV, papers. Posters too – along the coast. Let’s give it all we’ve got. She’s either a killer, or she knows who is. So let’s find her.’

  18

  The Ark was a converted chapel across the street from St James’s, a red‐brick shed in the shape of the living‐quarters on a child’s model of Noah’s boat. For nearly a century it had been home to one of the nonconformist sects. But the church had sold up in the sixties and moved out to the ring road. West Norfolk Constabulary had been the purchaser, and, despite the constraints of a Grade II listing, had quickly renovated the Victorian structure to house the force’s principal forensic laboratory. This had freed up space in the main building, where the force was struggling to deal with a crime wave brought about by the influx of East Enders to the new estates. Not that the newcomers brought with them any crimes that the locals hadn’t tried. It was just that there were more of them.

  Most of the town’s 200,000 inhabitants had no idea what went on behind the Ark’s freshly sandblasted walls and bottle‐green and cream stained glass. Now, in the falling snow, lights shone from the savagely sharp lancet windows.

  Shaw and Valentine sat in the Mazda, parked in one of the spaces reserved for CID at St James’s, waiting for the hour to strike. Being early for an appointment with Dr Kazimierz was a crime second only to being late. They had six minutes to kill. The news that Harvey Ellis had picked up a hitch‐hiker, and that she was in the truck when it ground to a halt on Siberia Belt, had turned the case on its head. Valentine thought one motive was obvious. ‘They’re trapped in the truck, Ellis and the girl, they know they’re gonna be there most of the night, she’s young and sexy and…’ he said, letting the world slur along, ‘and she stuck her thumb out at dusk for a lift off a truck on a lonely road. He thinks the hitch‐hiker’s up for it; she isn’t.’

  He stopped, watching the snow, and his shoulders rose with a breath. ‘He pushes his luck, she’s sat on the passenger side with the toolbox between them. She’s scared, he makes a move, she flips the top, grabs a tool, and goes for his eye.’

  ‘Then she disappears, not a trace,’ said Shaw, shivering as he watched a uniformed PC running across the yard, the snow clinging to his back.

  Valentine blew his nose, took a quick breath. ‘If Harvey Ellis was murdered, and if the murderer isn’t John Holt – then the killer left without leaving tracks. That’s a fucking fact. There’s no way round it – so you can’t use that fact to rule anyone out, can you?’

  Shaw’s father had always said that George Valentine should have made DCI before any of the rest of them. But there’d been just too many rough edges.

  ‘But there’s two other corpses with no apparent link to your amorous driver,’ countered Shaw. ‘One on the beach – and then a few hours later our friend out on Styleman’s Middle.’

  Hadden’s team had recovered the body from the sands an hour before full tide slipped over his grave. No forensic evidence had been found at all on the sands: no sign of a boat landing, and again – no footprints. The previous tide had wiped the scene of crime clean, leaving only the mathematical precision of the ribbed sea sand.

  The Mazda’s heater was pumping out warm dust into the car and Valentine sneezed, prompting a series of metronomic sniffs which Shaw tried hard to ignore.

  The clock at St Margaret’s on the Tuesday Market struck the hour and they got out, ducking through the snow towards the chapel’s double doors. Inside they pushed open a heavy perspex hinged screen into the main body of the old chapel. A low metal partition divided the room, continuing in glass up to the vault of the wooden roof. The windows spilt underwater light into the echoing space. The floor at this end was the original parquet, polished to reflect the stained glass, and on it stood three rows of lab tables, centrifuges, a computer suite, and a small conference area to one side beside a bank of sinks along one wall. Tom Hadden’s team ‘hot‐desked’, so there were no offices as such. A filter coffee machine coughed its way to the end of its cycle and Dr Justina Kazimierz emerged from the area beyond the partition to refill her cup. Valentine was already at the machine, helping himself. The pathologist worked on contract with the West Norfolk force but she’d been on enough cases in the last ten years for the Ark to have become a second home.

  ‘Tom’s back out at Ingol Beach,’ she said. ‘If you want coffee, help yourself,’ she added pointedly, but Valentine just sipped noisily from the mug.

  Shaw saw that here, on familiar ground, she moved lightly, reminding him of her canteen dance. She led them into the second room beyond the partition. A single stone angel stood in a niche at the centre of the end wall below the stained‐glass windows, and three covered bodies lay on metal autopsy tables. To one side was a desk and Kazimierz had put her black leather bag on top, flaps folded back like a large, exotic funeral flower. A mortuary assistant was hosing down a table.

  Shaw could see a foot showing on the nearest table and he thought the stone angel’s flesh had a more appealing colour. Valentine gulped coffee, the shock of the caffeine failing to overcome his anxiety at being in the mortuary. He didn’t like death, it marked the end of the game, the moment when there was nothing left to gamble with, let alone on.

  Their footsteps grated on the concrete floor, which was criss‐crossed with aluminium gutters so that the room could be sluiced. Each dissection table was in polished steel. Mobile surgical lights provided an almost unbearable blaze of electricity over each occupied table, driving away shadows where shadows should be.

  Dr Kazimierz leant on one of the tables, her weight on one leg, the other shoe raised behind her so that she could tap the concrete with the toe.

  ‘OK. I said I’d walk you through what we’ve got. That was before the latest on Styleman’s Middle. So I’ve got even less time than I thought. I’ll start the internal autopsies with the first victim tonight – bit later than I thought – seven thirty. Be prompt.’

  ‘We appreciate it,’ said Shaw.

  ‘Right. Let’s start with the latest, shall we? Not much to say.’ She swished a plastic sheet back from the first table. The man from Styleman’s Middle had been unfolded, the clothes cut away, the sand gently washed from each crevice of flesh. Water droplets covered the skin, adhering to the almost invisible body hair, some of them joining forces to trickle down onto the aluminium table.

  ‘So no prizes,’ she said, sliding on forensic gloves. ‘A blow to the head here…’ She placed both hands on the skull, turned it to one side, revealing the bruised wound. Shaw’s stomach shifted at the plastic sound of a click from the neck. Valentine took a step back. ‘This would have resulted in unconsciousness certainly – perhaps for several hours,’ she said. ‘Weapon? Wound’s odd – considerable force, but a cushioned effect. A blunt instrument wrapped in something, perhaps – or a rubber mallet, one of those you use to knock in tent posts? The prints are difficult to lift because of the saturation of the skin – but I’ve got a set. We’ll check them on records. Clothes are expensive. The polo shirt is interesting – it appears to be much older than the trousers, shorts, socks. Tom can do some more work on that. I’d say 1970s. The badge on the collar is Royal Navy.’

  ‘Just that,’ said Shaw. ‘Not a ship?’

  ‘No – just the badge.’

  Shaw looked at the face, trying to memorize the features. The neatly layered hair, the unblemished skin, the fine bones, the unscarred fingers, the burnless tan. He might have been handsome, he’d certainly had money. Royal Navy – that rang a bell, a ship’s bell, but he couldn’t place it.

  ‘Other than being dead he’s a healthy specimen,’ added the pathologist. ‘He’s taken a whack around the liver, but nothing too serious. We’ll need to get the lungs out to be sure of cause of death – b
ut everything’s consistent with drowning.’

  Dr Kazimierz went to move on.

  ‘Can you get me a set of shots?’ asked Shaw. ‘Black and white, frontal?’

  She filed the request in her head, then let the lab assistant who’d been working at one of the computer screens draw the plastic sheet back over the body. Shaw liked the gesture, a nod to the value of life, even when someone had succeeded in brutally destroying it with a single blow.

  ‘This is much more interesting,’ said the pathologist, her fingers interlaced, then free, then laced again.

  The corpse from the child’s raft was as pallid as it had been when Shaw had dragged it ashore on Ingol Beach. The shadow of a tan perhaps, but one that had faded since an English summer. He lay as if asleep, the white sheet drawn up halfway across the chest, both arms extended down and over the plastic. A crusader, laid to rest in stone. Shaw had noted the muscular physique on the beach, but here, under the laboratory’s unforgiving lights, it was even more apparent that this man’s body may well have been his business. The shoulders were wide and muscle tissue largely obscured the angle where the neck met the flesh of the shoulder blades.

  Dr Kazimierz stood, contemplating the face, a smile on her lips.

  ‘You’ve got a passport?’ said Shaw. ‘Prints?’

  She touched a small metal cabinet where a red light winked. ‘The paper’s virtually disintegrated so Tom’s drying it as slowly as he can. Again, prints were difficult. You need to be patient.’

  Shaw studied the face of the victim again. The hair was black and thick, dark stubble on the chin and neck, blood vessels broken in the nose and cheeks. The brown eyes were flat and fish‐like, the nails on the fingers and feet grimy despite the scrubbed skin. There was a signet ring on the right hand. A black stone with a carved surface. Shaw bent closer, trying to see it clearly.

  ‘It’s the figure of a man,’ said the pathologist. ‘With a dragon’s tail.’

  ‘Chinese?’ asked Valentine. He sniffed, aware that some chemical in the room was attacking his sinuses. The presence of the corpses on the mortuary tables was making it difficult for him to think. He needed something inanimate to focus on. The pathologist slipped the ring off the finger and dropped it in a metal dish. Valentine prodded it with a wooden spatula.

  ‘You’ll get a picture of it, ‘ said Kazimierz.

  ‘Cause of death?’ asked Shaw, turning back to the body.

  Beside the table stood a spot lamp and a large magnifying glass mounted on a flexible arm. ‘Here.’ She lit the lamp by switch and poised the glass over the wound on the arm. ‘It’s a match for his teeth, by the way, so it is his bite.’

  Shaw and Valentine leant in together, the DS retreating just in time to avoid a collision.

  Two interlocking sets of teeth marks – the top and bottom sets – had come together to lift the skin. The wound was an inch deep at its heart, revealing the muscle below, a single severed artery. In the middle of the double curve of the teeth was a central wound they’d overlooked at the scene: purplish, even black at the centre, surrounded by half a dozen small pustules – pimples which seemed to be full of a clear liquid, like a blister.

  Shaw was unsettled that he’d missed it at the time. ‘And here,’ said the pathologist, resetting the lamp and glass.

  Another little colony of pustules, perhaps six inches from the wound, further up the arm.

  Shaw saw again the toxic yellow oil drum and readjusted the dressing on his eye. ‘A burn – chemicals?’

  She shrugged and took a phial from her lab coat. A few drops of an almost colourless liquid, perhaps slightly blue, lay within. ‘I got this out of the wound and we did run all the industrial tests… but it turns out to be organic. Analysis of the organs may give us more. I’ve got some samples from the drum for comparison and we’ll run it through the spectrometer. But my guess is it won’t be a match. Do you know what I think this is?’

  They shook their heads like schoolchildren.

  ‘Venom.’

  ‘A bite, then,’ said Shaw. ‘And he knew, didn’t he? So he tried to suck it out, stop it getting into his bloodstream.’ He imagined the pain, the panic which would make a man drive his own teeth into his flesh. ‘From what?’

  ‘Certainly nothing native to the British Isles. There are two small fang marks at the centre of the lesion, so I’d say a snake. But which one? That’s more difficult.’

  ‘Are there any databases for this sort of thing?’

  ‘Ill try London Zoo. And Traffic, the wildlife charity.’

  ‘So what are we saying?’ asked Valentine. ‘That this bloke died because he got bitten by some exotic animal he was trying to smuggle?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Shaw.

  ‘I should tell Hadden,’ said Valentine, searching for the radio in the raincoat over his shoulder. ‘He’s got people out on the beach.’ Above them they heard snow sloughing off the roof, thudding on to the cars parked up in the lee of the old chapel.

  ‘But it won’t be alive,’ said the pathologist. ‘Whatever it is. The venom that killed him is tropical. Ten minutes in zero temperatures would be enough to kill whatever animal bit him.’

  ‘But then if he’s smuggling it in – and there may be more than one – he’d have it in something to keep it alive,’ said Shaw. ‘That’s what we need to look for, George. A canister, something that would retain the heat.’ Shaw’s skin crept.

  Valentine retreated to the office beyond the partition. Shaw stepped back from the corpse, trying to get the death in perspective. They heard the clock at St Margaret’s chime the half hour. The pathologist took it as a cue to move on.

  Harvey Ellis lay on the final table, the ruptured eye black, disfigured. Shaw noted that in death the narrow face appeared adolescent, resembling that of his son Jake, the child pictured on the photo in the victim’s wallet. It was difficult to see Harvey Ellis as a father of three when he looked more like their elder brother. The shroud was drawn up to his Adam’s apple, both feet exposed, a label attached to one of the toes.

  ‘Back to no news, or very little,’ Justina said.

  She pulled down the shroud revealing the military tattoo in blue and red: a castle on a many‐pointed starburst in silver. The badge of the Royal Anglians. ‘And the defence wound.’ She pulled the shroud down further and picked up the right arm.

  ‘So our modus operandi stays the same?’ asked Shaw. ‘Yes. I’d say so. He died from the stab wound in the eye socket with the chisel, having fought off one earlier thrust. I think he just about bled to death on his back, or certainly with his upper body twisted down, then he was moved to the truck seat. As I said, there isn’t enough blood at the scene. I’d say we were three to four pints short of a full measure. But death occurred in the sitting position, and that’s where rigor set in.’

  ‘He had a passenger,’ said Shaw. ‘A girl. Any trace – hairs, lipstick, a kiss? Any traces of semen on the victim?’

  She thought about that for thirty seconds, more, walking slowly round the table. ‘No one told me that,’ she said.

  ‘We just found out,’ said Shaw quickly.

  ‘OK. No, absolutely not, no traces at all. Which doesn’t mean she wasn’t there, of course. I’m looking at the body. The cab’s not a pristine environment. It’s a working one. There’s something like thirty sets of prints on the fascia inside. CSI will check them all out. But on the body, or near the body, nothing really intrusive. And no prints on the murder weapon.’

  She pulled off the forensic gloves. They looked at Harvey Ellis’s face.

  ‘You think he attacked her?’

  ‘It’s an idea,’ shrugged Shaw. ‘We’re short of them at the moment. He had a bracelet on, anything engraved?’

  She walked to a desk under one of the lancet windows and returned with a clear envelope. ‘Silver. A single word – Grace.’

  ‘Right,’ said Shaw. He wasn’t looking forward to meeting Grace Ellis.

  Shaw led the way out through the swing do
or into the laboratory beyond. Valentine was sitting with his feet up on one of the computer tables, his eyes closed. The pathologist coughed and his eyelids slowly opened.

  ‘And this may not help either,’ she said. On one of the desks beside a computer was a vacuum cupboard containing a single glass dish holding a half‐eaten apple. Valentine made an effort to look interested. Forensics wasn’t his forte. People committed crimes. It was all about getting to grips with people.

  ‘Tom said you wanted to make sure the apple was the victim’s last supper,’ said Kazimierz. ‘Not so.’

  ‘Someone other than Harvey Ellis ate this apple?’ asked Shaw. ‘Don’t suppose you can tell me if it was a leggy blonde, can you?’

  ‘Given proper funding.’

  Valentine peered through the glass at the apple. ‘And you can tell that – just from that?’

  Kazimierz’s back stiffened. ‘I’d put my reputation on it, Detective Sergeant Valentine.’ The inference was masterful. She had a reputation worth the bet.

  19

  ‘Back to Siberia Belt,’ said Shaw, as the Mazda pulled out of the shadow of the Ark and slipped into the traffic sweeping past on the inner ring road. It was his father’s golden rule – if in doubt, go back to the scene of the crime. Walk the job, don’t talk it. Shaw held a hand to the dressing over his eye, feeling his pulse behind the bruised lid.

  ‘Everything’s changed,’ he said, as Valentine tried to get the hot air vent to clear the windscreen of condensation. ‘There’s a passenger in the murder victim’s vehicle, but she’s gone. There’s an apple in the murder victim’s vehicle, but it’s not his. The corpse on the beach is involved in some form of illegal trade in wildlife, and that’s gone too. It wasn’t a simple inquiry to start with.’