Death Wore White

by Jim Kelly

  Shaw decanted the shells from his pocket and ran eight along the dashboard. The Mazda came to a halt at a set of traffic lights by the soaring Gothic spire of St Anne’s. A branch of Curry’s had a dozen TV sets in the window, each showing the local news. Shaw’s sketch of Harvey Ellis’s female hitch‐hiker flashed up. They studied it until the car behind beeped as the lights changed.

  Out of town they joined the coast road near Castle Rising Castle, the snow‐topped Norman keep visible over the trees of the park. It wasn’t yet dusk, but already there was more light in the fallen snow than the sky. Ahead emergency lights flashed. Valentine checked with traffic on the radio. There’d been an RTA on the bridge over the River Burn – a van hit black ice and crashed through the safety barriers. They pulled a U‐turn and threaded their way through the narrow lanes on the high ground until they re‐emerged near Gallow Marsh.

  Siberia Belt was windswept and looked deserted until they got round the bend. Ahead they could see some of the vehicles still on site, a CSI forensic tent pegged over one.

  ‘Come on,’ said Shaw, getting out. ‘Talk me through it, George.’

  Valentine got out, braced against the icy breeze. They walked along the bank, Valentine listing the eight vehicles from the tail end of the line, starting with the Mondeo.

  ‘By the way – for the record.’ He stopped, tapping his toe on the spot. ‘The Morris. I checked out the old dear first thing this morning. Early‐stage Parkinson’s Disease. The weed helps, apparently. I said she should see a doctor about painkillers. She said she had.’

  He shrugged, moving on, listing each vehicle.

  Tyres crunched and they looked back at the farm track to see a white van at the junction. It flashed its lights once and they saw Izzy Dereham, the tenant farmer, at the wheel, two men squeezed onto the passenger bench beside her. A wave, and she pulled out, heading down to the coast road.

  Just four vehicles were left of the original convoy on Siberia Belt – the plumber’s Astravan, the security van, Stanley Zhao’s Volvo and John Holt’s Corsa. Shaw slapped his hand on the roof of the Astravan. One of Tom Hadden’s team, a woman with a forensic face mask, was vacuuming the interior where the dog had sat. ‘Hi. Tom about?’ asked Shaw, looking at the dashboard, door pockets, open glove compartment.

  She flicked off the vacuum and lowered the mask. ‘We’re expecting him – he’s bringing drinks.’ She smiled but Shaw could see that her lips were blue, the temperature in the van low enough for her breath to hang between them.

  ‘We’re walking the line,’ said Shaw. ‘It’s all been dusted?’

  ‘Sure. It’s signed off – help yourself. But exteriors only, please. Don’t open any doors.’

  They heard the vacuum again, a whine as high‐pitched as birdsong from the marsh. As they passed John Holt’s Corsa Valentine stopped, studying the vandalized paintwork.

  ‘Tom says it’s a proper job – a diamond cutter,’ said Shaw.

  Valentine ran a finger along one of the lines. ‘It’s a picture,’ he said, shaking his head. Shaw stood at his shoulder, thinking he might be right, but he couldn’t see it. Valentine took his battered notebook and sketched the six savage cuts which made up the scrawl. He had an idea what they might be, but he kept it to himself.

  They walked on past the butchered pine stump, the crime‐scene tape still attached, flapping in the breeze like a Buddhist prayer flag.

  ‘Let’s get a clear picture,’ said Shaw. He tried to imagine it, conjuring up the scene from his memory, the cars steaming in the moonlight, white and red light splashed on the snow.

  ‘The hitch‐hiker changes everything,’ said Shaw. ‘For a start – if she killed Ellis we’re only looking for a set of exit prints. She was in the pick‐up already.’

  Valentine sniffed, brushing the back of his hand across the tip of his nose. ‘She could have got out the seaward side – the passenger side, a single print perhaps, lost under a drift? We could have missed it. There was plenty of wind about, even if there wasn’t much snow. Then the helicopter landed and covered the lot anyway.’

  Shaw walked to the edge of the deep dyke which ran the length of Siberia Belt on the seaward side. He stood on the brink and let a snowball fall at his feet. ‘Where’d she go from there, George? If she jumped the ditch we’re looking for a runaway teenager with an Olympic long‐jump gold medal. Plus she’d leave prints on the far side on the flat sand and we know it was untouched. If she gets in the ditch she can only go as far as the sluice that way.’ He pointed south. ‘And we know there were no prints there. And if she went that way,’ he pointed north, ‘there’s another sluice blocking the way after fifty yards and there was no sign of any prints there either. If she’d stayed in the water for just ten minutes, maybe less, she’d never get out. Hypothermia. There was two degrees of frost, if the dyke wasn’t full of tidal water it would have been solid ice. We’ve got to do better than that.’

  Valentine stamped his feet. Left, right, left, right. ‘OK. She was hidden,’ he said. ‘On the back of the truck under the tarpaulin. We didn’t see her and she got out when the CSI team arrived. They wouldn’t know she wasn’t one of the witnesses. She just walks out once the place is crawling with uniforms. CSI. Civilian branch. It was like Wembley Way.’

  Shaw clapped three times, the sound muffled by his gloved hands. Perhaps that was the key to unlocking Valentine’s skills: wind him up first. ‘That’s the best idea either of us have had since all this started.’ It was just about the only idea they’d had since they’d found Harvey Ellis’s body. ‘But… I stayed with the body until Hadden’s team arrived. I signed over to him. Then I moved back to the Alfa and waited there. When we got reinforcements from St James’s I put one on duty at the rear of the pickup. He was still there at dawn. Paul Twine – the graduate entry.’

  ‘He’s on the team.’

  ‘He checked IDs – he looked at mine and I chaired his appointment panel for God’s sake. By that point the CSIs had a forensic tent up. They’d booked the tipper load – I saw the manifest: plasterboard, building supplies and a tarpaulin. No leggy blonde.’

  Valentine sighed. ‘I’ll talk to Twine, make sure. It’s a long stint on the same spot – perhaps he slipped off for a Jimmy.’

  The wind blew in off the sea, a fresh shower of snow closing down visibility to a few yards. Then, just as suddenly, it cleared and a gash of blue opened up at sea.

  When they looked south again they could see a figure walking towards them. A minute later Tom Hadden was with them, shaking a flask. The three of them stood in a close triangle passing round a cup of sweet tea the colour of estuary mud.

  ‘Anything?’ asked Shaw, nodding in the direction of the vehicles left on the bank, his voice raised above the single note of the wind.

  Hadden ran a hand back through his thinning strawberry‐blond hair. ‘Yeah. I’ve seen a marsh harrier, and a seal – large as life, just off the beach there.’ He smiled. ‘But no. Routine, you’ll have a full report tomorrow first thing. But I can’t think there’s anything relevant, which, given the fact we’ve got a murder victim on the scene is relevant in itself.’

  Hadden leant back, closing his eyes to think.

  ‘We think the victim had a passenger in the pick‐up,’ said Shaw. ‘A girl.’

  Hadden opened his eyes, the whites slightly bloodshot. ‘There’s plenty of spare prints – could be her.’

  ‘But nothing else on the passenger side?’

  ‘I’ll double‐check,’ he said.

  Valentine smiled. ‘There were ladders on top of the Corsa. Fifteen‐foot extent – right?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Hadden, remembering he’d put that in his initial report, in the fine print. ‘So what?’

  ‘Prints, blood, anything?’

  ‘I did them myself back at the Ark. Clean as whistles.’

  ‘The idea being?’ asked Shaw.

  Valentine shrugged. ‘Nothing that makes any sense.’ Hadden laughed. ‘I think one of the witnes
ses might have noticed the killer building a bridge out of ladders to get to his victim.’

  ‘Like I said,’ said Valentine, taking a breath. ‘Doesn’t make sense.’ But if they were looking for a way the killer managed to get away from the scene of crime without touching the snow a full set of ladders seemed like a handy prop.

  Shaw could see it too. ‘But one more check – just for us?’ he asked Hadden.

  ‘OK. Sure.’

  ‘Anything on the spark plugs?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘Got ’em here.’ Hadden patted the pockets of his all‐weather jacket, retrieving a plastic envelope containing a pair of spark plugs. Hadden looked drawn, sleepless, the freckles along his forehead joined up in blotches on the pale skin. ‘Reckon they’re a year old – more. Perfectly serviceable but the contacts are well worn. We sent them down to the vehicle pool and they reckon – judging by sight – that they’d run for another year, maybe longer.’

  ‘Right. So not new?’

  ‘No way. The others – the ones from the inside of the cab – they’re shot. We tried them in one of the squad cars. They wouldn’t spark if you put five million volts through them.’

  ‘So that was part of the plan,’ said Valentine. ‘To fake a breakdown.’

  ‘But he didn’t need to, did he?’ said Shaw. ‘Because the tree was down – chopped down.’

  Valentine shook his head. ‘Right. Belt and braces? A change of plan?’

  ‘Or two plans,’ said Shaw.

  20

  Traffic control radioed them back before the news had got through to the murder inquiry room: the van which had crashed at Burn Bridge was one of North Norfolk Security’s – the company that owned the vehicle stranded on Siberia Belt. There was a single fatality. The RTA unit was in attendance, the road closed for the night. The company’s MD was en route to the scene.

  ‘He’s saved us the trip to his place,’ said Valentine.

  At the RTA checkpoint Shaw flashed a warrant card and they trundled forward to within fifty yards of the bridge; a graceful concrete arc with steel safety railings. The sun had set, leaving behind a wound in the sky. The river flowed inland, seawater filling the maze of creeks and ditches so that the mirror‐like surface seemed to fill the world to the brim.

  The van had crashed through the metal barriers but its rear wheels had become entangled in the sheared metal, so that it hung now, swinging slightly, the windscreen pointing down into the water. Except there wasn’t a wind‐screen. The driver hadn’t been wearing his seatbelt and on impact had been thrown through the glass. His broken legs were snagged behind the wheel so that he too hung down, his arms reaching towards the water, a snapshot of a diving man.

  Amongst the police cars and emergency vehicles was a civilian‐owned BMW, the driver being interviewed in the warmth of the car.

  The RTA unit had an inflatable in the water, a floodlight already set up on the bank. As they got closer Shaw could see what was left of the driver’s face, lacerated beyond recognition. Blood dripped from the man’s hands, carried off by the flowing river below. Valentine hung back, chatting to the senior fire officer with the RTA unit.

  ‘Do we know who he is?’ asked Shaw of a uniformed inspector in a reflective jacket. Shaw knew the officer vaguely. Ex‐CID, close to retirement, with an attitude problem that age had done nothing to mellow.

  He shrugged. ‘Let’s get him down first,’ he said. ‘He falls in the water we could lose the body. What’s it to you?’

  ‘Could be something, or nothing,’ said Shaw, happy to keep him in the dark. He searched his memory for the inspector’s name. Jennings, that was it. He’d worked with Shaw’s father in what he suspected both would have called the good old days.

  There was no doubt what had happened. The BMW had been overtaken by the van, touching 80 mph. It had hit the black ice in the shadow of a line of poplars which guarded the approach to the bridge. The witness said the driver had nearly regained control but had just clipped the railings, ricocheting to the opposite side, smashing through before being snagged by the ruptured metal.

  A black sports car crept towards them from the checkpoint. ‘This should be the owner of the security firm,’ said Jennings. ‘He might have an ID for you.’

  The man who got out certainly looked like he owned something. He wore a full‐length cashmere coat, driving gloves and black leather shoes shined to reflect the sky.

  ‘I’ll have a word,’ said Shaw, before Jennings moved. Valentine joined him.

  The MD’s name was Jeff Ragg. Well fed and tall, his face looked as though it had been soaking up moisture in a bucket all day; the features heavy and bloated, the fingers too, holding a cigarette with a gold band above the filter.

  ‘It’s been a long day,’ said Ragg, implying he didn’t want to talk. The voice was silky, like a recorded message on a cinema‐ticket line. But he couldn’t look at the corpse for more than a second.

  ‘Can you identify the driver?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘It’s Jonah. Jonah Shreeves,’ said Ragg. He drew on the cigarette and let the smoke sting his eyes.

  Shaw thought of the last time he’d seen the security guard, behind the wheel of a van identical to this one on a snow‐choked Siberia Belt.

  ‘You can’t see the face,’ said Valentine. He ran a hand inside his raincoat to comfort his stomach. No, you couldn’t see his face, not for the blood and bone.

  ‘The van’s missing from our compound and so’s Jonah. He’s my son‐in‐law. I don’t have to see his face.’ Ragg gave them a cold look, as icy as the frozen reeds on the riverbank. Shaw tried to gauge his emotions; a mixture perhaps of anger and resignation, both unsullied by grief. ‘Part of the family until three o’clock this afternoon,’ he added. ‘I rang him out on the round and told him you lot wanted a word about what happened on Siberia Belt. Then he went home, that’s their home – I bought it for them – and threw some clothes in a bag, left a note for my daughter Mary. He wasn’t planning on coming back. He’s got £10,000 in his wallet. They had a joint account – he’s cleaned it out. He said he’d send it back to her, sometime.’ Ragg laughed.

  ‘He had a criminal record,’ said Shaw. A seagull screeched and fell on the hanging body, pulling clumsily at the hair.

  Ragg’s eyes narrowed and he bought himself some time by taking a step closer to the water. The van creaked as it swung slightly in the tidal breeze. ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘No CRB check? That’s standard, isn’t it?’ asked Valentine, failing to hide a note of disbelief.

  ‘She trusted him,’ was all Ragg said. ‘She said it was an insult to check him out. Now we know why.’

  The RTA unit had got steel cables round the van and were preparing to winch it back to the road. The vibrations set the corpse jiggling, the blood‐red hands dancing like a marionette’s.

  ‘She had to marry someone,’ added Ragg. ‘With a kid on the way. If he was gonna be in the family he might as well be on the payroll and do some fucking work.’ He turned his back on the body of his son‐in‐law and looked out to sea where dusk was gathering on the horizon. ‘What was on his record?’

  ‘He nearly killed his girlfriend. He’d robbed her grandmother, and she wanted to turn him in. Broke her arms. But there were others,’ said Shaw. ‘Your daughter. Did he… ?’

  ‘No. Nothing. If he had I’d have killed him. He knew that.’

  ‘Why d’you think he did a runner?’ asked Shaw. ‘Because if you’d told me about his past I might have killed him anyway. I’d have kicked his arse out – and he certainly wouldn’t have got a ten grand pay‐off.’

  Valentine coughed, the cold air beginning to make his lungs ache.

  ‘It’s possible, Mr Ragg,’ said Shaw, ‘that the vehicles on Siberia Belt were diverted off the main road in order to set up a robbery – the contents of your security van being the target. Could Shreeves have been involved? The inside man?’

  ‘It crossed my mind,’ said Ragg. ‘We operate all along the north Norfolk
coast, have done for fifteen years. There are plenty of black spots for mobile signals but most of them are out on the beaches or the marsh. There’s just a few stretches of road. My vans never use them. We don’t have radios, so the mobile signal is crucial. Even the worst black spots can usually pick up something if you walk around a bit searching for the signal. But not Siberia Belt – there’s no signal on that stretch for about three miles. It’s the worst black spot on the coast. Which is why the regular drivers never use it. Ever.’

  ‘So maybe he was involved?’ pressed Shaw.

  ‘I love my daughter, Inspector, but she’s not the world’s best judge of character. I told her to wait when she met Jonah – give it a year. But she wouldn’t. I said she’d regret it one day. She’s at home now, doing exactly that.’

  The van on the bridge shuddered and they heard a joint crack in the swinging corpse. A leg had broken and Valentine looked away as the bone appeared, the shattered end glimpsed through the shredded overalls.

  ‘I should be with her,’ said Ragg. ‘As for Jonah, if he was involved I think he’s paid the penalty, don’t you?’

  21

  A single blue balloon hung from the door handle of Flat 34, The Saltings, North End; the home of Harvey Ellis. From the third‐floor balcony they could see over the rough lots to where a footpath was lit by a single lamp. In the dark the snow seemed to have its own glow, as if neon tubes had been sunk within. As Shaw knocked he pushed from his mind the vision of Jonah Shreeves’s corpse hanging below Burn Bridge. It seemed very likely that Shreeves had met his death fleeing the certainty of his exposure as a violent criminal who lied his way into both a job and a marriage. They might never know if he’d been part of a conspiracy to stage a robbery on the isolated coast road. A plan frustrated, perhaps, by the sudden snow storm.

  Harvey Ellis’s death had been no less violent than that of Jonah Shreeves – but in Ellis’s case they had a murderer still to find. Shaw squared his shoulders and knocked again, a triple crack. Valentine looked at his shoes, trying to remember the last time he’d worked a thirteen‐hour day. He felt shattered, almost dizzy, but good too – like he had a career again. As they waited the only sound was the swish‐swish of the ring road, and somewhere a washing machine rocking in its final phase.