Death Wore White

by Jim Kelly

  24

  Wednesday, 11 February

  Shaw swung the Land Rover over the Ouse Bridge, skimming above the estuary, looking back at the Lynn waterfront a mile distant, the tide running out now, revealing banks of mud the colour of Bisto. They turned north when they reached the far bank, past the canning factory and into West Lynn, a sleepy dormitory suburb with the one road in doubling up as the one road out, 1930s semis arranged in a maze of concentric cul‐de‐sacs, a church tower scarred by damp, and the ferry carrying commuters and shoppers over the water to the medieval quayside on the far side of the estuary.

  They followed the street signs for the West Lynn ferry. ‘Let’s make sure we do this one by the book,’ said Shaw, skirting a line of commuters’ cars. He bit his tongue, knowing it had been an unnecessary reminder. It was a scab he couldn’t help but pick.

  Valentine sniffed loudly, the phlegm in his throat bubbling. Then he looked out of the side window, his eyes narrowed in the harsh light, making sure the DI didn’t see that he’d spotted the inference.

  Fred Parlour’s house was just by the ferry office. Parked outside was an Express Plumbers van, identical to the one still in the pound at St James’s. They’d arranged for Parlour’s apprentice, Sean Harper, to be present at the interview as well. A footpath ran down to the river beside the house and Shaw could see a long back lawn covered by a foot of snow which stretched to the river. Out on the water boats jostled on the moorings as the rip‐tide cut through, ringing the bell on one of the marker buoys in mid‐stream. In the snow of the garden stood a toy windmill and a signpost pointing seawards which said NORTH POLE.

  ‘I don’t like this bloke,’ said Valentine, parking up. ‘Great,’ said Shaw, watching the net curtains twitch. ‘So we can count on you for some objective observations then.’

  ‘He’s got the victim’s blood on his hands.’ Valentine had spent a few waking hours the night before trying to find an innocent scenario which explained the blood on Parlour’s clothes. There wasn’t one. Even with a fancy degree, it just wasn’t there.

  ‘Thigh actually – the left. One smear. With traces of animal bone.’ Shaw liked details, because it was when they didn’t fit that you had to stop and think.

  ‘He’s a busy‐body. Gets his nose into everything.’

  ‘Remind me – what’s the tariff on that these days? Life, or just ten years?’

  Valentine coughed into a grey cotton bundle. ‘He’s a liar.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Shaw. ‘So let’s start with that.’

  Shaw’s mobile rang and he got out of the car to answer. It was one of Tom Hadden’s CSI team. They’d completed the dental checks on all those in the convoy. No match to the apple biter, not even close.

  ‘Just say it again,’ said Shaw, closing his good eye, pressing the dressing down on the injured one. The CSI told him again. Shaw tapped the roof of the bonnet. ‘OK, thanks.’

  Valentine could tell it was bad news.

  ‘Zero on the apple. No match to anyone in the convoy.’

  ‘Leggy blonde, then,’ said Valentine.

  Fred Parlour was on the step before they got to the top of the path. He turned abruptly, leading the way along a hall into a lounge which looked out through French windows, the lawn rolling down to the river. The ferry was crossing, butting the tide, crowded with shoppers. Flags flew over the Guildhall in Lynn while an undersized barrage balloon advertised petrol on the quayside, sea gusts making it dip and dive.

  ‘That’s quite a view,’ said Shaw. He ran his eyes over Parlour’s face, making an inventory of salient features, including the single plaster on his forehead where the door of the Mondeo had caught him that night on Siberia Belt.

  ‘So how can I help, Inspector? The paper’s full of it – this body on the beach, and now one out on the sands…’

  They heard a toilet flush upstairs, footsteps, and Sean Harper came in, still fiddling with his flies, then scratching the dimple in his chin. He didn’t know what to do with his arms, which seemed overlong, hanging by his sides. He touched the stud in his ear and nodded by way of greeting.

  A copy of the Daily Mail lay open on the coffee table at a page dominated by a story on the Lynn murders. Valentine had briefed the press, and they’d all done little more than take the police statement straight, while speculating the three deaths might be linked. The headline screamed: MURDER VICTIM FOUND ON SANDS. A breathless report tried to wedge in Harvey Ellis’s death, the discovery of Terence Brand’s body on Ingol Beach and the half‐buried body on Styleman’s Middle in 350 words of clipped journalese.

  ‘Tea?’ asked Parlour, not waiting for an answer. ‘Or something stronger… ?’ He laughed, but Shaw knew he hadn’t been joking.

  ‘Tea’s great,’ said Shaw.

  Parlour pottered in the kitchen, singing along to the faint music from a radio, the voice youthful, light. Shaw stood in the living room trying not to pick things up. A framed wedding photo stood on a shelf in the dresser; Parlour handsome in a narrow‐legged seventies suit, the wife embarrassed by a once‐in‐a‐lifetime hairdo. No pictures of children, nephews or nieces. Everything else in its place, the two armchairs: his and hers, hers with a sewing box on a small table. Coasters everywhere. Parlour found one and put down Shaw’s mug of tea, then retreated to get the others. Harper pretended to read the paper.

  ‘You’ll be delighted to know, Mr Harper, that we will not be taking proceedings over the pornography found in your possession,’ said Shaw.

  Harper looked pathetically grateful. He held up a thumb. ‘Brilliant.’ But Shaw didn’t return the smile. ‘As long as you can tell me where you got the magazine.’

  ‘The Skeg,’ he said. ‘Under the counter.’

  The Skeg was a beach café at Hunstanton. In the summer it was packed, but it limped through the winter serving greasy‐spoon meals to the winter surfing crowd.

  They heard a thud from above, then the sound of dog’s claws on the wooden stairs, dry food being tipped into a tin plate.

  Parlour came back with Valentine’s tea. ‘Milly’s a bit shy. Shy but hungry.’

  ‘Please,’ said Shaw, laughing. ‘Sit down if you want – it’s your front room. We wanted a quick word just to check your statement.’ He rearranged a sheaf of papers on the coffee table.

  They heard the dog scrabbling at the back door. ‘If she needs to go out perhaps Mr Harper could take her down the garden,’ said Shaw pointedly.

  Harper fled, then reappeared on the lawn, lobbing snowballs at the dog as it ran in circles.

  Shaw ran through the statement Fred Parlour had given Valentine at Gallow Marsh Farm. ‘I just need to be clear on one thing,’ said Shaw. ‘And I know this is labouring the point. But you didn’t, at any time, go further forward than the Alfa Romeo? I need to check that point.’

  Parlour worked at a zip on his cardigan. ‘Well, that’s true. Actually, I didn’t go any further up than that poor man’s Corsa. She came back to get me – the woman – and we went to see if the old bloke was dead. Then you sent me back to the van.’

  They heard Harper laugh in the garden, the dog barking like an unoiled hinge.

  ‘Sean went forward, of course – to the security van. But that was a minute, less. Then he came back.’ He looked out into the garden. ‘He’s not a bad lad. That’s the first time I’ve ever seen him with one of those magazines.’ He worked a finger under his collar.

  Shaw wondered how his father would have conducted the interview. The frontal assault perhaps, with Valentine offering him a lighter sentence if he made a full and rapid confession. He blew on the surface of the tea.

  ‘Anyone say much while you were all at the Corsa? There’d be you, Mrs Baker‐Sibley and Mr Zhao.’

  Parlour looked blank.

  ‘She was worried about her daughter?’ prompted Valentine.

  ‘Yeah. I said kids were a lot more independent than parents thought. Like I know.’ He laughed, looking round the room.

  ‘What did she say?’
>
  ‘She said I was right but she’d let her down before – that she’d promised it would never happen again. She was upset. I mean really upset. But she didn’t seem bothered if the old bloke was dead or alive.’

  There was silence and Parlour swished the dregs of his tea in the mug, humming an echo of the tune he’d sung in the kitchen. Out in the garden a pile of snow slid off the shed and thudded onto the lawn, burying the toy windmill. The dog dashed after snowballs.

  ‘Why are you lying to us, Mr Parlour?’

  Shaw watched Parlour’s face, and saw the smile clinging to his eyes, the muscles which held the line of the mouth twitching, a sudden flush of blood to the cheeks. And behind the eyes the brain working, trying to predict the next question, trying to find the answer.

  ‘Pardon?’

  Valentine sat back, enjoying the moment, wondering how long Parlour would be able to go on denying the obvious.

  ‘You said you didn’t know Harvey Ellis. That you’d never met him?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Parlour, a hand wandering to find the edge of the armchair for support.

  ‘Mr Parlour. Traces of Harvey Ellis’s blood were found on the trousers you were wearing on Monday night. Now I’m afraid that means one of two things. Either you did go further forward, which suggests to me that you might have killed Mr Ellis. Or that you met the person who did kill him.’ Shaw looked down the garden to the distant waterfront. ‘Either way the course of events from this point, right now, is pretty much unavoidable.’

  Shaw stood. ‘I’d like you to come with us to St James’s, sir – unless you have something to tell us. Did you kill Harvey Ellis, Mr Parlour?’ Shaw was less than two feet away when he asked. He liked to be that close. It was one of his father’s maxims: one of the few things he’d ever said about how he did his job. Get within their personal space, then you can feel the reaction.

  Parlour’s eyes were small and grey and they avoided his. ‘I… I don’t know how that could have happened. The blood. I didn’t go forward, and I don’t know Harvey Ellis. I don’t.’

  Valentine produced a copy of the family snapshot of Ellis at home. He held it up to Parlour’s face, uncomfortably close.

  ‘No. They showed me the pictures… the constable came round, when they checked my teeth. I said no then.’ He held out his hands, the wedding band catching the light on the ring finger. He looked round the room. ‘I can’t leave now. The wife’s at work, she won’t know, I need to tell her.’

  ‘Would you like to make a call?’ said Shaw.

  There was a phone by the armchair, a flip‐up address book. Parlour sat, and Shaw noted that his eyes had filled and his breathing had become uneven. They listened as he got through, waiting while they paged her, and Parlour fumbled through an explanation. When he put the phone down he stood up. They all watched the dog jump in the garden – the joy of the leap, the front paws extended.

  ‘I’ll put a bit more food down for the dog – she won’t be back ’til lunchtime.’

  Shaw went out into the garden where Harper’s footprints had soiled the lawn, revealing winter grass that was straw‐yellow. The apprentice dropped a snowball from his hand as if he’d been caught out breaking rules in the playground. The dog, madcap, raced headlong, fell, and went rolling through the snow.

  ‘OK, Mr Harper, Mr Parlour is coming to the station with us. He’s told us a few lies, I’m afraid, about Monday night. Have you?’

  Harper searched for the right answer, looking back at the house, the French windows reflecting a picture of the two of them stood in the snow. ‘Fred always tells the truth,’ he said.

  ‘Not quite. We found blood on his trousers, blood from the man who was killed in the pick‐up. When he does tell us the truth, Mr Harper, we’ll know, then, if you’ve told us lies as well.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Harper, following Shaw back into the house.

  Inside the kitchen door the dog bowl had been piled high. A mixture of chunky meat, slightly purple, and lumps of what looked like a white biscuity meal.

  Milly crunched in the bowl, her stub tail oscillating like a metronome on steroids. Shaw watched her, unblinking. His mind raced to the truth.

  ‘Shit!’ he said, and the dog cowered. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Valentine came into the kitchen and stood looking at the dog bowl with him. Shaw covered his eyes, one hand resting gently on the dressing, then dropped to his knees, a hand on the dog’s back, the fur wiry and slightly greasy.

  ‘It’s all right, Milly,’ he said.

  He’d been a fool, a bloody fool.

  25

  Shaw contemplated the large plate‐glass window of the Emerald Garden Chinese takeaway. It was fogged with condensation, trickles tracing a pattern like a bead curtain. A Day‐Glo poster advertised chips at 50p a portion, 60p with curry sauce.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Let’s try and get this inquiry back on the rails, shall we?’

  It was a rhetorical question, because the only person he blamed was himself. They’d left Milly the Jack Russell running round Fred Parlour’s garden. Valentine had taken a plastic bag of the dog food to the Ark. The CSI team was still finishing up out on Siberia Belt, so they wouldn’t have the results for twenty‐four hours. But in Parlour’s kitchen they’d found the still unopened cans of meat he used to make up Milly’s food, and the bag of bonemeal biscuits: reduced from sheep carcasses. The other organic material was likely to be the mixture of turkey and cow’s offal in the dog meat.

  Which only left one maddening question. How had the dog got blood on its snout, given that Ellis’s car doors had been shut, with the windows up, until the body was discovered and the dog locked up in the plumber’s van?

  Valentine pretended to study the front window of the takeaway. He hadn’t been able to work out why Shaw was so upset with the contents of a dog bowl. When he’d explained, Valentine had been forced to remind himself, not for the first time in thirty years, that he wasn’t as smart as he thought he was. But Jack Shaw’s son was: an uncomfortable fact Valentine was beginning to live with. Under all the tight‐arsed procedural nonsense he was starting to suspect there was a decent copper trying to get out.

  Shaw pressed the dressing to his eye, silently thankful that he hadn’t derailed the entire inquiry when Tom Hadden had discovered the blood traces on Parlour’s overalls. They did need to get back on track. Terence Brand, the man found dead in the raft on Ingol Beach, had given his aunt in Nuneaton a forwarding address: The Emerald Garden. That Stanley Zhao had been on Siberia Belt that night was a coincidence too far. Was anyone else in the little convoy involved in Brand’s smuggling? Had Harvey Ellis died because he’d been part of a plan, or because he’d been cut out of a plan?

  The front door of the takeaway was closed, so they walked down a side alley. There was a clatter of a wok on the high gas flame, the cracking of eggshells. They pushed open the fire exit by the storeroom and came into the kitchen from the back. Stanley Zhao didn’t jump an inch, just slipped an egg on to a plate.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Shaw. ‘Back door was open. A few more questions.’

  Zhao didn’t say a word, but led them upstairs, his six foot‐plus frame slightly stooped. The sitting room was about as Oriental as a fish‐and‐chip supper: a shag‐pile carpet, a sideboard covered in family photos, and a flat‐screen TV.

  Gail Zhao was Fen‐white, with black hair cut short, a face which had been pretty once but now tended to fat, the skin on her arms loose around the bone. Late forties perhaps, her husband’s generation, and tall too – five ten. And the teeth, too many for the mouth, the lips working hard to hide them. She looked tired, not lifetime tired but as though she’d had a fortnight of sleepless nights. Shaw noticed that one eyelid struggled to stay open, vibrating slightly.

  Valentine took Zhao through his original statement, letting them think it was all routine. Shaw sat forward in a wicker chair, watching their faces.

  ‘You’re quite sure you’d like your wife
to sit in on this, Mr Zhao?’ he said when Valentine had finished.

  Zhao adjusted the steel‐rimmed spectacles, dabbed a paper tissue on his lips now that he’d finished his breakfast. ‘I just want to help,’ he said.

  Valentine filled in their biographies. Gail had been born in Lynn, in the North End, before the old streets had come down. Her father was in the Merchant Navy and the family had gone to Hong Kong, where he’d put his savings into a boat‐building business: little launches in wood for the rich to picnic on the water. She’d been sixteen. The Zhaos had built boats too: junks for the harbour trade. She’d met Stan when she was eighteen. Her father had died two years before the territory had reverted to the Chinese. They’d sold up, come home. Stan had come with her. Four years on the Westmead, four years they didn’t want again.

  ‘It’s the crime we didn’t expect,’ said Zhao. Valentine stiffened, taking it personally.

  Shaw had run out of patience. ‘Right. So why did you lie about the spare room, Mr Zhao? You said Gangsun slept there at weekends when he was on the late shift.’

  ‘Yes.’ Zhao’s eyes had hardened.

  ‘Fine. So where did Terence Brand sleep?’

  ‘We’ve never heard of Terence Brand,’ said Gail Zhao, too quickly, her voice an octave too high. ‘Have we, Stan?’

  ‘I’d like your husband to answer the questions, Mrs Zhao – for now at least. Mr Zhao?’

  ‘I know the name. The local radio had a story. He was found on the beach?’ Shaw spotted it that time, the fleeting micro‐expression, like a shadow moving across the face’s tiny muscles and tendons, a glimpse of the truth. He’d seen fear, before Zhao had reimposed a look of polite confusion.

  ‘Yes. The beach below Siberia Belt. Where you were stranded on Monday night. His aunt has this restaurant as a forwarding address. That’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it?’

  From the kitchen came the rhythmic rattle of the wok being shaken on the gas hob.

  ‘Why were you helping these people, Mr Zhao?’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said, giving up on the smile. ‘Do you know what I’m going to do if you don’t answer my questions truthfully?’ asked Shaw, and Valentine recognized the buzz of stress in the voice, the almost imperceptible segue from patience to menace.