by Jim Kelly
During the drive Shaw told Valentine about the picture in Narr’s wallet. He wondered if any of Narr’s employees thought their boss had a secret life.
‘He’s well liked,’ said Valentine. ‘Wife left last year. Nobody thought much of her. A bitch, apparently; used to swan round the place like it was her kingdom. No one mentioned a new bird on the block, so must be hush‐hush.’
‘Anything else off the shop floor?’
‘Sly’s been around for years, isn’t happy unless he’s out on the sands.’ Valentine put a hand on his heart as if taking an oath. ‘There’s no love lost with Lufkin, he’s only been on the payroll for eighteen months. Nasty bit of work. Last Christmas the pickers had a party in a pub – Narr put a couple of hundred behind the bar. Lufkin and Sly got into an argument and Lufkin threw a sneak punch, in the kidneys. But Sly’s a big man. He didn’t go down. He knocked Lufkin into the New Year, hit him so hard that when he woke up his clothes were out of style. But Lufkin is one of Narr’s old mates from the deep‐sea fleet, so he’s here to stay, whatever Sly thinks. But the woman in the sorting shed said Lufkin was a little shit, and her mate said if they wanted someone to drown him like a rat there’d be a rush to form a queue.’
‘Otherwise it’s happy families?’
‘And something else. One of the old blokes said there was a rumour they were going to give Izzy Dereham the push at Gallow Marsh. The oysters aren’t making what they should make. She’s struggling on her own, and the lease is up next year.’
‘Good work,’ said Shaw.
‘How we gonna play this?’ asked Valentine, trying not to feel pleased about the compliment.
‘Baker‐Sibley? Well, it isn’t a crime, not telling the police you’re having an affair. I presume there’s a Mr Baker‐Sibley – although she didn’t mention anyone when she needed Jillie picking up. Divorced? So I guess we take it carefully, keeping in mind Mr Colin Narr’s – excuse me, Alderman Narr’s – position as chairman of the Police Committee. She doesn’t have to reveal her private life. However, I think we now have cause to ask her about it. Plus I’d like to give her another chance to tell us the truth about that phone call she made from Gallow Marsh. There was someone else on the end of that line, not just her daughter.’
‘Could be Narr,’ said Valentine.
‘Could be. Did we check on the daughter?’
Valentine pulled out his notebook. ‘I had a word with the head at the school, snotty cow. Didn’t want to talk. I said we’d come down with a blue flashing light on the roof of the squad car and park it in the drive at going‐home time. She coughed up pretty quick then. So – Jillie Baker‐Sibley.’ He heaved in a lungful of air. ‘Bright, wired for nerves. The pupil from hell. Disruptive, uncooperative, occasionally violent.’
‘Violent?’
‘Bullying, mainly – always younger girls. There’s been complaints but they’ve kept it all in‐school. Parents don’t want publicity either. Last time she boxed some ten‐year‐old round the head, broke an eardrum. Argument over who got to sit on a bench in the sunshine. Head thinks she’s disturbed, has been since she got to the school two years ago. She says she’s on her last chance, doesn’t matter how clever she is. One more foot out of line and they’re gonna bite the bullet and tell her mum where to stick the fees.’
As they threaded their way through the drifts on the pavement Shaw recalled what Parlour had said about Sarah Baker‐Sibley, how nervous she’d been that night on Siberia Belt, desperate not to let her daughter down again. Parental anxiety, or something more?
Baker‐Sibley’s shop was immaculately minimalist. The walls were whitewashed, mobile phones set like jewels on polished glass shelves. The flat‐screen TV was now running an advert for broadband mobile links. A display of the new iPhone range filled one wall with a giant picture, a montage of the last century’s best‐known musicians.
Sarah Baker‐Sibley was talking to a customer but an assistant, a teenager called Abigail with long flowing blonde hair, showed them into a back office and produced a cafetière and three cups, each with a small sinuous kink in the circular rim.
When Baker‐Sibley joined them she looked elated, her eyes catching the pinpoint halogen lights strung in a line across the ceiling. A sale, thought Shaw, taking out his notebook, despising the thrill of money.
‘You’re early,’ she said.
She sat behind a desk, the harsh light adding ten years to the carefully made‐up flesh of her face. Valentine struggled with the kinked rim of his coffee cup, slurping loudly.
‘I’m sorry to take up your time, Ms Baker‐Sibley,’ said Shaw pointedly. ‘We just wanted to check a couple of points in your statement. DS Valentine has the note, I think…’
They’d agreed this on the drive over. Valentine would pitch some questions while Shaw waited for the right moment. It was becoming their favoured strategy. She told them the story she’d told them that first night: she always picked Jillie up from school, always at 5.30 on Mondays, and she always drove along the coast road. She’d seen the AA sign, took the diversion, and the rest they knew.
Valentine set his cup down. ‘Then you called your daughter from the farm?’ he asked. The last question, so he took the breath he was dying for, his shoulders rising painfully.
‘Yes. I knew you’d only got a message through to an answer phone when we were out on the marshes so I was still worried. Jillie always looks at the incoming number before answering, so I wasn’t desperate; but, you know, she’s only thirteen. I caught her at home,’ she added. ‘I think anyone with a child would know how it feels.’ She tried a smile but got nothing out of George Valentine.
‘And the second call?’ asked Shaw.
‘I rang her back – I got cut off.’
‘But you asked her to pass the phone at one point, on the first call, I think – who to?’
She shook her head. ‘No. Nobody else.’
So one lie at least, thought Shaw. ‘Couldn’t have been her father, for example?’
She folded her hands on her lap, scrunching slightly the heavy velvet black dress. ‘We’re divorced, Detective Inspector. James lives in Greece now, when he’s not in the City. He has a flat in the Barbican.’
‘And your daughter…’
‘She’s thirteen and I have custody of her, naturally.’
‘Right. And you pick her up each evening?’
‘Yes. St Agnes’ Hall at Burnham Westgate. Just along the coast road. I usually pick her up earlier but Mondays it’s later because she has a clarinet lesson after school. I’ve always picked her up, even when James was with us.’
She made the family sound like a corporation, thought Shaw. ‘But not last Monday night?’
‘Clearly.’ She didn’t volunteer any more information.
‘So what did she do?’ asked Shaw.
‘She walked home. She has a key.’ She folded and unfolded her hands, a little dance of exaggerated patience.
‘But your house is where?’ He made a pretence of checking his notes; the address was in Burnham Overy Town, a hamlet just inland. ‘There must have been three feet of snow on the road by the time she got there.’
‘Did she have a choice?’ she asked, the aggression in her voice misplaced.
‘Is she at school today?’ asked Valentine, closing his notebook.
‘No.’ Baker‐Sibley stiffened. ‘She’s doing school work here, she’s not well enough to go in.’
‘Anything serious?’ asked Shaw.
‘Just a chill.’
‘Can we see her then, briefly?’ Shaw sat back, while Valentine leant forward, helping himself to a fresh cup of coffee.
‘Why?’ she asked, but Shaw guessed she regretted it immediately.
‘We don’t want to have to bother you again,’ said Shaw, pleased at the elegance of the implied threat.
‘This is a waste of time – principally my time,’ she said.
She was gone a long time and they both wondered why, but said nothing. Shaw’s
pager buzzed and the call‐back number was the RNLI station at Wells, along the coast. That meant their boat was out, and that Hunstanton had to stand by. Shaw was less than five miles from home so he texted the coxswain saying he was on hand and could make up the crew.
‘We might have to wind this one up, George,’ he said. ‘There might be a shout.’
Valentine knew all about Shaw’s role in the RNLI. He thought most coppers found being a DI was job enough without being a part‐time hero. He wasn’t the only one at St James’s who thought it was out of order. He glugged some phlegm, stowing the cotton handkerchief quickly when he heard footsteps above, the floorboards creaking.
When she appeared Jillie Baker‐Sibley was a walking contradiction: thin, with fragile bones, a pale face free of make‐up. She was hugging a copy of Bleak House to her chest. But there were hints of another life. A single tattoo of a teardrop peeking out from the cuff of a crisp white collarless shirt, and the hair, cut short like a boy’s, was savagely severe, with an uneven fringe. Shaw remembered the little framed picture on the dashboard of the Alfa Romeo: Jillie with long straight hair, the perfect public‐school daughter. He guessed there’d been a family argument about hairstyles and that this time, at least, the teenager had won. He also noted the mobile hitched by the buckle: an expensive model in turquoise. Her face was formless, puffy, almost insolent, as if it might resolve itself into something more mature and structured by the end of the day. But the eyes were extraordinary: violet rather than blue. Film stars’ eyes, an extra’s face.
‘Hi,’ said Shaw, trying to hit the same adult tone he used with Francesca’s friends. ‘Studying?’
Her mother answered for her. ‘GCSE English Lit. – she’s years early of course, but the school seems to think she can sit it next year.’ She leant forward and touched her daughter’s hair, an expression crossing her face that Shaw couldn’t place: she loved her daughter, he could see that, but there was something else. It might have been fear.
‘You had to walk home the other night – that must have been frightening?’ asked Shaw.
‘I’ve walked before – it’s not a problem.’ Her eyes didn’t meet Shaw’s. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of in the dark. Dad always says that. And Mum always checks…’ She touched the mobile. ‘Mum and I are always in touch.’ Her voice was flat, emotionless, so that Shaw couldn’t tell if that was a good thing.
‘Clara – my best friend – we’ve walked home before, she lives up the lane. If you go back to school you have to work with the boarders – they do homework early. Losers.’
‘Jillie,’ said her mother. ‘There’s nothing cool about not working hard at school.’
Shaw held up a hand. ‘But this time you set out on your own?’
She shook her head, thinking, so that Shaw could see the confusion behind the eyes. ‘Clara has music lessons too on Mondays. But she does an extra hour. I like snow,’ she added. ‘It was beautiful.’
Shaw thought about the head teacher’s character summary: disruptive, violent. She flicked her head as if to clear a strand of hair from her eyes, a strand of hair she didn’t have. Then she crossed her legs, interlacing the fingers of both hands at the kneecap. There was something about the ease of the movement which suddenly made her seem older.
Shaw looked at her hands. There was a slight tremble in both, a vibration like a taut piano wire. On the top of the left one was a blue mark, a circle with the letters BT at the centre, identical to the one Valentine had described on the hand of the young driver of the Mondeo.
‘What does that mean?’ he asked pointing, unable to keep a note of excitement out of his voice.
Valentine sat forward, realizing he’d missed it. Hands: you should always look at their hands.
‘Oh, Jillie, really – I did ask.’ The annoyance in her mother’s voice was partly manufactured, Shaw sensed. Ritualistic.
Jillie smiled. ‘A disco at the village hall – at Burnham Thorpe. It’s Sodom and Gomorrah when the lights go down.’
Her mother bit her lip.
‘And when was that?’ asked Shaw.
‘Saturday night.’
‘It’s for charity,’ said her mother. ‘For meals‐on‐wheels. She never washes those things off – it’s to show off at school, isn’t it?’
Valentine hadn’t taken his eyes off the teenager. ‘Have you got a boyfriend, Jillie?’
Her mother snorted like a horse. ‘She needs to rest,’ she said, rising.
‘One last question,’ said Shaw. ‘When your mother phoned you on Monday night she asked you to pass the phone to someone else. Who was that, Jillie?’
Valentine watched her mother’s face, the line of the mouth setting murderously straight. Her daughter tossed her head. ‘I was at home, alone. I don’t remember that.’ She rearranged the simple gold chain at her neck, running it back and forth, but Shaw detected a fleeting expression on her face, reluctance perhaps, even distaste.
Sarah Baker‐Sibley took her daughter by the arm, gently letting her stand. ‘Indeed, as I said. Now, Jillie needs to rest.’
When she returned Shaw stood up, giving her the impression the interview was over. But he’d saved two questions. ‘You told Fred Parlour – the man you first informed that you thought John Holt was dead out on Siberia Belt – that you were very keen to get back on the road and see if Jillie was OK because you’d let her down before. When was that, Mrs Baker‐Sibley?’
Her eyes danced around the pictures on the office wall – a poorly executed landscape of Hunstanton cliffs, a watercolour of Holkham Hall. ‘It was one of the discos, at Burnham Thorpe. It was stupid of me – I fell asleep at home and when I got to the hall it was all shut up. No one. You can imagine. I just freaked out.’
‘But she was all right?’ asked Valentine, standing too. ‘She’d gone home with Clara – she was fine. I think she enjoyed it, actually – showing me up.’ A bitter smile.
‘Colin Narr,’ said Shaw. ‘You’re friends?’
It had been an act up until now, Shaw could see that, because this was the question she hadn’t expected. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘I ask the questions.’ Shaw smiled the surfer’s smile. ‘And why on earth do you think I should answer them?’
‘I’m investigating two murders and a suspicious death.’
Valentine noted the subtle shift again. The voice shedding its polite sugar coating.
‘Your car was stranded the other night near Ingol Beach; Gallow Marsh Farm owns the land, and Mr Narr’s company both owns Gallow Marsh and runs the cockle‐picking business out on Styleman’s Middle, where another corpse was discovered yesterday morning. Plus you’re insisting on telling me lies about the call you made that night at Gallow Marsh Farm. I heard you ask to be passed to someone else. So I can ask that question, and if you choose to not answer it, you can choose not to answer it down at St James’s. Was Mr Narr at home with Jillie?’
She gave him the full 100‐watt stare. Then she led the way to the plate‐glass door at the front of the shop, opening it to let some snowflakes blow in over the marble floor. A woman walked past outside, a pair of corgis wearing gaberdine jackets trailing on leads in her wake.
‘Colin and I have been seeing each other since shortly after my marriage broke down, Inspector. I don’t think we have any secrets, from either each other or the police. Any suggestion to the contrary might be of interest to his lawyers. If you insist on continuing this conversation at a police station then I will have to notify my lawyers.’
28
DC Jacky Lau stood on the rotting wooden jetty at Morston Creek, watching a pair of seals in the tidal run bobbing up, then down, like fairground ducks. In the mud the crabs scuttled, and the sound of the water draining out of the marshes was as loud as the wind. She’d parked her souped‐up Renault Mégane by the National Trust information hut. A light peppering of snow was obscuring the glass lenses of her wraparound Foster Grants.
Lau had good eyes: 20:20 vision. The creek ran ou
t through the marshes towards the open water protected by the long shingle arm of Blakeney Point. A few yachts bobbed in the tide. But one, on the edge of the marsh, looked odd – its mast set permanently off the vertical.
‘Ian,’ she said, not turning round.
A small man came up beside her and trained his binoculars on the sea breaking out on the distant point. Ian Norton was the harbour master at Morston, a part‐time post he combined with running the National Trust booth and tea shop. Norton was stocky, powerful, like a crab on its hind legs. Jacky Lau had gone out with his son Paul for a year, and his racing Mini with outsized wheels stood on the wharf. Ian was one of her best contacts, watchful, sceptical, with an eye for detail.
‘What you looking for, Jacky?’
‘Good question. Guv’nor thinks the body out on the sands at Styleman’s Middle had money. Yachting set. So, he figures, there might be a boat. He saw one on the night before they found the body out on the sands. A yacht, with a clam motif on the sail. How about that one?’ she asked, pointing.
Norton trained binoculars on the dipped, distant mast. ‘It’s run aground.’
‘Seen the owner?’ she asked, turning to look him in the face.
Norton shook his head.
There was a gust of snow‐crated wind. ‘Can you run me out?’ she asked, shivering, thinking about the warm interior of the Mégane, the heated driver’s seat.
Norton collected his wife from a cottage on the old quay to look after the coffee shop. The NT launch was a twoman dinghy with an outboard which laboured as they nosed out into Blakeney Channel, edging up towards the yacht, the wind beginning to chop the wave tops off, spraying them with spume. Visibility dropped, the snow thickening like feathers from a pillow fight, so that by the time they came alongside they couldn’t see the quay or the church up on the hill. Somewhere a foghorn sounded.
They were lucky to find it – a white yacht in a snowstorm. They could just read the name on the prow – Hydra.