Death Wore White

by Jim Kelly

  ‘Yes. I called her mobile. She told me what had happened, said she’d decided to go with her father. She said it was his turn…’ She laughed. ‘I told her it didn’t work like that. I said I wanted to speak to James. Then the line went dead.’

  ‘But you rang a second time,’ said Shaw, looking out at the snow, a hawk over the hedgerow.

  ‘James answered. He said they’d sort it out together. That I wasn’t to come after them and that if I went to the police I’d never see her again. That’s why I told you she was at home. He said if I kept quiet then he’d work something out, I could see her abroad. Which was nice of him,’ she added, not smiling. ‘I could hear Jillie crying in the background. I think she realized then that it wasn’t a game. That we might not see each other again.’

  ‘Did you go after them?’

  ‘I didn’t need to. Your squad car dropped me home. I went inside, got changed and set off for the creek – it’s only a mile. I met Jillie coming up the lane. She said James had rowed her ashore. She’d told him she wanted to go home, to me. She said he’d cried when she said goodbye – which is sweet, isn’t it?’

  DC Mark Birley knocked, came in. ‘Squad car says Mrs Baker‐Sibley’s daughter isn’t at her friend’s house.’ Birley’s new shirt was too long in the arm so that he had to keep readjusting the cuffs. Shaw wondered if he’d kept his uniform, still hanging in a cupboard at home.

  ‘Mrs Baker‐Sibley?’ asked Shaw.

  She stood. ‘I’ll check her other friends. The school.’

  ‘We’ll give you an hour,’ said Shaw. ‘Then we’ll put out an alert. We need to find her.’

  Anger flashed across her mother’s eyes. ‘I know that. Christ – I know that.’ She took one last look at the sketch Shaw had made from her husband’s corpse. She stabbed a finger at it. ‘The eyes were crueller. Much crueller.’

  It was only after Valentine had walked her to the car park that Shaw realized her perfume still dominated the interview room: an astringent citrus. Shaw watched as she drove the Alfa out into the street, the gravel screeching as she made the turn, wrestling with the steering wheel.

  ‘It makes sense,’ said Valentine from the door. ‘The diversion on to Siberia Belt, the mobile black spot, everything. All set up to stop Sarah Baker‐Sibley picking Jillie up, and then stranding her out of mobile contact long enough to get to sea.’

  ‘Let’s get out to the scene, see if it works on the ground.’

  ‘Mark wants a word,’ said Valentine, nodding down the corridor towards the front counter.

  The DC was filling in the station logbook. He gave Shaw a black plastic box, about the size of a brick, and flipped open the hinged top. Inside was a porous pad. In the lid was a stamp. He pressed it into the ink, turned his hand over, and printed a neat BT on his skin, just like the one Valentine had seen on the skin of the driver of the Mondeo, and just like the one on Jillie Baker‐Sibley’s narrow wrist.

  ‘We’ve had some luck,’ said Birley. ‘Forty‐one tickets were sold for the dance. Security for the disco, and the running of the bar, was handled by a private company…’ Birley checked a neat note, ‘called SoundEvent, based in Lynn. The parish council chairman is Rod Belcher – he’s outside if you want a word. He says his son went and he said there was no trouble. The bar was beer and lager only with an age limit of eighteen. Anyone purchasing alcohol had to show an ID card. Payment at the door – which is where the hand stamp was given – secured a voucher for a free drink, a soft drink for those under‐age, in return for name and address. They sell the lists on to a direct marketing company involved in flogging CDs, DVD, pop‐concert tickets, magazines. So there’s a list – and it’s complete. SoundEvent says everyone went for the voucher.’

  Birley worked a finger inside his shirt collar, easing the material away from his neck. ‘So: forty‐one names, twenty‐nine blokes. I’ve got the lot. One of them has to be our runaway driver.’

  He unfolded a file and arranged the snapshots. Birley had dragooned two uniformed PCs from Burnham to help build the photo gallery. He laid them out in rows, then stood back, admiring his work. Valentine studied the faces. Then he did it a second time, but it was just for show. ‘Nope. ’Fraid not.’

  Birley blew out his cheeks. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

  ‘Our kid got in for nowt,’ said Valentine.

  ‘How?’ said Birley, looking at Shaw.

  ‘You said the parish council chairman had a son?’ asked Shaw.

  Birley searched the faces, found the one he was looking for, and stabbed it with his index finger. ‘Gerald Belcher – known to his friends as Gee.’

  ‘It’s not him,’ said Valentine. ‘Believe me.’

  ‘There was someone else at that disco, Mark. We need to find him. Let’s speak to Gee’s dad. He’s here?’

  They found Rod Belcher standing outside, smoking by a gleaming BMW. Shaw thought he looked like an incomer: trendy‐bald, his head shaved, a thin well‐toned face lightly tanned. The leather jacket he wore was worth a uniformed PC’s monthly salary. And glasses: narrow, across the face in red lacquer, as thin as a horizon.

  Birley outlined their problem with the photos but Belcher couldn’t help. His son was a regular at the discos, which were monthly, and he was sure there was no one there who was a stranger.

  ‘Bit of a mystery,’ said Belcher, checking a mobile. ‘You never go?’ asked Valentine, his head wreathed in cigarette smoke.

  ‘No. Well, sometimes. But kids at this age are best left to themselves. There’s been no trouble.’

  ‘We’d like a word with Gee,’ said Birley. ‘Just to double‐check.’

  ‘OK,’ said Belcher, ditching the cigarette and getting back in the car. The dashboard bristled with the calm, sophisticated telemetry of a £45,000 motor car. The engine purred into life. The finish was teak, a SatNav unit attached to the windscreen, the seats in tan leather. Valentine reached in and turned the ignition key, killing the engine, because around the steering wheel there was a snakeskin cover, the design unmistakable – black chevrons on a silver background.

  33

  Jillie Baker‐Sibley could hear the traffic in the sea mist but she couldn’t see the pus‐yellow headlights until they were thirty yards away; the cars whispering past, the drivers bent forward, trying to see something where there was nothing. Fossdyke, the ancient Roman bank which kept the sea back off the land, stretched out into fog ahead of her, like a drawbridge over an unseen gorge.

  She was getting colder, her arms held awkwardly at her sides, her jaw aching with the effort of not shivering. Any warmth she’d gathered overnight was bleeding away. She’d slept in the shed at the bottom of Clara’s garden, wrapped up in a picnic blanket, with a paraffin lamp on. Her friend had got her soup in a flask and a microwaved stick of garlic bread.

  At dawn she’d crept out and left a note.

  Thanks. Don’t tell them. I’ll write.

  J. x

  She picked up her first lift on the coast road, round Lynn, and west towards the Midlands. The mist had cleared for an hour and she’d seen the horizon. To the north, reclaimed land ran to the shore of the Wash, a patchwork of mathematical fields dusted with snow, a power station the only feature, catching the sunlight like a solar panel. To the south the snow lay heavier on the villages which marked the old coastline, Dutch‐style lead spires rising from knots of wind‐cowed trees.

  The icy wind had made the legs of her jeans flap. ‘Fuck it,’ she’d said to herself, wishing she hadn’t forgotten how to cry. In her pocket she clutched a key, but its power to still her rising panic was fading. Alone, stranded, she felt an almost overwhelming urge to scream.

  She’d got a lift, finally, from a truck to Sutton Bridge where the old mechanical swing bridge loomed, a giant’s Meccano set crossing the grey waters of the Welland. The mist closed in again beyond the town, curling over the thirty‐foot‐high bank like dry ice. Grey cottages built on the wide dyke came and went, but they saw no one. Villages d
ripped in the damp cloud which had fallen on the world.

  Then another truck: Luxembourg plates, a single silver container. She’d answered the driver’s questions.

  Where was she heading? The M1.

  Was this the right way? It was the right way. Shouldn’t she be in school? She was sixteen.

  Where would she go when she got to the M1 – north or south? To the airport.

  Did she have a ticket? Did her parents know?

  She said she needed to get out at the next roundabout. He said that it would be best to go to a police station, they could check she was OK. She said she’d tell them he’d tried to rape her, in a lay‐by, that he’d used his weight to lie on top of her, that you couldn’t hear her screams because of the traffic thundering by. He didn’t see her cut a thin line along her cheekbone with a fingernail.

  ‘You hit me,’ she said, her voice dead.

  They drove to a service station in silence and she got out at the exit. Standing on the grass verge she’d spat on his windscreen. That made her feel better, in charge, powerful. Empowered. She liked that word.

  He’d pulled away and she’d watched the tail lights fade in the mist, the world around her a shifting jigsaw of grey and white.

  The car that picked her up was a black Jag.

  It went past once. Then she heard it brake. She didn’t notice it going back the other way, or hear it pulling an unseen U‐turn. When it coasted out of the gloom the second time its tyres crunched in the kerb on broken glass and she recognized the umbrella furled on the back seat.

  She took a step back, looking around as if trying to find a way off the bank. But the field below was a milk‐white pool of mist, weaving its way between wooden posts.

  The passenger side window came down electronically. She shook her head, but then she got in.

  34

  A POLICE – NO ENTRY sign blocked the way forward on Siberia Belt.

  ‘Weird,’ said Shaw. ‘Tom said he’d have it wrapped up by last night. Why are they still here?’ He got out and stamped in the snow while Valentine struggled into his raincoat. They heard a marsh bird’s call, like fingers down a blackboard. Walking, Valentine smoked doggedly, while Shaw tried to set in order, in his own mind, everything that they’d learned.

  He’d left DC Birley to interview Rob Belcher and his son Gee about the whereabouts of the BMW – and the snakeskin wheel cover – on the night of the blizzard on Siberia Belt. DC Campbell was told to get a unit down to the cockle‐pickers’ hostel in the North End and round them up for interview. But the big breakthrough was Sarah Baker‐Sibley. Her statement would provide a cornerstone for the inquiry; laying out the foundations of the plan her ex‐husband had so meticulously laid to abduct his daughter. Luring her mother into the mobile black spot, and then bottling her up like a spider in a jar for the crucial hour it would take to spirit Jillie out of the country. The sudden snowstorm had all been to the good, turning the lid on the jar ever tighter.

  But to achieve that James Baker‐Sibley had to put in place a conspiracy. How many? Two on Siberia Belt – Ellis in front, and a backstop. Then another two at either end of the diversion to put the signs out and take them in. He doubted that Ellis put out the diversion sign – Sibley‐Baker was right behind him – and he certainly didn’t take it in. And the timing had to be perfect, but then they knew Sarah Baker‐Sibley ran her life by timetable. She’d always be there, on the coast road, at a few minutes past the hour, on her way to pick up Jillie. It was elaborate but brilliant. If it had worked the police would never have been involved, Sarah Baker‐Sibley would have been forced to stay silent or face the possibility – probability – that she’d never see her daughter again. An almost ghostly crime. As intangible as the mist now forming on the black marsh water.

  Valentine slipped on the ice, his arms flailing to keep his balance, the black slip‐ons skating. The sharp right turn in Siberia Belt was still two hundred yards away. So they plodded on.

  And then there were James Baker‐Sibley’s killers, thought Shaw. What if Jillie’s mother had used her second telephone call from Gallow Marsh to reach someone other than Jillie and her father? Sarah didn’t really need to phone him back at all. She knew what he planned, and as far as she knew her daughter was going to go with him. What she really needed was to stop her. What better friend to call than Colin Narr at Shark Tooth? All roads led to Narr, and to the cockle‐pickers Fiona Campbell was assembling for interview.

  They reached the turn in the track and, once round the corner of the high flood bank, they saw ahead a single SOC tent, lit within.

  Shaw stood at the turning, braving the shock of the wind off the sea. Valentine knew what was coming, a clinically logical summary of the case so far. He was getting tired of the regular lectures. Bored with treating a murder like a set of children’s building blocks. The wind wrapped his raincoat round his legs, tugging at the thin cloth of his trousers.

  His radio buzzed so he took the call. It was DC Twine in the murder incident room. They’d made progress in tracing the teenager at the wheel of the Mondeo on Siberia Belt. According to parish council chairman Rodney Belcher his BMW, and its distinctive steering‐wheel cover, were in use on the night of Harvey Ellis’s murder – but not by him. The Belchers’ eighteen‐year‐old neighbour, Sebastian Draper, was teaching Belcher’s son Gee how to drive. By way of payment they let him have use of the BMW on occasional weekday evenings when Belcher was up in the City. Draper was on a gap year, waiting to go up to Oxford to read maths in September. Responsible, sensible, polite – according to Belcher. Draper’s father had refused to allow his son to answer questions when DC Lau had called, until the family solicitor was present. An interview had been arranged for the morning at St James’s. Lau could have arrested him, but Twine had counselled caution. Shaw agreed. They knew where he lived and nobody was doing a moonlight flit from a million‐pound address.

  Other news: John Holt had discharged himself from hospital, and was under surveillance, and Jake Ellis – Harvey Ellis’s son – had died overnight at the hospital, his mother at his side. The Lynn News was reporting a cruel irony. When his mother had been taken home from the hospital she’d found a letter on the doorstep: an anonymous donation of £5,000 to the Jake Ellis Appeal. A cheque payable through an offshore trust based in Switzerland.

  Valentine relayed the messages and then stowed the radio.

  ‘Perhaps that’s Harvey’s pay‐off for playing his part in the abduction,’ said Shaw. ‘Baker‐Sibley said James stopped off in Morston to post letters – let’s try and trace the trust. But if it’s the Swiss they’re good at hiding money.’

  Shaw turned on the spot. Late afternoon: a grey sky loaded with snow, pinned up above their heads in folds, like a dreary circus tent. Siberia Belt had been churned up by vehicles, the ruts frozen.

  ‘So we know a bit,’ said Shaw. ‘At last.’

  They both ducked their heads as a fresh squall of snow blew into their faces.

  ‘What we don’t know is what happened out here on Siberia Belt. Why did Harvey Ellis die? Obvious scenario: he loses his nerve, one of the other members of the conspiracy kills him. So – who was the backstop? The kid in the Mondeo? Sebastian Draper. But he goes out and steals a car first? I know he’s going to Oxford but he can’t be that stupid. But is there another credible suspect? I can’t see it. Shreeves – in the security van. I guess it’s possible. Was that why he was so keen to start a new life somewhere else?’

  Shaw led the way forward to the lit SOC tent. ‘Let’s see what’s keeping Tom’s boys out in the cold.’

  Shaw had presumed the lit tent covered Harvey Ellis’s truck, but as they got close he realized it was too far back down the line. Within it Shaw could see an ultra‐violet light playing across the polythene. He pulled aside one of the plastic‐flap doors and ducked inside, followed by Valentine. The space was empty, a cube of air, lit by three lights. Tom Hadden was on his knees, alone, beside him a flask and lunch box and spread out
on a piece of white plastic a set of hand trowels and evidence bags.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, straightening his back. Around his neck hung several hundred pounds’ worth of binoculars. Shaw guessed he’d been planning a quiet hour after the final vehicle had been towed off Siberia Belt, scanning the marshes and beach for waders. ‘I’m glad you’re here, Peter – George. I’m afraid this isn’t going to make things any easier.’ He smiled, but they didn’t smile back.

  ‘This is the spot where our friend in the security van, God rest his soul, was parked on Monday night.’

  Hadden knelt and threw a switch on a light gun held in a tripod before killing the overhead halogen bulb. The light was infra‐red, and the effect made Valentine’s eyes swim out of focus. Shaw saw a liquid stain on the ground, glowing faintly like his daughter’s Halloween mask.

  ‘Luminol?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘Yup. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you what that means. Blood – might not be human of course – but blood. And lots of it; it’s soaked in – so several pints. Just the right amount.’

  Shaw hugged himself in the cold, relieved at last to find an answer to part of the puzzle. This must be where Harvey Ellis had begun to bleed to death, before his body had been moved to the cab of the pick‐up truck. ‘And this was underneath the security van?’ he asked.

  ‘Lucky find, actually,’ admitted Hadden. ‘One of the uniformed PCs was told to do a quick fingertip along the line once we’d cleared the bank.’ Hadden held his fingers up. ‘Red smudges.’ Hadden crouched, getting his face as close to the earth as possible. ‘And there’s something else.’

  Shaw mimicked his position, looking across the brightly lit patch where the blood had soaked in. ‘Footprint?’

  ‘Yup. Deep – given it’s frozen earth. Three centimetres. Just one – we can’t find anything like it anywhere else on the bank.’