by Jim Kelly
‘One footprint – in the blood?’ asked Valentine.
‘Yes. A boot, actually. Steel toecap. We’ve got a cast – here…’ He rummaged in the holdall and produced a lump of plaster with the imprint of the boot. ‘This helps,’ said Hadden, tapping the heel, which held the imprint of a fern, like a stencil.
‘Odd,’ said Shaw.
‘Yes. Reckon it’s a burn mark. Perhaps he stepped into the edge of a bonfire when the fern was burning and it’s left its outline. Anyway, distinctive, that’s the main thing. Good as a fingerprint.’
He slid the cast carefully back in the bag. ‘It’s not the victim’s boot, by the way – that’s a visual assessment but it isn’t going to change in the lab.’
‘Why just one footprint?’ asked Shaw.
‘Well – blood’s warm, hot when fresh. So three pints of it – perhaps more – would melt the frost out of the earth. So the foot sank in here – but not anywhere else, which was still rock hard.’ He knocked a gloved hand against the earth. ‘Iron,’ he said.
‘Which means the footprint was in the blood, not the other way round?’
‘Could be,’ said Hadden, closing his eyes. ‘Yeah – it’s a sound scenario. I’d work with it.’
‘So…’
‘So… we’ve got all the shoes from Monday night. We’ll see if we can track down a match. But if you’re looking for the place where Harvey Ellis began to bleed to death then this is it. There are no scatter marks in the cab – no blood particles at all as far as we can tell. Blow like that, blood would shoot… see?’ He crouched again. The glowing puddle of blood was shapeless except for a single plume, like a wisp of pampas grass, which shot forward in an elegant curve.
‘The fact the blood splatter is a parabola helps. I’d say he was stabbed in the eye, then toppled sideways, that’s why you get the pattern.’
Valentine nodded, seeing it happen, feeling the familiar nausea in his stomach.
‘Another puzzle,’ said Hadden. ‘There’s no blood trails or drag‐marks. I’d say he was lifted or rolled into something here – tarpaulin, plastic sheeting, God knows, and then taken to the pick‐up. Like I said, the earth was frozen, so maybe that’s why there’s so little evidence on the ground. That’s all a working hypo – so don’t quote me.’
‘Could the blood have dripped through from the van above?’ asked Valentine.
Hadden shook his head but said: ‘I’ll check it out for the record, but no way – it’s a sold‐on Securicor van, it’s a tin can, but a bloody strong tin can. Without the vents you couldn’t breathe in it. And if he was attacked in the van, why the splatter mark?’
Shaw held the conundrum, unsolved, in his head. ‘So the victim was found in the driving seat of his truck – thirty feet away from the spot where he virtually bled to death. Nearly three hours before he was found dead he’d driven his own van over the same spot. That’s not possible.’
‘I just do the science, Peter,’ said Hadden, flicking off the light. ‘I need to finish up.’ They took the hint, backing out into the snow.
‘One step forward, two steps back,’ said Shaw. ‘What’s the step forward?’ asked Valentine.
‘We know how the dog got Ellis’s blood on its snout.’
35
Back at St James’s Shaw ran up the steps while Valentine waited for the antiquated lift. He pushed open the fire door and saw ahead the long corridor which led to the murder incident room. A woman, with a pail and mop, had stopped in mid‐distance, hands on hips. Suddenly a reinforced glass door thudded open and DC Twine was running towards him. Policemen never run, that’s standard basic training, unless it’s to save life.
Twine skidded to a halt on the damp lino.
‘Officer down,’ he said. ‘Out at the hostel – it’s Fiona.’
Twine drove Shaw, commandeering a squad car on the forecourt, Valentine’s Mazda in the rear‐view. The rush‐hour streets were wet and splashed with the jagged colours of the town: traffic lights, headlamps, bright shopfronts, pedestrians turned away from the sea wind. The workers’ hostel in the North End was tucked away in the warren of terraced streets that once was home to the town’s fishing community. It had been the district’s Co‐op, and the distinctive red‐brick façade was still decorated with vine leaves and an inlaid picture in a pale sandstone of a dairymaid carrying a yoke through a meadow. Graffiti covered it now: a curled indecipherable moniker in soot‐black.
An ambulance, sirens screaming, tagged on to the
Mazda as Twine put the squad car on the pavement. A small crowd backed off, a woman clasping a huge Argos bag tripping over her own heels and falling back against the wall.
They brought Fiona Campbell out on a stretcher. Even under the amber street light Shaw could see she was as pale as a Goth. A paramedic was pressing a bandage to a wound at her shoulder, a single knife‐cut from the clavicle up towards the neck, the flesh hanging open to reveal a white, chipped bone. She was doused in blood on her left side, her own hand a sticky glove of arterial red.
Shaw placed a hand on her forehead. Fear had made her eyes unnaturally bright. ‘You can take tomorrow morning off if it helps,’ he said. As he spoke blood oozed to fill the trench of the wound. Valentine hung back. The paramedics slid her into the back of the ambulance, set up a drip and pulled off in a cloud of sirens.
‘She had a uniformed PC with her apparently,’ said Valentine, stepping forward, his face a colourless mask.
‘Where?’
‘In the building.’
The shop area of the old Co‐op had been left as a storeroom: tea crates, furniture, the old marble counter stacked with loo rolls, catering packs of detergent and light bulbs. A uniformed PC sat on a stool, holding a plastic bottle of water. Even from ten feet away Shaw could see he was shaking.
Valentine spoke to Shaw’s ear. ‘PC Darren Cole. It’s his beat – local community liaison officer. First tour of duty. He’s not having a good day.’
Shaw squatted down on his heels in front of Cole. ‘Darren. I need to know what happened. Quickly.’
The PC nodded, but said nothing.
‘Darren. You need to tell me.’
The PC went to unscrew the top of the water bottle but thought better of it. Vomit covered his reflective tunic. ‘We went in – down there.’ He looked to a single metal door – Shaw guessed it was the original entrance to the Co‐op’s cold store. ‘We searched the place. There’s some drugs – and cash: fifty‐pound notes, hidden under the Czech’s mattress. A lot of money – thousands.’
Shaw took the water bottle, removed the cap, and gave it to him. He drank, almost half, then handed it back. ‘Fiona told them we wanted to talk, down at St James’s,’ said Cole. ‘Most of them said OK. They’d been drinking, but not as much as the Czech. He said he wouldn’t go.’ The PC wiped his sleeve across his mouth. ‘Like, never. Fiona tried to talk him round while I got the rest out into the van. They took a bottle with ’em. I said they couldn’t have it, but they took it anyway.’
A bead of sweat ran to the end of Cole’s nose. But it was cold in the old shop, and Shaw noticed a bucket full of ice under a damp patch.
‘When I went back in Fiona had sat down with him – there’s a table. He said he wasn’t coming because he was going to kill himself. He’d got a knife, a butcher’s knife. He cut his wrist.’ Cole gagged. ‘Fiona went to stop him and he just…’ He couldn’t find the words. ‘He just chopped at her, like she was jungle, you know? I grabbed her – she was on the floor – and dragged her in here. I locked the door, then I called St James’s. Officer down.’
‘Well done, Darren,’ said Shaw, standing. ‘Get him out of here,’ Shaw told Valentine. ‘He needs looking after – treat him like a hero. I’ll take a look at chummy.’
The door was like a ship’s – iron, riveted, with a heavy‐duty handle. Shaw turned the key, leant on the handle and heard a pop, as if entering an airlock. The corridor beyond was tiled, a line of blood smeared down the centre where Col
e had dragged Fiona Campbell through to the old shop. On each side there were shelves. Old tin boxes rusted in the corners.
Shaw got to the second door when he heard the air pop behind him and he turned to see Valentine, an unlit cigarette in his mouth, a folder in his hand, his eyes drawn down to the arterial line.
‘George,’ he said.
They stood together at the inner second door. ‘This was in Fiona’s car,’ said Valentine. ‘She’d picked up the men’s records from Shark Tooth. Cole says the one they haven’t got down the station is this one…’ He held up the file. ‘Bedrich Fibich,’ said the DS, reading. ‘Forty‐two‐year‐old from Prague. A teacher, family back home. Papers list him as a labourer. He’s been in England since last summer.’
‘What is this place?’ asked Shaw.
‘I asked in the crowd – old bloke said it used to be an abattoir for all the Co‐ops in town.’
Shaw pushed the second door open and the hinges screamed. A line of camp beds ran down a room. Storage heaters hadn’t taken the chill off the white‐tiled walls; lots of the tiles were cracked, and Shaw wondered if the engrained black stains were dried blood. He couldn’t stop himself drawing in a lungful of air, examining it for traces of the slaughterer’s art: the burnt bone where the saw had cut, the raw stench of offal.
The room’s brutal past was impossible to obliterate, but the men had tried. The walls were covered in random pictures: the castle in Prague, a centrefold with her legs splayed, a snapshot of a young man standing on a river bank holding up a silver fish, a family wedding. And they’d brought their own smells: sweat and stale tobacco, cheap deodorant and whisky. There was a gas stove, a single garlic sausage hanging from a nail. No windows, just grilles in the roof and beyond them reinforced glass stained green by moss.
Bedrich Fibich was sitting behind a large table facing down the room, like a lonely Christ at a deserted Last Supper. There was nothing on the table except a bottle of whisky and a single glass; but a pool of blood had spread out from Fibich’s clasped hands to form an almost perfect circle. His eyes were shut, and Shaw wondered if he knew anyone else was in the room. Gravity seemed to have attacked his face, pulling down the folds of skin, the heavy eyelids, the bottom lip.
Shaw walked to the table and pulled out a metal chair, its legs squealing on the tiled floor. He heard Valentine’s soft steps behind him, then to one side, and then he came into peripheral vision, standing with his back to the tiled wall, just within a lunge of Fibich. Shaw could see the single knife wound in the Czech’s left wrist.
‘We should get you to a doctor,’ he said.
Fibich opened his eyes. They were blue but the colour was lifeless, like a vein glimpsed through thin skin. ‘No.’ He produced from his lap a carving knife with which he almost casually made a second neat incision across his wrist, the flesh falling open like an uncooked sirloin steak.
Valentine took half a step forward and Shaw heard saliva glug in his throat. But Shaw raised a hand from his wrist, enough to hold him there, well within striking range.
The blade of the knife reflected the light, the bottom six inches smeared with blood. Fibich held it in his hand with the point at Shaw’s face, ready to thrust.
‘Why? You don’t have to die,’ said Shaw.
Fibich seemed to stir, rolling his shoulders, wincing as the movement reopened the gash in his wrist. ‘She won’t have me back. Not after what we did. I had to explain the money, why I was coming home. She said I should stay away, that I was a stranger to them now.’
‘She? Your wife?’
He looked at Shaw for the first time. So this was why he was dying, because he was an exile in his own land. But what had he done? Shaw had a shrewd idea. If Sarah Baker‐Sibley had called Colin Narr that Monday night and told him Jillie had been abducted he would have organized a rescue. Had he sent a boat out to intercept James Baker‐Sibley’s yacht? Had Fibich been aboard?
‘That’s the bit I don’t understand,’ said Shaw. ‘Why did the man on the yacht have to die? Narr sent you out there to get his girlfriend’s daughter back, didn’t he? But why did her father have to die?’
Fibich turned his wrist to examine the wounds. ‘So good to be rich,’ he said. ‘Other people take all your risks.’ Shaw noted that he hadn’t denied Narr had sent them out to the yacht.
Fibich tried to focus on Shaw’s face. ‘The man on the yacht tried to pay us to leave him – to leave them, the daughter too.’ He stopped, and Shaw wondered if he was thinking of his own children.
‘He said we could be rich if we let them go. That was a big mistake. We took her anyway. He did not want her hurt, so he did not fight. I rowed her ashore. When I return we beat the truth from him. A desperate man, he fought too hard. So we hit him too hard. But he told us where the money was before he died. Thousands of pounds, all in cash. Then we threw him overboard.’
His head rocked back and he closed his eyes. Above them a line of hooks were still embedded in the roof where the carcasses had once hung.
‘I deserve to die here,’ he said.
‘You said “we”. Who was in charge, who else was there, Bedrich?’
Fibich’s eyes spun out of focus. ‘The little man,’ he said. ‘The little man without pity. Lufkin.’
36
Fiona Campbell had undergone an emergency blood transfusion at the hospital and an operation to reconnect severed arteries in her neck. Bedrich Fibich had been taken to the same hospital. He was alive when they put him in the ambulance outside the old Co‐op, but dead when they took him out on the forecourt by A&E. Shaw sat in the Mazda outside the Co‐op with Valentine, who smoked beside the open driver’s window. Lights poured through the murky windows of the old shop façade. Three uniformed PCs ferried personal effects out to a black van: clothes, letters, a fishing rod.
Shaw shared the silence with Valentine, aware of a subtle tilt in their relationship. He’d taken the decision to go into that room and confront Bedrich. Valentine could have hung back, let him run the risks alone, but he’d chosen instead to share the danger, and the sight of the spreading blood.
Valentine was concentrating on not being sick. He’d gone into the room because he felt he should. Whatever he thought of Shaw he was his partner, and as such he deserved the back‐up. When he’d seen Fibich’s blood spreading towards the edge of the table he’d changed his mind, but by then his legs had gone, so he leant against the wall. He’d fainted standing up for a second, an image of Jack Shaw on his deathbed flashing across his memory, only to be replaced by the sight of his son sat before the pool of spreading blood.
‘Let’s take Lufkin at dawn – tomorrow,’ said Shaw, checking his watch. ‘And let’s go mob‐handed too – with forensics. Tonight we need surveillance on him in case he does a runner.’
‘I’ll sort it,’ said Valentine.
‘We need to tie up loose ends tonight. Narr’s the key: Fibich virtually admitted he’d sent them out to get Jillie back. Narr is Lufkin’s boss too – they’re close, we know that. But before we go for Narr we need more evidence. Fibich is dead. Lufkin’s a pro – he won’t talk, not straight off, anyway. Out on the sands that leaves Sly – the gang‐master. We know there’s no love lost with Lufkin. We think he’s honest. Let’s see if he’s got a tale to tell.’
Valentine turned the key, thinking that if Shaw wanted a chauffeur he should bloody well hire one.
Sly’s houseboat was moored behind Boal Quay. There was an abandoned creek, an old bend in the river by‐passed by the main channel which spewed into the estuary. A crescent of houseboats stood moored to a raised jetty. Each had a small hut on dry land, a gangway across the mud, access to a power point and a standpipe. It was home to a menagerie of misfits, some of the boats fashioned into fantastic shapes: one, the superstructure an old single‐decker bus laid on a steel hull, another incorporating a Reliant Robin. In between the New Age fantasies there were boats from a more stately era – an old Cambridge college boat, with a veranda like a Vict
orian railway‐station platform; an old steam tug off the set of The African Queen; a wooden 1930s minesweeper in Atlantic grey.
They made their way along the jetty, reading off the numbers tacked to the US‐style post boxes until they got to 67 The Boal Bank.
The heavy scent of rotting wood and putrid mud was cloying. Sly’s home was a wooden barnacle on a steel hull, portholes lit, a washing line on the forward deck hung with a single pair of overalls. Moored alongside was a metal‐hulled inshore fishing boat with an open deck, a mast bristling with sonar, GPS, radomes, a fish‐finder aerial and floodlights. Shaw recognized it as the one they’d seen anchored off Styleman’s Middle on the morning they’d found James Baker‐Sibley’s body.
They were only halfway across the gangplank when Sly appeared. A deck light flooded them in white, catching falling snowflakes. Shaw was struck again by Sly’s size – the barrel‐chest, the ham fists. On board his floating home he’d lost the awkwardness that had been apparent out on Styleman’s Middle. He raised a hand to his side, without looking, and clicked the light off at a switch, then ran the hand down to find a latch so that he could swing the double doors into the cabin wide open. He pulled a blue seaman’s cap off his cannonball head.
Inside they could see the winter‐red glow of a potbellied stove.
‘She’s new,’ said Shaw, ducking inside, wrapping himself in the sudden woody heat. ‘The fishing boat alongside.’
‘Refurb,’ said Sly, shutting the doors. ‘I’ve done a lot of the work. The engine’s giving me gyp. Which isn’t funny, ’cos it’s my livelihood now.’
Shaw let him tell them what he wanted to tell them.
‘I chucked the job. Today. At Shark Tooth.’ Valentine didn’t like the self‐satisfied look. ‘You’ll miss your mate – Andy Lufkin,’ he said.
Sly took a handful of wooden staves from a basket by the door and fed them into the pot‐bellied stove.
The room was simple, furnished with just a few chairs and a single oval table in scratched mahogany. A bookcase filled the prow end. The portholes were brass, a skylight above was crated with snow. As Sly tried to find glasses Shaw looked at some of the framed prints: a map of the Falkland Islands, a picture of a tanker in the Suez Canal, one of Sly – a young man of twenty perhaps – arms round two other sailors outside a bar somewhere hot, in shorts, tattoos on their arms. He was the biggest of the three; the torso muscled like meat, the neck as wide as the thighs.