by Jim Kelly
And an old leather football in a glass case, a hand‐painted legend in white: ‘RFA Winners: 1971/2’.
Sly gave them glasses with a shot of vodka in each. ‘We heard you had a fight with Lufkin last Christmas. What was that about?’ asked Shaw.
‘Drink,’ said Sly, tipping back the glass. ‘Too much of it. He’s only little, it goes to his head.’ Shaw guessed Sly was a man who’d relied all his life on his power to physically intimidate. Now, with the advance of age, he’d been unable to adapt. He moved with a slightly arthritic limp.
‘We’ve been asking around, Mr Sly,’ said Shaw, studying a chart laid on the table – the Wash sands out to the navigation light on Roaring Middle. ‘And there seems to be a consensus that you’re honest. Is that a difference we might assume you have with Mr Lufkin? Is that why your face doesn’t fit?’
Sly ran the back of his hand across his lips. ‘Maybe.’ They heard a burst of sparks fizzing out in the darkness and through the porthole saw flames lick up from a fire. Out on the mud there was an island of grass and a bonfire burnt; in the shadows men moved.
‘That’s the social club,’ explained Sly.
Valentine hadn’t taken his eyes off Sly. ‘And Lufkin’s got the boss on his side right? That’s Colin Narr?’
‘And Colin Narr’s been there for years,’ said Shaw. ‘So how come your face doesn’t fit now all of a sudden?’
Sly shrugged. ‘Too old to cut it. It’s a young man’s game.’
Shaw’s temper had run its course. When he spoke, his voice had an edge like a rusty saw. ‘Mr Sly, I’ve just left Mr Fibich – you know Bedrich?’
Sly didn’t move a muscle, his glass cradled in his hand.
‘We went to pull him in at the hostel down in the North End. He decided he didn’t want to come, so he stabbed a police officer, then dragged a meat knife across his wrists. He’s dead. Someone will have to tell his wife, his kids. It’ll be someone like me. We wanted to talk to him about the man you found out on Styleman’s Middle. A man by the name of James Baker‐Sibley.’
They heard wood crackling out in the dark, a surge of intoxicated laughter.
‘And we want to ask you the same questions,’ finished Shaw, setting the drink on a ledge below a porthole.
‘Nothing happens on my watch,’ said Sly, helping himself to more vodka.
‘Mr Sly, you seem to be labouring under a misconception,’ said Shaw. ‘It’s immaterial to me on whose watch these crimes took place. You were out there. You’re out there every day. You’re in charge. I want some answers. Did you have anything to do with Mr Baker‐Sibley’s death?’
Sly took a decision, tipping what was left of the alcohol down his throat. ‘No. I liked James, we’d known each other for many years. He was my boss.’
‘In what sense?’ asked Shaw, the edge still in his voice.
‘In the sense that he owned Shark Tooth.’
‘What?’ said Valentine, flicking his notebook open and closed in irritation.
‘Why doesn’t everyone know that?’ asked Shaw. ‘Silent partner,’ said Sly. ‘That’s the way he wanted it. Same as his dad. I did the job for him too before he died. The money’s offshore. Commander Baker‐Sibley set it up in the nineties. I was in the Falklands with him. Narr ran the business – but I reported over his head, straight to the family.’
Valentine sniffed. ‘What about the other shareholders?’
‘They’re in for the local knowledge, expertise, influence. They hold the licences. But James bankrolled it. I was his eyes and ears. And I didn’t like what I saw, and I didn’t like what I heard.’
‘Right. You knew – of course you knew. That Lufkin and Narr were smuggling, maybe dumping the toxic waste. So you told James and he wanted it stopped?’
‘Sure. He had interests all over – Greece, south of France, Hungary… the last thing he wanted was the police crawling over some two‐bit scam. So yeah – he wanted it stopped. But in life there’s what you want, and there’s what you get.’
‘Why didn’t he just chuck Narr out – Lufkin too?’
‘Like I say – Narr’s important, he knows the business, the licences are in his name. Chuck him out, you ain’t got a business.’
‘So why didn’t you tell us it was James’s body when you found it on Styleman’s Middle?’
‘I saw a lot of dead men in the Falklands,’ said Sly. ‘They all look the same. Like meat.’ He bowed his head, knowing that wasn’t good enough. ‘I needed time to think. Time to work it out.’
‘And you worked it out. Then you did nothing.’
‘That’s your job. I’m out of it.’
‘We need some help,’ said Shaw. ‘I don’t think Colin Narr was on the yacht when James died. But I think he sent Lufkin out there. I need to make that link.’
‘I don’t want to be part of this,’ said Sly. ‘Can you promise me that?’
‘I can promise you only one thing, Mr Sly. That if you don’t tell us what you know I’ll make sure you’re charged with perverting the course of justice. This investigation was severely hampered by our failure to ID the body on Styleman’s Middle. That’s down to you.’
Sly slugged the vodka back and refilled his glass. ‘Take the ferry across at West Lynn. Take it tonight. Half‐way across there’s a small trawler in mid‐stream, the Skolt. They used it for the runs over to Belgium – for the merchandise, and for dumping the waste. She’s due to sail on the dawn tide. I’d make sure she doesn’t. And I’d make sure you talk to her registered owner – Colin Narr.’
37
They stood on the steps of St James’s – Shaw and Valentine – feeling the frost on the air. A bus went past, empty, the condensation on the windows cleared in circles by passengers already safely at home. It had been a good day: they knew why the convoy had been diverted down Siberia Belt. They knew how James Baker‐Sibley’s plan had been foiled, and they knew why he’d died. HM Coastguard had located the Skolt and towed it back to Boal Quay, where it was being examined by one of Tom Hadden’s CSI units. But Hadden had brought them up to speed quickly on the most promising development – a gash on the port side where the trawler had been in collision with a smaller vessel. The paint was white. Yacht white.
A good day. And so Shaw couldn’t deny it to himself any more: as a partner George Valentine had proved to be worth his weight in filter tips. He’d already contributed more than his fair share to the investigation. He was a good copper, inspired even, when the moment was right. Shaw wasn’t the textbook pedant everyone liked to paint him as, but he knew his limitations, so having Valentine around made him feel a lot more confident about solving the final mystery: finding Harvey Ellis’s killer.
But the Tessier case stood between them. Shaw might admire Valentine’s unpredictable skills, he might feel sorry for him, he might even be able, one day, to ignore his astonishingly annoying habits: but he couldn’t find it in himself to trust him. Not completely, not implicitly. Did he have a right to let a decade‐old question mark hang over the DS’s career? No. But it did. And it hung over his father as well. The Tessier case was unfinished business: worse – business they kept pretending didn’t exist. The elephant in the locked room. He knew Valentine’s bitterness went back to those twelve lost years of his career. Shaw couldn’t give them back. But he could do something about the Tessier case.
Shaw stamped his feet on the icy steps. ‘I need the file on Jonathan Tessier,’ he said.
Valentine looked at his black slip‐ons, his toes beginning to go numb in the cold.
‘Why?’
‘I just do, George. By the morning. And while we are on the topic, I think you might have talked to me about taking it out. It’s my father’s reputation too, not just yours.’
‘Jack’s dead.’ Valentine bit his lip, looked at his car keys in his hand, the gold on the green dice catching the electric light. He forced himself not to apologize for saying it. ‘I don’t get an explanation, then?’ he said. ‘I just hand over the file. My
career, my life, but you take the decisions.’ He spat in the snow. ‘You’re an arrogant fucker, sir.’ Valentine had been wanting to say that since they’d been put together as partners. He wondered if Peter Shaw had even thought what it was like for him, taking orders from his former partner’s son; a snotty‐nosed kid when he was first made up to DI.
It was a calculated insubordination that Shaw was powerless to reprimand. This was personal, and ranks didn’t matter. So he counted to ten in his head. ‘My decision, as a matter of fact, is that neither of us is going to have anything more to do with the case. It goes to Warren: he decides. That’s the right thing to do. And that’s what’s gonna happen. You like it – great. You don’t. Well, then fuck you. George.’
Valentine shook his head. Did Shaw really think anyone at St James’s was going to reopen this case? They buried it once. They were the last people likely to dig it up. That’s how the top brass kept their uniforms and shiny buttons: by making sure someone else always carried the proverbial can.
‘I want the file back, George. This isn’t the end of it – but I need the file back.’
Valentine looked around.
‘By morning.’
‘Yeah, right,’ said Valentine, putting a cigarette on his bottom lip.
Shaw stepped inside his personal space, close enough to smell the nicotine engrained in the raincoat. ‘I want the case reopened,’ he said, his voice vibrating like a reed. ‘Just like you do. But we’re the last people who can do that. You and I have an interest in this case which makes anything we do suspect in front of a jury. It’s all going up the line. I want you to understand that. For us, the case is over.’
Valentine stuck his head forward, the weak chin grey with stubble. ‘This case will never be over,’ he said.
38
Friday, 13 February
Andrew John Lufkin was arrested at 6.15 a.m. in his bedsit above Josie’s International Hair Salon – a lock‐up on the Greyfriars Estate. The backstairs entrance reeked of singed hair and cheap scent. DS Valentine stood back as they took out the door with a shoulder ram, the splinters flying as they pushed through into the bedroom. Lufkin was naked, on top of the sheets, the room heavy with the smell of a paraffin heater and the salty tang of sex.
Shaw couldn’t help thinking he looked a lot cleaner than he’d expected. His skin was slightly pink, shiny, and tussling with the fumes from the heater was something else: pine, perhaps? Lufkin asked to see the warrant, not bothering to pull the sheet across his genitals. The girl was in the bathroom. She came out wrapped in a towel, a cigarette unlit between red glossed lips.
‘Suzi,’ said Valentine, recognizing one of the women who worked the docks, based in a sauna off the quayside. That was the smell, cedar wood, splashed with scented water. ‘I’d get your stuff; this one’s done.’
‘He’s paid up ’til lunchtime,’ she said, genuinely affronted on behalf of her client’s rights.
‘He’s not gonna take you to trading standards, is he?’
They ran her back into town in a squad car while Lufkin dressed.
All the clothes in the flat above the shop were new – brand new, newer. Boxer shorts, socks and T‐shirts still held the creases from the shop packaging which filled the kitchen bin. M&S receipts, also in the bin, put the date of purchase as the previous Tuesday. Three pairs of jeans – identical – and a waterproof jacket hung in the wardrobe. They may have been worn once. But Lufkin’s watch had a green army‐style corded strap, a dark stain by the buckle. A single CSI officer had accompanied them on the raid. The watch strap was bagged and dispatched to the Ark with him.
‘What’s this about?’ said Lufkin, pulling a T‐shirt over his head. But it wasn’t a question, just part of a ritual.
‘Let’s save the questions for the station, Mr Lufkin,’ said Shaw. Tom Hadden’s early morning report from the Skolt was encouraging. The mark on her port side was an exact match for the gash on the Hydra’s starboard side. The paint samples matched, too. And there were plenty of fingerprints on the trawler. Shaw had little doubt he’d be able to put Andy Lufkin on board the Skolt the night James Baker‐Sibley died.
Lufkin brushed back the blond curly hair, then covered it with the hood of his duffle coat.
DC Twine was trawling through the drawers in a bedside table; a model of concentration, methodically sliding his gloved hand around each drawer, then slipping it out to check underneath.
‘I don’t usually have to pay for it,’ said Lufkin, hitching up his trousers and putting on a pair of platform shoes.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Valentine. He picked up a cardboard box on a windowsill and from it pulled out the plastic wrapping around a new mobile phone. ‘Your phone?’
Lufkin laughed. ‘It’s not just a phone, Grandad.’ He licked his lips. ‘TV, radio, video messaging. It’s the dog’s bollocks.’
Valentine looked around the flat and tapped his foot against the cheap electric fire sitting in the hearth. ‘You can tell me some more about it down at the nick. Like how you paid for it.’
Lufkin took a packet of gum from the bathroom and chewed loudly as they completed the search. He gave them the key for a drawer in a cheap desk set under the window, inside of which they found a passport, an HGV licence and a certificate of registration with the Trawler Association.
‘Where were you Monday night?’ asked Shaw.
‘Poker. Regular thing – with the Serbs. They can play all right, but I still won. I always win – but they come back for more. Stupid fuckers.’
‘Excellent,’ said Shaw. ‘Perhaps it’s your lucky week. But then again, perhaps it isn’t.’
‘There’s something here, sir,’ said Twine. He was flat on his back, searching under the bed. He rolled clear, a metal canister in either hand.
Each was the shape of a pencil box but the wrong size: larger, almost a shoe‐box, in brushed aluminium, with several bands of metal added for strength. Shaw had never seen objects like them.
‘Shit,’ said Valentine, doing up his tie as he backed away.
Twine knelt, put the canisters on the bed, withdrawing his hand quickly. They were all imagining what might be inside.
‘Right,’ said Shaw, his good eye scanning the room. ‘Mr Lufkin – enlighten us.’
Lufkin chewed gum. ‘Never seen them before.’
‘Get him out,’ said Shaw.
Two of the DCs searching the kitchen came in as a uniformed PC took Lufkin down to the squad car. They all stood in a circle as if round a death bed.
‘That one’s heavy,’ said Twine, smearing his hand on his trousers, then pointing.
‘OK – we need to open them,’ said Shaw.
‘Count me out,’ said Valentine.
‘You were never in,’ said Shaw. He picked up the heavier canister quickly and slid the top back a millimetre, then right back, quickly, tipping it over. A gun lay on the soiled sheet.
‘Makarov,’ said Twine. ‘Russian‐made pistol – loads come in, mainly from Serbia.’
‘OK,’ said Shaw. ‘That explains a lot.’ He’d wondered how Lufkin and Fibich had found it so easy to take Jillie away from her father when they’d boarded the Hydra. Now he knew.
He picked up the other canister, then applied an even pressure to the lid until the contents were revealed, placing it on the bed.
What was inside began to expand, like a time‐lapse film of an orchid. Red, gold, and purple. Leaves uncurling.
Shaw picked one out and held it against the light. A £50 note. He tipped the canister over and prised the bundles out, and they each began to unfurl on the soiled bed; blossoming, like exotic flowers.
39
By noon the snow clouds had gone, the sky a depthless blue, the only blemish the full moon and the contrails of two 747s leaving a neat cross at 25,000 feet. Another storm lay beyond the horizon at sea, waiting to slide over the coast like a coffin lid. But for now the world was windless, the tide rising in the creeks and marshes as if percolating up, rather than
flooding in; the seawater as sluggish as mercury.
Shaw and Valentine stood on the old wooden wharf at Thornham Harbour, a sheet of water as polished as a mirror between them and Nelson’s Island – a tear‐shaped bank of gravel in the wide creek on which the Victorians had built a suburban villa, as out of place as Valentine’s black slip‐ons. Red brick, with a single Gothic tower, embraced by a copse of pine trees cowed into shape by the north winds. A black Jag was parked in the shadow of the house.
‘Narr lives here?’ asked Valentine, suppressing a series of coughs which shook his narrow shoulders.
‘Moved in ninety‐one. So there must be some money in shellfish.’
Since their confrontation the night before they’d kept it like this – professional, distant, and cold. It didn’t seem to bother either of them.
Shaw walked to the wooden dock’s edge and looked down into the water. The clarity was heart‐stopping. He could see the black mud beneath, an eel sliding sideways raising a small whirlpool of silt, a rotting ship’s timber arcing out of the river bed like a whalebone.
Shaw’s mobile throbbed. It was Twine, passing on the latest from the Ark. Shaw took it all in, cut the link, brought Valentine up to speed. ‘The bloodstain on Lufkin’s wristwatch band looks like a match for Baker‐Sibley. Twine says Lufkin’s sweating so fast he’s losing weight. And he’s started talking. Claims Baker‐Sibley went for him on the yacht, they fought, he fell and hit his head.’