by Jim Kelly
Shaw closed his eyes. ‘No.’ He edged closer to the gas heater, turning one of the limpet shells in his pocket. ‘I checked Askit’s out through the files. Then I cross‐checked the company with all criminal records online for West Norfolk from 1995. And I got something – a match. A witness at a juvenile court case in the summer of ninety‐six. Timber Woods dug me out the file.’
Valentine didn’t say anything.
‘There was a child, another child,’ said Shaw. ‘Poynter. Gideon Poynter – they called him Giddy. He was twelve, lived on the Westmead. The family used to have money, before the father disappeared, so the Westmead must have been a bit of a shock. Mum had trouble because they were new on the estate and by local standards a bit on the posh side: so, standard welcome party – fire on her doorstep, dog shit through the letterbox, a late‐night thud on the front door. She set up a Neighbourhood Watch scheme. She planned a public meeting and sent Giddy out with posters and fliers.’
‘On the Westmead?’
‘Quite. Someone suggested she might like to forget the idea. She declined. So they thought they’d teach her a lesson, by teaching Giddy one.’
‘What’d they do?’ asked Valentine, licking his bottom lip.
‘They took him. A Sunday night, after dark. He was out playing on the landing so they bundled him down the stairwell. Four young thugs put him in one of the bins under the flats, one of the metal ones, and tied a bit of rope round the handle so he couldn’t force it open from the inside.’
Shaw leant back, trying to remember that this had really happened, that it wasn’t some sick plot from a TV thriller.
‘But he got out?’ said Valentine. ‘He must have got out.’ When they’d picked up Bobby Mosse that night in July 1997 they’d checked back through the files; reviewed every serious crime on the estate for the last eighteen months. Standard murder inquiry procedure. Valentine didn’t remember anything about Giddy Poynter.
‘Yeah, he got out. Eventually. Before they put him in the bin they showed him what was inside it.’ Shaw looked at the bottom of his empty pint glass. ‘Rats. Half a dozen. That’s what counted as a joke on the Westmead.’
‘How long was he in there?’ said Valentine. The drink had wiped some of the anger and tension out of the line of his mouth, the narrowed eyes.
‘The council emptied the bins at seven the next morning. The kid was traumatized, couldn’t speak. He needed help, probably still does. But it was just another nasty story from a nasty place. The juvenile court dealt with it.’
‘So how’d they catch them?’
‘The kids wore gloves but one of them had a hole in the finger. There was enough to get a match – that was…’ He checked his notebook. ‘Kid by the name of Cosyns. He was on file, even then. Another two stepped up for it when he was charged. Proud of it in fact. Bunch of little heroes.’
‘But just the three?’
‘Yeah. They never got the fourth.’ They both thought about that for a second, thinking the same thing, that it could have been Bobby Mosse. ‘The three got suspended sentences and community service. Nothing custodial. Know why?’
Valentine jiggled his empty pint.
‘Employer took the stand, said they’d all got decent jobs, prospects, and if they got sent down he’d have to let them go.’
‘Askit’s,’ said Valentine.
‘Askit’s. A year later we’ve got forensic evidence linking Askit’s to Jonathan Tessier’s murder. And Tessier’s body’s found in the underground car park, a hundred yards from the waste bins where Giddy Poynter spent the worst night of his life.’ It was the kind of coincidence, thought Shaw, that didn’t happen in the real world.
‘Is there a link to Bobby Mosse?’ asked Valentine. ‘Other than the fact Mosse lived on the Westmead – none.’ He watched as Valentine’s hooded eyes closed. He knew what his DS was thinking; that Warren would use that weak point in the case to ignore their plea to reopen the file.
They heard the last bell ring and went back to the party. Half an hour later they were walking through deserted backstreets towards the car park at St James’s. Opposite the police station was a park, stone griffins on each gatepost, the Gothic ironwork hung with icicles. Inside a necklace of white lamps led through the darkness across unblemished snow. On a bench a tramp slept, the snow a blanket.
Shaw checked his mobile. He had one message – Justina Kazimierz. The US Wildlife laboratory in Ashland, Oregon had identified the venom she’d extracted from Terry Brand’s arm. A spider: the Indian white jacket. Very rare, very nasty. On the black market they’d fetch $3,000 each.
‘Justina,’ he said to Valentine. ‘She says our man on Ingol Beach was bitten by a spider. Rare, valuable, fatal bite.’
‘Terrific,’ said Valentine. British household spiders made him jump. Anything bigger and he’d be running before he knew he was scared.
Shaw looked through the park gates. ‘I used to meet Dad here sometimes in the summer holidays,’ he said. ‘A half‐hour lunch hour. I’d walk in from the North End, wait for him down by the pond. I had a sailboat. It was the one place he’d go without the radio – here and the beach. I’d bring a football, or a Frisbee, like we were by the sea. He’d sit and describe the view from Gun Hill, as if he was there. He’d bring chips. A can of beer. I’d play in the shadows, fight dragons under the trees.’ He laughed. ‘I miss him.’
Valentine looked the other way, embarrassed by the intimacy.
Shaw took a deep breath. ‘George. I told you how this is going to be.’ The snow was driving in again from the docks, so they turned their backs and looked through the ironwork gates. ‘It’s Warren’s call. He’s got everything I know, everything you know. We’re off the case.’
‘You too?’ asked Valentine, a smile disfiguring his face.
‘Me too.’ Shaw tasted a snowflake on his lip, caught the acid hint of carbon dioxide. ‘I’m the son of the investigating DCI. The officer explicitly censured by the judge in the original trial. Any juror would accept that I had an interest in clearing Jack Shaw’s name.’
‘And do you?’
Shaw clenched his fists, stamped his feet, spooking a raven which rattled into one of the snow‐laden trees. He felt trapped, and that made him angry. And when he was angry he needed exercise, needed to dissipate the energy. But he couldn’t run.
‘I have an interest in finding out who killed Jonathan Tessier.’
‘But you’re not sure that’s the same thing, are you?’
‘No. That’s right,’ he said, aware that he’d been cornered into the implied accusation. Because if he didn’t trust Jack Shaw, then he didn’t trust George Valentine either.
‘Thanks for the vote of confidence,’ said Valentine, flapping the raincoat like a pair of furled wings. ‘I’m done for,’ he said, suddenly deflated. ‘I’m going home.’
But he didn’t mean it.
41
Valentine walked down through the town to Vancouver’s statue. The day had left him confused and exhausted. They’d cracked open the heart of the case – he was sure of that. But his final confrontation with Shaw had sucked the adrenaline out of him. The thought that his future, what was left of it, was in the hands of DCS Max Warren made him feel impotent, discarded.
He wandered back towards Greenland Street, forcing himself not to steal a glance ahead to check if the light shone from the house on the corner. It did. And there, low down in the curved plate glass of the double doors of the old shop, the white piece of crisp cartridge paper.
Yat ye hoi p’i
‘The game is open, night and day,’ said Valentine, translating.
He knocked twice, waited, knocked again.
A man opened the door, the man they called the sentinel. Beyond the doors the sudden heat enveloped them both. The sentinel stood, smiling, waiting for him to choose. Which was polite of him, because although upstairs, in the loft, they played white pigeon, Valentine always climbed down to the basement for fan‐tan.
In the h
allway a child in pyjamas played with a radio‐controlled car. A Christmas present, Valentine guessed, the car racing through an open door into a room where he knew the sentinel’s woman slept. The sentinel said something brutal and short but the child ignored him. The sound of a parent trying to get a child to go to bed was the same in any language. As Valentine descended the stairs he could still hear the whirr of the little electronic motor as the car ran the length of the carpet.
He took one of the tall stools beside the fan‐tan table. The cashier sat to one side, the dealer stood. There were eight players, each on stools. There was no alcohol – Valentine liked it that way, he liked his vices singly, and this way he knew that he’d really enjoy the thrill of luck.
An hour later he’d made £300. The dealer smiled at him. ‘The numbers like you,’ he said.
‘Makes a change,’ said Valentine, using the answer he always had ready.
He stood, stretching, poured himself some water and went to the far end of the room to sit. He always stopped at £300. It was his interim limit, the point when he forced himself to take stock. Fan‐tan was a game of pure chance. George Valentine’s grip on the laws of probability was crisp. He knew that a winning streak was no less likely to lead to another winning streak than a losing streak. But £300 up was always a good time to think about what it meant: six crisp £50 notes. After all, he could spend the money.
The far end of the room was a rest station. A set of wooden chairs stood in a circle, some pretzels, nuts and crisps in bowls on a low table. A small TV showed a Chinese cable station with the volume so low it sounded like a trapped bluebottle. Convention decreed that all conversation here must be in English when a gweilo was present, so the three Chinese already there switched from Mandarin immediately.
The snow was keeping people in, they agreed. Even the police. They all laughed because DS Valentine had never hidden his trade; indeed his relationship with illegal gambling was fundamentally symbiotic. When the Serious Crime Squad had tried to clear up the gambling dens of South Lynn the house in Greenland Street had been mysteriously empty, the cellar crammed with broken furniture.
Valentine thrust a hand in his pocket to get his handkerchief but found, instead, a scrap of paper. He took it out, unfolded it: the six savage lines on the side of John Holt’s car door. He’d recognized immediately that it wasn’t just a scrawl, a mindless graffito. But now, suddenly, he was sure he knew what it was. He just didn’t know what it meant.
‘Anyone know what this says?’ he said, flattening it out on the table.
They all looked at each other, a necklace of glances which didn’t include him.
‘Joe’s sign,’ said the man they called Paddy. He was compact, the racial characteristics of his face mixed with something subtle: Anglo‐Saxon perhaps, or Celt. ‘It’s his name. Simple as that.’
‘And who’s Joe?’ asked Valentine.
‘You might visit him to borrow money,’ said Paddy. ‘But it would be a mistake.’
‘A loan shark?’
‘With sharp teeth,’ said Paddy, running a finger along his own.
Shaw waded out onto the beach at Old Hunstanton, bare feet running over the snow on the sand above the high‐tide mark, water falling off the winter wetsuit. Lena stood on the sands cradling a mug. She laughed at him, the way he lifted his feet quickly off the cold pebbles which lay in front of the café.
They walked back to the cottage and she lay on the rug in front of the wood‐burning stove while he got out of the suit and found a bathrobe. She held a portable shaving mirror up while he looked at his injured eye. The scar was fading, the sutured eyelids still pressed together in the bruised socket. Lena bathed the eye in water from a bottle, then took a fresh dressing from the batch Shaw had been given at the clinic.
‘It’s healing,’ she said. ‘Francesca will be upset. She thinks you look like a pirate.’
Lena left him in the dark, watching the incoming waves, luminous on a moonless night. Swimming, he’d cleared his head, then filled it again. On his back, his arms rising and falling, he’d seen the Pole Star through a thin disc of cirrus. He’d put the Tessier case out of his mind and instead tried to piece together the first twenty‐four hours of the Ellis inquiry. The answer was in the detail, he’d told himself, always in the detail.
He saw in his memory Holt again, in his hospital bed. It had been a bad night. High blood pressure had broken an artery in his nose, and he’d lost a lot of blood. They’d had to fight to clear his airways the doctor had said, cutting away his dentures which had become lodged in his throat.
He thought of the two halves of the shattered dental work, the apple on the dashboard of Ellis’s truck, and the image made him smile at last.
As he padded down the corridor and into their bedroom, Lena turned in the shadows, an arm thrown across the sheet, welcoming, and his heart skipped a beat.
At the fan‐tan table Valentine had lost heavily, handing in his playing card at just after one o’clock when he’d got down to £50. He stood in the hall waiting for his coat. He could hear the boy crying somewhere and the reason was plain: the electric car lay on its side, the battery compartment open, the four AAs, presumably spent, spilt out.
The sentinel returned with his coat.
‘Costs a fortune,’ said Valentine. ‘Keeping a car on the road these days.’
‘Least he sleep now,’ said the man, nodding, showing too many teeth. ‘Sleeps like the dead.’
The moment he stood on the step, and the door closed behind him, the thought hit him and Valentine knew he was right. A child’s toy, bereft of batteries. He saw the inside of Harvey Ellis’s pick‐up truck, smelt the spilt blood, listened again to the unnatural silence which always seems to shroud the dead.
The night air, the thrill of understanding, made his skin hum, and he clapped his hands like a child. He turned left up Greenland Street and set out for St James’s, knowing that he wouldn’t sleep unless he checked now. The key to the CSI box would be with the desk sergeant. He’d need to drum up a witness from the canteen. He thought about running, but told himself to grow up.
42
Saturday, 14 February
George Valentine lay in bed listening to the gentle throb of a three‐litre engine. It was parked below his bedroom window. The street light still showed between the curtains, and the alarm clock said seven. He wanted to sleep, to stave off the yearning for nicotine, the pillowcase still holding the dim memory of his last illicit Silk Cut.
‘Well, fuck this,’ he said, getting up, pulling back the curtain and running up the sash before he’d looked out. The cold air hit him like a bucket of iced water. DI Peter Shaw was standing by the Land Rover, the engine running, a police radio to his ear.
‘I said early start,’ he said, looking up. ‘I meant very early start – sorry.’ A gust of sea breeze blew off the freezing river and rippled through Valentine’s pyjamas. He slammed the window shut.
As soon as Valentine opened the door Shaw knew that this was part of the DS’s life he’d not imagined. The hallway was uncarpeted, but spotless, a picture on a hook of Valentine as a teenager, sitting on a beach with a woman with long legs and a smile hidden in the shadow from a stylish sun hat. Valentine at twenty, perhaps still a teenager even, a mop of hair over the narrow face, the cheekbones rakish rather than cadaverous. Did Shaw remember his wife? Perhaps, somewhere back in a childhood memory, his father’s friends drinking in the back garden.
The kitchen was 1950s basic. A wooden draining board, ugly taps and a stone basin. Valentine made tea, changed, then smoked while the pot brewed. He poured the liquid into two mugs, added milk from a fridge which was otherwise empty.
He hadn’t said a word, and Shaw sensed he was enjoying the silence.
‘No cards then?’ said Shaw.
‘What?’
‘There’s nothing on the mat. It’s Valentine’s Day.’ Valentine ignored him, taking a scrap of paper from his pocket and placed it on the table.
&nbs
p; Shaw leant back, balancing the stool on two legs. ‘This is the mark left on Holt’s car.’ Valentine coughed, stubbed out the cigarette, played with the packet. ‘Chinese name character for Joe. I asked some questions. He’s a loan shark with a reputation for using muscle to collect. I think we can take it that daubing one of these…’ he stabbed the Chinese character with his finger, ‘on someone’s car door is a final demand. A very final demand.’ He knocked a fresh cigarette on the table top. ‘Holt.’
‘It’s a motive?’ asked Shaw.
‘Yeah. Think about it.’
Shaw did. Holt needed the money – he was desperate; living in a slum down by the docks, supporting a daughter who couldn’t work, a granddaughter. So James Baker‐Sibley recruits him. Ellis too.
‘There’s more,’ said Shaw. ‘I’ve got Twine out at Holt’s dentist. Night he was taken in the Queen Vic he lost his dentures – they had to be cut out of his windpipe. So when Tom’s boys went round they must have taken a cast from an old pair.’
‘The apple?’ asked Valentine.
‘Maybe.’
‘I should have thought of that,’ said Valentine, annoyed with himself.
‘We both should have,’ said Shaw.
Valentine stood and went to the raincoat hung on the pantry door. He took out a plastic evidence bag: inside was the toy eagle which had hung from the roof of Harvey Ellis’s truck.
Shaw went to touch it, then stopped.
Valentine held up his hands. ‘It’s all booked out. No problems – it’s been dusted, everything.’
He unpopped the seal and retrieved the toy. He found a tag on the underside with his index finger and a plastic door opened to reveal a slot for a single AAA battery. Against the light he held the plastic evidence bag. Inside was a battery.
‘Hadden’s team didn’t check it. I did. It’s flat.’ Valentine produced a TV remote control from the kitchen drawer and knocked out a battery, slotting it into the toy. Then he flipped a switch on the breastplate. The wings flapped, up and down, a jagged movement. Standing, he turned on the kitchen light and held the toy up to the bulb. Shadows danced around them – the kind of shadows Shaw had taken for movement that night on Siberia Belt when he’d first spotted the pick‐up truck.