At Death's Window (4 page)

‘Exactly,’ said Valentine. ‘Her Majesty. Not so much second home as fifth, I think – or maybe sixth. It’s an interesting take on the whole question, of course – the country house. Nobody complained about them when they employed a hundred servants below stairs. And not just HM. Part of the Sandringham Estate has just been refurbished to provide a new home for Prince William, his wife Kate and their baby George.’

‘Anmer Hall.’

‘Correct.’

Anmer was a one-horse village in the hills just north of Brancaster Staithe. The house was a late Georgian pile with an indeterminate number of rooms which the royal couple had indicated was inadequate for a family of three by proposing an extension.

Guarding Anmer Hall and making sure its new occupants led a carefree life was Max Warren’s number one policing priority.

Valentine’s mobile danced a tight circle on the Formica tabletop.

The text read:
Murder Inquiry. SOCO leaving Boal Quay in 15 minutes. Shaw.

Valentine read it three times while Lee studied the pictures.

‘I have to go, Gordon.’ He pushed the pint away.

Lee held up a hand. ‘One question. Same question. Why me?’

‘I need you to tell Bartlett a lie about the origins of the story. These pictures were sent to the Home Office. They’ve asked to be kept abreast of developments, which is clearly adding to the pressure on the chief constable. Havelock’s still on the
Guardian
, yes?’

Steve Havelock had been a junior on the local rag before heading south for Fleet Street.

‘I want you to tell the newsdesk that you used contacts at the
Guardian
to get through to the Home Office. Back channels – whatever you call it. That’s the deal. The details, the photocopies, all came from the Home Office, via the
Guardian
. I don’t want my name to appear in the list of possible sources, let alone the probable ones.’

As Valentine left he put his CID business card on the blue baize of the pool table by the elbow of the kid with the spliff.

T
hey put up the scene-of-crime tent on Mitchell’s Bank at nine-thirty p.m. that evening: a cube of white light in the darkness of Overy Creek. It looked as if a giant’s Chinese lantern had come to rest on the north Norfolk coast. At low water Mitchell’s Bank would no longer be an island, but linked by a damp, muddy path to the shore. Shaw had decided almost immediately that they couldn’t wait that long. Even as the tidal waters closed over the tethered victim he’d used the RNLI radio to put a message through to the Ark – West Norfolk’s forensic laboratory, at the St James’ HQ in Lynn. They had six hours in which mud, beach and reed would be exposed, before the next tide began to turn. They couldn’t afford to let the night pass.

The police launch arrived on the scene shortly after dark. Shaw had flown
Flyer
back to Old Hunstanton. The D’Asti family were taken to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Lynn, care of a flying doctor helicopter trip from the beach in front of the lifeboat house. The father was suffering from shock and would remain overnight, while his wife was driving up from London to be with the children.

Shaw returned to the scene of crime in the RNLI’s Atlantic 75 – an inshore fibreglass rescue boat. When he rounded the point by Scolt Head he could see that the waters had retreated enough to allow Hadden’s team to put up the forensic tent at the summit of Mitchell’s Bank. The night was moonless, clear and cool, so that the sandbanks and channels, the dunes and reeds, seemed to be illuminated solely by the wheeling planetarium of the stars, revealing a world of nearly-sea, threaded with nearly-land. The scene ahead of Shaw’s boat appeared to shimmer and change with each minute of the slowly falling tide, revealing sandbanks, islands, cockle beds, the brown, fibrous stumps of an ancient wood and the bones of a shipwreck under Gun Hill.

Shaw cut the twin Yamaha seventy-five horsepower engines and let the boat skim up the leading edge of Mitchell’s Bank. He wore a full winter wetsuit and a safety helmet with a headlamp. His passenger wore a gabardine raincoat, black synthetic slip-ons and a lifebelt; DS George Valentine was not in his element. His discomfort levels had peaked when Peter Shaw had handed him a wetsuit outside the lifeboat house. George Valentine wasn’t even comfortable in his own skin.

While Shaw ran a mooring rope to a black-and-white marker buoy, Valentine sat watching, immobile, until a match flared and the cigarette smoke drifted in the night like a ghost.

‘When you’re ready, George.’

Shaw was scanning the scene, his feet set wider than his shoulders. His father, Jack Shaw, a DCI back in the seventies, had teamed up with a young DI called George Valentine. In ten years as the force’s crack detective unit they’d made a name for themselves – before it all came tumbling down with their last, ill-fated case. Shaw Senior had bequeathed his son a handful of working maxims, indispensable to the up-and-coming detective. Rule Number One: memorize the scene of crime, everything you can see, all you can touch, smell and hear, so that for the rest of the inquiry you can carry it around with you, as accessible as the family photo in your wallet. When his father had died, an invalid in the wake of the case that had broken his body as well as his spirit, Shaw had cleaned out the bedside table in the family home and found his wallet. It was no surprise to find he’d hadn’t carried a family photo.

Valentine put a foot on the sand and the water welled up and over the lip of the slip-on. His first full step produced an obscene noise as water squirted out of the shoe in a series of miniature fountains. The DS swore under his breath, expertly keeping his cigarette in position in the left-hand corner of his mouth. He wasn’t happy. He didn’t like the seaside, hated boats, couldn’t swim, and had been looking forward to
Match of the Day
. He’d grumpily given Shaw a résumé of his interrupted meeting with the reporter. They’d agreed that the chief constable could be safely kept in the dark until the story broke. In fact, he could
stay
in the dark after the story broke.

The DS’s raincoat flapped around his narrow thighs. ‘Where’s that?’ he asked, pointing at lights reflected across the water.

‘Burnham Marsh – nearest village.’

‘I thought we got the call from Burnham Overy Staithe?’

‘We did. That’s back inland along the towpath …’

Shaw pointed directly south where they could see another cluster of lights a mile distant.

‘Burnham Marsh is much smaller – and the only way you can get there from here is by boat. Unless you want to pick your way over the sands at low tide. It’s a dead end. Pretty, picture-postcard and all that, but about as much life as a dead whelk.’

Shaw was going to dismiss the thought of Burnham Marsh but he had long learned that Valentine had a genius for spotting the obvious.

‘However, now you mention it, George, we better think about house-to-house. If and when you can get a signal on the mobile let’s get the team together in the morning on the quayside at Burnham Marsh. Mobile incident room – the full works. I think we can be pretty certain our victim didn’t die of old age given D’Asti’s statement.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Get Paul Twine, in fact – he can be point
.
’

‘Point’ was a key position in any murder inquiry. The officer chosen had to act as a central gateway for all information. It required a first-class brain, an ability to work without sleep for long periods, and excellent organizational skills. Twine, a graduate-entry fast-tracker, was the obvious candidate.

Valentine looked at his feet. ‘I sent Paul a text when I had a signal, before we left the lifeboat station, back at Hunstanton. He’s sorting the incident room now. Team will be on the road by six.’

Shaw took a deep breath but couldn’t quite make himself say sorry. Before being busted down a rank – after becoming embroiled in Jack Shaw’s last, disastrous case – DI Valentine had a spotless CV boasting more murder inquiries than Shaw’s did GCSEs. Shaw really did need to learn to trust his right-hand man.

‘I’ve got Fiona and Mark too,’ said Valentine. ‘We’ll knock on a few doors early on. Most of ’em will be second homes anyway; it’s not like anyone’s got work to go to in the morning.’

Shaw’s torchlight beam lit Valentine’s face. The DS’s skin was sallow, slightly grey in natural light, as if cigarette ash had caught in the folds.

‘I know a lot of people with money are crooks, George. But be careful. Some of them worked for their money. It’d be pretty dull up here on the coast without the Chelsea pound.’

‘Sir.’

Shaw gave him an old-fashioned look. He’d known George Valentine for thirty years. He’d worked with him for six. He was a friend of the family, if a cantankerous one. The ‘sir’ dripped with irony.

They approached the forensic tent, following a line of flags set on a path left by the SOCO team. As Shaw pulled aside the flap to enter, his heartbeat picked up. The sight of death was always a solemn moment, because Shaw felt the victim, despite death, still had the same rights as the living. Seeing the corpse as a mere assemblage of forensic evidence was the first step to the kind of corrosive cynicism that had produced George Valentine. And Shaw’s father. It was a fate he had promised Lena he would do everything in his power to avoid. For him the dead were owed urgency and respect.

Inside they found two men: one dead, still held in the stiff pose of a diver, caked in the drying face-pack mud, while at his head knelt Tom Hadden, head of West Norfolk’s forensic science unit: strawberry blond, but losing his hair, with a slight lesion on his forehead where a skin cancer had been removed two years before. A former Home Office specialist based in Whitehall, Hadden had come north to escape a messy divorce, and to indulge a passion for coastal bird watching. It occurred to Shaw that he’d probably stood on Mitchell’s Bank before, watching the migrating geese fly over in D-Day formations.

‘Peter, George. Make yourselves at home.’

Shaw prowled around the narrow space. If he did stand still he moved his head rapidly from side to side, a technique he’d learnt during occupational therapy after he’d lost the sight in his eye. The skull movement allowed his brain to get a series of images of the same objects, from different angles, through a single lens, helping his brain build a three-dimensional picture. He was a human blackbird, eyeing an emerging worm before the kill.

Valentine held his snuffed out cigarette between thumb and finger, fishing a plastic evidence bag out of his raincoat. His eyes were focused on a point about three feet in front of his nose, anywhere in fact that was not the victim’s face. We all have an appointment with death, but George Valentine suspected his was closer than most. Fear of death did not haunt him. He’d stood over a hundred murder victims in a thirty-year career in CID. It was just the thought that if his own death came now even he would have to judge his life a failure.

Hadden watched Valentine stash the cigarette. ‘Next time I do an autopsy on a lung cancer victim I’ll give you a bell, George.’

‘Don’t bother, Doc.’ Hadden wasn’t a medical doctor and disliked the appellation, which encouraged Valentine to use it. ‘What’s the point, anyway? I could give up then find myself like this bloke. I’m only guessing, but I don’t think the immediate cause of death is a daily intake of forty Silk Cut.’

Hadden was using a metal spatula to lever the dead man’s head from left to right. The bones of the spine grated slightly and Valentine looked up at the stretched white polyester ceiling. In the autopsy room back at the Ark – the force’s forensic lab – he always watched the clock when they opened up the corpse. Here he had nothing to rest an eye on – just four white walls, a white ceiling. The way in which his eyes just slipped off the reflective surface was beginning to make him feel sick.

‘OK. You’ll want to know when he died, Peter, and – as ever – I won’t be able to tell you. Justina might, but only after an autopsy. A guess? Rigor’s passing. The water temperature is ten degrees centigrade. I think he’s been dead
at least
twenty-four hours.’

‘Why’s he like that – stretched out?’ asked Valentine, licking his upper lip, wishing he could have that cigarette back.

‘If the body was here, on this spot, twenty-four hours ago, then the intervening tide would have lifted him off the mud. His feet are roped to a lead net weight. We’ll get it out once we move the corpse. Once underwater his limbs have floated up, the arms, the hands, reaching up, as it were, for the surface. Rigor set in then – hence the diver’s position. It’s wearing off now.’

‘George?’ asked Shaw. ‘Thoughts?’

‘I’d give him eight point nine on style and eight point eight on degree of difficulty. But let’s face it: he’s not going to do any better next round, is he?’

Shaw let the silence stretch out, just so that Valentine knew he’d gone too far.

Valentine coughed. Then straightened his back. ‘Something’s not right,’ he said. ‘Cut the rope and the body would be out in the North Sea on the first ebb tide. Would we find it? Probably not. Would someone find it? Maybe. Dutch coastguard. Thames River Police. Take your pick. Why tether the victim?’

‘Indeed,’ said Shaw. ‘What’re we saying on timing, Tom? This time last night?’

‘Working hypothesis – yes. But nothing more than that. As I say, the pathologist will be with us soon. It’s her stiff, Peter. You know that.’

Shaw held up both hands. ‘Last question. We’re saying the blow to the neck killed him?’

‘Christ, Peter. You think he could survive
that
?’

In the end, then, Valentine had to look. The guy was dead meat, cold dead meat at that, but there was no ignoring the brutal nature of the wound. Valentine didn’t let on but he’d passed the eleven plus with flying colours. His favourite subject had been English – especially Shakespeare. Not the drama, just the language. He rolled it round sometimes in his head, but never out loud. He knew immediately the word that applied to this kind of head wound, delivered in battle by a swinging axe which
cleaved
the head from the body.

‘But it’s not the only wound,’ conceded Hadden. ‘There’s a bad bruise on the left side of the skull above the hairline. I’d say it was bad enough to leave him unconscious, but nothing like bad enough to kill him.’

‘He was out here on this sandbar all today – in broad daylight?’ asked Valentine.

‘Looks like,’ said Shaw. ‘We’re in a gully – so you can’t see it from the side that easily. There’s no visitors about, the Scolt Head ferry isn’t running, no fishing boats out in winter – in fact, I’d guess no one left the harbour all day. So, yes. He’s been out here looking at the sky all day.’

Hadden used gloved hands to tilt the skull. ‘As to murder weapon, Peter. Justina will read you through the medical assessment, but if you want somewhere to start I’d speculate it was a spade, edge first, which isn’t very nice, is it? Or a machete. But as we’re in Norfolk, I’d go for the spade. The wound’s about four inches deep, which is good going, given it’s had to smash through the neck, spine, muscle. We’re talking maximum force. Traumatic impact. He’d be senseless immediately, dead within seconds.’

‘And the lesser head wound?’

‘Blunt object – not metallic. Wood, I’d guess. A decent bit of timber.’

A small crab appeared in the victim’s curly black hair. Hadden plucked it out with a gloved hand and added it to a murky plastic bucket which stood beside his forensic tool kit.

‘When we’ve got pictures, and Justina’s had a look, we can clean his face for you. But for now we’ll have to stick with the mud-pack.’

The eyes were open, some of the mud washed away, but not wide open, so the iris colour was impossible to pinpoint, although they looked brown. He could have been any age between eighteen and thirty. But as Valentine had pointed out, he wasn’t going to get any older.

Shaw looked at the facial structure: wide cheekbones, broad, flat forehead, heavy jaw. A boulder skull, close-cropped hair, deep eye sockets. He looked like a Halloween pumpkin without a candle to light the eyes.

Faces were Shaw’s special subject. The DI was one of less than twenty officers in the UK qualified as a forensic artist. Art at Southampton – his chosen degree – had included a year out at the FBI college at Quantico, Virginia; an option he had not shared with his father, who had encouraged him to pursue any career of his choice
except
the police force. Back at Southampton Shaw had added a Home Office diploma in facial reconstruction. By the time he’d left the Met he was able to build a face from an eyewitness account, age the face of a missing child, tease key details out of reluctant witnesses and construct a wide range of ID pictures – from the traditional photofit to a subtle three-dimensional pencil portrait.