At Death's Window (9 page)

T
he Old School House, built after the sea wall was strengthened in 1948 – according to the plaque on the façade – had been converted into a seaside getaway. A grass field to one side was as smooth as a snooker table. Shaw could see, through the large, full-length original classroom windows, a lounge set around a Swedish wood-burner. Inside, the old parquet flooring rattled slightly under their feet as they made their way down a long corridor and into the main room, at one end of which hung a panelled board listing the head teachers of St John the Baptist’s Junior School from 1901 to 1967.

Sgt Bill Cooper, the senior uniformed officer on site, was waiting for them by the stove, a boot up on the grate as if he owned the place.

‘Bill. Place empty?’ asked Shaw, checking his mobile for an elusive signal.

‘We’re trying to trace the people,’ said Cooper. ‘They didn’t have anything delivered from the shop in Burnham Norton – that’s the nearest. We’re trying to track down the postman. The alarm’s been disabled – wires cut. Council offices open in an hour, so we can always trace them from the council tax roll if all else fails.’

Second homeowners paid less than the full council tax, Shaw recalled, getting a discount of five per cent – although it had once been a whopping fifty per cent. The only way, it seemed, was up. Shaw wondered if the council would one day start charging
extra
for second homes. It seemed unlikely given that all the major parties strained to remain aspirational. Labour, he recalled from the last election, wanted a flat, equal rate.

‘OK, Bill. Let Paul Twine know you’re on it. Thanks. We’ll just nose about.’

Dismissed, Cooper left them to it.

The room contained several items of memorabilia from the original school. A handbell on a rope hung from a metal stand. Two wooden settles placed against one wall were engraved with the school name and the old council initials: BVDC – Burn Valley District Council. The blackboard had been left, fixed to the largest wall, where it would have faced the class, lit by the natural light flooding in through the windows.

This had proved too much of a temptation to the burglars.

DOMESDAY BOOK 1086

BURNHAM MARSH POP. 134

17 OCTOBER, 2014

BURNHAM MARSH POP. 0

Shaw considered the graffiti for a few moments, coming to the conclusion that the burglars might regret this particular inscription, because it potentially revealed so much: premeditation, education, erudition, and an ability to put together an effective polemic. Hardly the skill set of the average burglar. And that last line was surely a bit of propaganda – population
zero?
Could that be true? Shaw recalled that the second-home rate in north Norfolk was ten per cent, higher in some villagers. But a hundred per cent? For a start they’d seen the man with the mower outside the villa up by the seawall.

And then there was the date: October the seventeenth. The day their victim died out on Mitchell’s Bank. It was getting increasingly difficult to keep these two cases apart.

If the village was empty they needed to get an overview of the number of break-ins. And they’d need forensic back-up quickly.

Shaw did a circuit of the kitchen, a boot room, the three bedrooms, a walk-in shower, and an office. He’d been to three other burglaries which they were treating as the work of the so-called Chelsea Burglars – two converted barns and an old windmill – so he had an idea of the gang’s modus operandi. While they didn’t treat the target properties with complete respect – drawers on the floor, pictures examined and discarded, wall safes hammered out – there was never anything wanton about the damage. They’d simply been in a hurry. He’d attended enough violated homes to know what burglars were capable of: precious ornaments smashed, food and drink half-consumed, pictures ripped out of frames, books pulled down from shelves. And worse, much worse. But the picture here was quite different. There was a measure of control, even restraint.

Back in the main room he found Valentine taking a note of the graffiti.

‘Thoughts?’

‘This line, about population zero – that’s got to be bunk. We’ve seen at least two this morning. And there’s a pub as well.’

T
he Ostrich was at the far end of the lane beyond the ruins of the church, built slightly into the sea-wall bank. It was whitewashed, with eggshell-blue window frames, and a sign showing a heraldic shield incorporating the eponymous exotic bird – a common local symbol along the coast, an echo of the Crusades. Shaw recalled a local newspaper story covering the sale of the business by Adnams, the brewers, to a village cooperative. A micro-brewery had started up in Burnham Deepdale and they took their ‘Burnham Beers’. There were three picnic tables outside, and an A-board, chained to a drainpipe, advertising morning coffee, and a Monday night quiz.

Shaw thought he could remember sitting here with his father, watching the tide come in, his mother’s mood hidden by a pair of reflective 1960s sunglasses. It was the view that had stuck: the narrow mouth of the creek, between Gun Hill and Scolt Head, revealing the open sea beyond. His father had produced a compass, a small brass antique, which he’d set on the table to show the arrow pointing directly through the gap to the magnetic Pole.

Valentine peered in through the bar window.

‘Bar cloths over the pumps, spirit bottles on optics, so it’s still in business.’

Shaw discovered a note in a glass cabinet screwed to the door:

Joe and Eve are sorry – The Ostrich is closed 16 Oct–7 Nov inclusive. We’re off on our annual holidays. We’ll be in Arles on the mobile if anyone wants us. If you phone we can’t guarantee being sober! We will be bringing back a few cases of the Coulange ’94. Be here for the grand reopening: 7.00 p.m., 8 Nov.

Shaw was at the window too and saw something Valentine had missed. In the lounge bar there was a large tank of tropical fish, the air compressor producing several trails of bubbles, the water lit a lurid green. One fish – large and black with a white go-fast stripe – rose to the surface as Shaw watched and sucked in some food through a perfect O-mouth.

PC Boles appeared along the staithe with a clipboard.

‘Just to let you know, sir. So far we’ve found three residents at home. Two came down yesterday – Saturday afternoon. One – the elderly gardener – arrived at dawn this morning from London. Apparently he can do it in two hours ten minutes from Marble Arch if he lets the Bentley out full-throttle.’

‘No one here Friday night?’

‘Nothing so far.’

Valentine set off to organize a thorough inventory of all the village properties, and a ‘census’ for the nights of the seventeenth and eighteenth of October.

Shaw’s brain needed clearing so he walked down the quay towards the church. The penultimate house on the harbourside was called Overy View, a fine piece of naval architecture, with double bay windows on two floors, facing directly on to the track. Inside the first he could see the remains of a party: cans on the floor, a full ashtray, cushions scattered and the remains of a takeaway meal – silver cartons in the hearth, plates smeared with a virulent sauce. The knocker was brass, in the shape of a dolphin. As soon as he heard the sound echo inside he knew he was out of luck. Flipping up the letterbox he could see the hall. A carpet, brass rods on the stairs, a pair of socks discarded halfway up. No – not a pair. One white, one blue.

He waited thirty seconds then checked in the other bay window to find a sharp contrast to the first: a library, with a polished table, a silver pepper and salt set precisely at the centre. He knocked three times again to be sure, checked the upstairs net curtains for movement, and gave up.

The church ruins were partly lost in a nest of ivy. The nave had collapsed long ago, leaving just the south-facing wall, and a few shattered Gothic windowsills. By contrast the west end remained almost intact, although the tracery of the great west window encompassed fresh air, not stained glass. And the tower still stood, and was open underneath, so that Shaw could look up into the interior, and a square of sky. An exterior steel staircase had been put up to give access to what looked like a small electronic weather station. Wires ran up to a small anemometer mounted on the tower. Shaw climbed to the first landing, where a gate barred the way further up to the summit.

He looked down on Burnham Marsh.

He saw now that there was one house beyond the church: a large, rambling pile of stone in several styles with all its windows shuttered. Just beyond it was a small dock running in off the beach into a wooden boathouse. There was a flagpole, but no flag. The garden had once been tended but was now run to seed. Of all the houses he’d seen this looked the most lived-in, but also the most deserted. The paintwork was slightly peeling, the lawn patchy.

He twisted on the metal platform and looked back at the rest of Burnham Marsh. Had it really been a ghost village on the night of the seventeenth of October? There were a few ‘lost villages’ on the coast – abandoned during the plague, torn down by landowners wanting to graze sheep, or cleared to enhance the view from one of the new Georgian country houses. But this was a lost village of second homes, a twenty-first-century lost village, like thousands of others in France, and Hungary, and Italy, and Spain – abandoned by a generation, except for a few days a year when the rich descended to walk their dogs, enjoy the cool mountain air or play on the beach. Such places were rare in England. Burnham Marsh, perhaps, was the shape of things to come.

At the bottom of the steps Shaw realized he’d missed another sample of graffiti. On the surviving south wall was a series of gravestones and memorials to which someone had added in spray-can black:

BURNHAM MARSH

1000–2014

RIP

T
hey were back on the coast road, heading for the autopsy at the Ark, when Valentine, ahead of Shaw, flashed the warning lights of the Mazda, signalled left and turned off the coast road, running inland. After a mile they came to six post-war council houses on one side: three pairs of semis, big and dull, and in the wrong kind of brick, as if a small section of suburbia had been accidentally dropped on the north Norfolk hills. A stone plaque in the façade of the middle set said they’d been built in 1957. The gardens were smart – all except one, which had an old bath in it and a collection of children’s three-wheelers.

Valentine was out of the Mazda before Shaw brought the Porsche to a halt.

‘Sorry, Peter. Someone you should meet. Five minutes, tops. Believe me, this can help.’

The DS set off up the path of the last semi, a cigarette already lit between his lips.

‘George Bloody Valentine,’ said the man who opened the door of number 6. ‘Still alive. Pickled or smoked – which one is it?’

They could see an Alsatian in the hallway, muzzled and chained to the newel post. Upstairs a radio was playing Classic FM, but was quickly switched off. As Shaw went into the front room he heard a rhythmic mechanical breathing from above, as if they’d got a dragon up there, and it was curled up on the landing at the top of the stairs.

‘DI Peter Shaw,’ said Valentine. ‘Meet Geoff Wighton – formerly DS Wighton, stationed at Wells.’

‘Geoff,’ said Shaw. He wondered if he’d known Jack Shaw too, but decided to let him make the connection if he had.

The front and back rooms of the house had been knocked through and turned into a gym. There was an exercise bike, a rowing machine, some weights. On the mantelpiece stood a picture of Wighton at the tiller of a clinker-built sailing boat, above it a watercolour of a tea clipper at sea. Wighton was fleshy, maybe thirteen stone, short and broad, but with plenty of muscle to leaven the fat. Shaw guessed he was in his fifties, but his complexion didn’t augur well for his sixties: his cheeks were that dead shade of red, like cold roast beef.

Wighton had a towel round his neck, the ends hanging down, and he pulled one, then the other, as if slowly drying the back of his neck. Shaw noted his fists, which were heavy and knuckled, like the claw on a mechanical digger. If DS Wighton had given you a clip round the ear you’d stay clipped.

‘George rang and he thinks I can help,’ said Wighton, backing into the centre of the room. ‘I chucked in
The Job
a few years back – now I babysit second homes. Three are down at Burnham Marsh, so it looks like I might have some disgruntled customers.’ Overhead they heard something fall to the floor, but Wighton didn’t react. A book perhaps, or a slipper.

Valentine asked him to outline his business.

In 2009, when he left the force, Wighton dropped a thousand business cards through letterboxes in the Burn Valley. How had he chosen them? Touring villages in his van he looked at the properties with a burglar’s eyes: anything behind walls, with security systems, key boxes, manicured gardens, flagpoles, boathouses, double garages, pretentious little plaques with names etched on slate, BMWs, or 4×4s, Bentleys. Or two cars or more, especially if one of them was the new Mini Cooper with the go-fast stripe over the roof.

If they called back, or emailed, or sent a text, he’d go round for an interview. That’s when he asked them questions, not the other way round, because there were some things he didn’t do, like teenager-sitting, or cooking, or taking diverted calls from the house number, or just ‘keeping an eye on the place’ for three bob a week. He had his own life to lead, and while the police pension was very handy, he needed to use his time efficiently.

His ‘do’ list was, however, extensive: he’d feed cats, walk dogs, clean out fish tanks, change bird-feeders, take deliveries, supervise tradesmen (a very popular offer – why spend your two-week summer holiday waiting for a plumber to turn up on July rates when he could do the waiting on cut-price winter tariffs?). He offered a simple
elite
package that included a daily visit, a quick check of all doors and windows, all boundaries. Lights could be left on, switched off, radios too, or even TVs – a very effective anti-burglar ploy. There were separate rates for actually staying in the property – usually one night a week, but occasionally for an extended period of up to a month.

‘Then there’s the call-out service. A lot of these properties have an alarm system which is linked to a call centre. They then ring the owners. My name can go first – so I get to react, check it out, then bother the owners if needs be. Most of the time it’s a cat, or the wind, or a trapped bird. So that saves them a lot of hassle – and that’s what they’re paying me for, to take the hassle.’

Wighton walked to a wooden cupboard mounted on the wall and used a code to open a steel hinge lock. There were sets of keys hung on hooks but no house names or numbers – just letters, A–Z.

‘And you’ve three clients in Burnham Marsh?’

‘Yeah – worse luck. There’s Spithead House, down past the church. They’re in Japan for four months. They’ve just bought the place anyway, with plans to modernize, which is a shame, but there you go. I stay once a week, visit one other day. A conservatory’s on the to-do list as well, and I’ll be on site most days over New Year and into the spring.’

So that explained what Shaw had noted: the former owners had probably actually lived in Spithead House. Now it awaited its transformation into a second home.

‘Then there’s Overy View, almost next door. The Todds. Nice family. Then over the sea wall there’s Wisteria Cottage – although it’s got fifteen rooms, so hardly a cot. I’m on call for them, but they’ve just got audible alarms. I drop in once a week – sometimes more. If they’re coming up they let me know and I make myself scarce. So three – none with an external security link.’

‘The rest will be with other firms?’ asked Shaw.

‘Maybe. A lot still rely on deterrence: a big wall, iron gates, and a flashy alarm system on the outside, with boxes and lights. If the alarm actually goes off it can be very effective, because other second homeowners get jumpy and ring us – sorry, you. It’s not like a city street, where there’s loads of noise. Out here, a bell rings, someone jumps.’

‘Not in Burnham Marsh, they don’t,’ said Shaw. ‘Not last Friday night, anyway. Looks like the village was empty – nobody at all. Population zero. And it’s two miles from the road, three from Burnham Norton.’

‘The alarms cut out after a fixed period, usually an hour. Were they triggered?’ asked Wighton.

‘We’re checking that out,’ said Valentine, hoping they were.

There was something of the salesman about Wighton, thought Shaw, and a cynical edge, which was unappealing. In a monied world he’d found a way of cashing in forty years’ worth of being a copper. This should have been admirable, but Shaw found it, conversely, vaguely disloyal to the service. It wasn’t poacher turned gamekeeper, but it was on the way.

‘And all this happened when?’ asked Wighton.

‘Friday night, we think – late. One of your days in the village?’ asked Shaw.

‘Yeah. I did all three Friday – but in the morning. I’d have been back tomorrow. I stay Monday nights at Spithead House. Check it out Friday – like I said. So sorry – not on the scene when you needed me.’

There was a sudden snatch of speech from above, nightmarish and garbled.

Something like irritation flitted across Wighton’s face. ‘Excuse me a moment.’ He climbed the stairs, but not in a hurry, and they heard a brief conversation.

Shaw caught Valentine’s eye. ‘Wife?’

‘Emphysema,’ he said. ‘She’s bad, but she’s been bad for years.’

They heard Wighton’s footsteps descending.

‘We better be going,’ said Shaw. ‘But to be clear: who else has this kind of inside knowledge, other than you, and those in the same business?’

Wighton walked to the window and looked out over the open fields which faced the line of semis. A tractor ploughed a furrow on a hill, trailed by seagulls.

‘Who else knows what I know? You gotta think there’s two markets out there,’ he said. ‘There’s rented stuff – that’s different. The agencies run them. It’s unpredictable – and there’s not that much in ’em anyway. Hardly a burglar’s paradise, is it? Cutlery, a TV, bed linen. The second-home market is pretty distinct although a lot do “mates’ rates” for friends. But they’re going to be about, at most, twenty weekends a year and maybe three weeks in summer, one at Easter, one at Christmas–New Year. So the people who know are the people who provide services: local pubs, restaurants, takeaways, newsagents, village shops. Then the trades: boilermen, carpenters, builders – especially builders.’

‘Thanks,’ said Shaw, offering his hand. ‘That’s given us a real insight into the business.’

Wighton shrugged, patting the Alsatian out in the hall. ‘Personally, I think it’s all crap. When it comes to security, you can’t beat a decent set of locks and a bloody great dog.’