Death's Door (35 page)

Shaw squatted down. The pathologist applied a swab to the heel of the foot and showed him the blood.

‘He’s been dragged in, on his back, heels kicking.’ Standing, she came round to the front of the chair and set her head, motionless, about six inches from Coyle’s thrown-back face. She sniffed theatrically. Shaw got in close too.

‘Almonds again?’ he asked.

She took the dead man’s head and gently lifted it from its position of rest over the back of the chair, and let it come forward, the fleshy chin resting on the chest. ‘Rigor’s gone,’ she said. ‘So he’s been dead twelve hours, maybe a little less.’ Taking his chin in one hand and clasping his upper jaw with the other, she went to open the mouth. Valentine looked quickly away but heard the plastic click of the joint.

Coyle’s teeth were milk-like and even. Wedged between two at the back on the right was the wreckage of a terracotta pill.

‘Our fourth victim,’ said Shaw, rocking back on his heels. He thought through each one, in the order in which they’d been found: Marianne Osbourne in her deathbed, Arthur Patch, dying in a half-second flash of exploding gas; Jeff Holtby, clawing at the broken bones in his leg, amongst the shadows of the wood above their heads. And now ‘Tug’ Coyle, the East Hills’ boatman.

‘But why?’ he asked Valentine. ‘Why did he have to die, and why hide his body here?’

Valentine was in no position for logical reasoning. He didn’t like death, not up close like this, and he didn’t like enclosed spaces, so he wasn’t having a great day. Plus they’d just lost their prime suspect less than five hours before a press conference in which they’d planned to announce his name, starting a national media frenzy which might have just saved their careers. More importantly,
his
career. Now all they were left with was Ruth Robinson’s mysterious knife wound – hardly the foundations of a successful multiple murder inquiry – and Sample X, which might be many things but certainly didn’t belong to a woman.

Hadden set up a tripod camera to record the documents still pinned to a wooden board by the bunk beds. ‘You can have these after I’ve got a picture,’ he said. ‘They’re original – they may not survive being taken down.’

The halogen light was turned to illuminate them. There was a single A4 sheet with a railway timetable on it. The line terminus was listed as Hunstaton which dated it as pre-1962 and Beacham’s Axe. There were also two large-scale plans – one of the dugout, showing exact dimensions, and the relative position of the gun emplacement on the edge of the wood. The other showed a smaller facility, a single room, with one entry/exit. It was shown relative to an inked-in octagonal structure.

‘That’s a pillbox,’ said Shaw, getting closer. ‘That eight-sided shape . . .’

‘There’s one about 200 yards further down the hill, on the edge of the trees,’ said Hadden.

‘But what’s this?’ added Shaw, putting his finger on the one-roomed structure.

‘Paul’s briefing mentioned something . . .’ said Hadden.

Valentine chipped in: ‘Yeah. Sometimes there’d be second dugout nearby, like a safety option. Makes sense. Main unit would come in here. But one person would go to this smaller one – like a lookout. They were usually on the edge of open ground. So it was that person’s job to judge when the unit should emerge. The beauty of it was, if they got seen or captured, they’d lead the Germans back to this smaller one, not the main base. I’ll get a search under way.’

Shaw was going to leave then, because the metal walls were pressing in, making him feel giddy. But he took one more look round the room, trying to imprint the scene on his memory, noting that one touch of comfort – the single pillow. He slipped on a forensic glove and lifted the pillow’s edge. There was a snapshot underneath, face down.

‘Tom,’ he said.

Hadden broke off his work with the tripod and came over, using a metal pair of callipers to flip the picture over. It was Tilly Osbourne, a recent snap, taken in her garden, the bungalow behind. She was at the heart of this, thought Shaw, and therein lay the real mystery, because on that summer’s afternoon in 1994 when Shane White had died on East Hills she hadn’t even been born. He thought how often a trauma within a family – Marianne’s experience that day on East Hills – seemed to echo in the next generation. What was Tilly’s secret? Did she even know she had one?

‘Bag it,’ he said.

Once outside Shaw walked away from the spot, downhill, the trees thinning slightly, so that some weak sunshine cut down, like searchlights. He felt his limbs were heavy, each leg a weight to lift, and he was depressed by the knowledge that the killer had taken another victim. He felt a sense of imminent failure; knowing, at some subconscious level, that the answer to the mystery of the East Hills killer was before them now but they were too close to see it. ‘Wood for the trees,’ he said.

Behind him he heard a twig snap and Valentine joined him. They were in an open glade with a view down into the valley, the sea glimpsed between the hills, still scarfed in mist, the church tower at Morston just showing like a rock.

Valentine was on his mobile, trying to get through to the incident room. ‘What we going say at the presser? We won’t have an official ID on Coyle before then – we could play dumb, stick with him as prime suspect. What you reckon?’

Shaw didn’t answer. He was perfectly still, looking seawards. The fog was drifting, buckling, as it slipped past the single medieval tower of the distant church, like a slow motion replay of a wave crashing against a lighthouse.

‘Peter?’ asked Valentine, sensing the moment.

It was the mist on the coast that brought back the memory. Shaw would have been six – maybe seven. The last day of the summer holidays and his school uniform laid out on his bed. His father had come home early from St James’ and announced they were off to the beach. Shaw had felt contempt then for his father, who’d worked throughout the summer and had chosen this day for the beach – a fret, thick and cold, lay along the north Norfolk coast and had done for two days, bringing with it the smells of winter: damp pine needles under the trees and the salty tang of cooler water. But his father had just smiled, bundling beach things into a hamper, then dragging them all down to Wells quay in the car. The ferry out to East Hills had been cancelled that day. But there was a boat waiting for them, the engine running. Shaw had recognized the man at the tiller as one of his father’s shadowy band of ‘contacts’ – most of them criminals who swapped snippets of information for being left alone. This one was called Joyce, he remembered, and only had teeth on the left side of his mouth – and then only in the top of his jaw. He slapped young Shaw on the shoulder, pressing the muscle, as if assessing a calf at market.

The boat was called
Myriam
; Shaw remembered that detail too. Sitting in the damp boat, watching the cool grey water slip past, a little of his father’s obvious excitement had been contagious. Shaw had stared into the mist, wondering what would happen next. As they slipped past the lifeboat station the foghorn had sounded, making his mother jump, so perhaps she too had sensed that this was special. A day they’d recall a lifetime later.

Fifty yards further on and the world changed: they were free, wonderfully released from the grey gloom of the fret, and instead swamped by sunshine. The fret was only a hundred yards wide, beyond the beach the sun shone unfettered. The seascape seemed bathed in all the extra light the landscape had lost. Shaw remembered the sensational switch of colours, from sepia to blue and green, and then, half a mile ahead of them, the mustard-yellow sands of East Hills topped with its ridge of pine trees. And not a single human being in sight.

It had been his first trip to the island of East Hills. He’d been allowed to explore after they’d eaten a picnic. And running along the island’s single path, which clung to the ridge, he’d got to the northern point and made his great discovery. Nestling amongst the stone pines, almost lost in the encroaching sands, had stood the pillbox. Looking inside he’d let his eyes adapt to the dark so that he could see the remains of an old fire, a few bottles and some litter. He’d looked out through the gun slit to sea and felt the beginnings of a thousand daydreams, in which this secret place would provide the stage and the backdrop. But what he’d never imagined was that the place may have had a past of its own. That close to the pillbox the
Stay Behind Army
might have dug one of its secret dugouts. That it might still be there. And that it might be the answer to everything.

FORTY-ONE

I
nside the sea fog the light levels were astonishingly low, as if dusk had fallen and night was gathering. And the temperature was cool, autumnal, with even a hint of ice. Valentine sat in the RNLI inshore boat with his back to the prow, watching the shadowy outline of the quayside at Wells recede behind Shaw’s shoulders. The DI had declined to explain the rationale behind their being in a boat heading for East Hills, and Valentine’s pride prevented him asking the same question twice. The
Andora Star
, the East Hills ferry, lay moored, all trips cancelled for the day. Beside them sat Ruth Robinson. She hadn’t said a word since they’d left The Circle. They’d found her alone, two coffee cups untouched on the table, her hand held in a fist. When Shaw had asked she’d unflexed the fingers and they’d seen what she held: a single cyanide pill.

‘He said I should take it,’ she’d said, sitting at the table, her voice dull with shock. ‘That it was for the best because he wouldn’t be coming back. He said you’d never find his body. Why was that important?’ She looked at Shaw, appearing to search his face for the answer. ‘He said that he’d done it all for me.
All?
I don’t dare think what he meant.’ She covered her mouth with both hands. ‘I won’t dare.’ She’d shaken her head, struggling to understand. ‘We said goodbye,’ she added, pushing the pill away. ‘I couldn’t take it.’ Shaw noticed the patina of tiny cracks in the seventy-year-old rubber casing of the pill. ‘I said I’d be here for Tilly, now Marianne’s gone, and I will be. I told Aidan that and it seemed to suck the life out of him. I’ve never seen him so . . .’ She searched for the word, her eyes filling with water. ‘
Crushed.
’ She brushed the tears from her eyes roughly with the back of her hand. ‘I can’t understand what’s happened to us; what’s happening to me.’

Since then, silence. But she hadn’t complained, following them to the Porsche and then sitting quietly as Shaw drove down to Wells. No questions, which told Shaw he was right. Using the hands-free he arranged for the RNLI’s inshore boat to be at the quay. And he’d summoned back-up – the police launch from Lynn, but they’d be an hour. The coastal forecast he’d picked up from Petersen on duty watch at the lifeboat house. The fret was thickening and ran out for nearly a mile, nearly to East Hills, but not quite.

When he said the words ‘East Hills’ on the mobile he looked in the rear-view mirror and watched her close her eyes. At the lifeboathouse they said that ‘Tug’ Coyle’s boat had gone from its buoy in The Cut. Petersen had heard an engine chugging past about two hours ago, just seen, off the point. ‘A small fishing boat, but not Coyle at the helm,’ he said.

‘We know,’ said Shaw, seeing again the body strapped to its chair, the heels bloody. Shaw looked ahead into the mist. On the port side he could see the first of the buoys leading out of the harbour: green, the size of a small car, rusted. He steered the boat a few degrees to starboard and let the engine pick up a few revs. A pain cut across his blind eye but it bled away as soon as he closed it, and he was relieved to feel that his heartbeat remained stable.

The second green buoy came into sight just as he lost contact with the grey outline of the pinewoods on shore. Now there was nothing but the buoy itself in the circular, colourless world which surrounded the boat. He cut the engine and started using the single paddle, switching from port to starboard expertly, guiding the boat ahead. The only chance he had, thought Shaw, was to approach the island silently. Visibility was about thirty yards but it seemed to lessen unpredictably, the mist suddenly closing around them. It was like a pulse – the mist thickening, then thinning, as if the fret was breathing.

The foghorn boomed.

Valentine had rooted out a flask in her kitchen before they left and made tea – dark, steeped with tannin. He poured some into the cap and offered it to her. When she took it her hand was steady, but she didn’t raise it to her lips, she just cradled it for warmth.

The foghorn boomed again and this time it seemed to release something within her, as if a lock had been picked. She looked about her for the first time and saw nothing but the circular grey horizon. ‘He never did tell me everything,’ she said, her voice a whisper, as if she were holding a conversation in her own head. ‘But I trusted him.’ She hauled in some air. ‘The night of the East Hills killing, the day of the
murder
,’ she added, as if it was an accusation, ‘I couldn’t find Aidan. He wasn’t up at the house, at The Circle. His Mum said Tug Coyle had phoned from a call box, and they were going out night fishing, and that Aidan was in town getting bait. That she wasn’t to worry. I was hurt. They did go fishing, the two of them, but I was only back for the summer and it was Saturday night, so it felt like he didn’t care. It was Mum who told me about East Hills because it was on the radio. She’d had a call from Lynn to say Marianne would be dropped home after she’d given a statement; they were all giving statements, so there was nothing to worry about. So we waited. She was in bits, really, hysterical, when the police dropped her at our house. Dad gave her a drink and I got her to bed. It was late – after eleven – and there was another call. It was Tug again – he didn’t say where he was, just that I was to meet Aidan the next evening at dusk on Holkham Beach. There was no need to worry or mention the call to anyone else, Tug said, but I should bring the first aid kit from the Lido.’

She’d been staring into the mist but now she glanced back to Shaw. ‘I did a course when I got the job – the summer before Durham. So Aidan knew I could do stitches.’