[PS & GV #6] Death on Demand (29 page)

Joyce gave him a very cold eye. ‘You better hope he hasn’t slipped the net, Peter. Got it?’

‘Sir.’ Shaw nodded, beaming.

The chief constable’s Rover slid away past a crowd of pilgrims coming down from the hill, their excited, exultant, faces reflected in the black, mirror-like paintwork.

FORTY-TWO

B
y noon the town, expectant, was bulging with sightseers, pilgrims, and the WAP protest group, which had set up its banners and billboards on a grassy triangle on the edge of Common Place at midnight, and spent the night singing tuneless protest classics, from ‘We Will Overcome’ to ‘Ninety-nine Red Balloons’. At the one o’clock police briefing the uniformed DCI in charge of crowd control estimated the total numbers – including the ‘incoming’ pilgrims from the Slipper Chapel – at 3,000–3,500. A small contingent of Tamils – largely from Coventry – had arrived in four cars and a multicoloured van. One of Shaw’s team, DC Jackie Lau, had been deployed to discreetly track the group. She’d ditched her usual leather jacket and wrap-around sunglasses for a tie-dye shirt in mauve and green, and a bling silver crucifix studded with fake stones.

Shaw, briefing the thirty plain-clothed detectives on duty, was worried only about complacency. The self-styed Wolves had so far struck twice, and in both cases revealed a distinct aversion for direct action. There was little doubt they would mark the day with a third attempt, but Shaw suspected the role of the police would simply be to discover the damage after the fact. The most worrying scenario, given the town’s medieval streets and ancient buildings, involved fire, so he’d called in the brigade’s senior operations man on the ground and put two officers on a rooftop watch for smoke or flames. A small explosive device could not be discounted either, so he made sure that the emergency services and the St John’s Ambulance Brigade were ready to deal with the consequences: burns, shock, trauma. An army bomb squad unit near Sheringham stood on amber alert.

‘So what are we looking for?’ asked Shaw.

He’d got everyone outside the mobile control room, in the shadow of St Seraphim’s. ‘I have no doubt the Wolves are in the crowd. Or at least, on its edges. Look for familiar faces, in the wrong places. They’ll want a
symbolic
triumph, so the icon itself is the key, let’s concentrate on the statue of the Virgin Mary under the portable canopy; the Holy House itself, although attacks on either would have to be public, possibly violent, and would certainly result in arrest. So, maybe not. There are six other churches at risk, so we need to check them out on a regular basis. George has got the rota.’

Valentine, standing at Shaw’s shoulder, waved a piece of paper.

‘The abbey ruins are crowded, the gardens full of picnicking pilgrims. But our principal problem is that the focus of attention – the icon – is a moving target. It’s brought out to meet the pilgrims as they process in, then carried back to the shrine, and then on to the abbey, before returning back to the shrine. All eyes are on her. That’s their chance. So while we must track the icon,
our
eyes must be on the pilgrims. Look relaxed, enjoy the crowds, mingle, but remember, we’re here to do a job.’

A radio crackled. ‘Procession’s in sight at the south end.’ DC Lau’s voice was mildly distorted, charged with an unmissable tension.

‘OK. Good luck. And keep talking. The radios are our lifeline.’

Shaw took his set and slipped through the crowds towards the High Street, dropping sharply down Station Lane into Common Place. The protestors of WAP, on their slight mound, were delivering sporadic radical chants: an elderly woman, with a banner reading A WOMAN’S RIGHT TO CHOOSE, was trying to inveigle pilgrims into a discussion on the issues. ‘Why do you want to oppress women? On what authority do you claim jurisdiction over my body?’

Shaw noted that Nano Heaney was absent, although uniformed branch reported that she’d been into the control room to confirm that 208 protestors had assembled by ten o’clock. Overnight, Tom Hadden had answered his questions and Paul Twine had tracked down the Causeway Trust. Shaw had questions for Nano Heaney, but for now, they’d have to wait. Around the protestors various pilgrims, avoiding eye-contact with their protagonists, made preparations to greet the procession, hoisting banners and crosses. Applause rippled along the route.

Looking down the High Street, Shaw glimpsed the on-coming pilgrims, the icon of the Virgin Mary at their head, wavering slightly from the horizontal and the vertical, as it was borne along in the vanguard on its platform; a pulse of clapping, like a wave falling on a beach, grew loud, almost raucous. A group of men in the square, in white robes, began to chant in plain- song, the stone walls of the town museum as a backdrop, below its crenellated mock-medieval roof. The first flower was thrown, in a graceful arc, into the path of the barefoot pilgrims. Herbs followed; sprigs of rosemary, bay and thyme, immediately lacing the air with a culinary, exotic scent.

‘Why does the church ignore the rights of gay people?’ shouted a man on the grassy knoll and Shaw heard a woman to his own right ‘tut’ with a tight smack of the lips.

Ahead of the procession a TV film cameraman walked backwards, balancing an extraordinary gyroscopic gantry, which supported the camera and a sound boom, and a series of three floodlights. This crude blast of illumination fell on the leading pilgrims, making them hold their hands up in defence, leaving blinded eyes in shadow. The richness of the icon attracted even Shaw’s eye: the gold rays radiating from the head, the silver-edged gown, the richly embroidered canopy, the lifelike hand-painted detail of the Virgin’s face, feet and hands, one of which was held up in stiff benediction. The gentle rocking of the wooden figure, above the heads of the passionate, was deeply Latin, a tiny glimpse of a festive street in Assisi perhaps, Rio, or Tarragona.

Shaw, feeling himself beguiled by the spectacle, made himself look away and let his eye rest on the reflections opposite in a shop window; an old-fashioned butchers, the plate glass clean and unsullied by offers or enticements, revealing the meat within: a long neck of beef, a collection of crusted pies, a brace of partridge hung from a rail. In the rest of the window the reflection was perfect, so that Shaw could see himself, and then at the back of the protestors, in between a set of banners, a familiar face. Shaw knew in that moment that he had been recognized too, because the face immediately disappeared from view.

Javi Copon had fled.

Turning away in pursuit, Shaw sensed a change in the air: a vibration perhaps, but more – and this in retrospect – a change in pressure, as if the door on a jet had been closed ahead of takeoff, a sudden compaction of the atmosphere, so that one of his eardrums popped, and he began, in the second he thought he had left, to duck what he thought must be an explosion. Head down, he kept his good eye on the swaying icon, the scene caught in frozen frame, and instead of the blinding flash of a bomb, he saw the splash of blood red, the icon’s neck shattering, the arterial fluids spraying out over the crowd, leaving shocked white faces blotched with crimson.

A static second of silence, then the screaming, then the concertina effect again, the air compacted as if for a sonic boom, but this time blue and white exploding, a Miroesque nightmare of the spectrum, leaving gouts of dripping colour on the shoulders and coats of the pilgrims, matting heads, falling in veils of pigment from the icon’s decorated mobile shrine: one pilgrim, a teenage girl, stood screaming, arms rigid with fear, and the only feature of her whitewashed face discernible was the mouth, stretched in a tortured oval – a sickening reminder of Ruby Bright’s last breath, glimpsed through the misted freezer bag.

In slow motion the Technicolor chaos lasted, in fact, half a dozen seconds, in which a pure, wild panic gripped the crowd. Shaw locked on the colour red: a primeval signal of blood. From that one assumption all else followed, leading inexorably to gunfire. The icon’s plaster head lolled from its broken, blood-drenched neck. Using the kerb and a Victorian lamp post Shaw hoisted himself up above the heads of the crowd, swinging round to look back at the rooftops. The periphery of his vision was blurred, a physiological symptom of the adrenalin pumping round his body, but the centre, the clear focus, was preternaturally sharp, as if he could discern each of the split flints in the facade of the old museum, or the waft of the linen cowls on the monks who had been, until a handful of seconds earlier, executing a mesmerizing Gregorian chant.

Along the crenellated roofline of the museum one of the clear notches held a figure, with a gun. Because panic still had a grip on his brain, he saw the transparent, tubular object as a gun. One of the uniformed officers in the crowd was pointing up, an arm as straight as an archer’s. Instantly the roofline figure was gone. Sirens began to wail and the street, now thronged with the crowd which had filled the pavements, seemed to divide of its own, collective will, giving Shaw a view again of the stricken procession. It was the woman in white, or rather the woman
drenched
in white, who broke the spell. The horror had gone from her face, to be replaced by shock, but she held out her hands, watching the sticky fluid drip from her fingertips.

Shaw’s eye, at last free of the spell cast by the word ‘gun’, moved rapidly over the scene picking out a new set of clues: the blue paint sliding down a shop window, the priest lovingly attempting to reconstruct the red-spattered figure of the shattered icon, the sticky puddle of colours on the cobbles, even now producing odd hues of green and brown, on a palette of stone.

Shaw hit the open channel button on his radio: ‘Paint-gun attack, calm everyone down. Culprit male, on the roof of the museum, now not visible. Let’s see if there are any injuries, and get emergency services in from Back Lane and up from the shrine. Repeat: not gunfire.’

Shaw needed to get to the rear of the museum, so he ducked under the medieval gate into the old abbey gardens. Through the dank archway lay the ruins, and a great field of grass, edged with trees. A crowd here had been waiting patiently for the icon to process down the High Street, past the shrine and into the parklands from the riverside. The Stiffkey, a brook, wound its way like a corkscrew through the grassy estate. To the south lay a house, in the Palladian style, built from plundered abbey stone.

Shaw climbed a tower of masonry which had once formed the base of one of the abbey’s great pillars. The screams from the High Street had precipitated a division in the waiting crowd: some, curious, thronged the gateway; others, retreating, often in family groups, had fled to the edge of the grass, marked by a high ridge. Shaw’s eye sought out the attacker, trying to pick out an individual not in tune with either of these two basic responses, to draw close in curiosity, or flee danger. Instead he spotted George Valentine, striding towards him though the crowd.

‘No sign,’ he said. ‘He’s come down that fire exit …’ They could see an iron zigzag escape route from the roof of the museum to the park below. ‘Lock’s been forced. Some injuries in the procession, one woman got a paint ball in the face and it’s broken some bones, and one of the wheelchair-bound pilgrims has caught it in the eye. A few cases of shock. Otherwise, it’s just fear.’

Shaw listened, but still watched. ‘Organizers?’

‘There’s another statue at the shrine they can use. They’re going to get everyone down there and then carry on. Bloody-minded doesn’t come into it.’

‘Javi Copon’s here. I saw him in the crowd just before it all kicked off. He saw me too. So that means we’ve got two on the run.’ He turned back to Valentine. ‘Get Mark Birley to check the CCTV, there’s a live feed in the mobile control room. One camera is outside the shrine and there’s two traffic cameras on the road to the Slipper Chapel. There might be something …’

‘Big question,’ said Valentine. ‘Is that it?’

‘Probably. It’ll make every paper in the country, plus the TV news. So I guess that counts as a success. Chief Constable’s going to get a text soon, if he’s not in the club house already. He might even see it on the TV news, which’ll be a nice surprise. I’ll ring his driver.’ Shaw checked his watch. ‘Then I’ll meet you at the control room in ten.’

An ambulance siren pulsed, the sound magnified by the Gothic archway of the gate. Shaw heard another, circling the abbey ruins, but couldn’t see it until the blue light appeared running briefly above the distant ridge which marked the edge of the gardens. He understood then it was not simply a ridge, but the first bank of a ha-ha
,
designed to shield the owners of the Palladian mansion from the sight of peasants using a hidden road: the bank would rise, then dip to the track, then rise again, even higher, tricking the eye.

Jogging away from the ruins, he ran up the slope and looked down on the sunken lane; a single-track, in red tarmac to reinforce a twenty-miles-per-hour speed limit. To the north it ran to the shrine, to the south towards the parish church. A stand of pines and a great cedar dominated the graveyard, creating a pool of deep shadow. By the churchyard wall he could see two men, circling a small two-door car, the boot open. A door slammed, the sound travelling the acoustic curve of the ha-ha. As the car drove off, with a slight skid on gravel, the man left behind scanned the horizon, appeared to miss Shaw, then turned away, running easily, back around the gardens towards the High Street. The high-step running action was that of a surfer, leaving the shallows, a moving, kinetic signature.

FORTY-THREE

I
t took an hour to create a sense of order out of the chaos in the streets of Walsingham. A police helicopter circled constantly overhead and Common Place, below the battlements of the old museum, was taped off. The procession had been routed directly into the abbey grounds and an icon, hastily attached to a replacement ‘litter’, was blessed, and then led by a line of priests and monks into the gardens. An open air service, under a white billowing canopy, began only twenty minutes later than scheduled. St John’s Ambulance brigade vans, at each exit road, treated nearly thirty pilgrims and tourists for minor injuries and shock. Two pilgrims, a young woman and an eighty-four-year-old man, were taken to the QE2 hospital at Lynn. Eight bales of straw, teased out, were used to cover the wet paint on the roadway and pavements. The ‘sniper’s’ eerie, on the museum roof, was checked for forensics.