At Death's Window (11 page)

‘T
he Ark, West Norfolk’s forensic lab and mortuary, was in an old nonconformist chapel behind St James’. The exterior was disfigured by a large extractor pipe in aluminium which rivalled the original Victorian bell tower. Inside, the simple nave was divided by a wooden half-partition, with glass completing the wall up to the wooden rafters. Tom Hadden’s kingdom – the forensic suite – consisted of half a dozen ‘hot desk’ bays, a small, windowless photographic lab, and a full-length ballistic tube for firing and analysing bullets. Beyond the partition lay three fully equipped mortuary bays. The wooden partition was low enough to reveal if any of the tables was occupied. Valentine’s eye caught the unmistakable clay-grey of dead flesh.

There was very little of the original church architecture left within the interior except for a single stone angel, in a niche in the end wall above the mortuary tables, which held its hands to its face, weeping, as if unable – like George Valentine – to consider the bodies of the dead, laid out so coldly below.

There was a sharp tap on the partition: a diamond ring striking the glass. Dr Justina Kazimeirz, the pathologist, was beckoning them into her world. Mid-fifties, stolid, a Polish immigrant who’d arrived in the eighties and eventually applied for citizenship. At first Shaw had put her brisk rudeness down to difficulties with the language, but Kazimeirz was simply impatient with the faults of others. She’d mellowed slightly since the recent, untimely death of her husband, Dawid. In the final months of his illness she’d taken a cottage in the dunes behind the Shaws’ café at Old Hunstanton and become a friend of the family. This friendship had been created, as they often are, by one casual, unplanned visit. The pathologist had left her husband sitting in the dunes on a dull winter’s day and gone swimming, suited up, beginning an obsession with what the trendy magazines now called ‘wild swimming’. The sleek black suit had been undermined by a swimming hat of blue with white daises on it like floral barnacles. As she walked, heavy-legged, out of the surf Shaw had met her with a flask of hot sweet tea, and then taken the couple back to meet Lena and Fran. The swim became a ritual, the tea routine.

Now, taking Justina’s hand briefly, he thought he could smell sea salt on her skin.

Valentine edged into the room and stood back six feet from the mortuary table which held the victim. There was a clock in the mortuary below the angel, the one he’d used before to divert his mind and his eyes: big enough for a railway platform, with Roman numerals and a juddering minute hand, plus a sweeping red second hand. Lots to watch, plenty of movement to distract him from the butchery.

Shaw stood beside the dead man’s head. The neck wound gaped and seemed more brutal than it had when the face had been caked in the ink-black mud and dried blood. It was as if someone had taken a butcher’s cleaver to the spine: a single blow, revealing dead meat and bone. It was an extraordinary wound, and one unprecedented in Shaw’s ten-year career.

‘Some luck, I think,’ said the pathologist. ‘And I haven’t even drawn my knife.’ She smiled sweetly at Valentine.

The corpse was naked. Shaw had never quite seen the logic for this. The cause of death was clear and the pathologist had already completed an external examination of the body, so why did the victim’s dignity not stretch to a simple white sheet?

Kazimeirz lifted the left arm and twisted it slightly. Rigor had long passed; the movement of wrist and elbow was easy, if not fluid.

There was a tattoo on the bicep, high enough to be hidden by a short-sleeved shirt. A white flag striped red flew from a flagpole, the letters KSC forming the background in red.

‘KS Cracovia,’ she said. ‘Oldest football club in Poland. Krakow’s other football team. This is common of a certain class in Poland, as here.’

Valentine sniffed.

‘A Pole?’ asked Shaw. ‘Right – well, that’s awkward. We’d rather discounted the original theory behind the killing: that this was a clash between local samphire pickers and interlopers from Lynn. The gangmaster hires Poles to run the boats. So that’s not good news, as I say. That takes us back a step.’

Kazimeirz shrugged. ‘I wish I could not be awkward. But there it is.’

A set of knives and saws waited on a tray. She let her fingers dance over the hilts.

‘Heavy smoker, also. I found, incidentally, a few stubs in his pocket. Either he saved them to roll a cigarette from the butts, or he was careful about not dropping them. The brand name is Zenit – common also in Poland, but Russian made and therefore common also in Eastern Europe.’

Kazimeirz circled the table.

‘A thirty-five- to forty-five-year-old adult male. Heavy muscle development. There is significant scarring to the hands which I would say was typical of – what? Working on a farm, working on a ship, anywhere with heavy machinery out of doors, I think. The skin itself is heavily weathered.’

‘A fisherman,’ said Shaw bleakly. If this was one of John Jack Stepney’s Polish captains he wondered what kind of reprisal would be forthcoming.

Kazimeirz didn’t bite.

She parted the hair on the left side of the skull to reveal a bruise. ‘This happened before the blow that killed him,’ she said. ‘Certainly he was alive. An incapacitating blow, certainly, but not fatal. Timing? A few minutes before he died, or a few hours? The science does not help us, I’m afraid. We can say only that it was before.’

Coming round the table she inserted a spatula in the neck wound: ‘I think this is the cause of death. Obvious, yes. But also intriguing. You see, this isn’t easy …’ She held the skull with both hands and turned it so that the cleft of the cut was fully revealed. Valentine watched the second hand on its rhythmic journey past twenty-five, towards half past and onwards.

‘Think of this,’ she said. She picked up an umbrella which stood by her desk, took two steps towards Valentine and swung it like a weapon at his upper body.

‘George does what anyone would do,’ she said. ‘He takes a step back, so that he would be moving
away
from the weapon when it struck. This radically reduces the force of the blow. Also, because I was stationary as I delivered the blow, his movement took him beyond the arc of the falling weapon, so that it was delivered by my extended arm – again, reducing the impact.

‘Further, in this case the killer blow is, I believe, delivered from the front. We can see this from the angle of the wound. The victim must have been able to take evasive action. And yet the blow is a devastating one – slicing through the neck muscles, the bone. To deliver this blow I have to do this …’

She stood back and raised the umbrella until it was behind her head. ‘The problem is obvious. If you do this then the victim has several seconds to retreat, or indeed, attack – coming in under the swinging arm which must also have been hampered by the weight of the murder weapon. This man did not die beneath an umbrella, of course. A shovel, perhaps.’

‘Nothing else?’ asked Shaw, trying to see the moment of death.

‘No. A spade, I think. A flat, traditional digging spade, but perhaps half-size – a woman’s model.’

‘Sorry?’ said Valentine. ‘A woman’s spade – what’s that?’

‘To do this with a full-sized spade would take extraordinary strength – and a strangely cooperative victim. Not impossible, but unlikely. A lot of men use half-sized spades. They are lighter, and you end up lifting a lot less weight each time you haul up earth, or mud, or peat, or whatever is being dug over. So they’re very popular. Next time you pass these smallholdings …’ she searched for the exact word, ‘… allotments, look at those working and what they use. A woman’s spade. Dawid had one – even if it hurt his pride a little bit.’

Shaw was trying to see the picture the pathologist was describing. He’d worked with Kazimeirz for more than five years and he knew how she worked: it was her job to give him facts, his to speculate.

‘There’s one way this could work,’ he said. ‘The victim was tied up, restrained, unconscious?’

‘Not unconscious, unless his head was held up for the blow.’

‘He was standing?’ asked Valentine.

‘Upright. Sitting, standing, kneeling, perhaps – the angle of the blow is difficult to calculate. But maybe kneeling. If he was held, those holding were very close to the blow too. Very close.’

‘But tied to something,’ persisted Shaw. ‘Because the body did not move in anticipation of the blow. So perhaps he died somewhere else, and then got dragged out to the sandbar, or dumped from a boat?’

Mark Birley had briefed them on the results of the webcam sweep in the CCTV suite. The team knew now that it was possible a boat was involved in the crimes of that night.

‘Perhaps the first blow, to the side of the skull, knocked him out, and then when he woke up he was tied up?’ said Shaw. ‘That works.’

‘Yes. Possibly. But there is no physical evidence of a boat. No rope threads, no paint, no grease, no oil. But yes, possibly …’

Which was good enough for Valentine. ‘The gang could have fallen out during the burglary,’ he said. ‘The raid’s well organized. Do they each take a house? One of them strikes lucky – jewellery, cash, something portable. They must plan on pooling the stolen goods – perhaps this guy tried to keep it all to himself. He gets found out, tries to run for it. Anyway, they catch him, and that’s when he gets smacked on the skull.

‘When he comes round there’s a summary trial and execution, and then they dump the body out on Mitchell’s Bank to make it look like something else. The scissors and the sprig or two of woody samphire are designed to make us think it’s not connected to the burglary. Exit by boat.’

‘So it’s a coincidence he’s a Pole? And he’s not one of John Jack Stepney’s hired men?’ asked Shaw.

‘Samphire’s out of season – you said so yourself. He lays the men off in the winter. Why wouldn’t they be thieves?’

Valentine sucked on an unlit cigarette and began tapping out a text on his mobile, walking back through the swing plastic sheet doors into the forensic lab.

Shaw let him go. There were fifteen burglaries in the file with political slogans found at the scene. None of them had been on the coast. The idea that the gang was a bunch of twenty-first-century pirates arriving by boat was, until further evidence was found, pure fantasy. However, it was a fantasy which had got George Valentine out of the room just in time.

Kazimeirz lifted a knife and pressed a gloved hand down on the victim’s chest, splaying her fingers.

V
alentine parked the Mazda on the harbour a foot from the edge and stood for a moment watching kids try to catch crabs in the dusk. A cherry-red sunset marked the end of another Indian summer’s day. Wells-next-the-Sea was the closest the north Norfolk coast ever got to kiss-me-quick seaside entertainment. Flashing lights from the three amusement arcades were reflected in the water. Somewhere a Victorian clown laughed in a stagey horror-show cackle. The aroma of melted sugar hung in the air from John’s Rock Shop. The tide was up, nearly brim-full, a foot from flooding. A few ghostly yachts rode at anchor in the channel, while beyond them the sea marshes lurked in an early evening mist.

In the long decade of Valentine’s banishment from CID at St James’ he’d lived in Wells: a flat over a second-hand bookshop in the little high street. With the house on Greenland Street rented out, he tried not to visit Julie’s grave more than once a week. Instead, he found he could talk to her here, sitting on the harbour wall. The Ship was his local, although he was known by name (and rank) in the town’s other five pubs.

But he wasn’t here to talk to Julie tonight.

Wells was a town caught between two worlds – the old Norfolk coast and the new world of the incomers. Most of the pubs had jumped one way or the other – the
Nelson, up on the green, was now serving scallops and Sandringham lamb, and beer at £3.70 a pint. In the
Balloon, by contrast, the landlord was moving the tables to one side to make room for the first darts match of the winter: kitchen closed, and beer at £2.50. The Ship
trod a more subtle line, due to its prime position on the harbour. It was the unofficial headquarters of the town’s fishing fleet, and the locals who ran the amusements and shops, but on a good evening, with a livid sunset smeared across the horizon, it drew in visitors, keen to sit and watch the bustle on the water.

Valentine was half an hour early but Jan Clay was already there, and like any decent copper’s wife she’d chosen the seat by the side of the bay window, which had a good view of the bar and out to the harbourside. She was in her late forties, neat, compact, with blonde hair cut short so that it always seemed to fall in the right place.

‘Georgie,’ she said, adjusting an empty wine glass.

Valentine nodded at the drink and she nodded back quickly.

At the bar he felt the familiar prickling of hair at the back of his neck. He wondered what she saw when she looked at him, which made him square his shoulders and extend his spine. Jan had been his cleaning lady for nearly seven years, every Monday and Thursday morning from ten till noon. In that time he’d seen her here and there – to hand the key over, at the CID Christmas Party, the going-away dos. He’d always felt profoundly uncomfortable in her presence for two reasons. Her husband, DS Peter Clay, was a teetotal pen-pusher who wore aftershave at work; and she knew too much about Valentine’s life: the empties, the ashtray on the window ledge, the single birthday card from his sister, the sagging, overused wing armchair in which he sat and read, or watched TV, or just slept off a few beers.

He’d been called back to St James’ and the central CID squad six years ago. DS Clay had died the year after. Valentine couldn’t remember the cause of death, but there’d been a card to sign in the incident room, and he was pretty sure someone said it was cancer. There’d been an awkward moment when he’d hesitated over the message of condolence. ‘Sorry to hear of your sad news’
seemed pathetically limp. In the end he’d just written his name on impulse: not George Valentine, but Georgie, which he’d immediately regretted because nobody called him that now, except his sister. But Jan had always called him Georgie, right from the first time they’d met on his doorstep, him with the key, her with the hoover.

She had two teenage daughters and a job at one of the harbour front’s fish and chip shops. They’d met a few months earlier when Valentine had taken a room at the
Ship to be handy for an inquiry. It had made him really miss Julie, that first meeting, because he suddenly realized how much he enjoyed talking to a woman, particularly one that didn’t seem in any hurry to judge him or his life. Conversation with his colleagues – men and women – always felt like a contest, as if there would be a score sheet at the end indicating who had won. Chatting to Jan didn’t feel like a competition.

‘How’s the family?’ he said, and suddenly thought the whole thing was a bad idea. Where did he think it would lead? How many of the locals at the bar thought she was his daughter?

‘Good. Sam’s got into Essex to do teacher training. It’s what she’s always wanted.’

‘She’ll be off your hands.’ But the thought came to him: kids are at home, or they’ve gone. He and Julie had never had children so this was an opening, a window, into another world.

Jan was still talking, answering his question with meticulous care: ‘Rosie’s at home. She’s still at the Co-op,’ she added, pulling a face. ‘She’ll be on FaceTime or Skype now, talking to her friends. I know she’s on her own up there most nights but all I can hear is other people’s voices. It’s another world, Georgie.’

He’d taken a seat beside her on the banquette and they drank in silence for a moment. Because they hadn’t had children he felt that he’d been closer to Julie than many husbands were to their wives. It was just simple maths. There were fewer people in that first, intimate ring of human contact. So when she’d died the gap left behind was more profound.

‘I probably reek of chip fat,’ she said at last.

‘Talking of food …’ said Valentine.

‘What time’re we in?’

‘Eight. So we’ve got an hour.’ He’d booked a table at an Italian restaurant up by the church – Sergio’s
.
It would be the first time he’d eaten out in twelve years, in the sense that there would be a table and someone else at it but him.

The prospect of sixty minutes of conversation seemed to overwhelm them both.

‘Something’s been worrying me,’ said Jan. ‘I don’t know why I want to tell you this – because so few people know except Rosie and Sam, I guess, although we never talked about it and they don’t mention their dad now.’ She took a gulp of wine. ‘I know Peter had such a clean-cut image at the station. He was very handsome as a teenager. He played tennis – that’s typical, isn’t it, the whites?’

She touched her wine glass. ‘He drank, Georgie, at home. Secretly. Spirits – vodka mainly, because there’s no smell. At least, that’s what he thought. At work too, I think. We said cancer but it was his liver. I think people knew at the end because his skin was so bad. I thought I’d say something. He didn’t even try to stop. And I still don’t know why he started. I just had to say it. I couldn’t live like that, not again.’