At Death's Window (2 page)
‘Chinese?’
‘No, a local thug from the Lynn estates, name of Stepney. Known to the police as John Jack Stepney.’
Lynn’s post-war estates were full of East Enders who’d moved north out of sub-standard housing. They were no more inclined than the locals to commit crime; it was just that there were 80,000 of them, and once they’d got to their new homes the port promptly closed, robbing most of them of any chance of making a decent living. The result was the kind of poverty the government’s statistics said didn’t exist, and crime, often embellished with that nasty urban edge they’d fled London to avoid.
‘In many ways this Stepney character is as much an outsider as a gangmaster from Guangzhou. An entrepreneur too, if twice as ruthless. Stepney put on his whistle-and-flute and went down to Billingsgate to make them an offer: he’d meet their targets and he’d get the stuff down to market. Then he looks at his problem: how do I harvest it? There’s a Polish club in the North End at Lynn. There’s a Polish club for everything but this one’s for sea fishermen, not trawlers – inshore small boat-fishing for pocket money. So he pops along and asks how’d they like to earn a few bob running boats along the coast and picking weeds? I reckon he roped in one of the original local pickers to mark up a decent map with the best locations of samphire and to lead them to it, at least on the first trip. The season starts in June. So did they. It didn’t help that they just ripped it up. Thing is, you’re supposed to snip off the green fronds of the plant and leave the woody stem in the sand.’ Shaw made a scissors movement with two fingers. ‘The locals have to come back next year. It’s a wild crop, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be nurtured. This lot did considerable damage in the first month.’
‘So … bad blood.’
‘Yup. The locals hit back. A week ago someone broke into John Jack’s garage off the Tuesday Market in Lynn and slashed the tyres on his fleet of vans. So he did what any decent psychopath would do when attacked – he hit back too, only harder.’
‘It’s like the mafia.’
‘And his enemies will sleep with a trio of fishes.’
They interlocked their feet under the table.
‘How did he hit back?’
Shaw produced a pocket telescope and scanned the distant dunes and the sea beyond. To the far west he could see a wind farm off the Lincolnshire coast; directly north, three white sails in an arrowhead formation. ‘Local uniform at Morston, time-server called Accrington, says the harbour master there found two of the locals’ boats keel-up, with a hole hammered through the fibreglass hulls. No crime report, which is always a bad sign, because it means they think this is a problem they can solve themselves.’
He focused on a buoy in the harbour channel, bucking at its chains as the tide flooded in.
‘To be fair, Accrington was thorough. He tracked down one of the boat owners and went to visit him at home in Binham. Finds him in bed, all the fingers on his right hand broken and his fist in a cast. So he’s not harvesting samphire for a while, is he?’
‘How did that happen?’
‘He fell down the stairs, apparently.’
‘Not very convincing.’
‘You said it. He lives in a bungalow.’
Lena, shivering for the first time, fixed her eyes on the water, which was now churning and swirling into all the pools and creeks in the marsh.
‘How long is a samphire season?’
‘You pick in June and July – six to eight weeks. This time of year they’d usually just go out to check the beds, but otherwise it’s downtime. The late summer extended this year’s season. It’s pretty much done now, though.’
‘So why the interest?’
‘John Jack Stepney has hired more men. He’s trained the ones he’s got not to rip up the plants. Next summer he’ll be back in force.’
‘You’re the guardian angel of the coast, are you, Peter?’
‘They’ll be back. They made money, Lena. That’s what this is all about. The question is what next? I predict fishing trips. Year after next he’ll have the ice-cream vans. Then the amusement arcades. Slot machines. A bit of contraband, perhaps. In ten years’ time he’ll run the coast. Who knows – maybe pubs, restaurants, fag machines, drugs for the rich kids …’
Their plates were cleared and Shaw ordered coffee – a double espresso – while Lena went for chocolate brownies.
When the waiter had left, Shaw leant forward and looked Lena in the face. ‘Nobody owns this coast. I can’t let that happen.’
Sensing a change in the air pressure, he looked up: a single branch of electric-white lightning zigzagged down and seemed to strike a point on the distant dunes. Shaw’s good eye blinked at the moment of impact, while the shockwave seemed to pulse through his chest. Then raindrops began to fall, the size of paperweights. Lena stood, a hand on the rail of the terrace, her face turned up so that the water began to roll over her skin.
‘Here it comes,’ she said, smiling. She loved rain on the beach, walking in it and the sound it made, as if the sea was whispering.
Shaw’s RNLI pager buzzed. He was on the crew of the lifeboat at Old Hunstanton and pilot of the inshore rescue hovercraft. He grabbed it quickly as it performed its waggle dance, like a bee trying to indicate the way to the flowers.
The message made his heartbeat triple: 121212 – the code for an emergency call-out for the hovercraft.
They paid in cash and ran for Shaw’s old Porsche. As he swung it out on to the coast road they felt the visceral thud of the maroon going up from the rocket station on the cliffs at Hunstanton, and then ahead, rising up over the coastal marshes, the sudden purple synapse of the signal blazed in the sky.
L
eo D’Asti had always felt uneasy about owning a second home. To be brutally honest, it was, technically, his third home. Or, given the company flat in Paris, his fourth. In all the years he had tussled with the moral and political questions involved with multiple ownership, however, he had never actually thought owning a second home would kill him. But now there was a very good chance it would indeed lead to his untimely death at the age of just fifty-one. A betting man, he calculated that the odds were, perhaps, thirty to one
against
him surviving the next hour.
He was standing on a sandbar called Mitchell’s Bank in the wide estuary marked on his OS map as Overy Creek. The tide was still rising. Being a fine swimmer (two of the houses had pools), the situation was not, on the face of it, inevitably lethal. The problem was that he was not alone. His held his daughter, Lucilla, by her right hand – she was eight and could swim a width of the Serpentine Lido. By his left hand he held Paulo, who was six and couldn’t swim. And Paulo held the hand of the toddler of the family, three-year-old Cornelia. She didn’t really like paddling. If Leo had taken her advice when they’d set out they would not now all be in this appalling situation. They’d be eating ice cream.
They were stranded on Mitchell’s Bank. To the north the creek spilled into the North Sea through a narrow gap, which boiled with white water. The water around them was choppy; a maze of whirlpools, whorls and wavelets. Out at sea, thunder rolled along the horizon like an empty barrel.
It had all looked very different just half an hour earlier. He’d driven up to the house in nearby Burnham Market the day before with the children, leaving his wife to run her business – a florist’s on Upper Street, Islington. Leo was a banker, a distant scion of the Asti family of Piedmont – a very junior scion, it had to be said. His father had been sent to London after the Second World War to learn the business and had gone quietly to seed ‘watching the shop’ in an office on Lombard Street. Leo had inherited this unchallenging brief. The family spent the summers in a house they’d inherited in the foothills above Lucca. Autumn and spring was north Norfolk – crabbing with the children, sitting in pubs eating too much, and watching wood burn. They let the house to friends on ‘mates rates’ because Leo had seen what could happen if properties stayed empty all year. His ancestral home was a three-storey pile on a hillside above Brindisi, in a village now entirely inhabited by sheep. At Christmas the kids loved to play hide and seek in its warren of staircases and rooms, while the grown-ups fed wood into a stove the size of a small car.
Each house had its own routine. Today, Leo had driven the 4×4 to the quayside at Burnham Overy Staithe, half a mile inland from Mitchell’s Bank, and they’d walked up the riverbed, past the crumbling houseboats, the clinker-built yachts, the two or three small trawlers. They’d done it a hundred times before: a predictable hike, shot through with mild peril. Leo had collected driftwood and he’d brought a firelighter and matches. They’d build a fire on the sand, catch some unlucky crabs then wander back and have an early evening meal in the
Red Lion at Stiffkey. Or Stewkey, as the locals called it. Although Leo suspected you’d struggle to find a local to ask in summer.
The walk out to Mitchell’s Bank was supposed to be an adventure. It certainly was now.
Things had gone wrong almost immediately once they’d set out across the wide black mud flats. The kids loved to get close to Scolt Head Island, which formed the western bastion guarding the narrow outlet to the sea. Paulo had discovered Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, and particularly Kirrin Island, and told his sisters all the stories – of treasure, thieves and ruined castles. Their destination was Mitchell’s Bank because it was an island too – although not a full-time one. It had steep, glistening sides, and they had to form a human chain to reach its lowly summit. Leo said the pinnacle must be ten foot high and he always let Cornelia plant a plastic flag at the spot to mark their ascent.
Once they were up they would look around and see how Mitchell’s Bank had changed since their last visit. The tide was like an invisible sculptor, remaking the landscape each day, moulding it with salt-water hands. Today, they found that a channel had been cut across the heart of Mitchell’s Bank – a rivulet, cut deep into the black mud. It was partly flooded because the tide was already running in fast. Leo was certain that this muddy crevasse had not been there on their previous outing the day before.
It was Lucilla who saw the body first.
‘Look,’ she said, as cold-blooded as any child. ‘There’s a drowned man, Daddy. Can we see?’
Out of breath, carrying Cornelia, he squinted in the direction his daughter was pointing, expecting to see a dead seal or driftwood, but instead the air flooded out of his lungs.
The corpse was mud-black, stretched out and stiff, as if he’d dived into the water and been instantly preserved in that falling, elongated shape. Floating, but only just, with his feet towards the sea, a ship’s rope taut round his ankles, taking the strain, attached to something heavy which had sunk into the gloopy mud.
What could Leo do? Telling the kids not to look seemed bizarre. There was nothing else on Mitchell’s Bank. So they gawped. Then they all got closer, and gawped again. They were ten feet away when Leo set Cornelia down and told Paulo to hold her hand. Paulo complained because his hands were full, clutching his model sailing ship – the
Endeavour
. Paulo lived for ships and boats, but now he obediently set the toy down on the mud and took his sister’s chubby fingers in his own.
Leo edged forward, stepping over the channel, and knelt down in the yielding ooze. It was luck, of course, but he thanked God for it. The wound was on the far side of the head, hidden from the children. It looked like someone had taken an axe to the neck, nearly severing the skull. Mud had filled the wound and the blood and flesh was dull red, like old meat. Lightning flickered overhead and the dead man looked alive, as the shadows on his face switched from grey to black and back again. For a second it looked to Leo as if the pale white death-mask had flinched.
‘Stay there, kids,’ he said, astonished at how natural he could make his voice sound.
He made himself touch the skin, just below the ear, feeling for a pulse. The flesh was solid, cold, unyielding. The face looked up at the sky, the eyes full of mud, which was a blessing. The water in the deep-cut rivulet was rising quickly – a funnel into which the tide was rushing. The body was bucking and pulling on the rope, attached to its unseen weight. Leo still didn’t know what to do. He checked his mobile phone but he knew what he’d find: no bars.
He decided, almost too late, that he should try and identify the dead man. Placing one Wellington boot in the water he unzipped the man’s windcheater and looked for a wallet, but there was nothing in the inside pockets. He couldn’t make himself force a hand into his trouser pockets, but they looked empty too, although they seemed to be oozing mud. So he stood back, struck again by the unnatural pose: the diver, each bone aligned to its full extent, as if he’d woken up in bed and this was the first stretch of the day.
The wound gaped. Leo looked back at the children, his eye going beyond, tracing their footprints back towards land. The tide had risen, and it looked as though they might already be on an island. If he’d acted then – instantly – they’d have been safe. It was only two or three feet of water. But he kept thinking that if he slipped he might get washed away and then the kids would be alone, and he couldn’t allow that to happen. Juliet, his wife, would never forgive him. She wasn’t a judgemental person, but she had a shrewd eye for Leo’s slightly flaky decision-making under pressure. So, instead, he ordered Paulo and Lucilla to quickly reconnoitre their new kingdom. The children ran to the edges – north, south, east, west – and reported back. They were trapped, it seemed, and then it really was too late.
The children didn’t panic. Cornelia had started crying when she’d seen the corpse but had quickly recovered. Paulo was fascinated, excited even, while Lucilla just watched, as she always did, taking it all in. The realization that broke Leo’s heart was the knowledge that their lack of fear sprang from confidence in him: that he would get them all safely back to the 4×4 and then drive them off to a nice warm pub for fish and chips and sticky toffee pudding. So the children didn’t panic. But Leo did. He made an elaborate ploy of examining his mobile phone as if it held the secret to walking on water.
Then Lucilla said a woman was waving from the bank near Gun Hill – the sandy hill at the eastern edge of the outlet to the sea, the counterpoint to Scolt Head. Relief flooded through Leo’s veins like heroin. They all waved back and bellowed: ‘Help!’ Stupidly, they were so relieved they were all smiling and laughing, and Leo was tormented by the thought that the woman would think they were having fun. She returned the wave, then ran, walked, ran, walked along the towpath back towards Burnham Overy Staithe. She’d have to find a phone – a landline. Leo checked his watch: 3.08 p.m. The chalk board by the harbour had said high tide was 2.45 p.m., but Leo was no day-tripping fool. Winds and air pressure often combined to bottle up the water; drive the tide in with extra force. Tide tables were useful, but all the locals said you had to use your eyes.
Twenty minutes later the water had reached Leo’s knees and he could feel the current tugging at his trousers. Another few inches and his own weight would be sufficiently diminished to the point where he’d be unable to keep a foothold. His muscles were shaking quite badly now, and he kept readjusting his legs to hide the tremor from the children. He briefly let go of Paulo’s hand and was dismayed to see the first flash of fear in the boy’s eyes; but he needed the arm free to pick Cornelia up, because the water was at her chest. Once he had her on his hip the boy could wrap both arms round his father’s thigh. Lucilla squeezed his other hand and he realized with a desperate sadness that she was trying to comfort
him
.
Thunder rolled over them from a bank of clouds which had formed as if by black magic right over their heads. Scenarios flashed like newspaper headlines before Leo’s eyes: all of them dead, the children saved but him dead, and worst of all – all of them dead
except
him.
He checked his watch: thirty-one minutes had passed since the woman had waved from Gun Hill.
‘OK,’ he said, and this time his voice was an odd half-octave too high so that all the children looked at their father. ‘Let’s just have a plan. First of all – Lucilla.’ He forced himself to look at her. She was still clutching a see-through plastic bucket full of the murky outlines of muddy crabs. ‘All this water is pouring in – see? It’s flooding down towards the village. You can swim. When the time comes I’ll take your coat and wellies, and you need to just float away. Let the tide take you in, Luce – all right, sweetheart? Don’t fight it – float until you come aground, like a bottle with a message in it.’
Lucilla’s eyes flooded with tears. ‘What message?’
‘Just get yourself safely on dry land and then find someone as quickly as you can.’
He turned away because she didn’t move a muscle in response. ‘Paulo,’ he said.
The boy had his head buried in his father’s waterproofs. ‘I can’t swim,’ he said.
‘I know,’ said Leo. ‘That doesn’t matter. People float. You can’t stop yourself.’ He forced himself to chuckle. ‘Honestly, once your feet leave the bottom you’ll bob like a cork. Just stick with me and Cornelia.’
The waves had been breaking just out to sea, beyond the gap, but now one didn’t break, it rolled over the submerged sandbar at the harbour mouth and carried on, so that they all had to step forward, accommodating the sudden swell. Cornelia screamed.
The wave went on to break in the reeds beyond them.
‘What about the man, Dad?’ asked Paulo.
They all had their back to the floating corpse, but Leo had been stealing glances. Because of the rigor and the tethering rope holding the feet down, the body was upright as it rose in the pit of the channel, and the outstretched hands and arms were now sticking up out of the water, the head appearing then disappearing with each wave. The heavy skull flopped on its shattered neck. It was an unnatural sight, and disturbing, because it looked as if the man was striving to rise out of the flood – like one of those nuclear missiles, bound for the sky, or a God of the deep ascending, like Poseidon.
A fresh wave broke around them and Leo pulled them all to him, his plan disintegrating. He was too scared to pray, so he just kissed Cornelia’s hair.
Which is how Peter Shaw first saw the D’Asti family – a circle of silent figures, half submerged, in mid-stream, the man bending down with that strange bird-like pecking motion which signals a kiss. The picture was etched on his retina thanks to a blinding flash of white lightning.