While this had a spare, old-fashioned charm, it didn’t have the bijou look of a place which had expelled all its local inhabitants and replaced them with rich weekenders from London. Essentially, Marsh Creake consisted of a handful of houses strung unevenly along the coast road. There was a garage with three pumps and an oily-floored workshop, and next to it the Trafalgar pub, whose leaded lights and brick-and-beam exterior suggested that it had been built in the years immediately following the Second World War. Alongside the pub stood a gabled village hall through whose windows stacked chairs were visible. Continuing westwards along the sea front, Liz discovered the village stores and a ship’s chandler and souvenir shop which appeared to have closed for the winter. Behind these were several streets of red-brick houses and a low council block.
A turn in the road and a stand of elderly pines masked the village’s westernmost building. Headland Hall was a grey, rather charmless Victorian sprawl whose Gothic turrets and lancets suggested a hotel or town hall rather than a private home. On the seaward side of the house, dimly visible through the surrounding trees, a long walled garden reached out over the exposed salt marshes. The house was less elegant than Creake Manor, half a mile to the west, and the grounds less lavishly maintained. But there was a symmetry to the two establishments, enclosing the village like bookends as they did, and perhaps an implicit rivalry. Both unquestionably spoke of money and influence. Was Headland Hall where “twenty, plus a special” had been brought ashore? Liz wondered. It was certainly not impossible.
A three-point turn and a couple of minutes later she was back in the centre of the village. Parking the Audi on the sea front, she stepped out into a stiff east wind, causing a line of herring gulls to lift from the back of a concrete bench and wheel complainingly away.
The words In Memoriam were inscribed above the entrance to the village hall. Inside, it had the cold, slightly damp feel of a building that was not in regular use. Much of the space was taken up with stacked piles of canvas-backed chairs. At one end was a small stage, whose curtain hung half open to reveal a dusty upright piano. At the other a laptop computer and a printer had been set up on a trestle table. In front of the trestle table a female constable and a male plain-clothes officer were setting up a VCR and a monitor on an extension cable.
As Liz looked around, a wiry ginger-haired man in a waxed jacket stepped enquiringly towards her. “Can I help you?”
“I’m looking for Steve Goss.”
“That’s me. You must be…”
“Liz Carlyle. We spoke.”
“We did indeed.” He glanced at the rain-spattered window. “Welcome to Norfolk!”
They exchanged smiles and shook hands. He was about forty-five, Liz guessed.
“The DS is still winding things up at the transport café where the shooting took place, but the photographer’s just e-mailed us the pictures. Why don’t I take you through them, and then we can wander up to the pub for a sandwich and a chat and defrost a bit?”
“Suits me,” said Liz. She nodded to the police personnel, who watched her warily and without expression. Stepping over a trail of electronic cables, she followed Goss to the trestle table. The Special Branch officer pulled up one of the canvas-backed chairs for her, sat himself in another, and flicked his fingers over the laptop’s touchpad.
“OK, Gunter, Raymond… here we are.”
Columns of thumbnail images flickered into view.
“I’ll just give you the key shots,” murmured Goss. “Or we’ll be here all day.”
Liz nodded. “That’s fine. I can always check back if there’s anything I need to see again.”
The first image that Goss enlarged was a wide shot of the vehicle park. Along the far boundary of this muddied expanse the heavy goods vehicles crouched like sullen prehistoric beasts, their wet tarpaulins shining. To the left was a low prefabricated building with a sign reading Fairmile Café. Strip lights shone dimly inside it, and the coloured loops of Christmas decorations were visible. To the right stood a concrete toilet block, beyond which a line of policemen in fluorescent yellow foul-weather jackets were conducting a ground search.
The shots which followed showed the interior of the café. This was probably a cheerful enough place when it was open for business and its tea urns were steaming. Empty, however, despite the paper chains and the inflatable Santas, it was decidedly mournful.
The third sequence showed the toilet block. First the exterior, with the pathology and forensics people milling around in their pale blue protective overalls, and looking glad of them as the rain sliced its way round the breeze blocks, and then the interior. This was empty-at least of the living. It was dressed in glazed white tiles, and contained a hand basin, two wall-mounted urinals and a toilet stall. A close-up shot showed that the lock on the stall door was broken. In place of a toilet roll, a Yellow Pages directory hung on a loop of baler twine.
The final sequence showed Ray Gunter. Dressed in an off-white sweater and a pair of dark blue Adidas track-pants, he was lying on the floor beneath a metre-wide starburst of dried blood and brain tissue. At the centre of this was a black hole where the bullet had passed through a ceramic tile. A long red-brown smear led downwards to the slumped body. The round had entered through the left eyebrow, leaving the face more or less intact. The back of the head, however, sagged formlessly away from the skull, and had voided its contents on to the concrete floor.
“Who found him?” asked Liz, narrowing her eyes against the photographs’ bloody horror.
“An HGV driver. Just after six a.m.”
“And the round?”
“We were lucky. It went right through the toilet block and lodged in the boundary wall.”
“Any forensic from the gunman?”
“No, and we’ve been over every inch of the floor and walls. They’ll be testing the victim’s fingernail deposits too, but I’m not hopeful.”
“Where was the killer standing when the shot was fired?” asked Liz.
“Hard to tell at this stage, but far enough away for there to be no obvious powder burns. Twelve feet, perhaps. Whoever did this knew exactly what he was doing.”
“What makes you say that?”
“He went for the head shot. The chest shot would have been much easier, but our killer wanted his man down in one. Gunter would have been dead before his knees started to bend.”
Liz nodded thoughtfully. “And no one heard anything?”
“No one will admit to hearing anything. But then there would have been lorries coming and going and all sorts of incidental noise.”
“How many people were there around?”
“A good dozen drivers sleeping in their cabs. The café shut at midnight and opened at six a.m.” He switched off the laptop and leaned back in his chair. “We’ll know a lot more when the CCTV footage comes in, which’ll probably be in about an hour. How about that drink?”
“The drink that started off life as a sandwich?”
“That’s the one.”
The warmth of the Trafalgar was welcome after the cheerless cold of the village hall. The saloon bar was panelled in oak and decorated with portraits of Nelson, knotted ropes, ships in bottles, and other naval paraphernalia. Above the service counter hung a framed Red Ensign flag. The place smelt of furniture polish and cigarette smoke. A handful of middle-aged customers were nodding and murmuring over ploughman’s lunches, salads and half-pints of beer.
Goss ordered a pint of bitter for himself, a cup of coffee for Liz, and a plate of toasted sandwiches. Liz had no great hopes for the coffee, and didn’t particularly feel like the sandwiches, but felt that she ought to eat. She had a tendency, she knew, to get caught up in the impetus of work and forget such things. Contributing to her lack of appetite-a quiet but insistent backbeat to the day’s other issues-was Mark’s phone call. If he meant what he said, then she would have to act. She would have to break things off; draw a once-and-for-all line beneath the affair.