What did unite them were the placards they held — each one off a production line, each one carrying the same slogan:
Save Our Unspoilt Landscape.
SOUL
Valentine had the passenger window down as they inched past. ‘Nutters,’ he said. He was still annoyed Shaw had pulled rank and insisted they go in the Porsche. He’d have preferred twenty minutes on his own.
Shaw had to stop as several demonstrators stepped into the road and one leaned in the open passenger side window, offering a leaflet. He had a kind of Brideshead Revisited mop of hair, a T-shirt marked ANARCHY INTERNATIONAL, and a birthmark on his left cheek. Valentine noted an understated, expensive watch on his tanned wrist, the kind that shows the phases of the moon, and a ‘bum bag’ wallet on the belt of his black jeans, which were slung below his hips. He wasn’t as young as he’d like people to think. Up close Valentine guessed thirty, maybe more.
‘Thanks for your support,’ he said, trying to make eye contact.
Shaw looked him quickly in the face, noting the birthmark — a naevus flammeus, or port-wine stain. He’d studied facial disfigurements as part of his forensic art studies. This type was treatable using lasers, but rarely with a hundred per cent success. The worst long-term effect was emotional. But in this case the young man seemed to have suffered no damage to self-esteem or confidence.
‘There’s plans for two hundred of these things along the Norfolk hills — and more than five hundred at sea. There’s a petition — the details are on the leaflet. . ’ He tossed two on to Valentine’s lap.
As Shaw edged the Porsche forward the young man kept pace with the car. He’d already sensed Valentine was hostile so he was talking to Shaw. ‘This kind of thing happens because of apathy. I mean, look at it. . ’ He pointed at the nearest turbine.
Shaw did; he thought they were beautiful. Elegant, Aeolian, immensely unhurried. They always made him think of the plastic windmills he’d stuck in the sand as a child.
‘And the bird strike’s horrific. Geese alone — thousands of them cut to pieces. They won’t release the figures but you can see the dead ones out at sea, after an offshore wind. Plus the noise. . Not now. But in winter it’s, like, constant.’
‘Beats a nuclear power station,’ said Valentine, pressing the button so the window went up.
The crowd cleared, ushered out of the road by some bored-looking security guards. Shaw accelerated away but he beeped three times and the little crowd cheered, because he admired anyone who could be bothered to demonstrate about anything.
Half a mile further and they saw the sea, revealed like a backdrop on stage, as if the marine blue was a vertical painted board. The wide arc of the horizon was unbroken, stretching east to west along the north-facing sands. Out almost on the edge of vision they could see another wind farm, thirty, forty turbines, off the unseen Lincolnshire coast. In the mid-distance a school of yachts was bunched in a tight U-turn around a distant buoy.
A mile from Wells they slowed to join a queue of holiday traffic. Valentine dropped his window, letting the breeze cool the sweat on his scalp. On his lap was the file on the inquiry they’d selected to reopen and were about to reveal to the press. While there was a decent chance they’d find the killer, even after an interval of eighteen years, he knew the real reason they were here, why they’d be on this case for the next few weeks, pretty much full-time. West Norfolk’s new Chief Constable, Brendan O’Hare, the former No. 2 from the Royal Ulster Constabulary, was a high-flyer amongst high-flyers. He hadn’t taken the job on to be forgotten. He wanted the world to know the West Norfolk was there, fighting crime on the front line with the latest scientific techniques. That morning he’d had the press over to the West Norfolk’s HQ, St James’, for interviews — his aims, methods, targets. This afternoon the press got their sweeties to take home — a nice juicy cold case to write up under embargo for Monday’s papers. A fat little maggot of a story just right for the so-called ‘silly season’ when the news dried up from Westminster, the Law Courts, even the City. This was all about publicity, and netting O’Hare his next chief constable’s ribbon, preferably a big metropolitan appointment: Manchester maybe, or Bristol. Then he’d be poised for the final run-in, the big push for the only job he really wanted: Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, with a gleaming office looking out of New Scotland Yard at the London Eye and Big Ben. Then, arise Sir Brendan.
Which is where Shaw came in. Valentine glanced in the rear-view mirror at the DS’s face. Young, good-looking, sharp. The face of modern policing, the face O’Hare wanted to present to the media. Because putting yourself right up front was dangerous. If anything went wrong, it was Peter Shaw who’d take the flak. Valentine didn’t often look in mirrors to see his own face. In fact, sometimes he couldn’t recall it — not in detail. But he was pretty certain it wasn’t the face of modern policing.
The quayside at Wells-next-the-Sea was crowded with small boats. The press already aboard the Osprey, a modern sixty-seater, which spent most of its time running parties out to Blakeney Point to see seals. Today it was rigged out to keep journalists happy, with an icebox full of bottled beer. Shaw parked in a reserved police bay by the harbour master’s office and retrieved a box file from the boot containing information packs and a CD with pictures, a map and cuttings from 1994 — the year the cold case broke. All the journalists had to do was sit back, drink a cold beer and listen to the story. Then they could tap it out on their laptops as they took the train back to London. Like water, Shaw thought, most journalists took the path of least resistance.
Walking the gangplank to the Osprey he thought he’d judged the event perfectly: he hadn’t just netted the familiar faces from the local weeklies, the evening paper in Lynn, and the Eastern Daily Press in Norwich, he’d also snared three nationals and the regional man for the Press Association, who’d put it out to the rest of Fleet Street and the big regional dailies. As long as nothing broke through on to the news agenda for the UK over the weekend he thought they had every chance of getting a page lead in half a dozen nationals.
Shaw nodded to the skipper and the Merlin inboard engine coughed into life.
Osprey swung away from the stone quay, leaving behind a line of children and parents on the quayside crabbing — plastic see-through buckets dotted between them, full of skittering silhouettes. Behind them the little car park was crammed full, heat radiating from metal bonnets making a mirage of the shop fronts, the council attendant’s caravan office adorned with a large sign which read: CAR PARK FULL.
Shaw settled with the sea view, his back to the town, drinking his beer, and talked to the woman from the Guardian: dangerously thin, with long, bare legs, a short grey skirt and a white collarless shirt. Her name was Nikki — Nikki Tailor. She squinted at him through narrow, horizontal glasses which were electric pink. Her hair was short and expensively cut, but she fiddled with it, brushing it back from her forehead whenever she spoke. Seated, she wrapped one leg round the other so that her ankles were entwined.
She stubbed a biro on her notebook, mildly smug that she’d worked out that if the West Norfolk was reopening a cold case after nearly eighteen years — as the press invite they’d all got stated — then the science they’d used to open it up was almost certainly DNA analysis. She was right, wasn’t she?
Shaw gave her a surfer’s smile. He was aware of the effect he could have on some women. Her own smile broadened, a flush of colour rising on her narrow, elegant neck, and her legs crossed and uncrossed, locking again at the ankles. ‘Ten minutes you’ll know everything,’ he said.