‘I can’t pretend you won’t get life,’ said Shaw. ‘But think about Tilly, Aidan. Your daughter. She’s lost her mother. Today, Aidan, she lost the man she thought was her father. Joe’s dead.’
Aidan’s eyes widened. ‘I don’t. . ’
‘Stress, shock, the asthma. I think he just gave up. Tilly was with him. But she’s alone. And you’re going to leave her now?’
‘She’s got Ruth,’ said Robinson.
He saw it then as clearly as Aidan Robinson had seen it. The future: Ruth with the daughter she’d always wanted, Tilly untainted by the knowledge that she was Aidan’s child. An impossible future, but the only hope this man could imagine, Gone now.
Very slowly Shaw let his hand move towards the knife. Robinson didn’t move, or even follow the movement with his eyes. He retained the rigid pose he’d kept, as if trying to sit to attention. ‘You can bring them together,’ said Shaw, trying to make himself believe it. ‘That’s what you should do with the time you’ve got left.’ Shaw took the knife from the tabletop and held it in both hands, like a ceremonial dagger. ‘We should go to them,’ he said.
But there was something wrong because as Shaw turned the blade in his hands he saw that it left a bloodstain on his fingers.
‘Too late,’ said Robinson, lifting both arms and putting his hands, palm up, on the tabletop. Both wrists were cut to the bone.
FORTY-FOUR
Shaw left the Porsche on a double-yellow line outside St James and ran up the semicircular steps to the front doors of police headquarters, Valentine, wheezing, just behind. The sergeant on the main reception desk was one of Shaw’s father’s old colleagues: Sgt Timber Woods. He’d taken retirement ten years earlier, it being plain that he couldn’t catch a cold without uniformed assistance, and was eking out a decade until his sixty-fifth birthday working in the records office downstairs and taking shifts on the front desk. As one of the senior DI’s had said at Timber’s retirement party, he might not live longer, but it was certainly going to feel that way.
‘Bloody hell, Peter.’ Woods looked up at the hall clock — a Victorian original, big enough for a mainline railway station platform. It was 3.14 p.m. Not only was Shaw late for the press conference, he’d also failed to file the chief constable a summary brief of developments, leaving him to face the great unwashed of Fleet Street alone and unprepared.
‘Presser started on time,’ added Woods. ‘O’Hare’s had all units out for you. He’s ballistic. If you haven’t got a good excuse I’d make one up,’ said Woods, clearly energized by the misfortunes of others.
Shaw’s mobile had contained so many messages when he’d turned it back on he hadn’t bothered to read any of them. He headed for the lifts, knowing Valentine might not make the stairs to the seventh floor. There was piped-in music in the lift: Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. ‘You got him?’ asked Shaw, his heart pounding smoothly, his blood making an oily churning noise in his eardrums.
Valentine was bent double, but he held out his mobile. ‘Yup.’
Once they’d got Aidan Robinson into the RNLI launch Shaw had asked Valentine to wait for his phone signal to return on the trip back, then try and get through to Lionel Smyth, reporter at large for The Daily Telegraph. They needed to plant a question with him to ask at the East Hills press conference. Several questions — a series, interlinked. Valentine had got Smyth first ring; he was with the press pack at St James, grazing on sausage rolls, waiting for the briefing to start. Valentine got him to find a quiet corner out in the corridor and carefully marked his card: three questions. The last one was the best one. In its own way, a killer question.
As they came out of the lift Shaw got a text from DC Campbell at A amp;E at the Queen Vic. ROBINSON STABLE. ROTA 24/7.
Campbell would stay with Robinson, then they’d run shifts until they got him charged and to court. One of the medics who helped load Robinson, lifeless, on to the force helicopter on the beach at Wells had told Shaw the cuts at the wrist were deep but had missed both the brachial arteries, so there was hope, because while he’d bled for a long time into the sandy floor, he’d bled slowly. That had been the liquid, iron, smelclass="underline" dripping blood.
The Norfolk Suite was decked out in oak panels and fitted with a conference table at the front, microphones, full multimedia, including a whiteboard and acoustic ceiling. It was where O’Hare held his senior management meetings and was one of half a dozen rooms in Peter Shaw’s life he hated with a passion equal to the love he felt for being outside, on the beach. It was packed — maybe fifty reporters, with a TV camera and radio at the back. A table of coffee cups and biscuits. Wine bottles ready for the post-conference drinks.
As Shaw burst through the doors O’Hare was on his feet. The chief constable’s voice was barely more civilized than a snarl. ‘So that completes our summary of the mass screening. I was hoping. .’ He caught sight of Shaw, then Valentine.
‘Ah. DI Shaw. Sergeant. Please. .’ He held a hand out, indicating the empty seats at the front, facing the press. Shaw walked down the middle of the room between the rows, Valentine took cover along the wall, but they met at the front. The force’s press officer was nominally the chair, seated in the middle of the row facing the reporters. She was sporting a weary smile. Valentine sat on the desk edge despite a glare from the chief constable.
‘Great,’ said O’Hare. ‘Good of you to make it, Peter.’
There was nervous laughter from the press. Shaw noted Smyth, from The Daily Telegraph, in the front row. The nervous woman from the Guardian was in the second row, notebook poised.
O’Hare couldn’t stop his body language betraying him. His shoulders had relaxed and the forward, aggressive, angle of his head and neck had returned to upright. He’d been facing an uphill struggle to convince Fleet Street’s best the North Norfolk Constabulary was only just a step behind the East Hill’s killer. Now that job was Shaw’s.
‘So. If I can introduce DI Peter Shaw,’ said the chief constable, ‘investigating officer in the reopened East Hills inquiry. Peter, perhaps you could get us all up to speed and then. .’
‘Sir,’ said Shaw, holding up a hand, cutting him dead.
O’Hare went to speak but Shaw didn’t give way. The chief constable’s surprise at being overrun while he was speaking was palpable. In the stress of the moment his tic returned, the quick sideways jerk of the jaw.
The room was silent but for the hum of the air conditioning.
‘We have today made an arrest in connection with the East Hills murder of 1994,’ said Shaw. He had the confidence to pause, readjusting the microphone, letting the silence lengthen and not rushing to fill it.
‘Charges are imminent,’ added Shaw, ‘and therefore reporting restrictions will come into place very shortly. However, I’m happy to indicate that we are no longer looking for anyone else in respect of the killing of Shane White on August 26, 1994 at East Hills, Wells-next-the-Sea. ‘
Everyone started talking, most to each other, a few stabbing numbers into their mobile phones. Mid-afternoon was a crucial time for the TV networks and evening papers, so most would have to alert news desks that a big story was coming. The PR woman tried vainly to regain order. Shaw stood, rapping the table, his eyes on Smyth, his sight back to pin-sharp. ‘Some details. .’ he said, confidence and adrenaline giving his voice that serrated edge. The TV lights, which had been off, thudded on with a muffled explosion of electricity. ‘I am able to give you some details.’
Gradually the hubbub subsided. Shaw looked at his audience. Valentine looked at O’Hare, whose body was absolutely still, no — rigid.
‘We shall name the man arrested in due course. I should add that we expect to lay before the same defendant several further charges of murder. The victims in these cases will also be named shortly — all these offences stem, in part, from the East Hills killing.’