The question he posed was a simple one: why the three day embargo until Monday? It was a good question — sharp, businesslike, despite the attempt to bumble his way through it. He tried to recall the reporter’s name from the briefing sheet he’d sent Valentine. Smyth — that was it, and now he wondered if the ‘y’ was an affectation.
Shaw sipped his iced beer. ‘That’s a good question — and the answer’s coming, I promise.’
Smyth smiled, nodding, but there was nothing jovial about his eyes, which were slate grey.
Osprey’s engine changed its note, the speed dropping, edging into East Hills past swimmers — most of them, despite the summer heat, in wetsuits, bobbing like tadpoles. The sea breeze had picked up once they’d got beyond the sand bar at the mouth of the channel and the breakers drummed on the sands, so that Shaw almost didn’t hear his text alert on the mobile. It was from Inspector Jack Craxton at Wells Police Station.
NO SIGN OF DAUGHTER. Shaw looked at Valentine, who’d got the same text.
‘Trouble, Inspector?’ asked Smyth from The Daily Telegraph, on Shaw’s shoulder.
‘Routine,’ said Shaw.
Osprey dropped anchor fifty yards off the beach. In the late-afternoon sun about sixty people lay on the white sands. The ferry ran just two trips a day: out and back. The last time Shaw had been in Wells with Fran, his daughter, in the early summer last year, he’d checked out the price: twelve pounds. So you got social exclusion as well as spatial. Plus the lack of facilities kept kids and families to a minimum. A woman stood, topless, and waded into the sea, shoulders back.
With the exclusivity of East Hills came one other major benefit on a north-facing coast: the south-facing beach, which attracted serious sun-seekers, dedicated heliophiles. One man stood close to the landing stage, towelling a flat stomach, one foot on a cold box, drinking from a plastic bottle covered in icy condensation.
Shaw leant on the little capstan house where the skipper of Osprey was now theatrically filling a pipe.‘OK, everything I’m gonna say is in the briefing pack, as I said. So sit back, enjoy the sun and I’ll tell you a story.’He opened a bottle of fizzy water as the sea slapped the hull of the Osprey. ‘In 1994 there were seventy-five people on this beach one Saturday afternoon in August,’ said Shaw. ‘We know it was seventy-five by the way because the boat which ferried them out sold tickets. Still does. One of those tickets went to a young Australian called Shane White; he was twenty, travelling in Europe. He’d picked up a summer job as a lifeguard, employed by the local council. Back home — that’s a small place up the coast from Sydney called Barrie Bay — Shane had been the school swimming champion, and he had all the certificates you needed: life saving, endurance, first aid. It was his job to make sure no one got into trouble out here on East Hills. On the boat he’d have briefed all the tourists, the message clear: it’s a good beach to lie on, you can even have a paddle and a dip, but don’t try to swim out, especially back to land, because the currents are treacherous and when the tide’s running you’d need to be Mark Spitz to have any chance of making it alive. It doesn’t look it, but it’s nearly two thousand yards to safety. A country mile.’
Several of the reporters squinted into the distance.
‘At about four twenty p.m. that afternoon — the return boat was due at four thirty p.m. — Shane White’s body was found floating in the water just over there. .’ Shaw pointed along the beach towards the open sea. ‘He’d been stabbed in the midriff and had lost a lot of blood. The wound was a slash, about eight inches long, delivered by a blade at least five inches long. The woman who found him got help and he was dragged ashore. He died about ten minutes later. The boat which arrived to take everyone off the sands had a radio, and so assistance was called. The RNLI launched and came across the channel. A police launch came out too. Officers took everyone off the beach and back to police headquarters at Lynn — St James’ — to take statements. Shane was a good-looking lad. .’
Shaw nodded to Valentine but he was already on his feet handing out the press briefing packs. The first print in a set of photographs was of the victim. The local paper had done a story that summer when he’d helped save a horse and rider who’d got caught out on the sandbanks beyond Holkham. Shane had swum out while the lifeboat launched. He’d gone out to comfort the rider — a ten-year-old girl who’d got separated from a riding school outing. Shane looked like a lifeguard: two-tone dyed blond hair, muscled, in red and gold shorts marked WDC — Wells District Council. His face was as forgettable as most handsome faces — too symmetrical to be really interesting, like the computer-balanced features of some comic strip hero. The ten-year-old looked mortified and clutched White’s hand without enthusiasm while he held the wrecked bridle of her horse.
‘From the statements we were able to piece together Shane’s last few hours alive on East Hills,’ said Shaw. ‘He’d chatted up a few of the girls on the beach. Subsequent interviews revealed he did that a lot, and didn’t always stop with the chat-up line. At the funeral, which was held at Hunstanton, there were half a dozen heartbroken teenage girls in the congregation. All of them thought they were Shane’s one and only. Anyway, when he wasn’t sorting out the local talent he sat up on the dunes, near the ridge with a pair of binoculars, keeping an eye on the swimmers.’ Shaw glanced to the beach and they all saw a lifeguard sat on a high chair below a single red and yellow flag. ‘About an hour before Shane’s body was found he swam out and dragged a kid back to shore on an inflatable dolphin. There hadn’t been any real danger — the winds were very light — but it was the right thing to do. The kid’s father apologized and offered Shane a beer, which he declined. The next thing we know about Shane is he’s floating in the water leaking blood.
By 6.45 p.m. that evening we had evacuated East Hills. Each person on the beach — all potential suspects — were asked to take with them everything they had brought over from the mainland: towels, picnic baskets, kites, the lot. We took seventy-four people off the beach. Shane’s body went later after the pathologist had finished an examination at the scene. The preliminary cause of death — confirmed at autopsy — was drowning. He’d lost nearly three pints of blood due to the puncture wound. There was also a wound to his eye, possibly caused by a fist, but not a knife. Once we had his corpse off the sands, and his stuff, the beach should have been empty. It looked empty. We let the sniffer dogs lose and they found a spot up in the dunes where there was fresh blood in the sand, and buried in the sand they found something else — again, there’s a picture in your pack.’A threadbare towel, blue and white stripes, bloodstained, in a polythene evidence bag. ‘None of the seventy-four people left alive on East Hills would admit to recognizing this towel,’ said Shaw.
‘And they all had their own towels?’ asked Smyth, from The Daily Telegraph. Again, sharp, businesslike.
‘Yes. Everyone — but then some had two. Lots of people take spare towels. So that’s no mystery.’
They all looked along the beach. Shaw was right; the nearest couple were lying on two wide coloured towels but they had others drying from a parasol stuck in the sand.
‘We examined the towel thoroughly but it yielded nothing but bloodstains — a match for the victim. There were several layers of footprints at the spot — too many to be of use. But given the progress being made in forensic science at the time, especially in DNA analysis, it was thought wise to keep the towel in a secure environment in the long term. .’
‘What kind of secure environment?’ asked the man from the Daily Mail.
Shaw’s temper, never that far from the surface, flashed briefly. ‘A secure one.’ That was the problem with his temper: it came and went so quickly hardly anyone noticed. He swigged some water, letting the lack of control recede, then pressed on. ‘Fresh tests, undertaken in the last six weeks at The Ark, West Norfolk’s own forensic laboratory, using the?400,000 Home Office grant the chief constable has, I think, told you all about, and later under contract at the Forensic Science Laboratory, have revealed several skin cells on the towel from which a DNA profile has been drawn. It is not the victim’s DNA profile. We can assume, I think — an assumption we’re confident a court would accept — that the person whose cells are on the towel shed the cells as they cleaned the victim’s blood from their own skin. The DNA sample — Sample X — is that of a man. It has no direct match on the National DNA Database. We believe, with some confidence, that Sample X belongs to the killer of Shane White.’