Her shoulders had sagged and Shaw had guessed she was thinking about the first few months of Fran’s life — the endless vigilance required to make sure a small child didn’t ingest anything containing milk.
He hugged her too hard. ‘OK.’
‘Handsome,’ she’d said then, nodding back at the picture. ‘Innocent.’
‘Interesting word,’ said Shaw, adding shadow beneath the broad chin. ‘Why innocent?’
‘It’s a presumption — the dead are innocent, aren’t they?’
They’d chatted for a while over fresh coffees before going to bed. An hour together before the day began. When Shaw had walked back into the cafe to retrieve the sketches at dawn he’d stopped six feet from them, aware that he’d recreated someone who had once been alive. The face of this man who had died so violently looked at him over the twenty-eight years separating that last terrifying moment from this one.
‘All you need is a name,’ said Shaw out loud. Then he’d held out his hands, as if pleading before a jury, laughing at himself. ‘And justice.’
And now, sitting in Max Warren’s office, he looked again at the sketch. The adrenaline of the murder inquiry had dispelled all tiredness, despite the lack of sleep, but he did feel that nauseous buzz, his blood rushing with the effects of several doses of strong coffee.
He handed the frontal view to Valentine, who took it, then held it out at arm’s length.
‘Get it out for me, George. Usual suspects — TV, radio, Lynn News. We’ll give it twenty-four hours and if nothing bites, let’s go for posters — five hundred will do.’
Valentine pushed his bottom lip forward. ‘Reckon the Old Man will pay up? Posters cost a fortune.’
In the outer office Max Warren was finishing his dictation.
‘He won’t know until it’s too late,’ said Shaw, flicking over the sketch pad to work on the side view.
Valentine rubbed his eyes, feeling a gritty resistance. He hadn’t slept after leaving St James’s either. It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted to — he’d walked into South Lynn by the towpath until he’d reached the ruins of Whitefriars Abbey, then turned into the network of streets in which he’d been born, married and widowed, and where he still lived. The cemetery in which they’d found their victims that night was less than half a mile away. He’d considered returning there, but thought better of it. Instead, he’d walked to the church of All Saints and stood before his wife’s headstone:
JULIE ANNE VALENTINE
1955–1993
Asleep
The stone was mottled with moss and the inscription partly obscured by the charity lapel stickers he’d stuck on it. He added wood green animal shelter, thinking how, like him, she’d hated dogs. It always annoyed him, that cloying euphemism — Asleep. He wondered who’d chosen it, because it hadn’t been him. But then he’d walked through her death, and the funeral, as if it had all been happening to someone else.
On the corner of Greenland Street he’d stopped outside an old shop. His house was in sight, but he often lost the will to go home at this precise point. The old shop’s double doors were glass and curved gracefully. Within was a second door, with a fanlight, from which shone a green light. And a sign hung from a hook up against the glass. Chinese characters, but ones that Valentine could pronounce.
Yat ye hoi p’i
The game is on, the game is open
He’d looked up and down the street, then knocked twice and waited; then twice again. A man had quickly opened the door, and Valentine had slipped in like a cat. Inside, enveloped in the scented warmth, the man they called the sentinel had taken his raincoat. Valentine had held on to his wallet, keys and mobile. The den was on three floors, but he always went down to the basement for fan-tan. He’d taken a glass of tea from the pot set on a table in the hall — there was no alcohol at the house on Greenland Street — and that suited him well, because he’d always liked to enjoy his vices serially.
In the basement room were a dozen men sitting on high stools around the gambling table. There was a room to one side for smoking, but Valentine never went over the threshold.
On the table he’d bought?60 worth of chips and put?5 on the number 2. The dealer had swirled a pile of golden coins and covered them with an ornamental lid. Then the sharing out began — in little collections of three — until only three or fewer were left. On the table sat two coins. Valentine had picked up his winnings and bet again — this time on 1. An hour later he’d won?30. He’d taken a break, going upstairs to drink more tea, then returning to stand on the edge of the circle of light which blazed down on the fan-tan table. His bladder had been aching so he’d slipped out of the basement door into the yard. There had been ice in the toilet pan, and as he’d stood there he’d felt that his life was raw, and that he’d never wanted it to be like that — he’d sought warmth, but it had been denied him.
He’d cashed his winnings and walked out into the street, the snow falling steadily now, muffling the noises of the town at night. Sleep had become a distant dream. He’d walked briskly past his house. In the next street there had been a single light in the bedroom of number 89 — his sister Jean’s. He didn’t see her much. He told himself he didn’t like her husband, but the real reason was that she was an echo of his past, because she’d been a good friend to Julie, and so a reminder of what might have been. But he found the light comforting because he liked to know she was still here, in the streets where they’d all grown up.
He’d walked on down to the quayside. Greyfriars Tower provided the only light in the sky, a lighthouse in a gentle snowstorm. He’d checked his watch: 2.30 a.m. The St James’s canteen opened at 5.30 a.m. and the thought of a cooked breakfast made him feel better about the day to come. He’d zigzagged towards the tower through the Old Town, past the Jewish Cemetery where the fine blown snow lay in the chiselled Hebrew inscriptions. When he’d reached St James’s he’d taken the curved steps two at a time and breezed past the front desk, where the duty sergeant had nodded once before returning his attention to the previous day’s Daily Mail.
He’d gone back to his desk in the open-plan CID room and swung open the window to smoke. Then he’d flicked through a shelf of reference books until he’d found what he was looking for …Old Lynn — A Social History.
The Flask appeared once in the index.
Of South Lynn’s whaling past, little is left except in the street names. The dockside for the whaling fleet was on Blubber Creek, now just a grassy, reedy, inlet off the Nar, opposite the end of Explorer Street. The only physical reminder of this once lucrative trade is the Flask — the pub named for one of the fleet’s most famous ships. The building is much altered but the main structure is still the timber-framed inn set up on the edge of the flensing grounds in 1776, possibly on an older site. It very soon fell into the hands of the Melville family — wealthy merchants who had moved south from Boston, Lincolnshire. Originally called the Jetty, the pub was renamed to mark the?6,000 profit made by the Flask when she returned to port at the end of the whaling season in 1848. Court records show that an action was brought against the Melville family because of the stench of blubber boiling in the vats on open ground for more than six weeks as the eleven ‘fish’ aboard were rendered. In 1885 the building was renovated after one wall collapsed in a storm. In the 1950s the pub became famous as one of the last outposts of the sea shanty. Local choirs were recorded — preserving for posterity Lynn’s unique tradition of whaling songs. Ralph Vaughan Williams came to the pub on several occasions in the summer of 1947. Several of the songs Vaughan Williams recorded in his notebook were to reappear in his later works: particularly A Sea Symphony and Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1. In 1976 the neighbouring houses were demolished, leaving the building to stand alone with the help of steel buttresses. In the 1980s the Arts Council funded further recordings of the Whitefriars Choir. A documentary film was produced in 1993 and shown on Anglia TV — called The Song of the Sea.