Valentine tipped back the coffee cup, letting the last gritty granules fire up the taste buds on his tongue. ‘The runaway kid. Why run? And why run then? St James’s is on to the Mondeo’s registration – should be an hour, less.’
‘But he’s not a killer, is he?’
Valentine stretched his arms aloft, the joints cracking. ‘We won’t get anything tonight.’ Shaw stood. ‘Let’s touch base first thing. We’ll need to come back in daylight anyway – I’ve told them to keep the vehicles in situ until then. But the fact is that even by daylight the problem is still the same: we’ve got a murder scene with no footprints in and no footprints out.’
Valentine flapped his raincoat in front of the fire. ‘Let’s find a motive. Worry about footprints in the snow later…’
There was a silence again. Shaw remembered something his father had said about George Valentine. That when it came to the textbook he worked backwards: he found the criminal first, then the evidence which linked them to the crime. Had there been an unspoken inference: that if he couldn’t find the evidence, he’d make it up?
‘Right – anyone else?’ asked Shaw.
Valentine rubbed the pouched skin below his eyes. ‘The Chinky in the takeaway Volvo?’
Shaw winced at the casual racism, wondering if Valentine had said it deliberately. As far as his DS was concerned PC was something you stuck on your desk and didn’t want to use.
Shaw went to speak.
‘Perhaps they’ve got something going, the Chinese… people smuggling?’ Valentine continued.
Shaw shook his head. ‘One guy on a raft and he’s European. We had illegals coming in last year, but the trade’s dried up since the Coastguard started patrolling the Wash. That’s stopped it – and stopped it dead.’
‘OK,’ said Valentine. ‘Ciggies, then; drugs? We don’t know what the bloke on the beach might have had in that raft before he died. So there’s a welcoming party, one of the cars that’s stranded on Siberia Belt. Just because there’s a detour sign doesn’t mean none of them wanted to be there.’
Shaw was listening now.
‘So they get snarled up in the snow,’ said Valentine. ‘An argument about what to do. Low life, falling out. Do we stay, do we run? Who’s got the money?’ He stopped, hauling up his ribs to draw air into his lungs. ‘Do we get paid? We know the score with these people. It’s all sweetness and light until the shit flies, then they tear each other apart. Someone gets the chisel for their trouble.’
Shaw’s back stiffened. ‘And then the murderer disappears without leaving a footprint. How does that work?’
‘Don’t know,’ said Valentine, checking his watch.
Two doors led out of the kitchen. One into the hall and to the living room beyond, the other into a makeshift office. They could hear a woman’s voice: Sarah Baker‐Sibley. Each witness had been offered one call on the landline, and they could hear her talking; the speech pattern oddly modulated, tiredness perhaps, blended with stress. Valentine had got a message through to her daughter’s voicemail via the control room at St James’s while they were out on Siberia Belt. Three messages, in fact: stay at home; check the security lights were on; pizza in the fridge.
‘God,’ they heard her say, stressed out. ‘OK, OK. Look, pass me over…’
They heard the phone go down on the hook suddenly so Valentine opened the door to usher her back to the living room. But she’d picked up the phone again. ‘I’m sorry – we got cut off. Do you mind?… I need to ring again.’ She was desperate, and Shaw knew that no one could have stopped her making a second call. The tyranny of children.
Valentine shrugged. ‘Then the car’s ready, OK? You’ll be home in twenty minutes,’ he said, closing the door.
Shaw pressed his forehead against the cold glass of the kitchen window. A line of taxis was edging through the farmyard gates.
They heard footsteps on ice outside the door. It was Izzy Dereham, back from checking the oyster beds. ‘Storm’s turned a couple of the frames,’ she said, walking briskly to the sink, scrubbing her hands.
‘Sure. We run the oysters in it.’
‘Where?’ pressed Valentine.
‘Shark Tooth.’ It was one of the town’s newest com panies, commercial shellfish mainly, having started out running boats for tourists to catch North Sea dogfish, based up the coast from Lynn at Wootton Marsh.
‘They own this place,’ said Dereham. ‘I’m just a tenant. But you know, I’ve got plans…’ She looked up to where her child was sleeping. ‘Bit of arable, dairy herd, it could be a decent farm this… but the quick money’s in the oysters.’
‘Your husband?’ asked Shaw, knowing instantly it was the right question.
‘Patrick died.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Shaw touched the picture over the fireplace taken on a farm. Something crossed Izzy’s face, an expression so fleeting as to be subliminal. Grief thought Shaw, and something else, expertly hidden.
‘I was born there – up the coast,’ she said. ‘That was our farm, before the bailiffs moved in.’
The door to the back room opened and Sarah Baker‐Sibley came through. She was going to say something but the phone rang behind her. Valentine went through to answer.
‘I’ve finished,’ she announced, and Shaw noticed the hard edge to her voice. ‘My daughter’s at home, she’s fine.’ She tried to look relieved but didn’t get her face right. Shaw wondered what was wrong. ‘Thank you,’ she added, slipping out under cover of a smile.
It was late and Shaw was tired, almost too tired to let the thought take shape. Valentine shuffled the papers on the kitchen table, looking at the CSI pictures, setting apart the shots of the Mondeo. A stolen car, so they might never find the young driver.
‘Thought so,’ said Valentine, spinning one of the CSI prints round so that Shaw could see. It was an interior shot of the Mondeo. ‘The kid does a runner,’ he said, his voice suddenly animated. ‘Panics when he knows we’ll nab him for the theft. But he makes sure he takes something with him…’
‘What?’ asked Shaw.
‘A snakeskin steering‐wheel cover. Chevrons, black and white. Distinctive.’ He pressed a stubby finger into the shot, leaving a greasy print.
The cobblestones along St James’s glistened like pebbles on the beach. Police HQ was a curved brick 1960s block with civic pretensions, the single Victorian blue lamp salvaged from its predecessor down in the old town. The snow was turning to sleet, then rain, sheets of it thrown in off the sea falling through the floodlight that still played on Greyfriars Tower, a medieval stump which stood in waste ground opposite St James’s. Under the styleless portico of police headquarters, held up by four square brick pillars, two uniformed constables manhandled a half‐naked youth towards the doors, the young man’s knotted back a riot of illustration: an anchor, a dancing girl, a military badge.
Valentine sniffed the pungent kick of meths on the night breeze and walked down towards the quay. He’d got a lift back into town with a CSI unit, and the trip had woken him up. The pub sign outside his local, the Artichoke, swung in the rain, no lights within. He stood for a moment beside Captain George Vancouver’s statue on the waterside. This was where he’d always had a cigarette, the last one before home. He took a double lungful of night air, his shoulders aching with the effort. A day without cigarettes had left him feeling no better, no worse.