He considered the bronze statue, wondering what the
Staring into the mud, he thought about the old girl in the Morris in the line of cars on Siberia Belt. Nice woman, old money. He’d helped her out of the car and then she said she’d forgotten her glasses. He offered to get them out of the glove compartment but she’d said not to bother, her voice edging just too high to be natural. They’d take her car into the pound tomorrow, so there was no hurry. He’d find out what she didn’t want him to see. And one other thing that kept snagging his brain. The ladders on the Corsa’s roof. He’d get the CSI report on those. Check the length.
He walked over the narrow wooden footbridge which crossed the Purfleet and made his way along the King’s Staithe to the maze of terraced streets he’d lived in all his life. He stopped on the corner of Greenland Street. The central heating at home would be off. He hadn’t understood the timing mechanism when his wife was alive, and the secret had died with her. She’d been buried in the churchyard at All Saints’ and sometimes he went by on the way home. Not tonight. A cat sat in the middle of the road like a fur hat, its eyes as green as the paper dragon set in the fanlight of the end house: once a shop, its downstairs window curved around the corner gracefully, a door set within the arc. Behind the glass a handwritten sign in Chinese characters.
He knew the sound they made. Yat ye hoi p’i.
Here, on the corner of a rain‐soaked street, a warm
Tuesday, 10 February
The eight vehicles of the stranded convoy stood in the light of the rising moon, the cold blue streak of dawn in the east as raw and unwelcome as the scream of an alarm clock. Shaw had slept for three hours in the CSI back‐up van. He’d been a poor sleeper since childhood. So he was used to waking up in the dark.
But he wasn’t used to waking up anywhere that wasn’t home. Lena, his wife, said he was a homing pigeon, always circling back towards the loft. The contrast with his father was, as always, stark. Jack Shaw had liked working nights, sleeping at St James’s when a case was on, living the job. So his father’s life had been a secret from him; one of the reasons he’d been drawn to the same career, to find out, in little ways, what his father’s life had been like, to see how closely the real world snapped into place beside the one he’d imagined.
So when he’d woken in the CSI van he felt a familiar frisson of anxiety, the loss of something just beyond his understanding. He thought about texting home, but knew it was too early. And there’d still be no mobile signal. The night before he’d relayed a message through St James’s, telling Lena he’d be out overnight. But he wanted to hear her voice.
Shaw tried to think of the day ahead as separate from that which had gone before. Day Two: a time to take stock, step back, let the adrenaline fade. But the intensity of the images from the previous evening were too strong to dismiss: the blood‐caked mouth of the man he’d pulled out of the sea; the crumpled figure at the wheel of the pick‐up truck, impaled. The buzz was still electric, an intensity of consciousness, which made Peter Shaw feel very alive. He suppressed the excitement, aware that this was a drug to which his father had become addicted, the living of a life through the deaths of others. He’d wondered if that was why his father had made just that one rule: that his son could do anything with his life except become a policeman.
Shaw craved his own drug: the surge of endorphins, the rush of blood, the certainty of well‐being that came with pushing himself to run, to swim, and to run again. He checked his map. The coast road was almost exactly a mile away. He set the stopwatch going on his wrist and began to run, despite the lightweight boots he wore, and when he found his footing secure in the crisp deep snow, he opened up into a wide, easy pace. The lights of the road came into view all too quickly and he slowed to a halt: 4 minutes 43 seconds. His body cried out for him to carry on, to push himself until his bloodstream pumped
He bent double, his palms in the snow, then straightened. His mobile buzzed, picking up text messages he’d been unable to receive overnight within the dead zone on Siberia Belt. He scrolled down: three from Lena, all pictures. His daughter in bed, a book folded over her head where it had dropped from her hands as she fell asleep, a snowman on the beach in front of the house, and one of Lena – cowering out of the wind on the veranda, taken by his daughter.
He jogged back along Siberia Belt, looking steadily ahead, imagining the cars the previous night, edging their way through the snow towards the sharp right‐hand turn just before Gallow Marsh Farm. He rounded the bend and saw the stranded convoy. Each car and van sealed with signed plastic tags on the door handles and boots – except the Alfa, where he could see the CSI team still at work, the gentle buzz of a forensic vacuum within. The victim’s truck was hidden within a SOC tent, lit like a Chinese lantern. Ahead, the pine tree still blocked the road, but beyond it stood a fire rescue vehicle, and behind that an ambulance, blue lights silently flashing. Both emergency vehicles were parked in a lay‐by Shaw had not noticed before, built to allow cars to pass each other on the narrow track.
The sound of a chainsaw serrated the silence and amongst the pine’s branches Shaw could see movement, the last of the snow falling from the needles.
Tom Hadden, the force’s senior crime scene investigator, was buried within, while a fireman cut wood on
‘Anything?’ asked Shaw, knowing he could leave the pleasantries aside.
Hadden struggled to turn his head amongst the pine branches. ‘Well. I’m pretty sure it’s a tree.’
Shaw pressed in amongst the pine needles, which released a wave of pungent scent. ‘How’d she come down?’
‘Three blows,’ said Hadden, reaching forward, parting branches to reveal the trunk, neatly severed by a series of axe blows. ‘Instant roadblock. I’d say it wasn’t the first time our woodman had swung an axe.’
Shaw recalled George Valentine’s summary of the crime: on one hand a disregard for leaving clues – the victim left to die in the cab, now the axe marks – combined with the complete absence of footprints.
‘Anything else I should know now?’
Hadden extricated himself, a kneecap clicking as he did so. ‘Pathologist is still at work,’ he said. ‘I think we’ll leave her to it, don’t you?’
The pronoun told Shaw all he needed to know. There
Edging past the pick‐up they came to the Alfa, and Shaw noticed a small flag marked with an ‘A’ below the driver’s window.
‘Ciggy butt – menthol,’ said Hadden, not stopping. ‘Common brand.’ Shaw leant in at the Alfa’s open window. The interior smelt of money: soft leather and scent. A child’s picture was stuck on the dashboard, a girl with long hair, the ashtray bristled with dog‐ends soiled with lipstick.
Behind that the old man’s Corsa. For the first time Shaw noticed the car had been vandalized: scratched lines, crossing, peaked like a hat, an angry inchoate scrawl.
‘They’re fresh,’ said Hadden. ‘A month old, maybe less. My guess is a diamond cutter – see how deeply the metal is scored. Nothing casual.’