‘Thanks for that image,’ said Shaw. ‘Speak later.’ Valentine fired the engine again, which coughed and then roared. The snow was falling steadily now, tempering the bleak greyness of the Westmead Estate.
‘You asked Tom to check out the Morris Minor glove compartment?’ said Shaw. ‘Pot – brown Moroccan.’
The DS popped a mint, crunched it immediately. ‘Blimey,’ said Valentine. ‘Takes all sorts. I’ll check her out.’
‘And Zhao? What d’you think?’
‘I think he’s dicking us about.’
‘The real question,’ said Shaw, ‘is what is he dicking us about about. Illegals? Smuggling fags? VAT fraud? Porn?
He checked his watch: 10 a.m. They had an appointment at North Norfolk Security at eleven and it was a half‐hour run to Wells‐next‐the‐Sea and the company’s headquarters.
The snow was draining the light out of the sky, leaving the day stillborn. The grey monolith that was the twenty‐one‐storey tower block at the heart of the Westmead Estate was just visible above them, the top lost in low cloud. Snow flecked the north‐east face of the flats, clawing at windowsills and downpipes. They could hear a helicopter hovering over the traffic on the ring road.
‘We’ve got twenty minutes,’ said Shaw, and he knew he couldn’t stop himself now, couldn’t leave the scab of the past unpicked. He turned in his seat so that he was facing George Valentine and realized there was another reason he found his company so unsettling. It was the fact that Valentine knew more about Shaw’s own father than he did. That all those hours Jack Shaw should have been with his family, he’d been in an unmarked police car, just like this battered Mazda, with George Valentine.
‘I’d like to see the scene of crime,’ he said.
‘Siberia Belt?’
‘No. Dad’s last case. Your last case. I’ve never seen the spot where you found him – the child. I’d like to see it now. It’s close – yes?’
Valentine too knew it would come to this. In fact if it hadn’t come to this he’d have wondered what kind of son Peter Shaw was. He put a dry cigarette between his lips and clenched his teeth. ‘It’s close,’ he said.
Mid‐morning and the Westmead Estate was coming to life: low life. An elderly man in carpet slippers shuffled along a covered walkway between two blocks of flats hugging a dressing gown, a copy of the Daily Express and a single can of white cider. A woman, dressed neatly in a see‐through plastic raincoat and matching hat, poured milk into a line of saucers by some waste bins, her feet lost amongst a clowder of cats.
Shaw followed George Valentine through the precinct, across a triangle of open ground covered in snow, turned past a line of lock‐up garages and then between a pair of the five‐storey blocks which dotted the estate. Above their heads an aerial walkway linked two sets of concrete concertinas. A piece of rope dangled, two trainers strung from the end, out of reach.
Vancouver House, the estate’s central block, stood alone on a tarmac island: a giant gravestone without an inscription except for the jagged multicoloured graffiti on the concrete pillars which held it clear of the ground. Shaw thought the scene almost exotic – the wastelands of Sarajevo perhaps, the sound of a mortar about to fall from hills hidden in the mist. Ramps ran up to stairwells and lifts, leaving the dark space beneath the block as a car park. Steam billowed from heating ducts along each of the twenty floors and trailed from overflow pipes, as
They cut straight across the waste ground, then ducked into the shadows of the car park, threading a path through the pillars, passing a burnt‐out VW, and skirting a huge pool of rainwater stained with oil in which two seagulls fought over a packet of chips.
Valentine felt colder once they were in the shadows. He stopped, looking around, waiting for his eyes to shift into night vision, filling his lungs now he had the chance. He’d been back many times, so that looking around was like viewing a favourite film clip. ‘Used to be a park here – back in the fifties. Marsh in summer, ponds in winter. That’s why they put the flats up on pillars. Didn’t work: the place reeks of damp. Keep wallpaper on the walls for a year, you get a fucking certificate.’
‘How’d you know?’
Valentine took out a cigarette, ran it under his nose, deciding then he’d left it too long to give up. ‘Grandparents. Dad’s side. They moved ’em here when they took down the houses on Dock Street – 1971.’ He spat into a puddle. ‘Didn’t live a year, either of them.’
Shaw knew when they’d found the spot. He had a press cutting at home with a picture of the scene that first morning. A pillar behind painted in black‐and‐white warning stripes, a staircase leading up, a sign showing a green figure climbing steps, two women standing where the press photographer had put them, tissues pressed to their mouths. And a lift entrance, the doors battered aluminium, lights above in the shape of up and down arrows, inexplicably unbroken. And a security phone in
Valentine kicked the pillar. ‘Here.’ He thrust his hands in his pockets and closed his fingers around the dice on his lighter.
‘Dad always said he thought the bloke was stupid.’
‘Mosse,’ said Valentine. ‘Robert James Mosse.’
‘Right. Dad reckoned he must have panicked – to dump the kid here, under the flats. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. If you’d got the body in the car, why not go somewhere? He could have taken it out on the marshes, Dersingham Woods. We’d still be looking.’
Valentine glanced down at his black slip‐ons, refusing to be drawn.
The bare facts of DCI Jack Shaw’s last case had never been disputed. Jonathan Tessier, aged nine, had been found dead at three minutes past midnight on 26 July 1997. He was still dressed in the Celtic kit he’d put on that morning to play football on the grass triangle by the flats. He had been given £1 to buy chips for lunch: 40p change was in the pocket in his shorts. There was no evidence at the scene, or in later medical and forensic examinations, that he had been sexually assaulted. But he had been strangled with a ligature of some sort, the condition of the body pointing to a time of death between six and eleven p.m.
DCI Jack Shaw and DI George Valentine were the first CID officers at the scene. The body had been found by a nurse, parking after her late shift a few feet from the boy’s corpse. She said she’d seen a car drive off quickly – a Volkswagen Polo, she thought – as she got out of
DI Valentine had radioed an alert on the damaged car to all units. A squad car on patrol found a Polo abandoned on the edge of allotments at Wootton just after two that morning, the front offside headlamp shattered, the engine warm. A police computer check identified the owner as Robert James Mosse, a resident – like Jonathan Tessier – of Vancouver House. Back at the scene the body had been removed, revealing a glove beneath, black leather, with a fake fur cuff. Jack Shaw and George Valentine went to Flat 8 on the first floor of Vancouver House, where they confronted Bobby Mosse, a 21‐year‐old student reading law at Sheffield University, at home during the summer vacation.
Here the accounts of the night diverge. Jack Shaw and George Valentine’s statements dovetailed: they maintained that they showed Mosse the glove in a cellophane evidence bag before obtaining his permission to search the flat. They conducted the search and failed to find the other glove. Mosse, in contrast, swore in evidence they showed him the glove, minus any protective bag, only after the search. His mother, who also gave evidence, agreed with her son’s version of events and added that at one point DI Valentine had reversed the fingers of the glove, turning it inside out, and looking inside.