‘OK – the kid was annoying,’ said Shaw. They stood together, looking out to sea. ‘But bright. And he was right, George. We’ve made assumptions. We’ve assumed, and all the drivers have assumed, that the vehicles they followed round this bend were the vehicles they found when they got round this bend.’
‘I guess,’ said Valentine. He didn’t see what difference it made.
A marsh bird made a noise like a 1950s football rattle.
‘Two things are possible,’ said Shaw. ‘One of the
Valentine spat in the snow. ‘Well that clears things up.’
‘Yes, it does.’ Shaw beamed. ‘I reckon we’re pretty close, George – pretty close. The jigsaw’s almost finished.’ He smiled the surfer’s smile.
‘So what shape’s the missing bit?’ asked Valentine, acutely aware that the ‘we’ didn’t appear to include him.
‘I’m not absolutely sure, but it’s got four wheels.’
Snow lay across the yard at Gallow Marsh, marred by tyre tracks, straw laid out in the worst of the ruts. The hazmat unit had beaten them to it, and was parked in the entrance to the barn, out of the wind. A blue light flashed, shadows dancing round the high rafters within. They walked past it and out through a pair of double doors on the far side. There was another yard here, bounded on one side by a deep arrow‐straight dyke running towards the sea. A broken harrow stood rusting in frosted weeds, and a pile of sugar beet gave off a stench of damp earth. Two farmhands stood smoking in the half‐light, standing on the snowy bank a hundred yards down towards the beach. Closer, three men stood in full protective gear, looking at mobile phones.
The dyke was a gullet of shadow about twenty feet across, the surface ten feet below them. The sound of water churning filled the dusk as the tide pushed in, swamping the banks of reeds and grass. One of the hazmat team produced a heavy‐duty torch and scanned the dark channel below.
‘She’s here somewhere; I found it earlier,’ he said. A corner of bright unpainted metal stuck up in midstream, the edge of a box, perhaps, an angle of reflective steel.
‘OK,’ said Shaw. ‘When you’re ready.’
‘Right. But we think this might be dangerous, yes?’
The firemen began to unload a winch from the unit, a set of boat hooks. Valentine let the burst of flame at the end of a match warm his spirits as he lit a cigarette. This was tying up a loose end. They were making progress, and it felt good. Sunset soon, and then back to the city. The canteen at St James’s did a roast on Sunday nights. He’d read the papers, then watch the live match on Sky at the Artichoke. It was the best week’s work he’d done in ten years. Yes, it made him feel very good. It made him feel like a human being again.
One of the farmhands came up to Shaw; a teenager, swaddled against the cold, stamping his feet. ‘Izzy said if we found anything we should get her first, but the kid’s not well – flu, she reckons – so we thought we’d ring you lot.’ They all stood back as a fireman in waders began to edge down the bank with a hook.
‘Thanks, it might be important,’ said Shaw. He scanned the horizon, trying not to look in the water, wondering what the chances were that whatever had come ashore that Monday night was still alive.
The fireman expertly snagged the metal triangle, then attached a chain back to the winch. The engine squealed, the chain tightened, water droplets flying off, and then whatever it was in mid‐stream got sucked off the muddy bed of the dyke. Suddenly it was there beneath them, on the grass bank.
‘Well that’s solved that mystery,’ said Shaw.
It was an AA diversion sign. Black lettering on a yellow background. Green weed, black under the light, knotted around one of the metal legs.
The door to the farmhouse was on the latch, the hallway warm, full of shadows. Upstairs they could hear a child’s voice, Izzy Dereham’s comforting murmur running in counterpoint. Valentine shouted up that they were there, that they needed to talk. She said she’d be a minute, so they sat in the kitchen by what was left of a log fire, watching the clock creep towards six. Three rabbits, a hare and a brace of pigeon hung gutted from a rafter. She must be good with a gun, thought Shaw, and imagined her out on the marsh, the birds wheeling over her head. There was a child’s drawing pinned to the door – a black cat again, on a raft at sea. Shaw walked to the window and shivered. Outside the clouds had finally closed over Gallow Marsh. The night snow was sporadic, in the wind.
When she appeared in the kitchen she seemed distracted, harassed. She considered taking the rocking chair by the Aga, but stood instead, leaning against the warm rail.
‘Detective Inspector. Sergeant.’ She tried to find pockets for her hands but gave up the struggle. She wore heavy‐duty boots, green canvas trousers, a smock in blue, blotched with chemical stains.
‘We found something in the ditch.’
She crossed her arms.
‘The AA diversion sign. We wondered where it had
‘I don’t understand,’ she said.
‘Was it just for the money?’ He looked round the kitchen. ‘The lease is up next year? Things must be tough. And then John Holt turns up on the doorstep one day – bringing a present for his godchild?’
She looked at her feet. Shaw thought how it was always little lies and omissions that were the real clues to guilt. Valentine got out his notebook and began to scribble a note.
‘Holt’s got your daughter’s picture at his daughter’s house. Bit like that one…’ Shaw nodded at the snapshot framed on the wall.
She shrugged. ‘John’s my uncle. It’s not a crime, is it? I’m a Holt too – I kept Pat’s name after he died. It’s all there was.’
Shaw braced both hands around his knee. ‘You’ve been formally interviewed about the events here on Siberia Belt – you didn’t mention the connection. Neither did he. What was there to hide?’
She ran her wrist across her lips and Shaw could see the rhythmic tremble in the fingers. Water began to pump out of her eyes and she grabbed a chair, the legs scraping horribly on the cork tiles.
‘Your parents lost their farm, didn’t they?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ she said, her head dropping. ‘Dad couldn’t take it – he killed himself, in the car with a pipe to the exhaust. I was seven. Uncle John helped Mum for a while, but it was no good. We gave it up.’
‘And then it looked like it might happen again. Your
The line of her mouth broke, a sudden flush in her face squeezing out the tears, fully formed, like a child’s crystal beads. ‘It wasn’t a crime,’ she said, throwing her head back. ‘No one was going to get hurt.’
Shaw winced at the cliché, because it was never true. ‘John said James Baker‐Sibley owned Shark Tooth – and Shark Tooth owned Gallow Marsh. I’d get a year, rent free, time to get back on top of things.’ She stood suddenly, pacing the kitchen. ‘All I had to do was put the sign out at the right moment, then fetch it back in. They had to do it on Siberia Belt because there’s no phone signal – and it’s the only spot on her route that’s remote enough. It’s always her route – that was something else I had to do, down on the coast road, I timed her each Monday for a month. Five o’clock, a few minutes either way. She never missed.’
She went to the mantelpiece over the fire. There was a family picture, framed in black wood; she turned it face down.