The sports car nudged the speed limit and Sarah Baker-Sibley watched the first flake of snow fall on the windscreen in the middle of her field of vision. She swept it aside with a single swish of the windscreen wipers and punched the automatic lighter into the dashboard, her lips counting to ten, the cigarette held ready between dry teeth.
Ten seconds. She thrummed her fingers on the leather-bound steering wheel.
It was two minutes short of five o’clock and the Alfa’s headlights were waking up the cat’s eyes. She pulled the lighter free of the dashboard. The ringlet of heated wire seemed to lift her mood and she laughed, drawing in the nicotine enthusiastically.
She turned up the heating to maximum as a spiro-graph of ice began to encroach on the windscreen. The indicator showed the outside temperature at 0°C, then briefly -1°C. She dropped her speed to 50 mph, and checked the rear-view mirror for following traffic: she’d been overtaken once, the car was still ahead of her by half a mile, and there were lights behind, but closer, a hundred yards or less.
She drew savagely on the menthol cigarette, swishing more snowflakes off the windscreen. Attached to the passenger-side dashboard by a sucker was a little pink picture frame enclosing a snapshot of a girl with hair down to her waist, in a school uniform complete with beret. She touched the image, as if it was an icon, and smiled into the rear-view mirror; but when she saw the lipstick on the filter of the menthol cigarette, and the imprint of her thin dry lips, her eyes filled with tears.
Rounding a bend she saw rear lights ahead again for a few seconds. And a sign, luminous, regulation black on yellow, in the middle of the carriageway, an AA insignia in the top-left-hand corner.
DIVERSION
FLOOD
An arrow pointed bluntly to the left – seawards down a narrow unmetalled road.
‘Sod it.’ She hit the steering wheel with the heel of her palm, then brushed a tear from her eye. Ahead, the road ran straight for a mile but there was no traffic either way.
She slowed and looked at her watch: 5.09pm. Throwing her head back she let the smoke dribble out of her nose, as if the day had delivered its last fatal blow.
Looking in the rear-view again she saw that the following car was close, so she put the Alfa in first, and swung it off the coast road on to the snow-covered track. The headlights raked the trees as she turned and fleetingly lit a figure, stock-still, dressed in a full-length dark coat flecked with snow, the head turned away. Then the lights swung further round and she saw a road sign.
SIBERIA BELT
Ahead, immediately, were the tail lights of the car in front. There was a sudden silence as a snow flurry struck; muffling the world outside. For the first time she felt afraid, haunted by the sudden image of the lone figure, behind her now, somewhere in the dark. The wind returned, thudding against the offside, fist-blows deadened by a boxer’s glove. She searched the rear-view mirror but there were no lights behind, no trace of the figure following. The tail lights ahead were still visible; warm, glowing and safe. She pressed on quickly in pursuit.
2
Detective Inspector Peter Shaw stood on the waterline as the snow fell. He tried to smile into an Arctic north wind. The seascape was glacier-blue, the white horses whipped off the peaks of the waves before they could break. A sandbank offshore was dusted white with snow – icing sugar on marzipan. As quickly as the snow flurry had come, it was gone. But he knew a blizzard would be with them by nightfall, the snow clouds massed on the horizon like a range of mountains.
‘Dead water,’ he said, licking a snowflake off his lips. ‘So it should be here. Right here.’ He tapped his boot rhythmically on the spot, creating a miniature quicksand inside his footprint, and zipped up his yellow RNLI waterproof jacket. ‘We’ll have to wait.’ Waiting was something he found it impossible to do well. He wanted to run, along the water’s edge, feel his heart pounding, blood rushing, the intoxicating flood of natural painkillers soaking his brain. Standing still was a form of torture. He needed the runner’s high.
Detective Sergeant George Valentine stood six foot down wind, his face turned away from the sea. He stifled a yawn by clenching his teeth. His eyes streamed water. An allergy – seaweed perhaps, salt on the air, or just fresh air. Valentine looked at his feet, black slip-ons, oozing salt water. He was too old for this: five years off retirement, rheumatism in every bone. He blew into his hands and smelt a hint of nicotine from his fingernails.
The setting sun broke free of the clouds for a moment at the death and in a splash of light out at sea Shaw counted six cockle-pickers’ boats, heading in for Lynn. He scanned the ruffled seascape with a telescope raised to his good eye. The iris was blue, as pale as falling water; the other was covered by a dressing, secured with a plaster across the socket, the inflamed red edges of a fresh scar just visible beneath. ‘A bright yellow drum, right? Mustard, like the other one.’ He put a finger to the wound, a plain wedding band catching the light. ‘And floating a foot clear of the water. So where is it?’
Shaw’s face mirrored the wide-open seascape; the kind of face that’s always scanning a horizon. His cheekbones were high, as if some enterprising warrior from the Mongol Horde had wandered off to the north Norfolk coast, pitching his tent by the beach huts. The skin on his forehead was tight, tanned and unlined. He stood with his feet squarely apart, matching the width of his shoulders, as if he owned the beach.
DS Valentine looked at his watch. He’d bought it at the Tuesday Market in Lynn for one pound and was pretty sure the word ROLEX was fake. Its tick-tock was oddly loud, but the second hand had stopped. He shivered, his head like a vulture’s, hung low on a thin neck. He tried to keep his mouth shut because he knew his teeth would ache if they got caught in the wind. Shaw, who studied faces as closely as George Valentine studied the odds at Newmarket, thought his DS’s bore a remarkable resemblance to a whippet’s, the lines around his lips – the striae – turning his mouth into a small snout.
A radio crackled and Valentine retrieved it from the shapeless raincoat. He listened, said simply ‘Right.’ Fumbling it back inside the folds of the coat he retrieved a tube of mints, popping one, crunching it immediately. ‘Coastguard. They lost sight of the drum an hour ago. The water’s churning up with the tide.’ He shrugged as if he knew the moods of the ocean. ‘Not hopeful.’
‘We’ll wait,’ said Shaw, running a hand through close-cropped fair hair. ‘An hour. The tide’ll turn.’
They stood together, one looking south, the other north, wondering how it had come to this.
Shaw and Valentine, North Norfolk Constabulary’s latest investigative duo. Some joker in admin, thought Shaw, some old lag who knew the past and didn’t care about the future. They needed a new partner for Shaw, who at thirty-one years of age was the force’s youngest DI, the whiz-kid with the fancy degree and a father once tipped to be the next chief constable. And they’d come up with George Valentine – a living relic of a different world, where crooks were villains, and coppers gave hooligans a clip round the ear. A man who’d been the best detective of his generation until one mistake had put him on a blacklist from which he’d never escaped. A man whose career trajectory now looked like a brick returning to earth.
Shaw walked down to the water’s edge and let the next wave leave white bubbles on the toecap of his boot. Valentine followed reluctantly, popping another mint, the fingers on his right hand phlegm-yellow from cigarette stains. Half a mile east Shaw could see a clump of trees marking the point where the creeping dunes had come to rest for a lifetime, a row of low hummocks thirty foot high. Gun Hill. Just below the crest were the cracked remains of a military emplacement, the metal fittings for an Ack-Ack gun in the concrete, snow in the rusted grooves. He’d stood there a decade ago with his mother, watching his father’s ashes blow away into the beach grass.