The smashed glass at the scene was matched to pieces found still clinging to the rim of the headlamp of the abandoned car — Mosse’s car. In terms of material evidence, this was as good as fingerprints. He was arrested, taken to St James’s and held overnight. A preliminary analysis of skin tissue found in the glove pointed to Mosse. Usherettes at the cinema were unable to recall him in the audience that evening. It had been a packed house. Mosse was charged with murder at 3.30 on the afternoon of his first day in custody. He denied the charge. Bail was refused.
Police records showed Jonathan Tessier had been cautioned on three occasions for vandalism — twice for scratching the paintwork of parked cars. The prosecution planned to suggest that Mosse had found Tessier preparing to damage the Polo, and an attempt to administer summary justice had spiralled out of control. Hence they would be
Shaw looked around, as if he might find it now, more than a decade later.
The court case itself had been a one?day wonder. They’d made a crucial mistake, Shaw and Valentine, by taking the glove to Mosse’s flat.
Mosse’s defence team reviewed the forensic evidence in the final days before the case was to open in the Crown Court. His barrister considered the error grave enough to bring it to the judge’s attention in his opening address. Mosse’s mother kept her flat clean, an upright vacuum stationed in the hallway like a sentry, but even the cleanest surfaces collect a thin veneer of household dust — its composition varying between 62 and 84 per cent decaying human skin. That was how Mosse’s DNA had got on the glove, maintained Mosse’s defence team. The two detectives had been in the flat with it for nearly forty?five minutes. More than enough time for the unbagged evidence to be contaminated.
The prosecution was forced to concede that the glove was the only physical evidence which linked Mosse to the scene of the crime. There was, of course, abundant forensic evidence of Mosse’s presence in the car, but nothing that proved he had driven it from the car park
The case against Bobby Mosse was thrown out shortly after lunch on the first day. The judge’s closing remarks were brief, but he had time to suggest that the slipshod police work which had compromised the prosecution case left open the possibility that the contamination of the evidence might have been deliberate.
So Mosse walked free owing to a procedural error — evidence found at the scene should be bagged, tagged and remain in the custody of the scene?of?crime team until booked into the evidence room at St James’s — signed in by the duty sergeant. But Jack Shaw had been too angry to think straight. And George Valentine thought he was too good a copper to have to follow the rule book. That was the ex planation Shaw wanted to believe. But the judge’s barely veiled suggestion that the pair had attempted to fabricate the evidence nagged at him like an aching tooth.
Outside the court Mosse posed for press pictures under the wheeling seagulls on the quayside. Shaw had often tried to imagine what his father must have felt that day: the defeat, the injustice perhaps, the impotency. Or was it more complicated than that? Resigned, perhaps, to his fate because he
If they did frame Mosse then they’d paid a heavy price for it. His father was dead within the year. George Valentine was knocked down a rank and sent out to the sticks, a one?way ticket in his hand. And Peter Shaw had paid for it too: the memory of the father he’d idolized marred by the worst slur of all:
‘I never understood why Dad was so angry about it,’ said Shaw, looking at Valentine. ‘Mum said it got under his skin, right from the start. But he’d done kids before — that schoolboy strangled by his father in the North End in the seventies. But it didn’t get to him — not like this.’ Shaw dragged a boot through the puddle, sending a swash of water out over the pockmarked concrete.
Valentine took out his wallet, flicking it open, holding it up for Shaw to see.
The details of the Tessier case had never registered with Shaw at the time. He’d been at Hendon, with the Met. He’d met Lena. He was building his own life. So he’d never really looked at the child’s face — other than a smudged black?and?white thumbnail which had appeared in the nationals in London when the body had been found. But now there it was, in colour, pin?sharp. And he could see why his father had taken the case personally:
Jonathan Tessier’s face had found a place in George Valentine’s wallet, where his own family snapshot should have been. Shaw couldn’t imagine what it was like being that obsessed with a crime a decade old, but he could understand it, because Valentine’s career had nearly ended beneath Vancouver House that night just as suddenly as his father’s.
Hiding his emotions he handed the wallet back to Valentine without a word. ‘You’ve been back before,’ he said, wishing now that he hadn’t asked to see the spot.
‘Sure,’ said Valentine, lighting up, the sudden flare warming the cold interior. Shaw watched him draw the nicotine into his narrow chest. A car bounced down the ramp and accelerated across the tarmac before braking in a neat circle, the smell of burnt rubber instantly acrid. Valentine licked his lip where the cigarette butts had made it sore.
‘And Mosse?’ asked Shaw.
‘Life of crime,’ he replied, smiling. ‘Solicitor, down at College Lane, the magistrates courts. Married, two kids — boys; Citroen Xsara Picasso, detached house at Ringsted. A conservatory, carriage lamps, crazy paving. A cat called Zebra.’
‘But otherwise you’re not bothered,’ said Shaw. Valentine gave him a rare direct look. ‘I’m bothered.
Shaw envied Valentine that promise,
And he stored away the slight, after all these years; the knowledge that if his own father had been innocent of fabricating evidence why hadn’t he asked his son to clear his name?
‘You had your own career,’ said Valentine, reading his mind. ‘Mine was over. I had the time. I’ve had the time.’
‘And?’
‘And we’re right back where we were on that night. Your dad and I knew for a fact that Bobby Mosse killed that kid. We didn’t need the forensics on the glove to be sure. If you’d been there that night you’d have known too. He was cool all right; cool as an ice?cube. But the mother was a wreck, and she really struggled to get her story straight. Then when we showed him the glove he nearly lost it — started shaking, threw up in the loo. Said he was upset — well, yeah, I guess he was. Upset he was gonna get nicked.
‘He was guilty as sin. Trouble is, I still can’t prove it. Twelve years going fucking nowhere. Story of my life.’ He spat in the puddle and walked away, fading into the shadows.
Out on Styleman’s Middle, the sandbank three miles off Ingol Beach, five cockle boats came in to land. The snow, falling from the north, melted as it touched the sands. Crews disembarked, pencil?grey outlines working in a bank of falling snowflakes, bristling with rakes and buckets and forks. One worker carried a navigation light, a red beacon in the gloom. Otherwise the view was grey: the dark line of the horizon separating the grey clouds from the grey sea. Sometimes a seagull wheeled, a tiny white tear in the monochrome canvas. The tide, edging out, revealed the surface of the sandbank; the deep trenches left by yesterday’s cockle?pickers had been sucked smooth by the sea, but the lines remained. And a single bucket, filled to brimming with the fine, gritty sand; a moat at its base washed deep by the ebb and flow of the waves.
Duncan Sly, gangmaster, joined the men to haul one of the boats hard into the bank. A big man in a seaman’s donkey jacket, a blue cap covering thinning hair on a skull like a cannonball.
He spotted the cockle?picker’s bucket. Leaving kit on the sands was a crime. Once the tide was over them they usually got sucked down, gone for ever. ‘It better not be one of ours,’ he said. He’d know if it had been left by yesterday’s gang because they marked all their gear: not
The pickers didn’t watch; they were cocooned in the cotton?wool world which helped them live through the pain in their backs, the numbing boredom. The snow fell on them, heavy now, cutting down visibility like a shutter. They’d been on Styleman’s Middle for less than five minutes and most had looked at their watches once already. Spread out in twos in the mist, each within sight of the others for safety, they began to dig.
Ten feet from the bucket Sly realized what he was really seeing: not sand piled high to form a dome, matted with seaweed, but a face, the distorted oval of an open mouth, the head tilted back sharply, a small green crab on the left cheek like a beauty spot. He saw that the head was not the only part of the body which had emerged from
