Valentine sniffed, brushing the back of his hand across the tip of his nose. ‘She could have got out the seaward side — the passenger side, a single print perhaps, lost under a drift? We could have missed it. There was plenty of wind about, even if there wasn’t much snow. Then the helicopter landed and covered the lot anyway.’
Shaw walked to the edge of the deep dyke which ran the length of Siberia Belt on the seaward side. He stood on the brink and let a snowball fall at his feet. ‘Where’d she go from there, George? If she jumped the ditch we’re looking for a runaway teenager with an Olympic long?jump gold medal. Plus she’d leave prints on the far side on the flat sand and we know it was untouched. If she gets in the ditch she can only go as far as the sluice that way.’ He pointed south. ‘And we know there were no prints there. And if she went that way,’ he pointed north, ‘there’s another sluice blocking the way after fifty yards and there was no sign of any prints there either. If she’d stayed in the water for just ten minutes, maybe less, she’d never get out. Hypothermia. There was two degrees of frost, if the dyke wasn’t full of tidal water it would have been solid ice. We’ve got to do better than that.’
Valentine stamped his feet. Left, right, left, right. ‘OK. She was hidden,’ he said. ‘On the back of the truck under the tarpaulin. We didn’t see her and she got out when the CSI team arrived. They wouldn’t know she wasn’t one of the witnesses. She just walks out once the place is
Shaw clapped three times, the sound muffled by his gloved hands. Perhaps that was the key to unlocking Valentine’s skills: wind him up first. ‘That’s the best idea either of us have had since all this started.’ It was just about the
‘He’s on the team.’
‘He checked IDs — he looked at mine and I chaired his appointment panel for God’s sake. By that point the CSIs had a forensic tent up. They’d booked the tipper load — I saw the manifest: plasterboard, building supplies and a tarpaulin. No leggy blonde.’
Valentine sighed. ‘I’ll talk to Twine, make sure. It’s a long stint on the same spot — perhaps he slipped off for a Jimmy.’
The wind blew in off the sea, a fresh shower of snow closing down visibility to a few yards. Then, just as suddenly, it cleared and a gash of blue opened up at sea.
When they looked south again they could see a figure walking towards them. A minute later Tom Hadden was with them, shaking a flask. The three of them stood in a close triangle passing round a cup of sweet tea the colour of estuary mud.
Hadden ran a hand back through his thinning strawberry?blond hair. ‘Yeah. I’ve seen a marsh harrier, and a seal — large as life, just off the beach there.’ He smiled. ‘But no. Routine, you’ll have a full report tomorrow first thing. But I can’t think there’s anything relevant, which, given the fact we’ve got a murder victim on the scene is relevant in itself.’
Hadden leant back, closing his eyes to think.
‘We think the victim had a passenger in the pick?up,’ said Shaw. ‘A girl.’
Hadden opened his eyes, the whites slightly bloodshot. ‘There’s plenty of spare prints — could be her.’
‘But nothing else on the passenger side?’
‘I’ll double?check,’ he said.
Valentine smiled. ‘There were ladders on top of the Corsa. Fifteen?foot extent — right?’
‘Yeah,’ said Hadden, remembering he’d put that in his initial report, in the fine print. ‘So what?’
‘Prints, blood, anything?’
‘I did them myself back at the Ark. Clean as whistles.’
‘The idea being?’ asked Shaw.
Valentine shrugged. ‘Nothing that makes any sense.’ Hadden laughed. ‘I think one of the witnesses might have noticed the killer building a bridge out of ladders to get to his victim.’
‘Like I said,’ said Valentine, taking a breath. ‘Doesn’t make sense.’ But if they were looking for a way the killer
Shaw could see it too. ‘But one more check — just for us?’ he asked Hadden.
‘OK. Sure.’
‘Anything on the spark plugs?’ asked Shaw.
‘Got ’em here.’ Hadden patted the pockets of his all?weather jacket, retrieving a plastic envelope containing a pair of spark plugs. Hadden looked drawn, sleepless, the freckles along his forehead joined up in blotches on the pale skin. ‘Reckon they’re a year old — more. Perfectly serviceable but the contacts are well worn. We sent them down to the vehicle pool and they reckon — judging by sight — that they’d run for another year, maybe longer.’
‘Right. So not new?’
‘No way. The others — the ones from the inside of the cab — they’re shot. We tried them in one of the squad cars. They wouldn’t spark if you put five million volts through them.’
‘So that was part of the plan,’ said Valentine. ‘To fake a breakdown.’
‘But he didn’t need to, did he?’ said Shaw. ‘Because the tree was down — chopped down.’
Valentine shook his head. ‘Right. Belt and braces? A change of plan?’
‘Or two plans,’ said Shaw.
Traffic control radioed them back before the news had got through to the murder inquiry room: the van which had crashed at Burn Bridge was one of North Norfolk Security’s — the company that owned the vehicle stranded on Siberia Belt. There was a single fatality. The RTA unit was in attendance, the road closed for the night. The company’s MD was en route to the scene.
‘He’s saved us the trip to his place,’ said Valentine.
At the RTA checkpoint Shaw flashed a warrant card and they trundled forward to within fifty yards of the bridge; a graceful concrete arc with steel safety railings. The sun had set, leaving behind a wound in the sky. The river flowed inland, seawater filling the maze of creeks and ditches so that the mirror?like surface seemed to fill the world to the brim.
The van had crashed through the metal barriers but its rear wheels had become entangled in the sheared metal, so that it hung now, swinging slightly, the windscreen pointing down into the water. Except there wasn’t a wind?screen. The driver hadn’t been wearing his seatbelt and on impact had been thrown through the glass. His broken legs were snagged behind the wheel so that he too hung down, his arms reaching towards the water, a snapshot of a diving man.
Amongst the police cars and emergency vehicles was a
The RTA unit had an inflatable in the water, a floodlight already set up on the bank. As they got closer Shaw could see what was left of the driver’s face, lacerated beyond recognition. Blood dripped from the man’s hands, carried off by the flowing river below. Valentine hung back, chatting to the senior fire officer with the RTA unit.
‘Do we know who he is?’ asked Shaw of a uniformed inspector in a reflective jacket. Shaw knew the officer vaguely. Ex?CID, close to retirement, with an attitude problem that age had done nothing to mellow.
He shrugged. ‘Let’s get him down first,’ he said. ‘He falls in the water we could lose the body. What’s it to you?’
‘Could be something, or nothing,’ said Shaw, happy to keep him in the dark. He searched his memory for the inspector’s name. Jennings, that was it. He’d worked with Shaw’s father in what he suspected both would have called the good old days.
There was no doubt what had happened. The BMW had been overtaken by the van, touching 80 mph. It had hit the black ice in the shadow of a line of poplars which guarded the approach to the bridge. The witness said the driver had nearly regained control but had just clipped the railings, ricocheting to the opposite side, smashing through before being snagged by the ruptured metal.
A black sports car crept towards them from the checkpoint. ‘This should be the owner of the security firm,’ said Jennings. ‘He might have an ID for you.’
