The man who got out certainly looked like he owned
‘I’ll have a word,’ said Shaw, before Jennings moved. Valentine joined him.
The MD’s name was Jeff Ragg. Well fed and tall, his face looked as though it had been soaking up moisture in a bucket all day; the features heavy and bloated, the fingers too, holding a cigarette with a gold band above the filter.
‘It’s been a long day,’ said Ragg, implying he didn’t want to talk. The voice was silky, like a recorded message on a cinema?ticket line. But he couldn’t look at the corpse for more than a second.
‘Can you identify the driver?’ asked Shaw.
‘It’s Jonah. Jonah Shreeves,’ said Ragg. He drew on the cigarette and let the smoke sting his eyes.
Shaw thought of the last time he’d seen the security guard, behind the wheel of a van identical to this one on a snow?choked Siberia Belt.
‘You can’t see the face,’ said Valentine. He ran a hand inside his raincoat to comfort his stomach. No, you couldn’t see his face, not for the blood and bone.
‘The van’s missing from our compound and so’s Jonah. He’s my son?in?law. I don’t have to see his face.’ Ragg gave them a cold look, as icy as the frozen reeds on the riverbank. Shaw tried to gauge his emotions; a mixture perhaps of anger and resignation, both unsullied by grief. ‘Part of the family until three o’clock this afternoon,’ he added. ‘I rang him out on the round and told him you lot wanted a word about what happened on Siberia Belt. Then he went home, that’s their home — I bought it for them — and threw some clothes in a bag, left a note for my daughter Mary.
‘He had a criminal record,’ said Shaw. A seagull screeched and fell on the hanging body, pulling clumsily at the hair.
Ragg’s eyes narrowed and he bought himself some time by taking a step closer to the water. The van creaked as it swung slightly in the tidal breeze. ‘I didn’t know.’
‘No CRB check? That’s standard, isn’t it?’ asked Valentine, failing to hide a note of disbelief.
‘She trusted him,’ was all Ragg said. ‘She said it was an insult to check him out. Now we know why.’
The RTA unit had got steel cables round the van and were preparing to winch it back to the road. The vibrations set the corpse jiggling, the blood?red hands dancing like a marionette’s.
‘She had to marry someone,’ added Ragg. ‘With a kid on the way. If he was gonna be in the family he might as well be on the payroll and do some fucking work.’ He turned his back on the body of his son?in?law and looked out to sea where dusk was gathering on the horizon. ‘What was on his record?’
‘He nearly killed his girlfriend. He’d robbed her grandmother, and she wanted to turn him in. Broke her arms. But there were others,’ said Shaw. ‘Your daughter. Did he…?’
‘No. Nothing. If he had I’d have killed him. He knew that.’
‘Why d’you think he did a runner?’ asked Shaw. ‘Because if you’d told me about his past I might have
Valentine coughed, the cold air beginning to make his lungs ache.
‘It’s possible, Mr Ragg,’ said Shaw, ‘that the vehicles on Siberia Belt were diverted off the main road in order to set up a robbery — the contents of your security van being the target. Could Shreeves have been involved? The inside man?’
‘It crossed my mind,’ said Ragg. ‘We operate all along the north Norfolk coast, have done for fifteen years. There are plenty of black spots for mobile signals but most of them are out on the beaches or the marsh. There’s just a few stretches of road. My vans never use them. We don’t have radios, so the mobile signal is crucial. Even the worst black spots can usually pick up something if you walk around a bit searching for the signal. But not Siberia Belt — there’s no signal on that stretch for about three miles. It’s the worst black spot on the coast. Which is why the regular drivers never use it. Ever.’
‘So maybe he was involved?’ pressed Shaw.
‘I love my daughter, Inspector, but she’s not the world’s best judge of character. I told her to wait when she met Jonah — give it a year. But she wouldn’t. I said she’d regret it one day. She’s at home now, doing exactly that.’
The van on the bridge shuddered and they heard a joint crack in the swinging corpse. A leg had broken and Valentine looked away as the bone appeared, the shattered end glimpsed through the shredded overalls.
‘I should be with her,’ said Ragg. ‘As for Jonah, if he
A single blue balloon hung from the door handle of Flat 34, The Saltings, North End; the home of Harvey Ellis. From the third?floor balcony they could see over the rough lots to where a footpath was lit by a single lamp. In the dark the snow seemed to have its own glow, as if neon tubes had been sunk within. As Shaw knocked he pushed from his mind the vision of Jonah Shreeves’s corpse hanging below Burn Bridge. It seemed very likely that Shreeves had met his death fleeing the certainty of his exposure as a violent criminal who lied his way into both a job and a marriage. They might never know if he’d been part of a conspiracy to stage a robbery on the isolated coast road. A plan frustrated, perhaps, by the sudden snow storm.
Harvey Ellis’s death had been no less violent than that of Jonah Shreeves — but in Ellis’s case they had a murderer still to find. Shaw squared his shoulders and knocked again, a triple crack. Valentine looked at his shoes, trying to remember the last time he’d worked a thirteen?hour day. He felt shattered, almost dizzy, but good too — like he had a career again. As they waited the only sound was the swish?swish of the ring road, and somewhere a washing machine rocking in its final phase.
Footsteps within, sharp and workmanlike, coming closer on the lino. A woman who introduced herself as
Grace Ellis was on the sofa holding her small daughter. An older boy sat at a Formica table with homework in front of him — an exercise book with special grid lines for maths. He’d been crying, and there wasn’t a mark on the paper. Shaw noted the glass of water in front of him and the frayed collar of the boy’s white shirt. He could see his father in his face — the large features crowding the narrow skull, the small, compact build. Valentine accepted tea in a mug and took a dining?room chair for a seat. Shaw stood, leaving the armchair free in front of the electric fire.
Mrs Ellis stared at the TV which wasn’t on, her knees pressed together, until Mrs Tyre prised the toddler from her arms and let her play on the carpet. The boy left his books and knelt, spinning toys for his sister.
Shaw estimated Grace Ellis’s age as late twenties, early thirties. She had what looked like natural blonde hair falling to her shoulders, and the kind of thin stretched skin which reveals the veins beneath, the bones of the forehead and cheeks threatening to break through the papery surface. He tried to conjure up Harvey Ellis’s face — the adolescent features — and thought what a fragile couple they’d been.
‘The blue balloon on the door…?’ asked Shaw. Grace shook her head, put a hand out for a mug of tea, then took it back. ‘It’s for Jake.’ She thought about that. ‘He’s got leukaemia and there’s an appeal — it was Harvey’s idea. Jake’s mad about birds of prey — always
Shaw thought about the plastic eagle hanging in the pick?up’s cab. ‘It’s a start,’ he said.
Valentine was reluctantly impressed by Shaw’s skills at talking to people, putting them at ease. He wondered what Shaw would say if he told him it was a skill his father had also mastered. ‘Where’s Jake now?’ he asked, his lips suddenly coming into contact with the tea bag floating in the mug.
‘The Queen Victoria,’ said Grace Ellis. ‘We go every day.’ She looked up at a clock on the mantelpiece. ‘At six. We’re late.’
‘I’ll arrange for a car to take you,’ said Valentine, putting the mug down quickly, unable to face another encounter with the wayward tea bag.
Shaw left her some silence. Then they filled in the missing life: Ellis was local, primary school in the North End, then GNVQs at the college. He’d been a boy soldier, the TA, and he still played football most weeks for an army side. Jake and his brother Michael used to go and watch. That was Harvey’s big passion — although
‘I can’t stand it,’ she said, nodding at a CD rack by the fireplace. She looked at her watch. ‘I’m going to have to tell Jake.’
‘The illness must have been a blow,’ said Shaw, trying to get her to talk. ‘When was your son diagnosed?’
‘Eight months ago. Wasn’t a blow, exactly. Well, course it
