shadows, fight dragons under the trees.’ He laughed. ‘I miss him.’
Shaw took a deep breath. ‘George. I told you how this is going to be.’ The snow was driving in again from the docks, so they turned their backs and looked through the ironwork gates. ‘It’s Warren’s call. He’s got everything I know, everything you know. We’re off the case.’
‘You too?’ asked Valentine, a smile disfiguring his face.
‘Me too.’ Shaw tasted a snowflake on his lip, caught the acid hint of carbon dioxide. ‘I’m the son of the investigating DCI. The officer explicitly censured by the judge in the original trial. Any juror would accept that I had an interest in clearing Jack Shaw’s name.’
‘And do you?’
Shaw clenched his fists, stamped his feet, spooking a raven which rattled into one of the snow?laden trees. He felt trapped, and that made him angry. And when he was angry he needed exercise, needed to dissipate the energy. But he couldn’t run.
‘I have an interest in finding out who killed Jonathan Tessier.’
‘But you’re not sure that’s the same thing, are you?’
‘No. That’s right,’ he said, aware that he’d been cornered into the implied accusation. Because if he didn’t trust Jack Shaw, then he didn’t trust George Valentine either.
‘Thanks for the vote of confidence,’ said Valentine, flapping the raincoat like a pair of furled wings. ‘I’m done for,’ he said, suddenly deflated. ‘I’m going home.’
But he didn’t mean it.
Valentine walked down through the town to Vancouver’s statue. The day had left him confused and exhausted. They’d cracked open the heart of the case — he was sure of that. But his final confrontation with Shaw had sucked the adrenaline out of him. The thought that his future, what was left of it, was in the hands of DCS Max Warren made him feel impotent, discarded.
He wandered back towards Greenland Street, forcing himself not to steal a glance ahead to check if the light shone from the house on the corner. It did. And there, low down in the curved plate glass of the double doors of the old shop, the white piece of crisp cartridge paper.
‘The game is open, night and day,’ said Valentine, translating.
He knocked twice, waited, knocked again.
A man opened the door, the man they called the sentinel. Beyond the doors the sudden heat enveloped them both. The sentinel stood, smiling, waiting for him to choose. Which was polite of him, because although upstairs, in the loft, they played white pigeon, Valentine always climbed down to the basement for fan?tan.
He took one of the tall stools beside the fan?tan table. The cashier sat to one side, the dealer stood. There were eight players, each on stools. There was no alcohol — Valentine liked it that way, he liked his vices singly, and this way he knew that he’d really enjoy the thrill of luck.
An hour later he’d made?300. The dealer smiled at him. ‘The numbers like you,’ he said.
‘Makes a change,’ said Valentine, using the answer he always had ready.
He stood, stretching, poured himself some water and went to the far end of the room to sit. He always stopped at?300. It was his interim limit, the point when he forced himself to take stock. Fan?tan was a game of pure chance. George Valentine’s grip on the laws of probability was crisp. He knew that a winning streak was no less likely to lead to another winning streak than a losing streak. But?300 up was always a good time to think about what it meant: six crisp?50 notes. After all, he
The far end of the room was a rest station. A set of
The snow was keeping people in, they agreed. Even the police. They all laughed because DS Valentine had never hidden his trade; indeed his relationship with illegal gambling was fundamentally symbiotic. When the Serious Crime Squad had tried to clear up the gambling dens of South Lynn the house in Greenland Street had been mysteriously empty, the cellar crammed with broken furniture.
Valentine thrust a hand in his pocket to get his handkerchief but found, instead, a scrap of paper. He took it out, unfolded it: the six savage lines on the side of John Holt’s car door. He’d recognized immediately that it wasn’t just a scrawl, a mindless graffito. But now, suddenly, he was sure he knew what it was. He just didn’t know what it meant.
‘Anyone know what this says?’ he said, flattening it out on the table.
They all looked at each other, a necklace of glances which didn’t include him.
‘Joe’s sign,’ said the man they called Paddy. He was compact, the racial characteristics of his face mixed with something subtle: Anglo?Saxon perhaps, or Celt. ‘It’s his name. Simple as that.’
‘And who’s Joe?’ asked Valentine.
‘A loan shark?’
‘With sharp teeth,’ said Paddy, running a finger along his own.
Shaw waded out onto the beach at Old Hunstanton, bare feet running over the snow on the sand above the high?tide mark, water falling off the winter wetsuit. Lena stood on the sands cradling a mug. She laughed at him, the way he lifted his feet quickly off the cold pebbles which lay in front of the cafe.
They walked back to the cottage and she lay on the rug in front of the wood?burning stove while he got out of the suit and found a bathrobe. She held a portable shaving mirror up while he looked at his injured eye. The scar was fading, the sutured eyelids still pressed together in the bruised socket. Lena bathed the eye in water from a bottle, then took a fresh dressing from the batch Shaw had been given at the clinic.
‘It’s healing,’ she said. ‘Francesca will be upset. She thinks you look like a pirate.’
Lena left him in the dark, watching the incoming waves, luminous on a moonless night. Swimming, he’d cleared his head, then filled it again. On his back, his arms rising and falling, he’d seen the Pole Star through a thin disc of cirrus. He’d put the Tessier case out of his mind and instead tried to piece together the first twenty?four hours of the Ellis inquiry. The answer was in the detail, he’d told himself, always in the detail.
He saw in his memory Holt again, in his hospital bed.
He thought of the two halves of the shattered dental work, the apple on the dashboard of Ellis’s truck, and the image made him smile at last.
As he padded down the corridor and into their bedroom, Lena turned in the shadows, an arm thrown across the sheet, welcoming, and his heart skipped a beat.
At the fan?tan table Valentine had lost heavily, handing in his playing card at just after one o’clock when he’d got down to?50. He stood in the hall waiting for his coat. He could hear the boy crying somewhere and the reason was plain: the electric car lay on its side, the battery compartment open, the four AAs, presumably spent, spilt out.
The sentinel returned with his coat.
‘Costs a fortune,’ said Valentine. ‘Keeping a car on the road these days.’
‘Least he sleep now,’ said the man, nodding, showing too many teeth. ‘Sleeps like the dead.’
The moment he stood on the step, and the door closed behind him, the thought hit him and Valentine knew he was right. A child’s toy, bereft of batteries. He saw the inside of Harvey Ellis’s pick?up truck, smelt the spilt blood, listened again to the unnatural silence which always seems to shroud the dead.
The night air, the thrill of understanding, made his
6
