we found?’
‘That’s right. We think he was part of a plan to divert the traffic off the road. Mrs Baker?Sibley’s daughter was abducted that night — while she was stranded out on Siberia Belt.’
Draper’s mouth opened to reveal perfect dentistry.
‘I just need you to tell me precisely what happened,’ said Shaw. ‘You’re good with details, Seb — that’s what we want. That’s where the devil is, right? You left Gayton in the Mondeo when?’
‘Five. Five past. I left the BMW under the trees by the gate to The Walks. Outside number 56. I drove out towards Hunstanton — I took the old road ’cos it’s always quieter. I got behind another car at the lights at Castle Rising. I kept my distance after that, ’cos, like, I didn’t want some stupid shunt on the road. You need to keep it simple, nicking cars — no accidents.’
Barrett was looking at his client, his eyes hardening.
‘I saw lights ahead turning down onto the sea wall. I got to the diversion sign, so I turned too. The lights were ahead, moving away from me. By the time I got round the corner the lights were ahead of me again — but they’d stopped.’
Shaw nodded. ‘So you’d followed the same car from the lights at Castle Rising, to the turning, and then down the causeway until you came to a stop?’
‘Well. Yeah. But that’s an assumption right? For you. Not for me.’
‘Why not for you?’
He didn’t laugh because he wasn’t joking, and Shaw felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. He thought about it. ‘Because if you hadn’t noticed the registration number and the make of the car it didn’t have to be the same vehicle?’
‘Yeah — I lost sight of it twice. Once on the coast road, and then when it went round the corner on the causeway.’
‘Because in the time it was out of sight it might have pulled off the road, and another one pulled out to take its place?”
‘That’s it,’ said Draper.
Out of the mouths of babes… thought Shaw. He pictured the scene that night on Siberia Belt, able at last to see the events unfolding, creating the puzzle which they’d been unable to break. Until now.
‘Here,’ said Shaw, tapping on the windscreen of the Mazda. Valentine pulled the car over where Siberia Belt met the track to Gallow Marsh Farm. Shaw kicked open the passenger door. The snow had stopped and the red disc of the sun was setting between banks of cloud the colour of theatre curtains. The air temperature was falling like a hailstone. It felt good, standing on the bank, now that he thought he knew what had happened that night.
He had to see if it worked on the ground, in the real world. So they’d come straight to Siberia Belt from Kimbolton’s yard. En route St James’s had radioed Valentine. They’d got a call at 3.30 that afternoon. One of Izzy Dereham’s farm labourers had been walking down to check the oyster cages in the sea when he’d seen something in the dyke — metallic, floating in the tidal wash from the beach. DC Twine had told them to leave whatever it was, and wait for Shaw and Valentine. A fire?brigade hazardous materials unit was on its way too — just in case they needed specialist handling gear.
‘Could be what killed chummy in the raft,’ said Valentine, as the wind thudded against the offside of the Mazda. He wanted to get up to the farm, check out what they’d found in the dyke, get back to the station. What he didn’t want to do was get out of the car.
Shaw walked back to the turn in the road, then round the corner, leaving Valentine shivering in the wind. Once out of sight of Valentine Shaw could see down to the coast road; a bus lurching towards Lynn. Then he retraced his steps until he could see the Mazda again, and beyond it the rest of Siberia Belt, and the spot where the pine had been felled that Monday night.
‘Check it, check it, check it…’ said Valentine under his breath, annoyed at being kept out of the loop. He felt the damp insinuating its way down his throat and into his lungs, so he coughed, a deep hollow boom, like a goose. Shaw was upbeat, excited, but he hadn’t shared whatever the good news was.
Shaw walked back. He stood still, then spun round, taking in the circular horizon of water, marsh and trees. He’d got it clear in his head now, and it made sense; at last, it made sense. He clapped his hands and listened to the echo ricochet off the farm buildings at Gallow Marsh.
‘OK — the kid was annoying,’ said Shaw. They stood together, looking out to sea. ‘But bright. And he was right, George. We’ve made assumptions. We’ve assumed, and all the drivers have assumed, that the vehicles they followed round this bend were the vehicles they found when they got round this bend.’
‘I guess,’ said Valentine. He didn’t see what difference it made.
A marsh bird made a noise like a 1950s football rattle.
‘Two things are possible,’ said Shaw. ‘One of the
Valentine spat in the snow. ‘Well that clears things up.’
‘Yes, it does.’ Shaw beamed. ‘I reckon we’re pretty close, George — pretty close. The jigsaw’s almost finished.’ He smiled the surfer’s smile.
‘So what shape’s the missing bit?’ asked Valentine, acutely aware that the ‘we’ didn’t appear to include him.
‘I’m not absolutely sure, but it’s got four wheels.’
Snow lay across the yard at Gallow Marsh, marred by tyre tracks, straw laid out in the worst of the ruts. The hazmat unit had beaten them to it, and was parked in the entrance to the barn, out of the wind. A blue light flashed, shadows dancing round the high rafters within. They walked past it and out through a pair of double doors on the far side. There was another yard here, bounded on one side by a deep arrow?straight dyke running towards the sea. A broken harrow stood rusting in frosted weeds, and a pile of sugar beet gave off a stench of damp earth. Two farmhands stood smoking in the half?light, standing on the snowy bank a hundred yards down towards the beach. Closer, three men stood in full protective gear, looking at mobile phones.
The dyke was a gullet of shadow about twenty feet across, the surface ten feet below them. The sound of water churning filled the dusk as the tide pushed in, swamping the banks of reeds and grass. One of the hazmat team produced a heavy?duty torch and scanned the dark channel below.
‘She’s here somewhere; I found it earlier,’ he said. A corner of bright unpainted metal stuck up in midstream, the edge of a box, perhaps, an angle of reflective steel.
‘OK,’ said Shaw. ‘When you’re ready.’
‘Right. But we think this might be dangerous, yes?’
The firemen began to unload a winch from the unit, a set of boat hooks. Valentine let the burst of flame at the end of a match warm his spirits as he lit a cigarette. This was tying up a loose end. They were making progress, and it felt good. Sunset soon, and then back to the city. The canteen at St James’s did a roast on Sunday nights. He’d read the papers, then watch the live match on Sky at the Artichoke. It was the best week’s work he’d done in ten years. Yes, it made him feel very good. It made him feel like a human being again.
One of the farmhands came up to Shaw; a teenager, swaddled against the cold, stamping his feet. ‘Izzy said if we found anything we should get her first, but the kid’s not well — flu, she reckons — so we thought we’d ring you lot.’ They all stood back as a fireman in waders began to edge down the bank with a hook.
‘Thanks, it might be important,’ said Shaw. He scanned the horizon, trying not to look in the water, wondering what the chances were that whatever had come ashore that Monday night was still alive.
The fireman expertly snagged the metal triangle, then attached a chain back to the winch. The engine squealed, the chain tightened, water droplets flying off, and then whatever it was in mid?stream got sucked off the muddy bed of the dyke. Suddenly it was there beneath them, on the grass bank.
‘Well that’s solved that mystery,’ said Shaw.
It was an AA diversion sign. Black lettering on a yellow background. Green weed, black under the light, knotted around one of the metal legs.
