They heard the phone go down on the hook suddenly so Valentine opened the door to usher her back to the living room. But she’d picked up the phone again. ‘I’m sorry — we got cut off. Do you mind?… I need to ring again.’ She was desperate, and Shaw knew that no one could have stopped her making a second call. The tyranny of children.
Valentine shrugged. ‘Then the car’s ready, OK? You’ll be home in twenty minutes,’ he said, closing the door.
Shaw pressed his forehead against the cold glass of the kitchen window. A line of taxis was edging through the farmyard gates.
They heard footsteps on ice outside the door. It was Izzy Dereham, back from checking the oyster beds. ‘Storm’s turned a couple of the frames,’ she said, walking briskly to the sink, scrubbing her hands.
‘Sure. We run the oysters in it.’
‘Where?’ pressed Valentine.
‘Shark Tooth.’ It was one of the town’s newest com panies, commercial shellfish mainly, having started out running boats for tourists to catch North Sea dogfish, based up the coast from Lynn at Wootton Marsh.
‘They own this place,’ said Dereham. ‘I’m just a tenant. But you know, I’ve got plans…’ She looked up to where her child was sleeping. ‘Bit of arable, dairy herd, it could be a decent farm this… but the quick money’s in the oysters.’
‘Your husband?’ asked Shaw, knowing instantly it was the right question.
‘Patrick died.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Shaw touched the picture over the fireplace taken on a farm. Something crossed Izzy’s face, an expression so fleeting as to be subliminal. Grief thought Shaw, and something else, expertly hidden.
‘I was born there — up the coast,’ she said. ‘That was our farm, before the bailiffs moved in.’
The door to the back room opened and Sarah Baker?Sibley came through. She was going to say something but the phone rang behind her. Valentine went through to answer.
‘I’ve finished,’ she announced, and Shaw noticed the hard edge to her voice. ‘My daughter’s at home, she’s fine.’ She tried to look relieved but didn’t get her face right. Shaw wondered what was wrong. ‘Thank you,’ she added, slipping out under cover of a smile.
It was late and Shaw was tired, almost too tired to let the thought take shape. Valentine shuffled the papers on the kitchen table, looking at the CSI pictures, setting apart the shots of the Mondeo. A stolen car, so they might never find the young driver.
‘Thought so,’ said Valentine, spinning one of the CSI prints round so that Shaw could see. It was an interior shot of the Mondeo. ‘The kid does a runner,’ he said, his voice suddenly animated. ‘Panics when he knows we’ll nab him for the theft. But he makes sure he takes something with him…’
‘What?’ asked Shaw.
‘A snakeskin steering?wheel cover. Chevrons, black and white. Distinctive.’ He pressed a stubby finger into the shot, leaving a greasy print.
The cobblestones along St James’s glistened like pebbles on the beach. Police HQ was a curved brick 1960s block with civic pretensions, the single Victorian blue lamp salvaged from its predecessor down in the old town. The snow was turning to sleet, then rain, sheets of it thrown in off the sea falling through the floodlight that still played on Greyfriars Tower, a medieval stump which stood in waste ground opposite St James’s. Under the styleless portico of police headquarters, held up by four square brick pillars, two uniformed constables manhandled a half? naked youth towards the doors, the young man’s knotted back a riot of illustration: an anchor, a dancing girl, a military badge.
Valentine sniffed the pungent kick of meths on the night breeze and walked down towards the quay. He’d got a lift back into town with a CSI unit, and the trip had woken him up. The pub sign outside his local, the Artichoke, swung in the rain, no lights within. He stood for a moment beside Captain George Vancouver’s statue on the waterside. This was where he’d always had a cigarette, the last one before home. He took a double lungful of night air, his shoulders aching with the effort. A day without cigarettes had left him feeling no better, no worse.
He considered the bronze statue, wondering what the
Staring into the mud, he thought about the old girl in the Morris in the line of cars on Siberia Belt. Nice woman, old money. He’d helped her out of the car and then she said she’d forgotten her glasses. He offered to get them out of the glove compartment but she’d said not to bother, her voice edging just too high to be natural. They’d take her car into the pound tomorrow, so there was no hurry. He’d find out what she didn’t want him to see. And one other thing that kept snagging his brain. The ladders on the Corsa’s roof. He’d get the CSI report on those. Check the length.
He walked over the narrow wooden footbridge which crossed the Purfleet and made his way along the King’s Staithe to the maze of terraced streets he’d lived in all his life. He stopped on the corner of Greenland Street. The central heating at home would be off. He hadn’t understood the timing mechanism when his wife was alive, and the secret had died with her. She’d been buried in the churchyard at All Saints’ and sometimes he went by on the way home. Not tonight. A cat sat in the middle of the road like a fur hat, its eyes as green as the paper dragon set in the fanlight of the end house: once a shop, its downstairs window curved around the corner gracefully, a door set within the arc. Behind the glass a handwritten sign in Chinese characters.
He knew the sound they made.
Here, on the corner of a rain?soaked street, a warm
2
The eight vehicles of the stranded convoy stood in the light of the rising moon, the cold blue streak of dawn in the east as raw and unwelcome as the scream of an alarm clock. Shaw had slept for three hours in the CSI back?up van. He’d been a poor sleeper since childhood. So he was used to waking up in the dark.
But he wasn’t used to waking up anywhere that wasn’t home. Lena, his wife, said he was a homing pigeon, always circling back towards the loft. The contrast with his father was, as always, stark. Jack Shaw had liked working nights, sleeping at St James’s when a case was on, living the job. So his father’s life had been a secret from him; one of the reasons he’d been drawn to the same career, to find out, in little ways, what his father’s life had been like, to see how closely the real world snapped into place beside the one he’d imagined.
So when he’d woken in the CSI van he felt a familiar frisson of anxiety, the loss of something just beyond his understanding. He thought about texting home, but knew it was too early. And there’d still be no mobile signal. The night before he’d relayed a message through St James’s, telling Lena he’d be out overnight. But he wanted to hear her voice.
Shaw tried to think of the day ahead as separate from that which had gone before. Day Two: a time to take stock, step back, let the adrenaline fade. But the intensity of the images from the previous evening were too strong to dismiss: the blood?caked mouth of the man he’d pulled out of the sea; the crumpled figure at the wheel of the pick?up truck, impaled. The buzz was still electric, an intensity of consciousness, which made Peter Shaw feel very alive. He suppressed the excitement, aware that this was a drug to which his father had become addicted, the living of a life through the deaths of others. He’d wondered if that was why his father had made just that one rule: that his son could do anything with his life except become a policeman.
Shaw craved his own drug: the surge of endorphins, the rush of blood, the certainty of well?being that came with pushing himself to run, to swim, and to run again. He checked his map. The coast road was almost exactly a mile away. He set the stopwatch going on his wrist and began to run, despite the lightweight boots he wore, and when he found his footing secure in the crisp deep snow, he opened up into a wide, easy pace. The lights of the
