boot room so they could come straight off the beach without leaving a ton of sand in the cottage. He’d been nominated site manager, which meant two weeks on the beach watching someone else work.
He accelerated to 70 m.p.h., testing out his latest toy —?17,000 worth of second-hand Porsche 911. The car was a fifteen-year-old oddity he’d tracked down on the internet through a specialist car dealer. He’d seen a recommendation for the model on a website run by the Partially Sighted Society. It was one of the few relatively modern cars with a narrow ‘A’ bar — the strut between the windscreen and the side window. In new cars these ‘A’ bars were inches thick because they disguised a roll-bar. And they’d been edged forward for strength. The result was that any monocular driver had a serious restriction on visibility. The Porsche had an elegant, thread-like ‘A’ bar, set back, giving Shaw excellent vision on both sides. This was his new code, to deal with his disability
He thought about driving straight home to the beach but decided there was one thing he needed to do first. On the dashboard there was a Post-It note with a number in black felt pen: 51. At the last roundabout on the ring road he pulled off to the left and ran into the North End, then round to the edge of town and onto the Westmead Estate. He drove past Valentine’s Mazda without recognizing it because the DS had put it through the car-wash that morning. Down by the community centre there was a telephone box under a security CCTV camera, so Shaw parked there. As soon as he’d robbed himself of the forward motion of the car the heat crowded back in. There was something about the architecture of housing estates which made the sun unbearable — the scorched grass, the reflecting windows, the blank concrete. But it was more than that. It was the way the estate captured the idea of being trapped. The sound of a lone ice-cream van seemed to make it worse, the reedy call-sign horribly harsh: the whistled theme from
He’d been a young DS, just posted to Lynn from Brixton, when he’d first been sent out to the Westmead to take a statement from a man who’d been attacked getting
The lock-up at the top of the first row was numbered 160, the next 121, then 120, 81, 80, and then 41. He kept walking but glanced down the next alley and saw a battered BMW parked, but nothing else. He knew 51 was down there, but he felt exposed, approaching from the front, so he walked on past 40, to the last alley, looking to double back using one of the gaps. But there was a car in this alley and it didn’t look right at all. It was another BMW, but this one had a soft top, and its black paint-work was waxed to a patina which made it look like there was an invisible inch-thick layer of glass covering the paint. This wasn’t a third-hand BMW. This was new. It was a? 40,000 motor car. He touched the bonnet, felt the warmth of the engine on his palm.
He looked inside the car and saw a pair of reflective sunglasses on the passenger seat. The roll-top reeked of leather. Maybe, thought Shaw, the driver was just stupid,
He chose the nearest gap between lock-ups, clogged with stinging nettles but easy enough to edge down. Brushing a path through, he stopped to untangle a thread of blackberry thorns. He could hear an engine, low and visceral; a big sporting engine. Each of the lock-ups had a small rear door, wooden, with a single window, although most were boarded up now for security. The one at the side of number 51 was covered in a metal sheet of corrugated iron.
The throbbing engine made the iron door vibrate. Using the sound as cover, Shaw tried the handle and, despite the rust and the thick, flaking blue paint, it turned noiselessly, the door opening in on well-oiled hinges like the lid of a musical box. The interior was gloomy and unlit, and appeared to be empty. He went inside and closed the door behind him, letting his eyes assemble the greys and blacks in the half light which came in through a mossy skylight. The air was laden with lead. He went to breathe, coughed once, then doubled over.
Down on his knees the air was clearer. He wanted to call out but knew if he inhaled enough of the fumes to do so he’d pass out. Looking across the stained concrete floor he saw that the breeze-block wall between lock-ups 51 and 52 had been taken down and replaced by a steel joist. A trailer carrying a stock car stood sideways, beside it a Mini, up on blocks, the paintwork a rusted quilt — but Shaw could see the underlying colour, and it made his blood chill: mustard yellow, the colour of the microscopic
Could that be true? Could this be the car that had crashed at that lonely crossroads thirteen years earlier? After the murder of the child they’d have been too scared to move the car, even if they had resprayed the vehicle. Perhaps they’d never finished, traumatized by what they’d had to do, and focused on the desperate need to get rid of the boy’s body. Robert Mosse would have been in custody for the killing — but they must have hoped, even then, that the case against him was fatally flawed, but most of all that he wouldn’t talk. If they kept their nerve, sat tight, they might get away with murder. After Mosse was freed the vehicle was too hot to put on the streets. A double fatal hit-and-run was one thing, but child murder was in a different league. They’d have been paralysed, so they’d just waited, hoping. And Jack Shaw’s myopic investigation had let the moment slip, because he should have turned the Westmead over, looking for more evidence, but he was convinced he had his man, and that was all the evidence he’d need.
Shaw heard something else then, a whimper. Unexpectedly close, a dog barked. Still crouching, he made his way round the trailer until he saw a figure lying on the floor, spreadeagled, face obscured under the vehicle below the exhaust pipe, which was churning out blue gas. A small terrier dog snuffled at his trouser leg, pulling at a pair of racing overalls.
Shaw grabbed the man’s feet and dragged the body.
54
Shaw knew he was still alive when he heard the sound of a trolley wheel squeak. It was mundane enough to rule out the possibility he was in heaven, or, for that matter, hell. If he opened his eyes he knew there’d be pain, but he steeled himself and tried anyway. His eyelids parted stickily, and through his good eye he saw a hospital room. White sheets, white walls, a blanket exactly the colour of the one that used to cover his bed as a child — a sort of nursery blue. He wasn’t lying down, not flat, but perched up, with something holding his neck almost vertical, so that he could see forward to the foot of the bed.
The second time he woke up he knew he was alive because of the pain: like cramp, but in the muscles at the base of his skull. He was aware of a surgical collar, lifting his chin, locking his head into position. There was a small wheeled trolley at the foot of the bed with some greetings cards on it, one a seascape in the precise shade of green his daughter always used. On a chair by the trolley sat George Valentine. He had his legs crossed and Shaw noticed he’d bought himself a pair of new shoes: black slip-ons.
‘Cosyns?’ asked Shaw, but he didn’t hear anything, so he tried the word again. His voice sounded like a pencil sharpener.
‘Dead on arrival,’ said Valentine. ‘Staged suicide is my bet. You got in the way. It’s early days, but Tom says there’s traces of morphine on Cosyns’s lips, in the nostrils.’
‘I heard the bookcase fall — I was opposite, staking the place out,’ said Valentine. ‘I tried to get the door up, heard something inside, and the dog yelping. By the time I ran round the side the back door was open. You were inside on top of Cosyns. He was dead. You’re not.’
Shaw told Valentine what he’d done, up until the moment he felt the hands round his neck. A summary as compressed as a black hole; all that mattered rolled into a tight ball. How he’d tracked down the lock-up number, how he’d found the link with the fatal crash at Castle Rising, how he knew now that Mosse had been at the wheel, and that was why the other members of the gang had a hold over him. And the black BMW with the soft top.
‘Was it Mosse who attacked me?’ he asked, when he’d finished.
‘Probably, though we can’t prove it. You didn’t get the number of the BMW?’
Shaw went to shake his head but the pain stopped him dead so that he closed his eyes, tears spilling out of one.
‘We shook down Mosse’s house last night,’ said Valentine. ‘And the car. Nothing. Wife says he was home at the time. Domestic bliss.’
Shaw thought about the hands round his neck. ‘I thought I broke his rib.’
