Valentine didn’t answer; he was looking over Shaw’s shoulder, and a look of genuine horror was spreading over the DS’s narrow features. ‘You’re on parade,’ he said, ditching the cigarette.
Shaw turned to see the chief constable walking up the back street towards them.
‘Peter,’ he said, looking at Valentine. ‘Give us a second, George.’
Dismissed, Valentine went back into The Ark.
Brendan O’Hare was in a suit. He was bony, medium height with very short hair, not quite a crop. Shaw knew that he ran marathons for fun. He was fifty-one and the second youngest chief constable in the UK. Briefly, on the way up the career ladder, he’d been a DI here in Lynn. Six months was all it took to tick another few boxes in the perfect CV and leave behind a reputation for clinical self-interest. A retiring DI had marked Shaw’s card when the Home Office had made the announcement of his appointment as chief constable. ‘Gold-plated bastard, our Brendan,’ he’d said. ‘Sell his grandmother? He’d put her on eBay for the best price.’
Despite his almost inhuman self-control O’Hare had one uncontrollable tic. Before speaking he’d duck one shoulder, just a half inch, the chin would come across like a boxer’s jaw reflex, ducking an imaginary punch. It identified O’Hare for what he was: a street fighter in a suit.
‘Someone said you’d be here,’ he said. The jaw ducked. His accent still held a strong Northern Irish burr, which seemed to give everything he said a paramilitary edge. Shaw always thought that if he was cast adrift in an open boat with Brendan O’Hare, and a single bottle of fresh water, that there would be only one survivor. And it wouldn’t be Peter Shaw. ‘So, I got your overnight report on this woman at Creake. What do we think, and what do I need to know? I’m in Whitehall all day — Home Office. Spending cuts — again. I don’t want any surprises, Peter. Monday East Hills hits the headlines. We don’t need anything else in the way. .’
They heard the ticking of an expensive engine and at the end of the street O’Hare’s car crept into view — the black Daimler, a driver in grey. Shaw noted that the belt-tightening hadn’t stretched to the chief constable’s perks.
‘I’ve got a minute,’ said O’Hare. He hadn’t looked at Shaw once. He didn’t do eye contact unless it was a fleeting and accidental connection.
Shaw thought about what he was going to say, then said it, slowly. ‘Two things. The woman found dead at Creake wasn’t alone when she died.’
O’Hare eyes narrowed dangerously. As he’d made clear, he didn’t like surprises, and that detail had not been in the overnight report.
‘She died, as you know, by crunching a poison pill — a cyanide capsule — between her teeth. But there’s clear evidence someone else helped her bite down on the pill. Her jaw had been broken. And. .’
Shaw paused for effect and O’Hare couldn’t stop the jaw reflex filling the gap. ‘She was on our list of East Hill suspects.’
‘Christ,’ said O’Hare. ‘That’s all we fucking need.’
‘So, either she wanted to die and someone helped her,’ said Shaw. ‘Or she didn’t want to die but somebody wanted her dead, although there’s absolutely no sign of force being used up to the very last moment — the bite.’
O’Hare gritted his teeth.
‘Plus, one of the suspects today has changed his story. Male, name of Roundhay. Says he fancied the lifeguard, sat on his towel, chatted him up. We won’t let him out of our sights until we have the DNA feedback. He went out to East Hills with another man — that’s why he didn’t tell the truth first time round. But the other man is dead, involved in an RTA a decade ago, but we’ll check that out too. We’ll get the DNA match in twenty-four hours — less.’ Shaw couldn’t resist the rider: ‘No extra cost.’
‘Right. But none of that is going to break before Monday, is it?’
‘Sir, nothing substantial. I thought I’d give the local radio a tip on the cyanide and the woman at Creake. No link to East Hills, just the bare bones — lonely suicide, but where did she get the pill? That kind of thing, because someone might know — in fact, someone almost certainly knows. But otherwise we’ll take a view on publicity after Monday,’ added Shaw.
‘Yes.
Shaw didn’t say a word because he hadn’t been asked a question. O’Hare seemed to take silence as insubordination. ‘Don’t fuck up. Don’t even think about it.’ He turned his back again and walked away, got in the back seat of the Daimler and opened a briefcase. Shaw had a sudden insight into O’Hare’s character, because generally he was charming and considerate with his officers, particularly junior ones. But Shaw understood for the first time this bristling antagonism towards him — in private. It was because the chief constable saw DI Peter Shaw as a rival. On the whole, he thought, that was a very bad thing to be.
EIGHT
Chris Roundhay brushed thinning blond hair back from his forehead. He kept himself in good condition, thought Shaw: the tight white polo shirt showing off gym-conditioned chest muscles. His voice was a dull, flat monotone,
George Valentine came back into the room with a tray of three teas and a plate of Nice biscuits: six, canteen-issue, arranged in a neat fan by the woman who he sometimes met out in the car park having a smoke, always still in her green hairnet. It occurred to him as she’d arranged the biscuits on the plate that if he didn’t smoke he’d have no friends at all.
Chris Roundhay had already told them his story, and it had been lucid and convincing. He was seventeen years old that day in 1994. His birthday. His father, a builder, had bought him a second-hand Suzuki motorbike — 175cc. His mother had got him a new set of binoculars because he spent so much time out bird watching. He’d gone to East Hills with a friend — eighteen-year-old Marc Grieve. Grieve already had his own bike — a Triumph Bonneville. They had been at school together. Roundhay was an outsider, not many friends, and Marc was lonely — he’d been in council care, then adopted, an unhappy child. As thick as thieves, they’d recognized each other as loners. Marc was a trainee-driving instructor at Holt that summer; Chris was with a firm of accountants in Lynn. The two of them had been to East Hills before. They didn’t talk on the ferry and went to separate spots on the beach. Then Chris would take his binoculars and go off into the pines to spot waders on the far sands. He’d find Marc in a hollow, where the north wind had carved out a valley in the sand. The deserted dunes and marshes beyond the thin partition of pine trees gave them the privacy they wanted. The privacy — said Roundhay, meeting Shaw’s good eye — that they had a right to enjoy.
But that day, on the trip to the beach, Marc had broken their routine, sitting beside him on the ferry, telling him that he was thinking of moving to Norwich to join a driving school run by a mutual friend. It became clear that this plan had in fact moved well beyond the ‘thinking about’ stage. Roundhay had been upset by the news. By the time they reached East Hills they were hardly talking. Abandoning their usual routine they’d thrown down their towels on the far end of the beach and Grieve had gone swimming while Roundhay had sunbathed, listening to the transistor radio. Radio One. They ate lunch in silence — a brace of Cornish pasties, Mars bars.
Roundhay said he knew Shane White by sight. He’d chatted to the lifeguard once or twice. That day he’d wandered up the beach to the edge of the dunes to strike up a conversation, principally to inspire jealousy in Grieve. He’d told the young Australian it was his birthday but he seemed not to hear. The lifeguard had two large towels, Roundhay recalled. Valentine had noted the detail and double-checked the original inventory, finding that they’d found only one towel with the Australian’s other things after his death.
Roundhay said they’d talked about the surf on the distant beach across the tidal cut where they could see the summer holiday crowds. White had surfed at Bondi, and he told Roundhay an anecdote about a shark attack which he hadn’t believed: a leg washed ashore, parents dragging children out of the white waves. During their
