conversation White had periodically used his binoculars to scan the beach, talking about the girls. After about ten minutes Roundhay had gone back to Grieve. They’d brought some cans of beer with them and they started to drink. The mood thawed. They swam, larking, then stretched out on their towels. Roundhay had fallen asleep. He’d been woken by the shouts and screams, when someone had found the Australian’s floating body. Grieve had been in swimming again and he came out of the water, a thin trace of blood across his skin. They stood, trying to clean it away, Grieve retching.
‘These girls he was looking at with the binoculars,’ said Shaw, pushing the picture of Marianne Osbourne in her bikini across the table. ‘Recognize her?’
‘Yeah, maybe.’ He frowned, as if something he’d feared would happen had happened.
‘He took a special interest in her?’ pressed Shaw.
Roundhay looked at each of them, perhaps trying to work out where the questions were leading. He reached inside his back trouser pocket and put a thin wallet on the table, expertly picking out a colour snapshot of a family on a beach — Greece, probably, white houses like sugar lumps on a green hillside beyond a sickle-beach. Two kids, with Roundhay, sat beside a woman in a bikini. She looked older than him, with slightly greying blonde hair, and laughter lines splayed from both eyes.
Shaw thought carefully about what he was going to say next. Early in his career he’d been tempted to cut deals, make promises he couldn’t keep. It was almost always unnecessary. Roundhay sensed he was being drawn into the case, that he might end up giving evidence in court. He wanted anonymity, protection, but it was too late for that.
‘I can’t make any promises,’ said Shaw, and he felt Valentine stiffen, leaning back, away from the interview tape. ‘If you want a bit of advice instead, I’d recommend telling the truth. It’s what you should have done that day in ’ninety-four. This girl. .’ He tapped the picture.
Roundhay readjusted the snapshot so that he could see it clearly.
‘We’re not interested in what you did,’ said Shaw, his voice half an octave lighter. ‘We’re interested in what you saw.’
Roundhay just stared at the snapshot.
‘Chris?’ prompted Shaw.
Roundhay said he’d been sitting with White and the lifeguard had just completed a sweep of the beach with the binoculars. He’d put them down and nodded to the far north end of the beach where a girl was lying on a towel. She’d got up right then, adjusting the straps on her bikini top and the edge of the bikini bottoms where the sand had got under the material.
Roundhay said he remembered what White had said. ‘Just watch.’ Just the two words. So they did. White retrieved a valuables bag from a shallow hiding place in the sand underneath one of his sandals and found a watch. ‘’Bout now,’ he said.
She went for a swim — just a dip in the waves breaking — and then came back and dried herself, still standing. Roundhay said she’d done it very elegantly, as if she enjoyed the touch of the soft material on her skin. Then she’d walked north, towards the point. And Roundhay remembered
White had stood, readjusting his swimming trunks, his hand thrust inside the thin material. He’d said it was time he took a walk and pulled on his lifeguard shorts and top, put one of the towels over his shoulder, and set off along the beach.
Roundhay went back to Grieve. Lying down on his stomach, letting his friend rub suntan oil into his back, he’d watched White stroll into the trees. He hadn’t seen anyone else. The next time they’d seen White he’d been floating in the sea, in the pink seawater. And that was the truth.
‘And he took one of the towels with him?’ asked Valentine.
‘Yeah.’ But Roundhay couldn’t meet their eyes, haunted perhaps by the lies he’d told before. But was he telling the truth now? If he was then the scene he’d described fitted nicely into the scenario they’d constructed for the last day of Shane White’s life. The lifeguard was blackmailing Marianne Osbourne; he’d followed her into the dunes to either take more pictures or collect his money, and there he’d met his killer, whose DNA would match the sample on the towel found buried in the dunes.
And if Roundhay was lying? Sitting in the empty interview room, after Roundhay had gone, they agreed it was possible. What if the lifeguard had been blackmailing Roundhay and Grieve, and what if it had been them that he’d followed into the dunes that day? In which case Roundhay’s new statement was a calculated package of lies designed to allow him to wriggle out of the forensic evidence. He’d simply claim he’d left his skin cells on the towel when he’d sat on it to talk to White. No jury would convict on the DNA evidence alone.
Valentine felt Roundhay was their man. He’d organize a unit to stick with him till they had the mass screening results. Shaw wasn’t convinced. He had no illusions that Roundhay was anything but an accomplished liar. But he suspected that was just the way he’d lived his life. There was something about the scene that Roundhay had painted for them that rang true: the beautiful, self-conscious, sixteen-year-old Marianne Osbourne, alone on the distant beach. And then that catwalk stroll into the pine trees, as if she’d been the bait, and the trap was set.
NINE
Chris Roundhay was the only one of the sixty-six surviving East Hills suspects to opt to change his statement. The last DNA swab was completed just before 3.30pm. The East Hills inquiry would be on hold for the weekend, especially as the chief constable’s latest round of cost-saving cuts had specifically banned overtime expect in exceptional circumstances and only if personally sanctioned by his office. With O’Hare in London any decision to bankroll overtime would fall to Dep. Chief Constable Don Clarke, a man who’d got to the top by avoiding mistakes, and avoiding mistakes by rarely making any decisions at all. Shaw hadn’t even considered an application to keep the inquiry running at full steam.
Shaw and Valentine listened to the throaty roar of the courier’s BMW 1,500cc motorbike as it edged out into the traffic outside St James’ on its way to the forensic laboratory in Birmingham.
‘Now we wait,’ said Valentine, arching his back over, trying to squeeze the stress out of his bones, thinking about a cool pint in the Artichoke. Did it open at five? Then he realized he was kidding himself. He knew the Artichoke was open at five.
Shaw checked his watch, which showed the time, and the tide.
‘One more call, George, then we’ll wrap it up. Separate cars. The funeral parlour where Marianne Osbourne worked — name?’
‘Kelly’s — out at Wells.’
‘Right,’ said Shaw, using the remote to unlock the Porsche. ‘Let’s find out what she was really like. Once we’ve got our name from the lab on Monday we’ll need to find a link to her. So if she had a secret life, we need to know about it.’
Valentine didn’t say a word, but he thought it was typical that their last call was on Shaw’s way home. But he made a decision then that he’d hang around Wells once they’d checked out the funeral parlour, maybe grab a pint by the quayside, fish and chips, then look up a few old contacts. After all, it had been his manor. Plus Shaw had asked him to leak a few details on Marianne Osbourne’s death to the BBC local radio station — he could do that on the mobile from The Ship. Very pleasant — and on all expenses to boot.
They made a convoy on the coast road, the Porsche at half speed, the Mazda’s engine heating up under the rusted bonnet. The sea front at Wells was already Saturday-evening packed; the funfair’s piped-in music at full throttle, both the quayside pubs spilling customers out on the greasy pavements. Cars looking for parking spots edged bumper-to-bumper past the crowds. Shaw, the Porsche’s window down, thought that was the authentic tang of the British seaside — chip fat and exhaust fumes.
The council car park sign was out — FULL — and probably had been all day, so Shaw edged past and turned up one of the old streets which led directly inland. The back lanes were a medieval maze in miniature. He pulled a left, a left and then a right, into a single carriageway, waiting beyond each turn for the Mazda to appear in his
