Looking once more to the horizon he tried to glimpse open water. But in the mid-distance he saw instead two black specks: seals, undoubtedly, lounging on a sandbar summit where the sun had already dried out the damp colour to leave it a poster paint yellow.
The image flickered. Shaw’s heartbeat jumped, an injection of adrenaline making his blood race. He closed his eyes, trying to think of nothing. The sensation in his right, damaged eyeball was like one of those tics you can get above or below the eye when a fibrillating micro-muscle signals how tired you really are. But he wasn’t tired. He’d slept well. He opened his good eye and focused on the two seals, but the image flickered again, and this time there was a pain in the good eye — right through it, as if the ball had been lanced with a needle. Both eyes closed, he knelt on the sand, placed the cup carefully down, and willed his heartbeat to slow. It took a minute, and even then he knew it hadn’t returned to normal. He stood, distressed to feel the muscles holding his left knee straight were unsteady too, so that the kneecap trembled.
Looking south he found the lighthouse tower. The image was clear. But when he traced the distant horizon for the Boston Stump the image blurred; two horizons suddenly separating, then meshing. Stress was pumping water into the eye which made the image mist completely, so he closed both eyes again.
He waited, feeling his heart thud, the sound of blood in his ears. Without the visual world he felt adrift, the distant sound of waves falling adding to a feeling of disorientation. What next? Wait, then open his eyes and get back to the cafe. Was this what he’d see for ever? The thought made him sick. Even if his vision cleared he’d have to see the eye specialist. Perhaps they’d have to take the blind eye out because that might help. Or operate on the good eye. He could see the word ‘blind’ on a page, diagrams of the eyeball above and below. The world for Shaw was intensely visual; the loss of it would change him for ever. And then, sickeningly, he remembered what he’d tried to forget over these last few days and weeks — the rapid and almost preternatural heightening of his powers of smell and hearing.
His body had
‘Peace offering,’ she said, then froze. ‘Peter, you’re crying.’ She kept walking towards him and put her free hand round his neck, gripping the base of his skull, sliding her fingers through the close-cropped hair. ‘Peter, what is it? Peter, look at me.’ And they were the words he’d always remember from that moment. ‘Look at me.’
FOURTEEN
Tom Hadden had a flat in the Baltic Tower, a ten-storey converted grain mill in the centre of Lynn, overlooking the Boal Quay and the old cranes, the centrepiece of a miniature waterside Manhattan. Around it clustered the smaller medieval lookout towers the merchants of the town had built to keep a watch on The Cut as their ships came home, testament to the town’s three centuries as one of the great ports of Europe. The Baltic Tower was the highest, a misplaced Victorian statement of confidence in Lynn’s prospects as a port in the age of the railway.
Double-glazed windows looked out west, over the river to the flatlands along the shore of The Wash. Hadden had a door open on to a small wrought-iron balcony which gave a view north towards the sea. Shaw stood with a cup of tea, Earl Grey, with a twist of lemon, and an ice cube shaped like the letter H.
Concentrating on the cup, Shaw tried to forget about his eye. He studiously avoided the panoramic view, any strain on his vision. The pain had gone; his close-up vision was clear and in an odd way each minute that passed without a return of the flickering images made his spirit rise: perhaps it had been a one-off, a momentary response to stress or overworking the single lens. Talking to Lena had helped. She’d found the name of the specialist who’d treated him at Lynn after his accident and checked he was still practising at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. Switchboard had routed her to an answerphone and she’d left a request for an urgent appointment. Then she’d bathed the eye in warm water and massaged Shaw’s neck and scalp. She said his muscles had been hard with tension and that he’d never been good at knowing when he was overworking. Shaw had phoned ahead to postpone his meeting with Hadden until mid-afternoon, then rested, his eyes closed, pretending to sunbathe while Fran played nurse — bringing food, reading snippets out of the papers. Then he’d let her go, free to run to the beach huts near the town where a school friend would be out with her family; a school friend with her own DS, so that they could link them up and play building cities together.
Three hours later, behind the wheel of the Porsche, he felt restored. He’d left Lena in tears, standing by the car as he drove off, adamant he should take a few days off; rest, give himself a chance; certain, above all, that he shouldn’t drive the car. But he’d set her anxieties aside, aware that the most immediate way he could make himself feel better was to go to work. The fear of imminent disaster which had overtaken him on the beach had receded. He saw it now as irrational, born perhaps of some subconscious anxiety about total blindness.
The North Norfolk coast had flashed by in streaks of blue and green. He’d been in a good mood, on an artificial high, so he’d jogged up the ten flights of stairs to Hadden’s door. The CSI man got the bad news over with indecent haste. ‘Peter, sorry. No match on Roundhay.’ He stood aside from the door. ‘Overnight email, but I thought I’d wait until I saw you.’
Bad news, certainly, Shaw had agreed. But not unexpected. And it told them something: that Roundhay’s version of what he’d seen that day was almost certainly true. That Marianne Osbourne had walked off into the dunes, followed by Shane White. Now the rest of the mass screening results should place the missing jigsaw piece on the table: the name of the man she’d gone into the long grass to meet. Roundhay was in the clear. He’d lied back in 1994, but there was no evidence he’d lied again.
Hadden said there’d been some sort of problem at the lab because they’d phoned him to say they were double-checking the double-checked results. The final email should drop at any moment. Now the little balcony was in the afternoon shade he said he’d get his laptop and they could wait in the fresh air.
The open laptop was silent for twenty minutes. So they talked about kids, swapping tales of rights of passage. Then the iMac pinged. Hadden opened the email file and opened first the earlier message from the Forensic Science Service containing the Roundhay result. Shaw tried to speed-read the text but it was mostly maths — a complex statistical analysis. And there were no names, just coded letters, corresponding to a sheet Hadden had beside the laptop.
Hadden covered his mouth with the back of his fingers. ‘As I said — no match. You know the science here?’
Shaw nodded. They’d done DNA matching at the Met Police College at Hendon.
Hadden hit the inbox button and opened the new email from the FSS. It was about 3,000 words — complex analysis again. Shaw stopped staring at the screen, leant back in the seat, and let his shoulders relax, forced them to relax, his eyes closed, waiting to hear the name of their killer.
‘Right,’ said Hadden. ‘Good job you’re sitting down.’ He went back into the flat and came back with a bottle of wine, a white Burgundy, the glass blushed with condensation. Hadden had the corkscrew in and the cork out in one fluid movement.
Shaw left the glass untouched. ‘What’s wrong?’ he said.
‘Clean sweep,’ said Hadden, taking an inch of wine out of the glass. ‘No match — they finished the whole batch overnight. Given the result they ran it all again this morning. All thirty-five male samples, both from the living and relatives of the dead. No match.’Hadden closed his eyes. ‘From a scientific point of view. From a forensic point of view, I would say that was a disaster. That’s a technical term we boffins use, but you get the drift.’
Shaw pushed the wine glass away by the stem. Hadden’s eyes were still closed, so that Shaw was able to study the freckles clustering on his forehead where the lesion of the skin cancer op still showed. ‘The towel was buried on the beach,’ said Shaw, trying to cling to logic, to any structure that might explain the inexplicable. ‘The bloodstain is
White’s. The skin cells gave us Sample X. The boat took seventy-five people to the island. We brought back
