Death

the makeshift football pitch. His step was light, almost weightless, thought Valentine, as if he might begin to tread air, rising into the Norfolk sky. Shaw always wore a white shirt, crisp, open-necked, and Valentine suspected him of the worst vice of all — that he ironed it himself. In the flat, late-afternoon sun the shirt just seemed to drink in the light. Shaw was six foot one, slim, with blond hair and a beach tan. Up close the brand image was slightly undermined by the eyes: one was blue, that kind of washed-out blue that’s almost not a colour at all, like falling water, and the other was blind, a moon-eye, white, floating. His face, which his DS considered now with a kind of half-hearted disappointment, was wide with high cheekbones. Outgoing was what Shaw’s face was. George Valentine had always been aware that his face was ingoing: pinched, narrow, his small black eyes set deep, his narrow hatchet-like head appearing too heavy for his neck, so that it hung forward of his shoulders like a vulture’s. This was George Valentine’s self-image, but it was only one of the reasons he didn’t have a spring in his step.

Shaw turned, filled his chest with warm air and stared at the dead woman’s house. ‘Tom’s right — something’s not right,’ he said.

Valentine didn’t move a muscle.

‘She’s put her foot through the sheet; she’s clutched at the duvet. And the eyes. .’ Shaw looked to the horizon as the distant tractor engine whined. Beside it, over the brow of the hill, stood a wind turbine eighty foot high, Shaw guessed, turning now so slowly you had to stop and watch it to see the movement at all. Batches of turbines had begun to appear on Norfolk’s north-facing hills, catching the Polar winds. ‘She hasn’t fallen asleep, she’s struggled violently,’ he said. ‘The pills and glass are wrong. .’

‘She died alone,’ said Valentine, his furred-up voice hardening. His narrow, two-dimensional head seemed to flip from right side to left side with nothing in between. Shaw always thought that if he had to put Valentine’s head on canvas it would be a Picasso — all those bony, angular, asymmetrical lines, like a skull constructed from parts of a wrecked car.

‘Really, George. Why alone?’

‘Windows are all locked. Uniform had to force the door.’

‘Have you come across the notion of a key, George?’

Valentine’s eyes went blank.

‘What do we know?’ asked Shaw. He had a light voice, as weightless as his step, surprisingly tuneful, suggesting an ability to hit a note first time.

Valentine had a notebook open on the bench beside him, taking up the space where Shaw might have sat. He didn’t need to check it, but he certainly wasn’t going to move it.‘Marianne Osbourne. Thirty-four. Mother-of-one. Husband is Joe, owns a locksmiths in Wells — family business. Daughter’s Tilly, aged eighteen, still at school.

Last person to see her mum alive that I can find was one of the neighbours — bloke with racing pigeons. .’ Valentine nodded at No. 2. Down the side alley they could see the pigeonhole shed. ‘That was at eight this morning — at the front gate, shouting at the daughter. Apparently that was standard. The kid stormed off down the lane to the village.’

Valentine felt a bead of sweat running down his back. He took a double lungful of air into shredded lungs, lifting his shoulders with the effort. He’d never been a talker, and he knew Shaw hated prattle, so he always kept it short — which was just as well, because with his lungs long sentences were getting harder to finish. ‘Kid from No. 3, Lewis, found the body. He’s seven. All the kids seem to run wild. He’s home alone, playing in the street, and he falls over and cuts his leg. So he goes to No. 6, a Mrs Robinson, a friend of the family. But she’s not there. She’s usually at home but she’s got a part-time job up at Well’s Lido, so the kid tried next door.’ He looked around The Circle, a pause which disguised a deep breath. ‘No answer at the front door. Dead woman works on the internet flogging stuff according to one of the other neighbours: cosmetics, toiletries. There’s a website and a company, which is in her maiden name by the way — Pritchard. She also works part-time down in Wells, at Kelly’s, as a beautician.’

Kelly’s was the town’s funeral directors. Shaw tried to imagine that face, dripping with Pre-Raphaelite tragedy, bent over the dead, applying make-up. It was a striking thought, because she hadn’t bothered with it herself.

‘So the kid wanders round the back to see if anyone’s in the garden,’ said Valentine. ‘Then sees the victim in bed.’

‘And that’s another thing that’s wrong. .’ said Shaw. ‘You’d pull the curtains, wouldn’t you? You’d take the pills, go to bed. . you don’t leave the curtains open.’

Valentine shrugged. ‘The kid may be only seven, like I said, but even he knows what a stiff looks like. Eyes open, that colour. He goes and finds someone. They ring us.’

Shaw detected a cynical, casual tone in his DS’s voice, the source of which was no mystery. DS Valentine had been up in front of a promotion panel the previous week. He’d expected to get back the rank of DI, the rank he’d lost more than fifteen years earlier after being accused of fabricating evidence in a murder inquiry. That stain had now been removed, thanks largely to Valentine’s doggedness in uncovering the truth. So he’d gone into the promotions panel expecting it to be a formality. He was so sure he’d be walking out a DI he’d had a couple of pints at the Artichoke as a pre-celebration celebration. The panel was a nightmare: no one likes being taken for granted, especially by a fifty-two-year-old DS slouched in the interview chair emitting the aroma of warm beer. Twenty years ago belligerent self-belief might have got him his DI badge back. Not any more.

‘Where’s the daughter? Husband?’ asked Shaw, wishing silently that Valentine would leave his raincoat at home. They were in the middle of the hottest summer for a decade but the DS still wore the grimy gabardine like a comfort blanket. Its only saving grace was the cluster of charity stickers on both lapels, evidence the DS couldn’t pass a street collection without putting a coin in the tin. At home Shaw had a family snapshot of George Valentine and his father leaving the Old Bailey in 1988 after a high-profile murder trail. DI Valentine, as he then was, had that same raincoat over one arm. The fact that Valentine had known Shaw’s father so well added a bitter taste to their relationship. It was an immutable fact of life that George Valentine knew his father better than Shaw ever would.

‘Hubby’s been told; he’s not a well man apparently, asthmatic, and he took it badly,’ said Valentine. ‘Had some kind of attack. He’s under sedation at the old cottage hospital in Wells. Not very coherent but the uniform who spoke to him said the wife’s got a history of depression — a couple of failed attempts with aspirin over the last five years. One bash with a kitchen knife, but only superficial. He did say the daughter should have been home with her mum ’coz she flunked her exams and they want her to resit. She’s doing media studies — God help us. Wants to be a campaigning journalist. Right the world’s wrongs. But she’s eighteen, so you know, she does what she likes and apparently she reckons she doesn’t need to revise again. She’s probably right. These days all you’ve got to do is turn up.’

Valentine thrust his hands into his raincoat pockets and flapped the material against his narrow thighs. He didn’t really believe what he’d just said about exams, but a lot of the time he couldn’t stop himself sounding like someone else. ‘Kid could be anywhere, anywhere ’cept inside that house with her mum,’ he said. ‘Victim liaison’s getting a woman PC out to look round town; apparently Tilly is no stranger to the amusement arcade by the harbour, or The Ship for that matter. They do underage, always have, in the back room round the pool table.’

Shaw nodded, stress making his shoulders bunch. All of which was local knowledge to Valentine, because after they’d busted him down to DS they’d sent him out to the backwater that was the North Norfolk coast. Wells- next-the-Sea, and the villages around it, had been George Valentine’s manor.

Shaw looked at his watch. They needed to find the girl and wait for the pathologist’s report, then they’d know if there was anything suspicious about the death. But for the moment they didn’t really have time for this because they had a press conference at 4 p.m., down at Wells. The West Norfolk Constabulary had secured a?400,000 grant from the Home Office to use the latest forensic techniques to examine cold cases on its files: they’d reviewed eight then chosen one — a murder from 1994. The reopening of the case was guaranteed to get wide media coverage because it was based on using the latest DNA tracing techniques. West Norfolk’s new chief constable wanted a splash to mark the reopening of the file, to show that even sleepy backwoodsmen could match the country’s finest, and he wanted his whizz-kid DI Peter Shaw to front it up. They’d got half of Fleet Street up for the day and it was Shaw’s job to put on a good show.

Which was why Shaw didn’t need this distraction. He hadn’t said it, just thought it, but he felt a surge of guilt, matching the word distraction with an image of the dead woman in her bed. Lena, his wife, had often warned him to watch out for the day that his natural scepticism rotted into cynicism. He always said it would never happen. He forced himself to conjure up an image of the dead woman’s room. ‘There was a kiss