so that all that would be left would be salt, a pure crust. He looked along the beach towards the cottage and shop, the
‘Problem?’ he asked, coming easily to a halt, his chest heaving, but his breathing already picking up its regular rhythm. He pressed the stopwatch on his wrist to record his time.
The PC’s eyes widened at the sight of the force’s most high-profile DI — in shorts and a T-shirt marked
‘My wife runs this place,’ said Shaw, by way of explanation. Ms Lena Braithwaite was the name over the door. She’d kept her maiden name after they’d married — a mark of independence and, as an only child, a way of keeping her family name alive; a delight for her father.
‘Shoplifters, sir — a gang, over from the Midlands, we think. Two or three shops in town too — quite a haul.’
Lena appeared from the cafe, stepping lightly down on to the sand but dragging her toes as she walked, as she always did when her mood was down. She walked to Shaw and kissed him lightly on the lips, resting her forehead against his. The PC studiously studied his notebook.
‘How many kids, men, women — what we got?’ asked Shaw, pulling off the sweaty T-shirt and draping it over his shoulder.
‘Maybe a dozen of them — we think it’s a white van job. Traffic are keeping an eye on the A47. All men, usual profile. Eighteen to twenty-five.’
Shaw’s eyes narrowed and he tried to remember the PC’s name. Any standard description of a gang of away-day thieves would have included their ethnicity. Perhaps the young constable had been intimidated by Lena’s Barbadian skin.
The North Norfolk coast’s only mass tourist market was the East Midlands — Leicester, Coventry, Rugby. If the forecast was right they’d get thousands for the day trip. With the ethnic mix came a heightening of tension along the beaches, but it rarely boiled over into anything more than some name calling and a push’n’shove in the pubs. The pickpocket and shoplifting gangs tended to be mainly white, unemployed, and liquored-up. It was hardly a problem at all further east — the mileage limited the day-trippers to the campsites and amusement arcades of Hunstanton.
Shaw took Lena’s hand. ‘Black, white, Asian?’
The PC’s Adam’s Apple wobbled. ‘White, mainly. Maybe one or two of Asian descent.’
‘They got three wet suits. .’ said Lena, stepping back, putting her feet shoulder-wide in the sand the way Shaw did. ‘Just snipped off the security rings, which isn’t very encouraging. They tried to force the case with the watches but it held. I was over in the cafe, an old woman was taken ill. I think they just took their chance.’
The PC closed his notebook. ‘CCTV’s a thought,’ he said.
Shaw was close enough to see some of the light fade from Lena’s eyes.
‘All the shops they targeted are camera-free.’ He counted them off on his fingers: ‘Turner’s Gift Shop, toy and model shop in the arcade, and Menzies. Worth thinking about.’ He said he’d call back later in the week or earlier if they managed to spot the white van on its return trip. ‘But you know,’ he said, shrugging. ‘It’s a white van, on the M6. Sorry.’
Shaw helped Lena take an inventory of the shop. Fran came back from a day with friends in Wells and they told her what had happened. She ran to her room to check her things, even though Lena told her the thieves hadn’t been in the house, and that she’d already checked every room.
Later, Shaw ran back to the lifeboat house at Old Hunstanton and the pub beyond — the Mariners’ Arms — where he had a pint of Guinness while he waited for three lots of fish and chips, a weekend treat, midweek, to cheer them up. The bar was packed with tourists, the picnic tables outside too, the sky starlit.
He stood outside as well, to finish the pint. His mobile rang and he answered when he saw Valentine’s number.
‘I’m in Wells,’ said his DS. Shaw heard seagulls on cue, and a distant thread of fairground organ music. ‘Just a head’s up. I don’t know what to make of this but you need to know.’ Valentine gave him an expert one hundred- word summary of everything he’d learned in the museum.
Shaw was silent. Then he checked just one detail: ‘Six cyanide pills?’
‘Six.’
They agreed to meet next morning, then drive to The Circle. ‘What you reckon?’ asked Valentine, unable to resist the question.
‘I reckon we need to look for this dugout. It’s not just the pills, is it? It’s the fact that if it’s there then maybe he uses it. Like I said — the killer comes and goes. And there’s Aidan Robinson’s military man, up on the edge of the woods. And Hotlby died up there. Either way we can’t ignore it even if it does sound a bit fanciful. We have to look. Force helicopter might be useful — does thermo-imaging work in summer?’
Shaw took silence for ignorance and cut the line.
He ran back along the beach, the adrenaline clearing his mind. Lena had set out the picnic blanket on the sand and Fran had collected driftwood for a fire, and twisted a newspaper retrieved from one of the litter bins into twenty knots of kindling. Shaw added some dried seaweed off the high-water mark and then lit it with a light from one of three oil lanterns Lena had set out. Shaw thought that this was one of the joys of their life: beach craft.
They watched the fire burn, transfixed; the sight as hypnotic as the waves coming in, breaking on the convex coast, embracing the shore. Shaw thought it was one of the peculiarities of this stretch of coast, where the Wash met the North Sea, that the land was always leading away behind you on either side. No headlands, or bays, or great sweeps of coast interrupted the seascape. It was as if they lived on the edge of the world. He caught Lena’s eye — the one with the slight caste — and was astonished to realize, by some leap of telepathy, that in her own way she was thinking the same thing.
She kept her lips together but still smiled, then went back to using the blank white paper the fish and chips were wrapped in to add up some figures with the stubby pencil she kept in her shirt breast pocket.
‘Damage?’ asked Shaw, when she’d screwed up the paper and lobbed it into the fire. He broke a piece of white fish in batter off and held it lightly between his teeth, letting the air cool it. Fran had finished and was drawing something in the sand with a stick.
‘Nearly four thousand, but it’s all insured,’ she said, smiling at her daughter.
Shaw knew the calculations were subtler than that. They’d lose their no-claims bonus and the premiums would go up next time. If they went for CCTV that would be?10,000, minimum. The other way forward was to employ enough staff every day of the summer to put someone in the shop, someone in the cafe, someone in the kitchen. Minimum of three; whereas now they scrapped by with two, three for weekends and holidays. That would significantly raise their costs. But the real damage was psychological, he knew, and the real victim was Lena. She’d always been clear that life on the beach only looked like paradise when the sun was out. But now, even on one of the best days of the summer, they’d been bitten by the first snake.
They ate ice creams from the Walls’ freezer in the shop, then took the old dog down to the water’s edge. Shaw put Fran to bed, reading a chapter of the latest Terry Pratchett. His daughter complained that there was still light in the sky, seeping in through the curtains, but he said it would be gone soon because the stars were out, and the best way to sleep was to watch the dark creep into the room, filling up the corners first. For the first time that year she asked him to close the bedroom window. She said there was a chill off the sea, but Shaw knew she was lying, because she turned her head away on the pillow.
He closed the door and stood in the long corridor which joined the cottage to the shop, wondering if he should sneak in later and open the window. Then his phone vibrated: a text from Paul Twine up at The Circle to say that Joe Osbourne had seen the on-duty doctor at St James’ and been admitted to the Queen Victoria Hospital. Acute, ongoing, asthma attack. Irregular heartbeat also noted. Condition: stable.
Shaw let himself into the cafe and took one of the OS maps from the display on the counter. Out on the picnic blanket he spread it out, realizing too late he should have asked. But Lena wasn’t looking at the map, she was looking at him. ‘How’s the eye?’ she asked. ‘Tell me.’
Shaw took his good health for granted and he realized how quickly he’d discounted the attack of blurred vision as a one-off, a never-to-be-repeated episode, just a glimpse of a future he was fated to avoid. He’d always
