Death

sight of the candle flames he thought of Holtby’s skin-white face, smoke pumping out of the ash, and Hadden’s chilling description: human candle.

TWENTY-SEVEN

DC Lau walked towards the Porche from the direction of the wind farm’s gatehouse. Leather trousers, leather jacket, open to reveal a crisp white collarless shirt. Wrap-around reflective sunglasses hid her eyes. Shaw thought the effect was designed to radiate brisk, sexless, efficiency but the walk was strangely sinuous, almost a cat walk.

Shaw threw the door open and put a booted foot up on the dashboard.

Lau nodded a greeting, taking the time to squat down so that she could catch Valentine’s eye as well. ‘We’ve got statements,’ she said, her voice free of any hint of her Chinese descent. ‘But they’re pretty much the awkward squad. Talk about blood out of a stone. They seem to think Holtby’s been murdered by a worldwide conspiracy — US corporates bankrolling the wind farm, CIA, us. Paranoid stuff. We’ve spoken to Holtby’s aunt at Morston. She’s pretty sure he’d have been at Morston on the beach in 1994. You know, that’s a guess given it was eighteen years ago. But odds on he was there. A big family, they didn’t go anywhere else, just let the kids run wild.’ She smiled. ‘Sounds great.’

‘Biog?’ asked Shaw.

Lau painted the picture they’d put together of Holtby: local rich kid, absentee parents in the City, a degree from York University in history, student activism, then the eco-warrior circuit. Justina had emailed a preliminary autopsy report from The Ark. The scenario was provisional, but clear. The trap had brought Holtby down, a cyanide pill had been administered while he was alive — the casing was in his lower gullet — then the body had been abandoned to the approaching overnight fire. Something in the rucksack had accelerated the heat next to the body — so far they’d found chemical traces of phosphorous. ‘Tom thinks it might be a flare — you know, like an Olympic torch or something,’ she added, shrugging.

‘OK,’ said Shaw, kicking open the door. ‘Suggests he was up there after dark — or expecting to be up there after dark. Any idea why?’

Lau slipped on reflective sunglasses. ‘They’re all playing dumb on that, but I think they know. The Osbourne girl might talk. She said she wanted to see you, sir. Alone.’

Tilly Osbourne stood away from the group, by the security fence of the wind farm, watching the nearest turbine, the sixty-foot blades slicing through the air like the sharpest of knives. She had her fingers meshed through the wire, her face pressed against the latticework.

As Shaw approached on the tufted downland grass she turned her head. The tears were drying on her face, which was puffy, with the surface tension of a week-old party balloon. ‘How’s your Dad?’ he asked.

‘Ill. It’s the stress. He doesn’t really deal with emotions — not properly. But he’s comfortable, the drugs are working, he’ll be home soon.’ It seemed to be the thought of home that made her eyes fill with tears, so that she looked away. ‘It’s a man thing, right? Not talking.’

She straightened her back and looked up into the sky, an oddly adult mannerism for a teenager. ‘Once you get used to secrets — collecting them — it’s addictive.’

Shaw wondered who she was talking about: her dead mother, her father, or herself?

She stared through the wire at one of the turbines marked by a six-foot-high letter B in black stencil on the silver, elegant, tower of steel.

‘Paul’s death. It’s linked to Mum, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘It has to be. But I don’t understand why.’

‘Why linked?’

She shrugged and almost smiled and Shaw caught the ghost of a resemblance to her mother, or at least to the woman he’d seen smiling for the photographer in the Fleet Street studio. ‘I’m eighteen years old — I’ve lived here all my life, in the village. Once, when I was little, there was a car crash by the pub and someone died. But that’s it — eighteen years, one death, an accident. Now three in a few days. Mum, Paul and that old bloke up on The Row. You don’t think Mum’s death was an accident, do you? I don’t know why, but you think someone else was there. At the end. And there’s still people on The Row — people in white suits. So something’s going on.’ She smiled. ‘There’s not much to do up here but talk. We do conspiracy theories by the dozen.’

She watched the blade turning. ‘If I tell you what I know about Paul, will it help?’

‘Of course.’

‘It wasn’t Dad — at the end, with Mum,’ she said. ‘I know that. We talked, last night, at the hospital.’ She pressed her fingers on either side of the bridge of her nose. ‘And it wasn’t Dad out at East Hills. I’d know.’

‘OK. If he’s telling the truth we’ll know soon because we’re checking his DNA, so there’s nothing to worry about.’ Shaw waited a beat: ‘If he’s telling the truth, which means we still need to know who it was, Tilly. Who killed that lifeguard and who was with your Mum. Who brought her that pill, who helped her take it — and in the end made her take it.’

Shaw gave her a brief summary of the autopsy findings on her mother.

Shocked, she released her fist from the wire, like a plant opening in time-lapse photography, and showed him that in one of her palms she held a key. In the sunlight it was almost too bright, as if it was emitting energy, not reflecting it. Then she told him what they’d planned. ‘It was so exciting,’ she said, and the smile flared again.

A construction company had moved on to the Docking Hill site in April to build a canteen and a new office block by Turbine C. The work had required a replacement computer system, designed to monitor wind speeds and the inclination of each turbine blade. The workmen had been given access to each of the three giant turbines, the other on-site facilities, and the generating block. One of the labourers was young and had been to school with one of the female demonstrators. Sweethearts, briefly, they’d drifted apart.

The demonstrators had watched this young man each Friday, blowing his wages in the quayside pubs at Wells. One night, in June, they made sure he met the girl again. By the end of the night he was lying in a back alley, head foggy with a mixture of alcohol and prescription sedatives. In his pocket were his work keys. Three of the keys were marked A, B and C. None were missing, but if he’d looked hard he’d have seen traces of Blu-Tac in the teeth of B.

The plan had stalled there. It was no good having the key to the turbine if they couldn’t get into the compound. As soon as the SOUL campaign had begun a security firm had been hired to patrol the perimeter. The gates in the fence were individually computer locked — opened only by a sequence of numbers changed daily. The group favoured a mass demo by the gates, then trying to break through into the compound so that they could occupy Turbine B — get up to the gondola at the top, unfurl a banner, and see how long it took the security firm to get them out with a TV crew training its telescopic lens on their every move. They’d take up some flares as well, so they could be seen after dark. ‘A light of protest,’ said Tilly, smiling for the first time. ‘That’s what Paul said.’

That was the plan, and they’d set the date a month ago, and it had been timed for today. The chances of it working, however, were extremely slim. The compound was patrolled by dogs. The security firm was mob-handed most mornings. Pushing and shoving would turn into a brawl, the police would be called, and they’d all end up in cells at St James’. Nobody really thought they’d make it to the turbine, let alone the gondola aloft. ‘Then Paul called me on Saturday. He’d heard about Mum, so he said he was sorry. But there’d been a change of plan and he wanted my help. Would I help?’ She looked directly at Shaw. ‘I said yes, because I thought it would give me something else to think about, and stop me brooding about Mum. And if I felt better, I could help Dad feel better too. I’m in charge of media for the group, for SOUL, contacting papers, radio. It’s what I do at college. So it was up to me.’

Holtby, she said, had a new plan. He’d found a way into the compound. Overnight, on Sunday. Once he was in he’d get to the gondola at the top, and unfurl the banner at precisely eight o’clock the next morning. It was Tilly’s job to make sure pictures got to the media. She should take some herself, some on video camera, but best of all wait and see if the plan had worked and then get one of the TV companies out as fast as she could before the security guards worked out how to get him down the turbine steps. If he could stay up all day he’d light a flare after dark. That would shine for miles, like a beacon.‘I thought he’d found someone on the inside,’ she said. She looked through the wire again as the vanes on Turbine B began to turn. ‘Then, yesterday, nothing. No sign of him, and he