woods — he doesn’t have to be privy to the plan.’
They drank in silence.
‘The key here, George,’ said Shaw, finally, ‘is that he doesn’t really care if we find the cyanide. The priority is the kill — each time. A professional.’
‘A soldier,’ said Valentine. ‘Maybe the bloke Robinson saw above the house on the edge of the woods. It fits. But there’s nothing from the army. Nobody’s gone AWOL. None of the East Hills suspects was military — not even TA.’ Valentine finished his pint and went for refills. He bought Shaw a half of Guinness.
‘I spoke to Tom first thing,’ said Shaw. ‘The forensics aren’t going to help us at any of the three SOCs. We’ve been all over the Osbourne’s bungalow — nothing. Patch’s house is burnt-out. We found Holtby in a pile of ash. It’s not hopeful, is it? Plus the fact we don’t have a single witness sighting for any of the three killings. Arthur Patch’s neighbours saw and heard nothing. Nobody on The Circle appears to have seen anyone approaching No. 5 on the day Marianne died. And no one was seen around the woods Sunday night. ‘Perhaps that’s it,’ he added, suddenly, irrationally, elated. ‘We’re looking for someone who can come and go without being seen.’ He added that to the idea of the professional killer and thought it helped — an outline appearing, like a silhouette on a distant horizon. He looked up to the woods on the hill. ‘So perhaps there is something up in the woods, one of these dugouts.’
Valentine was concentrating on Shaw’s face — the way his eyes had come alive, despite the deep-set sockets which were often in shadow. So he didn’t see the figure approaching and didn’t take any notice until he took a seat at their table. It was the man from
‘Lionel Smyth,’ he told them. ‘
‘What’s
The reporter’s face was benevolence itself. The kind, slightly rheumy eyes, studied Shaw’s face. He wasn’t in a hurry to answer, and Shaw guessed he was calculating how much of the truth to tell. ‘A few days holiday,’ he said. But Shaw could see his iPhone on the table, beside a notebook, and that morning’s copies of most of the national newspapers.
‘Busmen’s holiday?’
‘Well, maybe.’ He sniffed the air. ‘Body in the woods — that’s what the locals tell me. And that gas explosion down in the village. That’s terrible. You survive a world war and then get blown out of your bed one morning for no rhyme or reason.’ He shook his head. ‘Then there’s the woman from up at that hamlet. . The Circle? Suicide. And then you lot putting out a media alert on cyanide pills. Very exotic.’
Shaw tried not to react.
‘Real question is — how does any of all that link up with East Hills.’
Shaw and Valentine locked eyes.
‘Refills?’ asked Smyth, and even Valentine said no. Smyth shrugged, setting his own glass aside. ‘Because by now you must have the results of East Hills — the DNA screening. So you should have your killer. Instead of which, you’re here, in the garden of The Ostrich.’
‘There’s a press conference Thursday — notice is going out later. You doing a story?’ asked Shaw.
Smyth produced what looked like a hip flask from his inside pocket, flipped open a silver cap and extracted a cigar. ‘I wasn’t. It’s
Shaw thought it was a nicely judged retreat. But he didn’t believe a word of it. All Smyth had to do was formally ask for confirmation of what he already knew — that there’d been three deaths in this small village in as many days. Shaw could hardly deny what had happened.
Smyth lit the cigar, replacing the silver cap on the fumidor.
Valentine shifted on the bench, thinking how much pleasure it would give him to frogmarch the reporter to the car, slap on a charge — wasting police time, anything, just so they could leave him in a cell at St James’ for half an hour, wipe that fake upper-class smirk off his fat face.
‘OK,’ said Shaw. ‘I can give you what we’ve got. But first — anything you can tell me? You must have picked up plenty of local colour — that’s what they call it, right?’
‘Sure. But like I say — it’s all gossip. This isn’t the only pub in the village,’ he said. Valentine pictured The Royal Oak, a fifties roadhouse, on the edge of a former council estate down past the church. ‘The Oak’s where all the real locals drink ’coz the prices here are pretty much Mayfair standard. And the food — Christ. How hard is it to catch a scallop? Anyway, The Circle’s got a reputation — quite an interesting one, given the strange case of the cyanide pill. Locals reckon the woman — the suicide — was some kind of pervert. Beautiful, lonely, never went out, but did business on the computer. Adds up see, to the rural mind. Husband’s odd too — I heard he pays for his sex down in Lynn. So, happy families all round. Daughter spends all her time up with the weirdos at the wind farm. Was she being knocked off by the bloke they found in the woods? Stands to reason. There’s a tented village up there so clearly it’s sex again, because there’s nothing like six weeks under canvas to get the hormones raging. Locals reckon they run round naked at full moon.’
Smyth laughed to himself, then blew a smoke ring. ‘So that’s it — the fruits of two days on expenses. Anything you can tell me, I could do with it.’
‘One new fact,’ said Shaw. ‘Marianne Osbourne, the woman who died in her bed up at The Circle, was one of the people we took off East Hills in 1994.’ Shaw sipped his Guinness, calculating. ‘And she took a pill. A cyanide pill. Military-issue. We’re trying to trace the source.’
Smyth just sat there, unblinking. ‘Right,’ he said, eventually, stretching out the syllables. ‘And the old bloke in the gas explosion?’
‘We can’t rule out a link. He worked for the council back in ’94 — the car park at Wells, right by where the ferry leaves.’
Smyth pursed his lips, as if producing a soundless whistle. ‘And the body up in the woods?’
‘Too early to say anything, but clearly we’re concerned given how close the three deaths are. What? Half a mile apart. Hell of a coincidence. Give me your mobile number. Anything develops I’ll let you know if I can.’
‘An arrest?’
‘Maybe,’ said Shaw. ‘We’re hopeful.’
This time Valentine offered refills and they all said yes. At the bar he admitted, if only to himself, that Peter Shaw was a good operator under pressure. Valentine guessed he’d given the reporter the East Hills link to wrong- foot the chief constable. Could O’Hare really remove Shaw and Valentine from the inquiry if there was a triple killer at large? This wasn’t an academic cold case anymore. And all of a sudden that?400,000 mass screening bill didn’t look quiet so important up against the fact they had a murderer on the loose. It was a high-risk strategy. But it might work. And the cleverest thing of all was that the reporter had not been given the most important bit of news: that the mass screening had scored a total blank. Cradling three drinks effortlessly in his bony hands Valentine turned from the bar, squeezing through the holiday ‘scrum’ and back out into the garden.
Smyth was already on his mobile, arranging with Shaw to double-check dates, times and names. He cut the line, pushing away his pint. ‘We’ll talk,’ he said, standing, then walked away without looking back.
‘Smarmy bastard,’ offered Valentine when he was out of earshot, looking at the abandoned pint.
‘You’re not wrong,’ said Shaw. ‘But clever. He didn’t ask about the DNA results. Maybe he knows. That’s all we need.’
Valentine’s mobile registered an incoming text. An old colleague at Well’s nick, saying they had something on the Patch case for him: FOR YOUR EYES ONLY. First Jan Clay comes up with the link to the museum, now one of his old mates wanted to help. Maybe his years at Wells weren’t all wasted. He showed Shaw the screen message.
Shaw stood, told him to finish his drink, and he’d see him at six down in Wells, outside The Ship. He was going east in the Porsche to Morston: he wanted to see the spot where the young Holtby had once stood, stand there too and imagine a figure wading out of the water that summer’s evening, and a young boy watching from the sand. Then he’d get on the phone and see if they could get Osbourne’s DNA result out of the lab by nightfall.
When Shaw reached the Porsche he could feel the heat radiating from the paintwork. Glancing north, towards the coast, he was startled to see the first storm clouds of the summer, a great billowing mass of cumulus, each one
