Death

They had house rules about holes in the sand. As a child Shaw had been on this beach, a mile south, near the pier, one late summer’s day. Two families had started digging pits in competition — a long, hot, afternoon of spadework, until they’d both got down ten foot. Shaw, an only child, had watched in envy as the two teams had revelled in the contest. Fathers, uncles, big brothers stood back, shouting, drinking beer from cans, while the children dug. That would have been fine. They could have posed for pictures, then gone home. But the holes were only twenty foot apart — why not dig a tunnel between them? Shaw had joined the crowd on the edge of one pit, watching as a child’s legs disappeared into the horizontal shaft.

Then the tunnel had collapsed. He’d run for his father, who’d been up in the dunes reading his paper in a deckchair. When they got back men were in the two holes, trying to dig through with their bare hands. When they got the child out they passed him up and laid him out on towels. The gritty sand was pressed into him: his eyes, his mouth, his ears, his hair. Then Shaw’s mother had led him away and his father, finding them later at a prearranged spot up in town, had never told him if the child had lived, which was stupid, because if he had survived he’d have said. Shaw was pretty certain that was his first dead body. The eyes had been closed so there was no clue there, but there had been one hand, turned out, ugly, and one foot, turned in, uglier still.

So they had rules.

Shaw walked to the hole and shouted: the anger so sudden, and mixed with so much fear and anxiety, that what he said was just a burst of noise. Then he took her hand and hauled her up so that she shouted, this time in pain.

‘I was just finishing,’ she said, looking up at him, scared, a note of defiance in her voice for the first time. Now she was looking at Valentine across the table as he ate his pasta. ‘Did you know granddad?’ she asked. ‘Granddad Jack?’

Valentine looked at her, sensing that Lena and Shaw were waiting keenly for the answer.

‘Yes, I did. He looked like you — a bit. Just round the eyes, and the way you look out through your lashes.’ He and Julie hadn’t had kids. It was wrong to say he didn’t like them. It was just that he didn’t know them.

‘Like Daddy?’

Valentine caught Shaw’s eye and saw he was laughing. ‘No. I don’t think so.’ He coughed, trying to clear his voice of the effects of thirty years of cigarettes and booze. ‘He looks like your Grandma. He sounds like your Granddad. You know, sometimes, when I’m not looking and he says something, I think — for a second — that Jack’s there.’

Valentine intercepted a look between Lena and Shaw. He’d never been good at interpreting such looks. They had a word for it now, probably an exam in it: emotional intelligence. This look between Shaw and his wife seemed to radiate reproach with disappointment. It was a wild guess but Valentine thought it meant one of two things: either that the next time Shaw brought someone home to dinner he should let her know in advance, or that they should have asked him to dinner before.

He wondered, for the first time, whether she’d told Shaw she’d been to Valentine’s house to talk about his eye. He thought about Brendan O’Hare wrapped in his fluffy towels, seeking betrayal.

Fran announced ice cream, everyone else passed, and she went off to help herself from the Walls fridge. When she was out of earshot Shaw took Lena’s hand. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have lost it.’ He looked along the table at Valentine. ‘Bit of a domestic.’

Lena shook her head and turned to Valentine. ‘He beats her daily with a rock. Now. Coffee,’ she said, getting up. Valentine didn’t have the nerve to tell her he only drank tea. She was one scary woman. He checked his mobile — nothing. When he looked up he knew something had happened because Shaw had got up and was holding his head in both hands.

‘Peter?’ He wondered if Shaw’s eye had lost vision, but when he saw his face the DI was laughing, an incredulous laugh.

‘George,’ he said. ‘Thank God you came to dinner.’ He felt behind him for his seat like an old man and fell back, his shoulders sagging. ‘You’re right about the voice. I heard it on my answer phone the other week and thought for a second it was Dad.’

He got up again, quickly, and took a bottle of iced white wine out of a bucket on the table. Shaw cracked the screw top, poured Valentine a large glass, and put a splash in his own.

‘It’s just a bit of what I inherited, isn’t it? The vocal chords. The shade of hair. The stance. Not the temper — that’s Mum’s.’

Valentine nodded, trying to see where this was going.

‘He wouldn’t have been very proud of us,’ said Shaw, sipping wine. ‘We missed the obvious, George. Both of us. What did he always say? That the real challenge of a murder inquiry was holding on to common sense.’

Valentine let the wine touch his lips. He didn’t really trust wine — too much alcohol in too small an amount of liquid. Shaw had slipped into lecture mode, and he knew better than to interrupt him now.

‘What was this whole inquiry about?’ asked Shaw, leaning forward. ‘What was the key to it all? Why did we reopen East Hills in the first place?’

‘New evidence,’ said Valentine.

‘What kind of new evidence?’

‘DNA — genetics.’

‘Exactly. The code which can lead us to a killer. Our problem is that we can’t find a motive for the deaths of two of our victims: Arthur Patch and Paul Holtby. Let’s turn this on its head. What would have happened if they hadn’t died?’

Valentine caught the slight hint of the rhetorical question in Shaw’s voice, so he didn’t even shrug.

‘If Arthur Patch was alive and well he’d have been at Wells’ nick this Friday morning,’ said Shaw. ‘He’d have picked out young Garry Tyler — almost certainly. They’d have charged the kid, George. Then taken him down to St James’ where the duty sergeant would have booked him in, got him a solicitor and then, standard routine, he’d have taken a swab and gathered a DNA sample.’ Shaw’s voice had gathered in strength as he spoke, and in volume.

Shaw came round the table, hands splayed on the wood, his face close to Valentine’s. ‘Next, Paul Holtby. If Holtby hadn’t been murdered in the woods, George, what would have happened the next day? The demonstrators would have tried to break through the gates — they’d all have been arrested. My guess is they’d have bussed them down to St James’ to process the lot. Teach ‘em a lesson. Breach of the peace, maybe even some criminal damage. Both reportable offences. So, again, DNA samples all round, and straight on to the national database.

‘It’s the timing that’s crucial. For the killer it couldn’t be worse. Because at this point in the inquiry he knows — is absolutely certain — that we won’t have found a DNA match from the mass screening. So what happens next; what should have happened next?’

‘We’d have run the East Hills samples through the database looking for a close match — a family match,’ said Valentine. ‘Which we didn’t do because O’Hare wanted to save?7,000 quid.’

‘Right, but the killer doesn’t know that. He presumes we will do the family match. He can’t afford not to presume that. I think he killed again — twice — to make sure we didn’t pick up that family link.’

Shaw drank the wine in his glass, held the cool liquid in his mouth, then let it trickle down his throat. He knew he was right because it was so simple. Sample X was the heart of the case. The killer had, at all costs, to stop the police finding a match. The mass screening was always going to draw a blank. But a family link was just as damning. The police would begin checking relatives: brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins — moving out through the family network until they got their man. The killer had to destroy any chance that would happen. And so he killed twice more.

Valentine leant forward and helped himself to another glass of the wine he didn’t like. ‘We’ve already got a suspect related to one of the wind farm demonstrators — Joe Osbourne,’ he said. ‘If anyone was going to end up in the cells — other than Holtby — it was Tilly Osbourne, his own daughter. It wouldn’t have taken us long to find that link. And Joe’s local — North Norfolk through-and-through. He could easily be related to this Tyler kid too.’

Shaw set the wine glass aside. ‘Yeah. Maybe it is Joe. With a little help from his mate Tug Coyle, I think, running him out to East Hills for nothing then forgetting he was ever on board. Anyway, we’ll know soon enough, George.’

Lena returned with the coffee and they sat watching the tide come in; the rows of white water just visible under a moonless sky.

Shaw’s mobile buzzed, shuffling on the wooden table top. It was Paul Twine up at The Circle. They had a problem with Tug Coyle. He’d missed two appointments at St James’ to give a new statement. So they’d sent a