Death

Sylhet. His notes make it pretty clear that in his judgement the wound was caused by a knife. Whose knife, Ruth?’

‘Look — what is this?’ asked Aidan.

‘Well, Ruth? It’s a good question. What is this?’ asked Shaw. Neither of the Robinsons seemed ready to speak. ‘Shall I tell you what this is?’

Ruth raised a hand to stop him: ‘No. I’ll tell you. I went swimming that afternoon, the Sunday. We always did — the family. Dad and Mum, Marianne and I. But she was in shock over what happened the day before at East Hills, so she stayed with them on the beach and I went in alone, at Brancaster. There’s a wreck out by the point. There was a swell, a rip tide that I didn’t judge right. I just wanted to rest, climb out of the water, and I put out a hand and it just got ripped by the metal. It was Dad said I had to go get it stitched — I wasn’t bothered. The salt cleaned it up.’

Shaw still held her fingertips. ‘The scar’s straight. Dead straight. Dead clean.’

She wouldn’t meet his eyes. ‘I was lucky,’ she said, drawing her hand back.

You were there.

‘Yeah, yeah, course. I remember,’ said Aidan. ‘After East Hills, I had to drive you up to the Lido for work after you got it stitched.’

‘Now I’ll tell you what actually happened,’ said Shaw, ignoring Aidan. ‘I think you, Ruth, went out that day on the boat with Marianne to East Hills. You were friends with Tug because he was Aidan’s cousin, so it’s my guess you never had to pay for a ticket. Unlike Marianne. She’d come to you for help, hadn’t she, because she was being blackmailed by Shane White. She always came to you for help and it was your job — your role, really — to be there for her. You followed Marianne into the dunes and confronted White. Threatened him — but you weren’t alone. You needed support. Aidan couldn’t help — not with his leg injury. So you asked Tug, asked him to be there, to add muscle — a hint of real threat.

‘So he anchored the boat and swan ashore. But it went wrong and Shane ended up dead. Who killed him? My guess is Tug. But I think you both tried. Then he swam back, but your problem was the wound you’d picked up in the fight. Then you realized there wasn’t a ticket, so you could disappear. The boat was full of trippers — no one had recognized you. So you swam back. And Tug kept the secret. With Marianne.’

‘What does Tug say?’ asked Aidan, a smile disfiguring the thin lips.

Night had fallen and a bat fluttered over them like a dying neon light, attracted by the candles.

‘Tug’s missing — has been for forty-eight hours, as you may know, Mr Robinson. After all, he is family.’

Shaw held on to that thought: family. ‘You and Tug shared a grandfather, of course. Who lived here for the last years of his life. Where’s his stuff? Any wartime memorabilia?’

Aidan squared his jaw. ‘What’s he got to do with this?’

Shaw looked back at the house. ‘Big attic? We’ll start there, shall we?’ Perhaps, thought Shaw, Coyle hadn’t found the dugout in the woods to get his supply of cyanide pills. Perhaps Aidan helped him. Shaw thought that might be Aidan Robinson’s role in all this — the key accomplice.

‘Just routine,’ added Shaw, knowing just how menacing that phrase could be to the guilty.

‘Meanwhile we’ll be tracking down Tug Coyle. We’ll find him. Then we’ll match his DNA to Sample X — and that, for you two, is when the fun begins. That’s when you both find the answer to the really important question: which is thicker — blood or water?’

THIRTY-NINE

Thursday

A helicopter whoop-whooped over the woods above Creake, the pilot briefly holding his position, so that the aircraft hung against the blue sky like a hawk. Beneath it trailed the thermal-imaging camera, like a miniature torpedo. Shaw could see it through the branches of the cedar tree which grew from the ruins of the Warrenner’s Lodge. The outdoor incident room was busy, all the phone lines in use as the search for Tug Coyle was stepped up. They’d got one bit of news: Interpol had some sightings from two Belgium ports — a single mariner, a small yacht. They’d asked the local police to check it out. Excitement was like lightning in the air, waiting to crackle. With the chief constable’s press conference timed for four that afternoon they all knew that with one more push, and one more stroke of luck, they could get their man. Shaw was even more convinced in the brash sunlight of day that that man was Tug Coyle, with Ruth Robinson a willing accomplice.

But even if they caught Coyle that didn’t mean they had a case. They needed the evidence to make sure the murder charges stuck in court. A decent defence lawyer would attack the DNA evidence, try and insinuate that the police had contaminated the sample, either by accident or design. A guilty verdict required a direct forensic link between the killer and the cyanide pills. The search of the Robinson’s attic had drawn a blank. Their best chance still lay out in the woods. Or, more accurately, beneath the woods.

A uniformed constable appeared at the door of the ruin.‘Sir. DC Twine would like a word — he’s up on the edge of the field, beyond the sunflowers. He said it was urgent.’

As they climbed the slope the helicopter swung overhead, a single Day-Glo arm signalling from the open door. Twine was kneeling on the grass, unpacking a ground-floor plan of what looked like an ambitious garden shed. A single room, an antechamber; but then Shaw saw the narrow almost vertical staircase entrance, and a long tunnel leading away.

‘We got this from the MoD, its a generic plan of the style of one of the hundreds of these dugouts built along the South coast in 1939, but they said it would be close to anything put in by sappers here.’ Twine, usually a picture of controlled efficiency, was struggling to keep excitement out of his voice.

‘This is what we’re looking for underground,’ he said, switching his eyes to Valentine’s face, then back to Shaw. ‘It’s effectively a miniature Nissan hut. So heavy-duty corrugated steel, a curved roof, sunk under the earth. Entry’s through this hatch, which is double-locked in iron, then down about fifteen feet in a series of high steps which are concrete. The emergency exit tunnel is also held in place beneath a curved roof. Steel again.’

‘And they’ve found it?’ asked Shaw.

‘Maybe.’ Twine had a plastic see-through overlay with the outline of the dugout in superimposed in white: box-like, with the escape tunnel as a kind of tail. ‘This is exactly to scale,’ he said, putting it to one side.

Then he spilt out a set of aerial pictures. ‘They took these on the first run after dawn. This is what we’re interested in,’ he said, stabbing one of the images with his Mont Blanc, edging the see-through outline into place on top of it with his other hand. Nestling beneath the tree canopies there was something where Twine was pointing — a blurred yellow, just shading to orange. The shape had no hard edges, no real architectural form, but it did have a single trailing tail. The match with the overlay was close — not perfect, but close.

‘I’ve just sent a team up with a map,’ said Twine. ‘And I’ve asked for dogs.’

On cue they heard barking from down on The Circle and the squad appeared, three handlers, three dogs, cutting straight across the open meadow, through the sunflowers and into the woods, the Alsatians straining ahead. They set off in pursuit, catching the dogs up when they reached the open space with the lightning tree. Unleashed, the dogs plunged on, heading down hill towards the stone folly set above the Old Hall estate. The trees began to thin out — no longer pine, but the original oak and birch. Ahead they could hear barking and somewhere unseen the insistent buzz of police radios. Finally they entered a clearing — gorse and bramble cut back so that the dogs could sniff the earth. Three uniformed officers in fluorescent bibs were already digging. One offered Shaw an Ordnance Survey map on which Twine had marked the spot with a red cross. Shaw noted that it was less than 300 yards from the glade where they’d found Holtby’s burnt corpse.

‘Looks like it’s been years,’ said Valentine, craning his neck to see into the hole they’d dug. The earth was compacted, hard, with a yellow-clay layer, undisturbed. The air of palpable excitement was dissolving fast. This didn’t look like their killer’s lair. It looked like an archaeological dig. The dogs, ears down, circled aimlessly.

‘The trapdoor entrance should be just below the surface, but they’re down two feet already,’ said Twine. He looked at Shaw, avoiding the moon-eye. ‘Could be it was just filled in after the war. .’

Shaw walked off into the trees, checking his mobile, trying to hide his disappointment behind pointless action.