home just one day a week – Saturday. Rest of the time she’s at boarding school. She’s thirteen years old, thirteen years and two months. So that morning there was a parcel with her name on it with the rest of the letters on the mat. A thin parcel, just the right size for the letterbox. No stamp, delivered by hand, but there’s no CCTV.
‘She sits on the doormat to open it up. She’s excited because she doesn’t get post often and when she does it’s usually a present from her gran. It’s June, but it’s Christmas for Mary Christine, until she gets the bubble wrap off. Then it explodes in her face.’
The burn covered the forehead and left cheek, the ear on the left side reduced to a trace of crackling, the upper eyelid raw.
Dryden felt sick and looked around for a chair but the room was otherwise empty.
‘Sorry,’ said Shaw. He seemed genuinely flustered. ‘I don’t seem to use chairs,’ he laughed. ‘I can get you one from the incident room?’
Dryden shook his head. ‘What was in it? The package.’
‘The chemical was phosphorus,’ said Shaw, looking at Dryden, not the picture. ‘It was mixed with various other common ingredients to create an effective incendiary. I can give you the exact chemical composition if you want. The company’s based in Sleaford, forty miles up the road.’
Shaw’s eyes were an extraordinary light blue, like falling water, creating the illusion for Dryden that he was looking through him. He had the impression he was dealing with someone with a well-ordered mind, and it was spooking him out. So far he hadn’t asked a question to which the detective inspector had not been able to give a precise answer.
And Major Broderick had been wrong about the hair; it was cut short and blond, but Dryden guessed it had been dyed by immersion in the salt of the sea. He’d been right about the tie, though, which was missing from the immaculately white shirt. Shaw’s face was broad and open, and Dryden could imagine him looking out to sea. It was the kind of face that’s always searching a horizon. Above the trestle table was a notice board with rotas and pictures taken in the cellar and at St Swithun’s. There was one personal note, a snapshot of a beach, a single empty chair by the water’s edge, a sea rod beside it. Perhaps it was the one chair he did use.
The detective’s mobile rang and he snapped it open quickly. ‘Shaw,’ he said. ‘Of course I’ve checked,’ he said quickly, laughing as if the reverse was an impossibility.
Dryden stepped out of the office into the public bar of the New Ferry Inn, which had been commandeered as an operations room and was almost unrecognizable from the one in which he and Broderick had talked just three days earlier. Shaw had explained that the scene of crime forensics team had swept the upstairs rooms in the pub on the first night of the investigation and found nothing of significance. An industrial sized coffee maker gurgled on the bar, and six new darts stuck out of the old board. A wad of insulated cables had been fed in through the front window and provided telephone links and a broadband connection running to a radio car parked up on the town bridge. At a desk two plain-clothed detectives were on phones, tapping at laptops. Plastic sheeting had been draped over the door to the snug bar, beyond which Dryden could see two white-coated scene-of-crime officers working at a trestle table. Box files ran the length of the bar top. It was exactly the kind of operation you didn’t set up to deal with a decade-old suicide victim, and now Dryden knew why. DI Shaw’s interest was in animal rights extremists, and it was pretty clear he was under pressure to catch them quickly before they decided to send another deadly surprise by post.
The detective followed Dryden out of his office and ended the call. He took a couple of paces away before turning on his heel to return. Shaw was still holding the picture of Mary Christine.
Dryden sighed. ‘Look, can we skip this stuff? I’ve seen enough pictures. You want me to sit on this story. The question is, why – it’s a simple one and I think I deserve an answer which is a little more sophisticated than trading on any sympathy I might have for a damaged child.’
A rook called from somewhere in the village and Dryden was aware of the deserted buildings which surrounded them, the empty street outside, and the just audible trickling of water down the ditch beside The Dring. Something rat-like scuffled over their heads in the room above.
Shaw said the forensic team had slept overnight at the inn to get an early start, a night’s rest Dryden couldn’t imagine attempting.
The detective leant against the wall, one knee bent up so that he could place a foot flat against the flaking plaster.
‘All right. An answer then.’ He looked at a point on the ceiling where the wires of the light fitting still hung loose and Dryden guessed he was framing the answer, ordering his thoughts. He recalled the reference he’d found online to Shaw’s role as a visiting lecturer in forensics. He could imagine him pacing a stage, deftly holding an audience with the authority in his voice.
‘My job,’ said Shaw, ‘initially, at least, was to clear up the case of the Skeleton Man. Chances are it was suicide. Chances are we’ll never know who did it. Chances are very few people care.’
He pushed himself away from the wall and went to the bar to look again at the picture of Mary Christine.
‘Then Henry Peyton gets his call from the animal rights extremists and we find that the tomb here at St Swithun’s has been emptied. There’s a unit at King’s Lynn – made up of personnel from across the East of England forces – which is about tracking down the leadership of these groups. It’s a big deal, Dryden, a lot bigger than sweetie snatching from a corner shop, which was my last major arrest of any note. This unit’s job is to track down the people who cooked Mary Christine’s face.
‘And now that’s my job too because I’ve been seconded in to that unit as I’m on the spot – thanks to our friend in the cellar. The line from the team in Lynn is that it looks like this local cell of activists, the one that’s contacted you, is indeed a renegade band. That’s why none of the CID team is here in person – although they’ve sent down their forensics people. No. They’ve got bigger fish to fry keeping an eye on the really nasty bastards. But it is just possible the people who contacted you may lead us to the same people.’
Dryden didn’t understand. ‘So we’re saying these people are taking orders from someone smart? You reckon? They’ve kidnapped some dogs, a herd of rats, and they’ve mustered enough loose change for two telephone calls. It’s not al-Qaeda, is it?’
The heat in the room was fetid, a layer of dust drifting in a box of sunlight which fell through the frosted glass of the bar windows. Shaw produced a cold box from behind the bar and extracted a can of sparkling mineral water. Dryden accepted another coffee. The can finished, Shaw lobbed it perfectly through a toy basketball hoop which had been fixed to the wall above an oil-drum dustbin. An electric gizmo in the hoop produced the sound of a crowd cheering.
