Death's Door (16 page)

He waited, feeling his heart thud, the sound of blood in his ears. Without the visual world he felt adrift, the distant sound of waves falling adding to a feeling of disorientation. What next? Wait, then open his eyes and get back to the cafe. Was this what he’d see for ever? The thought made him sick. Even if his vision cleared he’d have to see the eye specialist. Perhaps they’d have to take the blind eye out because that might help. Or operate on the good eye. He could see the word ‘blind’ on a page, diagrams of the eyeball above and below. The world for Shaw was intensely visual; the loss of it would change him for ever. And then, sickeningly, he remembered what he’d tried to forget over these last few days and weeks – the rapid and almost preternatural heightening of his powers of smell and hearing.

His body had
known
, even before his brain; it had begun to prepare for blindness, honing other senses to take the place of the pictures by which he navigated his way through life. He couldn’t stop himself then, trying to still the panic by opening his eyes. The fluttering stopped and the image sharpened: one of the seals was trying to get in the water, like a sleeping bag on the move, while the other rolled away. But the eyeball still felt wrong, as if he’d suddenly become hyper-aware of its movements, synapses opening up in his brain to monitor its position in real time. A footstep behind him sucked at the sand and he turned to find Lena just a few feet away, with a fresh cup of espresso.

‘Peace offering,’ she said, then froze. ‘Peter, you’re crying.’ She kept walking towards him and put her free hand round his neck, gripping the base of his skull, sliding her fingers through the close-cropped hair. ‘Peter, what is it? Peter, look at me.’ And they were the words he’d always remember from that moment. ‘Look at me.’

FOURTEEN

T
om Hadden had a flat in the Baltic Tower, a ten-storey converted grain mill in the centre of Lynn, overlooking the Boal Quay and the old cranes, the centrepiece of a miniature waterside Manhattan. Around it clustered the smaller medieval lookout towers the merchants of the town had built to keep a watch on The Cut as their ships came home, testament to the town’s three centuries as one of the great ports of Europe. The Baltic Tower was the highest, a misplaced Victorian statement of confidence in Lynn’s prospects as a port in the age of the railway.

Double-glazed windows looked out west, over the river to the flatlands along the shore of The Wash. Hadden had a door open on to a small wrought-iron balcony which gave a view north towards the sea. Shaw stood with a cup of tea, Earl Grey, with a twist of lemon, and an ice cube shaped like the letter H.

Concentrating on the cup, Shaw tried to forget about his eye. He studiously avoided the panoramic view, any strain on his vision. The pain had gone; his close-up vision was clear and in an odd way each minute that passed without a return of the flickering images made his spirit rise: perhaps it had been a one-off, a momentary response to stress or overworking the single lens. Talking to Lena had helped. She’d found the name of the specialist who’d treated him at Lynn after his accident and checked he was still practising at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. Switchboard had routed her to an answerphone and she’d left a request for an urgent appointment. Then she’d bathed the eye in warm water and massaged Shaw’s neck and scalp. She said his muscles had been hard with tension and that he’d never been good at knowing when he was overworking. Shaw had phoned ahead to postpone his meeting with Hadden until mid-afternoon, then rested, his eyes closed, pretending to sunbathe while Fran played nurse – bringing food, reading snippets out of the papers. Then he’d let her go, free to run to the beach huts near the town where a school friend would be out with her family; a school friend with her own DS, so that they could link them up and play building cities together.

Three hours later, behind the wheel of the Porsche, he felt restored. He’d left Lena in tears, standing by the car as he drove off, adamant he should take a few days off; rest, give himself a chance; certain, above all, that he shouldn’t drive the car. But he’d set her anxieties aside, aware that the most immediate way he could make himself feel better was to go to work. The fear of imminent disaster which had overtaken him on the beach had receded. He saw it now as irrational, born perhaps of some subconscious anxiety about total blindness.

The North Norfolk coast had flashed by in streaks of blue and green. He’d been in a good mood, on an artificial high, so he’d jogged up the ten flights of stairs to Hadden’s door. The CSI man got the bad news over with indecent haste. ‘Peter, sorry. No match on Roundhay.’ He stood aside from the door. ‘Overnight email, but I thought I’d wait until I saw you.’

Bad news, certainly, Shaw had agreed. But not unexpected. And it told them something: that Roundhay’s version of what he’d seen that day was almost certainly true. That Marianne Osbourne had walked off into the dunes, followed by Shane White. Now the rest of the mass screening results should place the missing jigsaw piece on the table: the name of the man she’d gone into the long grass to meet. Roundhay was in the clear. He’d lied back in 1994, but there was no evidence he’d lied again.

Hadden said there’d been some sort of problem at the lab because they’d phoned him to say they were double-checking the double-checked results. The final email should drop at any moment. Now the little balcony was in the afternoon shade he said he’d get his laptop and they could wait in the fresh air.

The open laptop was silent for twenty minutes. So they talked about kids, swapping tales of rights of passage. Then the iMac pinged. Hadden opened the email file and opened first the earlier message from the Forensic Science Service containing the Roundhay result. Shaw tried to speed-read the text but it was mostly maths – a complex statistical analysis. And there were no names, just coded letters, corresponding to a sheet Hadden had beside the laptop.

Hadden covered his mouth with the back of his fingers. ‘As I said – no match. You know the science here?’

Shaw nodded. They’d done DNA matching at the Met Police College at Hendon.

Hadden hit the inbox button and opened the new email from the FSS. It was about 3,000 words – complex analysis again. Shaw stopped staring at the screen, leant back in the seat, and let his shoulders relax, forced them to relax, his eyes closed, waiting to hear the name of their killer.

‘Right,’ said Hadden. ‘Good job you’re sitting down.’ He went back into the flat and came back with a bottle of wine, a white Burgundy, the glass blushed with condensation. Hadden had the corkscrew in and the cork out in one fluid movement.

Shaw left the glass untouched. ‘What’s wrong?’ he said.

‘Clean sweep,’ said Hadden, taking an inch of wine out of the glass. ‘No match – they finished the whole batch overnight. Given the result they ran it all again this morning. All thirty-five male samples, both from the living and relatives of the dead. No match.’Hadden closed his eyes. ‘From a scientific point of view. From a forensic point of view, I would say that was a disaster. That’s a technical term we boffins use, but you get the drift.’

Shaw pushed the wine glass away by the stem. Hadden’s eyes were still closed, so that Shaw was able to study the freckles clustering on his forehead where the lesion of the skin cancer op still showed. ‘The towel was buried on the beach,’ said Shaw, trying to cling to logic, to any structure that might explain the inexplicable. ‘The bloodstain is

White’s. The skin cells gave us Sample X. The boat took seventy-five people to the island. We brought back seventy-four alive – thirty-five of them men. We’ve taken samples from all thirty-five – thirty in the mass screening, five from relatives of those who’d died since 1994. There was a police unit on the island overnight, and the whole place was subject to both a fingertip search and a thorough examination by two dog units. The killer has to be in our sample.’ He tried to keep any note of antagonism out of his voice, any trace of a witch-hunt, but the ‘we’ was enough to put the forensic scientist firmly on the spot.

‘What are we missing?’ asked Shaw.

Hadden opened his eyes but avoided Shaw’s face.

‘There’s only one answer,’ said Shaw. ‘Sample X was on the towel when it was taken out on the boat.’

Hadden formed his hand into a fist and tapped it on the table. ‘No, Peter.’ His voice had returned to its usual whisper. ‘The science is clear and persuasive. The DNA sample – Sample X – was co-mingled with the victim’s blood cells on the towel. That’s not a term I’ve picked out of the air. It’s a term I’d use in the dock, in court, giving expert evidence. It means the two trace samples of blood and skin were deposited on the towel
simultaneously.
It is not possible – in the real world – for that to happen in any other way. If you asked me to re-create that double sample in the lab at The Ark I couldn’t do it. No way.’ He held both his hands out as if warming them at an open fire. ‘OK?’

They’d had this discussion before, when Shaw and Valentine had chosen the East Hills case to reopen. He’d talked it through with Hadden, testing his hypothesis, searching for a loophole in the logic. In the real world there wasn’t one. It
was
airtight.

‘But is it watertight?’ asked Shaw. ‘It’s a country mile out to East Hills but the rip-tide is so bad you have to swim twice that to be sure you don’t get sucked out to sea. Can it be done? Sure. We only discounted the possibility entirely because of the numbers: seventy-five out to East Hills, seventy-four back plus the victim. It adds up. But it doesn’t add up anymore. So maybe someone swam out then swam back.’

Hadden refilled his wine glass. ‘You’re right, we did go through this. You’d have to be an expert swimmer to do it one way, but there and back again? Without being spotted? You’ve got to come ashore, you’ve got to swim back. White was actually still alive when his body was dragged in. The killer had only just struck. Within minutes you had a police launch out, the lifeboat – we checked all this. Witnesses were looking out to sea, scanning the water. The harbour master came out as well, and he was specifically asked to stand off in the channel while the island was secured. Plus, the lifeboat called out the inshore crew and they went round East Hills, checking to see if someone was in the water. So if we’ve got some latter-day Captain Webb on our hands he’d have had to swim out to sea, straight out. We always said it was
theoretically
possible, Peter. But it’s a one in a million chance.’ Hadden’s eyes were closed; he pressed his lips to his fist.

Shaw recalled a beach barbecue they’d held at the cafe that spring. He’d invited Tom Hadden and he’d spent the evening drinking white wine and gathering driftwood for the fire. At sundown Shaw had suggested a swim. A group of them – thirty strong – had charged into the breaking surf. But Hadden had stayed ashore, explaining he wasn’t a strong swimmer and had never been an enthusiast for the sea. So that two-way marathon swim might look like an Olympic feat to him, but to Shaw it looked very different. He could have done it. Head down, sideways breaths, and a long series of languid dolphin body strokes. Difficult – dangerous even, but not impossible.

‘What other options have I got?’ Shaw closed his palms together as if in prayer.

‘The mass screening’s not foolproof,’ said Hadden. ‘I’ll check back through the DNA matches.’ He tapped the laptop. ‘I’ve no doubts about the samples we took from the suspects still alive. But those we had to do from the families of the dead – just maybe. I’ll see if there’s any long shots.’

‘So, what are we saying? That our killer might be one of the five men who died between 1994 and now, and that the DNA sample we took from their kids, or their mothers or whatever, didn’t give us an accurate reading across to theirs? Because with them we weren’t looking for a direct match – we were looking for a family match – right?’

‘We were careful but you never know. One family secret can screw up any amount of science. We try to stick to maternal lines: it’s pretty difficult to get the identity of someone’s mother wrong. But it’s not always possible to stick with mothers. So if we went for a paternal line there’s a danger – clearly. Exhumation’s the only foolproof method. And we didn’t go down that line because of the cost, which is pretty eye-watering.’

Hadden began to tap out some emails. Shaw retrieved his wine and stood at the edge of the balcony, letting the breeze cool his skin. Was there an upside to bad news? It did mean they could now consider suspects for the killing of Shane White who were
not
amongst those they’d taken off the island. So who was the obvious suspect now?

‘Joe Osbourne,’ said Shaw, out loud, but Hadden didn’t respond, focusing instead on the statistics on-screen. Joe thought he was Marianne Osbourne’s sweetheart back in 1994 but she was playing the field. That was a motive – the most common and most lethal motive of all: jealousy. What if Marianne was wandering off into the dunes to meet White? Maybe it wasn’t blackmail; maybe it was just sex. Plus Joe had an alibi no one alive could support or disprove. Had he really been in his father’s workshop that afternoon? And when they’d reopened the case and called Marianne in to double-check her statement it had been her husband who’d been the last person to see her alive. And it was Joe who’d phoned in to the funeral parlour to say she wouldn’t make work that day before taking his BSA Bantam down into Wells to open up his shop. What if Marianne had been dead before he left the house?

Shaw phoned Twine at the incident room at The Circle, Creake, and filled him in on the results of the lab tests. The young DC was all for interviewing Joe Osbourne that day. But Shaw counselled caution: by the morning they’d have some idea if their mass screening results were copper-bottomed, and the rest of the team would be in place. And their suspect wasn’t going anywhere. He told Twine to check on Osbourne: nothing heavy, but tell him Shaw and Valentine had some loose ends to tie up and they’d be at the house first thing. And for elimination purposes they’d like to take a DNA sample. ‘Play it softly, Paul,’ said Shaw. ‘Just routine.’