Death's Door (28 page)

‘What’s
The
Daily Telegraph
’s interest in rural Norfolk pubs?’ asked Shaw, trying to think fast and talk slow. If Smyth was here, in Creake, he knew something. The question was how much.

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
The Daily Telegraph
– not the
National
Enquirer
. I need confirmation – facts. A statement. A story. So the ball’s in your court.’

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 with a heart so black they hinted at purple. On the breeze, thrillingly, he scented rain.

TWENTY-NINE

T
he storm was still at sea as Shaw drove the coast road. Clouds churned over sunlit water. Thunder and lightning crackled together, the sound so immediate it appeared to be inside his head. The coast road was busy with holidaymakers quitting the beaches, heading back to cottages or the amusements at Wells. He turned off at the village of Morston, waiting several minutes for a break in the bumper-to-bumper traffic. A lane led past a line of stone houses and a small caravan site down to Morston Quay. Getting out of the car on the grass beside the wooden dock Shaw could see grey parallelograms of falling rain on the horizon, like solid ladders between sea and cloud. The wide expanse of water trapped in Blakeney Pit – the tidal waters between the coast and the long shingle spit of Blakeney Point – churned with energy, creating thousands of small pyramid shaped waves, slapping randomly at the boats tied along the quay.

Morston House was the last in the village, set on its own at the far end of the quay, with just the marshes beyond. Two storey, with playful Naval detail in the bay-windows and balcony, it commanded the landscape before it, and Shaw was not surprised to find a small blue plaque on the stone gatepost:

Harbour House

Official residence of Morston’s Excise Office.

1823–1941.

In the window by the front door was a poster for the Labour Party candidate in the forthcoming district council elections and a
SOUL!
placard, just like the one Tilly Osbourne had brought home the day her mother died. Shaw pulled a manual brass doorbell and stood back. The exterior woodwork of the house was bleached white, like whalebone, and unvarnished. There were no net curtains at all, but it was impossible to look in because the immaculately clean glass reflected the choppy water and the chaotic sky.

Jeanette Holtby, Paul Holtby’s aunt, answered the door and took Shaw through to the kitchen. The house had wooden parquet floors and high ceilings. Despite the summer the rooms were cool, a lot of the furniture stylish but threadbare. In the wide hall there was a grandmother clock, but there was no sound of it working. Ms Holtby was a small, sinewy woman in a darned skirt and a man’s linen shirt, and cork deck-shoes. Making Shaw tea, mashing a bag in the mug, she added milk from a plastic half-pint carton.

‘I’m sorry about Paul. You must have been close.’ He’d meant it as a statement but he could see her considering it as a question. She said it was oppressive inside, would he mind talking outside, at least until the storm broke? There was a deck beyond the kitchen, looking out over the marshes to the north. Thunder rumbled in steady beats, but the sky directly above was blue by contrast.

‘A policewoman called,’ she said, looking out to sea. ‘I told her . . .’ She didn’t finish the sentence, letting the cool airlift her short, workaday hair.

‘Yes,’ said Shaw. ‘I just wanted to see for myself.’ He looked out beyond the reeds to a narrow shell beach.

She gave Shaw a potted family history. Paul’s parents had split up and she’d offered to take the boy in the summer holidays. It had become a ritual, one of the fixed points in his life. The house was full of cousins in the summer. She’d left his room in the barn untouched so he’d returned after university. His mother sent him money, the room was rent-free and he cooked his own food.

‘And you remember the East Hills murder in 1994 – a lifeguard, stabbed out on the island?’ asked Shaw.

She turned towards him then and for the first time Shaw could see she’d spotted his blind eye. ‘Of course – an Australian? And there was something in the paper on Monday. The
Guardian
.’ She glanced back at the kitchen door. The newspapers had been spread over a plane deal table.

‘Well, we think – just think – that the killer may have swum ashore from East Hills. If he did, then he might have come ashore here. And we thought there was a chance that Paul saw him. Or saw something. The killer may have been injured, you see. Bloodied.’

She shook her head. ‘There’d have been no blood, would there?’ she said. ‘What would it take to swim – forty minutes, an hour? That time the salt would have cleaned a wound – unless it was bad, really bad.’ Shaw thought she’d have made a good copper.

‘And that’s why he died – because he saw this man?’ she said, a note of disbelief in her voice. Another long pause. ‘It would be good to have a reason,’ she said at last. ‘Because as a random act of violence it’s pretty appalling isn’t it? So
disproportionate
.’

‘Were you born here?’ asked Shaw, thinking the only way he’d find out anything now, after all these years was by chance, by giving her time to talk. He’d been taught this at Quantico, at the FBI school. Accessing someone’s memory wasn’t like putting a key in a lock, it was like getting a cat to come to your hand.

‘Good God, no.’ She talked about her life while Shaw watched the storm clouds darken. A degree in law, a career in the City, getting out before the stress killed her.

Finished, she looked out to sea with a smile on her dry lips.

‘I met Paul just a few days ago, up at the wind farm protest,’ said Shaw. ‘He tried to give us a leaflet through the car window.’

‘Well he was nothing like that, not really . . .’ she said. ‘That was an act, a performance. I mean that, precisely. Psychologically it was actually a performance, as if he’d fooled himself into thinking the real world was a stage. Inside, privately, he was fantastically self-conscious – the birthmark, I suppose, but maybe there was something else, something more rooted. Or uprooted.’ The laugh again.

‘He played on the beach – alone?’

‘Well, not quite. The house was always lively in summer. Family, friends. But books were the thing for Paul. Later, politics and books. But back then, just books. Science fiction – that got him started. Clarke, Dick, Huxley. Then the classics – Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, Conrad, Faulkner, anything he could pick up. We talked about books and politics. Thank God we had that.’

Which was odd, thought Shaw, because he hadn’t seen a book in the house, let alone a bookcase.

‘But he wasn’t a book worm – not a little nerd,’ she said. ‘He loved all this – the sea, the beach. So he’d have gone down with the rest – over there? Do you see? There’s a slip of sand at low tide. The seals come in too and they used to swim with them. But Paul just used to sit; make himself a chair out of the sand. I did see him swim but it was pretty rare. Usually he was wrapped up – clothes, books, just wrapped up.’

Shaw felt the first rain drop on his head. It felt as big as a marble, and icy.

He didn’t even have to ask to see his room. Behind the house was the barn, half brick, the loft converted to a bedsit with shower and loo. One wall was a scrapbook of political activism – an old poster from the Grunwick dispute, the Miners’ Strike of ’82, a black and white print of Castro. The bed was unmade, like a human nest, the sheets swirled. In the corner was a mechanical poster printer and fresh pile of
SOUL!
placards.

Ms Holtby flipped the window open from the bottom so that it lifted up, like the shutter on a counter, and at that moment the first lightning struck down to the marshes – forking like a synapse. The light lit the room as if it was a flashgun, and Shaw saw again what wasn’t there.