Death's Door (38 page)

The Norfolk Suite was decked out in oak panels and fitted with a conference table at the front, microphones, full multimedia, including a whiteboard and acoustic ceiling. It was where O’Hare held his senior management meetings and was one of half a dozen rooms in Peter Shaw’s life he hated with a passion equal to the love he felt for being outside, on the beach. It was packed – maybe fifty reporters, with a TV camera and radio at the back. A table of coffee cups and biscuits. Wine bottles ready for the post-conference drinks.

As Shaw burst through the doors O’Hare was on his feet. The chief constable’s voice was barely more civilized than a snarl. ‘So that completes our summary of the mass screening. I was hoping . . .’ He caught sight of Shaw, then Valentine.

‘Ah. DI Shaw. Sergeant. Please . . .’ He held a hand out, indicating the empty seats at the front, facing the press. Shaw walked down the middle of the room between the rows, Valentine took cover along the wall, but they met at the front. The force’s press officer was nominally the chair, seated in the middle of the row facing the reporters. She was sporting a weary smile. Valentine sat on the desk edge despite a glare from the chief constable.

‘Great,’ said O’Hare. ‘Good of you to make it, Peter.’

There was nervous laughter from the press. Shaw noted Smyth, from
The Daily Telegraph
, in the front row. The nervous woman from the
Guardian
was in the second row, notebook poised.

O’Hare couldn’t stop his body language betraying him. His shoulders had relaxed and the forward, aggressive, angle of his head and neck had returned to upright. He’d been facing an uphill struggle to convince Fleet Street’s best the North Norfolk Constabulary was only just a step behind the East Hill’s killer. Now that job was Shaw’s.

‘So. If I can introduce DI Peter Shaw,’ said the chief constable, ‘investigating officer in the reopened East Hills inquiry. Peter, perhaps you could get us all up to speed and then . . .’

‘Sir,’ said Shaw, holding up a hand, cutting him dead.

O’Hare went to speak but Shaw didn’t give way. The chief constable’s surprise at being overrun while he was speaking was palpable. In the stress of the moment his tic returned, the quick sideways jerk of the jaw.

The room was silent but for the hum of the air conditioning.

‘We have today made an arrest in connection with the East Hills murder of 1994,’ said Shaw. He had the confidence to pause, readjusting the microphone, letting the silence lengthen and not rushing to fill it.

‘Charges are imminent,’ added Shaw, ‘and therefore reporting restrictions will come into place very shortly. However, I’m happy to indicate that we are no longer looking for anyone else in respect of the killing of Shane White on August 26, 1994 at East Hills, Wells-next-the-Sea. ‘

Everyone started talking, most to each other, a few stabbing numbers into their mobile phones. Mid-afternoon was a crucial time for the TV networks and evening papers, so most would have to alert news desks that a big story was coming. The PR woman tried vainly to regain order. Shaw stood, rapping the table, his eyes on Smyth, his sight back to pin-sharp. ‘Some details . . .’ he said, confidence and adrenaline giving his voice that serrated edge. The TV lights, which had been off, thudded on with a muffled explosion of electricity. ‘I am able to give you
some
details.’

Gradually the hubbub subsided. Shaw looked at his audience. Valentine looked at O’Hare, whose body was absolutely still, no – rigid.

‘We shall name the man arrested in due course. I should add that we expect to lay before the same defendant several further charges of murder. The victims in these cases will also be named shortly – all these offences stem, in part, from the East Hills killing.’

He looked at the press officer and smiled. She smiled back, but then caught sight of O’Hare’s face, which shone with a kind of feral intensity, as if he’d been deprived of some obscene pleasure. The sight, perhaps, of Shaw being torn apart by the baying hounds of Fleet Street.

There was a stunned silence in the room, then a barrage of questions. Shaw chose the woman from the
Guardian
. ‘Can you talk us through the motives in these killings and how they’re linked to East Hills?’

Shaw stood. ‘Delighted. We believe Shane White died, as we always suspected he had, as a result of his activities as a blackmailer. He tried to extort money from a young woman who he had caught on camera with her boyfriend. We believe this young woman and her boyfriend killed White – probably without premeditation. Probably together. The girl was still on the island when the police arrived. The boyfriend hid on the island because he’d been wounded in a struggle with White. Just how he managed to avoid the search of East Hills, which was extensive, is something we’ll be able to share with you once the case has moved to court. But I can say now that I don’t think any blame can be attributed to those who conducted the search, or indeed the initial inquiry.’

Shaw poured himself a glass of water, his hand unnaturally steady. ‘Our reopening of the East Hills inquiry sparked a series of killings – as I said, all designed to protect the identity of the boyfriend. The first victim was the girlfriend. The killer doubted she would be able to face cross-examination, and she was in a fragile mental state. Her lies had saved him once, but he doubted she would be able to lie again. We believe he assisted her in taking her own life and that he provided her with the means to take her life – a cyanide capsule. He had six of these capsules. Again, the source of the capsules is something we will reveal in court once we have secured the necessary forensic evidence. Three other victims followed. All died from ingesting cyanide capsules, all of them administered by the killer against the victims’ wishes. Two of these victims – an elderly man from the village of Creake, near Wells, and a young man from Morston, just along the coast, died to make sure we couldn’t trace the killer using the DNA from the towel. He feared we would track him down – not through a direct DNA match, which as you’ve heard drew a blank, but through a partial family connection which would have been revealed by a so-called
familial
search of the DNA database. That’s a search in which we look for close matches, not direct matches. It’s a one-off, special search. The final victim – a middle-aged man related to the killer – died because he was, like the girlfriend, not prepared to go on shielding the identity of the killer. That will be the basis of our case. I’m confident a court will find the evidence overwhelming. Charges are imminent.’

Someone at the back whistled and there was a scattering of applause. The woman from the
Guardian
hadn’t lowered her hand. ‘So we’re saying that while the mass screening failed because there is no
direct
match with the DNA on the towel, it prompted the killer to kill again, because a check would have led the police back to him through an
indirect
family link?’

Shaw let the full surfer’s smile light up. ‘Exactly. Beautifully put.’

Valentine was watching Smyth of
The
Daily Telegraph
. He didn’t raise his hand, but held a gold propelling pencil vertically.

‘Yes?’ said Shaw, nodding. There was so much talk still going on in the room that the press officer had to call for silence again. At the back the door swung open and another TV crew piled in. Shaw pointed at Smyth. ‘Your question?’

‘Remind me,’ said Smyth. ‘I don’t understand. What’s a familial check? Why’s that different from the mass screening?’ Valentine breathed a little easier, confident now that Smyth would ask the questions as he’d been given them.

‘Well. We started by trying to match Sample X – that’s the DNA recovered from the towel found at East Hills – with any of the eight million profiles on the national DNA database. We drew a blank. Then we took samples from the men on East Hills and tried to match them with Sample X. We drew a blank. That was the mass screening. Then it’s standard practice to run the sample through the national database looking for partial, or close, matches. If we get such a match then it usually means we’ve found someone closely related to the person we’re after. So we can often trace them from that point. It’s a long shot, clearly. But standard practice.’

‘And that’s what the killer was afraid of?’ asked Smyth.

‘Right,’ said Shaw, letting his eyes shift to the next reporter with his hand up.

But Smyth, Shaw knew, hadn’t finished. ‘And that was done when? This familial search?’ he asked, reading the question as he’d written down in his notebook. Tension was building in the room. Two or three reporters were shouting questions now and two TV presenters were getting miked-up.

Smyth’s question appeared to have shocked Shaw. He looked at Valentine and shrugged, then along the desk to O’Hare. The chief constable was still staring at the back of the room. But now he slipped off the edge of the conference table and stood. Shaw had a sudden insight into O’Hare’s psychology and sensed that he was able to think better on his feet, like a street fighter. It almost made him feel sorry for him.

The room, sensing the moment, fell silent. ‘In this case,’ said Shaw carefully, ‘it was decided to dispense with the familial check due to financial pressures on the budget. But of course our killer didn’t know that. So he acted as if the check was going to take place. The chief constable has, I think, already briefed you on the current budget situation.’

But Smyth had one more question. ‘But if this familial check had been made, just to be clear, it would not have led to our killer because he’d killed again, several times, to make sure the DNA trail wouldn’t lead to him. Right?’

‘Well, that’s a theoretical question,’ said Shaw.

‘You’re right,’ said O’Hare, unable to resist self-justification. But he’d said it too quickly, and even his cauterized emotional intelligence suggested he’d been led into a trap.

‘Except . . .’ said Shaw. He had a briefcase with him and he opened it, papers spilling out. Valentine walked over with a further wodge of files. It was a little bit of theatre they thought might indicate they hadn’t come prepared for this very moment.

Smyth, in the front row, was smiling now, nodding gently. ‘Any time,’ he said, getting a laugh.

‘Here,’ said Shaw. He offered the slender file to O’Hare but the chief constable cut the offer dead with his hand. ‘What the killer didn’t know,’ said Shaw, ‘and what is going to become obvious if this case moves to court, is that a close family member – his daughter, in fact –
was
already on the database, but he had no idea. She was arrested last year by the Metropolitan Police during a street demonstration. It’s just that she kept that a secret.’ Shaw shuffled some papers, but he didn’t waste any time, because he wanted O’Hare back in the firing line as quickly as possible. ‘It was an anti-war demo and she was arrested, processed, but released without charge from Paddington Green police station along with several hundred others. But we did take a DNA sample, as is our right under the current legislation. She was eighteen at that time and didn’t inform her parents, which was also her right. So a familial check would have taken us straight to the killer – just about, once we’d sorted out a few complications.’ Shaw let the silence stretch. ‘That would have been on Sunday,’ he added, letting the last word almost trail away.

Smyth asked the final question. The killer question. ‘How many people have died since then?’

Shaw sniffed, shrugged. ‘Three.’

He leant back; the TV cameras switched to O’Hare. The questions began.

O’Hare fought a valiant rearguard action but, on the third time of asking, was forced to confirm that a familial search would have cost less than £7,000. And it had been his decision, and his alone, to ditch the familial check. He didn’t say that Shaw had formally requested such a search but he knew Shaw, or Valentine, would leak that detail to Smyth after the presser was finished. The chief constable tried to bring Shaw back into the discussion, reminding the press that they had a suspect in the cells. But they’d got all they’d get on that story – Shaw had made that clear. So they returned, relentlessly, to the fact that the chief constable’s cost-cutting campaign had resulted in the deaths of three innocent people. Given that reporting restrictions were about to come crashing down on their murder suspect
that
was going to be the story.

Valentine had his mobile out, texting. He’d got Jan Clay’s number the last time they’d spoken and he thought he’d meet her, if she had the time, for a drink on the quayside at Wells. The whole of St James’ was a non-smoking building, and especially the Norfolk Suite, but he lit up anyway, and no one seemed to mind.

Shaw closed his eyes; aware of being outside himself, looking in. Only one question remained to answer. At the moment of Marianne Osbourne’s death did she change her mind, did she reach out for that startling yellow and black image, the field of sunflower heads. Did she want to live? Shaw suspected she’d asked her lover, the father of her child, to make sure that this
was
the end – to press down with all his force, violently, so that she would have no choice but to accept death. Only Marianne knew the truth. Shaw would let the question die with her, so that he wouldn’t be tempted to take it home for Lena.

He’d had his phone on silent for the press conference. There was a picture text from his wife. It showed the sea from the stoop: the mist had risen, so this might be the last warm evening of the summer. An entire Indian summer, perhaps, compressed into one sunset. In press conferences he always took his watch off, laying it face down on the desk: so he could see it was 4.08 p.m. High tide was at 6.06 p.m. He’d be in the sea by then. Lying on his back, floating in the warm water, trying to memorize the precise shade of the colour blue that filled his entire vision.