Death's Door (8 page)

Shaw looked out to sea, nothing in front of him and the world behind him. Lena pulled on a pair of Boden shorts. Shaw recognized the patterned material because
Surf!
sold the range. ‘Good day?’ he asked.

She thought about that. Lena’s attitude to the business was fiercely practical. This wasn’t a hobby, it was what she did, and it made her independent.‘£1,400 in the shop. I had Jon and Carole in the café and they took £550. Most of that was ice cream and coffee. A good day – up there in the top ten for turnover. Profits? Decent.’ Lena sat on the stoop steps, stretched her legs out and curled her toes into the sand: cold now the sun was gone. ‘You?’ she asked, a ritual invitation to talk about his day. Just the basics. If she wanted more, she’d ask again. There was no point Shaw
hiding
his life from his family.

Shaw told her about the death of Marianne Osbourne. The dynamic tension in their relationship sprang from his decision as to when to
stop
telling her about it. Shaw believed in the police, he thought they made people’s lives better. And he knew that Lena thought the same way. So most nights he told her what he’d done at work. Then they moved on. He outlined the case in two hundred words then stood, preparing to set out and join Fran at the edge of the motionless sea.

‘So this woman, Marianne, was on the beach at East Hills? Alone?’ said Lena. The moon was up now and she tilted her face to it as if it was the sun, so that the light gave her face an architectural quality.

‘Yeah.’ Shaw thought about that, sitting beside her. ‘Well, she said she hadn’t planned to be alone. Her friend just hadn’t turned up at the quay. And she may have met someone out there. But she said she was alone. I got George to read through her statement – the one she made at St James’ the day they took them off the island. She was sixteen, out of school, doing a course at the college, selling cosmetics door-to-door.’

‘Takes guts,’ said Lena, ‘at sixteen. Think back, how you’d feel, having to walk up strangers’ paths and just knock. That
is
a cold call.’

Shaw stopped, realizing that he hadn’t thought about Marianne Osbourne as a businesswoman: capable, competent, just like Lena, perhaps. His wife was right: it did take guts, a maturity as well, to work alone. Had a dream sustained her, as it did Lena?

His wife was shaking her head. ‘I’d have gone to the main beach – given the island a miss.’ She examined her toes, easily reaching to touch them. ‘Mind you, maybe there was someone she fancied on the boat? That would be perfect – she’d be alone, but she had a reason she was alone, ’coz her friend had let her down. Good opening line . . .’

‘In the statement she said she got there early,’ said Shaw. ‘Got herself a ticket because she didn’t want to miss out. It was a perfect day. She didn’t want to waste it if the friend didn’t turn up, and there was a crowd there already. And she liked East Hills more than the other beaches. She had a picnic, the lot. Anyway, she went. Says she sunbathed at the south end of the beach till lunch – had a swim just before – then read her book.’ Shaw slipped a notebook out of his pocket. ‘George says they took an inventory when they evacuated the island of what everyone had. This is Marianne’s . . .’ He handed her the notebook with the list. Towel. Bag. Bottle of made-up orange squash. Sandwich box – Tupperware, empty. One apple. Shell of a boiled egg in greaseproof paper. A yogurt carton – empty. One spoon. Radio. Paperback. Sun-tan oil. Lipstick. Vanity mirror. Eyeliner, Tissues,
Daily Express.
TV Times.
Purse: eight pounds fifty-six pence in cash. Membership card for West Anglia College Students’ Union.
What’s On
leaflet for The Empire, King’s Lynn. ATM debit card – NatWest. Membership Card: Docking Lido.

Clothes: shorts, pants, T-shirt –
Wham!
sandals.

‘What’s missing?’ asked Shaw, not knowing if anything
was
missing.

Out on the sands Fran had corralled the Chinese lantern and was walking it back towards the house. The thought crossed Shaw’s mind that she was growing up an only child, and what would that do to her? They didn’t want another child; they felt comfortable, close-knit and intimate. But was it fair? Lena had siblings – two brothers, a sister. Being part of that family, embedded in it, was important. Why deny Fran that life?

‘You said she went swimming?’ she asked. ‘So where’s her costume?’

Shaw checked back: no costume. She’d come well prepared for the day – so she had one. A mistake on the list? Was it rolled in the towel and they didn’t unfurl it? Maybe.

‘Did they talk to the friend – the one that was supposed to turn up?’ Lena turned towards him, suddenly sure of herself. ‘Because that’s what’s odd, isn’t it? She’s brought her own food, like, one yogurt. Her own sandwiches. One boiled egg. But she said she always went with the friend – the girlfriend. You wouldn’t do that – you’d share. Like, this time I do the sweet stuff, you do the sarnies. That kind of thing. Food’s part of the fun, not fuel.’ Pleased with herself, she turned back to look at the sea.

‘Alright, why would you leave the kiss on a window?’ asked Shaw. He’d painted that image for her already – the image he couldn’t forget, the two lips forming a perfect bow.

Lena stiffened, knowing they were close to crossing the line, that they were going deeper into his world and he wanted her to follow.

‘It’s for her. A goodbye,’ said Lena, thinking it through.

‘A lover?’ asked Shaw. He studied her face.

‘A lover,’ she said, pulling a jumper on, letting her foot touch his in the sand.

‘Because?’

‘It’s for him, isn’t it? Because she’s dead. It helps him avoid the guilt.’ She stood, shivering slightly now the day’s heat was flooding out of the sand into the cloudless night. She took his hand, pulling him to his feet.

‘So she was dead already, and he’s outside the window, and he knows she’s dead, so he puts the last kiss on the glass?’

She took his face in her hands: ‘Yes. Now that’s it. Enough. Let’s eat.’

While the pasta cooked Shaw took a tennis ball and bounced it off the sidewall of the shop. Each night he did this 200 times – often more. Continuous practice developed innate skills which helped him to catch a moving object with 2D vision. As so often with the human brain it could develop astounding talents when faced with the challenge of operating normally despite disability. One trick he was working on was to move his head rhythmically side-to-side just a few inches – much in the way that a pigeon would – so that his one eye got two views of the moving ball, the brain putting them together as it would with two eyes, to create a 3D picture. He did it 300 times, dropping it twice, then went to his office and booted up the iMac. He used Skype to contact The Ark – the West Norfolk’s forensic lab. The screen flicked into life. Dr Kazimierz loomed then disappeared, and Shaw heard a chair being dragged into place. Shaw stood and closed the door. When he got back to the screen he could see the empty lab. The roof of the old chapel was original – carved beams, and the thin lancet windows were green-stained glass. On the far wall was a single carved angel, its hands over its eyes, as if in grief.

Kazimierz came back into view, both hands held up, one – gloved – smeared with blood. ‘Peter,’ she said. She looked beyond him, recognizing the cottage office. Since her husband had died the previous year the pathologist lived alone in a cottage further along the beach. They’d become friends, but no one at work would ever have guessed.

‘Anything?’ he asked.

She touched her forehead and Shaw thought for a moment she was going to cross herself. He’d seen her once, on the steps of the Catholic church in the centre of Lynn – a converted carpet warehouse. She’d stood for a second, bracing herself for the world.

‘I double-check the victim’s throat and mouth. We have a scenario – yes. She takes the cyanide pill, holds it in her mouth, goes to the bed, then she bites down. The poison stops her swallowing entirely, but enough fluid is in her throat for the toxin to seep into the bloodstream.’

She leant out of the picture and reappeared with a skull – plastic, with movable joints for the jaw and upper neck. ‘Here . . .’ she said, pointing at the bony peg which joined the jaw to the skull. ‘There is a micro-fracture. I lift the skin and some of the muscle. On the other side there is no match. But broken capillaries here . . .’ She touched her own chin, fleshy, heavy-set. Shaw recalled the dead woman’s finer features, the narrow, elegant jawline, fragile even in death.

‘She broke her jaw then . . .’ said Shaw, ‘biting down?’

‘Not possible,’ said the pathologist, leaning back, a hand and coffee cup appearing from the left of the screen, the glove gone. She looked up into the rafters above her head. ‘Just possible,’ she conceded. ‘But one in a million chance. No. I think she put the capsule between her teeth, then someone do this . . .’ She put down the cup and slung one arm round her own neck.

‘A half Nelson,’ said Shaw.

‘Yes. Then the other hand presses the top of the cranium down as the grip tightens. That is when the jaw breaks. The pressure is very much . . . sustained. Maybe a strong man, maybe a strong woman. I could do this . . .’ She meant physically, not morally. ‘There are no signs she struggled. So I think she agreed in this, but only as a passive person. The word I don’t have . . .’

‘Acquiesced?’ suggested Shaw.

‘Thank you. Certainly up to the point when this other person applies this pressure. After that she has no choice. You understand this, Peter?’

Shaw thought that this was what Justina Kazimierz did well: the picture she’d painted was authoritative, clear and final: it was what made her a first-class prosecution witness. He heard Fran’s dog barking out in the corridor, the paws scrabbling at the door.

‘And these things . . .’ He struggled for the right word. ‘The capsules. They keep. They don’t perish?’

‘Tom is looking at this. Certainly they perish, but as long as the internal seal is intact then they still can be used. Constant temperature, out of sunlight, that would help. Fiona emailed me – you are already begun on this? She have the same question. I gave her the same answer. I need to get on,’ she said. The screen blanked.

Shaw heard the door open behind him and suddenly Fran was on his lap.

SEVEN

Saturday

T
wenty-two semicircular York stone steps led up to the main doors of the West Norfolk Constabulary’s headquarters, St James’ Street, King’s Lynn. St James’ had once been an imposing Victorian edifice, built at the junction of two of the town’s main streets, a bold statement of order amidst chaos. It had been cruelly used by the advent of the motor car, which had left it isolated, beleaguered on a traffic island. The inner ring road swept by on one side, enveloped in a perpetual blue cloud of carbon dioxide, while the street that led into the town centre had been unable to save itself from a long and seedy decline: kebab shops jostled with a brace of burger bars and one of Lynn’s roughest pubs – The Angel, the regulars of which saw the proximity of the police HQ as an incitement to riot. The sun was up and already high enough to penetrate the cool shadows in the old streets. Across the thoroughfare stood Greyfriar’s Tower, a remnant of the abbey which had once stood on the edge of the medieval town. A ruin, restored, it stood at a giddy angle, Lynn’s very own leaning tower.

Shaw savoured the moment of sudden silence as he pushed his way through the revolving doors and into the hush of the main reception area – a high ornate hall with busts of long-dead civic dignitaries in niches beneath a painted dome.

It was 8.15 a.m. A large white sign stood in the middle of the floor marked with an arrow, pointing left, and the words, EAST HILLS INQUIRY. Shaw walked lightly down a marble corridor. There were two doors at the end: one led into a spiral staircase, down into the old basement of the building and the cells; the other – marked with a second East Hills’ sign – into a courtyard, already splashed with sunlight, bouncing off freshly polished squad cars. Shaw noted that the chief constable’s limousine was in its reserved space.

On the far side of the car park stood The Ark, the West Norfolk’s forensic lab and in-house mortuary, converted from a nineteenth-century nonconformist chapel. The original church’s nickname came from its resemblance to Noah’s floating quarters – the box-like deckhouse of the Biblical boat. The only hints that it had been given a new role for the twenty-first century were an aluminium flu, a bristling communications aerial and a set of three new garage ports, currently housing two of the CSI mobile units and a hearse.

The East Hills mass screening had required the addition of three standard Portacabin blocks: one for re-interviews and for all those called to reread their original statements, one for the DNA swab tests, and one for witnesses not amongst those evacuated from East Hills on the day of the murder – the original CID team, the RNLI crew who turned out to help, the harbour master, the local uniformed officers who’d secured and searched East Hills. Each of these would also be asked to reread their original statements. Shaw might have a reputation as a whizz-kid but it was mostly built on being thorough. He had a talent for organization but a genius for not letting it get in the way of inspired detection.

One of the West Norfolk’s mobile canteens was also set up to provide tea and coffee, completing a temporary East Hills ‘village’.

Shaw bounced on his toes as he walked, feeling good. He’d swum that morning as the sun rose, the sea still deep summer warm, his hands rising and falling over his head as he let a rhythmic backstroke take him out to sea. Then he’d run to the Porsche – his measured mile, and clocked six minutes eighteen seconds, a new record. He could still feel his blood coursing, and the burst of endorphins had cleared his mind. It had taken nearly a month to organize the East Hills mass screening, a constant low-level stress that had been difficult to accommodate with his everyday caseload. Now the day was here he felt the thrill of liberation and the freedom which comes from reaching the point of no return. By Monday they’d have their DNA results – and the name of the man who had killed Shane White and had probably helped Marianne Osbourne take her own life with a cyanide pill. A large A-board stood before The Ark with an arrow pointing towards its Gothic double doors.