“I’m talking about us, Liz. I’m telling her that I’m in love with you. That I’m leaving her.”
Liz stared ahead of her, appalled, as her future cracked across like mirror glass. This, quite simply, must not happen. There would be a divorce, and she would be named in open court.
“Did you hear what I said?”
“Yes, I heard you.” She swung on to the M11. Red brake lights were refracted through the rain.
“And?”
“And what?”
“What do you think?”
“I think it’s just about the worst idea I’ve ever heard.”
“I have to tell her, Liz. It’s only fair.”
Anger was racing through her now, darkening the stream of her thought. “If you tell her, Mark, I promise you, we’re—”
“It’ll be just us, Liz. Just us and the night.”
An idea—the tiny splinter of an idea—flickered across the dark cloud of her fury.
“Say that again.”
“Just us … and the night?”
The night. Silence.
“What is it?” he asked.
It was still there, pulsing just beyond her reach. And it was important. “I’ll call you later,” she said.
“Liz, this is … I’m talking about ending my marriage here. About leaving Shauna. About our future.”
The night. Silence. Damn.
“I have to go. I’ll call you.”
“I love you, Liz, OK? But I can’t—”
Two lanes were closed. Flashing arrows were bottlenecking the traffic. Damn it. She had to keep hold of this train of thought. Mark would try and ring back. She switched off her phone. It took ten minutes to stop and call Goss.
“Can I just check a couple of details with you?” she asked him. “Like, have you been able to establish an exact time of death?”
“The pathologist reckoned between four fifteen and four forty-five.”
“Were there other people around?”
“A dozen or so drivers sleeping in their cabs.”
“And the shot didn’t wake any of them?”
“Not that we’ve spoken to, no.”
“You saw the round?”
“Yes. Ballistics recovered it.”
“And it was definitely 7.62 calibre?”
“So they say; 7.62 armour-piercing.”
“Case of sledgehammers and walnuts at that range, surely?”
“Well, they’ll certainly be regrouting the wall.”
Liz fell silent, considering this information. The wind buffeted the car. She had no idea where she was.
“Thanks. Be with you in a couple of hours or so.”
“OK. I’ll be in the Memorial Hall at Marsh Creake. That’s the village the dead man lived in. The DS is setting up an incident room there.”
In the event it was almost three hours before she saw the first signpost to Marsh Creake. It stood at the junction of two narrow roads. To either side of her, windblown fields extended to the horizon; above, the wide skies were darkly charged with rain. Small villages, often no more than a handful of farmhouses, were strewn across the panorama, their flint-rendered walls and pantiled roofs visible for miles.
In late summer, Liz guessed, these fields would be a blaze of gold, and the drainage cuts which bisected them would reflect the clear blue of the sky. At this time of year, however, the landscape was a sullen brown; the corn stalks had long been ploughed into the wet soil, and the marsh reeds bristled secretively. You could walk for ever across this countryside and get nowhere.
As she drove into the village of Marsh Creake the fields became the outlying greens of a golf course. No one actually seemed to be playing but a few hardy souls were gathered outside a small clubhouse roofed in green-painted corrugated iron. She continued past rain-swept bunkers of pale sand on one side of the road and 1960s villas on the other, and found herself facing the sea. The tide was out, and beyond a low sea wall an uneven expanse of grey-green mudflat lay exposed. Narrow wind-ruffled channels snaked through this, their banks dimpled with worm casts. A hundred yards out a regiment of wading birds patrolled the incoming tide, stabbing delicately with their beaks.
Looking eastwards, Liz’s curiosity was pricked by a wooded promontory and the roof of a grand-looking Georgian house. Was that the headland she had seen on the map? Surely that had been to the west of Marsh Creake. She decided to drive up there and make certain.
Two minutes later she came to a halt. To her right, the road was bordered by the outlying parts of the golf course. To her left, at the point opposite which the golf course became reeded marshland, a balconied and weatherboarded building announced itself as the Marsh Creake sailing club.
Like the golf clubhouse, this was on a miniature scale, and overlooked an inlet through the mudflats which provided anchorage for a dozen shallow-draughted craft. Liz listened to the faint clatter of the wind at their masts. It would be next to impossible to bring a cargo ashore here at night. Marker buoys lay at the end of muddy ropes at the side of the inlet to mark the channel at high tide, but without using torches or showing lights there would be a serious risk of grounding. This was not Eastman’s headland.
Beyond the clubhouse was the Georgian building she had seen. Creake Manor, it called itself, and very imposing it looked. On the gravelled drive in front of it a blonde woman was sitting in the driver’s seat of a metallic-green Cherokee jeep, talking on a mobile phone and, as far as Liz could see, thumbing through a magazine. The car’s engine, meanwhile, was quietly turning over, blowing fumes into a hydrangea bush.
As Liz drew up outside the gates the woman looked over. Enquiringly, at first, and then with mild irritation. Returning her a vacant sightseer’s smile, Liz drove away. The grounds, which were enclosed by a high wall, seemed to continue for some distance. Large trees—ilexes, oaks, a beech—rose above the rendered brickwork.
Creake Manor, Liz discovered, was the last house in the village, and neither it nor the sailing club looked remotely suited to any kind of smuggling. Returning to the T-junction on the sea front, Liz nosed the Audi into the main body of the village.
While this had a spare, old-fashioned charm, it didn’t have the bijou look of a place which had expelled all its local inhabitants and replaced them with rich weekenders from London. Essentially, Marsh Creake consisted of a handful of houses strung unevenly along the coast road. There was a garage with three pumps and an oily-floored workshop, and next to it the Trafalgar pub, whose leaded lights and brick-and-beam exterior suggested that it had been built in the years immediately following the Second World War. Alongside the pub stood a gabled village hall through whose windows stacked chairs were visible. Continuing westwards along the sea front, Liz discovered the village stores and a ship’s chandler and souvenir shop which appeared to have closed for the winter. Behind these were several streets of red-brick houses and a low council block.
A turn in the road and a stand of elderly pines masked the village’s westernmost building. Headland Hall was a grey, rather charmless Victorian sprawl whose Gothic turrets and lancets suggested a hotel or town hall rather than a private home. On the seaward side of the house, dimly visible through the surrounding trees, a long walled garden reached out over the exposed salt marshes. The house was less elegant than Creake Manor, half a mile to the west, and the grounds less lavishly maintained. But there was a symmetry to the two establishments, enclosing the village like bookends as they did, and perhaps an implicit rivalry. Both unquestionably spoke of money and influence. Was Headland Hall where “twenty, plus a special” had been brought ashore? Liz wondered. It was certainly not impossible.
A three-point turn and a couple of minutes later she was back in the centre of the village. Parking the Audi on the sea front, she stepped out into a stiff east wind, causing a line of herring gulls to lift from the back of a concrete bench and wheel complainingly away.
The words In Memoriam were inscribed above the entrance to the village hall. Inside, it had t
he cold, slightly damp feel of a building that was not in regular use. Much of the space was taken up with stacked piles of canvas-backed chairs. At one end was a small stage, whose curtain hung half open to reveal a dusty upright piano. At the other a laptop computer and a printer had been set up on a trestle table. In front of the trestle table a female constable and a male plainclothes officer were setting up a VCR and a monitor on an extension cable.
As Liz looked around, a wiry ginger-haired man in a waxed jacket stepped enquiringly towards her. “Can I help you?”
“I’m looking for Steve Goss.”
“That’s me. You must be …”
“Liz Carlyle. We spoke.”
“We did indeed.” He glanced at the rain-spattered window. “Welcome to Norfolk!”
They exchanged smiles and shook hands. He was about forty-five, Liz guessed.
“The DS is still winding things up at the transport café where the shooting took place, but the photographer’s just e-mailed us the pictures. Why don’t I take you through them, and then we can wander up to the pub for a sandwich and a chat and defrost a bit?”
“Suits me,” said Liz. She nodded to the police personnel, who watched her warily and without expression. Stepping over a trail of electronic cables, she followed Goss to the trestle table. The Special Branch officer pulled up one of the canvas-backed chairs for her, sat himself in another, and flicked his fingers over the laptop’s touchpad.
“OK, Gunter, Raymond … here we are.”
Columns of thumbnail images flickered into view.
“I’ll just give you the key shots,” murmured Goss. “Or we’ll be here all day.”
Liz nodded. “That’s fine. I can always check back if there’s anything I need to see again.”
The first image that Goss enlarged was a wide shot of the vehicle park. Along the far boundary of this muddied expanse the heavy goods vehicles crouched like sullen prehistoric beasts, their wet tarpaulins shining. To the left was a low prefabricated building with a sign reading Fairmile Café. Strip lights shone dimly inside it, and the coloured loops of Christmas decorations were visible. To the right stood a concrete toilet block, beyond which a line of policemen in fluorescent yellow foul-weather jackets were conducting a ground search.
The shots which followed showed the interior of the café. This was probably a cheerful enough place when it was open for business and its tea urns were steaming. Empty, however, despite the paper chains and the inflatable Santas, it was decidedly mournful.
The third sequence showed the toilet block. First the exterior, with the pathology and forensics people milling around in their pale blue protective overalls, and looking glad of them as the rain sliced its way round the breeze blocks, and then the interior. This was empty—at least of the living. It was dressed in glazed white tiles, and contained a hand basin, two wall-mounted urinals and a toilet stall. A close-up shot showed that the lock on the stall door was broken. In place of a toilet roll, a Yellow Pages directory hung on a loop of baler twine.
The final sequence showed Ray Gunter. Dressed in an off-white sweater and a pair of dark blue Adidas track-pants, he was lying on the floor beneath a metre-wide starburst of dried blood and brain tissue. At the centre of this was a black hole where the bullet had passed through a ceramic tile. A long red-brown smear led downwards to the slumped body. The round had entered through the left eyebrow, leaving the face more or less intact. The back of the head, however, sagged formlessly away from the skull, and had voided its contents on to the concrete floor.
“Who found him?” asked Liz, narrowing her eyes against the photographs’ bloody horror.
“An HGV driver. Just after six a.m.”
“And the round?”
“We were lucky. It went right through the toilet block and lodged in the boundary wall.”
“Any forensic from the gunman?”
“No, and we’ve been over every inch of the floor and walls. They’ll be testing the victim’s fingernail deposits too, but I’m not hopeful.”
“Where was the killer standing when the shot was fired?” asked Liz.
“Hard to tell at this stage, but far enough away for there to be no obvious powder burns. Twelve feet, perhaps. Whoever did this knew exactly what he was doing.”
“What makes you say that?”
“He went for the head shot. The chest shot would have been much easier, but our killer wanted his man down in one. Gunter would have been dead before his knees started to bend.”
Liz nodded thoughtfully. “And no one heard anything?”
“No one will admit to hearing anything. But then there would have been lorries coming and going and all sorts of incidental noise.”
“How many people were there around?”
“A good dozen drivers sleeping in their cabs. The café shut at midnight and opened at six a.m.” He switched off the laptop and leaned back in his chair. “We’ll know a lot more when the CCTV footage comes in, which’ll probably be in about an hour. How about that drink?”
“The drink that started off life as a sandwich?”
“That’s the one.”
The warmth of the Trafalgar was welcome after the cheerless cold of the village hall. The saloon bar was panelled in oak and decorated with portraits of Nelson, knotted ropes, ships in bottles, and other naval paraphernalia. Above the service counter hung a framed Red Ensign flag. The place smelt of furniture polish and cigarette smoke. A handful of middle-aged customers were nodding and murmuring over ploughman’s lunches, salads and half-pints of beer.
Goss ordered a pint of bitter for himself, a cup of coffee for Liz, and a plate of toasted sandwiches. Liz had no great hopes for the coffee, and didn’t particularly feel like the sandwiches, but felt that she ought to eat. She had a tendency, she knew, to get caught up in the impetus of work and forget such things. Contributing to her lack of appetite—a quiet but insistent backbeat to the day’s other issues—was Mark’s phone call. If he meant what he said, then she would have to act. She would have to break things off; draw a once-and-for-all line beneath the affair.
Later, she thought. I’ll deal with it later.
“So,” she began, when they had settled themselves at a quiet corner table with their drinks, “this 7.62 round.”
Goss nodded. “That’s why I’m up here. It looks like a military-spec rifle was involved. An AK or an SLR.”
“Have you ever come across a weapon like that used in an organised crime context?”
“Not in this country. Far too bulky. Your average UK gangster tends to go the handgun route—preferably tooling up with a status weapon like a nine-millimetre Beretta or a Glock. Professional hitmen prefer easy-carry revolvers like snub-nosed .38s, because they don’t spray used cartridge cases around the place for forensics to pick up.”
Liz stirred her coffee. “So what’s your take on the whole thing? Unofficially?”
He shrugged. “My first thought, given that Gunter was a fisherman, was that he was involved in drugs-or people-smuggling and had a falling-out with someone. My second, which I’m still inclined towards, was that he stumbled into someone else’s operation—some heavy-duty Eastern European mob’s, perhaps—and had to be silenced.”
“If that was the case, though, why do it ten miles inland at Fakenham, in a busy place like a transport café?”
“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” He looked at her assessingly. “Does your presence here mean that your people think there’s a terrorist connection?”
“We don’t know anything your people don’t,” said Liz.
Technically, given that she had reported Zander’s call to Bob Morrison, this was true. Goss glanced over at her, but any suspicions that he might have been about to voice were silenced by the arrival of the toasted sandwiches.
“Has the murder caused a big stir?” she asked, when the barmaid had withdrawn.
“Yeah. Major chaos when the body was found. We had to clear the place, get all the HGV drivers out and behi
nd the tape barriers. You can imagine how well that went down.”
“Who actually found Gunter?”
“A driver called Dennis Atkins. He drove down from Glasgow last night and parked up at the Fairmile about midnight. He was due to make an eight thirty delivery of precision lathes to an industrial park outside Norwich. The café had just opened and he was going for a pre-breakfast wash.”
“And all that checks out?”
Goss nodded. “It looks kosher enough. Atkins was pretty upset. And the CID have spoken to people both ends and confirmed that he is who he says he is.”
“Much press interest?”
“The locals were there within the hour, and the nationals weren’t long after.”
“What did the DS tell them?”
Goss shrugged. “Man discovered dead as a result of a shooting. Statement as soon as we know more.”
“Have they named Gunter?”
“They have now. They spent several hours trying to locate his only relative, a sister who lives in King’s Lynn. Apparently she went out to work last night and has only just got home.”
“What’s the sister do?”
“Kayleigh? Not a lot. Takes her clothes off a couple of nights a week at a membership club called PJs.”
“And that’s what she was doing last night?”
“Yeah.”
“And the dead man—do we know what he was doing last night? Apart from being shot?”
“Not yet.”
“And none of the vehicles in the car park were his?”
“No—the police have identified all of them as driven there by other people.”
“So we’ve got him ten miles from home in a transport café without any transport.”
“That’s about the shape and size of it, yes.”
“Was Gunter known to the CID? Did he have any form?”
“Not really. He was involved in an affray after a pub lock-in in Dersthorpe a couple of years back, and there was talk of him having set light to a vehicle there at some point too, but no charges were brought. The car belonged to a small-time local drug-dealer.”
“Was Gunter a dealer himself? Or a user?”
At Risk Page 9
