Death's Door

by Jim Kelly

  Shaw had to stop as several demonstrators stepped into the road and one leaned in the open passenger side window, offering a leaflet. He had a kind of Brideshead Revisited mop of hair, a T-shirt marked ANARCHY INTERNATIONAL, and a birthmark on his left cheek. Valentine noted an understated, expensive watch on his tanned wrist, the kind that shows the phases of the moon, and a ‘bum bag’ wallet on the belt of his black jeans, which were slung below his hips. He wasn’t as young as he’d like people to think. Up close Valentine guessed thirty, maybe more.

  ‘Thanks for your support,’ he said, trying to make eye contact.

  Shaw looked him quickly in the face, noting the birthmark – a naevus flammeus, or port-wine stain. He’d studied facial disfigurements as part of his forensic art studies. This type was treatable using lasers, but rarely with a hundred per cent success. The worst long-term effect was emotional. But in this case the young man seemed to have suffered no damage to self-esteem or confidence.

  ‘There’s plans for two hundred of these things along the Norfolk hills – and more than five hundred at sea. There’s a petition – the details are on the leaflet . . . ’ He tossed two on to Valentine’s lap.

  As Shaw edged the Porsche forward the young man kept pace with the car. He’d already sensed Valentine was hostile so he was talking to Shaw. ‘This kind of thing happens because of apathy. I mean, look at it . . . ’ He pointed at the nearest turbine.

  Shaw did; he thought they were beautiful. Elegant, Aeolian, immensely unhurried. They always made him think of the plastic windmills he’d stuck in the sand as a child.

  ‘And the bird strike’s horrific. Geese alone – thousands of them cut to pieces. They won’t release the figures but you can see the dead ones out at sea, after an offshore wind. Plus the noise . . . Not now. But in winter it’s, like, constant.’

  ‘Beats a nuclear power station,’ said Valentine, pressing the button so the window went up.

  The crowd cleared, ushered out of the road by some bored-looking security guards. Shaw accelerated away but he beeped three times and the little crowd cheered, because he admired anyone who could be bothered to demonstrate about anything.

  Half a mile further and they saw the sea, revealed like a backdrop on stage, as if the marine blue was a vertical painted board. The wide arc of the horizon was unbroken, stretching east to west along the north-facing sands. Out almost on the edge of vision they could see another wind farm, thirty, forty turbines, off the unseen Lincolnshire coast. In the mid-distance a school of yachts was bunched in a tight U-turn around a distant buoy.

  A mile from Wells they slowed to join a queue of holiday traffic. Valentine dropped his window, letting the breeze cool the sweat on his scalp. On his lap was the file on the inquiry they’d selected to reopen and were about to reveal to the press. While there was a decent chance they’d find the killer, even after an interval of eighteen years, he knew the real reason they were here, why they’d be on this case for the next few weeks, pretty much full-time. West Norfolk’s new Chief Constable, Brendan O’Hare, the former No. 2 from the Royal Ulster Constabulary, was a high-flyer amongst high-flyers. He hadn’t taken the job on to be forgotten. He wanted the world to know the West Norfolk was there, fighting crime on the front line with the latest scientific techniques. That morning he’d had the press over to the West Norfolk’s HQ, St James’, for interviews – his aims, methods, targets. This afternoon the press got their sweeties to take home – a nice juicy cold case to write up under embargo for Monday’s papers. A fat little maggot of a story just right for the so-called ‘silly season’ when the news dried up from Westminster, the Law Courts, even the City. This was all about publicity, and netting O’Hare his next chief constable’s ribbon, preferably a big metropolitan appointment: Manchester maybe, or Bristol. Then he’d be poised for the final run-in, the big push for the only job he really wanted: Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, with a gleaming office looking out of New Scotland Yard at the London Eye and Big Ben. Then, arise Sir Brendan.

  Which is where Shaw came in. Valentine glanced in the rear-view mirror at the DS’s face. Young, good-looking, sharp. The face of modern policing, the face O’Hare wanted to present to the media. Because putting yourself right up front was dangerous. If anything went wrong, it was Peter Shaw who’d take the flak. Valentine didn’t often look in mirrors to see his own face. In fact, sometimes he couldn’t recall it – not in detail. But he was pretty certain it wasn’t the face of modern policing.

  The quayside at Wells-next-the-Sea was crowded with small boats. The press already aboard the Osprey, a modern sixty-seater, which spent most of its time running parties out to Blakeney Point to see seals. Today it was rigged out to keep journalists happy, with an icebox full of bottled beer. Shaw parked in a reserved police bay by the harbour master’s office and retrieved a box file from the boot containing information packs and a CD with pictures, a map and cuttings from 1994 – the year the cold case broke. All the journalists had to do was sit back, drink a cold beer and listen to the story. Then they could tap it out on their laptops as they took the train back to London. Like water, Shaw thought, most journalists took the path of least resistance.

  Walking the gangplank to the Osprey he thought he’d judged the event perfectly: he hadn’t just netted the familiar faces from the local weeklies, the evening paper in Lynn, and the Eastern Daily Press in Norwich, he’d also snared three nationals and the regional man for the Press Association, who’d put it out to the rest of Fleet Street and the big regional dailies. As long as nothing broke through on to the news agenda for the UK over the weekend he thought they had every chance of getting a page lead in half a dozen nationals.

  Shaw nodded to the skipper and the Merlin inboard engine coughed into life.

  Osprey swung away from the stone quay, leaving behind a line of children and parents on the quayside crabbing – plastic see-through buckets dotted between them, full of skittering silhouettes. Behind them the little car park was crammed full, heat radiating from metal bonnets making a mirage of the shop fronts, the council attendant’s caravan office adorned with a large sign which read: CAR PARK FULL.

  Shaw settled with the sea view, his back to the town, drinking his beer, and talked to the woman from the Guardian: dangerously thin, with long, bare legs, a short grey skirt and a white collarless shirt. Her name was Nikki – Nikki Tailor. She squinted at him through narrow, horizontal glasses which were electric pink. Her hair was short and expensively cut, but she fiddled with it, brushing it back from her forehead whenever she spoke. Seated, she wrapped one leg round the other so that her ankles were entwined.

  She stubbed a biro on her notebook, mildly smug that she’d worked out that if the West Norfolk was reopening a cold case after nearly eighteen years – as the press invite they’d all got stated – then the science they’d used to open it up was almost certainly DNA analysis. She was right, wasn’t she?

  Shaw gave her a surfer’s smile. He was aware of the effect he could have on some women. Her own smile broadened, a flush of colour rising on her narrow, elegant neck, and her legs crossed and uncrossed, locking again at the ankles. ‘Ten minutes you’ll know everything,’ he said.

  She scratched some shorthand and readjusted the pink glasses, then dropped her notebook. ‘It’s John, isn’t it?’ she asked, when she’d retrieved it from the deck. ‘DI John Shaw.’

  ‘Peter,’ said Shaw. He thought this woman radiated a kind of perpetual low-level anxiety. ‘And we’re off the record, as I think your letter of invitation made clear.’ She nodded. ‘The information pack, which I’ll give you later, contains a statement from us – feel free to use that.’ He smiled, but she didn’t smile back because she’d got the point. All the quotes on the record would come from the chief constable. The last thing Shaw needed was to discover he’d stolen the boss’s limelight. Shaw’s time to take centre stage would only come if the inquiry turned into an expensive fiasco.

  Osprey threaded its way through moore
d yachts. The boat had a canvas sun-cover but the sparkling seawater reflected light up, dappling the shadowy interior with light.

  They’d been at sea for ten minutes and the quayside was almost out of sight, although they could still hear a one-armed bandit shuffling in the amusement arcade, the sound bouncing over the mirrored water of the long harbour. To the right the marshes stretched out of sight, deep channels of chocolate mud wandering through the reeds. To the left ran the sea wall, holidaymakers on the top walking out to the beach rather than taking a ride on the miniature railway which ran, unseen, on the far side. The smell of fish and chips lingered. But the air was cooler out here and the soundtrack was fluid – the screw turning, the water slapping the fibreglass hull and, just audible, the thud of waves falling on an unseen beach.

  Shaw stood on one of the bench seats which circled the deck, his hand gripped to one of the poles which held up the awning. Valentine noted with irritation the DI’s stance: his weight down one leg, the shoulders relaxed, the face devoid of any trace of stress. It was one of the many facets of DI Peter Shaw that got under his skin – the effortless ability to be at ease.

  ‘Ladies, gentlemen,’ said Shaw, the voice lighter than you’d expect. ‘Thanks for coming. I have to remind you at this point that in accepting this invitation from the West Norfolk today your editors signed the embargo notice, so nothing can appear in print until after one a.m. Monday – and we take that to mean that nothing will appear until your Monday print editions. Websites can carry the same information, but only from one a.m. The information is being released only to print media – radio and TV will get the press release by email on the Monday morning at nine a.m.’

  Shaw watched as the reporters exchanged smug looks of contentment. It was what they called in the trade a ‘beat’ – not quiet a scoop, because they were all being given the story, but they were going to be firmly one step ahead of TV and radio. He paused as the man from the Daily Mail rummaged in the cool box for a bottle. He had clearly decided, thought Shaw, this was a day off. He was in a pair of moleskin shorts with a shiny brass buckle, and a Polo shirt: baby blue, with a Lacoste brand label of the little crocodile. He’d once been able to fit into these clothes. Shaw guessed he was sixty, perhaps older. His skin was shiny, without surface tension. His name was Forbes – the first name Shaw had already forgotten.

  ‘So,’ continued Shaw, ‘just so that you can get your bearings . . .’ He pointed back to Wells. ‘The town’s to the south of us; we’re just leaving the harbour, marshes to the east, reclaimed land behind the sea wall to the west. Over there – coming into view beyond the Lifeboat House – is the beach.’ They could see a line of beach huts in seaside colours, a wide expanse of sand, room enough for several thousand holidaymakers. Even now that they’d picked up the sea breeze, you could hear the sound of a summer beach: the whisper of a crowd punctuated with children screaming, a dog barking, the flutter of kites. On the steep sandbank beside the channel a cluster of seals basked in the sun, roped off from a small crowd of inquisitive holidaymakers by a flimsy fence of tape and sticks.

  As Osprey slipped past the Lifeboat House Shaw trained his binoculars on the window in the mess room, on the second floor. Two figures in RNLI work overalls were at the glass, looking back at him. He waved once and both responded. Shaw had been on the lifeboat at Old Hunstanton, along the coast, for nearly ten years, having joined the RNLI while at university in Southampton. But he’d done shifts at Wells, which was one of the few full-time stations left on the coast, so he knew his way around. The doors of the main boathouse were open, revealing the blue and amber, sleek-hulled boat within.

  ‘And there,’ he said, raising his voice over the sudden cawing of seagulls, ‘is our destination,’ he added, pointing out to sea. The marshes turned inland here, to the east, to follow the coast. At the far point, about a mile off land, was a low island, crowned with dunes, marram grass and cowed pines. ‘East Hills,’ said Shaw. ‘That’s the scene of the crime – it’ll take us twenty minutes to get to the jetty. So do help yourself to a drink, and we’ve got some food too . . .’ Shaw nodded to Valentine, who heaved a picnic basket up on to the engine cowling in the middle of the deck. The journalists descended like the gulls – all except Forbes, from the Daily Mail, who insinuated himself into a seat next to Valentine and tried to listen to his conversation with the man from the local paper.

  Shaw studied the distant island. He had come here many times with his father as a child on the little ferry boat that ran out from the quay. Like most of the locals they’d avoided the trip in the high summer because the boat was crowded out with tourists and the ticket prices were steep. They’d gone at the weekend, spring and autumn. Despite the inconvenience – there was no drinking water, no shop, no nothing – it was one of the few places he’d ever seen his father relax. Even as a child he’d understood why, standing, holding his father’s hand, watching the ferry depart. Six hours before it came back. Six hours when the island was theirs. But even back then East Hills had a racy reputation – a kind of insular lover’s lane, with couples disappearing quickly off into the grassy dunes and pine trees as soon as the boat left. Shaw had stumbled on one pair, up in the pines, and the memory still brought the blood to his cheeks. He’d have been ten, maybe a year older, so the tangled naked limbs had made some kind of illicit, thrilling sense. But he didn’t know what to say – just a mumbled apology before running back to his parents. He’d sat, guiltily, feeling like a Peeping Tom who’d been caught out. He’d seen the couple, loose limbed, emerge from the dunes when the boat had come back, sounding a claxon as it bobbed off the floating landing stage, and they’d laughed at him – openly, and he’d felt that sickening adolescent certainty that he was never going to be admitted to the adult world.

  But East Hills, like all his childhood haunts, looked smaller now. About six hundred yards long, a narrow ribbon of high dunes cut off from the coast by a deep channel and a persistent and lethal rip tide. Shaw noted the stone pines, the navigation buoy off the point, the pillbox: at an angle now, subsiding into the sand on the distant point. And the small wooden floating dock, beyond which the crowd on the beach was thickest.

  He heard a question being asked and realized it was being asked of him. It was the man from The Daily Telegraph: a three-piece suit in a green country cloth. He’d be fifty-five, maybe sixty, radiating a kind, avuncular personality. But Shaw perceived something else beneath the unthreatening exterior. Accents quite that perfect were almost always manufactured. And when he’d got a hip flask out of his leather briefcase Shaw had seen a sheaf of cuttings on the West Norfolk force and its new chief constable, annotated in a neat, pencil, copperplate. So he’d done his homework.

  The question he posed was a simple one: why the three day embargo until Monday? It was a good question – sharp, businesslike, despite the attempt to bumble his way through it. He tried to recall the reporter’s name from the briefing sheet he’d sent Valentine. Smyth – that was it, and now he wondered if the ‘y’ was an affectation.

  Shaw sipped his iced beer. ‘That’s a good question – and the answer’s coming, I promise.’

  Smyth smiled, nodding, but there was nothing jovial about his eyes, which were slate grey.

  Osprey’s engine changed its note, the speed dropping, edging into East Hills past swimmers – most of them, despite the summer heat, in wetsuits, bobbing like tadpoles. The sea breeze had picked up once they’d got beyond the sand bar at the mouth of the channel and the breakers drummed on the sands, so that Shaw almost didn’t hear his text alert on the mobile. It was from Inspector Jack Craxton at Wells Police Station.

  NO SIGN OF DAUGHTER. Shaw looked at Valentine, who’d got the same text.

  ‘Trouble, Inspector?’ asked Smyth from The Daily Telegraph, on Shaw’s shoulder.

  ‘Routine,’ said Shaw.

  Osprey dropped anchor fifty yards off the beach. In the late-afternoon sun about sixty people lay on the white sands. The ferry ran just two trips a
day: out and back. The last time Shaw had been in Wells with Fran, his daughter, in the early summer last year, he’d checked out the price: twelve pounds. So you got social exclusion as well as spatial. Plus the lack of facilities kept kids and families to a minimum. A woman stood, topless, and waded into the sea, shoulders back.

  With the exclusivity of East Hills came one other major benefit on a north-facing coast: the south-facing beach, which attracted serious sun-seekers, dedicated heliophiles. One man stood close to the landing stage, towelling a flat stomach, one foot on a cold box, drinking from a plastic bottle covered in icy condensation.

  Shaw leant on the little capstan house where the skipper of Osprey was now theatrically filling a pipe.‘OK, everything I’m gonna say is in the briefing pack, as I said. So sit back, enjoy the sun and I’ll tell you a story.’He opened a bottle of fizzy water as the sea slapped the hull of the Osprey. ‘In 1994 there were seventy-five people on this beach one Saturday afternoon in August,’ said Shaw. ‘We know it was seventy-five by the way because the boat which ferried them out sold tickets. Still does. One of those tickets went to a young Australian called Shane White; he was twenty, travelling in Europe. He’d picked up a summer job as a lifeguard, employed by the local council. Back home – that’s a small place up the coast from Sydney called Barrie Bay – Shane had been the school swimming champion, and he had all the certificates you needed: life saving, endurance, first aid. It was his job to make sure no one got into trouble out here on East Hills. On the boat he’d have briefed all the tourists, the message clear: it’s a good beach to lie on, you can even have a paddle and a dip, but don’t try to swim out, especially back to land, because the currents are treacherous and when the tide’s running you’d need to be Mark Spitz to have any chance of making it alive. It doesn’t look it, but it’s nearly two thousand yards to safety. A country mile.’