Death's Door

by Jim Kelly

  Valentine hauled himself out of the Porsche, telling himself not to feel good about this; that Shaw was probably planning a dressing down for his DS, and didn’t want to do it up at the incident room.

  The bar of The Ostrich was full of dining tables, crowded with plates of scallops, fish in beer batter, and oysters. Shaw bought Valentine a pint of Norfolk Wherry and a fizzy water for himself, with ice and lemon. Then he led the way down a whitewashed corridor and out into the garden.

  Shaw made a quick call to St James’ and got through to the control room. The force’s own helicopter was on holiday traffic watch until noon, then back on at five. They could have it for two hours and the thermal-imaging gear was on board. Summer leaf cover markedly reduced the chances of getting a clear image, but it didn’t make it impossible. The Serious Crime Unit would have to make an internal payment to Road Traffic for use of the helicopter – nearly £4,000. So they had a deal.

  They watched a peacock strutting its stuff in the beer garden. Shaw had bought nuts and he put three of them out on the table top, spilling the rest in a pile so that they could both pick at them. ‘Three witnesses to East Hills: Marianne Osbourne, Arthur Patch and Paul Holtby.’

  Valentine took a nut from the pile.

  ‘Patch died first, probably,’ said Shaw. ‘Then Osbourne, then Holtby.’ He filled Valentine in on what he’d learnt from Lena’s map of the tides and winds of the North Norfolk coast. So it made sense, especially if their killer was either an inexperienced swimmer, or had panicked, or more likely still, was struggling with a wound.

  Valentine took two inches off his pint. He could recognize this moment now, the point in the day which seemed to act as a fulcrum, so that the afternoon would feel better than the morning, the evening better than the afternoon. It wasn’t all to do with the alcohol, although he was well enough insulated against self-pity to know that it helped.

  ‘The problem,’ said Shaw, ‘is that we appear to be dealing with a singular killer.’ He’d chosen the word well and it pleased them both, he could tell. ‘Singular. He – let’s say he for now, because Sample X is a man, so it’s a decent assumption. He operates in a purely pragmatic way. It’s almost ruthless, but somehow even more bloodless than that.

  ‘First is Patch. That’s completely cold-blooded. But for the bizarre chance of the candle surviving in the bedroom we’d have put that down to a gas explosion. Justina – alerted to the possibility of murder – did the tests. Otherwise we’d have presumed the cause of death as all too plain, given he was reduced to a few pieces of random bone and flesh. Spotting that it was murder was a one in a thousand chance. Then, before the explosion at Patch’s house, there’s Marianne. My guess is this was an assisted suicide, if you like, maybe more than that. But he just walks away from it, except for that kiss on the glass. That’s the only scintilla of emotion. If, and only if, it’s the killer’s kiss. He doesn’t try to make it look any more like suicide than it is; he doesn’t move more pills by the bed, or rearrange the body, or contrive a note. Nothing. He knows we’ll find the cyanide in her system, and he just walks away. And then Holtby, up in the woods, two nights later. The killer lures him into the woods, is my guess, by promising him he can get him through the perimeter wire. He falls into the trap – literally. The cyanide is administered. The killer walks away again – and he’s lucky again, but not quite lucky enough. The fire destroys our crime scene, but not all of the body.’

  Valentine flapped his raincoat with his hands in the pockets. ‘The killer could’ve just followed Holtby into the woods – he doesn’t have to be privy to the plan.’

  They drank in silence.

  ‘The key here, George,’ said Shaw, finally, ‘is that he doesn’t really care if we find the cyanide. The priority is the kill – each time. A professional.’

  ‘A soldier,’ said Valentine. ‘Maybe the bloke Robinson saw above the house on the edge of the woods. It fits. But there’s nothing from the army. Nobody’s gone AWOL. None of the East Hills suspects was military – not even TA.’ Valentine finished his pint and went for refills. He bought Shaw a half of Guinness.

  ‘I spoke to Tom first thing,’ said Shaw. ‘The forensics aren’t going to help us at any of the three SOCs. We’ve been all over the Osbourne’s bungalow – nothing. Patch’s house is burnt-out. We found Holtby in a pile of ash. It’s not hopeful, is it? Plus the fact we don’t have a single witness sighting for any of the three killings. Arthur Patch’s neighbours saw and heard nothing. Nobody on The Circle appears to have seen anyone approaching No. 5 on the day Marianne died. And no one was seen around the woods Sunday night. ‘Perhaps that’s it,’ he added, suddenly, irrationally, elated. ‘We’re looking for someone who can come and go without being seen.’ He added that to the idea of the professional killer and thought it helped – an outline appearing, like a silhouette on a distant horizon. He looked up to the woods on the hill. ‘So perhaps there is something up in the woods, one of these dugouts.’

  Valentine was concentrating on Shaw’s face – the way his eyes had come alive, despite the deep-set sockets which were often in shadow. So he didn’t see the figure approaching and didn’t take any notice until he took a seat at their table. It was the man from The Daily Telegraph, name of Smyth, Shaw recalled. He was in the suit, still, in country green cloth, with upstairs-downstairs glasses and that carefully cultivated air of intellectual distraction.

  ‘Lionel Smyth,’ he told them. ‘The Daily Telegraph.’ Smiling, he fumbled in the narrow pocket on his waistcoat and produced an embossed card. ‘We meet again.’

  ‘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

  The 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.