Death Ship

by Jim Kelly

  Shaw thought that for all the flip-flop routine Roos was a shrewd operator who had just expertly distanced herself and the STP from any number of environmental extremists.

  Valentine left with Roos to take a note of some names from an online register of supporters and fundraisers.

  Shaw examined the framed picture of the tug on the wall. ‘The name – something to do with salvage? Like flotsam?’

  Coram’s eyes softened as he examined the boat. ‘Yeah. Flotsam’s floating wreckage from a ship. Jetsam is stuff thrown overboard to keep a boat afloat – cargo, equipment, even bits of the superstructure if it’s wooden. Lagan is stuff that’s lying on the bottom of the sea, but you might get it back – maybe it’s marked by a buoy on the surface. Derelict – that’s stuff on the bottom you can kiss goodbye to. She was my first boat – well, my dad’s – a salvage tug. We worked out of Wells – still do. Fleet of six now, worth millions. You could fit the Lagan in the hold of one of the new boats. The wind farms – off the Lincolnshire coast, off north Norfolk? We service them, stand by on construction, shift the heavy stuff. A good business. Son runs it now. Thinks he knows best.’

  ‘There’ll be some business on the pier project, then?’ asked Shaw.

  Coram rolled with the punch. ‘Actually, that all went to a Belgian outfit, out of Antwerp. They undercut us. Anyway, neither here nor there. I don’t let the company’s commercial interests impinge on the campaign.’

  ‘So why do this? Why run STP and take on the aggravation?’ asked Shaw.

  Coram’s eyes narrowed. ‘What’s in it for me, Inspector? I’ll show you.’

  Out on the balcony they could see down to the beach, deserted for half a mile on either side of the blast site. The distant fun park was in full flow, the weaving, sickly, circus-ring music coming in waves with the breeze. On the water’s edge the West Norfolk’s diving unit was preparing to enter the water, ready to scour the seabed for any more fragments of the explosive device. A light aircraft, in military camouflage, flew the shoreline, a torpedo-like sonar device hung beneath in a wire cradle.

  Coram watched the fly-past. ‘Aerial survey, right? They’ll find others, believe me. Wartime. You see.’

  Shaw smiled, thinking of Donald Ross’s silver fish spilling into the sandpit. For now, they’d let the STP hang on to the convenient theory that the bomb was military.

  Coram turned abruptly and stalked off down the balcony towards the prow of the ‘ship’ that was Marine Court. Looking landwards over the roofs of the Victorian town, a maze of red brick and Norfolk stone and flint, he picked out a distant building on the horizon.

  ‘See the tower?’ He extended his arm, the whole limb seeming to vibrate with tension.

  A line of large villas stood on the chalk ridge inland, one adorned with a high tower, octagonal, topped with a single room under a witch’s-hat roof.

  ‘The Old Lookout. My home, Inspector. From there I can see clean across to Lincolnshire, or north out to sea. I’ve been north, not in the Lagan, but in one of the new tugs. Far enough to see ice. We did a few jobs in Spitsbergen, beyond the Arctic Circle. Sometimes, when I look north from home – and I know this is an illusion – I think I can see ice blink – that’s the reflection of the ice, bouncing light up on the clouds. It’s as if I can see for ever. It’s a view to die for. I don’t want it polluted by an ugly eyesore of a pier.’

  Shaw turned his good eye back to the sea, but Valentine, who had followed them both out on to the balcony, focused on the house and that lookout window in the tower. He thought he saw a figure there, and a pair of binoculars perhaps, catching the light.

  THIRTEEN

  The army established a command post with military precision on the green above the beach, commandeering the square of police cars set up by Shaw in the hours after the bomb explosion. A miniature encampment, it comprised three canvas tents, a jeep with trailer, and a five-tonne truck with a hard cover over the flatback. Another tent, set aside, was clearly for catering, as two cooks in aprons ferried food in and out. One soldier stood guard with a sub-machine gun held horizontally across his chest, a slender microphone extending from his combat helmet. Until the all-clear from the Home Office anti-terrorist branch, the military was, Shaw noted, determined to play with all its toys.

  To one side, a group of five squaddies shared cigarettes, standing in a loose Arthurian circle, looking at their boots.

  Shaw broke the ring. ‘Captain Wharram?’

  Led down the brick steps to the beach, Shaw was taken to the edge of the original shell hole, now smoothed into a dish by several high tides, but still clearly visible, its bow-tie-shaped scar aligned broadly north-west–south-east. At the pit’s bottom, St James’ head of forensics, Tom Hadden, was on his knees, trying to prize a piece of glass-like rock from the sand with a metal spatula, while beside him crouched an officer in fatigues.

  Shaw slid down the pit face as Hadden held up a splinter of rock.

  ‘DI Shaw,’ said Hadden, by way of introduction. Captain Wharram introduced himself with a surprisingly limp handshake, which involved just the tips of his fingers.

  The bomb site was six feet deep, and Shaw felt the familiar anxieties of the claustrophobic. The sound of the surf breaking seemed to retreat to the far distance. It was probably Shaw’s imagination that added the astringent edge of cordite to the pungent earthy smell of the damp sand.

  Wharram bit the piece of rock lightly, like a cat delivering a warning nip.

  Hadden took it back. ‘The blast melted the sand, forming glass, but some bits contain tiny shards of the metal. We need all we can get, Peter. The spectrometer eats the stuff up.’

  Hadden, a former Home Office scientist who’d fled a messy London divorce for the backwaters of the West Norfolk Constabulary, ran one of the best-equipped forensic laboratories outside the capital. Whitehall links and a string of academic papers on police methods had helped to secure additional funding from several universities, including Cambridge. The mass spectrometer, an item budgeted at £470,000, analyzed material by incinerating it in a controlled crucible and recording the signature colours emitted, each associated with individual chemical elements. The instrument’s major drawback was that it destroyed evidence. Each experiment was an expensive one-off.

  ‘I’ve just given the captain here the bad news. You might as well get to enjoy it too. The metal fragments we have so far put through the flames indicate that the device – let’s just call it that for now, because we don’t know it’s a bomb – the device is not military Second World War.’

  ‘Right,’ said Shaw. ‘Eye-witness accounts concur. They say it was silver, shiny, and curved. And you’re right, it’s not good news.’

  ‘Military records sing from the same song sheet,’ said Wharram, checking a smartphone. He made eye contact with Shaw for the first time: large grey eyes, a steady gaze, but with a certain liquid depth. Shaw had worked with bomb disposal officers before and had found that they fell neatly into two categories: those without the imagination needed to realize what they did was lethal, and those able to function by burying that truth, screening their conscious minds from the potentially explosive truth. Wharram, he felt, was in this second group. Nerveless, but thanks to a conscious force of character.

  ‘The Yanks dumped loads of military material along this coast, but nothing explosive. Clapped-out vehicles, Jerry cans, Nissan huts, sure. I know local rumour would have it otherwise, but there’s no way they dumped live ammo, or even decommissioned explosives. Anything you could sell, they sold, and that was anything that wasn’t nailed down. The black market boomed. But anything viable went back stateside. No German air raids, not within miles: rail yards at Peterborough, docks at Ipswich – that’s as close as we get. Sometimes jittery pilots dumped their bombs and fled – but there’s no record. Our guys? Bombers turning back in damaged aircraft sometimes shed their load, but it was rare, and they had the North Sea as a target … You ain’t gonna miss that. So – I agree. It’s not a UXB
, or at least it’s not one from the Second World War.’

  They hauled themselves up the pit face and surveyed the deserted beach.

  ‘I’m bomb disposal,’ said Wharram. ‘As far as this one’s concerned, I’m a bit late on the scene. My concern is a simple one. I need to know if there are any more. If this is not from the war, then that’s actually pretty good news; it’s much more likely to be a one-off because it suggests it wasn’t dropped at all, but planted. What did the eye witnesses see, exactly?’

  Shaw gave them a summary.

  ‘A bomb would fail to detonate in soft sand, but it would plug deep – ten feet, fifteen. Not eighteen inches,’ said Wharram. ‘Our unit’s priority is a magnetic survey of the beach. We’re doing one from the air, and we’ll get the results later this morning, although they may take time to analyze. If that throws up anything, we’ll use hand-held detectors to locate anything suspicious in the sand. But – given the forensics – we can at least hope there won’t be anything to worry about.’

  Shaw held up a hand, turning to Hadden. ‘Just for the record. Precisely – chemically – why not the war?’

  ‘Impurities in the metal. Irregularities too – within very small areas of less than fifty microns. Suggests a process much less rigorous than the mass production of shells. We have a very small fragment of the surface material of the device and there’s no sign of rifling, so if it is a bomb, it wasn’t fired.’

  ‘Help me out here,’ said Shaw. ‘If you had to guess—’

  ‘Guess? I’ve just run a series of sophisticated tests through half a million quids’ worth of kit and you want me to guess?’

  ‘An educated guess.’

  Hadden shrugged, his eyes switching skywards to track a flock of Canada geese. ‘All right. A guess. Nothing more. It may have been made – constructed – of metal not cast for military use. Now, that might be a modern metal structure – I don’t know, like a bathtub or a wheelbarrow.’

  ‘We’re saying this could be an amateur device? A metal box full of fertilizer. A terrorist device?’

  Hadden held his hands up, and Wharram shook his head. ‘Peter, Peter – slow down,’ said the forensic scientist. ‘We know virtually nothing. For analysis, we need more material. I’ve got the force divers in now trying to find fragments thrown out to sea. So we may get lucky. But if it’s not the war … Also, we have been able to pick up a trace of the explosive itself. Indications are that it is related to TNT. Terrorist cells rarely have access to TNT, but it is widely used in the construction industry. We’re shaking down the rig in an hour … again. That’ll be the third time. This rate, we might as well move the forensics team offshore.’

  Out at sea a Blue Square flag flew from the rig’s radio mast.

  ‘The CC’s under pressure to keep the beach open,’ said Shaw. ‘It’s summer and the sun’s out. There should be two thousand people on the sands. At the moment there’s us three.’

  Wharram pointed seawards. Four divers in full wet suits with oxygen gear were emerging from the waves, knee-deep in modest breakers. The lead diver, his suit marked by a yellow stripe, held an evidence bag at head height and signalled to Hadden, the hand gesture rapid and urgent. Behind him, two of his fellow divers knelt in the shallows, pulled off their face masks, and threw up into the sea.

  FOURTEEN

  Valentine sat at his desk in the CID room at St James’.

  ‘At his desk’ was a flexible description, in that he rarely sat and liked to use the landline phone standing up – an old trick, which subconsciously gives the voice a tense, impatient timbre, effectively shortening any conversation. Today, his desk was covered in the latest batch of estate agent details Jan had left for him before going out on duty: a new-build in Heacham, a lonely cottage near Docking, a semi on the outskirts of Hunstanton. All boasted sea views, however distant, and the virtues of the wide-open landscape. Valentine gulped coffee, tidied them all up in a pile, and dropped them in his wastepaper basket.

  He’d driven the Mazda back to HQ to review progress with the team. The West Norfolk’s appeal for information concerning the explosive device on Hunstanton beach had resulted in 256 calls to the 24/7 emergency line at St James’. The majority had favoured the theory – now discredited by the forensic analysis of the metal fragments found on the beach – that the bomb was a discarded remnant of the US occupation of the town between 1942 and 1963. A lingering anti-American sentiment seemed to underlie these views, which had little basis in fact.

  Several more flamboyant theories had been put forward to explain the explosion. The ‘bomb’ had been planted by a group of three Irishmen at the height of the IRA’s mainland campaign in 1976; two ‘Muslim-looking’ men had been seen digging on the beach two weeks earlier at dusk; a cache of gunpowder had been hidden on the beach in the seventeenth century during the Civil War, and – finally – a single German bomber had attacked the town in late 1944, at midnight, but none of the six bombs dropped had exploded and the flight had been mistaken for a British aircraft returning to the Lincolnshire aerodromes after a raid on Berlin.

  There was one other caller that morning, identifying himself as speaking on behalf of Squadron Leader Max Aycliffe. He refused to expound on the airman’s theory, simply announcing that it needed to be laid out in person, if an officer could find the time to call at The Lodge, Gayton Road, King’s Lynn, on any day before three.

  DC Twine walked over with a copy of that morning’s edition of the Eastern Daily Press: POLICE BAFFLED BY BEACH BOMB.

  ‘Baffled,’ said Valentine out loud. It seemed to sum up the day. ‘I’m on my way back to the coast,’ he added. ‘A boat trip out to the rig. Hurrah. Two things, Paul. Check how we’re doing on the list of Leander Club members – drop me a text. It’s a priority, OK? I’m turning up at their swim tomorrow morning, so I’ll need two other officers to assist with a roll call, and to check off the watches. Meanwhile, I’ll drop in on Squadron Leader Aycliffe for you; he’s on my way. No doubt he’ll have some crackpot theory like the rest.’

  Edging the Mazda through town traffic, Valentine cut west into the leafy suburbs. The Lodge came into sight, at the end of a cul-de-sac of Edwardian villas, the name etched in a stone lintel over the door.

  Valentine pressed a bell and checked the time: twelve twenty-eight p.m.

  A woman in a business suit answered the door, a smartphone in hand: mid-fifties, brisk to supercilious as she held Valentine’s warrant card with the other hand while squinting at the photo ID.

  ‘I wanted to speak to Squadron Leader Aycliffe.’

  ‘Tricky. He’s been dead ten years. I’m his daughter.’ There was a moment’s silence. ‘Your move,’ she said, tapping her left foot on the tiled floor.

  Valentine explained why he’d called, noting that the hallway was hung with a series of prints of RAF aircraft – Spitfires, Hurricanes, Lancaster bombers.

  She asked Valentine in, closed the door, and, standing at the foot of the stairs, one hand on the newel post, shouted, ‘Guy? Guy? It’s the police. For you.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she added, as they heard a door open on an upper floor, possibly the attic. ‘I’ll leave you to this. Guy can see you out.’ There was something pitying in her eyes as she shook Valentine’s hand.

  Guy tripped down the stairs, taking the last three in a single vault. A smart public school blazer, with blue piping, hung loosely off the child’s shoulders. Guy looked sixteen, with a trendy stand-up haircut and a Perspex brace on his teeth.

  Valentine and his first wife, Julie, had never had children, so he didn’t feel confident in such situations. He resorted to formality. ‘Wasting police time is an offence.’

  ‘I didn’t think you’d come if I said it was me. Grandad would have known about the bomb, and that’s why I know. I can show you, like, now …’

  The hallway led to a kitchen with quarry tiles and an Aga, beyond which was an original conservatory, half brick, with a sloping roof, slightly green with moss.

  Guy
seemed uncomfortable in his blazer. ‘School’s out – but I get tuition after three. I have to go in.’

  Valentine noted a lemon tree with one wizened fruit and an open laptop on a wicker table.

  ‘This is one of Grandad’s charts,’ said the teenager, leading the way to a deal table covered in documents. The map showed the Wash and the coastal towns of Hunstanton, Heacham, and Snettisham. A dotted line weaved its way along the north Norfolk coast from the east, out into the Wash, and then back – making landfall at Hunstanton, before charting a course towards Lynn.

  The boy’s fingers edged nervously across the map. Valentine noted that the skin was marked by biro, an equation on the wrist, some numbers on one palm.

  ‘Aircraft? German aircraft?’ he asked.

  ‘A Zeppelin L3. The first ever raid on Britain. They were aiming for Hull but hit the coast at Cromer. After that, they were basically lost for the whole flight. They bombed Lynn – people were killed there. I reckon they spotted the pier later, took it as a target, and went for it. But none of them blew up – the bombs – not one. Witnesses said they dropped three. I thought that was important, that you should know. Grandad would have called it operational data.’

  Valentine had a curious feeling that the floor was falling away from his feet, so he sat down.

  ‘Of course, he wasn’t alive then,’ said Guy, setting the map at an angle so that Valentine could see it clearly. ‘But he heard first-hand accounts. I think that in a weird way he felt he’d missed out – that if he’d had his time again, he’d have chosen that war, and then he could have flown aircraft against the Zeppelins. That’s January 1915. A lot of people saw it, and the bombs falling. Back then, they had a maid, and she told Grandad what she saw. Like, actually saw, right here.’ He stood up and took Valentine out through a set of doors into a walled garden. Guy pointed up, above the roofline of the villas on the next street. ‘Right there.’ The boy’s eyes were shining. ‘An airship, a Zeppelin – that’s five hundred feet long, bigger than the Queen Mary – that’s what Grandad said – right there, hanging in the sky. It’s like in A Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, right – when he says the alien spaceship hung in the air the way bricks don’t. The maid, she was called Sadie, she said you could feel the engines, like a thud, thud, thud. And it had this observation cabin – a gondola, they call it – and she said you could see them – the Hun. It’s like Nazi, isn’t it – a word that makes them not us. That’s what Mum says. Then it moved on – they’re a lot faster than you’d guess, right? So – forty miles an hour or more. It would have been gone in seconds.’