At Death's Window

by Jim Kelly

  ‘George?’ asked Shaw. ‘Thoughts?’

  ‘I’d give him eight point nine on style and eight point eight on degree of difficulty. But let’s face it: he’s not going to do any better next round, is he?’

  Shaw let the silence stretch out, just so that Valentine knew he’d gone too far.

  Valentine coughed. Then straightened his back. ‘Something’s not right,’ he said. ‘Cut the rope and the body would be out in the North Sea on the first ebb tide. Would we find it? Probably not. Would someone find it? Maybe. Dutch coastguard. Thames River Police. Take your pick. Why tether the victim?’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Shaw. ‘What’re we saying on timing, Tom? This time last night?’

  ‘Working hypothesis – yes. But nothing more than that. As I say, the pathologist will be with us soon. It’s her stiff, Peter. You know that.’

  Shaw held up both hands. ‘Last question. We’re saying the blow to the neck killed him?’

  ‘Christ, Peter. You think he could survive that?’

  In the end, then, Valentine had to look. The guy was dead meat, cold dead meat at that, but there was no ignoring the brutal nature of the wound. Valentine didn’t let on but he’d passed the eleven plus with flying colours. His favourite subject had been English – especially Shakespeare. Not the drama, just the language. He rolled it round sometimes in his head, but never out loud. He knew immediately the word that applied to this kind of head wound, delivered in battle by a swinging axe which cleaved the head from the body.

  ‘But it’s not the only wound,’ conceded Hadden. ‘There’s a bad bruise on the left side of the skull above the hairline. I’d say it was bad enough to leave him unconscious, but nothing like bad enough to kill him.’

  ‘He was out here on this sandbar all today – in broad daylight?’ asked Valentine.

  ‘Looks like,’ said Shaw. ‘We’re in a gully – so you can’t see it from the side that easily. There’s no visitors about, the Scolt Head ferry isn’t running, no fishing boats out in winter – in fact, I’d guess no one left the harbour all day. So, yes. He’s been out here looking at the sky all day.’

  Hadden used gloved hands to tilt the skull. ‘As to murder weapon, Peter. Justina will read you through the medical assessment, but if you want somewhere to start I’d speculate it was a spade, edge first, which isn’t very nice, is it? Or a machete. But as we’re in Norfolk, I’d go for the spade. The wound’s about four inches deep, which is good going, given it’s had to smash through the neck, spine, muscle. We’re talking maximum force. Traumatic impact. He’d be senseless immediately, dead within seconds.’

  ‘And the lesser head wound?’

  ‘Blunt object – not metallic. Wood, I’d guess. A decent bit of timber.’

  A small crab appeared in the victim’s curly black hair. Hadden plucked it out with a gloved hand and added it to a murky plastic bucket which stood beside his forensic tool kit.

  ‘When we’ve got pictures, and Justina’s had a look, we can clean his face for you. But for now we’ll have to stick with the mud-pack.’

  The eyes were open, some of the mud washed away, but not wide open, so the iris colour was impossible to pinpoint, although they looked brown. He could have been any age between eighteen and thirty. But as Valentine had pointed out, he wasn’t going to get any older.

  Shaw looked at the facial structure: wide cheekbones, broad, flat forehead, heavy jaw. A boulder skull, close-cropped hair, deep eye sockets. He looked like a Halloween pumpkin without a candle to light the eyes.

  Faces were Shaw’s special subject. The DI was one of less than twenty officers in the UK qualified as a forensic artist. Art at Southampton – his chosen degree – had included a year out at the FBI college at Quantico, Virginia; an option he had not shared with his father, who had encouraged him to pursue any career of his choice except the police force. Back at Southampton Shaw had added a Home Office diploma in facial reconstruction. By the time he’d left the Met he was able to build a face from an eyewitness account, age the face of a missing child, tease key details out of reluctant witnesses and construct a wide range of ID pictures – from the traditional photofit to a subtle three-dimensional pencil portrait.

  If they failed to find an ID for the victim Shaw would be called on to ‘revitalize’ the corpse’s face for a picture to be distributed to the media: a pencil sketch of what the victim might have looked like before that traumatic blow had knocked the life out of him in a single, brutal second. British newspapers in the twenty-first century rarely ran photos of the dead, unlike their Victorian forerunners. Using the work of a forensic artist was the only way to broadcast an image acceptable to the public.

  Looking at the face now, Shaw decided he’d have to begin work with the eyes – opening them right up to reveal the colour. The human iris was less than twelve millimetres in width – a constant throughout life – but often the most significant facial feature, part of the ‘lifelong look’ which gave every face its unique imprint. Within minutes of death eye colour fades, often obscured by a smoky white film. Shaw would have to rely on the pathologist to assess the original colour and hue.

  ‘Anything on ID?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘Not really,’ said Hadden. ‘Unless there’s a chance this is a Mrs T. G. Grainger.’

  He tipped the halogen lamp so that they could see a Visa credit card on the top of the evidence box.

  ‘No wallet – at least, nothing I can find. That was in his shirt top pocket.’

  ‘Odd. We need to check her out fast, George. A relation? Theft?’

  Valentine made a note, copying the numbers standing out and throwing minute shadows on the silvered card. He saw two things the others had missed but said nothing: the leading edge of the plastic was worn, and the expiry date was 2011.

  ‘Pockets were empty but for these,’ said Hadden. He’d vacuum packed a pair of kitchen scissors. ‘Outer pocket of the waterproof. With this …’

  A second vacuum pack, this one containing a single woody sprig of samphire.

  ‘Now we’re talking,’ said Valentine, stepping closer. In Shaw’s experience his DS’s principal failure as a detective was a need to find a theory before he’d assessed the facts.

  Pointedly he turned to Hadden. ‘Tom – any ideas? Facts. That’s what we need at this stage. But are there any?’

  Hadden was too good an operator not to have a hypothesis. His sphere of competence wasn’t just the body, but the wider crime scene. His team had got here with twenty minutes of light still lingering in the sky, so whatever picture he’d managed to assemble was multifaceted. That was Jack Shaw’s Rule Number Two: listen to the experts.

  ‘Cheap synthetic clothes, although the shoes are brand new and good quality. Poor teeth, with evidence of sub-standard dental work. Hip flask in the breast pocket contains whisky – not malt. Fingers on the right hand show evidence of nicotine. He’s not a relation, is he, George?’

  ‘Can’t ignore the obvious,’ said Valentine, rearranging his feet, largely to conceal the fact that he suddenly needed an extra lungful of air to complete his next sentence. ‘Samphire wars: locals vandalize the London mob’s vans, so the newcomers hit back by stoving in the skull of some poor sod who collects weeds for a living. Which would mean mud-man here is local, and his killer’s probably already home, thanks to the A10.’

  ‘For a start it’s not the samphire season,’ said Shaw. ‘The plant vegetates in winter, so that’s not right. Plus it might cost you thirty-five quid for a punnet online but it’s not heroin, is it? Is murder a proportional response to a few slashed tyres?’

  ‘I don’t think the average East End scumbag knows what a proportional response looks like,’ said Valentine. ‘If they get angry enough they’re quite capable of swinging a spade at someone’s skull – usually from behind.’ Valentine went to spit on the sand, then remembered where he was.

  Outside they could hear the last of the water trickling out to sea down Overy Creek.

  Valentine pl
oughed on: ‘Plus it’s a theory that fits the one fact that really stands out – if we’re talking facts. Someone’s attached the victim to a lead weight, deliberately arranged for the corpse to stay put and be found, which sounds like a warning to me. Unless anyone’s got any better ideas.’

  No one had any better ideas, so they stepped outside.

  The air was still, balmy, the temperature somewhere in the fifties. A sliver of an old moon had risen over the north Norfolk hills so that they could just see the thin creek running in its deep, muddy bed.

  Hadden’s eyes flitted over the shadowy landscape and Shaw had a sudden intuition that he was searching for birds.

  ‘We’ve taken pictures of all the footprints,’ said Hadden. ‘But don’t hold your breath. The body’s been attached to the buoy, then inundated by high tide, so all those prints are lost. Then it’s been discovered by the D’Asti family, so that’s four sets all over the place, and then we’ve had another high tide. That means there’s very little left, and certainly no print patterns.

  ‘One stroke of luck. The tide before the one that washed over our friend here on the night he died was a spring tide, second highest of the year so far, so that left a clean slate on the beaches. Any prints below the spring tide mark, but above the last tide, on the flat sand, have been left in the last two days. We came over on the launch from Burnham Marsh and there’s a single set from the staithe leading out this way for about twenty feet. I got a cast.’

  ‘Just one set?’

  ‘Yup. So it could be our victim. Or it might be somebody with nothing to do with the crime, or it just might be the killer. When was the last time we were that lucky, Peter?’

  SIX

  Peter Shaw’s toes floated free of the mud: weightless, he enjoyed the moment, sensing the slight seaward tug of the current. The winter wetsuit was double-insulated, but he could still feel the chill of the sea, which was cooling his body, working inwards from the hands and feet to the core of his chest. When he let the wavelets slap his face the shock of it made him gasp. Water was Shaw’s medium; on land he always felt the compulsion to run, to expend energy, in order to dissipate tension. In the sea he felt quite different because it was moving all the time and he had to struggle to be still. So he could use up nervous energy by trying not to move; he could just be, living in the moment, like a child. One of his first books had been Through the Looking-Glass. His favourite character had been the Red Queen, who had to run on the spot just to stay where she was.

  He let his body tip forward, its centre of gravity sliding towards his chest, then his waist, so that he fell into a swimming position. For a moment he lay outstretched, looking down into the darkness before making two rapid arm strokes and slipping away from the edge of Mitchell’s Bank. The crescent moon and stars lit the surface of the sea, while what lay beneath was unseen: a black, fathomless element. In daylight there was always a degree of transparency, but not after sunset, when the sea was transformed into a medium within which something hid. Treading water he turned in a circle, his diver’s headlight a lighthouse beam on the water. He thought about his legs hanging down into the depths, as if he were a very large piece of fisherman’s bait. Unable to resist the uneasy fear this image brought, he hitched his knees up and let the point of buoyancy tip him back again, so that he lay looking up into the sky.

  Midnight: the next three hours until high tide presented a clear opportunity in the investigation, and Shaw was determined to seize it. It was still possible there was evidence on the beaches from the night of the murder. Hadden’s team already had a set of footprints leading out towards Mitchell’s Bank from the village of Burnham Marsh. Were there other tracks to find? One set of prints begged several questions. Shaw needed to beachcomb, and he needed to do it quickly, before the evidence was washed away. On his back he had a diver’s wet-bag, with camera, tape, torch, map and notebook.

  Swimming across the channel he reached the sands beneath Gun Hill and emerged in twenty brisk steps, each one adding incrementally to his weight as his buoyancy diminished. Standing still, his feet in an inch of water, he let his breathing return to normal, unzipping the top two inches of the suit to let out the heat generated by his own body. Sticking to the shallows, he ran two hundred yards along the water’s edge and then retraced his steps, playing a torchbeam over the flat sand further up the beach, searching for prints.

  After fifty yards he spotted an old campfire. Slipping off the thermal glove of the suit he tested the ashes: cold, damp too. There were no footprints. The surface of the beach was a desert, each half-buried razor shell with a ‘tail’ of sand left by the north wind. He spotted a barbecue tray, some cans of beer and a condom, but again the sand, between the water and the spring tide mark, was free of prints.

  A crab scuttled, leaving its hieroglyphics among the lightweight prints of birds’ feet. Lugworms created bubble domes in the wet sand at the water’s edge, as if the earth was a gently deflating balloon. Worm casts appeared as he watched, morphing into miniature organic castles. But there were no forensics. No footprints. No one had arrived or left this beach after the spring tide of two nights earlier.

  Over on Scolt Head Island, across the narrow gap through which the sea was still pouring into Overy Creek, he heard a seal bark, then a chorus of others, like a pack of dogs greeting a midnight postman. Slipping back into the water he struck out across the mouth of the creek with as much power as he could summon, his toes at one point brushing the submerged sandbar which lay mid-stream. A trailing hand brushed the sandy bottom and so he stopped and stood up, facing the sea, the incoming tide split on either side of him, making a small wave at his waist.

  In the summer a ferry ran to a wooden jetty on the island from Burnham Overy Staithe, bringing visitors out to the National Trust reserve. Scolt Head drew bird watchers, hikers, adventurous families. Camping was banned, along with fires, dogs off leads, bikes and litter. The island comprised two and a half miles of rare habitat and nesting grounds, a warren of marram grass, sandhills and wind. The best time to explore was winter, but the maze-like trail through the shallows was treacherous. Every winter the lifeboat had to make several rescue visits, picking up stranded ornithologists, loaded down with zoom lenses and hiking sticks.

  He swam on, emerging from the water beside the landing stage. To his right a pathway led round the point towards the open sea, glowing in the dark, its serried ranks of white water sweeping in, the wind strong enough to hit the constant, mournful note of winter. A faint, ghostly luminescence lit the falling, foaming water. He turned left, inland, along the south shore of the island, which faced the marsh and Mitchell’s Bank, the illuminated cube of the forensic tent still at its summit. The wind died as he fell within the lee of the sandhills which formed the island’s backbone. After five hundred yards he’d found nothing but the wrecked remains of some lobster pots, a pair of seal trails, and a few broken wooden staves of old oyster beds.

  On the point of turning back he saw footprints. Two sets, crossing the flat sand below the spring tide watermark. From his wet-bag he retrieved his iPhone and took a set of pictures: not admissible as forensic evidence, as no court would accept a digital image, but a record nonetheless. The prints stood in sharp contrast to the moonlit sand, one line coming ashore, the other retreating. Parallel sets, as if the walker had used the first set as a guide to firm ground. The set coming up the beach were deeper than the set going down to the water. Obvious inference: someone came ashore carrying something heavy, then left without it. The prints were sharp enough for Shaw to take measurements: ten inches by three and a half at the navicular bone. A small man, an average woman or a child? Both sets made by the same sized boot. What he couldn’t see, and never would now the tide had risen, was whether they’d come ashore by boat, or waded in at low water.

  He stood back from the double line of prints, moving his head from side to side, trying to see the evidence within the landscape – trying to imprint a photographic image in his brain of the setting
. Instead, he saw two other trails – not footprints, but thin cuts, as if someone had drawn parallel lines to the footprints using a discarded lolly stick. Not a continuous line, as it came and went in a regular pattern, every three to four feet.

  His brain constructed a moving picture: the killer, walking, a short spade in one hand, swinging it by the handle, touching it down with each stride. Was this spade the murder weapon? Or had the killer come ashore with it to bury vital evidence? Or both. Shaw realized he’d made an assumption. He’d been building a picture in his head: the murder out on the mud, the rising water, the killer slipping over to Scolt Head, perhaps in a small boat, to bury evidence. But the double set of footprints could tell another story: what if the walker had left the island empty-handed, and then returned carrying something? They could have buried vital evidence on the island. They could still be on the island.

  Shaw scanned the long ridge of marram grass set against the stars. The footprints disappeared once they crossed over into the rough sand above high water, but the general direction of travel was clear: directly north, over the ridge, towards the sea. Shaw climbed the hill, zigzagging between clumps of tall grass, until he reached the summit. A tour d’horizon revealed the sea to the north, marsh to the south, Mitchell’s Bank now slipping underwater, the forensic tent encircled by the tide; and finally the coast itself, stretching east and west – a white line of surf in the night.

  The wind came out of the north with just a hint of Arctic ice. His face stung, crusted with salt, but the wetsuit still retained its warm layer of blood-heated water. Jogging down the face of the sand cliff like a skier, turning his heels left, then right, then left, he ran out on to the beach itself, over thousands, millions, billions of crushed and shattered shells. The glittering sand crunched like shattered glass under his bare feet.