Concentrating on the cup, Shaw tried to forget about his eye. He studiously avoided the panoramic view, any strain on his vision. The pain had gone; his close-up vision was clear and in an odd way each minute that passed without a return of the flickering images made his spirit rise: perhaps it had been a one-off, a momentary response to stress or overworking the single lens. Talking to Lena had helped. She’d found the name of the specialist who’d treated him at Lynn after his accident and checked he was still practising at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. Switchboard had routed her to an answerphone and she’d left a request for an urgent appointment. Then she’d bathed the eye in warm water and massaged Shaw’s neck and scalp. She said his muscles had been hard with tension and that he’d never been good at knowing when he was overworking. Shaw had phoned ahead to postpone his meeting with Hadden until mid-afternoon, then rested, his eyes closed, pretending to sunbathe while Fran played nurse — bringing food, reading snippets out of the papers. Then he’d let her go, free to run to the beach huts near the town where a school friend would be out with her family; a school friend with her own DS, so that they could link them up and play building cities together.
Three hours later, behind the wheel of the Porsche, he felt restored. He’d left Lena in tears, standing by the car as he drove off, adamant he should take a few days off; rest, give himself a chance; certain, above all, that he shouldn’t drive the car. But he’d set her anxieties aside, aware that the most immediate way he could make himself feel better was to go to work. The fear of imminent disaster which had overtaken him on the beach had receded. He saw it now as irrational, born perhaps of some subconscious anxiety about total blindness.
The North Norfolk coast had flashed by in streaks of blue and green. He’d been in a good mood, on an artificial high, so he’d jogged up the ten flights of stairs to Hadden’s door. The CSI man got the bad news over with indecent haste. ‘Peter, sorry. No match on Roundhay.’ He stood aside from the door. ‘Overnight email, but I thought I’d wait until I saw you.’
Bad news, certainly, Shaw had agreed. But not unexpected. And it told them something: that Roundhay’s version of what he’d seen that day was almost certainly true. That Marianne Osbourne had walked off into the dunes, followed by Shane White. Now the rest of the mass screening results should place the missing jigsaw piece on the table: the name of the man she’d gone into the long grass to meet. Roundhay was in the clear. He’d lied back in 1994, but there was no evidence he’d lied again.
Hadden said there’d been some sort of problem at the lab because they’d phoned him to say they were double-checking the double-checked results. The final email should drop at any moment. Now the little balcony was in the afternoon shade he said he’d get his laptop and they could wait in the fresh air.
The open laptop was silent for twenty minutes. So they talked about kids, swapping tales of rights of passage. Then the iMac pinged. Hadden opened the email file and opened first the earlier message from the Forensic Science Service containing the Roundhay result. Shaw tried to speed-read the text but it was mostly maths — a complex statistical analysis. And there were no names, just coded letters, corresponding to a sheet Hadden had beside the laptop.
Hadden covered his mouth with the back of his fingers. ‘As I said — no match. You know the science here?’
Shaw nodded. They’d done DNA matching at the Met Police College at Hendon.
Hadden hit the inbox button and opened the new email from the FSS. It was about 3,000 words — complex analysis again. Shaw stopped staring at the screen, leant back in the seat, and let his shoulders relax, forced them to relax, his eyes closed, waiting to hear the name of their killer.
‘Right,’ said Hadden. ‘Good job you’re sitting down.’ He went back into the flat and came back with a bottle of wine, a white Burgundy, the glass blushed with condensation. Hadden had the corkscrew in and the cork out in one fluid movement.
Shaw left the glass untouched. ‘What’s wrong?’ he said.
‘Clean sweep,’ said Hadden, taking an inch of wine out of the glass. ‘No match — they finished the whole batch overnight. Given the result they ran it all again this morning. All thirty-five male samples, both from the living and relatives of the dead. No match.’Hadden closed his eyes. ‘From a scientific point of view. From a forensic point of view, I would say that was a disaster. That’s a technical term we boffins use, but you get the drift.’
Shaw pushed the wine glass away by the stem. Hadden’s eyes were still closed, so that Shaw was able to study the freckles clustering on his forehead where the lesion of the skin cancer op still showed. ‘The towel was buried on the beach,’ said Shaw, trying to cling to logic, to any structure that might explain the inexplicable. ‘The bloodstain is
White’s. The skin cells gave us Sample X. The boat took seventy-five people to the island. We brought back seventy-four alive — thirty-five of them men. We’ve taken samples from all thirty-five — thirty in the mass screening, five from relatives of those who’d died since 1994. There was a police unit on the island overnight, and the whole place was subject to both a fingertip search and a thorough examination by two dog units. The killer has to be in our sample.’ He tried to keep any note of antagonism out of his voice, any trace of a witch-hunt, but the ‘we’ was enough to put the forensic scientist firmly on the spot.
‘What are we missing?’ asked Shaw.
Hadden opened his eyes but avoided Shaw’s face.
‘There’s only one answer,’ said Shaw. ‘Sample X was on the towel when it was taken out on the boat.’
Hadden formed his hand into a fist and tapped it on the table. ‘No, Peter.’ His voice had returned to its usual whisper. ‘The science is clear and persuasive. The DNA sample — Sample X — was co-mingled with the victim’s blood cells on the towel. That’s not a term I’ve picked out of the air. It’s a term I’d use in the dock, in court, giving expert evidence. It means the two trace samples of blood and skin were deposited on the towel simultaneously. It is not possible — in the real world — for that to happen in any other way. If you asked me to re-create that double sample in the lab at The Ark I couldn’t do it. No way.’ He held both his hands out as if warming them at an open fire. ‘OK?’
They’d had this discussion before, when Shaw and Valentine had chosen the East Hills case to reopen. He’d talked it through with Hadden, testing his hypothesis, searching for a loophole in the logic. In the real world there wasn’t one. It was airtight.
‘But is it watertight?’ asked Shaw. ‘It’s a country mile out to East Hills but the rip-tide is so bad you have to swim twice that to be sure you don’t get sucked out to sea. Can it be done? Sure. We only discounted the possibility entirely because of the numbers: seventy-five out to East Hills, seventy-four back plus the victim. It adds up. But it doesn’t add up anymore. So maybe someone swam out then swam back.’
Hadden refilled his wine glass. ‘You’re right, we did go through this. You’d have to be an expert swimmer to do it one way, but there and back again? Without being spotted? You’ve got to come ashore, you’ve got to swim back. White was actually still alive when his body was dragged in. The killer had only just struck. Within minutes you had a police launch out, the lifeboat — we checked all this. Witnesses were looking out to sea, scanning the water. The harbour master came out as well, and he was specifically asked to stand off in the channel while the island was secured. Plus, the lifeboat called out the inshore crew and they went round East Hills, checking to see if someone was in the water. So if we’ve got some latter-day Captain Webb on our hands he’d have had to swim out to sea, straight out. We always said it was theoretically possible, Peter. But it’s a one in a million chance.’ Hadden’s eyes were closed; he pressed his lips to his fist.