Then he let it run on – still in slow motion. The second car, its bonnet buckled, trundled back into the picture, at the edge of vision, up on the verge in the shadows under some trees. Nothing moved for forty-five seconds – then three youths got out, two from the rear seats, one from the driver’s. In the shadows where the car was Shaw could just see the windscreen and the wipers still wiping. The three wore baseball caps, T-shirts, jeans, and each had something wrapped round his lower face – a sweatshirt, a football scarf… That’s what they’d done in that dead forty-five seconds – because they knew there were cameras, so they’d masked their faces. The three walked to the other car and peered in through the shattered side windows. One of them vomited at his feet, the other two started fighting, pushing, almost hugging. Then they all stood still, watching a spreading black stain which had formed beneath the passenger-side’s buckled doors.
One walked towards the CCTV mounted by the T-junction and looked up between the peak of his cap and the scarf round his neck and lower face. Cool, appraising. He looked back at the Mini parked under the trees, perhaps satisfying himself the camera couldn’t read
The written report which went with the CCTV had formed the basis of the press article Shaw had read to Lena and laid out the details found at the scene: the two dead OAPs in the rear seats. The driver, neck broken, but still alive. The tyre marks. And the evidence of the CCTV itself – a narrative description of the film Shaw had just watched. No IDs possible for the three men, or the car, although the paint job on the vehicle was distinctive – a central white band over the doors and roof – leaving the boot and bonnet in another colour. From the hue it looked grey-blue.
The film was eight minutes long, and Shaw watched it six times. At first he concentrated on the fragile bundle, not mentioned in the report. Too small for a child. It was a guess, and only a guess, but it may have been that the original CID team had withheld the fact one of the youths had taken something from the car – a detail they could use to weed out crank confessions. But what was in the bundle?
He watched the film again. There was something
‘Who’s in the passenger seat?’ he asked himself. ‘Why would two teenagers go out on a joyride and sit in the back? Is there someone in the front seat – or is there something on the front seat?’
He found the image again of the windscreen when the car came to rest under the trees. He drew a cursor round the darkened area on the passenger side and blew the image up: ×10, ×20, ×50. But the film’s original poor quality made the images chaotic, an illogical patchwork of black and grey.
Shaw printed out half a dozen stills from the footage.
He looked at one frame of the three men standing on the road. Could one of these young men be Robert Mosse, the 21-year-old Shaw’s father and George Valentine had arrested for the murder of Jonathan Tessier? He’d been a member of a gang of juvenile thugs in his teenage years before leaving for university. A gang of four. In the weeks leading up to Tessier’s murder he’d been at home, back amongst his roots. Had he gone out for a joyride, a few drinks with old friends, and then a late-night high-speed romp, just like old times? Or – another possibility – had he gone for the joyride but been smart enough to stay in the car after the crash? Was he there, amongst the grey and black shadows, in the passenger seat?
He looked at a still image of the Mini, the windscreen speckled with raindrops except where it had been cleaned by the wipers. There was still something wrong. Something else wrong.
Tuesday, 7 September
Two hours after dawn, and low tide in Morston Creek; no view except the mudbanks, oystercatchers planting webbed feet in the sticky ooze. The boat nosed its way through the maze of creeks out into Blakeney Channel. The sky was stretched-blue, dotted with clouds which would later billow into chimneys of heated, moist air. But the morning was cool still, the smell of the tidal waters salty and fresh.
Shaw sucked the sea air in like a drug. He’d had a call from DC Twine in the murder room at 5.30: a body had been spotted by a fishing smack on a sandbank in the Wash. Tom Hadden had gone out on the Harbour Conservancy launch with his night-duty CSI officer. He’d texted Twine to say there was a link with the Judd murder – no details. Shaw didn’t need to go to sea himself – but he was awake, and he had his father’s mantra: if you can see it for yourself, see it for yourself. And if he was losing sleep, he didn’t see why DS Valentine shouldn’t too.
The tourist boat Albatross broke into open water, following a channel marked by buoys past the small craft moored in the shallows. Hadden had called out anyone on the CSI payroll who wasn’t tied up on the Judd inquiry. Half a dozen of them sat morosely in the boat
Twine had the bare details from the crew who’d spotted the body. The Kittyhawk had landed three men at sunrise on Warham’s Hole, a stretch of sand the size of a football pitch. Basking seals had scattered as soon as they’d come ashore, to retrieve a string of crab pots which had broken loose during the night. When the seals were gone something was left: one of those industrial bags, incredibly strong, used on building sites to carry rubble, or sand, or hard core. It held assorted rubbish – tin cans, oil drums, and what the Kittyhawk’s captain reported as ‘human remains’.
Valentine sat, pulling his raincoat up to his ears. ‘Here it comes,’ he said, looking up at the sky. The rain began to fall in drops the size of paperweights, leisurely, then in a frenzy, turning swiftly to hailstones which stung the flesh. Visibility dropped to twenty feet, the air white with plummeting ice, the hailstones lying in the boat and in the folds of Shaw’s all-weather jacket. They chugged on, the summer boat trip suddenly transformed into a snapshot from some Antarctic expedition. Valentine felt ice-cold water beginning to insinuate itself down his neck. He thought about the coke fire in the Artichoke; the intensity of the heat on the palms of his downturned hands.
The blue sky appeared overhead even before the hailstones had stopped falling. Then the sun broke through, and Shaw saw that they were there – fifty yards off the Albatross heads appeared in the sea, disappeared, like fairground targets.
‘There,’ said Valentine, pointing at two figures on the far lip of the sand working beside a grey bag, long and narrow like a deflated balloon. The spot had been marked by the Kittyhawk with an orange distress buoy.
In two feet of water Shaw stepped overboard. The seals, mildly inquisitive of the floating boat, panicked as the humans stepped ashore, shuffling towards the sea, trapped, it seemed, in sleeping bags. Within a minute they’d deserted Warham’s Hole.
The CSI team jumped ship and unloaded a mobile SOC tent and lights. Shaw led the way about eighty yards across the ribbed sand – hard, crystalline, surprisingly solid. Beside the asbestos-grey bag Hadden had laid out its contents in military rows: about thirty tin cans, some metal tubs which had once held machine oil, and three black bin liners – one of them torn – to reveal more rubbish, mostly discarded food wrapping. Shaw could see a cardboard pizza box and a plastic curry tray. All that was left in the bag, which had been stretched open, was a corpse on its side, one hand thrown backwards, the fingers of the hand stiff and swollen, the arm extended like a waiter’s offering a salver of champagne glasses.