‘I’ll be five minutes,’ said Shaw.
He was four. Shaw always kept his basic kit in the back of the Land Rover in a black attaché case: a sheaf of high‐quality cartridge paper – Bristol, with a slight pink tint, and a rough texture like skin. Then pencils, woodless plastic‐coated leads, chisel‐point, and a range of H, F and B hardnesses. A piece of J‐cloth for blurring, a set of tortillions – cone‐shaped sticks made from compressed paper used to blend graphite lines to produce a smooth finish. Erasers, eraser shields, brushes and pastel chalk sticks. Shaw had studied art at Southampton University. He’d always drawn as a kid, an only child’s escape, encouraged by his mother. What his father didn’t know was that the course at Southampton offered a year out in forensic art at the FBI’s college in Quantico, Virginia.
He opened his dog‐eared copy of the FBI Facial Identification Catalog. Over the years he’d added to the basic catalogue. Thousands of mugshots compressed by category: bulging eyes, broken noses, pouting lips, lantern jaws, providing the basic building blocks for composite imagery. He’d added his own, cut from newspapers, brochures, and magazines. There was also a recorder for the cognitive interview, so that later he could reconstruct the order in which the witness had accessed their memory. Recall first, then if that failed them, the catalogues for
Twenty minutes later Shaw had the basics of the face established.
‘I’m not much good, am I?’ said Holt. ‘I just can’t see her face. Not clearly.’
‘You don’t have to – the memory’s not like that. You’ll see her in flashes, we just have to wait for them. Each time try and take something new from the image. Don’t force it. It’ll come.’
And it did. They talked about that night, about the snow, about walking forward in the icy wind. Slowly Holt’s memory gave up its secrets. Another twenty minutes and they were done. Shaw was pleased. The face looked out at him: dominated by the wide arched eyebrows, the small mouth with too many teeth.
Holt had closed his eyes while Shaw worked, sketching in the features, adding a light source from the right to add the 3D effect.
‘Oh – yes, yes, that’s her. That’s terrific.’ Holt sat up, holding the sketch book.
There were other last‐minute changes. They darkened the hair at the parting, lowered the ears, added a shine to the teeth as if they’d been polished.
Finished, Shaw fetched the ward sister and she counter‐signed the sketch, with Holt and Shaw. They used a date stamp off the ward desk, the hospital motif underlaid by the symbol of a ship at sea – the Lynn badge. Shaw gave it to Valentine, who bagged it in cellophane and signed it as evidence received. He’d book it in with the desk at St James’s, then they’d use photocopies.
Sitting in the Land Rover, Valentine looked at the sketch through the clear envelope, trying not to let his admiration for the skill of the artist show.
‘Next step?’ he asked.
‘TV, papers. Posters too – along the coast. Let’s give it all we’ve got. She’s either a killer, or she knows who is. So let’s find her.’
The Ark was a converted chapel across the street from St James’s, a red‐brick shed in the shape of the living‐quarters on a child’s model of Noah’s boat. For nearly a century it had been home to one of the nonconformist sects. But the church had sold up in the sixties and moved out to the ring road. West Norfolk Constabulary had been the purchaser, and, despite the constraints of a Grade II listing, had quickly renovated the Victorian structure to house the force’s principal forensic laboratory. This had freed up space in the main building, where the force was struggling to deal with a crime wave brought about by the influx of East Enders to the new estates. Not that the newcomers brought with them any crimes that the locals hadn’t tried. It was just that there were more of them.
Most of the town’s 200,000 inhabitants had no idea what went on behind the Ark’s freshly sandblasted walls and bottle‐green and cream stained glass. Now, in the falling snow, lights shone from the savagely sharp lancet windows.
Shaw and Valentine sat in the Mazda, parked in one of the spaces reserved for CID at St James’s, waiting for the hour to strike. Being early for an appointment with Dr Kazimierz was a crime second only to being late. They had six minutes to kill. The news that Harvey Ellis had picked up a hitch‐hiker, and that she was in the truck and…’ he said, letting the world slur along, ‘and she stuck her thumb out at dusk for a lift off a truck on a lonely road. He thinks the hitch‐hiker’s up for it; she isn’t.’
He stopped, watching the snow, and his shoulders rose with a breath. ‘He pushes his luck, she’s sat on the passenger side with the toolbox between them. She’s scared, he makes a move, she flips the top, grabs a tool, and goes for his eye.’
‘Then she disappears, not a trace,’ said Shaw, shivering as he watched a uniformed PC running across the yard, the snow clinging to his back.
Valentine blew his nose, took a quick breath. ‘If Harvey Ellis was murdered, and if the murderer isn’t John Holt – then the killer left without leaving tracks. That’s a fucking fact. There’s no way round it – so you can’t use that fact to rule anyone out, can you?’
Shaw’s father had always said that George Valentine should have made DCI before any of the rest of them. But there’d been just too many rough edges.
‘But there’s two other corpses with no apparent link to your amorous driver,’ countered Shaw. ‘One on the beach – and then a few hours later our friend out on Styleman’s Middle.’
Hadden’s team had recovered the body from the sands an hour before full tide slipped over his grave. No forensic evidence had been found at all on the sands: no sign of
The Mazda’s heater was pumping out warm dust into the car and Valentine sneezed, prompting a series of metronomic sniffs which Shaw tried hard to ignore.
The clock at St Margaret’s on the Tuesday Market struck the hour and they got out, ducking through the snow towards the chapel’s double doors. Inside they pushed open a heavy perspex hinged screen into the main body of the old chapel. A low metal partition divided the room, continuing in glass up to the vault of the wooden roof. The windows spilt underwater light into the echoing space. The floor at this end was the original parquet, polished to reflect the stained glass, and on it stood three rows of lab tables, centrifuges, a computer suite, and a small conference area to one side beside a bank of sinks along one wall. Tom Hadden’s team ‘hot‐desked’, so there were no offices as such. A filter coffee machine coughed its way to the end of its cycle and Dr Justina Kazimierz emerged from the area beyond the partition to refill her cup. Valentine was already at the machine, helping himself. The pathologist worked on contract with the West Norfolk force but she’d been on enough cases in the last ten years for the Ark to have become a second home.
‘Tom’s back out at Ingol Beach,’ she said. ‘If you want coffee, help yourself,’ she added pointedly, but Valentine just sipped noisily from the mug.
Shaw saw that here, on familiar ground, she moved lightly, reminding him of her canteen dance. She led them into the second room beyond the partition. A single stone
Shaw could see a foot showing on the nearest table and he thought the stone angel’s flesh had a more appealing colour. Valentine gulped coffee, the shock of the caffeine failing to overcome his anxiety at being in the mortuary. He didn’t like death, it marked the end of the game, the moment when there was nothing left to gamble with, let alone on.