‘Telecom?’ said Shaw.
‘It wasn’t anything fancy,’ said Valentine, shaking his head. ‘Kind of thing you get on your hand at a nightclub.’
‘We need to find this witness. He’s important. So let’s think of ways to find him, shall we?’ said Shaw.
They heard footsteps in the corridor and the double doors swung open. Tom Hadden held a single sheet of computer paper, a tracing across it like a read‐out from a seismograph.
Under the neon light he looked ill, his eyes pink, matching the strawberry‐blond wisps of hair above his ears. Hadden always reminded Shaw of a laboratory rabbit, pink ears, pale flesh under thin white hair, and the eyes set back, as if glimpsed under ice.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘Go ahead – just winding up,’ said Shaw. ‘Anything?’
‘Yeah. Fred Parlour, the plumber. He hit his head on the door of the kid’s Mondeo. We did all the checks. The blood on the door is Group O, as is Parlour’s. But there was a smudge on Parlour’s overalls… here.’ He put his right hand over the left thigh of his cords. ‘It’s not O. It’s AB – same as the victim.’ He held up the print‐out.
One of the DCs clapped slowly.
‘Is that definite?’ said Shaw.
‘Well, it’s more likely you’ll be hit by a meteorite on the way home, Peter, than this blood belongs to someone other than Harvey Ellis.’
Everyone started to talk but Shaw raised a hand. ‘Tom. Thanks.’
‘Unfortunately…’ Hadden was looking at the printout. ‘It’s never that easy. I can match the blood, no problem. But the smear isn’t just blood. There’s something else and I can’t ID it, not 100 per cent. Spectrometer says it’s organic. The nearest match I’ve got is bone.’
‘Ellis’s eye socket was chipped,’ said Twine. ‘The pathologist’s report mentioned fragments.’
‘Yes,’ said Hadden. ‘But not fragments of sheep bone.’
Valentine snapped a pencil.
‘As I said, I haven’t got it exactly right. But it’s an animal bone. Possibly more than one. Anyway, you’ll have it in writing in the morning.’ He was already retreating through the doors. ‘I’ll be in the Ark if you want me.’
There was a moment of silence as the doors banged shut. Shaw took a deep breath.
‘OK. That could be the breakthrough we don’t deserve. On the other hand it might not be – so let’s keep our heads. We do the legwork tomorrow. George and I will deal with Parlour.’
Valentine cracked the joints in his left hand. ‘He’s got the victim’s blood on his trousers.’
There was a silence that made all the other silences sound like the Hallelujah Chorus.
‘And carrying a dead sheep,’ added Valentine.
The murder team dispersed quickly to the Red House. Shaw had told the team not to get excited about Hadden’s forensic evidence. But it hadn’t worked. He could feel the almost palpable rush of adrenaline. He didn’t blame them for their optimism. Parlour had lied. He’d sworn he hadn’t gone further forward along the line of cars than Holt’s silver Corsa. But at some point that night he’d got very close indeed to Harvey Ellis. He’d be on a murder charge by lunchtime unless he could talk his way out of it. And Valentine was right – not for the first time. Their job was to catch a killer, not solve some arcane forensic puzzle. They could work out how he’d done it later. But in the end Shaw knew that if they got him in front of a jury then they would need all the answers to secure a conviction. In the end they’d have to work it out.
Shaw said he’d see them there. He wouldn’t, and they knew it, knowing the DI would slip home. But this night, for once, they were only half right. Shaw knew he should go home, sleep well, and prepare for the crucial interview. But first there was something he had to do. Something which, if he’d really had faith in his father, he would have done many years before. He’d avoided even thinking about the Tessier case for a decade, probably – he could admit it now – because he was afraid of what he might find. Doubting his father’s honesty seemed safer than trying
He walked down the back stairs to the ground floor. St James’s had been built in 1926, on the ruins of the old city walls. Permission had been granted for the demolition of a row of Victorian lock‐up shops. The problem was what was under the lock‐up shops. At that precise point on the old medieval walls the original builders had dug deep to create a series of underground magazines for the storage of gunpowder. Semi‐circular vaults, in local clay brick, linked like a tube train. Four carriages in all, each nearly sixty feet in length.
But it was for the last two that Peter Shaw was bound. The custody sergeant let him into the corridor that led to the stairs and the overnight cells. A drunk sang from the first, the voice light and tuneful. At the end of the corridor was an iron door, painted gloss black, with the single word RECORDS in copperplate script.
The door, unlocked, swung easily inward on oiled hinges. Here the barrel roof of the old cellar had been left in its original state, spotlights illuminating the intricate work of the medieval builders, studded now with a network of discreet piping which provided a state‐of‐theart sprinkler system. The room was full of black metal shelving, stacked with file boxes, the rows arranged like a library. In each row stood a dehumidifier.
A man at a desk sat obscuring the chair which presumably was supporting him. He had agricultural bones from which hung enough weight for two people. Even seated
‘Peter,’ he said, standing, inadvertently heaving the desk forward. ‘Sir.’
‘Timber.’ They shook hands, laughing.
Shaw thought Sergeant ‘Timber’ Woods looked his age, which must have been sixty‐six. Woods had retired a year earlier after a lifetime of unblemished, if uninspired, service. He’d been asked back to cover the late shift at the records office, a sinecure demanding only diligence. West Norfolk had switched to computerized records in 1995. But the St James’s budget had yet to find the extra cash to transfer the backlog. Access to information and data‐protection legislation demanded the files be kept, preserved, and made available to any member of the public completing the necessary paperwork – as well as for CID and uniformed branch inquiries. So nearly three thousand case box files, bound back copies of the local papers, stenographers’ notes and scene‐of‐crime evidence boxes had been saved – the collective memory of West Norfolk Constabulary stretching back to 1934.
‘So.’ Woods mashed a tea bag in another mug. ‘George Valentine,’ he said, smiling. ‘Jack would’ve laughed.’
Shaw had known Timber Woods all his life. He’d been one of the few of his father’s friends not to fade out of the picture after the Tessier case and Jack Shaw’s hurried retirement.
‘We went out to the Westmead,’ said Shaw. ‘George and
I. I’d never seen the spot, where they found the kid.’ He paused.
Woods picked up the mug, effortlessly enclosing it within his fist. ‘We spent three years on the beat together – Jack and me – and we broke a few rules, cut a few corners, but I never saw him plant anything, Peter. That’s a rule he didn’t break, wouldn’t break. If you played by all the rules you didn’t get to nick anybody. He was a good honest copper. I don’t know why you can’t just accept that.’
‘Doesn’t mean I don’t want to, does it?