‘Shit,’ said Valentine, turning, taking three steps and vomiting into the sand.
He came back, dabbing at his lips. ‘Sight of blood,’ he
Shaw tried to reanimate the victim’s face in his mind as he’d been trained to do. He tightened up the jaw, balanced the eyes, replaced the graceful bow of the lips. Not a cerebral face, a muscular face.
It was Valentine who first saw the mark on the arm. The seawater had washed it clean and so it bled no more, but there was no mistaking the shape: a bite. A human bite. The teeth puncturing the skin deeply, viciously driving into the sinew and muscle, almost meeting in a crisp double incision.
Sarah Baker‐Sibley pulled the Alfa up three car lengths behind stationary tail lights. The vehicle ahead had stopped, a fallen pine tree blocking the way, lit silver by the headlights. Looking ahead she saw that it wasn’t a car but a small pick‐up truck, with an open back, and a covered low load. The cab had a rear window which showed a light within through frosted glass. The engine idled, the exhaust fumes spirited away each time there was a breath of wind. In a lull she heard music: something urban, jagged and loud. Then silence, and the next track, louder, even less melodic. The flurry of snow had passed, but flakes still fell.
She activated central locking and searched her handbag for her mobile. The latest modeclass="underline" a gift from one of her suppliers, retail price £230. Internet link, GPS, camera, video, the casing decorated with a detail from Monet’s Water Lilies.
NO SIGNAL
Searching network
She threw the mobile onto the passenger seat. Ahead the snow lay three inches thick on the road, as clean as hotel linen, the two parallel tyre tracks just visible, running forward to the stranded truck.
She watched as the man levered himself out of the driver’s seat, straightening, with a hand on the car for support. He struggled forward, but when the wind blew he stopped, braced, waiting for a lull.
He lowered his face to the closed driver’s window. A strained smile, the white hair matted with snow, the plump fingers holding an outsized working jacket to his throat. Glasses, heavy with black frames, magnified his eyes, which were milky with age. The cold had brought some blood to his cheeks but otherwise he was pale, drained, a cold sweat on his forehead.
‘You OK?’ he said when she wound the window down an inch. She heard the sound of music again, louder, from the pick‐up truck.
‘We’re stuck,’ she said, briskly. ‘I need to get through – I’m picking up my daughter from school. Could you check ahead, see if we can move the tree?’
He looked forward, licking his lips, reluctant, but then set out. She watched the prints he made in the snow – a single line of flat‐footed impressions, slightly unsteady. He slipped at the edge of the ditch when the wind blew, his arms flying out in a crooked semaphore, the coat billowing.
‘That’s all we need,’ she said out loud, punching in the lighter. ‘Grandad in the soup.’
A minute, less, and he was back, out of breath so that he had to lean on the Alfa’s roof. ‘OK then. We’re not gonna move the tree – not now. He says we’ll have to all back out. Have you got a mobile?’ he asked.
‘No signal.’
‘Same with him. I don’t own one.’ He rubbed one of his eyes under the thick spectacles. Despite the cold she could see now that his whole face was wet with sweat.
Baker‐Sibley pushed smoke out of her nostrils, her lips pressed in a humourless line. ‘You should take it easy,’ she said.
He held his jacket’s lapels together. ‘I’m OK. I’ll try and reverse back to the turn, there was a farm track there, just give me a few minutes.’ He set off before she had time to answer.
He tottered back to his car and wiped the snow from the windscreen with his sleeve before lowering himself into the driver’s seat and starting the engine. He peered down at the dashboard, then at the rear‐view mirror.
‘Come on, come on,’ said Sarah. ‘It’s not a fucking Space Shuttle.’
He didn’t move. She threw open the door and stepped out into the night, holding a hand above her eyes to stop the snowflakes snagging her lashes. The cold made her back arch and she hunched her shoulders to try to protect the exposed skin at her neck.
It was what stretched behind the Corsa that made Sarah Baker‐Sibley swear. A line of headlamps running back, all stranded now in the snow.
She looked up and let some of the flakes settle on her face. ‘Why me?’ she asked. She thought of Jillie trudging home in the snow. ‘And why now?’
On cue the blizzard finally broke, the snow thickening, the wind driving it in from the sea. Visibility dropped to a few feet. She brushed flakes from her eyelids and scrambled back into the safety of the car.
In the blizzard Shaw and Valentine worked quickly, dragging the raft across the sands to the DI’s black Land Rover, parked beyond a copse of hawthorns. By the time they had a tarpaulin secured, weighting the corners with rocks, the snow was settling. Then they sat it out, Shaw watching the high tide boiling on the sands through an open window. He’d been a policeman for eleven years but this was the first time he’d discovered a corpse: he was distressed to find that the emotional impact was refusing to fade. His stomach felt empty, and he kept seeing the dead man’s mouth, the blood terracotta red between the white enamel of the teeth.
Valentine bent forward, his hands over the warm‐air vent, his throat glugging with phlegm as the hot dust triggered his immune system. He’d binned his last packet of Silk Cut back at the station, so he closed his eyes, trying not to think about nicotine, trying not to think about the corpse in the raft. But the image of the apparently self‐inflicted wound was difficult to shake off. He took a call on the radio: Control said the force pathologist was on her way and a unit of the West Norfolk CSI team was assembling, but the snowfall had brought chaos to the coastal roads, so they could be some time.
The storm itself passed in twenty minutes, rolling
Shaw’s patience snapped. He flung the door open and shuddered in the super‐cooled air. He threw the keys to Valentine. ‘Roll the Land Rover out on the beach and put the lights on – there’s a floodlight there.’ He leant in and tapped a red switch. ‘Walk the high‐water mark, see if you can find anything – clothing, a weapon, just anything. Any footprints in the sand other than ours, mark them with the scene‐of‐crime flags – they’re in the boot – and there’s some tape; try and box off the point where I dragged him ashore, although it’s probably under water by now. There are evidence bags in the glove. When you see the fire brigade unit or our boys, fill them in. Scene‐of‐crime rules – so no smoking.’
Valentine popped another mint.
‘I’m going to climb, see what I can see. I’ll be ten, no more.’
‘Right,’ said Valentine.
Shaw detected the grudging note, a single syllable that said so much. He recalled George Valentine at his father’s deathbed, a glass of malt whisky in his hand, a cigarette burning between the yellowed fingers.
Boredom, bungalow and early retirement (enforced) had killed DCI Jack Shaw. Luckily, they killed him quickly. The early exit to Civvy Street had come care of his father’s last, notorious, case. Until then they’d been the force’s star team: DCI Jack Shaw and DI George Valentine. A pair of old‐ fashioned coppers in an old‐fashioned world. And so he knew what Valentine was thinking: that a