Bedrich Fibich was sitting behind a large table facing down the room, like a lonely Christ at a deserted Last Supper. There was nothing on the table except a bottle of whisky and a single glass; but a pool of blood had spread out from Fibich’s clasped hands to form an almost perfect circle. His eyes were shut, and Shaw wondered if he knew anyone else was in the room. Gravity seemed to have attacked his face, pulling down the folds of skin, the heavy eyelids, the bottom lip.
Shaw walked to the table and pulled out a metal chair, its legs squealing on the tiled floor. He heard Valentine’s soft steps behind him, then to one side, and then he came into peripheral vision, standing with his back to the tiled wall, just within a lunge of Fibich. Shaw could see the single knife wound in the Czech’s left wrist.
‘We should get you to a doctor,’ he said.
Fibich opened his eyes. They were blue but the colour was lifeless, like a vein glimpsed through thin skin. ‘No.’
Valentine took half a step forward and Shaw heard saliva glug in his throat. But Shaw raised a hand from his wrist, enough to hold him there, well within striking range.
The blade of the knife reflected the light, the bottom six inches smeared with blood. Fibich held it in his hand with the point at Shaw’s face, ready to thrust.
‘Why? You don’t have to die,’ said Shaw.
Fibich seemed to stir, rolling his shoulders, wincing as the movement reopened the gash in his wrist. ‘She won’t have me back. Not after what we did. I had to explain the money, why I was coming home. She said I should stay away, that I was a stranger to them now.’
‘She? Your wife?’
He looked at Shaw for the first time. So this was why he was dying, because he was an exile in his own land. But what had he done? Shaw had a shrewd idea. If Sarah Baker‐Sibley had called Colin Narr that Monday night and told him Jillie had been abducted he would have organized a rescue. Had he sent a boat out to intercept James Baker‐Sibley’s yacht? Had Fibich been aboard?
‘That’s the bit I don’t understand,’ said Shaw. ‘Why did the man on the yacht have to die? Narr sent you out there to get his girlfriend’s daughter back, didn’t he? But why did her father have to die?’
Fibich turned his wrist to examine the wounds. ‘So good to be rich,’ he said. ‘Other people take all your risks.’
Fibich tried to focus on Shaw’s face. ‘The man on the yacht tried to pay us to leave him – to leave them, the daughter too.’ He stopped, and Shaw wondered if he was thinking of his own children.
‘He said we could be rich if we let them go. That was a big mistake. We took her anyway. He did not want her hurt, so he did not fight. I rowed her ashore. When I return we beat the truth from him. A desperate man, he fought too hard. So we hit him too hard. But he told us where the money was before he died. Thousands of pounds, all in cash. Then we threw him overboard.’
His head rocked back and he closed his eyes. Above them a line of hooks were still embedded in the roof where the carcasses had once hung.
‘I deserve to die here,’ he said.
‘You said “we”. Who was in charge, who else was there, Bedrich?’
Fibich’s eyes spun out of focus. ‘The little man,’ he said. ‘The little man without pity. Lufkin.’
Fiona Campbell had undergone an emergency blood transfusion at the hospital and an operation to reconnect severed arteries in her neck. Bedrich Fibich had been taken to the same hospital. He was alive when they put him in the ambulance outside the old Co‐op, but dead when they took him out on the forecourt by A&E. Shaw sat in the Mazda outside the Co‐op with Valentine, who smoked beside the open driver’s window. Lights poured through the murky windows of the old shop façade. Three uniformed PCs ferried personal effects out to a black van: clothes, letters, a fishing rod.
Shaw shared the silence with Valentine, aware of a subtle tilt in their relationship. He’d taken the decision to go into that room and confront Bedrich. Valentine could have hung back, let him run the risks alone, but he’d chosen instead to share the danger, and the sight of the spreading blood.
Valentine was concentrating on not being sick. He’d gone into the room because he felt he should. Whatever he thought of Shaw he was his partner, and as such he deserved the back‐up. When he’d seen Fibich’s blood spreading towards the edge of the table he’d changed his mind, but by then his legs had gone, so he leant against the wall. He’d fainted standing up for a second, an image of Jack Shaw on his deathbed flashing across his memory,
‘Let’s take Lufkin at dawn – tomorrow,’ said Shaw, checking his watch. ‘And let’s go mob‐handed too – with forensics. Tonight we need surveillance on him in case he does a runner.’
‘I’ll sort it,’ said Valentine.
‘We need to tie up loose ends tonight. Narr’s the key: Fibich virtually admitted he’d sent them out to get Jillie back. Narr is Lufkin’s boss too – they’re close, we know that. But before we go for Narr we need more evidence. Fibich is dead. Lufkin’s a pro – he won’t talk, not straight off, anyway. Out on the sands that leaves Sly – the gang‐master. We know there’s no love lost with Lufkin. We think he’s honest. Let’s see if he’s got a tale to tell.’
Valentine turned the key, thinking that if Shaw wanted a chauffeur he should bloody well hire one.
Sly’s houseboat was moored behind Boal Quay. There was an abandoned creek, an old bend in the river by‐passed by the main channel which spewed into the estuary. A crescent of houseboats stood moored to a raised jetty. Each had a small hut on dry land, a gangway across the mud, access to a power point and a standpipe. It was home to a menagerie of misfits, some of the boats fashioned into fantastic shapes: one, the superstructure an old single‐decker bus laid on a steel hull, another incorporating a Reliant Robin. In between the New Age fantasies there were boats from a more stately era – an old Cambridge college boat, with a veranda like a Victorian railway‐station platform; an old steam tug off the set of The African Queen; a wooden 1930s minesweeper in Atlantic grey.
The heavy scent of rotting wood and putrid mud was cloying. Sly’s home was a wooden barnacle on a steel hull, portholes lit, a washing line on the forward deck hung with a single pair of overalls. Moored alongside was a metal‐hulled inshore fishing boat with an open deck, a mast bristling with sonar, GPS, radomes, a fish‐finder aerial and floodlights. Shaw recognized it as the one they’d seen anchored off Styleman’s Middle on the morning they’d found James Baker‐Sibley’s body.
They were only halfway across the gangplank when Sly appeared. A deck light flooded them in white, catching falling snowflakes. Shaw was struck again by Sly’s size – the barrel‐chest, the ham fists. On board his floating home he’d lost the awkwardness that had been apparent out on Styleman’s Middle. He raised a hand to his side, without looking, and clicked the light off at a switch, then ran the hand down to find a latch so that he could swing the double doors into the cabin wide open. He pulled a blue seaman’s cap off his cannonball head.
Inside they could see the winter‐red glow of a potbellied stove.
‘She’s new,’ said Shaw, ducking inside, wrapping himself in the sudden woody heat. ‘The fishing boat alongside.’
‘Refurb,’ said Sly, shutting the doors. ‘I’ve done a lot of the work. The engine’s giving me gyp. Which isn’t funny, ’cos it’s my livelihood now.’