Authors: Jim Kelly
Fran announced ice cream, everyone else passed, and she went off to help herself from the
Walls
fridge. When she was out of earshot Shaw took Lena’s hand. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have lost it.’ He looked along the table at Valentine. ‘Bit of a domestic.’
Lena shook her head and turned to Valentine. ‘He beats her daily with a rock. Now. Coffee,’ she said, getting up. Valentine didn’t have the nerve to tell her he only drank tea. She was one scary woman. He checked his mobile – nothing. When he looked up he knew something had happened because Shaw had got up and was holding his head in both hands.
‘Peter?’ He wondered if Shaw’s eye had lost vision, but when he saw his face the DI was laughing, an incredulous laugh.
‘George,’ he said. ‘Thank God you came to dinner.’ He felt behind him for his seat like an old man and fell back, his shoulders sagging. ‘You’re right about the voice. I heard it on my answer phone the other week and thought for a second it
was
Dad.’
He got up again, quickly, and took a bottle of iced white wine out of a bucket on the table. Shaw cracked the screw top, poured Valentine a large glass, and put a splash in his own.
‘It’s just a bit of what I inherited, isn’t it? The vocal chords. The shade of hair. The stance. Not the temper – that’s Mum’s.’
Valentine nodded, trying to see where this was going.
‘He wouldn’t have been very proud of us,’ said Shaw, sipping wine. ‘We missed the obvious, George. Both of us. What did he always say? That the real challenge of a murder inquiry was holding on to common sense.’
Valentine let the wine touch his lips. He didn’t really trust wine – too much alcohol in too small an amount of liquid. Shaw had slipped into lecture mode, and he knew better than to interrupt him now.
‘What was this whole inquiry about?’ asked Shaw, leaning forward. ‘What was the key to it all? Why did we reopen East Hills in the first place?’
‘New evidence,’ said Valentine.
‘What kind of new evidence?’
‘DNA – genetics.’
‘Exactly. The code which can lead us to a killer. Our problem is that we can’t find a motive for the deaths of two of our victims: Arthur Patch and Paul Holtby. Let’s turn this on its head. What would have happened if they
hadn’t
died?’
Valentine caught the slight hint of the rhetorical question in Shaw’s voice, so he didn’t even shrug.
‘If Arthur Patch was alive and well he’d have been at Wells’ nick this Friday morning,’ said Shaw. ‘He’d have picked out young Garry Tyler – almost certainly. They’d have charged the kid, George. Then taken him down to St James’ where the duty sergeant would have booked him in, got him a solicitor and then, standard routine, he’d have taken a swab and gathered a DNA sample.’ Shaw’s voice had gathered in strength as he spoke, and in volume.
Shaw came round the table, hands splayed on the wood, his face close to Valentine’s. ‘Next, Paul Holtby. If Holtby hadn’t been murdered in the woods, George, what would have happened the next day? The demonstrators would have tried to break through the gates – they’d all have been arrested. My guess is they’d have bussed them down to St James’ to process the lot. Teach ‘em a lesson. Breach of the peace, maybe even some criminal damage. Both reportable offences. So, again, DNA samples all round, and straight on to the national database.
‘It’s the timing that’s crucial. For the killer it couldn’t be worse. Because at this point in the inquiry he knows – is absolutely certain – that we won’t have found a DNA match from the mass screening. So what happens next; what
should
have happened next?’
‘We’d have run the East Hills samples through the database looking for a close match – a family match,’ said Valentine. ‘Which we didn’t do because O’Hare wanted to save £7,000 quid.’
‘Right, but the killer doesn’t know that. He presumes we will do the family match. He can’t afford not to presume that. I think he killed again – twice – to make sure we didn’t pick up that family link.’
Shaw drank the wine in his glass, held the cool liquid in his mouth, then let it trickle down his throat. He knew he was right because it was so simple. Sample X was the heart of the case. The killer had, at all costs, to stop the police finding a match. The mass screening was always going to draw a blank. But a family link was just as damning. The police would begin checking relatives: brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins – moving out through the family network until they got their man. The killer had to destroy any chance that would happen. And so he killed twice more.
Valentine leant forward and helped himself to another glass of the wine he didn’t like. ‘We’ve already got a suspect related to one of the wind farm demonstrators – Joe Osbourne,’ he said. ‘If anyone was going to end up in the cells – other than Holtby – it was Tilly Osbourne, his own daughter. It wouldn’t have taken us long to find that link. And Joe’s local – North Norfolk through-and-through. He could easily be related to this Tyler kid too.’
Shaw set the wine glass aside. ‘Yeah. Maybe it is Joe. With a little help from his mate Tug Coyle, I think, running him out to East Hills for nothing then forgetting he was ever on board. Anyway, we’ll know soon enough, George.’
Lena returned with the coffee and they sat watching the tide come in; the rows of white water just visible under a moonless sky.
Shaw’s mobile buzzed, shuffling on the wooden table top. It was Paul Twine up at The Circle. They had a problem with Tug Coyle. He’d missed two appointments at St James’ to give a new statement. So they’d sent a squad car round to check his address that evening – a flat in the Woodley estate. Neighbours said he hadn’t been seen for a week. Much more worryingly he’d missed three shifts at the lifeboat station, having never missed one in the previous thirteen years. And his nets and pots were still strung out off the north point of East Hills.
Shaw tossed the mobile on to the table, then smiled at Valentine: the full hundred-watt surfer’s smile. ‘Coyle’s done a runner.’
THIRTY-FOUR
Wednesday
W
ells’ lifeboat station was at the end of a straight mile of sea wall which led directly out to sea from the town quay. The beach stretched beyond, a vast yellow undulating plain, an early morning August crowd of several hundred reduced to isolated dots. Lifeboat crewman Tug Coyle was still missing. Peterborough CID had contacted his wife who said she had received her monthly support payment from Tug’s solicitor, but there had been no call from her ex-husband, which was rare. The coming Thursday was his regular monthly date with his son. Usually he’d call to fix up time and place: often the town cinema, or the stock-car racing arena, or a fishing trip in summer. Coyle’s car – a battered Vauxhall van – was not outside his flat or beside the lifeboat station.
Shaw put the Porsche in an empty slot marked for RNLI crewman. As soon as he swung open the door he could smell the salt, hear the distinctive shouts of children playing out at the water’s edge. The heat was already building, yesterday’s thunderstorm a distant memory. The air over the modern corrugated iron roof of the lifeboat house buckled in the sun’s rays, an anchored mirage. From the outside the building had all the charm of an MFI out-of-town showroom, painted in corporate shades of grey and orange. But inside the Aran-class boat gleamed. Half a dozen tourists were already up on the walkway which gave a view inside the boat’s hi-tech cabin.
Valentine arrived and spread some A4 sheets on to the flat glass top of a display cabinet containing medals. Ignoring a sign he lit a Silk Cut. They’d talked this through the night before after coffee. If Shaw was right about the killer’s motives then there was a genetic link between the murderer and
both
the teenage burglar and one of the thirty-seven demonstrators the inquiry team had interviewed who would have been up at Docking Hill on the day of the planned wind farm protest. The sure-fire way to catch their killer was to put the thirty-eight DNA profiles on the database and wait for the link to appear. But that would take several days. And they didn’t have several days. So they’d try to do it on paper, by interview. They were dealing with close family relationships: near family, so it wasn’t an impossible task – it just needed some painstaking work.
‘So far?’ asked Shaw.
‘So far nothing,’ said Valentine, sifting the papers. ‘But Paul seems to know what he’s doing. The whole team’s on it flat out. He says it’ll take twenty-four hours – maybe more. But we’ve set up a fast track too, seeing if we can find a link between our Garry Tyler – the burglar – and Joe Osbourne.’
He held up a head-and-shoulders print of a teenager: cropped hair, belligerent stare. ‘This is Tyler by the way, care of Wells’ nick. Jackie Lau’s going out to see the kid’s mother over lunch. That’s our best bet. Paul talked to Tilly Osbourne and she says she can’t recall any Tyler’s in the family, but hey, they’re not that kind of family and she’s a teenager. Why would she care?’
They climbed a short spiral metal staircase into the mess room. News of a crewman missing had brought several lifeboatmen into the station. Shaw recognized most of the faces. No one had seen Tug Coyle for forty-eight hours. He had been due on a standard watch that morning at six but hadn’t reported in, having missed two shifts the day before, one the day before that. There’d be a disciplinary hearing; if there wasn’t a copper-plated excuse, he might be thrown off the crew.
They asked to see Coyle’s locker and one of the senior crew opened it up: spare boots, gear for the lifeboat, roll-up tin, torch, two heavy RNLI sweaters, two pairs of camouflaged trousers, and a programme for the Norfolk Arena, featuring rally cross and speedway. Valentine took the key, relocked the locker, and asked them to leave it that way.
The deputy coxswain was a man called Petersen, Navy-clean, with eyes that looked as if the sun had bleached the colour out of them. He showed Shaw Coyle’s rota: eight six-hour shifts a week, plus any back-up shifts he could make. Available on call 24/7 except for an eight-hour gap on Thursday afternoons when he took his son out.
‘Broken marriage,’ said Petersen, shrugging.
When asked he said that Coyle was popular but not particularly sociable. They went back downstairs to the boathouse and Petersen nodded at the portrait on the wall of Tug John’s. ‘You know he was his grandson? Difficult act to follow. Didn’t help giving the kid the nickname, did it? Like he was supposed to be right there in the old man’s footsteps. I knew Johns, and frankly I thought he was pretty unpleasant. Kind of skipper in the Navy you’d go a long way to avoid. Bit of a tyrant. You couldn’t tell him anything. If you’ve done it, he’s done it, only he’s done it better. Coyle was better than that. But, you know, if we could see ourselves . . .’
The doors of the boathouse were open so they were looking down the ramp at The Cut, the tide flowing out and a yacht sliding past, East Hills on the horizon.
‘There is one thing,’ added Petersen. ‘One of the crew comes from a family in the town that owns one of the huts – way out the end. Tug used to sleep over some nights rather than driving back to Lynn. Illegal, but like nobody’s counting, and there’s plenty that can’t afford the local house prices anymore. Give me a sec I’ll get you the key.’
They stood together out on the sand, not far from a family encamped round a hole full of children. Both their mobile’s buzzed with an identical incoming text. It was Paul Twine up at the incident room: CSI had phoned from The Ark, the lab result on Joe Osbourne’s DNA had arrived. Negative – no match with Sample X. They’d sent a uniformed officer up to the hospital to give Osbourne the good news in person.
‘Negative!’ Valentine held his phone at arm’s length and thought about lobbing it into the sea.
‘How does that work?’ He spat in the sand. ‘Coyle, the ferryman, does a runner, but it’s not Joe Osbourne out on East Hills. So who the fuck was out on the island?’ He looked skywards and his neck cracked. ‘Are we back to Grieve and Roundhay?’ His voice had risen with frustration: ‘And if we’re back to them why the fuck has Coyle pissed off?’
Shaw just stood in the sand, rooted, feet in his own shadow, like he wasn’t going anywhere.
THIRTY-FIVE
T
o the east the long, graceful curve of the beach huts bled into a shimmering horizon of blue. Shaw and Valentine walked for half a mile but didn’t seem to get any closer to the end. Most of the huts were open. The families in them fell into three groups. The Chelsea-on-Sea set: cooler boxes, literary novels and not to many kids. Then the families from the big camp site and holiday park beyond the pine woods who got a hut as part of their package deal: extended families, noisier, kids playing games, kettles whistling. And then just a few local families. They’d be wrapped up against the sun, dogs about, and perhaps some fishing gear set up to catch the tide as it came in.
Shaw had been walking while looking out to sea so that when the sudden clap of thunder came it was a shock. He spun round, to the land and trees, and saw the black edge of a storm cloud over the pines. As he tried to measure the speed of the cloud, lightning flashed: someone screamed in one of the nearby huts, and then the first fat raindrops fell. He looked back at Valentine, a hundred yards adrift, standing in his raincoat looking up at the charcoal-grey lid of cloud as it slid over the beach. The rain started to crater the sand.
Shaw broke into a jog. Halfway along the line of huts he got to one of the wooden stairways which led back over the dunes into the pinewoods. Beside the bottom step stop a standpipe, dripping into the sand. The next hut, No. 124, Shaw had once hired himself, a favourite spot for Lena and Fran. He stopped, recalling that it was about here on the beach that he usually lost his mobile signal. He checked: the usual six bars had been reduced to one, flickering. Within seconds the rain was an impenetrable screen, like a shower curtain, hiding the woods and then, by degrees, the sea. He waited for Valentine and then they trudged on, the beach crowds going in the opposite direction. No. 186 was indeed almost the last in the line, citrus lemon in colour, one of the older huts, so its stilts were shorter, the top step only just above the encroaching sand.