Death Ship Read online

  Valentine leant forward, elbows on knees. ‘Got to be. Ask me, he’s either a saboteur working with the campaigners or he got in the way. My money’s on the second.’

  ‘We need to keep an open mind,’ said Shaw.

  ‘Bollocks. Sorry – bollocks, sir.’

  A moon rose over the roof of All Saints’ and Shaw began to look forward to a swim before sleep. For the first time he realized that what he saw in his mind when he thought of the beach was the result of many images overlaid – like sheets of tracing paper on top of an old photograph, each layer depicting a scene from his life. The result was strangely three-dimensional, an object built from memories.

  The thought of the physical exercise made him stand quickly, pacing the gravel path.

  Valentine pulled out a dog-eared notebook. ‘Paul’s found three people who saw Hartog the day before he disappeared. I’ll organize interviews. Maybe he said something – although he’s hardly Mr Chatty, is he?’

  ‘Let’s dig deeper on Hartog’s background, check there’s no links between Hartog and Blue Square, or for that matter any eco groups.’

  The church clock struck midnight.

  ‘I’m off home,’ said Shaw.

  Valentine stretched out his legs. ‘I’ll stick with it for ten.’

  ‘Keeble?’ he asked as a parting shot.

  ‘Yeah. Progress, thanks to smart work by PCC Jan Clay no less. There was a Keeble family bash down on the Fisher Fleet a month ago. She’s a Salt, right? Big family – fishing, boats, the lot. Anyway, the wet-fish warehouse is rat-free thanks to industrial supplies of strychnine. Still doesn’t tell us why she did it, though, does it?’

  ‘Maybe we’ll never know.’

  TWENTY

  Lena sat alone in front of Surf!, the café windows dark, a single light showing in the cottage on the dunes. Shaw, running the last hundred yards in the moonlight, collapsed on to the seat beside her. Two glasses stood next to an ice bucket, inside it a bottle of Prosecco clouded with condensation.

  Shaw checked his watch. ‘Bit late for a celebration, isn’t it? What’s the occasion?’

  ‘An exciting trip to a foreign country where there’s loads of sun, good music, and a silver sea. Problem is, I don’t think you can come, Peter. Which is why this isn’t strictly a celebration. More a consolation.’ She poured the drinks. ‘Fran’s asleep. I checked a few minutes ago,’ she said, noting Shaw’s glance back into the shadows where their cottage lay in the dunes. A sudden wave broke in the dark, drawing a white line across the night, the water sparkling with phosphorescence.

  ‘It’s Mum,’ she said. ‘They read the will. Marcus was there. I talked to her a lot, you know, towards the end. About coming here, about the beach, how we could make a flat above the shop, so she could be with us. This could be her place too. Her final place. I thought then she liked the look of our lives, but she wasn’t really listening.’ She took a sudden gulp of wine. ‘She wanted her ashes scattered in Jamaica. Some village I’ve never heard of, off the track, in the west. Seriously – sixty miles from Kingston, a town called Black River. Fran looked it up online; the water’s black because of the rotting vegetation on the riverbed, so that’s something to look forward to.’

  Shaw just sipped his wine. He’d learnt that the best way to deal with Lena’s family issues was to listen.

  ‘Marcus says we should ignore the will. She left a little cash, and I think he’s got his eyes on it. The flat’s gone to Jessie, which is sensible, and it means Marcus can’t get his hands on that, at least. He’s willing to compromise – his word – with a cremation, but he wants the ashes buried at the crem. So that’s big of him. She wants her ashes taken to the Caribbean, and he’s prepared to have them stay inside the M25. How did he end up so … venal? How can he be my brother?’

  Shaw stared into the dark, waiting for her to say what she wanted to say.

  ‘I thought about what Mum always said, that if someone asks you for a loan, then you give them the money and don’t ask for it back, but you never do it again. Life’s not about debts. It’s about gifts. So that’s what I want to do for her, Peter. I want to give her what she wanted. And I want to do it now. This way, Fran can come too. It’s summer, I can organize cover here; we could go for a month. And Jessie says she’ll come with me if money’s not an issue. She’s got nothing of her own. So I bought the tickets. And I’ve paid for the cremation, at Tooting, the day before we fly. There’s regulations, but I’m sure we can get by.’

  ‘You’ve been busy.’

  ‘I wish we could all go. There’s no way?’

  Shaw smiled. ‘Murder inquiry. It’s a mess. I can’t.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But you should go; you’re right. Find out why she chose it. And Fran needs to see the place. It’ll make a mark.’

  ‘Maybe. But it makes no sense to me. She said she wanted to go home. It’s about the only thing she said at the end that made sense. She was nineteen when she came over on the boat. The family lived in Kingston, a place called Half Way Tree, which was a slum then, but it’s posh now. That was home. So why this dead-end township, Black River? Marcus has no idea, but he’s not curious. I am.’

  TWENTY-ONE

  Valentine was back where he didn’t want to be: on the beach, his black slip-ons skating uncertainly on the pebbles, his eyes watering in the salty breeze off the sea. A hundred yards out, beyond the breakers, a school of blue swim caps bobbed: the Leander Club was afloat, heading out to round a buoy which marked the theoretical extension of the old Victorian pier, before returning to the beach on a wide, lazy oval course. Behind Valentine came DCs Birley and Twine, hauling a trestle table, clipboards, and evidence bags down to the sands.

  Tad Atkins was there to meet them, his teenage assistant further out on the water’s edge, where he busied himself preparing hot drinks, towels, and folding chairs for the returning swimmers. The cherubic athlete was a study in dutiful concentration, partly, Valentine sensed, in order to avoid any further conversation with a detective sergeant of the West Norfolk Constabulary.

  Atkins helped them set up the table, ready to log in each of the swimmer’s Leander Club watches as they staggered ashore.

  ‘You’ve said nothing, I trust,’ offered Valentine.

  ‘Not a word,’ said Atkins.

  ‘While we’ve a moment, Mr Atkins, I have a few questions.’

  ‘Everyone calls me Tad.’

  ‘We’ve checked every club member with our central criminal files. These go back several decades, of course. We included Flume! staff.’

  Atkins seemed to visibly deflate, his shoulders sagging, head down. That curious buoyancy he seemed to affect was gone in a heartbeat.

  Valentine’s voice softened. ‘Mr Atkins – Tad. We’re not interested in past convictions that are not relevant to the inquiry. But I do need to ask some questions.’

  Atkins’ answers were curt but delivered without delay. On leaving prison, he had applied for a job with the council as part of a prison rehabilitation scheme. The original contract had been for just six months. He’d been lucky, but he’d worked hard too, and he hadn’t taken an alcoholic drink in the intervening years. He never drove. The memory of the accident would live with him for ever.

  ‘I guess it’s not something you can just forget,’ said Valentine.

  Atkins filled his chest with sea air. ‘It’s not something I want to forget, Sergeant. The boy’s buried at Wells; I go to the cemetery every week.’

  Valentine wanted to ask other questions. Did he visit at night, at dusk, at dawn? Did he sit close by, or just on a bench in the distance? But he knew any more questions were simply intrusive.

  ‘If that’s all you need, Sergeant,’ said Atkins, ‘I’ll be getting back to the pool. Theo will look after the club members, and provide any help you need.’

  ‘Tell me about Theo first,’ said Valentine. ‘He keeps his head down.’

  Atkins offered a brief biography: the surname, it transpired, was
Kersk. The young man was a twenty-one-year-old Romanian citizen, with up-to-date EU migrant papers, who had arrived in the UK eighteen months previously. Before being taken on, he had passed, under council supervision, all the necessary safety certificates and a CRB check.

  ‘We’re lucky to have him,’ said Atkins. ‘Great swimmer. He’s magic with the kids, the OAPs – everyone. Language isn’t a problem, either. He set the Leander Club up, you know – that’s his thing really: wild swimming.’

  With that, Atkins trudged off towards Flume! while Valentine headed out towards Kersk, who looked up at his approach, manufacturing a smile.

  ‘They’re brave,’ said Valentine, nodding towards the blue caps, which had begun to stretch out into an arrow-head formation, the leaders rounding the distant buoy.

  ‘A challenge. But all safe.’

  ‘Tad said it was your idea – the club. Why Leander? Your choice?’ he asked, subsiding into one of the folding chairs the teenager had set out to welcome the swimmers back to dry land.

  Kersk knelt on the pebbles, pulling the ring on a can of Red Bull.

  ‘A romance,’ said the teenager. ‘Leander, he is on one side of the sea.’ He gestured at the waves. ‘The Hellespont – yes? You say the Dardanelles. I live on the Black Sea – we say Hellespont still. Each night Leander swims to his special one – Hero. She is priestess of Aphrodite. He swims the Hellespont, to her bed.’ The cherub face broke into an accomplished leer. ‘In summer – no problem. Then the year ends. Hero must hang a light from the tower of her house to be a guide. A storm comes and blows out the light.’ Kersk blew a kiss as if extinguishing a candle.

  Out at sea, those in the arrow’s head were just a hundred yards off the sands. Atkins had insisted the club was non-competitive, but it looked like a race to Valentine.

  ‘Four miles, this Hellespont, and the water is rough. He drown in the dark, and body she sees on the beach from her high tower at dawn. She throws herself from this tower in her grief.’ Kersk placed both hands over his heart.

  ‘Four miles,’ said Valentine.

  ‘This,’ said Kersk, looking out to sea, ‘just two and a half.’

  ‘You could tackle the Hellespont then?’

  For the first time Kersk held Valentine’s eyes. ‘I have. We take the boat to Stanboul. Yes – I swim this. Not alone. A club too.’

  In one movement he was on his feet, running down the beach to help the first swimmers out of the surf; both were women, with full figures, in their sixties perhaps, one revealing white hair as she pulled off her blue cap.

  While Kersk sat them down and gave them coffee and towels, Valentine introduced himself, explained why CID were interested in the club, and asked them to check in with the two officers at the trestle table on the pebbled beach above.

  ‘Just routine, nothing to worry about,’ said Valentine, promising that the watches would be returned at the next Leander Club meeting – a ‘wild swim’ in the moat of Hunstanton Hall on the following morning.

  Within twenty minutes all the swimmers were back and being processed by Twine and Birley.

  After dispensing hot drinks and towels, Kersk sat on the sands with a girl in a one-piece swimsuit and a Leander Club blue cap. They whispered into each other’s ears as lovers do. Valentine caught her voice on the breeze and noted the crisp clear English vowels.

  Of the fifty-one watches manufactured by WaveCrest, forty-six were collected in forensic evidence bags, labelled, and laid out on the trestle table. Two club members had called in sick, and so uniformed branch had dispatched motorbike officers to pick up their watches from home.

  The three club members issued with watches who were unable to produce them fell into three distinct categories. Bill Cartwright, a forty-nine-year-old butcher, said he’d lost his watch on holiday in Madeira on the beach in December the previous year. He’d made an insurance claim on their holiday policy, and Birley had been furnished with the details after a quick mobile conversation with Cartwright’s wife.

  Sian James, a thirty-year-old PE teacher, had lost her watch from the lockers at the swimming pool in Peterborough just after Christmas. She was able to show Valentine an email on her phone from Peterborough police confirming that she’d reported the theft and giving her a crime number for insurance purposes. She’d made no claim, due to a £200 excess on the policy.

  Finally, Lester Finn, a sixty-eight-year-old pensioner, had given his watch to his fifteen-year-old grandson, Ethan, because he found the weight of it distracting as he swam. Twine phoned Ethan’s parents who reported, reluctantly, that the teenager had sold the watch on Lynn’s Tuesday market to a dealer to provide some spending money for a school skiing trip.

  Given that WaveCrest had confirmed the original delivery of fifty-one watches, Valentine had now tracked each one down: forty-six here on the beach, two to be collected, one stolen, one lost, one given away and sold. It was, in some ways, a dispiriting outcome. The watch left on the rig had to be one of the three separated from their original owners. It was unlikely to be the lost one, but it might be the one stolen from the public baths in Peterborough. The third had been sold locally. If they could find the market trader, they might get a lead, but it didn’t look promising. Nothing looked promising.

  Valentine sat for a moment, sipping his coffee, as Kersk and his girlfriend returned to the water, holding hands, until the final wave – a wall of tumbling water perhaps six foot high – reared up like a window, and they simultaneously arrowed their bodies through, to emerge on the other side, clutching each other, shocked at the impact of the icy sea.

  For the first time Valentine thought what a morbid choice it had been: to name a swimming club after the classical Leander, lost at sea, washed ashore, dead.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The details of Dirk Hartog’s last days were beginning to emerge into sharper focus. A string of witnesses had responded to newspaper, radio, and TV appeals and come forward with information to help track down his killer. Besides his evening drink in the Wash and Tope, the Dutchman had been a regular in the Copper Kettle tearooms. He’d mingled with the holiday crowds, and entered his name in the visitors’ book at the lifeboat station on three separate occasions. RNLI volunteers said he’d seemed interested in books on local history, sold in the shop, and always took time to climb the staircase to the observation deck above the lifeboat, as well as checking out the hovercraft through the glass ‘ports’ built into the sides of its hangar.

  A woman in Hunstanton Marine had sold the Dutchman the scuba gear with which he’d made his last, fatal dive. Hartog was no stranger in the store, having previously hired several items, including a small, hand-held underwater camera (which, Shaw noted, had never been recovered) and an underwater GPS unit. His English, she said, was near perfect, if obscured by a heavy accent which mashed vowels in a thick sibilance.

  Asked why he was on the Norfolk coast, he’d offered ‘walking and swimming’ in search of a break from a busy life back in Holland. She’d judged his mood as buoyant, which Shaw found grimly humorous in the circumstances. Diving enthusiasts who used the shop said he’d been seen on several occasions emerging from the sea at various points along the coast, from Shepherd’s Port in the south to Holme in the north, a stretch of beach nearly six miles long.

  He’d bought the telescope the police had found in his room – a Gali 13 – from Birdwatchers’ World in the town, explaining that he wanted to track seabirds on the sands at low tide, and that binoculars made him go cross-eyed. The shop assistant, a keen twitcher, told Shaw he doubted Hartog’s credentials as he’d been unable to name any breeds he’d seen so far. The Gali provided a modest magnification of x22 and cost Hartog £146.99, including tripod and cover.

  Perhaps, most significantly, Hartog had hired a small sea-going motorboat at Wells harbour on three occasions. A fourth voyage had been booked and paid for, but he had never appeared at the yard to pick up his boat. The owner of the fleet of inshore motor boats, usually hired to fishing clubs, said h
e’d paid in cash in advance each time, and shown a Dutch marine navigation certificate. In the box on the hire form marked Purpose of trip, he’d filled in Sightseeing. Given the fuel-tank capacity, and the boat’s GPS and radar, the owner had stipulated a maximum range of forty nautical miles. When asked his planned destination or route – standard safety practice with all such hirings – he’d answered Roaring Island, an area of sand banks out on the edge of the deep water channel, popular with fishing trips and parties trying to get close to the Wash’s resident seal colonies. Shaw had pulled Hartog’s charts from storage at the Ark, and found the sandbanks marked Roaring Island – the oiled paper slightly smudged by a persistent fingertip.

  Was this where Hartog hoped to find the elusive Cala?

  Their final witness had telephoned St James’ and offered to speak to a member of CID, explaining that he had become a ‘friend’ of the deceased. And he’d provided an address of sorts: Beachcomber. Hut 1314, South Beach.

  Valentine looked at his black slip-ons, partly submerged in the white sand. ‘Is this really necessary?’ he asked, noting Shaw’s bare feet.

  The coast stretched ahead into a noonday heatwave, the long line of huts and beach houses flexing in a mirage. From the promenade the tinny soundtrack of an ice-cream van rode the breeze.

  Shaw walked on, counting off the house and hut numbers along South Beach. This stretch of the coast of the Wash, leading away from the open sea but towards the estuary that narrowed into Lynn, provided a bleak prospect even on a blazing blue summer’s day. For a few hours it could pass for the seaside at high tide, but for most of any twenty-four-hour cycle it overlooked a desert of black mud and the exposed sands that clogged the heart of the great inlet.