Death Ship Read online

  Valentine eased the collar on his shirt with a finger as a trickle of sweat ran down his neck.

  Sitting opposite Hunstanton’s modest bus station in the summer sunshine, he watched a queue beginning to form for the T45 service to King’s Lynn railway station, fifteen miles south along the zigzag route that hugged the coast. The bus, a single-decker, was due at three thirty. Folding out a copy of the East Anglian Daily News with a crack, Valentine peered over the top of the newspaper and noted the faces of the eight would-be passengers waiting for the bus: two men, six women, none a match for the widely distributed police ‘wanted’ poster, a copy of which he had between the pages of the paper. He forced himself to scan the other queues, at the other stops, reminding himself that his surveillance shift would be over soon with the departure of the T45, and that he should remain alert. He sensed, however, with all the cynicism of his thirty years of service, that he was wasting his time.

  It had not been a good day: he was bored, uncomfortable, hungry, thirsty, and hot. Valentine was newly married for the second time, to Probationary Police Constable Jan Clay, the widow of a former colleague, who had brought up a family out here on the windswept north Norfolk coast. Valentine was, by contrast, a man of the town. His two-up two-down lay in the tightly packed terrace streets inside Lynn’s London Gate, a warren of corner shops, backstreet boozers, and the Gothic remnants of the port’s whaling past.

  Jan wanted to start a new life, in a new house, out here in sight of the sea. They’d spent the morning viewing identical Barratt boxes on faceless streets, each estate agent desperate to meet Jan’s desire for that glimpse of the ocean. One property had boasted ‘a much sought-after view’ – which turned out to be an apology for the fact that to see the sea you had to stand on tiptoe at one of the dormer windows.

  Valentine didn’t want to move. He’d spent his life on Greenland Street. Late at night he’d sit by his first wife’s grave in the nearby cemetery of All Saints’. It pleased him, oddly, to be a ghostly presence. Moving out to the coast felt like an act of betrayal, although even Valentine was able to discern behind that simplistic summary other, less accessible emotions: a fear of failure perhaps, and a stunted, atrophied expression of the concept of home.

  He caught the soft whisper of the distant crowds on the beach, a gentle pulsing scream marking the onward rush of the tide. There were so many things he loathed about the seaside: the sun and fresh air, the irritating sand, the salty tang of burnt flesh on the breeze. Even the sound of it made him feel anxious.

  Snapping the paper open again, he took his hundredth look at the wanted poster.

  The crime in question had occurred at precisely this time a week earlier. An elderly woman standing in the queue for the T45 had, at first, done nothing to attract attention. Her fellow passengers had outlined a surprisingly consistent picture of her face. Several said they might have seen her before, on the bus, but they couldn’t be sure. Valentine’s boss, DI Peter Shaw, was a trained forensic artist, and having interviewed the witnesses in the queue to form an overall visual impression of their suspect, he had been able to produce the wanted poster. The ghost of lost beauty lay in the fine features, the wispy white hair, and the choice of earrings, noted by three of the female witnesses: two small classic cameos, set in silver. Pushing a wheeled shopping bag, she had worn a crisp white blouse and pale cream pleated trousers, with brown leather court shoes. She was neat, respectable, and, as it turned out, lethal.

  A few minutes before the scheduled arrival of the bus, she had started offering those in the queue a sweet, her hand held out with a few wrapped toffees and chocolates cupped lightly in her fingers. Working her way up and down the queue, she’d approached everyone. The brand of confectionary was unknown, but was later identified from a discarded wrapper as TopChoc, a discount product sold through supermarket chains. Five of the nine passengers had taken the sweets, but only four had eaten them. One of these had been Jack Roach, a sixty-eight-year-old former train driver, on a day out from his home in Norwich. Roach, a widower, had two grandsons, and the trip was in part a recce ahead of a planned outing the following week. Visiting the town’s Sea Life Sanctuary, he had purchased three advance tickets, later found in his wallet.

  The T45 had arrived on time and the passengers had climbed aboard, all of them alighting at Lynn railway station, or the next, and final, stop, at the bus terminal. Roach chose the railway station and waited for the 4.17 to Ely. Feeling unwell, he bought a bottle of still water on the train from the trolley. At Ely he bought a packet of paracetamol before getting on the 5.22 to Norwich. At Wymondham, Roach had quit the train and run for the station toilets, where he was sick. Complaining of nausea and cramps, he asked station staff to call an ambulance, which arrived promptly, and took him to the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital, where he was admitted. Sitting in A&E, he was sick several times, this time vomiting blood. His condition deteriorated rapidly and he was unconscious by the time doctors were able to make a full examination. Suffering a violent attack of muscle cramps in the hospital lift, he entered cardiac arrest and, despite the attentions of medical staff, was certified as dead at six fifteen p.m.

  Valentine’s mouth was dry, and so he retrieved a bottle of water from his raincoat and wet his lips. Checking his watch, he noted that the T45 was two minutes late.

  The Ark, West Norfolk’s forensic lab, had examined the contents of Roach’s stomach following a full autopsy. The toffee was located and found to contain nearly four grams of strychnine – an industrial mix, with other chemicals, probably purchased wholesale. The Ark’s electron microscope revealed traces of water and flour in the chocolate, suggesting that the poison had been injected into the sweet in the form of a sticky solution.

  West Norfolk’s serious crime unit had been on the case for six straight days. The priority was to make sure there were no more victims, and so the poster had been mass-produced, and Shaw had made several TV appearances to appeal for witnesses to step forward with a name, or information leading to a name. Every possible facet of Roach’s life had been investigated in the hope that he was the intended victim. Two of the passengers said they’d been allowed to pick their sweet, while another said the woman had handed him one she had nominated. None of the other passengers was ill. Shaw’s unit was visiting care homes, sheltered housing, and churches, armed with the poster. Meanwhile, the media, including the national tabloids, had covered the case, labelling the suspect the ‘sweetie killer’. Shaw, ever-cautious, had been the first to suggest the killing might be accidental: had the sweet been doctored as vermin bait? Had a tragic error led to death?

  Valentine was happy to leave bizarre accidents to his superiors, while he volunteered to run a surveillance unit of six officers providing cover here at Hunstanton from six to ten – the last bus leaving at nine fifty-six for Lynn. So far he’d sat through a dozen three-hour slots. Not a naturally contemplative man, the vigils had given him time to consider the question: Why do criminals return to the scene of the crime? Did the nervous offender haunt the scene in order to gain some brief advantage of time if a clue was found? Some, he felt, must believe they were superior beings to common detectives, and the return merely offered an opportunity to gloat, to watch poor uneducated coppers like George Valentine missing vital clues. Perhaps he was being watched now. Swiftly, he stood, his hatchet skull panning the scene, but nobody hid, nobody looked away.

  Valentine had shared the perplexing question with Shaw. It was a mark of their developing relationship that he could bring himself to ask his young superior officer a question at all. In another life, before Valentine had been busted back to DS, he’d worked with Shaw’s father – DCI Jack Shaw. Valentine had once been a whizz kid too. So this current partnership had been a wary, edgy, and occasionally ill-tempered affair. But some of the jagged edges had come off, especially now that Valentine realized that for Shaw the difficult truth was that his detective sergeant had once known his late father better than he ever would.

  ‘I
t’s emotional, George. Criminals – especially violent ones – register a palpable thrill when they commit a crime. How can they get that buzz again? They can kill again, or rape again, or disfigure again. But there’s another way. They can relive it, if they can get back to the scene. Take my beach,’ said Shaw, aware that Valentine knew it well. Shaw’s wife ran an up-market beach bar and café at Old Hunstanton, a mile distant along the coast from the bus station. ‘I played there as a child with Dad. Now I watch Fran play on the same sands. I’m happy at that precise spot because it’s associated in my mind with freedom, joy, beauty, and family. I can feel that – all of that – every time I set foot on the beach.

  ‘If a criminal enjoys a crime, they’ll come back in just the same way. It’s a facet of the place, burnt into the mind, a trigger which releases the emotions into the bloodstream. If they’re smart, they’ll find somewhere with the same attributes as the original place – a path through woods, a sand dune, a back alley. But sometimes it has to be the same place. Exactly the same place.’

  Valentine felt that Peter Shaw, a clean-cut father of a young daughter, with a fancy degree and a beautiful wife, had an unhealthy grip on the murkier facets of the criminal mind.

  The T45 swept into the tight turning circle that formed the heart of the bus station, the hiss of expelled air marking the release of pneumatic pressure which allowed the bus to lower its doorway to the curb.

  ‘Christ,’ said Valentine, standing, the newspaper falling from his knees to the pavement.

  The little queue was uncurling to climb aboard and as it did it revealed what he had missed, a woman, halfway down, holding out her hand to a child who was on tiptoes to see all the individually wrapped chocolates on offer. Given the circumstances, Valentine later felt, it was unsettling that at the time he thought the elderly woman, a close match for Shaw’s portrait, had a remarkably sweet smile.

  THREE

  DI Peter Shaw gazed out to sea from the lifeguard’s high chair set on the sand in front of Surf!, the wine bar run by his wife, Lena. Beside it, they’d converted the Old Boathouse into a shop, selling everything from ninety-nine-pence beach windmills to £5,000 wind yachts. Back in the marram grass lay the family cottage, linked to the café by a modern extension. The three buildings formed a miniature outpost of Old Hunstanton, set on the beach a mile north of the lifeboat house, reached only with a four-by-four or tractor along the rough track below the dunes.

  In a minute, maybe two, he would swim in the water which was now flooding the beach, brimming over from the deep water channel offshore and sweeping towards the dunes in a series of hypnotic surges, covering half a mile in less than a minute. Southwards, where the beaches were crowded at Hunstanton, he could hear the gentle hum of the holiday crowds. Locals knew this was the time to swim, as the chilly waters of the North Sea soaked up the heat of the sunbaked sand, forming a lake of lukewarm water, just a few feet deep.

  The water horizon in front of Shaw now comprised more than 180 degrees, so that peripheral vision would have been needed to capture the entire sweep of the waters of the Wash in one panoramic snapshot. The East Anglian coast, especially at this precise point, boasted this strange, rare quality. On a map, the north Norfolk shoreline seemed to suggest a great bay window, looking out to sea, north towards the pole. The sandy, littoral coast, unencumbered by rocky headlands, gave a sense that the sea was not only ahead of you but stretched behind you, over both shoulders.

  The sea was calm. An extraordinary spring of gentle winds and clear skies had given way to an even softer summer. The unruffled waters had allowed the sand to settle so that the visibility below the surface was extraordinary, the water holding that degree of pure light more reminiscent of the Greek islands than the normally turgid, murky North Sea. The calm weather had seemed like a benediction after a cruel, stormy winter, which had seen the tides remake the sand bars and channels of the Wash, sculpting new creeks and rivers, and remoulding the beaches with ridges and banks. Sitting now, eager to run into the waves, Shaw felt that this was just one of the reasons he loved the place, that it was a work in progress, the result of a shifting balance between land and sea.

  Shaw closed his eyes and enjoyed the sounds of an English seaside beach. Memory was most vividly stimulated by those senses that did not change with age. We don’t see, we perceive, and images alter from year to year, depending on our experiences. The past is overlaid by newer, more relevant versions of the same picture. But sound was constant, unalterable, and by closing his eyes he could access the past directly, by-passing the intervening decades. He felt himself drawn to the edgeland of memory, playing as a ten-year-old to this identical soundtrack. There was no doubt he was haunted by the past in this spot, but he never saw ghosts, even in the long dusks of summer, because he’d written his own story on the landscape, partly obscuring what had gone before.

  Opening his eyes, he looked out to sea, the world behind him and nothing in front of him. Swinging a small pocket telescope southwards, he noted two jet-skiers, a lone red-capped woman, and three men hurling a rugby ball water-polo-style. Shaw’s personal marine horizon was actually just less than 120 degrees, due to a blind right eye. He’d lost his sight in an accident on the beach five years earlier, trying to haul a small child away from a toxic barrel of waste into which she’d been prodding a stick. The screaming girl had inadvertently pierced the sclera of his right eye with the point of the stick. The resulting white iris – a mooneye – was in stark contrast to the blue of the left.

  Blinking, exercising the good eye, he looked down at an open police file on his knee, the cover marked MISSING PERSON: Case no. 45998 M/EU/A.

  Shaw had never been good at losing things, not in the simple binary sense of winning and losing, but in the sense of objects misplaced, or its more final, brutal partner: lost. The concept of ‘missing’ left him deeply anxious. In childhood he had often been able to picture the lost object – a favourite toy, a treasured watch, a fossil from the cliff foot. The sheer power of his imagination was enough to conjure up the lost object in a palpable form. It was intolerable to consider the hard reality that he could not actually find it. This had led, throughout his life, to interminable and increasingly bitter searches. He had once spent an entire university vacation intermittently engaged in a forensic sweep of the family home in search of a black moleskin sketchbook, six inches by three. The problem was that every time he imagined where the lost object might be, he could see it – right there, where he pictured it to be. Lena had long abandoned him to these infatuations, which had persisted into adult life. It was as if his character was defined by the opposite of the maxim ‘out of sight, out of mind’.

  The missing object currently tantalizingly just beyond Shaw’s reach was a sixty-three-year-old Dutchman called Dirk Hartog. An enlarged black-and-white picture of his passport headshot showed a heavy face, with bags under oyster-like eyes, furled like the sails on a galleon.

  Hartog was an electrician from Harlingen on the Frisian coast. He had taken a room at the Lancaster Hotel, on one of Hunstanton’s Edwardian squares, insisting, in the manner of the great English landscape painter Joseph Mallord William Turner, that he be allocated a bay window, with a sea view. In apparently flawless English, he had informed the hotelier by email that he wished to see the sun set in the west. Arriving in early June, he had spent a month in the town, initially restricting himself to his room except for meals, which he took in various pubs and cafés in the town. In the evenings, at sunset, he took a window seat in the Wash and Tope, a pub on the front, and drank three pints of Guinness, each with a single whisky chaser.

  Breakfast was taken on a tray in his room. The landlady, cleaning when he went out, found the room’s round table set by the window and covered in Admiralty charts of the seabed offshore, extending to the distant Lincolnshire coast. By the bay window a small telescope soon sat in a fixed position on an expensive metal tripod.

  After a week Hartog started going out for most of the day, always
with a rucksack (distinctively marked with two sewn-on Dutch tricolour flags) and a metal hiking stick, and wearing worn walking boots. The wardrobe in his room now accommodated a summer wetsuit, purchased locally. By the start of the second week it had been joined by a full scuba kit (marked Hunstanton Marine), including an air tank and face mask. The owners of the hotel had spotted him on three occasions: once on the beach to the south, just beyond the pleasure park, drying himself after a swim; once on a bench in front of the sailing club; and, finally, emerging from the sea in the scuba gear, right here, on Shaw’s beach, a mile north of Old Hunstanton.

  Then Dirk Hartog had disappeared, and nobody seemed to care, except the owners of the Lancaster Hotel, keen to clear his room. Inquiries revealed he was divorced, with two grown-up children, whom he never saw. His father had died when he was a child, and his mother, a long-term inmate in a mental institution in Arnhem, had finally passed away that very winter.

  The missing-person file had landed on Shaw’s desk at St James’ a week ago. The Dutchman’s room at the Lancaster was Shaw’s first port of call. The diving gear was gone. The CID team had spent some time in the room and noted several details: the Admiralty charts were new and marked with the price – £143 each, comprising a set of five; and the telescope was focused on the floating crane and rig of the pier head. And while the cupboard no longer held the diving suit and gear, it wasn’t empty. Two items were removed for forensic examination: an urn of ashes and a piece of driftwood bearing the hand-painted letters Cala: a ship’s nameplate, with the first letter C, and letters possibly following the second A, as the wood had sheared at that point. The wood was wrapped in oilskin. Shaw speculated that Hartog had been searching for more wreckage of this partially named ship. However, the online Lloyd’s register listed eight ships lost in UK territorial waters since 1900 with a name beginning Cala; none lay off the East Coast.