Death Ship Read online

  Atkins’ rheumy eyes looked a little harder. ‘Right, that’s one of ours, Sergeant.’

  ‘Sold to?’

  ‘Members of the club. There’s loads of clubs, right? Water Polo, hundred metres, high board, lifesavers – we do watches for the lot. Even this mob – static apnea. Leander is wild swimming. Again, all the rage. Every day on the beach, unless they’ve found somewhere odd – a moat, a canal, a lake. Ask me, they’re a bunch of nerds, but it takes all sorts.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Fair weather only.’

  ‘You got a watch?’

  He shook his head, shooting out his thick, muscled arms. The skin was tanned and weathered, with no sign of wrist strap. ‘Can’t wear a watch. They always stop on me.’

  ‘Can’t be cheap, either,’ said Valentine, picking up the forensic bag.

  ‘This version’s a hundred and twenty-nine ninety-nine, I think. WaveCrest’s the brand. We have ’em customized. The corkscrew’s on everything – leisurewear mostly. But this is a good bit of kit. The key is the reliability of the stopwatch. Compass can save your life too. And …’ He gave the watch a firm shake and the face lit up in fluorescent green. ‘You swim?’ he asked.

  Valentine managed to keep a straight face. ‘Not recently.’

  ‘I reckon we sold fifty watches like this. Leander Club members only; there’s an online form.’

  ‘So there’s a record of every purchase?’

  ‘Yeah. I guess. We always say it’s a one-off, every time we launch something – keeps the till tinkling. So Leander watches we did in 2012 – limited edition – that kind of crap. Always works. They love ’em; kids to pensioners – they all wear them. It’s like a badge of honour.’

  ‘I’ll need a list, Mr Atkins. With dates.’

  Atkins began to type laboriously on his PC keyboard.

  Valentine, irritated by the pool manager’s heroic lack of curiosity, filled in the background to his inquiry about the watches.

  At first light, the Ark’s forensic team had gone out to the rig off the beach and conducted a second sweep of the structure to try to locate evidence related to the arson attack. This subsequent search had extended to the rig’s lower platforms, set just above the sea, which provided access to boats and divers. One of the pontoon’s four tubular legs contained a staircase leading to an exterior port. The watch had been discovered there, the strap engaged and slotted through the metal gridwork of the exterior steps leading down into the water.

  ‘Arson is a serious offence, Mr Atkins,’ said Valentine. ‘We need to find the person who did this. A wet suit, if they wore one, doesn’t help. This stuff …’ Valentine reached for a suit hanging on the wall and worked the material between thumb and forefinger.

  ‘Neoprene,’ said Atkins.

  ‘Yeah. Doesn’t flake or shed threads … nothing. But we can take a guess at what’s happened. Diver gets on board, probably carrying an accelerant. Once he’s up deckside, the whole thing’s lit up like the Golden Mile, so there’s no problem finding the fuel store. Or maybe he knows the layout. The oil drum’s just gash gear in the store, so he stuffs it with cardboard, pours in the accelerant, and scarpers. A boat’s unlikely, given there’s a twenty-four-hour watch. So we’re talking a swimmer. We think he’d set himself a time limit – ten minutes, whatever. So he sits in the dark and hangs the watch through the gridwork steel, counting the minutes. If the fire didn’t take, he’d go back, try again. But the night watch spotted the smoke and hit the fire alarm. Given the dangers of fire at sea, you’ll know what that sounds like – flashing lights too, and an immediate roll call on deck. We think chummy panicked, got off the platform, left the watch behind …’

  Atkins’ eyes seemed to bore into the PC screen. ‘Nearly there,’ he said.

  ‘Nasty, really. Arson’s always reckless, of course. Fuel explodes, we’re talking severe burns for anyone close, maybe worse.’

  Atkins hit a printout button, and the list began to chug out.

  Valentine didn’t have to count the list: each name came beside a number. ‘Fifty-one,’ he said.

  Behind Atkins’ desk was a poster: red capital letters proclaimed Stop the Pier and advertised the planned public meeting.

  ‘Popular cause?’ asked Valentine.

  Atkins considered the poster as if he’d never seen it before. ‘Locals don’t like it – shopkeepers, people who run the fun fair, that lot. It’s gonna take business away. And then there’s the pollution, the ferry off the end – they’re talking three hundred DWT – right, dead weight tonnes. That’s big – really big. Bit of an eyesore too – you have to admit that.’

  ‘Not me. I like ugly. Whose poster?’

  Atkins shrugged. ‘Mine, I guess. This isn’t a pier to stroll down, is it? I remember the old pier, before it got swept away in 1978. Delicate, like a gangway. We used to dive off it,’ he added, handing Valentine the list.

  ‘Anyone I should be aware of, Mr Atkins? We’ll run everyone through the computer, of course … but a head’s-up always saves time.’

  ‘One of the girls – Abigail Clore – she got done last year for a topless sprint into the sea. Indecent exposure. She’s the club’s criminal mastermind, Sergeant.’

  ‘And there’s no spare watches?’

  ‘None. They were made to order – payment up front, like I said.’

  ‘And you haven’t got one?’

  ‘Like I said. No.’

  ‘The kid? What about him?’

  ‘Theo? Hardly. Minimum wage, Sergeant. He has to work sixty hours a week in here plus overtime just to stay alive. That’s why he hasn’t got a suntan.’

  Valentine considered Atkins’ oyster-like eyes for a second, then turned to leave. Everyone was out of the water except a lone diver.

  Theo, down on his knees, was using a stopwatch, calling the time out for the rest. ‘Six forty, six forty-five, six fifty …’

  At last the diver turned, the white face slipping from the water like a fish surfacing, and then it came again: the long slow hiss of the saved breath, spluttering and viscous.

  There was a ripple of applause, strangely inappropriate to Valentine, who couldn’t help thinking the audible breath sounded like a death rattle.

  Theo’s voice had taken on an official timbre. ‘Six minutes fifty-five seconds. Club record.’

  Atkins walked Valentine to the doors.

  ‘I need you to do two things, Mr Atkins,’ said Valentine. ‘I’d like you to keep our conversation to yourself. Whoever left the watch doesn’t know we found it; they may even not be sure where they left it. Second, I’d like you to let me know what the Leander Club is planning for tomorrow’s wild swim. Time and place, please.’

  TWELVE

  Marine Court, a chalk-white art deco block of flats on the seafront, looked like an Atlantic liner of the Blue Riband era, shipwrecked on Hunstanton’s clifftop by a freak wave. The ground floor, behind a wall of plate glass, housed a used-car dealership, the vehicles polished to a mirror sheen, like mechanical beetles, twinkling under artfully arranged halogen lights. The façade of the building was bisected by a thirty-foot-high ‘thermometer’ – designed to show how much cash had so far been donated to the Stop the Pier campaign. The rising red line had reached £210,000, within reach of the £250,000 target.

  Marine Court, once regal, had seen better days. The original Crittall metal window frames were rusted, one of the flats on the second floor was boarded up, and a makeshift wooden sign by the lifts now matched flat numbers to offices: a solicitors’ practice, an estate agent, a firm of financial advisers. Floor six – the penthouse – was marked Stop the Pier.

  As Shaw and Valentine waited for the lift, they examined a large, framed vintage poster in the distinctive British Rail style reading The Rock-Pool Coast, showing a pair of Edwardian children – girl and boy – fishing with a shrimp net in a tidal pond amongst the seaweedy rocks below Hunstanton’s famous red-and-white cliffs. Cleverly, the artist had created the surface of the po
ol, but also hinted at what lay beneath, with white lines sketching out a stationary fish, a curled lobster, a lurking crab, and the waving, pallid fronds of a sea anemone.

  The lift decanted them into a lobby, beyond which the whole floor was open plan, the seaward wall glass, a balcony beyond with a steel rail and a sea view. Stop the Pier posters covered the walls, together with a large blow-up archive picture of the original Victorian structure – all ornate ironwork and graceful spindle pillars – next to an artist’s impression of its replacement: a box-like structure, shuffling out to sea like an airport luggage conveyor belt. A dozen staff worked at trestle tables, filling envelopes, while others manned a bank of landlines.

  Tom Coram, the chairman of Stop the Pier, sat behind a shoulder-height sinuous glass screen, in a private office pod. The wall here held a framed black-and-white picture of a tug, the powerful engines churning the sea in its wake. A note in copperplate read Lagan. The word stirred connections in Shaw’s mind, and images set alongside flotsam and jetsam, but he couldn’t place the precise definition.

  Coram had a landline to one ear, a mobile on his knee, while he tip-tapped at a desktop PC, projecting a young man’s energy with vital, rapid, decisive movements. But his hair was white, set off by a skiing tan, the eyes betraying the first hint of the glaze that can be a symptom of cataracts. There was a dynamic tension here, Shaw felt, between the bustling energy and the ageing body. He held out his warrant card and Coram’s jaw set straight; tossing the mobile into an in-tray, he ended the landline conversation with an absent, half-mumbled ‘Bye’ and stood up, scanning the horizon outside the window, not his guests.

  ‘Not sure I want to talk to you lot,’ he said, the voice furred by a lifetime of cigarettes, alcohol, or both. ‘Heard the radio this morning – local, not national, but still. Police are taking seriously – exact words – taking seriously the theory that the bomb was planted by campaigners keen to disrupt the building of the new pier. So what does that make me?’ he asked, turning to face them. ‘That’s the deal, is it? I don’t care about human life to the point at which I’d plant a bomb on a crowded summer beach. My beach. Fucking kids …’

  The office had fallen silent during Coram’s tirade. On his feet, he projected a very real sense of physical threat.

  ‘Well? Spit it out. I rang into the radio station, and this oik had the gall to ask me to my face, live on air, did I think any of my supporters – my supporters – had planted the bomb? Fucking cheek.’ Coram’s voice had risen to a shout. A flush of cardiac red marked his throat. ‘It’s not going to be a sodding home-made bomb, is it? It’s from the war. Any idiot will tell you that.’

  ‘My sergeant scares easily, Mr Coram,’ said Shaw. ‘If you don’t calm down, he may faint.’

  ‘This isn’t a bloody joke.’

  ‘No. It isn’t. People could have died, which is why we are undertaking a thorough investigation and pursuing several lines of inquiry. Last night a further threat to the construction project, and those working out at sea, was lodged on the website of Blue Square, the developers. Next time people will die – that’s not verbatim, but you get the thrust. So, maybe not a wartime bomb after all. And certainly not a joke. If you don’t want to answer our legitimate questions, we can reconvene at St James’. Your call.’

  Coram sat, arms folded.

  ‘We’ve got a squad car outside,’ lied Valentine.

  Coram looked at Shaw, then back to Valentine. ‘Your warrant card?’

  Valentine searched in his raincoat for his wallet, and hung it open a foot from his face.

  Coram’s eyes slid out to sea in a mildly childish show of indifference. ‘I’ve got work to do. So make it quick. I’m on a flight this afternoon to lobby Tory MEPs. Ever been to Brussels? Chips are good. Rest of it is smoke-filled rooms, except you can’t smoke.’ Coram filled his lungs, as if weighed down by the prospect of tackling the bureaucratic inertia of the European Union. ‘These MEPs have the power to put a stop on the grant made by the EU’s cohesion fund. Like that.’ He thumped his fist on his desk top. ‘The original business plan envisaged a reconstruction – their word – of J.W. Wilson’s fine Victorian pier. That was eight hundred and thirty feet long by the way – not a mile-plus. There was supposed to be a graceful pavilion theatre on the end, and a miniature railway running the full length. That was it: the pier was merely a means of getting out to the end. No shops, no rides, no nothing. No bloody Moonraker or Corkscrew. Not a white-knuckle ride in sight. That’s the vision that secured funding. I—’

  Shaw raised a hand. ‘Forgive me. I live on the beach here – the café beyond the lifeboat house. I’m up to speed on the pier. So’s my sergeant. The question is this: Are any of your supporters sufficiently exercised by this issue to put the lives of innocent people in danger?’

  ‘Never,’ said Coram.

  ‘I’ve seen a few at the demos. Punches get thrown—’

  ‘They’re angry,’ Coram said, getting to his feet. ‘It’ll kill the town. Cafés, pubs, shops – everyone can see the future now. The whole point of Hunstanton was that it was where the kiss-me-quick coast ended. Beyond this point there’s a hundred-mile beach, yes? A hundred miles of sand and dunes – all the way to Cromer. A natural wonder. The other way, down to Lynn, it’s fun parks, caravans, and chalets.

  ‘This,’ he said, pointing out to the rig, ‘this is the start of something else. This isn’t a few dodgems and an amusement arcade. This gets built, you can kiss goodbye to Holme, and Brancaster, Holkham – the lot. And Hunstanton’ll be as tatty as most pier resorts. People think we’re the new Brighton. It’s not Brighton – it’s Southsea, Morecambe, worse, Blackpool. You been to the Golden Mile recently? It’s a ghost town off the front. Wintertime, the street lights are on half power. It’s like the Soviet bloc, for God’s sake. They’ve pulled a fast one – the developers, and we’re on their case.’ He sat down, breathless. ‘What we need is time,’ he said, checking his watch. ‘Even if we can get into the court in Brussels, we won’t get a ruling before Christmas. In the meantime, we have to stop the work because every minute the rig’s in operation … Every minute costs money. The more that gets built, the less likely Brussels is to call a halt. If we could raise the cash, we could go for a judicial review through the High Court; that would freeze the project until the legal issues are dealt with in full. But we need more time for fundraising. Lawyers – especially those expert in the minutiae of the EU’s legal systems – cost a pretty euro.’ Coram pressed the back of his hand against his lips, as if to steady himself.

  ‘But you don’t think any of your supporters are capable of taking violent action to buy that time in the short term?’ asked Shaw.

  Coram swallowed hard, perhaps realizing that he had just sketched a scenario in which it made quite a lot of sense for committed campaigners to try to stall the construction project. ‘Of course it’s bloody possible,’ he conceded, his shoulders sagging. ‘I just take exception to the idea that I’d condone it. This is a broad coalition of interests, Inspector. Loose cannons are inevitable. Frankly, loose doesn’t get near it. But bombs – I don’t think so.’ He stood, a hand on the glass divide, calling across the office, ‘Anna, a minute?’

  Anna Roos, Coram explained, was STP’s liaison officer with the environmental groups fighting the development, while Coram himself dealt with the coalition of business interests fighting the pier.

  Roos wore beach shorts and a loose T-shirt with the Greenpeace logo. Her arms and legs were impossibly thin, so much so that the coffee mug she was holding seemed to threaten to break her wrist.

  Shaw knew Roos – at least he knew what she stood for. Twenty years ago her father had founded a ‘Free School’ in the resort, an institution dedicated to letting children discover the world through play and adventure, not timetables and exams. Its motto – Freedom, not Licence – was taken from the famous – or infamous – school at Summerhill, down the coast in Suffolk. Hunstanton’s version had been christened Winterhill in h
onour of its forerunner. The school, a set of 1960s prefabs, had a mildly risqué reputation in the town for spontaneous nudity and petty theft. Roos taught at Winterhill and had established herself as an advocate of green politics in the town.

  ‘Sure. We’ve got our quota of crazies,’ she told Shaw, after he’d outlined their concerns.

  ‘Could one of the campaign’s supporters have been responsible for the arson attack on the rig, and – possibly – for the explosion on the beach?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘I deal with organizers, right? Scientists, professional campaigners, English Heritage, the National Trust. They’re not exactly environmental warriors, unless you count a cream tea as a lethal weapon.’ She kicked off a flip-flop and effortlessly raised a foot to massage the instep, brushing away sand. ‘Most of our time is spent putting together an application to have this whole coast designated an SSI – an area of special scientific interest. We get that, we can stop the work, and we’re very, very close. If that happens, we don’t need an expensive High Court action. But first we need to compile an ecological audit of the beach, the dunes, the seabed offshore – it’s painstaking, skilled work. As a group, I’d say studious was the key word, not extreme. But we need support at the grass roots, and we don’t turn away anyone. There’s a spectrum – at one end there’s what I’d call the romantics. They want to preserve the “rock-pool coast”. They’re all members of the Anchorstone Society – from the name of the town in Hartley’s book?’

  ‘The Shrimp and the Anemone,’ said Shaw, who’d gone to school in the town and had the Edwardian classic drummed into him by devoted teachers, who’d breathlessly revealed that Anchorstone was based on Hunstanton.

  ‘So, literary ladies who lunch – that kind of thing. Bird-spotters, walkers, watercolourists. Other end of our spectrum are the zealots, and for them this is personal. What do the Americans say? They’ve got skin in the game. The graffiti campaign was clearly in support of the STP – but totally unofficial, and we denounced it publicly. I hear stuff. Who knows what’s true? There’s links to animal rights activists, the anti-road demonstrators at Twyford: these people move around, looking for a cause. They may have found us, I admit that, but they’re as shadowy to me as they are to you.’