Death Wore White Page 8

  It was pretty clear which one Shaw meant.

  ‘We live here, on the Westmead,’ said Zhao. ‘My wife was born here. I mix with my own community.’

  ‘Staff?’ asked Valentine.

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Also Chinese?’

  Mr Zhao cleaned his already spotless fingers on his white apron.

  Shaw stepped in. ‘I’d appreciate it if you’d give DS Valentine the details. Names, addresses. I’m sorry, we’ll need to see their papers too. And one more formality… A driving licence?’

  Zhao raised both hands, palms up, as if nothing would be easier, but Shaw detected for the first time the hard, angry set of the man’s jaw.

  ‘A moment,’ he said, opening a door into a corridor, then closing it gently behind him. They heard his footsteps on carpeted stairs, then the creak of floorboards above. The door Zhao had closed swung back again and through the opening they heard drawers being pulled out, banged shut. Shaw walked quickly into the corridor beyond. To the left the stairs rose, boxes on each step. To the right the corridor led to a door, half open. He looked in: a storeroom, the jagged shadow of a fire escape just visible through reinforced frosted glass. He wondered if Stanley Zhao had really met a burglar here. That kind of scar looked more like a premeditated punishment.

  Valentine stood behind him and tried the other door in the corridor. It opened and they stood together looking in. A child’s bedroom: bright yellow wallpaper dotted with Looney Tunes characters – Daffy Duck, Road Runner. A cot rested in pieces up against one wall. A mobile hung, ships, fishes and lighthouses in wood. Shaw wondered if the child had an inflatable raft for the beach.

  But perhaps a child didn’t live there. A single metal collapsible bed was made up with grey blankets. On the coverlet a magazine. Porn: Das Fleisch. Sean Harper, plumber’s mate, would approve. Three copies, all different dates.

  They heard footsteps too late and met Zhao in the corridor.

  ‘The door was open – we wondered where you were,’ said Valentine, taking a laboured breath. ‘Whose room?’ he asked, making a virtue out of being caught.

  ‘Gangsun. My nephew,’ said Zhao, closing the door and forcing Valentine to step back. ‘He works the late shift at weekends and sometimes he sleeps, goes home next day.’

  ‘Likes reading, does he?’ asked Valentine, a sneer disfiguring his face.

  ‘Young man – lonely, I think. A wife in Kowloon.’ Shaw made a cursory examination of Zhao’s driving licence. They heard a key turn in the front door and a man joined them: Chinese, swollen eyes, twenty years of age, perhaps less. Mr Zhao said something they didn’t understand, something rapid and edged like corrugated paper. The new arrival walked out towards the storeroom. They heard a sound like coins being poured into a bucket. The man reappeared with a large plastic tub full of frozen chips.

  ‘And him?’ said Valentine, nodding at the other man. ‘My brother,’ said Zhao. ‘We open at noon; Edison cooks.’

  ‘You’ll tell him what we need. Papers, passport, driving licence,’ said Valentine, making it clear it wasn’t a question.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘We interviewed the Round Table secretary this morning, Mr Zhao,’ said Shaw. ‘He said the takeaway meal has been a standing order for – what – eighteen months?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Mr Beddard – I’m right with the name? He said the order was for six o’clock.’

  Zhao was aware now that he was being led somewhere he might regret going.

  ‘So you would have been early – twenty minutes or more.’

  ‘The insulated boxes keep the food OK,’ he said, too quickly. ‘Sometimes I get places early, take a break in the van. Smoke. My vice.’

  He seemed very keen to own up to an everyday vice, thought Shaw. He tried to imagine it, the takeaway van parked outside Burnham Overy Staithe Village Hall, engine running, Mr Zhao enjoying a well‐earned cigarette, light spilling out on to the snow.

  But that wasn’t what the secretary of the Round Table had described.

  ‘Mr Beddard says you’re often late,’ said Shaw.

  ‘In winter, people eat early. I drop off three or four times, it gets late.’

  ‘And Edison stays here cooking – with the others?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So who’s the other man? Mr Beddard says that a couple of times you’ve been with a friend. Always – almost always – he said that was when you were late.’

  ‘Sometimes Edison is bored – he comes for the ride,’ he said, his voice slightly louder.

  ‘But in winter people eat early – so it must be too busy for Edison to leave the kitchen, right?’

  Zhao cracked the window open. ‘Like your job, take‐away food, Inspector,’ he said, and Shaw sensed the syntax had been deliberately muddled to help blur the clarity of the answer. ‘Never know when busy.’ He shrugged. ‘Not busy.’

  ‘Mr Beddard says the other man – your friend – is not Chinese, Mr Zhao.’

  Zhao rubbed his face, then drew two circles in the air. ‘Mr Beddard’s eyes are not good. Always someone else signs for the food; he can find never his glasses. Who knows what he sees?’

  Shaw caught Valentine’s eye. Enough, for now. But they’d be back. ‘Let’s make a start, DS Valentine, please. Names, addresses, any papers to hand.’

  He turned to Zhao and tried out his most in sincere smile. He didn’t like it when people lied to him, especially when they didn’t seem to care if he knew.

  Back in the Mazda Shaw used the radio to get through to the murder incident room. The DC on point duty was Paul Twine – graduate entry, smart, but short on street‐wise coppering. He gave Shaw a one‐minute briefing. John Holt’s condition was fragile but improving fast. DC Fiona Campbell was in attendance again having had a six‐hour half‐shift off to catch up on some sleep. Holt had suffered severe bleeding from the nose during the night owing to high blood pressure and had nearly choked on his dentures, which had to be cut free to clear an airway. He’d spent three hours in intensive care before being returned to his ward. By dawn he was sleeping. Twine offered Shaw a précis of the preliminary report from the pathologist but he turned it down, preferring to ring direct.

  Dr Kazimierz answered her mobile on the first ring.

  ‘Sorry, Justina, it’s me. Anything I should know?’

  ‘It’s early,’ she said, but the icy formality was short of full blast. ‘The chisel had a nine‐inch blade – the point actually fractured the inside of the skull at the back of the head. Blood group’s AB – which helps, yes? Bad news – Tom says no prints on the weapon.’

  Shaw thought about the blood group. It was a break. AB covered just four people in a hundred. He heard a tap being turned, water gushing.

  ‘And there was a tattoo on the chest: Royal Anglians. Otherwise that’s it for now.’

  ‘So, a soldier once?’

  Silence. Shaw heard the sound of coffee now, a filter machine chugging.

  ‘As for our man on the beach…’ she said, ‘I haven’t touched him.’ She put the phone down.

  Shaw rang Tom Hadden in the CSI unit office. Hadden didn’t like being indoors, under the artificial lights which made him look so pale, and Shaw imagined him working briskly through the paperwork so he could get back out to the scene at Ingol Beach.

  ‘Couple of things,’ he said, and Shaw heard the metal locks on his forensic briefcase snap shut. ‘The Morris Minor 1000.’

  ‘The old biddy’s?’

  ‘Yeah. Marijuana.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘George asked me to look in the glove compartment. Brown, Moroccan, top quality. Must have blown her pension on it. She’d got a pouch stuffed with it – but there were fibres all over the floor. A regular little pot‐head, in fact.’

  ‘Two favours,’ said Shaw, beginning to shuffle the limpet shells he’d arranged in a line on the dashboard. ‘Can you check the plugs in the Vauxhall Rascal – the ones in the engine as well as th
e ones in the door pocket. And can you take a dental mould from the apple on the dashboard – check it’s Ellis’s lunch.’

  ‘That’s a long shot,’ said Hadden, aware of Shaw’s reputation for painstaking police work. A visual assessment of the apple against Ellis’s teeth had looked like a good match. Dental matches took time, cost money. They’d have to put the work out to the Forensic Science Service. ‘OK,’ he said.

  Shaw looked up and saw Valentine splashing out of the Emerald Garden, head turned away from the snow. Down the phone he heard tapping and guessed Hadden was entering a note in his palm pilot.

  ‘And the man on the beach?’ asked Shaw, as Valentine stretched the seatbelt, fired the ignition, listened to the engine race, then die.

  ‘There are some documents but I’ve got them in the dry heater – give me an hour…’

  ‘Passport?’

  ‘An hour,’ he said. ‘We got a hat – black wool. It could be his. Washed up about five hundred yards to the northwest. No name tag, but there are hairs. We can get a match if they’re his. Nothing else on the high‐water mark except the drum of chemicals – that’s gone back to the yard at St James’s They’ll get us a fix on the contents, but if you want to trust my nose I’d say sulphuric acid. When we got the lid off it smelt like a thousand rotten eggs with a gangrene sauce.’

  ‘Thanks for that image,’ said Shaw. ‘Speak later.’ Valentine fired the engine again, which coughed and then roared. The snow was falling steadily now, tempering the bleak greyness of the Westmead Estate.

  ‘You asked Tom to check out the Morris Minor glove compartment?’ said Shaw. ‘Pot – brown Moroccan.’

  The DS popped a mint, crunched it immediately. ‘Blimey,’ said Valentine. ‘Takes all sorts. I’ll check her out.’

  ‘And Zhao? What d’you think?’

  ‘I think he’s dicking us about.’

  ‘The real question,’ said Shaw, ‘is what is he dicking us about about. Illegals? Smuggling fags? VAT fraud? Porn? Prostitution? Gambling?… There’s something, I’m just not sure it’s got much to do with this inquiry.’

  He checked his watch: 10 a.m. They had an appointment at North Norfolk Security at eleven and it was a half‐hour run to Wells‐next‐the‐Sea and the company’s headquarters.

  The snow was draining the light out of the sky, leaving the day stillborn. The grey monolith that was the twenty‐one‐storey tower block at the heart of the Westmead Estate was just visible above them, the top lost in low cloud. Snow flecked the north‐east face of the flats, clawing at windowsills and downpipes. They could hear a helicopter hovering over the traffic on the ring road.

  ‘We’ve got twenty minutes,’ said Shaw, and he knew he couldn’t stop himself now, couldn’t leave the scab of the past unpicked. He turned in his seat so that he was facing George Valentine and realized there was another reason he found his company so unsettling. It was the fact that Valentine knew more about Shaw’s own father than he did. That all those hours Jack Shaw should have been with his family, he’d been in an unmarked police car, just like this battered Mazda, with George Valentine.

  ‘I’d like to see the scene of crime,’ he said.

  ‘Siberia Belt?’

  ‘No. Dad’s last case. Your last case. I’ve never seen the spot where you found him – the child. I’d like to see it now. It’s close – yes?’

  Valentine too knew it would come to this. In fact if it hadn’t come to this he’d have wondered what kind of son Peter Shaw was. He put a dry cigarette between his lips and clenched his teeth. ‘It’s close,’ he said.

  14

  Mid‐morning and the Westmead Estate was coming to life: low life. An elderly man in carpet slippers shuffled along a covered walkway between two blocks of flats hugging a dressing gown, a copy of the Daily Express and a single can of white cider. A woman, dressed neatly in a see‐through plastic raincoat and matching hat, poured milk into a line of saucers by some waste bins, her feet lost amongst a clowder of cats.

  Shaw followed George Valentine through the precinct, across a triangle of open ground covered in snow, turned past a line of lock‐up garages and then between a pair of the five‐storey blocks which dotted the estate. Above their heads an aerial walkway linked two sets of concrete concertinas. A piece of rope dangled, two trainers strung from the end, out of reach.

  Vancouver House, the estate’s central block, stood alone on a tarmac island: a giant gravestone without an inscription except for the jagged multicoloured graffiti on the concrete pillars which held it clear of the ground. Shaw thought the scene almost exotic – the wastelands of Sarajevo perhaps, the sound of a mortar about to fall from hills hidden in the mist. Ramps ran up to stairwells and lifts, leaving the dark space beneath the block as a car park. Steam billowed from heating ducts along each of the twenty floors and trailed from overflow pipes, as if the whole block were boiling on the inside, ready to spill out.

  They cut straight across the waste ground, then ducked into the shadows of the car park, threading a path through the pillars, passing a burnt‐out VW, and skirting a huge pool of rainwater stained with oil in which two seagulls fought over a packet of chips.

  Valentine felt colder once they were in the shadows. He stopped, looking around, waiting for his eyes to shift into night vision, filling his lungs now he had the chance. He’d been back many times, so that looking around was like viewing a favourite film clip. ‘Used to be a park here – back in the fifties. Marsh in summer, ponds in winter. That’s why they put the flats up on pillars. Didn’t work: the place reeks of damp. Keep wallpaper on the walls for a year, you get a fucking certificate.’

  ‘How’d you know?’

  Valentine took out a cigarette, ran it under his nose, deciding then he’d left it too long to give up. ‘Grandparents. Dad’s side. They moved ’em here when they took down the houses on Dock Street – 1971.’ He spat into a puddle. ‘Didn’t live a year, either of them.’

  Shaw knew when they’d found the spot. He had a press cutting at home with a picture of the scene that first morning. A pillar behind painted in black‐and‐white warning stripes, a staircase leading up, a sign showing a green figure climbing steps, two women standing where the press photographer had put them, tissues pressed to their mouths. And a lift entrance, the doors battered aluminium, lights above in the shape of up and down arrows, inexplicably unbroken. And a security phone in a metal box on the wall. The phone was ripped out now, the lift refurbished, but otherwise little had changed.

  Valentine kicked the pillar. ‘Here.’ He thrust his hands in his pockets and closed his fingers around the dice on his lighter.

  ‘Dad always said he thought the bloke was stupid.’

  ‘Mosse,’ said Valentine. ‘Robert James Mosse.’

  ‘Right. Dad reckoned he must have panicked – to dump the kid here, under the flats. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. If you’d got the body in the car, why not go somewhere? He could have taken it out on the marshes, Dersingham Woods. We’d still be looking.’

  Valentine glanced down at his black slip‐ons, refusing to be drawn.

  The bare facts of DCI Jack Shaw’s last case had never been disputed. Jonathan Tessier, aged nine, had been found dead at three minutes past midnight on 26 July 1997. He was still dressed in the Celtic kit he’d put on that morning to play football on the grass triangle by the flats. He had been given £1 to buy chips for lunch: 40p change was in the pocket in his shorts. There was no evidence at the scene, or in later medical and forensic examinations, that he had been sexually assaulted. But he had been strangled with a ligature of some sort, the condition of the body pointing to a time of death between six and eleven p.m.

  DCI Jack Shaw and DI George Valentine were the first CID officers at the scene. The body had been found by a nurse, parking after her late shift a few feet from the boy’s corpse. She said she’d seen a car drive off quickly – a Volkswagen Polo, she thought – as she got out of her Mini. The driver had failed to negotiate the narrow ra
mp to ground level and clipped one of the concrete pillars, spilling broken glass from a headlamp on the ground. She’d found the boy’s body in the oily puddle.

  DI Valentine had radioed an alert on the damaged car to all units. A squad car on patrol found a Polo abandoned on the edge of allotments at Wootton just after two that morning, the front offside headlamp shattered, the engine warm. A police computer check identified the owner as Robert James Mosse, a resident – like Jonathan Tessier – of Vancouver House. Back at the scene the body had been removed, revealing a glove beneath, black leather, with a fake fur cuff. Jack Shaw and George Valentine went to Flat 8 on the first floor of Vancouver House, where they confronted Bobby Mosse, a 21‐year‐old student reading law at Sheffield University, at home during the summer vacation.

  Here the accounts of the night diverge. Jack Shaw and George Valentine’s statements dovetailed: they maintained that they showed Mosse the glove in a cellophane evidence bag before obtaining his permission to search the flat. They conducted the search and failed to find the other glove. Mosse, in contrast, swore in evidence they showed him the glove, minus any protective bag, only after the search. His mother, who also gave evidence, agreed with her son’s version of events and added that at one point DI Valentine had reversed the fingers of the glove, turning it inside out, and looking inside.

  Mosse said his car had been stolen that evening, a crime he himself had reported at half‐past midnight, a fact verified by the duty desk at St James’s. He had been at the cinema alone. His mother had accompanied him to the same picture house – the Gaumont – but had seen LA Confidential on the small screen, whereas he’d seen The Full Monty on the main one. They’d walked in because it was a nice evening and it’s difficult to park near the cinema. He had a torn ticket for the performance. His film had finished first and he had strolled home. Mosse always parked his car on an open‐air car park a few hundred yards from Vancouver House because vandals caused a lot of damage in the underground car park. But he was still worried about the Polo – and that night he’d gone to check on it after his mother had got home and before going to bed. He found the car gone, and phoned the police from the flat.