Jim Kelly - Death Toll

‘Mosse had ample time to stage Cosyns’s suicide,’ he continued. ‘There is no evidence that Cosyns had any reason to kill himself. There is, however, evidence that Cosyns was force-fed narcotics prior to the “attempt” to take his own life.’

Warren leant back in his chair, the legs creaking. ‘But we can’t stick it on Mosse, can we? Otherwise we wouldn’t be here.’

‘Doesn’t mean the fucker didn’t do it. Sir,’ said Valentine, shifting his weight on his thigh bone to ease the pressure on his bladder.

Warren gave Valentine a look which constituted a written warning.

‘I beg your pardon?’

Shaw raised a hand. ‘You’ll recall that Mosse says he went to the lock-up that evening after the stock-car racing at the Norfolk Arena to talk about the performance of the car Cosyns had driven that day. He’d won. Mosse says he wanted to enter the car at a meeting in Peterborough the following weekend. All explicable as part of “Team Mosse”. Then he left. He said Cosyns was depressed about the failure of his marriage and the continuing financial burden of the regular maintenance payments he was being forced to make. He admits giving?1,000 to Cosyns shortly before his death as a favour. He admits he’d done it before. He says they were friends. More than that — family.’

Shaw finished the coffee. ‘So: a gang of four. Guilty of murder. Two dead.’

‘So where’s the third man?’ asked Warren, hooked now by the narrative, despite himself.

‘Voyce arrived back in the UK from New Zealand three months ago,’ said Valentine. His bladder ached like a bad tooth now and his craving for nicotine was making the saliva drain from his mouth.

‘Since then we’d lost him,’ added Shaw. ‘Until two days ago, when he checked into the Novotel on the bypass here in Lynn.’

He’d deliberately left this new information until last and he could see that Warren was furious that he was being manipulated.

‘Why wasn’t I informed about this?’

‘It’s taken us that long to be sure it’s our man. We had an alert out with all the hotels, B amp;Bs, the lot.’

Warren looked from Shaw’s face to Valentine’s and back again.

‘The Auckland police tell us that Voyce is married, with one child,’ said Shaw. ‘He’s a garage attendant — pump man, cashier, low-end mechanics. Earns a pittance. His wife works at the local supermarket. It’s pretty clear he could do with a bit more money. My guess …’ Shaw looked at his hands, then at Valentine. ‘ Our guess is that’s why he’s back here — to tap Mosse, just like Cosyns did. We think he knew Cosyns was getting cash out of Mosse, and we’re pretty sure he now knows he’s dead — which might explain the three months lying low before making his move and coming back to Lynn.

‘I don’t think he can afford to go home empty handed. We reckon he’s been biding his time, coming up with a plan, and now he’s ready. As far as we know he hasn’t made contact with Mosse yet. We propose round-the-clock surveillance. If he makes a move on Mosse then his life will undoubtedly be in danger. We can bug Voyce’s hotel room, maybe his car, and hope that Mosse incriminates himself on tape.’

Warren reached for the cafetiere, then shook it, annoyed that only the dregs remained. ‘So. You think that’s smart …Police entrapment with a corpse as a possible first prize?’

Shaw looked through Warren, focusing on a point just behind his head, a technique his father had used to effect on his only son. ‘With respect, sir. If we’re right — and we are — Mosse is responsible, either solely or collectively, for the deaths of at least four people: Jonathan Tessier, the elderly passengers left to die at Castle Rising and Alex Cosyns. He also very probably assisted the suicide of Chris Robins. And there are …’ he searched for the words, ‘other consequences of this man’s perjury.’

Shaw thought of the last time he’d seen his father, lying propped up in a hospital bed after a third, massive, stroke, his face already undergoing the process which would transform it into a death mask.

Valentine shifted in his seat. It was a measure of the degree to which he’d buried his emotions for the last thirteen years that the simple fact that they might at last bring Robert Mosse to justice had made his eyes flood.

Warren looked at his watch, frustrated to find that so much of his life seemed to be about stopping one thing he didn’t like doing in order to start something he didn’t like doing even more. He went to a mirror on the wall and set his peaked cap straight, but Shaw calculated that his superior officer was carefully considering what he said next.

‘All right. I’ll give you ten days. You can peel off the manpower from the murder unit. Then that’s it. Case closed. If it’s not wrapped up by then, I’ll burn the sodding file myself.’

He stood and looked at Shaw, some of the belligerence which had once made him such an effective police officer returning. ‘I am making you, Peter, personally responsible for Voyce’s safety. Screw up and you will look upon George’s career as a sparkling success. The highlight of your working week for the next twenty years will be lecturing on speed awareness courses to spotty boy-racers. And I’m still expecting a result on the body in the cemetery. Now, get out, both of you.’

A freezing fog the colour of pickled eggs had fallen on the waterfront as Shaw drove alone down to South Lynn: under the black bones of the quayside cranes, a Meccano set lost in the gloom, then round at the Millfleet into the gridiron of streets around All Saints. He was aware that the Porsche — black, polished and sleek — turned heads in this poor neighbourhood. He’d chosen it because it had a narrow ‘A’ bar — the stanchion which separates the windscreen from the side windows. In most modern cars the ‘A’ bar was at least a couple of inches thick — a considerable handicap for someone with only one eye. He’d taken advice from websites set up to help the partially sighted and found the cash to pick the car up third-hand. The bodywork was dented here and there, the engine well past its sell-by date, but even so, parked overnight on these streets it would be gone by daybreak, or up on bricks minus its spoked alloy wheels.

He slowed to take a corner by Whitefriars primary school and noted a man standing back on the pavement, most of his body hidden in an overhanging hedge of copper beech laced with snow. He wasn’t standing still: one arm jerked without rhythm, his head ticking like a metronome, and he was greeting the freezing fog in a T-shirt emblazoned with red letters that spelt espana. He watched the Porsche balefully as it crept past.

Shaw rang the control room at St James’s on his hands-free mobile, reporting the dealer’s presence. Most of Lynn’s drugs came in off the ships, peddled in pubs and a handful of town-centre clubs. Street-selling was rare, and Shaw guessed this man was desperate to fund his own habit; desperate and disorientated, because trying to peddle outside a primary school was not the recommended first step in a career as a drug baron. The lack of topcoat suggested he hadn’t come far to his pitch, so he was probably a resident of the brutal block of low-rise flats which clustered around All Saints — a cordon of concrete that effectively encircled the medieval splendour of the old church.

The Porsche cut through the street-mist until the lines of terraced houses petered out. Shaw trundled the car forward along the narrow quay — the river to one side, the tide low enough to reveal the thin grey outline of a wrecked wooden barge on the near sandbank, the cemetery on his left showing glimpses of hawthorn and cedar crated with snow. Early-morning dog walkers had hung plastic bags on the railings, like offerings for the dead. He could just see the outline of the Flask, no lights showing in the three floors of its timbered facade.