Jim Kelly: Death Wore White

‘What bastard cares?’ The young man bounced on his toes and Valentine noticed that he kept putting his hands in his pockets and then taking them out, then rubbing them on the backside of his jeans.

‘This one.’ Valentine flipped out his warrant card. ‘Why are you on this road, sir, can I ask?’

The kid took a step back and laughed inappropriately. ‘Diversion. There’s a sign down on the coast road — floods it said.’ His accent had flattened out: he’d gone up three socio?economic classes and moved thirty miles closer to London. He looked ahead. ‘Then this happened.’ He put his hand on the car door and then quickly removed it as if the metal were too cold to touch, but Valentine had

On the dashboard lay a mobile phone.

‘Yours?’

‘Shine,’ said the kid. ‘Two megapixel camera; hundred and fifteen grams; six point seven hours talk time.’

‘Right. But does it work?’

The kid shrugged. ‘I was gonna walk back to the road,’ he said.

Valentine shook his head. ‘A mile, and it’s treacherous.’

‘It’s one point three miles,’ he said. ‘I clocked it.’

‘Just stay here, OK?’ Valentine was running out of patience. ‘We’ve radioed for help but it’ll be a time.’ He took an extra breath and ran an eye over the Mondeo’s purple paintwork — spotless. On the back seat was a blanket, a picnic basket, a shooting stick and a Frisbee. The steering wheel had a cover, black and white chevrons: an animal skin, snake perhaps. He walked on, but turned and memorized the registration number. He had a good memory, if he could be bothered to use it. The kid had annoyed him. It always did: a teenager out in Daddy’s car.

Shaw was behind the plumber’s van now, and through the heated rear window and the grille he’d seen a young man in the passenger seat reading a magazine. He came alongside, noticing for the first time the paw prints in the snow between the footprints, and tapped on the driver’s window, then opened the door.

‘Police,’ he said, putting his knee on the driver’s seat

‘Name?’ said Shaw.

The man shrugged. ‘ Das Fleisch ,’ he said, mangling the words. ‘They got Turkish blokes on site, they bring them in from Frankfurt.’

‘ Your name.’

‘I found it, the last job this morning. Building site down in the Arndale, in the Portakabin where I brewed the tea. There was loads. Worse…’

Shaw waited. He studied the young man’s face. Noted the premature hair loss at the temples, the acne scars, and the pronounced dimple in the chin — the mental fovea.

‘Sean Harper. That’s my boss,’ said the young man, nodding forward to the group standing in the pool of light. ‘Fred.’ He grinned as if this was the ultimate character reference.

‘I’ll keep this, Mr Harper,’ said Shaw, folding the magazine inside his jacket.

‘Like — it’s not a crime.’

‘Well, it is actually,’ said Shaw. ‘We’ll talk about it later.’

‘You go out?’ asked Harper, pointing at the RNLI lifeboat motif on the lapel of Shaw’s jacket, trying hard to smile.

‘Yup.’

‘That’s cool,’ said Harper, watching his magazine disappear from sight. ‘I’ve thought of it… you know? Volunteering.’

‘You should,’ said Shaw, not smiling.

Next in line was the revamped Securicor van. The driver refused to open the window until he saw the warrant card pressed up against the glass, then he cracked it an inch.

‘Any trouble?’ asked Shaw, knowing he’d seen the man before — in the dock of the magistrates’ court. The crime? He searched his memory but couldn’t pinpoint the case. Something violent, he knew that. Something violent with his hands, in pursuit of cash. Why then, Shaw asked himself, was he sitting guarding a van full of the stuff? He was twenty?five to thirty, dark good looks marred by a narrow nose which had been broken and badly reset and which only just managed to separate his eyes, the eyebrows almost meeting at the bridge. He had a halfhearted moustache and designer stubble.

‘You got a control desk to contact?’ asked Shaw.

The driver found his voice. ‘We don’t have radios — and there’s no signal on the mobiles.’

Shaw stepped back, looking along the line of vehicles. ‘Get my DS to radio through for you — there’s enough chaos after the storm without half the force out looking for you and your bars of gold. What is in the back?’

The guard checked a clipboard. ‘Cash. We do corner shops, the supermarkets on the estates, wholesale fish

‘Sit tight,’ said Shaw, wondering if his employer knew about the criminal record. He approved of rehabilitation, but putting the alcoholic behind the bar was asking for trouble.

Ahead he could see the Corsa’s two nearside doors open, two figures standing back, watching Shaw. One, a man in overalls, waved and placed a hand on his heart, patting a quilted jacket. Shaw raised a hand.

‘Problem?’ he shouted.

The man pointed inside the Corsa, patted his chest again. ‘Heart.’

He moved quickly past the next car — a Volvo, an old model estate, a hand?painted sign reading ‘The Emerald Garden’ on the rear window. The distinctive aroma of soy sauce was laced with petrol fumes. No driver, no passengers.

An elderly man lay tilted back in the Corsa’s front seat. Shaw guessed he was sixty?five, perhaps seventy. He had heavy spectacles, with black plastic rims, and thin white hair stuck to his skull. His face was the colour of the streaks in Stilton cheese, saliva catching the light at the corners of his mouth. Vomit covered his chin and the front of the heavy jacket, a slimy eggshell?blue. Shaw picked up the strong scent of pine needles but couldn’t see the air freshener.

A woman in a yellow jacket stood back, smoking. Kneeling, the man in clean blue overalls held the sick man’s hand, his neat face screwed up with anxiety, a small wound on his forehead still wet with blood. A Jack Russell

‘Like I say, heart attack, I reckon,’ said the man in the overalls. ‘Don’t suppose you’ve got a mobile signal? You stuck too?’

‘I’m a policeman,’ said Shaw. ‘We’ve radioed. Can I see, please?’

He bent down and found that another man was on the passenger seat. Chinese features, his knees drawn up beneath him. ‘Can’t find a pulse,’ he said, the consonants dulled by his accent.

Shaw took out a pocket knife and cut the tie which had become fiercely knotted at the man’s throat. Then he pulled both sides of his heavy oversized jacket and shirt apart, the buttons popping clear. He turned the collar away from the neck and noticed a name tag: RFA. He leant in close to the man’s face, putting a hand to his forehead. He knew instantly that the man was alive: the drops of water in his eyebrows were warm, and although his lips were blue and didn’t move they were moist with the breath that was passing between them, like the draught under a door.

He backed out and shouted to Valentine, who was down on his haunches by the Morris, talking through the driver’s window.

‘George,’ he shouted. Valentine stood slowly, one hand on the Morris for support. ‘Get a chopper. Medical emergency — cardiac arrest, male about sixty?five years of age. They’ll see us from the air, tell ’em to come down on the seaward side — it’s flat sand under the snow.’

Shaw ducked back into the Corsa and, feeling inside

The man on the passenger seat said he was called Stanley Zhao. Even folded on his knees Shaw could see he bucked the racial stereotype by being the best part of six feet tall. He looked fifty, but his hair was still as black as a penguin’s feathers. Shaw told him to stay in the Corsa, run the heating at half blast and sound the horn if Holt came round or got worse.