Jim Kelly: Death Wore White

Shaw shut the door and straightened his back, bringing his face up level with the roof rack, the two sets of ladders strapped up neatly with webbing. The woman in the yellow coat and the man in the blue overalls stood between him and the first two vehicles in the convoy.

‘My name’s Baker?Sibley; Sarah Baker?Sibley,’ said the woman. ‘I need to get a message to my daughter. I should have picked her up from school — St Agnes’ Hall — and I’m worried. I’m always there on time — or I ring. She won’t have Clara with her — that’s her best friend. She has a clarinet lesson after school,’ she added. ‘She’ll walk home. She’ll try to walk. Two miles, she’s done it before and she has a key, but never in winter… in this,’ she said, looking out over the snowfield. ‘She’s thirteen. So she won’t think twice about trying.’ She laughed, then dropped the half?finished cigarette and fumbled for the packet. ‘I’m sorry — can I see your warrant card again?’

‘This your Alfa?’ Shaw asked her, walking forward. ‘I’d stay put for now,’ he added when she didn’t answer. ‘And the vehicle in front?’

‘The man who’s ill went forward and checked when we first got stuck,’ she said. ‘The driver hasn’t been out. Perhaps he’s getting some sleep; he had some horrendous racket at full blast to start with.’

The radio still played, but the volume was now low, the sound reedy.

Looking forward along the causeway Shaw could see an unsteady line of footprints weaving its way to the pick?up truck beside partially filled tyre tracks, the return line an uncertain attempt to retrace the same steps. Paw prints, crisper, zig?zagged between the tracks. The observation window in the rear of the cab still showed a light within. The pick?up’s headlights burnt yellow, and Shaw guessed the battery was low. He walked forward, the hair on his neck bristling as a breeze took his skin temperature down a degree. Something moved in the sky and he looked up in time to see a meteor fall, a flashing line of silver that died before it reached the sea.

The truck was wide enough to block the track almost completely, leaving just the narrowest of paths down the driver’s side. Shaw held on to the side and took the chance to lift the tarpaulin cover to see the load beneath: plasterboard, sheets of it for cheap walls.

Leaning forward he grasped the door handle, breaking the silence with his voice for the first time.

He turned the handle and swung the door open, stepping forward quickly to get a grip on the stanchion. He was less than two feet from the driver and it took him three seconds, perhaps less, to know that he was looking at a corpse.

The sight of death. For Shaw the shock was no less profound for being the second time he’d faced it in a few hours. If anything the sudden sense of living in a slow?motion world was even more pronounced. He felt his fingertips tingle as the blood rushed to his heart.

‘Crime scene,’ he said to himself, reassured by the calm resonance of his own voice. ‘Let’s stick to the book. He’s dead, so there’s no hurry, no imperative but observation.’ He stood outside himself, watching himself follow procedure. His voice sounded good. Very good. But despite the sensation that he’d taken control a persistent thought intruded, like the buzzing of a fly around a wound: what would his father have done? An odd sensation: missing someone who’d hardly been there.

‘Don’t look for links,’ he told himself, thinking of the body still freezing under the Land Rover’s spotlight down on Ingol Beach. ‘Let’s take them one at a time.’

He looked at his hands, checking. ‘Gloves,’ he said, double?checking.

The radio signal was weak, the volume hardly audible now, but he leant in none the less and turned the radio off, leaving himself some silence in which to think.

His training had been repetitive but clear: there were procedures to follow, and a single broken rule could destroy vital evidence.

‘George.’ He said it as calmly as he could, but Valentine was experienced enough to pick up the coded charge of adrenaline. He looked up sharply. ‘Make sure everyone stays put. And get that dog on a leash. Crime?scene rules. Then come forward — to the Alfa. Wait for me there.’

Now, observations. The corpse. First, the face. From a kneeling position Shaw could look up at the victim, the chin resting on the chest, a pair of off?white workman’s overalls buttoned high with a white T?shirt beneath. The skull was slight, almost child?like. The features — eyes, lips and eyebrows — were large and seemed to crowd the face. The nose was small, snub and under?developed. He checked the skin at the ankles and hands. Hypostasis, the telltale pooling of blood after death, was incomplete. The man was small — a guess, five foot six or seven.

The cause of death was brutally obvious: a thin?necked chisel projected from the dead man’s left eye socket. Shaw touched his own wounded eye, feeling his pulse in the blood behind the retina. The chisel had been forced in up to the hilt of the rounded wooden handle. There was remarkably little blood, but blood there was: a rivulet, now congealed, ran from the caked eye socket across the cheek to the neck and shoulder, and then behind the body, pooling on the seat. Rigor had begun to set in; both hands were held palm up, showing signs of soil stains, one with grass under the fingernails, fingers stiff. The head was bare, the close?cropped cranium vulnerable, but unmarked.

Immediate environment. He smelt the air. Heated over a period of hours, it was heavy with aromas: an acrid hint of something earthy, possibly urine, and from the engine the smell of hot plastic and warm oil. Alcohol too, sweet as death. The dashboard held a half?eaten apple, the exposed flesh already brown, and a can of Carlsberg Special Brew. The wrapping paper from a packet of Hula Hoops was in the ashtray, which was ashless. The passenger seat was obscured by a large toolbox: metal, blue and worn, with fold?back wing lids. Hanging from the rear?view mirror was a picture of three children: two boys holding a toddler, crammed into a photo booth. One of the boys had a shaven skull, the smile uncertain, the bone structure poking through translucent skin. From a suction hook in the roof hung a little plastic model of a bald eagle, which moved very slightly as Shaw’s weight tipped the suspension a few inches. Kneeling, he saw that a key ring hung from the ignition, a leather fob, with gold lettering. Three words: Jake Ellis Appeal.

He stood, feeling that he’d gained firm control of the scene, the tension beginning to ebb from his neck muscles. A run through the snow would ease the stress that was making his head ache, but he knew he’d have to wait. He looked back down the line of cars. Valentine stood beside the Alfa Romeo, motionless except for the rhythmic rise

Between them were three lines of human footprints — John Blickling Holt’s round trip and Shaw’s one way. Holt’s prints were still sharp, although partly filled with the snow that had fallen after the convoy had come to rest, and by the breeze which had blown flakes over the bank from the beach beyond. But they were still clear; unmissable. To the landward side the saltmarsh was dominated by sheets of black water, dotted with clumps of marram grass. There was no sign that anyone had tried to climb the bank, or drop down into the water. To the seaward side there was the dyke, six feet across, eight deep, and beyond that the snow?covered sands, unmarked except for the delicate herringbone footsteps of the marsh birds.

Which left forwards. The lights of the truck were still on and lit the fallen pine a pale yellow. There was a six?foot gap of untouched snow between the pick?up and the tree.

Shaw took a deep breath. Even the perfect murderer leaves footprints in snow. Suicide? Hardly. Stabbing yourself through the eye was not an obvious way to leave the world. Self?mutilation? Martyrdom? A message left for the living?