Jim Kelly: Death Wore White

Monday, 9 February

The Alfa Romeo ran a lipstick?red smear across a sepia landscape. Snow flecked the sands at the edge of the crimped waters of the Wash. To the landward side lay the saltmarsh, a weave of winter white around stretches of cold black water. And out at sea a convoy of six small boats were caught in a stunning smudge of purple and gold where the sun was setting.

The sports car nudged the speed limit as Sarah Baker?Sibley watched the first flake of snow fall on the windscreen. She swept it aside with a single swish of the wipers and punched the lighter into the dashboard, her lips counting to ten, a cigarette held ready between her teeth.

Ten seconds. She thrummed her fingers on the leather?bound steering wheel.

It was two minutes short of five o’clock and the Alfa’s headlights were waking up the catseyes. She pulled the lighter free of its holder. The ringlet of heated wire seemed to lift her mood and she laughed to herself, drawing in the nicotine.

A spirograph of ice had encroached on the windscreen, so she turned the heating up to maximum. The indicator showed the outside temperature at 0 °C, then briefly -1 °C.

She swished more snowflakes off the windscreen. Attached to the dashboard by a sucker was a little picture frame holding a snapshot of a girl with hair down to her waist, wearing a swimsuit on a sun?drenched beach. She touched the image as if it were an icon.

Rounding a sharp right bend she saw tail lights ahead again for a few seconds. And a sign, luminous, regulation black on yellow, in the middle of the carriageway, an AA insignia in the top left corner.

DIVERSION

Flood

An arrow pointed bluntly to the left — seaward down a narrow unmetalled road.

‘Sod it.’ She hit the steering wheel with the heel of her palm. Slowing the Alfa, she looked at her watch: 5.01 p.m. She had to pick her daughter up at 5.30 outside the school. She was always there, like clockwork. That was one of the big pluses of owning her own business: she kept her own time. And that’s why she always took the old coast road, not the new dual carriageway, because this way there were never any traffic jams, even in the summer. Just an open road. Once, perhaps twice, she’d got caught up at the shop and phoned ahead to say she’d be late. Jillie had walked home then, but Sarah didn’t want to let her down.

Looking in the rear?view again she saw that the following car was close, so she put the Alfa in first and swung it off the coast road onto the snow?covered track. The headlights raked the trees as she turned the car, but she failed to see that they fleetingly lit a figure, stock?still, dressed in a full?length dark coat flecked with snow, the head — hooded — turned away. But she did see a road sign.

Siberia Belt

Ahead were the tail lights of the vehicle she had been following. There was a sudden silence as a snow flurry struck, muffling the world outside. The wind returned, thudding against the offside, fist blows deadened by a boxer’s glove. She searched the rear?view mirror for the comforting sight of headlights behind. There were none. But the tail lights ahead were still visible: warm, glowing and safe. She pressed on quickly in pursuit.

Half a mile away Detective Inspector Peter Shaw stood on the beach as the snow fell, trying to smile into an Arctic north wind. The seascape was glacier?blue, the white horses whipped off the peaks of the waves before they could break. Offshore a sandbank was dusted with snow — icing sugar on marzipan. As quickly as the snow flurry had come, it was gone. But he knew a blizzard would be with them by nightfall, the snow clouds already massed on the horizon like a range of mountains.

‘Tide’s nearly up,’ he said, licking a snowflak offhis e off his lips. ‘So it should be here. Right here.’ He tapped his boot rhythmically on the spot, creating a miniature quicksand inside his footprint, and zipped up his yellow waterproof jacket. ‘A bright yellow drum, right?’ he asked. ‘Mustard, like the other one. Floating a foot clear of the water. So where is it?’

Detective Sergeant George Valentine stood six foot downwind, his face turned away from the sea. He stifled a yawn by clenching his teeth. His eyes streamed water. An allergy — seaweed perhaps, or salt on the air. Valentine looked at his feet, black slip?ons oozing salt water. He was too old for this: five years off retirement, rheumatism in every bone. They’d got the call from HM Coastguard an hour before: toxic waste, spotted drifting inshore off Scolt Head Island.

The injury was covered by a dressing, secured with a plaster across the socket, the inflamed red edges of a fresh scar just visible beneath. He touched it now, moving it slightly to relieve the pressure. The chemical had proved a mystery: an unstable mix of residual sulphuric and nitric acid, the by?products of some poorly monitored manufacturing process. A ‘class eight’ substance; highly corrosive, with a ferocious ability to attack epithelial tissue. Skin.

‘So where is it?’ Shaw asked again. Standing still like this was a form of torture. He wanted to run along the water’s edge, feel his heart pounding, blood rushing, the intoxicating flood of natural painkillers soaking his brain — the runner’s high.

He raised a small telescope to his good eye, the iris as pale and blue as falling water, scanning the seascape.

DS Valentine looked at his watch. He’d bought it for?1 and was pretty sure the word ROLEX was fake. Its tick?tock was oddly loud. He shivered, his head like a vulture’s, hung low on a thin neck. He tried to keep his mouth shut because he knew his teeth would ache if they got caught by the wind.

A radio crackled and Valentine retrieved it from the shapeless raincoat he was wearing. He listened, said simply, ‘Right.’ Fumbling it back inside the folds of the coat he produced a tube of mints, popping one, crunching it immediately.

‘Coastguard. They lost sight of the drum an hour ago. The water’s churning up with the tide.’ He shrugged as if he knew the moods of the ocean. ‘Not hopeful.’

Shaw ran a hand through close?cropped fair hair. They stood together, one looking south, the other north, wondering how it had come to this: Shaw and Valentine, West Norfolk Constabulary’s latest investigative duo.

Some joker in admin, thought Shaw, some old lag who knew the past and didn’t care about the future. They needed a new partner for Shaw, who at thirty?three years of age was the force’s youngest DI, the whiz?kid with the fancy degree and a father once tipped to be the next chief constable. And they’d come up with George Valentine — a living relic of a different world, where cynical coppers waged a losing war against low life on the street.

It was their first week as partners; already — for both of them — it seemed like a lifetime.

Shaw looked around. He’d played on this beach as a child. ‘Let’s get up there,’ he said, pointing at a low hill in the dunes. ‘Gun Hill. Get some height. We might see it then.’

Valentine nodded without enthusiasm. He turned his back on the sea wind, looking inland, along the curve of the high?water mark. ‘There,’ he said, taking a bare hand reluctantly from his coat pocket.

A yellow metal oil drum, on its side now, rolling in with the waves.

‘Let’s go,’ said Shaw, already jogging; a compact, nearly effortless canter.

The lid of the drum was rusted and crinkled so that the contents had begun to seep out. From six feet he could smell it, the edge of ammonia almost corrosive. The liquid spilling down the side was Day?Glo green, the paint of the drum blistering on contact.