13

Detective Chief Superintendent Max Warren kept a tidy office on the third floor. He was a Londoner who’d come north with a reputation for tackling street crime in the capital. He’d played rugby until settling for weekends at the golf club, but his face was still dominated by a serially broken nose. For a man who had once succeeded in projecting a tangible sense of menace, Shaw was always surprised how slight he was, a narrow neck on narrow shoulders, the loose skin mottled with liver spots. Warren had arrived fifteen years earlier to administer an injection of adrenaline into the sleepy West Norfolk Constabulary. But the operation had back‐fired – allowing several gallons of sleeping draught to flood back into the superintendent’s veins.

Shaw didn’t sit and Warren didn’t ask him to, merely eyeing the spot where Shaw’s tie should have been.

‘Keep it simple, Peter,’ he said. ‘It’s not a puzzle. It’s two nasty murders on the same night.’

Shaw thought about pointing out the assumptions behind that summary but let the moment pass. Warren was firmly of the school that felt police officers needed university degrees as much as they needed a diploma in tap‐dancing. So smart‐arse backchat was best avoided.

‘DS Valentine’s got a good nose for low life – unsurprisingly: let him use it. I expect him to make a major contribution to this inquiry, Peter. He’s applied for a permanent transfer back to St James’s every year for the last decade. I can’t go on saying no. So this is his big chance. His only chance. But he needs to do more than keep his nose clean. In his day he was a bloody good copper. He needs to prove to me that he still is.’

On the wall behind Warren’s desk was a framed line‐up of uniformed officers at Hendon – the Met’s training college. Warren was centre‐stage. Shaw’s father was on the row behind.

‘Dad always rated him,’ said Shaw, forcing himself to be fair.

Warren ignored the comment. ‘I’d like a position check on the inquiry daily. From you. OK?’

‘Sir.’

Warren looked up over half‐moon glasses, studying Shaw’s face. ‘Your eye?’

‘Robinson says ten days,’ said Shaw. ‘Chances are good.’

Dr Hugh Robinson was the force’s senior medical adviser. ‘Right,’ said Warren. ‘But what the fuck does he know, eh?’

‘Sir.’

That was it. Shaw, wordlessly dismissed, left Warren reading the morning papers, the Financial Times spread across his blotter. He remembered what his father had always said about DCS Warren – that he’d end his days in a bungalow at Cromer, chasing kids who stole gnomes from his rockery. But then his father had been jealous of Warren’s rapid rise and the aura of New Scotland Yard.

Shaw cleared his calls, reviewed his budget for the inquiry, and then met Valentine by the front desk. They took the DS’s car – a battered Mazda, the plastic dashboard engrained with ash, a week’s worth of sport’s papers in the footwell of the passenger seat.

‘The Emerald Garden, Jubilee Parade, Westmead Estate,’ said Shaw, getting in. ‘And remind me – why do we think Stanley Zhao’s worth a visit?’

Valentine pretended to watch the traffic, working on an answer.

‘The Chinese community…’ he said carefully, ‘is involved in cockle‐picking on the sandbanks. The bloke washed up on Ingol Beach may have died of many things – but natural causes isn’t one of them. It’s just worth a second look. Playing the odds. Percentages.’

Shaw raised an eyebrow, turning to watch as a gritter lorry swept past, the salt sizzling as it spilt across the road. He let Valentine drive in silence while he worked through a sheaf of papers from the murder team – calls they’d made, information gathered so far on the members of the snowbound convoy. He rifled through until he got to the file on Stanley Zhao.

DC Mark Birley, a former uniform branch man bumped up for his first CID case, had conducted a phone interview with the secretary of the Burnham & District Round Table, Zhao’s regular Monday night customer. Shaw flicked through a transcript, impressed by Birley’s meticulous questions and annotated answers, as Valentine swung the Mazda through the rush‐hour traffic.

They got to Westmead in ten minutes. It was clear that Jubilee Parade was one that had been rained on with some persistence. At one end was a pub called the Red, White and Blue, its ground‐floor windows boarded and painted matt black. It was known at St James’s as the Black and Blue, a reference to its owner’s penchant for staging boxing matches without the formality of a licence. At the other end of the parade was a mini‐market with metal grilles obscuring a plate‐glass window across which meandered a single crack; a man with a dog sat on a grease mark up against the wall, his feet drawn in to keep his whole body within the lee of the overhanging flat roof.

As Shaw and Valentine pulled up the gently falling rain turned suddenly to sleet, then a peppering of snow. The Emerald Garden was in the middle of the parade, a takeaway only, bare floorboards visible through the mesh covering the glazed door. Stanley Zhao opened up for them. He didn’t seem surprised to see them. He didn’t seem anything to see them. Shaw tried not to let the word inscrutable form in his head.

Zhao led the way into the kitchen through a hanging curtain of blue beads. Spotless woks dotted a bank of gas rings, and a set of chopping boards was criss‐crossed with a lifetime’s worth of knife wounds. The only smell was Jeyes’ Fluid.

There was one other knife wound. Zhao had a scar running from his hairline to his cheek, via an eye socket. Shaw had missed it the previous night in the half‐light inside the Corsa. Zhao’s eyes blinked meekly behind metal‐rimmed glasses, and when his lips parted he revealed a line of identical teeth, each one as white as toothpaste. He stood with his back to one of the kitchen’s metal tables, and Shaw thought he’d been right about his height: six feet two, possibly three.

‘I want to help,’ said Zhao, moving over to stand awkwardly by the serving hatch which opened into the shop. The accent was strong; the consonants shaved almost flat by the vowels, but free of any hint of the syntax of the comic‐book Chinaman.

Mr Zhao knew why they were there. He handed Shaw his passport, and a Xeroxed copy of a birth certificate. ‘I have been asked before,’ he said, by way of explanation.

Shaw flicked the passport open. Born Kowloon 1959. Married Hong Kong 1991. Cook. No distinguishing marks.

Shaw raised his eyebrows and touched his own cheek. Zhao pointed at the passport. ‘Inside,’ he said. And it was. A clipping from the Lynn News for 2006. ‘Takeaway owner knifed by burglar.’ Zhao touched the scar. He’d been in Lynn a year, he said, straight from Hong Kong, and he hadn’t expected crime to be so bad.

‘Did they get him?’ asked Shaw. ‘The burglar.’

‘No.’

‘You should get the passport updated,’ said Shaw, handing it back.

They heard a footfall upstairs, and then the distant mosquito‐buzz of a radio.

Shaw apologized if Zhao had been asked the questions before, but they were tying up loose ends, following procedure. Zhao smiled as if he believed them.

‘Remind me,’ said Shaw, trying to recall the details of DC Birley’s interview with the Round Table. ‘Why were you on the old coast road at five o’clock last night?’

Valentine began to walk round the kitchen, inspecting a notice board, a wall chart of the menu, some postcards of Hong Kong, San Francisco, Hamburg.

Zhao’s story was a carbon copy of the one he’d given Valentine at Gallow Marsh Farm. He delivered a large takeaway dinner to a meeting of the Burnham & District Round Table every Monday evening. The order never changed: fourteen chicken chow meins, a vegetable chow mein, ten portions of prawn toast, one of vegetable spring rolls. They met in the village hall at Burnham Overy Staithe. He had a contact number. Shaw remembered the warmth in the van, the fug of soya and sunflower oil.

‘It’s a long drive – but good customers, a big order,’ added Zhao.

‘Please,’ said Shaw, playing for time, looking around. ‘Finish your breakfast.’ On a side table stood a large porcelain cup, the light green liquid inside it giving off a thin scent. Beside it was a white plate, a fork, and the remains of an omelette, a brown smear on the china. A bottle of Daddies Sauce, catering size, stood on the counter.

Valentine took over. ‘You saw the other drivers stranded on Siberia Belt, Mr Zhao, at the farmhouse? Did you recognize any of them? Customers perhaps?’

Zhao shook his head, tucking in a stray piece of omelette at the corner of his mouth. ‘People all look the same to me.’ Valentine didn’t miss the joke, but he didn’t smile either. Finished, Zhao picked up his plate and took it to a metal sink.

‘Do you mix much within the Chinese community here in Lynn, Mr Zhao?’ asked Shaw, aware that the question was as subtle as the Daddies Sauce. There were two Chinese communities in Lynn. The first had come with the Londoners in the seventies and had turned out as respectable as a mock‐Tudor semi. They ran restaurants, chip shops, a big dry‐cleaning plant and a dozen or so of the town’s cabs. The other community was transient: the cockle‐pickers, gangmasters organizing agricultural picking in the summer, and an even more shadowy subculture of prostitution and gambling.

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 the 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.