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. A man who’d been the best detective of his generation until one mistake had put him on a blacklist from which he was struggling to escape. A man whose career trajectory looked like a brick falling to earth.
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.
‘I’ll get the Coastguard,’ said Valentine, breathless, digging out the radio. ‘The boat could be out there – they’ll have dumped others.’
‘And call St James’s,’ said Shaw. ‘They need to get a chemical team out to make this safe and get it off the beach. We better stay till they get here. Give them the grid reference.’ Shaw read out the numbers from his hand‐held GPS.
As Valentine worked on the radio Shaw squatted down, picking up ten butter‐yellow limpet shells and placing them in a line on the sand. ‘We could do with a fire,’ he said out loud. The breeze was dropping, a frost in the air now that night was falling. He imagined the brief dusk, the fire on the high‐water mark, and felt good. Pocketing the shells, he began collecting flotsam, a beer crate, a few lumps of bog oak, the dried‐out husk of a copy of the Telegraph, then turned with his arms full.
Which is when he saw something else in the waves. Ingol Beach shelved gently out to sea, so even though it was a hundred yards away it was already catching the bottom, buckling slightly, flexing in the white water. An inflatable raft, a child’s summer plaything in Disney colours. Shaw stood for a few seconds watching it inch ashore. Thirty yards out it ran aground, snagged.
Valentine watched his DI pulling off his boots and socks. Jesus! he thought, looking around, hoping they were still alone, hoping most of all that he’d stop at the socks. Shaw waded on, the jolt of the iced water almost electric, making his bones ache.
There was something in the raft, something that didn’t respond to the shuffle and bump of the waves. A dead weight. When he saw the hands – both bare – and the feet, in light trainers swollen with seawater, he knew it was the body of a man: the black hair on