black frames, magnified his eyes, which were milky with age. The cold had brought some blood to his cheeks but otherwise he was pale, drained, a cold sweat on his forehead.
‘You OK?’ he said when she wound the window down an inch. She heard the sound of music again, louder, from the pick‐up truck.
‘We’re stuck,’ she said, briskly. ‘I need to get through – I’m picking up my daughter from school. Could you check ahead, see if we can move the tree?’
He looked forward, licking his lips, reluctant, but then set out. She watched the prints he made in the snow – a single line of flat‐footed impressions, slightly unsteady. He slipped at the edge of the ditch when the wind blew, his arms flying out in a crooked semaphore, the coat billowing.
‘That’s all we need,’ she said out loud, punching in the lighter. ‘Grandad in the soup.’
She rubbed clear the condensation on the windscreen and watched as he reached the pick‐up’s window. He bent slightly at the waist, talking, just for a few seconds, then he straightened up, both bare hands deep in the jacket’s pockets.
A minute, less, and he was back, out of breath so that he had to lean on the Alfa’s roof. ‘OK then. We’re not gonna move the tree – not now. He says we’ll have to all back out. Have you got a mobile?’ he asked.
‘No signal.’
‘Same with him. I don’t own one.’ He rubbed one of his eyes under the thick spectacles. Despite the cold she could see now that his whole face was wet with sweat.
Baker‐Sibley pushed smoke out of her nostrils, her lips pressed in a humourless line. ‘You should take it easy,’ she said.
He held his jacket’s lapels together. ‘I’m OK. I’ll try and reverse back to the turn, there was a farm track there, just give me a few minutes.’ He set off before she had time to answer.
He tottered back to his car and wiped the snow from the windscreen with his sleeve before lowering himself into the driver’s seat and starting the engine. He peered down at the dashboard, then at the rear‐view mirror.
‘Come on, come on,’ said Sarah. ‘It’s not a fucking Space Shuttle.’
He didn’t move. She threw open the door and stepped out into the night, holding a hand above her eyes to stop the snowflakes snagging her lashes. The cold made her back arch and she hunched her shoulders to try to protect the exposed skin at her neck.
Now she saw the old man’s car clearly for the first time. A two‐door silver Corsa, a pair of ladders neatly strapped to a roof rack.
It was what stretched behind the Corsa that made Sarah Baker‐Sibley swear. A line of headlamps running back, all stranded now in the snow.
She looked up and let some of the flakes settle on her face. ‘Why me?’ she asked. She thought of Jillie trudging home in the snow. ‘And why now?’
On cue the blizzard finally broke, the snow thickening, the wind driving it in from the sea. Visibility dropped to a few feet. She brushed flakes from her eyelids and scrambled back into the safety of the car.
4
In the blizzard Shaw and Valentine worked quickly, dragging the raft across the sands to the DI’s black Land Rover, parked beyond a copse of hawthorns. By the time they had a tarpaulin secured, weighting the corners with rocks, the snow was settling. Then they sat it out, Shaw watching the high tide boiling on the sands through an open window. He’d been a policeman for eleven years but this was the first time he’d discovered a corpse: he was distressed to find that the emotional impact was refusing to fade. His stomach felt empty, and he kept seeing the dead man’s mouth, the blood terracotta red between the white enamel of the teeth.
Valentine bent forward, his hands over the warm‐air vent, his throat glugging with phlegm as the hot dust triggered his immune system. He’d binned his last packet of Silk Cut back at the station, so he closed his eyes, trying not to think about nicotine, trying not to think about the corpse in the raft. But the image of the apparently self‐inflicted wound was difficult to shake off. He took a call on the radio: Control said the force pathologist was on her way and a unit of the West Norfolk CSI team was assembling, but the snowfall had brought chaos to the coastal roads, so they could be some