then, but Sarah didn’t want to let her down. Not tonight, when snow was forecast. She’d make it in time, even with the diversion, as long as nothing else delayed her.
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.
2
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.
Six weeks earlier three drums had come ashore on Vinegar Middle, a sandbank just off the coast near Castle Rising. Shaw had been on the early shift at St James’s, the police HQ in Lynn – his daughter Francesca played on the beach sometimes, so he’d taken a parental interest. When he got to the scene there was a five‐year‐old poking a stick into the top of the drum where it had ruptured. Shaw had told her to drop the stick but he hadn’t been able to keep the urgency out of his voice, the note of command. Reading a child’s face wasn’t a textbook exercise. He’d spotted the sudden fear, but missed the anger. The kid didn’t like being told what to do, so she’d waved the stick in Shaw’s face as he’d grabbed her, pulling her clear of the liquid pooling at her feet. She hadn’t meant to do it, but the single thrust as Shaw bent down had caught him in the eye.
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. Shaw’s face mirrored the wide‐open sea; the kind of face that’s always scanning a horizon. His cheekbones were high, as if some enterprising warrior from the Mongol Horde had wandered off to the north Norfolk coast, pitching his tent by