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At half five he gave up and made coffee and stood at the window watching the street lighten to a dirty pearl. The saloon was gone. That did not comfort him.
He took the coast road, through Overstrand and Sidestrand, through villages that were still asleep behind drawn curtains. The satnav on his phone had given him a route to Happisburgh, but he did not need it. He had memorised the charts Siobhan had brought, the Admiralty maps from the 1950s that showed the coastline before the erosion ate it back, and the numbers from the microfilm had fixed themselves in his mind with the precision of a targeting coordinate. Three miles off the Happisburgh Sands. Forty metres of water. The lighthouse at Happisburgh was the nearest fixed point on land, the structure from which the bearings had been taken.
The lighthouse appeared as the road rose, a column of red and white bands against a sky the colour of old pewter. It stood on the cliff edge, alone in a field of rough grass, and the wind came at it across the North Sea without anything to break its force. James pulled the car onto the verge and killed the engine. The silence that rushed in was not silence at all but a low, constant roar of wind and surf, the sound of the sea eating at the land.
He got out and turned up his collar and walked toward the lighthouse. The grass was wet and the mud sucked at his boots. The tower loomed above him, its paint flaking in long strips, and the lamp room at the top was dark. The light had been decommissioned years ago, he remembered. Replaced by GPS and automated buoys. Another piece of the coast's working memory erased.
Two figures stood at the base of the tower, their backs to him, looking out at the water. One of them turned as he approached, and he recognised Siobhan's bright anorak, the hood pulled up against the wind. Beside her, Leo Bernard in a heavy fisherman's jumper and a woollen hat, his hands shoved deep into his pockets.
James stopped a few feet from them. “You're here early.”
Siobhan's face was pinched with cold and something else. “I rang Leo last night. After I finished with the charts.”
“You should have called me.”
“I thought you needed the sleep.”
“I didn't sleep.”
Leo grunted. “Neither did I. Siobhan told me what you found on that film. I've been turning things over in my head all night.” He shifted his weight, and the mud made a wet sucking sound under his boots. “Things I should have told you before.”
The wind whipped a strand of hair across Siobhan's face and she tucked it back with a gloved hand. “The coordinates you gave me. I plotted them against the old Admiralty charts and the wreck registry. The Northern Star is exactly where the microfilm says it is. Three miles out, forty metres down. But that's not the interesting part.”
“Tell me.”
“The wreck has never been officially salvaged. No recovery operation, no insurance claim that matches the cargo. The manifest filed with the port authority listed agricultural machinery bound for Rotterdam. But the manifests on the microfilm show electronics and medical equipment. High-value goods, undeclared, diverted to a pickup point that doesn't appear on any commercial register.” She paused. “Bartholomew Vane was running a floating warehouse. The ship went down with a fortune in contraband, and someone made sure nobody went looking for it.”
James looked out at the sea. The water was a churning slate, whitecaps breaking on the sandbanks, and the wind drove the spray sideways. Forty metres of cold North Sea. A steel hull resting on the seabed, its holds full of cargo that had been worth killing for in 1987. Worth killing for still, if someone was afraid it would be found.
“Thomas discovered it,” he said. “That's what got him killed.”
Siobhan nodded. “He must have found the watch. The microfilm. He realised what the Northern Star really was, what his family had been doing. And he confronted someone.”
“Arthur Vane.”
“Or someone acting for him. The family firm has a long reach.”
Leo cleared his throat. He had not taken his eyes off the horizon, and his face was set in a way James had not seen before. “There's something else,” he said. “Something I heard years ago, when I first took over the Crab Shack. One of the old fishermen, a bloke called Ernie Pettigrew, he used to drink at the bar most nights. This was back in the nineties. He'd worked the boats out of Happisburgh all his life, and he remembered the night the Northern Star went down. Said the storm came up fast, but not so fast a vessel that size couldn't have made for shelter. The skipper must have been following orders to hold position.”
“Orders from Bartholomew Vane,” Siobhan said.
Leo nodded slowly. “Ernie said there was a ledger. A private record Bartholomew kept, separate from the company books. Every shipment, every bribe, every payoff. He said if that ledger ever surfaced, half the respectable families in Norfolk would be looking at prison time.”
James felt the cold settle deeper into him, a stillness that had nothing to do with the wind. “Where is it now?”
“Ernie didn't know. He died ten years ago. But he swore it existed. Swore he'd seen it once, in the back office of the Vane warehouse, before the place burned down.”
“Convenient.”
“Isn't it.” Leo turned to face him. “I never put much stock in it. Old men talk, and Ernie liked his whisky. But after what Siobhan told me last night, I started thinking. The watch you've got, the one with the initials. B.V. That's Bartholomew Vane's timepiece. Thomas must have found it somewhere, maybe in the family house, maybe in a safety deposit box. And he found the microfilm inside it. And then he was dead three weeks later.”
Siobhan pulled her hood tighter. “The watch was a message. Thomas sent it to Elena because he knew he was in danger. He wanted someone to find the truth if he didn't make it.”
“But Elena gave it to me,” James said. “She didn't know what it contained. She thought it implicated me.”
“Or she wanted you to think that.” Siobhan's voice was flat. “She's a Vane now. Whatever she married into, she's part of it.”
James thought of Elena Vane in his office, the widow's composure, the careful way she had placed the watch on his desk. The grief that had seemed genuine. But grief and complicity were not mutually exclusive. He had learned that a long time ago, in rooms far from Cromer, in the company of people who could weep for the dead and still cash the cheque.
“Arthur Vane approached me at the gala,” he said. “He knew who I was. Knew about my service record, my work. He didn't threaten me directly, but the threat was there. He wanted me to know I was being watched.”
Leo's expression darkened. “Then you're in deeper than I thought.”
“We all are.” James looked at Siobhan. “You and Leo should step back. This isn't your fight.”
Siobhan's chin came up. “I'm not stepping back. Thomas Vane was murdered because he found out what his family was. If I walk away now, I'm letting them get away with it. I won't do that.”
“Neither will I,” Leo said. He pulled his hands from his pockets and blew on them. “I've spent forty years in this town listening to people whisper about the Vanes. Who they owned, who they ruined, who they drove out. I kept my head down and poured my pints and told myself it wasn't my business. But it is my business. It's everyone's business, when a family like that thinks it can do whatever it wants and bury anyone who objects.”
The lighthouse beam swept over them, a pale ghost of its former function, triggered by a solar cell that still fed power to the old mechanism. The light cut across the grey water and vanished, and then came round again, patient and indifferent.
James looked at the two of them, the young historian with her chin set and the old publican with his wind-reddened face, and felt something shift in his chest. He had been working alone for so long that he had forgotten what it felt like to have people at his back. It was not a comfortable feeling. It came with obligations he had spent years avoiding.
“All right,” he said. “Then we need to find that ledger. If it exists, it's the only thing that ties the Vanes to the Northern Star's real cargo. Without it, all we have is a microfilm and a watch and a dead man who can't testify.”
“The storage facility,” Siobhan said. “The receipt you found. Six years ago, thirty-five pounds. Thomas rented a unit somewhere. If he hid the watch, he might have hidden other things.”
James reached into his coat and touched the folded receipt, the paper soft from being handled. “It's a start.”
Leo nodded toward the car park. “I'll drive. My van's got four-wheel drive and I know the back roads. If Arthur Vane's got people watching, they'll be looking for your car, not mine.”
The three of them walked back across the wet grass, the wind at their backs now, pushing them toward the vehicles. The lighthouse stood behind them, its red and white bands fading into the grey of the sky, and the sea went on churning at the foot of the cliffs, patient and hungry, keeping its secrets close.
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