[PS & GV #6] Death on Demand by Jim Kelly Page A

tensions, which had grown over the years. A decade ago several hundred visiting Christian Tamils from London had made the journey north and ended up on the nearby beach at Wells, many worse for drink, prompting a ‘riot’ by brandishing ceremonial knives. A middle-class backlash had filled the local press with complaints of yobbish pilgrims urinating over garden fences.

    The following year the police had stopped and searched pilgrims’ cars, after being tipped off some were carrying guns. None were found. Large numbers of Irish travellers had begun arriving for the event too, across-country from the ferry ports of Wales and Liverpool, adding to the inflammatory mix. The addition of WAP, keen to pick a theological punch-up, brandishing banners and eager to engage the pious in debate, had raised the temperature a little further. Most of the local publicans planned to shut up shop on the big day.
    The jittery atmosphere had never engendered genuine violence, but the new chief constable felt the ‘World’ might just provide the spark necessary to light the powder keg. Most of the resident CID officers thought this view alarmist. The vast majority of annual pilgrims were very young, or very old, devout or peaceful. There was no real reason to think this pilgrimage would be any different, except for a sprinkling of foreign visitors, but Joyce was taking no chances. Pilgrims on foot were converging on Walsingham, not just with the main body, but along other, ancient routes. Their every footfall was being monitored at police headquarters.
    The protestors’ rainbow bus was difficult to miss, a seventies charabanc painted using the entire psychedelic spectrum, standing on an acre of tarmac otherwise deserted. By the time Shaw was out of the Porsche, a woman was climbing down the bus steps, clipboard in her hand.
    ‘Nano Heaney,’ she said, holding out a pale hand, a natural extension of a pale, slender arm. The name Nano, surely, an ironic nickname, must have had its origins in her height, which had to be six feet, possibly even an inch more. Her stature was the dominant feature of her outward appearance and surely stood in comic counterpoint to Nano, the Greek diminutive, the root of nanotechnology. The name suggested, Shaw thought, a classical education.
    The neat, luminous face was perched on a particular body shape, which reminded Shaw of the classic Pierrot – the sad clown of the comedy theatre, the fool, with a tear perhaps marked on the cheek, dressed in white, with wide hips and silver, silk pantaloons. The effect was enforced by the loose white trousers, a baggy white T-shirt, both hung on a kite-shaped body: even the motif was in a shade of almost unreadable grey: Sweet toleration .

    She held a West Norfolk Constabulary card between two fingers, flicking it deftly. ‘DI Shaw? The radio said there’s been a murder; I thought you’d be busy …’
    ‘We’ve got more than one detective,’ said Shaw.
    Heaney’s pale whiteness seemed to glow in the deepening gloom under the storm cloud. She looked like a daytime angel, fallen to earth. There was something about the make-up-free face, felt Shaw, which invited trust.
    ‘I’m chair of WAP,’ she said. ‘The chief constable asked me to cooperate, which I’m happy to do. I understand you’d like to know our plans ?’ She smiled, suggesting any anxiety might be misplaced. ‘I’m afraid they’re modest and hardly command the attention of a DI …’
    ‘This will be brief, Ms Heaney,’ said Shaw. ‘I think you’ve been liaising with uniformed branch, but I just wanted to get a quick overview. The chief constable is anxious to avoid flashpoints, if I can put it like that.’
    ‘A tour d’horizon?’ she asked, managing to imbue the phrase with the hint of an Irish accent. And again, an educated allusion. She swung her arm out over the view below, the little town a choppy seascape of rooftops.
    ‘Precisely …’ agreed Shaw, noting that this horizon, a