[PS & GV #6] Death on Demand

by Jim Kelly

  ‘Well done,’ he said out loud. ‘You’ll make CID yet.’

  The brick arch under the embankment acted as a wind tunnel and, as he stood torch in hand, litter came past like tumbleweed: a page of newsprint, a paper cup, a rolling can. A smell of decay wafted from the builder’s skip set on the pavement.

  Valentine had a retentive brain, if not an analytical one. Recalling Beatty Hood’s address precisely: 32 Hartington Street, he set out down the tunnel. The Marsh House inquiry was at a critical stage. Julia Fortis’s lawyer had advised that she not answer questions during a formal interview at St James’. Reluctantly, they’d had to let her walk free, even though Shaw was convinced she knew the secret of Marsh House. Linas Jessop would attend for questioning in the morning. Meanwhile, the team was working on the complex financial affairs of Ruby Bright, Beatty Hood and Irene Coldshaw, to see if there might be a pattern within. Had all three, perhaps, left fortunes behind? The Regional Crime Squad had made a forensic accountant available for the inquiry. DC Twine was travelling north to interview Coldshaw’s niece in Scunthorpe to ask if the family had any idea why she’d so dramatically decided to leave Marsh House.

  Ever since Valentine had found Beatty Hood’s death certificate taped behind one of Henry Bright’s serene moonlit landscapes, or more precisely, ever since Dr Scrutton had given him his scan results, he’d retained a morbid fascination for that official wording: date and place of death. One day his own certificate would carry this information. Every step he took brought him closer to that moment. By way, perhaps, of evasion, he walked on now towards 32 Hartington Street, the house in which Beatty Hood’s life had finally passed, quietly, away.

  The Spring’s eight streets formed a latticework like a Georgian window, creating nine ‘islands’ riddled with alleyways, allowing access to back yards, although the central island had been left open as a grassed square, a great chestnut at the centre, no doubt a remnant of the old, original garden which had surrounded the manor house.

  As a child he’d ridden his bike here to play football with schoolmates and lob sticks into the conker tree; recalling a sweetshop, a pub with frosted glass, a mild frisson of adventure: the Springs was the wrong side of the tracks, and even for a boy from the docks it held an illicit thrill of otherness.

  Walking the streets now he noted an upstairs bedroom light in a house on Gladstone and a downstairs light in one on Palmerston; so, despite the imminent arrival of the wrecker’s ball, the Springs was not entirely deserted. True, the pub was a burnt-out shell and the Methodist chapel on the corner of Peel and Frobisher, roofless and ruined, but he thought several other properties showed signs of life, and he counted four Sky dishes on properties with no lights and one trickle of smoke from a chimney on Salisbury.

  Beatty Hood’s house was a Victorian throwback, with dark-blue paint on the sash windows, an ochre door with a fine dolphin knocker, the original brickwork pointed in lime, the drainpipes black and steely. Inside, the interior looked faded, respectable once, now tawdry, cloaked in dust; an aspidistra in a Chinese vase on the window ledge was artificial, upholstered chairs sprouted gouts of interior padding, while a gilt mirror, the metal beneath visible in flecks of rust, reflected Valentine’s torch.

  Down on one knee, he pushed open the letterbox and noted a hat stand, iron-rails holding the stair carpet in place and a framed picture of George VI. He filled his lungs with the smell of it too: polish, the cold metallic odor of a scrubbed pantry and quite distinctly fish and chips, cut by vinegar, so pungent it made Valentine’s mouth flood with saliva. It was clear someone lived in Beatty Hood’s old house.

  He knocked twice, loud and sharp, the dolphin cracking against its metal plate. An echo came back a few seconds later, and then a third, but nothing stirred on the Springs. The street lights were unlit and, but for the moon, he’d have been in a series of dark ‘calle’ – urban canyons, pressing in, the soundtrack silent except for the occasional rustle of rats and pigeons. The bleak loneliness made him crave the warmth of his own bed, a comforting touch, so he tracked back towards the Lister Tunnel across the central square.

  It was the tree that spooked him; his childhood horse chestnut still held its pivotal position, if dead now, a mighty forty foot of leafless, bone-like branches. But it had fruit, in the form of dozens of discarded shoes and trainers, thrown up and over the brittle twigs and boles. In the moonlight the effect was unnerving, the tree’s canopy filled out with shadowy shoes and taut laces. Hanging, as if each pair had been the subject of its own, private, judicial execution. From underneath, where he stood by the trunk looking up, he could see the moon through the strange organic grid-work, and for the first time that night George Valentine looked over his shoulder.

  Lister Tunnel was in sight when he heard the crunch of car wheels on the tarmac behind him. Stopping on the pavement he looked back and saw a car kerb-crawling towards him, still a hundred yards away, having turned out of Peel Street by the burnt-out remains of the Parkwood Tavern. Later, in his statement, he’d guess blue as the colour, but the moonlight was deceptive and he couldn’t be sure. The licence plate started with an H – that was all he could see as the moon was beyond, high now in a starry, clear sky.

  The car, moving, no lights, kept up a steady ten miles per hour.

  Twenty feet back he’d passed an alley between two houses, so he retraced his steps, cutting the distance between himself and the advancing car, until he came level with the alley gate, and then – boldly – he stepped out into the street, directly in front of the advancing car. He had his hand on his warrant card, ready to hold it aloft, when he thought better of the tactic: he was alone, whoever was behind the wheel had a distinct, lethal advantage.

  At a distance of thirty yards it stopped, the engine idling, and then the driver slammed his foot down on the accelerator and put the headlamps on full beam.

  Valentine pushed the gate open and fell sideways out of the path of the on-coming car, heard the thud of the tyres mounting the kerb, and saw a fleeting vision of grimy paintwork, a reflecting passenger window, a roof rack.

  Back on his feet, he ran out in time to see it skid to a halt in the entrance to the Lister Tunnel. The lights went out again, plunging the scene into shadow, but leaving the vehicle in silhouette against the thin orange light of the streets beyond in the North End. The driver’s door creaked open an inch and he saw a hand on the inner handle, before a decision was made; the door cracked shut, the car – still blacked-out – skidded away into the night, a single backfire echoing like a gun shot.

  NINETEEN

  The playful naval architecture of Marsh House found its most stylish expression in what the staff liked to call the Poop Deck, a wooden balcony built out from the second floor and supported by pillars of old oak, the colour weathering towards silver. Here, behind the sturdy barrier of a brass rail, residents could enjoy the view of the sea beyond the marsh. It was possible to stand at the rail and, looking directly north, be unable to see any horizon that was not water; for here, at Brancaster, the great curve of the Norfolk coast turned from the Wash to the open North Sea, so that the ‘maritime horizon’ occupied all of the view ahead. Today the sea was two-tone, navy blue in deep water and a chalky green over the white sandy shallows. No waves broke the mirrored surface, which lay like mercury beyond the edge of the sands. A line of sea gulls occupied the brass rail, each one tilted into the lightest of onshore breezes, at precisely the same angle, like a set of Dutch windmills.

  Shaw had just spent twenty-five minutes that morning re-interviewing Javi Copon, his third on-the-record session. The Spanish authorities had overnight provided a resume of the nurse’s police record, a litany of politically-motivated minor offences, including three arrests during protest marches. Shaw had requested more information: was Copon really a violent man? He was certainly a smoker and he’d known all about Camera D, which gave him the opportunity to kill Ruby Bright. He admitted going out on the night she died at least six times to smoke. Otherwise his
story had not changed, and so far they’d found no hint of a motive which would link him to such a brutal killing. But he had told Shaw that if he wanted to know more about Ruby’s death he should interview Christian Keyes, one of the residents of Marsh House confined here, on the upper floor. Keyes, a friend of Ruby’s, had told Copon something remarkable during the night, summoning the nurse to his room. Shaw had agreed he should hear it first hand.

  Shaw sat alone waiting for Keyes to finish his breakfast, flicking the card Fortis had given him on his first visit, still troubled by the euphemism ‘Rest Home’, which continued to remind him of one of his father’s favourite blunt epithets: ‘You’re a long time dead.’ The idea of DCI Jack Shaw spending any time in a rest home was unthinkable. Cancer of the larynx had killed Jack Shaw, but it had been that last murder case which had really brought him down, and the judge’s insinuation that – in partnership with Valentine – they’d fabricated evidence to get a conviction. The corrosive label ‘bent copper’ had sucked the life out of Jack Shaw, and the fight. Time had shown that they’d put the right man in the dock; Valentine’s career, redeemed, had thrived with his return to CID at St James’. But vindication had made no difference to the late DCI Jack Shaw. His headstone still stood in the shadows at St Faith’s, Wells-next-the-Sea. Beyond the dates 1938–2008, there was but a single couplet from his favourite writer, Stephenson:

  Home is the sailor, home from the sea

  And the hunter home from the hill.

  It had been his mother’s choice, and she’d vetoed her son’s suggestion that they include the preceding line: Here he lies where he longed to be.

  Jack Shaw had wanted to die for the last year of his life, but it was a gift he was denied. Shaw had been shielded from his father’s daily disappointment that he kept waking up in the morning, each dawn a reminder that he’d failed to cheat his appointed fate. It was, perhaps, a mark of the arrogance of the man, or even the arrogance of mankind, that he’d expected to summon his own death like some celestial taxi, cruising the bedsides of the dying, its ‘For Hire’ dimly lit.

  Javi Copon slid the glass doors open and pushed out a wheelchair-bound resident, an elderly man in a tweed jacket, white shirt and tie.

  ‘This is Christian,’ he said, fussing with a blanket, which he wrapped round his knees despite the sun. The nurse’s white uniform transformed Javi from a beach bum into a professional. Shaw recognized a neat ceramic badge on one chest indicating he was a SRN, a state registered nurse, and another badge he didn’t recognize, which was square with a red outline, containing stylized letters reading CCOO. He also noted a thin white scar across the right edge of Copon’s jaw that he’d missed before, probably caused by a surfboard ‘skeg’; the injury, soaked in salt water swims, was a livid badge of honour as potent as a duelling scar.

  ‘Christian,’ said Copon, placing a hand on the old man’s shoulder. ‘This is Detective Inspector Shaw, he wants to talk to you about Ruby? Ruby, from downstairs? And her friend Beatty Hood. Do you remember? We talked about this last night. I want you to try to remember what you said.’

  Over acrid Spanish espresso in the nurses’ station below, Copon had outlined for Shaw the haunted life of Christian Keyes. Now aged eighty-six, the son of a Royal Navy officer, he’d been brought up in Devonport, Plymouth. His life had been overshadowed by the fate of his father, who’d been involved in one of the great naval tragedies of the First World War: the destruction of what became known as the Live Bait Squadron.

  ‘Live Bait – yes?’ Copon had asked, expertly producing the espresso from a gleaming Italian machine, while mimicking a fisherman casting a rod.

  The squadron had comprised obsolete ships, with poorly trained or reserve crews, and been stationed in the shallow waters of the North Sea.

  ‘All the staff know this story,’ said the Spaniard, his feet up on the edge of the CCTV console. ‘Christian will tell anyone, even if they don’t listen.’

  Copon’s version of Christian’s tale was succinct: despite concerns that the squadron was a sitting target for German U-boat attack, it was allowed to remain on station. One ash-gray dawn in the North Sea (September 22, 1914, Shaw had checked it on his mobile while out on the poop) a German U-boat spotted three cruisers in single file. It submerged, got close and fired a single torpedo which hit the engine room of the first, breaking the ship’s back and bringing it to a full stop. It sank within twenty minutes and many died. Its sister ships, thinking it had hit a mine, headed towards the wreck to pick up survivors. The U-boat, undetected, sank them both. By nightfall 1,560 men had died in the water. Midshipman Keyes was picked out of the swell by a Dutch trawler. Delirious, guilt-ridden, he seemed unable to shake off the idea that he was personally responsible for the carnage, as he’d been on watch aboard one of the ships.

  Midshipman Keyes died in a psychiatric unit at Reading in 1961, killing himself by tipping an electric fire into his bath. His son, Christian, by then a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, had been his only regular visitor. In 2010 Christian had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. As the details of his own life faded, the final hours of his father’s watch that day in 1914 seemed to grow more vivid. In a nightmarish echo of the Ancient Mariner’s fate, he seemed doomed, each day of the life he had left, to keep his father’s watch.

  His behaviour had become increasingly obsessive. He told his family, and later his nurses, that it was a harmless hobby; he had a neat phrase for it, he was a ‘maritime trainspotter’, keeping a note in a neat log of the vessels he saw. He’d used his savings, against his family’s wishes, to secure a view of the sea from one of Marsh House’s second-floor suites. And so the tally grew of coasters and trawlers, wind farm tugs, oil tankers and yachts, sloops and dredgers. But Copon was not alone in suspecting that he was really searching for the ghost of the merciless U-boat.

  Shaw pulled up a chair and shook Keyes’ hand – which was darkly tanned, allowing the knuckles to show up as knotty bones, only just below the stretched skin. In his lap was a battered set of binoculars.

  ‘Mr Keyes, hello. Thanks for talking to me. Javi tells me you were friends with Ruby. Why did you like her?’

  Shaw was pretty convinced Keyes had heard the question and he saw the light of understanding in his pale green eyes; but then, convulsively, the old man clasped the binoculars and raised them to his eyes, scanning the horizon: once to the west, once to the east, then once more back to the west.

  ‘The light’s good,’ he said, ‘low. So you can see shadows. I see a lot of seals at this hour, they break the surface.’

  ‘Is that what you’re looking for, seals?’

  Shaw saw that Keyes’ lips were dry, cracked, like the survivor his father had once been. There was a suppressed tension in Keyes’ watching, the hint of active service, rather than an idle hobby.

  ‘Did Ruby like looking out to sea?’

  ‘Yes, yes. That’s it, you’ve got it. The others laugh – I know that, I see that. She had those eyes that get sharper with age. A precision, visually, that was quite extraordinary. Yes. Typically, she was gifted at that, telling people what was good about age, old age. This …’

  He spread his hands out to indicate the width of the horizon, but somehow also encompassed his own personal predicament.

  ‘She’d keep a weather eye for me. She loved being outside, down near the beach. It was the landscape, the art of it; the seascape as well. If she saw a vessel from the terrace she’d shout – yes, even if they told her not to. She called me Mr Christian; that was our joke, from the Mutiny on the Bounty. No one else remembers.’

  His bony fingers tightened on the brass rail and he pulled the chair closer to the edge, looking down on to the empty terrace below.

  ‘What was the name again?’ asked Keyes.

  ‘Shaw. Peter Shaw. I live on the beach to the east so I’m always looking out to sea too.’

  He’d dropped the binoculars. ‘I’m on watch.’

  ‘Me too. I’m a lifeboat man. A pilot, actual
ly, on the hovercraft.’

  ‘Good God. Well done. Well done.’

  He lifted the binoculars and again swept west, east, west.

  ‘There. Coaster. See it? Fifteen miles, NNE.’ He seemed excited, revitalized, but Shaw also glimpsed a genuine fear in his eyes which he thought was rare in those of such an age, who often seemed to know that death was inevitable and so life had lost its terrors. Here was a facet of the Ancient Mariner’s dilemma which was subtly horrific; that the fear would be endless, because the look-out was immortal.

  ‘I’ve only got the one good eye,’ said Shaw, squinting. He could see the ship, a stern bridge, flat deck, probably a small container ship bound for Harwich or Felixstowe. Over a distance of more than twenty feet, having two eyes rather than one provided no actual advantage at all to anyone. Eyepatched pirates proved the point.

  Keyes studied his face then, which was a strange reversal of roles, because the human face was Shaw’s area of expertise. ‘Yes, blind in one eye, I see that now.’ Without warning the concentration seemed to snap, so that Keyes fussed with the binoculars, the tartan rug, his cuffs, as if he’d been overwhelmed by instant senility.

  ‘Don’t forget the ship,’ said Shaw, pointing out.

  As Keyes relocated the vessel, Shaw drew closer. ‘Did you know Ruby’s friend Beatty, Beatty Hood? Javi, the nurse, said you’d remembered something about Beatty.’

  ‘Hood was bad, not as bad as Live Bait. HMS Hood – they never did know why she blew up like that. Sometimes they show it on TV – a clip they call it. A clip; sometimes modern life is so cruel, isn’t it? Flippant. There she is, the Hood, and then she’s lost, in a single plume of water. What, two seconds? 1,415 dead. It’s callous, isn’t it, they shouldn’t do that, not with relatives watching – children, even. Still a mystery. Live Bait wasn’t a mystery. It was a scandal. Idiots thought it was a mine she’d hit. When the ship went, she rolled right over, turned turtle, with men running down the hull, like human ants. Not a sight you forget, can forget. A stricken ship is a savage sight.’