Death Watch

by Unknown

  Shaw could read a face like an essay. His problem now was finding the face. The heat had seared the skin – leaving nothing of the ears, for example, but the concha, the funnel-like opening, and the tragus, the forward flap that protects the inner ear. The rest – the fleshy helix and fossa – were gone. All the skin of the face was missing, and the complex system of micro-muscles beneath had been reduced to gristle.

  ‘A man…’ he said over his shoulder to Valentine. ‘Plenty of hair. The forehead’s exceptionally high, a ridge above the eyes – a bony ridge, but muscular too – the corrugator is pronounced.’ That would be the crucial element of the dead man’s ‘lifelong look’ – thought Shaw – the particular arrangement of features by which he’d always been recognized. Deep-set eyes, the brow dominant. Shaw would have called it a Celtic face.

  Valentine hadn’t said a word.

  ‘Irish?’ asked Shaw. ‘Heavy build. Large head. Nothing of the nose left, or lips. Teeth charred, but we might get a dental match.’

  Valentine stood at the tape. ‘’Bout right. Foreman said the Judds were Irish – face like a front-row forward. Thirty-five, something like that.’ He picked at a bit of tobacco on his lip.

  ‘Justina on her way?’

  ‘Ten minutes,’ said Valentine. He’d be gone by then, he’d make sure of that. He’d kept his beer down so far, but watching the pathologist at work always brought on a sweeping nausea. It was something to do with the way she dealt with the corpse, like it wasn’t a human being there at all, but some interesting fossil. ‘I should get down to the incident room,’ said Valentine, but Shaw didn’t respond.

  Tom Hadden, the head of the force’s CSI unit, came over to the crime tape. He was ten years short of retirement, thin red hair now strawberry blond, with a scar just below his hairline where a skin cancer had been removed a year before. Freckles crowded round intelligent green eyes. Hadden had fled a broken marriage and a high-profile job at the Home Office for the West Norfolk Constabulary. A keen bird watcher and expert naturalist, he spent his spare time on the dunes and in the marshes, a solitary but never lonely figure, weighed down with binoculars.

  ‘This is odd,’ he said. He held up an evidence bag. ‘Found these just by the conveyor belt where the victim worked. Don’t quote me, but I’d say they were grains of rice.’

  ‘Rice?’ asked Shaw. ‘So – he’s a healthy eater, one of those salads you can get from M&S?’

  ‘That would work nicely, if, and only if, it was cooked rice. Which it isn’t.’

  Shaw took the evidence bag. Three grains, almost translucent, twenty minutes short of al dente.

  ‘There’s blood on the conveyor belt, by the way – plenty of it,’ said Hadden.

  ‘That survived the heat?’

  ‘No. There’s two conveyor belts, Peter. This one,’ he said, touching the belt in front of them with a hand inside a forensic glove. ‘This one… runs into the furnace, and then turns back under itself. Anything on it gets dropped onto an internal conveyor which moves the waste through the furnace system. It’s more like one of those moving walkways from the airport. Steel.’

  They looked at the victim in silence. ‘Justina will talk you through chummy here,’ said Hadden. ‘But I’d caution against any amateur assessments at this stage.’

  ‘Meaning?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘The hole in the skull. I don’t think it’s what it looks like. We can’t get into the furnace yet to retrieve the blown bits of cranium, but one shard is here…’

  It was on the belt, about six feet from the body, already in an evidence bag, its original location marked with a white circle and the letter ‘D’.

  Hadden tipped it slightly with a metal stylus, like a fragment of ancient pottery. ‘You’ll notice that there is a depression fracture on this piece of bone – just here.’

  ‘Someone hit him?’

  ‘Maybe. But we need the science to back that up, and at the moment, we don’t have the science.’

  Shaw brushed a finger along a gull’s feather he’d put in his pocket from the beach. ‘But blood suggests a struggle?’

  ‘Or one of the waste bags burst a week ago. Don’t assume it’s his blood. I need to get the evidence back to the Ark.’

  The Ark was West Norfolk’s forensic lab, situated in an old Nonconformist chapel beside St James’s – the force HQ in Lynn. It was Tom Hadden’s kingdom, and the only place he was happy other than the saltmarshes on the coast. He plucked at his forensic gloves. ‘You’ll need to see outside too.’

  He led the way to a door in one of the metal walls, heavy duty, riveted, like one below stairs in a ship. They stepped through, Valentine reluctantly tagging along, and down a short corridor into a dark cavity beneath the giant piping which fed oxygen into the furnace. Hadden flicked on a torch which lit their feet as they edged through. A second metal door led outside.

  ‘This door was unlocked when we got here, by the way,’ said Hadden.

  Outside was a small steel platform, an eyrie, at the base of the incinerator chimney. It housed one of the atmospheric testing units for the furnace. An encased stepladder led up, another down into the floodlit goods yard below. A line of yellow waste tugs waited, backing up now the furnace was cold.

  Valentine pointed up. ‘Is this how the running man got out?’

  Hadden craned his neck. ‘That’s it – a small door, an emergency exit, about fifty feet above us. Again, unlocked.’

  They were a hundred feet up with a view west over the town. Although the sun had gone there was still light in the west. A perfect night sky turned over their heads like a planetarium. The air was warm and sweet. There was a single chair on the little platform, office metal with the stuffing coming out of the seat, beside it a hubcap full of cigarette butts.

  ‘Bourne, the foreman, says they knew Judd smoked out here – strictly against the rules, but it’s a shitty job, so they bend them,’ said Hadden.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Valentine. ‘’Cos you wouldn’t want to pollute the atmosphere,’ he added, spitting over the side.

  ‘We’ll check the butts for saliva. But there’s only one brand of cigarette – Silk Cut,’ said Hadden.

  ‘OK,’ said Shaw. ‘Let’s arrest George.’

  Valentine peered pointedly up at the distant apex of the incinerator chimney.

  ‘One oddity,’ said Hadden. He knelt by the hubcap. ‘There was only one match. I’ve sent it down to the lab with a runner – single match, broken in the middle to form a V. We might get something off it. Potts, the engineer, says Judd used a lighter.’ He stood, closed his eyes to think. ‘And this doesn’t help,’ he added, producing another evidence bag from his overalls leg pocket. A torch in yellow and black plastic, hefty, as good as a cosh.

  ‘Hospital issue?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘Nope. Not according to Potts. It was by the chair.’

  Valentine took the torch in the bag and turned it 360 degrees. On one side there was a stick-on fluorescent label which bore the letters MVR in black marker pen. He held it up for Shaw. ‘A company? Initials?’ he asked. ‘I’ll check,’ he added, beating Shaw to it.

  Shaw took the evidence bag. ‘It’s dusty,’ he said, noting that the matt black surface of the torch was scuffed.

  ‘Yes – I’ll let you know what kind of dust it is when I get it to the lab,’ said Hadden. ‘But visually I’d agree – dust, lots of it.’

  ‘It’s not white – the dust,’ said Shaw, worrying at the detail that didn’t fit.

  But Hadden wouldn’t be drawn. ‘I’ll get it analysed. No point in guessing.’

  Shaw took one more look round, trying to imprint a mental photograph of the scene on his memory banks. ‘Any ideas – anyone?’

  Valentine didn’t like puzzles. He didn’t think police work was a set of crossword clues. He leant back, his spine creaking. Up above them condensation still trickled out of the chimney, a thin line unmoved by any breeze, like a 747 contrail.

  ‘It’s nasty, clinical – it isn’t ama
teur,’ he said. ‘If they hadn’t shown the kid inside the furnace we’d have no idea the bloke was ash. So it’s organized. Premeditated.’ He shifted weight, trying to lessen the pressure on his bladder. ‘But an inside job, ’cos you’d have to know the layout. So – a grudge. Sex is top of any list – we should check out wives, girlfriends. See who’s knobbing who.’

  That was just one of the things that irritated Shaw about George Valentine. He tried to solve crimes backwards. Dream up a motive and then see if any of the evidence could be made to fit. What was really annoying was that he was good at it.

  ‘Let’s do the legwork,’ said Shaw. ‘Check the staff here, check the victim’s friends, background, then we’ll evaluate the forensics when Tom’s done, and see what Justina can find on the body.’

  Check-It, that’s what they called Shaw down at St James’s. Check this, check that, check everything. As a nickname it was bestowed half in exasperation, half admiration. Valentine just found the meticulous approach annoying, like a hole in his shoe in wet weather.

  Back inside beside the incinerator belt Dr Justina Kazimierz had arrived. The pathologist was kneeling on the conveyor, shining a torch into the shadows where the victim’s arm had come to rest shielding the face. Kazimierz was sturdy, a once-fine face overwhelmed by heavy middle-European features. She worked alone, and viewed interruptions as insubordination. Her only known pastime was dancing at the Polish Club with a diminutive husband who drank fruit juice but always bought her glasses of the very best Chopin vodka, the colour of lighter fuel.

  She looked up as Shaw ducked under the SOC tape.

  ‘Not now,’ she said.

  When he’d first met the pathologist he’d put her brisk rudeness down to the difficulties of learning a new language. That had been a decade ago.

  ‘OK,’ said Shaw, peeling off forensic gloves. ‘But I’m not looking at an accident here – is that right?’

  ‘It’s not an accident,’ she said, delicately taking a sample of singed hair from the side of the skull. ‘Now go away.’

  ‘One more thing,’ he said, trying not to be intimidated. ‘The kid who spotted the victim in the furnace said he was moving…’ Shaw slipped the assumed gender into the question, knowing she couldn’t let it pass.

  ‘That’s two things,’ she said. There was a long pause and Shaw thought she’d leave it at that. Instead, she straightened her back. ‘At temperatures like this the tendons contract violently. Sudden immolation could produce what looks like movement.’ She sighed. ‘And it is indeed a man, Shaw. And, at some point he’s broken his arm in two places.’ She indicated just above the wrist and about three inches higher, below the elbow. ‘Now. Go away.’

  She looked him in his good eye. Hers were green, like a field of cabbage. ‘I need to work,’ she added, without a trace of apology.

  Hadden called them round to the other side of the belt. From there you could see there was something under the body. It looked like a melted strawberry ice cream with streaks of yellow custard.

  ‘That went in with him,’ said Hadden.

  ‘One of the waste bags?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘Yes. The plastic label was burnt off – but there’s a punched steel tag with some kind of notation. I can’t read it – but let me get it back to the lab.’

  ‘But no others on the belt…?’

  ‘No. A gap before and, not unsurprisingly, a gap after.’

  ‘So – he was either holding it, the waste bag, or whoever killed him put it on the belt?’

  Hadden sighed. ‘Let me do the science. Then I’ll have some answers.’

  A uniformed PC gave Valentine a clocking-on card.

  ‘Bryan Judd’s,’ said Valentine, reading. ‘Address on Erebus Street – Bentinck Launderette.’ His shoulders sagged. He’d broken enough bad news in his life to fill a newspaper. It had happened to him once: the hollow knock, the PC in uniform on the doorstep. An RTA, his wife in the passenger seat on the bypass, a hole in the windscreen where her head had punched through. DOA. Dead On Arrival.

  ‘Let’s do it,’ said Shaw. He dreaded the knock too, the light footsteps down the hall, and then that look in their eyes as he stood there telling them their lives had changed for ever. It was like being the Angel of Death.

  3

  Late-night Sunday traffic was light so they swung across the deserted inner ring road to thread a path through the rotten heart of town, past the Guildhall, where a pair of drunks wrestled on the marble steps in the full glare of the floodlight designed to illuminate the magnificent chequered brick façade of the medieval building. Shaw checked the tide watch on his wrist against the blue and gold seventeenth-century version on one of the towers of St Margaret’s – a perfect match. High tide had been and gone by an hour. And the time matched too: 10.17 p.m.

  As Shaw drove, Valentine read Bryan Judd’s file, retrieved from the HR department at the hospital after they’d dragged in the on-call manager. It was a bleak life in five hundred bleak words. Valentine offered a précis. ‘Aged thirty-three. Born Lynn. Married. Left school for Tech College at sixteen. No GCSEs – that takes some fucking doing; even I got three. Apprenticeship as a mechanic. Been working on the incinerator for ten years. Before that general hospital porter.’

  He found a set of passport-style pictures of Judd for his security pass and held it up for Shaw as they waited at lights, so that he could study the face, try to see through the skin to the bone structure beneath. There was little doubt he was looking at their victim. One notable feature not apparent from the bones and seared flesh was the serially broken nose, smudged flat, and to one side.

  ‘Liked a fight,’ he said.

  They snaked through the old warehouse quarter, where dark archways led into cool courts of stone; then, suddenly, they were out into the Tuesday Market, a vast medieval square, ringed with Georgian gas lamps. Every Lynn pub crawl ended here, and a warm summer evening had drawn a big crowd; a heaving mass of drinkers. Someone let a firecracker off in the middle, the echo bouncing round off the stone façades, and a single scream was met with a chorus of laughter.

  Shaw put his foot down, the sailboards on the roof rack of the Land Rover rattling in the breeze. Two minutes later they’d swung into Erebus Street – a cul-de-sac, ending in the old dock gates, clogged now with ivy and scraps of rubbish like prayer flags. The original iron rails for the dock freight trains ran down the middle of the street, rusted, the ruts clogged with grit. Shaw parked in the shadows.

  This was a different world, and one in darkness.

  ‘A power cut?’ asked Shaw. ‘That’s odd. In one street?’ And a coincidence, an echo of the brief electricity failure at the hospital. Shaw didn’t trust coincidences; they got his mind working in circles, trying to construct links that didn’t need to exist.

  A full moon, hazy in the heat, hung over the street like a Chinese lantern. On one house a burglar alarm flashed blue. A woman stood by her front door in the moonlight, a candle set in its own grease on the window ledge, a cat snaking round her ankles. At the far end of the street a fire burnt in a brazier, while figures stood in a circle, the flames reflected in the frosted windows of the Crane, the pub by the dock gates. Cans were tipped back, the light catching stretched throats.

  ‘Street party,’ said Valentine.

  In front of the dock gates was parked a white van, a motif on the side too shadowy to read, while beyond they could see a merchant ship at the quayside, as black as crêpe paper, a silhouette against the stars. Three storeys high, dwarfing the street. One of the giant quayside cranes bent over it like a praying mantis.

  Shaw got out and stood in the heat, which seemed to radiate from the cheap red bricks. The air was still, all windows open; and it was an odd sensation – and you only ever got it in the city in a heatwave; a feeling that he wasn’t outside at all, but in a huge room, a vast auditorium, a theatre perhaps, so that what looked outside was really inside, and that up beyond the illusion of the stars were the house lights.

&nb
sp; They both stared at the shadowy house fronts, searching for the Bentinck Launderette. Several of the houses were boarded up, one’s door had been kicked in, another’s encased in a steel shutter. Erebus Street was the kind of address that came up every week at magistrates’ court for all the wrong reasons. Its crimes were low, mean, and plentiful: domestic violence, street fights, muggings, benefit fraud, meter fraud, car theft, and a few RSPCA prosecutions for cruelty to dogs.

  ‘P’rhaps they’ve nicked their own light bulbs,’ said Valentine, stepping out into the street. He’d been to Erebus Street before. Another summer’s evening. What? Ten years, twenty years ago? He flicked through the cases filed in his memory but it wouldn’t come. There was something there – something unfinished.

  The street party was high octane, the cheers ringing louder, the crowd swaying around the brazier. No one seemed to notice their arrival. Something went bang in the fire – probably an aerosol – and there was a scream. A child danced on the edge of the light, a boy in baggy joggers, maybe six or seven years old, with a mask Shaw recognized – one of the Cat People from Dr Who.

  ‘Let’s ruin the party,’ said Shaw. ‘It might be the best knees-up they’ve had since Mafeking, but I don’t fancy telling some poor woman her husband’s been incinerated against a backdrop of community singing. Have a word, George, tell ’em to keep it down. And don’t tell them why we’re here – they’ll be selling tickets for the wake before we’ve got to the widow. I’ll try and find the launderette.’

  Shaw got out and walked into the middle of the street; six foot tall, his feet planted confidently apart as if he owned the place. He looked round, but you couldn’t see far on Erebus Street. The docks one way, back to a T-junction the other. The two end corner properties at the junction were local landmarks: to the east the Church of the Sacred Heart of Mary, a black spireless cut-out of neo-Gothic; to the west the town abattoir – Bramalls’ – four storeys of brick, with narrow fake arrow-slit windows and a crenellated top. A single tunnel entrance gave the cattle trucks access to an unseen yard. Over the arch there was the stone base of a sundial, its arm long lost, but still with the builder’s motto in gold letters a foot high, catching the moonlight: