Death Watch

by Unknown

  The stairs, bare wood, ran up between two plaster-board walls. Smoke rose up, the stairwell acting as a chimney. He closed his eyes and took the steps three at a time. At the top he stopped, holding his breath, and for the first time he thought he’d made a mistake. It was supposed to be a calculated risk. But it felt like a posthumous medal. The fumes were blurring his vision and a sharp pain was pulsing in his head. He saw a vivid snapshot: Lena, standing in blue water, a still sea lapping at her thighs. Ten seconds; he’d give himself ten seconds.

  He checked the back bedroom – empty – then the front. A figure was curled up on the bare floorboards, white smoke leaking up through the gaps. He had scraggly hair held back in a pigtail with a black ribbon and wore an old suit, pinstripe, filthy. Shaw knelt, watching his lips move, hearing only the word: ‘Jesu.’ He opened his eyes, saw Shaw, then covered his face with trembling hands. But Shaw had seen his eyes nonetheless, and there are few emotions that can animate a face as effectively as terror, the white sclera of the eye visible around each pupil.

  Shaw grabbed him by the shoulders but he tried to pull away, hands still over his face, his body twisting. ‘I can’t go out there,’ he said, his voice oddly clear. Shaw knew then it wasn’t the fire that terrified him. ‘He’s there.’

  ‘You’ll die if you stay here,’ said Shaw. He could hear the staircase burning, blocking their escape, and the smoke coming through the floorboards was black now, toxic. ‘Who are you afraid of?’ he asked, while he tried to think what to do, tried to calculate how long was left before he had to leave him to die.

  The man tried to say something but retched instead, choking with his head turned down to the floor. Shaw thought he’d heard three words:

  ‘The Organ Grinder.’

  The man’s heavy boots pedalled on the bare floor as he tried to scoot back from the window.

  ‘I heard the footsteps,’ he said. ‘They all hear the footsteps.’

  ‘We’re going out the back way,’ said Shaw, deciding that this was some kind of twisted anxiety that he would have to address. ‘He won’t see you there.’ He grabbed him by the ragged lapels of his coat, picking him up and pulling him over his shoulder in one fluid movement. At the top of the stairs Shaw pivoted, turning his back to the room, clasping his burden.

  It was too late. The staircase was all flame. He thought then that Lena would never forgive him. He tried to blot out an image of his daughter, asleep, the duvet held to her chin by a fist.

  He didn’t understand what happened next. He heard a noise, a sizzling, like a giant frying pan. The air filled with smoke and steam. Then a jet of water hit him and threw him into the back bedroom. When he got to his knees there was an inch of water on the carpet, and he could hear it boiling, tumbling down the blackened, smoking stairs. He picked the man’s body up a second time and stumbled to the staircase. Each wooden tread cracked as he moved their double weight quickly onwards, downwards, to safety.

  A fireman stood in the still-burning room below; full breathing gear, an oxygen tank on his back. The floor was a mirror of water, the sound of steam a hissing roar. Between them they carried the choking man out into the yard and laid him face down on the parched grass. He struggled when one of the paramedics tried to turn him over, covering the sides of his head with his hands.

  Shaw got down so that he could speak into his ear.

  ‘We’re in the yard. Pete. Can you hear me? It’s just us – the fire brigade, ambulance. You’re OK.’

  Pete’s breath rattled, and when he coughed he arched his back, drawing up his knees under his chest. They rolled him onto a stretcher and gave him a blanket which he gripped, then pulled up to cover his head. They took him down the brick tunnel like that, and out into Erebus Street, as if he were a dead man.

  5

  An hour later Shaw stood at a bedroom window over the Bentinck Launderette looking down into Erebus Street, where hose water welled up out of blocked drains, creating pools to reflect the last flames of the fire at number 6, just out of sight, further up the street, towards the church and the abattoir. A single fire-brigade tender remained, and Shaw could just see two firefighters playing water into the burnt-out building. He knew that all that was left was a gap now, where the house had once stood, a rotten, blackened tooth, although the roof-line was left – slung like a hammock between chimney stacks. The power cut, confined to Erebus Street and the adjacent dock buildings, was ongoing, so most of the residents had been moved to the Kingdom Hall, a Jehovah’s Witness meeting place a quarter of a mile into town.

  Behind him on the single bed lay Neil Judd, Bryan Judd’s younger brother. He’d demanded to speak to Shaw, insisting he had information crucial to the murder inquiry. Shaw had decided the remaining members of the Judd family should stay on Erebus Street that night – the emergency services had portable lighting, and he didn’t want them mixing with the rest of the residents until he’d had statements taken. Shaw’s wounds – some burns to his left hand, right leg, and a nail-gash on the right shin, had been treated out in the street. He was soaked, but had borrowed overalls from the fire crew.

  The burnt-out house, as Liam Kennedy had told them, was owned by the church on the corner and run as a hostel. Both Aidan Holme and the man Shaw had rescued from the flames were at the Queen Victoria. Holme – accompanied by Kennedy – had been taken to intensive care, where he was fighting to overcome the shock of third-degree burns to his arms and neck. His friend was in better shape, but smoke inhalation would keep him in a hospital bed for forty-eight hours, maybe more. Andy Judd had been arrested at the scene. He’d spend the night in the cells at St James’s after a thorough medical examination. The fire brigade’s forensic unit had removed evidence from the house indicating that at least two home-made Molotov cocktails had been lobbed through the broken downstairs window, although the only thing Shaw had seen Andy Judd throw had been a half-brick. A team was taking statements at the Kingdom Hall – but Shaw knew the chances that any of them would incriminate Andy Judd for the arson attack were slight.

  Ally Judd had been visited by the parish priest – Father Martin – then given a sedative and was asleep in her house, next door to the launderette, an officer from family liaison at the bedside. It was nearly midnight and Shaw had wanted to go home, grab some sleep, so that he’d be alert and prepared for the murder inquiry’s first full day. Overnight Paul Twine, a keen, graduate-entry DC, would man the inquiry phone lines at the incident room Valentine had set up on Level One at the hospital, and keep a watching brief on the injured. Shaw had been about to swing the Land Rover out of Erebus Street and drive home when a uniformed PC had flagged him down with a message from DS Valentine: Neil Judd said he wouldn’t sleep, couldn’t sleep, because he had to talk to someone. He’d demanded to see Shaw.

  So sleep would have to wait.

  Shaw turned from the window and watched Neil Judd swig water from a bottle, sitting propped up on pillows on his bed. The bedsit was directly above the launderette, the kitchen shared with his father, a widower, who had a bedroom next to his son’s. Neil’s room was cluttered with teenage paraphernalia – neatly stacked magazines, CDs, DVDs. And the technology to go with it: an iPod and matching sound system, DVD player, a pair of cool dark Wharfedale speakers, a laptop.

  All of which was in sharp contrast to the bare utility of the little shared kitchen, the rusted paraffin heaters in each of the rooms, the bare floorboards. The flat smelt of cheap talc, aftershave, and laundered clothes. Andy’s room was like a cell: spotless, but without a single note of individuality except for a framed picture of Dublin’s O’Connell Bridge. In Neil’s room, by contrast, the walls were covered in film posters: No Country For Old Men, In the Valley of Elah, Godfather II. A Japanese cartoon, framed, blood dripping from a severed arm.

  With the power still out Neil Judd had lit two night-lights on the windowsill and a candle on his bedside table. But the SOC team had set a halogen lantern in the corridor outside which splashed fake daylight into the room
as well.

  Shaw thought there was something wrong with the room; it seemed to belong to someone younger, a fifteen-year-old perhaps. A fifteen-year-old you’d worry about. On the wall was a poster from Taxi Driver showing vigilante Robert De Niro stripped down, weapons taped to his body, a knife on a sliding rail on his upper arm, ready to slip down into his palm from within a jacket, a gun in a neat pouch at his groin. And then there were the magazines – arranged with disturbing neatness on two shelves. Shaw pulled one out: Martial Arts Illustrated.

  ‘You wanted to tell us something,’ he said, prompting. Shaw had noticed that, when someone spoke, Judd turned his head, bringing his ear closer to the sound. But there was nothing subservient about the tic, because a brief look of irritation went with it, as if it were Shaw’s fault that his voice couldn’t be clearly heard.

  ‘I know why Dad did it – why he went for them – the dossers in the hostel.’ Shaw observed that, when he wanted to, when he prepared the sentence, Neil Judd could almost completely disguise the dulling effect of his deafness on his diction.

  Valentine stood with his back to the wardrobe, trying to do some mental arithmetic. He didn’t know much about modern technology or wages on the quayside – Neil Judd said he’d just started as a stevedore, taking his dad’s old job – but Valentine reckoned there was at least a few thousand quids’ worth of gear in the room. And Neil Judd wasn’t full time, he’d told them proudly, but on college day release.

  Valentine knocked out a Silk Cut but Neil Judd got in before he lit it. ‘Spare one?’ he asked. They lit up together, from Valentine’s lighter.

  Judd worked a hand beneath his T-shirt, massaging his stomach, then grasped his bare right foot with the other hand, bending it back so that he could examine the sole. ‘He hated them – the men in the hostel,’ he said. ‘Bry, he was a user, right? He’d always taken stuff – nothing hard, just dope. But they gave him this thing to drink. Green Dragon…’

  He looked at Valentine, sensing the older man would know.

  The DS nodded. ‘Skunk and raw spirit.’ He looked at Shaw. ‘You get it – ’specially off the boats, in from Holland.’

  Neil stretched himself on the bed, and Valentine thought how slight he was, how fragile the bones. Shaw wondered why Judd’s face seemed to radiate an oddly smug expression, as if his evening was going to plan. The death of his brother seemed to be an emotional event confined to another world. When he exhaled his cigarette smoke he pushed it out in a long plume, up at the ceiling.

  ‘Bry was trying to kick it – just ask Ally – and he’d done it, you know, for a year, maybe more. But they got him back on it and he couldn’t get off.’

  Shaw thought there was something cloying about Neil Judd, about the whole family, as though they were all victims, or looking to be victims. ‘Where’d he get the money?’ he asked. ‘Job at the hospital can’t pay enough for a habit like that.’

  Judd swallowed hard. The question seemed to confuse him. He sat up on the bed, pulled his T-shirt up and over his head.

  ‘It’s hot,’ he said, by way of explanation. But Shaw and Valentine knew why he’d done it. His body was slight, but beneath the T-shirt his muscles were clear, sharp with a textbook six-pack. He flexed a hand like a claw. ‘He didn’t pay. He gave them something back – stuff he got from the hospital.’ He smiled. ‘That’s down to you lot… police use the incinerator to burn off drugs – street gear. The bloke in the hostel, Holme, he and Bry worked out a way of getting it out so it looked like it had gone up in smoke. But it hadn’t. Bry got it, and gave it to him…’ He stood and walked lightly on the balls of his feet to the open window.

  Shaw looked quickly at Valentine, asking with his eyes if this could be true. His DS shrugged, unhappy that he’d worked out it was organized crime, but had missed the link with drugs. Now, looking back, it should have been obvious. Because drugs were the rotten heart of modern crime.

  ‘Bry wanted to call the deal off,’ said Judd. ‘He’d told Holme – but there’d been a fight and Bry came back in a mess – his eye cut up. He was crying. Dad saw that. They weren’t close, they hadn’t been for years, but he saw that, and he knew Holme was making him do it, making him trash his life.’

  ‘Hold on,’ said Shaw. ‘You’re saying this Holme character, from the hostel, hit your brother.’

  Neil Judd struck his solar plexus with a fist. ‘Hit!’ he shouted. ‘Christ – Bry was terrified. Holme said he couldn’t back out now, that they’d kill him.’ Neil Judd nodded, kept nodding, leaving that idea to hang in the air.

  ‘He said that?’ asked Valentine, taking a note. ‘Those words? When did he say this?’

  Shaw went to the window as Judd went back to the bed, and, looking down, saw that a priest stood before the ruins of the burnt-out house. He watched him make a sign of the cross then punch a number into a mobile.

  ‘A week ago, yeah – at the weekend,’ said Judd, stretching out. ‘A Sunday. Bry was on his way into work and he went over to try and tell them again – tell them he wouldn’t do it. I think there was a big haul coming through – Bry got to know because he had to make room for the consignment, and be ready to make sure it all went in by batch. He said the place was always crawling with coppers, that it was risky – what they did. He said Holme had gone berserk, laid into him, and that it wasn’t just Bry that would suffer if he pulled out now. Holme said they’d make Ally suffer too. He hit Bry, in the eye, a few times, so that it kind of ballooned up. The white bit was all bloody.’

  As he said it he couldn’t stop himself looking into Shaw’s dead eye – the full-moon white pupil oddly piercing. He turned away on one shoulder so that he could pull up the pillow behind his head. Then he put an ashtray onto his knee, but Valentine didn’t offer him another cigarette. Adrenaline was making the young man’s foot shake from side to side, like a windscreen wiper, the underside of the foot black where he’d walked out into the street.

  ‘We’ll need a formal statement,’ said Shaw. ‘Tomorrow. We’ll come here.’

  ‘Right. No problem. It’s only right – that fucker needs to pay for what he’s done.’ The tone of his voice was flat, as if he was reading out his emotions rather than feeling them.

  They left him to rest and made their way down the stairs and back through the launderette to the street. DC Jacky Lau was on the doorstep. Lau was in her thirties, short, stocky, and pugnacious. Her spare time was spent racing at the Norfolk Arena: hot rods, souped-up road cars. She wore a leather jacket now, despite the heat, and her Mégane, complete with aerofoils and spoilers, was parked at the kerb. She had a notebook in one hand and a bacon sandwich in the other, partly wrapped in foil. Valentine had told her she could clock off from the murder team an hour ago, but she’d insisted on checking out the two men from the hostel against the records at St James’s.

  ‘The men from the hostel, sir, I’ve got some details.’

  She put the sandwich on top of the roof of the Mégane. Shaw heard footsteps in the street and looking towards the church saw the priest again, moving through the headstones set in the small graveyard.

  ‘Holme, the badly injured one,’ said Lau. ‘Aidan Smith Holme – he’s got a record as long as a needle-pocked arm. Thirty-two. He’s up on a charge – supplying again. Third count. Guilty both times, but never jailed. Due in court end of the month. Bailed by a family member – an uncle, who must trust him; he’s put up five thousand pounds. In another life he was a teacher at the tech. General science. Lost the job after the first offence. He was supplying the kids.’

  ‘Plea this time?’

  ‘Not guilty.’

  If he can raise bail he can afford a decent lawyer as well, thought Shaw. But if he couldn’t wriggle out he’d be inside for a decent stretch, two to five years on the third count.

  Shaw pressed the heel of his palm into his good eye, massaging the skin, uneasy now that he hadn’t known where the West Norfolk force destroyed street-haul drugs. He’d never worked on the drugs squad, and nei
ther had George Valentine. It was a weakness – worse, a weakness they shared.

  ‘And this “Pete”? – the one from upstairs?’

  ‘According to the priest – a Father Martin – his name’s Hendre, with an “e”. It’s a match for a name on our database too. Peter Hendre – if it’s the same man – was an accountant. Struck off in 1990. He fleeced some old dears while sorting out their finances. One of the relatives spotted that the numbers didn’t add up. Eight counts – down for three years. He’s only just come back to the area; been away a year, here for just a few days. They gave him a spare room. Hostel’s only for the dossers they trust, apparently. They have to be clean – no booze, no drugs, no sex. Martin says Hendre’s got serious mental health issues: paranoia. But he doesn’t touch stuff – any kind of stuff. He hadn’t heard of anyone called…’ She checked her notebook. ‘The Organ Grinder?’

  Shaw nodded.

  ‘But he says the last time Hendre was here he claimed he was being followed by a man in a white coat with a butcher’s cleaver. Mad as a hatter.’

  Shaw walked out into the middle of the street. He was past tired now, his mind invigorated by Neil Judd’s statement. He took in a lungful of night air. Valentine looked at his watch, a Rolex he’d bought on the Tuesday Market for £1. It said 12.15. He hugged his raincoat to him. They had a suspect, a motive, and the inquiry was less than four hours old. If they tied up a few loose ends he might sneak in for the last ten minutes at the Artichoke. It had a late licence for Sundays till one. Then, maybe, a lock-in.

  But Shaw had other ideas.