Death Watch

by Unknown

  ‘Jackie,’ he said. ‘Get some sleep – then seven tomorrow at the hospital. George has set up an incident room close to the SOC. Be there.’

  ‘Sir.’ She crammed the last of the bacon into her mouth and fired up the Mégane, the engine rumble making a few loose windows vibrate.

  Shaw watched the car turn the corner by the abattoir. ‘We don’t really need our beauty sleep – do we, George? How about some overtime?’

  Valentine’s shoulders slumped. ‘Now?’

  ‘Yeah – now. Ring the hospital – find me this Kennedy character. If he’s the warden, does he live here, on the street? Find out. See if he’s coming home, and if he is, tell him we want a word. He knows Holme, knows him well. I want to know what he knows, and I want to know now. Holme said something to him – here, in the street. When Holme said he was dying he also said, “I told you” – like he’d predicted it. I want to know what that meant.’ He looked around, bouncing on his toes. ‘If he’s staying at the hospital we’ll go to him.’

  As Valentine made the call Shaw listened to the night. It was quiet now, in the witching hour after midnight, except for the trickling of water falling through the ruins of number 6 and pooling in the basement. As Valentine negotiated his way through the hospital switchboard to try and raise Kennedy, Shaw walked to the old dock gates, then turned, looking back towards the Gothic outline of the Sacred Heart.

  Valentine stood by the car, cut off his mobile, and lit a cigarette. ‘Kennedy’s on his way back now in one of our squad cars – ten minutes. He lives at the church.’

  ‘Great,’ said Shaw.

  And then, sharply, out of the night, came the sound of running footsteps. In the street, nothing moved. But the sound was as unmistakable as a chiming clock. Shaw could see the whole street and nothing in it was moving. Behind the houses on each side ran tarmacked paths. Is that where the sound came from? Not just footsteps. Metallic footsteps. Shaw imagined them conjuring up a line of sparks in the dark. And then they were gone.

  6

  Shaw and Valentine stood together in silence, examining the texture of the night for the sound they’d both heard. It was an odd facet of their relationship, one that neither would ever openly admit, that they did have this ability to know, unspoken, that they were thinking exactly the same thing.

  ‘Get a couple of uniforms to check the back alleys,’ said Shaw. ‘Someone’s about.’ He checked the tide watch. ‘Someone who shouldn’t be about.’ But Valentine went himself, walking stiffly but quickly to the nearest entry and disappearing down into the shadows, already on the mobile summoning assistance.

  Then Shaw heard footsteps again, but this time they were scuffed and soft. Looking back at the dock gates he saw a man appear out of the shadows, opening a wire gate, and swinging a torch so that it danced at his feet. He had a badge on the chest pocket of a set of neat blue overalls which read NORTH NORFOLK POWER. Mid-fifties, with academic half-moon glasses, he looked out of place in the utility’s overalls. A professor on a building site. He said his name was Andersen, head of supply, out on call.

  ‘Police? Senior Fire Officer said I should talk to you – we’re here to get the power back on? We sent out a unit earlier but they’ve just got me out too…’ Shaw recalled the white van they’d seen parked by the dock gates when they’d first arrived in Erebus Street. ‘I’ve got a problem, and frankly, I think it should be yours.’

  ‘I’ll get an officer to you asap. Ten minutes?’

  Andersen shrugged. ‘Sure. But I think you’ll regret not taking a look yourself. Believe me.’

  Shaw felt the tension buzzing in his bloodstream. He needed to get on, to focus; he didn’t need a pointless distraction. But that, he knew, was an attitude which might lead to disaster. Because it was far too early to separate a pointless distraction from a vital lead, just hours into a murder inquiry. He forced himself to relax, letting his shoulders fall, his neck muscles unbunching, telling himself he was tired, stressed.

  He followed Andersen to the wire fence, through the gate, and around some dusty shrubs until they could see the electricity sub-station. The building was bathed in the light from a small battery lantern hung from a branch. Shaw guessed the building was inter-war, a confection in concrete thinly disguised as a kind of Greek temple, with a row of half-columns, a decorated arch, and the rendering painted a delicate cream. There was even a frieze depicting naked Greek athletes: a discus thrower, a shot putter, and wrestlers. Genitalia had been added in spray paint to the original graceful classical lines, and a graffiti tag, ‘TOG’, in curled, bloated letters.

  ‘Bit of a collector’s item, this one,’ said Andersen. ‘Grade II listed; 1949. Renovated in the nineties. Build one these days you’d pick a brick-box out of a catalogue. They had some civic pride then.’

  Shaw examined the engineer’s face, noting the bags under the eyes, the bloodshot sclera, the loose flesh. ‘Long day?’ he asked. ‘Hope you’re on overtime.’

  Andersen laughed. ‘You’re kidding. This is all part of the job, Inspector. Our contract makes us solely responsible for restoring supply – till then I stay on site.’ He yawned, revealing a pale pink throat.

  There was a yard strewn with rubbish: beer bottles, cans, a CD player, and a buckled supermarket trolley. A dead cat lay amongst the litter, its lips drawn back from white teeth.

  Andersen opened a reinforced metal door and switched on a torch.

  ‘They cut the bolts on this,’ he said, indicating a padlock hanging, the shackle sheared through.

  Inside, there was a small area of bare concrete, while the rest of the building was crammed with what looked like a giant 1930s radio, or an antique computer: electrical switch gear, insulated wiring, printed circuit plates, brass, aluminium, steel and plastic. Despite the squalor of the yard the machinery was rustless. If electricity has an aroma they were overwhelmed by it now; the thin after-smell of warm plastic and heated metal.

  ‘This is pretty much museum quality too,’ said the engineer, swinging the torch beam over the scene. ‘Upgraded, like I said, in the nineties. Past it now. We won’t bother to repair it, put it like that. We’ll rip it out. Which means the power’ll be out for some time, so we’re running in a temporary supply now by cable.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We should have the juice any moment now.’

  The engineer knelt where someone had drawn a chalk line.

  Before he said another word Shaw saw something which made his heart skip a beat: a single match on the concrete floor, spent, but snapped neatly in half and left to form a V – just like the one they’d found at the hospital, where Bryan Judd had sneaked away to smoke. But Bryan Judd had had a lighter.

  Shaw squatted down. ‘You smoke? Any of your crew?’

  Andersen shook his head.

  Shaw thought about the habit. You struck the match, you broke it with one hand, then flicked it clear. No ashtray – just on the ground. It was the kind of habit you’d pick up working outside, all day, every day.

  Andersen played the torch on the concrete floor, revealing a stain like a spreading head wound. Shaw could smell evaporating fuel – probably paraffin. A bottle lay on its side unbroken – a milk bottle – a half-burnt rag in the neck. Scorch marks ran up into the electrics and a bunch of wires, like disembodied nerves, hung together in a melted mess. Shaw couldn’t stop the flash of memory, seeing again the handless arm of the victim in the incinerator, the flesh fused by the heat.

  They heard footsteps behind them, and Valentine appeared. He caught Shaw’s eye. ‘Nothing from the back alleys – they’re checking out the rough ground but it’s deserted out there.’ He stepped forward, assessing the scene. ‘Molotov cocktail?’ he asked.

  ‘Right,’ said the engineer. ‘Fire officer tells me there’s evidence of others up at that house they burnt out. So there’s a little production line somewhere – someone’s a proper little Guy Fawkes.’

  Shaw looked into the machinery. A set of black scorch marks had disfigured a circuit panel.
<
br />   ‘I don’t get it – looks like it didn’t explode.’

  ‘That’s right, I think. They got two things wrong. The bottle didn’t break – perhaps they chucked it in and then ran for it – and they’ve shut the door after them. These things are pretty much airtight. The fire’s used up the oxygen and fizzled out.’

  ‘But the power went?’ said Valentine, shifting his feet because his back was aching, the tiredness making his head hang even lower on his neck.

  ‘Yes. If that was what they wanted then they struck lucky. The flames from the rag have burnt those wires there…’ He pointed with an insulated screwdriver. ‘The insulating plastic has melted away and left two of the cables touching – so yeah, bang it is. The short circuit has blown a load of fuses and cracked some of the insulated boards – so we can’t even do a quick fix.’

  ‘There were other power cuts,’ said Shaw. ‘We were up at the hospital and it went there too.’

  ‘A few. When something like this shuts down it throws the grid. We have to juggle the power supplies. That puts extra load on areas not designed to take it and so we lost a couple of other units later in the day, when everyone put their kettles on. It’s all up now – ’cept this.’

  Shaw thought about that: the power cut at the hospital, the silent conveyor, the torch marked MVR. Pieces of the jigsaw that didn’t seem to fit.

  ‘The rag?’ asked Shaw. What they could see of it was only burnt at one end. The rest had been white, defaced by a vivid red stain.

  Shaw sniffed the warm air. He got closer, a few inches from the rag. He might be imagining it, but he thought he’d caught the thin hint of iron behind the reek of paraffin.

  Valentine couldn’t squat down if he wanted to, so he took a guess. ‘Blood?’ he asked.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Shaw. ‘But a better question is why. Why cut the power, and why cut it in Erebus Street? And why cut it at noon?’ He turned to Valentine. ‘And is there a link to Bryan Judd and the hospital? Judd died between 7.45 and 8.31 tonight. The broken matches are the same – but that’s hardly compelling. Take a thousand smokers, a few will do that – it’s one of those black and white movie mannerisms: Bogart, Jimmy Cagney. That generation. But if there’s no link, then it’s a coincidence. And we don’t like those, do we, George?’

  Andersen wiped his hands on a J-cloth from his pocket and tugged his shirt collar away from his neck. ‘Well – cutting the power is not going to have much effect on people’s heating systems. It’s got to be eighty degrees out there – more. But you lose power, you lose lots of things: TVs, radios, clocks – some clocks.’

  ‘Doorbells, some doorbells,’ echoed Valentine.

  ‘Or lights,’ said Shaw. ‘You cut the power you get darkness. No street lights, no house lights. Just darkness. Then, if you don’t want to be seen, you don’t have to be seen.’

  Valentine lit a Silk Cut, the sudden flare just managing to flicker in the hooded eyes. ‘Yeah. That makes sense.’ He couldn’t keep a note of contempt out of his voice. He had a real weakness for insubordination. ‘Then you light a fire and dance round it.’ He blew on the match, snapped it in the middle, then slipped it in his raincoat pocket.

  They picked their way back out into Erebus Street where the unclouded moon still beat down. Valentine dabbed at the sweat on his forehead.

  ‘Heat,’ said Shaw. ‘What you need – really need – in a heatwave is ice. Fridges, freezers. And air conditioning. You cut the power, everything cooks.’

  ‘Then what?’ said Valentine.

  Shaw sniffed the night air. ‘Something starts to rot.’

  7

  A minute later, at 12.46 a.m. precisely, the power came back on, flooding Erebus Street with light, sending the shadows dashing for cover. The street lamps flared Lucozade-orange, catching the drifting smoke and steam from the burnt-out house; while a neon cross, as stark as Christ’s, now shone lime green from the roof of the church. Halfway up the street the launderette’s 24-HOUR WASH sign throbbed like an insipid imitation. The oppressive heat still hung in the street, making the air thick, distorting the straight urban lines, like a mirage.

  Shaw sat in the Land Rover, his knees up, head back, resting his eyes, waiting for the squad car to bring Liam Kennedy, the hostel warden, back to the church. Valentine waited too, on one of the trestle tables outside the Crane, smoking for pleasure, looking down at his shoes.

  Shaw thought he was beyond sleep now. He was thinking about the milk bottle, full of fuel, and the bloody rag. He’d ask Valentine to ring the station and order swabs to be taken from all those they’d arrested in the street outside the hostel. They’d have taken fingerprints as routine, but swabs were a long shot, just in case they found any DNA on the bottle. He tried to keep his mind on the case but instead his thoughts went back to the beach, to his world, an antidote to places like Erebus Street, and the people who lived there.

  The beach. Earlier that evening – which seemed now like a snapshot from someone else’s life – he’d sat on the sand to watch the sunset, the world behind him, and nothing in front of him, the seascape alive with shades of shifting blue and falling white. And the blue above, the particular stretched-blue of a summer sky, made something rush through his bloodstream, just like the endorphins that made him run and swim. The kick from the ozone was tangible too, and came in waves like the sea, especially when the water had broken, sliding in over the flat sands in a sizzling pool.

  If he sat on the beach alone, he always sat at the same spot, at the place where he’d come to rest as a child. This view, from this precise point, had been with him all his conscious life – in fact he often wondered if it was written in his DNA, an inheritance from an unknown ancestor. Or his father? He should have asked him before he died if he’d come here as a child. They’d certainly played here together. He’d often, in his turn, watched his daughter Francesca running in circles, then stopping, on the same spot, and looking out to sea. Shaw liked to think she had discovered in her head that precise set of images which he held in his. DNA as a map reference. It was a 360-degree panorama: the tufted dunes behind, with their hidden amphitheatres of sand, the beach running south towards the huts and the lifeboat station at Old Hunstanton, a barnacle cluster of wooden roofs, and the sea itself – not a single image, but two: to the west on a clear day the low hills of Lincolnshire across the Wash, while to the north the beach ran towards Holme, where the coast of England turned at last to face the Pole, a great sweep of sand, ribbed like a giant fingerprint, the line of high tide marked by pines, bent back, cowering from the wind.

  When the Old Beach Café had come on the market its location had been perfect, combining his beach with Lena’s dream – to live and work in the free air, out of the city. Two years ago it had been a derelict timber chalet, although Shaw recalled buying ice cream at a wooden counter there when he was a child. But it had closed before he was ten. He’d been on the crew of the little inshore lifeboat before he’d left for university, so he’d been able to keep a watching brief on the ruin of crumbling buildings. When he’d come back from the Met he’d joined the crew of the rescue hovercraft, installed to cover the sands and marshes of the north Norfolk coast, so he’d checked it out again, secretly, for Lena.

  She’d been looking at properties along the coast, at Cromer, Sheringham, and beyond. He’d let her search, then suggested she take a look at the Old Beach Café, just when he thought the price would be at rock bottom, at the point when the roof beams looked like they wouldn’t make another winter. She’d been looking for the right place. It took her thirty seconds to realize she’d found it. For the asking price of £80,000 they acquired the old cottage behind the café (no roof, no services) and the boathouse beside it (wet rot, no roof ). Lena had worked hard, but most of all she’d kept going, surmounting each crisis, amending the business plan with the bank as they got to know their customers – the weekend/summer-cottage London crowd who were turning north Norfolk into ‘Chelsea-on-sea’, and the kiss-me-quick hordes who desce
nded on Hunstanton in the high season from the East Midlands. Families, raw with sunburn by the time they headed back for their cars, or clustered on blankets, the women in shell-suits or saris, giggling at the men.

  Two ends of the market, with nothing in between. The boathouse was now called Surf – selling beach gear from £300 wetsuits to plastic windmills at £1.50. The Old Beach Café was just that. The cottage was home. A night-light would be burning now in his daughter’s room. He imagined her in the narrow bunk bed, a pale arm hanging down from the duvet through the gap in the wooden slats. And Lena? She had an ability to wake when he came home, then slip away again at will, as if sleep could be dismissed, then summoned, without taking offence. But he could touch her now, because he’d found that he could do that in his mind – feel the salt drying on her skin, the dampness at the nape of the neck, the slight inward curve of her back. Only her face, animated and fluid, was less easily conjured, like the shape of a cloud.

  The first time he’d seen that face the black skin had been splashed with blood. She’d been sitting on the bottom step of a staircase in a house on Railton Road in Brixton, holding a young boy to her chest, with both arms around his neck. Shaw had never forgotten his name: Benjamin Winston Azore. He was fifteen years old and would get no older. Lena, a field lawyer for the Campaign for Racial Equality, had been working in the neighbourhood for a year. She’d been in the house seeing Benjamin’s mother about a complaint she’d made against the Met when someone had knocked on the front door. Benjamin had answered it. He’d had several suppliers in a short and brutal life, but this one was new, and he’d run out of cash. Benjamin didn’t have any cash. He’d been shot twice – once in the shoulder, once through the heart. Shaw, straight out of the Met training college at Hendon, had answered a 999 call from a neighbour. When he came through the door Lena was holding Benjamin, the boy’s mother was on the landing above, gently pressing both her pale palms against the wall, keening gently.