Death Watch

by Unknown

  He watched the film again. There was something wrong. But what was it? Something that didn’t fit. Something that jarred.

  ‘Who’s in the passenger seat?’ he asked himself. ‘Why would two teenagers go out on a joyride and sit in the back? Is there someone in the front seat – or is there something on the front seat?’

  He found the image again of the windscreen when the car came to rest under the trees. He drew a cursor round the darkened area on the passenger side and blew the image up: ×10, ×20, ×50. But the film’s original poor quality made the images chaotic, an illogical patchwork of black and grey.

  Shaw printed out half a dozen stills from the footage.

  He looked at one frame of the three men standing on the road. Could one of these young men be Robert Mosse, the 21-year-old Shaw’s father and George Valentine had arrested for the murder of Jonathan Tessier? He’d been a member of a gang of juvenile thugs in his teenage years before leaving for university. A gang of four. In the weeks leading up to Tessier’s murder he’d been at home, back amongst his roots. Had he gone out for a joyride, a few drinks with old friends, and then a late-night high-speed romp, just like old times? Or – another possibility – had he gone for the joyride but been smart enough to stay in the car after the crash? Was he there, amongst the grey and black shadows, in the passenger seat?

  He looked at a still image of the Mini, the windscreen speckled with raindrops except where it had been cleaned by the wipers. There was still something wrong. Something else wrong.

  He popped out the cassette, put it in the machine above, and made three copies. He took his copies, and the stills, and deposited the original back at the duty desk. When he got in the Land Rover he pinned that same image on the dashboard. He looked at it for ten minutes, then gave up, turned the ignition key and swung out into a deserted St James’s.

  25

  Tuesday, 7 September

  Two hours after dawn, and low tide in Morston Creek; no view except the mudbanks, oystercatchers planting webbed feet in the sticky ooze. The boat nosed its way through the maze of creeks out into Blakeney Channel. The sky was stretched-blue, dotted with clouds which would later billow into chimneys of heated, moist air. But the morning was cool still, the smell of the tidal waters salty and fresh.

  Shaw sucked the sea air in like a drug. He’d had a call from DC Twine in the murder room at 5.30: a body had been spotted by a fishing smack on a sandbank in the Wash. Tom Hadden had gone out on the Harbour Conservancy launch with his night-duty CSI officer. He’d texted Twine to say there was a link with the Judd murder – no details. Shaw didn’t need to go to sea himself – but he was awake, and he had his father’s mantra: if you can see it for yourself, see it for yourself. And if he was losing sleep, he didn’t see why DS Valentine shouldn’t too.

  The tourist boat Albatross broke into open water, following a channel marked by buoys past the small craft moored in the shallows. Hadden had called out anyone on the CSI payroll who wasn’t tied up on the Judd inquiry. Half a dozen of them sat morosely in the boat cradling their kit, smoking, drinking tea from flasks. Valentine stood at the back talking to the man at the tiller, an eye on the sooty net-curtain of rain which fell from a lone storm cloud, edging inland.

  Twine had the bare details from the crew who’d spotted the body. The Kittyhawk had landed three men at sunrise on Warham’s Hole, a stretch of sand the size of a football pitch. Basking seals had scattered as soon as they’d come ashore, to retrieve a string of crab pots which had broken loose during the night. When the seals were gone something was left: one of those industrial bags, incredibly strong, used on building sites to carry rubble, or sand, or hard core. It held assorted rubbish – tin cans, oil drums, and what the Kittyhawk’s captain reported as ‘human remains’.

  Valentine sat, pulling his raincoat up to his ears. ‘Here it comes,’ he said, looking up at the sky. The rain began to fall in drops the size of paperweights, leisurely, then in a frenzy, turning swiftly to hailstones which stung the flesh. Visibility dropped to twenty feet, the air white with plummeting ice, the hailstones lying in the boat and in the folds of Shaw’s all-weather jacket. They chugged on, the summer boat trip suddenly transformed into a snapshot from some Antarctic expedition. Valentine felt ice-cold water beginning to insinuate itself down his neck. He thought about the coke fire in the Artichoke; the intensity of the heat on the palms of his downturned hands.

  The blue sky appeared overhead even before the hailstones had stopped falling. Then the sun broke through, and Shaw saw that they were there – fifty yards off the island of sand. About forty grey seals lounged amongst the melting hailstones. Two or three pairs half-heartedly cuffed each other or rolled in tumbles. Around the Albatross heads appeared in the sea, disappeared, like fairground targets.

  ‘There,’ said Valentine, pointing at two figures on the far lip of the sand working beside a grey bag, long and narrow like a deflated balloon. The spot had been marked by the Kittyhawk with an orange distress buoy.

  In two feet of water Shaw stepped overboard. The seals, mildly inquisitive of the floating boat, panicked as the humans stepped ashore, shuffling towards the sea, trapped, it seemed, in sleeping bags. Within a minute they’d deserted Warham’s Hole.

  The CSI team jumped ship and unloaded a mobile SOC tent and lights. Shaw led the way about eighty yards across the ribbed sand – hard, crystalline, surprisingly solid. Beside the asbestos-grey bag Hadden had laid out its contents in military rows: about thirty tin cans, some metal tubs which had once held machine oil, and three black bin liners – one of them torn – to reveal more rubbish, mostly discarded food wrapping. Shaw could see a cardboard pizza box and a plastic curry tray. All that was left in the bag, which had been stretched open, was a corpse on its side, one hand thrown backwards, the fingers of the hand stiff and swollen, the arm extended like a waiter’s offering a salver of champagne glasses.

  Hadden was examining a piece of nylon rope which had been threaded through the four handles of the bag. Shaw could see where the rope was still kinked by the memory of the knot.

  ‘Weights?’ asked Valentine.

  Hadden nodded. They were all thinking the same thing. The sack, weighted down with the rope attached to an anchor or lead weight.

  ‘If the knot hadn’t slipped we’d have never seen chummy again,’ said Shaw. ‘He’d have been fish food within the week. How long’s he been in, Tom?’

  ‘Rigor’s still apparent,’ said Hadden. ‘So – given the water’s not that warm – forty-eight hours? Maximum of forty-eight – maybe less, Peter.’

  Shaw still couldn’t see the face. But he could see the victim was male, white, middle aged, wearing jogging pants and a sweatshirt, the head shaved. The skin showed all the signs of immersion, puckered and swollen, but was otherwise intact, free of feeding marks. There was a washed-out bloodstain on the sweatshirt chest. Hadden used gloved hands to lift the material, revealing a gunshot wound.

  ‘Justina needs to tell you about this,’ he said. ‘But if you want an amateur’s opinion, I’d say this killed him. It’s very close to the heart.’

  ‘Calibre?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘Nine millimetres – a handgun. Difficult to tell range, Peter. He’s been in the water too long for any residue to be left on the skin. But it’s not point-blank. I can’t say any more.’

  Shaw leant in. He couldn’t smell anything except an intense aroma of the sea, like oysters on a bed of ice. He noted acne on the body’s exposed neck. ‘It’s not Blanket,’ he said. ‘Height and weight are wrong.’

  And one detail he didn’t see first time – only three fingers and a thumb on the right hand, an old scar where the index finger should have been.

  ‘This is why I called…’ said Hadden, handing Shaw an evidence bag. Inside was a plastic charity wristband. Valentine had seen Shaw wearing one in the spring – red and blue, with RNLI printed on the ring. Shaw turned it to catch the early slanting sun and saw that three letters were stencilled in the w
hite plastic.

  MVR.

  Shaw thought about that – about what kind of organization would have charity bands made, and issue torches with the letters on as well. Silently he decided that he needed to make a personal visit to the hospital vehicle pool.

  ‘The band’s luminous, by the way,’ said Hadden. ‘If that helps.’

  Shaw handed Valentine the bag. ‘Can we see the face – you’ve not turned him over?’

  Hadden called up one of his team, who took a set of pictures. Then Hadden took hold of the dead man’s shoulder, Shaw his thigh, and they rolled him over, the dead arm flailing.

  The face was almost perfect – untouched. The lips were blue, a light stubble on the chin, the nose slender and almost feminine. There were only two things missing.

  The eyes.

  26

  Valentine watched a thin line of tourists in blue and red cagoules walking out over the tidal mud on duck-boards, queuing to climb aboard one of the seal trip boats moored on Morston Creek. Valentine had brought ‘solids’ from the National Trust shop – a game pie, a coffee, and a packet of Hula Hoops.

  Shaw was on the mobile, tracking down DI William Creake.

  ‘Bill?’ he said, cupping the phone, turning his back on the sea breeze.

  ‘Yeah – fine, good. She’s well. Look. I need your help. You know this stiff down on the docks – the one they found on the storm grid? Right. I know. Have you got the records down from Cleethorpes yet – the missing person?’

  Shaw looked at Valentine and couldn’t help a weary glance up to the sky. ‘No? Yeah – it takes time. But you’re sure of that – the widow says he never wore a watch? Right. I was in the Ark for the autopsy on our man from the hospital and I couldn’t help noticing your one had marks on his wrist. So, if it’s not a watch…’

  Shaw’s shoulder sagged. He listened for a minute, then cut the line.

  He walked towards Valentine’s Mazda talking over his shoulder. ‘Creake’s just read the original witness statements. Something he’d missed – one of the workmen who found the floater said he was caught on the grid by a plastic band on his wrist, snagged on the mesh. It’s with the victim’s personal effects at St James’s – Bill’s checking it out. But I think we know what letters are stencilled on it, don’t we?’

  Shaw was angry, but not as angry as George Valentine. He’d spent ten years of his life on the north Norfolk coast – busted down to DS – running a case load dominated by petty theft at weekend cottages and the odd half-hearted armed robbery at an amusement arcade. Meanwhile police officers as incompetent as Bill Creake had been made up to DI.

  ‘Ring Justina for me, George. Tell her I want another examination of the floater – tell her to make up any excuse she wants to get it off Rigby. It doesn’t usually take much.’

  Valentine made the call. He threw the mobile onto the dashboard. ‘Why wristbands?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know, but I can have a guess. They’re ID bands; last thing you want to do in a transplant operation is mix up donor and recipient. Maybe it’s that simple – white for donors, red for recipients. Like I said, I don’t know. But if Bill Creake had done his job I could have started trying to find out yesterday – which would have been a big plus.’

  Valentine thought how often it was that the simple details brought a crime to life. He still couldn’t get the image of the victim they’d just found out of his mind. ‘There’s a market for human eyes?’ he asked, avoiding Shaw’s.

  ‘Yes. There’s a market for everything. There’s a market for the bones.’

  ‘And MVR?’ asked Valentine.

  ‘I still think it’s the motor pool – especially now. This isn’t some backstreet one-off op, George. This is trade. This has to be a donor. Bill Creake’s floater too. Then there’s Blanket – where’s he gone? This isn’t just about Bryan Judd’s murder any more – although as he isn’t a donor, he may be the key to this. We need to get this info to people who can help us. As soon as we get to the incident room get on it, George – Interpol, the Yard, Customs, the lot. And we need to shake down the hospital – surgeons, nursing staff, everyone.’

  Valentine drove, lighting a Silk Cut from the Mazda’s dashboard lighter, keeping his eyes on the road. He had that trick of being able to keep his eyes open even when the smoke got in them. When they parked outside A&E, they slapped a ‘Police’ sign on the windscreen. Twine was in the incident room, with Birley still running through CCTV footage.

  ‘Where’s Jofranka Phillips?’ asked Shaw, taking a coffee from a tray.

  ‘Organ bank, sir, with the inquiry team. She’ll be there all day.’

  ‘Right.’ He told Twine what they’d found on Warham’s Hole, and the link with Bill Creake’s floater in the storm grid. ‘MVR. There has to be a link,’ he said. ‘So let’s shut the garage down – seal it. Get a description of the body out on the sands to all the papers. Hadden says there’s a missing finger – the scar’s an old one, so that helps. Don’t mention organ removal. We’ll hold off for another twenty-four hours on that – then make a splash. We need to get the team trawling through the hospital staff, Paul. Let’s start at the top. Do we have anything on Phillips and Peploe? Background, HR files… anything?’

  Twine nodded, expertly sifting through documents on the computer, then printing out two sheets of A4. Shaw read Peploe first – a life in 350 words. Standard education for the son of a Perth doctor. A good school, then Edinburgh University, then a post at a New York clinic specializing in restorative cosmetic surgery for young children. He was forty-five, married, with two grown-up children. In 1989 he had taken part in the Whitbread Round the World Race as part of a team based in Southampton, sponsored by Goldman Sachs.

  Jofranka Phillips’s life story had been defined by her father – Kalo Kircher. A surgeon at a private hospital in Neustadt, western Germany, in the 1930s, he was a pioneer in early operations to remove cataracts. At the outbreak of the Second World War he had been rounded up and transported to a Jewish holding centre at Mannheim, and then sent to the death camp at Chelmno in Poland. He was not a Jew. He was a member of the Roma, the once-footloose people who had dispersed across Europe; the true cultural forebears of the gypsies. He was a Roman Catholic. Like many Roma, he’d simply taken on one of the religions of his adopted country.

  For the Nazis the Roma were as eligible for extermination as the Jews. Kalo’s medical qualifications enabled him to escape the mobile gas vans of Chelmno. Instead, he was forced to assist staff under the command of Dr Eduard Wirths. A series of barbaric experiments were undertaken at Chelmno in an attempt to prove the Nazis’ racial theories. In 1945, when the camp was liberated, Kircher was found hanging from a roof beam in the block reserved for those prisoners who had worked for the Nazis. He wasn’t dead. A medical team with the Soviet Army saved his life.

  Kalo returned to Neustadt, then part of West Germany, and helped reorganize surgical services in the city. In 1958 an application was made by the State of Israel for Kircher’s extradition to stand trial for war crimes committed at Chelmno. Kircher was found hanging in his holding cell where he had been awaiting interview. The noose had been fashioned from the stethoscope in the medical bag he’d been carrying when picked up outside his surgery. This time he was successful. His daughter was born posthumously in early 1959. She moved with her mother – a GP – and her three elder brothers to London in 1962. A private school, a degree in medicine at Bristol, and a series of positions at major hospitals followed. Phillips was divorced, with no children. The brothers had all taken medical degrees and practised in the US – two in California, one in Maine. All the brothers supported a charity which provided free medical care for the poor in Israel.

  Shaw folded the two sheets of paper inside his jacket. It was one of the oddities of police work; that you got to meet people, then strip down their lives without them knowing. He’d never got over the sense of intrusion. He swigged back the last of the double espresso.

  DC Birley had been w
aiting for Shaw to finish reading. ‘Sir,’ he said, nodding towards the bank of CCTV screens. ‘I’ve got something.’ He pulled up seats for all of them, then began running a cassette on the main screen. ‘Got to this an hour ago,’ he said. ‘Paul’s got some software which cleans up the image – this is the original…’

  The main screen flickered, then showed a sunlit car park.

  ‘The camera’s over the entrance to the Bluebell – that’s the maternity hospital. I left it till last – big mistake.’ The Bluebell shared the site with the main hospital, a single covered walkway linking the two main buildings.

  A man and a woman came into view from beneath the camera position and shared a cigarette. Then a large figure in what looked like a set of workman’s overalls walked surprisingly quickly into shot, then into the hospital. Movement was jerky, the figure seeming to disappear, then reappear, with each small laboured step.

  ‘This is the best image after we’d run it through the clever stuff,’ said Birley.

  The image cleared, then reappeared, sharper, the grey edged out by black and white. It was Jan Orzsak, glancing up at the sky as he stepped into the shadows of the Bluebell maternity wing.

  ‘Time and date?’ asked Valentine.

  ‘That’s the really good news. Seven thirty on the target day – Sunday evening.’

  They’d already checked out Jan Orzsak’s alibi and they’d been able to track his movements throughout Sunday except for the two hours before he’d arrived at the Polish Club at nine. Now they knew why.

  ‘Let’s get him in,’ said Shaw. He leant back in his seat, looking up at the neon strip above. ‘No, forget that. We’ll go to him.’ He checked his watch. ‘One hour. George and I will be there.’ He shook his head. Every time he set aside the story of Norma Jean Judd he regretted it. Her disappearance eighteen years earlier seemed to run through the case like letters through seaside rock. Letters in code. But the link between the two sides of the case – the trade in organs and the disappearance of Bryan Judd’s sister – eluded him still. And he had to fight now, to keep the broader view in mind. This wasn’t a single murder inquiry any more. It was a multiple murder inquiry.