Death Watch

by Unknown

  Dawn was still an hour away. The night had taken its toll on Phillips, who covered her face with her long fingers.

  ‘Tell me about your father,’ said Shaw, knowing it was one question she’d feel compelled to answer.

  ‘He died before I was born. By the time I arrived his life was over, but its shadow was on all of us. And has been ever since.’

  Shaw hardened his voice, impatient with the self-pity in her answer. ‘Your brothers?’

  ‘They felt, and I feel, that he would have wanted us to make recompense.’ She’d chosen the word beautifully. ‘We are innocent of his guilt, of course – but families don’t work like that, do they? It’s the stigma, attached to the name, to the blood.’

  ‘And the Kircher Institute needs money?’

  She laughed, closing her eyes. ‘Millions. My brothers coped, then old age has overtaken them, and then death – only Hanzi now, and he is bedridden. So they turned to me. And I felt helpless, impotent. I’d been to the Kircher, of course, and I’d become involved in the campaign to change the law, to allow the removal of organs from the brain-dead. I was interested in the subject, aware of the market. I thought I could do this, that if we were careful with collecting our donors, if we offered them this’ – she searched the dictionary in her head – ‘this opportunity, then there was nothing evil in this, and that great good would come from it. I posed as a client, and met Juan de Mesquita. The Rosa had already been converted by then, but he had no steady supply of donors, and the surgeon he used was on the edge of the law – in Germany, near Hamburg. It was too dangerous. I solved his problems.’

  ‘And the money?’

  ‘Went to the Kircher. All of it.’

  ‘And you don’t see the irony in that? That your father died of shame because he experimented on prisoners. Innocents.’

  ‘We pay the donors. They are treated well. Very well.’

  Shaw conjured up what he hoped was a cruel smile, seeing again John Pearmain’s body on Warham’s Hole. ‘You don’t know, do you? You think Rey is here just to assist in these operations? They needed you for this. For the transplants. But other things are simpler… cornea grafts, tissue removal. You didn’t think of that, did you? And you believed that all the donors walked away. Just like that. With a fat cheque?’

  She drank more tea, ignoring the question, although he could see that it had troubled her deeply because the blood had drained from her face and her lips were hardening into a murderous line.

  ‘And Gavin Peploe? Why did he have to die? Because you are his murderer, I’m sure of that. Where was the ultimate good in that? Because he was an innocent, wasn’t he? A playboy, maybe; a man who sold his skills in the private market. But not a bad man.’

  She couldn’t keep the revulsion she genuinely felt from disfiguring her face. ‘Neil Judd said he would go to you with everything if we did not do this operation for his father. I had to make time. We can’t change the schedule for the Rosa without the owners’ permission. I thought you might find her here on the quayside – that what was on board, hidden, might be found. A diversion was needed.’ She dropped her eyes, ashamed, Shaw knew, that she’d resorted to such a euphemism. ‘He administered his own poison,’ she said, as if the difference between good and evil came down to a technicality.

  ‘You switched the pills – knowing that he never looked.’

  ‘I don’t think you can prove that, and I doubt you ever will.’

  Shaw’s mobile, sitting on the table top, buzzed and shook, like a bee pointing the way to honey. A text on his mobile from DC Lau:

  EREBUS STREET – POWER SUB-STATION – 187

  The code for a suspicious death.

  Phillips wouldn’t say another word. She wanted her lawyer.

  ‘I wish you would talk to us now – because it might be important – it might save lives.’ She watched him. ‘Because, even now, there is so much I don’t understand. Neil said that he didn’t always fetch the donor – that the captain said there was another “source”. And the man we found dead out on the sands – and the one in the docks – they’d given…’ He let that word hang between them. ‘They’d given organs several times – and tissue. Which begs the question, where were they between the operations? Do you see? There’s still something hidden.’

  She remained silent, even as Shaw walked her to a squad car on the quay. There she stood with the door open, to take one last look at the ship. ‘He’ll do well,’ she said. ‘Neil’s father. The liver will regenerate, but only if he stops the drinking. There’s a drug, his GP should be told – now. Even if he goes to prison – because of the fire – he needs to take it. It’ll make the alcohol repugnant to him…’ She looked about her. ‘Like ashes.’

  Shaw turned and walked away without giving her the comfort of an answer. He moved quickly through the night shadows which still stretched across Berth 4. The gate to the sub-station stood open, the yard crowded with building gear: a cement mixer, a pallet of new bricks, the glittering innards of the new electrics wrapped in industrial clingfilm.

  The roof and walls of the original listed building still stood but the gear within had been removed and the floor broken up. Lumps of reinforced concrete stood in the yard. In the shadows within Shaw could see Tom Hadden, and then, suddenly, the interior was bathed in bright white light, an arc lamp blazing. Shaw stood on the edge of a trench, a slit so dark by comparison that it seemed to suck in the heat as well as the light so that he shivered, staring down, waiting for his eyes to find a line, a shade, a pinpoint – anything to make sense of the absence of shape and meaning.

  Flints first, glistening, where they lay in strata amongst the clay. Then at the bottom, many shapes, in pale outlines. A human body. The shock made him fall forward slightly so that he had to suddenly drop to his knees, looking down at the familiar bones of the dead, but turned on one side, the knees up, and the shreds of something wrapping it – a dress as a shroud.

  Hadden edged the light nearer so that the grave was lit. The corpse was slight, five feet tall, the skull complete, the teeth still in place, all in place, but ugly in the lipless mouth.

  Hadden squatted down beside him. ‘Andersen, the engineer, says they found some bones late yesterday. St James’s rang me – you were on the ship. And she’s not going anywhere. It’s a girl – yes. Early teens.’

  ‘I think I know her name,’ said Shaw. ‘There’s something on the chest,’ he said. Hadden stepped down beside the body.

  ‘What is it, Tom?’ said Shaw. ‘Jewellery?’

  Hadden slipped something into a plastic evidence envelope and reached up – laying it on the ground with a kind of reverence that Shaw didn’t understand until he saw what it was.

  ‘Fish skeleton,’ said Hadden. ‘There’s twenty – twenty-five. I’m no expert but they’re bony fish – tropical.’ He held another in a second bag in his hand. This one was as delicate as a ship in a bottle.

  Shaw told him what he knew of Jan Orzsak’s obsession with his tropical fish; the favour he’d asked of Norma Jean that last summer of her life – that she feed them while he was away. How she’d promised she would and how, on the day she died, Orzsak had confronted her with the consequences of her failure to keep that promise: the dead, resplendent fish.

  ‘I see,’ said Hadden. ‘There was one in her throat. I think he pushed her down, Peter, pushed her head down into the tank of water, amongst the dead fish she’d killed with her neglect. There’s a crack in the jawbone too. That’s typical if she was held under; she’d strain for air until the bone broke.’

  Shaw took the envelope and held the tiny skeleton up to the light. ‘It’s a beautiful thing to be buried with,’ he said.

  52

  Shaw understood now why Jan Orzsak hadn’t left the street in all those years, why he’d taken the opportunity to move next door to the site. He was his victim’s guardian, and the keeper of his own secret. But for this, the chance discovery of her bones, he’d have lived out the rest of his years knowing she w
as there, knowing Andy Judd was hated by his own children – condemned to a lifetime under suspicion – for what he, Jan Orzsak, had done. And he’d persisted with this lie knowing that Andy Judd’s world had been reduced to a single wish: to bury his daughter, to know, finally, that her body was at peace.

  But Orzsak wasn’t at home now. He’d been brought back to Erebus Street by community ambulance at six the previous evening. He’d made himself a simple meal – two boiled eggs, with the stale sliced bread toasted. Then he’d selected the best bottle of wine he had left in the rack. He’d gone to bed, knowing sleep was a mercy he was denied. At just after six that morning DC Lau, in an unmarked car by the dock gates, had seen him leave his house, walk the street and weave his way through the tombstones towards the presbytery of the Sacred Heart of Mary. Ten minutes later she’d watched as Orzsak retraced his steps through the graveyard, followed by the priest, who’d opened up the church.

  The small neo-Gothic side door was still open, the interior cool, despite the low dawn sun which streamed through one of the Victorian stained-glass windows. The light revealed something Shaw had missed before – a figure of Christ, the wounds of the crucifixion still bleeding, the bland face looking askance, hung high over the altar. The men slept in the nave, rolled in their blankets, innocent of the crime that Shaw guessed was even now being confessed under this same roof for the first time.

  Shaw stood in the silence, listening, managing to pick out a steady, insistent whisper. Three confessional boxes stood to one side, but there was light in none of them. Looking back up the aisle towards the great doors and the shadowy mural, he saw Orzsak, kneeling in a pew, Father Martin beside him, a hand on his shoulder. As Shaw walked towards them Orzsak stood, and Shaw felt that gravity had won whatever battle it had been fighting with this man for a lifetime. He stepped out into the aisle, moving as if he was under water, the folds of fat on his face looser, his jaw slack, his bottom lip down, wet and pink.

  Shaw stood in his path. Orzsak almost fell, then steadied himself by holding on to the end of a pew.

  ‘An honest confession?’ he asked, and Orzsak couldn’t stop himself nodding.

  ‘Really?’ He turned to Martin, who wore a confessional stole over a white T-shirt and jeans. ‘So he’s forgiven?’

  ‘Absolution isn’t mine to give,’ he said. ‘That will come later, possibly. In another life.’

  ‘I know how you did it, Mr Orzsak. You hid her body in the basement that first night,’ Shaw said. ‘I checked the original report of the officers who searched the houses. None of the rest had a basement. But yours had been dug out for the wine, hadn’t it? When your mother bought it in the sixties. All you had to do was conceal the door.’

  Orzsak moved his knee, a tiny stamp. ‘A trapdoor,’ he said.

  ‘And you had time; she died at – what – six? We didn’t get to the house before ten. And after that you had all the time you needed not to hurry, not to make a mistake. Her body was in the basement; they were rebuilding the electricity sub-station – that’s right, isn’t it? Sometime then – ’92, ’93?’

  ‘The next spring,’ said Orzsak, a slight sibilance on the ‘s’.

  ‘So easy enough for you, because you were in the industry – power supply. In fact, were you on the job?’

  Orzsak looked away, suddenly tired of the questions.

  ‘So one night you ran a car to the dock gates and slipped her body into the waiting footings of the floor – an extra foot, beneath the clay. Then you just sat back and waited for them to pour the concrete. Your secret then, until Andy Judd’s little spasm of vengeance led us all to this…’

  Shaw looked up at the mural of the wedding feast around the doors.

  ‘What I don’t understand is why,’ said Shaw. ‘Why she had to die.’

  Orzsak considered the implied question, as if it were an abstruse point of contention in a philosophical debate.

  ‘She came to me crying,’ he said. ‘Not for what she’d done to me, but for what she wanted to do to her child. The unborn child. She’d taken all this life from me without a thought. Just a regret. And she so misunderstood my grief that she would bring this to me – this plan to kill her child against the wishes of God. Not just my God – her God. Do you know what she asked me…?’ A trickle of saliva left the corner of the bow-like mouth. ‘For money. She said she had the courage to do it – but not here, amongst her own people. Her doctor had suggested Norwich – a hostel. But she wanted to know if she could ask me for help – for “pocket-money”, she said. It was the obscenity of that. The childlike obscenity. She wanted to take that life away. But she didn’t deserve the one she had. I felt God’s wrath within me.’

  Shaw didn’t believe most of that. ‘So you killed her – drowned her – held her head under the water of the tank. But you killed the child as well – that doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘I was angry.’

  ‘Just angry?’ asked Shaw. He thought about the relationship between the lonely bachelor and the child who had become a woman. ‘Or jealousy? You didn’t know about Ben Ruddle, did you? You didn’t know that Norma Jean wasn’t a child any more. What did you really feel?’

  ‘I won’t speak, not again,’ said Orzsak. ‘Not about this.’

  Father Martin sat, pulling the purple stole of confession from around his neck. He’d heard many confessions, Shaw guessed, but none that had taken him so far into the depths of human pain: Orzsak’s pain, the pain of the teenager who had died that night at his hands, and the pain of the father, an outcast even to his children.

  They heard footsteps and Ally Judd appeared from the vestry, holding a tray of coffee cups, a nightgown only partly concealed by a raincoat. Behind her came Liam Kennedy, rubbing sleep from his eyes, in only shorts and a sweatshirt. He tried to look floppy, at ease, but Shaw could see the tension that made him hold his arms at an awkward angle, as if in pain.

  Ally handed out coffees. Orzsak shook his head so Shaw took his. The liquid was hot, gritty, and pungent. Shaw was always astonished at how such a simple thing could make him feel a splinter of joy, even here.

  Kennedy stood watching the men sleep.

  ‘And what do the voices say today?’ asked Shaw of Kennedy.

  He shook his head, as if clearing it of other thoughts. ‘They’ve been silent.’

  Shaw stood and looked back down the nave to Kennedy’s painting, completed now to the halfway stage above the pointed arch of the main doors – Patigno’s Miracle at Cana.

  ‘I did wonder why you’d left it out – the candle, the ultimate symbol of memento mori, of the passing of time, of death. In the original there’s a rather fine one, in a gold holder, at the centre of the table… just there, to the right of the skull.’ He walked to the wall, pointing up at the velvet-covered table, heavy with rotting fruit.

  But Kennedy wouldn’t look. Instead Father Martin walked towards the mural, as if seeing it for the first time. ‘Yes, you’re right,’ he said, tapping a finger on the cold stone wall.

  Valentine appeared at the small door with two uniformed PCs. Shaw shook his head a fraction and they melted away.

  ‘You couldn’t bring yourself to paint the candle, could you, Liam – because that was the sign, the signal, that you used to mark each of the victims after Mrs Phillips gave you the names.’

  Kennedy came alive then, realizing for the first time that he’d made mistakes, that good intentions didn’t mean he hadn’t committed a great sin. ‘This is rubbish. Selected who – for what?’

  Shaw ignored him.

  ‘The second time we met you, Liam, here, in the church, you were wearing a T-shirt with a slogan. Do you remember?’

  Kennedy licked his lips. He did, and he put a hand over his heart where his pulse was beginning to race.

  ‘Voluntary Service Overseas,’ said Shaw. ‘I checked you out with their London office. They passed me on to Tel Aviv. You were at a kibbutz in 2008. A whole harvest – a good worker, even if you weren’t Jewish. And politica
l too – speaking up for the Palestinians, for their rights on the same land. But that wasn’t so popular, was it? So you went to Jerusalem to work for an organization that didn’t discriminate – the Kircher Institute. And you could use some of your IT skills, at last. You helped them build their website. And when you came home you kept in touch, which is how you met Jofranka Phillips. But you were ill by then, and the voices were part of that. So what could she give you in return for your help? There’s a room up at the hospital – for the Hearing Voices Network. We had a look inside. PCs, an office. I checked out the website – it’s good, Liam, really good.’

  Kennedy turned to Father Martin. ‘This is rubbish.’

  ‘And she’d have told you what she told me. That the donors each had a choice. And that once they’d taken that choice they’d be looked after. No evil could come from that. Is that what she said?’

  Kennedy held a coffee cup but he put it down now because his hand was beginning to shake.

  ‘I’m not here to listen to you deny this,’ said Shaw. ‘I’m here because there is still something I don’t understand. It was one of your little kindnesses, I think, at first, to collect the men’s pills from the chemist. At first I thought that was it – that was how you were able to select the ones that Mrs Phillips could use. And it might have helped – but it wasn’t good enough. No, she had the files, up at the hospital, so she didn’t need you for that. But I checked with Boots.’

  He took a list out of his pocket.

  ‘And that’s what I don’t understand, because only yesterday you picked up a prescription for Paul Tyler – and he disappeared six months ago. And there are others, men who haven’t been listed here, on your records, for months, even a year. So my question – and it’s an urgent one – is why. If these men have gone, why do you still collect their drugs?’