At Death's Window

by Jim Kelly

Patten was able to add one unexpected layer to the picture they were constructing of the dead man: ‘You’d think he was an old codger, Shrimp. He’d ham it up for tourists – the Norfolk burr, the rustic charm – then he’d charge them twenty-five quid for a conger eel. But a couple of times I saw him out at dusk by the boathouse and you could see from the glow he had a smart phone – like he was playing with it. Once, when I heard him stumbling about around his van, I saw him use it as a torch. You find that, did you – the smart phone?’

  They hadn’t. But then they’d not found his clothes either. Or the gun. Or anything unexpected in his neat cottage at Docking, a dozen miles inland. A single armchair placed squarely in front of a box-like TV had reminded Valentine of his old flat in Wells. The bathroom had been a mild revelation: a power shower, a shelf of deodorants, a pile of Geographic magazines by the loo. Neat, ordered, uncluttered. It was difficult to avoid the yawning cliché: shipshape. All of his mates said that while he’d go home to the cottage in winter, most days he’d sleep over in the boathouse because that’s where he wanted to wake up.

  Valentine slipped off the padlock and the corrugated-iron door screeched on rusty hinges. The interior, smoky black, reeked of tar and old fish heads. Valentine, who hated the sea for the salty crust it left on his lips, felt his skin crawl. There were dark corners, and rotting tackle, and the word ‘maggoty’ slipped into his mind.

  Patten, in the harbour office – his eyes out the window on the channel even when he answered a question – said he’d turned a blind eye to Davies’ sleeping in the shed, even if it was against all the regulations. In the summer Davies would drink in the Jolly Sailors up in the village, then stagger back to the staithe to collapse among the old tackle.

  ‘Up at first light, mind. Whistling on the wharf,’ said Patten with obvious approval.

  Once their eyes had become accustomed to the windowless shack they could make out where he slept, in a kind of nest made out of old nets, under a single brass oil lantern. There were two plastic beer holders set on the floor, cylindrical, dark brown, with a special cork to allow the ale to breathe. An ashtray – clean – and a book of nautical signals lay beside a pillow made out of the local free-sheet newspaper tied in a bundle.

  A gust of wind slammed the door and they were plunged into darkness. Then they saw the holes: several on the eastern wall, so that the sun shone in narrow beams through cracks between the metal sheet panels.

  ‘Wouldn’t fancy it on a winter’s night,’ said Shaw.

  Valentine pushed the door back open and wedged it there with a breeze block.

  They stood looking at what was left of Shrimp Davies’ life.

  ‘At the risk of sounding like a long-playing record, we shouldn’t disregard the obvious,’ said Valentine. ‘He was a fisherman. Samphire was a nice little sideline. It’s only a guess, but twenty-five years in the Merchant Navy doesn’t turn you into the kind of character who’s going to roll over and crawl away when a thug comes round and tells you that you can’t do what you’ve always done – what your father did before you. He had that little Post Office van. He could have driven in to Lynn after a few bevies and slashed Stepney’s tyres, or got some of the young bloods to help.

  ‘Look at it from Stepney’s point of view. He gets his van fleet vandalized then the body turns up on Mitchell’s Bank. If the victim was one of Stepney’s pickers he’d think a war was on. He jumps to conclusions. He’d like us to think he’s Jean-Paul Sartre but he’s really just a crook, and we know they’re not that bright. So he thinks he’s losing a war and he hasn’t fired a bullet yet – all he’s done is stove in a few boats. You can see the reasoning. Unless he makes a statement, an unequivocal statement of intent, he’s lost authority.’

  ‘Why Shrimp Davies?’

  ‘Sedentary, predictable, lonely old Shrimp Davies? Why’d you think?’

  Shaw, running a hand along one shadowy wall, found what they might have missed. The shack did have a window – covered with a large interior shutter, which dropped down on hinges. The flood of marine light when they got it open was extraordinary, driving the shadows into the corners. It also revealed, above Davies’ bed, a wooden joist to which had been pinned a series of photographs.

  Shaw understood immediately the rationale behind the arrangement of the pictures, about thirty in all, from left to right. Those to the left, at what he took to be the start of the sequence, were old black-and-whites. The first showed a woman’s head, bare shoulders and no shoulder straps – she might have been naked. In fact, Shaw sensed she was naked, and that her body, unseen by the viewer, was in full view for the photographer. She looked Arabic, the natural beauty disfigured by too much make-up, a glossy oil in the hair. Outside, through an open window, the sunlight was brutal on what looked like a Middle Eastern street – dusty, a donkey passing pulling a cart, inky shadows below an awning.

  ‘Port Said, Valetta, Nicosia, Aden – take your choice,’ offered Shaw. A first love, he wondered, or just the first.

  Valentine had started at the other end of the sequence: a vivid colour snapshot with the Boots PhotoShop logo in one corner.

  ‘That’s why he’s got the iPhone,’ he said. ‘So he can keep his little collection going.’

  This girl was probably eighteen but she could have been thirty, the blue eyes shielded by a precocious cynicism. Just the head again, but more of the shoulders and the clear skin of the chest, the first curve of her breasts. A window again behind, but no sunlight this time, just a dull yard with a standing tap, some flaking whitewash.

  ‘North End, Lynn,’ said Valentine, tapping the print. ‘One of the cribs. Not that I’ve got any first-hand experience. She’s on the game, mind – no doubts.’

  ‘Know what I think?’ said Shaw. Valentine knew him well enough not to try and interject an answer. ‘I don’t think he had sex with them at all. I think he’d paid his money and asked to take a picture.’

  They both stood thinking about the secret life of Shrimp Davies, sprawled on his bed of nets, contemplating his conquests. It was a sad life, thought Valentine, but ultimately a gentle one.

  Shaw knelt among the nets. Beneath the line of snapshots were three more prints from the iPhone pinned to a lower wooden joist.

  The first was slightly out of focus and Valentine said it looked like Davies had tried to use the telephoto option on the camera. It showed a man astride a motorbike on the sea wall by the lifeboat house at Wells. Shaw guessed from the angle it had been taken from Shrimp’s boat as it came in on the Run – the channel that led to the harbour. The rider had unzipped the top half of a set of leathers so that his splayed arms dangled like a spider. His torso was white, hairless and gym-shaped. The bike looked like a Harley-Davidson, with the wasp-like insect tank, in black paint. Shaw couldn’t shake the thought that Shrimp had taken the picture as a warning, because the rider was looking directly at the camera.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The foundation stone for Greenwood House had been laid in the flood winter of 1947 on the edge of a bombsite on Lynn waterfront. Shaw had once seen a picture of the ceremony in the library archives when he’d been helping Lena search for images to frame and hang in the Old Beach Café. The scene was almost Victorian, the block of flats just a building site against the vast Brunel-like dockside cranes, hoists and derricks, a coaster’s superstructure stark against a grey sky, and a horse tethered to a cart of bricks. Mud and slush lay thick over the ground where the seawater had only recently receded. It had been an act of faith in March 1947, this declaration that there was a future, despite the war and such random, devastating acts of God as the flood that had inundated the Fens, battered the coast and killed thousands with its freezing damp, all in the wake of a pulverizing Arctic winter. Morale, weighed down by rationing and post-war gloom, had plummeted. Shaw had studied the faces of the dignitaries in the picture and thought that they all looked to be in collective shock, their bodies stiff, skin pale, expressions blank. He could almost feel what it was like to sta
nd there that day in a heavy damp coat, the smell of wet earth on the air, ice in the puddles underfoot.

  Greenwood House stood still on the edge of the docks, nearly seventy years later, its five serried balconied floors looking out towards West Lynn on the far side of the Cut. It was dull red-brick with cream-painted concrete edges, all in a streamlined 1930s style with Crittall windows and open stairwells, impregnated with seven decades of disinfectant. A smart unvandalized sign at the ground-floor entrance proclaimed the building to be owned by the King John Trust, a local housing association. But for half a century it had simply been council housing: five floors, three stairwells and sixty-three flats, with one spare for a caretaker on site, now a locked store and boiler room.

  Shaw couldn’t stand on the steps without thinking about the thousands of children who’d run up and down them since 1947. The children of the Welfare State. He wondered what the eponymous Arthur Greenwood, leader of the parliamentary Labour Party during the war, would have made of this memorial. He tapped a metal toecap against the brickwork.

  ‘That’s the van,’ said Valentine, reading a registration number off his mobile phone. ‘The only one in the vehicle pool with those four characters – DN10.’

  A white Ford stood on the acre of wide concrete in front of the flats. The scene looked Soviet, a workers’ palace designed with space for a car for all, each marked out by bureaucratic white lines; except it didn’t look like anyone else could afford a vehicle.

  The van would have been as anonymous as any white van except for the Norfolk County Council logo on the side.

  ‘Lau says this bloke should be inspecting flat fifty-four,’ said Valentine. ‘That’s what he put on the vehicle request form, along with fifteen other appointments over two days. He’s nothing if not meticulous.’

  They climbed to the top floor and circled the building using the balcony. It gave them views across Lynn town centre, to the small, stately bell tower of Customs House and over the shining water to the chimney pots of West Lynn, the little ferry inscribing a white wake as it ran shoppers to a wooden jetty.

  Shaw went round the last corner first and saw a man locking a front door: shirt, tie, a suit under a good quality outdoor jacket. There was something in the way he failed to react to his footsteps which made Shaw think they might have found their man.

  ‘Mr Whyte?’

  ‘How can I help?’ He had a large head, much too big for a slight frame, possibly five-eight, or less, and very narrow shoulders. His eyes were lost behind a pair of metal-rimmed glasses which caught the light.

  Valentine appeared next and Whyte’s face fell.

  ‘Sergeant,’ he said.

  ‘Mr Whyte. Of course – I’d forgotten the name. Labour Party business? Or council?’

  ‘Bit of both.’

  Valentine quickly brought Shaw up to date on how he knew Clem Whyte: district chairman of the party and one of the council’s three assistant chief housing officers. That’s what he said out loud but he’d briefed Shaw on his meeting with Clem Whyte on the day he’d visited Adelaide Gardens. He’d said then he thought Whyte knew more than he was prepared to divulge to CID about the anti-second-homes protestors.

  Shaw told Whyte why they were there: a white van, registration DN10, with the council logo, had been spotted in the vicinity of a series of burglaries. They’d tracked the vehicle to Norfolk County Council. The head of the motor pool said the van in question was pretty much permanently out for the use of the housing department. Whyte had signed for it on an almost continuous basis for the last eight months. Perhaps Mr Whyte could explain his movements? Why, for example, was the van in the hamlet of East Tines at four o’clock in the morning two nights ago?

  Whyte blinked behind his glasses.

  ‘That van,’ said Shaw, pointing over the parapet. The next flat along the level had its kitchen window open and they heard a brief interlude of conversation in an exotic language.

  ‘Sorry, yes, perfectly good question,’ said Whyte. ‘I get around a bit, it’s true. I leave it out in the field sometimes if I’m working with other units. No point wasting council money if we’re all going back to the same site next morning. But East Tines – I don’t think so.’

  They heard footsteps in the stairwell and a woman appeared hauling two Tesco bags.

  ‘Clem,’ she said, by way of welcome. ‘Lift’s out again. Did you know? You like the stairs, you always did, but they’ll kill me.’

  She walked on, turning the sharp corner, climbing up.

  ‘First name terms with all the residents, Mr Whyte?’

  ‘No. A lot. I was brought up here, Inspector. We moved here in ’eighty-nine – me, my mum and my grandfather. Flat sixty-eight, sixth floor. Stairs never bothered me.’ He worked at the tie round his throat, giving himself some air. ‘We were homeless, so I’ve always been grateful. I wasn’t then – grateful, I mean, ’cos Granddad was so upset. We got evicted from our house, the one I was born in. Don’t you just love a landlord …’

  When the light wasn’t clashing with the lenses Shaw could see small eyes, possibly grey, constantly looking away, down at the van.

  ‘So, two nights ago, where were you at four in the morning?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘At home in bed. To be honest, that’s where I’ve been at four in the morning every night for the last ten years. ’Cept for holidays. Devon usually. This year we’re going mad. Cornwall.’

  Whyte took a half step away from the front door of the flat he’d been leaving. It was a tiny miscalculation, because Shaw and Valentine were blocking his exit to the stairwell, and so it looked like what it was: a conscious effort to move them all away, down the stairs.

  Shaw peered in through the window. ‘What would the rent on this be?’ He could see a sink with a single plate, a decent fridge, an old gas cooker scrubbed clean. On the kitchen table was a small doll in a rich red medieval-style coat, studded with cheap sequins.

  ‘Basic is a hundred and three pounds a week. But you know, most of those high enough on the list to get a property may well be able to claim benefits to cover part of that, or all of it.’

  ‘So what’s the Labour Party policy on second homes?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘I explained all that to your sergeant.’

  ‘He’s not my sergeant, sir. He’s a community resource, aren’t you, George?’

  Valentine was prowling up and down the balcony.

  ‘I should get on,’ said Whyte.

  Shaw and Valentine didn’t move.

  ‘Why are you visiting this particular flat, Mr Whyte? The departmental secretary thought you’d booked the day off.’

  ‘It’s empty. I’ve got someone on the list – out at Burnham Norton, actually, an elderly woman in a tied cottage. She’s been asked to leave. Told to leave. I needed to check this place out: wheelchair access, handrails. I do work on my lieu days – it makes life easier. We can’t afford a complete makeover, but there’s a few pound in the contingency fund. I think we can take her. It’s good news.’

  Shaw thought about the red doll on the kitchen table. It didn’t look like the flat was empty to him.

  ‘I’d like to see inside, sir,’ said Shaw. ‘I can apply for a warrant but I’d have to insist you remain here during the interim – an hour, maybe two. It would be easier …’

  Whyte had a heavy-duty belt around his narrow waist off which hung a set of keys. Shaw thought how much that must be like a badge of office. It was almost Shakespearean – the gatekeeper, the locksmith.

  They let him go first and Valentine stayed by the door, which Shaw took as a signal that his DS thought their suspect might decide to run for the van. There was no doubt Whyte found entering the flat profoundly unsettling. He kept coughing as if about to give a speech.

  Something had died in the flat. Not this week, or this month, but a lifetime ago. A mouse perhaps, or a rat, under the floor or in the walls or roof.

  ‘It doesn’t look empty to me,’ said Shaw.

  ‘I know. Last tena
nt did a runner. Five hundred pounds in arrears.’

  Shaw opened the fridge and it was full of provisions – both vegetable drawers crammed with carrots and beets and parsnips. There was a whole shelf of smoked and pickled meats.

  ‘Name, please?’

  ‘Stefan Bedrich,’ said Whyte. ‘He lived alone.’

  The double bed had a sleeping bag on it, and there were plastic razors next to the bathroom sink. Neat, tidy, minimal.

  ‘Odd, isn’t it – when there’s such a lot of pressure on cheap housing, that you found a flat for this man?’ Shaw was in the corridor. He pointed out the bedroom doors. ‘One double, one single, a box. Just one man. How does that work?’

  ‘The Home Office has the details,’ said Whyte. ‘There was a family coming, but they were held up for some reason in Poland. That’s why he got the larger flat. We’d have had to move him into a family flat eventually. It saved time.’

  It was such a weak excuse the last few words were almost inaudible.

  The lounge told the real story. The walls were extraordinary, the original wallpaper almost completely obscured by artwork. Most of the pictures were A4-sized and showed evidence of having been folded. Abstract studies mostly, but there were a few landscapes and portraits. All were characterized by vibrant, startling colour. The effect reminded Shaw of stained glass but more chaotic, unrestrained by lead or stone. There was one large window in the room, without curtains, and the late summer light ignited the pictures.

  Whyte teased at one piece of paper, trying to loosen it from the Blu-Tack which fixed it to the wall.

  ‘We did warn him about this. The rules are clear: all pictures should be hung from the rail.’ He lifted a corner of a larger work – A3 size – to reveal the original picture rail underneath.

  Shaw walked up to the wall opposite the fireplace until there was nothing in his field of vision except the colours. Each of the pictures was signed with the same elegant scrawl: Liddy.

  On the chimney breast was a Polish flag. On the mantelpiece a framed picture of a young man hugging his sweetheart. Shaw wondered if the pretty young woman was Liddy. He didn’t have to wonder about the man because he’d seen him before, his face streaked with black sand, the flesh soaked as if it had been too long in a warm bath, the eyes mirror-like, fish-dead. He’d been looking up into the sky, his back soaked with salt water, his left foot attached to a weight, snagged in the mud of Mitchell’s Bank.