At Death's Window

by Jim Kelly

  ‘I better get our forensic boys out.’

  ‘What d’ya reckon, Georgie? How does the Limpet fit in?’

  ‘Maybe the killer used it to dump Bedrich’s corpse on Mitchell’s Bank. We don’t know where he died. Maybe he died on-board – in the cockpit, or below. Blood, mud, fingerprints. But she looks too clean to me.’ He bent down and looked through one of the cabin windows. It looked like a London club in there, with dark wood panels, books, an elegant cushioned bench, a polished stove. ‘Once he’d snared Bedrich’s body to the buoy perhaps he just kept going. Get rid of the evidence, take the boat somewhere lonely, and get it clean. Anyways, I owe you.’ He filled his lungs: ‘What you doing tonight?’

  Jan smiled and walked away along the grassy towpath trailing a hand, as if she wanted to take Valentine for another walk. But she wanted him to look back at the boat. The Limpet lay at an angle, leaning into the bank. They could see the hull clearly, and the dark blue stripe that marked the Plimsoll line, below which the hull had been painted a brilliant white.

  ‘The hull’s spotless too. Not a mark,’ she said. ‘It’s been cleaned like you said, but not yesterday, or the day before. High tide was four hours ago. Sea water always leaves a film of salt, a little mud, some scurf. There’s nothing. Your man – if it is a man – has been here in the last three hours. Maybe less.’

  Valentine was on the mobile. ‘You should be on the force,’ he said, swearing at the faltering signal.

  ‘I’m glad you said that, Georgie. I was going to break it gently when the time was right.’ She took a breath, before looking him directly in the eyes. ‘I’ve applied to join the police training scheme. Mature entrant. I tick boxes. There’s a medical, a few tests, but I’ve been led to believe – that’s the phrase they use – led to believe that my application will be successful. Are you going to be all right with that, DS Valentine?’

  FORTY-ONE

  Shaw edged the Porsche to the junction by the village green at Anmer. He’d already spotted three squad cars, the vanguard of the security force which would have to patrol the area once Prince William and his wife and son were living at Anmer Hall. One was parked on the edge of the churchyard to the rear of the house, as conspicuous in its blue and white livery as an ice-cream van among the weathered tombstones. Another stood at the gates to the estate, the third by the little bowling green spread out in front of the village hall.

  Shaw felt sympathy for the locals. At least his stretch of deserted Norfolk was only invaded in good weather. This area of north Norfolk, inland from Sandringham and the coastal resorts, had once been remote; a high plateau of wide, whale-backed hills and hamlets. Now it was on the map, and life would move to a different rhythm. Anmer had no inn, but he wondered how long it would take for some entrepreneur to open a gastro pub, with distant views of the royal estate. The new royal residents would also put a few more thousand pounds on the price of a local house, not that they’d ever been that cheap. Save for a row of tied cottages on the back road, most of the buildings were solid landed gentry, surrounded by artfully gone-to-seed English gardens.

  Anmer Hall itself, glimpsed beyond the churchyard trees, boasted an eighteenth-century red brick façade, with a high tiled roof. Scaffolding masked the whole range of house, barns and conservatories. Renovations were under way, royal nurseries being wallpapered. Some of the locals had broken ranks to voice criticism of the building work – particularly the new red roof tiles – labelling the result a ‘giant Barrett home’.

  Unkind, thought Shaw. With time the new works would blend into the Georgian ensemble. Drifting through the village, he tried to read the names of the houses, wondering if anyone in north Norfolk actually had an address made up of numbers and postcode. The Vineyard appeared, glimpsed beyond a Norfolk-stone wall. The Porsche crunched over the gravel as he swung through the open gates, and he thought that nothing sounded like money more than that grating of tyres over half an acre of pale Cotswold Buff. A van was parked to the side of the house, just visible beyond a garage.

  Geoff Wighton came out to meet him. He was smiling but Shaw thought he looked unwell, those red roast-beef cheeks a little less livid, edging towards purple.

  ‘Inspector. I’ve made a pot of coffee.’

  The interior had been decorated in perfect taste. Coir carpeting throughout, except on the wooden stairs, and a parquet-floored nineteenth-century kitchen, complete with Aga.

  ‘This stuff’s amazing,’ said Wighton. A modern oven and fridge were mounted in the wall and twinkled with digital read-outs. ‘All this – and the heating system – can be accessed remotely on your phone. They’ve got a cable link. So they can jump in the Jag in the mews off the King’s Road, or more likely the Angel, and switch the heating on a hundred miles away. Do me out of a job.’

  ‘But it hasn’t.’

  ‘No. Tropical fish need feeding, checking. And they’re worried about thieves. I know they’ve not made the press yet but there’s plenty of incomer-anxiety about burglars. It’s the number one topic of gossip over the scallops and Chablis.’

  The fridge made a small electronic beep as Wighton opened it to find milk. It reminded Shaw of the noises he’d heard upstairs at Wighton’s house, the sound of the medical equipment which helped keep his wife alive. What did this ex-copper really think of people who could afford to get someone to feed their angelfish?

  He pushed a coffee mug towards Shaw. ‘No. You’re right. I’ve got a job for life. I’m basically a servant, right? But there’s none of the tricky social stigma that you get with actually having a servant. I’m unseen. A helpful spirit. A watchful eye.’

  Something stirred in Shaw’s memory banks. A sudden electric spark flared then died. If he’d been alone he might have been able to pinpoint the notion, the shadowy shape of a brilliant flash of intuition.

  But the moment had gone, so he asked Wighton about his wife.

  ‘Louise?’ Wighton’s eyes flooded and Shaw realized it was a brutal question in a way. He hadn’t once mentioned her, even when they were in the same house, and now Shaw had forced him to evaluate her condition to a virtual stranger.

  ‘Sorry.’

  Wighton held up a hand: ‘No. No. It’s fine. She’s alive – that’s the blessing. And at home, which is where she wants to be. But it’s a struggle. Every breath. Sometimes, when I see people smoking – especially teenagers – I have to go. I can’t watch. I want to take it out of their lips and crush it.’ He laughed. ‘You can’t buy air, doesn’t matter how rich you are.’

  Shaw produced his notebook. ‘Look. It was just a small thing. But one of your properties in Burnham Marsh was Overy View, the one with double bay windows down on the quay.’

  ‘Yup. Jonathan Todd’s house.’

  ‘You said you checked the houses out on Thursday, around four o’clock. What kind of condition did you find the place in? It would have been a week since your last visit. Had anyone been in the house?’

  ‘Shouldn’t have been. The Todds let me know when they’re due. He’s a dental surgeon – at Guys – nice people. There’s a son comes down too, but again, I get a call. They’re better than most. Least they don’t treat me like staff.’

  Shaw sipped his coffee, black and acrid, and tried not to sound adversarial. ‘So it should have been as you left it. But the question is, was it?’

  ‘This is important? I can’t see why, the burglaries were Thursday night.’

  ‘Mr Wighton. I’m the investigating officer. You are a witness. Can you answer this question?’

  Wighton’s mobile buzzed and he checked a text.

  ‘More work,’ he said, tossing the mobile on to a soft chair.

  He clapped his hands, rubbing them together in a display of brisk efficiency.

  ‘Look. Business is good, Inspector. Crazy, really. Wills and Kate don’t do it any harm. North Norfolk’s never been so trendy. New money’s moving in, old money’s moving out. Fact is, I don’t always check every property. If I know the owners aren’t
about and there’s nothing pressing I just give it a glance and get on.’

  ‘You’re saying you didn’t check Overy View that day?’

  He nodded, wiping a hand across plump lips.

  ‘Any others missed out?’

  ‘No. I was on the way down to Spithead House and they’ve got cats, and a sodding gerbil. It takes me half an hour to muck it out – it’s only two inches long. I just cut a corner.’

  ‘Risk assessment’s not very smart though, is it? Your business is based on trust. Reliability. Honesty. You slip up, you’re out of a job, right?’

  ‘It’s a wake-up call. It won’t happen again. I need to take the plunge, pay someone to help. But I need another copper. That’s my Unique Selling Point, my USP: I’m a professional. The paperwork’s the thing, and the tax forms. One employee and suddenly I’m running News International.’

  Shaw finished his coffee and told Wighton what he thought of an ex-copper who had taken the decision to mislead a murder inquiry. Then he told him he’d have to consider his next move, but that it might involve informing the Todds that they weren’t getting everything they paid for from their house-sitter.

  Which still left Shaw with the problem of Sebastian Todd and Overy View.

  Back out in the Porsche he sat for a moment waiting to see if his mobile could pick up a signal.

  Five minutes later Wighton’s white van crunched past on the gravel. Side-on Shaw could clearly see the logo for his business. There was a mobile telephone number, a website. Discreet, classy even, in an elegant script. Then the design: an angel, a portfolio under one arm, the wings folded, but held high above the shoulders.

  And the one big word, ANGELS, with the tag line underneath:

  The second-home guardian security service.

  FORTY-TWO

  Shaw followed Wighton’s white van, leaving a quarter of a mile of clear road between them. Why was he following the ex-copper? He’d let several images form simultaneously in his mind: Smith-Waterson’s blackened skin, medieval glass angels, empty seaside second homes, Wighton at Burnham Marsh, the boathouse at Spithead House. Two miles short of Wighton’s terrace house Shaw pulled off the road. The lay-by was on the crest of a hill from which he could just see the sea to the north. In the silence he heard his mobile text box filling up as it suddenly found a strong signal.

  The first was from Valentine: Limpet found. Cleaned top to bottom today. SOCO on way.

  Another image to add to the list: the seagoing boat.

  He rang DC Twine in the incident room at Burnham Marsh and told him to get hold of the owners of the Limpet in Cley and ask them if they employed former DS Geoff Wighton as a security man. Top priority. Then he rang DS Fiona Campbell.

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Fiona. At your desk?’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Great. We had a file online for Smith-Waterson. Do I recall an arrest in Wells in 2000 for possession of a Class-A drug? If I do, can you read me off the prosecuting officer’s name?’

  He heard the finger-taps on the computer keyboard, the buzz of the CID room in the background.

  ‘DS G. Wighton.’

  ‘Great. Thought so. I’ll keep you posted.’

  He slid the Porsche back out into the traffic and driving on, past Wighton’s house, glimpsed the van parked outside. A mile down the road he took the Porsche through a farm gate and left it on the edge of a field of wheat stubble, then walked back up the lane. Two hundred yards short of the house he saw Wighton come out, lock the door, then load a suitcase in the back of the van. Then he drove off at sixty, black exhaust trailing. Shaw rang Twine to give him the details on the Bedford and instructions to have it tailed along the coast road.

  ‘Sir. I got the owner of the Limpet – he’s at the house for the weekend. Wighton’s been looking after the property for eighteen months. No complaints. Excellent service.’

  ‘OK. Get traffic on this van. Tell ’em to maintain contact but not to approach the driver. Keep me up to date.’

  Shaw ran to the house. On his first visit he’d missed the intercom by the front doorbell. A small sign read: Please press button and speak. He said he was DI Peter Shaw and he had a few questions for Louise Wighton.

  No answer.

  He stood back and looked up at the front-bedroom window. Net curtains, condensation, a faint glimmer of electric light. He pressed the intercom again. Three times.

  The front door had what Lena liked to call a Kentucky-Fried Fanlight: a window set in the door, instead of above, as favoured by the fast-food chain. Fanlights were popular with the Georgians because they wanted the light, but they needed strong doors to keep out thieves. Putting the window in the door was a big mistake, especially for a security consultant. Shaw put a lump of York stone from the garden rockery through it, reached inside, and sprung the lock. That set an alarm off on the side of the house. By that time he was at the top of the stairs. He could hear the dog behind one of the bedroom doors.

  He spoke her name clearly and confidently. ‘Mrs Wighton? Louise Wighton. This is DI Peter Shaw.’

  Between the wails of the alarm there was complete silence except for the distant barking of the dog: the mechanical breathing, the sound of a dragon sleeping on its treasure, had gone.

  Pushing open the front bedroom door he found a room dominated by a king-sized bed covered by an oxygen tent. Mounted on the wall was an electric ventilator and a small control panel, but none of the lights showed either red or green, and the tent had partly deflated, so that the upper part clung to the face of the woman beneath.

  Shaw unzipped the plastic sheeting and pushed his head within the tent. The air smelt of liniment and antiseptic. Louise Wighton’s face was very pale, her lips a green-blue, her eyes closed. Shaw thought she looked as if she’d been pushed down into the bed itself, as though gravity had pulled her into the mattress. In her left hand she held an oxygen mask. Held? Perhaps not: it lay in her hand, the fingers of which were open and splayed.

  Shaw touched her flesh. Warm still, but she wasn’t breathing, and when he felt her jugular there was no pulse.

  The bars on his phone were gone so he ran downstairs and used the landline to ring 999.

  Then he ran back up the stairs, tore the oxygen tent back, applying his weight through both hands to her chest. The ribcage creaked, but he made himself exert maximum pressure, because even if the heart had stopped her blood still held some oxygen, and if he could force it round her body she might revive. The principal danger – if he could get her breathing – was brain damage: so even a few seconds of partly oxygenated blood could make a life-changing difference.

  For eighteen minutes he applied a rhythmic pressure to the beat of ‘Nellie The Elephant’. The room around him seemed to still hold the woman’s consciousness within it – far more so, indeed, than her actual body. When he heard the siren he left her and went to the window to watch the yellow and green ambulance park neatly in the drive. Turning back he realized that any sense of her presence within the room had fled.

  FORTY-THREE

  Wighton’s van was not picked up by West Norfolk traffic on any of the major roads. Two hours after leaving Holme it was spotted travelling at seventy-three mph on the fast lane of the M11. A squad car noted the number and tracked it for half a mile. Forward units monitored its route to Junction 26 for Stansted Airport. DC Twine rang the British Airports Authority police liaison office and they located a G.H. Wighton booked on a flight for Pisa with EasyJet. The van was parked in Q65 Long Stay, and was on a trailer heading back to West Norfolk’s forensic laboratory before Wighton had got to passport control. When asked by a Border Agency official to accompany him to an interview room he dropped his suitcase and ran for the fire exit. He was apprehended thirty-five minutes later on the apron of the runway by two airport security officers. He told one he had an acute fear of flying and had panicked. The officer replied that he could relax now, as he wasn’t flying anywhere.

  By the time Valentine’s Mazda parked b
eside Shaw’s Porsche at the Burnham Marsh incident room, Wighton was travelling north in the back of an unmarked CID car in the company of two officers of the Essex Constabulary. Silent for the majority of the journey, he did ask twice if they had any news on the condition of his wife – and was told that West Norfolk officers would be on hand to brief him on his arrival at Burnham Marsh mobile incident room. For the last twenty minutes of the journey, over the north Norfolk hills, he appeared to be asleep.

  Twilight was falling on the old quayside. The Ostrich was open, the owners having flown back from France after being advised the property had been burgled. A floodlight played on the picnic tables set out front, where a group of smokers had gathered on the patch of grass which ran down to the water’s edge. The sound of laughter, a sudden throaty burst of good humour, seemed more than anything to finally lift the spell that had once held the village in a trance, like a model in a paperweight, transfixed in glass. Life had truly returned now: Valentine could smell the distinctive whiff of barbecue gas on the air, and somewhere Radio Four played Big Ben striking the hour.

  Twine appeared from the mobile incident room with a computer print-out of Geoff Wighton’s website. The home page featured the angel logo.

  Valentine went to speak but Shaw raised a hand: ‘George. We just missed it. I missed it, you missed it. It’s just bad luck. We need to move on. Priority is the first interview and letting Tom have free range down at Spithead House. I presume the boathouse is empty?’

  ‘We checked it out on the first sweep – but we weren’t looking for a boat then, so who knows what we missed,’ said Twine. ‘There was no sign of any forced entry so we moved on.’

  ‘You think it’s drugs, Peter?’ asked Valentine. ‘That he was in the village that night, running it ashore, and Bedrich just blundered in on him?’

  ‘Who knows, George. Call me old-fashioned, but let’s collect some evidence and then speculate. And that’s the good news. Think about it. He had time to clean up the Limpet. But there’s no way he would have risked coming back here while we were on site. It’ll be as he left it. That’s our chance.’