At Death's Window

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At Death's Window Page 24

by Jim Kelly


  They walked down past the Ostrich to Spithead House. Three stories high, almost a townhouse, with one large Georgian window converted on the second floor into an oriel, an elegant box-shaped balcony. To one side a narrow inlet of deep water had been dug when the house was built to give access to a wooden boathouse. Inside, the walls shimmered with the reflected light from the dock, which was empty, the water oddly clear and luminous, as if lit from within by an invisible neon bar. Looking down into the green depths Shaw could just see shells on the bottom, and a shoal of small black fish in synchronized motion.

  The boathouse was roughly the shape of the living quarters of Noah’s Ark. Once inside they could see that the roof above their heads was flat. Shaw threw his head back to examine it.‘Trapdoor,’ he said, pointing at a brass handle.

  Hadden brought them a pair of white SOCO suits. Twine arrived with ladders and a clipboard.

  As they struggled to get a ladder into place on the narrow wooden walkway beneath the trapdoor, Twine filled Shaw in on the latest from the owner of the Limpet.

  ‘Wighton did the usual up at Cley. Checked the house, fed the cat. But there was one added extra. Lott’s a pilot. He’s short of time, but he’s not short of money. He took Wighton on because he’s got his own master’s licence for a boat. So when Lott came back he could take the Limpet out on a jolly and not worry about getting back home. He’d leave it in Boston, or Lowestoft, or Grimsby, or wherever, and Wighton would sail her home. So he knew the ropes.’

  The trapdoor popped easily enough, once Shaw got his shoulder under it, and then it fell back on brass hinges. Squeezing through was extraordinarily difficult, so that Shaw had to lead with one hand, one arm, then the shoulder and head, before letting the other shoulder follow.

  The space revealed was lit by an oculus window in the seaward end of the room. Shaw hadn’t noticed this from outside and realized that it wasn’t visible from the wharf, only from the sea. At the opposite end to the window was a door with a davit built into the wood beside it, ready to swing out and haul up goods into the loft. Beside the door was a rack of tools, boathooks, saws, wooden mallets, and a shelf of pots, sticky with paint, or glue, or pitch.

  ‘Sorry, George,’ shouted Shaw. ‘You should see this too.’

  Valentine was thin enough for the trapdoor, but the stiffness of his joints made the exercise excruciating. At one point he brushed aside Shaw’s offer of a helping hand. When he did finally get through, he straightened up with a hand to his back, trying to brush dust off his raincoat, his breathing audible.

  Shaw checked out the contents of the room. There was a mug on a long central table, which was collapsible, with a plastic surface. It had been cleaned, because in the sideways light from the oculus window they could see the wipe marks of a cloth. There was one folding chair, and a portable electric heater, a cable running to a plug on the floor beside a socket.

  Shaw went back to the trapdoor and looked down at DC Twine. ‘The owners here at Spithead House – do they have a boat?’

  ‘Yes. They’ve got another house in the Brighton Marina and their boat’s there – a white ship, patio doors, gin bottles, the lot. There’s pictures in the house.’

  At the far end of the room was a pile of plastic sacks, each carrying a blue script and a logo: ERGAMISOL. Oostende Ziekenhuis. Each one had been stamped with a circular red disc and the word FARMACIE. There were various codes and licence numbers. One bag had been opened but resealed with a clothing peg. Shaw used a gloved hand to reopen the bag and a naked wet finger to taste the contents.

  He winced. ‘Salt. A salt. My guess is Ergamisol is a trade name for Levamisole, the stuff the dealer used to adulterate the cocaine supply. How many bags, George? A guess.’

  ‘Two hundred – more.’

  They stood in silence imagining the scene. The long plastic tabletop used for mixing quantities of cocaine with imported Levamisole.

  They heard footsteps on the ladder and Twine’s head appeared through the trapdoor, then his upper body, so that he was neatly wedged in position. ‘Sir. Squad car’s here with Wighton.’

  ‘Take him into the house, Paul. We’ll be ten minutes.’

  Twine retreated, but it took him a second to work his arms back through the narrow trapdoor.

  Shaw saw the moment then – the vivid, terrifying second in which Bedrich must have died. Wighton, working silently in the loft, would have heard him enter the boathouse, perhaps checking it out before trying the house itself.

  Footsteps then on the ladder. No light would have shown through the boards or round the trapdoor, so Wighton could have moved swiftly to plunge the room into darkness, because the socket was by the chair.

  Did Bedrich speak? ‘Anyone there?’ Just to be sure.

  Then, in the dark, the sound of the trapdoor flipping back, the struggle as Bedrich forced his body upwards into the space, trying to bring his trailing arm through with a torch.

  Wighton would have waited for the moment. Two steps to the tool rack, a spade selected, then as the light came round he’d have swung it through the beam at the intruder’s neck. How quickly had he calculated that murder was his only way out? There was no innocent explanation for what he was doing in the loft. Who did he think was climbing the stairs? The owners – disaster. Thieves – worse. Or dealers from Lynn, determined to cut out the middle man? Did he say anything in those fleeting, final seconds?

  Wighton was a powerful man. Shaw thought of the weights and rowing machine in his front room. Striking from above he had his victim at his mercy, trapped, wedged in the narrow trapdoor. The spade would have swung through the torchbeam like an executioner’s axe, the single blow almost severing the head from the body. Did he fall back, slump forward? Shaw imagined the blood dripping down into the water below.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Handcuffed, Wighton had been marched to Spithead House, and sat down at the kitchen table. Stone floor, open range, Belfast sink, utility shelves and cupboards, the plasterwork peeling slightly – this one house, at least, had slipped the bonds of modernization and gentrification which had overwhelmed Burnham Marsh. Shaw recalled that the new owners had notified Wighton that they were planning to rip it all out and install a new kitchen. Shaw wondered where the old owners had gone. The graveyard? A care home? A block of modern flats glimpsed from a Tube train? They’d left behind a welcome echo of the past. There was even an old black-and-white framed picture of the church, the roof intact, taken inside looking seawards towards the altar, the light blazing through the window with its central image: Salome dancing for Herodias, St John’s severed head on a gold platter.

  Wighton’s mouth hung open and he was breathing heavily. They could smell him too, that distinctive odour of fear, a combination of sweat and nervous electricity. A mug of tea stood, untouched, on the worktop in front of him, the steam rising.

  Shaw opened a mullioned window into the garden. There was a peacock outside, a female, pale and red-eyed, perched on a shed. A rumble of thunder made the old china on the shelves rattle.

  Valentine had brought one of the bags of Dutch drugs with him and placed it on the table in front of Wighton. Outside, through the window, they could see the St James’ forensic van, its back down, white-suited officers extracting gear.

  ‘They won’t tell me about Louise,’ said Wighton. ‘I asked in the squad car – and now, the constable, he knows but he wouldn’t say. I have a right to know.’

  This was either an elaborate double bluff or Shaw was looking at a genuine psychopath.

  ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you that your wife is dead, Mr Wighton.’

  He looked to one side, towards the back door, and for a moment it looked as if he was considering a second attempt at escape. Instead, he covered his face with both hands, then ran them back through his hair.

  ‘She was alive when I left and the respirator was working,’ he said, his voice thicker, less distinct. It was an odd response, and certainly made it clear that during his few last moments
in the house he had gone upstairs. What had been said? What had he done? Hadden’s deputy, Dr Elizabeth Pryce, had a forensic team in the room now, and the pathologist was on her way.

  ‘The switch to the respirator was surely beyond her reach, Mr Wighton?’

  ‘I want a solicitor. It’s my right,’ he said, quite calmly, although his facial muscles were displaying several contrary emotions: fear, distress and a clear edge of anger.

  ‘Did she ask you to turn it off when you told her you were leaving?’ asked Shaw. ‘Or did you leave her with a lie? As opposed to the truth: I’m driving to Stansted Airport and getting a flight to Italy.’

  ‘She would have been fine. She knew that. She has nurses,’ said Wighton. ‘They come every few hours. I pay for that. It costs a fortune, a fortune I have to earn, so that she’s never alone for very long, or in pain.’

  Shaw felt they’d moved on very quickly from any sense of grief.

  ‘You don’t seem particularly upset at your wife’s death, Mr Wighton. Is that a fair summary of your feelings at this point?’

  Wighton shrugged. ‘I’ve spent a decade looking after Louise; she’s spent a decade wanting to die. It’s a release for both of us. I didn’t kill her. If that had been a way out I’d have taken it years ago.’

  ‘What’s wrong with the local health authority?’ asked Valentine. ‘Respite care is excellent. You didn’t have to pay.’

  Shaw had a vague memory of Julie Valentine’s death. He’d been a child but he could recall the whispers at home, the forbidden C-word, visits to a cold, damp terrace house in the North End.

  ‘Louise wanted to die at home. She insisted on that. Her problem was she wasn’t dying. And she’d couldn’t give up the fags. I’d wheel her out sometimes, after dark, always after dark. If she was down – really down – she’d smoke in the room and then the nurses would smell it. So there wasn’t a lot of sympathy. Emphysema can last for years, a lifetime really. With the respirator, and the oxygen, she could have struggled on for another ten years. She wouldn’t go into hospital. She wouldn’t go into care. She wanted me to die with her, really. The words were never said – but she wanted me there, at the bedside. All those years when I was in the job, or out messing about on boats, she said the boredom drove her to the fags. So it was my fault anyway. The dying are cruel people. Much worse than the living.’

  Shaw had no doubt that was the truth.

  ‘The NHS nurses would come round, of course they did. Louise always said they were second-rate. She was a snob too, Louise. I had the money, I had the clients, and the police pension, so I could fucking well pay for the best.’

  The Anglo-Saxon word seemed to release something in Wighton, and despite the fact that his composure did not falter, Shaw could see his colour draining away.

  ‘So I paid. Then she started getting magazines – from Exit and Dignitas. It was clear to her, she claimed, that I didn’t want to care for her – not really. So why didn’t she just die? I had to organize it, and she never asked about the cost. It’s seven thousand pounds, by the way, for Dignitas. They use helium, so you’ve got to laugh.’

  He raised a hand from under the table to wipe his lips and it shook violently.

  ‘But that’s not the real cost. You’ve got to get there. There isn’t an airline that would let her near a commercial flight so we’re talking a private jet. It’s not as much as you’d think; fifteen thousand, a little more. I’d have to take a nurse because you couldn’t have her dying en route. I don’t have that kind of money. And I thought when she’s gone I want a life, so I’m not borrowing it off some shark.’

  Twine came in with tea in paper cups.

  ‘Last summer the pilot who owns the Limpet, Bob Lott, took her over the Channel. Big adventure, that, you’d think he’d found the North West Passage. I had to go over and fetch the boat back. Money was good. She was laid up in Dunkirk, the old town. I know a few people there from when I was at Wells: harbour police, customs, state-wide CID. They said there was a big problem with cocaine going out in commercial vessels to the UK – East Coast ports mainly – and they couldn’t stop it. Fact was they’d given up trying. I thought, if they’re not bothered I’ll cash in. I requested the files and promised I’d have a look at it from our end. It wasn’t difficult to find a way in to the network. I’d done some drugs work back in the nineties, so I had the contacts. But you can’t make a fortune like that, not as fast as I wanted it.’

  Outside they heard the peacock screech.

  ‘I thought I’d cut it.’

  He drank his tea, the hand much steadier now.

  ‘How did you know Arnold Smith-Waterson?’

  ‘Gutter? I used to run a boat for him out of Wells when he had a house up here – back in the nineties. Nice people, him and the wife. After the divorce I did him for possession, cocaine that time. But he wasn’t finicky. I knew he’d been a doctor, and I knew he was on the streets. I tracked him down and made him an offer. If he’d tell me what to get and do the mixing I’d do the rest. He got a free supply. I’d run into town in the van and give him his fix. Once a day, out by the Boal Quay. Personal service.

  ‘But he fucked up. Too much Levamisole. Irony was he thought he was getting a pure supply. Never knew he was poisoning himself until it was too late. Most of it had gone out on the streets by the time we knew it was dangerous. I used street dealers in Lynn. I told Gutter that if he said a word I’d get him locked up for life. A cell. Like a lot of them, he can’t stand the thought of it – being caged. I paced him out a standard cell. Three by two. That freaked him out.’

  Shaw thought of Smith-Waterson, sitting now in a neon-lit room, looking out of a window at the manicured grounds of the secure unit. His silence was explicable now, not the product of fear at all, but guilt. He’d mixed the adulterated supply, his own mutilated hand was evidence of the consequences. The sheer terror of being incarcerated had stopped him doing the only thing that would have saved his sanity: confessing and leading the police to Wighton.

  ‘But you were still cutting it,’ said Valentine. ‘We’ve found the evidence in the boathouse.’

  ‘Once you know how it’s simple. Like cooking. I had to shift what was left.’

  ‘Until Stefan Bedrich stumbled on the boathouse that night,’ said Shaw. ‘Talk me through that. No doubt that was his fault.’

  Wighton looked at his hands. ‘Your boy – Twine – he said I had a lawyer on the way.’

  ‘Won’t be long,’ said Shaw. ‘But so you know, we found the Limpet, and we’ve got it on CCTV heading out to sea that night. And we’ve got SOCO in the boathouse loft. What chance is there that there isn’t a bloodstain?’

  Shaw thought he saw the moment when the truth, in the sense of the shape of his life from this moment forwards, actually became a reality for Wighton. He would never again enter a room, or leave a room, without permission. Wighton’s tradesman-like exterior hid a certain subtle intelligence. Did he see the irony then – that he’d done all this to escape the tyranny of that upstairs room and the oxygen tent, only to spend the years that were left to him in a cell?

  ‘I didn’t kill him. The Pole.’

  ‘I find that hard to believe,’ said Shaw.

  ‘I hit him,’ he said, the confessional moment marked by an intake of breath. ‘I hit him hard with a piece of four-by-two, so there’ll be blood all right, and he fell down the ladder into the dock. I fished him out with a hook. Breathing – I got him breathing – but he wouldn’t come round, so I wrapped him up in tarpaulin and put him in the cockpit of the Limpet. I tied a lead weight to his leg with rope and tape. Then I went up into the loft and started clearing up.

  ‘I was going to throw him overboard, I don’t mind admitting that. When I came down with the stash he had gone. Like gone, Houdini or something, just gone, with the tarpaulin still there. I ran out on the beach and I could see his footprints in the mud. Concussion, I reckon, ’cos it’s totally mad, setting out at night over those sands. I thought he’ll die
out there. I better run too. So I cleaned up what I could and waited for the tide.’

  ‘You didn’t see the other burglars?’ asked Shaw.

  Wighton calculated for a moment. ‘Sure. I went up into the village and clocked them in the van. That’s when I got the reg number. When I thought you were getting close to me, after you circulated a description of the Limpet, I staged the burglary up at Tines Manor. That way I could put you on to them. That night, the night the Pole died, they waited about an hour and then drove off. I was safe then, but I still had to catch the tide. So I did.’

  ‘Know what I think?’ asked Shaw.

  They could hear a car purring outside. Wighton’s lawyer had arrived.

  ‘I think Stefan Bedrich died in the boathouse loft. Forensics will be key, but I’m confident we’ll find what we need. It was a bloodbath, and you can’t clean up after a bloodbath. Yes, you took the Limpet out into Overy Creek, but I think you had him on-board – roped up to the lead weight, with his pockets stuffed with samphire. Then you threw him overboard. Then you set out to sea. That’s the story the evidence is going to tell, and it’s the story that’ll convince a jury you killed Stefan Bedrich.’

  FORTY-FIVE

  The Old Beach Café had a set of extra-large meteorological instruments mounted on the wooden balcony edge: a thermometer, barometer, a wind gauge linked to an anemometer on the roof, a sunshine recorder. Shaw had never seen the pointer on the barometer so low, wedged firmly beyond STORM. Blue-black clouds dominated the sky, with ragged windows of blue beyond. The air was so still the beach felt like a giant room in which all the windows had been closed. The anemometer was static, its little ice-cream-cup vanes set to the points of the compass. The thermometer read 22°C (72°F), and although the sun was falling rapidly towards the horizon, as Shaw watched the digital readout flipped to 23°C.

 

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