Death Watch

An hour later Shaw stood at a bedroom window over the Bentinck Launderette looking down into Erebus Street, where hose water welled up out of blocked drains, creating pools to reflect the last flames of the fire at number 6, just out of sight, further up the street, towards the church and the abattoir. A single fire-brigade tender remained, and Shaw could just see two firefighters playing water into the burnt-out building. He knew that all that was left was a gap now, where the house had once stood, a rotten, blackened tooth, although the roof-line was left – slung like a hammock between chimney stacks. The power cut, confined to Erebus Street and the adjacent dock buildings, was ongoing, so most of the residents had been moved to the Kingdom Hall, a Jehovah’s Witness meeting place a quarter of a mile into town.

Behind him on the single bed lay Neil Judd, Bryan Judd’s younger brother. He’d demanded to speak to Shaw, insisting he had information crucial to the murder inquiry. Shaw had decided the remaining members of the Judd family should stay on Erebus Street that night – the emergency services had portable lighting, and he didn’t want them mixing with the rest of the residents until he’d had statements taken. Shaw’s wounds – some burns to his left hand, right leg, and a nail-gash on the right

The burnt-out house, as Liam Kennedy had told them, was owned by the church on the corner and run as a hostel. Both Aidan Holme and the man Shaw had rescued from the flames were at the Queen Victoria. Holme – accompanied by Kennedy – had been taken to intensive care, where he was fighting to overcome the shock of third-degree burns to his arms and neck. His friend was in better shape, but smoke inhalation would keep him in a hospital bed for forty-eight hours, maybe more. Andy Judd had been arrested at the scene. He’d spend the night in the cells at St James’s after a thorough medical examination. The fire brigade’s forensic unit had removed evidence from the house indicating that at least two home-made Molotov cocktails had been lobbed through the broken downstairs window, although the only thing Shaw had seen Andy Judd throw had been a half-brick. A team was taking statements at the Kingdom Hall – but Shaw knew the chances that any of them would incriminate Andy Judd for the arson attack were slight.

Ally Judd had been visited by the parish priest – Father Martin – then given a sedative and was asleep in her house, next door to the launderette, an officer from family liaison at the bedside. It was nearly midnight and Shaw had wanted to go home, grab some sleep, so that he’d be alert and prepared for the murder inquiry’s first full day. Overnight Paul Twine, a keen, graduate-entry DC, would man the inquiry phone lines at the incident room Valentine had set up on Level One at the hospital, and keep a watching brief on the injured. Shaw had been

So sleep would have to wait.

Shaw turned from the window and watched Neil Judd swig water from a bottle, sitting propped up on pillows on his bed. The bedsit was directly above the launderette, the kitchen shared with his father, a widower, who had a bedroom next to his son’s. Neil’s room was cluttered with teenage paraphernalia – neatly stacked magazines, CDs, DVDs. And the technology to go with it: an iPod and matching sound system, DVD player, a pair of cool dark Wharfedale speakers, a laptop.

All of which was in sharp contrast to the bare utility of the little shared kitchen, the rusted paraffin heaters in each of the rooms, the bare floorboards. The flat smelt of cheap talc, aftershave, and laundered clothes. Andy’s room was like a cell: spotless, but without a single note of individuality except for a framed picture of Dublin’s O’Connell Bridge. In Neil’s room, by contrast, the walls were covered in film posters: No Country For Old Men, In the Valley of Elah, Godfather II. A Japanese cartoon, framed, blood dripping from a severed arm.

With the power still out Neil Judd had lit two night-lights on the windowsill and a candle on his bedside table. But the SOC team had set a halogen lantern in the corridor outside which splashed fake daylight into the room as well.

Shaw thought there was something wrong with the Taxi Driver showing vigilante Robert De Niro stripped down, weapons taped to his body, a knife on a sliding rail on his upper arm, ready to slip down into his palm from within a jacket, a gun in a neat pouch at his groin. And then there were the magazines – arranged with disturbing neatness on two shelves. Shaw pulled one out: Martial Arts Illustrated.

‘You wanted to tell us something,’ he said, prompting. Shaw had noticed that, when someone spoke, Judd turned his head, bringing his ear closer to the sound. But there was nothing subservient about the tic, because a brief look of irritation went with it, as if it were Shaw’s fault that his voice couldn’t be clearly heard.

‘I know why Dad did it – why he went for them – the dossers in the hostel.’ Shaw observed that, when he wanted to, when he prepared the sentence, Neil Judd could almost completely disguise the dulling effect of his deafness on his diction.

Valentine stood with his back to the wardrobe, trying to do some mental arithmetic. He didn’t know much about modern technology or wages on the quayside – Neil Judd said he’d just started as a stevedore, taking his dad’s old job – but Valentine reckoned there was at least a few thousand quids’ worth of gear in the room. And Neil Judd wasn’t full time, he’d told them proudly, but on college day release.

Valentine knocked out a Silk Cut but Neil Judd got in before he lit it. ‘Spare one?’ he asked. They lit up together, from Valentine’s lighter.

He looked at Valentine, sensing the older man would know.

The DS nodded. ‘Skunk and raw spirit.’ He looked at Shaw. ‘You get it – ’specially off the boats, in from Holland.’

Neil stretched himself on the bed, and Valentine thought how slight he was, how fragile the bones. Shaw wondered why Judd’s face seemed to radiate an oddly smug expression, as if his evening was going to plan. The death of his brother seemed to be an emotional event confined to another world. When he exhaled his cigarette smoke he pushed it out in a long plume, up at the ceiling.

‘Bry was trying to kick it – just ask Ally – and he’d done it, you know, for a year, maybe more. But they got him back on it and he couldn’t get off.’

Shaw thought there was something cloying about Neil Judd, about the whole family, as though they were all victims, or looking to be victims. ‘Where’d he get the money?’ he asked. ‘Job at the hospital can’t pay enough for a habit like that.’

Judd swallowed hard. The question seemed to confuse him. He sat up on the bed, pulled his T-shirt up and over his head.

was slight, but beneath the T-shirt his muscles were clear, sharp with a textbook six-pack. He flexed a hand like a claw. ‘He didn’t pay. He gave them something back – stuff he got from the hospital.’ He smiled. ‘That’s down to you lot… police use the incinerator to burn off drugs – street gear. The bloke in the hostel, Holme, he and Bry worked out a way of getting it out so it looked like it had gone up in smoke. But it hadn’t. Bry got it, and gave it to him…’ He stood and walked lightly on the balls of his feet to the open window.

Shaw looked quickly at Valentine, asking with his eyes if this could be true. His DS shrugged, unhappy that he’d worked out it was organized crime, but had missed the link with drugs. Now, looking back, it should have been obvious. Because drugs were the rotten heart of modern crime.

‘Bry wanted to call the deal off,’ said Judd. ‘He’d told Holme – but there’d been a fight and Bry came back in a mess – his eye cut up. He was crying. Dad saw that. They weren’t close, they hadn’t been for years, but he saw that, and he knew Holme was making him do it, making him trash his life.’

‘Hold on,’ said Shaw. ‘You’re saying this Holme character, from the hostel, hit your brother.’

Neil Judd struck his solar plexus with a fist. ‘Hit!’ he shouted. ‘Christ – Bry was terrified. Holme said he couldn’t back out now, that they’d kill him.’ Neil Judd nodded, kept nodding, leaving that idea to hang in the air.

Shaw went to the window as Judd went back to the bed, and, looking down, saw that a priest stood before the ruins of the burnt-out house. He watched him make a sign of the cross then punch a number into a mobile.

‘A week ago, yeah – at the weekend,’ said Judd, stretching out. ‘A Sunday. Bry was on his way into work and he went over to try and tell them again – tell them he wouldn’t do it. I think there was a big haul coming through – Bry got to know because he had to make room for the consignment, and be ready to make sure it all went in by batch. He said the place was always crawling with coppers, that it was risky – what they did. He said Holme had gone berserk, laid into him, and that it wasn’t just Bry that would suffer if he pulled out now. Holme said they’d make Ally suffer too. He hit Bry, in the eye, a few times, so that it kind of ballooned up. The white bit was all bloody.’

As he said it he couldn’t stop himself looking into Shaw’s dead eye – the full-moon white pupil oddly piercing. He turned away on one shoulder so that he could pull up the pillow behind his head. Then he put an ashtray onto his knee, but Valentine didn’t offer him another cigarette. Adrenaline was making the young man’s foot shake from side to side, like a windscreen wiper, the underside of the foot black where he’d walked out into the street.

‘We’ll need a formal statement,’ said Shaw. ‘Tomorrow. We’ll come here.’

‘Right. No problem. It’s only right – that fucker needs

They left him to rest and made their way down the stairs and back through the launderette to the street. DC Jacky Lau was on the doorstep. Lau was in her thirties, short, stocky, and pugnacious. Her spare time was spent racing at the Norfolk Arena: hot rods, souped-up road cars. She wore a leather jacket now, despite the heat, and her Mégane, complete with aerofoils and spoilers, was parked at the kerb. She had a notebook in one hand and a bacon sandwich in the other, partly wrapped in foil. Valentine had told her she could clock off from the murder team an hour ago, but she’d insisted on checking out the two men from the hostel against the records at St James’s.

‘The men from the hostel, sir, I’ve got some details.’

She put the sandwich on top of the roof of the Mégane. Shaw heard footsteps in the street and looking towards the church saw the priest again, moving through the headstones set in the small graveyard.

‘Holme, the badly injured one,’ said Lau. ‘Aidan Smith Holme – he’s got a record as long as a needle-pocked arm. Thirty-two. He’s up on a charge – supplying again. Third count. Guilty both times, but never jailed. Due in court end of the month. Bailed by a family member – an uncle, who must trust him; he’s put up five thousand pounds. In another life he was a teacher at the tech. General science. Lost the job after the first offence. He was supplying the kids.’

‘Plea this time?’

If he can raise bail he can afford a decent lawyer as well, thought Shaw. But if he couldn’t wriggle out he’d be inside for a decent stretch, two to five years on the third count.

Shaw pressed the heel of his palm into his good eye, massaging the skin, uneasy now that he hadn’t known where the West Norfolk force destroyed street-haul drugs. He’d never worked on the drugs squad, and neither had George Valentine. It was a weakness – worse, a weakness they shared.

‘And this “Pete”? – the one from upstairs?’

‘According to the priest – a Father Martin – his name’s Hendre, with an “e”. It’s a match for a name on our database too. Peter Hendre – if it’s the same man – was an accountant. Struck off in 1990. He fleeced some old dears while sorting out their finances. One of the relatives spotted that the numbers didn’t add up. Eight counts – down for three years. He’s only just come back to the area; been away a year, here for just a few days. They gave him a spare room. Hostel’s only for the dossers they trust, apparently. They have to be clean – no booze, no drugs, no sex. Martin says Hendre’s got serious mental health issues: paranoia. But he doesn’t touch stuff – any kind of stuff. He hadn’t heard of anyone called…’ She checked her notebook. ‘The Organ Grinder?’

Shaw nodded.

‘But he says the last time Hendre was here he claimed he was being followed by a man in a white coat with a butcher’s cleaver. Mad as a hatter.’

Shaw walked out into the middle of the street. He was

But Shaw had other ideas.

‘Jackie,’ he said. ‘Get some sleep – then seven tomorrow at the hospital. George has set up an incident room close to the SOC. Be there.’

‘Sir.’ She crammed the last of the bacon into her mouth and fired up the Mégane, the engine rumble making a few loose windows vibrate.

Shaw watched the car turn the corner by the abattoir. ‘We don’t really need our beauty sleep – do we, George? How about some overtime?’

Valentine’s shoulders slumped. ‘Now?’

‘Yeah – now. Ring the hospital – find me this Kennedy character. If he’s the warden, does he live here, on the street? Find out. See if he’s coming home, and if he is, tell him we want a word. He knows Holme, knows him well. I want to know what he knows, and I want to know now. Holme said something to him – here, in the street. When Holme said he was dying he also said, “I told you” – like he’d predicted it. I want to know what that meant.’ He looked around, bouncing on his toes. ‘If he’s staying at the hospital we’ll go to him.’

As Valentine made the call Shaw listened to the night. It was quiet now, in the witching hour after midnight,

Valentine stood by the car, cut off his mobile, and lit a cigarette. ‘Kennedy’s on his way back now in one of our squad cars – ten minutes. He lives at the church.’

‘Great,’ said Shaw.

And then, sharply, out of the night, came the sound of running footsteps. In the street, nothing moved. But the sound was as unmistakable as a chiming clock. Shaw could see the whole street and nothing in it was moving. Behind the houses on each side ran tarmacked paths. Is that where the sound came from? Not just footsteps. Metallic footsteps. Shaw imagined them conjuring up a line of sparks in the dark. And then they were gone.