Death Watch

A minute later, at 12.46 a.m. precisely, the power came back on, flooding Erebus Street with light, sending the shadows dashing for cover. The street lamps flared Lucozade-orange, catching the drifting smoke and steam from the burnt-out house; while a neon cross, as stark as Christ’s, now shone lime green from the roof of the church. Halfway up the street the launderette’s 24-HOUR WASH sign throbbed like an insipid imitation. The oppressive heat still hung in the street, making the air thick, distorting the straight urban lines, like a mirage.

Shaw sat in the Land Rover, his knees up, head back, resting his eyes, waiting for the squad car to bring Liam Kennedy, the hostel warden, back to the church. Valentine waited too, on one of the trestle tables outside the Crane, smoking for pleasure, looking down at his shoes.

Shaw thought he was beyond sleep now. He was thinking about the milk bottle, full of fuel, and the bloody rag. He’d ask Valentine to ring the station and order swabs to be taken from all those they’d arrested in the street outside the hostel. They’d have taken fingerprints as routine, but swabs were a long shot, just in case they found any DNA on the bottle. He tried to keep his mind on the case but instead his thoughts went back to the beach, to his world, an antidote to places like Erebus Street, and the people who lived there.

If he sat on the beach alone, he always sat at the same spot, at the place where he’d come to rest as a child. This view, from this precise point, had been with him all his conscious life – in fact he often wondered if it was written in his DNA, an inheritance from an unknown ancestor. Or his father? He should have asked him before he died if he’d come here as a child. They’d certainly played here together. He’d often, in his turn, watched his daughter Francesca running in circles, then stopping, on the same spot, and looking out to sea. Shaw liked to think she had discovered in her head that precise set of images which he held in his. DNA as a map reference. It was a 360-degree panorama: the tufted dunes behind, with their hidden amphitheatres of sand, the beach running south towards the huts and the lifeboat station at Old Hunstanton, a barnacle cluster of wooden roofs, and the sea itself – not a single image, but two: to the west on a clear day the low hills of Lincolnshire across the Wash, while to the north the beach ran towards Holme, where the coast of England turned at last to face the Pole, a

When the Old Beach Café had come on the market its location had been perfect, combining his beach with Lena’s dream – to live and work in the free air, out of the city. Two years ago it had been a derelict timber chalet, although Shaw recalled buying ice cream at a wooden counter there when he was a child. But it had closed before he was ten. He’d been on the crew of the little inshore lifeboat before he’d left for university, so he’d been able to keep a watching brief on the ruin of crumbling buildings. When he’d come back from the Met he’d joined the crew of the rescue hovercraft, installed to cover the sands and marshes of the north Norfolk coast, so he’d checked it out again, secretly, for Lena.

She’d been looking at properties along the coast, at Cromer, Sheringham, and beyond. He’d let her search, then suggested she take a look at the Old Beach Café, just when he thought the price would be at rock bottom, at the point when the roof beams looked like they wouldn’t make another winter. She’d been looking for the right place. It took her thirty seconds to realize she’d found it. For the asking price of £80,000 they acquired the old cottage behind the café (no roof, no services) and the boathouse beside it (wet rot, no roof ). Lena had worked hard, but most of all she’d kept going, surmounting each crisis, amending the business plan with the bank as they got to know their customers – the weekend/summer-cottage London crowd who were turning north Norfolk into ‘Chelsea-on-sea’, and the kiss-me-quick hordes who

Two ends of the market, with nothing in between. The boathouse was now called Surf – selling beach gear from £300 wetsuits to plastic windmills at £1.50. The Old Beach Café was just that. The cottage was home. A night-light would be burning now in his daughter’s room. He imagined her in the narrow bunk bed, a pale arm hanging down from the duvet through the gap in the wooden slats. And Lena? She had an ability to wake when he came home, then slip away again at will, as if sleep could be dismissed, then summoned, without taking offence. But he could touch her now, because he’d found that he could do that in his mind – feel the salt drying on her skin, the dampness at the nape of the neck, the slight inward curve of her back. Only her face, animated and fluid, was less easily conjured, like the shape of a cloud.

The first time he’d seen that face the black skin had been splashed with blood. She’d been sitting on the bottom step of a staircase in a house on Railton Road in Brixton, holding a young boy to her chest, with both arms around his neck. Shaw had never forgotten his name: Benjamin Winston Azore. He was fifteen years old and would get no older. Lena, a field lawyer for the Campaign for Racial Equality, had been working in the neighbourhood for a year. She’d been in the house seeing Benjamin’s mother about a complaint she’d made against the Met when someone had knocked on the front door. Benjamin had answered it. He’d had several suppliers in a

Shaw was going to speak but Lena asked him a question. ‘Are his eyes open?’

He’d nodded, aware that his own pulse rate had soared, and a muscle had started to tic below his left eye.

‘In the front room, over the fireplace, there’s a family picture…’

Shaw had noticed the slight cast in her left eye, and the easy way she’d withdrawn one arm from the boy’s neck. He took those thoughts into the front room. It was cold, despite the June day outside, the grate holding a folded white paper flower and a dusty Palm Sunday cross. Standing there, trying to focus on what he’d been asked to do, he thought he might be in shock, because he’d never seen death up close, not the moment of it, despite all the hours in the morgue sketching faces.

The picture showed a boy on a beach, bedraggled palm trees in the background, a parent in either hand. He took it back to Lena.

He stood on the doorstep waiting for the ambulance, straining to hear the siren. Behind him he knew, without looking, that she’d got him to look at the picture, so that that would be the image he took with him.