Death Watch

‘Rice?’ asked the man behind the counter of the all-night mobile kiosk. He wore a Chinese shirt, dragons and little willow-pattern bridges, but the accent was London overspill and he had Red Devils tattooed on one hand.

‘Chips,’ said Valentine. ‘Curry sauce.’ He didn’t recognize the man; normally it was a woman with cutaway gloves.

He took the tray and a plastic fork and left without saying anything, leaving the right money in loose change on the counter: 90p. It had been that price for a year now.

The quayside was deserted, it was 2 a.m, the light from the all-night takeaway spilling out to the railings over the water. Valentine touched the iron, a little ceremony of luck, then walked, picking at the food, until he got to South Lynn, the network of streets he’d lived in all his life. He put the tray of half-eaten chips into a bin, crunching it down so that the seagulls wouldn’t tear it back out.

His terraced house stood dark and still; but the street light outside his bedroom was on, buzzing like it always did. Briefly, he wondered if the power had been out here, then dismissed the thought. There was nothing in the fridge anyway.

In his imagination he could see into the rooms, through the bricks, as if it were a doll’s house standing

His keys were heavy in his pocket, and only a few minutes earlier he’d been dreaming of his bed, but now he couldn’t face it, because sleeping was about letting go, and he wasn’t very good at that. He walked on instead, past the corner shop and its security grille, to the graveyard of All Saints’. Someone had put an empty can of Special Brew on top of his wife’s gravestone. He sat on a bench and lobbed grit at it. He unpeeled the charity sticker from his lapel and stuck it on the stone. There were twenty, thirty, others in various states of rotting away, all over the granite surface.

Julie Anne Valentine 1955–1993

Asleep

The beer can clattered down on the tarmac path.

He walked; zigzagging through the terraced streets behind the London Road, trying to shake off the illusion that he was being followed, an illusion which haunted him now when he was alone, at night, in the silent streets. Near the old city gate there was a pub called the Honest Lawyer, the sign a headless clerk; closed down now, the windows stopped-up with breeze blocks. Beside it stood a funeral parlour. Granite stones in the window, lilies in

On the other side of the shop from the chapel was a house, two-up two-down, with a front door in matching gloss black. And beside that a set of garages: four roll-up doors. Valentine knew what was inside each: a sleek black car with glass panel sides for the coffin, a Daimler estate, and a glass-casket funeral coach; he’d often seen the plumed black horses pulling it towards the cemetery at Gayton Road.

The fourth roll-up garage door was never open in the week except in the evenings. Inside was a souped-up Citroën, stripped down for stock-car racing, up on blocks, with a bonnet logo that read TEAM MOSSE.

In front of the house, parked at the kerb, was a battered BMW, rust on one of the wheel arches.

There was a chestnut tree opposite the house on a triangle of open ground and the branches came right down to the ground, creating a perfect canopy. By the trunk of the tree was a bench, a hidden gazebo. And that’s where he always sat. It was a bit like his other addictions now, watching this man – like the booze, the fags, and the gambling. He did it without thinking, and wouldn’t have admitted that it wasn’t fun any more. He’d started after Christmas because January was always his worst month. His generation – born in the fifties – didn’t do depression, but if he’d known a little he’d have spotted the symptoms. He felt cold when it was mild, tired when he woke up, and alcohol deepened the feeling that he’d forgotten how to get through a day, like suddenly losing the ability to tie your own shoelaces.

July 26th 1997.

He’d set out that night for the Westmead Estate, an up-and-coming DI, with a career ahead of him. His partner had been DCI Jack Shaw – Peter Shaw’s father. The body of a nine-year-old boy, later identified as Jonathan Tessier, had been found dead at three minutes past midnight in the car park beneath Vancouver House – a twenty-one-storey council block in the heart of the estate – a sprawling warren of deprivation, the kind of place that official statistics said didn’t exist.

The body was still dressed in the sports kit the boy had put on that morning to play football on the grass triangle by the flats. He’d been strangled, with a ligature of some sort, the condition of the body pointing to a time of death between six o’clock and eleven o’clock that night. A witness who’d found the body had seen a car leaving the scene – a Volkswagen Polo. The driver had failed to negotiate the narrow ramp to ground level and clipped one of the concrete pillars, spilling broken glass from a headlamp on the ground. Valentine and Shaw had stayed at the scene – overseeing the forensics team, organizing a door-to-door of the flats above, setting up an incident room in the community centre in the row of shops across the waste ground.

Shaw and Valentine confronted Mosse, showing him evidence found at the scene – a leather, fur-lined glove, in a sealed evidence bag. They searched the flat but could not find a matching glove. Later DNA analysis of the skin residue inside the glove produced a close match for Mosse. And there was a motive, of sorts. Mosse’s car had been vandalized on several occasions in the previous month – each time separately reported to back up insurance claims. Had Mosse caught Tessier damaging the car? Had an attempt to administer summary justice turned violent, then lethal?

The case was thrown out of court just after lunch on the first day. Shaw and Valentine had made an elementary procedural error in taking the glove to Mosse’s flat. The defence argued that the glove had been contaminated in the process. Mosse’s original statement, and that of his 62-year-old mother, was that the glove had not been in

Jack Shaw’s career ended in early retirement a few months later. George Valentine was busted down a rank to DS and sent out into the wilderness that was the north Norfolk coast; ten years of petty crime, traffic offences, and community policing. For George Valentine it felt like the start of a long slow death. But he’d kept his nose clean, and he’d worked hard, and he’d finally been given one chance to get his rank back. He’d been recalled to the CID at St James’s.

Since becoming partners a year earlier he and Peter Shaw had tried to reopen the case into Robert Mosse – now a solicitor practising in Lynn. What they needed to do was build a fresh case against him – one that did not rely on the contaminated glove. They’d managed to link Mosse to a gang of teenage thugs who’d imposed some rough justice on the Westmead Estate. Mosse – away at university – was already living a different life. But it was clear that at one time he’d been part of this violent and unstable clique, and that they’d been a force to reckon with on the estate. On at least one occasion they’d meted out a violent lesson to a child in the very same underground car park where Tessier’s body had been found. And Shaw and Valentine had found forensic evidence

They’d put all the new evidence they’d collected before Detective Chief Superintendent Max Warren, asking for the case to be reopened. At the very least, reviewed. They’d got a flat refusal. It was a notorious case, which had badly dented the reputation of the West Norfolk force. Warren said he needed more than circumstantial evidence to reopen old wounds. Worse, Warren warned Peter Shaw that any further attempts to interview witnesses or approach the one-time suspect would result in disciplinary action. Shaw had, in turn, warned Valentine off. The case was closed.

They’d never discussed it again. Valentine knew, although it had barely been said, that Jack Shaw’s son still harboured a lingering doubt that his father might have planted the evidence that night. Valentine could see he’d been tortured by not knowing the truth: and now, perhaps, he’d accepted he never would – which meant that in part he not only distrusted his father’s honesty, but Valentine’s too, a judgement which lay at the heart of the animosity between them.

Valentine had not accepted the order to drop the case. He’d tracked down the remaining members of the original gang of four other than Mosse. One had emigrated to New Zealand, one was in a secure psychiatric

Which left him with Alex Cosyns. He’d been watching his house, here, opposite the chestnut tree, for twelve weeks, picking up threads, and using police records and the odd spare moment in CID to piece together a biographical jigsaw. What had he learnt? His age – thirty-seven – born St George’s Day in Lynn Royal Infirmary. Brought up on the notorious Westmead Estate, sixteenth floor of Vancouver House. Valentine had found a cutting from the Lynn News for 1980 – a picture of Cosyns’s father, with his young son, and a litter of prizewinning dogs. Labradors. Dogs had been their shared passion. Then came a school record unblemished by achievement, followed by a course in mechanics at the tech college. Awarded the Griffiths Medal for best student 1989. Worked at Askit’s Agricultural Engineers, Castle Rising until 1998. Then Kwik-Fit. Now a driver-mechanic for Gotobed’s Funeral Services. Married, the father of one daughter, and divorced – all three life-defining events crammed into the same year, 1999. Affected dark glasses and driving gloves. When he wasn’t working he was caring for the stock car or driving the third-hand BMW down to a semi in Manea, near Ely, to see his daughter. That was twice a month, always a Saturday. They went shopping in Peterborough, the cinema, a pub meal, then home.

And that was the first clue: those shopping trips round the Queensgate Centre were just a little too generous for a man who drove a hearse for a living and still paid child support. And then Valentine had checked out the stock

And that was the life he’d pieced together. All that, and the dog.

Valentine checked his watch. It was fifteen minutes past two. He wouldn’t be seeing either of them tonight. The usual pattern was a late-night walk at around midnight. The lights would wink out, then the door would open. The dog was a Jack Russell and had seen better days, grey fur around the narrow snout, too much fat round the middle. Cosyns would tug it along the path towards the park, stooping down, ruffling its fur, talking. Like the extra cash, thought Valentine, the dog didn’t fit. People do end up looking like their pets – a process of nature and nurture. They choose them, and then they mimic them. But the stumpy Jack Russell, despite its age, was hyperactive, fretful, skittering. Its owner, on the other hand, was tall, with unhurried movements, the lead always held firmly in the hand – and the hand always unseen in a leather driving glove. Mismatched partners, thought Valentine.

While Cosyns walked, Valentine would check out the front door just in case he’d left it off the latch. Then he’d look in the last of the four garages. Inside there’d be the

Next time he’d spring the front door lock, check out the inside of the house. This time he’d just wait, think, and see if he felt more like sleep. He fished in his pocket for his hip flask and drank.

He pictured Erebus Street, the dock gates, and the Crane. He knew that Shaw and he had come, silently, to the same conclusion; that Bryan Judd’s killer had not only come from Erebus Street, but that the heart of the mystery was there too. Because too much had happened in one night: the blackout, the murder, the sabotage, the attack on the hostel. Then there were the potential forensic links with the murder scene – the rice, the broken match. But what was cause, and what was consequence? Surely, within one of those houses, a motive must have been born, strong enough, and dark enough, to set in motion such a violent series of events.

And then there was that curious knowledge that he’d been to Erebus Street before. He snatched at the memory, but it slid past, like a fish just seen under reflective water. All it left was a phrase in his mind, almost slipping off the hook: missing person. Now he knew he wouldn’t sleep – not in his bed, anyway. So he stood abruptly and set out towards The Walks, across the silent park, picking up the long sinuous path which skirted the medieval Red Tower, and led back to police headquarters at St James’s.