Death Watch

Sergeant Ernest ‘Timber’ Woods had let George Valentine bring a bacon sandwich into the records room. They’d worked together in the seventies with Jack Shaw. But Timber was never in their league: he couldn’t catch a cold without uniformed assistance. He’d embraced early retirement and a nice little job to pay for his domino nights at the Institute – he was working the early shift that day: six till noon. West Norfolk had still to secure government funding to transfer all the force records to computer. Anything before 1995 was still on paper. So they needed Woods and the dusty box files which filled the old gunpowder magazines under St James’s – a Grade II listed relic of the barracks which had stood on the spot before the city walls had been demolished to make way for police headquarters.

Valentine had got two hours’ sleep at his desk, his feet up, then he’d gone out to the bus station to get his breakfast. He’d brought Woods a tea and a round of toast and dripping wrapped in silver paper.

‘Missing person, you say?’ asked Woods, pulling himself up from behind the steel desk they’d given him. He was built like an armchair and walked like a fisherman, with a roll of the shoulders.

‘Not my case, Timber, but I think Jack was involved. And Erebus Street – I know that address.’ Valentine

‘It’s got to be the early nineties,’ said Valentine. ‘It’s before I teamed up with Jack – I know that. That was ’94. I’d have been a DI – so that’s after ’91.’

Woods came to a halt. ‘Right – there’s one of these for each year; missing persons in alphabetical order.’ He tapped a printed sheet inside a metal frame holder. ‘Here’s 1990 – then go that way,’ he added, pointing down the room. ‘I’ll eat my toast,’ he said, hobbling away.

Valentine didn’t know if he’d recognize the name. But he liked long shots, especially when he was this tired. It was like gambling, a kind of listless excitement. There was nothing on 1990 – from Brent to Wynch. Or 1991. He was at the bottom of the list for 1992 when he knew his concentration had gone. He pressed two fingers on either side of his nose, and read them again. And there it was: JUDD, N. J.

‘Well, well,’ he said, the adrenaline flooding his bloodstream. ‘Family secrets.’

He found the box file using the code provided. There was a table and chair at the end of the aisle. He set his packet of Silk Cut to one side, the lighter beside it, and opened the file in the box to the first page, a typed sheet with a single line…

Investigating officer: DCI Jack Shaw.

Norma Jean Judd was fifteen years old when she disappeared; fifteen years nine months. Her home address was number 14 Erebus Street – the house occupied by her twin brother until his violent death. Norma Jean was last seen alive on a summer’s afternoon in 1992. She was at Lynn Community College but on a day-release scheme in hairdressing – NVQ Level 2. She’d been at Fringe Benefits, the hairdressers on the London Road, from 10 o’clock that morning until 3.45 that afternoon. Colleagues said she’d always been tidy, dutiful, and polite. That day, however, she’d been unusually quiet – a trait which had been deepening for several weeks. She’d explained that she was worried about her exams. She’d walked home. A neighbour saw her in Erebus Street at 4.30, talking to a neighbour, a man called Jan Orzsak. The witness said their voices had been raised and that Norma Jean appeared upset by the encounter. She ran home to number 14. She was never seen again by anyone

It was not a happy house. The problem was Norma Jean: attractive, precocious, and independent, and four months pregnant. The father was Ben Ruddle, of number 31 Erebus Street. He was nineteen at the time, in a young offenders’ centre up the coast at Boston, awaiting trial for burglary. Andy Judd wanted her to keep the baby. Marie, her mother, wanted her to have a termination. A brief note from Norma Jean’s doctor was included in the file; it confirmed that another GP had been asked to review the case notes on the grounds that a request had been made by the patient – on 1 September – for the doctors to consider a termination under the 1967 Abortion Act, on the grounds of the damage it would cause to the mental health of the mother.

In his statement to police Andy Judd said he’d gone home, found Norma Jean crying on her bed, and had comforted her. Norma Jean said – according to her father – that she was upset and confused about what to do about the child. Andy said he’d run himself a bath because he and his wife were planning a night out at St Luke’s – the Catholic club in nearby Roseberry Street. While he was in the bathroom he heard Norma Jean going down the stairs – he said he presumed she was making herself a cup of tea. But when he came down he

Marie Judd, in her statement made that evening to DCI Jack Shaw, corroborated her husband’s version of events. She’d said she’d seen Norma Jean crossing the yard at about 5 o’clock – it had to be before that because one of her friends had come into the launderette to listen to the local weather forecast on the radio. They both wanted to hear it because they’d planned a trip to the beach at Heacham the next day – a Sunday.

Andy Judd went back to the Crane. The landlord said he was certain he was back by 5.30 p.m. It was the mother who raised the alarm when she went home to get ready to go out at 7.30 p.m. There was no sign of her daughter. She rang friends, and – after dragging her husband out of the pub – they checked neighbours as well. At 9.30 p.m. they called the police.

The prime suspect was Jan Orzsak. Aged forty-eight. An engineer. Polish. A bachelor whose mother had died two years previously. When she was much younger, he’d made friends with Norma Jean and a few of the other children in the street. They went to his house to see his tropical fish. Orzsak said he’d asked Norma Jean to feed the fish while he’d been out of the country on an assignment for the company he worked for – in Africa, installing a power plant in a village near Lagos. When he got back the fish were dead. She’d lost the key he’d given her. He admitted they’d argued in the street. Orzsak said he’d simply expressed his disappointment. CID had him in that first night while an extensive house-to-house search was conducted. He was released without charge

Nothing was ever heard of her again.

Jack Shaw had next hauled the father – Andy – into St James’s. Marie Judd, re-interviewed, admitted that there had been family arguments about the baby. The issue was deeply divisive. Marie Judd was from a sprawling Irish Catholic family. She’d watched her own mother worn down by bearing eleven children: three boys and eight girls. Her death at fifty-eight had been a release from grinding poverty. It was a fate Marie was determined her daughter would not share. Her father, a teetotal wages clerk at one of Dublin’s linen mills, had seen in the size of his family the only evidence that his life had been a success. Andy, as devout a worshipper at the Sacred Heart as his wife, could walk away from the consequences of childbirth; he considered all forms of abortion to be infanticide.

The CID team asked themselves the obvious question: had Andy, on that last evening, discovered that his daughter had finally decided to take her mother’s advice? Had an argument turned to violence?

It wouldn’t have been the first time. Andy Judd had a violent criminal record; often linked to alcohol abuse. In 1984 he’d been convicted on a charge of ABH – he’d coshed a workmate from the docks with an empty beer bottle after an argument over a card game in one of the North End pubs. In 1993 he’d been before the magistrates court on three counts of breaching the peace – all in the Crane. Each time excessive alcohol consumption

But despite an extensive forensic sweep of the house no evidence could be found of a violent struggle, let alone murder. If he had killed his daughter, where had he put the body in the few minutes during which he’d an opportunity to cover his tracks? And there was Marie Judd’s eyewitness account of seeing Norma Jean alive leaving the house. She insisted her husband was not capable of hurting their daughter and had never struck her, despite the bitter family row over the unborn child. Jack Shaw had believed Marie Judd’s statement, although the suspicion would always linger that she might have been persuaded to lie to protect her husband.

If they couldn’t find a killer perhaps there was another possibility: had Norma Jean simply left home? She’d talked to at least one school friend about running away. But extensive checks on buses, trains, and the major roads out of Lynn drew a blank. The Garda visited relatives in Dublin to make sure she had not fled across the Irish Sea. The file on Norma Jean Judd remained open for almost two years. There was a single sighting of the teenager in 1993 after an extensive poster campaign in eastern England. She was ‘seen’ buying Hello! in Peterborough by a woman who ran a newsagent’s. Hello! was Norma Jean’s favourite magazine. The woman said she was ‘nearly certain’ it was the girl in the poster. Lynn police set up a

Valentine finished his cigarette and threw it from the metal fire escape outside the canteen, watching it corkscrew down five floors to the St James’s car park. What did Norma Jean’s story tell him about the dead man – her twin brother Bryan? What did it tell him about the Judds? Only, perhaps, that they were a family who lived with a secret and a question: if Norma Jean was dead, did her killer live amongst them? Or just a few doors away?

He asked himself how many families could withstand that kind of distrust, that intensity of internal tension, before blowing itself apart. And he knew the answer was none.