Death Watch

Shaw stood back to let one of the hospital tugs go past, the electric motor straining, the driver rhythmically hitting the horn with the heel of his palm. Eight trucks, all crammed with yellow bags destined for the incinerator. He held his breath, making sure he didn’t pick up a trace of the smell, then watched it diminish for fifty yards, trundling into the heart of Level One, until it turned a distant sharp left, and was gone.

He stood looking at the face of his mobile phone. He’d just had a short conversation with Valentine, who’d filled him in with a fifty-word summary of what he’d discovered about the disappearance of Norma Jean Judd. Was it relevant? Maybe. But they needed more information, so he’d asked Valentine to track down DCI Jack Shaw’s DS on the case – Wilf Jackson. Retired now, he lived in a bungalow at Snettisham on the coast. But he had a mind like a gazetteer, and he’d remember the case like it was yesterday. Shaw had a specific question: where was Bryan Judd the evening his sister went missing in 1992? And Neil – the youngest? Valentine was to get out to the coast, flesh out the story, then get back for the full briefing at 10.30.

The murder incident room was at Junction 24. Shaw pushed open a pair of double doors marked BIOMECHATRONICS: STORAGE.

The original contents of the room – a series of metal shelves holding artificial limbs – had been pushed back against one wall. Shaw could see rows of arms, lower legs, claw-like hands and feet; in plastic boxes swaddled prosthetics with pink fake skin, tangles of cable and pulleys, balls and sockets in sickly-white and perspex. And a rack of sticks and crutches, some in metal, but many in worn wood. On the wall was a glass cabinet, with shelves like a Royal Mail sorting office. In each, held in cotton wool, was a glass eye. The sight made him look away. He’d avoided having a glass eye himself, but it was always a possibility, as over time his doctor had warned him that healthy single eyes often deteriorated in sympathy if their injured partners were left in place.

Shaw took off his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his crisp white shirt, nodding at the watching eyes. ‘Are they all looking at me, or what?’ he asked.

Twine handed him a short report summarizing developments since they’d last talked by mobile just after

‘DS Valentine asked for a shakedown on Potts and Bourne – they’re the incinerator workers who were there when the victim was found,’ said Twine, holding a sheaf of statements. ‘Potts was the last to see Judd alive at 7.45 – but he wasn’t alone. There was a third man on early duty – Kelley. He saw him too. By the way, all of them had noticed he’d picked up a black eye recently, but none of them can recall when he got it.’

Twine’s summary had brought silence to the room, but his voice didn’t alter. ‘We know Judd was dead at 8.31 when the furnace was stopped by Bourne. Between 7.45 and the arrival of Darren Wylde, Potts and Bourne were with Kelley in the control room. They were brewing up some tea on a gas burner after the power went out. Bourne got on the line to the electricity company to see what had gone wrong, and Potts was on a mobile to the generator room – checking that they could go on taking up the demand. Then Potts went down to see what the situation was on the incinerator belt. So – unless they’re all in it together – they’re all in the clear.’

Shaw sat on the edge of a desk and reread the statements, looking for a loophole. There wasn’t one. Valentine had been right to insist on a fast-track check because the odds on a killer being the person who found the corpse were surprisingly high. A fact almost constantly overlooked in those first anxious hours of a murder inquiry.

The core of the CID team had been on site since five

‘Anything?’ Shaw asked.

Birley swung round, his six foot two inch frame and fifteen stone of rugby-playing muscle crammed into a plastic bucket seat. His wrists seemed to bulge where they emerged from his suit. He’d spent a decade in uniform and his outfit was still hanger-new. There was a plaster over one eye.

‘Match?’ asked Shaw.

‘Argument with the fly-half’s boot. I lost, but you should see him. He could do with one of those sticks.’ Birley nodded at the rack. ‘And no – nothing yet.’ Birley had been on Shaw’s team before in a major inquiry and he’d learnt one good rule early: if you’ve got nothing to say, keep it short.

Twine handed Shaw a coffee and a printout of personnel. ‘That’s everyone, with mobiles.’ The young DC had been a good choice for ‘point’ – a key role, the lynch-pin between Shaw and the team, channelling information, pulling everything together, then sifting out what needed to be shared, keeping the information moving. It was like being a human mini-roundabout.

‘Right, what we need to find out, Paul, is this… Is it really possible – feasible – that Bryan Judd was able to is possible, then we have a motive which would put Aidan Holme in the frame for Judd’s murder. We’re told they fought. We’re told threats were made. But all that depends on Judd being able to supply…’

Twine tapped a fountain pen on his teeth, then flicked the screen into life on his PC. ‘I figured we’d want to have a walk-through of the incinerator system – the waste bags. From top to bottom. We can go ahead with that then see where the drugs consignment fits in. I’ve got the man in charge of human waste ready now, for a quick tour. Dr Gavin Peploe – Level 10, Mary Seacole Ward.’

‘Well done,’ said Shaw. That’s what he wanted in his team, the kind of straightforward logic that made a murder inquiry hum. He put a £20 note on the desktop. ‘In the meantime get someone up to Costa Coffee on the main concourse and get everyone a decent coffee – that was truly awful.’ He lobbed his empty cup fifteen feet into a bin.

‘One other thing,’ said Twine. He clicked the screen. ‘Duty book…’ The front desk at St James’s kept an online record of all crime. It was standard inquiry procedure to cross-check with the last forty-eight hours. ‘Familiar litany,’ said Twine. ‘Two house burglaries in Gayton – next door to each other, that’s cheeky. A mugging in Greyfriars Gardens, an affray outside the Matilda, some vandalism in the town centre during one of the power cuts – six shop windows gone in the Arndale. Local paper wants to know if that’s looting, which is a good question.

‘Keep an eye on the floater,’ said Shaw. ‘Whose case?’

‘Creake,’ said Twine. DI William Creake was a slogger, with a reputation for wearing cases down by sheer bloody footwork. Inspired detection was not his strong suit. ‘I’ll get the basics off him, then make sure he gets an update from us too,’ added Twine.

‘Get me a copy, Paul. And I’d like a summary on the Arndale – anything to do with the power cuts we should see too. OK – press office? What are we telling the great unwashed of the British media about Bryan Judd?’

‘Bare details for release.’ Twine hit a key and a sheet of A4 slipped out of the printer. ‘We’ve stuck to suspicious death at the Queen Vic, no name yet, or address. The fire brigade released the basics on the blaze in Erebus Street and listed it as suspicious. If anyone finds a link we’ll stonewall for now.’

‘Fine,’ said Shaw, not bothering to read the release through. That had been one of his father’s maxims – trust people in a big inquiry, because if you try to do everything yourself, you’ll fail. ‘Going forward, Paul, I want to keep back the initials on the torch – MVR. The torch isn’t Judd’s, so there’s a good chance it’s the killer’s. If we get any nutters claiming they did it I want something to catch ’em out with. That’ll be it. And I don’t want the killer knowing for sure he’s left it at the scene.’ He saw a millimetre jump in Twine’s left eyebrow. ‘Or she, for that matter.’ Twine smiled. ‘And something for the door-to-door on Erebus Street, Paul. See if there’s any gossip about the Judds’ marriage. Something’s not right there –

‘Housework’ done, Shaw took the lift to the tenth floor of the main hospital block. The view over the town was already lost in heat and smog, a toxic layer of pollution like a blanket, deep enough to obscure everything but Lynn’s own skyscraper – the Campbell’s soup tower, down by the river. A tug was bucking the tide coming down the Cut from the sea, a wake behind like a slug’s trail. Out at sea a summer storm cloud like a giant chef’s hat drifted east. It would be a fine day on the beach, thought Shaw, squinting to see a distant line of surf.

Mary Seacole Ward was for infectious diseases, so he took care to squirt plenty of gel on his hands before entering. Dr Peploe met him by the nurses’ station. He was a paediatric surgeon, and the Lynn Primary Care Trust’s spokesman on the disposal of human tissue, a post required under the Infectious Diseases Act. A neat Glaswegian with a widow’s peak, Dr Peploe possessed one of those asymmetrical faces that the Celts seem to breed: one eye slightly more open than the other, the mouth off the horizontal. Handsome enough, with taut healthy skin stretched over a muscular face. And there was nothing Hebridean about his tan, which was an Italian brown. Stern, but playful – an image enhanced by the small cuddly toy sticking out of one pocket.

He laughed at himself, stuffing the teddy bear’s head out of sight.

‘Sorry – Human Tissue isn’t my day job. It pays to

‘We think someone, somehow, infiltrated the waste system to steal street-haul drugs before they were incinerated,’ said Shaw. ‘Consignments from law enforcement, customs, the lot. Is that possible?’

Peploe thought about it, and there was a long intake of breath. ‘Right. You want the Cook’s Tour or just a run-through?’

‘For now, just the basics please,’ said Shaw.

Peploe picked up an empty yellow waste bag from the room behind the nurses’ station. Each bag, sealed, had a metal tag. This one read NHS: W 10.

‘This bit’s pretty obvious,’ he said. ‘Every ward gets its own supply.’

On the bag itself was a plastic label on which had been printed a further code: 1268. Non-R. Non-C. I.

Peploe took him through it: the label was filled out by a nurse, 1268 was a patient number. Non-R – no radioactive material. Non-C – no chemotherapy residue. I – infectious.

Twice a day the bags were taken by a ward orderly to the metal chute in the cleaners’ room. A drawer, opened then shut, tipped the bag down a gravity-driven pipe system. They listened to it rattle away.

‘Let’s go get it,’ said Peploe, light on his toes. As they walked down the corridor he slid a hand in his pocket and pulled out something small, plastic and colourful; then he tapped it quickly, twice, in the palm of his other hand and quickly swallowed whatever he’d dispensed. Self-medication, thought Shaw, or a sweet tooth.

‘The young man who found the body said he was sent down to Level One with a waste bag,’ said Shaw.

Dr Peploe nodded, as if that fitted the system he had just described, which it didn’t.

‘Anything that might stick in the system, or break, goes by hand delivery – but never through the public areas of the hospital.’

The lift dropped to Level One and he followed Peploe through the maze of corridors to the tug depot, beneath the hospital’s main concourse. A metal chute descended into the depot room, cut off in mid-air, so that they could glimpse up into the darkness. They heard a sigh, then a rattle, and a yellow bag fell out of the darkness and into an angled bin below, which deadened the impact, then allowed it to slide down an aluminium ramp into a waiting tug.

‘That simple,’ said Peploe. He walked to the tug truck, looked amongst the yellow bags, and retrieved the one he’d put down the chute on Mary Seacole Ward. ‘Tugs take it all to the furnace. Then we monitor what goes up the chimney in terms of chemical composition. We can – broadly speaking – match input and output. It’s a good system.’

‘Tell me they didn’t just put the drugs down the chutes?’ said Shaw.

They walked through Level One to Junction 57. Shaw was braced for the cacophony when he brushed through the doors, but it was like a hammer blow, the bass note making one of the bones in his ear vibrate. And the air was laden with the white, lifeless dust.

But they weren’t stopping.

‘We can’t talk here,’ shouted Peploe. ‘Follow me.’ He took them beyond the incinerator belt, where a man worked with ear protectors and a plastic mask, and to a door marked simply CONTROL.

Shaw was about to step through when someone shouted his name. He turned to see Tom Hadden standing by the belt, waving him over. He used his hands to tell Peploe to carry on – he’d catch up. Hadden pushed what was left of his strawberry-blond hair back off the pale forehead, took a breath, and shouted. ‘I had someone brush all the metal surfaces in here for prints. Nothing, but we found this instead.’

Beside the belt and next to Bryan Judd’s small office was a control panel in beaten metal. A few dials, an LED display which, Shaw guessed, showed the temperature at various levels of the furnace, and a set of brass switches sticking out, each with a small bulb of metal at the end, like a chapel peg. One of them was darker than the rest, smeared.

‘It’s blood,’ said Hadden, into Shaw’s ear. ‘And brain and bone. The switch has been impacted by some kind of

Shaw went to speak but the dust caught in his throat, so that he had to turn away, coughing violently. ‘So – what – not a fall?’ he asked eventually, holding the back of his hand to his lips.

‘No, no. A fight perhaps.’ Shaw moved closer. ‘Judd was medium height,’ said Hadden. ‘My guess is his assailant got him by the neck and threw him back against this wall – the switch would be just right for here…’ He touched the base of his skull at the back of the neck. ‘There’s a lot of force – see, the whole thing’s dented.’

Shaw stood to one side so that the light played across the metal. A dent, around the switch, and again below where Judd’s hips would have crashed into the metal panel.

‘One other thing,’ said Hadden. He gave Shaw a piece of card marked NHS: W 22.

‘That’s what was on the metal tag with the bag that went in with the victim.’

Shaw took it. ‘Tom,’ he patted him on the back. ‘Thanks.’

He went after Peploe, climbing an enclosed spiral staircase until he stepped into a room with a glass wall looking out onto two large gas turbines. Peploe explained that these were used to drive the air through the furnace and up the 200-foot chimney. The surgeon pointed up and Shaw craned his neck; the ceiling was glass too, giving them a view up through the mesh floors of the furnace.

‘What?’ Shaw’s voice buzzed with frustration. ‘He had someone on him?’

‘Yeah. But he went for a pee. They told him chummy was out sparko – couldn’t lift a finger. When he got back he’d gone, plus the dusty suit. Last seen legging it over the car park.’

‘Get a description out through Paul – let’s find him before he goes to ground.’ A tiny detail, but Shaw hadn’t missed it. Valentine could have given him the name of the DC who had bungled the job, but he’d kept it to himself. There’d be a quiet word later, a warning, nothing bureaucratic, no paperwork, just a note added to the Valentine memory banks.

‘I’ll be at the briefing,’ said Valentine, cutting the line before Shaw had a chance to check on his progress with ex-DS Wilf Jackson out on the coast.

There were two engineers in the room monitoring a bank of dials and LED displays. But Peploe affably took charge. He tore off a foot of printout. ‘So, you want to know how the drugs fit in…’

He tapped the printout. ‘When a consignment’s due we put aside an hour in the schedule. That’s what they pay for – and they pay by the minute. The drugs arrive with a certificate from the Home Office lab which lists the contents of the batch. The drugs are in sealed metal containers – old fashioned, but effective and simple. The seals are wax. They’re signed over to us downstairs. personally – puts each container on the belt.’

He tapped the printout again. ‘This shows the chemical composition of what’s going out of the top of the chimney… This is state-of-the-art technology. Every drug has a chemical signature. As it burns we can match it up with the printout. These are very sensitive machines. If any of these emissions breach EU guidelines, for example, the furnace shuts down. It’s that strict, there’s no margin for error. Half a mile away the cars on the ring road are churning out carbon monoxide like there’s no tomorrow – a self-fulfilling prophecy if ever there was one. But here – a few milligrams of toxic gas slips through the filters and we’re out of business.’

‘And it is a business,’ said Shaw.

‘Of course. Every penny we make goes back into the NHS. But this kit costs millions, so, like any business, we have to sweat the assets. We run it twenty-four hours a day. Shutting down’s too expensive, so we need to make sure we can generate income full-time. We have several contracts – vets, private hospitals, doctors’ surgeries, pet cremation – and then the whole range of law-enforcement seizures – police, customs and excise, British transport police, the lot. And not just West Norfolk, of course, but several other forces without access to this kind of facility. But it doesn’t matter how busy we are, Inspector – what goes up in smoke is what goes on the belt. Believe me. You can watch it yourself…’

‘The gases come in about thirty feet above our heads,’ said Peploe. ‘What’s left behind is lifeless ash.’ They could see the pipes, the gases churning out, colourless but distorting, like a fairground mirror.

‘You mentioned the head of security,’ said Shaw. ‘Name?’

‘Nat Haines.’ Shaw knew him – a retired DI from Norwich he’d once worked with on a migrant workers case – an illegal gangmaster running a prostitution business from a chicken farm.

‘When was the next consignment due?’ asked Shaw.

‘Tomorrow – five p.m. That’s not Norfolk, actually – it’s Cambridgeshire. There’s a manifest.’

‘How much notice do you normally get?’

‘Ten days,’ said Peploe. ‘Usually longer. This isn’t a cheap form of disposal, but bulk cuts the price. So most forces stockpile seizures for a month, maybe six weeks, then we burn a job lot.’

‘Would Judd have known the consignment was coming?’

Peploe nodded. ‘Yes. Bryan Judd’s job is to coordinate the waste disposal, so he’d be told in order that he could make sure there was a gap, and also ensure that anything that needed to go up went up before the security van arrived. So, if there was something radioactive from

A seagull crossed the circle of sky above. ‘Bryan Judd was a registered drug addict – was that sensible?’ asked Shaw. He’d disguised the question by keeping his voice light. Peploe climbed back out through the door and Shaw wondered if he was buying himself time.

‘I’m sorry – your question again?’ asked Peploe.

Shaw repeated it, though he was certain he didn’t need to.

‘Well, at the time, it seemed to be sensible. The trust has responsibilities as an employer,’ said Peploe. His pager buzzed and he read the message.

‘You need to go?’ asked Shaw.

‘No. No – it’s fine. I need to get up to the theatre. But this is important.’ He gathered his thoughts, looking down at his shoes. ‘We give opportunities to those with criminal records. Judd was one of those. Given the fact that drug disposal is so closely monitored, none of us saw any potential danger in letting him work the conveyor. It’s not a pleasant job down there. He did it well.’

‘I’ve got a note of the annotation on the metal tag on the bag we found with the victim. Can you trace it back for us? Our forensic lab is testing the waste itself, but we’re pretty sure it’s a human organ. But this would help.’

He showed him the note marked NHS: W 22.

‘That can’t be right,’ said Peploe, putting both hands in the neat white pockets of his house coat.

‘Why?’

‘But there was body waste in that bag,’ said Shaw. ‘The CSI lab’s checking it out, but we’re pretty sure it’s human.’

Peploe nodded. ‘Well. Then we’ve got ourselves a problem, Inspector. A very serious problem.’