Death Watch

The front door of number 47 Erebus Street was an old-fashioned ceramic blue. The downstairs window was barred, the letterbox covered with a metal plate. Across the blue wood a sharp object had been used to write one short word in tall capitals: PEDO. And a green estate car parked right in front of the door had a lazy scratched line down the offside.

Shaw checked his tide watch: it was 11.41 a.m. and low water at Brancaster. Standing on Orzsak’s front step, he saw just how close the house was to the electricity substation which had been vandalized the night before. Number 47 was the last house of the terrace, a high fence, clogged with blackthorn, shielding its backyard from the Grade II listed building. A power company van was still parked in the street, and from behind the thorns came the sound of a pneumatic drill cracking concrete as the engineers replaced the unit’s electrics.

Valentine knocked once. He went to knock again but the door opened to the sound of an electric lock buzzing, then a chain being pulled. Jan Orzsak stood in his pyjamas and a pair of wrecked slippers, one of them squashed flat, as though he’d channelled all the weight down one leg. His mouth was open, his tongue too big to hide behind the small lips. For a face as odd as Orzsak’s the most striking feature was its agelessness: it was almost

‘Mr Orzsak?’ Valentine showed his warrant card. Close up to the front step he could smell dog, the stench engrained in the door itself.

‘Did this happen last night?’ asked Shaw, touching the paintwork, nodding at the car.

‘Yes.’ It was the first word he’d said and the syllables were indistinct. The tongue again, fighting to find space to articulate the words.

‘Could we come in, sir?’ asked Shaw. ‘We’re investigating the death of Bryan Judd. You may have heard?’ Orzsak didn’t meet his eyes but nodded, the flesh round his neck swinging. ‘Just a few questions…’

Orzsak turned away without another word and walked down the hallway into the through-lounge. One side wall of what had been the back room was obscured by a series of fish tanks built into a wooden frame. Each tank had been smashed, the glass scattered in the thick-pile carpet. The air was cool, but damp, and for the first time in weeks Shaw shivered.

Orzsak walked to the nearest tank, lifted the lid, which was fitted with what looked like a small electric heater, and set it on the table beneath. He turned to face them with the corpse of a fish on his hand: a gorgeous fish – black velvet scales, with a rainbow splash of tangerine orange and lemon yellow. It was a diamond shape, as thin as a sheet of paper; a resplendent corpse.

Orzsak went to the second tank. Same story. In the last tank the glass had not been smashed completely from the frame so that one fish had survived – an inch long in

Shaw and Valentine exchanged a look. ‘When exactly did this happen, Mr Orzsak?’ asked Valentine.

‘My neighbour – Elspeth – she said she heard them at one; her husband was watching the football.’ He touched one of his cheeks and a sudden gout of tears spilt out of his eyes. Shaw felt a rush of sympathy, prompted by a vision of what this man’s life was like on the inside.

Orzsak turned and went into the kitchen. They found him sitting with a quart mug of tea in front of him on a plain wooden table. Valentine recognized the kitchen of a lonely man. Shaw noted that the rear window was barred too, and that an electric Maglock had been fitted to the rear door, just like the one on the front. A plate lay on the draining board covered in burnt crumbs. Rubbish collected in a black bag slumped in the corner like a corpse. There was a wine rack, not a flimsy dozen-bottle one, but a solid homemade piece of furniture. Shaw estimated it had held up to a hundred bottles. Now, perhaps twenty. There was an echo of an image in his mind – the faint shadow of the criss-cross marks on the wall in the flooded basement of the men’s hostel.

‘What’s happened here?’ asked Shaw. ‘Have you reported this?’

‘A Sunday,’ said Orzsak. ‘They know that on a Sunday I am out all day. Mass at St Casimir. Then the Polish Club. I get back at ten – sometimes later. I found all this. They cut the power – so the locks pop. It’s an old system – cheap. They are better now.’

‘You think someone cut the power to do this – to you?’

‘Who did this?’ asked Shaw, still incredulous. ‘And why didn’t you report it?’

Orzsak laughed silently, the folds of fat around his neck shaking. ‘The same as always. Each year – on that day. The dogshit through the letterbox. The rotting rubbish over the fence into the yard. The broken window. The telephone calls when no one is there.’ He studied his mug and Shaw noticed that it bore a picture of Pope Benedict.

‘On that day?’ asked Shaw. ‘The day Norma Jean disappeared?’

This time when he laughed the tiny mouth opened to reveal milk teeth.

‘Yes. Eighteen years ago.’

‘Why didn’t you come to us?’ asked Valentine.

The change in Orzsak was frighteningly quick. He was almost across the table, the chair legs screeching on the lino, his face congested with blood.

‘Never.’ He hit the table, the mug of tea slopping over. ‘I am never going back to that place.’ He shook a finger at Valentine. ‘Men like you,’ he said, looking at Valentine.

‘You were interviewed – about Norma’s disappearance,’ said Shaw.

Orzsak looked away.

‘Who does this?’ asked Shaw. ‘Is it the Judds – Andy, the boys?’

But Orzsak was smarter than that. ‘I didn’t kill the boy.’ He laughed. ‘He knew – as do I – who killed Norma Jean.’ Blood flushed into his face. ‘Andy Judd knows who killed Norma Jean.’ His eyes bulged. ‘When we were friends, Norma and I, we talked.’ He laid one hand on top of the other, showing how close they had been. ‘How he beat her. Beat the boy. I knew both the children. Their father killed Norma Jean. They fought – I know this. I’ve said this to his face.’

Orzsak tapped a pudgy finger on the table. ‘Bryan knew too. And one day, I think, he would have told me why he knew.’

‘What makes you say that?’ asked Shaw.

‘He had no part in his father’s feud with me. Never. He stood apart. I think that each year it was harder for him to keep his silence. But now…’ He cut his hand through the air like a cleaver. ‘Silence for ever.’

Orzsak looked at Valentine, his large head on one side. ‘Once – eighteen years ago – you, people like you, took me to a police station and beat me. They said I killed this girl. I told them the truth then, I tell you the truth now. I did not.’

Shaw set his jaw. ‘We need a statement, Mr Orzsak,’ he said. ‘And we need to talk to people who can verify where you were last night.’

But Orzsak wasn’t listening. ‘Because I tell the truth the people here want to push me out. As others drove us out… the Russians, the Nazis, always… pushing us on.’ He hit the table and his mug slopped again on the Formica top. ‘But this is my home.’

‘But it wasn’t always,’ said Valentine, smiling. ‘You used to live at number 6.’

Orzsak looked down at his hands and Shaw could see he was calculating something before he spoke. ‘Mother’s house. When she died I didn’t like those memories, and the house was noisy. So I moved when I could. But not away. I will not run away.’

Orzsak licked his lips and Shaw sensed he’d been going to say something else, but had checked himself. He pulled a face, and sipped tea to dispel the bitterness.

Valentine was standing by the kitchen window. He looked out on the yard, strewn with rubbish, and the high fence of the electricity sub-station, a fig tree, leaves sticky and shiny in the sunshine. He dotted his pencil on his notebook. ‘Names, sir. Times. Specifically between seven and nine yesterday.’

‘Alone?’ asked Shaw.

‘Alone.’ He drank from the mug.

‘See anyone you knew?’ pressed Valentine.

He didn’t seem to understand the question. Shaw guessed that Jan Orzsak didn’t collect casual acquaintances.

‘Mr Orzsak – we’re going to have to talk again,’ said Shaw. ‘And I’m going to ask our forensic crime unit to check the house; not least to see if we can find any finger-prints belonging to the people who did this – to the fish. And the car. Do you have any objections to us checking that out too?’

Orzsak stood, one hand on the table for support. He shook his head, then led the way to the front door.

‘But one question now,’ said Shaw. ‘Do you ever pray at the church across the street?’

They could see him struggling with the question, trying to work out what the answer should be. Finally, he nodded. ‘Not often. Because of Andy Judd. He is there, sometimes, praying, like a Christian.’ He shook his head.

Shaw couldn’t stop himself coming to Judd’s defence. ‘He wanted Norma Jean to keep her baby. So on that, presumably, you’d have both agreed?’

Orzsak’s jaw worked, eating food that wasn’t there, struggling with that contradiction.

‘And the priest…’ He left some unknown accusation unsaid. ‘I do not have time for him. But yes, sometimes