Death Watch

On Erebus Street three pairs of uniformed PCs were working the doorsteps and a team of builders were shoring up the ruins of number 6. DC Jackie Lau was on the kerb to meet them as Shaw parked the Land Rover in the shadow of the Sacred Heart.

‘Sir. Sorry – but I’m absolutely sure you need to see this.’ She led the way inside the church, out of the sun, the nave already a cool haven amongst the red bricks of the North End. Valentine hung back, trying to get a decent signal on his mobile so that he could check Aidan Holme’s condition at the Queen Victoria.

Inside, DC Lau checked a note. ‘According to the warden – Kennedy – there were fourteen homeless men here last night,’ she told Shaw. ‘There’s thirteen here now. All the statements we’ve taken match – except one. Most of them ate a big meal at 7.30, then went to bed because there were no lights. The fracas in the street woke some of them up, and a few went out to have a look. Then they all went back to bed. But one of them has a different story. He woke up some time before the attack on the hostel. He says he saw a man being abducted.’

She let Shaw take that in. ‘The witness is well short of 100 per cent reliable, sir – but I think he’s telling the truth. Either that, or I can’t see why he’d lie.’

Valentine joined them. He studied a text message on his phone. ‘Holme’s still bad,’ he said, sniffing the air, laden with the smell of huddled people.

In front of the altar the team had set up a pair of tables and two uniformed officers were taking statements. The homeless men were sitting in the pews, drinking tea from paper cups or reading bits of newspapers. Lau took them into the vestry they’d seen the night before. A man sat at the table on which stood an empty mug and a single biscuit on a large plate. The door to the boiler room, and Kennedy’s bedsit, was open. ‘This is John William,’ she said. ‘He’s from London, hitched up in a lorry to Cambridge some time ago. He says his surname’s gone. But he might remember it later.’

Shaw shook the old man’s hand, noticing as he often did that age seemed to add weight to the limbs, as if they were seeking a place to rest.

‘It was his first night here at the church,’ said Lau. ‘He’s very tired because he says he walked here from Cambridge – he thinks it’s taken him a month, sleeping rough.’

John William nodded, helping himself to the last biscuit.

‘Can you tell us again, John William?’ asked Lau, putting a hand on his shoulder. Shaw looked into his green eyes, the colour of lichen, floating in watery sockets, like lily-pads. It was the only colour left on him: his skin and thin hair were like parchment and his shirt, which had been washed to destruction, was handkerchief-grey.

‘I slept,’ he said. ‘I was tired, like she says. And the

He grinned, showing wrecked teeth.

‘What did you see, John William?’ said Shaw patiently.

‘There was a man, standing beside one of us – one I’d seen at the meal, everyone called him Blanket because he had this old grey thing, like a horse blanket, but he wore it, like a poncho.’ He shook his head, still scandalized by the impropriety. ‘He had long hair, so you could hardly see his face. That’s against the rules too – so I don’t know what’s going on.’

It was Valentine’s turn to act as prompt. ‘And did they talk, these two?’

‘Yes. He was sat hunched, Blanket, smoking too. And then this stranger, the outsider, he said…’

John William looked into the middle distance, trying to get the words just right. ‘He said, “That’s the deal – take it or leave it. Like you’ll get better.”’

‘Then?’ asked Shaw.

‘This Blanket smoked the fag, and then when he was done he looked away and said, “I’ll leave it.” – No. “I’ll leave it – so should you…” Yeah, that was it. And he started to get back in his bedroll, but then I saw the other

‘And what did you do?’

‘I was scared,’ he said. ‘Really scared. I went back to the loo and hid. I thought he might come back – and Liam, the warden, he’s always…’ He leant forward, lowering his voice. ‘He’s on stuff…’ he said, making small ‘mad’ circles with one finger at his temple. ‘He’s always asleep, so I just went back to bed – but this morning, at breakfast, I told him then.’

He looked at Shaw, the lily-pads floating. ‘I should have done something last night – I’m sorry now I didn’t.’

Shaw stood. ‘Show me, show me where you saw the torchlight.’

John William shuffled out into the nave, holding his trousers up with one hand even though he had a belt. He took them up the aisle and then to one side, where a small altar held an alabaster Virgin. On the floor was one of the church’s standard bedrolls.

‘Here,’ he said.

Shaw could see his hands were shaking, and his body above the waist swung rhythmically from side to side.

‘Thank you, John William. Is there anything else you can tell us about what you saw – anything unusual, perhaps, about the outsider?’ he asked. ‘Height? Age?’

The tramp shook his head. ‘I didn’t see him – just a shape in the shadows. He had the torch in his hand so all the light kind of went away from him.’

‘There was a noise,’ said John William, ignoring the question, suddenly animated by the realization he might, after all, be of some use. ‘His shoes – I noticed that because he did everything else so quietly. But when he dragged Blanket out I could hear them, on the wooden floor, like a tap-dancer’s.’

‘Metallic?’ asked Shaw, almost in a whisper.

‘That’s it. Yes – drive me mad, shoes like that, like you were being followed everywhere by yourself.’

Shaw and Valentine stood back, both trying to see if it was possible, trying to see if the man who had killed Bryan Judd at the hospital had time to get back to Erebus Street and abduct the homeless Blanket. And if it was possible, which it was, then why?

Lau led John William away, an arm under his elbow, keeping him on his feet, taking him down to sit with the other men. Then she came back, rattling a silver bracelet on her wrist, getting down on one knee by the bedroll. There was a Tesco bag under the bench, and she slipped on a driving glove and lifted it out. But she’d left something behind, so light it almost fluttered out when she moved the bag – a £50 note on the parquet floor.

Shaw was down on his knees too, and Valentine stood back so he could see as well.

‘OK, let’s get Tom here,’ said Shaw. ‘Bag that for a start. I take it Blanket isn’t this character’s real name?’

‘It might as well be, sir,’ said Lau. ‘We just don’t know. To qualify for the doss they have to fill in a form. But Kennedy – the warden – is clearly no stickler for the rules. Blanket’s was pretty much, well, blank. He put

She looked inside the Tesco bag. There was a carpeted step in front of the small side-altar and on it she arranged the five objects in the bag.

A picture in a wooden frame without glass. A child, pale with black hair, on a man’s knee. Blanket had clearly been touching the face of the man, because it was gone now, smudged into a pale, featureless oval.

Lau nodded. ‘I reckon he’s ten, eleven years old – the kid. There’s a date on the back: April, 1984. So it could be our missing man.’ Next, a folding fisherman’s knife made by a French company – Opinel – the handle well worn. Then a National Express bus timetable; a packet of Nice biscuits, and a copy of Moby Dick. Inside was a library sticker, the due date a week away.

The blanket-coat still hung from its impromptu hook. It was filthy, heavy with engrained dirt. Shaw took it down, twisted it, so that they could all see that there was a mark on the back; in chalk, a single vertical rectangle, narrowly drawn, with a wispy elliptical circle just over the top, like a fat dot on a wide letter ‘i’.

‘That’s odd too,’ said Shaw. ‘Someone’s drawn that.’

‘It’s a candle,’ said Valentine.

Liam Kennedy walked up the aisle from the altar carrying a tray with mugs. He had on a fresh T-shirt, this one with a VSO logo.

He took orders, then handed out teas, adding sugar and milk to taste. Then he stood, mug in one hand, the other tucked into the front pocket of his jeans. Shaw thought that now, in the daylight, after a night’s sleep, he looked

‘You’re not exactly running a tight ship here, Mr Kennedy. No proper documentation for this man who’s gone missing. And his violent abduction unreported – largely because the men here seem to think they can’t wake you up at night. You were here?’

Kennedy’s good humour froze on his face, but he seemed to fight back the inclination to meet Shaw’s accusations with anything other than humility.

‘I’m sorry. Yes. The paperwork’s never been my strong point, and Blanket was a difficult case. He wouldn’t tell us his name, so if I followed the rules I’d have to deny him a bed, or food, which seemed unfair.’

Kennedy saw John William still sitting on the pew, waiting to give his statement, his head buried in his hands. Kennedy said he’d be a moment, and went to sit beside him, an arm along the shoulder. They heard sobbing and looked away. Shaw thought how often flawed people led flawless lives.

When Kennedy returned Shaw got back to the question, but he couldn’t keep a note of conciliation out of his voice. ‘This happened about ten – John William seems to think you were asleep then – but that’s not right, is it?’

Kennedy looked at his trainers. ‘Not at all – although I would be most days. I take medication.’ The admission seemed to diminish him, and he looked younger still. ‘I was outside – by the abattoir actually, watching the street.

‘How did you know Father Martin was in?’ asked Valentine.

‘I’d seen a light earlier, and I’d noticed, because of the power cut. Father Martin has this old lantern, oil fired. I think it’s a family heirloom. The light’s multicoloured.’

Valentine scuffed his slip-ons across the parquet flooring. ‘Where was the light?’

Kennedy swallowed hard. ‘Bedroom.’ He stirred his tea, adding sugars from little paper packages that he’d collected in a dish.

‘We need to find this man – the one called Blanket – Mr Kennedy,’ said Shaw. ‘Can you tell us anything more about him, anything that wasn’t on his form?’

Kennedy sat, composed himself, as if he were a prisoner in the dock. ‘Most of these men are short on words, Inspector. I doubt I heard him string three together. He wouldn’t give us a name, as I said, which is why he got the label he did. Alcohol he didn’t touch, that was clear. His mind was good and he read a lot of the time – we get a travelling library. Good stuff, too. I always try to notice so that there’s something to talk about –

‘And he’d been here how long?’ asked Valentine.

‘Two weeks – I can check the record. But about that.’

‘Description?’

Kennedy laughed. ‘Well, that’s a sore point. Once the men have been here a few days we insist they get their hair cut – it’s a health issue. Most of them have been on the streets for years so there are various skin complaints, lice, that kind of thing. But Blanket said he wasn’t having that – that he’d leave if we made him. We just agreed to differ. I hoped he’d come round. And he was pretty clean – he used the showers at the town baths. But the hair stayed, and the beard. He looked like Ben Gunn.’

Another hidden face, thought Shaw.

‘But Middlesbrough – so an accent?’ said Valentine.

‘Not really. Ask the men – they’ll say the same. One or two are from up north and they said no way was he from Teesside, or Tyneside, for that matter. And there was something else. It was weird.’ He pressed his narrow knees together. ‘The first day he arrived it was mid-morning and we lock the church between ten and four – usually, anyway. But he rang, and I came out. I said he could come back at four, but he could fill in the form now – it saves time, and people get upset when all they want is to grab a bed and some food and they have to fill in a questionnaire. I watched him walk off. He went down the gravel path round the back of the church, there’s a bench there – wrought iron, Victorian. Anyway, the point is you can’t see it from the street. But he went straight