Death Watch

He’d woken at dawn, listening to the seagulls scratching on the roof. He didn’t need to recall specifically what had been said between them – it was there, already part of the memory bank he’d carry with him for the rest of his life. And it wasn’t his life that was the point. It was Fran’s. She could have died, and that would have destroyed them, because he wouldn’t have been there. He always answered if Lena phoned. But he’d been blinded – she was right – blinded by the conflicting pressures in his life, between his home and his job, and between his case and his father’s case. And the Tessier killing was an obsession; dangerous and disfiguring in so many ways. His problem was that he could no more walk away from it than walk away from himself. But in the darkness before dawn he had made a fresh appraisal of his failure to solve the case so far. Was it really such a baffling crime? Or was his inability to make progress really a reflection of his own inner conflict: the fear that if he found the truth, it would be an uncomfortable one?

He’d swum then, at dawn, seeing now that Lena was right, he’d overlooked so many more direct avenues of inquiry. It was a case he’d worried at, like a sore. Watching his hands rise above his head as his backstroke took him out to sea, he decided he must return to first principles, and talk to those with a direct recall of the night Jonathan would walk away. For Lena’s sake he’d walk away – even if he did leave part of himself behind.

He’d decided to start here, on the Westmead, because he wanted an answer to Lena’s original, and perceptive, question: why would a gang caught on CCTV at the fatal crash at Castle Rising go on to murder a nine-year-old boy just because he stumbled on them respraying the car? There had been reports of the accident in the local paper, and on the radio and TV – but why would a boy take any notice of that? It was nothing to do with him, or the small world in which he was living out his summer holidays. Even if he had sensed something sinister, and children were certainly gifted at that, he could have been bought off with a crisp £10 note. There had to be another motive.

In the block of flats opposite an alarm rang, the sound travelling across the concrete canyon to Shaw as he stood on the balcony outside Flat 43. A seagull glided between the high-rise blocks, below him, so that he could see the feathers on its back ruffled by the breeze. The digital numbers on his watch flashed seven o’clock, so he knocked on the plywood door, knowing she’d be up, because he’d checked out her shift pattern with a quick call to the Queen Vic.

Angela Tessier, the dead boy’s mother, answered the door with a toothbrush sticking out of her mouth. ‘What?’

‘I’m sorry – I wondered if you had a few moments.

She turned on her heel without a word and walked into the shadows of the flat. Shaw followed, down the corridor into the front room, which faced east and caught the full sun. There was a flat-screen TV, sound-deck DVD/CD player, a poster of Amy Winehouse.

‘You’ve got a minute,’ said a voice, echoing slightly in a bathroom. She came in, bustling, picking up a mobile, an iPod. Shaw knew from the file she was forty-three, a nurse at the Queen Victoria. But she looked thirty-five, the face animated by a sense of purpose. Her waist was narrow, circumnavigated by a thick leather belt. She’d looked after her figure and her eyes were a stunning green, like snooker-table baize. They looked at each other, and she didn’t seem fazed by Shaw’s lunar eye. She went out, then came back with a small cup of pitch-black coffee.

‘Fifty seconds,’ she said, but her voice wasn’t unfriendly.

In the file on the Tessier killing there’d been a husband mentioned, Mike, a salesman with a carpet warehouse. But this was her world now, and Shaw sensed there was no one else in it, not even the ghost of Jonathan.

She read his mind. ‘Mike left. We didn’t handle what happened very well. But we still talk – we’re friends. So – if your question’s for him, I’ve got a number.’

‘No.’ Shaw hesitated, suddenly aware that he was unprepared. He didn’t know where to start, so he had to tell the truth.

‘My father was DCI Jack Shaw.’

‘I know – I figured that out. Shit happens. I think he got the right man, so does Mike. But he fucked up.’ She

‘I think Jonathan – on that evening – I think he went after the ball but got distracted, and he ended up on the far side of the estate by the lock-up garages. I think he saw a car there – and some men, working on the car. I’m pretty sure that’s why he died.’

‘Mosse was one of those?’

‘Yes. I think he was.’

She put the cup down. ‘It’s a bit late.’

‘I know. It’s the car that’s important. Was he interested in cars? Would he have been able to recall the make, for example? You know how some kids are fixated on machines.’

‘No. Jon wasn’t like that. Some boys, they just don’t like boys’ stuff. Football, maybe – but even that was just something to do. Books were the thing. That kit he was wearing was from his grandad – Celtic. But he didn’t really care.’

Shaw didn’t understand. ‘But he’d played all that day…’ He stopped himself saying it was the day he died.

For the first time Shaw saw that she was distressed by trying to recreate the memory. Holding the fragile Italian coffee cup with both hands she stared into the bottom. ‘He wasn’t in the flat because we had my father with us – Mum had just died. It was very difficult here. He sort of broke up on us – so we got Jon out. If we’d known better, we’d have let him stay, share the emotion. But that’s

Shaw admired her for that, for not taking the easy way out and blaming herself.

‘It was sudden – your mother’s death?’

She laughed. ‘You could say that. Some pissed-up kids killed her on a joyride. And her best friend. Out near Castle Rising. They never found them, the joyriders. That was the week before – the Tuesday.’

For the first time Shaw could hear a tap dripping in the kitchen.

‘What was her name? Your mother?’ He didn’t want to know – he’d go back to the files for all the detail – but it bought him some time to think, because a single fact had just transformed the crime, like stepping into the hall of mirrors.

‘Watts. Agnes.’

Shaw nodded.

‘Does that help?’

‘Maybe.’

Shaw walked to the window, looking down on the Westmead, cars scattered over the acres of tarmac between the blocks. He hadn’t been honest with himself about the Tessier case, because he’d always thought on a secret level that he’d never find out the truth. And now, for the first time, looking out over the squalid estate where it had all happened thirteen years ago, he thought he might be wrong.

‘At the time did anyone think there might be a link between Agnes’s death and Jon’s?’

‘No – why should there be? It’s a cliché, Inspector –

Something in the way she said it made Shaw realize how stupid he’d been not to go back, not to talk to the witnesses, the people who were there that night – not just George Valentine. But the real victims, the ones without a police pension.

‘Look,’ he said, turning, stopping himself from saying that they should all have been asking themselves another question that first day of the original inquiry: not who did it – but why. Because the idea the boy had died in a tussle over a vandalized car didn’t stand up in the light of day. It was possible, but hardly probable. They’d left motive to look after itself – a fatal omission.

‘There may be a link. It’s possible that this car – the one I said was in the lock-ups – is the one that killed your mother. There’s a link, you see, between that car crash and Jon’s death. There was a fleck of paint on his football shirt, it’s a match for the car involved in the crash your mother died in.’

She sat down, fumbled in a heavy-duty handbag, and

‘Fuck,’ she said, and rubbed her hands into her eyes. ‘I’m sorry.’ Her mouth broke into a zigzag line. ‘It’s OK. It’s a shock, bringing it all back.’

He sat on the sofa, trying not to push her too far with questions. And he was thinking fast himself, trying to straighten out the line that linked the shadowy CCTV footage at Castle Rising and Tessier’s broken body. He opened his wallet and took out a folded print of the still from the CCTV – the Mini in the rain, under the floodlights at Castle Rising. He placed it on the table so they could both see it, and again, with even more force, he knew he was missing something vital in that black and white image. ‘That’s the car,’ he said, touching the shadowy image of the Mini under the pine trees on the verge.

She stood, blowing her nose. ‘I need to think about this.’ She jotted down a mobile number on a corner of the local paper then ripped it off. ‘Ring me, after work. The shift’s over at two. I can’t think now.’

Shaw walked to her car; a Ford Fiesta, the tyres slightly flat, a dent in the off side deep enough to show the metal beneath the paintwork. They hadn’t talked as they’d tip-tapped down the stairs – the lift was out of order – which meant he’d had time to try and work it out. The problem was, even now that he’d established a link it didn’t explain why the child had been murdered.

‘Was Jon upset about his grandmother? Were they close?’ he asked as she looked for her car key.

She checked her watch. ‘Sure. Well, not really, to be