Death Watch

Shaw was in the dark – not the dark that is the absence of light, but a suffocating presence; on a vertical ladder, a hoop of steel at his back, both hands on a rung, his feet on two. The air was so hot it felt like a blanket, and he could imagine letting go and just sinking into it, hanging there in the velvet blackness. Then the hatch above opened and a light burnt down into the well like a laser beam. Dazzled, he closed his eyes, then looked down. Below him, perhaps thirty feet, was the deck of the hold. He was in a vertical tube, like an empty packet of Smarties. Number 3 hatch. He’d already been down number 1, number 2 and number 4. At the bottom of each he’d found a bulkhead door, which they couldn’t force open because there was 4,000 tonnes of grain on the other side.

He looked down again. This one had to be different.

Above him he heard boots rasping on metal rungs. DC Twine stopped ten feet above his head and looked down.

‘I got a certificate,’ he said. ‘Just in case.’ Over his shoulder he had an automatic carbine. Twine was one of a dozen officers at St James’s with firearms clearance, but he still required a magistrate to clear the issue of the gun.

‘OK,’ said Shaw. It didn’t make him feel any better because now he was the filling in the sandwich – between the gun and whatever lay below. He looked at Twine’s finger, curled round the trigger, which was in the locked

They climbed down, in silence, trying not to let their boots grate on the rusted metal. At the bottom Shaw jumped down the last three feet into the well of the hatch. There was something different. In the other hatches the base of the shaft had been empty, but here there was a metal cradle, like a seat, enclosed in steel crash bars and connected to a cable which ran up the side of the well to the square of light above. Shaw imagined it rising slowly, pulled by the capstan on the deck, a vertical bosun’s chair.

Twine stepped down beside him. They’d got a routine now, so Shaw radioed Valentine on the deck above, told him they were going in, then he put his shoulder to the metal door, spun the central lock, and Twine used his leg to try and force it open.

It opened, unlike the first three – the hinges oiled, an almost silent entry, the only sound a faint exhalation, like a breath.

They stepped out into a large space, a hold, but this one was empty, and had what must be a false deck above, so that it was only ten feet high. A single emergency light in a frosted box lit the whole scene, like a lamp under water seen from fathoms above. Above them, thought Shaw, would be grain. But beneath the grain was this hidden hold, empty except for a nest of HGV containers set against the port side. There was a door open, but the view was obscured by heavy plastic sheeting. Beyond it burnt lights, figures moving, casting kaleidoscopes of shadow.

Shaw took a breath and it caught in his throat. There Rosa had once carried across the Atlantic.

Twine released the lock on the carbine. He’d seen that out here in the hold they were not alone. A man sat on the floor outside the first container, his back to the bulwark wall which separated the holds, his head in his hands. He looked up now, and they saw it was Neil Judd, his hair and clothes soaked with sweat, both hands gripping his knees, which he pressed together. The moment he saw them his body tensed and Shaw thought he was going to stand. But he seemed to assess the moment, and his fragile body relaxed, deflating; and Shaw noticed a burning dog-end in his hand. Around him on the decking were spent matches, each one neatly broken in a V-shape. And Shaw thought that, with hindsight, that made more sense: that it would be Neil who would mimic his father, not Bryan, who hated him. Judd stretched out his legs so that they could see the soles of his shoes and Shaw noted the double Blakeys on each – little sonic transmitters, designed to rap on the floor, the pavement, steps; sending vital sounds back to Judd’s damaged ears, so that he could keep his balance.

The hold was a box of noise: a generator rumbled, and the electric cables which ran along both walls thrummed with power. The heat was counteracted by a set of air-conditioning units, the size of a pair of fridge-freezers, the outlet/inlet grilles vibrating. Shaw walked forward towards the hanging plastic door, which was marked with a diagonal red line.

‘I can’t do that,’ said Shaw; but he stopped, trying to think it through. If Andy Judd was on the table, under anaesthetic, then the donor had already lost his – or her – liver, or at least, part of it. Perhaps Neil Judd was right, perhaps it was too late.

‘Dad will die if they stop now.’

Shaw walked to the door and then turned to face Judd. The light was glaucous, as if they’d all been drowned, and were floating – suspended – while Jofranka Phillips finished her work.

‘Then I need to know all that you know,’ said Shaw. Twine stood with his back to the ship’s hull, looking at Neil Judd, the carbine held level. Beyond the plastic doors, even against the background noise of the generators and coolers, Shaw could just hear the occasional top-of-the-spectrum clash of surgical instruments, like cutlery in a busy restaurant.

‘I helped load the Rosa many times,’ said Neil Judd. ‘Once, we did it in record time, so they said to come aboard to the mess. We drank, ate their food, talked about our different lives. One of the Filipinos was into martial arts, and they had this gym set up on the pontoon deck. So I worked out – showed him what I could do. I knew they wanted something – something back. But I thought I’d wait and see what it was, ’cos I’m not stupid.’

He adjusted the hearing aid in his left ear. ‘And they had girls too…’ The smile disfigured his face with the effort of trying to look weary of such vices. ‘Then one night they said there was a man living in the church hostel

Sweat seemed to suddenly spring from Judd’s young face, like jewels, so with one fluid movement he took off his T-shirt, then used it to towel his narrow chest and tattooed arm.

‘Two hundred quid a time, they paid me. Like I said, I didn’t need it. I’m OK. But Dad was getting worse, and even if he didn’t say as much, we knew he was dying. And that was crazy because they could help him if he’d just stop the booze. It was like Mum said it was going to be – that I was to watch out for – that he’d just self-destruct. It was what was on the inside that would get him. I promised her that wouldn’t happen. She said I was the man now, that it was down to me.’

Inside the operating theatre they could hear a suction pipe sucking liquid from an incision.

‘The mark,’ said Shaw. ‘The mark they left on the men – the candle?’ Judd’s eyes widened with the realization that this man knew more about his life than he thought was possible. Shaw saw an image then of Patigno’s Miracle at Cana on the wall of the Sacred Heart. The memento mori on the velvet drape – but in this version, unlike the original, the candle had been omitted.

‘Tell her,’ said Neil Judd. ‘Tell her it’s all over – but she can finish.’ The man looked at the carbine, the open hatch door.

‘Rey?’ said a voice within.

He retreated without a word.

Three uniformed officers came through the door to the hatch, all armed. Twine briefed them. They all waited, awkward, like nightclub bouncers.

Shaw squatted down in the dust, trying to see into Neil Judd’s unfocused eyes. ‘So you were the Organ Grinder?’

‘I didn’t know I had a name,’ he said. ‘But I knew they were afraid of me; the story was out there, like a legend. It helped, the fear, because it meant hardly anyone dared to say no. Before I did the work for them they had others. Sometimes they bungled the job – so the news had got out, but only whispered. When the ship came in I could…’ He rubbed his fingers together. ‘Feel the fear.’ The excitement made the biceps in his tattooed arm twitch.

‘But this time – the last time?’

‘They didn’t need me every time,’ he said. ‘I didn’t ask why. I saw the captain and we had some food, booze, but they didn’t want a donor. They had other sources – that’s what he always said. Then, that Sunday, the power went.’ He laughed bitterly, and again Shaw was struck that it wasn’t a genuine emotion, but a mimicked version, like a child copying an adult. ‘All because Dad wanted to keep his little vendetta going – because he thought it proved to

‘They had a client on board the Rosa – everything ready to go. They’d got a kidney out, ready. But once the juice went the temperature soared – the fridges too. It was chaos. That’s when Rey called. I had to find a donor. Really quickly. And that’s when I saw my chance. So I said I wouldn’t do it, that it was too dangerous, ’cos normally I had time to watch them, time to see if there was a routine that I could cut into. I said that, if they were really desperate I’d do it, provided they gave Dad the op. For free. We made the deal – right there on the mobile. Then they said they’d found me someone at the hostel, that he was called Blanket, and they’d marked up his coat.’

‘And you didn’t know who Blanket really was, did you?’

Judd ducked his head and threw up, a thin trickle of bile, his body convulsing in rhythmic waves like a cat being sick.

He started telling the truth before the rhythm had ceased, so that what he said came in broken phrases. ‘I threw the money at him… got him…’ He looked up suddenly and Shaw saw tears spilling out of his eyes. ‘Got my brother, by the scruff of the neck.’ He wiped a hand across his mouth. ‘I think he knew it was me, but I didn’t recognize him, or the voice. I was a toddler when he left home, so he’s a stranger – was a stranger. I hardly had a memory of him. I just thought – I have to do this. So I hit him.’

They both looked to the perspex door, as if the lost brother might walk out, large as life.

‘Down the alley, through the yard. Then there was a second problem. They got the engineer back on board but he was pissed-up, so they put the generator back arse about face and when the juice ran it blew the fridges – nearly all of them – so most of the stored stuff – tissue, tendons – it was all useless. They said they knew where Bry worked. That it was ideal, that I had to get him to do this, to put all the waste through the furnace, because they needed to clean out the fridges and it was too dangerous to drop that much at sea. So I said I’d go up and ask him, and I took the waste from the op they’d had to abandon – the kidney, the rest – I took that with me, to show him how easy it was, and because they wanted to clean up the theatre when the lights came back on. It was all in a Tesco bag, wrapped, sealed…’

He looked at Shaw for the first time, as if that one domestic detail had brought back the horror of what he’d done. ‘I went home ’cos I’d got his…’ He stopped, his throat filling with fluid. ‘Sean’s… blood, on my shirt. The lights were out so the street was chaos. One of Dad’s overalls was left hanging on the stairs where Ally leaves them, so I took those. Then I ran – up to the hospital.

‘I knew the layout up there from when I was a kid and I’d go up in the holidays – take Bry’s lunch up. And I knew he went out on the ledge for a smoke. So that’s where we talked. I was waiting for him. I told him how easy it was. Then we went inside ’cos I was going to show him. I picked another bag which was nearly empty, ripped the plastic, and stuffed my bag in.’

‘But he didn’t want to do it, did he?’ said Shaw.

‘What did you stab him with?’

He used both hands to roll up one of the legs of his jeans. A screwdriver was taped to his calf muscle, the head sharpened to a murderous point, like a snapshot from Taxi Driver. ‘The lights went out – a power cut – and he lunged for me in the dark. I threw him back, and I heard him crash into the metal instrument panel.’ He touched the back of his skull. ‘I knew he was dead – that he’d die – right then, because when the emergency lighting came on I could see him pinned to the metal, his arms jerking. He was gonna scream. I couldn’t let that happen. So I walked forward and put the screwdriver in his chest, just once, so he’d be quiet.’

Shaw let him have the euphemism unchallenged.

‘Why’s the skipper dead?’ he said.

‘Ally showed me the note from Sean last night, asked me if I’d seen him. So I knew then what I’d done. I’d brought him here for this…’

‘So I went to de Mesquita when I brought Dad aboard. I wanted to know where they went – the donors – when the ops were done. I could put it right then – bring him back. I wanted to know where I’d find him. But of course part of me knew, knew instantly, when they found that corpse on the sands. And I thought – can that be true? Can that be true? And then I thought I’d been a fucking fool.’

He was sobbing now, pushing his palms into his face as if he could compress the tears. ‘The captain said they always dropped them out at sea. He’d been drinking, which loosened his tongue. And I guess he thought I was one of them now, that there was no way out. It was just the words he chose. His English ain’t good. So perhaps I should have forgiven him. But he said they dumped them when they’d served their purpose. He was standing in the shower, naked, shameless. I don’t think I can live with the truth. I was fucking sure he wasn’t going to live with it.’

He looked up quickly at a noise from the operating room. Jofranka Phillips parted the plastic curtains. She still wore a surgical gown, the chest bloodsoaked. Shaw thought how cool she looked, revealing her fingers as she pulled clear the gloves.

‘Thank you for waiting,’ she said. Just like that, as if she’d just come out of her office at the hospital.

She turned to Neil Judd and even managed a half-smile. ‘He’s going to be fine.’