Death Watch

Sunday, 19 September

The stock cars circled the arena as if locked together, a screaming high-velocity scrap heap of painted metal wrapped in exhaust fumes. Above rose a cloud of summer dust, like a nuclear mushroom, climbing into a towering column in the hot, windless evening air. The sun was setting through this prism of dirt, so that everywhere the light was red and golden. Valentine watched the last race; or rather, he looked as if he was watching the last race. But his field glasses did not swing as the cars went past. They were fixed instead on a spot in the pits opposite. The man he was watching wore a spotless mechanic’s jacket, reflective glasses, and a baseball cap with a logo Valentine couldn’t read – although he knew what it said: TEAM MOSSE.

The air was soaked with petrol so that he could taste it on his lips – iron, and the astringent kick of gas – so he pulled the third can of beer out of his raincoat pocket. The first had been iced, this one was warm, and as he pulled the tab he let the froth explode in his mouth. He was pleased it was the last race because his back ached, and the noise was making a small bone in his inner ear buzz like a trapped fly.

A chequered flag the size of a picnic blanket waved WINNER – TEAM MOSSE. As the chasing pack swept past a piece of chassis span off one of the cars, followed by a few strips of burnt tyre. The crowd, about 8,000 strong, screamed with delight as the disintegrating car failed to pull out of the bend, the offside front wheel crumpling so that the whole vehicle carried on, catching the crash barrier, tipping, then riding ahead on its roof.

But Valentine wasn’t watching. He’d found his target again in the pits opposite: Robert Mosse, standing alone, hands on hips, watching Cosyns bring in the winning car. When the driver got out Mosse stopped clapping and lit a cigar, turning away, and it was a mechanic from the next pit who patted the winner on the back. Valentine wondered again why Robert Mosse was sending Cosyns £1,000 cheques and then cutting him dead in his moment of glory. Cosyns didn’t register the slight, simply accepting a bottle of beer from the man in overalls and calmly sipping it as he watched the replay of the final lap.

Valentine dropped the can, half finished, in a bin and began to thread through the crowd towards the exit gates. There’d be a kind of circus finale, with all the cars circling, but he didn’t need to see that because he was here to find out where they kept the Team Mosse trailer. Cosyns housed the car in the garage beside the undertakers, but there was no room for anything else, and Valentine had executed a drive-by surveillance of Mosse’s tasteless suburban villa – there were three garages, but all standard

Outside the arena it was chaos, like some nightmare version of the Monte Carlo Rally, with people running for their cars, trying to beat the inevitable traffic jam. The sun shone from a thousand windscreens. Valentine found the Mazda, zigzagged to the gates, and slipped into a lay-by next to a mobile tea van. He had the window down so the smell of fat and bacon filled the car.

He kicked open the door but left the engine running.

His mobile rang. He’d changed the ring tone to play the theme from Ghostbusters, and it still made him laugh.

GUILTY PLEA

The text was from Shaw, on his way back to Lynn from an informal meeting in Peterborough with the CPS, who were involved in an international effort to prepare the case against the organ traffickers – a case set to cause an international sensation.

Andy Judd was due before the magistrates the following morning to lodge a plea, and had waited until the last moment before agreeing to the deal on offer to both him and his son Neil. Andy Judd would plead guilty to arson

The Crown’s case would further be strengthened by testimony from the three men discovered still alive in the hold of the Rosa by Shaw and Valentine – and Terence Foster, the donor in the operating theatre: brave men who, it now seemed, had come close to saving themselves on that Sunday night the power had blown on Erebus Street. In the sudden darkness they’d planned a rebellion, and when Rey Abucajo had opened the door by torchlight to select a replacement for John Tyler they’d coshed him, pushed him out, and barricaded the door. And that was why Neil Judd had been forced to go out on the streets for a fresh donor. When Rey Abucajo eventually returned with the rest of the crew to force his way through the door he’d come armed. The man they’d known as John Pearmain had been shot dead as an example to the rest, then taken away to the operating table to Rosa sailed out of the Wash, weighted down in the waste bag which had come ashore on Warham’s Hole. All four witnesses lived for the moment they’d take the stand.

Interpol was making progress in establishing when and where the Rosa’s hold had been adapted to conceal the operating theatre and makeshift ward and organ bank. The complexity of the wider investigation – which had been handed to a specialist cross-border unit at New Scotland Yard – meant that the trial was yet to be allocated a date in the legal calendar. Counsel’s best guess was currently spring 2012. None of the accused had been granted bail. Lawyers for Abucajo had indicated that their client would testify that the dead captain had administered lethal injections to those donors who had outlived their usefulness in the living organ bank. It was a ploy unlikely to save his skin. Jofranka Phillips’s case would be more subtle: a jury would have to decide the extent to which she’d known the secrets of the Rosa. Initial estimates of the number of men who may have died on board the vessel during its two-year career as a floating operating theatre varied between eight and thirteen. The final figure might be far higher.

Valentine sucked the life out of a Silk Cut. Then another. Was there another way out of the Norfolk Arena? He was about to walk back and check with the security guard by the entrance when Mosse’s soft-top BMW came into view, taking the corner onto the main road at 60 m.p.h., purring past, the Limousin leather hood folded back behind the rear seat.

Valentine slipped the Mazda in behind the trailer, up close, where he wouldn’t be seen too often in the BMW’s side mirror.

Following, he felt fleetingly happy, with the local radio giving out a forecast for the beaches, the heat making the plastic seats soft with that smell that brought back a memory of childhood holidays.

They hit the ring road, went east, then skirted the town, so that Valentine was beginning to think they’d pick up the coast road, but then one roundabout short they cut back into town, round the Magnox power station, and into the Westmead Estate. Valentine’s breathing became painfully shallow, because in all the years since the Tessier case he’d never found a single line of evidence which linked Robert Mosse back to his childhood home and the scene of the crime – except for the disputed fur glove. In fact all the members of Mosse’s little gang had put as much distance as they could between the estate and their adult lives. Cosyns had moved away, Voyce had gone to New Zealand, Robins to the Midlands, then prison and a string of psychiatric hospitals. But here Valentine was, following Cosyns right back to where it had all begun.

He dropped the Mazda back a hundred yards as they drove past the triangle of ground worn down to mud by kids’ football, the pitch where Tessier had been playing

He walked down the alley, clocking the numbers on most of the lock-ups: some just painted, others broken. The garages were built in pairs, each sharing a centre wall of breeze blocks and each pair separated by a narrow gap. Keeping the front of Cosyns’s lock-up in sight he edged closer, then slipped into one of the gaps opposite. A goods train went past on the old railway line, but when the silence returned he could hear something in it: the low rumble of an engine, throaty and visceral, coming from the lock-up. He noted the number: 51. He backed further down the narrow gap, behind some rubbish – two old pushbikes and an ancient rusted pram. Behind him he had an exit if he got spotted. He’d wait for Cosyns to go, then check out the lock-up. The engine rumbled on. The noise was subterranean, but rhythmic, oiled, and flawless.

Shaw watched the holiday traffic creeping west as he approached the outskirts of Lynn. His mobile buzzed in its holder on the dashboard. He pressed a key to open a picture message: Fran on the beach holding the string of a kite. Out to the north, over the sea, the sky was a vivid stretched blue. As he reached the ring road he fought and won against the temptation to return to St James’s. He had a fortnight’s holiday, and it started now. Lena had obtained planning permission for an extension to the cottage: a shower room and bathroom, utility room, and a boot room so they could come straight off the beach without leaving a ton of sand in the cottage. He’d been nominated site manager, which meant two weeks on the beach watching someone else work.

He accelerated to 70 m.p.h., testing out his latest toy – £17,000 worth of second-hand Porsche 911. The car was a fifteen-year-old oddity he’d tracked down on the internet through a specialist car dealer. He’d seen a recommendation for the model on a website run by the Partially Sighted Society. It was one of the few relatively modern cars with a narrow ‘A’ bar – the strut between the windscreen and the side window. In new cars these ‘A’ bars were inches thick because they disguised a roll-bar. And they’d been edged forward for strength. The result was that any monocular driver had a serious restriction on visibility. The Porsche had an elegant, thread-like ‘A’ bar, set back, giving Shaw excellent vision on both sides. This was his new code, to deal with his disability

He thought about driving straight home to the beach but decided there was one thing he needed to do first. On the dashboard there was a Post-It note with a number in black felt pen: 51. At the last roundabout on the ring road he pulled off to the left and ran into the North End, then round to the edge of town and onto the Westmead Estate. He drove past Valentine’s Mazda without recognizing it because the DS had put it through the car-wash that morning. Down by the community centre there was a telephone box under a security CCTV camera, so Shaw parked there. As soon as he’d robbed himself of the forward motion of the car the heat crowded back in. There was something about the architecture of housing estates which made the sun unbearable – the scorched grass, the reflecting windows, the blank concrete. But it was more than that. It was the way the estate captured the idea of being trapped. The sound of a lone ice-cream van seemed to make it worse, the reedy call-sign horribly harsh: the whistled theme from The Great Escape. He thought about staying in the car and going home, running to the cottage, getting back in the sea – leaving this until he was back at work. But Lena had been right, he needed to exorcize the ghost of Jonathan Tessier. This was a loose end, and he could tie it up in ten minutes. It didn’t cross his mind to ring Valentine for back-up, despite the fact he’d promised himself he would.

He’d been a young DS, just posted to Lynn from Brixton, when he’d first been sent out to the Westmead to take a statement from a man who’d been attacked getting

The lock-up at the top of the first row was numbered 160, the next 121, then 120, 81, 80, and then 41. He kept walking but glanced down the next alley and saw a battered BMW parked, but nothing else. He knew 51 was down there, but he felt exposed, approaching from the front, so he walked on past 40, to the last alley, looking to double back using one of the gaps. But there was a car in this alley and it didn’t look right at all. It was another BMW, but this one had a soft top, and its black paint-work was waxed to a patina which made it look like there was an invisible inch-thick layer of glass covering the paint. This wasn’t a third-hand BMW. This was new. It was a £40,000 motor car. He touched the bonnet, felt the warmth of the engine on his palm.

He looked inside the car and saw a pair of reflective sunglasses on the passenger seat. The roll-top reeked of leather. Maybe, thought Shaw, the driver was just stupid,

He chose the nearest gap between lock-ups, clogged with stinging nettles but easy enough to edge down. Brushing a path through, he stopped to untangle a thread of blackberry thorns. He could hear an engine, low and visceral; a big sporting engine. Each of the lock-ups had a small rear door, wooden, with a single window, although most were boarded up now for security. The one at the side of number 51 was covered in a metal sheet of corrugated iron.

The throbbing engine made the iron door vibrate. Using the sound as cover, Shaw tried the handle and, despite the rust and the thick, flaking blue paint, it turned noiselessly, the door opening in on well-oiled hinges like the lid of a musical box. The interior was gloomy and unlit, and appeared to be empty. He went inside and closed the door behind him, letting his eyes assemble the greys and blacks in the half light which came in through a mossy skylight. The air was laden with lead. He went to breathe, coughed once, then doubled over.

Down on his knees the air was clearer. He wanted to call out but knew if he inhaled enough of the fumes to do so he’d pass out. Looking across the stained concrete floor he saw that the breeze-block wall between lock-ups 51 and 52 had been taken down and replaced by a steel joist. A trailer carrying a stock car stood sideways, beside it a Mini, up on blocks, the paintwork a rusted quilt – but Shaw could see the underlying colour, and it made his blood chill: mustard yellow, the colour of the microscopic

Could that be true? Could this be the car that had crashed at that lonely crossroads thirteen years earlier? After the murder of the child they’d have been too scared to move the car, even if they had resprayed the vehicle. Perhaps they’d never finished, traumatized by what they’d had to do, and focused on the desperate need to get rid of the boy’s body. Robert Mosse would have been in custody for the killing – but they must have hoped, even then, that the case against him was fatally flawed, but most of all that he wouldn’t talk. If they kept their nerve, sat tight, they might get away with murder. After Mosse was freed the vehicle was too hot to put on the streets. A double fatal hit-and-run was one thing, but child murder was in a different league. They’d have been paralysed, so they’d just waited, hoping. And Jack Shaw’s myopic investigation had let the moment slip, because he should have turned the Westmead over, looking for more evidence, but he was convinced he had his man, and that was all the evidence he’d need.

Shaw heard something else then, a whimper. Unexpectedly close, a dog barked. Still crouching, he made his way round the trailer until he saw a figure lying on the floor, spreadeagled, face obscured under the vehicle below the exhaust pipe, which was churning out blue gas. A small terrier dog snuffled at his trouser leg, pulling at a pair of racing overalls.

Shaw grabbed the man’s feet and dragged the body

Shaw knew he was still alive when he heard the sound of a trolley wheel squeak. It was mundane enough to rule out the possibility he was in heaven, or, for that matter, hell. If he opened his eyes he knew there’d be pain, but he steeled himself and tried anyway. His eyelids parted stickily, and through his good eye he saw a hospital room. White sheets, white walls, a blanket exactly the colour of the one that used to cover his bed as a child – a sort of nursery blue. He wasn’t lying down, not flat, but perched up, with something holding his neck almost vertical, so that he could see forward to the foot of the bed.

The second time he woke up he knew he was alive because of the pain: like cramp, but in the muscles at the base of his skull. He was aware of a surgical collar, lifting his chin, locking his head into position. There was a small wheeled trolley at the foot of the bed with some greetings cards on it, one a seascape in the precise shade of green his daughter always used. On a chair by the trolley sat George Valentine. He had his legs crossed and Shaw noticed he’d bought himself a pair of new shoes: black slip-ons.

‘Cosyns?’ asked Shaw, but he didn’t hear anything, so he tried the word again. His voice sounded like a pencil sharpener.

‘Dead on arrival,’ said Valentine. ‘Staged suicide is my bet. You got in the way. It’s early days, but Tom says there’s traces of morphine on Cosyns’s lips, in the nostrils.’

‘I heard the bookcase fall – I was opposite, staking the place out,’ said Valentine. ‘I tried to get the door up, heard something inside, and the dog yelping. By the time I ran round the side the back door was open. You were inside on top of Cosyns. He was dead. You’re not.’

Shaw told Valentine what he’d done, up until the moment he felt the hands round his neck. A summary as compressed as a black hole; all that mattered rolled into a tight ball. How he’d tracked down the lock-up number, how he’d found the link with the fatal crash at Castle Rising, how he knew now that Mosse had been at the wheel, and that was why the other members of the gang had a hold over him. And the black BMW with the soft top.

‘Was it Mosse who attacked me?’ he asked, when he’d finished.

‘Probably, though we can’t prove it. You didn’t get the number of the BMW?’

Shaw went to shake his head but the pain stopped him dead so that he closed his eyes, tears spilling out of one.

‘We shook down Mosse’s house last night,’ said Valentine. ‘And the car. Nothing. Wife says he was home at the time. Domestic bliss.’

Shaw thought about the hands round his neck. ‘I thought I broke his rib.’

‘’Fraid not. Bruised – but he plays Sunday football for a side out at Wisbech. One of his mates says he took a knock last week.’

Shaw closed his eyes, trying to remember the question he’d asked and had no answer to. When he opened them again George Valentine was still there, the bedside light on, and the DS had a new sticker on his lapel: Alcoholics Anonymous.

‘You advertising now?’ he asked, nodding at the badge.

‘Your wife was here – she’ll be back in an hour.’

‘Why were you there?’ asked Shaw, knowing he was picking up where he’d stopped.

‘I followed Cosyns home from the Norfolk Arena. I’ve been tracking him, seeing what came up. I didn’t know where they kept the trailer. It seemed like a loose thread. I haven’t got a life, so I thought I’d tie it up. Mosse left the arena first – in a BMW soft-top.’

‘What does Warren say?’ asked Shaw. Detective Chief Superintendent Max Warren had made it clear to both of them that the Tessier case was a closed file. He’d clearly failed to make it clear enough.

‘When he stopped shouting he was pretty good about it,’ said Valentine. ‘He said if we were going to work on the case it was probably about time we got some fucking results. Because if we’re right, Mosse is clearly prepared to kill to make sure he never pays the price for what he did to that kid.’ Blood flushed Valentine’s face.

Shaw went to speak but Valentine held up a hand. ‘Let me do the pitch – I’ve done it once with Warren. He went

He put a cigarette, unlit, between his teeth.

‘It’s a cold case – an ice box. We ain’t gonna get any fresh forensics. No one’s going to tell us anything we don’t know. We’ve got to move on from Tessier. Find a new way in.

‘There were four of them – Mosse, Cosyns, Robins and Voyce. Once the case against Mosse collapsed they went their own ways: Voyce to New Zealand, Robins into crime – he went to Ashworth in the end, a secure psychiatric unit, and then to Bellevue, here, on the edge of Lynn. That left Cosyns and Mosse in town. Mates – whether Mr Up-and-Coming wanted it or not. That’s the crucial bit, ’cos Cosyns isn’t in that league – divorced, a job keeping a hearse on the road. It doesn’t take a lot to see what’s happened. Cosyns leans on Mosse for help – just a bit perhaps, then more. Because he isn’t gonna starve, is he – not while Mosse needs his silence. I’ve been asking a few questions about our Mr Mosse and it seems he’s no ordinary solicitor. He’s studying for the Bar. Should be called later this year. That’ll treble his earning power – there’s already a new house, the new BMW, kids at private school. Warms your heart – just a snotty-nosed kid from the Westmead. So he’s got all that to lose.

‘Then we turn up, fresh as daisies, trying to reopen the case.’ Valentine ran a finger round the tight collar of his grey shirt. ‘I had a look round Cosyns’s house. He’s been getting money from Mosse – cheques at a grand a pop. He came home while I was there. It’s not black-mail

Out in the corridor a metal tray hit the floor like a cymbal.

Shaw didn’t say a word so Valentine ploughed on. ‘My guess is that Cosyns pushed his luck. Upped the ante. If we were that close to him, he let Mosse feel the heat too. Mosse doesn’t like the heat. He leaves the Norfolk Arena first, gets back, parks, and waits for Cosyns. I reckon it isn’t the first time he’s killed to stop us getting to the truth.’

‘Go on,’ said Shaw, aware now that his DS had been running his own private investigation. But he was hardly in any position to show his anger, or a sense of betrayal.

‘I checked it out. Robins died in Bellevue in May this year – cut his wrists open with a brand-new Swiss Army knife. The local nick got involved because there was a suggestion he had help – a visitor, day before they found him. Name and address left at the front gate were false. I showed the orderly a picture of Mosse. He couldn’t be sure – or wouldn’t. But it’s possible.’

Shaw closed his eyes. ‘Why?’

‘Don’t know,’ said Valentine. ‘But I do know whose name pops up in the visitors’ book those last few months – Alex Cosyns’s. What’d they talk about? Did he tell Mosse about the visits – turning the screw?’

A nurse came and put a tea cup in front of Shaw which he couldn’t pick up.

‘So that leaves Jimmy Voyce,’ said Valentine, holding up a piece of paper on which was written what looked like a short piece of code.

‘I found this scrawled on a note on Cosyns’s desk at his house. It’s a flight number. Stansted, last week, incoming from Istanbul, a connection back to Auckland. Passenger list includes James Anthony Voyce. Why the return trip? My guess is they’d talked about money. And how easy it is to get, if you know the right people.’

‘Where’s Voyce now?’

Valentine smiled, and Shaw realized how unusual that was. He looked twenty years younger.

‘Fuck knows. But Warren’s lifted the ban – said it didn’t seem to make much difference what he said anyway. The Cosyns case is open, so’s Tessier’s. We’re on it – with one condition.’

‘Which is?’

‘We talk to each other.’

‘About what?’

‘About tracking down Voyce, and making sure we’re there when he tries to put the frighteners on Robert Mosse – because if he does do that, and that’s got to be why he’s here, then there’s a really good chance our man will kill again.’

‘Try to kill again,’ said Shaw, closing his eyes. He heard Valentine get up, open a window, and strike a match. A wave falling, exploding around him in white surf, was the first image in a dream. But he woke almost instantly, with a heart-stopping jerk, because he’d felt those hands again, locked round his throat, trying to take his life away.

The next time he opened his eyes Fran was standing there holding Cosyns’s terrier dog – the one he’d taken

His wife was behind his daughter, trying to smile. ‘George had it in the car when he came round to tell us what had happened. It’s ancient.’ Lena shook her head.

She came to the bed and laid a hand on his forehead. ‘George said Fran could have it, if it was OK with you.’

Valentine had gone. Shaw was too horrified to speak.

‘Is it, Dad?’ asked Fran. ‘Is it all right?’