Death Watch

Detective Inspector Peter Shaw was on the beach when his mobile rang – the ringtone a snatch from A Sea Symphony by Vaughan Williams. His beach. The death of an Indian summer’s day, the sun already long set, the sand cool now, where it had once burnt the pale arches of his feet. He sat on the lifeguard’s high chair, the RNLI flag flying over his head. Tracking his telescope from north to south along a falling wave he looked for the few late surfers prepared to stay out in the dusk, and found instead his wife, Lena, walking in the shallows with his daughter. Further out the swell spilt sets of waves in perfect sequence.

He’d been looking west, enjoying the last of the amber light. A broad face, wide open, matching the distant horizon, high cheekbones, almost Slavic, and short hair surfer-blond. His good eye was blue, as pale as falling tap water. The other blind, the pupil reduced to a pale circle like the moon edging its way into the sky above. He’d lost the sight in his right eye a year ago and he had only just begun to develop the skills which would allow him to judge distance. In the first months after the accident he’d tried to ignore his disability. Now he understood that it might give him skills he’d never had.

He twisted the top of a Thermos flask and let its lip sit on the edge of the cup before pouring out the cool juice

He watched as a family quit the beach, a straggled line from the mother, carrying beach bags, to a young child, reluctant to leave a ring of sandcastles. Soon, he thought, he’d be able to reclaim the beach for his own. The car park on the headland was nearly empty, a few barbecue fires flared along the waterline, but to the north the sands ran to a horizon as deserted as the Empty Quarter. He imagined a camel train threading its way into the night past Arab camp fires.

He shivered, zipping up a lightweight jacket, hugging himself.

He’d played with his father here as a child; between the lifeboat house and the old café. Detective Chief Inspector Jack Shaw, reduced to human scale by the tangled skein of a kite’s string or a child’s cricket bat. The beach had been their world, the only one they’d shared, the place they could both live life in the moment. Shaw remembered the day he’d traced the outline of an imaginary corpse on the sand, his first crime scene. Clues laid: a clamshell for the heart where the bullet had lodged, lolly sticks marking the shell cases, a cigarette butt between imaginary teeth. He’d been ten. His father had

Somewhere on the beach he heard the time pips from a radio, and he counted nine. Then his mobile had rung. He’d held it at arm’s length, as if that would help. But the text, from Tom Hadden’s CSI unit, was one he couldn’t ignore.

187 QVH

The code for suspicious death – 187 – and the scene of crime: the Queen Victoria hospital.

And now, twenty-three minutes later, he’d swapped his world for this world. He wore a T-shirt under a jacket, an RNLI motif on his chest, but that was the only link back to the beach. That and his suntan.

He stood in the incinerator room, watching the corpse emerge from the furnace doors, the conveyor belt set in reverse. Instead of a distant horizon, twenty miles away, he was surrounded by metal walls, greasy heat, and the stench of ash; ash that had had every ounce of life burnt out of it. His world, limitless on the beach, had been compacted, pressurized, to fit within this windowless box. The air had thickened, cooked, so that he felt sweat bristling on his face. A sparrow flew around, its wings clattering amongst the steel girders and pipes, prompting a snowfall of white dust.

The conveyor belt shook and the motion accentuated the vibration of the limbs. One hand was gone, the arm

And the face, one of Peter Shaw’s passions; but for now he avoided it, and especially the eyes, knowing he wouldn’t find them.

Shaw had been breathing in through his mouth since entering the incinerator room. He sniffed the air: just ash, charcoal perhaps, and seared bone. Nothing of the body itself, as if the great incinerator chimney had sucked away its essence, setting the soul free on the night breeze.

The belt juddered to a halt. Smoke rose from the charred flesh. The only noise, just on the edge of hearing, was the metal cooling around them, creaking like a stiff joint, and the bird above amongst the piping, fussing.

‘You said he was moving – when the witness saw him inside the furnace? What time was that?’ asked Shaw, not taking his eyes off the corpse.

Detective Sergeant George Valentine was at his shoulder, a grey cotton handkerchief pressed to his mouth and

Valentine might be an old-fashioned copper with thirty years’ experience but he’d be the first to admit he’d never been happy in the presence of death. When he’d got the call he’d been in the Artichoke. Six pints, Sky Sports 1. He’d been planning a Chinese takeaway, crispy-fried duck. He didn’t fancy it now.

‘Eight thirty-one,’ he said. ‘The furnace is run by computer – so there’s a record. It’s Darren Wylde – the kid’s name. He was being shown the works by the foreman…’ Valentine flipped the pages of his notebook. Shaw noticed he had a fresh charity sticker on his raincoat lapel: Cancer Research UK, stuck over the corner of another one which read RSPB. There was always something stuck on the lapel, as though he couldn’t pass a charity tin without emptying his pockets.

‘Bourne. Gerry Bourne,’ said Valentine. ‘Foreman.’ He didn’t volunteer any other information because he didn’t enjoy talking, so if he had to speak he kept it short and to the point, saving every breath. He’d smoked forty cigarettes a day all his adult life and he didn’t need a doctor to tell him what was wrong with his lungs. He coughed with a sound like someone shifting coal out of a scuttle.

Shaw laid a gloved hand on the conveyor belt. ‘How long would it take for something put on the belt here to get as far as the point where the kid saw the corpse?’

‘Potts, the engineer on duty, says eight minutes.’

‘So when this kid turned up here in the incinerator room it was just a few minutes after the victim had gone

‘Right. Says he looked up and saw shoes, running.’ Valentine pointed up at the metal-mesh ceiling. ‘Second floor – so whoever was running was on the third.’ He shifted feet, aware that his bladder was full. ‘And sparks – which is odd. I checked – nobody on site wears metal boots. They’re issued with rubber-soled shoes for grip, plus it’s insulation. Place is a death trap.’ He tried to focus on his notebook again, knowing that black humour was one of his many weaknesses. ‘Wylde’s twenty – student at Loughborough. English. This is a summer vac job.’ He took an extra breath to finish the sentence. ‘He’s downstairs in the incident room, if you want a word.’

‘Incident room?’ said Shaw, impressed, reminding himself that George Valentine had probably run more murder inquiries than he’d had shouts on the lifeboat. Standard murder inquiry procedure required the incident room to be set up as close to the SOC as operationally possible. That way CID was on top of the crime, close to witnesses, and the forensic team.

‘I’d better get on,’ said Valentine. ‘Get the statements organized. Unless…?’

Shaw shook his head. ‘Hang about.’

There had been a note of insubordination in the DS’s voice that Shaw couldn’t fail to detect. And there was a note of something else – bitterness. Valentine had been up in front of a promotions panel on the previous Friday – his third attempt to regain the DI rank he’d lost a decade before. His third, failed attempt.

‘So,’ he said. ‘It’s less than an hour since they found the body.’

‘Right,’ said Valentine, looking at his feet. ‘Foot sloggers are checking the gates, car parks, the buses. We’ve looked at every inch upstairs. There’s a door out to a ladder which drops down into the works yard. Running man got out there. It’s all taped off.’

‘ID on the victim?’ said Shaw.

‘Odds on he’s a Bryan Judd,’ said Valentine. ‘Ran the conveyor belt on this shift for ten years. Last seen at 7.45 tonight by Potts – just before a brief power cut. The line went down at eight fifteen, back up at eight twenty-nine.’ Another extra breath. ‘There’s a fault on the grid. Emergency generator kicked in – so the blackout lasted less than a minute.’

‘Where was Judd last seen?’

‘In his office, if you can call it that. Looks more like a kennel.’ Valentine nodded at a small wooden cubicle, with smeared, dirty windows on three sides, like the deck housing on a small trawler. The only decoration they could see was a poster: country-and-western, a girl with flaxen hair and an acoustic guitar. The only thing she was wearing was the guitar.

Valentine enjoyed swearing because he knew Shaw didn’t.

‘Absolutely fuck all.’

Smoke rose from the corpse like a barbecue. The CSI team had moved in and taped off the area, and were about to erect a small forensic tent over the body and the belt. Now that the machinery was switched off – including the extractors – white dust was settling everywhere like frost.

‘Accident?’ tried Shaw.

‘Why climb on the belt?’ countered Valentine. ‘Nah. ’Fraid not.’

‘Suicide?’

‘Potts says last time he saw him, Judd was singing “The Wichita Lineman”. Apparently he did that a lot – decent voice.’

‘Right – so short of tap-dancing across the shop floor I guess we’ll have to take that as an indication of robust mental health. Security?’ asked Shaw.

Valentine stepped closer, tiring of the machine-gun delivery of questions he was supposed to know the answer to. ‘Not great. To get in here from the hospital main building – the public areas – you need a tap-in PIN number. Changes daily – but it’s not exactly the Enigma Code. Today it’s 0509.’

‘It’s always the date?’

‘Yeah. There are exterior doors but all the staff have

Shaw shook his head. ‘You got a white coat on they’ll let you operate, let alone into the building. CCTV?’

‘I’ve got Birley sitting through it now – but you know, there’s five thousand people on site. It’s a long shot. And what are we looking for? A bloke with iron shoes?’

DC Mark Birley was new on the squad. Ex-uniform, with an eye for detail, and something to prove. It was a good choice.

Shaw stepped under the scene-of-crime tape, then stayed down on his haunches so that he could get close to the skull, right inside the personal space. The thought struck him that our personal space begins to shrink at the moment of death – until it vanishes into the skin. He tried to sense that now, to feel the edge of the life that had fled – but there was nothing there, no line to cross. He got an inch closer, so that what had been the victim’s face filled his field of vision. This close the loss of vision in his right eye didn’t make any difference – in fact it could help, providing him with a crisp 2D picture.

Shaw had done a degree in art. That had kept his father happy. Anything but the police force would have kept him happy. But what his father didn’t know was that the course his son had chosen at Southampton University included a year out at the FBI College in Quantico, Virginia, studying forensic art. It had been straight from there to the Metropolitan Police College at Hendon.

‘A man…’ he said over his shoulder to Valentine. ‘Plenty of hair. The forehead’s exceptionally high, a ridge above the eyes – a bony ridge, but muscular too – the corrugator is pronounced.’ That would be the crucial element of the dead man’s ‘lifelong look’ – thought Shaw – the particular arrangement of features by which he’d always been recognized. Deep-set eyes, the brow dominant. Shaw would have called it a Celtic face.

Valentine hadn’t said a word.

‘Irish?’ asked Shaw. ‘Heavy build. Large head. Nothing of the nose left, or lips. Teeth charred, but we might get a dental match.’

Valentine stood at the tape. ‘’Bout right. Foreman said the Judds were Irish – face like a front-row forward. Thirty-five, something like that.’ He picked at a bit of tobacco on his lip.

‘Justina on her way?’

‘Ten minutes,’ said Valentine. He’d be gone by then, he’d make sure of that. He’d kept his beer down so far, but watching the pathologist at work always brought on a sweeping nausea. It was something to do with the way she dealt with the corpse, like it wasn’t a human being there at all, but some interesting fossil. ‘I should get down

Tom Hadden, the head of the force’s CSI unit, came over to the crime tape. He was ten years short of retirement, thin red hair now strawberry blond, with a scar just below his hairline where a skin cancer had been removed a year before. Freckles crowded round intelligent green eyes. Hadden had fled a broken marriage and a high-profile job at the Home Office for the West Norfolk Constabulary. A keen bird watcher and expert naturalist, he spent his spare time on the dunes and in the marshes, a solitary but never lonely figure, weighed down with binoculars.

‘This is odd,’ he said. He held up an evidence bag. ‘Found these just by the conveyor belt where the victim worked. Don’t quote me, but I’d say they were grains of rice.’

‘Rice?’ asked Shaw. ‘So – he’s a healthy eater, one of those salads you can get from M&S?’

‘That would work nicely, if, and only if, it was cooked rice. Which it isn’t.’

Shaw took the evidence bag. Three grains, almost translucent, twenty minutes short of al dente.

‘There’s blood on the conveyor belt, by the way – plenty of it,’ said Hadden.

‘That survived the heat?’

‘No. There’s two conveyor belts, Peter. This one,’ he said, touching the belt in front of them with a hand inside a forensic glove. ‘This one… runs into the furnace, and then turns back under itself. Anything on it gets dropped onto an internal conveyor which moves the

They looked at the victim in silence. ‘Justina will talk you through chummy here,’ said Hadden. ‘But I’d caution against any amateur assessments at this stage.’

‘Meaning?’ asked Shaw.

‘The hole in the skull. I don’t think it’s what it looks like. We can’t get into the furnace yet to retrieve the blown bits of cranium, but one shard is here…’

It was on the belt, about six feet from the body, already in an evidence bag, its original location marked with a white circle and the letter ‘D’.

Hadden tipped it slightly with a metal stylus, like a fragment of ancient pottery. ‘You’ll notice that there is a depression fracture on this piece of bone – just here.’

‘Someone hit him?’

‘Maybe. But we need the science to back that up, and at the moment, we don’t have the science.’

Shaw brushed a finger along a gull’s feather he’d put in his pocket from the beach. ‘But blood suggests a struggle?’

‘Or one of the waste bags burst a week ago. Don’t assume it’s his blood. I need to get the evidence back to the Ark.’

The Ark was West Norfolk’s forensic lab, situated in an old Nonconformist chapel beside St James’s – the force HQ in Lynn. It was Tom Hadden’s kingdom, and the only place he was happy other than the saltmarshes on the coast. He plucked at his forensic gloves. ‘You’ll need to see outside too.’

He led the way to a door in one of the metal walls,

‘This door was unlocked when we got here, by the way,’ said Hadden.

Outside was a small steel platform, an eyrie, at the base of the incinerator chimney. It housed one of the atmospheric testing units for the furnace. An encased stepladder led up, another down into the floodlit goods yard below. A line of yellow waste tugs waited, backing up now the furnace was cold.

Valentine pointed up. ‘Is this how the running man got out?’

Hadden craned his neck. ‘That’s it – a small door, an emergency exit, about fifty feet above us. Again, unlocked.’

They were a hundred feet up with a view west over the town. Although the sun had gone there was still light in the west. A perfect night sky turned over their heads like a planetarium. The air was warm and sweet. There was a single chair on the little platform, office metal with the stuffing coming out of the seat, beside it a hubcap full of cigarette butts.

‘Bourne, the foreman, says they knew Judd smoked out here – strictly against the rules, but it’s a shitty job, so they bend them,’ said Hadden.

‘Yeah,’ said Valentine. ‘’Cos you wouldn’t want to pollute the atmosphere,’ he added, spitting over the side.

‘OK,’ said Shaw. ‘Let’s arrest George.’

Valentine peered pointedly up at the distant apex of the incinerator chimney.

‘One oddity,’ said Hadden. He knelt by the hubcap. ‘There was only one match. I’ve sent it down to the lab with a runner – single match, broken in the middle to form a V. We might get something off it. Potts, the engineer, says Judd used a lighter.’ He stood, closed his eyes to think. ‘And this doesn’t help,’ he added, producing another evidence bag from his overalls leg pocket. A torch in yellow and black plastic, hefty, as good as a cosh.

‘Hospital issue?’ asked Shaw.

‘Nope. Not according to Potts. It was by the chair.’

Valentine took the torch in the bag and turned it 360 degrees. On one side there was a stick-on fluorescent label which bore the letters MVR in black marker pen. He held it up for Shaw. ‘A company? Initials?’ he asked. ‘I’ll check,’ he added, beating Shaw to it.

Shaw took the evidence bag. ‘It’s dusty,’ he said, noting that the matt black surface of the torch was scuffed.

‘Yes – I’ll let you know what kind of dust it is when I get it to the lab,’ said Hadden. ‘But visually I’d agree – dust, lots of it.’

‘It’s not white – the dust,’ said Shaw, worrying at the detail that didn’t fit.

But Hadden wouldn’t be drawn. ‘I’ll get it analysed. No point in guessing.’

Shaw took one more look round, trying to imprint a

Valentine didn’t like puzzles. He didn’t think police work was a set of crossword clues. He leant back, his spine creaking. Up above them condensation still trickled out of the chimney, a thin line unmoved by any breeze, like a 747 contrail.

‘It’s nasty, clinical – it isn’t amateur,’ he said. ‘If they hadn’t shown the kid inside the furnace we’d have no idea the bloke was ash. So it’s organized. Premeditated.’ He shifted weight, trying to lessen the pressure on his bladder. ‘But an inside job, ’cos you’d have to know the layout. So – a grudge. Sex is top of any list – we should check out wives, girlfriends. See who’s knobbing who.’

That was just one of the things that irritated Shaw about George Valentine. He tried to solve crimes backwards. Dream up a motive and then see if any of the evidence could be made to fit. What was really annoying was that he was good at it.

‘Let’s do the legwork,’ said Shaw. ‘Check the staff here, check the victim’s friends, background, then we’ll evaluate the forensics when Tom’s done, and see what Justina can find on the body.’

Check-It, that’s what they called Shaw down at St James’s. Check this, check that, check everything. As a nickname it was bestowed half in exasperation, half admiration. Valentine just found the meticulous approach annoying, like a hole in his shoe in wet weather.

Back inside beside the incinerator belt Dr Justina Kazimierz had arrived. The pathologist was kneeling on the conveyor, shining a torch into the shadows where

She looked up as Shaw ducked under the SOC tape.

‘Not now,’ she said.

When he’d first met the pathologist he’d put her brisk rudeness down to the difficulties of learning a new language. That had been a decade ago.

‘OK,’ said Shaw, peeling off forensic gloves. ‘But I’m not looking at an accident here – is that right?’

‘It’s not an accident,’ she said, delicately taking a sample of singed hair from the side of the skull. ‘Now go away.’

‘One more thing,’ he said, trying not to be intimidated. ‘The kid who spotted the victim in the furnace said he was moving…’ Shaw slipped the assumed gender into the question, knowing she couldn’t let it pass.

‘That’s two things,’ she said. There was a long pause and Shaw thought she’d leave it at that. Instead, she straightened her back. ‘At temperatures like this the tendons contract violently. Sudden immolation could produce what looks like movement.’ She sighed. ‘And it is indeed a man, Shaw. And, at some point he’s broken his arm in two places.’ She indicated just above the wrist and about three inches higher, below the elbow. ‘Now. Go away.’

Hadden called them round to the other side of the belt. From there you could see there was something under the body. It looked like a melted strawberry ice cream with streaks of yellow custard.

‘That went in with him,’ said Hadden.

‘One of the waste bags?’ asked Shaw.

‘Yes. The plastic label was burnt off – but there’s a punched steel tag with some kind of notation. I can’t read it – but let me get it back to the lab.’

‘But no others on the belt…?’

‘No. A gap before and, not unsurprisingly, a gap after.’

‘So – he was either holding it, the waste bag, or whoever killed him put it on the belt?’

Hadden sighed. ‘Let me do the science. Then I’ll have some answers.’

A uniformed PC gave Valentine a clocking-on card.

‘Bryan Judd’s,’ said Valentine, reading. ‘Address on Erebus Street – Bentinck Launderette.’ His shoulders sagged. He’d broken enough bad news in his life to fill a newspaper. It had happened to him once: the hollow knock, the PC in uniform on the doorstep. An RTA, his wife in the passenger seat on the bypass, a hole in the windscreen where her head had punched through. DOA. Dead On Arrival.

‘Let’s do it,’ said Shaw. He dreaded the knock too, the light footsteps down the hall, and then that look in their eyes as he stood there telling them their lives had changed for ever. It was like being the Angel of Death.