Death Watch

2

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 cafe. 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.