Death Watch

28

Two children were playing football outside the Bentinck Launderette in Erebus Street despite the fact that the state school summer holidays had finished two weeks earlier. One of them could have been the child they’d seen dancing round the fire that first night in the Cat People mask. If it was, Shaw had been right about his age: seven, less. He had a snub nose and a brutal haircut designed to combat nits. The boys had scrawled a chalk goalmouth on the wall, the heads of an imaginary crowd added in for effect.

A voice shouted. ‘Joey!’ The boy with the snub nose ran to a door at the side of the Crane. Holding it open was a young woman with long, pale legs. She couldn’t stop herself looking their way. Then she clipped the boy round the head and dragged him indoors. Opposite the pub stood Jan Orzsak’s house; the curtains drawn, the scrawled insult on the door gone under a fresh coat of paint. But a splash on the woodwork below looked like fresh dog’s pee. Orzsak’s estate car, which had yielded no evidence, was back, parked at the kerb, behind the electricity van and a builder’s flatback pick-up and skip.

From beyond the razor wire and hawthorn they could hear a pneumatic drill munching concrete. On the back of the truck was a new power unit for the sub-station, much smaller than the original Shaw and Valentine had

‘New gear,’ said Valentine, looking across the street to the Crane. The front doors were wedged open and they could see a cleaner wiping tables. A man in a white shirt holding a coffee cup played a one-armed bandit.

The hot street, the atmosphere of aimless boredom, seemed to suck the energy out of Valentine. That and the sight of Peter Shaw, bouncing on his toes, knocking smartly on Orzsak’s front door.

They heard the crushed slippers shuffling down the hallway. Orzsak had a napkin at his throat, and his mouth worked, chewing. He let them in without a word and went ahead into the front room. The shattered glass had been cleared up, but the tanks still stood, cleaned out, dry. For the first time Shaw noticed a portrait, in oils, on the chimney breast, showing a man in formal Polish national costume. There was a small table in front of the barred bay window on which was a plate of cheese and rye bread, which Orzsak pushed aside as he sat. And a bottle, beside an elegant balloon glass a fifth full of red wine.

Shaw walked to the portrait. ‘This your father?’

Orzsak’s eyes were suddenly alive. ‘Yes. He was a vintner, import and export, based in Gdansk.’

‘Wealthy, then?’

‘He died in the war,’ said Orzsak, shrugging. ‘Then the Russians came. I was a baby. We had a little, which did

‘And you still like a glass of wine?’ asked Valentine. He looked at the bottle. ‘Not cheap, right? Dipping into the savings? Or do you still earn money, Mr Orzsak?’

But Shaw remembered something else. ‘Of course — the basement, at number 6. A wine cellar — the marks are still on the wall. But no cellar here?’

Shaw looked around; there was no little door in the hallway. He recalled that there’d been none in the Judds’ house either, or at the launderette. He’d check with door to door — was it the only basement in the street?

Orzsak ignored him, sipping the wine, circulating the blood-red liquid.

‘Did your people find Judd’s fingerprints in my house?’ he asked, although Shaw sensed he didn’t want an answer, that the question was a diversion.

‘Why did you lie to us about where you were on Sunday evening when Bryan Judd was murdered?’ he asked.

Orzsak seemed to deflate, his chin sinking further onto his chest.

‘I didn’t,’ he said, but it was barely a whisper.

Valentine produced a black and white print, a video-grab from the CCTV coverage.

‘This is you, sir. Seven thirty on Sunday. At the Bluebell.’

‘It wasn’t anything to do with… that boy.’ Odd, thought Shaw, that after nearly two decades he still thought of Bryan Judd as Norma Jean’s twin — but then Norma Jean would, perhaps, never get any older.