[PS & GV #6] Death on Demand

by Jim Kelly

  All the lanterns were aloft, a string of more than fifty, drifting up and out to sea, the candles flickering. Shaw was struck by the contrast between this joyful pagan worship of the supermoon, and the fervent, pious passion of the pilgrims, on their way to Walsingham.

  ‘I better get back to my table,’ said Joyce. ‘My wife’s not safe left alone with one of these …’ He shook the cocktail glass. ‘You’ve got a good business here. You’ve built something.’

  ‘It’s my wife’s business – lock, stock and barrel.’

  ‘Right,’ said Joyce, but he hadn’t heard. ‘Oh. The other thing. DS Valentine’s medical didn’t go well.’

  George Valentine was Peter Shaw’s partner, his sergeant. They’d been a team, a reluctant duo it had to be said, for nearly six years. Valentine had been his father’s partner back in the eighties. DCI Jack Shaw was a legend in the West Norfolk Constabulary – although Joyce had probably never heard of him. To the outside world, Valentine was an old-fashioned copper, a dinosaur roaming the brave new world of CSI, community relations and equal opportunities, not to mention health and safety. At fifty-nine he was in the last furlong before retirement. A widower, smoking sixty Silk Cut a day, he had never felt the need to plan for the time when he didn’t have to go to work. Dying on the job wasn’t a possibility – it was George Valentine’s goal.

  ‘He’s got an appointment with the force doctor, Scrutton, at St James’ to review his test results. They made him take a scan to track emphysema. Unfortunately, the picture told a different story – lung cancer. Looks bad, I’m afraid. If he wants some time off to think, he can have it. His pension lump sum comes in at just under £130,000. He could see the world. I don’t know. Whatever spins his wheels. Right now he’ll be feeling fine. In six months he’ll be on his knees. This isn’t something that’s going to go away.

  ‘That’s all entirely entre nous. You didn’t hear it from me. It might be an idea to take him out and get him pissed after he’s seen Scrutton. You need to break through, crack the complacency. Miracles aside, this is going to kill him.’

  Joyce spilt the dregs of his Moon Riser into the sand and waded off towards the lights of Surf!. On the way up the beach he passed a slim, black woman in a white bikini holding two full cocktail glasses, which meant Shaw had less than thirty seconds to manufacture a smile to greet his wife.

  TWO

  George Valentine descended the uncarpeted stairs to a familiar sound; the cat flap flapping as Zebra made his customary early morning exit. The cat had been Julie’s as a kitten, and with her death the animal had seemed to take a violent dislike to her bereaved husband, as if the disease which had killed her so swiftly was in some moral sense his fault. Standing in the kitchen he lit the gas ring under the kettle with the match he would have used to fire up his first cigarette of the day, if he hadn’t promised himself that today was the day. Valentine was a stubborn man but he didn’t fight losing battles. Emphysema was making him increasingly breathless. The quack at St James’ had made him take a scan at the Great Eastern Hospital, an experience so alien, antiseptic, and claustrophobic he’d vowed to quit for good while his old bones were still inside the machine, his head outside.

  ‘I’ve quit,’ he announced to the kitchen, although his eyes flitted across the Formica table and worktops until he remembered he’d thrown his last packet of Silk Cut into a bin on the Boal Quay the night before. Outside the cat caught his eye, treading its sinuous feline path along the fence, paw in front of paw, like a tightrope walker. The movement of featherweight bones apparent beneath the skinny flesh reminded Valentine that they were both of a certain age. He noted that the cat’s bowl was still full of yesterday’s food.

  While the aluminium kettle fidgeted on the gas ring he walked to the front door to pick up the paper, only remembering when he’d got to the end of the gloomy hallway that he’d been persuaded to cancel it. The Daily Mail – apparently – enhanced a cynical tendency, a mean view of the world, dominated by a morbid anxiety towards the concept of change. He stood for a moment, looking at his black slip-on leather shoes, and thought that while that might be true, what were the alternatives? He’d rather be suspected of necrophilia than being a Guardian reader. He’d have to do without. Something else he’d have to do without. It occurred to him that life had a certain symmetry, because you spent the first twenty years doing things for the first time, and the final twenty years doing them for the last.

  Back in the kitchen he found a new chopping board and a loaf of bread wrapped in slightly greasy tissue paper with a watermark, which must mean it was organic, and therefore almost certainly inedible. He cut some, noting with distaste the embedded shards of gritty husk, and popped it in the toaster, beginning to count the seconds before the slice was launched briefly into orbit. Outside, distinctly, he heard a child’s voice in play; so pellucid, so sharp, she could have been in the room. Whitefriars’ primary school was a street away and ran a breakfast club for kids with working parents. He’d grown up in these streets, between the river and the London Gate, and the playground simply provided part of the soundtrack to his life. If he’d been born in the country it would have been birdsong.

  Upstairs, the shower unit cut out, the sudden silence emphasizing the loss of the buzzing electric motor. He imagined the woman standing beneath the final drops of water, eyes closed, hands covering her mouth, and felt the stab of guilt that it wasn’t Julie he saw, that the water drops didn’t slide over her skin. The bathroom door opened and footsteps ran to the bedroom. In less than a minute she was coming down the stairs, with a smart rat-a-tat-tat; and then, there she was in the black-and-white uniform: creased trousers, polished shoes, a black-and-white chequered scarf, body belt, summer tunic, radio: Probationary Police Constable Jan Clay.

  She was the only thing in the kitchen that wasn’t stale, including the organic bread.

  ‘Morning, Constable,’ he said, thinking that when she got out of bed she never left an impression; no nest-like whorl, no crumpled, nightmarish shroud. There was something light and luminous about her, which he hoped wasn’t simply a facet of being temporary.

  ‘Detective Sergeant,’ she said, her brown eyes checking both his hands, left then right, for signs of the first cigarette.

  Satisfied, she turned her back to face the mirror; neat blonde hair, cut short, with that happy habit of always falling into place. Neat wasn’t quite right but it was the word everyone used. Tidy perhaps, compact even. And brisk. The uniform was as yet unfamiliar, and she re-jigged the scarf, readjusted the cap, tucking in a stray hair.

  Valentine had long harboured the fantasy that the mirrors in the house stored the images from the past which only he was blessed, or cursed, to see. If he stole a glance over Jan’s shoulder now, would he catch Julie’s face looking out; assessing, disappointed, approving?

  Jan’s husband, DC Paul Clay, had been Valentine’s partner in what he liked to refer to, with a Churchillian flourish, as his ‘Wilderness Years’ – when he’d been banished from the CID unit at Lynn to the north Norfolk coast after making a spectacular hash of a murder inquiry, fetching up finally at Wells-next-the-Sea, to spend a decade going quietly to seed, investigating petty thefts, Saturday night brawls, second-home burglaries.

  DC Clay hadn’t been his kind of copper, or his kind of man; but he’d envied him his life, the teetotal rectitude, the easy good humour, the dutiful wife, the two children. He’d seen the kids grow up, leave home. Then DC Clay’s health had started to decline, marked by a long series of vaguely mysterious ailments, and his wife had begun soliciting for odd jobs to supplement the single salary, now bereft of overtime. She’d taken in washing, offered to clean houses, and so Valentine’s bedsit had been one of her first tasks. She’d seen the minutiae of a widower’s life: the single Christmas card from Valentine’s sister, the armchair in front of the TV, the empty bottles, the takeaway cartons.

  How different, he’d thought at the time, it must all be to Jan Clay’s own home, but time
told a different story. DC Clay, it turned out, was a secret alcoholic who died of liver cancer after a long, final illness which was anything but bravely borne, and Jan had spent their life together, she later confessed, envying him his job; policing it turned out, was in her blood at just about the same concentration as alcohol was in his.

  ‘What’s on today then, Georgie?’ she asked, pulling down the front of her tunic and opening the fridge to retrieve a yogurt pot.

  Valentine yawned. The fact that she wanted to talk about The Job wasn’t a problem. The problem was that she wanted to talk about it at seven fifteen in the morning. But he liked being called Georgie; it made him feel twenty years younger, and it was thrillingly intimate after nearly twenty years of watching other people’s lives, as if through a half-open door. Flattered too, as almost any fifty-something widower would have been, by an attentive lover. Pressing his left foot down hard on the lino, he made an effort to straighten his back and felt the visceral ‘click’ of his vertebrae reshuffling, his spine uncurling.

  ‘Walsingham, planning for the pilgrimage,’ he said.

  Valentine had a head like a hatchet – two-dimensional, so that when he turned it now to track the disappearance of Zebra over a rooftop, his face seemed to move from light to dark with no intervening shadows. ‘Meetings all day. Tea cups. Biscuits. Agendas. God squad. Vicars – worse, monks. Neighbourhood Witch. PowerPoint presentations. Can it get any better? Especially when we’ve still got two GBHs and an attempted murder on the books.’

  It was his turn to let his image fall upon the silvered glass and it gave him a moment to recover: jet-black receding hair, narrow features fighting a losing battle with gravity, grey eyes with an icy splinter of reflected light.

  Jan blew on her tea. ‘I went once,’ she said, ‘with the kids on the railway.’ Wells, Jan’s old home town, was five miles from the shrine by a narrow-gauge tourist line which just about kept up a year-round service. ‘They’d just held a service in one of the old churches and the nave and the aisles, every bit of the floor was covered in fresh herbs – rosemary, thyme, mint. They’d processed up and down with the icon and crushed the herbs underfoot.’ She met Valentine’s eye. ‘It was amazing Georgie. Put the kids in a trance. Like breathing perfume.’

  Valentine looked dubious. When they’d taken a weekend break to Paris, Jan had tried to get him to join her inside Notre Dame, but he’d just walked away to watch the riverboats sliding past on the Seine. It wasn’t that Valentine didn’t believe, he later explained over an ice-cold litre of Normandy cider, he just reasoned that he’d find out one way or another soon enough. Life was a game of poker, why show his hand now?

  Munching the cast iron crust of his toast, he switched on the local radio news: haystack arson at Gayton; an affray on the Tuesday Market; weather fine. He worked a finger under his stiff white shirt collar. ‘Who you with today?’ he asked.

  Jan would be a West Norfolk Constabulary probationer for two years. She’d got through her initial training and was now spending time with various units, learning different aspects of The Job. She’d just completed two months on foot patrol.

  ‘DS Chalker. Shoe squad.’

  ‘Shoe squad?’

  She took Valentine by the arm and led him into the living room: sixty-inch flat-screen TV (with Sky Sports), ironing board and a mantelpiece crammed with pictures of Jan’s grown-up children. Parting the net curtains to look out in to Greenland Street, they found the world outside was bathed in mist, lit a rather beautiful lemon-yellow by the pale disc of the risen sun. Briefly it reminded Jan of the supermoon they’d glimpsed the night before, floating free of the rooftops, capturing Zebra in silhouette.

  A milk float tinkled past with a whirring electric motor.

  The house stood at a T-junction so that they could see down Whitefriars’ Street directly opposite. The telephone wires were strung between poles in a zigzag pattern into the distance. About a hundred yards down on the left a pair of trainers had been lobbed up over the lines, dangling in the air like a set of South American bolas.

  ‘Shoes,’ said Jan.

  ‘Right. They’re illegal, are they?’ said Valentine. ‘That’d be the Dangerous Sneaker Act, 2008.’

  ‘Listen,’ she said. She’d brought the yogurt pot with her and quickly took another teaspoonful. ‘Joyce has got some expert coming in to give us all the lowdown. It’s billed as a lecture, no less. It’s nothing new, I know, but there’s definitely something afoot …’

  She smiled at her own joke. ‘Twenty, thirty pairs a day out on the estates. And here in town. If you don’t look up, Georgie, you’d have missed them.’

  Valentine’s eyes rarely left the pavement.

  ‘Some of it’s art, vandalism, but criminal gangs use them too, drugs, gambling, prostitution. The Met’s had a spate around White City, West London that was drug related. Apparently there’s a lot of interest in the international policing community.’

  An ability to talk in italics was only one of the gifts Valentine admired in PPC Jan Clay.

  ‘We’re going out with the cherry picker to take ’em all down,’ said Jan, valiantly attempting to instill a sense of urgency into the project. ‘I saw a pair last night on Greyfriars right opposite the nick. Cheeky bastards. And we’ll have those too …’ she added, nodding down Whitefriars’ Street. ‘Last thing we want is the local PTA on our backs. Street drugs outside the primary school playground, not nice.’

  ‘It’s a craze,’ said Valentine, suddenly short of breath. ‘You take them down the kids will put some new ones up. I’d leave ’em. Ignore it. It’s graffiti in the sky. So what?’

  ‘You haven’t got Neighbourhood Watch to deal with, or the police committee, or the press. Or, for that matter, Facebook and Twitter – both of which are awash with pictures every time a new pair goes up. Social media, Georgie. It’s the new street.’

  She waved her iPhone at him, in its trendy polka-dot case.

  They both heard his mobile buzzing on the kitchen table, doing its bee-waggle dance on the Formica top.

  ‘See ya,’ she said, fleeing.

  The mobile screen when he snatched it up said simply: SHAW.

  He knew what he’d hear before he picked the mobile up: that weird sonar-echo of wide open space, a seagull or two, the soft rise and fall of the waves on the beach – his beach.

  ‘George?’ The voice was much higher than he ever expected, and tuneful, suggesting an ability to hit a note first time.

  ‘Peter.’ In public, and especially in front of the CID team, they kept it formal. It was DI Shaw, or just ‘sir’. But he’d known Peter Shaw for thirty years; in fact, Valentine had been young Peter’s godfather, although this had never been mentioned since the whizz-kid had returned home to join the West Norfolk Constabulary from the Met.

  ‘I know you were looking forward to a three-hour planning meeting on Walsingham, George, but … How about you jump in the Mazda. I’ll meet you on the coast road outside Marsh House, that’s a private residential care home about two hundred yards east of Brancaster Church. I’ll be outside. I’ll wait. We’ll walk in.’

  ‘Give me something for the journey,’ said Valentine, reaching for his coat and automatically searching the pockets for the packet of Silk Cut. He knew why Shaw liked to play it like this: no details, no theories, the walk-up routine. If Valentine had no idea what he was heading for he’d have no preconceptions. He’d be what Shaw needed: a pair of objective, experienced, investigative eyes. ‘Cold eyes’ was what Shaw had called them once, and they knew each other well enough for Valentine to recognize the compliment.

  ‘Murder, George. That’s usually good enough to get you out of bed in the morning. But here’s the thing: our victim’s a rarity. A one-off. All set to meet the postman this morning she was, expecting her card from the Queen. She’d have been 100 today, George, if she’d lived. Alert apparently, had all her marbles. But you’d think, after one hundred years, that all passion was spent. What’s the point in killing so
meone who’s lived a century? What possible motive could justify that?’

  THREE

  A great yew tree, its rickety zigzag branches obscuring the second-floor windows of Marsh House, spread its fingertips out in the grey mist, like hands reaching for the warmth of an unseen sun. Shaw had expected the usual brand-image cypress trees, which seemed to lurk above the manicured lawns of every care home. He’d never quite grasped the psychology of such a choice. The cypress was an evergreen, and therefore a symbol of immortality, and so grew in every churchyard and graveyard – thus, surely, becoming, at least for the skeptical, a potent symbol of the very opposite of eternal life, a signpost instead to a kind of evergreen, picturesque, death.

  At least the yew, by contrast, was unambiguous: toxic, with blood-red sap, indelibly linked to death and pain. Christ, it was said, was crucified on a cross of yew, the carpenter of Nazareth, finding death, nailed to wood. It too only grew in churchyards, because the surrounding walls and hedges guarded its lethal leaves and berries from becoming food for children, or worse, precious cattle. A symbol too of longevity, living two thousand years, three thousand years, or more. Which made its choice for the care home garden as unintelligible as the cypress. To complete the cemetery gloom a willow bowed its head, the ultimate icon of mourning.

  The mist nudged inland, as warm and damp as the fetid interior of a launderette. Somewhere, out in the phlegm-white gloom of the North Sea, a coaster boomed its foghorn. Marsh House itself seemed to crouch in its grove of manicured gardens, just glimpsed – a whitewashed Napoleonic mansion with playful naval features: double bay windows, a maritime lookout tower, a flagpole, the whole estate behind a Norfolk stone wall. To one side of the gate stood a blue-and-white police squad car. Out on the marsh, just visible in the gloom, lay the wreck of a wooden boat, its toast-rack beams set in a line like a broken ribcage.