[PS & GV #6] Death on Demand

by Jim Kelly

CCTV cameras were mounted over each outside door. They operated overnight from eight till six and the recordings were kept for thirty days, in line with Whitehall guidance. During the day they could be activated from the nurses’ station, but were generally shut down in the interests of patient privacy. Marsh House boasted a high nurse–resident ratio. The CCTV was a security system, not a replacement for personal care.

  DC Mark Birley, one of Shaw’s team, was an expert in CCTV evidence and was already on his way to the site. A picture, however murky or blurred, was their best hope of putting together a description of Ruby Bright’s killer – or killers.

  Given that the human body’s ability to sleep through the night declines with age, Shaw felt that the freedom to wander at night would be a necessity of old age. The residents of Marsh House paid the fees, why did they want to be locked in? If Shaw had the money to pay £1,200 a week he’d have found a way to get the keypad code and bribed the night nurse to look the other way. It was possible staff – and patients – came and went; but impossible that they did so unrecorded on the CCTV film.

  Valentine knelt beside the desk. There was a blotter and a small pile of A4 paper with the Marsh House heading and a pencil, laid neatly – almost mathematically – at ninety degrees to the blotter, alongside a blue biro. The DS held the biro up to the light. ‘No top,’ he said. They both examined the carpet around their shoes, but there was no sign of the missing blue cap. On a small ‘bureau’ style shelf there were envelopes, stamps, a few postcards unused – each one identical, showing the self-portrait of Henry Bright.

  On stiff knees, Valentine tried to get low enough to see if the thin light revealed any marks on the blotter. ‘I’ll get SOCO to bag the lot once they’re on site,’ he said.

  Shaw continued with a summary of what they knew, this time – the discovery of the victim’s body.

  Overnight there was one nurse on duty, while two others slept in the resident staff wing, which was over a pair of twin garages, separated from the main building by an open-air passage. The night nurse was Xavier ‘Javi’ Copon, a twenty-eight-year-old Spaniard. He had been relieved at the nurses’ station at 6.15 a.m. by Senior Nurse Kay Richmond.

  Catering staff had begun arriving at 6.20 a.m., and one of them – Gill Butcher – had taken a tray of tea to Bright’s room at 6.40 a.m. Her bed was empty and, indeed, still made-up, complete with crisp hospital corners. Richmond organized a search of Marsh House’s public rooms, and then asked Gill and two of the kitchen staff, to check the grounds. They spotted Ruby’s distant wheelchair at 6.55 a.m. The police – in the form of PC Curtis – arrived at 7.20 a.m. from Hunstanton.

  Tom Hadden, head of forensic services, appeared in the doorway. Energized, flushed, his green eyes catching the light, Hadden was as motivated by murder as the detectives themselves. A former Home Office adviser, who’d taken early retirement and fled a messy divorce for the north Norfolk coast, Hadden brought a first-class intelligence to the application of science. The thin sunlight made him look pale, receding red hair little more than an amber stubble. Several skin cancer lesions had been removed from his face, giving it a pitted, rugged look.

  ‘Peter, George. Victim’s room?’

  He took a step over the threshold. ‘Justina’s with the body now,’ he said. Dr Justina Kazimeirz was the force pathologist.

  ‘But some things are clear, if not set in stone,’ said Hadden. ‘Someone put a freezer zip-bag over her head and held it twisted at her collarbone until she was dead.’

  He held a hand to his own head above the left ear.

  ‘Her hands were tied, a slip knot. She’s used one foot to try and spin the chair round during the attack. Time of death? Tricky. The outside temperature was fairly chilly last night – so let’s say eight in the evening until two this morning. Justina may narrow that down, but it’s a six-hour window, so think yourselves lucky. As I say, we’ll know when she’s back at the Ark.’

  The Ark was West Norfolk’s forensic laboratory, built inside an old Methodist chapel, next to police headquarters on St James’ in the centre of Lynn.

  ‘One detail: her hands are clean, so that supports the theory she was pushed out there. The bark pathway picks up peat and grass, and she’d have soiled her palms if she’d propelled herself forward. Two nails broken, but still clean.’

  He was about to go but turned back, eyes closed, a mannerism which indicated he wanted to say something that might be important. ‘Justina wanted you to know that she put up a fight. Her words. Like in the poem: Do not go gentle into that long good night. Certainly nothing gentle about this. A fighter, our Ruby, despite her age.’

  Shaw went with Hadden to examine the outside doors, leaving Valentine to finish in Ruby Bright’s room.

  Shaw had left one of the watercolours against the wall and as Valentine lifted it back on to the hook he saw that an envelope had been taped to the back with two neat strips of sticky tape. Sitting on Ruby’s high, counter-paned bed he held the painting on his knees and extracted from the envelope a single sheet of paper. The slightly waxy paper allowed him to guess what it was before he had it open: a death certificate, dated eighteen months previously. The name, Beatrice Hood, meant nothing. She’d been eighty-seven years old and the primary cause of death was stated badly as ‘old age’, while the contributing factors were obscured by the peculiar tortured Latin of the medical profession. But the address listed under ‘place of death’ was plain enough, and the coincidence made his skin creep – because coincidence was, as Jan often told him, God’s way of remaining anonymous.

  32 Hartington Street, Parkwood Springs.

  SIX

  The Porsche, touching ninety miles per hour, breasted a hill and Shaw enjoyed the fleeting sense of weightlessness. In his rear-view mirror he could see the sunlit sea, while ahead the low hills were shrouded in threatening black clouds, boiling up as the summer heat rose. For a mile the road ran parallel with the narrow-gauge railway, and he drew level with a train, a line of wooden open carriages, mostly empty at this early hour, the small, gleaming engine ahead, emitting white puffs of toy-town smoke. Drawing ahead effortlessly he found the scene oddly comic, as if he’d been transposed into a black-and-white thriller of the silent movie era, racing for the spot where the heroine lay tied between the rails.

  On the passenger seat his mobile still held the chief constable’s latest text: Shaw. Keep me posted on Walsingham op. I’m at Home Office overnight.

  Shaw, whose temper was rarely, if ever, sighted, slammed the palm of his hand against the Porsche’s thin, leather-bound, steering wheel.

  For the next hour the murder inquiry would have to do without him. Walsingham was Joyce’s priority, not the brutal murder of a frail, elderly woman. He’d despatched Valentine back to St James’ to organize the murder team, and to ensure that he was on hand for his appointment with Dr Scrutton. The squad needed to find a relative of the dead woman and details of her last will and testament. Meanwhile DC Paul Twine – smart, graduate-entry, with an eye for meticulous detail – would stay at Marsh House to organize interviews and monitor forensics. The private trust which ran Marsh House had declined Shaw’s request for access to the staff records on the grounds of data protection, and the application for a warrant from a magistrate would take at least an hour, if not more.

  Uniformed branch had been drafted in to track down Javi Copon, the Marsh House night nurse, and deliver him for interview to St James’. The West Norfolk Constabulary’s records office was tasked with finding documentation on Beatrice Hood, the woman whose seemingly innocuous death certificate had been discovered sticky-taped to the back of one of Ruby Bright’s luminous Norfolk landscapes. The coroner’s officer had agreed to check the files to see if Hood’s body had undergone an autopsy.

  The tourist train was now in the far distance behind him and he had to slow as he slipped through the sleepy outskirts of Walsingham, dipping down into the town – in effect a large village – with the narrow leaded spire of the church ahead,
along with the neo-Byzantine campanile of the thirties’ shrine. The summer storm was close to breaking, the light inky and damp beneath gunmetal clouds.

  The Friday Market, the Georgian square at the heart of the village, would be crammed with trippers and pilgrims for the festival of the Virgin Mary and the arrival of the pilgrims, but this morning it lay deserted but for a flock of seagulls. Shaw’s appointment was with a representative of the Walsingham Alternative Pilgrimage (WAP) – an umbrella organization for left-wing protest groups from gay rights to A Woman’s Right to Choose, determined to make their voice heard on the big day. They had offices on a boat in Wells harbour, but also a protest ‘rainbow bus’, which would be their HQ on the day the pilgrimage arrived.

  WAP was just one of the reasons Joyce was so jittery about the pilgrimage, now only a few days from arriving in the town. The annual ‘National’ had its own tensions, which had grown over the years. A decade ago several hundred visiting Christian Tamils from London had made the journey north and ended up on the nearby beach at Wells, many worse for drink, prompting a ‘riot’ by brandishing ceremonial knives. A middle-class backlash had filled the local press with complaints of yobbish pilgrims urinating over garden fences.

  The following year the police had stopped and searched pilgrims’ cars, after being tipped off some were carrying guns. None were found. Large numbers of Irish travellers had begun arriving for the event too, across-country from the ferry ports of Wales and Liverpool, adding to the inflammatory mix. The addition of WAP, keen to pick a theological punch-up, brandishing banners and eager to engage the pious in debate, had raised the temperature a little further. Most of the local publicans planned to shut up shop on the big day.

  The jittery atmosphere had never engendered genuine violence, but the new chief constable felt the ‘World’ might just provide the spark necessary to light the powder keg. Most of the resident CID officers thought this view alarmist. The vast majority of annual pilgrims were very young, or very old, devout or peaceful. There was no real reason to think this pilgrimage would be any different, except for a sprinkling of foreign visitors, but Joyce was taking no chances. Pilgrims on foot were converging on Walsingham, not just with the main body, but along other, ancient routes. Their every footfall was being monitored at police headquarters.

  The protestors’ rainbow bus was difficult to miss, a seventies charabanc painted using the entire psychedelic spectrum, standing on an acre of tarmac otherwise deserted. By the time Shaw was out of the Porsche, a woman was climbing down the bus steps, clipboard in her hand.

  ‘Nano Heaney,’ she said, holding out a pale hand, a natural extension of a pale, slender arm. The name Nano, surely, an ironic nickname, must have had its origins in her height, which had to be six feet, possibly even an inch more. Her stature was the dominant feature of her outward appearance and surely stood in comic counterpoint to Nano, the Greek diminutive, the root of nanotechnology. The name suggested, Shaw thought, a classical education.

  The neat, luminous face was perched on a particular body shape, which reminded Shaw of the classic Pierrot – the sad clown of the comedy theatre, the fool, with a tear perhaps marked on the cheek, dressed in white, with wide hips and silver, silk pantaloons. The effect was enforced by the loose white trousers, a baggy white T-shirt, both hung on a kite-shaped body: even the motif was in a shade of almost unreadable grey: Sweet toleration.

  She held a West Norfolk Constabulary card between two fingers, flicking it deftly. ‘DI Shaw? The radio said there’s been a murder; I thought you’d be busy …’

  ‘We’ve got more than one detective,’ said Shaw.

  Heaney’s pale whiteness seemed to glow in the deepening gloom under the storm cloud. She looked like a daytime angel, fallen to earth. There was something about the make-up-free face, felt Shaw, which invited trust.

  ‘I’m chair of WAP,’ she said. ‘The chief constable asked me to cooperate, which I’m happy to do. I understand you’d like to know our plans?’ She smiled, suggesting any anxiety might be misplaced. ‘I’m afraid they’re modest and hardly command the attention of a DI …’

  ‘This will be brief, Ms Heaney,’ said Shaw. ‘I think you’ve been liaising with uniformed branch, but I just wanted to get a quick overview. The chief constable is anxious to avoid flashpoints, if I can put it like that.’

  ‘A tour d’horizon?’ she asked, managing to imbue the phrase with the hint of an Irish accent. And again, an educated allusion. She swung her arm out over the view below, the little town a choppy seascape of rooftops.

  ‘Precisely …’ agreed Shaw, noting that this horizon, a black sinuous line of surrounding hills, was already blurred by falling rain.

  A random hail stone fell between them, then twenty, then a hundred. The air filled with the alien aroma of ice and the sound of a million miniature percussions. The source of the falling hail, the blue-black cloud, slid away south, the sunlight flooding in behind, a rainbow vaulting the valley. But the hail still fell from a clear sky and another bank of clouds threatened.

  Shaw expected Heaney to retreat to the bus, but instead she ran, dodging the icy pellets, over the old level crossing towards a clapboard building which looked as if it had once been the town’s old mainline station. It was only as he ran up a set of entrance steps that he saw, improbably mounted on the roof, an onion-dome surmounted by a cross: no ordinary cross, but the triple-cross of Byzantium.

  Inside, beyond a glass porch, the darkness was velvety and it took a moment for Shaw’s eyes to pick out the gilt, glimmering in the light from a single, guttering candle. They were in a room divided by a wooden partition, decorated with a series of icons, Mary, Christ, various saints, all in the distinct style of the Orthodox Church. Crosses, crowns and statues stood in niches. Beyond the partition a lead-grey candelabra hung in what must be the priest’s vestibule, partly hidden by a decorated wooden double-door.

  ‘Welcome to St Seraphim’s,’ said Heaney, shaking her head like a dog, so that melting hailstones flew out, catching the light. ‘There’s a lot of interest within the Orthodox churches in the shrine. I think the Russians have been here fifty years. Mind you, the priests are discreet. I hardly ever see them.’

  ‘I’d have put you down as a lifetime atheist,’ offered Shaw.

  ‘The attraction’s entirely aesthetic,’ said Heaney. ‘I’ve had enough of religion and I suspect the feeling’s mutual. I was expelled by the Sisters of Mercy, Inspector, and that’s an All-Ireland record.’

  ‘And the crime?’ asked Shaw.

  She bit her lip. ‘I stayed home, nursing my mother in her final illness. They said I should have been in school learning the pluperfect of amo, an irony which, believe me, totally escaped them. They said God would take care of Mother. I suppose he did, but not in the fashion I’d hoped. Still, that’s all done now.’

  Shaw, examining the little church in the half-light, found the icons strangely unsettling. Was it the foursquare penetrating eyes, seeking out the watchers’ own? And what eyes; always lidded, full and hooded, as if searching for an image within as much as without.

  ‘I have to visit Walsingham a lot,’ said Heaney. ‘There’s an old people’s home over the back of the new Catholic church and two more on the outskirts. Occasionally, I like to have a few minutes on my own. I can thank St Seraphim for that, if nothing else. Sorry, I didn’t say. I’m in health care, just another bloody bureaucrat of course, based up at the Great Eastern.

  ‘It’s the oddest place, Walsingham. The shrine itself down in the town is a total horror, and the church isn’t much better. I was brought up a Catholic, County Mayo, and even I think it’s over the top. Talk about smoke and bells. Meanwhile, the Slipper Chapel, which is RC, feels like the C of E – so work that out. But St Seraphim’s is rather wonderful by comparison.’

  She reached out a hand and let her fingertips brush one of the icons, a small statuette of the Virgin. ‘I can come here and just sit, and I don’t get that claustrophobic feeling I do in th
e other churches, that someone’s trying to sell me an idea. I had enough of that as a kid.’

  She gave Shaw a mischievous smile. ‘And, to be frank, the absence of priests and nuns or – God help us – monks, helps a lot.’ The smile deepened and then saddened. ‘Priests, Ireland’s gift to England, just when you’d got rid of them.’

  In his back pocket Shaw felt his mobile buzz.

  A text from DC Twine: Night nurse not known at address given. Shaw considered the implications and a possible scenario for murder. The elderly often formed strong attachments to their carers. It was not unknown for wills to contain bequests. The will, if it existed, was the key.

  ‘Look,’ he said, meeting Heaney’s eyes, ‘we do need some rules. The National’s big enough, this could be much bigger. The numbers are pretty much fiction at this stage but it might be six, seven thousand. We need to be vigilant. We can’t have any surprises with those numbers of people in narrow lanes and streets. Any protest needs to be well controlled, and above all, static. How many will WAP bring, and where will you demonstrate?’

  ‘This is for police use only, not the press?’ asked Heaney.

  Shaw nodded.

  ‘Three hundred, that’s our target, but I think we’ll fall well short. Gay rights is strong, and there’s a bus load coming from North London, but the rest is’ – she broke something unseen with her narrow hands – ‘fragmented. Pro-choice is committed, angry even, but I really don’t think we’re a threat to public order, Inspector, although that is not to say there are not strong feelings here. The Christian Right, up close, can be an infuriating theology.’

  She took out a photocopied Ordnance Survey map and laid it out on a table which held a visitors book, and across which the candlelight fell. ‘We’ll be in town at dawn, or earlier,’ she said. ‘Our bus will be up here, where it is now. There’ll be someone on board all day. That’s the plan. The rest will go down to the war memorial at the top of the short hill from the shrine. I marked it all up on a map at one of the preliminary meetings. We’ll be in position by ten. Shouting, chanting, a bit of dialogue with those who want to engage. That’s the long and the short of it.’