[PS & GV #6] Death on Demand

by Jim Kelly

  ‘What you’ve just said.’ There was a slight sheen of sweat on his face. ‘Not precisely the same words, but the underlying message was on the money.’

  He took a big breath, his ribcage rising. ‘She said liver disease, which got her old man, isn’t a bag of laughs. Death by cancer is, by contrast, a walk in the park. Well, she said something like that.

  ‘Some quack on the radio she heard said cancer provided an ideal death, what with the morphine and all. It’s only a guess, but I bet he didn’t have it at the time. No. Apparently cancer affords an opportunity to say goodbye, time to do stuff, get ready for the end. Then there’s whiskey.’

  Valentine rubbed the skin on his face with both hands.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about this other bloke,’ he said. ‘When I went in for the scan the guy before me was called Juan Roberto Valenciana, a Portuguese migrant worker. He had a shadow on his lungs too. We worked it out quick enough, that the appointments are alphabetical. I’ve been thinking about what his scan showed. Emphysema, I bet. He’ll have to give up cigarettes, take more exercise, build a new life.’

  There was a silence and Shaw knew instantly they were picturing the same scene: the room his father had died in at the family house at Hunstanton, the nurses busy changing beds, his mother ferrying tea cups, and George Valentine a bedside companion, with a glass of whiskey. Shaw had been training at the Met at the time, and had been reduced to weekend flying visits, so that when the end came he missed it, having to take a call from his mother in the early hours. But Valentine had been there at the end, at the bedside.

  The DS shot the cuffs on his suit. ‘For now, Peter, for today – a week, maybe a month, I’m going to work. Scrutton’s trying to get a date for surgery. When he’s got it, I’ll decide.’

  Valentine stood, a hand to the small of his back. ‘I checked with the coroner last night. Beatty Hood, the victim’s best friend, and the subject of the hidden death certificate? Well, everything’s in order according to Furey. No inquest required. Died in her sleep, at home. Her medical records show she’d been ill for a while. Loads of things going wrong. He called it “complex morbidity”.’

  Dr Furey was the district coroner, a sociable Irishman with a commendable academic interest in deaths amongst Lynn’s homeless community. Hood’s death sounded routine, mundane, a fitting end to a quiet life.

  Valentine held the fire door open, but Shaw didn’t move. ‘Jack would have fought if he’d had a chance,’ he said. ‘But he didn’t have a choice, the diagnosis was too late. It’s not the same, it’s not like it has to end like that. You’ve got a chance, George. More of a chance than he ever had.’

  ELEVEN

  Inside the Ark they found Tom Hadden, in a laboratory white suit on the phone, so Shaw commandeered one of the hot desks and spread out a copy of Birley’s hand-drawn plan of Marsh House and what cartographers liked to call its ‘environs’.

  Shaw had texted Valentine on the latest CCTV news overnight, so the DS was up to speed.

  ‘I met Fortis at six thirty this morning,’ said Shaw. ‘We walked the boundary of the building. There has to be another way into, and out of, Marsh House.

  ‘She did confirm that the wheelchair was Ruby’s. They’re all coded with a punched metal tag. Which means either she got out alone, in the chair, or the killer got her out, by means other than the six doors, with the chair. It is technically possible to open two windows and step out of the building without being caught on camera – here and here …’

  Valentine, standing, curved his back over the plan to get a closer look. ‘Height of the sills?’

  Shaw put a boot on the desk top, judging the height. ‘Three foot six plus. So it’s hard to imagine. But even if she got out, with the chair, she couldn’t move away from the building because she’d have to cross the line-of-fire – so to speak – of one of the CCTV cameras.

  ‘There are two possibilities, George. If you were a gambling man, which you are, I’d say they’re both 1,000–1 long shots. There are twin wooden shutter doors here, outside the French windows, which lead down to the old coal cellar. We’ll get Tom to check, but you’d have to get into the cellar down a narrow staircase, and then climb out. In a wheelchair? Or, you can exit the building from a second-floor window on to the roof of the covered passageway which leads to the flat roof of the garage. I’ll leave you to work out the pitfalls in that little scenario. But I can’t see it, can you?’

  Hadden, off the phone, led them up a spiral metal staircase to what had been the organ loft of the old Methodist chapel. From the minstrels’ gallery they could gaze down the length of the church; the view reminded Shaw of the derivation of the word ‘nave’, from the Latin navis, for a ship. The body of this vessel had been divided, amidships, by a glass wall, separating Hadden’s laboratory from the pathologist’s morgue beyond, overseen by a single stone angel, its face covered with both palms, as if unable to look upon the dead below. A pair of glass doors provided access from morgue to laboratory. Valentine tried not to let his eye catch the image beyond the reflective glass, but it was too late; the grey corpse of Ruby Bright lay on the aluminium table, the only colour the yellow name tag attached to the right ankle. On any other morning of his life he’d have been able to keep this glimpse of mortality in perspective, but today it held a fatal attraction.

  ‘Here she is,’ said Hadden, extracting a small machine from the wooden chest once used for bibles. The ESDA (Electrostatic Detection Apparatus) had been hidden away – there was no other word for it – beneath several file boxes. The size of a small photocopier, constructed of glass and blue steel, it held the brand name: ESDA-Lite.

  ‘Don’t get a lot of call to use it, so might as well save the space,’ said Hadden, but he had the decency not to meet Shaw’s eye. They all knew why this particular machine had been slipped into a wooden chest: why remind everyone who came through the door of the Ark of the one single device that had done more damage to the collective reputation of the British police in the last century?

  Valentine and Shaw helped Hadden inveigle the ESDA down the spiral stairs and on to one of the hot desks. To make room, the scientist removed a plastic bag containing a pair of blood-spattered trainers.

  ‘What’s the story here?’ asked Valentine, examining the shoes through the murky plastic and the label marked: PC Clay 34671.

  ‘Pig’s blood,’ said Hadden. ‘Someone’s idea of a joke, or a warning.’

  Plugged in, the ESDA began to hum, an internal pump sucking air through thousands of small holes in the brass ‘table’ which formed the flat top of the machine. Over this Hadden placed the sheet of paper found on the blotter of Ruby Bright’s desk. On top of that he stretched a polymer sheet, effectively a piece of cling film, sealing the ‘sandwich’ below.

  ‘Now for the magic,’ he said, picking up the electronic ‘wand’ attached to the side of the table. ‘You might want to stand back a bit, George, this can generate a potential of 5,000 volts. I wouldn’t want it to wake you up.’

  He drew the wand across the blotter. Shaw knew the science from his Met forensics’ course: the ‘corona discharge unit’ – the wand in Hadden’s hand – was inducing an electrostatic current to pass down through the brass table. The charge was higher in any indentations made in the blotter such as the little – minute – valleys in the paper made by the downward pressure of a pen or pencil on the sheet above, and it was in these dips that the positive electric charge would linger.

  Hadden returned the wand to its holder, having primed the sheet, and then gently tilted the brass table on its hinges, clicking it into place at an angle of about thirty degrees. Down this gentle slope he now poured carbon granules from a glass beaker, ‘lubricated’ by tiny plastic spheres mixed with the powder. Slowly, inevitably, the carbon began to gather in the dips, attracted by the positive electrostatic charge. In effect, the ESDA operated as a sophisticated form of brass rubbing.

  It always took a few moments for any traces to appear. The thre
e of them stood, stupidly, watching the brass table vibrate. Shaw wondered what the forensic staff had felt on that day in 1982 when a very similar model of the machine was used to discover that the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad had tampered with evidence in their inquiries into the Birmingham pub bombings; or the day the New Scotland Yard lab staff operated their ESDA to uncover police fraud in the case against the killers of PC Paul Blakelock – hacked to death by rioters at Broadwater Farm. Before those two cases, a majority of the public thought the police never tampered with evidence; after them a majority thought they did. And all because of the innocent practice of taking notes in an interview room by leaning on a pile of fresh, unmarked, paper, so that each page, inadvertently, held an impression of its forerunner. The technology allowed them to compare original statements with their doctored, fraudulent successors, presented in court to secure convictions in high-visibility cases.

  ‘Nowt,’ said Hadden, giving the ESDA slope a light tap. Or rather, too much: they could see traces of written lines, each at a slightly different angle to the horizontal. But the result looked like spaghetti, and was unreadable.

  ‘Let’s try the top sheet from the headed notepaper.’

  As Hadden prepared the machine they heard the pathologist, Dr Justina Kazimierz, working on the far side of the glass divide: sluicing down a table, running an electric saw for thirty seconds, so that Valentine’s teeth seemed to vibrate in his narrow skull.

  Shaw stared at the ESDA’s brass table as it began to vibrate again, unable to slough off the image of George Valentine out in the street, sat on the kerb, head down. A detail of that picture was important, but he couldn’t see how. The scene appeared to his mind’s eye as if drawn for a Victorian newspaper, a morality tale like so many others; the fallen woman plunging from London Bridge into the Thames, the urchin stealing a loaf of bread. A black-and-white picture complete with a moral caption.

  ‘That’s strange,’ said Hadden. The cascading carbon had adhered quite distinctly to a small area of writing: three lines, set in a narrow space three inches by one-and-a-half.

  ‘It’s an address,’ said Shaw instantly, trying to turn his head to read the sense of it.

  Hadden applied an adhesive sheet to the cling-film layer to preserve the ESDA ‘lift’, and then slid the sheet out to reveal the writing, in so doing demonstrating one of the machine’s great benefits, that it didn’t in any way corrupt the original evidence. Such an experiment could be repeated in court with no deterioration in results. A forensic scientist could test the veracity of the evidence a thousand times, using the original on each occasion, even in court.

  It was an address of sorts.

  Gordon Lee

  Chief Reporter

  Lynn Express

  The three lines were set at a wide angle to the horizontal.

  ‘So,’ said Hadden, ‘like this.’ He took a roll of address labels, tore off one, set it on a sheet of A4, and wrote an address, the paper at an angle to allow his right elbow to support his right hand. ‘It’s perfectly natural to set something this small at an angle to suit the hand-writer. She’ll be right handed, absolutely no doubt.’

  ‘So, it’s possible the last thing she wrote was this label,’ said Shaw. ‘Where’s the letter?’

  ‘Perhaps the killer’s the postman,’ said Valentine, already keying in the number of the Lynn Express news desk to his mobile. ‘I’ll check it out …’ he added, retreating back towards the fire doors and the sanctuary of Clennam Street. The image flashed again behind Shaw’s blind eye: the cigarette stub, Valentine’s feet in the kerb, and he knew then what he’d missed.

  TWELVE

  Mark Birley, sleepless, in his gym kit, was at his desk in the CID suite, a wide-screen PC showing the six camera feeds he’d transferred from the Marsh House CCTV database: Cameras A, B, C, D, E and F.

  Shaw had ordered in a dozen Costa coffees and a round of sticky buns, so he had the team’s undivided attention, gathered round the desk. Hadden, still in his white forensic gown, completed the audience.

  ‘Mark, run me Camera D, please. Pick any time you like, but in darkness, please, and on the night of the murder.’

  The screen showed a single image of the terrace of Marsh House.

  Shaw let the images flicker forward for thirty seconds.

  ‘Mark, stop it there. Now, here’s the stone bench on the terrace …’ Shaw leant forward over Birley’s shoulder and touched the image. ‘George and I were on the scene first thing and there were half a dozen – maybe more – cigarette butts under that seat. There’s nothing in this shot, not one.’

  Birley had a set of notebooks open, flicking through pages of neat notes. Finding what he wanted, he ran the shot on Camera D forward to 5.36 a.m.

  ‘Here, right there.’ A marsh bird was visible on the terrace wall for a second, maybe three, before flying out of the halo of the floodlight. As it took to the air, the wings flapped once, twice, three times before it entered an effortless glide.

  ‘Marsh harrier,’ said Hadden. ‘The shallow “V” of the wing position marks it out – plus its size.’

  ‘Rare?’ asked Shaw, guessing where Birley was taking them next, sure that the detective had guessed the implications of those missing cigarette butts.

  ‘Maybe three hundred breeding pairs in the UK. Doing well now, but still on the amber list. Rare, certainly, a precious bird.’ Hadden’s own flight from London to north Norfolk had been, at least in part, an attempt to indulge his passion for birds.

  ‘We’ve got thirty days’ worth of the digital record,’ said Birley. ‘I was going to watch it through for the previous night at least, just in case the killer cased the joint. Here’s Camera D again, but twenty-four hours earlier.’

  They all watched as he entered 5.35 a.m. in the digital time counter: in the minute that followed Shaw imagined silent wings over starlit water, and then it was there, the marsh harrier, taking its identical three second bow, and then – one flap, two flaps, three flaps – sliding away on its effortless glide.

  ‘Same tape,’ said Birley, covering his eyes.

  ‘We both missed it, Mark. It was the night of the supermoon, and yet the marsh, and the pathway shown in Camera D, are all in darkness. The floodlight obscures it slightly, but you can see there’s no moon, nothing. Once you know what you’re looking for, it pretty much shouts at you.’

  ‘Obvious next question,’ said Valentine, knowing Birley was already after the answer, fingers tapping smartly on the keyboard, selecting from a folder a twenty-four-hour file for Camera D for a date a month earlier.

  The footage looked identical but they all waited dutifully for the minute to pass before the marsh harrier made its scheduled landing yet again.

  ‘So, not just for the night of the murder, or the night before, but every night. Mark, ideas?’ Shaw asked.

  ‘My guess is there’s an automatic programme which simply runs this one night’s footage, including the bird, over the actual film, or possibly, the camera’s blind and the footage just replaces a blank image.

  ‘I’ll check, but my guess is that it is just this one camera, not all six. Either way, it takes a degree of computer technical knowledge to set up the override. Question is did the killer set it up, or did he, or she, just know that camera was blind and take advantage?’

  Shaw chose a team of six to go back out to Marsh House with Valentine in charge; they needed to re-interview all night staff and find out who knew about the false camera. It suggested Bright’s killer may well have deliberately used the door under Camera D between eight and six.

  Shaw had one more job for Valentine. ‘George – stop off at Copon’s camper van en route. If he’s there rope him in, if the girlfriend’s there, try to get his passport. He’s worked in that nurses’ station for three years, there’s no way he didn’t know the camera was blind. And he’s a smoker. I think he’s just become our first prime suspect.’

  THIRTEEN

  Lena was clearing one of the picnic
tables outside Surf! when she spotted a man picking his way along the sands: grey suit, black shoes, a briefcase, wading through the dunes above the high-water mark, zigzagging a path between sunbathing bodies and families camped out around cool boxes and shell tents. By the time he’d reached the bar his thin hair was damp with sweat.

  ‘Mrs Shaw? Norfolk Coastal District Council.’ He offered her a photo ID in a see-through wallet. ‘Daniel Richmond.’

  ‘It’s Braithwaite, not Shaw. The name’s over the door.’ She nodded back towards the bar and the small brass plate over the lintel which held those magic words: ‘licensed to sell’ …

  Fumbling with his briefcase he spilt the contents out on the sand. ‘Sorry – of course. My mistake.’

  And what a revealing mistake, thought Lena. The council had clearly decided she was the wife of DI Peter Shaw, rather than Lena Braithwaite, licensee of The Old Beach Café, Hunstanton – aka Surf!, north Norfolk’s newest beach hotspot. She couldn’t work out if that was good news or bad news. Now that the government had removed magistrates from the licensing process, the local town hall was judge and jury on her opening hours.

  ‘I’m making coffee, or tea?’ She considered offering a glass of white wine but there was something of the petty bureaucrat about Richmond which held her back.

  The clock on the veranda read 11.32 a.m., so they were open to sell alcohol, and Leo D’Asti, Lena’s business partner, was behind the bar. A chef and two trainee cooks were already preparing sandwiches and salads. Fran – the Shaws’ daughter – was on a day trip to London with friends, so the pace was professional, a note of commercial tension in the brisk activity. The supermoon party had boosted takings by a clear £2,300 – cashflow, not profits, but a triumph nonetheless. If Lena could come up with an event a week in the summer, the business model would be transformed from a 1950s tea-shack to something much more exciting: a template for a string of bar/restaurants perhaps, on some of the country’s finest beaches.