[PS & GV #6] Death on Demand

by Jim Kelly

  ‘Her condition, in this final phase, it couldn’t have been induced? A poison, perhaps?’

  ‘Possibly. But I had no suspicions. Her symptoms were entirely consistent with her medical history. Death’s a process, which can last months or even years. She had been on that journey for some time. There were no signals, as it were, that anything unusual, or unnatural, had occurred. No, absolutely not, Inspector.’

  Dr Roy speared a piece of cauliflower baked in cumin. ‘She did have problems with vandals, I know that. The house is on that old estate …’

  ‘Parkwood Springs,’ offered Valentine.

  ‘Kids just run wild out there.’ Dr Roy held a hand to his forehead. ‘That last time, I do remember now. One of the windows in the kitchen was just papered over. I went down for water and asked about it and she said they’d smashed it, these kids, and got in, and she’d shouted from the top of the stairs and it spooked them so they ran. But I think she was worried they’d come back. If she did go out, she used a white stick, so it wasn’t as if they didn’t know of her disability. When she woke up in bed she said she’d lie still, listening, and that sometimes she thought they might be right there, in the room, by the bed. Given her near blindness that kind of anxiety isn’t going to help. Vandalism’s cruel, indiscriminate and gets under the skin, even when you’re young and healthy. It’s like a bad dream about your teeth falling out. It reflects a deeper anxiety, a fear of intrusion, a loss of control. But it isn’t murder, is it?’

  Valentine made a note: they’d check vandalism, petty damage, street crime, and see if any names came up. He thought too of the picture on his phone that Jan had sent him of the blood-spattered trainers under Lister Tunnel.

  ‘It was peaceful, then, her death when it came?’ asked Shaw.

  Dr Roy smiled and Shaw caught a glimpse of a crueler cast to the wide brown eyes. ‘Well, I suppose people tend to imagine the Death of Nelson, everyone crowding round in the warm lantern light. The great man rewarded with a good death. The last words. Ars moriendi – yes? The Art of Dying. That’s pretty rare in my limited experience.’

  ‘It was a bad death?’

  ‘No. She died in her bed. For her generation that’s a significant comfort. She didn’t die in the street, or from cholera.’

  Dr Roy’s eyes seemed to slip out of focus and Shaw had the distinct impression he was struggling with a memory he wished to forget.

  ‘She wasn’t cut down by a sword, or blown to bits by a bomb, or buried under rubble. So that’s a small victory. Dickens is good at the deathbed scene, Little Nell, that kind of thing. Affecting, a bit sentimental. But he was reflecting something very real, you see, that most people didn’t die in their beds. It was an extraordinary blessing to die in the home.’

  He seemed to realize the subject had taken wing. ‘My mother was besotted with Dickens. Very good on the poor, too. Bad deaths too, look at Sykes, swinging on his rope, neck broken. What would he have given for a cosy deathbed scene?’

  ‘Last words?’ prompted Shaw. ‘Did Mrs Hood say anything at all?’

  They all waited while the waiter swept the tablecloth with a set of brushes.

  ‘Last words?’ repeated Shaw.

  Dr Roy shook his head. ‘I think she asked me what the date was – yes. Not the time, the date. Which was odd. I had it on my smartphone. The room was half-lit, the curtains drawn, and I recall clearly her face, lit by the phone. But she couldn’t read it, of course. But she held it here …’

  He held his own phone up over his eye socket.

  ‘After that I don’t think she said anything cogent, I’m afraid.’

  Shaw looked at the certificate. ‘September the nineteenth. Why do you think she asked?’

  ‘No idea, Inspector. I concentrate on those things I can materially affect. I made her comfortable.’

  ‘But you were alone, after she died. What did you do?’

  ‘Yes, I was alone.’ Shaw couldn’t tell if he was manufacturing the emotion but the brown eyes flooded and he snatched for the iced water, draining the glass.

  ‘I contacted the relevant authorities. I waited for the funeral directors, I think, perhaps, twenty minutes.’

  ‘You didn’t call an ambulance?’

  ‘No. I was able to confirm that death had occurred, Inspector. Why waste scarce resources on calling out an ambulance for no reason?’

  Shaw nodded. ‘And then?’

  ‘I locked up and kept the keys, which were eventually couriered to the solicitors. The funeral directors dealt with everything else.’

  ‘You didn’t attend the funeral?’

  ‘I did. At the crematorium.’

  ‘You’re a busy man, that was, what? Kind, dutiful?’

  ‘Professional. The practice has served that area I think for many years. It’s expected. Rightly, I think.’ He dabbed the napkin at his lips.

  The doctor checked his watch. ‘My favourite last words are Dickens too – do you know them? His sister-in-law told him to rest on a sofa or chair and he said: “On the ground!” I can see that, can’t you? Wanting to feel the earth under your back. It’s as if he needed to hang on to the turning world.’

  ‘I prefer Mehr Licht,’ said Shaw. ‘It’s Goethe. More light.’

  ‘Very good. And you, Sergeant?’

  ‘I’ll think of something,’ said Valentine, holding up the empty pint mug for a refill.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Mow Creek was a tidal channel, a broad sandy inlet, opening out to the sea a mile south of Marsh House. At low tide it harboured shadows in its black, muddy depths, while high water saw it threatening to spill out into the marsh, the waves rattling the reeds. On a map it looked like an old vine, branched and curious, twisting between islands of grass and sand.

  Linas Jessop was in exactly the spot Shaw had been able to predict from the artist’s sketchbooks, the vantage point he’d used over the years to indulge his infatuation with atmospherics and light. A rough wooden easel stood against the sky on a grass knoll, the artist a few feet away, a separate silhouette, brush in hand. From the north a stiff tidal breeze gusted in, and Jessop stepped forward occasionally to grip the canvas. This was no delicate hobby, a bid to capture the picturesque, but something much more muscular, a kind of duel between artist and elements.

  Shaw, picking his way seawards on the marsh path, imagined the canvas as a shield, the brush a sword.

  Jessop was rocking back and forth on his booted heels, his windblown head still, when he must have heard the grate of Shaw’s shoe on the sandy path. His face swung round and for a moment there was a flash of obsessed anger, as if the magic of the place, the spectrum of light and colour, had been shattered and lost.

  His body straightened then, the anxiety dissipating. ‘Inspector. You’ve found my secret place, how clever of you. Feast your eyes!’

  The prospect seawards was breathtaking. A vast arrow of migrating birds, thousands deep, was a mere smudge to the west. The wind, picking up, flattened the marsh grass, buffeting it down, as if an invisible giant strode inland.

  ‘If you’ve secreted the chains about your person, perhaps you’d let me add time and date to this as it may be my last. This is about Beatty Hood, of course. Not an unexpected visit.’

  The sketch was in watercolour washes, broad free strokes of green and blue. The sky, equally uninhibited, showed a summer chef’s hat cumulus, billowing up into the stratosphere.

  ‘It wasn’t about her, no,’ Shaw replied. ‘It was about Ruby Bright. But if you feel the need to confess … You knew Beatty Hood?’

  ‘Yes, of course, I knew Beatty. In her youth she was a bit of a smasher, between you and I. Art school, the Slade, I think. She was good, very good. Her and Ruby were great friends – companions really, although it sounds old fashioned now, but that was it. Husbands dead, but they had each other. Odd, actually, because we all had something in common. Only children. And what that does is, I suspect, make you relate to friends. You end up surrounded by people you can actuall
y love or admire for no other reason than themselves. It’s odd, isn’t it, that as a society we attack so many prejudices – colour, sex, age. But we still think it’s necessary to value those who share our closest DNA. What’s so admirable about that? You tell me, because I don’t know, and never have. What’s the Luther King quote: “The content of their characters”. I’m getting a bit tired of that speech, but that bit’s worth the preachy exhortation of the rest.’

  Jessop licked his lips. ‘Anyway, it was only a matter of time before you discovered that Beatty, like poor Ruby, left me a bequest. No?’

  ‘We are exploring her financial background.’

  ‘Ah. Well, there we are. I could have volunteered the information, but what the hell.

  ‘A small lump sum. Five hundred pounds. Is that motive enough? I put it in the bank by the way, that’s how dull my life’s become. I can’t even spend a windfall.’

  He feigned a sudden look of horror. ‘Of course. This makes me a serial killer to boot – preying on old ladies and then murdering them for their pots of gold. Fame at last indeed!’

  ‘You were disappointed with the five hundred?’ asked Shaw. He hadn’t tracked out to the sea’s edge to question Jessop, quite the opposite, but something about the lost life and lonely death of Beatty Hood seemed to hold the echo of a greater truth. Perhaps it was her death that held the key to the mystery of Marsh House.

  ‘Disappointed? Not really. She left her house to some charity she supported. That was all she had, so I can’t argue with her priorities. The Causeway Trust, I think – the name stuck because it’s another one of those awful euphemisms: a narrow bridge between life and death, perhaps?

  ‘She was a good woman,’ Jessop went on. ‘Given the pain of her last few years, she bore them well. She went blind, you’ll know that, and it’s a cruel fate for the painter – the loss of light must be difficult to take, day after day. But Beatty was always optimistic, alive to the moment. She spent a lot of time at the Phoenix, mainly with one or two of the sculptors, but form – in the three-dimensional sense – is no match for colour.’ He looked out to sea. ‘To the outside world she showed a brave face.’

  For a minute he worked quickly with the wet paint he had on a tin palette. Satisfied, he stood back, staring into the middle distance. ‘There was a little cash left over after my bequest, I recall, which caused some excitement because most of it went on some memorial to mark her family grave. It was partly her own stone work. Quite a thing, I’m told. That’s out at Old Hunstanton, in the village. St Mary the Virgin. I’ve never bothered to visit since. I’m not a dutiful bunch of flowers kind of man, really. I went to the funeral but there’s no stone at that point, is there, just a hole in the ground.

  ‘There’s a James Thurber cartoon I’m very fond of …’ He turned to Shaw then, the face relaxed, honest, and open. ‘Thurber – you know Thurber?’

  Shaw nodded.

  ‘He sketched this graveyard, glimpsed through railings, the pavement crowded with determined men and women walking to the left, to the right, clutching shopping bags, briefcases, pushing prams. The caption read simply: Destinations. Devastating, really.’

  ‘I didn’t come to ask you questions about Beatty Hood,’ said Shaw. ‘I brought good news. You said you lived a life without alibis. For a while I thought that was very suspicious because it was as if you were saying don’t even try to find out if I’m telling the truth. And then I thought it can’t be true, because if you come here every day, or nearly every day, at the same “atmospheric” moment, then someone knows, someone sees. And I was right.’

  Looking south they could see the line of high ground that marked the apron of the hill country inland. Along this modest cliff-line they could see at least two churches in the far distance, and occasional roofs and chimneys and one tower: modern, in brick, a curved observation window set just below a party-hat roof.

  ‘I asked the local copper – PC Curtis – to see if he could find you that elusive alibi. He’s one of those people who walk around as if they’re under water, unhurried, but very thorough.

  ‘For the past ten years you’ve been out here mimicking John Sell Cotman, while the man in that house’ – he pointed to the distant tower – ‘has watched you, in between tracking the flights of migrant birds at dusk. On a landscape like this you need landmarks, especially if you’re chronicling the movement of creatures as mobile as the oystercatcher. You’re a landmark, Mr Jessop. Curious, isn’t it, that you thought you were a man with no alibis and actually you turn out to be virtually on the map …’

  Shaw produced a small tube of watercolour paint: sepia, in the Winsor & Newton ‘student’ range, branded under the name of ‘Cotman’.

  ‘A small gift from me. Our birdwatcher was particularly interested in the reaction of his beloved waders to the supermoon. He noted your arrival that night, the night Ruby died, and indeed your departure, setting out west towards Lynn. A perfect alibi, after all.’

  Jessop accepted the paint with a small theatrical bow.

  ‘Good news indeed. Can you keep a secret, Inspector?’

  ‘Depends.’

  ‘Well. If you can’t I’ll deny I ever said it – don’t suppose we’re bugged out here. Unless you’ve got young PC Curtis hiding in the reeds. No. I think I’m pretty safe. You see, I did know Ruby intended to cut me out of the will. I can say that now, of course. But at the time I thought it best to forget.’

  ‘She told you?’

  ‘Yes. The last time we met, down by the waterside below Marsh House. Straight to my face, too. She had guts, Ruby, you’d have to give her that. She asked Javi Copon to give us some space, so he walked off to smoke in the dunes. She said I seemed to be pretty “thick” with the Spaniard. That’s a good old-fashioned notion – “thick”, like we were ingredients in a stew. I said we shared politics, ideas … ideals, even. She said I could enjoy my ideals without the benefit of her money. Fifty thousand – she told me the exact amount just to rub it in. Never said another word. I presumed she’d got round to changing the will – but clearly not.’

  ‘I think you owe PC Curtis a present,’ observed Shaw. ‘Given that without your alibi you’d be an irresistible prime suspect, especially in the light of that little confession, on or off the record. He lives along at Wells, so perhaps a seascape, or even one of the sketches from here …’

  They both considered the wide horizon.

  ‘It’s nearly sunset and I need to work,’ said Jessop. ‘I feel inspired, you see – energized, even. It’s not the money, which is all the sweeter for knowing Ruby didn’t want me to have it. It’s the thought I might not leave anything worthy behind. So if you’ll excuse me …’

  Shaw walked away, inland, thinking about Beatty Hood, the artist plunged, eventually, into a world of gathering shadows, but living life to the full. Despite that upbeat picture, Jessop’s verdict hung in Shaw’s mind: To the outside world she showed a brave face.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Jan Clay had never worried about fashion, but she knew she had a sense of style. At five foot five, with a boyish close-cut blonde hairstyle, she’d always favoured trousers, rarely dresses, unless she was aiming for a ‘glam’ effect. She’d been able to turn heads when she wanted to, but she liked the anonymity a uniform brought. She felt compact, fit, but most of all at ease, as if she’d simply been awarded the insignia after a lifetime of working in CID. Which, in an odd way, was part of the truth. The first time she’d set the cap on her head it felt like she’d already deserved its aura of calm authority. The lace-up black leather shoes, with the low heels, gave her an intense sensation of being, literally, grounded.

  So when DS Chalker had told her to write a five-hundred-word analysis of the trainers they’d picked off telegraph wires in the last week, she’d thought the request typically crass; she was a woman: it was apparently axiomatic that she could write about shoes. If there was anyone in the shoe squad qualified for the job it was PC Wolinski, who she’d spotted one evening o
n the Saturday Market in a complete designer outfit plus Ray-Bans. Even on patrol he wore black leather brogues which must have cost a week’s wages. His haircut, while regulation, was finely layered, with a hint of an asymmetric cut.

  But the assignment was Jan’s, care of DS Chalker’s prejudices, but also by way of punishment, for tying up forensics to examine the trainers recovered from the Lister Tunnel. Chalker had said it was pig’s blood, and it was. Let that be a lesson to them all.

  The trainers, boots and shoes were all stored beneath St James’ in the old magazine chambers built by the military during the Napoleonic Wars. Police headquarters had been constructed over the ruins of the old town walls and a labyrinth of subterranean tunnels and vaults. Brick, curved, like London tube tunnels. There were six large chambers in total, three in daily use as the force’s records unit. Chamber one, once a series of metal-partitioned Victorian cells, was now used as a store for traffic division’s signage, but was otherwise empty. Jan requisitioned the keys from the duty officer and ferried all the shoes into the cellar in cardboard boxes. It took her twenty minutes to re-stack a set of Road Closed signs and the force’s supply of pedestrian barriers, clearing a space twenty foot square.

  Locking the door she drew an outline in chalk of the town perimeter, adding the Cut and main railway line and the inner ring road. The floor was brick too, the chalk lines wobbly, so she was relieved nobody could inspect her cartography.

  Each pair of shoes had an attached label indicating where they had been found. Using an A-Z map where her local knowledge failed, she placed each pair out on the chalk map until all were in position, right down to the blood-spattered specimens from the Lister Tunnel. Then she got a chair from the record office and sat looking north, the town in front of her, the sea to her right.