[PS & GV #6] Death on Demand

by Jim Kelly

  Shaw bit his tongue. There was a lot he could have said. Coincidence was his special subject. Thanks to a decent Catholic education he knew that the word itself cropped up just once in the entire Bible, in the parable of the Good Samaritan, to describe the moment he walks down the street and happens on the Pharisee lying by the side of the road. The word in the original text was synkyrian in Greek, a combination of ‘together with’ and ‘supreme authority’. So – this happened because God brought them together, so it wasn’t a coincidence at all, just a plan. But, given Joyce’s sectarian past, he didn’t think it was the right time for a little lecture on the Bible.

  ‘We’ll do two things,’ said Joyce. ‘First, we’ll run two separate inquiries. Second, we’ll liaise on an hourly basis. Both of you appoint liaison officers. They need to talk and share everything. NO playing games. If further links emerge, then we take action to merge the inquiries.

  ‘For now the priority is the Lister Tunnel killing. Let’s get into these gangs; close the schools down if you have to, get the troublemakers down the nick. Every time I drive home along the London Road I see these kids, hanging around. It’s the culture. We need to break it up. I want an arrest, Joe, twenty-four hours, less if you can do it. You get first call on forensics, pathology, manpower, the lot. You take the press; I’ll say a few words to kick off.

  ‘Peter. Your priority is Walsingham. These anonymous threats need to be taken seriously. Once that’s behind us you can get back to Marsh House. But remember, Ruby Bright didn’t have a life ahead of her. This kid did. Ruby Bright died in a care home. This kid died on the streets. It’s our job to keep the streets safe. All right?’

  Shaw stood back, letting Joyce blunder out, his flies still half open, heading for the press conference, followed by Carney. Ruby Bright hadn’t died in a care home, of course, but down by the water’s edge. And, while she might not have had years ahead of her, she had fought hard for the life she had left. Who were they to weigh the worth of anyone’s life in the balance?

  TWENTY-SIX

  Even in the midst of a murder inquiry Shaw tried to leave St James’ at six thirty, measured by the clock on the teetering tower of the old Greyfriar’s monastery. Work went with him on the journey home via a hands’ free headset. He parked the Porsche at Old Hunstanton, on the sandy lane that curved down to the lifeboat house and the beach beyond. Unclipping his earpiece, he slipped into the RNLI store to change into his kit to run the mile to Surf!. For those precious five minutes he would be alone, two worlds slipping by, the sea to the left, the dunes to the right; alone with his heartbeat: a steady eighty beats a minute. Ahead lay home, where he could use the office PC to Skype the team. Later, George Valentine would ring, usually from the garden of the Artichoke or the Red House yard.

  When they’d fled London he’d promised Lena they’d have a life outside the Job, that he’d see Fran most evenings, that they’d exist as a family, however briefly, once a day, every day. She’d left behind a high-profile career as a lawyer, he’d left the Yard’s armed response unit. They didn’t want to spend ‘quality time’ with each other, or Fran, they wanted to share a life. Trips to the cinema, celebration meals, Center Parcs, these were simply the trinkets of a childhood, gifts from indulgent uncles, or doting grandparents. A childhood was what happened every day.

  As his pace slackened coming down the dunes towards the beach bar, he heard his RNLI pager buzzing in his rucksack. The readout code was 102 – the call sign for Coast Watch, which maintained a service along the north Norfolk coast from a lockout post on top of Hunstanton’s red-and-white cliffs.

  Kneeling in the sand, waving to Fran and the dog, he rang the landline in the lookout. An emergency call had been received from Gibraltar Point Coast Watch, twenty-five miles directly west, on the unseen Lincolnshire coast, where the Wash curved north-east on its long sweep towards the Humber. A twenty-three-year-old paraglider called Steve Thorpe had taken to the sky at 4.30 that afternoon from a grass hillside above the beach at Skegness, leaving his wife and two children on a picnic blanket. He had a registered logbook with his local club at Spalding, with more than 100 hours of flying time. Before take-off, using a backpack-powered ‘paramotor’, he’d registered a flight plan with Skegness Aerodrome: he planned to fly down the coast to Gibraltar Point and then return, with an estimated flight time of one hour and thirty minutes.

  The first half of Thorpe’s flight had gone to plan, but turning over the marker buoy at Gibraltar Point he had failed to achieve the full 180 degrees required; instead he’d headed due east, out over the Wash, a flight path of nearly thirty miles over open sea, sandbanks and tidal races. Thirty-five minutes later he passed over the automatic light ship anchored on Roaring Middle. The paramotor had a flight range of 140 miles, which meant that the pilot could, in theory, make the crossing with about twenty miles to spare. Coast Watch at Hunstanton would try to track his arrival, but could Shaw provide an additional watch from his position two miles north?

  Fran brought him a cold Spanish beer, complete with lime slice in the neck.

  ‘Mum says to say she got her licence for the bank holiday weekend. So we’re celebrating.’

  Shaw climbed the eight feet to the high chair they’d put out in front of Surf!. The council provided a lifeguard from nine to six to encourage families to use a stretch of beach often deserted because it was so far from the car parks in the distant town. Fran ran to the office and fetched Shaw’s telescope: a small brass antique with a leather grip which he perched on one, raised knee.

  Scanning the clear blue sky three times from west to east he located nothing but a high-altitude con trail from a Scandinavia-bound jet, and a flock of geese, mid-Wash, a thousand beating wings heading south.

  Sipping his beer he checked his mobile, finding a brief email from DC Twine, who had failed to track down Irene Coldshaw’s relatives. The niece’s last address, a small terrace two-up two-down in a threadbare estate on the edge of Scunthorpe, had new owners, who said the family had emigrated to Australia.

  The contrast, between a terraced house in Scunthorpe, and a £1,200 a week room at Marsh House, held Shaw’s attention for a moment, until he heard Fran’s voice shout the dog’s name and, glancing up, he saw them in the surf at the edge of the sea. Letting his eye rise, taking in the view ahead, he found the sun had touched the horizon, illustrating in spectacular Technicolor Hunstanton’s great claim to fame: the only east coast resort with a beach facing west. The day had been hot and the warm buckling air hid the distant silhouette of the far coast, except that Shaw could just discern the needle-like column of Boston Stump – the 260-foot Gothic tower nearly forty miles distant. The sky ahead, warm and viscous, seemed almost solid, a vast block of glass, perhaps, or some fabulous semi-precious, translucent, stone – onyx, or quartz; and embedded within that jewel Shaw could now see a single dot of black, a hundred or more feet above the still surface of the sea, like a fossil insect trapped in amber.

  The engine noise, labouring, came to his ear the moment he spotted the powered paraglider. The telescope gave him a neat round image: the pilot, who could steer using brake toggles and a throttle ‘pedal’ bar below the bucket seat, appeared to be heading directly at him. Ringing Coast Watch on the cliff he asked them to put emergency services on alert: he’d text if the pilot failed to land safely. Signing off with a grid reference for the café, he put the telescope back to his good eye.

  The pilot’s body stood out in sharp silhouette against the bruised sky of the sunset: dangling as if hung beneath a parachute, the circular paramotor at his back, his feet on the wide lower pedal, the open crescent of the flexible wing arched overhead like a surprised eyebrow.

  At a steady, implacable, forty miles-per-hour the aircraft approached landfall, its reflection tracking across the mercury-like sea lying placidly beneath. Two things were wrong: the pilot’s arms hung down at his sides, whereas Shaw would have expected to see him adjusting his wing-tilt using the brake toggles above his head, and the en
gine was spluttering, actually cutting-out for a heart-stopping second, before firing back into an intermittent half-life.

  Ten minutes later he was directly overhead and Shaw noted that while the pilot’s left boot was set forward, the right was turned inwards at an angle and his crash-helmeted head lay chin-down on his chest.

  ‘I’d say semi-conscious,’ he told the emergency services op room at St James’ on 999, cutting out Coast Watch, now the pilot was almost over land. ‘Speed’s dropping, fuel’s pinking. I’ll try to track him from the ground but it’s going to be tough. I’d get paramedics on the road, on a line running roughly through Holme, Ringstead, Brancaster. If he stays aloft he’ll be back over the sea in twenty minutes. So ring the RNLI at Cromer. They should stand by.’

  He ran then, up the first wave of dunes, into the marsh grass beyond. A footpath led inland, threading the tidal channels, and he picked up speed as he heard the engine cut out again. This time he thought the motor had died but, miraculously, it fired again and he saw the paraglider soar briefly only to return to its slow descent. Crossing the coast road, he joined a farm track which ran towards the original village of Old Hunstanton, a few cottages around the church, all set at the gates of Hunstanton Hall. At the centre of the hamlet was a mound holding an old Celtic cross, from which Shaw could see the wing of the paraglider, now half a mile ahead of him and dipping out of sight.

  Hundreds of cut flowers lay in the churchyard, an elderly woman arranging them in bundles, no doubt for the altar, or to decorate the nave. The door was open, so Shaw ran in, immediately blinded by the sudden shadows after the sunlight outside. The church had run a fete to raise funds for the lifeboat and Shaw recalled they’d charged one pound for trips up the tower, with its views of the coast. The coffin-shaped door to the spiral staircase was unlocked and he counted 180 steps to the top, where an iron grid slid back to allow access to the open tower roof; a lead square, gently pitched, with a central pinnacle supporting a golden crow weather vane.

  At nearly 140 feet above the north Norfolk rolling hills he found himself above the paraglider’s wing, watching its final silent descent, a see-saw decline, the wing finally buckling as the craft swung over a small copse and subsided into a vast field of corn. The scene had a picture-book quality – the square of wheaten yellow, beside another of vivid rape seed, next to one of purple lavender and beyond a track, marked by blood-red poppies. Almost immediately he heard the siren of an ambulance, and saw it breasting a low distant hill. Asking the 999 desk to patch him direct into the paramedics in the unit, he talked them through the last 300 yards to the crash spot: across the field of lavender, over a brook, and then – blind in the eight-foot-high corn – into the centre of the final field.

  Shaw had the lead paramedic on the line when they reached the spot. ‘OK. Got him.’ Disorientated, Shaw could hear the close soundtrack of the wing being lifted clear of the wreckage in his ear as he watched the scene unfold a mile distant, the figures in emergency jackets oddly indistinct against the corn. ‘OK, we’ve got him out of the frame. Commencing resus.’

  But Shaw had heard the subtle change in tone, the sense of tension dissipated, a despairing return to routine. The line went dead. A local police squad car breasted the hill and parked up neatly behind the paramedics’ unit.

  Shaw watched until they carried the body away, his own heartbeat returning to normal. Descending the cold stone steps, he went and sat on a bench in the churchyard. The grass had been just cut and the hypnotic aroma of coumarin activated his memory banks so that he saw himself, ten years old, sat on a picnic blanket on his beach, the stretch that now lay in front of Surf!, his father walking out of the sea, rough enough that you could see the sand churning in the waves, as each set fell. Conjuring up another beach, another family, he imagined the scene at Skegness, the picnic blanket abandoned, eyes searching the sky for a buzzing paraglider returning to land.

  ‘St Mary the Virgin’ read the board by the gate and, for the first time, Shaw recalled what Linas Jessop had said about the last resting place of Beatty Hood. She’d left him £500 but the rest of her cash had gone on a stone memorial, which she’d partly helped to carve.

  That’s out at Old Hunstanton, in the village. St Mary the Virgin. I’ve never bothered to visit since.

  Shaw checked his mobile. He’d give the paramedics twenty minutes before a final call, so he had the time. The flower arranger said she thought the Hood memorial was on the south wall, just beyond an ugly Victorian boiler house. The ground was mossy, dank, and the gutters had leaked over a dozen winters so that the stonework was disfigured with mould. The memorial was mounted on the church wall, a sculptured frieze of angels, with the grave below, a parallelogram of chipped marble set within miniature railings.

  JAMES HOOD

  Born September 19, 1919

  Married Beatty, nee Farrar, September 19, 1951

  Died September 19, 2008

  BEATTY HOOD

  Born April 5, 1929

  Died September 19, 2014

  ‘And this was our day alone.’

  Shaw used a fingertip to clear moss from the numerals, double checking what looked like an extraordinary story; James Hood’s birthday seemed to echo through their lives, so that they were married on that day, and then – both – died on that day, although six years apart. It was a story which seemed to indicate an almost preternatural control over the chaos of life, particularly the gift of death. The day of a marriage lay in the hands of the couple, the day of birth the consequence of a moment’s passion nine months earlier, but death?

  His mobile bleeped and the text message from the paramedic unit was bleak in its simple capitals: DAS. (Dead At Scene.) A few seconds later a second one dropped: CARDIAC ARREST.

  Shaw considered the contrast between the Thorpe family, which had got up that morning and set out for the beach confident that their intertwined lives stretched forward into the distant future, and the ageing Beatty Hood, waiting for the day to dawn when her life had, it seemed, been preordained to end.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Lister Tunnel was deserted, although the scene-of-crime tape fluttered in a square around the spot where the skip had stood. Dr Gokak Roy, hurrying by, was relieved the police and forensic teams had quit the spot. He’d heard a brief radio item on the local news in the car: a brutal street murder, a turf war between teenagers spilling over into violence. The tawdry, random nature of such violence made his mood plummet, and he felt in his jeans pocket for the metallic strip of diazepam tablets. Walking through the Lister Tunnel left him apprehensive on the best of days, because it recalled vividly another archway, in another town, on the other side of the world.

  Gokak had been five when the family took his grandmother Ira to Varanasi to die. The train journey took two days, and although they’d bought first-class tickets and had their own compartment, the corridor was crowded with poor pilgrims, each group with their own elderly, infirm relative. His father had explained to Gokak the dogma at issue: that if Ira died in the holy city, and her body was cremated on the sacred steps, the ghats, beside the Ganges, she would achieve moksha, a release from the cycle of reincarnation, so that she could then rise into nirvana and final, permanent peace.

  The railway station lay outside the city’s walls; the way ahead lay through a narrow, dank arch. The city reeked of death. He’d clung to his mother’s hand on the long walk through the maze-like bustling streets. His elder brother and father had carried his grandmother on a stretcher, hired at the station. Ira was eighty-six years old and had announced a week earlier that she was ready for this final journey; she had stopped eating immediately, and her lips trembled constantly with prayer.

  Eventually they came to Mukti Bhawan – Salvation House – one of the hostels which offered shelter to the pilgrims. The family were allocated one room, with Ira on a settle bed, his parents on a mattress and the children on the floor. There was a courtyard outside and Gokak played with children from other families, although a
ll the games were whispered, and there was absolutely no running allowed! In the hostel’s other rooms, arranged on two floors, other pilgrims waited for death, surrounded by their families.

  Ira’s wish to die was frustrated. His father told his mother – when he thought the children were asleep – that they’d paid for two weeks’ accommodation and that if Ira was still alive at the end of that period, they’d have to take her back to Mumbai. In his father’s words this would be a ‘conspicuous waste of money’ and he certainly wasn’t going to pay for a second trip. Gokak awake, watching the shadows, thought he heard his grandmother sigh. The next morning she was gone.

  There was a brief, bitter inquest. His elder brother had been on watch. The owner of the hostel had reassured them the courtyard complex was secure. A bell was rung and families came to the stone balconies to look down on the family, gathered ready to set out as a posse to search the city of the dead for a woman who seemed to be very much alive.

  Gokak found his grandmother on the steps of the ghats, within a hundred yards of the burning cremation pyres. His father was asking for news from a taxi driver parked up on the Lanka Road. Gokak had been sitting, watching ash fall on his feet and knees when – entirely by chance – he’d seen Ira: sitting, head on her knees, feet pressed together, a neat ball, her arms clasping her shins – no, not clasping, they had been clasping. Now the hands lay open in a classic sign of offering. The poise, the balance of bones and flesh was remarkable, because when Gokak put his hand on her shoulder she tumbled to the side, as lifeless and haphazard as a pile of linen spilling from a basket. Gokak always thought that if anything drove his later obsession with the art of healing it was that moment when he saw his beloved grandmother splayed out unceremoniously across the hard stone steps.