by Jim Kelly
‘So what’s the story?’ asked Shaw, putting his knee against the front door, turning the key and pushing it open. The empty hallway, bare-boarded, with a print of George VI, set a dismal note.
In contrast, Valentine appeared to relish getting inside the house. In a few strides he was checking out the downstairs front room. He seemed energized, focused and even a little light-headed. Shaw hoped it wasn’t just a brief, irrational interval of post-diagnosis elation.
‘She left the house to the charity – apparently it’s linked to Help the Aged, but the solicitor was a bit vague,’ said Valentine. ‘They rent it out, fully-furnished, through a local agency, with the solicitors as agents. What’s left of the rent goes to the charity. Current tenant is a’ – Valentine consulted a note he’d made on his mobile phone – ‘Polish migrant. Name’s beyond me, but he works out of the Alexandra Dock. Currently at sea. Rent’s two hundred and fifty pounds a month, which is dirt cheap, but then nobody wants to live on Parkwood Springs. Long-term strategy, according to the agents, is to sell when the developers start waving cash about.
‘Current market value is sixty-eight thousand pounds, but if the developers buy up the rest of the street, it’s suddenly worth a lot more. They might see one hundred thousand more.
‘But that can’t be the whole story. I had a look at this place from the outside a few nights back and the takeaway wasn’t on the table. That night the place reeked of fish and chips. But the Pole’s been at sea for a week. So, he’s either sub-letting or he’s had uninvited visitors.’
They split the rooms between them and then met back on the upstairs landing. Shaw had little to report save the hand marks on the wallpaper, all at the same height; Hood had been blind for the last six months of her life, and the trailing hand had left its mark, feeling along walls, finding corners, seeking out switches. That was an insight which made the trip worthwhile, he felt, solidifying an image of the frail woman, alone and blind, surrounded by the decay of Parkwood Springs.
Valentine, besides noting the cardboard over the broken pane in the kitchen door pinpointed by Dr Roy, found further evidence of burglary: a cellar door jimmied open (the cellar empty, damp, but for a rustic cider press, which still gave off a faint aroma of crushed apples). And the kitchen looked strangely depleted of white goods: no fridge and the plumbing for a dishwasher, but no dishwasher.
The tenant had slept in the smaller, back box room. It was an odd choice but then Shaw raised the blind to reveal a fine view of the Cut, stretching out like a runway towards the sea. Two grain ships were passing in the mid-distance. The single bed held a sleeping bag and a girlie magazine with a Polish title. A rather fine china cup and saucer were set on the floor, containing a film of green tea. A bedside book lay spine up, splayed open: Typhoon by Conrad in the original English. Briefly, Shaw wrestled with the irony of the choice – the Pole who’d chosen English to write a British classic. Valentine touched the cup: cold, the tea stain almost fossilized. The wardrobe held worn work clothes, mostly high-quality thermal jackets, boots, double-skin socks, leather gloves with fur liners. Curled on the dressing table was a line and extension for a PC and a WiFi AirPort.
The front bedroom was very different.
It was dominated by a hospital bed, with hoist and stripped-down mattress, which looked almost new. The bedside table was NHS standard issue as well, as was a stand for an intravenous drip, complete with clamp and on-off metal tap. It was the only room in the house which smelt of disinfectant and the only room without a carpet.
‘If you’re going to die at home this is the price you pay,’ said Shaw. ‘Home looks like a hospital. I reckon Hood died in here. No wonder chummy’s taken the back room. Odd they left the gear here.’
The fourth, gold key seemed superfluous, until they got to the kitchen, which had been upgraded at some point in the eighties galley-style. The cat flap had been torn off its hinges. They let themselves out and Valentine spotted a new padlock on what had been the original toilet and bathhouse. Overhead a set of telegraph wires ran zigzag down the backs of the houses. A pair of white trainers hung above them, one spattered with blood.
Through the single window in the bathhouse, choked in cobwebs, Shaw could see a cracked mirror and a brush on a hook. Within the layered image lay something else, oyster-like and pale. Cleaning the glass with his cuff, he thought it might be the reflection of his own good eye, swimming in the silvered glass, but it didn’t blink when he did.
The key slipped the lock easily, but the hinges fell away from the rotting wood when they had to force the warped door open, the sunlight illuminating the broken toilet pan, encrusted with dead spiders. Taking up most of the space was a homemade smoker – a garden brazier with the top altered to form an ‘oven’ in which fish, or meat, could be cured over charcoal or wood. The smell was overwhelming, the tang of salty flesh.
The body was in the tin bath, naked, its back to the door, knees up, facing the mirror, the features distorted by the plastic bag over the head, which hung loose at the neck but must have been held tight at the nape, because it still preserved the shape of the fist which had crushed it tight. One arm lay outside the bath, the fingertips just touching the bare stone. Dr Gokak Roy’s eyes were very white, very wide and very open, in surprise or astonishment it was difficult to tell.
THIRTY-ONE
The killer struck the first blow in what had been Beatty Hood’s bedroom. Tom Hadden, suited, taking moon steps, led them up the stairs and into the floodlit space; outside the street was dark, taped-off, the single streetlight half-shaded with black paint long ago, perhaps on Beatty Hood’s insistence, to allow her some sleep before blindness plunged her into continuous shadow.
‘Here, there’s a bloodstain between the floorboards, a spatter mark, so I’d say as an initial hypothesis that he came in – took a step or two – and then his assailant struck from behind. Wound’s oddly jagged, so I’m thinking maybe an ornament, but we’ve checked everything and there’s no trace. I think he took it with him, along with the victim’s clothes and – presumably – valuables. A doctor you say, so maybe a medical bag, wallet, phone? He’s of an age for a smartphone.’
‘We’re on to it,’ said Valentine, out in the hall.
Hadden had his forehead almost on the floor, looking towards the bed. ‘We found a series of fibres here, some from what looks like a pair of jeans and traces of white linen – so I’m thinking an expensive shirt. Sound like our victim?’
Shaw, on his knees, nodded.
‘Blow to the head puts him down. Then the killer applies the plastic bag and suffocates the victim while he’s either unconscious or semi-conscious. There’s a little bruising on the victim’s left leg and left elbow, so the second seems more likely. I’d put money on death occurring here and the clothes removed here too, because there are no fabric traces at all on the stairs or the hallway carpets, or across the yard, and you’d have to think he was dragged to the bathhouse.’
They were back in the yard a minute later, floodlit like the bedroom, a SOCO inside the bathhouse brushing the door hinges for a print.
‘Question: were the trainers his?’ asked Hadden, in rhetorical mode. ‘We’ve removed some skin cells, so we’ll know soon. Expensive – Emirates brand – retail at one hundred and twenty pounds. So they could be his. The Lister Tunnel inquiry has identified two gangs, clashing over territory. The gang chucking them up around here are middle class, monied, so that would fit too. They’re not new, wear and tear looks like anything from a year to a few days, depends if they’re just for best. Kids – they do that, have two sets. Dress trainers. Knockabout trainers.
‘That’s the best I can do. You’re the detective, Peter. You work it out.’
The pathologist, Dr Kazimierz, appeared at the back door, a large leather bag in one hand, a multi-headed anglepoise lamp in the other, which she immediately attached to a cable extension. Despite being fifty, slightly stolid and big-boned, Shaw always felt her face, up close, held a glimpse
of the beautiful girl she may have been. A friend of the Shaws, and a regular visitor to Surf!, she often walked her Labrador on the sands or braved the swell in mid-winter in a flowery swim cap.
Nodding at Hadden, she gave Shaw a buckled smile.
‘Gentlemen,’ she said and stood at the bathhouse door, surveying the corpse. ‘I see,’ she said, and then remained motionless for a full minute before taking two short strides to the foot of the tub.
Shaw took her place at the door.
‘Why am I reminded?’ she asked. Kazimierz had been in the UK nearly twenty years but her English, while extensive, had stubbornly clung to the structures of her native tongue: Polish.
‘Why are you reminded of what?’ asked Shaw.
‘A picture – a painting, yes?’
Shaw saw it too, then, and not just in a mental frame, but on the wall of the Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels. They’d gone on a day trip from Southampton as part of his history of art module. The pathologist’s house, a clapboard cottage beyond the dunes behind Shaw’s beach, was cluttered with art too; on walls, on bookshelves, frames leant against the skirting boards. He recalled a late-night conversation around a beach fire in the last weeks of her husband Dawid’s illness in which she’d sought escape from tending her patient, with a spirited debate over the merits and demerits of Seurat and Monet, Renoir and Pissaro.
‘The Death of Marat. The arm’s very distinctive …’ he said, kneeling. ‘David, Jacques-Louis David,’ he added, using the French inflexion on the surname.
The depiction of the great revolutionary journalist’s death, stabbed by a female opponent, as he lay in his bathtub, a writing desk over his knees, comprised an image full of graceful lines, especially the languid arm outside the tub, the hand still holding the quill, the unfinished paper on the writing board.
‘An icon, really,’ he added. ‘He admired Caravaggio – The Entombment of Christ has the same arm, the collapsed body, almost asleep, and Michelangelo’s Pieta of course, in the Vatican, the same arm again.’
‘But the face not so,’ said the pathologist, setting up the spotlights, driving out the shadows.
No – not the face. Through the plastic they could see the expression, the eyes blank but seeming to register an unbearable pain. There was no sense here, as there was in art, of a gentle acceptance of a noble, famous death. Just a young life cut short. The line of the arm wasn’t a series of artistic curves, just a bone, encased in muscle, fallen away from the body.
‘Tin roof,’ she said, pointing up. ‘Already I think the corpse begins to decay in the heat of the day.’ She checked a digital thermometer. ‘Still sixty-three, and it’s long after dark.’
Had that been the aim? To leave the body to decay, without clothes or other sources of ID, so that when it was eventually found the evidence would have been reduced to bone and hair? They’d checked with the tenant’s shipping company and he was on a long-haul container ship which would – via Mombasa, Goa, Manila and Tokyo – circumnavigate the globe via the Panama Canal and Boston. The wandering mariner would be back home, such as it was, in early summer 2016. But for Shaw and Valentine’s visit, the victim’s skeleton would have been old bones and little else, with only the telltale bloodstained trainers in place to offer a convenient pointer to the possible killers.
The backyard gate, unbolted, opened to the alleyway and DI Joe Carney appeared.
Shaw left Dr Kazimierz to her work.
‘What do we know?’ asked Carney, trying to pull off a brand of effortless superiority, but falling short, taking a step back, yielding the floor to Shaw.
‘What we don’t know is more interesting. Why did Dr Roy return to this house? What possible reason could he have to re-visit the deathbed of a woman who died last year of natural causes? A woman who our Marsh House victim, Ruby Bright, insisted was murdered.’
‘Blood-spattered trainers over the wires, that right?’ said Carney, looking up, but the shoes had been cut down by SOCO. ‘So that links it to the Lister Tunnel.’
‘And a plastic bag over the head, which links it to Marsh House.’
Carney just shrugged. ‘The CC’s been on, he wants us at St James’ at seven tomorrow morning. His office. My guess is he’s gonna merge the inquiries. Not much choice. Thing is – who’s in charge?’
THIRTY-TWO
Dr Furey, district coroner, lived in an old Georgian house which stood just beyond the London Gate, its facade boldly confronting the ring road – although there was a cordon sanitaire provided by a long garden, a grove of birch trees and a high wrought-iron railing. The building, three storeys high, with dormers in the roof, stood narrow and alone, as if its supporting neighbours had been bulldozed away. Tonight, lights blazed from the sash windows on the lower two floors and from a pair of converted gaslights on either side of the door, the wooden pillars of which had become curiously warped by age or winter damp.
Shaw noted a modern electric doorbell and heard the distant buzz within, competing against an interior soundtrack which he could not identify with any confidence, but felt sounded like Mumford & Sons, a reel transformed into a rock and roll riff. Dr Furey opened the door, his round asymmetric face slightly flushed, the eyes catching the light. The hallway beyond was full of light and voices and laughter, coming from a room to one side with a half-opened door, which revealed a glimpse of armchairs, and a set of playing cards laid out on the carpet as if for a game of patience.
‘Shaw. Good man. Let’s cut to my office, unless … is there time for a drink?’ Shaw liked Furey, enjoyed working with him, because whatever the medium – telephone, email, face-to-face – everything he said was infused with a kind of convivial energy.
Shaw declined but Furey retreated to fetch his own glass of red wine, and then led the way up the stairs two steps at a time, his orange cords striding out, showing the heels of his worn leather brogues as they ascended to the attic.
The office had the same shabby-chic typical of the rest of the house; an old bureau writing-desk, a hat stand, fitted bookshelves, but also a flat-screen TV, three grey filing cabinets and a desktop PC set on a plain deal table, surrounded by neat piles of paper. On the wall hung the doctor’s medical degree certificate, issued by Trinity College, Dublin.
Despite the hour the internal shutters were thrown back and the curtainless window gave a view which made Shaw laugh out loud: the town’s cemetery ran to the edge of sight, lit by the peripheral street lights and the passing cars on the distant ring road.
‘I know, I know,’ said Furey, booting up the computer. ‘It’s a profound embarrassment. My wife says it makes us look like bodysnatchers. Burke, Hare and Furey! The coroner who takes his work home – eh? We fell in love with the house from the front gate. I don’t believe in ghosts, Shaw, do you?’
Shaw didn’t want to be drawn; he was still struggling with the sense that the headstones of the dead seemed to represent a crowd outside the window, looking up at the house, edging closer to share the light or to listen.
‘A cousin says it makes the place look like Joyce’s “dark gaunt house”,’ said Furey, selecting documents which chugged out of a printer on the table.
Shaw didn’t get the reference but, intrigued, wanted to know more.
‘The Dead,’ said Furey. ‘Fine story, set in a house just like this one. Which didn’t help really – Catriona hates bloody Joyce, but she liked the film.’ He pronounced ‘film’ in the Irish manner, squeezing in two syllables. ‘Gabriel, the hero, looks out the window, you see, and thinks of the snow falling on the grave of his wife’s young lover. It makes him wonder if it’s best to die young when we’re still strong, our vital emotions undiminished by the passage of time. There’s a phrase there …’ he added, putting thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose. ‘“Or die old, when the threat of error grows more with every year.”’
The doctor collected up the freshly printed pages. ‘No ghosts, Shaw, but we’re haunted by that, yes? That we grow towards a time of error. But not y
et, hopefully.… ’
Furey straightened, taking an inch off his wine. ‘I keep an eye on the dead. But some are more interesting than others, eh? Just like the living. Several years ago I created an ongoing digital log of the death certificates issued locally and, to some extent, the information provided on the medical certificates which support them, each one signed by the doctor who attends the deceased. Your man Twine rang and said you wanted to look at Dr Gokak Roy’s recent certificates. Given the outcome, that was a very smart question, Inspector.’
Furey stopped then, the manic activity instantly stilled, his eyebrows arching. ‘A strictly unprofessional request, of course. And no doubt you’ll fill me in on precisely why we need to answer such a question … Although I suspect that the fact Dr Roy’s body is currently in the morgue at the Ark awaiting my professional attention will have something to do with it, eh? But first, results …’
Furey summarized the document trail he’d investigated: Dr Roy had signed six certificates over a period of eleven months, covering patients with a wide range of ages, conditions and treatments.
‘Here they are,’ said Furey, brandishing the certificates.
‘Three of the deceased were women, two in receipt of ongoing respite care, one aged seventy-three, the other eighty-one. Mrs Beatrice Hood, who died first, was eighty-seven. In addition there were three adult males – two men – both under fifty, suffered degenerative neurological diseases. The third, aged eighty-seven, had spent some time at Marsh House care home – a detail I thought you’d appreciate. Two of the six were, additionally, psychiatric patients on day care. So, pretty much the usual hotchpotch, if a little on the grim side. The causes of death are exactly what you would expect given the secondary causes listed, and the background outlined in the medical certificates, which is why the coroner’s office would not be informed.