[PS & GV #6] Death on Demand

by Jim Kelly

  Shaw leaned his back against the glass.

  ‘So: Bright first, in the wake of Hood. Then Lewis in the Lister Tunnel, then Dr Roy – who points the way to the other Parkwood Springs deaths, represented by Richard Brook. That’s the picture.’

  Shaw tossed his empty coffee into the bin. ‘Motive, or motives, are still unclear. Mercy killings? Hardly. This feels much more like a hard-edged scam. Identity theft? We need to check that out – see if their names have lived on, see if their IDs are being re-used after death. Murder? Here’s a thought. Let’s find out how much these people were paying for care. Their bank accounts were bleeding away. What if someone decided to cut short their lives to get at that money? They may look like loners but there’s always someone in line for a windfall. We’ve got forensic accountants crawling over the paperwork. Let’s keep a sharp eye on what they find. They’re not detectives. We are. Let’s make sure they have access to our expertise.’

  Shaw checked his diver’s watch. ‘And, while we may still be struggling on motive, we have a clear suspect in Javi Copon. His disappearance is eloquent of guilt. Let’s touch base again right down the line: Interpol, Madrid, the ferry ports. Make sure they know how much we want to find Javi Copon. We need to know why he’s decided to run.’

  ‘I’ll sort it,’ said Twine, scratching a note with his trademark Montblanc fountain pen.

  Mark Birley, sitting down, stretched in his seat, linking his hands and cracking the joints. ‘Just on the practical side. And thinking about the Parkwood six – we’re saying that they all died at Hartington Street? There’s a missing link here, how did the body get to the undertakers for burial? By hearse, presumably. But like, you’d blow the whistle if you turned up at the same house six times. Are they in on the scam?’

  Twine shuffled papers, put the cap on his pen, and checked his laptop. ‘Good spot, Mark.’ He scrolled up and down twice, checking the certificates and his notes. ‘Yup – six different funeral directors. Four from Lynn, one from Gayton, one from Peterborough. So none of them would have found anything inconsistent in being called to the same address in a short space of time. And there are no neighbours to keep a nosey eye out. It’s a system – it has to be. A conveyor belt.’

  ‘And but for Ruby Bright’s murder it might be running still,’ said Shaw.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  DI Joe Carney phoned Jan Clay at seven that evening. Sat in an armchair by the gas fire, which was off, she’d been so still she jumped at the sound. Valentine had sent her a text saying he was on his way home an hour earlier, but had not appeared. His sullen retreat into the role of stricken wanderer had at its heart, she felt, a selfish streak. His announcement that he’d decided to turn down the chance of an operation when the date was offered had not been open to discussion.

  Angry, dejected – rejected – she had decided to leave. A trundle-case on two wheels stood in the hallway, and what was left of a fish and chip supper was in the oven. She’d simultaneously decided that she wouldn’t go until Valentine was back in the house. She’d tell him to his face why she couldn’t stay. Stupidly, she couldn’t stop herself worrying about the cat. Zebra lay curled listlessly beside its untouched food. She’d booked an appointment that evening with the vet, but doubted Valentine would be able to inveigle the animal into its carrier.

  ‘Look, Clay,’ said Carney, as soon as she picked up the call. ‘This is good work on the Lister Tunnel. It’s been noted. Well done. We’ve got a suspect. I want you in for the interview, that’s in twenty minutes, St James’. You can make that? Stow the kids, do whatever you have to, just get here.’

  ‘Sir. On my way.’

  She put the phone down. ‘Tosser,’ she said, so loud the cat looked up.

  The arrest had been made that afternoon at St James’. Like so many criminal cases the apparent breakthrough had involved luck and routine in equal measure. There’d been a brawl in a town centre shopping mall between two sets of kids: North End versus South End. The security guard in the Arndale saw it start on CCTV and rang the police control room. By the time a squad car arrived on the scene there was only one teenager left: Jacob James Dunne and he was lying in a sticky, smudged pool of his own blood. The extent of his injuries suggested the fight had been about more than territorial rights.

  While Dunne was receiving treatment in A&E, DI Carney had persuaded him, despite the fact the victim was half senseless with painkillers, to agree to the police entering his home address to pick up a change of clothing. An old trick, it had worked to perfection. By the time Dunne’s mother had summoned the wit to ask for a warrant the forensic team had found a bloodstained T-shirt.

  DI Carney was desperate for an arrest in the Lister Tunnel killing to undermine Shaw’s inquiry. He hadn’t moved his family from the stunning Irish coastline to a dead-beat north Norfolk commuter village to get lumbered with a petty gang dispute, while some one-eyed whizz kid was left to run a multiple-murder inquiry. He planned to dutifully inform Shaw of the arrest and interview, after the fact.

  The suspect ‘Jake’ Dunne, sat beside his lawyer – a legal aid regular Jan recognized from court called Ashington. No one had spoken for ten minutes. Dunne was staring into the lap of his jeans. When he looked up Jan could see the extent of the beating he’d taken. The original shape of his skull was not discernable, as he was so badly bruised the eye sockets and nose were misshapen. One eye was closed, the skin darkening to black, his top lip so badly broken it appeared in two separate sections, separated by a blood-red gash. She had to admit Carney was right. This was no teenage spat over a pair of trainers.

  Ashington, the lawyer, kept checking his watch.

  ‘The doctor was entirely clear,’ he said to Jan, breaking the silence. ‘Half an hour max. He needs to rest.’

  The echo of his words, trapped in the tiled room, circulated and then, finally, died. DI Carney’s footsteps clattered outside and he burst in with a swagger. Flicking on the digital recorder, a cigarette behind one ear, he asked them all to identify themselves. When Jan heard herself declaring her own name and rank, she felt a genuine thrill of achievement, wanting Valentine to be there. In a single moment of telepathic certainty she knew he was in the building, over their heads, in the CID room.

  ‘OK. Now. We’ve done the dull stuff, haven’t we, Jake?’ said Carney, affecting ‘hail fellow, well met’ conviviality. ‘You say this fight was just a dust up over name-calling. You say you didn’t leave your house on the night Lewis Gunnel was strangled, then knifed to death. You say the blood on your T-shirt was a mate’s who cracked his head in a game of street footy.’

  Carney waited for a response. Dunne nodded.

  ‘We’ve taken statements from your mother, step-father and half-sister to the effect that you were upstairs in your bedroom …’ Carney cast a glance over a statement sheet. ‘Doing your homework, it says here. Very commendable. You’re at West Anglia College right, doing a GCSE in business studies?’

  Dunne nodded and a gasp of air slipped out through his lips, as if breathing, the simple raising and lowering of his ribs, was a pain in itself.

  ‘I’m afraid there’s going to be a short break in your studies, Jake. Ten to twelve years is my guess. Or you could carry on, studying inside. You’d have the time.’

  Carney laughed at Jan and she was ashamed to find her lips creasing in a supportive grin.

  Ashington leant forward. ‘If you’ve got any evidence which would secure such a conviction perhaps you’d present it, Inspector. Your predictions on the future are fascinating; however, there’s a fortune teller on the Tuesday Market. She charges five pounds for reading tea leaves. If we wanted to listen to tripe we could have opted for her. I think the name’s Pellecano by the way – Madame Pellecano.’

  A ripe smile disfigured Dunne’s beaten face.

  Carney opened the folder and produced a forensics report.

  ‘Forensic examination of the bloodstains on the T-shirt removed from Jake’s bedroom has provided a match with the vic
tim. I’m looking into the future, Mr Ashington, completely free of charge, and I can see your client in the dock, unless he can tell me how this happened …’

  Ashington, mid-fifties, gaunt, slightly beaten himself, if in a less obviously violent manner than his client, put a hand on Jake Dunne’s shoulder. ‘That’s convenient, Inspector. I do hope you haven’t imported working practices best suited to the Royal Ulster Constabulary.’

  ‘What the fuck does that mean?’

  ‘It means you’re on the record as mouthing obscenities, Inspector. Tut tut. But if you really don’t know what it means, I’ll spell it out: I hope – and it is just a hope – that this evidence has not been fabricated. Or, possibly, fraudulently placed in my client’s bedroom. And I understand no warrant was in force? I can assure you that fact will be on the record …’

  DI Carney was having trouble sitting still and Jan wondered if he was used to a more physical brand of police interview. It was with a visible effort that he sat back, and began to read the forensic report.

  ‘Why is the victim’s blood on your clothing, Jake?’ he asked, eventually.

  ‘You’ve got this all wrong,’ said Dunne.

  ‘Jake. Remember. There’s a strategy and we agreed it,’ said Ashington, but he was looking at DI Carney and Jan noted with a thrill that there was a glint of genuine hatred in that tired legal eye.

  ‘I’m here to learn,’ said DI Carney, legs stretched out under the interview table.

  Dunne looked at Jan then, perhaps sensing an ally. ‘The South End kids come up to piss on our patch. We give as good as we get – we go down there, make ourselves felt, whatever it takes.’

  ‘Jake,’ repeated Ashington, his hand tightening on the teenager’s shoulder. ‘Think, please. I am your solicitor. I have your best interests at heart.’

  ‘They’re middle-class, right,’ persisted Dunne. ‘They’ve got stuff, and it’s quality stuff. Mobiles, trainers, gear. Haircuts – that’s what you notice first off. Latest cool look, instant, on every head. So they don’t need to steal, right, and so like, what do they do when they want to hit out? That’s the thing about needing money, it sort of soaks up why you’re angry. It’s a goal, right, something to go for. We get stuff, we’re happy.

  ‘Not them. This kid – Gunnel – was one of the kids with everything. Looking for something that’ll hurt us. Looking for a way to get his kicks. So they’d pick on the lonely, old folk squatters. Stand there in their front rooms and piss in the fireplace. You ask about, copper, find out. ’Stead of sitting there scratching your arse.’

  A grin fell off Carney’s face like a landslide.

  ‘Yeah. You. Find out,’ said Dunne and Jan thought that if his real IQ had been unleashed he wouldn’t be doing a single GCSE at the local tech.

  ‘They’d start fires too, upstairs, or in the yards, just to watch. And pets, they’d pick on them. Hang up a kitten, chuck a brick at a dog. And they’d tell ’em, these people, the old folks, You tell the police, we’ll burn your house while you’re in your beds. You’ll die screaming. Nice, right. I’m not saying we’re angels, but that’s not us.

  ‘I’m saying, the thing is this kid, Gunnel, might have picked the wrong house. The Springs is for the lonely, but there’s others. That’s all I’m saying. Others.’

  Ashington had taken a note and he popped the cap back on his biro, as if to say that was a nice, convenient place to pause.

  ‘Nice speech,’ said Carney. ‘But the question stands, Jake. Why’s his blood on your shirt?’

  Ashington was on his feet. ‘We’ll break there. I’d like a copy of the forensics, Inspector. You know the drill.’

  ‘That’s the story is it, Jake?’ persisted Carney. ‘That Gunnel, sixteen, fit, brimming with attitude, gets strangled, knifed, by some old dear who can’t sleep nights. Give us a break, kid.’

  Carney stood too, but the tape was still running. ‘I’m not the only one thinks you killed him, am I, Jake?

  ‘You didn’t get those bruises …’ Carney pointed his pen at the teenager’s injuries. ‘All that, in a punch-up over pissing rights. They think you did it, the North End kids. They think you killed their mate. Their brother. You get out of here, which isn’t going to happen, but for the sake of it, you get out of here and they’ll finish the job.’

  Jan, studying the beaten face, was appalled to see that the shape of the skull, especially around the left eye, was actually changing by the minute, as the injuries swelled, the tissue inflamed and torn. The eye, clear when the interview had started, was now blushed pink.

  ‘Gunnel.’ Dunne shook his head and then had to raise both palms to each temple to cool the pain. ‘Fuck. We found him in the skip. Dead as meat,’ he said, shaking his head at Ashington’s pleas for silence.

  ‘I climbed in the skip to see if there was anything worth lifting and there he was. The knife, right, it had gone in his chest. He just looked kinda stunned to me. I tried to lift him up, to get him out, but there was blood underneath too – loads of it, sticky and clotted. I just dropped him, right. Coz I thought, like what’s the point here.

  ‘I left him, I admit that.’ His voice rose to a shout, ‘Like he wasn’t going to get any deader, right. No deader than that.’

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Valentine felt as out of place in a vet’s surgery as he did in a hospital. The clinical surfaces, the bloodless efficiency, made him feel feral by comparison, and – overwhelmingly – guilty. The bright lights hurt his eyes.

  Standing at the table in the examination room he ran a hand along the spine of the cat and it flexed under his touch, but he noted – again – that a large amount of the dry black fur came off on his sweaty hand.

  ‘We could keep him in and try an ultrasound scan,’ said the vet, ‘but I can feel the problem …’ She held the cat with that expert vice-like grip that vets used to somehow hypnotize wild animals. ‘Just here, in the lower abdomen, there’s a definite lump. I’m guessing it’s a tumour, which is why he’s got no appetite. We could operate, but that would involve Zebra staying with us for a few days. And there would be the post-operative care.’

  Valentine was already in a foul mood because Jan was missing and she’d promised to help with the vet. Oddly, for once his own illness made the decision easier because he actually didn’t give a toss about the money. If cash could solve the problem he’d have gladly paid up. In fact, he’d been fantasizing that if things moved inexorably towards his own death he could start issuing post-dated cheques, just for the hell of it.

  So it genuinely wasn’t about the money. He just had to decide what was right. And he knew what was right because he could tell the vet didn’t think an operation was worth the pain, or … Valentine searched for the right word in his head and came up with ‘indignity’, because that’s what cats always managed to preserve, their sense of independent grace.

  Zebra looked disorientated, but worst of all, groggy. The real heartbreaker was not that the animal looked unwell, but that it had begun, very slightly, to lose its innate beauty. Everything, thought Valentine, dies ugly.

  ‘It’s cancer?’

  ‘Or he’s ingested something, a chemical. They’re very sensitive to that and they don’t have to swallow the stuff. They can take it in through their paws …’

  She held up her hands as if Valentine was a simpleton.

  ‘It’s a two-way membrane,’ she explained. ‘Anti-freeze off a car bonnet, or petrol on a garage floor. That kind of thing. It’s just bad luck.’

  ‘It’s in pain?’ asked Valentine.

  ‘Yes. Certainly. I can give you painkillers but as you know they’re murder to get down if they’re off their food. So we could give him injections, but you’d have to bring him in for those. And they have side effects. Or we could scan and operate, as I said. A major procedure, highly invasive.’

  Valentine thought that in the vet’s code, or whatever, there should be a rule that they have to mention the euphemism first – the one about sleep. It wasn
’t as if there weren’t ways to avoid the word death when it came to animals – although, personally, he’d always thought ‘destroying’ a racehorse was a unique euphemism in that it sounded worse than using straightforward English. But all that stuff about an operation being ‘invasive’, and a ‘major procedure’ was there to prompt Valentine to use the forbidden word. Why couldn’t they say it first?

  ‘You think it’s best to put him out of his pain?’ he said, bitter that it had been left to him and that he’d opted for a euphemism himself. Something of his own predicament seemed to loom then, casting a shadow over the brightly lit room, and he wanted, desperately, to be out on the street, jostling with the living.

  The vet’s voice was far off. ‘Do you want to stay? You could hold him.’

  A minute later Valentine had both hands on the cat, one under the chin, one on the abdomen, both of them hot, while the vet did something with a small bottle and a syringe. Then they both stood there for a while until it was all over, which, Valentine had to admit, was painless, in the sense that it didn’t hurt the cat.

  Brisk, businesslike, he said he thought that charging eighty quid to dispose of the body was a bit steep, so he’d take it with him and put it in the back yard, where there was six square feet of flowerbed.