by Jim Kelly
Which was why, a bit later, he was stood on the corner of London Road, waiting for the lights to change. Red. Amber. Green. None of the colours seemed capable of releasing him from a strange trance, until, holding the custom-made cardboard box with the dead weight inside, he thought that, actually, he’d like to change his mind; not about Zebra’s options, but his own.
THIRTY-NINE
The pilgrims made their way through the woods. Shaw, watching from the hillside above, felt an extraordinary, atavistic sense that the scene below had been played out a thousandfold, as if all those who had ever used the ancient path had materialized on this one evening, at dusk, to make their way up from the coast towards the Holy House of Walsingham, through the woods of Holkham. The old way, here a deep green lane, was a millennium in the walking; a curving, graceful track, hugging the low contours beyond the marsh, before setting off uphill, beside a small stream, a tributary of the Burn. The line of guttering lanterns which marked the pilgrims’ latter-day caravan snaked its way forward, accompanied by the sound of plainsong, just audible, adding another layer of the past, an audible memory, to match the visual.
Cutting in a zigzag path across open grassland, Shaw slipped into the trees and joined the old path, the line of pilgrims ahead now beyond sight around a slow curve. The tunnel vision, up the green lane, with the branches over-arching, seemed to crackle with the energy they’d left behind, a kind of electrical trace, like the after-image of a lightning strike. Shaw expected to see the ghost of a medieval monk perhaps, leaning on a crook, sandals slipping on the worn flagstones, fading into the half-light.
He set off in pursuit. The enfolding glaucous light took Shaw back to his first holiday with Lena. They’d driven the Porsche to Portsmouth and taken the car ferry across the Bay of Biscay to the north coast of Spain; a voyage of blue ocean, the rolling ship accompanied by sudden leaping dolphin and long-backed fin whales. Hiring an isolated farmhouse in the hills of Asturias, built into the rock side, they’d waited for the clouds to lift, revealing the distant coast. The first evening Shaw had followed the painted clam-shell signs on the roadside to a set of stone steps, which led between two old houses, until he fell out, unexpectedly, on a branch of the ancient Camino itself: the sprawling network of pathways which had led millions to the tomb of St James at Compostella. Dusk again, the stone path leading the eye into a misty distance, completely in the shadow of the trees. Shaw’s hair had stood on end as he felt the presence of those who had gone before, walking east, returning west, the millions who had stepped out on that rocky track, wearing it down, inscribing it into the earth. He’d never believed in life after death, but that moment on the Camino showed him another possibility, that you could make a direct, emotional link with the past. As he’d stood that evening in the falling night on the Camino he’d not been alone.
Ahead, a voice, baritone, threaded its way between the ash and the elder, its musical pattern mazy, hypnotic and sinuous. Shaw felt something of the fear of the stranger; the eyes watching from the woods, the danger of approaching night, of roaming boar or hungry wolves, and worst of all, the outlaws who must have watched, and waited, their prey striding into traps which they could lay with confidence along the many branches of this pilgrims’ way – Norfolk’s Camino, heading for England’s Nazareth.
This pilgrims’ way was, like its Spanish cousin, many-branched. This ‘leg’ – the ‘Wells leg’ – had thrived thanks to the ships which brought pilgrims from Europe and the north. At this point it was within two miles of the shrine itself. The pilgrims had ‘landed’ two nights earlier and camped just outside the town, before covering three miles and camping again. This one-off ‘World’ pilgrimage route was popular with the infirm, families and the disabled, as it offered the opportunity to complete the way, without covering more than six or seven miles over three days. The ‘camping’ provided was hardly ‘glamping’, but it was superior, with camp beds and some night heaters and food provided from a mobile kitchen on site.
This last site lay just outside the Holkham Estate, which owned the great house, the Elizabethan chimneys of which were just visible a few miles along the coast. At a point on the upland track, where the hillside held a narrow vale, the old woods cleared to form a natural clearing known as Foghanger, and, as Shaw cleared the brow, he saw the fire pits, freshly lit, and the trestle tables laid out for the evening meal, volunteers carrying water jugs and bowls from the catering vans parked in the shadows of the wood.
The Met Office forecast, a vital component of the modern pilgrim’s digital pack, was dry and clear. Leaves and moss, litter and boughs, had been spread in ‘dormitory’ lines to provide makeshift beds for the younger pilgrims, while a row of canvas tents stood back in the lee of the trees for the elderly and infirm.
A uniformed PC walked out of this medieval throng, a radio crackling at her chest. It was Jan Clay and, when she saw it was Shaw, her eyes flitted quickly beyond, expecting Valentine to limp out of the shadows too.
‘No George?’ she said. ‘Sorry, forget that, not very professional.’ A practised movement of the head flicked her blonde fringe out of her eyes.
‘I got a text. He’s back at St James’ running the team. We might have five more murders on the slate. I’m only here because the chief constable’s got the idea north Norfolk’s the next Ulster: barricades and Molotov cocktails next. And now there’s what, food poisoning?’
‘Medical officer’s here …’ She led the way towards the kitchens.
Louis Snow was the assistant medical officer for the district council based at Hunstanton: mid-thirties, earnest, a keen cyclist who specialized in turning up at St James’ for press conferences in the full lycra outfit. Shaw spotted his cycle now, a top of the range Dutch & Wolf, £10,000 worth of kit, carefully locked to an ash tree bole. Now they were in the wood Shaw could see two ambulances parked beyond the catering line.
‘One minute,’ he said, leaning back on the bonnet of one of the catering vans, filling in a report, his mobile set on the clipboard. ‘Just let me get this done and dusted, Shaw. If you’re hungry the food’s good. Just don’t touch the chicken.’
They had thirty seconds so Shaw repeated to Clay what he’d told Valentine to pass on, but suspected he hadn’t. ‘Good work on Lister Tunnel,’ he said. ‘DS Chalker’s a dinosaur. It was smart work all round and you don’t need me to tell you it’s been noticed. Has DI Carney got his man?’
‘You heard? I’ve done you a short report …’
‘He rang me to update. Perfunctory, but what the hell. He doesn’t like me, I don’t like him. Sorry, unprofessional …’
Snow was ready for them. ‘Hi. Right. We have what the authorities like to call a sequence of events. First night of the journey two elderly men complained of stomach cramps. One of those, an eighty-three-year-old, is in the QE2 now. I got test results an hour ago on him and it’s salmonella. Chicken, probably. Which is odd because according to the catering company they didn’t put chicken out. It’s an open buffet, some hot, some cold. Where did the chicken come from? That’s your department. Thing is the second batch of patients all said they had prawns on the second night, but again, that wasn’t on the menu either.
‘They collect all the food at the end of the evening and bin it and I’ve found some chicken and prawns and isolated the evidence …’ The pannier of the bike held a small plastic freezer box. The lid made a small hermetic pop as he flipped it open and held it out for them to see. Shaw, unable to suppress his instincts, took a step back.
‘It won’t kill you, Shaw. Well, actually that’s not true, is it? It might, if you ate this you’d get the full range of the usual symptoms: cramps, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea. Then you’d get better – unless you’re vulnerable – like the elderly, who can’t rehydrate quickly enough. So it could kill. And it’s deliberate all right. Take the chicken; each slice of breast has been left out – I’d say for twenty-four hours – then half-cooked. You can’t be sure it will produce the bacteria, but there�
�s a bloody good chance. In this case it was a bull’s eye, these samples are rife.’
The trick with any crime, Jack Shaw used to say, was to see it – not just hear about it, or read about it, but to see it actually happening. Shaw tried to imagine the buffet table, the volunteers putting out bowls. ‘Someone must remember where the chicken dish came from?’
‘No,’ said Jan, consulting a notebook. ‘Both nights they put out more than thirty bowls of food, plus salads, fruit, bread. It’s like a banquet, there’s people everywhere. The victims seem to think the chicken was mixed in with salad leaves in a wooden bowl. Nobody seems to recognize that dish, not amongst the volunteers anyway.’
‘Do they know each other that well?’ asked Shaw.
‘Not that well,’ said Jan. ‘But I think they’d spot an outsider.’
‘OK. So our culprit’s probably on the inside.’
‘Most of the volunteers are bussed in with the caterers,’ said Jan. ‘They bring rucksacks, so it would be easy to secrete the food, then simply serve it out.’
‘Tonight?’ asked Shaw.
‘Chicken’s on the menu, but it’s been vouched for,’ said Snow. ‘Plus they’d have to be blind not to see we’re on to them. And it’s done now; eight in hospital, including two kids. A couple of the pensioners who fell ill are soldiering on … I think it’s all part of the pilgrim experience.’
As if by stage direction the back doors of one of the ambulances opened and two nurses helped an elderly man negotiate the fold-down steps. Walking towards them he took a series of paces, each one taking several seconds, the moving foot held perilously horizontal to the leafy woodland path. It was an illusion, Shaw recognized, but it was as if they could hear bones creaking, joints stiff with arthritis.
‘This is Miles Thomas,’ said Snow. ‘Despite my advice he has decided against a night in hospital. I think you could say he was determined to finish the trip, isn’t that right, Mr Thomas? Just two more miles now, then I think a period of rest, don’t you?’
‘Tomorrow’s enough for any man,’ said Thomas, the voice stricken with a weak reediness. He held his back straight and his head up, but Shaw noted the almost imperceptible vibration of the jawbone.
Thomas had those blue, almost colourless eyes that can turn milky with age, but still retain a shard of ice. A life force burned out of those eyes, thought Shaw, which was at odds with the almost broken body. The combination of spiritual determination and physical frailty was not entirely inspiring. It was as if Thomas felt, on some higher level, that his body was a superfluous detail; nothing more than a necessary burden, supported by sheer willpower.
‘I will make it to the shrine,’ he said. ‘It’s my last journey, God willing.’
Shaw thought this sounded like a disguised invitation to ask a question, so he simply smiled.
‘Pancreatic cancer,’ volunteered Thomas. ‘I won’t let them touch me now. I’ve got days, weeks – but that’s what they said a month ago. I have prayed for a release from pain and it will be mine soon. These last hours are a blessing.’
‘Do many pilgrims come to die?’ asked Jan Clay and Shaw detected a belligerent note.
‘Yes. Oh yes. Many of us here have reached the ends of our lives, but we still breathe, still wake. So we must wait. There are, what can I say, other routes. Christ’s anger at such weakness must be sublime. A flight to Switzerland, a hypodermic. And they call that Dignitas.’
The passion with which he spat out the word almost unbalanced him and he would have fallen but for his stick.
‘They pay for death, counting out silver to the devil, in my view.’ When nobody agreed his eyes narrowed and he focused on Shaw’s mooneye. ‘It’s a package too, like a holiday to Spain. A flight, the room, the nursing care and, most vitally, the lethal dose of pento-bar-bital.’ He enunciated each syllable. ‘I’m told the current rate is eight thousand pounds. That’s it then, the price of death. They say we have a society in which everything has a price.’
Shaw found the sermon almost intolerable. A Catholic education had left him with a short attention span when faced with a one-way polemic. But something about that one word – Dignitas – made his skin cool, the hair prickling on the nape of his neck. The word stem was dignity, of course, and it brought to mind the clinical front room of 32 Hartington Street, with its NHS bed and the steel drip-holder, poised above. Dignity at a price. Shaw had missed this obvious truth; that faced with pain, or an apparently shameful descent into dependency, many people would pay handsomely for death on demand.
Thomas, impatient, shrugged off a helping hand from the nurse who’d helped him out of the ambulance. ‘What would you prefer, Inspector: the Geneva clinic, with its pretence of science, or the woods of Holkham, a night breeze, and tomorrow – God willing – my last sight of the Holy House?’
‘That’s up to God, isn’t it?’ said Clay. ‘That’s why you pay your money for a trip to Switzerland, Mr Thomas – the certainty of euthanasia. The pentobarbital always works,’ she added, with a brutal logic Shaw admired. ‘God’s ways, by comparison, are a bit more unpredictable.’
Thomas shuffled his feet, then sought out Jan’s eyes. ‘Euthanasia, assisted suicide, weasel words, don’t you think? It’s not our gift, of course, that’s the trick of it.’ He got a little closer. ‘You can pay for death, young lady, but you can’t pay for a good death. That’s what I live for, what I walk for, each step. A righteous death, and a timely one.’
FORTY
Gunning the Porsche west Shaw did what he never did: he went back to his office at St James’. The canteen, open for the night shift, provided coffee and a bacon sarnie, and by midnight he was at his desk, the anglepoise lamp burning a bright circle on Furey’s map of Parkwood Springs. The pious arrogance of Miles Thomas had provided the key to the mystery of Marsh House. All he needed now was to amass the necessary evidence.
A late email from Tom Hadden added two more pieces to the jigsaw. Toxicology on Dr Gokak Roy had revealed a high concentration of amphetamines in his bloodstream. Further analysis would follow at the Home Office’s London laboratory. But all the signs were Dr Roy had a serious, chronic, habitual need for drugs.
So Javi Copon needed the money to chase Atlantic waves and Gokak Roy had an extremely expensive addiction. Shaw saw them as a team: nurse and doctor, both adept at providing the necessary ‘care’ on offer at Hartington Street and the insiders’ knowledge needed to manipulate the documentary system. Crucially, Gokak Roy brought the magic word ‘doctor’, qualifying him to be the unquestioned signatory of any death certificate. Javi Copon had fled and Gokak Roy was dead. What was missing from this emerging picture was organizational brainpower.
From his office window Shaw could see that the lights were still on in the Ark, so he sent Hadden an email. Could the forensic scientist check the bones of Richard Brook for traces of pentobarbital, or any related drug used in assisted suicide, or euthanasia. Then he left an email for DC Paul Twine. Inquiries into the Causeway Trust, the charity to which Beatty Hood had left her house, needed to be fast-tracked; also, could he check through all the constituent organizations affiliated to WAP – the Walsingham Alternative Pilgrimage – and see if there was any reference to EXIT, or other campaign groups which supported a legal ‘right to die’. In addition, CCOO, the Madrid-based trade union, was supporting WAP – who provided the link with Spain? Finally, via the Charity Commission, he needed the name of WAP’s mysterious rich benefactor, responsible for bankrolling the Rainbow Protestor.
By dawn he was on the road home, the Porsche purring, and he thought of the pilgrims waking in their tents and hostels, congregating on the paths and tracks and green lanes, excited at the prospect of walking towards Walsingham and joining forces in their thousands for the final Holy Mile.
FORTY-ONE
The town of Walsingham radiated a kind of religious tension, like a miniature Vatican City. The main pilgrimage procession, an amalgamation of the various ‘legs’, had reached the Slipper Ch
apel at nine, and was now resting, before making its way down the final Holy Mile, a narrow lane, shielded by hedgerows. The two airborne police helicopters estimated the crowd below awaiting its arrival at between 2,000 and 2,500 – far less than the alarmist figures mooted by the chief constable, who had made an unannounced visit to the police mobile control room in the station car park, and finding everything quiet, had promptly announced he would return to St James’. (His civilian driver had tipped Valentine the truth. Joyce had a tee-time of 7.15 a.m. at the West Norfolk golf club.) Shaw had noted DI Carney, in the back seat of the chief constable’s official car, getting out for fresh air, his golf shoe spikes scraping on the tarmac.
The chief constable took Shaw aside for a personal debrief. They stood by three plain wooden crosses set on a miniature Calvary for the day, in the shadow of the Russian Orthodox church’s single onion dome.
‘The food poisoning?’ he asked, bristling with impatience, as if Shaw was wasting his time.
‘Four still in hospital. None in danger. A deliberate attempt to injure, certainly. Kill? No. Although that could have been the outcome and the perpetrators were reckless as to the consequences of feeding salmonella to the frail and elderly. Forensics have the tainted chicken and prawns, and some hope that they might have the culprit’s fingerprints on one of the bowls, because there’s a match with a blurred partial on the well-top in the shrine. If we’re close to an arrest I might even try using a bit of the budget to get a handwriting match off the note. My guess is we’re dealing with one zealot, maybe three – but no more. Committed, ingenious, but strictly limited in scope. The poisoner’s got to be one of the twenty-six volunteers who served out the food. We’ll get them all into St James’, but not until Monday. Today I need the manpower here, on the street.’