[PS & GV #6] Death on Demand

by Jim Kelly

  No one spoke. A bee, heavy and drugged, hung in the hot air.

  Shaw thought of a white nurse’s uniform with the red trade union badge CCOO. ‘What about Javi Copon?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘Javi’s a sweetheart,’ offered one of the elderly women. ‘He wouldn’t hurt anyone. He’s not been to meetings for months.’ Everyone shook their heads, agreeing.

  Searching faces, Shaw asked, ‘Has anyone any idea where Ms Heaney might be?’

  One of the pensioners raised a hand. ‘She slipped away … a text, I think. She said she wouldn’t be long. Sometimes I think we’re all a bit too much for her. She needs her own space. She’ll have found somewhere quiet.’

  FORTY-FOUR

  The door of St Seraphim’s, a rectangle of cool shadow, stood open as it had done the day Shaw had met Heaney inside; she’d said then, half in irony, that it was a wonderful place for an atheist to contemplate the mysteries of life. It was one of her hidden, quiet places.

  The sunlit vestibule, no more than a glass-fronted porch, gave quickly into the velvet darkness of the chapel. Icons glinted in the light of two candles, stood in sand within brass dishes, the image set against a reedy soundtrack of Orthodox chant.

  It was the beauty of this which made Shaw pause, and in that silence, his footfall poised, he heard a strange sound: a distinct guttural click; the noise, perhaps, a thirsty man might make drinking a glass of iced water. From behind the wooden painted screen which shielded the priest’s inner sanctum, the sound came again, slightly louder, and this time repeated twice.

  The small iron lock was broken, so that when Shaw touched the double doors they both swung open. A table held some simple chalices, a bottle of wine in a silver tracery holder and a plate of ashes. The light here came from an intricate candelabra which, when fully lit, must have supported fifty candles, but just one burned now, illuminating a bare concrete floor, on which lay Nano Heaney, the Pierrot still, in her white trousers and milky T-shirt and a pair of what looked like white ballet shoes.

  In one hand she held a wristwatch, unstrapped, on her chest, so that she could see the luminous face.

  As Shaw knelt beside her, she raised her wrist so that he could see a pinprick injection mark, a trace of blood smeared over the hidden veins and arteries beneath the pale skin.

  Her hand gripped Shaw’s arm with great force. ‘Listen,’ she said, the tongue slightly sluggish, so that the word was smeared with sibilance.

  ‘This is what they need to know. Forty-five milligrams of pentobarbital at 2.35 p.m. precisely. I need …’ Her voice failed and she had to haul in air before forcing herself to go on: ‘I need … a vasso suppressor – any will do. Medics, St John’s. Shaw’ – she pulled his face close – ‘just get them.’ She looked at the watch face. ‘I’ve got eight minutes – less.’

  Outside, Shaw found Valentine on the doorstep, drinking from a bottle of mineral water. The DS ran to the mobile control room and briefed three uniformed constables who set off in different directions to find the St John’s Ambulance units, Shaw used the radio to get direct to the ambulance service; he gave them location and deadline: eight minutes and counting. Finally he rang the St James’ control room and told them to raise local doctors and the Magpas Air Ambulance. Again, he reiterated the deadline: now seven minutes and counting.

  Heaney’s pallor was tinged with blue and a sickly fish-like green. Taking her hand he got his lips close to her ear: ‘They’re coming. Who did this?’

  Looking at the watch face she seemed to make a decision, so that the tension eased in her neck and she turned her head, letting the weight of it fall on Shaw’s arm, which he’d insinuated under her shoulders.

  ‘Javi. It’s a lethal dose. Death within twenty-five minutes. I might have longer, Javi’s hand was shaking, I don’t think he’d got the vein cleanly. I think Gokak always did the incisions. So there’s a chance.’

  Her eyes rolled back in her head. With what looked like a supreme effort, she refocused on Shaw’s face.

  ‘But you’re not the innocent victim, are you?’ said Shaw, gently. ‘You’re the supplier. Through the palliative care unit, the NHS admin, you found them, with Javi, the vulnerable and the desperate. And Gokak Roy administered the drug. And you provided the house, because Hood left it to the Causeway Trust, which bankrolls WAP.’

  ‘I only wanted to help, to enact the principal, that it’s their life and they can choose. They don’t have to live in pain. Many do, now. Hundreds. It’s not necessary.’

  Her face distorted and Shaw realized she was trying to smile. ‘I don’t want to die, Shaw. It’s not my time, not my place, but Javi thought you were close. He panicked when he saw your sergeant outside the house. He didn’t want loose ends. Gokak was a loose end, and so was I.’

  Her eyes locked on the single candle flame.

  ‘Don’t talk. Save your energy. They won’t be long,’ said Shaw.

  She shook her head. ‘Javi found the Coldshaw woman. He knew her well, she trusted him, but he pushed her too hard. It was a decision she couldn’t face. So she ran. I’m sorry for that. Then he found Beatty. It was an act of pure pity, because we didn’t know she’d leave us the house. It was a mercy. I’m proud of that.’

  Shaw thought then that she felt death was close, and that this was her chance to set out some justification for what she’d done, and to shift, in part, the blame to others.

  ‘Gokak said it could be our Dying House, a place for them to find peace, a way-station. But we needed to finance the project, the cause, and so if there was money, we took it.’

  She swallowed hard, her eyes closed.

  ‘We’d talked before, we all believed, Shaw,’ she said, suddenly brighter, engaged. ‘We all believed. We wanted to do good by our own rules. Finding others was easier than it should have been. We never pushed.’ She licked her lips. ‘I never pushed. But money corrupts. Boundaries, principles, were compromised.’

  A sudden convulsion made her body hinge at the waist, the legs rising, and she gasped for air. For the first time he saw abject despair in her face, the fear of death.

  When the fit passed she looked at the watch.

  ‘Once we’d begun we couldn’t stop. They said there were costs. The money was a drug, I can see that. It became …’ The eyes closed. ‘Businesslike.’

  Somewhere close they heard a siren wail.

  ‘Poor Beatty Hood. She told Ruby she didn’t want to go, even though the blindness was a nightmare. She said Javi was pushing her, telling her it was for the best, telling her she could choose the moment, the day, and that seemed to help. In the end, at the end, Gokak said she accepted it, embraced it even.

  ‘But Ruby thought we’d killed her. Murdered her. It’s a cruel word.’

  Her eyes closed and for a moment Shaw thought she’d gone, but then she suddenly gasped, the air whistling between her lips. ‘Javi took her down to the sea that night because she wanted to see the great moon, and he tried to tell her about Beatty, tell her how it had ended. And about the principle, the freedom. That it was about people’s right to choose, that thanks to Shipman most doctors were too afraid to help, too scared to ease the pain.’

  Her eyes locked on the wristwatch. ‘She said she’d tell the press, so Javi killed her. It was never planned, never. That ended the pretence, I suppose.’

  Her body stiffened and she gripped Shaw tighter by the fingers. ‘That’s the evil,’ she whispered. ‘Persuasion. I see it now, Shaw. It’s their choice, the choice of the dying, but they know what others want: family, friends, those who care. It’s not a decision they take for themselves. We don’t seek the death we wish, we seek the one expected of us.’

  Distantly they felt, rather than heard, the base thud of a helicopter’s rotors.

  ‘My share of the money was set aside, even when I said I didn’t want it. I had it transferred to WAP. I thought that one day we’d use it to campaign, a change in the law, perhaps. We should all have the right to die.’

  ‘Jon Parry
?’

  ‘Unstable. I told Javi not to encourage him but, after he killed Ruby, he wanted to keep you busy until he was ready to disappear. So he wound Jon up, helped him with the practicalities. Javi’s cool, cold. Jon’s a hot-head, a cat’s paw. I told them to stop, Shaw. I pleaded.’

  The eyes again, rolling back, slipping away.

  Shaw felt the pressure shift in his ear before he heard the swish of the blades, much closer now, right over the town. The vibrations made the icons shake and dust fell from the candelabra.

  Two paramedics were at her side within seconds, pumping adrenaline into her blood system. For the first time Shaw noted a thin trickle of blood crossing her left temple. One of the paramedics pushed back her hair to reveal a bruise forming, a blue shadow, swelling.

  As they strapped her into a stretcher she seemed suddenly desperate to finish her story.

  ‘Once Ruby was dead they both wanted out. We had to cover our tracks. Javi went back to the house to clear up because that was the plan, to sell, and bank the cash. The teenager was in the house. They’d left stuff about, Gokak’s hypos, the drugs, the bed set up with its drip. The kid was smart, said it was drugs, and he’d tell the police if we didn’t pay. Javi said they fought but I don’t believe him. It was out of control then, we were out of control. Dumping the body in the skip, and throwing the shoes over the wires, was clever. It nearly worked.

  ‘After that Javi was still worried. He thought Gokak and I were weak. I think he sent Gokak a message to meet at the house. Then he came for me …’

  They hoisted her up and her arm hung loose, the fingers seeking out Shaw.

  ‘I don’t want to die,’ she said, gripping his arm.

  To one side, for the first time, Shaw noticed a small door covered with a red velvet curtain and realized it was a confessional box.

  As they ran towards the helicopter, which had come down in the old station car park, the noise was shattering, the blades turning just above their heads. Shaw stayed with her, holding her hand, as they rose up and then swung out over Walsingham, and the pilgrims below at the open air mass covered their ears and looked up, the strobe shadow playing over the landscape as the helicopter cut across the sun.

  ‘I don’t want to die,’ was the last thing she said before the drugs plunged her into darkness.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Six days later

  The CID room looked empty, until Shaw spotted his team crowded round Mark Birley’s PC, and a flickering grainy image of a CCTV camera shot. Not Marsh House, but a grey dockside, lit by the flat shadowless light of security beams, a few HGVs parked in a line like a wagon-train pitched for the night, and beyond a distant security fence, a stream of car headlights on the wrong side of a road. The silhouette of a castle stood against a starless sky, as did a single tall pine, in the shape of an exclamation mark.

  ‘We’re in triple time,’ said Birley, and as if to prove the point the moon rose rapidly, care of a celestial props department, towards the stars. Cars, caravans and camper vans began to fill the wide expanse of tarmac, directed into line by Day-Glo clad officers with reflective bats – the narrow lanes marked in giant letters: A, B, C to K, L, M.

  ‘Here she is …’ said Birley, tapping the screen with his biro.

  The left-hand side of the screen had remained black, Stygian, with just a faint reflection of the speeding moon. It churned white now as a large ship’s stern came into view, ropes thrown from steel crow’s nests to port and starboard. Exhaust fumes, rising from the car decks, made it appear the ship was boiling on the inside, its heated guts seeping out into the cool night air.

  HGVs first, the ship began to disembowel itself, until the line of vehicles became simply small cars, the faces of excited travellers peering out at a foreign quayside.

  Birley noticed Shaw for the first time. ‘Sir. Dockside, Santander, night before last. Interpol released it to us an hour ago. You need to watch here …’

  At the roll-on roll-off exit there were two gangplanks, metallic covered walkways, disgorging people. Birley scaled back the fast-forward to x2. One line carried rucksacks and climbers’ sticks, the other comprised a stream of men and women in the corporate livery of the ferry company, neat uniforms or overalls emblazoned with a dolphin motif.

  Birley keyed a precise digital time into the frame finder on screen and they watched the crew file past until the automatic stop facility froze the image: then, defining a small rectangle with a cursor Birley magnified the image. ‘That’s him.’

  The only crewman with a hoody and a pair of silver-white trainers. ‘Watch carefully, this is a bit of a three-card trick which I suspect he’s done before …’

  The crew snaked their way around the waiting line of cars towards a one-storey building beyond which waited a coach.

  ‘This is Crew Alpha, just off a three-day stint, so they’re heading home after briefly checking out with customs and border security. All except our friend here …’

  The single-file crew line began to coalesce into small groups, chatting, hugging, excitedly discussing plans for leave. Ahead of them the doors of the single-story reception building had opened and a uniformed police officer stood waiting. ‘Hoody’, a hundred yards back, stooped to tie loose shoelaces until he was last in the line, then, with purposeful steps, he slipped to one side between two large shipping containers.

  The video stuck, then buzzed, before cutting out.

  ‘That’s it. The customs staff on the main gate watch this stuff live, especially during embarkation. At least that’s the drill. This time they spotted our friend and sent out a plain-clothed guard, who located him hiding in a large waste bin, where he was detained by two police officers. Interviewed on site at 20.35 hours, Spanish time, last night. This is the mug shot.’

  It was Javi Copon. The jawline looked different; tauter, as if he was determined not to show any emotion other than inner strength to the camera.

  ‘They interviewed him for sixty-five minutes but got nothing. The crew was dragged back off their courtesy bus, but they all claimed that they thought he was a deckhand, and they change every crossing, so nobody thought an alarm needed to be raised. Copon was arrested and put in a cell in the reception block awaiting re-interview by immigration officials. The block has three cells. When they went back for him at 23.30 hours he’d gone, a hole kicked through the partition, the window to the next cell off its hinges. They closed the port for two hours but there was no sign of him; by which time the unloading lorries had all gone through the gate. Their guess is he had a mate on board, an HGV driver. Anyway, long and short of it is, he’s gone.’

  The team seemed to let out a collective sigh. The inquiry’s big breakthrough, the arrest of Nano Heaney, had opened up the case like a magic key. They now knew that while Dr Gokak Roy was guilty of illegal euthanasia in the cases of the six Parkwood Springs victims, Javi Copon had brutally murdered Ruby Bright, Dr Roy himself – and had attempted to kill Heaney. It was all very well knowing what had happened, but the public and the chief constable wanted someone to pay. Heaney’s appearance in court, due in ten days, would spark a media circus, as her legal team sought to portray her as a principled campaigner for the right to die. The case itself, destined for the Old Bailey, could make legal history. But what Shaw’s team wanted, no, needed, was to put Javi Copon in the dock: a cold-blooded killer who might have been drawn to ending the lives of those in pain on a point of principle, but had soon found himself beguiled by the fortune that could be made.

  ‘We need to find him,’ said Shaw, simply.

  ‘We don’t know if his family is aware he’s back in Spain,’ offered Twine. ‘I’ve got the local police to watch their house at Zarautz. But he can’t be that stupid, especially now he knows the police are on his trail.’

  ‘I’ll try the Home Office,’ said Shaw. ‘We need to pull strings, apply pressure. The Spanish need to know what this man did: extortion, murder by knife, strangulation. I don’t want Madrid thinking we’re tracking down som
e kind of angel, a man who brought peace to the troubled and infirm. We’ve got this close, we need to lay a hand on him. We will lay a hand on him.’

  Out the window Shaw caught sight of the Cut, the distant surf line of the sea. ‘Let’s remind Madrid he’s a surfhead too. They can alert Lisbon. Let’s have them scouring the Atlantic beaches.’

  ‘The bank’s come through, sir,’ added Twine, the Montblanc poised over a list of figures. ‘Copon had a hire car out on the day of the Walsingham attack. He used a bank in Cromer to clear out the Causeway Trust’s current surplus of sixty-two thousand pounds. All in fifties. The Met put a round-robin out at mainline currency exchange points and one at Paddington said they’d done a sterling to euro transaction for fifteen thousand pounds. So he’s got resources. Can’t help thinking he’s got something specific in mind, why change that large a sum?’

  ‘Pay off the HGV driver?’ suggested Birley. ‘Buy himself a ticket that gets him further away.’

  ‘We lose him now, we’ll never get him,’ said DC Lau. ‘It’s not about money. He’s got what it takes to disappear: a language he can use anywhere in the world.’ Lau was first-generation British-Asian, armed with at least three useful languages, not including immaculate English. ‘The girlfriend’s made it clear he doesn’t need a passport anyway. He’s got friends on the ships, in the union, so he can come and go. South America, the Philippines, North Africa, Mexico; he leaves Spain undetected, he’s a new man. An innocent man.’

  Shaw closed the door of his office and put a call into the Home Office. Then he rang a former colleague from New Scotland Yard now at Interpol in Brussels.