Death Watch

by Unknown

  10

  Ally Judd stood at her bedroom window looking at the harsh neon sign that read 24-HOUR WASH, buzzing on, buzzing off, buzzing on, flooding the double bed with green light. Through the party wall she heard the washing machines return to life in mid-cycle, the driers turning like whispers. She hadn’t thought of that – that with the power back on they’d restart.

  On the bed she’d laid out some photos. She’d slept for an hour after she’d taken the sedatives, then started awake, crying out, so that the WPC on the step had come up to check she was all right.

  Alone again, she’d laid out Bry’s life in pictures.

  Her throat was dry and she still hadn’t cried. It was the guilt, she knew, that held her back. The knowledge that now she wouldn’t have to tell him that she had to leave, that she’d loved him once, but that the love had been ground out of her, drained, by her life on Erebus Street, and the bad blood which seemed now to be in the very nature of the Judd family.

  She sat on the edge of the duvet and picked up the first picture: a snapshot of Bry and his twin, Norma Jean, her teeth encased in a brace. They’d be eight or nine, Ally guessed, and already the mirror-like resemblance was being torn apart by the difference in sex: Bry’s brow getting stronger, his face broadening, while Norma Jean’s was lengthening, and the mouth bowing with full lips. She flipped the picture over to see the date: August 1984.

  Then, the picture she’d taken on her first day out with Bry, on the front at Wells, taken by a stranger from Scotland – Pennycuick, she remembered, because they’d laughed at the name and got her to spell it out. Ally looked bitterly at her seventeen-year-old body in its shorts and bikini top – lithe, the waist impossibly slim. She’d had curves then, not this drab figure like an ironing board stood on end. Bry didn’t like the sun, so he was shading his eyes, an arm draped round her neck. The year they met – 1991. The year before everything changed, the year before they’d lost Norma Jean. After that, Bry hadn’t smiled much, but she’d still been drawn to him – a vulnerable, damaged man she thought she could fix.

  The wedding day next; what was left of his family, all of her family – worse luck. But at least Bry’s smile was real enough amongst the sullen smirks. She’d been three months pregnant with the baby they’d lost. Andy in the background. She thought the cruelty of it was almost unbearable; Andy, alone after Marie had died, hiding in a family photo.

  Next, holidays. The Grand Ole Opry, Nashville, just bliss: the music, the heat, and the thought of all those miles between them and Erebus Street. They stood together, astonished at how much fun life could be.

  Back home it was always family. She bit her lip. A picture of Neil next, a laughing six-year-old, thrown over his brother Bry’s shoulder, her grinning behind. And then, finally, Christmas this year: her and Bry on the beach at Old Hunstanton. Bry, trying to be happy, but disorientated by the drugs and alcohol, winching up a smile, just to make her happy. There was a new café on the beach, and they’d opened Christmas morning for teas and coffees. Snow on the sand, and the sea as green as Bry’s eyes, and Neil’s shadow running away from the camera. The three of them, with Andy back home in the Crane, keeping an eye on the turkey from the public bar.

  And a new picture. A secret picture.

  It had lain on the bedside table slipped inside the psalter he’d given her. A snapshot, him in swimming shorts, on a beach. She covered her mouth with her hand. She had a right to be happy, just like anyone else. She propped the picture on the bedside table beside the night-light they’d lit together. And they’d said a prayer for Bry’s soul. They hadn’t even thought about the future. That would have been a sin too.

  She broke the line of thought. Next door she could still hear the washing machines. Neil and Andy shared the flat above the launderette. But Andy was at the police station, and would be all night. Neil slept heavily, and noise wouldn’t wake him anyway, unless he picked up the vibrations. She’d leave it until the morning. Then she thought about sleeping, in this bed, their bed, and decided she could deal with the machines now.

  The female PC had retreated from the front step to the squad car parked at the T-junction, blocking traffic, the thin squawk of the radio just audible. Looking up, Ally saw a clear night sky, the moon, going to earth now, over behind the abattoir. She put the key in the lock of the launderette and turned the Chubb – but the door wouldn’t open. She turned it back and it did. She’d left it open.

  Inside she turned her back to the door and looked down the centre of the launderette.

  ‘God,’ she said, thinking she might cry now. One of the washers had malfunctioned and there was a pool of water in front of it; a detergent slick. She grabbed a plastic laundry basket, knelt down in the water and pulled open the porthole, dragging out the contents.

  Inside was a pair of heavy-duty overalls. They were covered in red stains. Pressing the material to her nose she caught the unmistakable scent of blood: ferrous, acrid. She fumbled for the name tag inside the collar.

  ‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘No.’

  11

  As the seagull flies, Peter Shaw lay twenty-two miles to the north, on the cool sand of Old Hunstanton, watching the moon set. Despite the hour, nearly 3 a.m, along the high-tide mark small fires still burnt, the remnants of the surfing crowd staying up to see in the new day and enjoying what might be the last night of the Indian summer. Wavelets curled over to fall on the beach, creating the night’s only sound – a rhythmic whisper. Fran had made a seat in the sand in front of the café. He sat in it now, his skin drying after a swim, wrapped in a beach towel.

  Lena swam fifty yards offshore, the rise and fall of her arms hypnotic. When he’d got back she was up, in a chair on the stoop, unable to sleep through the heat. He watched her coming out of the sea: black skin, white bikini, slim and compact, treading heel-to-toe as if following a line in the sand. She grabbed a towel from the café and sat down, their bodies touching at the hip and shoulder. She dug her toes into the sand. ‘We made some money today,’ she said. She had brown eyes, only ever half open, but with a cast in the right. ‘Fifteen hundred pounds in the shop – a thousand in the café.’

  Shaw whistled, insinuating a hand around her waist. On his lap he had a reference book – 1001 Paintings from the Louvre. He’d had it open at Patigno’s Miracle at Cana. One of the many ways in which he was less than the perfect detective was this obsession with apparently incidental detail. But, he consoled himself, this was his time, and if he wanted to waste it, he could. He certainly wasn’t going to sleep. He’d wanted the swim to cleanse him of the day, but it had simply prepared him for the next. He held the book open on his lap, the hypnotic scent of the quality paper almost as enticing as the smell of the sea.

  Liam Kennedy’s copy on the walls of the Sacred Heart of Mary had been faithful to the original – at least in the corner he’d finished – in every detail except one. A tiny omission amongst the memento mori.

  Lena kissed him on the neck as he closed the book, but then he slipped a cutting out that he’d hidden between the pages of the index.

  ‘I found this,’ he said, knowing he’d just ruined the moment.

  It was from the Lynn News of 1997. July 22nd.

  An accident on the outskirts of town. A Mini had hit a Ford Mondeo at a lonely T-junction. The driver of the Ford – a 45-year-old woman – survived but the two passengers, both over seventy, died at the scene. CCTV footage showed clearly – the report said – that the Mini had jumped the red light. They’d got out of the car to inspect the wrecked Ford – three young men in peaked baseball caps, their car side-on to the CCTV. According to the police the footage showed the driver was alive – her forehead slumped over the wheel turning side to side, and one of the passengers in the back of the car, a hand at a rear window, pawing at the glass. Then the Mini drove away. It was nearly thirty-five minutes before another driver arrived at the scene and alerted the emergency services – thirty-five minutes in which both the passengers died.

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nbsp; It was just the kind of crime Lena said damaged the way you looked at the world. Just the kind of crime she didn’t want to know anything about, not any more. She folded the cutting, handing it back. ‘Nice people. Perhaps they’ve paid the price for it – we’ll never know. I don’t want to know.’

  But Peter Shaw did want to know. This was what he found almost impossible to tolerate: an open-ended question, the puzzle with no solution. Lena knew it was one of the things that made him a policeman.

  ‘The date,’ he said.

  She nodded. ‘I know. It’s a few days before the day we don’t seem to be able to ever forget.’

  She looked out at sea, annoyed – angry – that an almost perfect day had ended like this.

  They both knew the details of his father’s last case: the murder of nine-year-old Jonathan Tessier on the night of 26 July 1997 – three days after this fatal car crash. The case that had left his father to retire under the shadow of that dreadful epithet ‘bent copper’. The case that had seen George Valentine busted down to DS, and banished to the coast.

  Shaw held the cutting lightly. Lena watched the sea, hugging herself.

  ‘Tom Hadden’s done a re-examination of the forensics on Tessier. Remember there were tiny spots of paint on the kid’s football shirt? We linked those to the factory where some of Mosse’s mates worked. But there was another flake of paint on the football shirt that child died wearing – and this flake was different. It was bevelled, as if from an impact. Grey-blue. It was never considered in the original inquiry. I got Timber Woods in archive to run through all the car crime in the month running up to the murder. The car involved in this fatal crash,’ he waved the cutting, ‘was silver – but there were flakes of paint from the other car, the Mini, embedded in the offside door and boot. Grey-blue. Not just any grey-blue – seascape blue. It’s a commercial make used widely in the 1980s.’

  He flicked the cutting. Lena looked out to sea. ‘Widely,’ she said, expertly picking at the hole in the logic.

  But she’d walked into a trap. ‘Tom’s done a mass spectroscope analysis and the paint is one produced for this specific model of Mini by British Leyland at Long-bridge in 1991. That’s about eight thousand cars in the batch – most went for export. That’s a very small number, Lena. Think about it – eight thousand in the world. What are the chances that fleck of paint didn’t come from that Mini?’

  He gave up waiting for his wife to react, and watched the waves breaking instead. ‘So – a gang of youths in a fatal car smash do a runner from the scene. We know Mosse was involved in such a gang. Less than a week later we find Tessier’s body under the Westmead – and there’s a flake of paint from the Mini on his clothing.’

  Lena looked her husband in the eyes. She was always saddened at how much of their lives seemed to get sucked into this other world.

  ‘This is it,’ he said, raising both hands in frustration. ‘They know there’s a camera at the junction. They probably guessed you couldn’t do an ID on the registration number from the footage – and they’re right. But they’ve got a hot car – a two-tone Mini with a crushed offside wing. So the kids take the Mini back to the Westmead, my guess is to one of the lock-up garages – there’s dozens. They respray the car. Tessier is playing football, he runs off to get a ball – he loses interest – perhaps he can’t find it. He strolls on – around by the community centre, then into the lock-ups. He stumbles on them – somehow, I don’t know how. But he pays for it with his life.’

  She laughed without a trace of humour. ‘And you think that makes sense?’ Shaw had been at New Scotland Yard when he’d met Lena in Brixton. She probably knew more about crime on the streets than he did. ‘Why kill a nine-year-old kid because he’s seen you respraying a car? They knew where he lived. A threat would have done – sweetened with a five-pound note. Why would the sight of a Mini being resprayed have registered with the kid? You’ll have to do better than that, Peter. Max’ll have you for breakfast.’

  Shaw snagged an ankle round hers.

  ‘Have you told George?’ she asked.

  ‘No. I can’t. I don’t know why.’

  She threw her head back. ‘He’s a boozer – not far short of an alcoholic – and a nicotine addict with an aversion to exercise and a weak bladder who lives alone. You’re married, with a daughter, have an addiction to exercise, an aversion to cigarettes and no apparent need for a bladder at all. I’ve seen you drink a pint of Guinness, but never two. And you don’t get on? That’s a big surprise, is it?’ She rubbed the salt on her cheek, suddenly desperate to be in the shower. ‘And, while we’re on the subject, there is your father. George knew him better than you did. Let’s be brutal – he knew him better than you ever will.’

  ‘I don’t trust him,’ said Shaw, trying not to recognize how cruel she’d been to point that out. He was haunted by this simple conundrum: were Jack Shaw and George Valentine just old-fashioned coppers who’d bent the rules, or were they old-fashioned bent coppers? He was convinced now that Robert Mosse was involved in the murder of Jonathan Tessier – but he was aware that his guilt didn’t necessarily mean his father and George Valentine hadn’t twisted, or planted, the discredited evidence.

  Lena stood, brushing sand from her skin. ‘You don’t trust him because you still think there’s a chance he and Jack planted that glove. Which would imply that George’s enthusiasm for reopening the case is simply a cover for his earlier dishonesty. Which means you don’t trust – didn’t trust – Jack, either. Who do you trust?’

  Shaw narrowed his eyes, watching a light at sea. ‘I just want proof.’

  Lena stretched her fingers out, making her hands into two bird’s feet. Shaw could see that she was struggling to keep her temper. ‘All right. What about doing something practical – getting this over with? And if you can’t do that, Peter – let’s see if we can live without it.’

  She stood, took a step forward, looking out to sea. ‘Other than Robert Mosse, who is presumably fairly easy to find, where are the other three kids you and George have identified as members of this gang?’

  ‘They’re not kids.’

  ‘They were.’

  Shaw worked his hand into the muscles at the back of his neck. He’d been down this route, trying to track them down in the odd spare moment George Valentine wasn’t around. All he’d found were three dead ends.

  ‘One emigrated – two years after the murder. New Zealand. Another turned out a small-time crook – East Midlands somewhere. But he’s in a psychiatric unit now. The ringleader – well, the oldest – took up driving, car mechanics. He crops up in 1999 – drink-driving. Got off with a suspended sentence when the court was told he needs to drive as part of his job. Divorced, one child. Since the drink-driving he’s led a blameless life and appears a model citizen.’ He stood, kicked some sand. Out of his pocket he took his RNLI pager, checked the signal and the battery – a little ritual before sleep.

  ‘And he’s got a steady job. Even if it’s a peculiar job,’ he added. ‘A touch of the macabre – he drives a hearse.’

  12

  Monday, 6 September

  The SDM crew had that Monday-morning feeling, so that when the foreman, Joe Beadle, lifted the manhole cover, the stench of the air they’d all soon be breathing made them choke. It was always bad like this in hot, dry weather. The storm-drain system, which took rainwater off the streets and out to sea, was almost empty, so anything down there that shouldn’t be down there had time to rot between the tides. And the rats moved in and out of the sewerage system, rivers of them, following some phantom piper.

  The crew’s job was storm-drain maintenance – SDM. They swept out the channels, checked the brickwork vaulting for cracks and settling, then cleared the gratings which stopped anything too big being brought into the system from the sea. There were twenty miles of storm sewers under Lynn, a lot of it medieval. So they had jobs for life, the three of them, and they never complained to anyone but each other, because the money was good and they spent
half their time drinking tea, or at the greasy spoon by the dock gates. And they set their own hours, because they had to work between the tides, which was why they were here now, at just after six.

  Trance, the kid they’d taken on a year earlier from Direct Labour, zipped up his overalls. It hadn’t taken them long to see where he’d got the nickname; he lived in a world of his own, behind glassy eyes, his lips often rippling with an internal conversation.

  But he was young – just seventeen – and they needed a gofer, and someone to send down the narrow vaults. Trance took one last look along the narrow street they were in, full of closed shops, and lowered himself athletically into the hole, searching with his boots for the metal rungs of the ladder. Then he jumped, and they heard a splash, but there was no bass note, nothing to indicate depth. Beadle clapped once. ‘Well done, kid.’ He turned to Freeman, who was black, but the life underground had robbed his skin of its sunny lustre so that he looked grey, like a dead fish. ‘You next.’

  Beadle, last down, pulled the cover closed and they were in the dark until the torches came on – and then they were in their world, and despite the stink, they felt better. Trance whistled, picking up rubbish with a grip on a stick, popping it in a black bin liner. They walked at a steady pace, Freeman searching the curved brick arch of the tunnel for signs of cracking, ticking boxes on a clipboard that hung from a lanyard on his belt. Beadle checked a map in a cellophane wallet. The tunnel they were in was Victorian and ran for nearly 400 yards parallel with the quay. Overhead they could feel the early rush-hour traffic, a visceral rumble which made their guts vibrate. A thin trickle of water ran at the centre of the channel, but the rest was dry, the bricks stained and bleached by the daily inundation of salty seawater.

  Beadle checked his watch: 6.04 a.m. They had two hours to get to the grating at the head of the Purfleet and back before the seawater came in, sluicing the drain. Then, they had a tunnel to check under the park, and then they could knock off, get a fry-up, be home by early afternoon.