Death's Door

by Jim Kelly

  Hadden’s eyes narrowed. Shaw saw it now, and the shock of recognition made his heart freeze for just one beat. This was the dangerous moment, and he recognized it as such: the moment when the thrill of other people’s deaths began to outshine the everyday joys of being alive.

  It was a kiss on the windowpane: quite clear, the patterned upper lip meeting the lower in a perfect bow. The rest of the window was spotless – inside and out, freshly cleaned. ‘It’s on the outside,’ said Hadden, and Shaw heard his voice as if from far away.

  TWO

  DS George Valentine sat on a bench in the middle of the green at the centre of The Circle. The dead woman’s house was silent in the heat. It was difficult to avoid the word lifeless. The village of Creake, two hundred yards distant, was a cluster of thatch, Norfolk stone and woodwork painted that precise shade of blue beloved of the Chelsea-on-Sea weekend-cottage set. A round Norfolk church tower was just visible between the acorn-brown foliage of a great oak tree. Somewhere in the far distance he could hear tennis balls being hit in rhythmic succession.

  There was nothing Chelsea-on-Sea about The Circle. West Ham-on-Sea, perhaps. A deflated football lay on the parched, kicked earth of the ‘green’, while a union flag hung from the open bedroom of No. 2. A few cars were parked in the cul-de-sac – but none of them were new except the two CSI vehicles, and none of them were 4x4s. The green, kicked dry and grassless, was dotted with unwanted possessions: a bicycle without a saddle, a water pistol, and a dog’s plastic bone.

  Valentine yawned, the effort making his jaw crack. He leant back and his neck clicked in sympathy. The green, he’d noticed, wasn’t just empty ground. A two-storey medieval ruin stood to one side: roofless, with narrow arrow-slit windows, a massive chimney stack, and some elegant herringbone stonework over an arched doorway. A small area outside the walls was enclosed by a rusted set of railings which ended with a ‘kissing-gate’ just opposite the Norman doorway. Valentine had seen an English Heritage information board, but not what it said. The most remarkable feature of the ruin was the cedar tree which had grown up within it, thirty-five foot high, spreading its dark green-layered branches out over the curtain walls. The Circle and the modern access road had clearly been constructed to avoid encroaching on this ancient monument. It was an odd place, but it didn’t excite the DS’s curiosity, because he wasn’t a curious man.

  He checked his watch, a Rolex he’d bought at Lynn’s Saturday market for a fiver. The gold lettering of the word Rolex had faded with suspicious speed. He’d watched Shaw walk into the dead woman’s house twenty-one minutes ago. Fed up with waiting in the Mazda, he’d dragged himself to the bench. Imagination wasn’t Valentine’s strong point but he was pretty much astonished his DI could spend that long deciding he was looking at a case of suicide.

  Valentine had been in the room. He’d spotted the glass and the pills, and he knew, like the CSIs, that she hadn’t died of an overdose of just three Nurofen. But unlike CSI he couldn’t be bothered to cover his bony plain-clothed arse just because a few of the details didn’t fit. She’d died of something, and she’d died by her own hand. Valentine guessed she’d done it in the bathroom – a handful of painkillers – then gone to bed. He’d been a copper for thirty years and that was the detail that still unsettled him – the way people go to bed to die, as if being comfy helps. The only thing missing was a letter. But George Valentine had an insight into quietly desperate lives, and he understood that all that probably meant was that she had no one to write to. All of which meant they were wasting their time.

  Shaw appeared from the side alley of No. 5, walking down the path, past the gate off its hinges and out on to the makeshift football pitch. His step was light, almost weightless, thought Valentine, as if he might begin to tread air, rising into the Norfolk sky. Shaw always wore a white shirt, crisp, open-necked, and Valentine suspected him of the worst vice of all – that he ironed it himself. In the flat, late-afternoon sun the shirt just seemed to drink in the light. Shaw was six foot one, slim, with blond hair and a beach tan. Up close the brand image was slightly undermined by the eyes: one was blue, that kind of washed-out blue that’s almost not a colour at all, like falling water, and the other was blind, a moon-eye, white, floating. His face, which his DS considered now with a kind of half-hearted disappointment, was wide with high cheekbones. Outgoing was what Shaw’s face was. George Valentine had always been aware that his face was ingoing: pinched, narrow, his small black eyes set deep, his narrow hatchet-like head appearing too heavy for his neck, so that it hung forward of his shoulders like a vulture’s. This was George Valentine’s self-image, but it was only one of the reasons he didn’t have a spring in his step.

  Shaw turned, filled his chest with warm air and stared at the dead woman’s house. ‘Tom’s right – something’s not right,’ he said.

  Valentine didn’t move a muscle.

  ‘She’s put her foot through the sheet; she’s clutched at the duvet. And the eyes . . .’ Shaw looked to the horizon as the distant tractor engine whined. Beside it, over the brow of the hill, stood a wind turbine eighty foot high, Shaw guessed, turning now so slowly you had to stop and watch it to see the movement at all. Batches of turbines had begun to appear on Norfolk’s north-facing hills, catching the Polar winds. ‘She hasn’t fallen asleep, she’s struggled violently,’ he said. ‘The pills and glass are wrong . . .’

  ‘She died alone,’ said Valentine, his furred-up voice hardening. His narrow, two-dimensional head seemed to flip from right side to left side with nothing in between. Shaw always thought that if he had to put Valentine’s head on canvas it would be a Picasso – all those bony, angular, asymmetrical lines, like a skull constructed from parts of a wrecked car.

  ‘Really, George. Why alone?’

  ‘Windows are all locked. Uniform had to force the door.’

  ‘Have you come across the notion of a key, George?’

  Valentine’s eyes went blank.

  ‘What do we know?’ asked Shaw. He had a light voice, as weightless as his step, surprisingly tuneful, suggesting an ability to hit a note first time.

  Valentine had a notebook open on the bench beside him, taking up the space where Shaw might have sat. He didn’t need to check it, but he certainly wasn’t going to move it.‘Marianne Osbourne. Thirty-four. Mother-of-one. Husband is Joe, owns a locksmiths in Wells – family business. Daughter’s Tilly, aged eighteen, still at school.

  Last person to see her mum alive that I can find was one of the neighbours – bloke with racing pigeons . . .’ Valentine nodded at No. 2. Down the side alley they could see the pigeonhole shed. ‘That was at eight this morning – at the front gate, shouting at the daughter. Apparently that was standard. The kid stormed off down the lane to the village.’

  Valentine felt a bead of sweat running down his back. He took a double lungful of air into shredded lungs, lifting his shoulders with the effort. He’d never been a talker, and he knew Shaw hated prattle, so he always kept it short – which was just as well, because with his lungs long sentences were getting harder to finish. ‘Kid from No. 3, Lewis, found the body. He’s seven. All the kids seem to run wild. He’s home alone, playing in the street, and he falls over and cuts his leg. So he goes to No. 6, a Mrs Robinson, a friend of the family. But she’s not there. She’s usually at home but she’s got a part-time job up at Well’s Lido, so the kid tried next door.’ He looked around The Circle, a pause which disguised a deep breath. ‘No answer at the front door. Dead woman works on the internet flogging stuff according to one of the other neighbours: cosmetics, toiletries. There’s a website and a company, which is in her maiden name by the way – Pritchard. She also works part-time down in Wells, at Kelly’s, as a beautician.’

  Kelly’s was the town’s funeral directors. Shaw tried to imagine that face, dripping with Pre-Raphaelite tragedy, bent over the dead, applying make-up. It was a striking thought, because she hadn’t bothered with it herself.

  ‘So the kid wanders round the back to see
if anyone’s in the garden,’ said Valentine. ‘Then sees the victim in bed.’

  ‘And that’s another thing that’s wrong . . .’ said Shaw. ‘You’d pull the curtains, wouldn’t you? You’d take the pills, go to bed . . . you don’t leave the curtains open.’

  Valentine shrugged. ‘The kid may be only seven, like I said, but even he knows what a stiff looks like. Eyes open, that colour. He goes and finds someone. They ring us.’

  Shaw detected a cynical, casual tone in his DS’s voice, the source of which was no mystery. DS Valentine had been up in front of a promotion panel the previous week. He’d expected to get back the rank of DI, the rank he’d lost more than fifteen years earlier after being accused of fabricating evidence in a murder inquiry. That stain had now been removed, thanks largely to Valentine’s doggedness in uncovering the truth. So he’d gone into the promotions panel expecting it to be a formality. He was so sure he’d be walking out a DI he’d had a couple of pints at the Artichoke as a pre-celebration celebration. The panel was a nightmare: no one likes being taken for granted, especially by a fifty-two-year-old DS slouched in the interview chair emitting the aroma of warm beer. Twenty years ago belligerent self-belief might have got him his DI badge back. Not any more.

  ‘Where’s the daughter? Husband?’ asked Shaw, wishing silently that Valentine would leave his raincoat at home. They were in the middle of the hottest summer for a decade but the DS still wore the grimy gabardine like a comfort blanket. Its only saving grace was the cluster of charity stickers on both lapels, evidence the DS couldn’t pass a street collection without putting a coin in the tin. At home Shaw had a family snapshot of George Valentine and his father leaving the Old Bailey in 1988 after a high-profile murder trail. DI Valentine, as he then was, had that same raincoat over one arm. The fact that Valentine had known Shaw’s father so well added a bitter taste to their relationship. It was an immutable fact of life that George Valentine knew his father better than Shaw ever would.

  ‘Hubby’s been told; he’s not a well man apparently, asthmatic, and he took it badly,’ said Valentine. ‘Had some kind of attack. He’s under sedation at the old cottage hospital in Wells. Not very coherent but the uniform who spoke to him said the wife’s got a history of depression – a couple of failed attempts with aspirin over the last five years. One bash with a kitchen knife, but only superficial. He did say the daughter should have been home with her mum ’coz she flunked her exams and they want her to resit. She’s doing media studies – God help us. Wants to be a campaigning journalist. Right the world’s wrongs. But she’s eighteen, so you know, she does what she likes and apparently she reckons she doesn’t need to revise again. She’s probably right. These days all you’ve got to do is turn up.’

  Valentine thrust his hands into his raincoat pockets and flapped the material against his narrow thighs. He didn’t really believe what he’d just said about exams, but a lot of the time he couldn’t stop himself sounding like someone else. ‘Kid could be anywhere, anywhere ’cept inside that house with her mum,’ he said. ‘Victim liaison’s getting a woman PC out to look round town; apparently Tilly is no stranger to the amusement arcade by the harbour, or The Ship for that matter. They do underage, always have, in the back room round the pool table.’

  Shaw nodded, stress making his shoulders bunch. All of which was local knowledge to Valentine, because after they’d busted him down to DS they’d sent him out to the backwater that was the North Norfolk coast. Wells-next-the-Sea, and the villages around it, had been George Valentine’s manor.

  Shaw looked at his watch. They needed to find the girl and wait for the pathologist’s report, then they’d know if there was anything suspicious about the death. But for the moment they didn’t really have time for this because they had a press conference at 4 p.m., down at Wells. The West Norfolk Constabulary had secured a £400,000 grant from the Home Office to use the latest forensic techniques to examine cold cases on its files: they’d reviewed eight then chosen one – a murder from 1994. The reopening of the case was guaranteed to get wide media coverage because it was based on using the latest DNA tracing techniques. West Norfolk’s new chief constable wanted a splash to mark the reopening of the file, to show that even sleepy backwoodsmen could match the country’s finest, and he wanted his whizz-kid DI Peter Shaw to front it up. They’d got half of Fleet Street up for the day and it was Shaw’s job to put on a good show.

  Which was why Shaw didn’t need this distraction. He hadn’t said it, just thought it, but he felt a surge of guilt, matching the word distraction with an image of the dead woman in her bed. Lena, his wife, had often warned him to watch out for the day that his natural scepticism rotted into cynicism. He always said it would never happen. He forced himself to conjure up an image of the dead woman’s room. ‘There was a kiss on the window. Outside,’ said Shaw.

  Valentine disguised his surprise by shaking out a fresh Silk Cut. He’d missed that, and the error brought back a familiar feeling that sometimes the world moved too quickly for him, and that it didn’t matter how hard he tried he’d never quite make the pace. But while the first blast of nicotine made his vision hazy and the smoke made his lungs buzz, the exhilaration was bliss. His brain made a series of connections in less time than it took to exhale.

  ‘My money’s on the daughter for the goodbye kiss,’ he said. ‘Big argument with Mum. She storms out. Perhaps that pushes Mum over the edge. Everyone’s life’s a mess from the inside. She takes the pills in the bathroom then goes to bed to die. Daughter comes back to say sorry, she’s got a key, lets herself in. Finds her mum. Perhaps she opened the curtains to let in the light. Then she runs off into the woods – that’s when she plants the kiss on the glass.’ Valentine looked around, noticing that the heat was making the image of the distant hill buckle.

  Shaw thought about the pine needles on the carpet in the bedroom, which he hadn’t mentioned to Valentine. Maybe that’s where she came from, out of the woods, creeping back home. He thought about his own daughter and felt a surge of anxiety, and the pit of his stomach felt empty.

  ‘Alright George – the daughter’s the priority. If she did see her mum she could do something stupid. So let’s find her. Tell Wells we’re concerned that she might harm herself. Let’s find her quick.’

  THREE

  The narrow hedge-lined lane flashed past in a double blur. Shaw had bought the Porsche 633 second-hand because of the narrow A-bar – the stanchion between the windscreen and the side window – which allowed wider vision to anyone with only one working eye. It was all part of living with the disability, developing skills, avoiding excuses. He’d lost his sight in a freak accident on the beach three years earlier, a canister of chemical waste washed up on the tide line, a kid playing with a stick, stirring the Day-Glo green goo seeping out of the rusted metal, then waving it in Shaw’s face. He didn’t want an artificial eye: he didn’t want to fool anyone, least of all himself, which was a decision which held a hidden, secret danger – one that he’d never shared with Lena. Keeping the blind eye meant that there was a risk the good eye would begin to deteriorate in sympathy – a not uncommon reaction which led most people to have damaged eyes removed. It meant that Shaw was vigilant for the slightest indication his remaining sight might be failing.

  They slowed, approaching a police checkpoint as they climbed a hill half a mile beyond the village green. The line of cars ahead was being directed into a side street. As they crept forward they caught sight of a row of cottages, one of them charred, the windows black rectangles, smoke still drifting from the beams of the roof. Two fire tenders stood on the cobbles, a single hose playing a mist over the facade of flint and brick. A West Norfolk gas van and support vehicle were parked in the street.

  At the roadblock a uniformed officer approached, saluting Shaw. ‘B road’s closed ahead, sir – gas explosion in the house, and it’s ruptured the gas main under the road.’

  Shaw recalled the dull percussion he’d mistaken for a gunshot when he’d been
standing in Marianne Osbourne’s bedroom. ‘Anyone hurt?’ he asked.

  The officer nodded. ‘Haven’t found the body yet but the old bloke who lived in the house is missing – floor’s ripped out, might never find him.’

  Shaw checked his watch. ‘Can we sneak past . . .’

  The PC shepherded the Porsche up on the pavement and round the cracked road surface, which was slightly buckled, as if disturbed by a giant mole. Just beyond was another row of cottages, all with broken windows, two women on one of the doorsteps, clutching elbows.

  ‘Hell of a bang,’ said Valentine. ‘Poor bastard’s probably still in orbit.’

  The Porsche effortlessly scaled a straight incline to the final brow of Docking Hill and the open high grassland which hugged the coast. To the right a security fence ran beside the road, mowed meadow on the far side, and in the distance three giant wind turbines, turning slowly, one of which had been visible from The Circle. Along the perimeter fence, by the gates, a crowd of demonstrators stood, spilling into the road, slowing the traffic to a crawl. Beyond, on the open downland, was a small group of tents. Shaw had passed the spot several times that summer and noted what a disparate group they were: belligerent pensioners, middle-aged bird watchers with their binoculars and Alpine walking sticks, teenagers out of school and college for the summer, a few more seasoned campaigners, and the odd ‘usual suspect’ he recognized from the magistrates courts in Lynn, plus a couple of activists from the local animal rights movement.

  What did unite them were the placards they held – each one off a production line, each one carrying the same slogan:

  Save Our Unspoilt Landscape.

  SOUL

  Valentine had the passenger window down as they inched past. ‘Nutters,’ he said. He was still annoyed Shaw had pulled rank and insisted they go in the Porsche. He’d have preferred twenty minutes on his own.