Death's Door

by Jim Kelly

  Shaw clasped both hands on top of his head, bracing the muscles in his neck and back. ‘Yeah. Maybe. Maybe not.’ That was one of the most annoying things about George Valentine. He could imagine a crime, then set out to find the evidence which went with it. And ignore the evidence that didn’t go with it.

  ‘Why go to the beach armed with a knife?’ asked Shaw.

  Valentine watched an arrowhead of geese heading towards the coast.

  Shaw rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. ‘Unless . . . Maybe this isn’t the first time. What if Shane White already had his pictures, but this time he wanted the money? Don’t forget the burglary at his flat. That suggests he’d demanded his money, and that someone knew he had the pictures. So the killer takes the knife to help make the point that White’s not getting his money. Then, like you said, George, we can all do the dots.’

  They heard heavy footsteps: cork shoes striding down the path from the dead woman’s house. Dr Justina Kazimeirz, the forces resident pathologist, her white SOC suit fluorescent in the dusk. She’d been on the force nearly a decade after moving to the UK from Poland. She had a reputation for brusqueness bordering on outright rudeness, not helped by the occasional lack of fluency in English.

  ‘Peter,’ she said, handing Shaw a small forensic evidence bag.

  Inside was what looked like an aniseed ball. Slightly larger, perhaps. It was broken open like a tiny egg, weathered – the rubber having perished so that it was marked with a patina of cracks, like the surface of Mars.

  ‘Is this what killed her?’

  ‘I think so – the body has only just gone. Tomorrow – ask me tomorrow, for sure. But I guess yes. Lodged in her back teeth – here.’ She pushed her own lip up to reveal the upper left-side molars.

  ‘One?’

  ‘Enough, Peter. From the smell there is no doubt.’ She took the bag, unzipped the seal, and held it up to Shaw’s nose. Almonds. The detail he should have lingered over when he first stepped into Marianne Osbourne’s room.

  ‘Cyanide,’ she said, without any note of distaste. ‘Tom said the tap in the bathroom was dribbling, so I think this woman took one, then she runs to the bed. The poison works fast.’

  Valentine stood, lighting a cigarette, trying to relax, sensing one of those rare moments when a crime becomes distinctive, unclassifiable. It was one of the moments that made his life worth living.

  ‘I still don’t understand,’ said Shaw.

  ‘A suicide pill,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen such a thing before – a military museum, Crakow. The rubberized exterior is to protect, so it cannot be accident to break it open. They were hidden – sewn into a sock, a lapel.’ She thought about what to say next, struggling with the subtleties of the language. ‘A comfort for these men, that death was at hand.’

  ‘Fatal?’

  ‘Without doubt.’

  ‘Age?’

  She held it up to the street light. ‘Twenty years, more – maybe much more. But this is not my job – Tom, maybe.’ She gave Valentine the bag. ‘Someone will know.’

  Shaw rang the CID suite at St James’ and got hold of one of his team – DC Fiona Campbell. Her father was a DCI at Norwich, so she was a copper from a copper’s family, just like Shaw. She’d been with him for two years and she was smart, efficient and steeped in the traditions of streetwise policing. Shaw told her to spend an hour tracking down military/intelligence suicide capsules: where could you buy one? He suspected they’d end up looking at the former Soviet block so he advised a quick preparatory call to Interpol. Also to try the MoD in Whitehall to see what the position was with the British Military. Home Office too, MI6 and MI5.

  Then they stood in silence, together, until the church in the village struck the hour, a slight echo coming back off the hills.

  ‘She killed herself, Peter,’ said Valentine. ‘Just ’coz it’s simple doesn’t mean it is isn’t the truth.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Shaw.

  Valentine rearranged his feet. ‘The letter we sent her made it clear we’d interview everyone, DNA test all the men. So she thinks we’ll get to the killer – she knows we’ll get to the killer. Maybe she thinks he’ll drop her in it. She’s an accomplice.’ He rubbed the back of his neck where the muscles ached. ‘She knows she’ll be facing questions. Not just a statement this time. She lied first time round. This time she’d have to tell the truth. An ordeal. We know she’s depressed – she’s attempted suicide twice, for all we know loads of times – perhaps this was the trigger. This time it’s not a cry for help. It’s goodbye.’

  Shaw didn’t look convinced. ‘So she pops into the bathroom and opens the cabinet to find that handy cyanide pill she’d set aside for such occasions?’ He wondered what Lena would make of this conversation with its cold edge of cynicism, the emotional distance.

  ‘And she wasn’t alone when she died,’ added Shaw. ‘I think the killer was with her. We get a DNA match from the mass screening and we’ve got a good case, but it’s not watertight, is it, George? A good defence lawyer might get under our skin, suggest to the jury that we’d contaminated the sample. At that point Marianne’s evidence would have been crucial. She’d be the key witness.’

  Shaw forced himself to lock eyes with his DS. ‘So the killer’s worried. He talks to Marianne. Coaches her. But she can’t go through with it. She’s haunted by the truth. She’s a pretty fragile human being. She’d tried to kill herself before, like you said. Painkillers, blunt kitchen knives. This time there’s someone there to offer her an easier way. Death in seconds. And that suits the killer just fine, because we can’t put a dead woman on the stand. It’s a painful, excruciating death. But maybe he didn’t mention that.’

  FIVE

  Jackie Lau was on the doorstep of Marianne Osbourne’s house: four foot nine of pretty belligerent detective constable, in a new leather driving jacket and wrap-around reflective glasses. Lau was ethnic Chinese, ran fast rallycross cars for a hobby largely, it was said, to get closer to the men who liked speed as much as she did. The other thing she was interested in was being the force’s first female plain-clothed DI. There wasn’t much she’d let get in her way. Being on Shaw’s team was a good place to start.

  She took off the glasses. Her face was broad, faceted, like beaten metal. ‘Sir. Dead woman’s husband is in the front room. He’s on the whisky – but not bad. Daughter’s still missing. He’s worried, desperate, really. She’s never been missing this long before. I’ve checked her room. Usual teenage stuff, plus some politics: Far Left, Greenpeace, Save the Whale. Packet of condoms in the bedside cupboard but Dad says she hasn’t got a boyfriend. No . . .’ She stopped herself. ‘He says she’s never had a boyfriend.’

  Shaw wondered if he’d know as much as Joe Osbourne about his own daughter when she was a teenager. He and Fran were close now, there was a real bond, but would it survive the turbulence of adolescence? If he ever got to make the father’s speech on her wedding day would he, too, be talking about a stranger?

  ‘She’s resitting exams, right?’ he asked, trying to focus, aware he was dangerously tired. But he wanted the detail, and wanted to know if DC Lau had asked.

  Her face tightened, the skin like a drum. ‘A-levels – media studies, French and music. School says she was on course for straight As – fluffed it. Maybe nerves. She plays guitar.’ She looked Shaw straight in his good eye. ‘Classical Spanish. Her Dad plays too.’

  ‘Classical?’

  ‘Nope. Acoustic.’

  They shared a smile, even here, on death’s doorstep.

  ‘He’s older than the wife,’ Lau added quickly. ‘Thirty-five. She was a year younger. He’s sole owner of the business in Wells – key cutting, locksmith, that kind of thing. Father’s business before him. Gets about on an old motorbike – BSA Bantam. I get the impression there’s not much money about. The door-to-doors haven’t altered the estimated time of death. That still has to be between nine a.m. – when hubby left for work – and one forty-five p.m. when the kid saw her thr
ough the bedroom window and raised the alarm.’

  A blare of static came from a police radio in one of the parked squad cars.

  ‘One other thing,’ said Lau, catching Valentine’s eye, indicating that this was new. She checked her notebook, but Shaw guessed it was a theatrical gesture, designed to make them both wait for the detail. ‘I got control to run Osbourne’s name through the files online. Two years ago he was picked up in the red light district in Lynn trading slaps with one of the hookers. Punch up over the price, apparently. Just push and shove, really, so the PC on the beat took a note of the names – no action, but cautions all round.’

  Shaw thought about that Pre-Raphaelite face, the mask of tragedy, and the body he hadn’t seen below the duvet.

  ‘Well done,’ said Shaw. But he was an honest enough copper to realize the information would now fatally colour his judgement when he met Joe Osbourne. It might have been best to find out afterwards. He wasn’t there to judge; he was there to enforce the law. All this told them was that if Joe Osbourne tried to tell them he had a perfect marriage they’d know he wasn’t telling the whole truth. Nothing more. His father’s maxim was a good one, even if it took a definite control of willpower to put into practice: never judge a marriage from the outside. After all, who would ever know what hatred, or love, had existed between Joe and Marianne Osbourne.

  Osbourne was in the front room, bent forward in a wooden chair, elbows on the narrow arms, his head cradled in his hands. Lanky, slight, muscled; Shaw got the impression his body was folded into the chair, ready to spring out. For a man sat motionless in a seat he radiated a remarkable physicality, a latent energy. But he was also a living embodiment of the difference between fit and well. His skin was oddly lined, as if the wrinkles of his face had fallen in the wrong places, and his complexion matched the fat on dead meat. His eyes – a light grey – were lively enough, but the whites were bloodshot. Shaw had no doubt he could move like a thirty-year-old, but he looked a generation older.

  Behind him against the wall stood two acoustic guitars, one battered, one almost new.

  ‘Mr Osbourne?’ said Shaw, sitting opposite, waiting for the head to come up. ‘We’re sorry for your loss, sir,’ he added, immediately regretting how little emotion he’d put in the sentence.

  He coughed, ploughed on: ‘Your daughter, Mr Osbourne. We can’t find her. We’re concerned. One of the neighbours said she had an argument with your wife this morning. Was that common?’ Shaw checked a note. ‘She’d be just eighteen, I think?’

  Osbourne’s eyes were grey and flooded, an echo of the North Sea in winter. ‘They clashed,’ he said. ‘She didn’t understand Tilly.’ He gave a small shrug, which Shaw guessed hid the unspoken addition ‘And neither do I.’ Osbourne looked round the room as if searching for more words. ‘They weren’t close.’

  It was such an extraordinary thing to say about a mother and child that Shaw sat back, and he noticed Valentine, standing, edged back as well, as if they’d both decided to give him the time to carry on.

  Osbourne began to cry, but the tears fell only from his left eye. ‘She wants a life of her own,’ he said. ‘To escape.’ He coughed once, which triggered a series, until he retrieved an inhaler from his pocket and took three breaths.

  Shaw felt what he’d first felt standing by Marianne Osbourne’s bed: a sadness that seemed to permeate the house, seeping into each of the rooms, as if fingers of misery ran through the home, like strands of dry rot. He took an empty glass from Osbourne’s hand, locked eyes with him.

  ‘Any ideas where she might be, sir?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘It’s possible she saw your wife’s body on the bed through the window,’ said Shaw. ‘A kiss was left on the glass. It may be hers. So you see, we really do need to find her quickly in case she hurts herself or does something stupid . . .’

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Osbourne. He let his hands open and clench and Shaw saw he’d been holding a snapshot. The picture was of the two of them on a beach, Marianne in a bikini, him in trunks – trendy Speedos – his legs painfully thin, his taut frame strung with muscle and tendon. They looked like kids. They were kids. Shaw took the snapshot, flipped it over and read: Cromer. July 1994.

  ‘We’d asked Marianne to come to the police station tomorrow to be re-interviewed about the murder on East Hills in August 1994. Do you think that might have had something to do with her death, Mr Osbourne?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘She never swam after East Hills,’ said Osbourne. The voice was light, matching the slender hands. Shaw imagined the fingers manipulating the cogs of a lock. ‘I was working that day, the day of the murder; otherwise I’d have been there too,’ he said.

  ‘Your father’s shop – the locksmith’s?’

  ‘She went with a girlfriend,’ he said. Shaw and Valentine exchanged a glance, noting that Marianne had kept the precise truth from her husband: that she’d gone to East Hills alone, or at least without the friend she’d agreed to meet. Sometimes they had this ability, Shaw and Valentine, to know they were thinking the same thing. Did Marianne’s lie mean they were right? That she’d gone out to East Hills to meet a secret lover?

  ‘It really shook her up,’ said Osbourne. ‘Seeing the body – I suppose they all were. She’d have nightmares sometimes – always the same. She’d be swimming out and she’d get entangled in the body, in the arms and legs and she’d run out, covered in blood.’ He covered his mouth. ‘It was the blood – the sight of it. She wasn’t squeamish. But he bled to death. And she said you wouldn’t believe it – the amount of blood in the water, like a cloud, all along the beach. Like there were hundreds dead, or dying. She said one of the men on the beach said his father had been in Normandy for D-Day – on the beaches – and that the sea was red there too, for miles. It was like the colour was in her head, for ever.’

  He coughed again, trying to limit it to one, but failing, so that he needed a second dose from the inhaler.

  ‘She never said anything else about that day? Perhaps she met another friend out on the beach by chance? Did she have lots of friends?’

  ‘She was popular,’ said Osbourne, his voice flat, atonal.

  ‘You were going out by then . . .’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘So no other men?’

  ‘We were an item,’ said Osbourne, wiping tears from his face with the back of his hand, but there’d been a hint of bitterness in his voice.

  Shaw decided then that they’d come back and interview him when he wasn’t still in shock.

  Osbourne looked around the room, and Shaw sensed a kind of tedious hatred for what he saw. ‘It’s why we’re here, in this house, in this fucking house,’ said Osbourne. He spat the word out, as if his wife’s death gave him a sudden freedom.

  ‘Why?’ prompted Valentine.

  ‘After East Hills she couldn’t live by the sea. She couldn’t wait to get out of Wells. Ruth – that’s her sister – lives next door, has done since she was married, so when this one came on the market we pitched in. I’d have stayed . . .’ He shrugged, as if he’d been happy to give up the sea. ‘But prices were soft so we got it.’

  ‘They must be close – the sisters?’ asked Valentine, thinking it was a kind of nightmare for him, the thought of relatives next door.

  ‘Ruth’s always been there for Marianne,’ he said. ‘And Tilly.’ Shaw considered the testimonial. In his experience people who were ‘always there’ for others got their satisfaction in life from not being somewhere else.

  Robinson was up out of the chair, the spring uncoiled. He walked quickly to the makeshift bookcase and took a bottle out of a gap between two encyclopaedias, refilling his glass, his hands shaking rhythmically but slowly.

  ‘For the record, sir,’ said Valentine. ‘Today you were at the shop again, all day?’

  He turned back to them. ‘Yes. I closed for lunch, but I was out the back in the workshop.’

  ‘And your wife worked at home?’

  Osbourne n
odded, but his jaw was straightening. ‘No. She was due in at Kelly’s – the funeral directors down in Wells. It’s a part-time job but we need the money. She got up, had a bath, got dressed. Then, after Tilly went, she got back into bed. Said she couldn’t – not today. You know . . . she suffered.’ He drank, then added: ‘Low mood,’ making it clear he knew it was a euphemism.

  He let the words hang there. ‘So I made the call for her – told ’em she was ill. That’s where I left her . . . in bed, about nine.’

  Shaw watched Osbourne sip the whisky. Each mouthful was substantial and he didn’t gag. Shaw got the impression he was in it for the long run, and that he’d been down the road before.

  Osbourne filled his narrow chest with air, squaring the fragile shoulders. ‘How did she do it?’ he asked. ‘This time.’ He sat, rocking slightly in his chair, and Shaw thought how tiring it would be to live with his bristling energy, the lack of peace.

  ‘We’re pretty certain that she swallowed poison, a cyanide capsule. A suicide pill. Have you any idea where she could have got such a thing?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ But he did, Shaw could see, it was just that he didn’t have an answer.

  ‘And we believe that she may not have been alone when she died,’ added Shaw. ‘Have you any idea who might have been with her, Mr Osbourne?’

  ‘Not alone?’ Osbourne stood, as if he’d suddenly found the strength to be upright. He put the whisky glass down with exaggerated care. It was as if he hadn’t heard the question. ‘Can I see her – Marianne? I should.’ His voice was rising, taking on a note of panic. ‘I want to see her.’ His head, which was small and compact, seemed to shake at a very high frequency.

  Before Shaw could answer they heard voices in the front garden – women’s voices – and then the door opened and slammed and they heard heavy footsteps in the hall, and a teenage girl appeared in the doorway. Her face was already disfigured by shock – the mouth hung open, the micro-muscles beneath the skin malfunctioning, so that her face seemed to shimmer and distort. But even in distress Shaw could see the resemblance to the dead woman: the colouring, although the hair was dyed a more striking red, and the fine bone structure, which seemed to stretch translucent skin.