Death's Door

by Jim Kelly

  ‘Right,’ said Shaw. ‘First, we need an incident room we can breathe in.’

  He led the way fifty yards over the green to the English Heritage ruin. The information board announced:

  WARRENER’S LODGE

  This twelfth century building is now unique in Britain – the only surviving example of a warrener’s lodge. The Romans brought rabbits to England, but it was not until the Norman’s organized artificial warrens that they were farmed. This lodge was home to an official appointed by the Cluniac Monastery at Thetford; the first recorded holder of the office was Roger de Lacy in 1176. He would have spent time here, but more probably appointed under-warreners to oversee his livestock. The warrener dug tunnels, often lined with brick or stone, for the rabbits, fed them in winter, and provided cover in snow by cutting timber and gorse. Rabbits were valued for their sweet flesh, especially in winter, and their fur. The lodge has arrow-slit windows and high walls because bands of poachers, especially in times of famine, would ‘walk the night’, often attacking warreners and their officials in a desperate attempt to feed themselves and their families. Some estates kept warreners into the 1950s. But the popularity of rabbit as food fell, largely due to their enforced inclusion in diets during the war, and the terrible scourge of myxymitosi, a disease introduced to reduce rabbit populations. Originally the lodge would have stood on a wide downland, dominating the landscape and providing visual confirmation that this was the lord’s property.

  A metal sign hung on the kissing-gate, saying, simply: ENTRY FREE.

  Shaw went in, through the overgrown plot and then under the arch, and Valentine and Twine followed. They stood together, looking up at tiny patches of purple-blue sky, seen through the branches of the cedar. Twine stopped at the door, examining the intricate stone-carved lintel. The air was deliciously cool, the heat kept back by the three-foot wide stonewalls and the multiple layered roofs provided by the cedar. It was a stone larder.

  Shaw walked to what was left of a staircase and climbed three steps to touch a metal grill which barred the way up. He turned on the step and surveyed the interior of the lodge. The grass had been recently cut so the space was neat, contained, in deep shadow. ‘This’ll do us,’ he said. ‘Paul, ring St James’ – we just need to run the mobile unit to the gate, then a cable in for the computers and the kettle. We can’t work in that sauna. Drag the desks and chairs in. OK, let’s jump to it.’

  DC Campbell appeared at the Norman archway. ‘Sir. Tom’s up at the house – he’s ready to let the team go. Wants a word first – just routine. Nothing spectacular.’ She thought about that, anxious to make clear that she hadn’t made the judgement. ‘His words,’ she added.

  ‘I’m on my way,’ said Shaw. ‘And Fiona, can you pop into the sister’s house? I need to speak to the husband, Aidan Robinson.’ Shaw checked his watch. ‘I’ll be with him in half an hour. Fix it, please.’

  Shaw checked dispositions with Twine: the team could knock off, back on site at six thirty Monday. In the meantime everyone was on call. Shaw would get any news from the lab via Tom Hadden. They’d have Chris Roundhay’s result first, probably within twenty-four hours. If it was positive then they’d have to call everyone into St James’ for a briefing; pick up Roundhay, get him charged – maybe a holding count, not murder. But Shaw said he thought that was a long shot. He thought Roundhay had told the truth. If the result on Roundhay was negative they’d wait for the full mass screening report, which would probably land Monday morning. Any earlier Shaw would contact Twine, then they’d work out the next move.

  Valentine watched his superior officer walk away towards the victim’s house. Apparently, Valentine had been dismissed too – just another part of the team. He had a grudging admiration for Shaw’s abilities as a copper, but he thought now, and not for the first time, that a quick booster module in man management wouldn’t be a total waste of time. He was as keen to know what Tom Hadden had to say as Shaw was, and as the unit’s lynchpin DS it would have been pretty efficient for him to be included in the briefing. Besides, he was reluctant to face the rest of the weekend alone. He enjoyed his own company, but only by choice.

  Shaw found Hadden in Marianne Osbourne’s bedroom. With the body gone the room had lost its tension. It was like a room in a museum, thought Shaw. English interiors: 1970–2000. Again Shaw was struck by the innate sadness of the house, especially this room. Perhaps, he thought, it was the view that did it: the distant sunflowers, their faces closed now, the pine woods, dark and still. All that beauty, and freedom, outside, but the windows painted shut. ‘Are all the windows stuck shut?’ he asked, fighting the urge to walk over and force the frame.

  ‘Yeah. She had hay fever, allergies. Husband says that’s how she dealt with it. Wouldn’t have worked, but there you are. We’re all creatures of habit.’ Hadden had fled London and a career at the Home Office to escape a messy failed marriage. He had a capacity to forgive the faults of others.

  ‘Did she have a desk anywhere?’ asked Shaw. Hadden was on his knees, lifting fibres from the carpet.

  ‘Dressing table doubled-up. We’re running through the computer memory now down at The Ark. Fiona’s given us some keyword targets to track on the cyanide but there’s nothing yet. And we’ve done the obvious,’ he added.

  ‘And?’ asked Shaw, letting his eye roll quickly over the empty bed, stripped down to the mattress.

  ‘Nothing yet. We’ve collected emails off the East Hills survivors as they came through the Ark – work, home, the lot. No matches with anything on her hard drive or in her email account. Most of the traffic is with a mail-order cosmetics company in Lincoln.’

  ‘Fingerprints?’

  Hadden sat back on his haunches. He closed his eyes – a tic – which indicated he was thinking carefully about the reply. ‘Family mostly – a few we can’t identify but we’re still on to the daughter’s friends. She’s next door by the way with the aunt – dad went to work this morning, slept all afternoon.’

  ‘Work?’

  ‘That’s how it takes some people, Peter. He’ll probably carry on for a month, a year, even two. Then one day he’ll wake up and he won’t know how to tie his laces up. Then he’ll find himself sitting on the beach, but he won’t remember how he got there. Then he’ll fall to pieces. Doesn’t mean he’s a hard bastard, or that he didn’t love her.’

  It was quite a speech, the longest he’d ever heard from Tom Hadden.

  Shaw thought about the locked-up locksmiths shop in Wells. When they’d driven past it didn’t look like the dust had been disturbed for a week, let alone a few hours. If he hadn’t gone to work, where had he gone?

  ‘On the kiss, by the way,’ said Hadden. ‘I couldn’t get any material out of the moisture left on the glass. So no chance of a DNA profile. But, for what it’s worth, I’d say we’re looking at a man’s lips. Adult. Height – if he didn’t bend down, or stand on tiptoe – somewhere between five nine and six foot.’

  They walked back out into the evening air, Hadden carrying a cardboard box of files and papers. He put it down on the low front wall. ‘This was on the floor behind the dressing table.’ The CSI man pulled out a manila A4 folder marked: EXAMS. Inside were random certificates: GCSEs, a diploma awarded by Avon for a course on cosmetic science, registration forms for her work at the funeral parlour, an application form – untouched – for a residential course on skin care. Shaw put the file back and picked out another marked CV. With the documents and newspaper cuttings was a plastic see-through holder with a DVD inside marked SHOOTS.

  ‘Show time,’ said Shaw.

  Twine already had a desk in the Warrener’s Lodge, a laptop working on battery. The rest of the team had gone – all except Valentine, who was inputting the team’s mobile numbers to his own phone. Shaw gave Twine the DVD to fire up, while he flicked through the newspaper cuttings in Osbourne’s CV. Most were local – a couple from advertising free sheets with adverts ringed in lipstick. One was for kitchen units and he recognized Marianne Osbou
rne poised expertly, one hand caressing a fake-marble work surface. There was one shot from a national newspaper – The Mirror, 1995, just six months after the East Hills killing: Marianne Osbourne, in a bikini, lying down, propped up on one elbow, a miniature chocolate car in her hand, held towards the camera. The story said one of the big Japanese car makers had got Cadbury’s to make replicas of their forthcoming four-by-four to send out to garages as a publicity stunt.

  The caption read: ‘Two new models: curvy Marianne Pritchard, eighteen, test drives the tastiest new car on the road.’

  ‘Lied about her age,’ said Shaw, passing the cutting to Twine.

  The DVD flickered into life on the laptop showing the featureless white contours of a photographer’s studio.

  ‘Alright sweetheart,’ said a voice off-camera.

  Valentine stood, his backbone creaking, and came over to the screen to stand beside Shaw.

  Marianne Osbourne walked into the shot, turned, and looked back at the camera. Shaw guessed the stills camera was set next to the video. Her face was extraordinarily blank. Her arms were held awkwardly, her bare feet slightly pigeon-toed, and she looked – maybe – eighteen. Still holding the camera’s eye she slipped the bikini top off, revealing small breasts, but no variation in her lightly tanned skin.

  ‘No, no, kid.’ A laugh, slightly furred by age or nicotine. ‘Keep your kit on.’

  As she fumbled with the strap they heard the voice, but a whisper this time: ‘Jesus.’

  The photographer came into shot – middle-aged, pepper-and-salt hair, avuncular. He arranged Marianne lying down, in the pose Shaw had seen in The Mirror. Then he produced a box of the chocolate cars and set them in a line, beginning at her foot, up the narrow leg, over the very slight bulge of the hip, then up an arm to end at the shoulder, which she tucked under her chin.

  Alone in the shot, Marianne spoke for the first time. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Tell you what, darling?’

  ‘When you’re taking a shot.’

  The blank face stared into the lens.

  ‘Alright, here we go.’ They heard the whirr of a camera taking multiple shots.

  Marianne’s face was transformed. The chin dropped, the eyes looked up, the body tightened slightly so that the skin seemed to attain a sudden surface tension. Then the smile, a hint at first in the eyes, then breaking the lips apart to reveal the small, white, perfect teeth.

  ‘There ya go,’ said the voice, genuine now, excited.

  And then the smile opened, like an orchid in time-lapse photography: a full hundred-watt transmission of what looked like joy.

  The photographer came into shot, on his knees, his upper body swinging from left to right as he took his pictures. He got close, and Marianne didn’t register the intrusion into her personal space, just kept the smile tracking the lens. He gave her one of the chocolate cars and she opened her mouth, holding the fragile carapace of the model between her teeth, giggling, then crunching down so that a crumb or two of chocolate fell on her chin and she had to use a finger to push them back between her lips.

  The photographer leant back on his haunches, still on his knees, laughing too.

  ‘Right – some black and whites next. Alright?’

  He’d turned away before she answered, clipping a lens cap over his camera, otherwise he would have seen the smile leave her face, falling away like a mask.

  ELEVEN

  ‘Right here?’ asked Shaw, standing in the deep, cool shadow of the edge of the pinewood above The Circle. The field of sunflowers was in gloom, the heads closed now for the night. Below them they could see lights in the Warrener’s House, and spilling from the mobile incident room. Evening noises rose up gently – a radio, a chip pan, a swing creaking. In the Robinsons’ back garden – next to Marianne’s – chickens gossiped, unsettled. The run took up most of the space between the house and the open ground that led to the woods – all, in fact, except for a large woodpile.

  Aidan Robinson stood beside him in the shadows, looking down on his house. Even in the half-light it was impossible to ignore his huge hands which hung at his sides, like weapons.

  ‘Yes. Right here, or close. I was down by the back door so he was a way off, but yes. It looked like he was looking at us, but now, now I think, it could have been the back of Joe’s he was watching – their bedroom.’

  Shaw could just see the bedroom window behind which Marianne Osbourne had died, a flash of silver, reflecting a ribbon of red sky. Aidan Robinson had seen the stranger, a rare sight on The Circle, on the Wednesday afternoon at about twelve fifteen – it had to be then, because he’d been doing a long shift at the poultry farm and he always took lunch at noon and it was only five minutes away by car. ‘I need the break,’ he said. ‘I’m inside all day.’ There was something understated about that description which made it sound, to Shaw, like hell. The noise, the heat, the smell. And no glimpse of the sky.

  Shaw walked to the precise spot Robinson had indicated and looked down. He was trying to draw out the moment because he wanted the witness to relive what he’d seen, just in case there was a detail buried in his memory. All they had was a crude outline: a man, possibly fair hair, stood still, then retreating into the wood after two or three minutes. Really? Shaw had pressed him on that point. Did he mean he’d stood still for two or three minutes? Because that’s a very rare thing – to be still. But Aidan Robinson was sure, and even in the few moments he’d been talking to him Shaw could see that this man knew more than enough about stillness. He wondered if he’d learnt the skill: fly-fishing, perhaps, or poaching in the woods, or standing watching the sky with a shotgun broken over his arm. He didn’t think it was a quality you’d pick up in a battery farm.

  ‘So, just a figure?’ asked Shaw.

  The technique required to bring a memory alive had been a key skill Shaw had learnt at Quantico with the FBI, because getting witnesses to remember faces was a subtle, even fragile, thing. Memory recall was not a linear, absolute, process but rather piecemeal, flashes illuminating lost fragments which could be retrieved, then reassembled.

  ‘A man,’ said Robinson, stepping out of the shadows so that the last of the day’s light lit his face. ‘Sturdy.’ He shook his head, looking about, embarrassed. ‘That’s it. Sorry.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ said Shaw. And it was, because Robinson had already added to the picture he’d given with the word ‘sturdy’. If Shaw took it gently he might recall more.

  Robinson shifted from his right boot, to his left, and back again. As they’d climbed the hill Shaw had noticed the lameness in his right leg, the foot seemed to hang from the right ankle, as if broken. He was broad, an agricultural frame, heavy and powerful, so that it was easy to underestimate his height, which had to be six-one or two. When he walked the injured leg made his shoulders rock from side to side, like a human pendulum. His face was wind-tanned; his hair brown without a trace of grey, but it was the eyes which held a surprise – a shade of grey that suggested silver, unnaturally light.

  ‘And you were down there?’ asked Shaw.

  They both glanced at the Robinson’s back garden a hundred foot below them. Up by the kitchen door, beyond the chicken run, they could see Ruth, sat at a picnic table with Tilly. They had their arms around each other and in front of them a candle flickered in a glass cylinder, growing brighter as the day died around them.

  ‘Yeah. And he was up here. That’s what was odd. I just watched, thinking he’d move on.’

  ‘Do you think he saw you?’

  ‘Doubt it. Like I said, I was down by the back door. Ruth brings a paper home if she’s up at the lido in the morning and it was stifling indoors, so I got the kitchen chair out, but right on the hardstanding, in the shadows.’

  ‘Definitely a man?’ repeated Shaw.

  ‘Sure,’ said Robinson, but he didn’t sound it.

  ‘Fair?’

  Those oddly colourless eyes focused on the mid-distance. ‘Like I said, maybe.’

  The heat of the
day was flooding out into the sky but there was no wind here, in the lee of the hill. Shaw didn’t like the sound of the ‘maybe’ – suddenly they were going backwards, losing the memory.

  ‘Did Ruth see him?’

  ‘Yeah. I told her, and she glanced up the hill. But she was busy in the kitchen so she saw less than I did.’

  Shaw changed tack. ‘And then he took a path?’

  Robinson nodded, but seemed reluctant to enter the woods. He looked down at his wife, comforting his niece. ‘They’ve always been good together,’ he said. As they watched, Ruth Robinson lit a second candle lantern, embracing Tilly. She drew a cork from a bottle and they heard the pop a second later.

  ‘Where’s Joe?’ asked Shaw, not to get an answer, but to make the point that he wasn’t there, below, with his daughter.

  ‘Asleep on our couch. We’ll wake him later, for food. He needs to eat. He doesn’t want to go home.’

  Shaw wondered what Aidan Robinson had done with his memory of the summer of 1994. The time he’d spent with Marianne Osbourne as her secret lover. Perhaps he’d locked that image away, so that he could get on with the rest of his life. How else could he have lived here – a single course of bricks between his own bed and Marianne’s? How had he lived with that memory, lying next to her sister Ruth?

  Robinson didn’t say another word until he’d led Shaw deep into the woods, perhaps a quarter of a mile, up towards the crest of the hill. He hadn’t asked to go this far and so Shaw wondered if Robinson was buying time. Despite the gathering dusk Shaw didn’t rush, negotiating the half-light as well as his single eye would allow. One of the unexpected repercussions of losing his eye had been the loss of light due to the ‘shadow’ cast by the nose on the one remaining eye – as if a screen hung to his right. And not just light. One eye left him with ten to fifteen per cent less peripheral vision. So he took his time, one hand raised constantly to ward off any stray branches on his sighted side. Losing his good eye in another freak accident would be a disaster which would pretty clearly end his career. He’d had to sit a series of medical boards to stay on active duty, even now, after the first accident.