Death's Door

by Jim Kelly

  It was time. Shaw walked towards the lights. Passing car headlamps flashed through the iron railings like a stroboscope; making the tumbled field of gravestones shimmer like the crowd at a pop concert. Shaw half expected to see hands raised aloft, clapping to an unheard beat. By the time he reached the CSI van the team had got a tent up over the grave. Justina Kazimierz stood in a forensic suit looking at the distant spire, black against the street light-stained sky. She seemed to be whispering to herself, and Shaw wondered if she was praying. Tom Hadden stood by Shaw’s Porsche, a file of papers spilt across the bonnet.

  Doors creaked on a squad car and Valentine appeared with Chris Roundhay.

  The thin fair hair was damp and untidy across the wide forehead. Shaw was struck again by the way the lantern jaw unbalanced the face, an unsettling contrast to the blue eyes.

  ‘What is this?’ said Roundhay, looking around. He looked tense, the shoulders bunched, but as each car’s lights flickered by he could see that his skin was dry, his expression mildly inquisitive. ‘What do I tell my wife?’ demanded Roundhay. ‘My family. I’ve left them all – we were having dinner, for Christ’s sake.’

  Shaw checked his watch, but his hand moved so slowly to turn the face that he managed to convey the truth – that the hour, for him, didn’t matter. Which was, in a way, true; because when Shaw entered a graveyard he always felt the slackening of the leash of time. ‘So you didn’t attend your friend Marc Grieve’s funeral?’

  ‘No. Why . . .’ Roundhay’s eyes widened. ‘Is he here – Marc?’ He looked around at the gravestones and settled on the forensic tent, lit now from within. They could hear the sound of spades slicing into clay. Roundhay looked at his well-polished shoes.

  ‘Mr Roundhay, did you speak to Marc in the years after East Hills? I’m talking since he married. See each other? Ever?’ Shaw asked.

  Roundhay’s hands were hidden in a long coat, the night air ruffling his thin blond hair. ‘He had another life. I left him to it.’

  Hadden’s head appeared in the tent doorway. ‘Ten minutes, Peter.’

  Shaw lifted apart the plastic leaves of the forensic tent and gestured for Roundhay to go first. He was aware he was being cruel, that he had no real right and certainly no good reason for exposing him to this. But he knew that Roundhay held many secrets, and that if he could just dislodge one, the rest might follow.

  When they were all inside, Shaw read out the inscription on the stone, which had been hauled out of its position and set back. The design was modern, ugly, asymmetrical and decorated with a bunch of craved grapes.

  MARC JOHN GRIEVE

  Born 8/8/80 Died 8/4/06

  Three council workers were digging out the grave. The passing headlights on the ring road created a light show on the tent’s side. Roundhay rearranged his feet as if he might fall over, but his face was still utterly expressionless, a passive mask. ‘I didn’t know he was here,’ said Roundhay.

  The labourers had already dug down three feet creating a dark slit. Valentine had been to exhumations before and was struck by the resemblance to a judicial hanging: the grave as the drop, the witnesses clustered, the air of almost electric anticipation and growing dread.

  ‘I want to know what happened on East Hills that day,’ said Shaw. ‘And I don’t want any lies. And if you can’t tell me the truth – and I mean right now – then we’re going to dig up what’s left of Marc’s body and take a DNA sample from his bones. Because I think you’ve lied to us. I think it’s Marc’s skin on the towel we found on the beach at East Hills. I think you killed the lifeguard together because he’d taken pictures of the two of you, in the dunes, and he wanted money. I don’t think you meant to do it. Or planned to do it. But I do want the truth.’

  Roundhay rubbed his chest, where he’d built up the muscles, and Shaw guessed his heart was racing. Guilt or lost love? ‘I’ll say anything you want to stop this,’ said Roundhay. ‘But I’ve told the truth already.’ He looked at Shaw, his eyes dead. ‘What do you want me to say?’

  It was an impressive performance, thought Shaw. He’d brought Roundhay here to put him under pressure, to drag him closer to an emotional edge. Instead, somehow, Roundhay had switched the pressure on to Shaw. ‘Well?’ asked Roundhay.

  One of the men jumped into the grave to start digging from inside. Roundhay didn’t flinch, but the colour had drained from his face.

  Shaw had had enough. ‘Get him out of here,’ he said.

  Valentine held the plastic tent flap open. Roundhay hesitated, as if it had become his duty to stand and watch his lover’s bones revealed.

  ‘Unless you wish to stay?’ asked Shaw.

  Roundhay fled. Shaw let the tension bleed out of his shoulders, into his back, down his legs, into the grave. Then the sound of a spade hitting wood made him jump. He went outside and watched the tail lights on the squad car carrying Roundhay recede through the dark, eventually joining the coursing flow of cars on the ring road.

  A liar then, certainly. But a killer – not just of Shane White, but a multiple killer? The deaths of Marianne Osbourne, Arthur Patch and Paul Holtby were linked to East Hills – even if they couldn’t, as yet, uncover the link. Was Roundhay capable of killing them all just to save his own skin? Shaw had met several murderers, shook their hands, given them tea to sip, listened to them talk, watched them cry. He didn’t think there was a single, common telltale sign that someone was a killer. No cold eyes, no preternatural calm, no twitching facial muscle. But in each case he’d felt just like this: a victim himself, manipulated, controlled.

  He felt empty, but most of all, hungry. Not just for food but for human company. He watched Valentine appear out of the dark. A bone saw buzzed from inside the tent.

  ‘George. Let’s get something to eat.’

  THIRTY-THREE

  ‘George, parmesan?’ said Lena, passing the dish to Fran.

  They’d put Valentine at the head of the table so that he was looking out to sea towards the light that was still in the sky. It was the guest of honour’s chair. The heavy heat of the long drought had returned after the storm so they’d all agreed to eat outside, the table set on the wooden stoop of the cafe. Shaw had hoped the deluge marked the beginning of autumn, his favourite season. But it seemed that the summer would cling on, weakened by a series of storms, each one only sapping a little heat from the landscape.

  Somewhere out at sea, beyond the horizon, thunder and lightning still crackled.

  Valentine prodded at the shell-like pasta in its rich anchovy sauce. It was a small helping because he’d served himself from the large pottery bowl in which Lena had put out the meal. A bowl decorated with painted chillies which had made him wary. Fran stood at his elbow and shaved some cheese over his plate until he raised a hand.

  They drank iced water poured from a jug and Valentine tried not to think how long it had been since he’d eaten a meal with another human being. He shared his chips with the gulls every night, although they always dropped the ones with curry sauce on. And in the canteen people would sit at the same table, but only if the place was packed, and even then you weren’t sharing a meal, you were just sharing the table. His last meal with Julie had been fish and chips out of the paper. They’d sat on the front step and shared the chips, which meant he’d had to do without salt, and she’d had to do without vinegar, which was sweet, but annoying.

  Shaw had invited Valentine home because his DS said he’d taken a room in Wells. And besides, he didn’t want to be alone in the car driving the coast road after the exhumation: there was something about reversing the process of burial – hauling someone’s bones into the light – which unsettled him. More practically, his DS must be hungry. Shaw rarely saw Valentine take solids, but he presumed he did eat. He imagined greasy breakfasts in one of Lynn’s many cafes. The question would he like to eat with them?, was out of his mouth before he realized he’d crossed a line. They’d been partners for four years and this was the first time his father’s one-time DI had come to the ho
use. Now, looking down the table at Valentine’s gaunt face, he knew he’d left the invitation too long.

  The atmosphere was tense, not so much because of Valentine’s unexpected presence, but because Shaw had shouted at his daughter; a very rare flash of visible temper. They’d been close to the house, walking in the exquisite light of dusk, when they’d seen her digging a hole out on the wet sand; just her head showed, and she was still shovelling gritty sand, which flew out in fan-shaped fusillades. Beside the hole the child’s old dog barked.

  They had house rules about holes in the sand. As a child Shaw had been on this beach, a mile south, near the pier, one late summer’s day. Two families had started digging pits in competition – a long, hot, afternoon of spadework, until they’d both got down ten foot. Shaw, an only child, had watched in envy as the two teams had revelled in the contest. Fathers, uncles, big brothers stood back, shouting, drinking beer from cans, while the children dug. That would have been fine. They could have posed for pictures, then gone home. But the holes were only twenty foot apart – why not dig a tunnel between them? Shaw had joined the crowd on the edge of one pit, watching as a child’s legs disappeared into the horizontal shaft.

  Then the tunnel had collapsed. He’d run for his father, who’d been up in the dunes reading his paper in a deckchair. When they got back men were in the two holes, trying to dig through with their bare hands. When they got the child out they passed him up and laid him out on towels. The gritty sand was pressed into him: his eyes, his mouth, his ears, his hair. Then Shaw’s mother had led him away and his father, finding them later at a prearranged spot up in town, had never told him if the child had lived, which was stupid, because if he had survived he’d have said. Shaw was pretty certain that was his first dead body. The eyes had been closed so there was no clue there, but there had been one hand, turned out, ugly, and one foot, turned in, uglier still.

  So they had rules.

  Shaw walked to the hole and shouted: the anger so sudden, and mixed with so much fear and anxiety, that what he said was just a burst of noise. Then he took her hand and hauled her up so that she shouted, this time in pain.

  ‘I was just finishing,’ she said, looking up at him, scared, a note of defiance in her voice for the first time. Now she was looking at Valentine across the table as he ate his pasta. ‘Did you know granddad?’ she asked. ‘Granddad Jack?’

  Valentine looked at her, sensing that Lena and Shaw were waiting keenly for the answer.

  ‘Yes, I did. He looked like you – a bit. Just round the eyes, and the way you look out through your lashes.’ He and Julie hadn’t had kids. It was wrong to say he didn’t like them. It was just that he didn’t know them.

  ‘Like Daddy?’

  Valentine caught Shaw’s eye and saw he was laughing. ‘No. I don’t think so.’ He coughed, trying to clear his voice of the effects of thirty years of cigarettes and booze. ‘He looks like your Grandma. He sounds like your Granddad. You know, sometimes, when I’m not looking and he says something, I think – for a second – that Jack’s there.’

  Valentine intercepted a look between Lena and Shaw. He’d never been good at interpreting such looks. They had a word for it now, probably an exam in it: emotional intelligence. This look between Shaw and his wife seemed to radiate reproach with disappointment. It was a wild guess but Valentine thought it meant one of two things: either that the next time Shaw brought someone home to dinner he should let her know in advance, or that they should have asked him to dinner before.

  He wondered, for the first time, whether she’d told Shaw she’d been to Valentine’s house to talk about his eye. He thought about Brendan O’Hare wrapped in his fluffy towels, seeking betrayal.

  Fran announced ice cream, everyone else passed, and she went off to help herself from the Walls fridge. When she was out of earshot Shaw took Lena’s hand. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have lost it.’ He looked along the table at Valentine. ‘Bit of a domestic.’

  Lena shook her head and turned to Valentine. ‘He beats her daily with a rock. Now. Coffee,’ she said, getting up. Valentine didn’t have the nerve to tell her he only drank tea. She was one scary woman. He checked his mobile – nothing. When he looked up he knew something had happened because Shaw had got up and was holding his head in both hands.

  ‘Peter?’ He wondered if Shaw’s eye had lost vision, but when he saw his face the DI was laughing, an incredulous laugh.

  ‘George,’ he said. ‘Thank God you came to dinner.’ He felt behind him for his seat like an old man and fell back, his shoulders sagging. ‘You’re right about the voice. I heard it on my answer phone the other week and thought for a second it was Dad.’

  He got up again, quickly, and took a bottle of iced white wine out of a bucket on the table. Shaw cracked the screw top, poured Valentine a large glass, and put a splash in his own.

  ‘It’s just a bit of what I inherited, isn’t it? The vocal chords. The shade of hair. The stance. Not the temper – that’s Mum’s.’

  Valentine nodded, trying to see where this was going.

  ‘He wouldn’t have been very proud of us,’ said Shaw, sipping wine. ‘We missed the obvious, George. Both of us. What did he always say? That the real challenge of a murder inquiry was holding on to common sense.’

  Valentine let the wine touch his lips. He didn’t really trust wine – too much alcohol in too small an amount of liquid. Shaw had slipped into lecture mode, and he knew better than to interrupt him now.

  ‘What was this whole inquiry about?’ asked Shaw, leaning forward. ‘What was the key to it all? Why did we reopen East Hills in the first place?’

  ‘New evidence,’ said Valentine.

  ‘What kind of new evidence?’

  ‘DNA – genetics.’

  ‘Exactly. The code which can lead us to a killer. Our problem is that we can’t find a motive for the deaths of two of our victims: Arthur Patch and Paul Holtby. Let’s turn this on its head. What would have happened if they hadn’t died?’

  Valentine caught the slight hint of the rhetorical question in Shaw’s voice, so he didn’t even shrug.

  ‘If Arthur Patch was alive and well he’d have been at Wells’ nick this Friday morning,’ said Shaw. ‘He’d have picked out young Garry Tyler – almost certainly. They’d have charged the kid, George. Then taken him down to St James’ where the duty sergeant would have booked him in, got him a solicitor and then, standard routine, he’d have taken a swab and gathered a DNA sample.’ Shaw’s voice had gathered in strength as he spoke, and in volume.

  Shaw came round the table, hands splayed on the wood, his face close to Valentine’s. ‘Next, Paul Holtby. If Holtby hadn’t been murdered in the woods, George, what would have happened the next day? The demonstrators would have tried to break through the gates – they’d all have been arrested. My guess is they’d have bussed them down to St James’ to process the lot. Teach ‘em a lesson. Breach of the peace, maybe even some criminal damage. Both reportable offences. So, again, DNA samples all round, and straight on to the national database.

  ‘It’s the timing that’s crucial. For the killer it couldn’t be worse. Because at this point in the inquiry he knows – is absolutely certain – that we won’t have found a DNA match from the mass screening. So what happens next; what should have happened next?’

  ‘We’d have run the East Hills samples through the database looking for a close match – a family match,’ said Valentine. ‘Which we didn’t do because O’Hare wanted to save £7,000 quid.’

  ‘Right, but the killer doesn’t know that. He presumes we will do the family match. He can’t afford not to presume that. I think he killed again – twice – to make sure we didn’t pick up that family link.’

  Shaw drank the wine in his glass, held the cool liquid in his mouth, then let it trickle down his throat. He knew he was right because it was so simple. Sample X was the heart of the case. The killer had, at all costs, to stop the police finding a match. The mass screening was always going
to draw a blank. But a family link was just as damning. The police would begin checking relatives: brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins – moving out through the family network until they got their man. The killer had to destroy any chance that would happen. And so he killed twice more.

  Valentine leant forward and helped himself to another glass of the wine he didn’t like. ‘We’ve already got a suspect related to one of the wind farm demonstrators – Joe Osbourne,’ he said. ‘If anyone was going to end up in the cells – other than Holtby – it was Tilly Osbourne, his own daughter. It wouldn’t have taken us long to find that link. And Joe’s local – North Norfolk through-and-through. He could easily be related to this Tyler kid too.’

  Shaw set the wine glass aside. ‘Yeah. Maybe it is Joe. With a little help from his mate Tug Coyle, I think, running him out to East Hills for nothing then forgetting he was ever on board. Anyway, we’ll know soon enough, George.’

  Lena returned with the coffee and they sat watching the tide come in; the rows of white water just visible under a moonless sky.

  Shaw’s mobile buzzed, shuffling on the wooden table top. It was Paul Twine up at The Circle. They had a problem with Tug Coyle. He’d missed two appointments at St James’ to give a new statement. So they’d sent a squad car round to check his address that evening – a flat in the Woodley estate. Neighbours said he hadn’t been seen for a week. Much more worryingly he’d missed three shifts at the lifeboat station, having never missed one in the previous thirteen years. And his nets and pots were still strung out off the north point of East Hills.

  Shaw tossed the mobile on to the table, then smiled at Valentine: the full hundred-watt surfer’s smile. ‘Coyle’s done a runner.’