Authors: Jim Kelly
Looking up at the café Shaw saw Lena come out on to the stoop with a bottle of wine in a cooler. ‘This time next year we’ll be open for drinks too – wine and beer. Keep going on the good days. Catch the evening crowd.’ Shaw put his feet down and turned shorewards but Justina held up her hand.
‘One thing,’ she said. The pathologist hated herself for doing it, for stopping him having the rest of the day that he’d been looking forward to. But her job was her life, even more now that Dawid was gone, and she was nothing if she wasn’t a professional. So she didn’t have a choice. ‘I am not here by an accident, not completely. I knew I would find you – Tom asked me too. I think, yes, you should concentrate . . .’ She often did this, sifting through some mental thesaurus for the right word from a language she’d never quiet mastered. ‘Focus – yes, you should focus – on the Osbourne case. The woman in the bed. You know this is important. But I think perhaps it is the key.’
She looked into Shaw’s good eye, sinking in the water, ducking her head, then standing. ‘There was a gas explosion in the village, close to the house where she died?’
Shaw nodded, studying Justina’s face, ignoring the long arc of the beach behind her, the sea dotted with swimmers, inflatables, surf and body boards. His good eye was sharp now, painless, and the anguish he’d felt just that morning was now a cloud on the horizon, distant, retreating. He thought of the black smudged ruins of the house they’d past after leaving The Circle that first morning, the road surface buckled by the blast.
‘The explosion,’ said the pathologist. ‘Tom’s team is still on the site but they say the heart of it was in an upstairs bedroom. They’re helping the fire brigade unit now. The house is dangerous – you cannot go now. Not today. The blast goes up through the floor.’ She held both hands up, elbows down, as she often did in the autopsy room. ‘The victim – an eighty-seven-year-old man – was in bed at the time. His body did not survive. Just pieces. Already they have two men who need help.’ She searched for the right word again, this time finding it first time. ‘Harrowing?’
Shaw nodded. The sound of the beach, of children screaming with fun, had receded.
‘What there is of this man is on a table at The Ark.’ It was a starkly brutal sentence.
Shaw thought of the cold green light coming through the old chapel windows: the aluminium autopsy tables set out below the single stone angel, its hands covering its face.
‘The physics I do not understand. But in such cases, often, you are surprised what survives. The blast blew out the candle which lit the gas, you see? Only a few seconds of heat, then gone. So some things survive. A newspaper, perhaps. A picture on a wall. Here, this time, this candle. No – a tea light. Set in a saucer.’
Shaw thought about that.
‘Where?’
‘By the bed.’
‘Power supply?’
‘The house next door is on the same circuit and when they go to bed the night before they have lights.’
‘Perhaps he was afraid of the dark,’ offered Shaw, but he didn’t believe it.
She lifted a hand from the sea and held two fingers together, as if she was moving a chess piece.
‘It was set on a small table. Still in the ruins.’ She shook her head, amazed at how lucky they’d been. ‘So, I look more carefully at what is left of this man,’ she said. ‘I have the skull – in part. Some fatty tissue. The torso – two pieces. The test results are very clear but I can not confirm before tomorrow.’
‘Confirm what?’ asked Shaw.
‘Cyanide. Bloodstream – anterior chamber of the heart.’
Shaw saw the summer’s day in the pathologist’s eyes but it was only a reflection.
On the beach Lena was waving to them both. She stopped suddenly, dropped her arms, and Shaw knew she’d seen the stiffness in his body by the way she held her jaw up, like a challenge, as if she’d been excluded. She began to wade in, Fran running ahead up the beach to meet her.
Justina shook her short hair. ‘I’ve just left Tom at the house – what is left of the house. Even he cannot go in yet. The neighbours talk. This man – Patch – he was well known in Wells. He took tickets, Peter, for the car park – the one by the quay? Where the ferry leaves for the island, I think? For East Hills. For twenty years, more, he did this.’
Justina filled her swimming cap with water.
Shaw heard Lena call his name. He turned, manufacturing a smile he knew would disappoint her.
SEVENTEEN
A
tramp played a penny whistle in the doorway of a furniture showroom as George Valentine walked past; head down, so that the smoke from his cigarette seemed to caress his face like cool white hands. Night had fallen as he’d driven west along the coast, and by the time he’d dumped the Mazda outside his house in South Lynn the stars were clear despite the orange reflection of the street lights. He walked into town, strolling in the middle of the narrow medieval streets, well away from the shadowy shop fronts and alleyways. He walked the white dotted line, the roads empty of traffic, and had gone twenty yards past the tramp before he recognized the song:
Down Town
– Pet Clarke, 1963. It had been one of Julie’s favourites, so he walked back and threw a pound coin into a dog’s bowl. He often put money in begging bowls and charity cans, so he laughed to himself as he walked on, imagining a sticker the tramp might have given him for his donation:
Dosser Aid
.
The only thing moving in town was the neon sign on the tower of The Majestic cinema, which flickered electric blue. Valentine cut through the memorial gardens by the central library to the ruins of Greyfriar’s Abbey, a few pillars of a nave and the leaning Greyfriar’s Tower, a floodlit eccentricity which Valentine hadn’t consciously noticed in thirty years. What did he notice? A single hypodermic syringe by a bench catching the light, a discarded mobile phone on the grass and some graffiti on a wall by the library which read simply JayGo. He had an eye for crime, but little else. And it was often at its sharpest when he was off duty, and after dark.
His mobile rang and he stopped to take the call. It was Shaw, the sound of the sea in the background, bad news in the foreground: the old man who’d died in the explosion in Creake on the day they’d found Marianne Osbourne in her deathbed had been murdered, probably with a cyanide pill. And there was another, circumstantial link to East Hills. The dead man had run the council car park by the quay for thirty years. He’d have been there that day as the
Andora Star
had slipped its moorings with Marianne Osbourne on board. Valentine stopped dead on the pavement. He was outside a Polish migrant workers hostel. Two men playing cards on the step watched him without curiosity. ‘Cyanide?’ he said, looking at them until they looked away.
Shaw gave him what facts he had, then fixed to meet at the scene of the explosion at seven – they’d move on to interview Joe Osbourne afterwards.
As they talked a new thought emerged: perhaps, oddly, it was good news, not bad. They were looking for a fresh start, after all. Now they had a double killing, a
linked
double killing. All of a sudden the clean sweep on the mass screening wasn’t the best story in town. If they’d wanted a smokescreen they couldn’t have made a better one up.
Shaw was going to ring off but couldn’t resist the idea that Valentine was working. ‘You?’
‘Back to basics. Your Dad always said . . .’ Valentine bit his lip, because he’d always been careful never to use that line. ‘Just making sure we’ve got everything we need on Osbourne before we do the interview. If I strike lucky, I’ll shout.’ Valentine cut the line. The sudden complexity of the inquiry made him feel weary, and his shoes scuffed the dry pavements as he headed south again, towards the towering medieval bulk of the London Gate.
Traffic here, along the main road, was intermittent, whereas during the day the cars and lorries were always bumper-to-bumper, spewing blue exhaust into the street. He cut down a side street to the
Red House
, the CID’s favoured pub. There was no one in the little side bar with its beaten copper-topped tables and quarry-tiled floor. Door and windows stood open so that as he drank his pint he could hear the sounds of the town; a little traffic, dogs, and somewhere close in the old council flats the steady bass beat of a music system. He thought about Jan Clay, and the light on the water off the quayside at Wells, and the way she’d pressed down on his shoulder bone when she’d stood up.
He bent his head back, looking up, annoyed to discover he’d forgotten that the ceiling of the pub was decorated with a huge jigsaw depicting an Indian maze – the garden of a maharajah’s palace, paths interlocking, incredibly complex, the 3D world reduced to a 2D design. A puzzle. A riddle. One of the things he liked about the pub was its unselfconscious eccentricity. But why put jigsaws on ceilings? The second pint settled his mind. He left quickly, calling goodbye to the unseen landlord serving in the other bar.
Crossing back over the London Road he plunged into a network of small terraced streets which ran down to the river. The town’s red light district was a thriving community. Vice crackdowns in Peterborough and the East Midlands had encouraged increasing numbers of punters to drive down the A37 to satisfy their needs. For a year, eighteen months, St James’ had left well alone. But pressure was building for a clear out. Prostitution was encouraging the drugs trade, and social services were struggling to deal with the knock-on effects of addiction and violence. A coordinated operation between four constabularies was planned for late September. But for now, on a late summer’s night in Lynn, it was business as usual for the oldest profession.
He turned into Leopold Street, past the imposing facade of the old Central Methodist Church, and was relieved to see two girls halfway down the street outside The Abbey, a corner pub which held illegal dog fights in the yard at the back. Valentine’s blakeys clattered on the pavement as he walked, counting the upstairs bedroom lights that were lit: eighteen out of twenty, not bad for 9 p.m. on an August evening. The windows were open and he caught the authentic soundtrack of a world where you could buy affection: a match striking, a bed creaking, and a woman pretending to laugh.
The girls on the street didn’t move. The younger one asked for a cigarette and he gave her one of his Silk Cuts, prolonging the moment of his own anonymity, and unable to deny the slight thrill this gave him. She was a teenager, in a black plastic skirt and stockings, a blouse open to reveal a pale cleavage. Underage? Maybe. Valentine looked at her hands because he always found that crime seemed to leave its mark on the fingers. Hers were very clean, the nails painted neatly and unbitten. An innocent’s hands. An innocent in fishnet stockings.
Her friend was in her thirties, expertly perched on four inch heels, her handbag reinforced with heavy-duty clasps and a lock. She said she might as well have a smoke too, and took a Silk Cut. The two girls lit up from the same lighter, eyes shut, looks of bliss, and Valentine knew what they were thinking – that this would be the best moment of the evening, because there was a genuine emotion here, in this small communion.
He held his warrant card out, eye-level, in front of the woman on heels. ‘Fuck,’ she said, rocking back, so that he shoulders fell against the brick wall. ‘What?’ she asked, screwing a heel down on the Silk Cut, and looking over Valentine’s shoulder.
He’d memorized the note in records. A Thursday night. June 14, 1996, the corner of Tilden Street. A police caution issued to Joe Osbourne, of No. 5, The Circle, Creake.
‘Relax,’ he said. ‘I’m looking for someone. Name’s Goodchild, Naomi. She’d be in her late thirties by now, so maybe she doesn’t work anymore. She’s not in trouble. Just routine.’
They didn’t look impressed, but Valentine spotted a covert glance. ‘What’s it worth?’ asked the teenager, and Valentine spotted a Northern accent, suburban, middle-class. Manchester, perhaps.
‘It’s worth me not walking back to the nick and looking at missing persons. Worth me not taking you back with me to help look. Worth me not locking you up while I look. That do yer?’
She swore in his face, but there was just an edge of anxiety to the bravado, so that her voice caught, although she tried to cover it with a cough.
Behind him Valentine heard footsteps and he turned to see three men, all in their forties, all in shirts, no jackets, coming down the street. Classic long-distance punters, he thought. They’ve come in one car and parked it on the good side of town. They’d have left their IDs, wallets, rings and phones in the boot. Then they’d set out to find girls, with one of them holding the cash, probably in a body belt. He wondered who’d they’d left at home, and what story they’d concocted. A pub-crawl, perhaps. They wore one shared, mutual, overconfident smile.
‘Look,’ said the girl in heels. ‘We need a trick – OK? It’s a quiet night. They see that warrant card, it’s getting quieter.’
The men had stopped mid-street, waiting to see which of the girls walked off with Valentine.
‘Naomi Goodchild’s well past working,’ said the older woman. ‘But try the house next to the church, the one with the steel door.’ She nodded over Valentine’s shoulder, down the street, towards All Saints.
At the foot of the street Valentine paused and, looking back, saw the men and girls in a single ring, chatting, laughing. For the first time he recognized them as hunter and hunted. He thought about going back and taking the Manchester girl down to the station anyway, but he told himself he’d given his word, as if that mattered in her world, or his.
He was on the edge of an estate, built in the fifties, in egg-box brutal blocks. At the centre was an open space, the ancient graveyard of All Saints, and what was left of the medieval church itself, minus a tower which had tumbled in the seventeenth century. Beyond was another street of terraced red-bricks, two-up, two-downs. The first in the row didn’t only have a steel door; it had steel windows too. The whole house sealed off from vandals. But there were three neat council black bins in the front garden and a wheelie-bin set out on the pavement.
The door gave at the pressure of his knock and swung in, revealing a hallway with a new blue carpet and a hundred-watt shadeless bulb. Maybe it was the stark light that made the woman standing under it look so old. Perhaps
old
wasn’t right, thought Valentine, because age hinted, at least, at other things. Experience, wisdom, even peace. No. She looked like a young person worn out. Valentine held up his warrant card. ‘Naomi Goodchild?’