[PS & GV #6] Death on Demand (21 page)

His mobile bleeped and the text message from the paramedic unit was bleak in its simple capitals: DAS. (Dead At Scene.) A few seconds later a second one dropped: CARDIAC ARREST.

Shaw considered the contrast between the Thorpe family, which had got up that morning and set out for the beach confident that their intertwined lives stretched forward into the distant future, and the ageing Beatty Hood, waiting for the day to dawn when her life had, it seemed, been preordained to end.

TWENTY-SEVEN

T
he Lister Tunnel was deserted, although the scene-of-crime tape fluttered in a square around the spot where the skip had stood. Dr Gokak Roy, hurrying by, was relieved the police and forensic teams had quit the spot. He’d heard a brief radio item on the local news in the car: a brutal street murder, a turf war between teenagers spilling over into violence. The tawdry, random nature of such violence made his mood plummet, and he felt in his jeans pocket for the metallic strip of diazepam tablets. Walking through the Lister Tunnel left him apprehensive on the best of days, because it recalled vividly another archway, in another town, on the other side of the world.

Gokak had been five when the family took his grandmother Ira to Varanasi to die. The train journey took two days, and although they’d bought first-class tickets and had their own compartment, the corridor was crowded with poor pilgrims, each group with their own elderly, infirm relative. His father had explained to Gokak the dogma at issue: that if Ira died in the holy city, and her body was cremated on the sacred steps, the ghats, beside the Ganges, she would achieve moksha, a release from the cycle of reincarnation, so that she could then rise into nirvana and final, permanent peace.

The railway station lay outside the city’s walls; the way ahead lay through a narrow, dank arch. The city reeked of death. He’d clung to his mother’s hand on the long walk through the maze-like bustling streets. His elder brother and father had carried his grandmother on a stretcher, hired at the station. Ira was eighty-six years old and had announced a week earlier that she was ready for this final journey; she had stopped eating immediately, and her lips trembled constantly with prayer.

Eventually they came to Mukti Bhawan – Salvation House – one of the hostels which offered shelter to the pilgrims. The family were allocated one room, with Ira on a settle bed, his parents on a mattress and the children on the floor. There was a courtyard outside and Gokak played with children from other families, although all the games were whispered, and there was
absolutely no running allowed!
In the hostel’s other rooms, arranged on two floors, other pilgrims waited for death, surrounded by their families.

Ira’s wish to die was frustrated. His father told his mother – when he thought the children were asleep – that they’d paid for two weeks’ accommodation and that if Ira was still alive at the end of that period, they’d have to take her back to Mumbai. In his father’s words this would be a ‘conspicuous waste of money’ and he certainly wasn’t going to pay for a second trip. Gokak awake, watching the shadows, thought he heard his grandmother sigh. The next morning she was gone.

There was a brief, bitter inquest. His elder brother had been on watch. The owner of the hostel had reassured them the courtyard complex was secure. A bell was rung and families came to the stone balconies to look down on the family, gathered ready to set out as a posse to search the city of the dead for a woman who seemed to be very much alive.

Gokak found his grandmother on the steps of the ghats, within a hundred yards of the burning cremation pyres. His father was asking for news from a taxi driver parked up on the Lanka Road. Gokak had been sitting, watching ash fall on his feet and knees when – entirely by chance – he’d seen Ira: sitting, head on her knees, feet pressed together, a neat ball, her arms clasping her shins – no, not clasping, they had been clasping. Now the hands lay open in a classic sign of offering. The poise, the balance of bones and flesh was remarkable, because when Gokak put his hand on her shoulder she tumbled to the side, as lifeless and haphazard as a pile of linen spilling from a basket. Gokak always thought that if anything drove his later obsession with the art of healing it was that moment when he saw his beloved grandmother splayed out unceremoniously across the hard stone steps.

He didn’t remember the cremation, the smoke or the flames, or the crackle of the expensive wood his father had bought for the occasion.

Back at the Mukti Bhawan, they packed quickly and left.

On the train his mother had been forced to chat with other passengers as first class was full. Gokak remembered a brief interchange of conversation in frenetic Hindi.

‘It was a good death in the end,’ said his mother, puffed up with success. ‘She said her time had come and it had. It is a gift.’

‘Yes,’ said the woman opposite, a child on her knee. ‘A gift. And the name of the
dying house
?’

‘It was excellent, yes. Mukti Bhawan.’

TWENTY-EIGHT

I
t was not an image Shaw would ever forget; the sticky blood-red stain on the pale stone of the well, the wooden lid slid back to reveal the deep shadowy throat of the bricked shaft, the rising smell of trapped water from the circular surface below, which reflected the flame which burnt in the brass candelabra above. A steel grid prevented a headlong fall, and it too was spotted with blood, not the fluid crimson trickle from a flesh wound, but gouts mixed with crushed tissue and bone. The aromas of High Church, wax and incense and polish, were not enough to obscure that lethal edge of iron and salt, the reek of butchered meat.

Peering down, he caught the shimmering circle of light in the bottom of the shaft and looked quickly away.

The Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham had been violated. One of the official guardians had opened the church at six that morning to discover the Holy Well, the source of the shrine’s miraculous waters, broken open and desecrated; blood and gore around its edge and falling into the waters below.

The church, a functional brick thirties edifice in the neo-Byzantine style, held within it the replica of the Holy House, which in turn protected the icon of the Virgin Mary. The well stood behind the Holy House and had been cordoned off with tape from the rest of the building, where pilgrims milled, waiting their turn to enter the shrine through one of its two doors. Tom Hadden’s SOCO team had been first to arrive and his speed and expertise had saved the pilgrims the grim disappointment of having walked the final mile in bare feet only to be denied access to the idol.

Hadden had met Shaw at the main door to the shrine with a glass slide, the smear of blood captured beneath a slim evidence plate. ‘My guess is chicken’s blood. The consistency is quite different from human blood and you can see the cellular composition is distinct. A lot of chicken’s blood and some bone, muscle tissue, mucus.’

He closed his eyes, preparing to give his verdict. ‘But not human, Peter. One hundred per cent not human.’

Shaw considered the possibility of a link with the Lister Tunnel trainers, spattered with pig’s blood; then dismissed any connection. Blood was a popular medium of protest. Everyone was hard-wired to see red. In this case the effect had been particularly shocking.

The yellow-and-black tape, the white-suited SOCO at the well-head, the emergency services vehicles in the courtyard outside, had generated a profound sense of desecration, a palpable shock, amongst the pilgrims and clerics. Two priests stood in the nave of the small church in a tableau of comfort, one holding the other by the shoulders and being held by the elbows in return.

Shaw, circumnavigating the miniature house, saw that a window had been set in the back wall to allow those outside to view the icon and chapel within; the interior walls were covered in narrow shelves holding night-light candles, the pilgrims kneeling, the statue of Mary a blaze of gold and blue, a sunburst of silver. Pilgrims prayed, lips shivering, and one woman silently dabbed a tissue at tears on her cheeks. A young man, in a brutally unstylish haircut, edged forward towards the altar and, as he knelt, Shaw was strangely moved to note his blackened, injured feet, studded with wounds.

Other worshippers stood watching the SOCOs at work, whispering, surrounding a nun and two priests inveigled into sharing what little they knew of the discovered scandal of the blood. A large hot-water container, like those used to dispense tea at football matches or garden fetes, had been requisitioned to hold uncontaminated holy water, which was being handed out in plastic cups.

Shaw tried to find a quiet space in which to think. His priority had to be keeping this act of religious vandalism out of the media; the last thing he wanted was to escalate tensions ahead of the pilgrimage itself. Speed was the essence of success; they needed to get the blood cleaned away, the well re-dedicated by one of the guardians, and the SOCO unit back to St James’ – where it was needed for the Lister Tunnel inquiry.

He’d asked to see a spokesman for the shrine, but checking his watch he saw the so-called ‘guardian’ was already twenty minutes late. Valentine was picking up a key for Beatty Hood’s house on the Springs
.
Shaw, haunted by the elderly widow’s gravestone epitaph –
And this was our day alone –
felt certain that if he could understand her death, and the circumstances surrounding it, the rest would fall into place. The murder team were trying to locate Hood’s living relatives. Shaw wanted to see the house in which she’d died. All of which was urgent by comparison to a case of vindictive vandalism. Using his iPhone he sent an irritable text to the missing guardian:
Can we meet as planned?

A mass had begun in the Holy House and the pilgrims had edged inside until there was almost no space left. Outside several wheelchair-bound pilgrims watched through the window. Shaw backed away, around the shrine, to the west wall, where various messages were set in tiles, forming a ceramic noticeboard.

I was ill but returned home renewed

–
Katherine Carty

The cancer has weakened thanks to the Holy Water

–
John Maurice Forbes

My dear wife Anne came seeking an end to pain. God Bless this Holy House

– Vincent Kelly

I can live now with the life I have been given

–
Fr Michael Kennedy

A hand on his shoulder made him jump. ‘Inspector Shaw? I’m Jocelyn Smythe, one of the guardians. Sorry to keep you waiting. As you can imagine …’ He waved his own smartphone. ‘God may be my master, but there are several earthly intermediaries …’

Smythe steered him expertly towards a small anteroom which held supplies of candles, votive lights and Mass cards. Leaving the door open they were surrounded by the distorted echoes of the service being sung by the priest in the Holy House, that particular reedy tunelessness, which reminded Shaw so poignantly of his own childhood, quite a bit of which, he felt, had been wasted listening to Latin.

Shaw told Smythe the verdict of the SOCO investigation.

‘I’d like you to re-open the well, as soon as the damage has been cleaned up, can you do that, Father?’

Shaw tried to remind himself that this man, and this shrine, were part of the Church of England – not the Catholic Church – but the sounds and sights were so Roman as to overwhelm the logic. He’d called him ‘Father’ and he hadn’t flinched.

‘Yes, of course. You have what you need … I don’t know, fingerprints perhaps?’

‘There are prints in the blood, our best lead. But my principal objective is to keep a low profile. I’m sure you’re aware of the tensions building ahead of the pilgrimage. I’d like to keep the press in the dark …’

‘If they ring, I can hardly lie …’

Smythe was very much a physical guardian, rather than an intellectual one. Built like a front-row forward, with scrubbed pale skin and black hair which, Shaw suspected, had been oiled to lie straight back from his high forehead, and matched his starched black cassock. He looked like one of Bunyan’s Christian soldiers, a very muscular Christian.

‘No. I understand that. I’m not asking you to lie, or even mislead, if you’re asked for the truth. But we do need to keep this crime in perspective; technically, if I can use that word in this place, we’re dealing with criminal damage. Desecration isn’t on the statute book. I promise you we will try to find the person, or persons, responsible. Publically, I’d like this forgotten for now. Is that possible?’

‘Turn the other cheek?’

‘If you will,’ he said, taking a half-step back in what could have been submission. Smythe nodded once, then followed.

‘Pilgrims come to the shrine for many reasons …’ said Shaw, moving out through the door into the body of the church, running a hand over the ceramic tiles.

‘Yes. To complete the pilgrimage and to take the Holy Water. It’s a form of prayer, a physical prayer if you like. They may seek Our Lady’s intervention for themselves, in illness, or mental distress, or sexual confusion. Or they may seek her help for others, loved ones, friends. Some seek an end to pain, or even life itself. That is a gift in Her power.’

Shaw turned to go, but again the pale cold hand touched his shoulder. The king’s touch was once enough to cure the disease of scrofula, and Shaw speculated that this priest perhaps felt some of that gift lay within himself. In the modern world, however, touch was a dangerous instrument of power.

‘One other thing, Inspector. We’ve just noticed this.’ Smythe had a large book in his hand which he let fall open.