[PS & GV #6] Death on Demand (25 page)

Lena sipped her wine. Since opening
Surf!
up after dark for drinks she’d been working too hard and she’d lost a few pounds, which made her face – normally an array of curves – less sinuous and slightly harder, as if the skin was revealing the bone structure beneath. Her eyes, in contrast, had taken on a sparkle which had once been intermittent. They shone now, studying the street plan of Parkwood Springs.

‘You know me and maths …’ she said.

One of the reasons she’d gone into partnership with Leo D’Asti was that his skill set – banking, accounting, enterprise – had neatly plugged her own fear of numbers. And it was a fear, or a kind of phobia, rather than innumeracy. It was as if the numbers danced before her eyes, in a statistical form of dyslexia.

‘But …’ she said, splaying her hand out over the map. ‘Randomness: it’s the absence of a pattern. I look at this and I see a pattern in the fact that there’s no pattern. If you said to Fran sprinkle six red dots on the map evenly, they’d look like that. So randomness can betray an underlying logic, right? These dots are all on different streets, they’re all mid-terrace, they’re all “middling”, except there’s just one on a corner, as if that proves they’re random. That’s what I see, Peter, but then I’m not a mathematician.’

Shaw’s phone rang,
Valentine
came up on the screen and he put his voice on speaker.

‘Peter, I’m outside one of those addresses on the Springs. You need to see this.’

THIRTY-FOUR

T
he house was gone: mid-terrace, a stone step, then a gap like a rotten tooth, the space held open by two wooden beams which, at an angle, supported the dividing walls on either side, protecting the neighbouring properties from tumbling in on the cavity left behind. To the right was a boarded up house with a chalk 21 on the door, while to the left 25 still had its numerals, although one of the nails in the 5 had rusted free, so that the number hung upside down.

‘This is twenty-three, Salisbury Street,’ read Valentine from his notebook. ‘According to you the death certificate of Roland True, aged forty-three, stipulated this house as his home. Signed by Dr Gokak Roy. But Mr Robert ‘Bobbie’ Pauley – number eighteen – where the light is …’

Valentine pointed down the street, unlit except for a single lamppost, to a rectangle of light marking a downstairs window.

‘He’s been here since 1953. So he remembers the night this house blew up, in 1986, due to a fractured gas main. Christmas was early that year for glaziers, he reckons. Took out every window on the Springs. It’s been a pile of rubble for nearly forty years.’

Valentine set off towards the dimly-lit corner, where a pub, boarded up, still displayed a sketchy hanging sign of an ornate Victorian water pump: the Parkwood Tavern. Then, taking the next left, he doubled back down the parallel street to Salisbury – Stanley Street.

Outside number 31, Valentine stopped again. ‘Fire this time. I can’t find a light around here, but old Pauley says he thinks it was back in the nineties, arson to boot, although there’s nothing on the local rag’s website. We’ll have it on file. Not that it matters, point is that it was in this condition, apparently, when Arthur Ridge was supposed to be living here three months ago.’

Shaw walked up to the door and pushed it open to reveal the blackened bricks and timber. Somewhere in the darkness, impossibly, he heard a faint sound so reedy, so redolent of a human baby’s whimper that he could not stop his heartbeat picking up. The pitch changed, faltering, on the very edge of the range of the human vocal cords. Shaw’s good eye widened its aperture and from the darkness shadows and shapes appeared until finally he discerned what he knew would be there; the curled, taut body of a feral cat guarding a nook in the rubble, waiting, no doubt, for a rat to lose its nerve, and then its life.

A stone flew past his head and rattled in the rubble, so that the cat fled.

‘Christ,’ said Valentine. ‘Can’t stand it. Talk about a caterwaul.’

‘The other houses?’ asked Shaw, carefully closing the door despite the fact that the downstairs window frame had long gone, exposing the charred shell of the front room and, incongruously, a square yard of pristine wallpaper in arts and crafts colours, depicting spring flowers.

‘Two just empty – one, on Palmerston, did have a tenant but she said the place was refurnished by the landlord when they moved in and the neighbours, now gone, told her it had stood empty since the Coronation. So that’s a clean sweep, but at least there’s a pattern. All we need to do is work out what it bloody means.’

At the end of Stanley Street stood the Methodist chapel, as big as a cinema of the Gaumont era, its attenuated windows shadowy blanks, the glass long gone. A single iron cross clung to the apex of the roof. The doors, once a heart-warming eggshell blue, were daubed with slogans –
We rule the Springs, fuck off Polskies
– and half-a-dozen personal tags, in spray-can curls.

Parkwood Square lay beyond, the great tree at its centre, still decorated with trainers, like some grunge version of a counter-culture Christmas tree. The discovery of the body in the skip by Lister Tunnel had derailed the shoe squad’s orders to strip it bare. Samples had been taken, to back up Jan Clay’s sound theory that the middle-class kids of the South End were trying to muscle in on the North End. But the rest had been left to rot until uniformed branch had time on its hands.

In the docks a whistle blew on a coaster and, eerily, they saw it moving between the distant silhouettes of grain silos, edging out to take the night tide.

‘I think this all began with Beatty Hood, George. If we knew why she died, we’d be able to see the way ahead. Let’s see if we can get to this charity that owns the house.’

Valentine made a note. ‘I’ll get on to it first thing. The team needs to run down the other five too: background, relatives, the lot. If they didn’t live here, where did they live?’ His phone buzzed and he took the call. ‘Hi. Yeah – Parkwood Springs. I’ll be ten minutes, less. Sorry, I know. Look, I’ve decided.’

In the silence, Shaw watched a skein of mist off the Cut entangle itself in the shoe tree.

Valentine stared at the mobile screen as if he’d been cut off.

‘Decided what?’ asked Shaw. ‘As if I’ve got a right to know.’

Valentine pocketed the phone and shook his shoulders free of the damp of the night. ‘Things have come to a head. The hospital came up with a date. I was thinking I’d go for it, but I’ve decided now, and I won’t. In theory it was easy – saying yes. But now it’s real: a hospital bed, the operating theatre, waking up, not waking up. Or radiotherapy, chemo. I don’t want that. I’m scared too. She knows, she’s guessed, she’s not happy. So I better face the music. I’m going to play my life out the way the cards fall, Peter.’

THIRTY-FIVE

S
haw, in the half-light of their bedroom, pulled on swimming trunks and the summer wetsuit, bundled his work clothes in his rucksack and ran the dune-line to the Porsche. The day promised a tourist-brochure sky but with a hint of autumn cool on the air, which made the marram grass smell sweet. The coast road was empty but for an early bus, its lit interior deserted, the driver in dark glasses, braced to face the rising sun as his route took him east.

At Holkham, the small wooden kiosk inhabited by the car-park man was locked, so he left a single pound coin on the sill and put the car at the end of the carriageway by the National Trust information board, which held a wide, coloured map of the woods, leading into the funnel-shaped inlet of Holkham Bay. A chalk board marked 6.05 and 19.13 indicated the day’s two high tides.

The sound of the sea filled the air, polar breakers, as white as ice, thudded down on the sand. Running along the duck boards through the bird reserve, he tried to focus on the reason for his choice of beach: Javi Copon, the elusive Spanish nurse, who’d seemed to have such a genuine insight into the plight of his elderly patients. Why had he disappeared? His connections to their first victim, Ruby Bright, were intimate. Now, thanks to Dr Furey’s documentation, there was another direct link to one of the other Parkwood Springs deaths – the elderly man who’d once been a resident, but had eventually died at the house on Hartington Street. Did Copon’s nursing duties take him further afield than Marsh House?

The sea filled the view ahead, a 180-degree sweep of surf lines, running back towards the horizon, six deep, ten deep, twelve. He left his rucksack and clothes on the high-water mark and sprinted the last three hundred yards into the shallows, then – spear-like – he sliced through the glassy wall of the first wave, surfacing to savour his favourite sound, the hiss of the spume on the surface, nature’s own Alka-Seltzer, the air freighted with ozone and oxygen, salt and a hint of the crushed quartz of the sand beneath.

On his back, floating, buoyant in the suit, he let his eyes widen to allow the blue light to soak into his brain. A few seconds, and then the water bore him up as the next set approached, hissing, and washed him down into a darker shade of ocean, from green into the blue, with a distant, heart-stopping glimpse of the black that seemed to lurk just beyond his paddling feet.

Free-thinking, he centred on the compact, self-contained face of Javi Copon. The single fact which had stuck in Shaw’s mind from that initial meeting with Copon and his girlfriend concerned Garrett McNamara – the surfer pictured in the large poster in the VW camper. ‘That’s the great hero,’ she’d told them.

Shaw judged the waves, which were currently pounding his body into a numb coma, were, perhaps, seven feet in amplitude from the wave crest to the trough base. The wave that McNamara had ridden was more than ten times bigger; Shaw was no physicist but he understood that there was a relationship between the wave height and its speed as it teetered and then fell. Surfers were physically brave, often very fit, but could they really survive such an encounter on a slim board, encased in a single extra skin of neoprene?

The night before, out on the beach as Lena locked up, YouTube had given him the answer. Footage from a beach on the Portuguese coast was, in the surfer’s hackneyed phrase, awesome. Cameras on a clifftop held a foreground shot of a lighthouse, a constant crowd soaked in spray, while beyond, approaching from the Atlantic with an unseen fetch of nearly 4,000 miles, came the mighty waves, tripping over the edge of the continental shelf, falling towards Europe. And on the shimmering face of the waves were the tiny figures of the surfers, poised just ahead of the lethal fringe of the breaker, racing down the glassy tunnel, speeding towards the light.

But these surfers were not alone and were far from the image of the lonely knight of the sea. Circling in the choppy water beyond the surf line were jet skis, the pilots of which were twinned with the surfers, providing what the aficionados called a ‘tow in’. This is how McNamara rode a eighty-nine-foot wave – the jet ski pulling him into the right spot at a high enough speed to catch the wave while also giving him the chance to stand on a much larger, safer board.

This, then, had been Javi Copon’s dream, to ride the big waves, but it came with a price tag. This wasn’t beach bum surfing at the cost of a tub of wax. Shaw had checked out prices on a website and found the jet-ski pilots, as prized as golfing caddies, could charge £200 an hour. A lot of the surfers doubled up as pilots, which meant buying the jet ski, at something like £8,000, and then purchasing fuel. It was a rich boy’s obsession, and Javi Copon was no rich boy.

Shaw let the next wave take him inshore. His knees weak and his arms deadweights, he walked towards the curtain of Scots pine and his clothes, to find the path through the woods, his bones accommodating the unwelcome return of gravity. The VW camper van stood in its clearing still, the door open, the sound of KLFM a tinny waspish soundtrack. Gail appeared in what was nearly a uniform: white blouse, black skirt, black tights, her hair up and pinned back with regimented determination.

‘Day job?’ he asked, standing still, feeling the blood-warmed water percolating in his suit.

She locked the metal door, slipping the key under a stone in the sand. ‘If you’re still after Javi, forget it. The last time he just upped and went it was Cornwall, to catch the tail-end of typhoon Glenda. He’s obsessed, so it’s not personal. That’s what he’ll say when he gets back.’

Her face was set hard, the eyes without light, and Shaw thought then that she didn’t really think he’d ever return.

‘He missed a shift,’ said Shaw, looking away as she rearranged her tights by slipping a hand under the skirt.

‘I know. The mobile’s been buzzing.’

‘He left his mobile?’

She had brown eyes, a complement to the tan, and he could see now how worried she was, feigning a cynical worldliness she didn’t feel.

‘We’ve got his passport.’

‘That won’t stop him,’ she said, then bit her lip. ‘Javi’s got friends – brothers, he calls them. They work on the boats, the ferries – if he needs it he can slip in, slip out.’ She shielded her eyes against the sun which slipped through the trees. ‘He’s in politics, right? A union. So they all help. It’s a big part of his life, not as important as surfing, but loads more important than me.’

She had a small gold watch on a little leather strap which Shaw guessed was an heirloom, her mother’s perhaps, because it was workaday, solid and dependable.

‘I have to be at work for breakfast: The Sandcliffe.’ Shaw knew it well, a Norfolk stone mansion, now a hotel, with sky-blue woodwork and its own golf course.

‘Javi’s got dreams,’ said Shaw. ‘My question is how can he afford them. The sea’s free, but the hundred-foot waves aren’t, are they? He needs to get there, he needs to pay for a tow-in. Not just one – hundreds, right, hoping each one will build, become
the
big one.’

‘He saved.’ Shaw noted the past tense and thought that this little ritual – of dressing smartly for work – was perhaps the first step she had to take to re-build her life alone.

Shaw looked at the VW, the slightly rusted wheel spokes, the battered pot grill over an ash fire.