[PS & GV #6] Death on Demand (27 page)

Dunne nodded and a gasp of air slipped out through his lips, as if breathing, the simple raising and lowering of his ribs, was a pain in itself.

‘I’m afraid there’s going to be a short break in your studies, Jake. Ten to twelve years is my guess. Or you could carry on, studying inside. You’d have the time.’

Carney laughed at Jan and she was ashamed to find her lips creasing in a supportive grin.

Ashington leant forward. ‘If you’ve got any evidence which would secure such a conviction perhaps you’d present it, Inspector. Your predictions on the future are fascinating; however, there’s a fortune teller on the Tuesday Market. She charges five pounds for reading tea leaves. If we wanted to listen to tripe we could have opted for her. I think the name’s Pellecano by the way – Madame Pellecano.’

A ripe smile disfigured Dunne’s beaten face.

Carney opened the folder and produced a forensics report.

‘Forensic examination of the bloodstains on the T-shirt removed from Jake’s bedroom has provided a match with the victim. I’m looking into the future, Mr Ashington, completely free of charge, and I can see your client in the dock, unless he can tell me how this happened …’

Ashington, mid-fifties, gaunt, slightly beaten himself, if in a less obviously violent manner than his client, put a hand on Jake Dunne’s shoulder. ‘That’s convenient, Inspector. I do hope you haven’t imported working practices best suited to the Royal Ulster Constabulary.’

‘What the fuck does that mean?’

‘It means you’re on the record as mouthing obscenities, Inspector. Tut tut. But if you really don’t know what it means, I’ll spell it out: I hope – and it is just a hope – that this evidence has not been fabricated. Or, possibly, fraudulently placed in my client’s bedroom. And I understand no warrant was in force? I can assure you that fact will be on the record …’

DI Carney was having trouble sitting still and Jan wondered if he was used to a more physical brand of police interview. It was with a visible effort that he sat back, and began to read the forensic report.

‘Why is the victim’s blood on your clothing, Jake?’ he asked, eventually.

‘You’ve got this all wrong,’ said Dunne.

‘Jake. Remember. There’s a strategy and we agreed it,’ said Ashington, but he was looking at DI Carney and Jan noted with a thrill that there was a glint of genuine hatred in that tired legal eye.

‘I’m here to learn,’ said DI Carney, legs stretched out under the interview table.

Dunne looked at Jan then, perhaps sensing an ally. ‘The South End kids come up to piss on our patch. We give as good as we get – we go down there, make ourselves felt, whatever it takes.’

‘Jake,’ repeated Ashington, his hand tightening on the teenager’s shoulder. ‘Think, please. I am your solicitor. I have your best interests at heart.’

‘They’re middle-class, right,’ persisted Dunne. ‘They’ve got stuff, and it’s quality stuff. Mobiles, trainers, gear. Haircuts – that’s what you notice first off. Latest cool look, instant, on every head. So they don’t need to steal, right, and so like, what do they do when they want to hit out? That’s the thing about needing money, it sort of soaks up why you’re angry. It’s a goal, right, something to go for. We get stuff, we’re happy.

‘Not them. This kid – Gunnel – was one of the kids with everything. Looking for something that’ll hurt us. Looking for a way to get his kicks. So they’d pick on the lonely, old folk squatters. Stand there in their front rooms and piss in the fireplace. You ask about, copper, find out. ’Stead of sitting there scratching your arse.’

A grin fell off Carney’s face like a landslide.

‘Yeah. You. Find out,’ said Dunne and Jan thought that if his real IQ had been unleashed he wouldn’t be doing a single GCSE at the local tech.

‘They’d start fires too, upstairs, or in the yards, just to watch. And pets, they’d pick on them. Hang up a kitten, chuck a brick at a dog. And they’d tell ’em, these people, the old folks, You tell the police, we’ll burn your house while you’re in your beds. You’ll die screaming. Nice, right. I’m not saying we’re angels, but that’s not us.

‘I’m saying, the thing is this kid, Gunnel, might have picked the wrong house. The Springs is for the lonely, but there’s others. That’s all I’m saying. Others.’

Ashington had taken a note and he popped the cap back on his biro, as if to say that was a nice, convenient place to pause.

‘Nice speech,’ said Carney. ‘But the question stands, Jake. Why’s his blood on your shirt?’

Ashington was on his feet. ‘We’ll break there. I’d like a copy of the forensics, Inspector. You know the drill.’

‘That’s the story is it, Jake?’ persisted Carney. ‘That Gunnel, sixteen, fit, brimming with attitude, gets strangled, knifed, by some old dear who can’t sleep nights. Give us a break, kid.’

Carney stood too, but the tape was still running. ‘I’m not the only one thinks you killed him, am I, Jake?

‘You didn’t get those bruises …’ Carney pointed his pen at the teenager’s injuries. ‘All that, in a punch-up over pissing rights. They think you did it, the North End kids. They think you killed their mate. Their brother. You get out of here, which isn’t going to happen, but for the sake of it, you get out of here and they’ll finish the job.’

Jan, studying the beaten face, was appalled to see that the shape of the skull, especially around the left eye, was actually changing by the minute, as the injuries swelled, the tissue inflamed and torn. The eye, clear when the interview had started, was now blushed pink.

‘Gunnel.’ Dunne shook his head and then had to raise both palms to each temple to cool the pain. ‘Fuck. We found him in the skip. Dead as meat,’ he said, shaking his head at Ashington’s pleas for silence.

‘I climbed in the skip to see if there was anything worth lifting and there he was. The knife, right, it had gone in his chest. He just looked kinda stunned to me. I tried to lift him up, to get him out, but there was blood underneath too – loads of it, sticky and clotted. I just dropped him, right. Coz I thought, like what’s the point here.

‘I left him, I admit that.’ His voice rose to a shout, ‘Like he wasn’t going to get any deader, right. No deader than that.’

THIRTY-EIGHT

V
alentine felt as out of place in a vet’s surgery as he did in a hospital. The clinical surfaces, the bloodless efficiency, made him feel feral by comparison, and – overwhelmingly – guilty. The bright lights hurt his eyes.

Standing at the table in the examination room he ran a hand along the spine of the cat and it flexed under his touch, but he noted – again – that a large amount of the dry black fur came off on his sweaty hand.

‘We could keep him in and try an ultrasound scan,’ said the vet, ‘but I can feel the problem …’ She held the cat with that expert vice-like grip that vets used to somehow hypnotize wild animals. ‘Just here, in the lower abdomen, there’s a definite lump. I’m guessing it’s a tumour, which is why he’s got no appetite. We could operate, but that would involve Zebra staying with us for a few days. And there would be the post-operative care.’

Valentine was already in a foul mood because Jan was missing and she’d promised to help with the vet. Oddly, for once his own illness made the decision easier because he actually didn’t give a toss about the money. If cash could solve the problem he’d have gladly paid up. In fact, he’d been fantasizing that if things moved inexorably towards his own death he could start issuing post-dated cheques, just for the hell of it.

So it genuinely wasn’t about the money. He just had to decide what was right. And he knew what was right because he could tell the vet didn’t think an operation was worth the pain, or … Valentine searched for the right word in his head and came up with ‘indignity’, because that’s what cats always managed to preserve, their sense of independent grace.

Zebra looked disorientated, but worst of all, groggy. The real heartbreaker was not that the animal looked unwell, but that it had begun, very slightly, to lose its innate beauty. Everything, thought Valentine, dies ugly.

‘It’s cancer?’

‘Or he’s ingested something, a chemical. They’re very sensitive to that and they don’t have to swallow the stuff. They can take it in through their paws …’

She held up her hands as if Valentine was a simpleton.

‘It’s a two-way membrane,’ she explained. ‘Anti-freeze off a car bonnet, or petrol on a garage floor. That kind of thing. It’s just bad luck.’

‘It’s in pain?’ asked Valentine.

‘Yes. Certainly. I can give you painkillers but as you know they’re murder to get down if they’re off their food. So we could give him injections, but you’d have to bring him in for those. And they have side effects. Or we could scan and operate, as I said. A major procedure, highly invasive.’

Valentine thought that in the vet’s code, or whatever, there should be a rule that they have to mention the euphemism first – the one about
sleep
. It wasn’t as if there weren’t ways to avoid the word death when it came to animals – although, personally, he’d always thought ‘destroying’ a racehorse was a unique euphemism in that it sounded worse than using straightforward English. But all that stuff about an operation being ‘invasive’, and a ‘major procedure’ was there to prompt Valentine to use the forbidden word. Why couldn’t they say it first?

‘You think it’s best to put him out of his pain?’ he said, bitter that it had been left to him and that he’d opted for a euphemism himself. Something of his own predicament seemed to loom then, casting a shadow over the brightly lit room, and he wanted, desperately, to be out on the street, jostling with the living.

The vet’s voice was far off. ‘Do you want to stay? You could hold him.’

A minute later Valentine had both hands on the cat, one under the chin, one on the abdomen, both of them hot, while the vet did something with a small bottle and a syringe. Then they both stood there for a while until it was all over, which, Valentine had to admit, was painless, in the sense that it didn’t hurt the cat.

Brisk, businesslike, he said he thought that charging eighty quid to dispose of the body was a bit steep, so he’d take it with him and put it in the back yard, where there was six square feet of flowerbed.

Which was why, a bit later, he was stood on the corner of London Road, waiting for the lights to change. Red. Amber. Green. None of the colours seemed capable of releasing him from a strange trance, until, holding the custom-made cardboard box with the dead weight inside, he thought that, actually, he’d like to change his mind; not about Zebra’s options, but his own.

THIRTY-NINE

T
he pilgrims made their way through the woods. Shaw, watching from the hillside above, felt an extraordinary, atavistic sense that the scene below had been played out a thousandfold, as if all those who had ever used the ancient path had materialized on this one evening, at dusk, to make their way up from the coast towards the Holy House of Walsingham, through the woods of Holkham. The old way, here a deep green lane, was a millennium in the walking; a curving, graceful track, hugging the low contours beyond the marsh, before setting off uphill, beside a small stream, a tributary of the Burn. The line of guttering lanterns which marked the pilgrims’ latter-day caravan snaked its way forward, accompanied by the sound of plainsong, just audible, adding another layer of the past, an audible memory, to match the visual.

Cutting in a zigzag path across open grassland, Shaw slipped into the trees and joined the old path, the line of pilgrims ahead now beyond sight around a slow curve. The tunnel vision, up the green lane, with the branches over-arching, seemed to crackle with the energy they’d left behind, a kind of electrical trace, like the after-image of a lightning strike. Shaw expected to see the ghost of a medieval monk perhaps, leaning on a crook, sandals slipping on the worn flagstones, fading into the half-light.

He set off in pursuit. The enfolding glaucous light took Shaw back to his first holiday with Lena. They’d driven the Porsche to Portsmouth and taken the car ferry across the Bay of Biscay to the north coast of Spain; a voyage of blue ocean, the rolling ship accompanied by sudden leaping dolphin and long-backed fin whales. Hiring an isolated farmhouse in the hills of Asturias, built into the rock side, they’d waited for the clouds to lift, revealing the distant coast. The first evening Shaw had followed the painted clam-shell signs on the roadside to a set of stone steps, which led between two old houses, until he fell out, unexpectedly, on a branch of the ancient Camino itself: the sprawling network of pathways which had led millions to the tomb of St James at Compostella. Dusk again, the stone path leading the eye into a misty distance, completely in the shadow of the trees. Shaw’s hair had stood on end as he felt the presence of those who had gone before, walking east, returning west, the millions who had stepped out on that rocky track, wearing it down, inscribing it into the earth. He’d never believed in life after death, but that moment on the Camino showed him another possibility, that you could make a direct, emotional link with the past. As he’d stood that evening in the falling night on the Camino he’d not been alone.

Ahead, a voice, baritone, threaded its way between the ash and the elder, its musical pattern mazy, hypnotic and sinuous. Shaw felt something of the fear of the stranger; the eyes watching from the woods, the danger of approaching night, of roaming boar or hungry wolves, and worst of all, the outlaws who must have watched, and waited, their prey striding into traps which they could lay with confidence along the many branches of this pilgrims’ way – Norfolk’s Camino, heading for England’s Nazareth.

This pilgrims’ way was, like its Spanish cousin, many-branched. This ‘leg’ – the ‘Wells leg’ – had thrived thanks to the ships which brought pilgrims from Europe and the north. At this point it was within two miles of the shrine itself. The pilgrims had ‘landed’ two nights earlier and camped just outside the town, before covering three miles and camping again. This one-off ‘World’ pilgrimage route was popular with the infirm, families and the disabled, as it offered the opportunity to complete the way, without covering more than six or seven miles over three days. The ‘camping’ provided was hardly ‘glamping’, but it was superior, with camp beds and some night heaters and food provided from a mobile kitchen on site.