[PS & GV #6] Death on Demand (30 page)

The chief constable had asked Shaw for briefings on the hour and had agreed to appear on
BBC Look East
at six, excerpts of which might be used on the national news. The cameraman ahead of the procession had secured decent footage of the moment of the attack and the film had also been offered to ITV and foreign outlets and cable news. Shaw told Joyce to emphasize the fact that the service, the principal event of the pilgrimage, had gone ahead, and assured him that he’d seen a BBC camera crew capturing the event. The paint-gun attack was reckless and had showed no regard for the disabled, the infirm, or the elderly. The police were confident arrests were imminent.

Joyce’s sign-off was ominously brutal: ‘They better be, Peter. I want someone for this, and I want them today.’

Less than ten minutes after their first conversation Shaw rang back, to tell the chief constable that a traffic unit had stopped a silver Ford, registration DNIO HZK, matching Shaw’s description of the car he’d seen leaving the scene, and arrested a twenty-two-year-old male on suspicion of a breach of the peace; charges were indeed imminent and likely to include affray, which carried a maximum sentence of up to three years. Aggravating factors, including so-called ‘group action’, the presence of vulnerable individuals, causing injuries and using weapons, would – the police hoped – secure a stiff penalty. Not for broadcast, Shaw also had details on the arrested suspect: the man, Jonathan Parry, was a civil servant with a local address and a record as a gay rights activist.

In the minutes after the attack there had been scuffles between members of the procession and protestors from WAP. For their own protection uniformed branch had moved the group out of the village centre to their rainbow bus. There was still no sign of their leader, Nano Heaney, although two protestors said she’d been in place, on the grassy rise, just before the attack.

Shaw noted again the motif painted on the side of the bus – a single-decker. ‘The Walsingham Alternative Pilgrimage:
A Coalition of the Civilized.
’
Climbing aboard, he looked down the aisle. At the back the seats were piled with protest boards, loud hailers and banners. One of the protestors, a teenage girl, was nursing a bandaged ankle. Two others, an elderly couple, were trying to remove paint stains from sun hats, while still wearing them. Several others just sat, still shocked, one or two clutching handkerchiefs to their mouths.

‘What can anyone tell me about Jon Parry?’ asked Shaw. He spelt the name out, twice.

The girl with the injured ankle buckled first. ‘Jon’s a member. Well, he comes to meetings but we don’t see that much of him. He thinks we’ve sold out, that a street protest is a poor substitute for the principle of direct action.’ She delivered the end of the phrase in a deadpan tone, as if mimicking Parry’s own voice.

‘Bad tempered,’ said another alternative pilgrim, cradling a thermos cup of coffee. ‘Angry. Not like Nano, not channelled anger, just like spilling out. It’s him isn’t it, on the rooftop?’

‘Probably,’ said Shaw. ‘He’s in custody. Anyone like to volunteer some useful information? We’re thinking this is not a campaign organized, or delivered, by one man. If there’s still people out there we need to know about, now is the time to speak up.’

No one spoke. A bee, heavy and drugged, hung in the hot air.

Shaw thought of a white nurse’s uniform with the red trade union badge CCOO. ‘What about Javi Copon?’ asked Shaw.

‘Javi’s a sweetheart,’ offered one of the elderly women. ‘He wouldn’t hurt anyone. He’s not been to meetings for months.’ Everyone shook their heads, agreeing.

Searching faces, Shaw asked, ‘Has anyone any idea where Ms Heaney might be?’

One of the pensioners raised a hand. ‘She slipped away … a text, I think. She said she wouldn’t be long. Sometimes I think we’re all a bit too much for her. She needs her own space. She’ll have found somewhere quiet.’

FORTY-FOUR

T
he door of St Seraphim’s, a rectangle of cool shadow, stood open as it had done the day Shaw had met Heaney inside; she’d said then, half in irony, that it was a wonderful place for an atheist to contemplate the mysteries of life. It was one of her hidden, quiet places.

The sunlit vestibule, no more than a glass-fronted porch, gave quickly into the velvet darkness of the chapel. Icons glinted in the light of two candles, stood in sand within brass dishes, the image set against a reedy soundtrack of Orthodox chant.

It was the beauty of this which made Shaw pause, and in that silence, his footfall poised, he heard a strange sound: a distinct guttural click; the noise, perhaps, a thirsty man might make drinking a glass of iced water. From behind the wooden painted screen which shielded the priest’s inner sanctum, the sound came again, slightly louder, and this time repeated twice.

The small iron lock was broken, so that when Shaw touched the double doors they both swung open. A table held some simple chalices, a bottle of wine in a silver tracery holder and a plate of ashes. The light here came from an intricate candelabra which, when fully lit, must have supported fifty candles, but just one burned now, illuminating a bare concrete floor, on which lay Nano Heaney, the Pierrot still, in her white trousers and milky T-shirt and a pair of what looked like white ballet shoes.

In one hand she held a wristwatch, unstrapped, on her chest, so that she could see the luminous face.

As Shaw knelt beside her, she raised her wrist so that he could see a pinprick injection mark, a trace of blood smeared over the hidden veins and arteries beneath the pale skin.

Her hand gripped Shaw’s arm with great force. ‘Listen,’ she said, the tongue slightly sluggish, so that the word was smeared with sibilance.

‘This is what they need to know. Forty-five milligrams of pentobarbital at 2.35 p.m. precisely. I need …’ Her voice failed and she had to haul in air before forcing herself to go on: ‘I need … a vasso suppressor – any will do. Medics, St John’s. Shaw’ – she pulled his face close – ‘just get them.’ She looked at the watch face. ‘I’ve got eight minutes – less.’

Outside, Shaw found Valentine on the doorstep, drinking from a bottle of mineral water. The DS ran to the mobile control room and briefed three uniformed constables who set off in different directions to find the St John’s Ambulance units, Shaw used the radio to get direct to the ambulance service; he gave them location and deadline: eight minutes and counting. Finally he rang the St James’ control room and told them to raise local doctors and the Magpas Air Ambulance. Again, he reiterated the deadline: now seven minutes and counting.

Heaney’s pallor was tinged with blue and a sickly fish-like green. Taking her hand he got his lips close to her ear: ‘They’re coming. Who did this?’

Looking at the watch face she seemed to make a decision, so that the tension eased in her neck and she turned her head, letting the weight of it fall on Shaw’s arm, which he’d insinuated under her shoulders.

‘Javi. It’s a lethal dose. Death within twenty-five minutes. I might have longer, Javi’s hand was shaking, I don’t think he’d got the vein cleanly. I think Gokak always did the incisions. So there’s a chance.’

Her eyes rolled back in her head. With what looked like a supreme effort, she refocused on Shaw’s face.

‘But you’re not the innocent victim, are you?’ said Shaw, gently. ‘You’re the supplier. Through the palliative care unit, the NHS admin, you found them, with Javi, the vulnerable and the desperate. And Gokak Roy administered the drug. And you provided the house, because Hood left it to the Causeway Trust, which bankrolls WAP.’

‘I only wanted to help, to enact the principal, that it’s their life and they can choose. They don’t have to live in pain. Many do, now. Hundreds. It’s not necessary.’

Her face distorted and Shaw realized she was trying to smile. ‘I don’t want to die, Shaw. It’s not my time, not my place, but Javi thought you were close. He panicked when he saw your sergeant outside the house. He didn’t want loose ends. Gokak was a loose end, and so was I.’

Her eyes locked on the single candle flame.

‘Don’t talk. Save your energy. They won’t be long,’ said Shaw.

She shook her head. ‘Javi found the Coldshaw woman. He knew her well, she trusted him, but he pushed her too hard. It was a decision she couldn’t face. So she ran. I’m sorry for that. Then he found Beatty. It was an act of pure pity, because we didn’t know she’d leave us the house. It was a mercy. I’m proud of that.’

Shaw thought then that she felt death was close, and that this was her chance to set out some justification for what she’d done, and to shift, in part, the blame to others.

‘Gokak said it could be our Dying House, a place for them to find peace, a way-station. But we needed to finance the project, the cause, and so if there was money, we took it.’

She swallowed hard, her eyes closed.

‘We’d talked before, we all
believed,
Shaw,’ she said, suddenly brighter, engaged. ‘We all
believed.
We wanted to do good by our own rules. Finding others was easier than it should have been. We never pushed.’ She licked her lips. ‘I never pushed. But money corrupts. Boundaries, principles, were compromised.’

A sudden convulsion made her body hinge at the waist, the legs rising, and she gasped for air. For the first time he saw abject despair in her face, the fear of death.

When the fit passed she looked at the watch.

‘Once we’d begun we couldn’t stop. They said there were costs. The money was a drug, I can see that. It became …’ The eyes closed. ‘Businesslike.’

Somewhere close they heard a siren wail.

‘Poor Beatty Hood. She told Ruby she didn’t want to go, even though the blindness was a nightmare. She said Javi was pushing her, telling her it was for the best, telling her she could choose the moment, the day, and that seemed to help. In the end, at the end, Gokak said she accepted it, embraced it even.

‘But Ruby thought we’d killed her. Murdered her. It’s a cruel word.’

Her eyes closed and for a moment Shaw thought she’d gone, but then she suddenly gasped, the air whistling between her lips. ‘Javi took her down to the sea that night because she wanted to see the great moon, and he tried to tell her about Beatty, tell her how it had ended. And about the principle, the freedom. That it was about people’s right to choose, that thanks to Shipman most doctors were too afraid to help, too scared to ease the pain.’

Her eyes locked on the wristwatch. ‘She said she’d tell the press, so Javi killed her. It was never planned, never. That ended the pretence, I suppose.’

Her body stiffened and she gripped Shaw tighter by the fingers. ‘That’s the evil,’ she whispered. ‘
Persuasion.
I see it now, Shaw. It’s their choice, the choice of the dying, but they know what others want: family, friends, those who care. It’s not a decision they take for themselves. We don’t seek the death we wish, we seek the one expected of us.’

Distantly they felt, rather than heard, the base thud of a helicopter’s rotors.

‘My share of the money was set aside, even when I said I didn’t want it. I had it transferred to WAP. I thought that one day we’d use it to campaign, a change in the law, perhaps. We should all have the right to die.’

‘Jon Parry?’

‘Unstable. I told Javi not to encourage him but, after he killed Ruby, he wanted to keep you busy until he was ready to disappear. So he wound Jon up, helped him with the practicalities. Javi’s cool, cold. Jon’s a hot-head, a cat’s paw. I told them to stop, Shaw. I pleaded.’

The eyes again, rolling back, slipping away.

Shaw felt the pressure shift in his ear before he heard the swish of the blades, much closer now, right over the town. The vibrations made the icons shake and dust fell from the candelabra.

Two paramedics were at her side within seconds, pumping adrenaline into her blood system. For the first time Shaw noted a thin trickle of blood crossing her left temple. One of the paramedics pushed back her hair to reveal a bruise forming, a blue shadow, swelling.

As they strapped her into a stretcher she seemed suddenly desperate to finish her story.

‘Once Ruby was dead they both wanted out. We had to cover our tracks. Javi went back to the house to clear up because that was the plan, to sell, and bank the cash. The teenager was in the house. They’d left stuff about, Gokak’s hypos, the drugs, the bed set up with its drip. The kid was smart, said it was drugs, and he’d tell the police if we didn’t pay. Javi said they fought but I don’t believe him. It was out of control then, we were out of control. Dumping the body in the skip, and throwing the shoes over the wires, was clever. It nearly worked.

‘After that Javi was still worried. He thought Gokak and I were weak. I think he sent Gokak a message to meet at the house. Then he came for me …’

They hoisted her up and her arm hung loose, the fingers seeking out Shaw.

‘I don’t want to die,’ she said, gripping his arm.

To one side, for the first time, Shaw noticed a small door covered with a red velvet curtain and realized it was a confessional box.

As they ran towards the helicopter, which had come down in the old station car park, the noise was shattering, the blades turning just above their heads. Shaw stayed with her, holding her hand, as they rose up and then swung out over Walsingham, and the pilgrims below at the open air mass covered their ears and looked up, the strobe shadow playing over the landscape as the helicopter cut across the sun.

‘I don’t want to die,’ was the last thing she said before the drugs plunged her into darkness.

FORTY-FIVE

Six days later

T
he CID room looked empty, until Shaw spotted his team crowded round Mark Birley’s PC, and a flickering grainy image of a CCTV camera shot. Not Marsh House, but a grey dockside, lit by the flat shadowless light of security beams, a few HGVs parked in a line like a wagon-train pitched for the night, and beyond a distant security fence, a stream of car headlights on the wrong side of a road. The silhouette of a castle stood against a starless sky, as did a single tall pine, in the shape of an exclamation mark.