[PS & GV #6] Death on Demand (14 page)

‘Mrs Bright had asked to see her solicitor to
alter
her will. Which changes everything, doesn’t it? Did she plan to cut you out, Mr Jessop?’

‘So that’s it. Mad with disappointment I kill an old friend. Is that really the best you can do? She never mentioned money. People with plump bank accounts rarely do. I can hardly know I’ve been cut out of the will if I didn’t know I was in it.’

‘You were a regular visitor, I understand, at Marsh House?’

One of Shaw’s team had found the visitor’s book on a small table at the foot of the stairs. Jessop’s name turned up on a regular basis.

‘Regular? Hardly. Once or twice, half a dozen.’

Shaw let that unconvincing statement hang in the air for a moment. ‘I see. The last time?’

‘A month ago.’

‘At Marsh House?’

‘Yes, well, no … I think I better stop drinking this stuff …’ He put the glass down with a clatter on the workbench and then took a deep breath. ‘I met her on the beach, a month ago as I say, below the home. Javi Copon pushed her down through the marshes in her wheelchair.’

There was an image there to savour. Is that how Bright made her last journey?

‘You know Javi?’

‘Sure. He was Ruby’s nurse, and a good one. And we share the same politics, the radical Left. A couple of times I saw him at Trades Council meetings in Lynn, he talked about Spain, direct action. We both have a very unfashionable view that trade unions are an integral part of a democracy. Unbelievable, I know. Didn’t exactly please Ruby, she was a rural Tory of the old school.’

‘Artists have a trade union, do they, sir?’ asked Valentine.

‘No. That’s the point. I’m in the GMB by default.’

‘What time was this meeting with Ruby out on the marsh?’ asked Shaw.

‘Early evening, maybe six thirty.’

‘And Ruby gave you no hint that she’d either left you this money in her will, or might be considering cutting you out of it after all.’

‘Neither, she just enjoyed the sunset, which was glorious.’

‘Was Javi Copon a witness to the meeting,’ asked Shaw.

‘He left us alone for twenty minutes.’

Valentine let an eye run over the frames, the tools scattered on the worktop.

Jessop turned to Shaw. ‘I think it’s about time I rang a solicitor myself, what do you think, Inspector?’

‘Depends, sir. Where were you between eight o’clock Monday night and two o’clock Tuesday morning?’

‘Monday night? That, Inspector, is the easiest question to answer, because I’m always in exactly the same spot on a Monday evening, and many others too. And at exactly the same time; well, not in clock time, but in atmospheric time, if I can put it like that. From an hour before sunset, to about an hour or an hour and a half later.’

The studio had a long wooden shelf on which were set notebooks, maybe fifty or more. Each one was leather bound, slightly worn at the spine. Jessop took a volume from the end and let it fall open in his hand.

‘There’s a Suffolk artist called Cotman – John Sell Cotman.’ He’d hit a patronizing tone, particularly irritating as Shaw knew Cotman’s work well and that he was a
Norfolk
artist. ‘He had this rather laborious, if brilliant, idea. He painted the same scene, a parish church, over and over again, trying to catch its different moods, its atmospherics. In snow, in mist, in sunset light. I stole the idea.’

He flicked through a pile of sketch sheets and held one at arm’s length. ‘So here’s Monday night. Note the moon,’ he said. ‘That’s a supermoon rising, a rather spectacular collision of the harvest moon and the celestial apogee. I appear to have signed and dated the work too … which is hardly helpful to me, given that it is a worthless alibi, and puts me quite close to the scene of the crime.’

The work was meticulous and strangely magical, depicting a network of silvered reeds and a maze of marsh, the sky shaded to grey to allow the moon to shine. The only landmark, as such, was an old wooden sluice gate, standing alone like a guillotine.

‘Mow Creek?’ said Shaw. ‘I know the spot. Near the old wharf?’ The place was thirty minutes by coastal path from Marsh House.

The sketch was marked: 8.20 – 10.05 p.m.

‘You were alone?’ asked Shaw.

‘Always.’

‘And then?’

‘Home – by car, I park up by the Victoria. And home’s a council flat I live in alone. I’m divorced. She lives in Hampstead now, so you might like to guess why she left me. Anyway, the fact is I live a life bereft of alibis, Inspector. I’m your perfect suspect.’

SEVENTEEN

J
ulie Valentine’s grave was lit by the harsh white halogen security lamp on the wall of All Saints, Lynn’s ‘lost church’, set amidst the ugly egg-box flats thrown up after the old, riverside streets had been demolished in the sixties. Valentine often took a seat on the bench for a last cigarette before bed. Tonight he’d promised Jan they’d talk about the future, but as he’d stood at the corner and contemplated his house, the bedroom light just visible behind curtains, he realized his thoughts might be best shared, at least at first, with the dead.

The church had been diminished by age; the tower falling in the eighteenth century, a transept in the nineteenth. What was left seemed to crouch in the shadows like a feral cat, overlooked by the balconies of the flats, a concrete waste-burner, and a single, arthritic oak. Wire mesh covered the stained glass of the church’s West End, but he knew the scene depicted within well enough; Gabriel aloft, the Virgin below, the miracle of the Annunciation flooding out of her body in the form of a celestial light; a Medieval reference, surely, to the miracle at nearby Walsingham. Pilgrims arriving by boat would have prayed here, given alms, before walking on along the way.

Valentine had never thought of himself as an angel, and besides, he had news of a different sort, but it certainly constituted an announcement.

‘It’s me,’ he said, as if in apology. ‘I’ve got lung cancer, so I can’t see what’s wrong with this …’

He’d bought a new packet of Silk Cut and the cellophane came off in one vicious twist of his wrist. Right pocket, left pocket, shirt pocket; he realized he didn’t have a light and the tears started in his eyes for the first time since Scrutton had delivered the results of the scan.

That moment in the medical room at St James’ when the doctor had dropped the word ‘cancer’ like a depth charge, had seemed to halt time; noontime sunlight falling flat on the roofs of the Old Town, the window open but the sea breeze spent, a car horn sounding twice on the ring road. ‘George. There isn’t a good way of telling you this. It’s bad luck, of course. We have here’ – he said, patting a brown envelope with hieroglyphics on the label – ‘your scan. There’s a dark shadow on the left lung. Cancer. We can operate, open you up, have a look. Then there’s chemo, radiotherapy. That’s the good news,’ he added, and Valentine liked him just a little bit more. ‘The bad news is your general health is poor. That makes fighting the cancer tough. Emphysema, high blood pressure, early signs of Type 2 diabetes. I’m not saying it’s all over. But the brutal truth is that if you were running in the 1.30 at Haydock Park I’d put you at fifty to one – to finish.’

Valentine smiled again at the memory, leaning forward, as if about to share some intimate detail with an invisible companion. It was then that he’d seen the shell set on Julie’s gravestone, a delicate razorbill encrusted with worm casts, like some fabulous Victorian objet d’art
.

‘Who put that there?’ he asked, standing up and taking it off. From his raincoat pocket he produced an oyster shell he’d picked up two feet from Ruby Bright’s stricken wheelchair. The underside was full of mother-of-pearl colours, silvery blue, green and amber. A grammar school boy at heart he recalled the Latin adjective for such a shell-like mirror:
nacreous
, an ugly word for a beautiful thing.

Sitting down again he toyed with the razorbill.

‘So that’s something to look forward to,’ he said. ‘A week, ten days, and I’m in for the op. Or not. No waiting list, no tests, no further scans: straight under the knife. I did think I might pass, but I’ve thought about it and I’m thinking now I’ll give it a go. Although I’m scared, really scared. I’ll keep you up to date. What do they call it when the Royals are sick? A bulletin, that’s it. On the palace gates. I could get mine nailed up on the dartboard at the Artichoke. I owe money, so they’ll all be worried.’

The moon, now past its best, appeared above the gable end of All Saints’.

‘I only mention it because I’m not ready to die. And there’s a reason. The years, since you went, I’d have happily gone; planned it enough times. Pills, booze, our bed; nothing heroic or Gothic. Now, it’s different, there’s a future, I’ve got a future. I’ve said before, about Jan. Sorry, this isn’t very tactful, is it. Do they do tact in heaven? Maybe not.’

A light flared in the shadows beside the church porch and he saw a tramp on a bench, a purple-gold can of Special Brew in his hand. Walking over he cadged a light, gave him a Silk Cut, and strolled back.

‘I don’t think one more will change the odds dramatically, do you? But I’ll make this the last.’ Trying to draw the smoke down his throat the muscles contracted and he doubled over, retching. A second breath wasn’t worth the pain, so he ground out what was left into the path.

He shook his head. ‘I know it sounds disloyal but I thought I might as well be honest. Eventually, if there’s life after death, there’ll be three of us. The philosophers call that metaphysics, I call it sodding awkward. We’ll just have to see.’

Standing, he set the Silk Cut packet beside the oyster shell; full bar two, and thought for the first time that the packets were gravestone shaped, an omen he might have spotted if he’d had any kind of visual imagination. Some bright young thing in the NHS or the Ministry of Health should suggest that: each one a gravestone, with the name of a real victim on the front. It crossed his mind that he could give the packet to the tramp but then, he’d simply be giving him eighteen more chances to contract lung cancer himself.

‘I better go,’ he said, mumbling to himself. ‘It’s not fair, is it, sloping off to talk to the dead? This is the land of the living, we do things differently here. I should go home and talk to Jan. Talk about the op. Although not just yet, perhaps. I need to walk. Get tired.’

A wrought-iron gateway led north, away from home. As he passed beneath, an insight came to him, that his illness would expose many of his fears as mere wraiths and ghosts, but that unexpected horrors would emerge each day, like this sudden prospect of telling Jan he was prepared to go under the knife, and the inevitable sleepless night that would follow, waiting for the dawn.

EIGHTEEN

V
alentine read the text he’d composed for Jan once more, then pressed the send button.
Gone to touch iron.

It was an image they often shared from a long weekend in Barcelona, where they’d seen the Catalans heading for the end of La Rambla at the close of the evening, putting a hand on the elaborate railings above the sea, before heading home for bed; a ritual they’d come to mimic along Lynn’s often bleak waterfront.

At eleven o’clock precisely he stood and watched the celestial clock on St Margaret’s slide its stars into place, before walking down the cobblestones to the waterside and putting a hand on the metal rail. He slipped a bottle of Evian out of his raincoat pocket and took a long draught. ‘Rehydration, George,’ Dr Scrutton had explained. ‘Preferably without a whiskey chaser.’

On the vast open square of the Tuesday Market he found five girls, the flotsam of a hen party, washed up outside The Globe
.
One girl lay on the ground, star-shaped, while two others massaged her shoeless feet. A police squad car stole into view from the direction of St Nicholas’ Chapel and trundled round the four sides of the marketplace. The last thing Valentine needed was a late-night chat with uniformed branch so he set off further north, towards the docks.

He knew where he was going now, but still pretended the route was random; left to the Fisher Fleet, the boats silent in their muddy beds, up by the grain silo with its aircraft warning light blinking against the night, and finally into the North End, down terraced streets, out towards the rail yards. At one point he spotted a gang of teenagers on a street corner crowded round their mobile phones, the waft of alcohol palpable on the night breeze, and so he gave them a wide berth, prompting a single catcall.

Shaw and Lena had once given him a short, faintly patronizing, lecture about his habit of walking at night. Apparently, he was part of a noble tradition, a
flaneur
, a Victorian stroller, sampling the night life of the town, a poet without paper, a shadowy intellectual observer, a Dickens, a Stevenson, or worse – a latter-day Hyde. The truth was more prosaic. Even as a child he’d always found that the day got better the longer it lasted. Why go to bed just when things were getting interesting?

Lister Tunnel, when he reached it, seemed to breathe out the dank air of Parkwood Springs; a toothless mouth, dank with a kind of fetid halitosis. His ears also detected a faint echo, a sigh, pulsing slowly, like a dying heartbeat. Valentine wasn’t afraid; very little about the town made him anxious or worried. The unknown made him curious, but nothing more. When Jan had sent him the picture by text of the trainers they’d retrieved from the tunnel itself, he’d been intrigued. Not by the blood. The stains were too lavish, too liberal, to be human. His theory about the shoes on wires was that they marked territory, perhaps newly conquered. But who would want to celebrate capturing the Springs?

In his right pocket he always carried a torch, and he played the beam now on the power cable until he found the chalk mark she’d left to mark the spot and the initials JC.

‘Well done,’ he said out loud. ‘You’ll make CID yet.’

The brick arch under the embankment acted as a wind tunnel and, as he stood torch in hand, litter came past like tumbleweed: a page of newsprint, a paper cup, a rolling can. A smell of decay wafted from the builder’s skip set on the pavement.