[PS & GV #6] Death on Demand (2 page)

‘Just a couple of things, Peter.’

Shaw’s sense of augury deepened, so that the sounds of
Surf!
– the high-decibel chit-chat, the Beach Boys soundtrack – seemed to fade away. The world appeared to contract into a sphere of warm air, containing just the two police officers.

Joyce was compact, slight and wiry, with a thick head of hair prematurely silver-white. There wasn’t a single half ounce of fat on his bones, and he gave the appearance of someone who could drive a nail into a plank of wood with the flat of his hand.

‘Sir.’

‘Walsingham, Peter. I’m at the Home Office tomorrow. I’d like to reassure Whitehall we have this under control. I’m sorry, I know this is a social event. But we’re coppers, not bank clerks, so we don’t really do down time. I’d like an update.’

Every year, several times a year, thousands of pilgrims joined forces to mark the old paths which led to the shrine of the Virgin Mary, at Walsingham, a town ten miles inland from the coast. The so-called ‘National’ pilgrimage was the biggest, held in the spring; but this year a special one was planned for the August bank holiday to mark World Pilgrim Day, organized by an international committee and expected to attract thousands. The so-called ‘World’ had spawned a counter-pilgrimage, a coalition of largely Left-wing protestors, keen to challenge what were seen as the forces of reaction. The West Norfolk Constabulary was solely responsible for public order on the day.

Earlier, in the back office in their cottage behind
Surf!
, Shaw had checked out TV footage the team had downloaded from
BBC Look East
. A crowd of about two hundred were shown processing along a narrow country lane, following a priest and an icon of the Virgin Mary decked in flowers. The faithful, to either side, had crossed themselves as the icon passed, or knelt to say a prayer. A lone uniformed constable had made an entirely symbolic effort to keep the way ahead clear by preceding the procession, arms out-stretched. The pilgrims were still a week away and security was the responsibility of the Cambridgeshire force. As soon as they crossed the county line they were Shaw’s problem.

It wasn’t a new problem. They’d been coming for a thousand years, interrupted only by the Reformation. Way back, a Saxon noblewoman had seen a vision of Christ’s mother and been given the exact cubic measurements of the ‘Holy House’ of Nazareth, the site of the Miracle of the Annunciation. Shaw, the unwilling recipient of a Catholic education, knew his scripture: the Annunciation was the moment Gabriel told Mary she’d give birth to the Christ-child.

After the Saxon noblewoman saw the angel, she promptly built a replica of the Holy House as instructed. (Or, it was miraculously constructed overnight by Gabriel: you took your choice.) The noblewoman’s son built an abbey over the house. When the Holy Land was invaded by the Infidel, places like Walsingham were ideally placed to mop up the medieval tourist market. Millions made the trip to what became known as ‘England’s Nazareth’.

Henry VIII tore down the abbey, despite having been an enthusiastic pilgrim himself. The shrine was rebuilt in the 1920s with its replica
replica
of the Holy House tucked inside. As a result, Walsingham survived as an exotic, one-off remnant of pre-Reformation England, an Italian hill town cast down, it seemed, on the greensward of protestant Norfolk by a flock of passing angels.

But the chief constable wasn’t interested in Walsingham’s heavenly past – he feared an infernal future. In recent years the pilgrimage had attracted various protest groups, from the Far Right, enraged at Marian idolatory, to the Far Left, eager to air liberal views on women priests, gay rights and a Woman’s Right to Choose. Joyce, haunted by his own sectarian past, wanted to make sure north Norfolk didn’t spawn its own unique marching season.

It was Peter Shaw’s job to ensure the ‘World’ went ahead without incident. It took him less than a minute now to outline the measures he was taking: all leave had been cancelled for the force’s uniformed branch on the day, two helicopters would be on stand-by at Fakenham – seven miles south – while CID officers would be in the crowd. All official protest groups had been contacted and allocated agreed ‘protest points’. Six CCTV sites had been planned on radial routes and at the shrine.

‘OK. Good,’ said Joyce, looking out to sea. ‘Keep on it, Peter. It’s a bag of worms, so let’s keep it tied up nice and tight. This is a one-off. Next year we’ll be back to the National. We can handle that.’

All the lanterns were aloft, a string of more than fifty, drifting up and out to sea, the candles flickering. Shaw was struck by the contrast between this joyful pagan worship of the supermoon, and the fervent, pious passion of the pilgrims, on their way to Walsingham.

‘I better get back to my table,’ said Joyce. ‘My wife’s not safe left alone with one of these …’ He shook the cocktail glass. ‘You’ve got a good business here. You’ve built something.’

‘It’s my wife’s business – lock, stock and barrel.’

‘Right,’ said Joyce, but he hadn’t heard. ‘Oh. The other thing. DS Valentine’s medical didn’t go well.’

George Valentine was Peter Shaw’s partner, his sergeant. They’d been a team, a reluctant duo it had to be said, for nearly six years. Valentine had been his father’s partner back in the eighties. DCI Jack Shaw was a legend in the West Norfolk Constabulary – although Joyce had probably never heard of him. To the outside world, Valentine was an old-fashioned copper, a dinosaur roaming the brave new world of CSI, community relations and equal opportunities, not to mention health and safety. At fifty-nine he was in the last furlong before retirement. A widower, smoking sixty Silk Cut a day, he had never felt the need to plan for the time when he didn’t have to go to work. Dying on the job wasn’t a possibility – it was George Valentine’s goal.

‘He’s got an appointment with the force doctor, Scrutton, at St James’ to review his test results. They made him take a scan to track emphysema. Unfortunately, the picture told a different story – lung cancer. Looks bad, I’m afraid. If he wants some time off to think, he can have it. His pension lump sum comes in at just under £130,000. He could see the world. I don’t know. Whatever spins his wheels. Right now he’ll be feeling fine. In six months he’ll be on his knees. This isn’t something that’s going to go away.

‘That’s all entirely
entre nous
. You didn’t hear it from me. It might be an idea to take him out and get him pissed after he’s seen Scrutton. You need to break through, crack the complacency. Miracles aside, this is going to kill him.’

Joyce spilt the dregs of his Moon Riser into the sand and waded off towards the lights of
Surf!
. On the way up the beach he passed a slim, black woman in a white bikini holding two full cocktail glasses, which meant Shaw had less than thirty seconds to manufacture a smile to greet his wife.

TWO

G
eorge Valentine descended the uncarpeted stairs to a familiar sound; the cat flap flapping as Zebra made his customary early morning exit. The cat had been Julie’s as a kitten, and with her death the animal had seemed to take a violent dislike to her bereaved husband, as if the disease which had killed her so swiftly was in some moral sense his fault. Standing in the kitchen he lit the gas ring under the kettle with the match he would have used to fire up his first cigarette of the day, if he hadn’t promised himself that today was
the day
. Valentine was a stubborn man but he didn’t fight losing battles. Emphysema was making him increasingly breathless. The quack at St James’ had made him take a scan at the Great Eastern Hospital, an experience so alien, antiseptic, and claustrophobic he’d vowed to quit for good while his old bones were still inside the machine, his head outside.

‘I’ve quit,’ he announced to the kitchen, although his eyes flitted across the Formica table and worktops until he remembered he’d thrown his last packet of Silk Cut into a bin on the Boal Quay the night before. Outside the cat caught his eye, treading its sinuous feline path along the fence, paw in front of paw, like a tightrope walker. The movement of featherweight bones apparent beneath the skinny flesh reminded Valentine that they were both of a certain age. He noted that the cat’s bowl was still full of yesterday’s food.

While the aluminium kettle fidgeted on the gas ring he walked to the front door to pick up the paper, only remembering when he’d got to the end of the gloomy hallway that he’d been persuaded to cancel it. The
Daily Mail
–
apparently – enhanced a cynical tendency, a mean view of the world, dominated by a morbid anxiety towards the concept of change. He stood for a moment, looking at his black slip-on leather shoes, and thought that while that might be true, what were the alternatives? He’d rather be suspected of necrophilia than being a
Guardian
reader. He’d have to do without. Something else he’d have to do without. It occurred to him that life had a certain symmetry, because you spent the first twenty years doing things for the first time, and the final twenty years doing them for the last.

Back in the kitchen he found a new chopping board and a loaf of bread wrapped in slightly greasy tissue paper with a watermark, which must mean it was organic, and therefore almost certainly inedible. He cut some, noting with distaste the embedded shards of gritty husk, and popped it in the toaster, beginning to count the seconds before the slice was launched briefly into orbit. Outside, distinctly, he heard a child’s voice in play; so pellucid, so sharp, she could have been in the room. Whitefriars’ primary school was a street away and ran a breakfast club for kids with working parents. He’d grown up in these streets, between the river and the London Gate, and the playground simply provided part of the soundtrack to his life. If he’d been born in the country it would have been birdsong.

Upstairs, the shower unit cut out, the sudden silence emphasizing the loss of the buzzing electric motor. He imagined the woman standing beneath the final drops of water, eyes closed, hands covering her mouth, and felt the stab of guilt that it wasn’t Julie he saw, that the water drops didn’t slide over her skin. The bathroom door opened and footsteps ran to the bedroom. In less than a minute she was coming down the stairs, with a smart
rat-a-tat-tat
; and then, there she was in the black-and-white uniform: creased trousers, polished shoes, a black-and-white chequered scarf, body belt, summer tunic, radio: Probationary Police Constable Jan Clay.

She was the only thing in the kitchen that wasn’t stale, including the organic bread.

‘Morning, Constable,’ he said, thinking that when she got out of bed she never left an impression; no nest-like whorl, no crumpled, nightmarish shroud. There was something light and luminous about her, which he hoped wasn’t simply a facet of being temporary.

‘Detective Sergeant,’ she said, her brown eyes checking both his hands, left then right, for signs of the first cigarette.

Satisfied, she turned her back to face the mirror; neat blonde hair, cut short, with that happy habit of always falling into place.
Neat
wasn’t quite right but it was the word everyone used. Tidy perhaps, compact even. And brisk. The uniform was as yet unfamiliar, and she re-jigged the scarf, readjusted the cap, tucking in a stray hair.

Valentine had long harboured the fantasy that the mirrors in the house stored the images from the past which only he was blessed, or cursed, to see. If he stole a glance over Jan’s shoulder now, would he catch Julie’s face looking out; assessing, disappointed, approving?

Jan’s husband, DC Paul Clay, had been Valentine’s partner in what he liked to refer to, with a Churchillian flourish, as his ‘Wilderness Years’ – when he’d been banished from the CID unit at Lynn to the north Norfolk coast after making a spectacular hash of a murder inquiry, fetching up finally at Wells-next-the-Sea, to spend a decade going quietly to seed, investigating petty thefts, Saturday night brawls, second-home burglaries.

DC Clay hadn’t been his kind of copper, or his kind of man; but he’d envied him his life, the teetotal rectitude, the easy good humour, the dutiful wife, the two children. He’d seen the kids grow up, leave home. Then DC Clay’s health had started to decline, marked by a long series of vaguely mysterious ailments, and his wife had begun soliciting for odd jobs to supplement the single salary, now bereft of overtime. She’d taken in washing, offered to clean houses, and so Valentine’s bedsit had been one of her first tasks. She’d seen the minutiae of a widower’s life: the single Christmas card from Valentine’s sister, the armchair in front of the TV, the empty bottles, the takeaway cartons.

How different, he’d thought at the time, it must all be to Jan Clay’s own home, but time told a different story. DC Clay, it turned out, was a secret alcoholic who died of liver cancer after a long, final illness which was anything but bravely borne, and Jan had spent their life together, she later confessed, envying him his job; policing it turned out, was in her blood at just about the same concentration as alcohol was in his.

‘What’s on today then, Georgie?’ she asked, pulling down the front of her tunic and opening the fridge to retrieve a yogurt pot.

Valentine yawned. The fact that she wanted to talk about The Job wasn’t a problem. The problem was that she wanted to talk about it at seven fifteen in the morning. But he liked being called Georgie; it made him feel twenty years younger, and it was thrillingly intimate after nearly twenty years of watching other people’s lives, as if through a half-open door. Flattered too, as almost any fifty-something widower would have been, by an attentive lover. Pressing his left foot down hard on the lino, he made an effort to straighten his back and felt the visceral ‘click’ of his vertebrae reshuffling, his spine uncurling.

‘Walsingham, planning for the pilgrimage,’ he said.

Valentine had a head like a hatchet – two-dimensional, so that when he turned it now to track the disappearance of Zebra over a rooftop, his face seemed to move from light to dark with no intervening shadows. ‘Meetings all day. Tea cups. Biscuits. Agendas. God squad. Vicars – worse, monks. Neighbourhood Witch. PowerPoint presentations. Can it get any better? Especially when we’ve still got two GBHs and an attempted murder on the books.’