[PS & GV #6] Death on Demand (3 page)

It was his turn to let his image fall upon the silvered glass and it gave him a moment to recover: jet-black receding hair, narrow features fighting a losing battle with gravity, grey eyes with an icy splinter of reflected light.

Jan blew on her tea. ‘I went once,’ she said, ‘with the kids on the railway.’ Wells, Jan’s old home town, was five miles from the shrine by a narrow-gauge tourist line which just about kept up a year-round service. ‘They’d just held a service in one of the old churches and the nave and the aisles, every bit of the floor was covered in fresh herbs – rosemary, thyme, mint. They’d processed up and down with the icon and crushed the herbs underfoot.’ She met Valentine’s eye. ‘It
was
amazing Georgie. Put the kids in a trance. Like breathing perfume.’

Valentine looked dubious. When they’d taken a weekend break to Paris, Jan had tried to get him to join her inside Notre Dame, but he’d just walked away to watch the riverboats sliding past on the Seine. It wasn’t that Valentine didn’t believe, he later explained over an ice-cold litre of Normandy cider, he just reasoned that he’d find out one way or another soon enough. Life was a game of poker, why show his hand now?

Munching the cast iron crust of his toast, he switched on the local radio news: haystack arson at Gayton; an affray on the Tuesday Market; weather fine. He worked a finger under his stiff white shirt collar. ‘Who you with today?’ he asked.

Jan would be a West Norfolk Constabulary probationer for two years. She’d got through her initial training and was now spending time with various units, learning different aspects of The Job. She’d just completed two months on foot patrol.

‘DS Chalker. Shoe squad.’

‘
Shoe squad?
’

She took Valentine by the arm and led him into the living room: sixty-inch flat-screen TV (with Sky Sports), ironing board and a mantelpiece crammed with pictures of Jan’s grown-up children. Parting the net curtains to look out in to Greenland Street, they found the world outside was bathed in mist, lit a rather beautiful lemon-yellow by the pale disc of the risen sun. Briefly it reminded Jan of the supermoon they’d glimpsed the night before, floating free of the rooftops, capturing Zebra in silhouette.

A milk float tinkled past with a whirring electric motor.

The house stood at a T-junction so that they could see down Whitefriars’ Street directly opposite. The telephone wires were strung between poles in a zigzag pattern into the distance. About a hundred yards down on the left a pair of trainers had been lobbed up over the lines, dangling in the air like a set of South American
bolas.

‘Shoes,’ said Jan.

‘Right. They’re illegal, are they?’ said Valentine. ‘That’d be the Dangerous Sneaker Act, 2008.’

‘Listen,’ she said. She’d brought the yogurt pot with her and quickly took another teaspoonful. ‘Joyce has got some expert coming in to give us all the lowdown. It’s billed as a
lecture
, no less. It’s nothing new, I know, but there’s definitely something afoot …’

She smiled at her own joke. ‘Twenty, thirty pairs a day out on the estates. And here in town. If you don’t look up, Georgie, you’d have missed them.’

Valentine’s eyes rarely left the pavement.

‘Some of it’s art, vandalism, but criminal gangs use them too, drugs, gambling, prostitution. The Met’s had a spate around White City, West London that
was
drug related. Apparently there’s a lot of interest in the
international policing community.
’

An ability to talk in italics was only one of the gifts Valentine admired in PPC Jan Clay.

‘We’re going out with the cherry picker to take ’em all down,’ said Jan, valiantly attempting to instill a sense of urgency into the project. ‘I saw a pair last night on Greyfriars right opposite the nick. Cheeky bastards. And we’ll have those too …’ she added, nodding down Whitefriars’ Street. ‘Last thing we want is the local PTA on our backs. Street drugs outside the primary school playground, not nice.’

‘It’s a craze,’ said Valentine, suddenly short of breath. ‘You take them down the kids will put some new ones up. I’d leave ’em. Ignore it. It’s graffiti in the sky. So what?’

‘You haven’t got Neighbourhood Watch to deal with, or the police committee, or the press. Or, for that matter, Facebook and Twitter – both of which are awash with pictures every time a new pair goes up. Social media, Georgie. It’s the new street.’

She waved her iPhone at him, in its trendy polka-dot case.

They both heard his mobile buzzing on the kitchen table, doing its bee-waggle dance on the Formica top.

‘See ya,’ she said, fleeing.

The mobile screen when he snatched it up said simply: SHAW.

He knew what he’d hear before he picked the mobile up: that weird sonar-echo of wide open space, a seagull or two, the soft rise and fall of the waves on the beach –
his
beach.

‘George?’ The voice was much higher than he ever expected, and tuneful, suggesting an ability to hit a note first time.

‘Peter.’ In public, and especially in front of the CID team, they kept it formal. It was DI Shaw, or just ‘sir’. But he’d known Peter Shaw for thirty years; in fact, Valentine had been young Peter’s godfather, although this had never been mentioned since the whizz-kid had returned home to join the West Norfolk Constabulary from the Met.

‘I know you were looking forward to a three-hour planning meeting on Walsingham, George, but … How about you jump in the Mazda. I’ll meet you on the coast road outside Marsh House, that’s a private residential care home about two hundred yards east of Brancaster Church. I’ll be outside. I’ll wait. We’ll walk in.’

‘Give me something for the journey,’ said Valentine, reaching for his coat and automatically searching the pockets for the packet of Silk Cut. He knew why Shaw liked to play it like this: no details, no theories, the walk-up routine. If Valentine had no idea what he was heading for he’d have no preconceptions. He’d be what Shaw needed: a pair of objective, experienced, investigative eyes. ‘Cold eyes’ was what Shaw had called them once, and they knew each other well enough for Valentine to recognize the compliment.

‘Murder, George. That’s usually good enough to get you out of bed in the morning. But here’s the thing: our victim’s a rarity. A one-off. All set to meet the postman this morning she was, expecting her card from the Queen. She’d have been 100 today, George, if she’d lived. Alert apparently, had all her marbles. But you’d think, after
one hundred years
, that all passion was spent. What’s the point in killing someone who’s lived a century? What possible motive could justify that?’

THREE

A
great yew tree, its rickety zigzag branches obscuring the second-floor windows of Marsh House, spread its fingertips out in the grey mist, like hands reaching for the warmth of an unseen sun. Shaw had expected the usual brand-image cypress trees, which seemed to lurk above the manicured lawns of every care home. He’d never quite grasped the psychology of such a choice. The cypress was an evergreen, and therefore a symbol of immortality, and so grew in every churchyard and graveyard – thus, surely, becoming, at least for the skeptical, a potent symbol of the very opposite of eternal life, a signpost instead to a kind of evergreen, picturesque, death.

At least the yew, by contrast, was unambiguous: toxic, with blood-red sap, indelibly linked to death and pain. Christ, it was said, was crucified on a cross of yew, the carpenter of Nazareth, finding death, nailed to wood. It too only grew in churchyards, because the surrounding walls and hedges guarded its lethal leaves and berries from becoming food for children, or worse, precious cattle. A symbol too of longevity, living two thousand years, three thousand years, or more. Which made its choice for the care home garden as unintelligible as the cypress. To complete the cemetery gloom a willow bowed its head, the ultimate icon of mourning.

The mist nudged inland, as warm and damp as the fetid interior of a launderette. Somewhere, out in the phlegm-white gloom of the North Sea, a coaster boomed its foghorn. Marsh House itself seemed to crouch in its grove of manicured gardens, just glimpsed – a whitewashed Napoleonic mansion with playful naval features: double bay windows, a maritime lookout tower, a flagpole, the whole estate behind a Norfolk stone wall. To one side of the gate stood a blue-and-white police squad car. Out on the marsh, just visible in the gloom, lay the wreck of a wooden boat, its toast-rack beams set in a line like a broken ribcage.

The Porsche’s passenger side window was down so that Shaw could smell the sea, the wind-choked marshes, the drying sands inundated by an advancing tide; a spring tide, drawn up by the very supermoon the crowd had applauded the night before on the beach. He checked his diver’s watch – good at sixty fathoms – and noted the time: 8.21 a.m. He’d give Valentine another two minutes.

The landline call to Shaw from the control room at St James’ had made it clear a uniformed constable was at the scene of the crime, but like most detectives he felt that the quicker he could actually see the victim, the better chance there was to catch the killer. It was an odd irony but the scene of crime – especially of a murder – was in itself a living thing, which began to age from the moment of death, giving up its vital clues to the passage of time.

A hearse, in deadly black, purred past twice on the coast road before slipping down a side-entrance into Marsh House past a sign marked: DELIVERIES. As it slowed to turn, Shaw noticed a particular sound, a kind of oily clicking, which he’d heard before when walking beside his father’s casket as it was driven to the crematorium: the finely tuned motor idling perhaps, like a clock ticking. The engines of hearses must be strangely pampered mechanisms, polished and oiled, calibrated and recalibrated, for the occasional stately journey.

A sign opposite, across the misty deserted road, read:

MARSH HOUSE

REST HOME

STRICTLY PRIVATE

Another, much larger, warned with no obvious irony:

DEAD SLOW

George Valentine’s fate loomed: later that day, at the hands of the workmanlike Dr Scrutton, he’d learn that his life had just been irrevocably altered. Shaw had woken with that one thought, perfectly formed, like the lingering anxiety of a nightmare. Lung cancer; two words which seemed to suck the life out of the day ahead. Would Valentine embrace the diagnosis as inevitable, greet death as a friend, or fight against it? Shaw had checked online with the medical unit at St James’ and found the DS’s appointment was at three that afternoon. What was best? Let him walk into the room, sit down, hear the news, or warn him first? The problem with the second option was the near certainty that Valentine would simply not attend the medical. He needed to hear the truth, unvarnished, from a doctor.

Shaw’s phone, true to north Norfolk custom, showed no signal at all. Drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, he adjusted the rear-view mirror so that he could see the road to Lynn, the dotted white line disappearing into a floating world of white mist. A line of telegraph wire looped into the distance, distinguished by a single pair of old shoes thrown high over the road. He caught sight of his own face: broad, tanned; a nomad’s face, always searching for a wide horizon. An outrider, a lone horseman perhaps, scouting ahead of the Mongol Horde. Blinking, he could discern that his early morning swim had left his good eye slightly bloodshot, even clouded.

Patience was Shaw’s short suit. He kicked the door open, locked the car and considered Marsh House. It was important to Shaw where he lived, but it had never occurred to him that he might be able to choose
where
to die. Had the victim, as yet unknown, chosen Marsh House as her last home? Or had they hoped for something else? Shaw loved the beach where they lived because he’d played there as a child. The emotions he’d felt then, as a ten-year-old, had become imprinted on the landscape itself, as if it was a solid-state tape which he could replay by simply returning to the scene. Emotions dominated by a sense of freedom, because the world lay behind him, while ahead lay the sea – limitless, empty. And he lived on the edge between those two worlds. But where did he want to die? What would be the last image to fall on that one, blue-water eye?

Valentine’s Mazda emerged from the mist, executing a modest skid on the grit, the engine dying with two pulmonary coughs and a backfire. By the time the DS had extricated himself from the driver’s seat, Shaw was there, waiting, emitting that vaguely electrical buzz that indicates excessive good health. His short-cut hair stood up in spikes, as if powered by static.

‘Let’s walk,’ said Shaw, already halfway across the road. Small talk wasn’t something they ever shared, let alone convivial welcomes, and on this particular morning Shaw was keen not to allow any subtle changes in his persona to alert Valentine to his impending rendezvous with Dr Scrutton. The relationship between any DI and his DS was bound to be close; theirs was complicated by a shared past, and compatibly dry senses of humour, but personally it was generally cool, at worst tetchy, antagonistic, or even hostile – studded nonetheless with moments of almost familial intensity. For the rest of
this
day Shaw was going to keep their personal lives firmly separated from the case at hand.

Stopping on the broken white line, he looked up and down the foggy narrow coast road. To the east the village ran on, stone cottages on each side, summer lets and second homes. To the west lay the church, and the road down to the distant beach at Brancaster Staithe. The top of the church tower was lost in the mist.

‘What do we know?’ asked Valentine, wrapping a raincoat around his narrow thighs.

‘Local community copper attended an emergency call at just after 6.55 a.m. this morning. Name of Curtis – that’s the copper, not the victim. Patient missing from her room. No name. He arrived at 7.20 a.m. As I said, George, no details, but murder according to Curtis. He told the control room there was no doubt.’