[PS & GV #6] Death on Demand (7 page)

‘I’m chair of WAP,’ she said. ‘The chief constable asked me to cooperate, which I’m happy to do. I understand you’d like to know our
plans
?’ She smiled, suggesting any anxiety might be misplaced. ‘I’m afraid they’re modest and hardly command the attention of a DI …’

‘This will be brief, Ms Heaney,’ said Shaw. ‘I think you’ve been liaising with uniformed branch, but I just wanted to get a quick overview. The chief constable is anxious to avoid flashpoints, if I can put it like that.’

‘A tour d’horizon?’ she asked, managing to imbue the phrase with the hint of an Irish accent. And again, an educated allusion. She swung her arm out over the view below, the little town a choppy seascape of rooftops.

‘Precisely …’ agreed Shaw, noting that this horizon, a black sinuous line of surrounding hills, was already blurred by falling rain.

A random hail stone fell between them, then twenty, then a hundred. The air filled with the alien aroma of ice and the sound of a million miniature percussions. The source of the falling hail, the blue-black cloud, slid away south, the sunlight flooding in behind, a rainbow vaulting the valley. But the hail still fell from a clear sky and another bank of clouds threatened.

Shaw expected Heaney to retreat to the bus, but instead she ran, dodging the icy pellets, over the old level crossing towards a clapboard building which looked as if it had once been the town’s old mainline station. It was only as he ran up a set of entrance steps that he saw, improbably mounted on the roof, an onion-dome surmounted by a cross: no ordinary cross, but the triple-cross of Byzantium.

Inside, beyond a glass porch, the darkness was velvety and it took a moment for Shaw’s eyes to pick out the gilt, glimmering in the light from a single, guttering candle. They were in a room divided by a wooden partition, decorated with a series of icons, Mary, Christ, various saints, all in the distinct style of the Orthodox Church. Crosses, crowns and statues stood in niches. Beyond the partition a lead-grey candelabra hung in what must be the priest’s vestibule, partly hidden by a decorated wooden double-door.

‘Welcome to St Seraphim’s,’ said Heaney, shaking her head like a dog, so that melting hailstones flew out, catching the light. ‘There’s a lot of interest within the Orthodox churches in the shrine. I think the Russians have been here fifty years. Mind you, the priests are discreet. I hardly ever see them.’

‘I’d have put you down as a lifetime atheist,’ offered Shaw.

‘The attraction’s entirely aesthetic,’ said Heaney. ‘I’ve had enough of religion and I suspect the feeling’s mutual. I was expelled by the Sisters of Mercy, Inspector, and that’s an All-Ireland record.’

‘And the crime?’ asked Shaw.

She bit her lip. ‘I stayed home, nursing my mother in her final illness. They said I should have been in school learning the pluperfect of
amo
, an irony which, believe me, totally escaped them. They said God would take care of Mother. I suppose he did, but not in the fashion I’d hoped. Still, that’s all done now.’

Shaw, examining the little church in the half-light, found the icons strangely unsettling. Was it the foursquare penetrating eyes, seeking out the watchers’ own? And what eyes; always lidded, full and hooded, as if searching for an image within as much as without.

‘I have to visit Walsingham a lot,’ said Heaney. ‘There’s an old people’s home over the back of the new Catholic church and two more on the outskirts. Occasionally, I like to have a few minutes on my own. I can thank St Seraphim for that, if nothing else. Sorry, I didn’t say. I’m in health care, just another bloody bureaucrat of course, based up at the Great Eastern.

‘It’s the oddest place, Walsingham. The shrine itself down in the town is a total horror, and the church isn’t much better. I was brought up a Catholic, County Mayo, and even I think it’s over the top. Talk about smoke and bells. Meanwhile, the Slipper Chapel, which is RC, feels like the C of E – so work that out. But St Seraphim’s is rather wonderful by comparison.’

She reached out a hand and let her fingertips brush one of the icons, a small statuette of the Virgin. ‘I can come here and just sit, and I don’t get that claustrophobic feeling I do in the other churches, that someone’s trying to sell me an idea. I had enough of that as a kid.’

She gave Shaw a mischievous smile. ‘And, to be frank, the absence of priests and nuns or – God help us – monks, helps a lot.’ The smile deepened and then saddened. ‘Priests, Ireland’s gift to England, just when you’d got rid of them.’

In his back pocket Shaw felt his mobile buzz.

A text from DC Twine:
Night nurse not known at address given
. Shaw considered the implications and a possible scenario for murder. The elderly often formed strong attachments to their carers. It was not unknown for wills to contain bequests. The will, if it existed, was the key.

‘Look,’ he said, meeting Heaney’s eyes, ‘we do need some rules. The National’s big enough, this could be much bigger. The numbers are pretty much fiction at this stage but it might be six, seven thousand. We need to be vigilant. We can’t have any surprises with those numbers of people in narrow lanes and streets. Any protest needs to be well controlled, and above all, static. How many will WAP bring, and where will you demonstrate?’

‘This is for police use only, not the press?’ asked Heaney.

Shaw nodded.

‘Three hundred, that’s our target, but I think we’ll fall well short. Gay rights is strong, and there’s a bus load coming from North London, but the rest is’ – she broke something unseen with her narrow hands – ‘fragmented. Pro-choice is committed, angry even, but I really don’t think we’re a threat to public order, Inspector, although that is not to say there are not strong feelings here. The Christian Right, up close, can be an infuriating theology.’

She took out a photocopied Ordnance Survey map and laid it out on a table which held a visitors book, and across which the candlelight fell. ‘We’ll be in town at dawn, or earlier,’ she said. ‘Our bus will be up here, where it is now. There’ll be someone on board all day. That’s the plan. The rest will go down to the war memorial at the top of the short hill from the shrine. I marked it all up on a map at one of the preliminary meetings. We’ll be in position by ten. Shouting, chanting, a bit of dialogue with those who want to engage. That’s the long and the short of it.’

‘It’s a long day,’ said Shaw. ‘People get hungry, thirsty.’

‘The bus will be stocked up with food and drink. We’re not going near the pubs.’

‘Well, good news for my DS, at least. He’s on duty and he can’t stand a queue at the bar.’

The sound of hail on the roof seemed to change gear, becoming a thunderous percussion.

‘That’s our dispositions,’ she said. ‘Not exactly the February Revolution, is it? Or Bloody Sunday, St Petersburg or Derry for that matter.’

Shaw was glad the chief constable wasn’t present for that particular allusion.

‘Bloody Sunday, an uprising led, if I recall A-level history correctly, by a Russian Orthodox priest,’ said Shaw.

Over their heads the hail suddenly fell silent and sunlight beamed through a rather grimy window into the priest’s cubbyhole.

‘I’d like a promise, Ms Heaney. Let’s swap mobile numbers. If I ring on the day, please answer – OK? I’m happy to trust you, and your organization, but it only takes one individual to create a confrontation of a more physical nature. If you ring me I’ll answer too. I’d like to be able to communicate quickly if there’s a problem …’ They handed each other their phones and keyed in the numbers: she entered hers under NANO, his went under SHAW.

She got up close to another icon, a saint, with dark hair and asymmetric eyes. ‘They worship these, you know. This isn’t just art. Windows on heaven. Portals on the divine. On heaven and hell.’

The image of Ruby Bright’s scream suddenly pulsed in Shaw’s mind. He tried to push it aside, aware that considerations of heaven and hell had little part to play in a twenty-first-century murder inquiry.

‘I need to get back to my team,’ said Shaw.

By the door there was a full length, life-size image of St Seraphim himself, if Shaw was correctly transliterating the elegant Cyrillic script. He paused on the threshold, feeling the need to get close. Six inches away his good eye struggled to maintain focus, a few inches closer and he felt the surface of the picture buckle, and swim, as if it was a borderland, a thin film of paint and canvas, or a fragile lath of wood, beyond which lay the unknown, or at least the unknowable. Perhaps the power of these images lay in this sense that they were simply windows, flimsy barriers between the present and the past, the living and the dead.

SEVEN

A
s Javi Copon walked out of the sea, summoned by Shaw’s loudhailer, the detective tallied up the value of his surfing gear: a £1,000 Megaseaweed winter wetsuit, a £500 Studer FlexTail surfboard, and a pair of £150 sand shoes – brand unknown, but they looked like top of the range Tribords. Not bad for a care home nurse.

Copon emerged from the waves reluctantly, as if the salty sea was his chosen element and that he resented this summons to return to the gravity of the earth. Around him stretched Holkham beach, six straight miles of open sand, backed by pine woods, facing the North Sea. In high summer a crowd of several thousand could be entirely lost on this vast swathe of pristine beach. Shaw had been delighted after seeing
Shakespeare in Love
at the cinema in Lynn with Lena to discover, in the credits, that the final breathtaking vistas of Viola stepping ashore in the untouched New World of the seventeenth century had been filmed right here, a few miles along the coast from
Surf!.
(A still from the film was now framed over the bar.)

Copon began the long wade out of the shallows.

According to Fortis, the Marsh House administrator, Copon lived at Flat 18, Houghton House, South End, Lynn. Uniformed branch had checked the address out and found it occupied by an elderly couple who had been in residence for nearly thirteen years. They’d never heard of Javi Copon, but they did think immigrants were ruining the country, although Spaniards weren’t as bad as Portuguese, or Romanians. DC Twine had asked around, finding Copon had several friends on the staff at Marsh House. One, a Spanish woman who made beds, had told them where to find him if the sea was running a swell.

If Shaw had been alone he’d have joined Copon in the sea rather than dragging him out on dry land. How many more days as good as this would there be before winter blew in from the pole? The offshore breeze was creating perfect waves in a moderate swell. Surfers called such waves A-Frame – ideal, high-backed, curling breakers, offering the expert the chance to stay up on his – or her – feet for several hundred yards.

Javi was compact, muscled, with a good set of surfer’s teeth, which disappeared when Shaw flashed his warrant card and told him everything he needed to know about the death of Ruby Bright.

‘Why the false address?’ asked Shaw.

Javi worked a hand round his neck and slipped the zip on the wetsuit, shrugging himself out of the top half, so that it hung loose, making him look like a multi-legged pond-skater. Steam rose off his flesh, which was strangely pale, with black hair matted in swirls.

‘You need an address to get the job. I make it up, they don’t check. No one ever checks, right? Otherwise I never get work nowhere. I live here, in a camper van, and go up and down the coast. November I’ll drive home. Three years now I come back to Marsh House. It’s a lifestyle, the whole …’ He waved his arms around to indicate some invisible over-arching structure. ‘The whole corporate world, it can’t handle people like me.’

He produced a small oilskin package from the suit pocket, within which was a crumpled pack of Gitanes and a lighter.

‘Where’s home?’ asked Shaw.

‘Zarautz,’ he said, drawing in the nicotine.

Shaw knew of the town, a surfer’s paradise on the north coast of Spain, once patronized by the royal families of Europe, keen to escape the searing heat of the south. Shaw suspected that Copon was a middle-class boy, drawn to radical, anti-capitalist politics.

‘I need to wash the suit down,’ said Copon, and so they set off towards the woods, a path opening out, leading due south.

The Spaniard’s VW Camper, no doubt parked illegally, was in a glade of ageing Scots pine. Copon introduced his girlfriend, Gail, who lay sunbathing on a towel, a paperback in the grass beside her.

Copon had rigged up an outside ‘shower’: a ten-gallon water container wedged between the branches of a pine, with the tap downwards. Letting the water gush out, he rinsed the salt off the suit.

Gail said she’d make tea although no one said they wanted a drink. Shaw, taking his chance, followed her up the steps and stood at the door of the camper van, so that he could see a double bed, crumpled and unmade. The rest of the interior looked like a surfhead’s workshop: boards of various widths and lengths, wetsuits, waxes, beach shoes, a folded surf kite.

Most of the walls carried what looked like radical labour posters, stylized Stalinist images of men forging steel, or women tending the sick.

But one image stood out.

‘Who’s that?’ he asked, indicating a poster of a man’s face: salt-and-pepper stubble, the slightly bloated skin of someone immersed in water during daylight hours and cold, dead, jet-black eyes. He looked like the kind of surfer whose heartbeat could stay flat on a thirty-foot wall of water.

‘That’s the great hero,’ said Gail in a mock whisper, the kettle already pinking on its gas ring. ‘Garrett McNamara, rode a seventy-eight-foot wave. That’s the world record. I know all the facts, like I have a choice.’

‘Hawaii?’ asked Shaw.

‘Portugal, Hawaii’s ankle-busters up against the Atlantic.’

‘And the old man?’ Shaw had spotted another portrait, this one was framed, but otherwise the grizzly, wrinkled skin of the subject staring out was oddly reminiscent of the wave-riding surfer king.

‘That’s my grandfather,’ said Copon, climbing the steps, the wetsuit on a hanger. ‘A fisherman at home, he died in his boat, I think his heart went. I was with him, pulling in the net. He folded up, was gone in a minute. A good death, I think. You?’