[PS & GV #6] Death on Demand (8 page)

‘Yes,’ said Shaw. ‘A good death, if he loved the sea.’

The woods echoed to the staccato rattle of a woodpecker.

‘Let’s talk in the sun,’ said Shaw.

They waited while Copon stowed his gear and Gail ferried out mugs of tea.

‘I’m sorry Ruby’s dead,’ he said, reappearing. ‘I like her a lot.’ His Spanish accent came and went like a radio signal. ‘I saw nothing, for sure. Nothing in the night.’

Shaw thought about taking him back to St James’ for a formal interview, in a cell, a world away from his vast, spectacular, comfort zone. But Twine had reported that Copon was well known at Marsh House for a kindly, caring approach to his patients, and especially the aged Ruby Bright. Shaw wanted him to talk freely, because he might know a lot, and he judged there was no better place for that than here, in the dappled woods, within earshot of the sea.

‘How did she get out of Marsh House, Mr Copon? How did her killer get in? This doesn’t make sense. The killer would have to get in through the keypad door. She’d have to get out through a keypad door. The nurses’ station is on the ground floor, and you heard nothing? Saw nothing? There’s a bank of six CCTV screens. It’s your job to keep watch, yes? You were on shift from eight – when everyone went back to their rooms – until 6.15 a.m. And you saw nothing – really?’

Copon licked salt from his lips and tossed the damp towel to Gail. He had a curious face, with wide brown eyes, high cheekbones and black hair; but the components were undermined by a sickly complexion, the skin blotched and without surface tension. Shaw had seen this before, the way constant immersion in the sea undermined the surfer’s image: tanned, blond, toned. Most of the real fanatics looked like something goggle-eyed on a fishmonger’s counter.

‘Look. I not tell you this. The keypad code is 1818, since the day I come, my first season. If the residents have this’ – he tapped a forefinger just below his right eye – ‘they know this too. 1818. Now you know. How do you say? Join the club. So it’s easy to come and go. But I make rounds, on the hour, and see nothing. I don’t check, I don’t open doors, unless someone rings a bell, or I hear something.’

‘It’s part of your job to monitor the CCTV?’ asked Shaw.

‘I make rounds. I don’t watch TVs. It will be on the record, yes. But I don’t see.’ He licked his lips, tasting salt. ‘You look at film?’

‘We’re doing that now. But it’s several hours and there’s six cameras,’ said Shaw.

‘Last night busy too,’ said Copon. ‘The medical log will have this in the writing, yes? I go up to the secure wing to help patient there, Mrs Blanchard, she needs regular medication, every four hours. And Mr Eyres, he thinks I am room service. Ring for this. Ring for that. Really, he wants to talk, about diamonds and gold and silver, because he was a jeweller, and he wants to think about anything he can that isn’t what the doctors say: that he will be dead this year. I’m a nurse. So I listen. It’s better than the pills. I don’t see Ruby, not once, although she is a friend.’

He actually placed a hand over his heart, on his bare chest; a gesture so theatrical that Shaw felt, intuitively, that it must be genuine. Copon shook his head to dislodge sea water from his hair, the movement of the neat skull on the muscular shoulders fluid and easy and strangely reminiscent of Nano Heaney’s attempts to dislodge Walsingham’s hailstones.

‘There are pictures in her room of Ruby with a woman, the staff told us she was an old friend, but they didn’t know her name. They seem close, was she a relative, a sister?’

Copon took his time answering, blowing on his tea. Somewhere overhead a paraglider flew past, the material of the great single wing crackling.

‘She was yes, she died, a year ago,’ said Javi. ‘Beatrice. Beatty Hood.’

Shaw kept a poker face: Beatrice Hood was the woman whose death certificate they’d found Sellotaped to the back of one of Ruby Bright’s paintings.

‘Great woman,’ said Copon, the jaw hardening as if to emphasize the weight of the word
great
. ‘You know, dying I see very often. Often, almost always, it is not like that …’ He clicked his fingers. ‘An event. No, a process, yes? And sometimes this process begins when people fall alone. A husband dies, a wife dies. The downward path begins. Then – sometimes – they find someone else. Ruby, she has Beatty. Not a resident, no. But for many years a friend. They share this passion for art, for paintings. They cling together. Very close. Lost souls …’

Gail, who’d sat down on her towel, hugged her knees.

‘They make death wait these two. They want to live, this I’m sure is the secret; they want to live to spend more time with each other. They love life together …’

He held out a hand and, as if by telepathy, Gail rummaged in a large leather handbag and gave him a smartphone. Scrolling into a photo album, he showed them a shot of Bright in a wheelchair on the front at Hunstanton, pointing out to sea, where a line of breakers was dotted with wetsuited surfers.

Copon pressed a button and the picture became a video, revealing Bright’s animated face, a wide – genuine – grin, which crumpled into a laugh. The wind, blustery, wrapped a scarf around her neck and blew her hair into a wind-sock, but she looked delighted just to be outside. The contrast with Shaw’s only previous image of this woman was shocking.

‘Mr Copon,’ said Shaw, handing the phone back to Gail, ‘can you think of any reason why Ruby would have ordered, and kept hidden, a copy of Beatty Hood’s death certificate?’

Copon massaged his left shoulder and Shaw thought he detected a minute hesitation, a half-second break in the smooth manipulation of the pectoralis major, the thumb pressed into the flesh.

‘Death certificate? Where?’

‘I’m asking the questions, Mr Copon. Is there any reason why she’d have her friend’s death certificate. She died last year. Any idea?’

Copon looked at Gail. ‘No. Beatty died at home, I think, in her bed. A house in Lynn. She was a good age too, mid-eighties, maybe more. I don’t understand.’

‘Can you think of anyone who might have wanted Ruby Bright dead, Mr Copon?’

‘She had no enemies,’ said Copon. ‘Very popular. Full of life, still.’

‘We’ll need a statement,’ said Shaw, looking back down the track towards the sea. The rhythmic fall of the breakers was clearer now, the percussion just discernible through the sand.

Copon caught Shaw’s eye. ‘If the tide is right, and the waves, I swim, surf. Always. One day I will be too old. Or death will come early. I know this. One day I will be gone. So I take each day’s waves as they break. The sea is god – yes?’

EIGHT

P
ushing out through the revolving doors of the West End Community Health Centre, Dr Gokak Roy felt an immediate sense of relief: the night air was cool, the car park deserted, while behind him lay a pressure-cooker of stress and responsibility. At one point in the shift he’d had to immunize a four-month-old child; inserting the needle into the vein had required a clinical magnifier and the steadiest of hands, the wrist was less than thirty centimeters in circumference, the vein as narrow as a fibre-optic cable. The child – Bibiana – was being monitored by her father, who sat, masked, rigid with anxiety, his face so close his breath left the ghost of condensation on Dr Roy’s glasses, so that he felt his own stress levels climbing, the blood rushing in his ears. He’d taken his break in the canteen and had actually started awake, even though his eyes were open, to find himself watching a silent TV.

And this was his day off. It followed a ten-day stretch as a GP. The workload here was crushing and chaotic. He’d always wanted to be a doctor, and he’d always worked hard. In a real sense he was living his dream, but in an equally real sense it had become a nightmare. The frenetic schedule was shredding his health. But he’d found a way to cope, although, cruelly, that only meant he had to work even harder to afford his special remedy.

That afternoon he’d slipped into a toilet cubicle at the health centre at four o’clock and taken a codeine tablet, two temazepam and an upper. For thirty seconds he sat on the toilet seat and looked at the four walls. Each day now he passed through a room like this, a kind of portal, linking his life on one side (anxious, stressed, panic-stricken) to the life on the other side (relaxed, omnipotent, heroic). In a humdrum way such cubicles had become a symbol of his survival. After twenty seconds he felt the codeine hit his nervous system, so that his neck muscles were able to slip from the tendons at the top of his spine, relieving the pressure on the base of his brain stem. Within a minute the stress had pooled in his feet, then bled into the floor, which was a blue-grey lino flecked with colours. As he stood he was conscious of his body, of the bones in their skeletal frame, his blood pumping smoothly now, like a power supply.

The rest of the shift had been serene until six thirty when the codeine had begun to falter, so that during that last hour he’d been jumpy and brittle, manically completing the paperwork for a new drugs trial. A slamming door made his joints contract as if he’d been stricken by a seizure; the jangling music in the overhead speakers frayed his nerve ends. When his shift ended he’d had to stop himself actually running for the lift to the basement. Its blue walls, winking buttons and reflective mirror walls always provided an instant haven. Alone, he popped a pill. He caught a glimpse of himself then in the mirrored walls; European bone structure, from his Goan Portuguese grandfather – dark, sub-Continental skin, as dry as parchment. Only, perhaps, his eyes betrayed him, the brown irises wide and watery, like a fish glimpsed in the shallows, and with the same fleeting impermanence.

He’d parked the second-hand BMW soft-top in its usual spot. Once, a year earlier during his training, he’d let a diazepam tablet confuse him so much he’d spent forty-five minutes searching for his own car. But he walked directly to the BMW tonight, and driving at a modulated fifteen miles per hour, headed for the exit, his hyper-awareness acute, so that he watched a bunch of teenagers on a street corner opposite, sharing a cigarette, the lit butt glowing brightly on its downward trajectory to the concrete forecourt. Beyond the barrier-exit a police patrol car sat purring in a layby, so that his heartbeat picked up, and for the first time that day he felt globes of sweat prickling along his forehead. As he drove away he checked the rear-view mirror to make sure the police weren’t following.

Lynn’s Vancouver Centre shopping complex, refurbished this year in vibrant pastel shades, had been re-designed to incorporate a small block of ‘luxury’ flats, behind a gated car-bay. Planners, caustic about the deserted shopping malls of the 1980s, wanted people like Gokak Roy – young, salaried, single – to reinvigorate the town. He was only inside the flat for ten minutes: time enough for a shower, clean jeans, T-shirt and trainers. Then he was dancing down the stairs, his ankles sending little jolts of joy through his bones.

His uncle’s restaurant was three streets away and empty when he put his head in, so he said he’d eaten at work. Then he ran, laughing, down Eastman Street, to Ja-Ja’s – a basement bar, full of friends. He had four shots of vodka with a pint of lager and Sean, the barman, said he was on a roll, although the words seemed to float into his head as if they were falling leaves. At one point a girl, in white shorts and a ripped T-shirt, had licked his ear and he’d said something and she’d simply walked away. The disappointment, the frustration, felt like it might bloom into anger so he went to the toilet and popped two more diazepam. When he got back to the bar Sean had lined up three shots, each a kind of petroleum blue in colour, which he downed to the sound of applause.

Back in the flat, in the small hours, he forced himself to re-engage with his daily routine, setting up a saline drip by the bedside which would rehydrate his body overnight, so that when he woke up he might feel physically as if he’d been hit by a truck, but there’d be no actual pain, no headache, no nausea. The headlong chaos of his interior life could continue, masked by its crisp, carefully nurtured, facade.

Sitting on the bedside, naked, he’d seen the envelope on the distant mat at the end of the corridor. He must have walked straight over it a few minutes earlier.

On the outside it said simply GOKAK in an eccentric curling script he’d come to know well. Inside, he would find a date, a time, but no indication of place, because that was always the same. Sitting on the floor, he began to cry, the envelope on his knees. He knew that if he failed to rip open the letter his life would be over, but that if he
did
rip it open this simple action would set in motion a lethal series of events, which would begin in earnest after he parked the BMW under a street light as he always did, and slipped into the shadows beneath the Lister Tunnel.

NINE

T
he desktop PC glowed in the suburban dark of midnight. Nothing moved in the silent cul-de-sac outside the curtainless window as DC Mark Birley stretched until his bones cracked. Pushing the heel of his right hand into an eye-socket, he massaged the muscles, seeing a kaleidoscope of colours dance across the darkness, before forcing himself to re-focus on the screen’s six mini-images.

CAMERA A: looking west, showed the ‘tradesman’s’ entrance to Marsh House, consisting of a tarmac parking area, surrounded by hydrangeas, reaching up more than fifteen feet. A bird-feeder, with fat balls, took up part of the foreground in sharp focus. There was an exterior light, which lit the scene in a bleak monotone.

CAMERA B: mounted over the original front door, facing inland, covered the drive, the turning circle, the gardens and offered a brief glimpse of the coast road beyond the closed iron gates, all lit by a single floodlight in a flowerbed.

CAMERA C: one of three cameras mounted on the north-facing, seaward side of the building. This door was for the kitchen and served as an emergency exit. The view consisted largely of a close-up of an extractor unit, a series of three wheelie bins and a small iron bench. The scene was lit by an emergency-lighting, low-voltage bulb.

CAMERA D: mounted over the French windows, showed the view from the main lounge on to the terrace. Tables, chairs – all ironwork, and a fire pit of steel, the lawn stretching down to the edge of the marsh grass. Also, bone white, the stone bench: the whole scene illuminated by the only floodlight on the rear of the property.