Death Watch
PENGUIN BOOKS
Death Watch
Jim Kelly lives in Ely, Cambridgeshire, with his partner, the writer Midge Gillies, and their daughter. He is the author of The Water Clock, The Fire Baby, The Moon Tunnel, The Coldest Blood and The Skeleton Man, all featuring journalist Philip Dryden, and also Death Wore White, the first in this new series featuring DI Peter Shaw and DS George Valentine. The Dryden series won the 2006 CWA Dagger in the Library award for a body of work giving ‘the greatest enjoyment to readers’.
To find out more about Jim Kelly and other Penguin crime writers, go to www.penguinmostwanted.co.uk.
The author’s website can be found at www.jim-kelly.co.uk
Death Watch
JIM KELLY
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc, 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
First published 2010
Copyright © Jim Kelly, 2010
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-194364-0
This book is dedicated to the memory of
Donald Webster Gillies
11 August 1920 – 13 December 2008
A proud Son of the Rock
And a great teller of stories
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Saturday, 5 September 1992
The moment Bryan Judd’s twin sister died – that very instant – he was sitting on an abandoned sofa on the waste ground behind Erebus Street. He’d gone to the mini-market and bought a can of Special Brew which he was drinking slowly in the vertical summer heat, listening to his radio. The signal came and went, like an audible mirage, but he sang in the gaps, expertly finding the key, knowing all the words of ‘Success Has Made a Failure of Our Home’, mimicking the Elvis Costello cover, not this version by Sinéad O’Connor. The beer was warm, the tin damp, and the alcohol made him feel better about the night to come – about what it might hold for him. Ally had said she’d meet him outside the Lattice House. Her skin was always cool, even in this endless summer, and he’d found that to seek it, taut under his fingertips, had become an obsession. He smiled, tipped his head back, and drank, despite the taste of metal in his mouth.
And then his twin, Norma Jean, was there with him, a presence as physically real as the tin can in his hand. He never had any warning, there was never a sense in which she approached. She was just there. Inside him. They told people it wasn’t a link between their minds, it was a link between their bodies, as if the intimacy they’d shared in the womb continued now – nearly sixteen years later. But when she came to him there was always this sense of shock, or sudden arrival. The world he could see – the waste ground, the red-brick backs of the terraced houses, the distant crane on the docks – juddered, like a TV picture at home when his dad smacked the top of the set.
But this wasn’t like the other times. This was a violent shock, a blow. The beat of his heart became slow and hard, thudding, as if he were running, or hiding; and in the background he could hear her heartbeat, a mirror image of his own. His blood rushed in his ears and he knew the emotion she was feeling was fear; then, with a jolt which seemed to tear at the muscles that held his heart in place, the fear escalated into terror. He tried to stand, wanting to go to her, but his knees buckled and he knelt, not feeling the shard of glass that cut into the soft tissue below his knee.
And then, despite the sun, a shocking coldness covered his face, and his neck; and all the noises of the day – the creaking dockside crane, the traffic on the inner ring road – became dull, and distant, as if heard under water. The coldness enclosed his head, his shoulders, inside his mouth, and down his throat. He tried to gulp air but there was something in his throat, something slippery and cold. He gagged, spewing vomit down his T-shirt. He tried to fill his lungs but there was nothing there, just this fluid cloak of suffocation over his head and shoulders.
He was drowning, on a summer’s day, on a dusty piece of waste ground as dry as bones.
He tried to stand, but fell back on the sofa, blacking out.
He came to at the moment when that other distant heartbeat stopped, and for the first time in his life he felt alone. His world had changed, as if he’d been given tinted glasses to wear, and it made him want to cry out – the thought that this was how it would be for ever. Shakily, on his feet now, he listened to the sounds that had returned to him: a crane load of timber crumpling to the dockside, children playing on Erebus Street.
The lost heartbeat made him run to find her: across the waste ground, around the back of the Sacred Heart of Mary and down the street to his house, past the launderette where his mother worked, the windows clouded with condensation. As he passed he heard his baby brother crying from the pushchair by the open door.
The front door of their house, next to the launderette, opened as he got to it
and his father came out, pulling it closed behind him, pushing a hand through a shock of white hair like a wallpaper brush, thick with paste.
‘It’s Norma,’ said Bryan. ‘Something’s happened…’
His father brushed a hand over his lips and Bryan noticed the bib of sweat which stained his shirt.
‘Jesus, Bry,’ said his father, who was looking at the blood on his son’s trouser leg, below the knee, and a cut on his cheek.
Bry pushed past, just stopping the door before the lock dropped, running halfway up the stairs.
‘Norma!’ He stood, listening to the familiar sounds of the house: a clock ticking, the cat flap flapping.
His father came to the foot of the stairs, looking at him through the banisters, as if they were bars on a cell. ‘Your sister’s gone out, son. She’ll be back in her own time. Leave her be, Bry.’
The bedroom door to his sister’s room was open, the bed inside made, but dented, as if she’d thrown herself on it. In the bathroom there was a trickle of water still running to the plughole, and a single bloody fingerprint on the edge of the bath.
He felt his father at his shoulder.
‘I felt her, drowning…’ said Bryan.
He could smell his father now. Cheap talc, and the cream he put in his hair. Bryan looked at his father and saw that he’d cut himself shaving.
‘She walked out twenty minutes ago. She’s fine.’ Their eyes met. ‘We argued, that’s all – about the baby. That’s all you felt, Bry – she’s upset. Now leave it. Please.’
His father leant forward, pulled some toilet paper from the holder, and wiped the bloody print from the ceramic white edge of the bath.
1
Sunday, 5 September 2010
Eighteen years later to the day
When the lights went out Darren Wylde was at Junction 47. It was the last thing he saw – the big stencil-painted numbers – before the shadows rushed out of the corners. He stood still, the dark pressing in, making his skin crawl, as though he were hiding in a wardrobe full of fur coats. He looked at his luminous watch for comfort: 8.16 p.m. Down here, under the hospital, the lights often failed, but the back-up generator would be online in seconds. He started counting slowly and he’d got to forty-seven before the emergency lighting flickered on: which was spooky, because there it was – the big number on the wall: 47. Spooky. The weak emergency lighting didn’t really help; stillborn, barely struggling free of the neon tubes, creepier than the dark.
It was a T-junction; and so he could see three ways. Left towards the incinerator. Right? He thought that might be the corridor to the hospital organ bank. And back, over his shoulder, was the zigzag route to the lift shafts which led up to the main wards, A&E, and outpatients. But down here no one moved within sight. He caught only the echo of one of the little electric tugs, hauling laundry, a specific sound against the background hum, which was persistent and steady, like wasps in a jar.
This was Level One: a catacomb; a maze, in which a map was useless. There were small signs at crossroads, and some of the T-junctions, but you needed to know your way. He’d done Theseus and the Minotaur at school, and he knew that the Greek word for the ball of twine that the prince used to find his way out was the origin of the modern word clue. A smile lit up his face, because he loved that, the way the past was part of his life today.
Every corridor on Level One was the same: the walls bare concrete, services in dusty pipes running overhead, humming like a ship’s insides. That’s what it was like, he thought, Jonah and the Whale, and he was down amongst the intestines, the lurid coloured pipes, like he’d been swallowed whole.
Turning left, he walked quickly towards the incinerator, trying to forget what he carried; trying to forget why he was down here at all, when he could have walked through the hospital, down the long bright corridor with the children’s mural, the yellow bag swinging in his hand. But the theatre manager on surgery had spelt it out: Level One, and get it signed for. He felt the weight in the yellow plastic bag. His stomach gently flipped the full English he’d crammed down in the staff canteen for tea: runny eggs, sunny-side down, oozing out onto the greasy plate. Gulping, he tried to suck in some cool air; but it was fetid, unmoving, hot. Outside, above his head now, the hospital tarmac would be cooling in the dusk. Here, the heat went on, defying the sunset.
Darren hitched up his jeans with one hand and walked faster. It wasn’t a bad job as summer jobs went. Usually, all he had to do was take the clinical waste to the chute at the end of the ward, punch the code into the metal tag, and fill the metal drawer before sending it on its way, down to Level One, where the tug drivers collected it and ran it out to the incinerator. Those bags were full of things he tried not to imagine: dressings – bloodied, stained – and tissue, perhaps, discarded by the surgeon. Organs, cancers, fluids in sealed plastic bottles.
But sometimes they sent him on foot. The yellow bag would be too big, an odd shape, and they didn’t want any breakages in the chute system because then they’d have to have it deep-cleaned. Or the yellow bag would have that little sign on it: the three-cornered trefoil, the radiation symbol. Or the chemotherapy warning label. So those bags he’d have to take down to Level One himself. And at weekends, when they pushed through the private patients, there’d be hardly any tugs working, so they’d send him on foot then as well, because the last thing they wanted was a backlog, not in this heat.
He felt the heft of the yellow bag and tried to swing it, but the laugh he’d planned caught in his throat.
At last. Junction 57. A door, a radiation sign, a danger sign, and AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
He took the steps two at a time and burst through a pair of swing doors marked INCINERATOR ROOM.
It was like crossing the threshold into a kind of hell. The sudden brutal heat, the shearing scream of the furnace; but most of all the air – heavy with the fine white ash, and the heated fumes, making everything buckle like a mirage.
Darren tried to take a breath and gagged on the grit in the air. The ‘room’ was the size of a school gym, the belly of Jonah’s whale, the ceiling a mass of pipes, gantries, and extractors. The floor was concrete, the walls metal, windowless, held together by patterns of rivets. Half the floor space was taken up with the wagons the tugs dragged in from the hospital, each one full of yellow bags. Some came out of an industrial lift in one corner, but most came in through a tunnel which led in from the goods yard. The tugs could be tipped by a lever so that they spilt their waste onto a short conveyor belt which led across the room to the furnace itself, a dark metal mouth, a dim glow of fire just visible within, like a dragon’s breath.
Above him, unseen, Darren knew there were several more floors of the incinerator building, smaller than this room, but rising up to house the various stages of the furnace, the cooling ducts, the filters, until at last, 200 feet over the hospital itself, the incinerator chimney trickled a cloud into what he imagined to be an otherwise cloudless evening sky.
The polluted air made his skin creep, as if he’d walked into a spider’s web. Below him, around him, the furnace rumbled, as if he were part of the machine. And the heat was like a duvet, crowding out the last breath of cool air, sucking out his energy.
Emergency lights here too, running on the hospital generator, which had kept the furnace working – but, oddly, while the conveyor belt was running, it was empty of yellow bags, and unsupervised.
‘Bry!’ he shouted. The ash got into his mouth right away, and he had to lick his lips, tasting the carbon. Someone, on his first day, had given him a mask to wear in the incinerator room, but he’d never bothered. A klaxon sounded, making his ears hurt.
Bryan Judd – Bry – had always been here on the late day shift, two until nine, watching the conveyor belt shuffle the piles of yellow bags towards the furnace doors, his pudgy fingers running over the dials on the control panel, sorting the bags, working alone. Darren didn’t know why he liked him, especially as he always seemed annoyed that his solitude had been in
terrupted. Perhaps it was the music that created a bond, because Bry always had an iPod round his neck, like Darren. And, despite the age gap, they liked the same stuff: New Country, some Cash. And he knew what he liked because Bry was always singing, tunefully, hitting the notes dead on.
But there was no Bry.
One of the plant engineers appeared from behind one of the control panels wiping his hands with a cloth, a blue overall open to his waist, the hair on his chest grey, streaked with sweat. He shrugged. ‘What’s up?’ he shouted, holding his mask out with one hand. Everyone shouted in the furnace room. ‘The belt’s empty – where’s Bry?’ he asked.
Darren knew the man; his name was Potts. Like all the engineers his damp, warm face was plastered with the white ash-like dust, a face devoid of eyebrows, wrinkles, or stubble. The face of a clown. Across his skin sweat had eroded a few channels, as if his skull was about to fall apart.
‘I’ve got this,’ said Darren, holding up the bag.
They heard footsteps on the open-lattice metal ladder, descending from the floor above. Another one of the engineers, but this one had a tie, knotted neatly, and a clipboard in one hand. Bry had told him this one’s name was Gerry Bourne, and he called him Mr Bourne to his face, ‘The Git’ when he wasn’t there.
‘Nothing’s going in,’ said Bourne. ‘Better find Bry – he’ll cop it otherwise.’
Potts shrugged. ‘Probably having a fag outside – I’ll get him.’
Both of them looked at Darren, and the yellow bag.
‘It’s a leg,’ said Darren again, holding the bag out.
The two men exchanged glances.
‘Left or right?’ shouted Potts, readjusting the mask after wiping spit off his lips with the back of his hand.
‘What?’ said Darren, but he knew what he’d heard.
‘Left or right?’ said Bourne, tapping a ballpoint on the clipboard. He didn’t have a mask, which marked him out as one of the bosses from the second floor. ‘We need to know. You need a receipt, but we can’t sign it in unless we know. So – left or right?’