Death Watch Read online

  Two hands, DC Campbell again.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, amid laughter. ‘I still don’t get it. If Holme’s not using drugs himself, but he’s got this supply line through Judd, why’s he eating at a church kitchen? Why’s he living in the hostel? Why does the arse hang out of his trousers?’

  Laughter again. ‘My guess is that this is early days,’ said Shaw. ‘Neil Judd says his brother had been working the scam for a year, maybe less. The hostel’s a brilliant cover. And we know Holme got caught trying to supply. We’ve requested the notes from the drug squad but I had a word – when they picked him up he had nearly a hundred and fifty grand’s worth of stuff in a rucksack. He was trying to do a one-off sale in the docks. That was six weeks ago, so maybe that’s all of it so far. Which would explain why he was pretty keen on getting his hands on the next consignment. Maybe it was his pension. Maybe he thought he was going down and this was going to keep his spirits up while he ticked off the days on the calendar in his cell. Who knows?’

  DC Campbell folded her arms. She’d got her answer, but she wasn’t happy.

  ‘Now,’ said Shaw. ‘The things that don’t fit. We’ve got human tissue waste on the incinerator next to Judd’s body which is not traceable to any operation or procedure on the ward marked on the metal tag which survived the furnace. What’s that about? An admin mistake? Unlikely. We need to drill down on this… Judd died with this yellow bag of human tissue under his body. Is it what he died for?

  ‘Then we’ve got the arson on Erebus Street in the power sub-station. Unlike the arson at the hostel, this pre-dates the murder. Is there a link with Judd’s death? It’s a coincidence, certainly, especially as the power failure disrupted the grid and eventually put out the hospital power too – although that’s a random outcome according to the power engineers, so you couldn’t have planned it. There’s no cause and effect – there can’t be. And remember, coincidences happen, so let’s not get hung up constructing a link where there isn’t one. Although… there is the broken match found at the spot where Judd smoked at the hospital – and a similar one found at the electricity sub-station. A possible link, but nothing more than that.’

  Shaw took a marker pen and wrote CONCENTRATE in red on the board. ‘It’s that simple. First twenty-four hours keep focused. Don’t disregard anything. Be thorough, don’t cut corners, and don’t keep anything to yourself. If I find anyone’s tried to steal the show I will introduce them to the one-way traffic system in town and they can spend the rest of their careers making sure it keeps moving.’

  They all laughed, happy to be a team, thankful that so far no one had earned Shaw’s disapproval.

  ‘There’s something early from CSI,’ said Twine. ‘Tom said to say they’d got a fix on the blood-soaked rag used in the Molotov cocktail at the power sub-station. Pig blood. But there’s an abattoir on the corner. So maybe a link with the workforce?’

  The store door banged open and Valentine came in, carrying a copy of the Daily Telegraph in one hand, a bacon sandwich in the other.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, walking forward. The rest of the team watched the chemistry, knowing there’d be sparks. Everyone knew the story of George Valentine’s career: he’d come back from the coast to reclaim the rank they’d taken off him thirteen years ago. And they knew he’d been Jack Shaw’s partner in that last disastrous case. The question was whether he could really shake off the cynicism, the bitterness, and principally the booze, for long enough to impress the brass.

  ‘It was worth it,’ he said to Shaw, flapping his notebook.

  ‘OK. Tell ’em,’ said Shaw, noting his DS had picked up a fresh charity lapel sticker: Wood Green Animal Shelter.

  Valentine gave them the story of Norma Jean Judd – the one he’d rehearsed on the fire escape that morning. It was a faultless performance, delivered without a trace of either nerves or self-doubt. What they didn’t know was why he’d rehearsed it – not just to impress, but so that he could time those extra breaths, keeping his lungs full, so he didn’t wheeze. All he had to add was what he’d learnt from Wilf Jackson. He’d found the former DS in an over-heated greenhouse in a sandy garden, happy to sit on a camp stool to talk, wiping sweat from his face, crumbling lumps of dry clay between his fingers.

  ‘Wilf Jackson remembers the case well,’ said Valentine. ‘He said one disturbing facet of the inquiry was our victim Bryan Judd, Norma’s twin. Always “Bry”, by the way – never anything else,’ he hauled in some extra air. ‘They had all the family in to check out Andy’s story. Wilf said Bryan was lying – holding something back. He said he’d been drinking on the rough lots behind the houses that day and that when he’d gone home he’d met his dad coming out the house. He’d checked upstairs to see if Norma Jean was there because he wanted to speak to her – he didn’t remember why. Wilf said they didn’t believe that – and he still doesn’t.’

  Valentine fished a packet of Silk Cut out of his pocket and put a cigarette between his teeth. ‘Bryan said her room was empty. Bathroom too. He says he went back out ’cos he had a date that evening. Odd thing was there was a neighbour – the woman who helped Marie Judd run the launderette – and she said she’d gone home about 6.30 and she’d heard Bryan out on the waste ground calling Norma Jean’s name. So – question: why was Bryan looking for his sister at least an hour before anyone thought she was missing? When they asked him he came up with some crap about wanting to find her, that they were close, and he thought she needed him. Wilf said they put a surveillance unit on the family for ten days – nobody put a foot wrong. Were they all in it? Maybe. Andy could have killed her, Marie gives him an alibi, and Bryan goes out making it look like they were worried. Maybe – but they couldn’t get a lead. The family stuck together.

  ‘So they went back to Orzsak. Anniversary came round in ’93 so they leaked a story to the News that CID had new evidence. Close to an arrest – total crap, of course, but we’ve all done it. Still got nothing. Six months after that they wound the case up – cold case, as cold as they get. She could even still be alive, in theory. But there’s been nothing since that day except one dodgy sighting. No, she’s dead. Got to be.’

  Valentine took a seat, trying to make it look like it wasn’t a relief to do so. ‘One coincidence worth mentioning: Orzsak lived at number 6 – the house that’s now the hostel that was firebombed last night.’

  There was silence in the room. ‘Thanks, George. Pictures?’

  Valentine got out the copies Timber Woods had made of the originals in the file.

  First, Norma Jean Judd. Dark Irish looks. ‘Look familiar?’ Valentine said, pinning it next to their victim’s face, scanning the room, for once the deep-set grey eyes catching the light. Shaw examined the faces of the twins. The bone structure was similar, the colouring identical, and there was something about the withdrawn intensity of the dark eyes which marked them out as twins even now.

  Second, Jan Orzsak. A child’s face sunk in a full moon of white flesh. A double-chin obscured his neck, the cheeks pendulous, the eyes sunk like raisins in a cake. And something Shaw didn’t like the look of: a shadow of bruising across one eye, the white around the iris bloodied. From the code letters and the background you could see it was a police snap. The date and time of the picture were printed in one corner.

  Third, Ben Ruddle, the father of Norma Jean’s child. The resemblance to his girlfriend was uncanny; the same Celtic colouring, the street-urchin’s face with the delicate bone structure. The difference was in the eyes: Ruddle’s were small and lifeless. There was something cynical about the look into the camera, something knowing.

  ‘George,’ said Shaw, standing. ‘Great work.’ He let that sink in; the squad needed to know that despite their personal issues George Valentine had been given this last chance to save his career because he’d once been a first-rate copper.

  ‘We need to keep all that in here,’ said Shaw, tapping the side of his skull. ‘At the very least it gives us an insight into the Judd family. But maybe t
here’s something else too. It looks like Bryan knew something about his twin sister’s disappearance – something he didn’t want to share with us. Did he think his father was the killer? Did he know he was the killer? There’s a secret here – could it explain why Bryan Judd is dead? We need to keep that possibility in our minds going forward. So, a couple of loose ends to check. Are we sure Andy Judd was in Erebus Street all day? Let’s check that. And I want to know where Ruddle, the boyfriend, ended up.’

  Valentine took a note.

  ‘And the address, sir?’ asked Birley. ‘Coincidence?’

  There was a break in the tension in the room, a round of group coughing, because nobody liked that word: coincidence.

  DC Jacky Lau tried to speak over the sudden hubbub. Lau’s voice held a vibrant tension, like her small, compact body.

  ‘Just a thought, sir. If she was still alive – Norma Jean – she’d be thirty-three, and the child would be eighteen.’

  She’d got her silence. None of them had thought of that – a child, a young man, a young woman. Shaw looked at the picture of Norma Jean, rearranging the lines, trying to see the possibility of other faces from the same gene pool. Then he looked at Ruddle, trying to blend the pools into a common stream.

  ‘But given she’s probably dead – and the child with her. Where’s Orzsak?’ asked Birley, switching tack.

  Valentine shrugged. ‘He’d be sixty-six – we’ll trace the pension if he’s still alive.’

  ‘Sir?’ It was DC Fiona Campbell. ‘I’ve got the electoral roll for the house-to-house this morning – a D. J. Orzsak lives on Erebus Street – number 47, next to the dock gates, opposite the pub.’ Someone whistled and chatter broke out. ‘So the prime suspect still lives at the scene of the crime.’

  Shaw was looking at the pictures on the board and he’d just noticed the stencilled date on the mugshot of Orzsak.

  ‘Hold on…’ He put a finger on the date. Valentine stiffened, aware that he’d missed something he shouldn’t have missed. ‘That’s a coincidence we can’t ignore. The day this picture was taken – presumably the day the girl went missing. Fifth of September 1992. Yesterday, the day her brother died, was the anniversary. Eighteen years to the day.’

  17

  The front door of number 47 Erebus Street was an old-fashioned ceramic blue. The downstairs window was barred, the letterbox covered with a metal plate. Across the blue wood a sharp object had been used to write one short word in tall capitals: PEDO. And a green estate car parked right in front of the door had a lazy scratched line down the offside.

  Shaw checked his tide watch: it was 11.41 a.m. and low water at Brancaster. Standing on Orzsak’s front step, he saw just how close the house was to the electricity substation which had been vandalized the night before. Number 47 was the last house of the terrace, a high fence, clogged with blackthorn, shielding its backyard from the Grade II listed building. A power company van was still parked in the street, and from behind the thorns came the sound of a pneumatic drill cracking concrete as the engineers replaced the unit’s electrics.

  Valentine knocked once. He went to knock again but the door opened to the sound of an electric lock buzzing, then a chain being pulled. Jan Orzsak stood in his pyjamas and a pair of wrecked slippers, one of them squashed flat, as though he’d channelled all the weight down one leg. His mouth was open, his tongue too big to hide behind the small lips. For a face as odd as Orzsak’s the most striking feature was its agelessness: it was almost identical to the one in the file from nearly twenty years earlier.

  ‘Mr Orzsak?’ Valentine showed his warrant card. Close up to the front step he could smell dog, the stench engrained in the door itself.

  ‘Did this happen last night?’ asked Shaw, touching the paintwork, nodding at the car.

  ‘Yes.’ It was the first word he’d said and the syllables were indistinct. The tongue again, fighting to find space to articulate the words.

  ‘Could we come in, sir?’ asked Shaw. ‘We’re investigating the death of Bryan Judd. You may have heard?’ Orzsak didn’t meet his eyes but nodded, the flesh round his neck swinging. ‘Just a few questions…’

  Orzsak turned away without another word and walked down the hallway into the through-lounge. One side wall of what had been the back room was obscured by a series of fish tanks built into a wooden frame. Each tank had been smashed, the glass scattered in the thick-pile carpet. The air was cool, but damp, and for the first time in weeks Shaw shivered.

  Orzsak walked to the nearest tank, lifted the lid, which was fitted with what looked like a small electric heater, and set it on the table beneath. He turned to face them with the corpse of a fish on his hand: a gorgeous fish – black velvet scales, with a rainbow splash of tangerine orange and lemon yellow. It was a diamond shape, as thin as a sheet of paper; a resplendent corpse.

  Orzsak went to the second tank. Same story. In the last tank the glass had not been smashed completely from the frame so that one fish had survived – an inch long in see-through silver, with a go-faster stripe in pink, gliding in shallow water amongst the shards of glass.

  Shaw and Valentine exchanged a look. ‘When exactly did this happen, Mr Orzsak?’ asked Valentine.

  ‘My neighbour – Elspeth – she said she heard them at one; her husband was watching the football.’ He touched one of his cheeks and a sudden gout of tears spilt out of his eyes. Shaw felt a rush of sympathy, prompted by a vision of what this man’s life was like on the inside.

  Orzsak turned and went into the kitchen. They found him sitting with a quart mug of tea in front of him on a plain wooden table. Valentine recognized the kitchen of a lonely man. Shaw noted that the rear window was barred too, and that an electric Maglock had been fitted to the rear door, just like the one on the front. A plate lay on the draining board covered in burnt crumbs. Rubbish collected in a black bag slumped in the corner like a corpse. There was a wine rack, not a flimsy dozen-bottle one, but a solid homemade piece of furniture. Shaw estimated it had held up to a hundred bottles. Now, perhaps twenty. There was an echo of an image in his mind – the faint shadow of the criss-cross marks on the wall in the flooded basement of the men’s hostel.

  ‘What’s happened here?’ asked Shaw. ‘Have you reported this?’

  ‘A Sunday,’ said Orzsak. ‘They know that on a Sunday I am out all day. Mass at St Casimir. Then the Polish Club. I get back at ten – sometimes later. I found all this. They cut the power – so the locks pop. It’s an old system – cheap. They are better now.’

  ‘You think someone cut the power to do this – to you?’

  ‘I live for the fish,’ said Orzsak. It was a statement without a trace of irony. He opened his fist, which had been closed, and they saw that he still held the tropical fish. ‘And they helped themselves to wine.’ A sneer disfigured his face. ‘But they don’t know the good bottles from the rest…’ he added, looking at the wine rack. He slurped tea. ‘Last year they tried to break in, so I got the locks, and the bars. I didn’t want to be here to see if it was enough. One of them said in the street I should be castrated.’ He shook his head. ‘With a bread knife.’

  ‘Who did this?’ asked Shaw, still incredulous. ‘And why didn’t you report it?’

  Orzsak laughed silently, the folds of fat around his neck shaking. ‘The same as always. Each year – on that day. The dogshit through the letterbox. The rotting rubbish over the fence into the yard. The broken window. The telephone calls when no one is there.’ He studied his mug and Shaw noticed that it bore a picture of Pope Benedict.

  ‘On that day?’ asked Shaw. ‘The day Norma Jean disappeared?’

  This time when he laughed the tiny mouth opened to reveal milk teeth.

  ‘Yes. Eighteen years ago.’

  ‘Why didn’t you come to us?’ asked Valentine.

  The change in Orzsak was frighteningly quick. He was almost across the table, the chair legs screeching on the lino, his face congested with blood.

  ‘Never.’ He hit the table, t
he mug of tea slopping over. ‘I am never going back to that place.’ He shook a finger at Valentine. ‘Men like you,’ he said, looking at Valentine. ‘Yes. Maybe you. Four of them – and then just one of them.’ Holding up his right hand he separated the fingers so that they could see that at least two of them had once been broken, then badly set. ‘They beat me,’ he said, subsiding into the chair. The anger drained away, like air from a punctured child’s paddling pool. He drank his tea, looking everywhere but at them. Shaw thought of the blush of the bruise on the side of Orzsak’s head in his police mugshot.

  ‘You were interviewed – about Norma’s disappearance,’ said Shaw.

  Orzsak looked away.

  ‘Who does this?’ asked Shaw. ‘Is it the Judds – Andy, the boys?’

  But Orzsak was smarter than that. ‘I didn’t kill the boy.’ He laughed. ‘He knew – as do I – who killed Norma Jean.’ Blood flushed into his face. ‘Andy Judd knows who killed Norma Jean.’ His eyes bulged. ‘When we were friends, Norma and I, we talked.’ He laid one hand on top of the other, showing how close they had been. ‘How he beat her. Beat the boy. I knew both the children. Their father killed Norma Jean. They fought – I know this. I’ve said this to his face.’

  Orzsak tapped a pudgy finger on the table. ‘Bryan knew too. And one day, I think, he would have told me why he knew.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘He had no part in his father’s feud with me. Never. He stood apart. I think that each year it was harder for him to keep his silence. But now…’ He cut his hand through the air like a cleaver. ‘Silence for ever.’

  The kitchen window was open by an inch and through it they heard the dull rumble of an HGV on the quayside.