Death Watch Read online

  ‘Who took the picture?’ asked Shaw, trying to buy himself some time. Judd’s aggression had thrown him, and the note of self-pity was almost unbearable.

  ‘My oldest. Sean. He was at sea when Norma went missing. Trawlers out of the Bentinck. When he got back he found this…’ He spread his hands, including them all. ‘He didn’t stick around and I don’t fucking blame him.’

  Andy grabbed the picture back and staggered slightly, slumping back into the armchair. ‘He’d always looked out for Norma, did Sean – more than Bry. Like a guardian angel. She was dead because he’d left her – that’s what he said. And now she was gone there was no point in staying. He said he wouldn’t be back, and he hasn’t been back. It broke what was left of Marie’s heart. She never forgave him – burnt every picture we had of him.’ He looked at Shaw. ‘If he’d stayed he’d have done what I should have done. He’d have killed Jan Orzsak.’

  ‘We should kill the fucker,’ said Neil.

  His father laughed at him, and Shaw wondered just how much satisfaction he got out of humiliating his youngest son. ‘Yeah, right,’ he said.

  ‘Where are you, Neil? You’re not in the picture,’ said Shaw.

  Neil looked at his father. ‘He’s in his cot.’ Andy laughed, pulling at his shock of white hair. ‘This is nothing to do with him.’

  Neil didn’t know where to look. Instead his skull twitched to one side, like a boxer’s.

  ‘And where’s Sean now?’ asked Valentine.

  ‘He doesn’t write to me – ask them,’ said Andy, self-pitying again, finished with the conversation even if Shaw wasn’t.

  ‘I get cards,’ said Neil. ‘So did Bry. He joined the navy – shore crew, as a chef at Portsmouth. He won’t come back, like Dad said. He’s done with us.’ He sensed a reaction to what he’d said, adjusting one of his hearing aids, and Shaw wondered if he knew how loud his voice could be. There was a silence and he rushed to fill it. ‘Dad didn’t kill Norma,’ he said. ‘Mum always told me she’d told the truth – she’d seen Norma Jean, crossing the yard.’ He glanced to the French windows, beyond which they could see the brick back wall. ‘But Bryan used to feel things…’ He searched for the right words. ‘He could feel what Norma Jean was feeling. He blamed Dad when she went – we don’t know why. He never told me what he’d felt. And after she went he couldn’t feel… anything.’

  Ally smiled at Neil. ‘That’s why we all know she’s dead,’ she said. ‘If she’d been alive, Bry would have known. Andy’s right. She’s not.’

  Shaw tried one last time. ‘Mr Judd. Did you see Bryan yesterday – at the hospital?’

  ‘I’ve said no. I won’t say it again. I’ve told you who killed Bry – it was Holme. He got him hooked on that green slime he used to drink – then he made him steal. When Bry said he wanted out – Holme killed him. You’ve got your killer – he’s in a bed at the Queen Vic. Don’t let him get away with it.’

  Shaw stood. ‘We need to get on. I’d like you all to stay in Lynn, please. Mr Judd, you will be formally interviewed a second time about the events last night after we’ve completed the forensics. If you plan any journeys, please inform St James’s. We will need to talk to you all again.’

  Andy Judd spat in the grate.

  At the door Shaw turned. ‘Two other things – any of you heard of a character known as the Organ Grinder?’

  Neil shook his head. ‘You don’t see them any more, do you? Not here – it’s like rag-and-bone men. They’ve gone.’

  Andy Judd had his eyes closed, back in the armchair, breathing heavily.

  ‘And you should all know that on the incinerator belt with Bryan’s body we found some human tissue – in a waste bag. We can’t find any record of its contents. It might have been put there by his killer. Do any of you know why that might be?’

  The members of the Judd family swapped glances, a cat’s cradle of looks, then Andy Judd stood and went to the window, looking out into the street. ‘Human waste,’ he said. ‘The low life in the hostel. That’s what they were.’

  20

  The Ark stood just off the inner ring road, a broad avenue of swirling carbon monoxide and dusty plane trees which bypassed the medieval town centre. A former Nonconformist chapel, it had been converted into the West Norfolk Constabulary’s forensic laboratory in the nineties. Like most of the town’s Victorian red-brick buildings it seemed to suck up the heat on a summer’s day, its simple architectural lines buckling slightly in an exhaust-induced mirage. Shaw parked the Land Rover at St James’s and they walked across for their appointment with the pathologist, Dr Justina Kazimierz.

  Inside the Ark the light was sea-green, filtered in through the original Victorian glass. The rectangular box-like nave – the origin, with its simple pitched roof, of the building’s nickname – was divided by a metal partition six feet high. Beyond was the pathologist’s lab: a small morgue, six dissecting tables, and the only piece of the original statuary to remain in the building – a stone angel, set on the wall, its hands covering its face. On this side of the partition was Tom Hadden’s kingdom – six ‘hot-desk’ PC stations, two lab tables bristling with racks of test-tubes, and an array of forensic kit. Along one wall, running through the partition, was a heavily lagged horizontal chute – a closed shooting gallery for the analysis of bullets. In one of three fume cupboards they could see a green gas billowing.

  Hadden sat at a desk, a laptop open, the screen saver a flock of marsh birds over a Norfolk beach.

  ‘Toy shop’s open, then,’ said Shaw.

  ‘Justina’s ready,’ Hadden said, closing his eyes, as he always did when he was thinking. ‘Then I’ve got something for you. You’ll like it – not all of it – but some.’

  Dr Kazimierz pushed her way through a pair of barroom doors, topped up a mug of coffee, and retreated without a word.

  They followed her through. The blackened corpse of Bryan Judd lay on the central autopsy table. To one side a white sheet covered another corpse – two limbs partially visible: a foot, the veins marbled blue, and an arm and hand, fallen to one side and outwards, as if the victim were signalling a left turn.

  Dr Kazimierz saw Shaw’s interest. ‘That’s the floater. One of Rigby’s.’ Dr Lance Rigby was a former Manchester pathologist who had retired to the north Norfolk coast to be close to his boat. He picked up routine cases, private work, and consultancy. Dr Kazimierz had expressed the view to Shaw at the St James’s CID Christmas party that she knew several high-street butchers who were better qualified pathologists.

  Something had caught Shaw’s eye. He knelt by the hand. The skin around the wrist was rucked, red, and showed the distinct imprint of a band of some sort. ‘Watch?’ he asked.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Kazimierz, refusing to quit her position behind Bryan Judd’s head. ‘Rigby thinks it’s a suicide from up the coast – clothes and valuables left on the beach. Hence – presumably – no watch.’

  Shaw looked again. It didn’t look as if a watch strap had made the mark.

  He put the detail aside and joined them. A mortuary assistant fussed, setting out instruments on an aluminium side-table. Valentine found himself a spot to one side where he could see Judd’s corpse, but where he could also see the clock which had been fixed on the chapel wall. He concentrated on the second hand, the juddering, metronomic movement. If he felt sick he’d look at this, thinking about the clockwork within, imagining the interleaving cogs, clean, crisp, and inhuman.

  ‘So – externals first,’ said the pathologist. She tapped the teeth with a metal tweezer. ‘Perfect match, by the way, for Judd’s dental records – so there’s no doubt, if there ever was any.’

  She’d reconstructed the broken skull – as neat as a child’s jigsaw in 3D, held together with a plastic glue, clearly showing the small puncture-hole depression at the rear towards the apex of the spine.

  ‘This is an impact point,’ she said. ‘Don’t ask me what – I can’t tell. Tom says you’ve got a ball-head switch? Well, I couldn’t rule
that out. But that’s as far as I’ll go.

  ‘One surprise is this…’ She had a large magnifying lens on a tripod which she positioned over the chest. The blackened skin was taut, but just below the collarbone on the left side was a small hole. She worked the tweezers into the wound. ‘I need to cut through the tissue here to see how deep this is, but even from here I’d say three to six inches.’

  ‘Knife?’

  ‘Yes. Maybe. But it’s not a traditional kitchen knife, or a switchblade. The point is very narrow, almost like an épée – the heavier of the fencing weapons. So something very sharp, and narrow. It’s not fatal – that’s the skull wound, then the furnace. But it’s traumatic. His blood pressure would have collapsed pretty quickly if it severed any major arteries.

  ‘Now for inside.’ She began work, opening up the abdomen to gain access to the principal organs. While the exterior of the corpse had been sucked dry of any moisture the chest cavity had survived largely intact. The sound of trickling body fluids was set against the swish of cars on the ring road outside.

  ‘I’ve tested the blood,’ said Kazimierz. ‘We’re talking high levels of alcohol – twice the limit for driving, plus cannabis.’

  ‘Really?’ said Shaw. ‘Ingested when?’

  She spilt the contents of the stomach into a metal bowl. ‘Here’s the culprit,’ she said, drawing off a sample by pipette from the pool of vivid green liquid. She removed a length of intestine and, effecting a precise longitudinal incision, examined the contents.

  ‘Well – it’s mostly still in the stomach. Let’s say eighty per cent – with the rest in the small intestine. There’s nothing in the colon…’ She held a length of large intestine up to the light and Valentine watched the second hand of the clock judder.

  ‘So – two hours maximum.’

  Shaw and Valentine exchanged glances. Had Aidan Holme brought a bottle of Green Dragon to the hospital to help persuade Judd that his drug-supplying days were not over after all? The next major consignment for incineration was due within twenty-four hours. Holme would have been desperate to intercept it before it went up in flames.

  ‘We’re saying he was dead by the time he went in?’ asked Valentine, switching tack, trying to see what had happened beyond the technical jargon. He risked a glance at the blackened canines.

  ‘Yes. Or past saving. The lungs…’ She used her gloved hands to spread out the tissue on a metal drainage board. ‘The lungs have some toxic contents, I would say – but we need to test for that. There’s a tiny bit of inhalation from inside the furnace. Ash – as hot as any ash in any fire. He’d have taken half a breath, maybe less. The heat has scorched the tissue.’

  Shaw imagined being half-conscious for that excruciating second as the body jerked along the incinerator belt, then in through the opening to the furnace. Darkness, then heat, with a soundtrack out of hell.

  ‘Hell,’ said Valentine, seeing the same image.

  Dr Kazimierz removed the major organs and trepanned the skull, setting what was left of the brain in a glass dish. In another thirty-five minutes she was done. Valentine led the dash back to the coffee machine. As they turned away Shaw caught the movement in the pathologist’s right hand. A sign of the cross.

  She followed them back to her desk on the far side of the partition and speed-read a page of handwritten notes. ‘Nothing else. The clothes were largely burnt into the skin. Coins in one pocket, a lighter, a penknife. Mobile in the shirt pocket. What’s left of a cardboard packet – cigarettes, but we can’t get a brand for you until they’ve done their stuff…’

  She nodded once at Shaw, then at Tom Hadden. ‘That’s it.’ She turned away without another word.

  Hadden sipped a cup of espresso from the Italian coffee-maker on the desktop. ‘No joy on the snapped match, I’m afraid. Dry as bone. I thought we’d get some saliva if he held it in his teeth, but no go.’

  On Hadden’s desk lay an evidence bag holding the torch they’d found beside the hubcap ashtray. ‘Bad news first. I’ve checked MVR online and it’s not a company. We’re talking to the manufacturers of the torch – they’re Finnish.’

  That was a detail Shaw liked, so he filed it away.

  ‘But it’s the dust on the torch itself that’s interesting…’ He touched a key on his laptop and the screen filled with a microscope shot. A mass of fibre, unspeakable horror-movie bugs, chips of material.

  ‘It’s smeared in this stuff. This is it at ten thousand. All dust is different – like a fingerprint. This sample is very low on human tissue – skin and the like. It’s very high on two things…’

  He brought up another shot. ‘This is some kind of fibre – man made, like a polythene. I don’t know, maybe wrapping or packaging of some sort. And this…’

  The third shot. Splinters of something red.

  ‘It’s wood dust – sawdust. But really, really, fine. But it’s the wood that’s odd – Muirapiranga. Bloodwood. A South American hardwood – valuable stuff. Looks like teak. I’ve checked online and it’s used widely for expensive flooring. Imported, obviously. You want to see a bloodwood tree in its natural environment, you could try the banks of the Amazon. If you want it on your kitchen floor it’s five pounds a square foot.’

  ‘Right,’ said Shaw. Another detail that didn’t fit. Or did it? He thought of Father Thiago Martin, an exile from Brazil. He’d get Twine to organize a background check on the priest.

  ‘Other results…’ Hadden flipped a file. ‘The blood on the conveyor is Judd’s – and his alone. The rice you found at the Sacred Heart of Mary is a match for the grains at the scene. But it’s a standard import long-grain variety from the US – Tesco stocks it. Cash ’n’ carry warehouses too. So it helps, but I wouldn’t dream of taking it into court. And we’re still struggling with the waste in the bag under the body. Another twenty-four hours – maybe less. Oh, and I’ve sent the milk bottle away – the one from the electricity sub-station. There’s a trace of saliva round the neck.’

  Shaw thought of Andy Judd in his alpha male’s armchair, the pint of milk empty by his foot.

  Hadden smiled, as rare a sight as one of his beloved Ospreys. ‘Where we did strike lucky, however, was with this.’ Hadden scrolled through his image file on the laptop until he reached a picture of the metal seat they’d found on the balcony by the hubcap. ‘This was covered with Judd’s prints – and those of his colleagues who cover the other two shifts. But there was a print that didn’t match – and it was on top of Judd’s… It was very difficult to lift – we had to use a new methodology which I won’t bore you with, although you will become familiar with it, Peter, because you’ll have to defend the bill when it goes upstairs. Eight thousand pounds.’

  Valentine whistled, delighted that wasn’t going to be his job.

  ‘Anyway, once we’d got it, I ran it through the database Twine’s set up of all prints taken in the case so far. Suspects, witnesses, victim. I got a direct match.’ He let them sweat for a full second. ‘It’s Aidan Holme’s.’

  Valentine clapped once, and started searching for a Silk Cut. At last, a solid piece of forensics which put one of their prime suspects on the spot. Shaw let his naturally contrarian nature kick in, because that single print proved only that Aidan Holme had been there. It didn’t prove he was a killer. But then he told himself that a break was a break and he should be thankful for that.

  ‘Let’s hope Holme lives,’ he said.

  21

  On Erebus Street three pairs of uniformed PCs were working the doorsteps and a team of builders were shoring up the ruins of number 6. DC Jackie Lau was on the kerb to meet them as Shaw parked the Land Rover in the shadow of the Sacred Heart.

  ‘Sir. Sorry – but I’m absolutely sure you need to see this.’ She led the way inside the church, out of the sun, the nave already a cool haven amongst the red bricks of the North End. Valentine hung back, trying to get a decent signal on his mobile so that he could check Aidan Holme’s condition at the Queen Victoria.

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nbsp; Inside, DC Lau checked a note. ‘According to the warden – Kennedy – there were fourteen homeless men here last night,’ she told Shaw. ‘There’s thirteen here now. All the statements we’ve taken match – except one. Most of them ate a big meal at 7.30, then went to bed because there were no lights. The fracas in the street woke some of them up, and a few went out to have a look. Then they all went back to bed. But one of them has a different story. He woke up some time before the attack on the hostel. He says he saw a man being abducted.’

  She let Shaw take that in. ‘The witness is well short of 100 per cent reliable, sir – but I think he’s telling the truth. Either that, or I can’t see why he’d lie.’

  ‘Let’s see him,’ said Shaw.

  Valentine joined them. He studied a text message on his phone. ‘Holme’s still bad,’ he said, sniffing the air, laden with the smell of huddled people.

  In front of the altar the team had set up a pair of tables and two uniformed officers were taking statements. The homeless men were sitting in the pews, drinking tea from paper cups or reading bits of newspapers. Lau took them into the vestry they’d seen the night before. A man sat at the table on which stood an empty mug and a single biscuit on a large plate. The door to the boiler room, and Kennedy’s bedsit, was open. ‘This is John William,’ she said. ‘He’s from London, hitched up in a lorry to Cambridge some time ago. He says his surname’s gone. But he might remember it later.’

  Shaw shook the old man’s hand, noticing as he often did that age seemed to add weight to the limbs, as if they were seeking a place to rest.

  ‘It was his first night here at the church,’ said Lau. ‘He’s very tired because he says he walked here from Cambridge – he thinks it’s taken him a month, sleeping rough.’

  John William nodded, helping himself to the last biscuit.