Death Watch Read online

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Darren. He lifted the bag and read the written label attached to the metal tag. It was in code and meaningless. There was a signature, a squiggle in blue. Darren shrugged.

  ‘Take it back,’ said Bourne. Darren’s shoulders sagged. He should be clocking off at nine.

  ‘You could look,’ said Potts, pouring tea from a flask into the plastic stopper cup. Darren didn’t want to walk back, and he could feel they were judging him. He disguised a deep breath, then flipped the bag onto a metal worktop. The seal was plastic, poppable. He broke it open. The bloody stump was at the top, the bone cut clean to reveal the neat central core for the marrow. He forced himself to look beyond, down to the waxy toes. There was bile in his throat, but he was proud of himself for looking, so he didn’t show anything in his face.

  He resealed the bag with his fist; a savage blow.

  ‘Right.’

  Bourne was already laughing, Potts spat out his tea. They leant on each other, a little vignette of mirth. Darren thought, not for the first time, how cruel comedy could be.

  ‘Priceless,’ said Potts, leaving a smear under his eyes where tears had trickled out under the mask. ‘Left or right!’

  The main lights flickered back on, neon blazing, and – unbelievably – the noise levels jumped. A pain, quite sharp, went through one of Darren’s eardrums. He grabbed the yellow bag, feeling tears well up in his eyes.

  ‘Sorry, kid,’ said Bourne, avoiding the youngster’s eyes, pocketing the ballpoint. ‘Here – come and have a look at this.’

  Darren didn’t move. He didn’t trust Bourne. ‘No,’ Bourne laughed, loosening his tie. ‘Really. I have to check the furnace now we’re back on full power. Routine. Come on…’ He put an arm round Darren’s bony shoulders. They walked to the wall and climbed a metal stairway to the next level. As they climbed Darren felt the temperature rise so that sweat sprang out on his skin and a cool thread of salty water ran across his left temple. Here, on the second floor, the space was subdivided into corridors lined with control panels, the ceiling an open metal lattice just above their heads. There was a steel wall in front of them, some rusted dials, a red panic button. And that smell of heated metal, the stench of the guts of the machine. Darren licked dry dust off the roof of his mouth. In the centre of the metal wall was a small hatch which Bourne flipped open to reveal a pair of eyepieces, like a set of binoculars, sunk into the wall.

  ‘Ashes to ashes,’ said Bourne, running a hand down his stiff back and licking his lips. ‘Six hundred degrees. When we’ve done there’s nothing left but a thimbleful of white dust. She can take anything…’ He patted the metal wall affectionately. ‘Radioactive waste, chemical waste, plastics, metals. Go on, have a look.’

  Darren stepped up and sank his face into the plastic mould.

  He was looking into the heart of the furnace. It wasn’t fiery in there. It was like the sun; a searing yellow, with flares of aluminium white. And then, at the left-hand margin, a sudden intrusion of charred black, something extended, like a winter branch. Darren blinked, clearing his eyes. The vision edged across his field of view on the internal conveyor, and he saw it for what it was: a body, the head on the thin skeletal neck flexing, jerking, one of the arms thrashing with mechanical, inhuman spasms. A body in agony, combusting like newspaper tossed on an open fire.

  Darren sprang back, angry, the tears welling again. ‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘There’s someone in there…’ Vomit gushed through his hands as he tried to cover his mouth. Bourne stepped in, pressing his face into the mould, turning his head quickly, rapidly, left right, right left. He hit the panic button, hard, twice, and a siren screamed in the heart of the machine.

  Darren’s knees had buckled and he sank to the floor, then rolled over, lying on his back, looking up into the metal-mesh floor above. The noise level peaked and then died, like an aircraft engine after touchdown and throttle-back, so that what was left felt like silence. So he heard the footsteps, above them, on the metal floor. Not measured footsteps – he’d later tell the police officer who took his statement – not measured, but running, escaping footsteps. Briefly he saw those footsteps, through the wire, the base of a pair of fleeing shoes. But it was the sound that was wrong – the crack of iron on iron, of steel on steel. And the telling detail: the sparks – the little crackling electric sparks – as the shoes struck the mesh, creating a necklace of tiny lightning bolts.

  2

  Detective Inspector Peter Shaw was on the beach when his mobile rang – the ringtone a snatch from A Sea Symphony by Vaughan Williams. His beach. The death of an Indian summer’s day, the sun already long set, the sand cool now, where it had once burnt the pale arches of his feet. He sat on the lifeguard’s high chair, the RNLI flag flying over his head. Tracking his telescope from north to south along a falling wave he looked for the few late surfers prepared to stay out in the dusk, and found instead his wife, Lena, walking in the shallows with his daughter. Further out the swell spilt sets of waves in perfect sequence.

  He’d been looking west, enjoying the last of the amber light. A broad face, wide open, matching the distant horizon, high cheekbones, almost Slavic, and short hair surfer-blond. His good eye was blue, as pale as falling tap water. The other blind, the pupil reduced to a pale circle like the moon edging its way into the sky above. He’d lost the sight in his right eye a year ago and he had only just begun to develop the skills which would allow him to judge distance. In the first months after the accident he’d tried to ignore his disability. Now he understood that it might give him skills he’d never had.

  He twisted the top of a Thermos flask and let its lip sit on the edge of the cup before pouring out the cool juice within. In the early days after his accident he’d made a fool of himself more times that he could recall, pouring coffee onto his desktop rather than into his mug, his single eye unable to construct a 3D world. He twisted the top back on the Thermos and concentrated on a yacht which had dropped anchor out at sea. He tried to judge the distance using what artists called ‘sfumato’ or smoky perspective – the tendency for colours to dim to blue as they approach the horizon.

  He watched as a family quit the beach, a straggled line from the mother, carrying beach bags, to a young child, reluctant to leave a ring of sandcastles. Soon, he thought, he’d be able to reclaim the beach for his own. The car park on the headland was nearly empty, a few barbecue fires flared along the waterline, but to the north the sands ran to a horizon as deserted as the Empty Quarter. He imagined a camel train threading its way into the night past Arab camp fires.

  He shivered, zipping up a lightweight jacket, hugging himself.

  He’d played with his father here as a child; between the lifeboat house and the old café. Detective Chief Inspector Jack Shaw, reduced to human scale by the tangled skein of a kite’s string or a child’s cricket bat. The beach had been their world, the only one they’d shared, the place they could both live life in the moment. Shaw remembered the day he’d traced the outline of an imaginary corpse on the sand, his first crime scene. Clues laid: a clamshell for the heart where the bullet had lodged, lolly sticks marking the shell cases, a cigarette butt between imaginary teeth. He’d been ten. His father had looked at the outline long and hard, and then he’d sat his son in the sand and told him for the first time about the rest of his life; that he could do anything he wanted, be anything he wanted. Anything but this – anything but the police force. There’d been no reasons, no duologue. Just a diktat. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

  Somewhere on the beach he heard the time pips from a radio, and he counted nine. Then his mobile had rung. He’d held it at arm’s length, as if that would help. But the text, from Tom Hadden’s CSI unit, was one he couldn’t ignore.

  187 QVH

  The code for suspicious death – 187 – and the scene of crime: the Queen Victoria hospital.

  And now, twenty-three minutes later, he’d swapped his world for this world. He wore a T-shirt under a jacket, an RNLI motif on his
chest, but that was the only link back to the beach. That and his suntan.

  He stood in the incinerator room, watching the corpse emerge from the furnace doors, the conveyor belt set in reverse. Instead of a distant horizon, twenty miles away, he was surrounded by metal walls, greasy heat, and the stench of ash; ash that had had every ounce of life burnt out of it. His world, limitless on the beach, had been compacted, pressurized, to fit within this windowless box. The air had thickened, cooked, so that he felt sweat bristling on his face. A sparrow flew around, its wings clattering amongst the steel girders and pipes, prompting a snowfall of white dust.

  The conveyor belt shook and the motion accentuated the vibration of the limbs. One hand was gone, the arm ending in a twist of charred tendons like a severed power cable. But the rest of the body was intact, the mass reduced by the extreme heat of the furnace, so that it seemed elegantly elongated, thought Shaw, like a reclining statue by Giacometti. Clothing, what was left of it, was burnt into the body, a leather belt still visible, on the chest a mass of molten plastic and metal which might have once been a mobile phone in a breast pocket. The shoes were gone except for the heavy soles. The head was twisted back on the apex of the spine, the jaws impossibly wide, the teeth black. A hole had been blown in the back of the skull where the brains had boiled and popped the cranial bones.

  And the face, one of Peter Shaw’s passions; but for now he avoided it, and especially the eyes, knowing he wouldn’t find them.

  Shaw had been breathing in through his mouth since entering the incinerator room. He sniffed the air: just ash, charcoal perhaps, and seared bone. Nothing of the body itself, as if the great incinerator chimney had sucked away its essence, setting the soul free on the night breeze.

  The belt juddered to a halt. Smoke rose from the charred flesh. The only noise, just on the edge of hearing, was the metal cooling around them, creaking like a stiff joint, and the bird above amongst the piping, fussing.

  ‘You said he was moving – when the witness saw him inside the furnace? What time was that?’ asked Shaw, not taking his eyes off the corpse.

  Detective Sergeant George Valentine was at his shoulder, a grey cotton handkerchief pressed to his mouth and nose. Shaw could hear his laboured breathing, air being dragged into shredded lungs.

  Valentine might be an old-fashioned copper with thirty years’ experience but he’d be the first to admit he’d never been happy in the presence of death. When he’d got the call he’d been in the Artichoke. Six pints, Sky Sports 1. He’d been planning a Chinese takeaway, crispy-fried duck. He didn’t fancy it now.

  ‘Eight thirty-one,’ he said. ‘The furnace is run by computer – so there’s a record. It’s Darren Wylde – the kid’s name. He was being shown the works by the foreman…’ Valentine flipped the pages of his notebook. Shaw noticed he had a fresh charity sticker on his raincoat lapel: Cancer Research UK, stuck over the corner of another one which read RSPB. There was always something stuck on the lapel, as though he couldn’t pass a charity tin without emptying his pockets.

  ‘Bourne. Gerry Bourne,’ said Valentine. ‘Foreman.’ He didn’t volunteer any other information because he didn’t enjoy talking, so if he had to speak he kept it short and to the point, saving every breath. He’d smoked forty cigarettes a day all his adult life and he didn’t need a doctor to tell him what was wrong with his lungs. He coughed with a sound like someone shifting coal out of a scuttle.

  Shaw laid a gloved hand on the conveyor belt. ‘How long would it take for something put on the belt here to get as far as the point where the kid saw the corpse?’

  ‘Potts, the engineer on duty, says eight minutes.’

  ‘So when this kid turned up here in the incinerator room it was just a few minutes after the victim had gone on the belt… And after he’d seen the body in the furnace you say he heard footsteps?’

  ‘Right. Says he looked up and saw shoes, running.’ Valentine pointed up at the metal-mesh ceiling. ‘Second floor – so whoever was running was on the third.’ He shifted feet, aware that his bladder was full. ‘And sparks – which is odd. I checked – nobody on site wears metal boots. They’re issued with rubber-soled shoes for grip, plus it’s insulation. Place is a death trap.’ He tried to focus on his notebook again, knowing that black humour was one of his many weaknesses. ‘Wylde’s twenty – student at Loughborough. English. This is a summer vac job.’ He took an extra breath to finish the sentence. ‘He’s downstairs in the incident room, if you want a word.’

  ‘Incident room?’ said Shaw, impressed, reminding himself that George Valentine had probably run more murder inquiries than he’d had shouts on the lifeboat. Standard murder inquiry procedure required the incident room to be set up as close to the SOC as operationally possible. That way CID was on top of the crime, close to witnesses, and the forensic team.

  ‘I’d better get on,’ said Valentine. ‘Get the statements organized. Unless…?’

  Shaw shook his head. ‘Hang about.’

  There had been a note of insubordination in the DS’s voice that Shaw couldn’t fail to detect. And there was a note of something else – bitterness. Valentine had been up in front of a promotions panel on the previous Friday – his third attempt to regain the DI rank he’d lost a decade before. His third, failed attempt.

  Shaw looked at his watch. It didn’t just tell the time. It showed the tides at Hunstanton, the phases of the moon, sunrise and sunset. It was like carrying his other world around with him. He tried to suppress a wave of irritation with DS Valentine. The relationship between a DI and their DS was like a marriage; their problem was that it was a broken one, and the West Norfolk Constabulary didn’t do quickie divorces.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘It’s less than an hour since they found the body.’

  ‘Right,’ said Valentine, looking at his feet. ‘Foot sloggers are checking the gates, car parks, the buses. We’ve looked at every inch upstairs. There’s a door out to a ladder which drops down into the works yard. Running man got out there. It’s all taped off.’

  ‘ID on the victim?’ said Shaw.

  ‘Odds on he’s a Bryan Judd,’ said Valentine. ‘Ran the conveyor belt on this shift for ten years. Last seen at 7.45 tonight by Potts – just before a brief power cut. The line went down at eight fifteen, back up at eight twenty-nine.’ Another extra breath. ‘There’s a fault on the grid. Emergency generator kicked in – so the blackout lasted less than a minute.’

  ‘Where was Judd last seen?’

  ‘In his office, if you can call it that. Looks more like a kennel.’ Valentine nodded at a small wooden cubicle, with smeared, dirty windows on three sides, like the deck housing on a small trawler. The only decoration they could see was a poster: country-and-western, a girl with flaxen hair and an acoustic guitar. The only thing she was wearing was the guitar.

  Valentine’s small, round head lolled forward on his neck, like a vulture’s. He put a cigarette between his lips but left it unlit. ‘They’ve tannoyed through to the main hospital, searched everywhere he should be. Fuck all.’

  Valentine enjoyed swearing because he knew Shaw didn’t.

  ‘Absolutely fuck all.’

  Smoke rose from the corpse like a barbecue. The CSI team had moved in and taped off the area, and were about to erect a small forensic tent over the body and the belt. Now that the machinery was switched off – including the extractors – white dust was settling everywhere like frost.

  ‘Accident?’ tried Shaw.

  ‘Why climb on the belt?’ countered Valentine. ‘Nah. ’Fraid not.’

  ‘Suicide?’

  ‘Potts says last time he saw him, Judd was singing “The Wichita Lineman”. Apparently he did that a lot – decent voice.’

  ‘Right – so short of tap-dancing across the shop floor I guess we’ll have to take that as an indication of robust mental health. Security?’ asked Shaw.

  Valentine stepped closer, tiring of the machine-gun delivery of questions he was supposed to know the answer to. ‘Not
great. To get in here from the hospital main building – the public areas – you need a tap-in PIN number. Changes daily – but it’s not exactly the Enigma Code. Today it’s 0509.’

  ‘It’s always the date?’

  ‘Yeah. There are exterior doors but all the staff have keys.’ Valentine brushed the back of his hand across his five o’clock shadow. ‘Or you can come up from Level One – that’s the basement. I did. So did the kid. Admin. people say you’ve got to have one of these.’ They both wore a visitor’s pass looped round the neck.

  Shaw shook his head. ‘You got a white coat on they’ll let you operate, let alone into the building. CCTV?’

  ‘I’ve got Birley sitting through it now – but you know, there’s five thousand people on site. It’s a long shot. And what are we looking for? A bloke with iron shoes?’

  DC Mark Birley was new on the squad. Ex-uniform, with an eye for detail, and something to prove. It was a good choice.

  Shaw stepped under the scene-of-crime tape, then stayed down on his haunches so that he could get close to the skull, right inside the personal space. The thought struck him that our personal space begins to shrink at the moment of death – until it vanishes into the skin. He tried to sense that now, to feel the edge of the life that had fled – but there was nothing there, no line to cross. He got an inch closer, so that what had been the victim’s face filled his field of vision. This close the loss of vision in his right eye didn’t make any difference – in fact it could help, providing him with a crisp 2D picture.

  Shaw had done a degree in art. That had kept his father happy. Anything but the police force would have kept him happy. But what his father didn’t know was that the course his son had chosen at Southampton University included a year out at the FBI College in Quantico, Virginia, studying forensic art. It had been straight from there to the Metropolitan Police College at Hendon.