[PS & GV #6] Death on Demand Read online

  Shaw cast a final glance at the whiteboard, with its elegant equation.

  ‘My wife runs the watersports shop on the beach, between Holme and Hunstanton. We get clubs, hiring kit for the day, jet skis and the like. A barefoot ski club came up last summer from West London, the instructor put that very equation up on an A-board out on the sand. The “w” is easy – weight in pounds, right? The result in miles per hour is the speed you have to reach before there’s enough lift – in bare feet – to get the skier up on their legs. So, for me, that would be the best part of forty miles per hour, which is pretty scary in nothing but a wetsuit. But I guess you live for that – the thrill, the sea hissing, the sky, all that space.’

  Valentine was at the door, waiting to leave, but not in a hurry because he knew Shaw didn’t do idle chit-chat.

  ‘We are on the premises now and will be until further notice. The blind camera puts all members of staff under suspicion. Re-interviews will take several days. But then you’re off duty at six? For good. I’m sorry to cut into what little time you have left but when your criminal lawyer arrives you might inform him we will expect you to give a formal statement at St James’, police headquarters, Lynn, at four this afternoon. Sorry if that ruins any plans you had to get out on the water. Our interview rooms are eight feet by ten. All of which is positively spacious compared to a prison cell. Think about that, Ms Fortis.’

  FIFTEEN

  Detective (Grade 3) Tiffany Reason could have stepped right out of the DVD box set of NYPD Blue. Black, five foot three, 140 pounds, sharp-creased, slate grey pants, cap with badge and number: 455793. Shield in gold, silver and blue. Holster – minus gun – night-stick, cuffs and radio, with the mouthpiece pinned to her collar. Wet full lips, watery roaming eyes, and what looked like a permanent grin which said: ‘Shucks. I’m gonna have to bust your ass.’ PPC Jan Clay was sure the air of mild embarrassment, even self-effacement, was merely a screen.

  ‘Thanks for taking the time out to come see me here now. I appreciate it,’ said Reason.

  The conference suite on the top floor of St James’ police HQ was packed with maybe a hundred officers present, mainly uniformed. The chief constable’s email had been less than subtle: he expected all ranks to attend unless on operational duty elsewhere. Jan noted that while she was still in the building an hour after her shift clocked out, DS Chalker had led a break-out to the Red House. His parting shot had been a model of its kind: ‘Take a note for us, girl. We’re going to chew the fat on the corner. Copy on my desk overnight.’

  Jan was happy to avoid the pub. Sometimes she went along to make it clear she wasn’t intimidated. But this evening she wanted to be alone in a crowd. George’s news threatened the future she’d seen so clearly ahead of her just the day before. They’d meet later to talk some more, but for now she just wanted a distraction. She knew she had to get George in for an operation, because it might save his life, their lives. But she suspected he was going to duck the issue and leave the outcome to fate. She couldn’t let that happen.

  She sat alone, to one side, by an open window. Their affair was a well-kept secret, as they’d both wanted the anonymity and to avoid the office gossip machine. But she couldn’t help thinking now that when the news did break it wasn’t going to make DS Chalker’s day, and that she’d like to be there to enjoy the moment. For the first time since George had told her Scrutton’s diagnosis, she smiled.

  The room filled the east end of the main six-floor office block of St James’, with windows on three sides, which had been thrown open to capture the evening breeze. The view was clear to the horizon, the sea to the north, the river winding inland past a belching power plant. But they weren’t entirely above the town: Greyfriars Tower, the last remnant of the old abbey, stood next to St James’ – a leaning, Gothic, octagonal turret, which came just level with the conference room, and was home to a flock of roosting crows.

  Detective Reason had a fist the size of a ham-hock within which was hidden a remote control for a video screen. The first picture showed a pair of sneakers on a wire, the giant letters of HOLLYWOOD in the background, decorating LA’s mountain backdrop; then a pair by the London Eye, then Madrid, Rome, Chicago.

  ‘Yup,’ she said, ‘this is pretty much a global phenomenon. Isn’t new – I’m not saying it is. We’ve got records going back to the Civil War – that’s our one not yours – says demobilized soldiers, they used to chuck their boots over a tree branch on their way out of barracks, free at last. Maybe started there, maybe not. But it’s here to stay, and I’m going around …’ She mimicked a shuffle, her head down. ‘Going around, place to place, just saying what we know about it in my town, that’s New York. ’Cos if you’re a police officer on the street, you need to know this stuff. I don’t have the numbers here in King’s Lynn …’ She smiled at her own emphasis on the archaic name. ‘But New York we’ve lost 813 officers since the force was founded, 322 to gunfire. So you know, a few of us each year don’t get to see Christmas. It’s dangerous out there, and everything helps. Your chief constable, he’s one of the police officers who thinks we should all be sharing this stuff, so that’s why I’m here.’

  The room’s air-conditioning unit, despite the open windows, rattled. They all heard it because the room was silent now. Tiffany Reason had her audience respectfully spellbound.

  ‘There’s a website you can check out for yourselves – flyingkicks.com. They list the theories, right, but the big truth is there ain’t no one reason. There’s a plethora. That’s a good word, I learnt it just for the trip.’

  There was a dutiful flutter of laughter. On the screen they watched the images come and fade, come and fade; shoes on wires, thousands of them, in streets in every city on the planet.

  Detective Reason broke the theories down into ten neat categories.

  1. Celebration: apparently Oz teenagers throw their trainers over the wire to mark the loss of virginity. ‘They lose their cherry, they lose their shoes,’ said Tiffany. More generally the shoe might represent coming of age in many ways, literally sloughed off as the youngster grows and buys new ones. So brand new shoes on wires were extremely rare.

  2. Memorial: the shoes of the dead were hung in the air where ghosts walked. Fallen gang members were often honoured with such an aerial gravestone.

  3. Bullying: vicious but effective; the victim is simply forced to hobble away, barefoot or in socks, down the city’s hard streets. The shoes remain as a daily reminder of their humiliation and the power of the bully.

  4. No-Go Zone: documented cases in Madrid, Sicily, Marseilles and Manila point to shoes marking boundaries around neighbourhoods where the police have agreed to keep out, usually to allow organized crime to operate prostitution, drugs or illegal gaming. This is either a genuine policy, designed to limit the illegal activities, or part of a corrupt partnership between criminals and police.

  5. Drug dealing: as a signal that a crack house is close-by, or other drug vending. In some cases – Miami 2008, Sydney 2010 – the brands of trainer were found to be significant and were used to indicate the kind of drugs for sale. Generally, this theory was seen as making little real sense unless combined with a No-Go Zone, or large numbers of shoes, in clusters, which can obscure the signal shoes. Again, colour here could be key; one New York Brooklyn gang used purple Sky Kites to indicate drug sale points, but always on wires crowded with other shoes. (So-called shoe trees, hundreds on one tree or lamppost, were common in Latin American cities and the favellas.)

  6. Art: often compared with graffiti, so-called shoefiti was the expression of an individual’s identity in the city. One New York art house had made 5,000 pairs of wooden, two-dimensional sneakers, and tossing them had become a street performance, often greeted with applause from passers-by. Suburban residents tended to react quite differently to shoefiti, and several large cities have shoe squads to clear them away. Most residents felt they brought the neighbourhood down and depressed house prices.

  Tiffany had a pair of the
art shoes, green and gold, with a classic 1950s baseball design.

  On the video screen they saw a young man walking down a sidewalk at night, a pair of Skewville 2D sneakers sticking out of his jeans back pocket. They watched him dash out into the street, retrieve the ‘shoes’, then – holding one in his left hand, one in his right – launch them expertly up and over the wires running to a set of traffic lights. Applause, off-screen, was combined with a few excited whoops.

  The snippet of film brought a memory to Jan. Some nights, when George worked late, she’d walk along the river bank, then back through the graveyard of All Saints. Here, five minutes from the house on Greenland Street, lay Julie Valentine’s grave. She’d see, always, a shell or a stone perched, defying the laws of gravity, and she’d imagine George visiting the spot, to think perhaps, about the past and the future. The last time she’d been on a walk she’d moved his shell aside and put her own razorbill in its place. She thought now that this was like the trainers on wires, that she was claiming territory, or – at the very least – trying to make the point, even if only to herself, that her life was important.

  7. Murder: again, rare, but documented. Usually associated with gang warfare over territory. The victim was stripped of his – or her – trainers, which were often then smeared with blood, before being tossed over the wires as a warning and a statement of intent: this line will be defended. The NYPD shoe squad had five US documented cases of murder inquiries in which a so-called ‘flying kicks’ appeared as forensic evidence in subsequent proceedings. Interpol had two cases: one from Australia, one from Japan.

  Jan shifted in her seat. She was still taking flak from Chalker and the squad for sending the Lister Tunnel trainers to Tom Hadden for analysis. When they were officially told the result – pig’s blood, no more – she’d be roundly ridiculed.

  8. Meme. ‘This,’ said Detective Reason, ‘is a bit like a gene. Your guy – that Richard Dawkins – he come up with this in The Selfish Gene which you all read about as much as we have back in Brooklyn.’

  This time the laughter was genuine, spooking the crows to take to the sky in a grey, squawking, halo of wings from their roosting spot on Greyfriars Tower.

  ‘But the idea’s good enough. It’s a fad, right? Or a fashion. And it just moves about between people in their heads. And it changes – mutates, is what the psychologists say. There’s a line I remember from this report we got commissioned from Colombia. “They seem to suggest themselves to each other”. That’s good in there, ’cos people see the trainers on the wire and they think they’ll do that too. Maybe not for the same reason at all. But it marks the fact that they’re alive, that they’re here, now. And every time they walk under those trainers they think: “That’s me,” and, of course, it marks the passage of time – what they’ve done since. Their lives.’

  SIXTEEN

  The Phoenix artists’ cooperative, housed in a former Hanseatic warehouse on Lynn’s waterfront, boasted a facade of limestone blocks and the original thirteenth-century windows, from which hung painted banners proclaiming: Festival ’15. The Co-Op Café was on the ground floor, with tables outside, set between various metal and wooden artworks: a framework hung with aluminium fish, an oak totem pole decorated with Gothic gargoyle faces and a cane windmill, with coloured Picasso sails, which whirred in the stiff breeze off the distant North Sea. A visitors’ floating quay had been built at this point on the water, a hi-tech metallic construction which rose and fell with the tide, offering cheap berths for yachts and inshore cruisers plying the north Norfolk coast.

  Most of the warehouse windows were open after a long day of August sunshine. Spools of jazz, a sudden blast of KLFM radio, the sound of a drill biting into wood, spilled out on to the quayside. Shaw, whose degree in art had embraced months of work in the studios at Southampton, caught the distinct edge of turpentine on the air and what he could only describe as the smell of fresh air indoors, the reek of the open-window workshop. Valentine cast a bleary eye over an A-board listing ‘participating artists’ in the annual summer open studio festival.

  Plate-glass windows opened into a scrubbed brick atrium two storeys high. A woman in multi-coloured jeans and a T-shirt made a beeline for Shaw. Clean-limbed, with a wide mouth and a sinuous step, she got close before handing him a flyer.

  ‘For the festival …’ she said. Yet again, Shaw was struck by the ability of art to defy time, or perhaps the regenerative effects of any obsessive behaviour. At a distance of two feet he could see her skin, the crow’s feet and the thin grey roots to the ebullient hair.

  Shaw had his warrant card out before she’d finished speaking. ‘Sorry. I’d love to. But we’re here on business, hoping to see Linas Jessop?’

  A light went out in her eyes but she didn’t step back.

  ‘His studio’s not open today, but he might be in. Studio eight, top floor. If you have time do look in on some of the other artists. I’m Lee, studio three – it’s a video installation. I can offer tea too.’

  She seemed to see Valentine for the first time. ‘You’ll struggle to get a cuppa out of Linas, unless he can deliver a jeremiad to go with it. Joyous welcomes aren’t his style. As I say – number eight – just seek out the sound of constant laughter …’

  The old steps in the Phoenix had been replaced with steel staircases and glass walls, the plaster stripped from the medieval brick. The third floor lay directly beneath the original wooden hammer-beam roof, exposed and artfully lit. The doors to the studios stood open and as they passed they caught sight of the work within: a construction of wood and steel, a polished egg-like sculpture, a series of Rothkoesque block-colour oils.

  Shaw’s mobile buzzed, signaling an incoming text.

  ‘Chief Constable,’ he said, showing Valentine the message.

  Walsingham? Just had council CEO on the line – he says neither you or George attended the last meeting. DC Twine not adequate replacement. Do we still have our eye on the ball? Joyce.

  Shaw had sent Twine to represent CID at the council offices at Hunstanton, calculating that the clean-cut DC was the ideal stand-in for a hard-pressed superior officer. He’d been told to file a 1,000 word summary of the meeting to Valentine.

  ‘He does know this is a murder inquiry, right?’ asked Valentine. ‘For God’s sake, Peter. I could be dead in six months; I’m not wasting my time pushing a pen around. I’m a copper.’

  ‘I’ll sort it,’ said Shaw. ‘Send Twine’s report to me. I’ll make a few calls. It’s not a problem, George. Let’s get on.’ Valentine’s mood had been poor all day and Shaw guessed he was entering the next phase in his reaction to the diagnosis of lung cancer: anger.

  Studio eight was very different from the rest; a carpenter’s workshop, with a series of drawing tables, framing squares, a heavy-duty guillotine, an industrial glasscutter. Against one wall stood timber and wood for picture frames and glass, while under the one, full-length window, finished work was neatly set on the floor: framed oils, sketches, prints, even a few photographs of the north Norfolk landscape.

  Linas Jessop was in his fifties, lean, his jeans loose despite a leather belt. A shock of grey-streaked hair was combed back off his forehead like a Mohican. Most artists’ hands, in Shaw’s experience, were workmanlike, and Jessop’s were no exception, short, muscular, with a single Band Aid around his left-hand index finger.

  Jessop sipped black coffee from a tin mug marked: Je Suis Charlie.

  ‘How can I help?’ Even as he said it his eyes slipped away to a half-finished canvas. The mannerism was just a bit too smooth, Shaw felt, to indicate a genuine absence of stress, or even interest, in a visit from CID. Shaw felt a glimmer of optimism that at last they might make some real progress in the inquiry: was Linas Jessop their man?

  It had been Ruby Bright’s solicitors, or more precisely her last will and testament, which had brought them to the artist’s studio. Shaw had a copy in his pocket, like an ace up the sleeve.

  Shaw walked to one of the open dormer wind
ows, looking out on the quayside, as a small coaster slid by on the Cut, its engines churning, trying to turn against the ebb to enter the Alexandra Docks. On a high tide the steel superstructure stood level with the window. It was like watching a block of flats slide past on invisible rails. Shaw noted a lookout on the exterior platform of the bridge, craning his neck to see the wharfside below.

  ‘Bad news, Mr Jessop,’ he said, his back to the witness but knowing Valentine would be noting how he reacted. ‘You were a friend of Ruby Bright’s, I’m told. You framed all her pictures – at least, I saw the Phoenix sticker on the back of the work.’

  Jessop swilled coffee in a tin mug. ‘She’s dead. I heard, Inspector. The coast is a grapevine, if you take my meaning. The radio said there’d been a murder at Marsh House, but no name. I’m entitled to put two and two together, I take it?’

  ‘You don’t appear too upset at the news, sir,’ offered Valentine.

  ‘I’ve known Ruby for the best part of forty years. A good woman and a wealthy one. She married into the Bright haulage family. New money, well, Victorian new money, although they always claimed a tenuous link to Henry Bright and the Norfolk School; fifteenth cousin five times removed, that kind of thing. People think creativity is in the DNA. Hogwash, I’d say, but then my father was a bricklayer.’

  The artist tipped his tin mug back so that they could see his throat, the skin stretched over a jagged Adam’s apple.

  ‘They collected art, Ruby and the family. I framed it. Sometimes we talked about art, Ruby and I. She had a good eye, especially for the landscapes.’