[PS & GV #6] Death on Demand Page 4

  For a while, as Iris grew up, got married, rented a house on the Springs and raised a family of her own, the neighbourhood thrived; the nearby docks providing enough jobs to pay the rents, which were set just below the level of those in the rest of town. The tunnel-back houses, fetid in summer, churned coal-smoke into the sky in winter in a doomed attempt to eradicate the damp. But the community had been close, safe and self-contained. Jan recalled the rent book in Iris’ kitchen: tea-stained, dog-eared, set always on the sideboard, held down by a glass paperweight, which kicked up a snow storm around a miniature church if you turned it upside down.

  As Jan grew up the Springs began its long decline; first the docks closed, then the bus company’s new double-decker buses couldn’t fit under the Lister Tunnel. Finally, a run of dry summers dried out the marshy ground, so that large cracks began to appear in the red brick houses. By the time Iris died – at home, in the front bedroom – the Springs was a slum, the pubs closed, the shops boarded up.

  The council, according to the local paper, was considering blocking Lister Tunnel, while they vetted various plans put forward by developers keen to emulate Lister’s original, lucrative coup. Top of the list was a new ‘out-of-town’ Tesco, with an ice rink offered as planning gain.

  As soon as she’d seen the hanging trainers in the gloom of the Lister Tunnel, a strange image had come back to Jan. Back in the first year of her marriage to Paul Clay they’d gone away for a weekend break in York, cashing in on a deal at the Marriott, leaving the car at home. She’d bought a guide book and recalled standing under one of the city gates – Micklegate Bar – and reading how the heads of traitors had been spiked over the portcullis. It had been dusk, orange street lights casting a lurid light, and she’d imagined walking under and feeling the gentle splash of dripping blood from above. Paul had said that was the difference between then and now, that in the past they’d lived in daily sight of death, a condition as real as life.

  White-knuckled now, Jan held on to the cherry picker basket as it edged towards the old power cable, black with soot, and grease and what looked like rotting pigeon droppings. The Victorians seemed to be synonymous with the concept of grime. The air itself seemed heavy with soot, nearly half a century after the steam trains had run their last services in and out of Lynn.

  She was close enough to see the brand name on the trainers: a Guggenheim ’87 – whatever that meant: Guggenheim ’87 Sportfire. The laces had been tied together and the weight of the two shoes had twirled them into a single strand. The trainers were decorated with random red flashes of colour and a silver panel on the sides, with 3D hologram lettering. They didn’t look worn out, or even worn at all. Most trainers collapse slightly to fit the foot that wears them, these looked stiff, even shop-new.

  The council operator must have pulled the wrong lever because the basket suddenly dropped six feet. Jan’s stomach did a flip but she managed not to scream, although her audience below, the six other members of the shoe squad, whistled and clapped. A group of local children had already gathered and were catcalling, telling Jan to hold on tight.

  Jan, looking down, noted, as did none of the rest of the so-called shoe squad, that these local kids wore trainers of nothing like the quality of the pair she was trying to retrieve; just battered Slazengers, old Nike and gym shoes.

  At the second attempt the operator got her within three feet of her prize, so she had to let go of the basket rail to try and untangle the laces, which meant she wasn’t looking at the shoes until they were jiggling in front of her eyes. It wasn’t what she saw, it was what she smelt, that made her stop. She’d expected a kind of changing-room sweatiness, but this was earthier – with a hint of iron and seaweed. Then she saw that the chaotic red flash design wasn’t chaotic at all, but consisted of stripes and that the other red marks, little fireworks of crimson, weren’t random either, they formed a very particular pattern, one she recognized from her forensic science block course as spatter marks. So it was the smell of blood and maybe urine and – her heartbeat was running hard now – fear; although she realized that she might be the source of that.

  One shoe had held a lot of blood. It was pooled inside at the heel. One of the laces was smeared pink too.

  From her breast pocket she extracted her smartphone and took a picture, using her thumb to add the caption: PARKWOOD SPRINGS, then turned it into a text message and sent it to Valentine’s phone.

  Then she took a pair of forensic gloves from her belt bag and three evidence bags.

  The chorus below booed enthusiastically.

  ‘No, no, no – Christ – Clay. This is the shoe squad not CSI fucking King’s Lynn. You bag them the paperwork’s all yours, darling …’ DS Chalker advanced on the cherry picker. ‘D’you hear me? I’m not effing doing it.’

  ‘Second, Sarge,’ she said, keeping her voice light.

  She swiftly got the bloody shoe into an evidence bag and then, with a gloved hand, used it as the stationary point around which she could unwind the other. When the second was free, she lightly tossed it in with its partner, encompassing the laces.

  For a moment she stood still trying to think of anything she might have missed. Dimly, distantly, she could hear Chalker’s voice and the laughter of the kids, who’d started to jeer. She felt the cherry picker engine beginning to change gear, ready to pull away, and in the moment before it began to retract she took a piece of chalk from her pocket and left a dash of white calcium where the laces had looped the power line: adding a quickly scrawled JC on the brickwork above.

  FIVE

  The press had arrived at Marsh House, not because Ruby Bright had been murdered, but to cover her one-hundredth birthday; just a reporter and a photographer from the Lynn Express, with a bunch of flowers, which Shaw thought was a nice touch. The residents, not including those suffering from dementia and confined to the upper floor secure unit, were gathered in the breakfast room. Shaw glimpsed them through the glass doors and could tell that despite the absence of any official announcement they seemed acutely aware of events: three elderly women stood at the window looking out over the marsh to where a white scene-of-crime tent now stood over Ruby’s wheelchair. Two men sat at a chessboard, but none of the pieces had made a move. A flat-screen TV set in one corner showed Breakfast Time, volume down, but nobody watched. Outside the sun, its attendant mist burnt away, blazed down on a wide panorama of marsh, beach and sea, the SOCO tent like a sugar cube dropped by a giant.

  Shaw and Valentine, in forensic boots and gloves, edged into Ruby Bright’s room, No. 4, on the ground floor, its two windows facing seawards. In delicate silence, like a pair of deep-sea divers, they seemed to struggle through the thick air, examining only with their eyes, sweeping the surface of things for each telling detail. Jack Shaw, Shaw’s father, had always told him that the secret to conducting an efficient murder inquiry was to imprint the scene of crime on the mind’s retina, so that it was as familiar as a family snapshot. In Ruby Bright’s case this was not difficult; her face, distorted into its Munch-like scream, was indelible. Despite himself, Shaw had stepped over the threshold of Marsh House with a set of preconceptions, expecting – at worst – an insipid, half-hearted death; a feeble capitulation, perhaps, to a more vigorous assailant. But the frozen scream told a very different story.

  So he’d have no problem conjuring up that scene in detail. But the wider picture – the care home and the marshes – presented a greater challenge. They’d decided to start with the victim’s room, her only personal space, in the hope it would yield instant results. All murder inquiries were overshadowed by a ticking clock. The chances of finding the killer were falling by the minute. Shaw tried to breathe in the room, to inhale its precise coordinates; its aromas, colours, shadows.

  He’d always been fascinated by lives led in single rooms, packed into a limited space, like the contents of a trunk for a trans-Atlantic voyage. During his time on the Met two men had been found stabbed to death in one-room flats in Hammersmith. Shaw’s degre
e had been in art at Southampton University, including a year out at the FBI college at Quantico. He’d come back with a diploma in forensic art; able to produce facial reconstructions from bones, build ID pictures from witness statements, age the faces of missing persons, or produce ‘lifelike’ wanted posters from the morgue. He was one of less than fifty officers in the UK with the qualification. The murder squad had called him in to try and create a 3D artist’s impression of the killer by interviewing two men who’d survived similar attacks and seen their assailant. Dubbed the ‘Bedsit Killer’, the press were eager to print Shaw’s portrait. Shaw decided to interview the witnesses in situ, in the rooms where the would-be killer had struck. His FBI training had taught him techniques to extract memories, to tease out details, eking out half-remembered fragments. The key was that memory could be accessed gradually, it wasn’t a binary substance – either present or absent. One small detail could lead to the next.

  Those who live in houses, where rooms are stacked in layers, with attics, glory holes, cellars, can hide facets of their personalities in different parts of the building. So much can be concealed, whereas a single room reveals the gritty details of everyday existence: an ashtray by the pillow, a plate smeared with ketchup on a bookcase, a discarded dirty sock, the shredded utility bill. Shaw’s forensic eye had noted something SOCO had missed in those two bedsits; both survivors took prescribed medication, one had a pillbox by the bed, the other on top of a cabinet in the loo. Shaw backed a hunch, took a note, traced both prescriptions to the same chemist in Ravenscourt Park. When he’d turned up with a uniformed constable and one of the DSs on the murder squad, they’d found a corner shop, a young Asian woman behind the counter and a small ‘serving hatch’ into the chemists’ dispensing room in the back. The face looking out at them through the hatch was identical to Shaw’s 3D sketch of the killer. While he’d never stood trial due to mental illness, the chemist did tell the murder squad he’d chosen his victims because they’d ‘leered’ at the Asian girl, to whom he felt protective. The addresses of all four victims were on the pharmacy’s digital records.

  Ruby Bright’s room was no threadbare bedsit, but it held the same sense of a life condensed.

  A few charred logs lay in a stylish fireplace, behind a mesh guard, while a rocking chair had been set very close, a large-print novel on the seat: Slaughterhouse 5. The mantelpiece carried a series of framed photographs; Shaw recognized the victim’s glasses, rather than her face. In each of the five pictures she was with the same companion; a woman her junior by possibly ten years or more, taller, almost stately, with a ramrod back. In one, an artful composition, they reclined on a terrace overlooking a Tuscan landscape: stone pines, a distant villa, a wedge of sea between hills. Shaw noted their hands entwined – double-clasped, in an almost fierce grasp.

  The room also held a desk, clean-lined in a business-like pine. He left Valentine to sort the drawers and moved off to check the en suite bathroom which, by contrast, could have doubled up for any in a four-star hotel, as anonymous as an airport departure lounge. It wasn’t clean, it was antiseptic, the clinical ambiance rammed home by the Greek-white walls. The shower room had an entrance wide enough for a wheelchair. It was a mark of the dehumanization of the room’s scrubbed efficiency that the only object which Shaw felt was personal was the victim’s toothbrush, its slightly crushed bristles reminding him that he was dealing with the brutal murder of a frail human being.

  Back in the bedroom, Valentine had begun to bag relevant documents: a solicitor’s letter, a cheque book, some handwritten letters in a pale blue ink signed simply ‘Beatty’, a photograph album, various files marked with the date by year – the oldest 1993, all containing correspondence, insurance claims, AA membership.

  ‘I’ll try the lawyer – see if we can cut to the chase …’ said Valentine. Taking out his phone, he saw Jan’s text and brought up the picture, the bloodstained trainers and the caption PARKWOOD SPRINGS. He gave that five seconds of thought and then rang Ruby Bright’s solicitor: engaged, a smooth female voice requested he leave a message, which he did.

  Shaw considered the artwork on the walls: four canvasses, oils, in frames of pine, all hung on the unpapered white, south-facing wall. Picture frames leave a mark where they’ve protected the paint, or plaster, from sunlight. One of the four pictures was smaller than the mark on the wall, which extended both to the left and right beyond the frame. With gloved hands Shaw checked behind the other three frames, all were mismatched with their ‘shadows’. The pictures were, on close inspection, photographs of originals: high-quality, digital images. He didn’t recognize the painter, but he could guess the movement – the Norwich School, the Victorians inspired by the Dutch to capture the light and space of the East Anglian landscape. In the corner of one of the canvasses, an evening study of moonlight on a beach, a postcard had been wedged into the narrow gap afforded by the frame, a National Portrait Gallery postcard. Shaw gently eased it free, studied the face portrayed, and then flipped it over, to read a legend on the reverse: Henry Bright: 1810-1873. Self-portrait.

  ‘Which means?’ asked Valentine, breaking the silence.

  ‘Who knows, but at least it’s a personal touch. I think these are hers, the pictures, she’s had them copied. The originals are probably in Norwich Castle with the rest of the school. Shows, perhaps, an interest in landscape, light, water, sky. A famous ancestor perhaps? A fellow Bright?’

  The image came again unbidden; the wheelchair on the edge of the marsh, the view ahead of the sea, the misted freezer-bag scrunched tight below the ear.

  Shaw turned the picture frame over and noted a small gold sticker marked Phoenix – with the motif of the mythical creature rising from the flames. The framer, perhaps? There was a telephone number and website address.

  ‘We know there’s money,’ said Valentine. ‘Fortis gave me a brochure,’ he added, waving a glossy pamphlet. ‘This place charges a basic fee of £1,200 a week. A week, Peter. If there’s money on that scale, there’s a will. If she’s dead there are beneficiaries. I’ll make a start once I’ve got through to the solicitor.’

  Technically, Ruby’s body probably still retained traces of its original heat, and yet here was DS Valentine constructing motives, preparing to close in on possible suspects. It was the way he worked, the way Jack Shaw had operated too, fitting suspects to the scene, not vice versa. It was a modus operandi which deeply troubled Shaw. The great miscarriages of justice could all be traced back to this one, intensely human, vice; the need to find a pattern before the picture was complete, an inability to live with chaos.

  ‘Why don’t we collect some facts first, George, before we name the killer. You’ll have him, or her, swinging on a rope before the victim’s in the ground.’

  Valentine wordlessly continued to search the bedside table, a chest of drawers, a fitted cupboard.

  Shaw perched on the windowsill and summarized what they had discovered so far from Fortis and her staff.

  In two hours they’d assembled a bare framework of verifiable facts. They’d worked as a team for five years and this had become a key part of their modus operandi – they’d take it in turns to vocalize, to say out loud what they knew, what they didn’t know.

  ‘First – the victim,’ said Shaw.

  Ruby Rose Bright had outlived her relatives, a husband, son and daughter, and received no regular visitors. Her next of kin was listed as a great nephew resident in Belfast, from whom Ruby received a telephone call on Christmas Day and a birthday card. She had twenty-seven cards waiting to be opened beside her cake, the vast majority from staff and residents. One had a stamp, postmarked Northern Ireland. Her medical file listed eleven daily medications, for a range of conditions from diabetes to shingles. None of her ailments were life-threatening.

  ‘Second,’ said Shaw, ‘Ruby’s last twelve hours alive.’

  She’d had dinner in her room last night at six thirty: chicken chasseur, pilau rice and fine beans, followed by apple crumble with single cr
eam. She’d then been wheeled out on to the terrace by one of the nurses to join other residents. Fruit juice and wine were served, with cheese. All residents were back in their rooms by eight.

  ‘Third – security.’

  Ruby’s suite had one exit door, which was never locked. The first (upper) floor of Marsh House was restricted to patients suffering from dementia or Alzheimer’s and was entirely secure: one locked stairwell provided access, with double doors, both with keypads. Two fire escape doors were opened by special keys kept by the resident nursing staff, one of whom was on duty 24/7. The ground floor was less restrictive, but all exits were keypad controlled. The residents did not have the code.