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

  ‘It’s a long day,’ said Shaw. ‘People get hungry, thirsty.’

  ‘The bus will be stocked up with food and drink. We’re not going near the pubs.’

  ‘Well, good news for my DS, at least. He’s on duty and he can’t stand a queue at the bar.’

  The sound of hail on the roof seemed to change gear, becoming a thunderous percussion.

  ‘That’s our dispositions,’ she said. ‘Not exactly the February Revolution, is it? Or Bloody Sunday, St Petersburg or Derry for that matter.’

  Shaw was glad the chief constable wasn’t present for that particular allusion.

  ‘Bloody Sunday, an uprising led, if I recall A-level history correctly, by a Russian Orthodox priest,’ said Shaw.

  Over their heads the hail suddenly fell silent and sunlight beamed through a rather grimy window into the priest’s cubbyhole.

  ‘I’d like a promise, Ms Heaney. Let’s swap mobile numbers. If I ring on the day, please answer – OK? I’m happy to trust you, and your organization, but it only takes one individual to create a confrontation of a more physical nature. If you ring me I’ll answer too. I’d like to be able to communicate quickly if there’s a problem …’ They handed each other their phones and keyed in the numbers: she entered hers under NANO, his went under SHAW.

  She got up close to another icon, a saint, with dark hair and asymmetric eyes. ‘They worship these, you know. This isn’t just art. Windows on heaven. Portals on the divine. On heaven and hell.’

  The image of Ruby Bright’s scream suddenly pulsed in Shaw’s mind. He tried to push it aside, aware that considerations of heaven and hell had little part to play in a twenty-first-century murder inquiry.

  ‘I need to get back to my team,’ said Shaw.

  By the door there was a full length, life-size image of St Seraphim himself, if Shaw was correctly transliterating the elegant Cyrillic script. He paused on the threshold, feeling the need to get close. Six inches away his good eye struggled to maintain focus, a few inches closer and he felt the surface of the picture buckle, and swim, as if it was a borderland, a thin film of paint and canvas, or a fragile lath of wood, beyond which lay the unknown, or at least the unknowable. Perhaps the power of these images lay in this sense that they were simply windows, flimsy barriers between the present and the past, the living and the dead.

  SEVEN

  As Javi Copon walked out of the sea, summoned by Shaw’s loudhailer, the detective tallied up the value of his surfing gear: a £1,000 Megaseaweed winter wetsuit, a £500 Studer FlexTail surfboard, and a pair of £150 sand shoes – brand unknown, but they looked like top of the range Tribords. Not bad for a care home nurse.

  Copon emerged from the waves reluctantly, as if the salty sea was his chosen element and that he resented this summons to return to the gravity of the earth. Around him stretched Holkham beach, six straight miles of open sand, backed by pine woods, facing the North Sea. In high summer a crowd of several thousand could be entirely lost on this vast swathe of pristine beach. Shaw had been delighted after seeing Shakespeare in Love at the cinema in Lynn with Lena to discover, in the credits, that the final breathtaking vistas of Viola stepping ashore in the untouched New World of the seventeenth century had been filmed right here, a few miles along the coast from Surf!. (A still from the film was now framed over the bar.)

  Copon began the long wade out of the shallows.

  According to Fortis, the Marsh House administrator, Copon lived at Flat 18, Houghton House, South End, Lynn. Uniformed branch had checked the address out and found it occupied by an elderly couple who had been in residence for nearly thirteen years. They’d never heard of Javi Copon, but they did think immigrants were ruining the country, although Spaniards weren’t as bad as Portuguese, or Romanians. DC Twine had asked around, finding Copon had several friends on the staff at Marsh House. One, a Spanish woman who made beds, had told them where to find him if the sea was running a swell.

  If Shaw had been alone he’d have joined Copon in the sea rather than dragging him out on dry land. How many more days as good as this would there be before winter blew in from the pole? The offshore breeze was creating perfect waves in a moderate swell. Surfers called such waves A-Frame – ideal, high-backed, curling breakers, offering the expert the chance to stay up on his – or her – feet for several hundred yards.

  Javi was compact, muscled, with a good set of surfer’s teeth, which disappeared when Shaw flashed his warrant card and told him everything he needed to know about the death of Ruby Bright.

  ‘Why the false address?’ asked Shaw.

  Javi worked a hand round his neck and slipped the zip on the wetsuit, shrugging himself out of the top half, so that it hung loose, making him look like a multi-legged pond-skater. Steam rose off his flesh, which was strangely pale, with black hair matted in swirls.

  ‘You need an address to get the job. I make it up, they don’t check. No one ever checks, right? Otherwise I never get work nowhere. I live here, in a camper van, and go up and down the coast. November I’ll drive home. Three years now I come back to Marsh House. It’s a lifestyle, the whole …’ He waved his arms around to indicate some invisible over-arching structure. ‘The whole corporate world, it can’t handle people like me.’

  He produced a small oilskin package from the suit pocket, within which was a crumpled pack of Gitanes and a lighter.

  ‘Where’s home?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘Zarautz,’ he said, drawing in the nicotine.

  Shaw knew of the town, a surfer’s paradise on the north coast of Spain, once patronized by the royal families of Europe, keen to escape the searing heat of the south. Shaw suspected that Copon was a middle-class boy, drawn to radical, anti-capitalist politics.

  ‘I need to wash the suit down,’ said Copon, and so they set off towards the woods, a path opening out, leading due south.

  The Spaniard’s VW Camper, no doubt parked illegally, was in a glade of ageing Scots pine. Copon introduced his girlfriend, Gail, who lay sunbathing on a towel, a paperback in the grass beside her.

  Copon had rigged up an outside ‘shower’: a ten-gallon water container wedged between the branches of a pine, with the tap downwards. Letting the water gush out, he rinsed the salt off the suit.

  Gail said she’d make tea although no one said they wanted a drink. Shaw, taking his chance, followed her up the steps and stood at the door of the camper van, so that he could see a double bed, crumpled and unmade. The rest of the interior looked like a surfhead’s workshop: boards of various widths and lengths, wetsuits, waxes, beach shoes, a folded surf kite.

  Most of the walls carried what looked like radical labour posters, stylized Stalinist images of men forging steel, or women tending the sick.

  But one image stood out.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he asked, indicating a poster of a man’s face: salt-and-pepper stubble, the slightly bloated skin of someone immersed in water during daylight hours and cold, dead, jet-black eyes. He looked like the kind of surfer whose heartbeat could stay flat on a thirty-foot wall of water.

  ‘That’s the great hero,’ said Gail in a mock whisper, the kettle already pinking on its gas ring. ‘Garrett McNamara, rode a seventy-eight-foot wave. That’s the world record. I know all the facts, like I have a choice.’

  ‘Hawaii?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘Portugal, Hawaii’s ankle-busters up against the Atlantic.’

  ‘And the old man?’ Shaw had spotted another portrait, this one was framed, but otherwise the grizzly, wrinkled skin of the subject staring out was oddly reminiscent of the wave-riding surfer king.

  ‘That’s my grandfather,’ said Copon, climbing the steps, the wetsuit on a hanger. ‘A fisherman at home, he died in his boat, I think his heart went. I was with him, pulling in the net. He folded up, was gone in a minute. A good death, I think. You?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Shaw. ‘A good death, if he loved the sea.’

  The woods echoed to the staccato rattle of a woodpecker.

  ‘Let’s
talk in the sun,’ said Shaw.

  They waited while Copon stowed his gear and Gail ferried out mugs of tea.

  ‘I’m sorry Ruby’s dead,’ he said, reappearing. ‘I like her a lot.’ His Spanish accent came and went like a radio signal. ‘I saw nothing, for sure. Nothing in the night.’

  Shaw thought about taking him back to St James’ for a formal interview, in a cell, a world away from his vast, spectacular, comfort zone. But Twine had reported that Copon was well known at Marsh House for a kindly, caring approach to his patients, and especially the aged Ruby Bright. Shaw wanted him to talk freely, because he might know a lot, and he judged there was no better place for that than here, in the dappled woods, within earshot of the sea.

  ‘How did she get out of Marsh House, Mr Copon? How did her killer get in? This doesn’t make sense. The killer would have to get in through the keypad door. She’d have to get out through a keypad door. The nurses’ station is on the ground floor, and you heard nothing? Saw nothing? There’s a bank of six CCTV screens. It’s your job to keep watch, yes? You were on shift from eight – when everyone went back to their rooms – until 6.15 a.m. And you saw nothing – really?’

  Copon licked salt from his lips and tossed the damp towel to Gail. He had a curious face, with wide brown eyes, high cheekbones and black hair; but the components were undermined by a sickly complexion, the skin blotched and without surface tension. Shaw had seen this before, the way constant immersion in the sea undermined the surfer’s image: tanned, blond, toned. Most of the real fanatics looked like something goggle-eyed on a fishmonger’s counter.

  ‘Look. I not tell you this. The keypad code is 1818, since the day I come, my first season. If the residents have this’ – he tapped a forefinger just below his right eye – ‘they know this too. 1818. Now you know. How do you say? Join the club. So it’s easy to come and go. But I make rounds, on the hour, and see nothing. I don’t check, I don’t open doors, unless someone rings a bell, or I hear something.’

  ‘It’s part of your job to monitor the CCTV?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘I make rounds. I don’t watch TVs. It will be on the record, yes. But I don’t see.’ He licked his lips, tasting salt. ‘You look at film?’

  ‘We’re doing that now. But it’s several hours and there’s six cameras,’ said Shaw.

  ‘Last night busy too,’ said Copon. ‘The medical log will have this in the writing, yes? I go up to the secure wing to help patient there, Mrs Blanchard, she needs regular medication, every four hours. And Mr Eyres, he thinks I am room service. Ring for this. Ring for that. Really, he wants to talk, about diamonds and gold and silver, because he was a jeweller, and he wants to think about anything he can that isn’t what the doctors say: that he will be dead this year. I’m a nurse. So I listen. It’s better than the pills. I don’t see Ruby, not once, although she is a friend.’

  He actually placed a hand over his heart, on his bare chest; a gesture so theatrical that Shaw felt, intuitively, that it must be genuine. Copon shook his head to dislodge sea water from his hair, the movement of the neat skull on the muscular shoulders fluid and easy and strangely reminiscent of Nano Heaney’s attempts to dislodge Walsingham’s hailstones.

  ‘There are pictures in her room of Ruby with a woman, the staff told us she was an old friend, but they didn’t know her name. They seem close, was she a relative, a sister?’

  Copon took his time answering, blowing on his tea. Somewhere overhead a paraglider flew past, the material of the great single wing crackling.

  ‘She was yes, she died, a year ago,’ said Javi. ‘Beatrice. Beatty Hood.’

  Shaw kept a poker face: Beatrice Hood was the woman whose death certificate they’d found Sellotaped to the back of one of Ruby Bright’s paintings.

  ‘Great woman,’ said Copon, the jaw hardening as if to emphasize the weight of the word great. ‘You know, dying I see very often. Often, almost always, it is not like that …’ He clicked his fingers. ‘An event. No, a process, yes? And sometimes this process begins when people fall alone. A husband dies, a wife dies. The downward path begins. Then – sometimes – they find someone else. Ruby, she has Beatty. Not a resident, no. But for many years a friend. They share this passion for art, for paintings. They cling together. Very close. Lost souls …’

  Gail, who’d sat down on her towel, hugged her knees.

  ‘They make death wait these two. They want to live, this I’m sure is the secret; they want to live to spend more time with each other. They love life together …’

  He held out a hand and, as if by telepathy, Gail rummaged in a large leather handbag and gave him a smartphone. Scrolling into a photo album, he showed them a shot of Bright in a wheelchair on the front at Hunstanton, pointing out to sea, where a line of breakers was dotted with wetsuited surfers.

  Copon pressed a button and the picture became a video, revealing Bright’s animated face, a wide – genuine – grin, which crumpled into a laugh. The wind, blustery, wrapped a scarf around her neck and blew her hair into a wind-sock, but she looked delighted just to be outside. The contrast with Shaw’s only previous image of this woman was shocking.

  ‘Mr Copon,’ said Shaw, handing the phone back to Gail, ‘can you think of any reason why Ruby would have ordered, and kept hidden, a copy of Beatty Hood’s death certificate?’

  Copon massaged his left shoulder and Shaw thought he detected a minute hesitation, a half-second break in the smooth manipulation of the pectoralis major, the thumb pressed into the flesh.

  ‘Death certificate? Where?’

  ‘I’m asking the questions, Mr Copon. Is there any reason why she’d have her friend’s death certificate. She died last year. Any idea?’

  Copon looked at Gail. ‘No. Beatty died at home, I think, in her bed. A house in Lynn. She was a good age too, mid-eighties, maybe more. I don’t understand.’

  ‘Can you think of anyone who might have wanted Ruby Bright dead, Mr Copon?’

  ‘She had no enemies,’ said Copon. ‘Very popular. Full of life, still.’

  ‘We’ll need a statement,’ said Shaw, looking back down the track towards the sea. The rhythmic fall of the breakers was clearer now, the percussion just discernible through the sand.

  Copon caught Shaw’s eye. ‘If the tide is right, and the waves, I swim, surf. Always. One day I will be too old. Or death will come early. I know this. One day I will be gone. So I take each day’s waves as they break. The sea is god – yes?’

  EIGHT

  Pushing out through the revolving doors of the West End Community Health Centre, Dr Gokak Roy felt an immediate sense of relief: the night air was cool, the car park deserted, while behind him lay a pressure-cooker of stress and responsibility. At one point in the shift he’d had to immunize a four-month-old child; inserting the needle into the vein had required a clinical magnifier and the steadiest of hands, the wrist was less than thirty centimeters in circumference, the vein as narrow as a fibre-optic cable. The child – Bibiana – was being monitored by her father, who sat, masked, rigid with anxiety, his face so close his breath left the ghost of condensation on Dr Roy’s glasses, so that he felt his own stress levels climbing, the blood rushing in his ears. He’d taken his break in the canteen and had actually started awake, even though his eyes were open, to find himself watching a silent TV.

  And this was his day off. It followed a ten-day stretch as a GP. The workload here was crushing and chaotic. He’d always wanted to be a doctor, and he’d always worked hard. In a real sense he was living his dream, but in an equally real sense it had become a nightmare. The frenetic schedule was shredding his health. But he’d found a way to cope, although, cruelly, that only meant he had to work even harder to afford his special remedy.

  That afternoon he’d slipped into a toilet cubicle at the health centre at four o’clock and taken a codeine tablet, two temazepam and an upper. For thirty seconds he sat on the toilet seat and looked at the four walls. Each day now he passed through a room like this, a kind of portal, linkin
g his life on one side (anxious, stressed, panic-stricken) to the life on the other side (relaxed, omnipotent, heroic). In a humdrum way such cubicles had become a symbol of his survival. After twenty seconds he felt the codeine hit his nervous system, so that his neck muscles were able to slip from the tendons at the top of his spine, relieving the pressure on the base of his brain stem. Within a minute the stress had pooled in his feet, then bled into the floor, which was a blue-grey lino flecked with colours. As he stood he was conscious of his body, of the bones in their skeletal frame, his blood pumping smoothly now, like a power supply.

  The rest of the shift had been serene until six thirty when the codeine had begun to falter, so that during that last hour he’d been jumpy and brittle, manically completing the paperwork for a new drugs trial. A slamming door made his joints contract as if he’d been stricken by a seizure; the jangling music in the overhead speakers frayed his nerve ends. When his shift ended he’d had to stop himself actually running for the lift to the basement. Its blue walls, winking buttons and reflective mirror walls always provided an instant haven. Alone, he popped a pill. He caught a glimpse of himself then in the mirrored walls; European bone structure, from his Goan Portuguese grandfather – dark, sub-Continental skin, as dry as parchment. Only, perhaps, his eyes betrayed him, the brown irises wide and watery, like a fish glimpsed in the shallows, and with the same fleeting impermanence.

  He’d parked the second-hand BMW soft-top in its usual spot. Once, a year earlier during his training, he’d let a diazepam tablet confuse him so much he’d spent forty-five minutes searching for his own car. But he walked directly to the BMW tonight, and driving at a modulated fifteen miles per hour, headed for the exit, his hyper-awareness acute, so that he watched a bunch of teenagers on a street corner opposite, sharing a cigarette, the lit butt glowing brightly on its downward trajectory to the concrete forecourt. Beyond the barrier-exit a police patrol car sat purring in a layby, so that his heartbeat picked up, and for the first time that day he felt globes of sweat prickling along his forehead. As he drove away he checked the rear-view mirror to make sure the police weren’t following.