Jim Kelly - Death

Friday

The dead woman’s face was white, as bloodless as china. Only the veins, blue beneath the skin, provided any colour, a perfect match for the duvet under which she lay. She looked blankly out of the ground floor window of the bungalow’s main bedroom, and DI Peter Shaw thought that was the saddest detail: that she died contemplating a field of sunflowers, rather than with her eyes turned to the wall. It implied, it seemed, so much: that she’d been able to make a decision, even in the last few seconds of her life, to take with her that gold and black shimmering image of mid-afternoon summer heat. She wouldn’t have suffered. That’s what they’d tell the relatives, at least today, while they waited for the coroner to finish the tests on the body, tests on the pills beside the bed, tests on the glass of water. She wouldn’t have suffered. It was a form of words, a term of art which created a comforting image: the human body tucked up, snug, warm and at peace, which is why they wouldn’t let the relatives see the body, at least not yet. The reality of death was always shockingly unambiguous: the victim’s hand was not like any living hand, the fingers flexed up like the legs on a dead spider. And the bone structure of the woman’s face was just that, bone structure , as if the skull was already beginning to emerge from the skin. But the deadest thing of all was her left eye, the one he could clearly see, turned to the window, catching the light like a cold mirror.

Shaw stood on the threshold of the room, reluctant to break the spell which seemed to hold everything still, like a scene inside a glass paperweight. His DS, George Valentine, had got him on the mobile at home. He had a half-day off, and he’d been out on the stoop facing the sea, treating the wood for the coming winter sea-spray. A fatality, said Valentine: No. 5, The Circle, Creake, five miles inland from Wells-next-the-Sea. It was a reluctant call — that was plain. Valentine had made the situation perfectly clear. Forensics at the scene had requested CID attend. Valentine had driven out from Lynn in his battered Mazda, delighted to be separated from a month’s worth of case reports and the temptations of the public bar of the Artichoke. He’d found a lonely circle of post-war bungalows, a woman dead in bed, evidence at the scene pointing to the clear conclusion that she’d taken her own life, although there was no note.

But the head of CSI — Tom Hadden — was not satisfied. Hadden was ex-Home Office, studious, punctilious and, in Valentine’s experience, a pain the arse. Could DI Shaw attend? Valentine didn’t like being second-guessed. He didn’t like being outranked. His call to Shaw had been perfunctory, and he was currently sat outside the dead woman’s house in the Mazda, smoking his way through a packet of Silk Cut.

Shaw had met Hadden at the front gate. The CSI team had finished in the bedroom so Shaw was welcome to go in, but nowhere else for now — especially not the bathroom. Shaw had asked Hadden to keep his particular reservations about this lonely death to himself, because he wanted to see the deathbed with fresh, objective eyes.

He took his first step over the threshold. Young, fit, an athlete to anyone who saw him running on the morning sands, Shaw was able to control his body precisely. So he took the next step over the scene-of-crime tape slowly, lowering his left foot by the inch on to the bedroom carpet. The rest of his body followed, smoothly transferring his weight, like a martial arts enthusiast practising in the park.

Eventually he stood, his feet set wide to match his shoulders, listening. He could hear a clock ticking by the bed and had to suppress the illusion that it had only begun to work — to measure the time he was in — in recognition of that first moonwalk step. Despite the fact that he could see the victim’s body, at least the head and naked shoulders above the edge of the duvet, the room was, nevertheless, entirely inanimate, because she had become simply another object in it. The shadow on the pillow, cast by the woman’s head, was as solid, as permanent and as passive as the shadow which stretched from the bed to the wall, encompassing a pair of stylish black slippers and a magazine: Hello! open at a picture of a celebrity wedding, so that the perfect dentistry of the bride smiled up at the dead spider hand, thrown over the edge of the bed.

Shaw felt the heat even here, the heat of the dead hour between two and three. All the windows were shut; only the front door stood open, where the community police constable stood guard. The air in the room was still, a cube of stale, spent, air which seemed to offer its own resistance to movement as Shaw approached the bed. He’d been offered a face mask by CSI but he’d turned it down, so that when he breathed — even through his mouth — he caught the sweet smell that didn’t come from the bowl of fruit on the table in the hall.

He was good at registering scents and aromas, getting better with each passing year, as if the world was growing more pungent with the passage of time. It was one of the unexpected compensations of the loss of sight in his left eye just four years earlier in an accident. His other senses seemed to be rallying round. So the sweet smell was of pine sap, perhaps — furniture polish, or the woods behind the house? But there was something else, something aromatic and earthy that eluded classification. Later, he’d chide himself for not dwelling on that one detail.

Shaw took another step forward, his heartbeat picking up, as it always did in the presence of death. He tried to separate this physical reaction from his ability to think, because this was the moment when he should be the cool observer. His father, Chief Detective Inspector Jack Shaw, had always told him that any decent copper should carry a perfect picture in his head of the scene of crime: digital quality, flat screen, Dolby sound, and that throughout the investigation it should be at hand, as retrievable as a family face on a snapshot in the wallet. And that was easier than Shaw had thought it would be because of the excitement he always felt — there was no other word for the electricity in his body, in the room. That was the greatest irony: that as this woman had died, becoming an object, she’d given to everything in the room a kind of vitality, as if each thing acquired a brief, fleeting brightness and clarity.

Everything was important. Everything was relevant. The room rang with tension, like a freshly struck bell. Objects: a chair loaded with clothes, a dress — antique print, a leather belt a hand-span wide and a pair of espadrilles. A dressing table in MDF with a mirror which reflected the only picture in the room: a garish image of the quayside at Wells-next-the-Sea in oils. On the dressing table a computer — an old iMac, a printer on the floor. Two identical bedside tables — on one a glass of water. And a packet of pills — Nurofen, the top open so that he could see the shucked plastic from which the pills had been pressed. But if this was a simple case of suicide then he wouldn’t be here. Tom Hadden was possibly one of the sharpest CSI experts in the country. He’d seen something in this room. If this was just another statistic — a lonely death in a rural bungalow — then the SOC light and reflective umbrella wouldn’t be stood in the corner. There wouldn’t be fingerprint powder on the bedside table and the glass. So there must be doubt. Something was wrong; something in this room.

Shaw walked to the bedside table closest to the window — cheap, utility furniture, like the rest of the house. Three books: a Jilly Cooper novel, a biography of Kate Moss and one of those romances which always have the couple on the front, a Gothic house behind. The duvet looked right. It didn’t always look right. They’d once found a body dumped in a bed, then a corner of the cover tucked in, as if you could do that from inside a bed. Or the hair. It was disconcerting, but oddly comforting, that most killers couldn’t resist rearranging their victims; just a few hairs, perhaps, drawn away from the face, or splayed on the pillow. But this woman’s hair was twisted slightly, back around her neck and over one shoulder, as if she’d got into bed to face the wall, then turned over before she died to look out of the window, to see the wave-like motion of the breeze over that field of sunflowers.