Jim Kelly - Death Watch

‘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 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

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.

‘A man…’ he said over his shoulder to Valentine. ‘Plenty of hair. The forehead’s exceptionally high, a ridge above the eyes — a bony ridge, but muscular too — the corrugator is pronounced.’ That would be the crucial element of the dead man’s ‘lifelong look’ — thought Shaw — the particular arrangement of features by which he’d always been recognized. Deep-set eyes, the brow dominant. Shaw would have called it a Celtic face.

Valentine hadn’t said a word.

‘Irish?’ asked Shaw. ‘Heavy build. Large head. Nothing of the nose left, or lips. Teeth charred, but we might get a dental match.’

Valentine stood at the tape. ‘’Bout right. Foreman said the Judds were Irish — face like a front-row forward. Thirty-five, something like that.’ He picked at a bit of tobacco on his lip.

‘Justina on her way?’

‘Ten minutes,’ said Valentine. He’d be gone by then, he’d make sure of that. He’d kept his beer down so far, but watching the pathologist at work always brought on a sweeping nausea. It was something to do with the way she dealt with the corpse, like it wasn’t a human being there at all, but some interesting fossil. ‘I should get down

Tom Hadden, the head of the force’s CSI unit, came over to the crime tape. He was ten years short of retirement, thin red hair now strawberry blond, with a scar just below his hairline where a skin cancer had been removed a year before. Freckles crowded round intelligent green eyes. Hadden had fled a broken marriage and a high-profile job at the Home Office for the West Norfolk Constabulary. A keen bird watcher and expert naturalist, he spent his spare time on the dunes and in the marshes, a solitary but never lonely figure, weighed down with binoculars.

‘This is odd,’ he said. He held up an evidence bag. ‘Found these just by the conveyor belt where the victim worked. Don’t quote me, but I’d say they were grains of rice.’

‘Rice?’ asked Shaw. ‘So — he’s a healthy eater, one of those salads you can get from M amp;S?’

‘That would work nicely, if, and only if, it was cooked rice. Which it isn’t.’

Shaw took the evidence bag. Three grains, almost translucent, twenty minutes short of al dente.

‘There’s blood on the conveyor belt, by the way — plenty of it,’ said Hadden.

‘That survived the heat?’

‘No. There’s two conveyor belts, Peter. This one,’ he said, touching the belt in front of them with a hand inside a forensic glove. ‘This one… runs into the furnace, and then turns back under itself. Anything on it gets dropped onto an internal conveyor which moves the

They looked at the victim in silence. ‘Justina will talk you through chummy here,’ said Hadden. ‘But I’d caution against any amateur assessments at this stage.’

‘Meaning?’ asked Shaw.

‘The hole in the skull. I don’t think it’s what it looks like. We can’t get into the furnace yet to retrieve the blown bits of cranium, but one shard is here…’

It was on the belt, about six feet from the body, already in an evidence bag, its original location marked with a white circle and the letter ‘D’.

Hadden tipped it slightly with a metal stylus, like a fragment of ancient pottery. ‘You’ll notice that there is a depression fracture on this piece of bone — just here.’

‘Someone hit him?’

‘Maybe. But we need the science to back that up, and at the moment, we don’t have the science.’

Shaw brushed a finger along a gull’s feather he’d put in his pocket from the beach. ‘But blood suggests a struggle?’

‘Or one of the waste bags burst a week ago. Don’t assume it’s his blood. I need to get the evidence back to the Ark.’

The Ark was West Norfolk’s forensic lab, situated in an old Nonconformist chapel beside St James’s — the force HQ in Lynn. It was Tom Hadden’s kingdom, and the only place he was happy other than the saltmarshes on the coast. He plucked at his forensic gloves. ‘You’ll need to see outside too.’

He led the way to a door in one of the metal walls,

‘This door was unlocked when we got here, by the way,’ said Hadden.

Outside was a small steel platform, an eyrie, at the base of the incinerator chimney. It housed one of the atmospheric testing units for the furnace. An encased stepladder led up, another down into the floodlit goods yard below. A line of yellow waste tugs waited, backing up now the furnace was cold.

Valentine pointed up. ‘Is this how the running man got out?’

Hadden craned his neck. ‘That’s it — a small door, an emergency exit, about fifty feet above us. Again, unlocked.’

They were a hundred feet up with a view west over the town. Although the sun had gone there was still light in the west. A perfect night sky turned over their heads like a planetarium. The air was warm and sweet. There was a single chair on the little platform, office metal with the stuffing coming out of the seat, beside it a hubcap full of cigarette butts.