Jim Kelly - Death Watch

‘Bourne, the foreman, says they knew Judd smoked out here — strictly against the rules, but it’s a shitty job, so they bend them,’ said Hadden.

‘Yeah,’ said Valentine. ‘’Cos you wouldn’t want to pollute the atmosphere,’ he added, spitting over the side.

‘OK,’ said Shaw. ‘Let’s arrest George.’

Valentine peered pointedly up at the distant apex of the incinerator chimney.

‘One oddity,’ said Hadden. He knelt by the hubcap. ‘There was only one match. I’ve sent it down to the lab with a runner — single match, broken in the middle to form a V. We might get something off it. Potts, the engineer, says Judd used a lighter.’ He stood, closed his eyes to think. ‘And this doesn’t help,’ he added, producing another evidence bag from his overalls leg pocket. A torch in yellow and black plastic, hefty, as good as a cosh.

‘Hospital issue?’ asked Shaw.

‘Nope. Not according to Potts. It was by the chair.’

Valentine took the torch in the bag and turned it 360 degrees. On one side there was a stick-on fluorescent label which bore the letters MVR in black marker pen. He held it up for Shaw. ‘A company? Initials?’ he asked. ‘I’ll check,’ he added, beating Shaw to it.

Shaw took the evidence bag. ‘It’s dusty,’ he said, noting that the matt black surface of the torch was scuffed.

‘Yes — I’ll let you know what kind of dust it is when I get it to the lab,’ said Hadden. ‘But visually I’d agree — dust, lots of it.’

‘It’s not white — the dust,’ said Shaw, worrying at the detail that didn’t fit.

But Hadden wouldn’t be drawn. ‘I’ll get it analysed. No point in guessing.’

Shaw took one more look round, trying to imprint a

Valentine didn’t like puzzles. He didn’t think police work was a set of crossword clues. He leant back, his spine creaking. Up above them condensation still trickled out of the chimney, a thin line unmoved by any breeze, like a 747 contrail.

‘It’s nasty, clinical — it isn’t amateur,’ he said. ‘If they hadn’t shown the kid inside the furnace we’d have no idea the bloke was ash. So it’s organized. Premeditated.’ He shifted weight, trying to lessen the pressure on his bladder. ‘But an inside job, ’cos you’d have to know the layout. So — a grudge. Sex is top of any list — we should check out wives, girlfriends. See who’s knobbing who.’

That was just one of the things that irritated Shaw about George Valentine. He tried to solve crimes backwards. Dream up a motive and then see if any of the evidence could be made to fit. What was really annoying was that he was good at it.

‘Let’s do the legwork,’ said Shaw. ‘Check the staff here, check the victim’s friends, background, then we’ll evaluate the forensics when Tom’s done, and see what Justina can find on the body.’

Check-It , that’s what they called Shaw down at St James’s. Check this, check that, check everything. As a nickname it was bestowed half in exasperation, half admiration. Valentine just found the meticulous approach annoying, like a hole in his shoe in wet weather.

Back inside beside the incinerator belt Dr Justina Kazimierz had arrived. The pathologist was kneeling on the conveyor, shining a torch into the shadows where

She looked up as Shaw ducked under the SOC tape.

‘Not now,’ she said.

When he’d first met the pathologist he’d put her brisk rudeness down to the difficulties of learning a new language. That had been a decade ago.

‘OK,’ said Shaw, peeling off forensic gloves. ‘But I’m not looking at an accident here — is that right?’

‘It’s not an accident,’ she said, delicately taking a sample of singed hair from the side of the skull. ‘Now go away.’

‘One more thing,’ he said, trying not to be intimidated. ‘The kid who spotted the victim in the furnace said he was moving…’ Shaw slipped the assumed gender into the question, knowing she couldn’t let it pass.

‘That’s two things,’ she said. There was a long pause and Shaw thought she’d leave it at that. Instead, she straightened her back. ‘At temperatures like this the tendons contract violently. Sudden immolation could produce what looks like movement.’ She sighed. ‘And it is indeed a man, Shaw. And, at some point he’s broken his arm in two places.’ She indicated just above the wrist and about three inches higher, below the elbow. ‘Now. Go away .’

Hadden called them round to the other side of the belt. From there you could see there was something under the body. It looked like a melted strawberry ice cream with streaks of yellow custard.

‘That went in with him,’ said Hadden.

‘One of the waste bags?’ asked Shaw.

‘Yes. The plastic label was burnt off — but there’s a punched steel tag with some kind of notation. I can’t read it — but let me get it back to the lab.’

‘But no others on the belt…?’

‘No. A gap before and, not unsurprisingly, a gap after.’

‘So — he was either holding it, the waste bag, or whoever killed him put it on the belt?’

Hadden sighed. ‘Let me do the science. Then I’ll have some answers.’

A uniformed PC gave Valentine a clocking-on card.

‘Bryan Judd’s,’ said Valentine, reading. ‘Address on Erebus Street — Bentinck Launderette.’ His shoulders sagged. He’d broken enough bad news in his life to fill a newspaper. It had happened to him once: the hollow knock, the PC in uniform on the doorstep. An RTA, his wife in the passenger seat on the bypass, a hole in the windscreen where her head had punched through. DOA. Dead On Arrival.

‘Let’s do it,’ said Shaw. He dreaded the knock too, the light footsteps down the hall, and then that look in their eyes as he stood there telling them their lives had changed for ever. It was like being the Angel of Death.

Late-night Sunday traffic was light so they swung across the deserted inner ring road to thread a path through the rotten heart of town, past the Guildhall, where a pair of drunks wrestled on the marble steps in the full glare of the floodlight designed to illuminate the magnificent chequered brick facade of the medieval building. Shaw checked the tide watch on his wrist against the blue and gold seventeenth-century version on one of the towers of St Margaret’s — a perfect match. High tide had been and gone by an hour. And the time matched too: 10.17 p.m.

As Shaw drove, Valentine read Bryan Judd’s file, retrieved from the HR department at the hospital after they’d dragged in the on-call manager. It was a bleak life in five hundred bleak words. Valentine offered a precis. ‘Aged thirty-three. Born Lynn. Married. Left school for Tech College at sixteen. No GCSEs — that takes some fucking doing; even I got three. Apprenticeship as a mechanic. Been working on the incinerator for ten years. Before that general hospital porter.’

He found a set of passport-style pictures of Judd for his security pass and held it up for Shaw as they waited at lights, so that he could study the face, try to see through the skin to the bone structure beneath. There was little doubt he was looking at their victim. One notable feature not apparent from the bones and seared flesh was

‘Liked a fight,’ he said.

They snaked through the old warehouse quarter, where dark archways led into cool courts of stone; then, suddenly, they were out into the Tuesday Market, a vast medieval square, ringed with Georgian gas lamps. Every Lynn pub crawl ended here, and a warm summer evening had drawn a big crowd; a heaving mass of drinkers. Someone let a firecracker off in the middle, the echo bouncing round off the stone facades, and a single scream was met with a chorus of laughter.