Jim Kelly - Death Watch

Kennedy held a coffee cup but he put it down now because his hand was beginning to shake.

‘I’m not here to listen to you deny this,’ said Shaw. ‘I’m here because there is still something I don’t understand. It was one of your little kindnesses, I think, at first, to collect the men’s pills from the chemist. At first I thought that was it — that was how you were able to select the ones that Mrs Phillips could use. And it might have helped — but it wasn’t good enough. No, she had the files, up at the hospital, so she didn’t need you for that. But I checked with Boots.’

He took a list out of his pocket.

‘And that’s what I don’t understand, because only yesterday you picked up a prescription for Paul Tyler — and he disappeared six months ago. And there are others, men who haven’t been listed here, on your records, for months, even a year. So my question — and it’s an urgent one — is why. If these men have gone, why do you still collect their drugs?’

In the silence they could hear the uneven whirr of the electric clock over the vestry door.

The blood drained from Kennedy’s face.

‘I gave them to the captain,’ he said in a whisper. ‘He said they needed them — where they’d gone. That’s how they got away — on the Rosa . To the south coast.’ He

‘Was he lying to me?’ Kennedy asked, though Shaw could see he already knew the answer. It was the moment, Shaw thought, when Liam Kennedy realized he was a holy fool.

He stood, adjusted his jeans, and noticed for the first time the uniformed officers who’d slipped into a pew by the door.

‘I want to speak with Father Martin before I go,’ he said. ‘Can I?’

But Father Martin was already walking away, down the nave, with Ally Judd at his side. He knelt at the altar, crossed himself, then left his church without looking back.

On the Rosa Neil Judd was lying on a bunk in one of the crew cabins. It held a single bed, a fitted cupboard and a shower unit, slightly smaller than the one in which he’d squeezed the life out of Juan de Mesquita. He’d collapsed while being helped up the ladder in number 4 hatch. In the end they’d got him in the bosun’s chair and winched him up to the deck. A doctor had given him a sedative and advised a period of rest before trying to transfer him to St James’s. A uniformed woman constable sat at the foot of the bunk. When Neil Judd woke at eleven she brought him to the mess, where Shaw was having breakfast prepared from supplies in the galley: cereal, milk and toast. A pot of black coffee seeped a delicious aroma into the small room. He’d spent an hour running various versions of events through his head, and he was still disturbed by what he didn’t know. He was reluctant to leave the Rosa , sensing that the ship still held more secrets than it had so far revealed.

Shaw put an evidence envelope on the table. He was struggling still to think of Neil Judd as a killer, rather than a victim himself, the baby brother left as a guardian angel for a father he probably didn’t hate but almost certainly despised; haunted by the fact that he’d slept through the trauma which had ripped his own family apart and that he was too young to recall his missing siblings, Norma Jean

Shaw unpopped the envelope seal and slid the delicate skeleton of the fish onto the table.

‘We’ve found your sister’s body. It was buried in the foundations of the electricity sub-station at the foot of Erebus Street. These were with her — and many more like them.’

Judd laid a finger on the delicate tracery of the bones — a dorsal fin, as fine as a scrimshaw comb.

‘We think Jan Orzsak worked as a consultant for the power company in the 1990s. There is other forensic evidence, potential evidence — the body was partly wrapped in a blanket, a roll of carpet. We’ve recovered human hairs. We’re confident we can bring the appropriate charges.’

‘My father…’ said Neil Judd, trying to understand all the implications of this gossamer-thin skeleton.

‘Yes. An innocent man. Not a killer.’

The word made Judd jolt, as if he’d been stung. He drank some coffee Shaw offered him, and then asked a favour Shaw couldn’t refuse. ‘Can I see him? I want him to know that I know. I’m strong enough now — much stronger.’ He cracked the joints of his fingers.

‘He’s in the hold,’ said Shaw. ‘They won’t move him until they’re ready.’

Judd stood. ‘I can climb down. Please.’

The vertical shaft was lit now by a line of halogen lights. Shaw went first, then Judd, then DC Birley. The three of them descended like abseiling mountaineers. The operating theatre looked very different. The plastic

Neil Judd went to his father’s bedside and took his hand, standing at a slight distance, then stepped closer, pushing back white hair from the old man’s forehead. They put their heads together to talk.

Shaw could see now that the metal container which had held the operating theatre had two internal doors, not one. Three CSIs in SOC suits worked at the other door, one cutting through a padlock with a fine saw, overseen by Tom Hadden.

‘No key?’ asked Shaw, joining them.

‘If anyone’s got it they’re not telling us,’ said Hadden. ‘Which makes me even more determined to get through. It leads into the other containers. My guess is they contain stores, the fridges.’

Shaw thought about that and took a step back, but then the padlock gave and Hadden spun a circular lock. When the door finally gave there was a sound of escaping air, like a Tupperware lid being popped.

It took three of them to swing it out and back and the light flooded in to reveal a corridor, unlit, the steel walls Run Silent, Run Deep , a Second World War film set aboard a submarine, the crew sweating in the silence under an oily sea or dead in an airless tomb.

It was an eerie image, so that when he saw something move in the shadows it made him flinch, as if from a blow.

Out of the ash-grey shadows came a man, walking towards them, shuffling, a hand to his side where a bloody bandage encircled his flesh. The smell was fetid, the stench of humankind, and, thought Shaw, the sweet smell of rotting fruit. It was an image out of a nightmare, and the thought that broke into Shaw’s mind was that he was relieved that Fran wasn’t there to see it — because it would haunt a child’s mind, as it would his.

‘Sean?’

Neil Judd stood at Shaw’s shoulder. The word seemed to stop the shuffling man in his tracks, and he swayed, then sank to his knees.

Neil Judd ran forward and helped him up, and when their heads were together it became obvious that they were brothers, even now, because Sean Judd had lost his mop of hair.

Shaw and Valentine pushed past, down the corridor, which at first seemed to end in a blank wall. As his vision adjusted to the gloom, however, Shaw could see that the end wall contained another door. Beyond it was a room which doubled back towards the operating theatre.

Inside were six beds, three of them occupied, each occupant held to the bedstead by a single handcuff. The first raised his head from a grimy pillow and held Shaw’s

Standing there, Shaw’s mind locked, as if it was unable to complete a difficult computation. But he knew what he had in his mind — the image of Liam Kennedy, collecting prescriptions for men who should have been long gone. But they’d been here, waiting to fulfil their purpose, a living organ bank. And another image: the sudden darkness on that Sunday when the power had failed. The chaos here in this room, the fear and the anger. Had they been handcuffed then, he wondered, or free?

One of the other two men sat up, then rolled from his bed, tugging the bed frame with him, holding a hand up, trying to cover his face. In the third bed a man lay still, bandages around his head. The man on the floor began to scream, a thin wail, gathering strength. Shaw was still struggling to understand what he was seeing, and in his confusion he tried to find a parallel from his own experience, but all he could call to mind was a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, a nightmare vision of hell. The man in the corner stopped screaming and pointed at the man with the bandaged head.