Jim Kelly - Death Watch

Behind him on the single bed lay Neil Judd, Bryan Judd’s younger brother. He’d demanded to speak to Shaw, insisting he had information crucial to the murder inquiry. Shaw had decided the remaining members of the Judd family should stay on Erebus Street that night — the emergency services had portable lighting, and he didn’t want them mixing with the rest of the residents until he’d had statements taken. Shaw’s wounds — some burns to his left hand, right leg, and a nail-gash on the right

The burnt-out house, as Liam Kennedy had told them, was owned by the church on the corner and run as a hostel. Both Aidan Holme and the man Shaw had rescued from the flames were at the Queen Victoria. Holme — accompanied by Kennedy — had been taken to intensive care, where he was fighting to overcome the shock of third-degree burns to his arms and neck. His friend was in better shape, but smoke inhalation would keep him in a hospital bed for forty-eight hours, maybe more. Andy Judd had been arrested at the scene. He’d spend the night in the cells at St James’s after a thorough medical examination. The fire brigade’s forensic unit had removed evidence from the house indicating that at least two home-made Molotov cocktails had been lobbed through the broken downstairs window, although the only thing Shaw had seen Andy Judd throw had been a half-brick. A team was taking statements at the Kingdom Hall — but Shaw knew the chances that any of them would incriminate Andy Judd for the arson attack were slight.

Ally Judd had been visited by the parish priest — Father Martin — then given a sedative and was asleep in her house, next door to the launderette, an officer from family liaison at the bedside. It was nearly midnight and Shaw had wanted to go home, grab some sleep, so that he’d be alert and prepared for the murder inquiry’s first full day. Overnight Paul Twine, a keen, graduate-entry DC, would man the inquiry phone lines at the incident room Valentine had set up on Level One at the hospital, and keep a watching brief on the injured. Shaw had been

So sleep would have to wait.

Shaw turned from the window and watched Neil Judd swig water from a bottle, sitting propped up on pillows on his bed. The bedsit was directly above the launderette, the kitchen shared with his father, a widower, who had a bedroom next to his son’s. Neil’s room was cluttered with teenage paraphernalia — neatly stacked magazines, CDs, DVDs. And the technology to go with it: an iPod and matching sound system, DVD player, a pair of cool dark Wharfedale speakers, a laptop.

All of which was in sharp contrast to the bare utility of the little shared kitchen, the rusted paraffin heaters in each of the rooms, the bare floorboards. The flat smelt of cheap talc, aftershave, and laundered clothes. Andy’s room was like a cell: spotless, but without a single note of individuality except for a framed picture of Dublin’s O’Connell Bridge. In Neil’s room, by contrast, the walls were covered in film posters: No Country For Old Men, In the Valley of Elah, Godfather II . A Japanese cartoon, framed, blood dripping from a severed arm.

With the power still out Neil Judd had lit two night-lights on the windowsill and a candle on his bedside table. But the SOC team had set a halogen lantern in the corridor outside which splashed fake daylight into the room as well.

Shaw thought there was something wrong with the Taxi Driver showing vigilante Robert De Niro stripped down, weapons taped to his body, a knife on a sliding rail on his upper arm, ready to slip down into his palm from within a jacket, a gun in a neat pouch at his groin. And then there were the magazines — arranged with disturbing neatness on two shelves. Shaw pulled one out: Martial Arts Illustrated .

‘You wanted to tell us something,’ he said, prompting. Shaw had noticed that, when someone spoke, Judd turned his head, bringing his ear closer to the sound. But there was nothing subservient about the tic, because a brief look of irritation went with it, as if it were Shaw’s fault that his voice couldn’t be clearly heard.

‘I know why Dad did it — why he went for them — the dossers in the hostel.’ Shaw observed that, when he wanted to, when he prepared the sentence, Neil Judd could almost completely disguise the dulling effect of his deafness on his diction.

Valentine stood with his back to the wardrobe, trying to do some mental arithmetic. He didn’t know much about modern technology or wages on the quayside — Neil Judd said he’d just started as a stevedore, taking his dad’s old job — but Valentine reckoned there was at least a few thousand quids’ worth of gear in the room. And Neil Judd wasn’t full time, he’d told them proudly, but on college day release.

Valentine knocked out a Silk Cut but Neil Judd got in before he lit it. ‘Spare one?’ he asked. They lit up together, from Valentine’s lighter.

He looked at Valentine, sensing the older man would know.

The DS nodded. ‘Skunk and raw spirit.’ He looked at Shaw. ‘You get it — ’specially off the boats, in from Holland.’

Neil stretched himself on the bed, and Valentine thought how slight he was, how fragile the bones. Shaw wondered why Judd’s face seemed to radiate an oddly smug expression, as if his evening was going to plan. The death of his brother seemed to be an emotional event confined to another world. When he exhaled his cigarette smoke he pushed it out in a long plume, up at the ceiling.

‘Bry was trying to kick it — just ask Ally — and he’d done it, you know, for a year, maybe more. But they got him back on it and he couldn’t get off.’

Shaw thought there was something cloying about Neil Judd, about the whole family, as though they were all victims, or looking to be victims. ‘Where’d he get the money?’ he asked. ‘Job at the hospital can’t pay enough for a habit like that.’

Judd swallowed hard. The question seemed to confuse him. He sat up on the bed, pulled his T-shirt up and over his head.

was slight, but beneath the T-shirt his muscles were clear, sharp with a textbook six-pack. He flexed a hand like a claw. ‘He didn’t pay. He gave them something back — stuff he got from the hospital.’ He smiled. ‘That’s down to you lot… police use the incinerator to burn off drugs — street gear. The bloke in the hostel, Holme, he and Bry worked out a way of getting it out so it looked like it had gone up in smoke. But it hadn’t. Bry got it, and gave it to him…’ He stood and walked lightly on the balls of his feet to the open window.

Shaw looked quickly at Valentine, asking with his eyes if this could be true. His DS shrugged, unhappy that he’d worked out it was organized crime, but had missed the link with drugs. Now, looking back, it should have been obvious. Because drugs were the rotten heart of modern crime.

‘Bry wanted to call the deal off,’ said Judd. ‘He’d told Holme — but there’d been a fight and Bry came back in a mess — his eye cut up. He was crying. Dad saw that. They weren’t close, they hadn’t been for years, but he saw that, and he knew Holme was making him do it, making him trash his life.’

‘Hold on,’ said Shaw. ‘You’re saying this Holme character, from the hostel, hit your brother.’

Neil Judd struck his solar plexus with a fist. ‘Hit!’ he shouted. ‘Christ — Bry was terrified. Holme said he couldn’t back out now, that they’d kill him.’ Neil Judd nodded, kept nodding, leaving that idea to hang in the air.

Shaw went to the window as Judd went back to the bed, and, looking down, saw that a priest stood before the ruins of the burnt-out house. He watched him make a sign of the cross then punch a number into a mobile.

‘A week ago, yeah — at the weekend,’ said Judd, stretching out. ‘A Sunday. Bry was on his way into work and he went over to try and tell them again — tell them he wouldn’t do it. I think there was a big haul coming through — Bry got to know because he had to make room for the consignment, and be ready to make sure it all went in by batch. He said the place was always crawling with coppers, that it was risky — what they did. He said Holme had gone berserk, laid into him, and that it wasn’t just Bry that would suffer if he pulled out now. Holme said they’d make Ally suffer too. He hit Bry, in the eye, a few times, so that it kind of ballooned up. The white bit was all bloody.’