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 façade 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 précis. ‘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 façades, and a single scream was met with a chorus of laughter.
Shaw put his foot down, the sailboards on the roof rack of the Land Rover rattling in the breeze. Two minutes later they’d swung into Erebus Street – a cul-de-sac, ending in the old dock gates, clogged now with ivy and scraps of rubbish like prayer flags. The original iron rails for the dock freight trains ran down the middle of the street, rusted, the ruts clogged with grit. Shaw parked in the shadows.
This was a different world, and one in darkness.
‘A power cut?’ asked Shaw. ‘That’s odd. In one street?’ And a coincidence, an echo of the brief electricity failure at the hospital. Shaw didn’t trust coincidences; they got his mind working in circles, trying to construct links that didn’t need to exist.
A full moon, hazy in the heat, hung over the street like a Chinese lantern. On one house a burglar alarm flashed blue. A woman stood by her front door in the moonlight, a candle set in its own grease on the window ledge, a cat snaking round her ankles. At the far end of the street a fire burnt in a brazier, while figures stood in a circle, the
‘Street party,’ said Valentine.
In front of the dock gates was parked a white van, a motif on the side too shadowy to read, while beyond they could see a merchant ship at the quayside, as black as crêpe paper, a silhouette against the stars. Three storeys high, dwarfing the street. One of the giant quayside cranes bent over it like a praying mantis.
Shaw got out and stood in the heat, which seemed to radiate from the cheap red bricks. The air was still, all windows open; and it was an odd sensation – and you only ever got it in the city in a heatwave; a feeling that he wasn’t outside at all, but in a huge room, a vast auditorium, a theatre perhaps, so that what looked outside was really inside, and that up beyond the illusion of the stars were the house lights.
They both stared at the shadowy house fronts, searching for the Bentinck Launderette. Several of the houses were boarded up, one’s door had been kicked in, another’s encased in a steel shutter. Erebus Street was the kind of address that came up every week at magistrates’ court for all the wrong reasons. Its crimes were low, mean, and plentifuclass="underline" domestic violence, street fights, muggings, benefit fraud, meter fraud, car theft, and a few RSPCA prosecutions for cruelty to dogs.