the hours in the morgue sketching faces.
The picture showed a boy on a beach, bedraggled palm trees in the background, a parent in either hand. He took it back to Lena.
He stood on the doorstep waiting for the ambulance, straining to hear the siren. Behind him he knew, without looking, that she’d got him to look at the picture, so that that would be the image he took with him.
Shaw’s memories had slipped into a dream-like sleep, so that when a double tap sounded on the roof of the Land Rover he’d jumped, his heart racing. He opened his eyes to see a face at the open passenger-side window, a face he recognized but couldn’t name. He wore a fire helmet — white, with a black comb insignia and a black band. Shaw glanced at his epaulette and saw the two impellers which signified that he was the watch manager — senior officer at the scene.
‘Peter,’ he said. ‘George and I think you should see this.’ The voice gave Shaw the name — Jack Hinde, an experienced officer, who’d been friends with his father. Hinde was popular in the CID room at St James’s, and had been for twenty years, because he was a superb expert witness in arson cases. He was looking at retirement now, but Shaw guessed he’d pick up a consultancy from one of the insurance companies, and spend the last decade of his life being paid for what he knew, not what he did.
Hinde led the way to the threshold of number 6, the burnt-out house, where Valentine stood looking down into the gutted basement. Water still splashed amongst the blackened beams. The fire brigade would be here until first light, making sure the fire didn’t flare up again. The blaze had been an inferno at its height, and it was still
Valentine pinched a dog-end between finger and thumb before slipping it into his pocket, then followed them into the ruined house. Shaw looked up through the smoking rafters to the room where he’d rescued Pete Hendre. The floorboards on the ground floor were burnt through in the living room, revealing the flood beneath. The smell was one of the saddest Shaw knew — a home, all the lives in it, reduced to charcoal and soaked bedding. A metal stepladder had been fixed to a floor joist down into the basement. Hinde led the way, Shaw followed, while Valentine watched from above.
‘You see, Peter,’ said Hinde, stepping off into a foot of water. ‘That’s experience for you. George is keeping a professional distance — right, George?’
Valentine was backlit by a floodlight, so they couldn’t see his face.
The basement was a single room, less than half the area of the ground floor. Shaw stood with one foot on the bottom rung of the ladder, the other on a stone step which just cleared the water.
The room was empty but for a workbench, in heavy wood, which had survived the blaze. On it were various pieces of laboratory equipment. Most of the glass was smashed except for a spherical jar, a rack of test tubes, and what looked like a filter. ‘Big boy’s chemistry set,’ said Hinde.
‘Drugs — it’s a factory, right?’
Hinde shook his head. ‘Don’t think so, Peter. Fire Investigations Unit took some stuff away, but they know
‘Right — thanks for the heads up.’ Shaw looked round the basement walls. Up against one was the shadow of a set of shelves, not horizontal but criss-cross, creating a pattern of lozenge shapes, like a garden trellis. Within each of the spaces was the ghostly outline of the bottom of a wine bottle.
‘Chateau Dosser,’ said Hinde, laughing. ‘But not a single bottle. And before you ask — this isn’t a wine- making kit, or a still.’
Shaw filed the image away in his mental library.
‘Find much?’ asked Valentine, intrigued, when Shaw was back in the street.
‘A chemistry set, but no sign of drugs, and what looks like the remains of a wine cellar — long abandoned. So no — nothing that makes sense, anyway.’
They’d arrived at the church and Shaw cricked his neck looking up at the lime-green cross. ‘Where’s this Kennedy, then?’ he asked, checking his watch, surprised it was still just 12.58 a.m.
Valentine shrugged. ‘Squad car rang — Kennedy’s pretty tired, so they stopped for a tea at one of the all- night places on the Tuesday Market. Should be any minute.’
10
There was a light in the downstairs window, but as they watched it went out. Then a bedroom light came on, for a few seconds only, before it too went out.
A police squad car took the T-junction turn at 60 m.p.h. and slid into the kerb. Liam Kennedy got out, picking the sweaty T-shirt away from his narrow chest. He stood looking at the church, fidgeting, switching his weight from foot to foot.
Shaw nodded. ‘You OK? We need to talk — briefly.’
‘I need to check inside,’ said Kennedy. ‘We could talk then. I’ve got a room here, in the basement.’ He broadcast a smile, which Shaw judged he thought was charming.
The main doors of the Sacred Heart of Mary, under a high-pointed neo-Gothic arch, were locked, but along the side of the building ran a path to a single door over which hung a light bulb in a metal frame, like a miniature iron maiden.
Kennedy laid a finger to his lips and pushed the door open. The nave was unlit, a little moonlight struggling through the sickly blues and reds of the Victorian stained glass. Shaw stood, waiting for the subtle jigsaw of greys and blacks to form itself into an image. The smell was pungent: human sweat, lavatory cleaner, and something
Kennedy stepped close. ‘The hostel — number 6 — is home to only four men at any one time. It’s designed to provide a bridge — a real home, for a month, maybe three — for those who’ve got themselves a job. Here at the church we look after the less fortunate. A dozen, twenty a night. We do our best.’ He held out his hands to indicate that, while that was not enough, it didn’t mean God wasn’t pleased with him.
Shaw tried to keep his reactions to Kennedy as neutral as he could, but he recognized it would be a struggle. In his short career he’d found more evil than good in organized religion, more exploitation than salvation. And he couldn’t suppress the question: what were this young man’s motives for working here, amongst the broken? Perhaps, he thought, he was broken too.
The front sets of pews in the church had been removed, stacked to one side, and in their place mattresses laid out in two neat rows. On each lay a man; most of them just covered in a sheet, wrapped by constant movement into mummies. One lay on the cool wooden floor, only his hand left on the mattress. The outer door closed behind Shaw with a thud on an automatic spring, and one of the figures stirred, crying out ‘
They followed Kennedy behind the altar into a small room. A table with green baize had a rip in it, and the unshaded light bulb made the bare, unpapered walls look stark. A row of pegs was empty except for a surplice and a Tesco bag. In one corner stood a large metal filing
Kennedy opened a narrow door with a key, flicked a switch, and turned his body slightly to one side with practised ease so that he could drop down a flight of stairs.
‘It’s a bit hot,’ he said, greeting them at the bottom. Behind him was a lagged boiler, oil-fired, ticking in the silence. ‘We can’t shut it down because it provides hot water — for here, and the house. In winter, it’s snug — in summer, I try and keep the skylights open.’
At ceiling level there was a line of frosted-glass windows in one wall, heavily barred and letter-box narrow. The boiler room was neat and swept, as was a corridor which led away down the length of the church above, lit by three more bare light bulbs. Off it was a door into a bedsit, with a kitchen and toilet to one side. The narrow horizontal window here was open too, held up by a wooden stay, revealing the leaves of a fig tree in the graveyard above.
‘It’s not the crypt of St Paul’s, is it?’ said Shaw.
‘It’s home,’ said Kennedy. In one corner stood an easel, half a dozen twisted oil-paint tubes in the wooden gutter. A light sketch in pencil covered a piece of cartridge paper, the lines too thin to reveal the subject. There was a desk and a computer — a slim white laptop. Kennedy touched it like an icon. ‘I’m setting up a website for the
