said Twine. ‘Two house burglaries in Gayton — next door to each other, that’s cheeky. A mugging in Greyfriars Gardens, an affray outside the Matilda, some vandalism in the town centre during one of the power cuts — six shop windows gone in the Arndale. Local paper wants to know if that’s looting, which is a good question.
‘Keep an eye on the floater,’ said Shaw. ‘Whose case?’
‘Creake,’ said Twine. DI William Creake was a slogger, with a reputation for wearing cases down by sheer bloody footwork. Inspired detection was not his strong suit. ‘I’ll get the basics off him, then make sure he gets an update from us too,’ added Twine.
‘Get me a copy, Paul. And I’d like a summary on the Arndale — anything to do with the power cuts we should see too. OK — press office? What are we telling the great unwashed of the British media about Bryan Judd?’
‘Bare details for release.’ Twine hit a key and a sheet of A4 slipped out of the printer. ‘We’ve stuck to suspicious death at the Queen Vic, no name yet, or address. The fire brigade released the basics on the blaze in Erebus Street and listed it as suspicious. If anyone finds a link we’ll stonewall for now.’
‘Fine,’ said Shaw, not bothering to read the release through. That had been one of his father’s maxims — trust people in a big inquiry, because if you try to do everything yourself, you’ll fail. ‘Going forward, Paul, I want to keep back the initials on the torch — MVR. The torch isn’t Judd’s, so there’s a good chance it’s the killer’s. If we get any nutters claiming they did it I want something to catch ’em out with. That’ll be it. And I don’t want the killer knowing for sure he’s left it at the scene.’ He saw a millimetre jump in Twine’s left eyebrow. ‘Or she, for that matter.’ Twine smiled. ‘And something for the door-to-door on Erebus Street, Paul. See if there’s any gossip about the Judds’ marriage. Something’s not right there -
‘Housework’ done, Shaw took the lift to the tenth floor of the main hospital block. The view over the town was already lost in heat and smog, a toxic layer of pollution like a blanket, deep enough to obscure everything but Lynn’s own skyscraper — the Campbell’s soup tower, down by the river. A tug was bucking the tide coming down the Cut from the sea, a wake behind like a slug’s trail. Out at sea a summer storm cloud like a giant chef’s hat drifted east. It would be a fine day on the beach, thought Shaw, squinting to see a distant line of surf.
Mary Seacole Ward was for infectious diseases, so he took care to squirt plenty of gel on his hands before entering. Dr Peploe met him by the nurses’ station. He was a paediatric surgeon, and the Lynn Primary Care Trust’s spokesman on the disposal of human tissue, a post required under the Infectious Diseases Act. A neat Glaswegian with a widow’s peak, Dr Peploe possessed one of those asymmetrical faces that the Celts seem to breed: one eye slightly more open than the other, the mouth off the horizontal. Handsome enough, with taut healthy skin stretched over a muscular face. And there was nothing Hebridean about his tan, which was an Italian brown. Stern, but playful — an image enhanced by the small cuddly toy sticking out of one pocket.
He laughed at himself, stuffing the teddy bear’s head out of sight.
‘Sorry — Human Tissue isn’t my day job. It pays to
‘We think someone, somehow, infiltrated the waste system to steal street-haul drugs before they were incinerated,’ said Shaw. ‘Consignments from law enforcement, customs, the lot. Is that possible?’
Peploe thought about it, and there was a long intake of breath. ‘Right. You want the Cook’s Tour or just a run-through?’
‘For now, just the basics please,’ said Shaw.
Peploe picked up an empty yellow waste bag from the room behind the nurses’ station. Each bag, sealed, had a metal tag. This one read
‘This bit’s pretty obvious,’ he said. ‘Every ward gets its own supply.’
On the bag itself was a plastic label on which had been printed a further code:
Peploe took him through it: the label was filled out by a nurse, 1268 was a patient number. Non-R — no radioactive material. Non-C — no chemotherapy residue. I — infectious.
Twice a day the bags were taken by a ward orderly to the metal chute in the cleaners’ room. A drawer, opened then shut, tipped the bag down a gravity-driven pipe system. They listened to it rattle away.
‘Let’s go get it,’ said Peploe, light on his toes. As they walked down the corridor he slid a hand in his pocket and pulled out something small, plastic and colourful; then he tapped it quickly, twice, in the palm of his other hand and quickly swallowed whatever he’d dispensed. Self-medication, thought Shaw, or a sweet tooth.
‘The young man who found the body said he was sent down to Level One with a waste bag,’ said Shaw.
Dr Peploe nodded, as if that fitted the system he had just described, which it didn’t.
‘Anything that might stick in the system, or break, goes by hand delivery — but never through the public areas of the hospital.’
The lift dropped to Level One and he followed Peploe through the maze of corridors to the tug depot, beneath the hospital’s main concourse. A metal chute descended into the depot room, cut off in mid-air, so that they could glimpse up into the darkness. They heard a sigh, then a rattle, and a yellow bag fell out of the darkness and into an angled bin below, which deadened the impact, then allowed it to slide down an aluminium ramp into a waiting tug.
‘That simple,’ said Peploe. He walked to the tug truck, looked amongst the yellow bags, and retrieved the one he’d put down the chute on Mary Seacole Ward. ‘Tugs take it all to the furnace. Then we monitor what goes up the chimney in terms of chemical composition. We can — broadly speaking — match input and output. It’s a good system.’
‘Tell me they didn’t just put the drugs down the chutes?’ said Shaw.
16
They walked through Level One to Junction 57. Shaw was braced for the cacophony when he brushed through the doors, but it was like a hammer blow, the bass note making one of the bones in his ear vibrate. And the air was laden with the white, lifeless dust.
But they weren’t stopping.
‘We can’t talk here,’ shouted Peploe. ‘Follow me.’ He took them beyond the incinerator belt, where a man worked with ear protectors and a plastic mask, and to a door marked simply CONTROL.
Shaw was about to step through when someone shouted his name. He turned to see Tom Hadden standing by the belt, waving him over. He used his hands to tell Peploe to carry on — he’d catch up. Hadden pushed what was left of his strawberry-blond hair back off the pale forehead, took a breath, and shouted. ‘I had someone brush all the metal surfaces in here for prints. Nothing, but we found this instead.’
Beside the belt and next to Bryan Judd’s small office was a control panel in beaten metal. A few dials, an LED display which, Shaw guessed, showed the temperature at various levels of the furnace, and a set of brass switches sticking out, each with a small bulb of metal at the end, like a chapel peg. One of them was darker than the rest, smeared.
‘It’s blood,’ said Hadden, into Shaw’s ear. ‘And brain and bone. The switch has been impacted by some kind of
Shaw went to speak but the dust caught in his throat, so that he had to turn away, coughing violently. ‘So — what — not a fall?’ he asked eventually, holding the back of his hand to his lips.
‘No, no. A fight perhaps.’ Shaw moved closer. ‘Judd was medium height,’ said Hadden. ‘My guess is his assailant got him by the neck and threw him back against this wall — the switch would be just right for here…’ He touched the base of his skull at the back of the neck. ‘There’s a lot of force — see, the whole thing’s dented.’
Shaw stood to one side so that the light played across the metal. A dent, around the switch, and again below where Judd’s hips would have crashed into the metal panel.
‘One other thing,’ said Hadden. He gave Shaw a piece of card marked
‘That’s what was on the metal tag with the bag that went in with the victim.’
Shaw took it. ‘Tom,’ he patted him on the back. ‘Thanks.’
He went after Peploe, climbing an enclosed spiral staircase until he stepped into a room with a glass wall looking out onto two large gas turbines. Peploe explained that these were used to drive the air through the furnace
