Death Watch

who described herself as the common-law wife of his father. She’d kept her maiden name. And there it was — Roundhay.

Shaw rang Holden back and asked him to check Roundhay in the list of tenants — but he didn’t have to.

‘Yes. Of course — that’s a big family on the Westmead, Inspector. They’ve always owned a lock-up — that’s

Shaw told him not to bother; one number was enough.

The picture in Shaw’s head was like a snapshot from a family album — in 1990s colour, brash and glaring. A hot Sunday afternoon, the lock-up garages baking, a small boy standing at an open roll-up door, a puppy yelping. At the side of the door two numbers screwed into the woodwork: 51. Then the snapshot moved, coming to life, so that the child was free to move. Someone said something and he took a step inside, out of the sunlight, then another, and then he was gone. For ever.

40

Valentine walked home along the quayside. The incoming tide brought with it the remnants of the cool mist which had acted as a shroud for Gavin Peploe’s yacht. Out in mid-channel a freighter had slid in along the Cut from the sea, deck lights ablaze. The sound of a radio playing music to a Latin beat bounced over the water. The ship swung in the tide, the stern coming round towards the quayside so that she could enter the Alexandra Dock. The steel starboard side came to within fifty feet of the quay, towering over Valentine.

He stopped, lit a Silk Cut, and watched the ship glide towards him, skewed, the great mass edging sideways. The engines churned up chocolate-coloured water. On the side was painted a huge flag. Something exotic, thought Valentine; the Philippines, perhaps? Some banana republic? A blue flag, a yellow rhombus, within which was set a blue sphere of the night sky with studded stars, and a curving green band containing letters.

‘Tin-pot,’ he said to himself. You could always tell a country that had its arse hanging out by the fact that it had a flag cluttered with rubbish: coats of arms, emblems, flowers, you name it — they’d stuff it on the flag in the hope that no one would notice that the country was on its uppers.

The flag flying from the mast was different, something

Smoking, he read out the words on the coloured flag. ‘Ordem e Progresso.’ He thought it didn’t take his education to work that one out. Order and progress. Trite, he thought, flicking his cigarette end in the water, then turning away.

Fifty yards down the quay he stopped, in no hurry to get home. The house, despite the summer’s day, would be cold — especially the bathroom, which always offered up the worst moment of his life, the last look in the mirror each night. He lit another Silk Cut, and thought about Alex Cosyns — about the cheque from Robert Mosse, and who he knew on the regional fraud squad who could wriggle him access to Cosyns’s bank account. There’d been no complaint from Cosyns. Which was good news, but also unsettling. He shivered slightly, rolling his shoulders.

He looked back along the quay when he heard the odd, taut complaint of the buffers on the ship meeting the wooden piling which protected the concrete wharf; just a glance, a random moment which, he would later have to admit, probably saved his career, maybe even his life.

The name on the stern of the ship was written in blue letters ten feet high:

MV ROSA.

41

Shaw woke a millisecond before the phone rang. Or was it the second ring? He could never quite catch the echo, but sensed it was there, bouncing round the dark room. He could smell Lena; her skin was so close, a subtle mix of sweat and salt. He fumbled with the receiver trying not to think it must be bad news. It was George Valentine.

‘Peter. I need to show you something — outside the Crane, on Erebus Street.’ For once Valentine’s voice was free of the corrosive edge of antagonism.

Lena turned away in her sleep.

Shaw propped himself up on an elbow and looked at the harsh red numbers on the alarm clock: 12.55 a.m.

Then he made a mistake. ‘Is this really necessary, George?’

He heard Valentine draw on an unseen cigarette. Shaw knew he shouldn’t have asked, shouldn’t have questioned his DS’s judgement. George Valentine was his partner, and he’d got the best part of thirty years’ service under his belt. If he rang his DI in the middle of the night he had a reason — a compelling one. Shaw knew what Lena would say, and the word ‘trust’ would be at its heart. So he made himself cut in. ‘Sorry. Course it is. I’ll be there in twenty. Don’t move.’

There was no sign of the moon when he pulled the 24-HOUR WASH, although the launderette was closed.

Valentine sat in the gutter, a pewter flask in his hand, his lips wet, so that they caught the light. In the sudden flood of headlamps he stood arthritically, like a deckchair unfolding. When Shaw got out of the Land Rover his DS didn’t say anything, just led the way to the dock gates, following the sunken iron rails in the tarmac. The gate to the wired compound for the electricity sub-station stood open.

‘The lock here was broken — that’s how Andy Judd got in with his bottle of paraffin,’ said Valentine.

From the small yard within they could see up into Jan Orzsak’s house, where a single light shone through the frosted glass of a bathroom window. A shadow moved inside, and Shaw imagined Orzsak standing at a mirror, trying to forget whatever nightmare had woken him up, shifting his weight off the crushed slipper.

‘We missed this,’ said Valentine. He brushed his way through the hawthorn bushes to the far wire, the perimeter of the dockyard, and there they found another metal gate.

‘This is neat,’ said Valentine, holding out a padlock on his hand. The heavy-duty shackle had been filed through. The hinge screamed as the gate swung in. They walked out onto the barren acre of concrete, on which had been painted the giant number 4. A rat dashed left and right, left and right, seemingly following a path only it could see, as if it were negotiating an invisible maze.

Shaw read the letters painted on the stern, and felt his blood run deliciously cool.

‘MV Rosa,’ he said. ‘MVR.’

His second thought, after he’d stopped the elation flooding his brain, was that it could be a coincidence. ‘Was she here on Sunday night?’

Valentine nodded, looking at his black slip-ons. ‘I rang the shipping agent — she sailed Monday morning at dawn. But she was here, Berth 4.’

‘Well done,’ said Shaw, thinking fast, putting together pieces of a jigsaw which suddenly seemed to fit — like Pete Hendre’s description of the room he’d woken up in, with the steady mechanical hum, and the iron door. Like the bodies on Warham’s Hole and on the storm-drain grid. Like the torch and the wristband: MVR.

‘You haven’t been aboard?’ He bit his lip, recognizing that he’d done it again, shown his lack of trust, because only an idiot rookie would be stupid enough to blunder aboard.

The cold edge returned to Valentine’s voice. ‘Agent’s meeting us at the dock office — I’ve told him if he contacts anyone on the Rosa he’ll be a shipping agent in Murmansk by the weekend. He’s OK. Old school.’

The Rosa was silent except for the dribble of a bilge pump into the black oily water. They strolled away from the ship, keeping to the shadows of the hawthorns that grew through the wire fencing, round the edge of the Alexandra Dock, to the gates into the Bentinck — the inner dock — aware that by now they’d be on the CCTV. CONSTABLE SHIPPING AGENTS.

Valentine spoke into a crackling entryphone grille.