Death Watch

waiting.

‘No, they weren’t. There was a name tag — they were Andy’s.’

45

DC Mark Birley stretched out his legs under the table which held the CCTV screens in the security booth at the dock gates; his left leg was bandaged from the game on Saturday, when the opposition fly-half had raked his boot down Birley’s shin bone, lifting the skin away, damaging the muscle. He looked at his left fist where the knuckles were still swollen. If he’d hit him any harder he’d have had to arrest himself. He grinned, drank some cold coffee, rubbed the heel of his palm into his right eye, and focused again on the screen.

He was good at this, he knew enough about Peter Shaw’s methods to know that. The DI didn’t do Buggins’ turn — he worked out what you had a skill for and made sure it wasn’t wasted. Since the inquiry had begun Birley had spent eighty hours in front of CCTV screens, because he had an eye for detail and the strength of mind to concentrate when every nerve in his body wanted sleep. Beside the table was a pile of video cassettes running back a month. His job was to locate the Rosa’s dockings, then see if he could pick up the registration numbers of any cars making double visits. And any signs of a bicycle, too — high-tech, a racing model, with a pannier.

He watched the film at treble speed; cars swishing across the quayside, HGVs, the stevedores swarming like Rosa to appear off the dockside. There! It docked, in Keystone-cop time, and the captain’s Volvo was winched off the fo’c’s’le onto the quayside. He ran the film speed down to real time and began to make a note.

Despite his level of concentration he was still half listening to the real world. A car engine idled as someone pulled up at the barrier. In the outer office he heard the security guard separating the glass screens so that he could take the driver’s ID and paperwork.

‘The Rosa,’ said a woman’s voice. ‘Captain should have left a note.’

Birley stood quickly, moving to one side so that he could see through the hatch to the security window. He watched the guard flicking through a pile of documents.

‘Here it is…’ He made a note and passed a book across for the woman to sign. Birley clocked the car: a Vauxhall Zafira, new, spotless, with a parking permit in the window marked QUEEN VICTORIA HOSPITAL — SENIOR STAFF.

Then she was gone. Birley stepped into the guard’s booth. Turned the book round to see the scrawled name.

Mrs Jofranka Phillips.

By the time Shaw was in Galloway’s office on the dockside Jofranka Phillips’s car was parked at the foot of the gangplank and she’d gone aboard, carrying — according to DC Campbell — nothing more than a paper bag from Thorntons.

‘So she likes chocolates. Anything else?’

‘Nothing,’ she said. She looked at her notes. ‘Dark glasses, black summer dress. One of the crew met her at the top of the gangplank — they kissed, cheek-to-cheek, like friends would.’

‘Right — George, ring Ravid Lotnar. He told us he could get a set of documents to prove his operation had been legally conducted in Israel. Get me the name of the hospital.’

He asked Galloway if he could use his broadband link. The Scot said he’d need a minute to finish an e-mail. Shaw bounced on his toes, reviewing in his mind the interview they’d just completed with Andy Judd under caution at St James’s, with the duty solicitor present. They’d hauled him in quickly before he’d any time to discover that his eldest son had been living secretly in Erebus Street. Or did he know? That was the problem with the Judd family: trying to see its internal workings, its alliances and feuds, was impossible — the more you looked, the less you saw.

46

It was well after opening time and Judd was sober, which didn’t suit him. He held a pea-green cup of tea on a saucer, but every time he tried to lift it to his lips he’d given up. They’d been talking for an hour: question, answer, question, answer… routine, aimless, designed to confuse the suspect. Every time Valentine got up to take a cigarette break — which was every ten minutes — he’d ostentatiously taken his packet of Silk Cut with him. Judd didn’t just have a craving for nicotine, he had a dependency; they could see it was beginning to make his yellow- stained fingers shake.

Then Shaw showed him the artist’s impression that Ally Judd said was an accurate depiction of his oldest son.

‘This was in all the local papers, TV. I gave you your own copy too.’

‘Yeah — so?’

‘Your daughter-in-law says it is unmistakably your son, Sean.’

‘Looks like him, all right. You’d think I’d come and tell you that? I can look after my own…’ He regretted that, they could both see it in his eyes. Because he couldn’t look after his own.

‘He came back because you’re dying. But he couldn’t — didn’t — feel he could talk to you. Why was that? He thought Bryan was right, didn’t he? That you’d killed Norma Jean?’

‘So you knew he was back in Lynn?’

Judd whispered to the solicitor. ‘I don’t have to answer that question,’ he said, smiling through wrecked teeth.

‘Can you explain how a pair of your overalls came to be found in the launderette, Mr Judd — soaked in blood — on the night your son died?’

The solicitor stiffened, as though she’d got a shock off a cattle fence. But Judd pushed her hand aside when she tried to place it on the table in front of him. ‘I’ve got a bag of special tokens — Ally gives ’em to me. I work in an abattoir. You’ve seen it — seen what I do. You got me in here to ask a fucking question like that? That is harassment. You’ve got me on the arson charge — there’s a date, for the court. I’m sticking my hand up for that — OK — so well done, boys. Isn’t that enough?’

He hadn’t missed a beat and the explanation had been fluid and calm.

‘But that’s not how it works, is it?’ said Shaw. ‘The abattoir collects the overalls and gets them washed in town, on contract. But not this set of overalls. And not on the night your son died.’

Judd’s eyes widened. ‘It’s Bry, isn’t it? You still think I killed him? You think I don’t love my kids? You think I don’t ever wake up and not think of them first? I’d die for them.’ He fingered a gold cross which had fallen out of his open-necked shirt, and Shaw noticed the contrast

‘There’s twenty — more — who’ll tell you I was out on the street that day — by the fire, drinking. I didn’t kill Bry — I didn’t go anywhere near him. It was cow’s blood on the overalls. Your lot in the white coats too stupid to work that out? It’s not Silent Witness, is it?’

Shaw didn’t have an answer to that, because there was one irritating flaw in Ally Judd’s statement: why had she put the blood-soaked overalls back in the wash? Andy Judd had been released, still constrained by the conditions of bail previously set.

In the shipping agent’s office overlooking the Alexandra Dock Galloway finished his e-mail exchange and Shaw took his place at the computer, punching two words into Google: Kalo Kircher.

He’d been a fool. Phillips’s tangential link with Israel had been a coincidence he should have checked out. DC Twine’s summary of her background had included the fact that Kalo Kircher’s children supported a charitable medical programme in Israel. Ravid Lotnar — the Rosa’s last patient — was an Israeli citizen who had tried to claim that there was documentary proof he’d had his organ transplant in his own