Death Watch

51

On the Rosa Neil Judd was lying on a bunk in one of the crew cabins. It held a single bed, a fitted cupboard and a shower unit, slightly smaller than the one in which he’d squeezed the life out of Juan de Mesquita. He’d collapsed while being helped up the ladder in number 4 hatch. In the end they’d got him in the bosun’s chair and winched him up to the deck. A doctor had given him a sedative and advised a period of rest before trying to transfer him to St James’s. A uniformed woman constable sat at the foot of the bunk. When Neil Judd woke at eleven she brought him to the mess, where Shaw was having breakfast prepared from supplies in the galley: cereal, milk and toast. A pot of black coffee seeped a delicious aroma into the small room. He’d spent an hour running various versions of events through his head, and he was still disturbed by what he didn’t know. He was reluctant to leave the Rosa, sensing that the ship still held more secrets than it had so far revealed.

Shaw put an evidence envelope on the table. He was struggling still to think of Neil Judd as a killer, rather than a victim himself, the baby brother left as a guardian angel for a father he probably didn’t hate but almost certainly despised; haunted by the fact that he’d slept through the trauma which had ripped his own family apart and that he was too young to recall his missing siblings, Norma Jean

Shaw unpopped the envelope seal and slid the delicate skeleton of the fish onto the table.

‘We’ve found your sister’s body. It was buried in the foundations of the electricity sub-station at the foot of Erebus Street. These were with her — and many more like them.’

Judd laid a finger on the delicate tracery of the bones — a dorsal fin, as fine as a scrimshaw comb.

‘We think Jan Orzsak worked as a consultant for the power company in the 1990s. There is other forensic evidence, potential evidence — the body was partly wrapped in a blanket, a roll of carpet. We’ve recovered human hairs. We’re confident we can bring the appropriate charges.’

‘My father…’ said Neil Judd, trying to understand all the implications of this gossamer-thin skeleton.

‘Yes. An innocent man. Not a killer.’

The word made Judd jolt, as if he’d been stung. He drank some coffee Shaw offered him, and then asked a favour Shaw couldn’t refuse. ‘Can I see him? I want him to know that I know. I’m strong enough now — much stronger.’ He cracked the joints of his fingers.

‘He’s in the hold,’ said Shaw. ‘They won’t move him until they’re ready.’

Judd stood. ‘I can climb down. Please.’

The vertical shaft was lit now by a line of halogen lights. Shaw went first, then Judd, then DC Birley. The three of them descended like abseiling mountaineers. The operating theatre looked very different. The plastic

Neil Judd went to his father’s bedside and took his hand, standing at a slight distance, then stepped closer, pushing back white hair from the old man’s forehead. They put their heads together to talk.

Shaw could see now that the metal container which had held the operating theatre had two internal doors, not one. Three CSIs in SOC suits worked at the other door, one cutting through a padlock with a fine saw, overseen by Tom Hadden.

‘No key?’ asked Shaw, joining them.

‘If anyone’s got it they’re not telling us,’ said Hadden. ‘Which makes me even more determined to get through. It leads into the other containers. My guess is they contain stores, the fridges.’

Shaw thought about that and took a step back, but then the padlock gave and Hadden spun a circular lock. When the door finally gave there was a sound of escaping air, like a Tupperware lid being popped.

It took three of them to swing it out and back and the light flooded in to reveal a corridor, unlit, the steel walls Run Silent, Run Deep, a Second World War film set aboard a submarine, the crew sweating in the silence under an oily sea or dead in an airless tomb.

It was an eerie image, so that when he saw something move in the shadows it made him flinch, as if from a blow.

Out of the ash-grey shadows came a man, walking towards them, shuffling, a hand to his side where a bloody bandage encircled his flesh. The smell was fetid, the stench of humankind, and, thought Shaw, the sweet smell of rotting fruit. It was an image out of a nightmare, and the thought that broke into Shaw’s mind was that he was relieved that Fran wasn’t there to see it — because it would haunt a child’s mind, as it would his.

‘Sean?’

Neil Judd stood at Shaw’s shoulder. The word seemed to stop the shuffling man in his tracks, and he swayed, then sank to his knees.

Neil Judd ran forward and helped him up, and when their heads were together it became obvious that they were brothers, even now, because Sean Judd had lost his mop of hair.

Shaw and Valentine pushed past, down the corridor, which at first seemed to end in a blank wall. As his vision adjusted to the gloom, however, Shaw could see that the end wall contained another door. Beyond it was a room which doubled back towards the operating theatre.

Inside were six beds, three of them occupied, each occupant held to the bedstead by a single handcuff. The first raised his head from a grimy pillow and held Shaw’s

Standing there, Shaw’s mind locked, as if it was unable to complete a difficult computation. But he knew what he had in his mind — the image of Liam Kennedy, collecting prescriptions for men who should have been long gone. But they’d been here, waiting to fulfil their purpose, a living organ bank. And another image: the sudden darkness on that Sunday when the power had failed. The chaos here in this room, the fear and the anger. Had they been handcuffed then, he wondered, or free?

One of the other two men sat up, then rolled from his bed, tugging the bed frame with him, holding a hand up, trying to cover his face. In the third bed a man lay still, bandages around his head. The man on the floor began to scream, a thin wail, gathering strength. Shaw was still struggling to understand what he was seeing, and in his confusion he tried to find a parallel from his own experience, but all he could call to mind was a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, a nightmare vision of hell. The man in the corner stopped screaming and pointed at the man with the bandaged head.

The heat in the room lay like a second skin. The men were dressed only in shorts, so that Shaw and Valentine could see the scars. Several on each. And the long, stitched lines along calves and arms where tendon and tissue had been removed.

The man in the corner told them where to go next — not with his voice, but with his eyes, which kept flickering to the other door, into the third container.

Two men lay in the ice, their many scars a vivid blue, the bodies naked. One had had a leg removed, the stump a dull terracotta. Valentine walked past Shaw and opened the next: a man, ice like a blanket around him through which only lips and hair could be seen, and the toes — breaking through. But the skin looked patched, black in places, and disfigured. Shaw remembered that the Rosa’s power supply, when switched on that night after the generator had been reassembled, had blown the circuits, so that the contents of the fridges had begun to rot and they couldn’t have let the power engineers run a cable aboard — not that night, anyway, because of the chaos on the ship. Eventually these men had been refrozen, but now their flesh was useless.

Shaw wondered if he was in shock. Time seemed to have slowed down, and when Valentine spoke it was like listening to a voice underwater.

‘They kept them alive — for this?’ asked Valentine.

Shaw walked back into the next room. The man in the corner had begun to shake rhythmically, keening softly now. In the corridor he felt the first comforting hint of the cooler air from the operating theatre. And when he got there a sight which halted, for a moment at least,

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