Jim Kelly - Death Watch (Detective Shaw Mysteries)

JIM KELLY

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published 2010

Copyright Jim Kelly, 2010

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-194364-0

PENGUIN BOOKS

Death Watch

Jim Kelly lives in Ely, Cambridgeshire, with his partner, the writer Midge Gillies, and their daughter. He is the author of The Water Clock, The Fire Baby, The Moon Tunnel, The Coldest Blood and The Skeleton Man, all featuring journalist Philip Dryden, and also Death Wore White, the first in this new series featuring DI Peter Shaw and DS George Valentine. The Dryden series won the 2006 CWA Dagger in the Library award for a body of work giving the greatest enjoyment to readers.

To find out more about Jim Kelly and other Penguin crime writers, go to www.penguinmostwanted.co.uk.

The authors website can be found at www.jim-kelly.co.uk

This book is dedicated to the memory of

Donald Webster Gillies

11 August 1920 13 December 2008

A proud Son of the Rock

And a great teller of stories

Saturday, 5 September 1992

The moment Bryan Judds twin sister died that very instant he was sitting on an abandoned sofa on the waste ground behind Erebus Street. Hed gone to the mini-market and bought a can of Special Brew which he was drinking slowly in the vertical summer heat, listening to his radio. The signal came and went, like an audible mirage, but he sang in the gaps, expertly finding the key, knowing all the words of Success Has Made a Failure of Our Home, mimicking the Elvis Costello cover, not this version by Sinad OConnor. The beer was warm, the tin damp, and the alcohol made him feel better about the night to come about what it might hold for him. Ally had said shed meet him outside the Lattice House. Her skin was always cool, even in this endless summer, and hed found that to seek it, taut under his fingertips, had become an obsession. He smiled, tipped his head back, and drank, despite the taste of metal in his mouth.

And then his twin, Norma Jean, was there with him, a presence as physically real as the tin can in his hand. He never had any warning, there was never a sense in which she approached. She was just there. Inside him. They told people it wasnt a link between their minds, it was a link between their bodies, as if the intimacy theyd shared in the womb continued now nearly sixteen years later. But when she came to him there was always this sense of shock, or sudden arrival. The world he could see the waste ground, the red-brick backs of the terraced houses, the distant crane on the docks juddered, like a TV picture at home when his dad smacked the top of the set.

But this wasnt like the other times. This was a violent shock, a blow. The beat of his heart became slow and hard, thudding, as if he were running, or hiding; and in the background he could hear her heartbeat, a mirror image of his own. His blood rushed in his ears and he knew the emotion she was feeling was fear; then, with a jolt which seemed to tear at the muscles that held his heart in place, the fear escalated into terror. He tried to stand, wanting to go to her, but his knees buckled and he knelt, not feeling the shard of glass that cut into the soft tissue below his knee.

And then, despite the sun, a shocking coldness covered his face, and his neck; and all the noises of the day the creaking dockside crane, the traffic on the inner ring road became dull, and distant, as if heard under water. The coldness enclosed his head, his shoulders, inside his mouth, and down his throat. He tried to gulp air but there was something in his throat, something slippery and cold. He gagged, spewing vomit down his T-shirt. He tried to fill his lungs but there was nothing there, just this fluid cloak of suffocation over his head and shoulders.

He was drowning, on a summers day, on a dusty piece of waste ground as dry as bones.

He tried to stand, but fell back on the sofa, blacking out.

He came to at the moment when that other distant heartbeat stopped, and for the first time in his life he felt alone. His world had changed, as if hed been given tinted glasses to wear, and it made him want to cry out the thought that this was how it would be for ever. Shakily, on his feet now, he listened to the sounds that had returned to him: a crane load of timber crumpling to the dockside, children playing on Erebus Street.

The lost heartbeat made him run to find her: across the waste ground, around the back of the Sacred Heart of Mary and down the street to his house, past the launderette where his mother worked, the windows clouded with condensation. As he passed he heard his baby brother crying from the pushchair by the open door.

The front door of their house, next to the launderette, opened as he got to it and his father came out, pulling it closed behind him, pushing a hand through a shock of white hair like a wallpaper brush, thick with paste.

Its Norma, said Bryan. Somethings happened

His father brushed a hand over his lips and Bryan noticed the bib of sweat which stained his shirt.

Jesus, Bry, said his father, who was looking at the blood on his sons trouser leg, below the knee, and a cut on his cheek.

Bry pushed past, just stopping the door before the lock dropped, running halfway up the stairs.

Norma! He stood, listening to the familiar sounds of the house: a clock ticking, the cat flap flapping.

His father came to the foot of the stairs, looking at him through the banisters, as if they were bars on a cell. Your sisters gone out, son. Shell be back in her own time. Leave her be, Bry.

The bedroom door to his sisters room was open, the bed inside made, but dented, as if shed thrown herself on it. In the bathroom there was a trickle of water still running to the plughole, and a single bloody fingerprint on the edge of the bath.

He felt his father at his shoulder.

I felt her, drowning said Bryan.

He could smell his father now. Cheap talc, and the cream he put in his hair. Bryan looked at his father and saw that hed cut himself shaving.

She walked out twenty minutes ago. Shes fine. Their eyes met. We argued, thats all about the baby. Thats all you felt, Bry shes upset. Now leave it. Please.