Death's Door (2 page)

He stood back, looking at the whole bed, which gave him two impressions: first, that the duvet had indeed been tugged upwards, and that the hand had left a scrunched mark in the material, suggesting that it had been done with some force. And second, from this angle, he could see the woman’s left foot, and could see that beneath it was a tear in the sheet, through which was thrust the heel. So that was an image that didn’t fit: one hand gripping the duvet, the leg kicking out. If she’d taken sleeping pills, painkillers, she’d have slipped off into a coma then died in her sleep. This looked like a more violent reaction to whatever she’d swallowed. Or, just a violent reaction.

He walked around the bed to the head and knelt down. Up close he thought something else was wrong – the glass of water? It was nearly empty and the sides were patterned with concentric rings where each summer’s day had evaporated a millimetre of liquid, as if it always sat there, for emergencies, but never got refilled. And the level of water was only a hair’s breadth below the last ring. So she hadn’t taken the pills then gulped the water. And now that he could see inside the packet of pills he could see that some were left, perhaps most of them. So that wasn’t right either.

He looked at her face, edging his own to within six inches of the victim’s. There wasn’t a personal space to intrude upon any more, because with death that sense of a projected barrier is destroyed, thought Shaw, or dwindles, with each moment that passes after life has gone. So getting close, really close, didn’t make his skin creep. And besides, this was his passion, his area of expertise: the human face. He was one of only three detectives in the country qualified as a forensic artist: he could build a human face in 2D on paper, from the bones outwards, laying the muscles out, the tendons, then the skin. He could take this face, any face, and run it backwards a lifetime to show you what it had been like; or forwards twenty years, to what it would become. He’d been taught to read a face like the opening paragraph of a book.

What did this one tell him? Age: mid or early thirties, the features combining two polar opposites in showing the first signs of wrinkles and an almost childlike openness, the lack of make-up suggesting innocence. The teeth were visible, the lips curled back in an ugly jagged line. The colour of the eyes was fading but had, perhaps, been a vivid green. Shaw had studied forensic art as part of a general degree in fine art so he often tried to classify faces, dead or alive, by painter. And if he had to put this woman’s face on canvas he would have hung that canvas in the room reserved for the Pre-Raphaelites: Millais, perhaps, with the fine jawline, the almost unnaturally symmetrical features, but above all a look of almost innate tragedy, as if she’d been caught in some legend from which there was no escape. That was the one thing that irritated him about the Pre-Raphaelites: they always tried to tell you a story, to weigh down the vision with a narrative. He didn’t know what story this woman would have told if she’d lived, but he knew she had one.

Shaw inched his head back to the point where he could see her whole face. Beautiful in life, there was no doubt. But beauty, he thought, is the composite of the features held together by the life within, and that had gone now: death reduced every face to a photofit.

What was odd, he thought, was that this woman’s sexual aura – the fact that she
was
a woman – had outlived her life. How much more striking had that sexuality been just a few hours earlier? Was she naked beneath the duvet? There was nothing to stop him pulling back the edge of the duvet, if he wanted to pull back the edge. He didn’t need to – the pathologist would examine the body in situ; nor did he want to – but he understood, for a brief moment, why someone would: a strange emotion, not longing or lust, but a kind of thrilling curiosity. The stronger urge, than pulling back the edge, was to pull it up and over the face. But that wasn’t his job either. It wasn’t even his job to close the eyes, although it would have been a decent thing to do.

He knelt on one knee and forced himself to look into her eyes. He thought that this woman hadn’t died in sadness, or desperation, or release. The only human emotion Shaw could confidently attach to her was fear. The sclera, the whites of the eye, were visible, completely circling the iris. So fear, perhaps, of death, but her eyes turned for that lingering last look at life.

He stood and noticed for the first time a single pine needle on the floor, and looking back towards the door saw two others, together. A lungful of air confirmed his first analysis: pine, natural pine. Through the window he could see the edge of the woods beyond the sunflowers, a dark curtain of shadow offering a cool haven from the heat of the day.

Outside he heard a noise, a dull percussion, and he thought it must be a shotgun. In the garden Tom Hadden was taking pictures of the house. He saw Shaw standing beyond his own reflection in the bedroom window and walked towards him. The white SOC suit Hadden was wearing emphasized his colouring: red hair fading to strawberry blond with age, freckles and almost colourless eyes – an insipid green.

They met at the window, one inside, one outside. On the window ledge was a series of miniature pottery houses. Up close Shaw could see the lesion on Hadden’s forehead. The CSI man had already had one small cancer removed, but the blemish had returned. And it was because he was focusing on the wound that he didn’t see what was
between
them on the glass.

Hadden’s eyes narrowed. Shaw saw it now, and the shock of recognition made his heart freeze for just one beat. This was the dangerous moment, and he recognized it as such: the moment when the thrill of other people’s deaths began to outshine the everyday joys of being alive.

It was a kiss on the windowpane: quite clear, the patterned upper lip meeting the lower in a perfect bow. The rest of the window was spotless – inside and out, freshly cleaned. ‘It’s on the outside,’ said Hadden, and Shaw heard his voice as if from far away.

TWO

D
S George Valentine sat on a bench in the middle of the green at the centre of The Circle. The dead woman’s house was silent in the heat. It was difficult to avoid the word
lifeless.
The village of Creake, two hundred yards distant, was a cluster of thatch, Norfolk stone and woodwork painted that precise shade of blue beloved of the Chelsea-on-Sea weekend-cottage set. A round Norfolk church tower was just visible between the acorn-brown foliage of a great oak tree. Somewhere in the far distance he could hear tennis balls being hit in rhythmic succession.

There was nothing Chelsea-on-Sea about The Circle. West Ham-on-Sea, perhaps. A deflated football lay on the parched, kicked earth of the ‘green’, while a union flag hung from the open bedroom of No. 2. A few cars were parked in the cul-de-sac – but none of them were new except the two CSI vehicles, and none of them were 4x4s. The green, kicked dry and grassless, was dotted with unwanted possessions: a bicycle without a saddle, a water pistol, and a dog’s plastic bone.

Valentine yawned, the effort making his jaw crack. He leant back and his neck clicked in sympathy. The green, he’d noticed, wasn’t just empty ground. A two-storey medieval ruin stood to one side: roofless, with narrow arrow-slit windows, a massive chimney stack, and some elegant herringbone stonework over an arched doorway. A small area outside the walls was enclosed by a rusted set of railings which ended with a ‘kissing-gate’ just opposite the Norman doorway. Valentine had seen an English Heritage information board, but not what it said. The most remarkable feature of the ruin was the cedar tree which had grown up within it, thirty-five foot high, spreading its dark green-layered branches out over the curtain walls. The Circle and the modern access road had clearly been constructed to avoid encroaching on this ancient monument. It was an odd place, but it didn’t excite the DS’s curiosity, because he wasn’t a curious man.

He checked his watch, a Rolex he’d bought at Lynn’s Saturday market for a fiver. The gold lettering of the word Rolex had faded with suspicious speed. He’d watched Shaw walk into the dead woman’s house twenty-one minutes ago. Fed up with waiting in the Mazda, he’d dragged himself to the bench. Imagination wasn’t Valentine’s strong point but he was pretty much astonished his DI could spend that long deciding he was looking at a case of suicide.

Valentine had been in the room. He’d spotted the glass and the pills, and he knew, like the CSIs, that she hadn’t died of an overdose of just three Nurofen. But unlike CSI he couldn’t be bothered to cover his bony plain-clothed arse just because a few of the details didn’t fit. She’d died of something, and she’d died by her own hand. Valentine guessed she’d done it in the bathroom – a handful of painkillers – then gone to bed. He’d been a copper for thirty years and that was the detail that still unsettled him – the way people go to bed to die, as if being comfy helps. The only thing missing was a letter. But George Valentine had an insight into quietly desperate lives, and he understood that all
that
probably meant was that she had no one to write to. All of which meant they were wasting their time.

Shaw appeared from the side alley of No. 5, walking down the path, past the gate off its hinges and out on to the makeshift football pitch. His step was light, almost weightless, thought Valentine, as if he might begin to tread air, rising into the Norfolk sky. Shaw always wore a white shirt, crisp, open-necked, and Valentine suspected him of the worst vice of all – that he ironed it himself. In the flat, late-afternoon sun the shirt just seemed to drink in the light. Shaw was six foot one, slim, with blond hair and a beach tan. Up close the brand image was slightly undermined by the eyes: one was blue, that kind of washed-out blue that’s almost not a colour at all, like falling water, and the other was blind, a moon-eye, white, floating. His face, which his DS considered now with a kind of half-hearted disappointment, was wide with high cheekbones. Outgoing was what Shaw’s face was. George Valentine had always been aware that his face was ingoing: pinched, narrow, his small black eyes set deep, his narrow hatchet-like head appearing too heavy for his neck, so that it hung forward of his shoulders like a vulture’s. This was George Valentine’s self-image, but it was only one of the reasons he didn’t have a spring in his step.

Shaw turned, filled his chest with warm air and stared at the dead woman’s house. ‘Tom’s right – something’s not right,’ he said.

Valentine didn’t move a muscle.

‘She’s put her foot through the sheet; she’s clutched at the duvet. And the eyes . . .’ Shaw looked to the horizon as the distant tractor engine whined. Beside it, over the brow of the hill, stood a wind turbine eighty foot high, Shaw guessed, turning now so slowly you had to stop and watch it to see the movement at all. Batches of turbines had begun to appear on Norfolk’s north-facing hills, catching the Polar winds. ‘She hasn’t fallen asleep, she’s struggled violently,’ he said. ‘The pills and glass are wrong . . .’

‘She died alone,’ said Valentine, his furred-up voice hardening. His narrow, two-dimensional head seemed to flip from right side to left side with nothing in between. Shaw always thought that if he had to put Valentine’s head on canvas it would be a Picasso – all those bony, angular, asymmetrical lines, like a skull constructed from parts of a wrecked car.

‘Really, George. Why alone?’

‘Windows are all locked. Uniform had to force the door.’

‘Have you come across the notion of a key, George?’

Valentine’s eyes went blank.

‘What
do
we know?’ asked Shaw. He had a light voice, as weightless as his step, surprisingly tuneful, suggesting an ability to hit a note first time.

Valentine had a notebook open on the bench beside him, taking up the space where Shaw might have sat. He didn’t need to check it, but he certainly wasn’t going to move it.‘Marianne Osbourne. Thirty-four. Mother-of-one. Husband is Joe, owns a locksmiths in Wells – family business. Daughter’s Tilly, aged eighteen, still at school.

Last person to see her mum alive that I can find was one of the neighbours – bloke with racing pigeons . . .’ Valentine nodded at No. 2. Down the side alley they could see the pigeonhole shed. ‘That was at eight this morning – at the front gate, shouting at the daughter. Apparently that was standard. The kid stormed off down the lane to the village.’

Valentine felt a bead of sweat running down his back. He took a double lungful of air into shredded lungs, lifting his shoulders with the effort. He’d never been a talker, and he knew Shaw hated prattle, so he always kept it short – which was just as well, because with
his
lungs long sentences were getting harder to finish. ‘Kid from No. 3, Lewis, found the body. He’s seven. All the kids seem to run wild. He’s home alone, playing in the street, and he falls over and cuts his leg. So he goes to No. 6, a Mrs Robinson, a friend of the family. But she’s not there. She’s usually at home but she’s got a part-time job up at Well’s Lido, so the kid tried next door.’ He looked around The Circle, a pause which disguised a deep breath. ‘No answer at the front door. Dead woman works on the internet flogging stuff according to one of the other neighbours: cosmetics, toiletries. There’s a website and a company, which is in her maiden name by the way – Pritchard. She also works part-time down in Wells, at Kelly’s, as a beautician.’

Kelly’s was the town’s funeral directors. Shaw tried to imagine that face, dripping with Pre-Raphaelite tragedy, bent over the dead, applying make-up. It was a striking thought, because she hadn’t bothered with it herself.

‘So the kid wanders round the back to see if anyone’s in the garden,’ said Valentine. ‘Then sees the victim in bed.’

‘And that’s another thing that’s wrong . . .’ said Shaw. ‘You’d pull the curtains, wouldn’t you? You’d take the pills, go to bed . . . you don’t leave the curtains open.’

Valentine shrugged. ‘The kid may be only seven, like I said, but even he knows what a stiff looks like. Eyes open, that colour. He goes and finds someone. They ring us.’

Shaw detected a cynical, casual tone in his DS’s voice, the source of which was no mystery. DS Valentine had been up in front of a promotion panel the previous week. He’d expected to get back the rank of DI, the rank he’d lost more than fifteen years earlier after being accused of fabricating evidence in a murder inquiry. That stain had now been removed, thanks largely to Valentine’s doggedness in uncovering the truth. So he’d gone into the promotions panel expecting it to be a formality. He was so sure he’d be walking out a DI he’d had a couple of pints at the Artichoke as a pre-celebration celebration. The panel was a nightmare: no one likes being taken for granted, especially by a fifty-two-year-old DS slouched in the interview chair emitting the aroma of warm beer. Twenty years ago belligerent self-belief might have got him his DI badge back. Not any more.