At Death's Window (23 page)

H
andcuffed, Wighton had been marched to Spithead House, and sat down at the kitchen table. Stone floor, open range, Belfast sink, utility shelves and cupboards, the plasterwork peeling slightly – this one house, at least, had slipped the bonds of modernization and gentrification which had overwhelmed Burnham Marsh. Shaw recalled that the new owners had notified Wighton that they were planning to rip it all out and install a new kitchen. Shaw wondered where the old owners had gone. The graveyard? A care home? A block of modern flats glimpsed from a Tube train? They’d left behind a welcome echo of the past. There was even an old black-and-white framed picture of the church, the roof intact, taken inside looking seawards towards the altar, the light blazing through the window with its central image: Salome dancing for Herodias, St John’s severed head on a gold platter.

Wighton’s mouth hung open and he was breathing heavily. They could smell him too, that distinctive odour of fear, a combination of sweat and nervous electricity. A mug of tea stood, untouched, on the worktop in front of him, the steam rising.

Shaw opened a mullioned window into the garden. There was a peacock outside, a female, pale and red-eyed, perched on a shed. A rumble of thunder made the old china on the shelves rattle.

Valentine had brought one of the bags of Dutch drugs with him and placed it on the table in front of Wighton. Outside, through the window, they could see the St James’ forensic van, its back down, white-suited officers extracting gear.

‘They won’t tell me about Louise,’ said Wighton. ‘I asked in the squad car – and now, the constable, he knows but he wouldn’t say. I have a right to know.’

This was either an elaborate double bluff or Shaw was looking at a genuine psychopath.

‘I’m sorry to have to tell you that your wife is dead, Mr Wighton.’

He looked to one side, towards the back door, and for a moment it looked as if he was considering a second attempt at escape. Instead, he covered his face with both hands, then ran them back through his hair.

‘She was alive when I left and the respirator was working,’ he said, his voice thicker, less distinct. It was an odd response, and certainly made it clear that during his few last moments in the house he had gone upstairs. What had been said? What had he done? Hadden’s deputy, Dr Elizabeth Pryce, had a forensic team in the room now, and the pathologist was on her way.

‘The switch to the respirator was surely beyond her reach, Mr Wighton?’

‘I want a solicitor. It’s my right,’ he said, quite calmly, although his facial muscles were displaying several contrary emotions: fear, distress and a clear edge of anger.

‘Did she ask you to turn it off when you told her you were leaving?’ asked Shaw. ‘Or did you leave her with a lie? As opposed to the truth: I’m driving to Stansted Airport and getting a flight to Italy.’

‘She would have been fine. She knew that. She has nurses,’ said Wighton. ‘They come every few hours. I pay for that. It costs a fortune, a fortune I have to earn, so that she’s never alone for very long, or in pain.’

Shaw felt they’d moved on very quickly from any sense of grief.

‘You don’t seem particularly upset at your wife’s death, Mr Wighton. Is that a fair summary of your feelings at this point?’

Wighton shrugged. ‘I’ve spent a decade looking after Louise; she’s spent a decade wanting to die. It’s a release for both of us. I didn’t kill her. If that had been a way out I’d have taken it years ago.’

‘What’s wrong with the local health authority?’ asked Valentine. ‘Respite care is excellent. You didn’t have to pay.’

Shaw had a vague memory of Julie Valentine’s death. He’d been a child but he could recall the whispers at home, the forbidden C-word, visits to a cold, damp terrace house in the North End.

‘Louise wanted to die at home. She insisted on that. Her problem was she wasn’t dying. And she’d couldn’t give up the fags. I’d wheel her out sometimes, after dark, always after dark. If she was down – really down – she’d smoke in the room and then the nurses would smell it. So there wasn’t a lot of sympathy. Emphysema can last for years, a lifetime really. With the respirator, and the oxygen, she could have struggled on for another ten years. She wouldn’t go into hospital. She wouldn’t go into care. She wanted me to die with her, really. The words were never said – but she wanted me there, at the bedside. All those years when I was in the job, or out messing about on boats, she said the boredom drove her to the fags. So it was my fault anyway. The dying are cruel people. Much worse than the living.’

Shaw had no doubt that was the truth.

‘The NHS nurses would come round, of course they did. Louise always said they were second-rate. She was a snob too, Louise. I had the money, I had the clients, and the police pension, so I could fucking well pay for the best.’

The Anglo-Saxon word seemed to release something in Wighton, and despite the fact that his composure did not falter, Shaw could see his colour draining away.

‘So I paid. Then she started getting magazines – from Exit and Dignitas. It was clear to her, she claimed, that I didn’t want to care for her – not really. So why didn’t she just die? I had to organize it, and she never asked about the cost. It’s seven thousand pounds, by the way, for Dignitas. They use helium, so you’ve got to laugh.’

He raised a hand from under the table to wipe his lips and it shook violently.

‘But that’s not the real cost. You’ve got to get there. There isn’t an airline that would let her near a commercial flight so we’re talking a private jet. It’s not as much as you’d think; fifteen thousand, a little more. I’d have to take a nurse because you couldn’t have her dying en route. I don’t have that kind of money. And I thought when she’s gone I want a life, so I’m not borrowing it off some shark.’

Twine came in with tea in paper cups.

‘Last summer the pilot who owns the
Limpet
, Bob Lott, took her over the Channel. Big adventure, that, you’d think he’d found the North West Passage. I had to go over and fetch the boat back. Money was good. She was laid up in Dunkirk, the old town. I know a few people there from when I was at Wells: harbour police, customs, state-wide CID. They said there was a big problem with cocaine going out in commercial vessels to the UK – East Coast ports mainly – and they couldn’t stop it. Fact was they’d given up trying. I thought, if they’re not bothered I’ll cash in. I requested the files and promised I’d have a look at it from our end. It wasn’t difficult to find a way in to the network. I’d done some drugs work back in the nineties, so I had the contacts. But you can’t make a fortune like that, not as fast as I wanted it.’

Outside they heard the peacock screech.

‘I thought I’d cut it.’

He drank his tea, the hand much steadier now.

‘How did you know Arnold Smith-Waterson?’

‘Gutter? I used to run a boat for him out of Wells when he had a house up here – back in the nineties. Nice people, him and the wife. After the divorce I did him for possession, cocaine that time. But he wasn’t finicky. I knew he’d been a doctor, and I knew he was on the streets. I tracked him down and made him an offer. If he’d tell me what to get and do the mixing I’d do the rest. He got a free supply. I’d run into town in the van and give him his fix. Once a day, out by the Boal Quay. Personal service.

‘But he fucked up. Too much Levamisole. Irony was he thought he was getting a pure supply. Never knew he was poisoning himself until it was too late. Most of it had gone out on the streets by the time we knew it was dangerous. I used street dealers in Lynn. I told Gutter that if he said a word I’d get him locked up for life. A cell. Like a lot of them, he can’t stand the thought of it – being caged. I paced him out a standard cell. Three by two. That freaked him out.’

Shaw thought of Smith-Waterson, sitting now in a neon-lit room, looking out of a window at the manicured grounds of the secure unit. His silence was explicable now, not the product of fear at all, but guilt. He’d mixed the adulterated supply, his own mutilated hand was evidence of the consequences. The sheer terror of being incarcerated had stopped him doing the only thing that would have saved his sanity: confessing and leading the police to Wighton.

‘But you were still cutting it,’ said Valentine. ‘We’ve found the evidence in the boathouse.’

‘Once you know how it’s simple. Like cooking. I had to shift what was left.’

‘Until Stefan Bedrich stumbled on the boathouse that night,’ said Shaw. ‘Talk me through that. No doubt that was
his
fault.’

Wighton looked at his hands. ‘Your boy – Twine – he said I had a lawyer on the way.’

‘Won’t be long,’ said Shaw. ‘But so you know, we found the
Limpet
, and we’ve got it on CCTV heading out to sea that night. And we’ve got SOCO in the boathouse loft. What chance is there that there
isn’t
a bloodstain?’

Shaw thought he saw the moment when the truth, in the sense of the shape of his life from this moment forwards, actually became a reality for Wighton. He would never again enter a room, or leave a room, without permission. Wighton’s tradesman-like exterior hid a certain subtle intelligence. Did he see the irony then – that he’d done all this to escape the tyranny of that upstairs room and the oxygen tent, only to spend the years that were left to him in a cell?

‘I didn’t kill him. The Pole.’

‘I find that hard to believe,’ said Shaw.

‘I hit him,’ he said, the confessional moment marked by an intake of breath. ‘I hit him hard with a piece of four-by-two, so there’ll be blood all right, and he fell down the ladder into the dock. I fished him out with a hook. Breathing – I got him breathing – but he wouldn’t come round, so I wrapped him up in tarpaulin and put him in the cockpit of the
Limpet
. I tied a lead weight to his leg with rope and tape. Then I went up into the loft and started clearing up.

‘I was going to throw him overboard, I don’t mind admitting
that.
When I came down with the stash he had gone. Like gone, Houdini or something, just gone, with the tarpaulin still there. I ran out on the beach and I could see his footprints in the mud. Concussion, I reckon, ’cos it’s totally mad, setting out at night over those sands. I thought he’ll die out there. I better run too. So I cleaned up what I could and waited for the tide.’

‘You didn’t see the other burglars?’ asked Shaw.

Wighton calculated for a moment. ‘Sure. I went up into the village and clocked them in the van. That’s when I got the reg number. When I thought you were getting close to me, after you circulated a description of the
Limpet
,
I staged the burglary up at Tines Manor. That way I could put you on to them. That night, the night the Pole died, they waited about an hour and then drove off. I was safe then, but I still had to catch the tide. So I did.’

‘Know what I think?’ asked Shaw.

They could hear a car purring outside. Wighton’s lawyer had arrived.

‘I think Stefan Bedrich died in the boathouse loft. Forensics will be key, but I’m confident we’ll find what we need. It was a bloodbath, and you can’t clean up after a bloodbath. Yes, you took the
Limpet
out into Overy Creek, but I think you had him on-board – roped up to the lead weight, with his pockets stuffed with samphire. Then you threw him overboard.
Then
you set out to sea. That’s the story the evidence is going to tell, and it’s the story that’ll convince a jury you killed Stefan Bedrich.’

T
he Old Beach Café had a set of extra-large meteorological instruments mounted on the wooden balcony edge: a thermometer, barometer, a wind gauge linked to an anemometer on the roof, a sunshine recorder. Shaw had never seen the pointer on the barometer so low, wedged firmly beyond STORM. Blue-black clouds dominated the sky, with ragged windows of blue beyond. The air was so still the beach felt like a giant room in which all the windows had been closed. The anemometer was static, its little ice-cream-cup vanes set to the points of the compass. The thermometer read 22°C (72°F), and although the sun was falling rapidly towards the horizon, as Shaw watched the digital readout flipped to 23°C.

Lena was inside serving an elderly couple tea and soda bread. His wife’s exaggerated good humour in talking to her last two customers of the day told him the long summer season had worn her down. Fran, bored with the adult world, played out on the water’s edge, her spidery form reflected in a mirror-like sea. Shaw was attempting what they liked to call the ‘full relax’ – a large glass of white wine, his feet up on the wooden verandah. He’d brought a spare glass with him in the hope that Lena would join him, but he suspected she would just clear up, get the working day done, and then start on supper.

Geoff Wighton had been charged with a specimen drugs offence and taken to St James’. They’d interview him in the morning, or possibly the next day. A full assessment of the forensics was unlikely to be complete before the weekend. Privately, Hadden had told the CID team that he’d managed to extract a full blood sample from the wood around the trapdoor. The hunt for the murder weapon would include a second fingertip search of the marshy edge of Overy Creek. Initial results from Wighton’s house were equivocal: a full autopsy was planned for the next day at the Ark. The
Limpet
was under tow back to Boal Quay, where it would be taken out of the water for a dry-dock examination.

Shaw had enjoyed a brief conversation with the chief constable in which he’d suggested they break the media blackout on the Chelsea Burglars asap, given that they could now name two suspects under arrest: Whyte and Connor (apprehended in a B&B outside Warren Point, Northern Ireland, by a sharp-eyed police constable who spotted the Mondeo’s licence plates), and had one suspect in the morgue: Stefan Bedrich. Reporting restrictions would radically reduce the media’s ability to ramp up the second-homes story, given that charges were about to be laid. Shaw could deflect questions about Bedrich’s killer by asserting that an arrest in the murder inquiry was imminent. Warren had agreed; no doubt overjoyed that he could now tell his wife that their dual elevation to the status of Lord and Lady was back on track.

Shaw sipped his wine. For the rest of the day he was prepared to leave his mind blank, to let his eyes drink in the light. A sense of well-being seemed to blossom, filling the wide-open space around him.

The only problem was that line of footprints across the mud, leading towards Mitchell’s Bank. If Stefan Bedrich hadn’t made them, who had?

His phone rang and the screen said simply: CC.

‘Sir.’ He fought the urge to stand up.

‘Peter. Private call. Look, this is entirely in the form of a heads-up. My office has received a complaint of police harassment. You’re in the frame, although George gets an honorary mention. Needless to say, we take this kind of thing seriously.’

Shaw didn’t say a word.

‘Yes,’ said Warren, as if answering a question that hadn’t been asked. ‘Name of Murano – Pietro Murano. He came in to St James’ and saw Bill Troutman.’

Troutman was one of Warren’s two assistant chief constables, a former DCI who’d once worked with Shaw’s father. He was widely referred to throughout St James’ as ‘Uncle Bill’.

‘As I say, we’ll have to deal with this by the book, but Bill said he was a total prick. In fact he took time out to check him out on records and he is known to us. Two incidents of domestic violence back in the early eighties. Dealt with by family division, but still, you get the picture. Apparently he thumped his wife about. She thumped back. As I say, it never made the courts but it looks like a messy domestic.

‘Anyway, he says you’ve been harassing his daughter. Doctor’s report says she is currently unwell – nerves, anxiety attacks. She’s already done her duty, he says, by making a full statement. He wants you to keep away. Unless there’s an overwhelming operational need, I can’t help thinking that’s a good idea.’

Shaw sipped his wine. ‘OK.’

‘Good. You’re a fucking good copper, Peter. Don’t let bastards like this grind you down. Anyway – paperwork starts Monday. Least you know.’

‘I appreciate the call.’

That was it. So much for the ‘full relax’. The complaint was an irritation at best, unless Murano intended to fabricate details about the interview Shaw had conducted at Holme House. Her father’s reaction was wildly disproportionate. Was it
his
reaction, or his daughter’s? Why was the Murano family so touchy?

He took a swig of wine and then realized what he’d missed. Keen to get the chief constable off the line, he’d let that one, throwaway remark slip past:

She’s already done her duty, he says, by making a full statement.

What statement?

He rang Paul Twine at the incident room and asked him to access the CID database and enter the name Sonia Murano.

Ten seconds. Fifteen seconds.

‘Here it is,’ said Twine. ‘Oh, yeah. She was the witness in the Chelsea Burglars case – the one who caught sight of one of the gang. Only a glimpse. What did she say? Here: jet-black thick hair, beard, moustache, sideburns. Ruddy outdoor skin. Heavily muscled arms. Blue waterproof jacket, trainers, jeans. Not much to go on. Address was Holme House. Sir?’

‘Hi. Right. I missed that. OK, Paul, can you send me the statement?’

‘She was interviewed at Wells’ nick. There’s a transcript. I can send that?’

‘Please.’

Shaw let his arms hang limply, feeling blood rush to his heart, leaving his skin cold. He’d missed something here, at the heart of the case, and the thought of exploring it, uncovering its ramifications, made him feel physically sick.

Most of all he felt a righteous anger. But for the chief constable’s embargo on using the media, he would have read Murano’s original statement. Then he would have interviewed her to try and extract more detail for a forensic ID picture. At Quantico, at the FBI school, he’d been taught the techniques required to tease from a witness those fragmentary crucial images that made a face
live
. Memory didn’t come and go in completed, framed images. It was like a ball of string. If you could latch on to a loose thread you could shepherd a witness backwards in time, to the moment when the image was real. All that would have been possible if he’d been allowed to build his forensic portrait.

The brutal fact was that he was blaming Warren for his own failings. He
should
have read the original statement.

By the time Shaw was sitting at his desk in the cottage the email and attachment from Twine had reached his inbox. He feathered the slats on the blind so that a little of the evening light fell across his desk, but the laptop screen glowed in shadow.

Statement of Sonia Maria Murano. Recorded by tape Ref 568/12/10. Case officer DC Mark Birley. Transcript by secretarial pool R5.

Can you describe to me the events of the night of the seventeenth of July this year?

‘I was alone in the house, Holme House.’

Is that unusual?

‘No. It’s unusual at night. I was working and hadn’t noticed the time passing. The house is really a workshop – and it’s where I grew up – but I live in a flat over my shop in Burnham Market. My father’s still alive but he now lives in London. If he comes to visit he stays at Holme. My mother died in 2004. She lived there in the final years of her illness, after the divorce. I never sleep there – it’s quite … er, isolated, spooky really. But the glass oven’s there so I’m happy to work all day if I have to, alone.’

Go on.

‘It was past nine, the light just suddenly went. The trees block the sunset anyway. It’s a very shadowy house. I heard a vehicle on the road and we’re the only place anyone could be visiting – unless they want to walk on the beach, and then they’re supposed to leave their car down at Holme and walk. I went to the scullery window to see if they were going to park and then walk. If they do that I’ve got a little notice I can put on their windscreen – nothing threatening, just please don’t park here, it’s a private house.

‘I saw four men getting out of a white van.’

Was your car there?

‘No. I’d left it down at Holme and walked that morning because it’s so beautiful. I enjoy it. And it gives me time to think about the work. I was designing and I had lots of colours in my head so I decided I wanted the fresh air. So no car. They must have thought the place was deserted because they were talking loudly, and they had rucksacks, and crowbars and torches. Once the car lights went that was all I could see, the torchbeams.

‘There’s a security light on the back of the house and that was on, so I think they missed the fact that the conservatory light was on too, where I was working.

‘I didn’t panic. I checked my phone but there was no signal – there hardly ever is. I did think about going out the back into the woods. If they’d seen me I didn’t think I could outrun them. I’m strong, but they looked young, fit – at least, three of them did. There was an older one, much smaller. I heard a few snatches of what they were saying and I got the definite impression they’d been drinking.

‘I heard the sound of wood splintering and thought I should try and keep out of the way. There was a cupboard under the stairs where I used to hide when I was a child. The door is a wooden panel and it blends in with the rest, the handle’s flush with the wood. So I got in there.

‘They were in the house about twenty minutes. I could hear them upstairs, the furniture being moved around. They must have been disappointed because most of the house has been moth-balled since Mum died. Then I heard crying. It had all gone very quiet and I thought they’d gone at first, but then I heard this sobbing – very close.

‘It’s very difficult to listen to another human being in distress and not respond.’

Tape stopped to allow witness to drink water.

‘I opened the cupboard door an inch and saw a man kneeling in the hallway in front of the window – our window. I should explain. It was a life’s work, for my mother, to restore this window. Medieval glass, from St John’s at Burnham Marsh. When she was a child the church was still in use and it was this window that inspired her, she was a great glassmaker. After the storms in the eighties a lot of the glass was lost, and then vandals smashed more. She wanted to rebuild it – mostly with glass she’d fired herself. The diocese has a plan to restore the window to its original glory.

‘That’s the words they always use, isn’t it?
Original glory.
After she died I carried on. I was very close to finishing, after twenty years of craftsmanship, the work of mother and child. It
was
extraordinary. More than that, it provided a link back to her, and back to my childhood, which was very happy until my parents split up. A link back to how it had once been.’

Witness requests brief break in interview.

‘The man kneeling in front of the window was the only one I saw clearly at all. As an image, in my head, the overwhelming feature is how black his hair was – it’s a cliché to say jet-black, but this was very close, almost a blue-black, like pencil lead. A stubble beard and moustache, and here …’

Can you describe it for the tape?

‘Sorry. Sideburns. Black sideburns – but stubble again. He was wearing a sweatshirt top with the sleeves cut away so that you could see his muscles. I didn’t see his eyes – I’m sorry I didn’t because I might have understood then why he did what he did.’

And clothes?

‘A waterproof zip-up jacket – blue, I think, and jeans and trainers.’

Please, carry on.

‘He was sobbing, as I said. And I could hear the others – out the front, shouting for him to hurry up. He got to his feet, took a crowbar out of his rucksack and attacked the window. It’s the right word.’

Would you like to stop?

‘No. I want this over. He
flew
at it – a frenzy. The window’s about fifteen feet tall so there were some bits of glass he couldn’t reach but he destroyed most of it. It rained down – glass falling, so that it covered the floor. The noise was infernal, just unbearable. The shattering. I couldn’t watch for a moment and then when I did look again I saw he was being dragged away by the others.

‘I saw his eyes then. That’s what I was focused on. I didn’t have any time to notice the others. I’m sorry about that. I’m not very useful, am I? But
his
eyes were very dull – very defeated. Almost blank of emotion except that I did think, for a moment, that I detected a look of envy. It doesn’t make sense, any of it. I’m sorry.’

Go on.

‘I don’t remember much more but one of the others had a spray can and I thought that was odd. I only saw his back but he spelt out LOCAL HOMES FOR LOCAL PEOPLE on the wall, the can hissing. He was in such a hurry you could hardly read it. Then they were gone.

‘For a few minutes I just waited. At the time I told myself I was listening to see if they might come back. All I heard was the sea and some wood pigeons. I think that really, inside, I was hoping for a miracle, that when I did come out and stand in front of the window it would be complete. That the window of St John’s would be untouched.

‘I took the first step – not looking at the window at all – but I knew the truth because the glass was all over the floor. Each step I took it broke underfoot.

‘To destroy such beauty is evil. I hope he finds his own hell, and that there’s no colour, or light, or beauty there.’

Tape ends.

Shaw stood immediately, realizing he’d been holding himself totally still, so that his bones creaked as he stretched.