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 author’s website can be found at www.jim-kelly.co.uk
Death Watch
JIM KELLY
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc, 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
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 publisher’s 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
Donald Webster Gillies
11 August 1920 – 13 December 2008
A proud Son of the Rock
And a great teller of stories
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Acknowledgements
Saturday, 5 September 1992
The moment Bryan Judd’s twin sister died – that very instant – he was sitting on an abandoned sofa on the waste ground behind Erebus Street. He’d 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 Sinéad O’Connor. 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 she’d meet him outside the Lattice House. Her skin was always cool, even in this endless summer, and he’d 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 wasn’t a link between their minds, it was a link between their bodies, as if the intimacy they’d shared in
But this wasn’t 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 summer’s day, on a dusty piece of waste ground as dry as bones.
He tried to stand, but fell back on the sofa, blacking out.
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.
‘It’s Norma,’ said Bryan. ‘Something’s 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 son’s 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.