[PS & GV #6] Death on Demand by Jim Kelly

Beatrice Hood, meant nothing. She’d been eighty-seven years old and the primary cause of death was stated badly as ‘old age’, while the contributing factors were obscured by the peculiar tortured Latin of the medical profession. But the address listed under ‘place of death’ was plain enough, and the coincidence made his skin creep – because coincidence was, as Jan often told him, God’s way of remaining anonymous.

    32 Hartington Street, Parkwood Springs.

SIX
    T he Porsche, touching ninety miles per hour, breasted a hill and Shaw enjoyed the fleeting sense of weightlessness. In his rear-view mirror he could see the sunlit sea, while ahead the low hills were shrouded in threatening black clouds, boiling up as the summer heat rose. For a mile the road ran parallel with the narrow-gauge railway, and he drew level with a train, a line of wooden open carriages, mostly empty at this early hour, the small, gleaming engine ahead, emitting white puffs of toy-town smoke. Drawing ahead effortlessly he found the scene oddly comic, as if he’d been transposed into a black-and-white thriller of the silent movie era, racing for the spot where the heroine lay tied between the rails.
    On the passenger seat his mobile still held the chief constable’s latest text: Shaw. Keep me posted on Walsingham op. I’m at Home Office overnight .
    Shaw, whose temper was rarely, if ever, sighted, slammed the palm of his hand against the Porsche’s thin, leather-bound, steering wheel.
    For the next hour the murder inquiry would have to do without him. Walsingham was Joyce’s priority, not the brutal murder of a frail, elderly woman. He’d despatched Valentine back to St James’ to organize the murder team, and to ensure that he was on hand for his appointment with Dr Scrutton. The squad needed to find a relative of the dead woman and details of her last will and testament. Meanwhile DC Paul Twine – smart, graduate-entry, with an eye for meticulous detail – would stay at Marsh House to organize interviews and monitor forensics. The private trust which ran Marsh House had declined Shaw’s request for access to the staff records on the grounds of data protection, and the application for a warrant from a magistrate would take at least an hour, if not more.

    Uniformed branch had been drafted in to track down Javi Copon, the Marsh House night nurse, and deliver him for interview to St James’. The West Norfolk Constabulary’s records office was tasked with finding documentation on Beatrice Hood, the woman whose seemingly innocuous death certificate had been discovered sticky-taped to the back of one of Ruby Bright’s luminous Norfolk landscapes. The coroner’s officer had agreed to check the files to see if Hood’s body had undergone an autopsy.
    The tourist train was now in the far distance behind him and he had to slow as he slipped through the sleepy outskirts of Walsingham, dipping down into the town – in effect a large village – with the narrow leaded spire of the church ahead, along with the neo-Byzantine campanile of the thirties’ shrine. The summer storm was close to breaking, the light inky and damp beneath gunmetal clouds.
    The Friday Market, the Georgian square at the heart of the village, would be crammed with trippers and pilgrims for the festival of the Virgin Mary and the arrival of the pilgrims, but this morning it lay deserted but for a flock of seagulls. Shaw’s appointment was with a representative of the Walsingham Alternative Pilgrimage (WAP) – an umbrella organization for left-wing protest groups from gay rights to A Woman’s Right to Choose, determined to make their voice heard on the big day. They had offices on a boat in Wells harbour, but also a protest ‘rainbow bus’, which would be their HQ on the day the pilgrimage arrived.
    WAP was just one of the reasons Joyce was so jittery about the pilgrimage, now only a few days from arriving in the town. The annual ‘National’ had its own