Death Toll (16 page)

The cellar of the Flask was a barrelled vault, with a shuttered watergate at one end leading out to the river. The brickwork had been plastered and whitewashed, the barrels raised on stone stoops on either side. A central gutter ran to the river, a sluggish trickle of stale beer foaming slightly. Shaw noted a plastic rat trap. He watched as John Joe Murray drank a pint of bitter drawn directly from the barrel he'd just tapped.

‘Perks,' he said, sitting on the stoop, his legs straight out to reach the other stoop. Shaw wondered how many hours he'd spent there, perfecting this exact position for maximum comfort. He tried not to judge John Joe as Ian, his stepson, had done. He didn't bring judgement, he brought questions. Had John Joe married Lizzie for love or fortune? Had he become a father to the infant Ian out of love for his mother, or expediency? Had he taken the chance that fate had given him to become Lizzie's husband – or had he tried to force Patrice Garrison to leave? Could he have murdered him that night in 1982 to get her? Now, nearly thirty years later, it seemed impossible that this greying, diminished man had followed his rival out into the night and driven a billhook into his skull. But Shaw recalled the image on the cine film they'd all watched – the murderous look in the young John Joe's eyes as he contemplated Pat Garrison, cradling his glass, surveying the back room at the Flask like an estate agent assessing a property ripe for development.

‘What's this about?' asked John Joe. He ran a hand along his hair to the black pigtail band and pulled it clear, letting the lifeless tresses flop over either ear. It reminded Shaw of one of Lena's many fashion edicts: that no man over twenty looks good in a ponytail. John Joe rubbed the green guitar tattoo on his throat and the friction brought a flush to his pallid skin. His face had not aged well – narrow, fleshless faces seldom do. The bone structure, the feline cheekbones, were pushing out beneath the dry skin.

Shaw studied John Joe while DC Birley asked a list of routine questions about the night of Nora Tilden's wake. Shaw tried to concentrate on the answers but kept thinking about the still-missing Jimmy Voyce. George Valentine had radioed the incident room shortly after the screening of the DVD. They'd found Voyce's hire car, burnt out, in a lane near Holkham, up on the coast. No sign of Voyce. Valentine would set up a couple of search units to check the area, then come back to Lynn. Tom Hadden's team were on their way to the scene. Shaw didn't know what that abandoned car signified, but he was pretty sure it didn't improve the likelihood of Jimmy Voyce being alive.

While the questions continued Shaw also checked a text from DC Twine. Sam Venn had been taken down to St James's and cautioned before repeating his statement that he'd been singing with the choir at the Flask all evening on the night of Nora Tilden's wake. He'd left at closing time and walked home. They were now showing him the film of that night they'd watched on DVD in the incident room. He'd text again with Venn's reaction to the proof that he was lying.

Above their heads they could hear footfalls, furniture being hauled over the quarry-tile floor as preparations were made for the opening of the inquest into the death of Pat Garrison.

Birley finished questioning Murray. They had a brief outline of his movements that night: he hadn't gone to the funeral because he didn't like Nora Tilden and she didn't like him. The year before her death he'd tried to get a spot at the Flask for his band but she'd stuck with the choirs, folk music, nothing electric. He'd come along to the wake because he knew the crack would be good and because Lizzie said they needed people to collect glasses, wash up, if things got really busy, and he needed the cash. There'd been food, and at the end a free drink or two. He'd lingered, talking to friends, and wandered home about midnight to his parents' house in Gayton, a leafy suburb. He'd been born and raised in South Lynn, but his father had got a better job and they'd moved up in the world. Up and out. He had his own key so hadn't woken them up that night when he got home.

He'd been there all evening, in the back room? No – he hadn't seen the choir's second session because he'd found the atmosphere stifling, fevered; so he'd gone out on the riverside stoop to smoke in the crisp November air. That's all he could remember – except that he had talked to Pat Garrison, information he volunteered before he'd been asked. There was a gig coming up at the Lattice House and he'd asked Pat if he'd come along because the tickets weren't selling. Pat said he would – he liked John Joe's music and he'd heard the band at the festival on The Walks that summer.

‘The kid knew his music,' said John Joe. ‘Graham Parker, Ian Dury – that's the kind of thing we were into. And he got it, which is more than the losers here did. No, Pat was OK. I liked the kid.'

Which was odd, thought Shaw, because no on else seemed to have liked him. He'd been variously described to them as arrogant and selfish. It was illustrative that John Joe had felt the need to point out that he was perhaps alone in valuing the young man's company.

John Joe stood, walked the central gutter between the barrels, his boots in the bubbling spilt beer, to a door at the opposite end to the watergate, and pushing it open stood back to let them see. Beyond was another vaulted cellar, but the brickwork here was lost behind stippled soundproofing board.

‘Wedding present from Lizzie – sound studio. We cut a disc, tried the labels, but they all passed. Everyone's got a dream, right? This was mine.'

Shaw could almost hear it, as if the brick walls were a solid-state tape, replaying those years again, the countless demos, the draining repetitive sessions, the dream slowly fading, until one day they'd all convinced themselves they'd never shared one, that it was just a hobby, a way of staying sane. That it had all been for fun.

‘Did you know Mrs Murray well then – in 1982?' asked Birley. The narrow vaulted space of the cellar seemed to accentuate the DC's muscled bulk. He stood, his backbone curved to match the wall, taking up too much space.

‘Lizzie? Went to school with her. Fancied her then, along with most of my mates and half the town. She stopped the traffic, that girl. Still stops mine.'

John Joe flipped open a wallet to reveal a black-and-white snapshot – Lizzie, in a bikini on a sandy beach, her legs folded underneath her. ‘That's Lizzie – twenty-first birthday. Talk about turning heads.' He let his eyes linger on the picture, but Shaw noticed instead the ticket tucked into the other side of the wallet – the charity Christmas lunch at the Shipwrights' Hall.

John Joe let the door to the old studio close.

‘And you were married when?' asked Shaw.

‘In 1983 – the summer. Ninth of June. Just after she'd had Ian.'

‘That's quick work,' said Birley.

John Joe gave him an old-fashioned look. ‘Yeah. Well, I tried my luck with Lizzie – a few times. When Nora died we were going out, but that kind of faded away. No hard feelings. It happens. When she fell pregnant, when the baby arrived, I understood why she'd been different that summer. I went back – told her I didn't care what had happened. That I could live with that if she could. Ian's my son. Has been pretty much from the day he was born. So that's our story. You got it now. Satisfied?'

Birley didn't flinch. ‘Did you try your luck that night – the night of the wake?'

Shaw admired Birley's direct approach, and he couldn't help thinking John Joe's indignation at the question was manufactured.

He shook his head and walked to the watergate, unbolting the two quarter-circle doors. The light flooded in with the cold, straight off the water, which lapped at the stone edge. They all stepped out on the stone wharf. The tide was full. On the water bobbed a small sailing boat, clinker-built, covered in with a tarpaulin, the one that Shaw had seen the day before, moored to a single bollard.

‘The beer came in this way back in the eighties – always had done, I guess. Now the cellar floods once a year, sometimes more. We'll have to do something about it – God knows what.'

He dipped the toe of his boot in the grey water. Across the river was the brick river frontage of the cannery. Shaw thought again of the Shipwrights' Hall Christmas dinner, the promise of ‘local fare'.

‘The boat?' asked Shaw.

‘Mine. I fish – up along the coast, days off. It's an escape. Used to take Ian when he was a kid.'

Shaw wondered what he'd had to escape from.

‘One last question, Mr Murray,' said Shaw. ‘Did you suspect that Lizzie and Pat were an item before the wake?'

John Joe spat in the water. ‘Others did – coupla my mates said later they knew. But me – no.'

The sailing boat nudged the quay, unsettled by the wake of a passing tug.

‘I tell you what I did know, mind …' He smiled, tapping a finger to his temple. ‘Still laugh about it. I
knew
about the baby. She looked incredible that night – Lizzie. Like I said, she was a stunner anyway, but that night, Nora's wake, she just kind of radiated something.' He shook his head, eyes closed, as if to see her more clearly. ‘Everyone was watching her that night. It was her mother's wake, for Christ's sake. But everyone knew where her sympathies lay. She loved her father. I'm not sure she felt anything about Nora. I never saw them swap a word that wasn't …' he hesitated, looking for the right word, ‘businesslike. So she kind of bottled up her real emotions. But there was something in her eyes. Just amazing. I've got sisters – I've seen it before. It's like her whole face was plugged into some kind of power supply. I thought – there's a baby. I didn't say it – but I knew. And you know what? I bet I wasn't the only one.'

The inquest into the death of Patrice Garrison was not the first to be held in the Flask. Stan Glover, the coroner's officer, a former DS from Cromer, was an old friend of Shaw's father. He'd been back through the records and found one in 1958. A child, a two-year-old girl, found strangled on waste ground down by Blubber Creek. They'd opened the inquest in the pub for the same reason they'd chosen to do it for Pat Garrison – to get the community involved, appeal for witnesses, and to give the coroner a chance to view the scene of the crime. A place like South Lynn had few secrets from its own people. In the nineteenth century they'd have had the body there on the first day as well, laid out on a couple of floorboards. Putting Pat Garrison's bones on show would have achieved little, but Glover had arranged for a large-scale picture of the victim from a snapshot of 1982 to be mounted over a desk set aside for the coroner. On the desk was a glass water pitcher, an upturned tumbler and a bible. To one side was a seat for witnesses.

Glover's close-shaved hair was greying, but the stubble on his face was still black. He came through the door marked staff carrying a bundle of documents.

‘Please rise for Her Majesty's Coroner,' said Glover.

The coroner, Dr Leslie Shute, followed him into the room. He wore a tweed jacket with leather patches, shirt and tie. Shaw always thought he looked like he'd been scrubbed with wire wool – his cheeks so flushed they might bleed, his ruddiness accentuated by a shaving regime which seemed to involve a machete. Shute ran a medical practice in Burnham Market. He was known widely as a breeder of greyhounds, which he ran at Mildenhall Stadium. Shaw sometimes saw him on the beach in the winter, the dogs circling him at speed as if on invisible gyres.

The dining room was packed, the round tables removed and replaced with rows of single chairs. Alby Tilden's gold Buddha looked down on proceedings with an enigmatic smile.

Glover took a chair beside the coroner. ‘Mobiles off, please – all of them.'

Shute smiled inappropriately.

‘Thank you all for coming.' He had a light clear voice that Shaw had heard him use to call the dogs. ‘I'm going to formally open the inquest into the death of Patrice Eugene Garrison and will presently adjourn those proceedings to enable the police to complete their inquiries and for any criminal prosecution to take its proper course.' Shute began to search inside his jacket pockets for something he'd mislaid, and Shaw noted that he could do so without breaking the thread of his preamble. ‘What I need to do today,' he continued, ‘is to confirm the identity of the deceased, the cause of death, and then my officer here will give us a brief summary of the details, the circumstances, so far as we can ascertain them, of the death in question. I've visited the spot where this young man's bones were found, and I hope that opening the inquest here will encourage as many people as possible to come forward and help this court – and the police – to find the person or persons responsible for his death.'

Shaw was standing at the back and he noticed that Lizzie Murray had joined him, together with a young woman with blonde hair cut savagely short whom he recognized as a reporter with the local paper. She leant close to Shaw. ‘This isn't worth my time, is it?' she asked. She looked skywards, didn't wait for an answer and slipped between rows to a desk set at one side for the press, already occupied by an elderly man who Shaw knew worked for Hospital Radio. Shaw thought the reporter's doubts over the news value of the proceedings were probably justified. The powers of the coroner were a pale imitation of the office's traditional authority – he could no longer name suspects or accuse the guilty. And while Shaw had agreed it was worth calling for witnesses to come forward, he wondered how many of the locals would have the courage to tell the court anything it didn't know already.

‘We already have a list of six witnesses who have indicated they wish to speak – but anyone may do so, even at this stage. In fact, especially at this stage,' said Dr Shute. He flicked open the single file he had before him. ‘First of all, I am able to confirm that a DNA analysis to be undertaken by the Forensic Science Service is expected to provide conclusive evidence of the identity of the victim. However, I am able to accept a preliminary identification based on a facial reconstruction of the remains together with forensic evidence from the scene and corroborating dental records. The deceased was an American citizen and the US Embassy has been notified of these proceedings. I can also report that a postmortem examination was completed here in Lynn and that the cause of death is understood to have been a single traumatic blow to the back of the skull with a pointed weapon – probably the billhook that was found with the remains. I have examined the medical notes in this case and discussed it with the pathologist – Dr Justina Kazimierz.' He surveyed the ‘court'. ‘I am entirely confident this finding is the correct one. Given that the deceased had been dead for many years there is no likelihood of any forensic evidence being recovered from tissue. But the bones tell us enough.'

He readied a fountain pen over a blank notepad. ‘Anyone giving testimony will be speaking under oath and may subsequently be required to make a formal statement to the police. Mr Glover?'

Glover then gave an outline of the bare facts of the case: Garrison's family background, the death of his aunt Nora Tilden, his journey to the UK, her burial, his disappearance. He then described the uncovering of the bones. He sat while he read in a dull monotone, but the room remained silent, watchful. Shaw indulged in a childhood fantasy – the idea that he could read people's thoughts in bubbles which hung over their heads. He wondered what he would have read now. It was particularly difficult in Lizzie Murray's case because she gave so few hints of an interior life behind her brittle exterior.

‘Before we get to the events of 1982,' said Shute when Glover had finished, ‘I'd like to ask briefly whether anyone has information regarding an attempt, in June this year the police believe, to reopen the grave in which the remains of this young man were discovered. This was on the night of the eighteenth. We have already a statement from a resident of Gladstone Street who says she saw lights in the cemetery that evening and called the police. They attended but found the cemetery empty.'

Four of the six witnesses who had already contacted the coroner's office then gave evidence. They all reported that the cemetery was used by young people, late at night, for the purchase of drugs. One witness was a council workman from South Lynn who said that syringes and other detritus were often found, especially in the area down by the riverside, close to two breaks in the iron fencing and the part of the cemetery most distant from local housing. While that corner of the graveyard was also closest to the riverside path, all the witnesses pointed out that the walkway was rarely used after dark, and that the council lighting was often vandalized. Shaw noted the timings of the witness accounts of sightings in the cemetery – all before midnight – whereas the woman who had seen lights from her window that night in June had reported them to the police at 3.15 a.m.

Shute moved on to the night of Nora Tilden's wake. He said that anyone who had already given evidence to the police did not need to repeat it here. They had two further witnesses listed: the first, a woman who lived less than fifty yards from the pub, said that noise from the wake had continued until well into the small hours. She said it was a regular problem, and had been since she'd moved to the area in 1975. She said she had reported the nuisance to both the police and the local council and they had failed to take action. Dr Shute thanked her for her time.

The second witness was a man who said he had seen Pat Garrison on the night of the wake walking away from the Flask towards the cemetery. The man, now in his sixties, was a night-shift worker at the old jam-processing factory in West Lynn and always went to the pub in the evening during his break – which was supposed to be between 10.30 p.m. and 11.30 p.m. but which he always ‘stretched' by a quarter of an hour each side. The man said he knew Pat Garrison, though only by sight. The only things he noticed, or could remember, were that the time was 10.15 or just before, because he usually heard All Saints chime the quarter-past before he went into the pub, and that Garrison was carrying two glasses in one hand, the rims held together between thumb and forefinger.

Shaw nodded to DC Birley to intercept the witness as he left the stand and fix an interview at St James's.

Dr Shute then asked for new witnesses to come forward. Seven merely added detail to the picture Shaw and his team had so far constructed of the evening of the wake. Three had been at the graveside for the funeral and recalled Pat Garrison standing with the family. Prompted, they also confirmed the presence of the two black men from the Free, Jesse and Emmanuel Rogers, standing with a group of the Elect, including the pastor. Shaw caught the young reporter's eye and she pulled a face, then gave in to the urge to yawn.

The eighth and last witness to come forward was a woman in her mid-fifties, Shaw judged, wearing cleaner's overalls. She gave her name as Jayne Flowers of West Lynn, her age as fifty-nine and her occupation as hospital cleaner. She said that at the time of Patrice Garrison's disappearance she had a part-time job as a caretaker at a block of private flats in Snettisham Road. Mrs Bea Garrison, the victim's mother, paid a weekly rent, she recalled, of £25 for a bedsit in the block for her son – the deceased.

‘What can you tell us?' asked Shute, leaning back, and Shaw noted – not for the first time – the coroner's skill at setting an informal tone in the court.

‘I went to the funeral because I knew Nora, and I wanted to pay my respects.' Shaw realized that giving evidence for this woman was an ordeal, because her voice buzzed, vibrating with a stress she didn't show in her face. ‘But I couldn't go back to the wake. I had to work that afternoon, at the hospital, then get back to the flats to cook tea. We had the bottom flat, you see – that was part of the deal. And when I'd done – the tea, I mean – I had to start cleaning. All the stairs, and do the rubbish.'

She looked at her hands. ‘I heard Pat come home – but late, about one o'clock.'

Shute stopped her there, trying to make sure of the time. Did she wait up for tenants to come home? No, never. But she was a light sleeper and she heard the door open, and Pat's flat was above theirs. So she heard his door open and close. And because she was a light sleeper she always had a clock – right there – that she could see without moving her head. And she knew for certain that it was one o'clock.

But how did she know it was Garrison? Shute asked.

‘Well I didn't, not then. But I was sure, because I heard him typing. It's showing my age, isn't it? These days it'd be a computer and you wouldn't hear it, but back then everyone used a typewriter. It was portable, but you still needed a sledge hammer to hit the keys. We often heard him typing – he was at the college, doing journalism, and he did bits for the paper even then. Sport and stuff. But this – he'd never done this, not at that time. I couldn't sleep. I just lay there. Then – after about an hour, he stopped. I knew something was up because I heard his door open again. I thought he was off out so I got up to get my dressing gown because I was going to have words. 'Cos it wasn't right.'

Out of the corner of his eye Shaw saw Lizzie sidling across the room to the far wall, to stand beside one of the red velvet curtains. Her hand played with the gold buttons on her black formal jacket, then touched the single diamond pin in her ear lobe.

‘And I'd had problems before,' she said, hesitating. ‘With girls – Pat brought girls back, and that was a problem. Not that I'd mind, but the landlords said if people wanted a flat for two the rent was higher. So no double occupancy. I should have said something earlier, but I let it drag. He was just a kid, and I didn't hear the girls complain. Quite the opposite.'

There was nervous laughter. Shute was nodding and Shaw guessed he was trying to work out what he should ask next. As coroner he had certain duties – to fix the time and place of death, for example. But he also had a duty to probe the cause and circumstances of that death.

‘Girls?' he said. He checked the file. ‘The deceased was only in Lynn for a few months before his disappearance – but in that time he had several girlfriends?'

‘Yes,' she said.

‘I see. I expect the police will want to ask you more questions about that, Mrs Flowers.'

Shaw watched as Lizzie took a seat.

‘But back to that night – so you went to the door?'

‘Yes. But I couldn't put the light on because that wakes Frank up, so it took me a minute to get my things. I heard him come down the stairs and go out the door. I followed – right out in the street. It was a cold night, but there was a moon, and so I could see that he'd gone. He must have cut down Jenkyns Street to the river. But I tell you what I heard – one of those suitcase things on wheels, like a trolley. That's what I heard. So I thought, he's done a moonlight flit, even though that didn't make any sense because his mother paid the rent and it was paid a month in advance. So I didn't call out or anything. I just let him go.'

‘But you didn't see anyone – how can you be sure it was Pat Garrison?'

‘He left me a note – typed. I saw it when I went back in our flat by the hall light, under our door. Just saying he was leaving, and thanking us for being kind. And that's what really made me remember it – Frank laughed when he saw it – because we hadn't been kind. Frank doesn't like 'em …' She shrugged, looked around. ‘You know, the blacks.'

There was a brittle silence.

Shute thanked her for her evidence, asked for any more witnesses to step forward and, when none did so, adjourned the inquest.