Death Toll (23 page)

John Joe Murray adjusted the oars so that they just brushed the surface, like the legs of a water boatman, skating on the sea. Ahead, in the flooded moonlit marshes, he could see his destination: the old coal barn, brick built, on its island of sand and reeds. He didn't look up, because he knew he'd see the lights of Wells if he did, and that would wreck his night vision which let him see the world in grey, black and silver. There'd be the lights inland too, along the crest of the north Norfolk hills. He'd known this stretch of coast all his life – all his life with Lizzie. They'd helped Bea choose Morston House back in 1983, and they'd come whenever they could to escape from the Flask. And as the years went by he'd come more often on his own, sailing up the river to the sea, then hugging the coast.

So if he looked up he knew what he'd see. The little seafront, Bea's house by the boatyard, the tower, and its single lit room. Bea would be there at the window, waiting for him to signal from the barn when he was safe. Bea had always been there for him and Lizzie, and John Joe knew that was because she'd always wanted Ian to be happy, because the boy was all that was left of the mess she'd made of her life, the one thing she was proud to leave behind. She wasn't proud of John Joe, she was tolerant, but he was thankful, even for that. So Bea hadn't asked questions when he'd tied up after dark. But when he'd told her why he was there, Bea had said he was crazy, confused, because who would want to kill him? He couldn't tell her the truth – she was the last person he could tell. So he'd told her nothing. Just that he had to get away, to vanish. She mustn't tell anyone. Not Ian. Not Lizzie. It wouldn't be for ever, or even for very long, but now – right now – he needed a haven.

But he did know why his life was in danger, even if he couldn't share it.

The night of Nora Tilden's wake he'd gone to Freddie Fletcher's table and they'd talked about Pat Garrison: the black kid who'd
dared
to look at Lizzie like that, with his dark, watery eyes. The black kid who was going to get all this – the Flask, right in the heart of their community – get everything, said Fletcher, their fathers had fought for. And Sam Venn was there too. And he had his own little hateful song to sing: that God was watching, and God would punish them for wanting to mix their blood – the blood of cousins. So they'd drank some more and decided on a plan: they'd wait for the kid in the cemetery, corner him and teach him a lesson. Break a bone. Bruise that unblemished skin. But they needed a weapon. So John Joe slipped back behind the bar and found an optic bottle that needed changing – the malt whisky – lifted the ivory key ring so that he could unlock the cellar. He'd seen Alby the Christmas before with a gun: a grey metal revolver he said he'd salvaged off the
Stanley
. And he knew where he kept it – up in the attic, in a sea chest. So he slipped upstairs and opened it up: but the revolver was useless when he finally got it out of its box, more like a child's toy than the real thing. Then he'd seen the billhook, and he'd stood there in the moonlight by the window, testing the heft of it, and liking what he felt.

When he got back to the bar Sam and Freddie were gone and he thought they'd lost their nerve. He sensed that both were cowards, because they had so much hatred in them, so much belligerent energy. Then he saw Sam through the bay window, out on the deck by the river. Sam whispered in John Joe's ear so that he could smell the whisky on his breath. ‘He's getting his coat.' And Fletcher was there, whispering with Kath Robinson. The three of them slipped out to wait for him in the cemetery: Murray, Venn and Fletcher. And Kath had watched them go.

And now they'd found the kid's bones in Nora's grave.

If John Joe hadn't felt so ill, so sick with worry, he'd have gone to the Shipwrights' Hall lunch with Freddie and Sam, because they agreed they had to go on, live their lives as if nothing had changed. When he'd heard that Fletcher was in intensive care up at the Queen Victoria he'd felt not fear, but the ghost of a fear. Did someone know? He'd gone up to the hospital to see him and found him in a small side room off the main ward – and his fear blossomed, because he knew what that might mean, because that was where they put people they thought would die. He'd looked at Fletcher, sprawled on the bed, his skin like lard, swirled with black hair, and told himself that it wasn't possible. This was chance, an accident. If death came for Freddie Fletcher it would be a random killing. He stilled his panic. To banish it he just needed to see Sam Venn, to check that he was all right. Davey Howe, the friend who'd bought his ticket, had told him that Venn had been sick at the Shipwrights' Hall, but recovered and taken a cab home.

Venn lived in two rooms over the London Road Shelter
.
Downstairs the kitchen and meeting room were locked up for the night, although the smell persisted in the sticky doorway: cabbage and sweat and damp cigarette butts. He'd thumped his gloved fist on the metal grille. Looking up, there'd been no light, but he knew that if Venn wasn't at the church then he'd be at home, and he'd seen Pastor Abney on Explorer Street, and he'd said the church was closed because only Sam could work the boiler, and he was ill, and it was freezing, wasn't it?

So he had to be home. There was an alley down the back of the building and from there he
could
see a light – not in the bedroom, but dimly in the little window that let on to the stairwell.

The door with the sign that read warden was unlocked. He rested his hand on the brass handle and pushed it open; it flew back, banging on the concrete wall and then rebounding, almost back to closed, so that he'd seen what was inside for only a few seconds, and then the image was gone. Neat, swept wooden steps, and halfway up a jacket, then a scarf above that, and shoes at the bottom, discarded. He pushed the door open again and looked at the shoes. The laces were still done up. He shouted up the stairs. On the fifth step there was a pool of something viscous, a pale fluid which he thought gave off the faint odour of high tide.

He climbed the stairs, stepping over the little puddle, and shouted again. The door slammed at the bottom and that made him jump so badly that he could hear his heart lurching in his chest like a rocking horse.

He found Sam Venn in his bed. He'd died with a bible on his chest, open at Leviticus. Vomit lay in a pool by his neck where it had run from his mouth. John Joe looked at him for only a moment, just long enough to know that he was looking at a dead man, and just long enough to think how odd that was – that as the rigor mortis had taken hold it had equalized the features of his face, so that the lop-sidedness had gone. And the left arm, his good arm, was held as awkwardly as the right, both half-crossed over his chest, resting on the Bible, holding it open. He knew Sam Venn well, and guessed that he'd arranged himself to be found like this, like a martyr. And he thought how pathetic it was that he'd got the Bible upside down, so that he couldn't have been reading it at all.

Standing there, his blood had run cold: ice in his veins. Because now the impossible was just a bit more possible. If death had come for Sam Venn, and death was waiting for Freddie Fletcher, then perhaps it would come for him. Perhaps someone did know. Perhaps someone wanted revenge. But he asked himself the question again. Who? Kath had seen them go. But there must have been others. And Kath wasn't his enemy. She was family. But he did wonder then, standing at the foot of Sam Venn's deathbed, if that was enough.

The tide was drawing him out from the land, so he stowed the oars and let the boat drift. The salty air and the fear had made him thirsty, and he wondered if there was anything to drink in the picnic basket Bea had given him. And food – he hadn't eaten all day, because there was a coldness in the pit of his stomach. His boat edged seaward, so silently, so effortlessly, that he had the brief illusion he wasn't moving at all, but that the world was slipping under him, sliding past, so that it felt as if the island which held the old coal barn was edging towards him under its own power.

He waited for the inevitable meeting of wood and stone, then edged the boat along the rubble quay, using an oar like a punting pole, around the barn until he was on the north side, hidden from the coast. It was high tide, but the coal barn, all that was left of an old harbour, stood clear of the water. Rising sea levels had inundated the rest since the last boats had brought in coal in the early twentieth century. Now it provided John Joe with all he needed: a place to be, where no one came.

As he tied up his boat snowflakes fell out of a clear night sky. The door, still weatherproof, swung easily on iron hinges, and by torchlight he climbed the stone stairs to the first floor, spread a blanket on a pile of nets and opened the picnic basket. Inside he found food in a supermarket bag, which he hung from a hook in one of the roof beams, and a two-litre bottle of water from which he drank immediately. Then he looked about him: a pile of firewood was stacked along one wall and the fireplace was clean. By the time he'd gathered some dry reed heads from the bank outside and set the fire with shreds of old newspaper it was nearly midnight.

Only when the red light from the flames began to flicker and light the room did the old memories come alive: he saw, strobe-lit, Lizzie's naked back, arched with pleasure, a leg stretched wantonly across a warm blue blanket. He felt guilt then: that he'd just left her without a word. There would be a time for the truth when he was safe, but not now.

He wrapped himself up in the blanket by the fire but couldn't sleep, so he went outside and sat on the stone step looking at the frosty planetarium of stars, and wished he'd had the presence of mind to bring his guitar. But he did have the penny whistle, he always had that, and so he sat and played a tune. He'd played only one verse when he remembered the signal – so he went and got the boat's lantern and set it on the south bank, facing the coast, and sat beside it, feeling better, content that the only person in the world who knew where he was, was Bea. She'd be there, looking north, because she'd promised to wait until she saw the light. And of all the people he trusted, he trusted Bea the most.

Friday, 17 December

Freddie Fletcher lay on his hospital bed, his chest bare, the black hair swirled in spirals on his damp skin. The sheet that should have covered him from the waist down was tangled, so that they could see some of his pubic hair, and an old scar like a lipstick kiss on his thigh. His eyes were the only part of him that moved, up to the ceiling, focused on the light fitting, then down, around the bed, and back to the ceiling, as if there was something up there he wanted to hold on to, something that would save him.

There was sunlight in the room, the kind of cheerless sunlight that only hospitals allow. But the most remarkable effect of the light was that Fletcher's skin seemed luminous, so that he appeared to float apart from the drab bed, with its steel frame and stiff sheets. It was a precarious state, Shaw thought, as if he was held there by his own determination not to die, anchored by the image of the light above.

The contaminated food he'd ingested had prompted a series of minor strokes in the early hours of that morning, and the shock had flooded his lungs with fluid, so that pneumonia was now established in the left, and the right was deteriorating too. Freddie Fletcher was suffocating by degrees. But it wouldn't be the lack of air that would kill him, thought Shaw, it would be his in-ability to maintain the concentration required to stay alive, an effort which patently was growing with each passing minute. His condition had been weak anyway, the doctor had explained, as he'd apparently gone to the Shipwrights' Hall dinner suffering from some kind of gastric illness which had put him in bed for the previous twenty-four hours. While his fellow patients had been able to call on their own internal resources to repel the effects of the poison, he had been at its mercy from the first mouthful of the tainted fish soup.

Fletcher kicked out, revealing a foot, and Shaw looked away, embarrassed by sight of the pale withered flesh. Valentine stood by the door, trying not to think how much less frightening this would be for Fletcher if he could have held someone he loved by the hand. Shaw was struggling to dispel the idea that because he disliked this man, in several deeply interlocking ways, he would find his death less shocking – viewing it not as a death at all, in fact, but as retribution. He thought about Fletcher lying in wait that night for Pat Garrison, made brave by being in a crowd of three. George Valentine had expanded on the message he'd left after he'd spoken to Jean. They'd dispatched a car to pick up Kath Robinson and Bea Garrison, another to the London Road Shelter to check on Sam Venn, and if he was well enough to bring him in too. They'd got a squad car out to the Flask as well. If they couldn't produce John Joe Murray then he was officially a missing person: TV, radio and the local papers would get a mug shot within hours.

Shaw was troubled again by this complex interlocking jigsaw of a world within a world – the community of South Lynn. The picture depicted was a shifting one. But now, at least, they had a clear snapshot of that fateful night: the three men setting out to teach Pat Garrison a lesson he'd never forget – to teach him he was an outsider, and that he'd always be an outsider.

Shaw looked at Fletcher and tried to imagine that moment when the billhook had swung down against the stars and buried itself in Pat Garrison's skull, slicing down through his brain, so that he would never feel the drop into the open grave. He tried to imagine Fletcher holding the weapon – but again, it wouldn't come. And again, like a tap dripping, his doubts impinged, undermining this all-too-simple solution to the question of who killed Pat Garrison. Three men, each with a motive, setting out on their victim's heels.

Shaw checked his mobile at the sound of an incoming text. It was from Guy Poole: the latest from the Environmental Health laboratory was that the soup had been contaminated by a base metal – a compound of aluminium – which had seeped into the soup, probably from the cans in which it had been delivered. They had a team down at the Clockcase Cannery and they were running tests on the unopened can recovered from the Shipwrights' Hall. Poole's text wasn't just to share the latest news – he wanted advice. Management at the Clockcase refused to believe the fault was with their product. They suspected sabotage by a disgruntled workforce facing redundancies as the factory closed. Poole said it was an incident he couldn't afford to ignore. He needed to seal off the works and get a full team on to the premises. In the circumstances he couldn't trust the company's day time security – and the resident factory watchman was a pensioner. Could Shaw liaise with St James's and get him a couple of uniformed officers to secure the factory?

Shaw relayed the text to the duty desk at St James's with a recommendation to pull in a squad car off the ring-road traffic patrol.

He killed the phone, then the power, and slipped the dead mobile into the zip pocket on his RNLI jacket. On the bedside table someone had neatly laid out Fletcher's personal possessions: a watch, a wallet and a menu card for the Shipwrights' Hall lunch. Turning the card over, he found a printed seating plan: Fletcher had shared a table with eleven others, including Pastor John Abney, Sam Venn and John Joe Murray – although they knew Lizzie's husband had ducked the meal and given his ticket away before disappearing.

Fletcher's eyes left the ceiling and locked on Shaw. ‘Worked it out?' he asked next, trying a smile. His voice was surprisingly clear, but then he gulped in air, as if he'd forgotten how to breathe. His eyes went back to the ceiling. His body stiffened with the effort of reconnecting with that point above his head.

Shaw sat, pulled the chair so close to the bed frame that the wood hit the metal, and spoke into Fletcher's ear. ‘We know you were in the cemetery that night, waiting for Garrison. You, Sam Venn and John Joe Murray. We know the billhook you used to kill him was from the sea chest in the loft – Alby's chest. We know you tumbled Garrison's body into the open grave. What more do we need to know?'

‘You know fuck-all,' he said. Fletcher clawed at the stiff sheet. ‘Sam drew him little pictures,' and the smile came this time, because it was cruel, and just slid into place. ‘Just a line on the first one. Two lines on the next one – the start of the gibbet, then the hanging man, because I told him one night, in the dark out by the river. I said we'd lynch him. I said that when they found him swinging they could cut him down with that penknife he always had with him – the one his GI dad left him; the one he was always flashing about to impress the girls.'

He passed out then, a fleeting few seconds of unconsciousness. When he opened his eyes, Shaw knew he'd no idea there'd been a break.

‘But that's all Sam was gonna do about it – draw little pictures. At the wake I said that all he believed in was talk. That's why they had their little church – inside it they could hide from the real world the rest of us had to live in. Pathetic. Just because he had a withered arm didn't mean he couldn't act. Do something.'

He took a careful breath this time, sipping the air. ‘I said we should teach him a lesson.' His breathing began to dip into the shallows, picking up speed. ‘And I'd have done it too, but I was outside, smoking, waiting for the kid to go home when Kath Robinson came up. Bit of gossip for me – she said Lizzie was pregnant. That the black was the father. She thought I'd like to know. Thought that might fire me up …'

He licked his lips. The heart monitor by the bed began to buzz and the consultant was beside them. ‘I think that's it,' he said. ‘Mr Fletcher can't do this – not now.'

Fletcher smiled at the notion of ‘now' – suspecting, perhaps, that there might not be a ‘later'. He held up a hand, and the doctor shrugged, silently mouthing ‘five minutes' to Shaw.

Fletcher tore his eyes from his anchor above and looked Shaw in the face.

‘I couldn't do it – not then, not when I knew there was a family. Lizzie's kid deserved a father – even if it was scum like Garrison.'

Fletcher's eyes swam, and Shaw recalled his story. The child who'd seen his mother desert the family, then watched the failure of his father to hold what remained of it together. A childhood in care, separated from his only sister. He remembered the single picture on his mantelpiece, his arm thrown round the woman in the cheap shell suit. Reunited. But he could imagine the damage that had been done to both, struggling through separate childhoods.

‘I left them, Sam and John Joe, just inside the cemetery gates. Went home.' His eyes spilt tears. ‘I said it wasn't right, told 'em what Kath had said. John Joe said it was rubbish, that she'd made it up because she wanted us to scare Pat off good and proper. Because if she couldn't have him, why should Lizzie? That she might be simple but she wasn't stupid. But John Joe knew Kath was right, deep down he knew, so he was really up for it – he had the billhook under his jacket, and he was high all right, like he'd been doused in the whisky. So I left them.'

He shifted his eyes back to the ceiling.

‘Next day I went up with Will Stokes and filled the grave in. We'd covered Nora's coffin the day before, we just had to finish the job. Took us an hour – with a couple of fag breaks. That night I was in the Flask and the rumour was round that Pat had gone. It didn't take long to find out why. Sammy and John Joe always had the same story, that they'd lost their nerve too. Too scared. So I never knew – never guessed. But I was always scared – of what I came close to doing.'

He looked at Shaw again. ‘I'm scared now,' he said.

They left him asleep. In the corridor outside Shaw checked his mobile as he watched the patient through a glass porthole. The doctor appeared at his shoulder.

‘What are his chances?' asked Shaw.

The doctor was reading a set of medical notes. He didn't look up. ‘He hasn't got chances, Inspector. Death's a process – like life. It's started. Miracles happen – but up till now, never on my shift.' He pushed Fletcher's door open and went in to check the bedside monitors.

There was a text on the phone from Paul Twine.

SAM VENN DEAD AT HOME. TOM AT SCENE.