Death Toll (32 page)

As Shaw ran after Kath Robinson he heard the double echo of his boots hitting cobbles, bouncing off the shopfronts of the narrow high street. The crowd on the quayside was cheering now, a constant ebb and flow of sound like the sea on the sand. A family ran past them down the street, the father with a baby held in a carrier on his shoulders, one of the children crying. The street was so narrow, almost too narrow for a single car, that the shops seemed to reach out to each other, trying to touch – a toy shop unlit, a bakery, a hardware store with empty hooks above a bay window. An ageing Labrador swung its head from side to side, padding down towards the crowd, pursuing the running family.

‘Miss Robinson!' Shaw didn't call out until they were almost with her, because even then he thought she might just run, ditch the suitcase, so he was already on his toes.

She turned and Shaw saw the disappointment in her eyes, but nothing else, so that he wondered for the first time if he might be wrong.

‘Yes,' she said, setting the suitcase upright.

She looked at her watch. ‘I've not much time,' she said. ‘My car's up by the church and this crowd will be on its way home soon.'

In the white light she should have looked pale, but her face was flushed, and Shaw thought that for the first time she might have the capacity to be happy. Her blonde hair was pinned back, her head bare despite the cold. She wore a quilted jacket, good quality, but shapeless.

‘I thought you lived at Morston House,' said Shaw.

She settled back on her heels, crossing her arms across her breasts. In most people it was a stance that radiated confidence. But, as always with this woman, Shaw thought it looked like an impersonation of confidence rather than the real thing. ‘I don't understand,' she said.

Shaw looked up and down the empty street. ‘Someone – a woman – was seen digging up Nora Tilden's grave last June. We think she was trying to recover something; something incriminating, perhaps. We think she may have been Pat Garrison's killer.'

Her face was blank, and Shaw wondered what kind of mind worked behind that perfect skin.

‘I thought that woman might be you. And that would explain why you were running away.'

‘I told you the truth,' she said. She blinked several times and Shaw was certain she hadn't understood the accusation. It was the kind of misunderstanding only the innocent make.

She unzipped a pocket on the suitcase, took out a travel wallet and gave it to Shaw.

As he reached into his jacket for a torch she looked back down the high street to where Santa's boat had just arrived at the quay: a figure clad not in the usual Disney scarlet but in russet, with a crown of winter berries and what looked like a real white beard. Camera flashlights popped and someone out of sight began to address the crowd through a megaphone.

Inside the travel wallet was a return ticket to Tenerife, boat tickets to Gomera and a brochure for a holiday village – whitewashed apartments beside a beach dotted with parasols.

‘It's a present from Bea,' she said. ‘I've always said she owes me nothing but she's been good – more than that, she's been family, really. Finding Pat, finding his bones, brought it back for both of us. We've both been bad. She was going to come …' She nodded at the tickets. ‘But she wants to be near Lizzie – and Lizzie won't leave the Flask.'

Shaw didn't answer. He was looking at the plane ticket. London Heathrow to Tenerife North. LHR to TFN.

Valentine filled in the gap. ‘It must have been bitter news – when Lizzie told you she was pregnant, that Pat was the father. Is that why you tried to stir it up with Freddie Fletcher, telling him the black kid had his feet under the table? That he was family now. That one day he'd be running the Flask. Did you follow them out there? Did you take the billhook with you?' He stopped, dragging in a fresh breath. ‘Did you finish it when they wouldn't?'

She looked suddenly genuinely exhausted. ‘No. Really. I don't – didn't – hate Pat. Freddie was a friend. I knew him from school – he was a couple of years above Lizzie and me. I just wanted to share it – like you do, when you get news.'

Valentine noted that she hadn't said ‘good' news.

‘It was supposed to be a secret, wasn't it?' pressed Valentine. ‘Lizzie's secret.'

‘She told me fast enough,' said Robinson, unable to keep the bitterness out of her voice. ‘I thought she'd tell everyone by last orders.'

‘What did you think Fletcher would do – start knitting socks?' said Valentine, concerned that Shaw seemed to have given up on the cross-examination. The DI was still studying Robinson's airline reservation.

Kath Robinson looked at her watch. Shaw handed back the travel wallet. ‘You can go,' he said. ‘We know where you are. We'll need to speak when you get back.'

‘Perhaps I should stay?' Not a statement, a question.

‘No. It's OK,' said Shaw.

She looked at Valentine, as if asking his permission as well, then flipped the suitcase back on its wheels. Down by the water's edge the civic party had welcomed Santa Claus aboard a tractor-drawn float. It turned, heading for the church, and behind it the crowd scrambled to squeeze between the narrow shopfronts of the high street.

‘You'd better go,' said Shaw. He tried to smile, but an image of Dawid Kazimierz looking out to sea made him give it up half done. They watched her hurry away, one of the wheels on the suitcase trolley squealing. Valentine waited for an explanation – several explanations – but Shaw turned towards the oncoming crowd and plunged in, his mobile already at his ear.

Bea Garrison was standing on the balcony of Morston House wrapped in a Barbour, looking out over the now deserted waterfront. Santa's boat lay moored, the inflatable reindeer buckling slightly on the ebbing tide, a light wind exhaling from the streets of the town as if it were preparing for sleep. On a yacht out in the channel a family sat in the cockpit eating, the sound of a champagne cork bouncing back off the façades of the fish 'n' chip shops.

There were three flights of stairs to the balcony and Shaw reached the top well before Valentine.

‘Alone?' asked Shaw.

Bea turned her face, the ship's fine figurehead, away from the sea to look at him. Below they heard Valentine's mobile ring, followed by a whispered conversation.

‘Always,' she said. ‘It's not a problem.' She touched a finger to her face, smoothing the single patch of makeup she wore.

She was standing, leaning easily on the low wall, a glass of white wine on the ledge. Shaw guessed it was a favourite spot; an escape from the people she had to let into her home.

‘We don't have time,' said Shaw. ‘John Joe's life is in danger – it may even be too late. But you know that. You tried to kill him before, at the Shipwrights' Hall lunch.'

She was prepared for that. Sipping the white wine, she used one hand to fasten the top button at her chin, then tighten a cashmere scarf.

‘It's a cliché – but I really do have no idea what you're talking about, Inspector.'

‘Toxic synergy,' said Shaw. She was a very still person, but even Shaw sensed an instant immobility, as if those two words had turned her to stone.

Valentine arrived, out of breath, a thin veneer of sweat on his narrow forehead and showing through the thinning hair. He still held the mobile in his hand. ‘No sign of John Joe,' he said. ‘Lizzie's frightened now. Jacky Lau says she thinks that if he's gone anywhere in the boat it would be here.'

Bea Garrison had spent her life maintaining an impenetrable exterior, but Shaw could see she was struggling now, her eyes drawn back out to sea, to the lights in the channel and beyond, to the darkness of the marshes. Shaw scanned the quayside, the mid-channel moorings, but there was no sign of John Joe's clinker-built sailing boat.

‘We don't have time for this, Mrs Garrison. If John Joe Murray dies, you will be responsible. Where is he?'

She set her hard face to the sea. Out along the quayside a council Scarab swirled up the rubbish. Towards the dunes a bonfire flickered. Shaw was struck again by how imperious Bea Garrison was, how she'd carved a life for herself, a woman alone, deserted by men: first a husband she didn't love who drank himself to death, and then – as far as she'd known for the last three decades – by the son she did love. But she'd survived, prospered in a way, and then, provided with the names of the men who'd killed that son, she'd organized a clinical and lethal revenge.

‘We know you told Alby that night – at the Clockcase – about what Kath had seen,' said Shaw. ‘Did he mention the Shipwrights' Hall lunch then? It's an annual affair. Every year he'd worked at the cannery he'd have seen the order go through. So he knew the Flask would have a table and that all three of your targets would be there. And I think it was you who thought of revenge – an almost instant retaliation. You asked Kath Robinson not to tell us what happened, didn't you? What did you say? That after all those years it was unlikely – nearly impossible – that we'd be able to make a case against them? But she didn't listen. That's the neighbourhood vice around the Flask – gossip.

‘But that didn't mean the three of them couldn't be punished. That they couldn't suffer. So you told Alby to lace the cans. You knew they'd have the soup, of course – they eat at the Flask every week, so you knew they were all keen on seafood. And local fare. It's a guess, but I think you didn't tell him how it would work, or that they'd die. He'd have to trust you – trust that only they would really suffer. And anyway, he knew that the dose he was giving them wasn't lethal – it doesn't even work on the rats every time.'

She turned her back on the sea and looked up at the tower of Morston House, and Shaw wondered if she was saying goodbye, trying to imprint a memory that she could take with her.

‘Toxic synergy,' he said. ‘Occupational hazard if you're a chemist. Which you were, of course. You, Mrs Garrison, not Latrell. That was a lie – and a desperate one. So I think you suggested using the rat poison to make them suffer, then went out to the poison bin to check on its chemical composition. And perhaps that's when you realized you could do it. Kill just those three and nobody else.'

Across the water the sound of a second champagne bottle opening bounded to them.

‘The real question,' said Shaw, ‘is what did you tell Ian.'

Shaw smiled and took one of the wooden chairs. Out in the channel a water rat surfaced and swam towards the open sea, leaving a perfect V-shaped wake.

‘Because that was part two of the plan – the part Alby didn't know about. Before they got to Alby's rat poison at the Shipwrights' Hall you needed to make sure they each had a dose of mercury in their bloodstream. Just a bit – nothing fatal. Again, a non-lethal dose. And they got that, I'd guess, at lunch on Tuesday at the Flask. A lunch Ian cooked. Angry, bitter, Ian. Three daily specials: grilled salmon with bubble and squeak and winter vegetables. And here I'm guessing again. I don't think Ian knew the two halves of the plan, did he? You asked him to trust you, just like you'd asked Alby.

‘It's the ultimate toxic synergy: aluminium and mercury. Individually slow acting and non-lethal, but put them together and the result is guaranteed. It's a textbook study: give a hundred rats a dose of aluminium and on average one will die; give a hundred rats a dose of mercury and on average one will die; give a hundred rats a dose of both and they'll all die. Every time.'

Valentine lit a Silk Cut, absorbed by Shaw's account.

Bea turned towards them, a hand finding the wooden shelf on the low balcony wall without looking, an action of familiarity which reminded Shaw of Lizzie Murray reaching for the fruit-machine switch behind the bar of the Flask.

An ice bucket stood in the corner, and she walked to it now and refilled the glass of wine.

‘I like it cold,' she said. ‘Icy.'

She stared Shaw in his blind eye.

‘I'm not sure you have a single item of evidence to support this fanciful scenario,' she said. But her age betrayed her: the wine glass rocking as the tendons in her arm failed to smoothly elevate it to her lips.

‘You have three problems,' said Shaw. ‘Alby is happy to confess to his side of the plan – although I will concede that he'll never implicate you directly, as he is actually pretty keen to spend the rest of his life in a secure cell at Lincoln. I just wonder how coherent his testimony would be under cross-examination. Especially as his sabotage was carried out
before
the discovery of Pat Garrison's bones was made public, and he admits to seeing you only hours before he laced the cans. Second, I think Freddie Fletcher fell ill during his lunch at the Flask. I think the mercury was in the salmon – he started feeling nauseous before he'd finished, so he used the foil from his sweetcorn cob to wrap up the fish. It's a generation thing: waste not, want not. He wouldn't have suspected the meal he was currently eating. Probably blamed it on a dodgy curry the night before. It's in his fridge, the salmon. Well, it was in his fridge – it's in our forensic lab now. Where we will also be spending some of our budget on a more thorough examination of the stomach contents of Fletcher and Venn. We'll find the mercury, although I suspect the amounts will be truly microscopic. Because that's the dreadful beauty of toxic synergy – the traces of the two poisons can be almost undetectable, especially if you're not looking for them.

‘And third, and most importantly, Fletcher, Venn and Murray didn't kill your son.'

She shook her head and tried a laugh, but it died in her throat.

‘How do we know this? Well, initially we ignored several pieces of evidence which didn't fit the scenario painted by Kath Robinson – a story, by the way, which I'm sure was genuine in outline.'

‘Such as?' She tried to make the question sound casual, but even Valentine detected the edge in her voice, as if she was about to choke.

‘The two green glasses we found with Pat's bones, for a start. Why two?'

Bea took a sip of wine.

‘But the real breakthrough came just a few minutes ago. Right here. We bumped into Kath Robinson. She showed us the airline ticket you'd bought her. A kindness you will regret.'

Valentine's mobile rang and he turned away, walking down a few steps.

‘Your son died with a piece of paper in his pocket. There's not much left now – shreds. But we could see three letters: bold capitals. MOT – not part of a word, there were no letters missing just those three, so that was it – like a code for something. Something like an airport.'

Valentine came back. ‘The Flask – 999 call: ambulance, police, the lot.'

Bea Garrison held the wine glass, poised, but the rim dipped and the liquid began to fall to the ground. Shaw thought she'd be cold now: icy. He couldn't imagine the thoughts she must be struggling with, but he sensed there would be an image in her mind of the home she'd once had on the other side of the world, and perhaps the last time she'd left it, rising through the thin Midwestern clouds above North Dakota.

Shaw showed her his mobile. ‘I've just checked MOT is the airport code for Minot, North Dakota. A small municipal airport then, but the one Pat would have used to go home. And that's what he had in his pocket that night. His ticket home. Away from the Flask, and you, and the life you'd tried to make for him. But most of all it was a ticket home away from Lizzie.'