Death's Door (7 page)

‘We’d asked Marianne to come to the police station tomorrow to be re-interviewed about the murder on East Hills in August 1994. Do you think that might have had something to do with her death, Mr Osbourne?’ asked Shaw.

‘She never swam after East Hills,’ said Osbourne. The voice was light, matching the slender hands. Shaw imagined the fingers manipulating the cogs of a lock. ‘I was working that day, the day of the murder; otherwise I’d have been there too,’ he said.

‘Your father’s shop – the locksmith’s?’

‘She went with a girlfriend,’ he said. Shaw and Valentine exchanged a glance, noting that Marianne had kept the precise truth from her husband: that she’d gone to East Hills alone, or at least without the friend she’d agreed to meet. Sometimes they had this ability, Shaw and Valentine, to know they were thinking the same thing. Did Marianne’s lie mean they were right? That she’d gone out to East Hills to meet a secret lover?

‘It really shook her up,’ said Osbourne. ‘Seeing the body – I suppose they all were. She’d have nightmares sometimes – always the same. She’d be swimming out and she’d get entangled in the body, in the arms and legs and she’d run out, covered in blood.’ He covered his mouth. ‘It was the blood – the sight of it. She wasn’t squeamish. But he bled to death. And she said you wouldn’t believe it – the amount of blood in the water, like a cloud, all along the beach. Like there were hundreds dead, or dying. She said one of the men on the beach said his father had been in Normandy for D-Day – on the beaches – and that the sea was red there too, for miles. It was like the colour was in her head, for ever.’

He coughed again, trying to limit it to one, but failing, so that he needed a second dose from the inhaler.

‘She never said anything else about that day? Perhaps she met another friend out on the beach by chance? Did she have lots of friends?’

‘She was popular,’ said Osbourne, his voice flat, atonal.

‘You were going out by then . . .’

‘That’s right.’

‘So no other men?’

‘We were an item,’ said Osbourne, wiping tears from his face with the back of his hand, but there’d been a hint of bitterness in his voice.

Shaw decided then that they’d come back and interview him when he wasn’t still in shock.

Osbourne looked around the room, and Shaw sensed a kind of tedious hatred for what he saw. ‘It’s why we’re here, in this house, in this
fucking
house,’ said Osbourne. He spat the word out, as if his wife’s death gave him a sudden freedom.

‘Why?’ prompted Valentine.

‘After East Hills she couldn’t live by the sea. She couldn’t wait to get out of Wells. Ruth – that’s her sister – lives next door, has done since she was married, so when this one came on the market we pitched in. I’d have stayed . . .’ He shrugged, as if he’d been happy to give up the sea. ‘But prices were soft so we got it.’

‘They must be close – the sisters?’ asked Valentine, thinking it was a kind of nightmare for him, the thought of relatives next door.

‘Ruth’s always been there for Marianne,’ he said. ‘And Tilly.’ Shaw considered the testimonial. In his experience people who were ‘always there’ for others got their satisfaction in life from not being somewhere else.

Robinson was up out of the chair, the spring uncoiled. He walked quickly to the makeshift bookcase and took a bottle out of a gap between two encyclopaedias, refilling his glass, his hands shaking rhythmically but slowly.

‘For the record, sir,’ said Valentine. ‘Today you were at the shop again, all day?’

He turned back to them. ‘Yes. I closed for lunch, but I was out the back in the workshop.’

‘And your wife worked at home?’

Osbourne nodded, but his jaw was straightening. ‘No. She was due in at Kelly’s – the funeral directors down in Wells. It’s a part-time job but we need the money. She got up, had a bath, got dressed. Then, after Tilly went, she got back into bed. Said she couldn’t – not today. You know . . . she suffered.’ He drank, then added: ‘Low mood,’ making it clear he knew it was a euphemism.

He let the words hang there. ‘So I made the call for her – told ’em she was ill. That’s where I left her . . . in bed, about nine.’

Shaw watched Osbourne sip the whisky. Each mouthful was substantial and he didn’t gag. Shaw got the impression he was in it for the long run, and that he’d been down the road before.

Osbourne filled his narrow chest with air, squaring the fragile shoulders. ‘How did she do it?’ he asked. ‘This time.’ He sat, rocking slightly in his chair, and Shaw thought how tiring it would be to live with his bristling energy, the lack of peace.

‘We’re pretty certain that she swallowed poison, a cyanide capsule. A suicide pill. Have you any idea where she could have got such a thing?’

‘I don’t understand.’ But he did, Shaw could see, it was just that he didn’t have an answer.

‘And we believe that she may not have been alone when she died,’ added Shaw. ‘Have you any idea who might have been with her, Mr Osbourne?’

‘Not alone?’ Osbourne stood, as if he’d suddenly found the strength to be upright. He put the whisky glass down with exaggerated care. It was as if he hadn’t heard the question. ‘Can I see her – Marianne? I should.’ His voice was rising, taking on a note of panic. ‘I want to see her.’ His head, which was small and compact, seemed to shake at a very high frequency.

Before Shaw could answer they heard voices in the front garden – women’s voices – and then the door opened and slammed and they heard heavy footsteps in the hall, and a teenage girl appeared in the doorway. Her face was already disfigured by shock – the mouth hung open, the micro-muscles beneath the skin malfunctioning, so that her face seemed to shimmer and distort. But even in distress Shaw could see the resemblance to the dead woman: the colouring, although the hair was dyed a more striking red, and the fine bone structure, which seemed to stretch translucent skin.

She walked to Osbourne, who’d slumped back into his seat, and knelt down so that they could hold on to each other. Osbourne slipped from the chair to his knees and Tilly took his weight, letting his head sink to her shoulder.

A woman stood at the doorway. Shaw could see the resemblance to the dead woman in her too, in the colouring – the auburn hair, the green eyes. This had to be Ruth, Marianne Osbourne’s next-door sister. But she was also a striking opposite to her sibling: fleshy and rounded, the skin tanned from the wind and sun, so that she had no hint of tragic paleness. Shaw recalled that she worked at the Lido at Wells, and he could imagine her, executing an efficient breaststroke, effortlessly covering length after length, her head clear of the water. She looked at Shaw. ‘I told her,’ she said, ‘that Marianne’s gone.’

They heard Joe Osbourne thank her, his mouth buried in the nape of his daughter’s neck. Osbourne, sitting back now on his haunches, was sobbing, his hands fluttering in front of his face like a pair of bird’s wings. He kept saying, ‘Thank God’, and touching his daughter on her head, as if giving her a blessing.

Shaw and Valentine went out into the hallway. By the front door, thrown down, was a placard with a wooden stump.

Save Our Unspoilt Landscape.

SOUL

Ruth followed them out. Up close Shaw could see her skin was unnaturally clean and slightly rucked, like corrugated paper. ‘I don’t think she can face any questions tonight,’ she said. ‘But she did say they argued this morning because she didn’t want to revise for the resits. She wanted to go with her mates – that’s what she said. In fact, she wanted to go up to Docking Hill, to the wind farm demo. But she didn’t tell Marianne that, or Joe.’

Shaw thought how odd it was that no one in the family ever shortened the victim’s name to something less formal, less cool. Marie, perhaps. And he wondered if Tilly had been there, up by the wind farm gates, when he and Valentine had driven through on the way down to the coast.

‘She’s been up there all day,’ added Ruth, answering a question Shaw hadn’t asked. ‘Till four. Then she went to the boyfriend’s down in Wells and they went for a drink on the front – The Harbour Lights. Marianne wouldn’t have approved of that either.’ Ruth looked down the short corridor to the bedroom, where the door was open but still blocked with the yellow and black tape. ‘It’s an awful shock,’ she said. ‘But the worse thing is she’s going to think it’s her fault.’

SIX

S
haw parked the Porsche by the lifeboat station at Old Hunstanton. It was past nine but a necklace of beach fires still sparkled along the dunes. He shrugged himself into his rucksack and began to run north along the high-water mark. Out at sea the spot where the sun had set was marked by a flash of green-yellow light, and silhouetted in it were the wind farms off the Lincolnshire coast. As he picked up speed he passed the new lifeboat station, built to house the inshore hovercraft. He’d been the pilot for nearly four years and the radio call-out pager was strapped to his belt, but the summer had been quiet and they hadn’t had a single shout in July. Tonight the sea was a sheet of mercury, untroubled by any wave.

The halfway point to his house was marked by a single stone pine, the branches buckled by the wind, thrown back as if in shock at the sight of the sea. He stopped, climbing the low dunes, to breathe in the view. He filled his lungs with the air that he always imagined had arrived direct from the distant Pole – a 3,000-mile fetch uninterrupted by any landfall. He unpacked the parcel of air he’d drawn into his lungs: salt, ozone and a trace of the exposed seaweed on the cockle beds. But with the wind following the shore there were other elements – a hint of a chemical barbecue tray, the strangely inert aroma of sand itself and a citrus edge from the lone pine.

He could see his wife and daughter long before they saw him, in chairs set out in front of the Beach Café. Lena had bought the old shop, derelict, two years earlier, a job lot with a small cottage to the rear and an old boathouse beside it, now transformed into
Surf!
, selling anything
from beach windmills at seventy-nine pence to a sand-yacht at £3,999. Wetsuits had got them through the first year because the surfing revolution had transformed the British beach into a stretch of sand dotted with human dolphins. And while surfing and the North Sea were not natural companions the north-west-facing beach at Hunstanton did catch a decent swell if the wind was right. Next year they planned to open the café in the evenings, thanks to a newly acquired alcohol licence. Supplies for the cafe and shop were currently ferried along the sand in an old Land Rover that Lena drove. But they’d need a new 4x4 van to run daily deliveries if they opened late, using the wet, hard sand below the waterline when they could. They’d made the most of this last summer of perfect sunsets because next year Lena might be struggling to serve iced Chardonnay, or bottled Adnams, to thirsty trippers.

His wife stood, black skin showing off the white bikini. Five foot three inches tall, a full figure, but the skin taut and lustrous, especially at the close of a sunny summer. She’d just been in the sea and as she shook her hair Fran screamed, jumping away, the old dog their daughter loved barking at the sudden movement.

Lena brought him a glass of wine, standing close with a hand pressed against his stomach, insinuated through the gap between the buttons on his shirt. Her face was made up of curves, not slight subtle lines but bold, strong facets, so that sometimes he thought of an African mask, the curves around the eyes defining the face. She had a slight cast in her right eye, an odd match for Shaw’s blindness in the left.

They watched Fran taking a Chinese lantern on a string out on the sand. She lit the candle within and it rose, just beyond her reach, and in the windless air drifted at walking pace to the north. She followed it, trying to coax it round, so that she could bring it back to show them. Shaw noted that she walked as he did, as if she might at any step float free of the earth, her elbows slightly out from her narrow body. It was one of many physical similarities: the fair hair, the wide cheekbones, the almost colourless pale blue eyes. One of the mild complications of having an only child was that discussions about which side of the family she took after were loaded. It wasn’t as if the fact that she looked like Shaw – the light brown-sugar skin aside – would one day be outweighed by another sibling’s likeness to Lena. Thankfully Fran’s psychological make-up was entirely in her mother’s mould: forthright, outgoing, matter-of-fact – with just the same added ingredient: an ability to step back and watch the world go by.

He sipped his wine, his hand on the back of Lena’s neck. This was the moment he had to fight the urge to talk about work, because Lena had left the city, left Brixton and an urban life, to get away from the kind of lives people had to lead there. She didn’t believe in trying to create a paradise, Shaw understood that, but she didn’t want any glimpses of hell either. In the winter they’d be lucky to sell a pot of tea, let alone a beach yacht, so there was nothing easy about it. On a wet Tuesday in February, under a grey sky, it could be soul destroying, watching the sea through rain-streaked glass. It was going to be a struggle, but she was prepared for that. She didn’t think life owed her anything. But the lives that Shaw saw in his work were not everyday lives; they were a cross-section of the damaged, the cruel, the victimized. It was his job to deal with that, said Lena, not bring it all home.

When they’d met she’d been a lawyer for the Campaign for Racial Equality, picking through the London housing benefit system, trying to help families get a home. She’d always thought that if she immersed herself in that world, a world of poverty, crime and abuse, she’d be untainted by it – be able to just walk away at the end of a day’s work. By the time she met Shaw – on his first placement from the Met College at Hendon – she’d realized she was wrong. The sceptical, logical, forensic mind she’d trained so well was being coloured with cynicism. She always recalled something a judge had said in chambers. ‘To the jaundiced eye, Miss Braithwaite, everything is yellow.’ And that’s how her world looked: tainted. So they’d planned this: to live away from the city, outside Shaw’s urban manor, and for Fran to have a childhood. Their daughter could do with her life what she wanted. but first they’d give her this: a wide sky and a beach.