Death Ship Page 23

  Clay took a breath. ‘I visited Alice Banks, your sister-in-law. She said you gave this box of chocolates to her three weeks ago, a present from your husband. The doctors had told her she was developing type-two diabetes, and she needed to be careful. So no more, please. She was allowed one a day, so the box would last long enough. And she asked you not to tell George. She feared he’d make the effort to visit. They weren’t close, she said. A visit would tire her.’

  Keeble reached out a hand for the swivel chair but thought better of it. Shaw took her arm and led her to the small two-seat sofa. Age seemed to overwhelm her once she was off her feet.

  ‘They were too close,’ she said. ‘George once said that as children they’d been inseparable. Odd, isn’t it? That’s where hatred starts sometimes, when you can read someone else’s mind, understand how selfish they are, how weak. George never forgave her for her cruelties, especially to me. I don’t know when love turned to hatred, but it did.’

  ‘A week later George gave you more chocolates for his sister,’ said Shaw. ‘So, rather than break your promise to her and tell him the truth, you took the gift, but handed them out in the bus queue, with fatal results,’ said Shaw. ‘And that set the precedent. It was only DS Valentine here who stopped you handing out another box. Once you were arrested, your husband must have hoped that Alice might yet finish the first box. So he waited. No doubt he always planned to confess. But he kept giving it just one more day. That reveals a quite extraordinary degree of hatred, Mrs Keeble. That he was prepared to see you in a cell, just to preserve the chance that his sister would die in agony.’ He paused. ‘I’m still not entirely clear of his motive? Are you?’

  She avoided all their eyes, watching a seagull on the window ledge, its egg-white feathers ruffled by the stiff sea breeze.

  ‘George never, ever asked her for a favour. She had money, but we were poor. I don’t think either of us was worried by material things.’ She looked at her hands. ‘I asked him to break that rule. I couldn’t have children, Inspector. We went to doctors, clinics, quacks. By the time we’d stopped trying, the NHS was offering IVF – but only to certain couples. I was too old – thirty-five. I wanted to try. The cost of going private was prohibitive for us. George asked her for the money. She said no. He asked again. He never said, but, knowing George, he begged. She still said no. He thought it was unforgivable.

  ‘I think death – his death, the mere prospect of it – crystallized that hatred. He thought I’d be alone. If we’d had children, it would have been different. He wanted to die knowing I was all right – that I’d cope. She’d robbed us of that sense of peace.’

  Shaw picked up the forensic bag and gave it back to Clay. ‘At which point I suppose we should simply leave you here, Mrs Keeble. It’s still home. We have George’s confession. But. There is a but – isn’t there? There’s an uncomfortable truth here, Mrs Keeble. Because you kept silent too. Our forensics experts tell us that two of the chocolates on the lower layer in this first box are poisoned. Another week – ten days – it would all have been over. George was hoping she’d die, but you knew she was eking out the box, that she would, eventually, swallow a poisoned one.’

  ‘I always took her chocolates. I’d done it for years. I thought George had started lacing them when he switched to the cartons – TopChoc. I had no idea. I knew what he’d tried to do, but I thought he’d failed.’

  She’d kept silent so long that Shaw didn’t think she’d succumb to cross-examination now. ‘Indeed. And I suspect that is where that line of inquiry will have to end. We’ll never know the truth of it, will we?’

  For a few seconds they listened to the clock. ‘There’ll be a brief court appearance – here in Lynn,’ said Shaw, moving on. ‘The DPP will need to formally drop the charge of murder.’

  He went back to the mantelpiece and took down the framed picture of the RNLI medal presentation. ‘George’s medal – it was for bravery on the night of the tempest? Back in 1953?’

  From the back bedroom Keeble fetched a shallow blue box held tightly shut with a red ribbon. Unthinkingly, perhaps, she took her dead husband’s chair and carefully unwrapped the box on her lap to reveal the bronze medal, which glowed dully.

  ‘George would take it out sometimes and hold it, turning it over. Sometimes I think he felt cheated, that the world moved on so quickly. He would have given his life that night, for others. They saved so many people from the flooded houses, in the dark and the ice.’

  She nodded once, twice, and then Shaw realized her head was shaking slightly, the strain showing for the first time. ‘Earlier that night the lifeboat stood off a ship out at sea that had got into trouble. The Calabria – a Dutch coaster. Did he ever talk about that, Mrs Keeble?’

  ‘Yes. He saw the ship sink. The inquest was held in the old town hall, up on the green. Just crew then, of course – it was years later they made him coxswain – so it wasn’t his call …’

  ‘His call?’ prompted Shaw.

  ‘The crew – the lifeboat crew – felt there was something wrong with the sinking of that ship. It just didn’t seem the right time or the right place to make a fuss. So they kept their peace. Besides, the relatives were there, from Holland, but hardly any of them could speak English. George said that was the worst part – that they could see how distraught they were but they couldn’t comfort them.’

  ‘What was wrong with the sinking of the Calabria?’

  ‘George said when they came in sight of the coaster, she was listing. Then she snapped in half, and the stern began to rise up. She sank in a few minutes. George said they never understood why they saw no one on the bridge, at the rails – nothing. The ship’s lights were running on a generator, so they could see her clearly. They signalled and got nothing back. The radio channel was open but they never answered. George said – and he talked of it often, especially on the anniversary – he said that even if they were below trying to fix the pumps, they’d have come up when the back broke. It wasn’t hopeless – it was worse than that. What’s the point of trying to get the pumps working when the ship’s in two halves? They’d have come up, and taken a chance in the sea. The lifeboat was on the spot within a few minutes of her going down, and they never saw a sign of anyone. George said the ship was big enough to leave a whirlpool behind, and when they got the lifeboat to the spot, they cut the engines and she just turned, round and round, like she was a top, until it slowed down, and then there was just the white water of the storm. And nothing. No bodies – ever.

  ‘The inquest was over in an hour. Then they moved on to the others who’d died down on the South Beach. That took days. Not the time or the place for awkward questions. And maybe the crew were below decks. But George didn’t think so. He said the crew either jumped ship before she went down or they were trapped below.’

  FORTY-EIGHT

  The pale body of Theo Kersk was taken directly to the morgue at the Ark. Within two hours it lay naked, eviscerated, blind beneath the Gothic unseeing angel that stood on its plinth in the east wall. The autopsy, performed immediately by Dr Kazimierz, had been of considerable professional interest, due to the fact that initial tests had revealed that not only was the teenager’s blood severely depleted of oxygen, but it was also unnaturally free of carbon dioxide.

  Dr Kazimierz’s interest was further piqued by a note from Shaw by email: I have a hook on cause of death here. Rare. Very rare. Ring me if you need info. Peter.

  While the first mystery lay in the blood, the second lay in the lungs, in that the pulmonary tubes on both the left and right sides were dry. She had sluiced the salt and sand from the skin herself, and she had the written report of the victim’s discovery before her on a nearby workbench: Washed up on Hunstanton beach, lower left leg entwined with green seaweed. The victim’s job description had also been helpfully added: pool attendant, swimming coach.

  But dry lungs, and none of the characteristic carbon dioxide poisoning of a typical victim of drowning.

  Dr Kazimierz
had taken a tea break, standing by the corpse, the condensation from the mug clouding slightly her rimless spectacles. The body, now stitched closed, troubled her in a disturbingly nameless way. Death had clearly been caused by asphyxiation, but this had not resulted in the victim gulping down seawater in the final minutes of his life. Such a degree of self-control she knew to be impossible, and this therefore led her swiftly to an unavoidable conclusion.

  She made several telephone calls to substantiate her deduction. The key conversation was with the chief medical officer of AIDA – the Paris-based International Association for the Development of Apnea – the regulator, according to its website, of the sport of free diving and its pool-based offshoot, static apnea.

  Satisfied with her work, she fetched a metal stool from the forensic suite and sat beside the corpse. How many autopsies had she performed in her thirty-five-year career? A thousand? She closed her eyes and did the sums: five thousand, perhaps more. Of all those who had died conscious, perhaps only this sad young man had been unaware that death was a second away.

  Kersk had died during an extended free dive – submersing his body without the support of either a snorkel or oxygen tanks. The key danger in such a dive was that the use of pure oxygen before submersion – or its substitution by hyperventilation – drove out the blood’s natural carbon dioxide, during the process of packing the blood with oxygen. This removed the body’s natural early warning that asphyxiation was about to take place. The irresistible urge to breathe is triggered by unease and pain, related to the amount of carbon dioxide in the blood; drive that out, and the victim is blissfully unaware that a danger point is approaching.

  Such a danger was markedly increased if the swimmer overexerted themselves physically. Any extreme effort undertaken during the dive could prove fatal.

  Kersk had almost certainly fainted underwater, unaware that but for the absence of carbon dioxide in his blood, he would have been screaming with pain. His breathless body, devoid of buoyancy, would have hung beneath the surface, or danced above the seabed in the languid basal current, before it was washed ashore.

  She composed a text to Shaw: Kersk – asphyxiation during free dive. No evidence of violence. One detail. You were interested in watches. Pale skin, but indentation of strap on right wrist.

  She pulled the mortuary sheet up to the teenager’s chin, looked once at his face, and then covered the head. ‘Peaceful,’ she said out loud. ‘Thank God.’

  FORTY-NINE

  Hunstanton was enjoying its special moment in time: sunset. While along the rest of the East Coast shadows were beginning to creep across the sand, prompting families to pack for home, here the sun was boiling in a purple cloud, bathing the Victorian resort’s seafront villas in a golden light. Shaw, standing on the high balcony of the Old Lookout, gazed out to sea. ‘How bad are your eyes?’ he asked, turning back to address Edward Coram, who was sitting behind his chart-strewn table.

  The old man’s hand rose to stretch the crow’s-foot skin beside his left eye. ‘Twenty per cent in the right; the left’s blind. So, no better than a mole’s, Inspector, and fading fast. The cataracts are breeding, it seems, and there’s a problem with the blood supply to the retinas. I’ll be blind in a year.’

  It occurred to Shaw that his sight was so poor that he didn’t know Shaw was blind too, even if it was only in one eye. ‘So why is the view so important?’

  Coram steepled his fingers to consider an answer, ignoring, or failing to detect, the belligerent tone of the question. Since Shaw and Valentine had arrived unheralded, with the younger Coram in tow, the father had been polite, almost serene. Shaw sensed in this over-confidence an opportunity.

  ‘St Dunstan’s, the hospital at Brighton for the blind – have you seen it? Rather a strange building, set high on a hillside above the cliffs, with a view to die for. That’s the expression, isn’t it? A view to die for. The residents love it. I entirely understand. It’s a given, of course, that some senses, like hearing and taste, improve when we lose our sight. But what of new senses? Or long-lost senses revitalized? There’s a certain bat-like skill in appreciating space, you see. Hearing space – can that be right? It’s a great pleasure, and I’m profoundly relieved that I may be able to enjoy it in my extreme old age. My dotage.’

  Shaw stood in the window, partly blocking the view. ‘By the same token, you’d be able to feel you were in a prison cell?’

  Valentine, standing to one side beside a bookcase, felt the hair rise on his neck.

  ‘Odd question,’ said Coram, affecting a smile.

  ‘Let’s take Captain Ring first, shall we? The father was always a weak link, I suspect. You gave him a job at Wells, in the back office; kept him close. Did you guess he’d told his son the truth? Or that he might one day tell the truth?’ Coram sat quite still, the setting sun now shining directly into his blinded eyes. ‘Someone tried to kill him today, in the caisson below the rig. A free diver, a pool attendant called Kersk, one of Tad Atkins’ men. But then Tad Atkins is one of your men. We’ve just checked on his job application and you provided the reference, and you were a councillor back then – a man of influence. So he owed you everything.

  ‘You’ll know Tad is dead. Suicide. Death seems to haunt you, Mr Coram. You think this is all about honour and friendship, I suspect. But it’s blackmail really. And it all started that night you took the Lagan out to sea and spotted a listing Dutch coaster. Do you regret the events of that night, Mr Coram?’

  ‘This is fantasy,’ said Coram, his lips set murderously straight. ‘Thomas, can you get me the chief constable’s office, please. Just mention my name.’

  Tom Coram stood by the lift doors, his arms folded, but he didn’t move, and for the first time Shaw wondered about their relationship, and the extent to which the son was merely another of the father’s unwilling foot soldiers.

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Shaw. ‘But you might as well wait and hear me out. Whoever it was who found Tad’s body, in the pool, lying in his blood – nearly all of his blood – was understandably shocked. A young environmental health officer, I think. She called the emergency services. And the news spread quickly, of course. It’s a small town … Who did you send round?’ Tom Coram stared out into the dying light. ‘It was only when CID visited the scene that they discovered the building had not been adequately secured. It looked as if the office had been ransacked. Did someone suspect a note had been left, an inconvenient confession? Clearly, they didn’t find it as his bedsit was broken into, trashed.

  ‘Actually, there was a note at the pool, in plain sight. My sergeant here found it. There was a PC in the office – actually on Kersk’s desk, because Tad couldn’t deal with the digital age, could he? Loved telling people he still used pen and ink. That wasn’t quite the truth. The screen was blank, of course. Easy mistake to make, thinking it was off. My sergeant simply touched the space bar. The computer wasn’t off; it was asleep. Tad wouldn’t have expected that – he thought the note would be there for all to see.’

  Shaw took a printout from his inside pocket, unfolded it, and placed it on Coram’s desk under a brass anglepoise lamp which had incised a golden circle on the wooden surface. ‘That’s a copy. It tells us all we need to know.’

  ‘But doesn’t prove he wrote it.’

  ‘Right. Yes, if you’re going to cling to something, try that. In the meantime, some of our forensic technicians are down at the pool, and others are at the bedsit. Modern science is a wonderful thing, and we live in hope. Three officers are downstairs now with a warrant to search these premises.’

  Valentine, stepping forward, began to shuffle the various charts on the desk until he found a large-scale Admiralty map of the Wash. The father looked at the son, and the son looked out to sea, locked in some kind of guilty triangle.

  ‘Which brings us to motive,’ said Shaw. ‘Underlying motive, fundamental motive. Good word, fundamental – same root as founder, which brings us back to the sea, and the Calabria – and the Lagan, of course.’r />
  ‘I told you what happened that night,’ said Coram, his blind eyes searching the desktop, until Valentine realized he wanted a drink: an empty wine glass stood next to a bottle of Merlot. The DS poured out a glass and set it by the old man, whose fingers encircled the stem carefully before he raised it to his lips.

  ‘Yes, you did. But Captain Ring told us a different story, involving a failed attempt to salvage the Calabria by force. And then today we came across another version of the story which was much more disquieting. Do you know what I think happened? I think you went aboard and they fought back, and you either killed them or injured them to such an extent that they couldn’t get off the ship. Or did you lock them below? Is that it?’

  ‘Is this true?’ asked the son, broken from his trance at last.

  ‘Shut up,’ said the old man, inadvertently spitting on the polished tabletop.

  Shaw walked to the window. ‘Which means that out there the bodies of these men still lie in the wreck of the Calabria – proof of your act of murderous piracy, a dishonourable crime.’

  ‘You might like to repeat that allegation in public.’

  ‘I’ll take the allegations in the order of my own choosing, Mr Coram. We’ll start with blackmail, and then move on to conspiracy to murder. It will be several months yet before we get to the Calabria. We need to find it, or at least what’s left. A wooden five-hundred-ton coaster in deep water – impossible to find in 1953, but today? That’s what was so dangerous about Dirk Hartog’s visit, of course. If wreckage from the ship was coming ashore, what might follow? Bones?

  ‘Which brings me to the real puzzle …’ Choosing a marine chart, he briefly scanned the depths marked, the hachured sand banks, the maze-like channels. ‘Why are you obsessed with stopping the construction of the pier?’ Coram didn’t move, so Shaw slid the Cook’s glass over the map, magnifying the features. ‘The inquest accepted the accident report which placed the sinking of the Calabria here …’ He placed his finger at a spot out in the deep water. ‘But the lifeboat crew thought the ship sank here …’ A mile and half north lay the edge of Roaring Island. ‘Dirk Hartog planned a trip out to the island. He was on the trail of the Calabria. What led him there? My guess is he talked to some of the local fishermen. The island’s a graveyard of flotsam and jetsam; I think he hoped to find more wreckage. It’s a lonely spot, well away from the deep water channel. But it’s not going to be quite so lonely if they build the pier – is it? A pier and a ferry service across the Wash, snaking through those long-forgotten channels. Is that what you’re afraid of, Mr Coram? That one day they’ll find the Calabria? Perhaps a winter’s storm will reveal it once again? The fear is still alive, isn’t it? The fear that someone will find her, and look in her hold?’