Death Toll Page 9

  The little ceremony of welcome didn’t include saying anything, while his right hand picked out a complicated beat to match the track playing through the speakers.

  ‘Coffee?’ asked Shaw, nodding at a well-used Italian coffee machine. He ordered an espresso. Campbell went for fizzy water. Valentine got a second pint on Shaw’s round. As the barman pulled it Shaw noted a wedding ring and a bronze bracelet.

  ‘Landlady around?’ asked Shaw, laying his warrant card on the bar.

  The smile on the barman’s face fell like a calving iceberg. Behind the bar was a small wooden door, as narrow as a coffin. The barman inched it open. ‘Lizzie,’ he shouted. They heard footsteps on the wooden floor above.

  ‘What?’ asked a disembodied voice.

  ‘Police, Lizzie. They want a word.’

  ‘I’ll be five.’

  Everyone pretended to relax. Another customer came in – a pensioner in a threadbare jacket, shirt and tie. The barman pulled a pint without asking what he wanted, holding the finished article up against the light to check its clarity.

  He turned to set up the coffee machine for Shaw’s espresso. ‘So, what’s up?’ he asked over his shoulder. ‘Postman said you’d found something in one of the graves – something you shouldn’t have. That right?’ Shaw noted that as the barman set aside the crockery he held it with both hands, one on the rim of the small cup, one on the saucer.

  ‘I’m sorry – you are … ?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘John Joe Murray,’ he said. ‘It’s over the door. I’m the landlord.’

  ‘Ali, at the shop,’ said the man in the threadbare jacket, butting in, ‘he says it’s one of those Polish immigrants. Ali says they cut him up, in bits.’ He extended a purple bottom lip to the edge of his pint glass.

  ‘Ali’s talking out of his arse,’ said Valentine, reaching for his pint, then stopping himself. He was nearly at the bottom. Then his mobile rang and he got up and went into the back bar, which had once – he guessed – accommodated a full-sized billiards table, because a raised platform that had run around it for chairs and tables was still there, but it had all been cleared away to make a dining room. Each table was neatly laid for a meal. In one corner on a plinth was a gold Buddha, glowing against the polished dark wood.

  Shaw and Campbell took a seat in one of the bay windows in the bar, the river at their backs. Valentine came back in, still rolling his shoulders to get rid of the morning’s damp. He waved the mobile at Shaw. ‘Voyce took the hired car out to the Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital to visit Chris Robins. Bit late – even for his funeral. He left flowers and fruit juice with the ward sister – so clearly Robins’s death was all news to him. Makes you wonder why, though. What did he think Robins could tell him? Anyway – it shook him up. He drove back, dumped the car, then bought a bottle of vodka from an offy on the London Road and drank it in the park. Then he walked back to the hotel and phoned Mosse.’

  Campbell looked bemused as they beamed at each other.

  Shaw thought about Chris Robins. An original member of Bobby Mosse’s little teenage gang, who’d lived a life of petty crime and diminishing mental powers until he’d been sectioned under the Mental Health Act.

  ‘What did he say?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘Didn’t use the phone in the room – he’s got a mobile. We’re trying to trace it. But we heard his end of the conversation: he said he was in town seeing family, thought they should catch up on old times.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Pier at Hunstanton – six tomorrow night.’

  ‘It’s all shut up.’

  ‘I guess. They’ll go somewhere – a pub? Car?’

  ‘OK. We need to be there. Sort it, George.’

  Shaw watched Valentine’s narrow back as he retreated to the bar, downed the rest of his pint, then left, holding the lapels of his raincoat tight to his throat, braced for the cold outside. Campbell shifted uneasily in her seat, aware she’d been shut out of something but equally aware she shouldn’t try to muscle her way into another inquiry.

  They heard a door hinge scream and turned to see a woman appear behind the bar, through the coffin-top door, coolly assessing the clientele while trying to get an earring in place: a diamond stud just catching the light. She was about John Joe Murray’s age, but her hair was still a lustrous black, like a patent-leather shoe. Her face looked hard, but not effortlessly so. Shaw thought she betrayed not the slightest remnant of the DNA which had built the face of her mother, Nora Tilden. This face was a fine one, sculptural, like a ship’s figurehead. Keeping her eyes on Shaw and Campbell she let her hand rise to find a switch she knew was there, and a one-armed bandit in the corner flickered into life.

  ‘Someone wants to see me?’ she asked, resting a hand on the bar, demanding an answer, radiating the kind of self-assurance that women rarely feel in a pub bar unless they own it. Her voice helped: it was furred by nicotine and had an edge, like corrugated paper. She rearranged one of the bar towels, again without looking at it, and Shaw reminded himself that she’d probably spent her entire life in this building, and that she must know every nail and latch, like a ship’s cabin.

  John Joe nodded at Shaw. ‘Coffee, love?’

  She didn’t answer but glanced up at the optics behind the bar, which seemed to be a signal. A crew of four men came in, all in overalls. John Joe turned away to serve them.

  Lizzie Murray flipped up the bar top and walked to Shaw’s table. She had a good figure still, a narrow waist, and something of a catwalk step. She wore black trousers and a fitted top with a V-neck, in butterscotch, and practical plain court shoes. As she walked she smoothed down the material, and Shaw noted the absence of a visible panty line, imagining something in Lycra beneath, comfortable and snug. When she sat he saw a necklace in gold, again with a single diamond.

  ‘Is there somewhere private?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘Not really,’ she said, sitting. She licked at the pearly lipstick at the corner of her mouth. ‘This’ll do. Sorry – it’s just that Mondays are hell. Brewery delivers at noon – then comes the frozen food for the week. So …’ She briefly held Shaw’s good eye. Hers were green, like her husband’s, but flecked with brown and blue, catching the Victorian colours of the bar’s windows. ‘What’s this about?’

  Shaw wondered if she was like this with everyone she met. Despite her manners, which were coolly professional, she radiated an almost tangible sense that she didn’t have time to waste.

  John Joe brought her a drink, a gin with ice, lots of ice, so that you couldn’t see how much spirit was in the glass. Shaw watched her raise it to her lips and sip. The glass was green, with an etched drawing on it of a whaling scene. DC Campbell went to speak but Shaw, almost imperceptibly, shook his head.

  ‘It’s about your mother …’ said Shaw.

  ‘The cemetery?’

  ‘You’ll know the graves are being emptied and the bones reinterred because of the flooding. You’d have had a letter about it, from the council?’

  She shrugged. ‘Maybe. So what?’

  ‘I wanted to talk to you about her death – specifically, the funeral. I realize that might be painful …’

  ‘Not particularly,’ she said. ‘We weren’t close.’

  ‘OK,’ said Shaw, taking her answer in his stride. ‘I just need to know what happened that night of the wake. She was murdered, your mother – by your father. There must have been tensions. Did anything boil over? Anyone have too much to drink, perhaps? We understand there were two black men at the graveside – from your mother’s church. Did they come back to the pub? Were they welcome?’

  She looked out at the Russian trawler which was venting water, taking a swig from the glass, letting one of the ice cubes click against her teeth. ‘I don’t know about tensions. Dad was in Lincoln – they’d held on to Mother’s body until after the trial.’

  Shaw noted the clash of idioms: ‘Dad’ – but ‘Mother’.

  ‘She’d been dead for months. The family all came – her side – t
he Melvilles, but nobody from the Tildens. There’d have been a riot, so they kept away. It was a party. Sorry, but that’s the truth. I don’t remember anyone from the church staying late, black or white. We don’t run a colour bar – now or then. There’d have been no trouble. They might have been here earlier, I suppose. I was upstairs with Mother’s friends from the church. We gave them tea, sandwiches. I left Bea in charge behind the bar.’

  ‘Bea?’

  ‘Mother’s sister. She came back to look after me when they took Dad away. Well …’ She looked at her empty drink. ‘I was nineteen, so I didn’t really need looking after. She came back because she was a widow, and she was lonely. But it was a big help – having her around. Dad phoned her, from Bedford when he was on remand, asked her to help. That’s what family’s for.’ She caught Shaw’s eye but couldn’t hold his gaze, looking away instantly. ‘After that, she stayed. She runs a B&B up on the coast at Wells.’ Shaw thought she was lying, or only telling them a facet of the truth, and that in some people that became a practised skill – concealing reality behind a screen of small, partial, truths.

  She drained melted ice from the glass, rattling what was left, and glanced at the bar. The drink had brought colour to her face to go with the hint of blusher she’d applied. John Joe was looking at her directly and nodded once, coming over with another identical drink in an identical etched green glass.

  Campbell had slipped out her notebook and they could hear her pen scratching over the paper.

  ‘Look – what is this about? I’ve got a pub to run.’

  ‘Just a few questions,’ said Shaw, sipping the espresso, which was excellent: potent and bitter. He retrieved his sketch pad from the leather satchel he’d brought with him and set it on the table top, closed.

  ‘I wanted to show you something,’ he said. ‘Something we found in your mother’s grave. On top of your mother’s coffin …’

  She ran the top of her tongue along her upper lip, and Shaw noticed how hurriedly she’d applied the lipstick, so that it spilt beyond the vermilion border, the dividing line between the skin and the fleshy tissue around the mouth. He briefly tried to imagine what it was like to look at that face in a mirror each morning, thinking about going downstairs to face the customers, most of whom she’d probably known all her life. This was a woman, he thought, who lived her life in public.

  ‘We found another body in your mother’s grave,’ he said. ‘Bones.’ He watched her fingers tighten around the glass. ‘He – it’s the remains of a man – would have been thrown into the grave, we think, possibly shortly after your mother was buried. Perhaps that very day, or the next, before the gravediggers filled it in.’

  She looked over Shaw’s shoulder and he half turned to see her husband standing behind them. ‘Ian can run the bar,’ he said, sliding onto the settle beside his wife, but their bodies didn’t touch.

  Shaw flipped the pages of the sketch book until he got to the facial reconstruction he’d finished that morning in DCS Warren’s office.

  She fished out a pair of reading glasses and took the piece of cartridge paper, snapping it once so that it stood upright in her hand.

  ‘This is a very rough idea of what he might have looked like,’ said Shaw. ‘You probably won’t recognize the face – but try to see if it reminds you of someone. Anyone.’

  She nodded several times. Blood drained from her skin, as if she’d been turned into a monochrome snapshot. ‘God,’ she said. But it wasn’t an exclamation, just a statement. Her husband took one corner of the piece of paper. Her eyes flooded and her body slumped, so that she seemed to shrink. ‘Oh, God,’ she said, again, still staring at the image. John Joe put an arm round her, drawing her upright. She half-turned to look at the bar. It was such an extraordinary look in her eyes – a kind of bitter pity, that Shaw turned to follow her gaze. The barman was in his late twenties, close-shaven hair, a symmetrical handsome face, a cook’s white smock, and skin the colour of Caramac chocolate: like golden syrup, as exotic in the Flask as the vase of pale orchids.

  10

  Lizzie Murray led them behind the bar, and she managed to close the coffin-lid door behind her before she fainted, kneeling then keeling, so that her head came to rest quite gently on the bottom step of the stairs. Her husband sat with her while DC Campbell fetched a glass of water. Shaw sat halfway up the flight of wooden steps, the steps down which this woman’s mother had fallen, bones breaking with each twist of her brittle body. They made her drink, then John Joe carried her up. Ian, the barman, watching from below, was told to mind the bar until noon, then take over in the kitchen, and he should call Aunt Bea, tell her to come, tell her she needed to be with the family.

  ‘It’s all right, Ian,’ said John Joe. ‘Just get Bea – then we’ll explain.’

  They sat Lizzie on a tattered floral sofa in the sitting room of the Flask, looking out through two identical bay windows at the river, now filling with the tide, the mudbanks shrinking. From below they could hear the sounds of the bar: a tape playing Elvis Costello, the clunk of pool balls, and from the kitchen the crackle of a deep fat fryer.

  The room they were in was a collection of an achronisms: an Artexed ceiling, a Victorian chandelier and peeling fake Regency wallpaper: Shaw guessed it had been used for functions over the years, an endless unbroken series of wedding receptions, parties and christenings – and, no doubt, the wake for the members of the Free Church after the funeral of Nora Tilden, while downstairs the real party was waiting to begin.

  The furniture was out of scale: the modern sofa and two armchairs lost in the space, the disconnect between the room and its furniture driven home by the fireplace, which was big enough for an ox-roasting. A flat-screen TV sat on a flat-pack unit. Next to it was a small table upon which stood an electric kettle, cups, sachets – Shaw was reminded of a B&B’s tea-making kit A birdcage hung from a gilded wrought-iron stand; the bird within was white and hit the same note rhythmically, like an alarm clock.

  Lizzie drank coffee and more water, and seemed not to notice that they were all watching her. The touch of mascara on her upper lashes had run. She set Shaw’s sketch on the coffee table and every few seconds adjusted it slightly, as if it had three dimensions and she might see more if she altered the angle.

  ‘I’ve got to tell Ian,’ she said eventually to John Joe, and the thought seemed to release the tears, bringing her eyes alight.

  ‘Christ, Lizzie – just take a moment,’ said John Joe, shaking his head. ‘Bea can tell him – she’s on her way.’

  ‘Who is this?’ asked Shaw, impatient, tapping the sketch.

  She wiped her lips, smudging the lipstick.

  ‘It’s Patrice – Pat – Aunt Bea’s son. My cousin. Bea married a GI – a black GI. She brought Pat back when she came home from the States to look after me. Pat was twenty.’ She looked at her hands, the fingers working in knots. She looked at Shaw’s picture with a kind of fond fear.

  ‘And Ian?’ asked Campbell. ‘The barman?’

  ‘Yes – Ian’s his son.’

  Shaw let the silence stretch out until she answered the question they hadn’t asked.

  ‘And I’m his mother.’ Her chin came up then, rekindling the figurehead defiance, daring them to tell her it had been wrong. Shaw worked it out: she’d have been nineteen, maybe twenty. They were cousins – first cousins. In some areas of the States the relationship would have been illegal on three counts: age, race and consanguinity. And here in Lynn, in 1982, it would have raised a few eyebrows too, not least in the God-fearing Melville family. Shaw thought about Alby Tilden and his lost years at sea, and the tattooed image he’d brought back home. Lizzie had grown up in a house where the issue of race was a toxic one: a running sore on the family’s collective skin.

  They heard a car engine ticking outside the pub’s front door and a minute later Aunt Bea was with them. Shaw knew she had to be in her late sixties, but she looked and moved like a fifty-year-old; a bustling, sinewy woman, with grey hair cut short b
ut expertly. She wore knee-high brown leather boots and woollen tights under a knitted skirt, and she had a vivid blue pashmina wrapped round her neck. No necklace or earrings, but Shaw noticed that both hands bristled with silver rings.

  Of Nora, her sister, there was hardly an echo. Shaw worked out a rough age difference – the two sisters would have been born more than a decade apart. But the resemblance to Lizzie was striking: two figureheads. Bea’s face was set against the world too, but it was open, challenging perhaps, and devoid of the bitter irritation that seemed to disfigure her niece.

  She came into the centre of the room, dusting snow from the shoulders of a heavy Barbour which she had already taken off. She wasn’t alone. The woman with her was Lizzie’s age, late forties, but blonde, with the kind of skin that reveals the veins beneath, especially on the high forehead, which was only partly hidden by a fringe. Unlike Lizzie she wasn’t dressed for customers, but in a pair of faded jeans and a T-shirt. Shaw sensed immediately that she was a rare woman – unaware, to some extent, of her own beauty, as if her own self-image didn’t match the reality. She hung back, one arm held awkwardly just beneath her breast. She radiated a strange anxiety, as if she perpetually thought she didn’t belong. Shaw was reminded of the embarrassed hesitancy of a teenage child.

  Aunt Bea walked forward and picked up the sketch on the table. Shaw noted that she hadn’t even looked at Lizzie. ‘John Joe told me,’ she said. ‘It’s true?’ she asked, looking at Shaw and then, finally, at her niece. Shaw noted she wore no make-up except a dash of concealer, and a smudge of foundation on her cheek, perhaps to cover a liver spot.

  Shaw showed his warrant card.

  ‘I’m Bea Garrison – Lizzie’s aunt.’ Her voice still held the unmistakable twang of the American Midwest. ‘This is my son,’ she added, gripping the sheet of paper so tightly it buckled. She flattened the vowel in ‘son’ – making it rhyme with run. The other woman, whom nobody had bothered to introduce, had slipped round behind the sofa and put a hand on each of Lizzie’s shoulders.