Death Toll

by Jim Kelly

  Twine worked at the laptop, the screen went blank and one of the DCs in the dark whistled. Then the screen lit up again. The face – slightly distorted by magnification – was wide and belligerent, caught in the middle of a snarl. It was Freddie Fletcher.

  ‘Let’s see if we can get names for the rest of the men at that table, Paul,’ said Shaw. ‘Can we see the shot without Venn again?’

  Twine had it up instantly. The crowded group of skinheads at the table was still there, but the camera angle was different, three men nearest the camera blocking the view, playing cards, concealing the spot where Fletcher had sat.

  ‘Run it forward,’ said Shaw.

  For a minute the table was in shot but they couldn’t see whether Fletcher was still at his seat. Then the camera moved, taking up a wider angle to one side, so that the skinheads were no longer in shot at all.

  ‘Damn,’ said Shaw, taking his seat. ‘And the third thing you want to show us?’

  ‘Lizzie Murray, sir. Well, Lizzie Tilden then, it would have been. They gave her a framed photo – of Nora with the choir. Here.’

  The image froze, then broke into pixels before reforming and flowing on. Lizzie stood on the little stage, most of the men in the room on their feet, clapping.

  Again, a whistle from the dark. ‘She’s amazing,’ said Shaw. Her figure was sinuous, in a simple black dress, the black hair loose. Of the starched stiffness of the woman she’d become there was no hint. She rubbed the palm of her hand down the line of her waist and hip. The noise of the applause seemed to unsettle her, the smile a nervous one. Shaw thought she was an exotic figure, the only female in the shot, her young face an almost painful contrast to those around her. At one point she looked to the door marked STAFF, but it was closed.

  Twine ran the film back, but too far, so that Lizzie Tilden was gone. ‘Sorry – I’ll run up to that image if you like.’

  The image of the choir returned, the choirmaster speaking …

  ‘Thank you. Thank you. It’s been wonderful for us to sing here tonight for Nora. She was a real friend to the choir and we’ve always felt this is our home.’ There was a perfunctory round of applause and someone said something on Fletcher’s table that caused a scandalized hushing. The choirmaster looked around, searching faces at the back of the room. ‘We have something for Lizzie – but I understand she’s gone to ground.’ There was a shout from the back of the room. ‘Is she there?’

  Applause filled the room, genuine this time, the volume sustained.

  Lizzie stepped up on the stage and accepted the framed photo. ‘Thanks. I know Nora loved the choir, and their singing. I’m sure you know you’ll always be welcome here.’ The choir applauded that – and Shaw realized that was the point. That the choir had turned out to perform in order to stake their claim. This had been their home while Nora was in charge. They wanted the same commitment from Lizzie, and they’d got it.

  Lizzie’s voice rang out again. ‘She used to say that when the choir was here it was the one time the Flask really came alive.’ She turned to the choir. ‘You made her very happy.’

  The room was silent, waiting to see what she’d say about her mother, and whether she’d say anything about her father. Cigarette smoke drifted from hands, swirled round spotlights. Shaw had to remind himself that this was a wake, that the woman they’d gathered to honour had died just a few feet away, through that door marked staff, murdered by her husband.

  ‘Some of you sang with her, didn’t you? Years ago. She had a good voice. It was a shame we didn’t hear it more often.’ There was a scattering of applause. ‘Well, we won’t hear her again now.’

  Shaw thought she was struggling to bring emotion, any emotion, into the little speech.

  She looked at the picture they’d given her. ‘But this is how she’d have wanted us to remember her.’ Applause again, a voice crying out, ‘A song!’

  But she held up her hands. ‘Not me. I inherited a lot from Mother, but not her voice.’

  There was laughter again, dutiful, confused. ‘A toast …’ She held up a small green glass. ‘To Nora.’

  Relief flooded the room, feet stamped and they all stood, drinking and clapping. Lizzie left the stage through the Moorish arch to the bar. Matches flared as fresh cigarettes were lit.

  Twine tapped away at the laptop. ‘Do you want to see the whole thing?’ he asked Shaw.

  ‘Please, Paul. First – coffee. Updates?’

  The neon flickered back on as they refilled mugs.

  ‘One thing,’ said Mark Birley. ‘I had a look back through the log book at St James’s to see if there were any incidents in the last year in or near the cemetery. In June, the eighteenth, there was a report from one of the houses overlooking the graveyard – on Gladstone Street: lights at night. The incident sheet has the time down as three fifteen a.m. Woman up with a sick teenage daughter. Said she looked out the balcony window and saw a cluster of lights – two, maybe three, over down by the river. Her brother-in-law’s on traffic. She rang him, he rang the incident room. They got a car out, and the cemetery warden who had the keys for the gates. The archaeologists had started by then, so there were open graves, some digging gear. Best guess was it was someone trying to lift some of the plant. Anyway, no trace by the time they got there. But they went back – it was on the squad-car schedule for a month. They’d check twice, three times, a night. Nothing.’

  ‘OK,’ said Shaw. ‘Let’s get the notes on that call. And we need to talk to the cemetery warden. How’d these characters get into the cemetery – given they’re probably carrying spades and lanterns? Or did they borrow the tools – or take them? Let’s check that out with the Direct Labour boys and the Cambridge unit …Anything else?’

  Lizzie Murray and Bea Garrison had already put together a list of all those they thought had been at Nora Tilden’s graveside – and later at the wake. DC Twine said he’d try to match the lists with the film, see whether there was anyone they’d missed. The rest of the team would continue interviewing those people still alive who’d been at either the wake or the funeral or both. Two key questions for them all: had they seen Patrice Garrison leaving the pub that night, and had they seen anyone leaving at around the same time. Shaw reckoned they could clear the list in twenty-four hours: then they could liaise, get a 3D picture of the night.

  ‘While all that’s in train let’s get Sam Venn off the street and down to St James’s,’ said Shaw. ‘We need to get him on the record telling us he was in the pub till closing time. Then we show him this. He wanted to know if he was a suspect. Well, he is now.’

  For an hour they watched the Flask coming alive again on film. The colour was poor, the film quality patchy, but the atmosphere was perfectly rendered: a close-knit community coming together to celebrate a life lived amongst them. Nora Tilden had been born in the Flask, and she died on its wooden stairs. She’d given birth to two children in a bedroom with a view over the cemetery in which she and her lost child would lie. These people may have despised her, ignored her, or even hated her – but they’d lived their lives with her. By the time the choir sang the last song the whole room was on its feet, the sound thunderous, making the soundtrack crackle.

  From his viewing of the film Shaw had made two mental notes. First, in the break between the two choral sessions, sandwiches and food had been served by five people: Lizzie, two men Shaw didn’t recognize and two women he did. The first was Kath Robinson, the second was George Valentine’s sister, Jean. He must prompt his DS to track her down.

  Second, and more importantly, when Patrice Garrison had come into the room, or at least stood on its threshold, he had at first indeed been ignored by everyone except those at Fletcher’s table. But then someone else had noticed him, a man standing by the stage, cradling a pint. He had long black hair, swept back, a fine pointed face and a thin poised body, which he held stylishly, one leg angled behind him so that the sole of his shoe rested against the wall. With his free hand he kept the beat; over his shoulder was
draped a white dishcloth. In a room of hard faces it was an outsider’s face: watching, not taking part. He wore a T-shirt, the front of which carried a slightly faded picture of Elvis Costello. When this young man did notice Garrison he didn’t take his eyes off him, not once, until he turned and left. And despite the intervening twenty-eight years Shaw had little trouble putting a name to the troubling face: it was John Joe Murray, later to be Lizzie’s husband, a surrogate father to Ian and landlord of the Flask.

  18

  The cellar of the Flask was a barrelled vault, with a shuttered watergate at one end leading out to the river. The brickwork had been plastered and whitewashed, the barrels raised on stone stoops on either side. A central gutter ran to the river, a sluggish trickle of stale beer foaming slightly. Shaw noted a plastic rat trap. He watched as John Joe Murray drank a pint of bitter drawn directly from the barrel he’d just tapped.

  ‘Perks,’ he said, sitting on the stoop, his legs straight out to reach the other stoop. Shaw wondered how many hours he’d spent there, perfecting this exact position for maximum comfort. He tried not to judge John Joe as Ian, his stepson, had done. He didn’t bring judgement, he brought questions. Had John Joe married Lizzie for love or fortune? Had he become a father to the infant Ian out of love for his mother, or expediency? Had he taken the chance that fate had given him to become Lizzie’s husband – or had he tried to force Patrice Garrison to leave? Could he have murdered him that night in 1982 to get her? Now, nearly thirty years later, it seemed impossible that this greying, diminished man had followed his rival out into the night and driven a billhook into his skull. But Shaw recalled the image on the cine film they’d all watched – the murderous look in the young John Joe’s eyes as he contemplated Pat Garrison, cradling his glass, surveying the back room at the Flask like an estate agent assessing a property ripe for development.

  ‘What’s this about?’ asked John Joe. He ran a hand along his hair to the black pigtail band and pulled it clear, letting the lifeless tresses flop over either ear. It reminded Shaw of one of Lena’s many fashion edicts: that no man over twenty looks good in a ponytail. John Joe rubbed the green guitar tattoo on his throat and the friction brought a flush to his pallid skin. His face had not aged well – narrow, fleshless faces seldom do. The bone structure, the feline cheekbones, were pushing out beneath the dry skin.

  Shaw studied John Joe while DC Birley asked a list of routine questions about the night of Nora Tilden’s wake. Shaw tried to concentrate on the answers but kept thinking about the still-missing Jimmy Voyce. George Valentine had radioed the incident room shortly after the screening of the DVD. They’d found Voyce’s hire car, burnt out, in a lane near Holkham, up on the coast. No sign of Voyce. Valentine would set up a couple of search units to check the area, then come back to Lynn. Tom Hadden’s team were on their way to the scene. Shaw didn’t know what that abandoned car signified, but he was pretty sure it didn’t improve the likelihood of Jimmy Voyce being alive.

  While the questions continued Shaw also checked a text from DC Twine. Sam Venn had been taken down to St James’s and cautioned before repeating his statement that he’d been singing with the choir at the Flask all evening on the night of Nora Tilden’s wake. He’d left at closing time and walked home. They were now showing him the film of that night they’d watched on DVD in the incident room. He’d text again with Venn’s reaction to the proof that he was lying.

  Above their heads they could hear footfalls, furniture being hauled over the quarry-tile floor as preparations were made for the opening of the inquest into the death of Pat Garrison.

  Birley finished questioning Murray. They had a brief outline of his movements that night: he hadn’t gone to the funeral because he didn’t like Nora Tilden and she didn’t like him. The year before her death he’d tried to get a spot at the Flask for his band but she’d stuck with the choirs, folk music, nothing electric. He’d come along to the wake because he knew the crack would be good and because Lizzie said they needed people to collect glasses, wash up, if things got really busy, and he needed the cash. There’d been food, and at the end a free drink or two. He’d lingered, talking to friends, and wandered home about midnight to his parents’ house in Gayton, a leafy suburb. He’d been born and raised in South Lynn, but his father had got a better job and they’d moved up in the world. Up and out. He had his own key so hadn’t woken them up that night when he got home.

  He’d been there all evening, in the back room? No – he hadn’t seen the choir’s second session because he’d found the atmosphere stifling, fevered; so he’d gone out on the riverside stoop to smoke in the crisp November air. That’s all he could remember – except that he had talked to Pat Garrison, information he volunteered before he’d been asked. There was a gig coming up at the Lattice House and he’d asked Pat if he’d come along because the tickets weren’t selling. Pat said he would – he liked John Joe’s music and he’d heard the band at the festival on The Walks that summer.

  ‘The kid knew his music,’ said John Joe. ‘Graham Parker, Ian Dury – that’s the kind of thing we were into. And he got it, which is more than the losers here did. No, Pat was OK. I liked the kid.’

  Which was odd, thought Shaw, because no on else seemed to have liked him. He’d been variously described to them as arrogant and selfish. It was illustrative that John Joe had felt the need to point out that he was perhaps alone in valuing the young man’s company.

  John Joe stood, walked the central gutter between the barrels, his boots in the bubbling spilt beer, to a door at the opposite end to the watergate, and pushing it open stood back to let them see. Beyond was another vaulted cellar, but the brickwork here was lost behind stippled soundproofing board.

  ‘Wedding present from Lizzie – sound studio. We cut a disc, tried the labels, but they all passed. Everyone’s got a dream, right? This was mine.’

  Shaw could almost hear it, as if the brick walls were a solid-state tape, replaying those years again, the countless demos, the draining repetitive sessions, the dream slowly fading, until one day they’d all convinced themselves they’d never shared one, that it was just a hobby, a way of staying sane. That it had all been for fun.

  ‘Did you know Mrs Murray well then – in 1982?’ asked Birley. The narrow vaulted space of the cellar seemed to accentuate the DC’s muscled bulk. He stood, his backbone curved to match the wall, taking up too much space.

  ‘Lizzie? Went to school with her. Fancied her then, along with most of my mates and half the town. She stopped the traffic, that girl. Still stops mine.’

  John Joe flipped open a wallet to reveal a black-and-white snapshot – Lizzie, in a bikini on a sandy beach, her legs folded underneath her. ‘That’s Lizzie – twenty-first birthday. Talk about turning heads.’ He let his eyes linger on the picture, but Shaw noticed instead the ticket tucked into the other side of the wallet – the charity Christmas lunch at the Shipwrights’ Hall.

  John Joe let the door to the old studio close.

  ‘And you were married when?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘In 1983 – the summer. Ninth of June. Just after she’d had Ian.’

  ‘That’s quick work,’ said Birley.

  John Joe gave him an old-fashioned look. ‘Yeah. Well, I tried my luck with Lizzie – a few times. When Nora died we were going out, but that kind of faded away. No hard feelings. It happens. When she fell pregnant, when the baby arrived, I understood why she’d been different that summer. I went back – told her I didn’t care what had happened. That I could live with that if she could. Ian’s my son. Has been pretty much from the day he was born. So that’s our story. You got it now. Satisfied?’

  Birley didn’t flinch. ‘Did you try your luck that night – the night of the wake?’

  Shaw admired Birley’s direct approach, and he couldn’t help thinking John Joe’s indignation at the question was manufactured.

  He shook his head and walked to the watergate, unbolting the two quarter-circle doors. The light flooded in with the c
old, straight off the water, which lapped at the stone edge. They all stepped out on the stone wharf. The tide was full. On the water bobbed a small sailing boat, clinker-built, covered in with a tarpaulin, the one that Shaw had seen the day before, moored to a single bollard.

  ‘The beer came in this way back in the eighties – always had done, I guess. Now the cellar floods once a year, sometimes more. We’ll have to do something about it – God knows what.’

  He dipped the toe of his boot in the grey water. Across the river was the brick river frontage of the cannery. Shaw thought again of the Shipwrights’ Hall Christmas dinner, the promise of ‘local fare’.

  ‘The boat?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘Mine. I fish – up along the coast, days off. It’s an escape. Used to take Ian when he was a kid.’

  Shaw wondered what he’d had to escape from.

  ‘One last question, Mr Murray,’ said Shaw. ‘Did you suspect that Lizzie and Pat were an item before the wake?’

  John Joe spat in the water. ‘Others did – coupla my mates said later they knew. But me – no.’

  The sailing boat nudged the quay, unsettled by the wake of a passing tug.

  ‘I tell you what I did know, mind …’ He smiled, tapping a finger to his temple. ‘Still laugh about it. I knew about the baby. She looked incredible that night – Lizzie. Like I said, she was a stunner anyway, but that night, Nora’s wake, she just kind of radiated something.’ He shook his head, eyes closed, as if to see her more clearly. ‘Everyone was watching her that night. It was her mother’s wake, for Christ’s sake. But everyone knew where her sympathies lay. She loved her father. I’m not sure she felt anything about Nora. I never saw them swap a word that wasn’t …’ he hesitated, looking for the right word, ‘businesslike. So she kind of bottled up her real emotions. But there was something in her eyes. Just amazing. I’ve got sisters – I’ve seen it before. It’s like her whole face was plugged into some kind of power supply. I thought – there’s a baby. I didn’t say it – but I knew. And you know what? I bet I wasn’t the only one.’