Death Toll

by Jim Kelly

  The first flight of the narrow stairs of the Flask took Shaw up to the room in which they’d first interviewed Lizzie Murray and Bea Garrison. Shaw had counted the steps – eighteen – aware that each one had helped to shatter the bones of Nora Tilden. The wood itself was worn and as black and stained as a ship’s beam. The first-floor landing was panelled in the same wood, a narrow doorway giving on to a second flight which led up to the attic. There were two attic rooms: to the left, Ian’s bedroom, said Lizzie; to the right Alby and Nora’s old room – now used largely for storage. The door here was more like a hatch, a hinged flap that you had to step through into the room beyond, which had six dormer windows, three looking over the river, three over the cemetery. Light flooded in from a streetlight by the cemetery gates. Over their heads they could hear seagulls scratching at the tiles. The room held a double bed, some shelves, a wooden cot and an old stainless-steel sink unit, unconnected to any pipes.

  ‘This was their room,’ said Lizzie, reluctant to step up from the stairwell. Her voice, usually hard, had a suppressed tension that almost exactly matched her aunt’s. She too seemed to be strangely watchful, as if here, in the attic of her own home, something lay waiting, hidden. When they’d asked for her at the bar they’d been told she was resting. When she appeared they could see the sleep in her eyes, and she hadn’t added the pearl lipstick, so that her mouth looked dry, compressed, and her eyes were red, as if she’d been crying.

  ‘Staff use it now if they’re stuck here late. There’s an extra sofa bed over there,’ she indicated the far end of the room, which was in shadow. ‘Like I said, Ian’s across the way, but these days he stays with the girlfriend – she’s got her own flat.’ She looked down at the uncarpeted boards. ‘This place gives me the creeps.’

  The bed was modern, and out of scale with the room.

  Under one of the windows was a sea chest.

  Shaw walked to it, then knelt, as if before an altar. He held out the billhook in its forensic envelope. ‘This is what killed Pat that night – the night of Nora’s wake. Bea thinks it came out of the chest.’

  Lizzie walked over but didn’t take it. The colour seemed to drain out of her under the electric light, the sparky eyes reduced to speckled grey and green.

  ‘Can you open it?’ asked Shaw.

  Valentine stood at one of the other windows, looking down into the cemetery, his hand on the cot, until he remembered that Nora Tilden’s baby daughter had died in this room.

  Lizzie pulled a key ring from her pocket. The keys and the ivory fob jangled against the wood of the sea chest, but the lock was oiled, Shaw noted, and when the lid flipped back there was no dust.

  Lizzie stood back, nodding. ‘It’s Dad’s stuff from the war. Way back – twenty years ago – I had it valued. There’s an auction room in Stamford that does military stuff. It’s insured for £10,000 – that’s because of Dad’s story, of course, and the ship. I thought that Ian could decide, when the time comes.’

  ‘What time?’ asked Valentine, looking at a framed press cutting on the wall. The paper was yellow, but the picture was clear enough – a crowd on the quayside, the stunted superstructure of the Stanley moored, and the headline:

  HEROES BRING STRICKEN SHIP HOME

  ‘The time when we leave this place. Ian’s got plans – with Bea. He doesn’t want the business. So one day we’ll sell. Pack it in. Maybe sometime soon.’

  Shaw began to pick out items: the Stanley’s bell, wrapped in a cloth, the ship’s log in an oilskin pouch, a sextant, a radio, and then a wooden box, which he set to one side, feeling along the edges, trying to find a way to lift the lid.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Lizzie. ‘There’s a knack to that.’ She worked her fingers around the wood until the lid opened. Inside, set on green baize, was a revolver.

  ‘Ship’s purser’s,’ said Lizzie. ‘Dad used to bring it out, wave it about, for the crack. I don’t think it’s loaded, but you’d better check.’

  ‘It’s been polished,’ said Valentine.

  ‘Ian,’ she said. ‘He played up here as a kid and he’s proud of his grandfather. Like I said – it’s his inheritance. He looks after it.’

  Shaw handled the gun, using the cloth from the ship’s bell. It wasn’t loaded, and the mechanism was rusted, but the leather handgrip was supple with beeswax.

  ‘On the night of your mother’s wake, where were the keys?’ he asked.

  ‘Where they always were, I imagine. They hang behind the bar. There’s keys to the cellar, the spirit store, they need to be where anyone can get them. Anyone who’s on the staff.’ She looked at Shaw, then at Valentine. ‘You think someone took the keys, came up here and found that?’ She looked again at the hook, appalled. She took one step back and stumbled, reaching out a hand behind her to find the edge of the bed.

  Shaw sat beside her, and he could hear her breathing. ‘That night – of the wake – the staff would be you … ?’ Shaw recalled the cine film they’d watched at the chapel. ‘And John Joe – he helped out too, didn’t he?’

  She nodded, pulling down the skin over her cheekbones. Squaring her shoulders, she seemed to regain control of herself, but instead of answering the question she moved on. ‘And the kitchen staff. Jean Walker was in, Kath was helping – Kath Robinson – a whole gaggle of women from the church who did the food. The two Bowles brothers – they worked as barmen. They’re all on the list I gave you …’

  ‘But John Joe could have taken the key, couldn’t he?’ pressed Shaw.

  Her jaw was set straight, defiant. The idea that she might have spent nearly thirty years living with a killer didn’t seem to shock her at all, Shaw sensed. It was only, perhaps, the suggestion that she wouldn’t have known, that she’d been hoodwinked, fooled. She clutched at the blanket on the bed, crushing the material. ‘John Joe’s never really done hatred – plenty of other emotions, but never that. I think he despised Pat – a lot of men did. But he didn’t kill him.’

  They heard a door creak below and there was a footfall on the stair. Lizzie stood quickly, the clutch of keys falling to the floorboards. A voice Shaw didn’t know shouted, ‘Lizzie! We’re taking a car up the Queen Victoria – I need to leave the bar. It’s Freddie Fletcher – he’s still poorly. You want to come?’

  ‘Later,’ she said.

  Shaw had a final question.

  The Department of Work and Pensions had finally released details on its pension payments to Lizzie’s father – now aged eighty-two. The monthly pension was deposited in an account registered at the post office on the corner of Explorer Street, right here in South Lynn. A special account, with Lizzie Murray listed as an authorized signatory. Paul Twine had checked with the manager: she picked up the cash in person on the first Tuesday of every month. Including this one.

  ‘You lied to us about your father. You do know where he is – you pick up his pension.’

  Lizzie looked younger, the skin taut on the figurehead face. Shaw thought it was the stress that had peeled back the years and that she was a born fighter.

  ‘No. I said, didn’t I, that Dad just wants to be left alone. Yes, I pick up his pension. I give the cash to Bea and she gives it to him. Bea’s the one person he’ll see – it’s always been like that. She’s the go-between.’

  26

  Shaw parked the Porsche on the sandy lane that led down to the sea, a mile south of the beach house and café. He sat in the sudden silence and let the face of his mobile light his face, punching in Paul Twine’s number. In the background he could still hear voices in the incident room at the cemetery – and a computer keyboard being tapped. Two things: first, he wanted Twine to arrange a fresh interview, under caution, at St James’s for Bea Garrison. She’d lied about not knowing the whereabouts of Alby Tilden. She took him his pension. He was local – how local? Second, he wanted the latest on Freddie Fletcher’s condition, and he waited while Twine contacted the uniformed officer they’d left up at the hospital overnight. ‘Stable, but still in intensive care.’ He
felt a creeping anxiety about Freddie Fletcher’s illness. If he died he’d lose a prime suspect. And his death would prompt a pertinent question – was there any reason someone would want Fletcher dead, and if there was, could he have been murdered? The answer to the first question was revenge, if he really was Pat Garrison’s killer. The answer to the second question was surely no – unless the killer was prepared to risk murdering a hundred innocent people just to get at one man. Even then there appeared no logical reason why Fletcher should die – along with the ailing Charlie Clarke – while everyone else recovered. No, Fletcher’s illness had to be a random event. But still the creeping anxiety remained.

  Shaw killed the signal and drank in the dark and the silence. He thought about checking Flyer, but decided that was a routine he could do without. Snow lay thick in the dune grass, and along the unlit path which led down to the beach. He got out, threw his jacket on the back seat and started to run, his legs reaching out, eating up the yards. He knew that by the time he got to the edge of the dunes, the point where the beach opened out, the security floodlight on the new lifeboat house would thud on, and then – just a few feet beyond, the view north would be clear and he’d be able to see the light they always left burning on the stoop of the café.

  At that precise point he picked up speed, so that when he saw – in the sudden glare of white light – who was waiting for him, the shock made him stumble, one knee taking the strain so that he felt a pain shoot to his back.

  Robert Mosse stood on the line of dry weed and flotsam that marked the last high tide. He wore a full-length black overcoat, but his head was bare, and there were snowflakes in the luxuriant black hair, so that Shaw knew he’d been standing there for some time, waiting.

  ‘What is it – a mile?’ he asked as Shaw stopped, looking along the beach to the house. ‘You must be fit.’

  The solicitor’s face was almost completely immobile. A snapshot would have shown a handsome man: Action Man looks, lean, with a good bone structure and taut athletic skin. But in real life the effect was oddly modified by the stillness. Only the eye movements – like the eyes on a Victorian doll – showed that he was alive. He’d kept himself fit and well, because he didn’t look in his forties at all. The hair was still thick and dark, almost decadent.

  ‘Where’s Jimmy Voyce?’ asked Shaw, determined not to be kept off balance. He’d checked with Jacky Lau earlier and they’d called off the search at Holkham until daybreak – still no sign.

  Mosse wore leather gloves, and he took one off to hold in the other.

  ‘That’s why I’m here. I’ve no real basis for my concerns, but I do have concerns.’

  A wind came off the sea and Shaw shivered, the cold cutting through to his skin through the white linen shirt.

  ‘You’re cold,’ said Mosse, taking a step forward so that they were just six feet apart, pulling a scarf from around his neck and holding it out.

  ‘Voyce?’ asked Shaw, not moving.

  Mosse sighed, as if with disappointment that they couldn’t be friends.

  ‘Yes. He’s here, in Lynn – did you know?’ Mosse looked at him, and Shaw could see he’d picked his good eye to focus on. ‘We met at Hunstanton the other evening. Anyway, to cut to the chase, he tried to extort some money from me. Threatened me, actually, with violence if I didn’t give him a cheque for £10,000. I said I would consider my response. I dropped him off at his car and drove to see friends at Snettisham – they can confirm that. He left me his mobile number. I’ve sent him a text with my response – I told him I’d go to the police.’

  Shaw was thinking fast, trying to see what legal status this conversation would carry in a courtroom. It was informal, not under oath, but he’d have to admit it had taken place. He’d made a tactical error, not pulling Mosse into St James’s. The warrant had come through that evening, but he’d decided to wait one more night. Now Mosse could claim that he’d stepped forward to alert the police.

  ‘Blackmail?’

  Mosse laughed easily. ‘No, no. I’m a just man, Inspector. What could …’ he looked for the word, ‘scum like Jimmy Voyce know about me that would expose me to blackmail?’

  Shaw noted the use of ‘just’, not ‘honest’, and wondered what that signified. Perhaps Robert Mosse thought he was the judge of good and evil.

  ‘No. I had given some financial assistance to Alex Cosyns over the years. I think Alex must have told Jimmy. But Alex was an old friend, and he was in financial trouble. The money was a gift. Jimmy seemed to think he was entitled to some of the same. He said we “went back a long way”. Precise words, Inspector. And he got that wrong, because we don’t go back. I never go back. The Westmead is where I was brought up. I have moved on, but Jimmy couldn’t see that.’

  ‘He went out to see Chris Robins – at the hospital. Just like you did.’

  Mosse pursed his lips, checked his watch.

  ‘I thought you should know that Voyce threatened me with violence – as I have said – and that he added that if I didn’t pay up he’d go back to New Zealand, but he’d make sure he left us with a reminder that I’d let down an old friend. I wasn’t the only old friend he’d looked up, you see. He’d gone to the Tulleys. He seemed to think they owed him something too – a very dangerous misunderstanding.’

  Shaw knew the family: three brothers, a Westmead legend, making decent money from a protection racket which had been running for the best part of thirty years. Violence was the currency in which they dealt – calibrated, cynical injury. They’d never faced a court on a charge of murder, but there was a list of missing persons in the file at St James’s, each one of whom had last been seen in their company. It was clear they had a reliable and efficient method for removing the unwanted.

  ‘I’ve not heard from him again,’ said Mosse. ‘You should know that. Now you do.’ He squinted along the beach towards the cottage. ‘I have a daughter too,’ he said.

  Shaw was shivering badly now, his jaw juddering. ‘I wonder what it was that Chris Robins knew, or had. Maybe I’ll find it.’

  Mosse’s face was oddly pale, and Shaw wondered where the usual winter tan had gone. He thought about telling him he’d been called to the reading of Chris Robins’s will, but held back, reminding himself that knowledge was power and that he didn’t need to squander it.

  ‘You’ve never really considered the possibility that I’m an innocent man, have you?’ said Mosse, the voice quite different – wheedling, and weak. ‘Have you thought about that? About your prejudices? I’m just a kid from the Westmead. Criminal by nature. But you don’t actually understand what that’s like – you don’t understand the loyalty that comes with a life like that. I am a loyal man. Cosyns, Voyce, Robins – they were my friends. They did something I can’t forgive. I did what I could to help. But I’m telling you this now – and you should believe it …’ He stabbed a finger at his chest. ‘I did not do it. I was not there.’

  Mosse took half a step forward, raising an arm. ‘If you continue to misunderstand this then you will pay as your father paid. That is not a threat. It is a fact.’

  There was anger in his eyes, Shaw noticed, but the emotion failed to radiate, as if it was acted out rather than felt.

  ‘I have escaped the Westmead,’ he said, and Shaw thought he detected a hint of a sob in the voice. ‘I have escaped them. I will not go back.’

  The security light on the lifeboat house clicked out. In the sudden darkness Shaw swung an arm to trigger it again, but when the light flooded out Mosse was walking away, down to the sea.

  27

  At nearly midnight George Valentine walked past the house on the corner of Greenland Street. The sign was in the window, so the game was open, the game was on, but he wanted his bed. He walked on, looking at his shoes and the ice on the pavement. He’d spent the last hour with Freddie Fletcher in a room at the intensive care unit at the Queen Victoria. Visitors had come and gone but he hadn’t said a word. The doctors said his body was in shock from the poison he’d i
ngested, that the dawn would show if he was winning the battle or losing it. Of the other five patients in intensive care brought in from the Shipwrights’ Hall four were recovering fast, one was stable – all those five had come from one table, sponsored by Age Concern, and were aged between eighty-five and ninety.

  He stopped outside his house. There was a light on, shining through the fanlight.

  It had been seventeen years since his wife had died and in those years he’d never come home to a light. He opened the front door and looked down the short corridor into the kitchen. For a second – which he tried to stretch – he thought it was Julie sitting there, her hands on the table top around a mug, the steam from it hanging in the air like smoke from a gunshot.

  ‘Georgie,’ said Jean Walker. ‘I’m sorry, kid. I didn’t know how to get you – they give you my message at St James’s?’

  Valentine shook his head, walking towards her, concealing as he did so that the shock had made his knees weak, trying to remember when he’d given his sister a key. He put his mobile on the table. He’d switched it to silent when they’d been in the Flask and forgotten to switch it back. The little message symbol flashed.

  He felt the pot. ‘What’s up?’ He turned his back to pour himself a cup.

  ‘Gossip is all it is. But I knew you’d want to know.’ She watched him sit down, the cup in two hands, so she looked away in case his hands shook.

  Valentine sipped the tea.

  ‘First off, there’s a real panic on at the Flask, Georgie, ’cos John Joe’s on walkabout. They didn’t see him overnight. Not the first time, mind you, but before they’ve found him pretty quick – down at the Globe or the Sailing Club.’ She shook her head. ‘Lizzie’s always taken him back. Christ knows where he sleeps when he’s out overnight. But this time there’s no sign of him. Ian was sent out to check the neighbours, round the streets. He said they didn’t want a fuss – just asked people to keep an eye out. Then tonight I heard they’d found his boat was gone from the cellar wharf. I’ve seen him out in it – in the summer he goes up to the coast, but winter’s different. They’ve got a few of the locals together to check the river – moorings, marinas, that kind of thing. But nothing – not yet.’