Death Toll

by Jim Kelly

  Fletcher’s eyes left the ceiling and locked on Shaw. ‘Worked it out?’ he asked next, trying a smile. His voice was surprisingly clear, but then he gulped in air, as if he’d forgotten how to breathe. His eyes went back to the ceiling. His body stiffened with the effort of reconnecting with that point above his head.

  Shaw sat, pulled the chair so close to the bed frame that the wood hit the metal, and spoke into Fletcher’s ear. ‘We know you were in the cemetery that night, waiting for Garrison. You, Sam Venn and John Joe Murray. We know the billhook you used to kill him was from the sea chest in the loft – Alby’s chest. We know you tumbled Garrison’s body into the open grave. What more do we need to know?’

  ‘You know fuck-all,’ he said. Fletcher clawed at the stiff sheet. ‘Sam drew him little pictures,’ and the smile came this time, because it was cruel, and just slid into place. ‘Just a line on the first one. Two lines on the next one – the start of the gibbet, then the hanging man, because I told him one night, in the dark out by the river. I said we’d lynch him. I said that when they found him swinging they could cut him down with that penknife he always had with him – the one his GI dad left him; the one he was always flashing about to impress the girls.’

  He passed out then, a fleeting few seconds of unconsciousness. When he opened his eyes, Shaw knew he’d no idea there’d been a break.

  ‘But that’s all Sam was gonna do about it – draw little pictures. At the wake I said that all he believed in was talk. That’s why they had their little church – inside it they could hide from the real world the rest of us had to live in. Pathetic. Just because he had a withered arm didn’t mean he couldn’t act. Do something.’

  He took a careful breath this time, sipping the air. ‘I said we should teach him a lesson.’ His breathing began to dip into the shallows, picking up speed. ‘And I’d have done it too, but I was outside, smoking, waiting for the kid to go home when Kath Robinson came up. Bit of gossip for me – she said Lizzie was pregnant. That the black was the father. She thought I’d like to know. Thought that might fire me up …’

  He licked his lips. The heart monitor by the bed began to buzz and the consultant was beside them. ‘I think that’s it,’ he said. ‘Mr Fletcher can’t do this – not now.’

  Fletcher smiled at the notion of ‘now’ – suspecting, perhaps, that there might not be a ‘later’. He held up a hand, and the doctor shrugged, silently mouthing ‘five minutes’ to Shaw.

  Fletcher tore his eyes from his anchor above and looked Shaw in the face.

  ‘I couldn’t do it – not then, not when I knew there was a family. Lizzie’s kid deserved a father – even if it was scum like Garrison.’

  Fletcher’s eyes swam, and Shaw recalled his story. The child who’d seen his mother desert the family, then watched the failure of his father to hold what remained of it together. A childhood in care, separated from his only sister. He remembered the single picture on his mantelpiece, his arm thrown round the woman in the cheap shell suit. Reunited. But he could imagine the damage that had been done to both, struggling through separate childhoods.

  ‘I left them, Sam and John Joe, just inside the cemetery gates. Went home.’ His eyes spilt tears. ‘I said it wasn’t right, told ’em what Kath had said. John Joe said it was rubbish, that she’d made it up because she wanted us to scare Pat off good and proper. Because if she couldn’t have him, why should Lizzie? That she might be simple but she wasn’t stupid. But John Joe knew Kath was right, deep down he knew, so he was really up for it – he had the billhook under his jacket, and he was high all right, like he’d been doused in the whisky. So I left them.’

  He shifted his eyes back to the ceiling.

  ‘Next day I went up with Will Stokes and filled the grave in. We’d covered Nora’s coffin the day before, we just had to finish the job. Took us an hour – with a couple of fag breaks. That night I was in the Flask and the rumour was round that Pat had gone. It didn’t take long to find out why. Sammy and John Joe always had the same story, that they’d lost their nerve too. Too scared. So I never knew – never guessed. But I was always scared – of what I came close to doing.’

  He looked at Shaw again. ‘I’m scared now,’ he said.

  They left him asleep. In the corridor outside Shaw checked his mobile as he watched the patient through a glass porthole. The doctor appeared at his shoulder.

  ‘What are his chances?’ asked Shaw.

  The doctor was reading a set of medical notes. He didn’t look up. ‘He hasn’t got chances, Inspector. Death’s a process – like life. It’s started. Miracles happen – but up till now, never on my shift.’ He pushed Fletcher’s door open and went in to check the bedside monitors.

  There was a text on the phone from Paul Twine.

  SAM VENN DEAD AT HOME. TOM AT SCENE.

  30

  The Clockcase Cannery stood against a winter postcard: the black river, the Old Town waterfront beyond, stretching from the needle spire of St Nicholas, past the old Custom House and the mismatched towers of St Margaret’s to the Flask on its lonely promontory – gateway to the Flensing Meadow and the low hill of the chapel. It was a panorama in grisaille, viewed through mist, under a grey sky low enough to tear at the single chimney of the old Campbell’s soup factory downriver. The only light came from the snow-covered ground.

  Shaw drove the Porsche at speed into the empty car park past an unmanned checkpoint and skidded on the gravel, bringing the rear of the car round in an arc. He got out, took a lungful of iced air, an antidote to the smell in Sam Venn’s flat: the vomit on the stairs, round the washbasin. And Venn’s corpse, decaying already in the overheated room, the features of his face pressed flat, as if he’d lost a fight with gravity which was pushing him down into the mattress.

  Shaw took a second lungful of the clean air.

  The cannery was a single factory block of three floors, as substantial as an ocean liner, the single stub of a chimney leaking fumes from the boiler. A vast hoarding hanging from the gutter read FOR SALE. Shaw thought that it was a depressing sight – a building, built to work, standing suddenly idle like a man in a dole queue. A short line of HGVs waited silently at the goods-in loading dock, a council Transit van blocking any others from entering the site. A group of cannery workers stood by the gates arguing with a man in a smart green safety jacket who was handing out a printed A4 sheet.

  Shaw was struck by just how narrow the river was at this point: he could see the tombstones of the Flensing Meadow clearly. It was one of the aspects of the case which unsettled him, the tight geographical compression of events within this small area of the town. It was as if all their witnesses, all their suspects, were doomed to live and die within sight of each other, as if the buildings themselves – and particularly the Flask – had some kind of magnetic attraction that bound them with an invisible force.

  ‘Let’s do it, George,’ he said. Valentine considered the dilapidated factory with distaste, and had made no move to get out of the car.

  Across the yard Guy Poole was in his 4x4, speaking on his mobile. The health officer cut the line and jumped down.

  ‘Bad news, Peter,’ he said.

  ‘You first,’ said Shaw.

  Valentine lit up, flicking his match into an empty skip.

  ‘Lab’s just finished a preliminary sweep through all the food at the lunch: so that’s everything from the bread rolls and the butter pats to the tap water in the jugs. Only contaminant was in the soup – that’s all the soup, by the way, every bowl we collected, the saucepans and the unopened can. The level of contamination varies very little in the samples taken from the bowls. So that’s suspicious for a start. If this was from the cans, from metal fatigue – which, given we’re looking for an aluminium compound, would be our prime suspect – then you’d expect some cans to be worse than others. You’d expect variation. There is none. Then there’s the actual level of contamination – it’s very high, high enough to produce symptoms in almost anyone who took any of this
stuff down into their stomachs. High enough to rule out metal fatigue. But not high enough to kill – well, not on its own.’

  Valentine felt his guts contort, buckling like a garden hose.

  ‘What are we saying?’ said Shaw. ‘Off the record.’

  ‘We’re saying the management might have a point. This looks like sabotage. These guys are all losing their jobs. So someone with a grudge laced the cans with a metal-based poison. Through either luck or judgement it wasn’t enough to be fatal. The death at the scene looks like a result of the victim’s underlying condition. Coroner will have the last word, of course, but that’s my call.’

  ‘There’s been another death,’ said Shaw. ‘And there’s another in the wings.’

  Poole’s eyes hardened, angry that he’d been allowed to float his theory without all the available information.

  Shaw placed his feet squarely apart. ‘A man called Venn – he didn’t drink and he didn’t smoke. And he’s as dead as a can of soup, Guy. He was found this morning but he’d been dead all night. In his bed. And another up at the hospital’s heading for the morgue. Slowly, but there’s no other destination.’

  Poole shrugged, fitting the facts to the theory. ‘Two out of a possible hundred. It’s a random shot. Let’s see what the coroner says. Poisoning is a two-part process, Peter. It’s all about how your body reacts. I’m sticking with my first guess: I think we’ve got an industrial saboteur, in the factory. The whole batch was laced, but with no intent to kill. What the culprit didn’t know is that any contaminant can be enough to kill in certain circumstances. This other victim – any unusual medical factors?’

  Shaw saw Sam Venn’s face, up close, skewed. ‘Maybe. Cerebral palsy,’ he said.

  Poole leant back on the 4x4, his arms crossed, more confident now in his theory. ‘I’ve interviewed the caterers – the staff. The soup was made up in three batches. Apart from the mayor’s party at the top table, no tables were allocated to any particular sponsor; the caterers just put the reservation cards where they felt like it. And although each table had a suggested seating plan, hardly anybody seems to have followed it. So it looks like these are three random victims. Let’s hope it stays that way.’

  Valentine coughed, looking at his black slip-ons.

  ‘I don’t think they’re random victims,’ said Shaw.

  Poole stared into Shaw’s good eye.

  Shaw had the grace to look up at the sky. ‘OK – this Charlie Clarke, the one who died on the spot, I think his death was an accident. But Venn and the man who’s fighting for his life – a man called Fletcher – are two of the three main suspects in our current murder inquiry. The third should have been sitting with them. Was anyone else on the Flask’s table affected badly?’ He checked his notebook. ‘The man who stepped in to take the third suspect’s ticket was called Howe.’

  Poole retrieved a pile of paperwork from the passenger seat of the 4x4.

  ‘No. Howe went up to the hospital – but symptoms are listed as nausea and vomiting. He wasn’t kept in.’ He punched in a number on the mobile and turned away.

  ‘How’s your maths?’ Shaw asked Valentine as they walked away to the riverside. Upriver they could see the ferry crossing, packed with Christmas shoppers.

  ‘Crap,’ said Valentine.

  ‘It was one of the rules at school, George: if you got a probability question on the exam paper you didn’t touch it – chances are you’d get it wrong.’ He smiled at his own weak joke. ‘But it’s like betting – so …’ He let the question hang in the air.

  ‘How’s it like betting?’ asked Valentine.

  ‘Forget about the hundred guests sitting down for lunch at the Shipwrights’ Hall. Think about a roulette wheel with a hundred slots. What are the chances of picking two winning numbers in a row?’

  Valentine thought about the fan-tan table. ‘It’s one in a hundred, times one in a hundred.’

  Shaw nodded. ‘Yeah. Pretty much. One in ten thousand. So, if this is really random, it’s a one in ten thousand shot.’

  ‘But it might happen first time you laid two bets,’ said Valentine.

  ‘Sure. But on average it would happen first time once every ten thousand times. I’m not saying it’s impossible – I’m saying it’s extremely unlikely. And if John Joe Murray had gone to the lunch and paid for the ticket with his life, the odds would be what, George?’

  ‘One in a million,’ said Valentine.

  ‘Which would be another way of saying murder. And I think this is murder. But how, George? How do you lace a hundred cans with a poison that doesn’t kill but still get the result that your two target victims end up dead?’

  ‘Three men died,’ said Valentine.

  Shaw shook his head. ‘Put that aside; put him aside. If you’d burst a crisp packet behind Charlie Clarke he’d have keeled over. Forget him – someone wanted Venn and Fletcher dead, George. They wanted John Joe Murray as well – but John Joe went walkabout, a decision that looks increasingly smart.’

  Poole rejoined them. ‘Howe, the man who took the last-minute ticket? He’s up and about, feels good, and he’s been checked out by his GP. Which doesn’t do your theory a lot of good, Shaw. If Howe took your third target’s place then he should be dead – or dying. He ain’t.’

  ‘If it’s murder we can’t take any chances,’ said Shaw. ‘Either we have a random saboteur, or we have a killer who’s murdered two specific targets at the Shipwrights’ Hall, and inadvertently killed an innocent bystander. We need to take over the site. You all right with that?’

  Poole looked relieved – irked, but relieved. ‘I’ll tell my people. We’ll need to keep someone on site – I’ll give you a name.’ He checked his watch. ‘The management’s assembled the factory’s production-line staff on the shop floor now. That lot …’ he nodded at the crowd by the security gate, ‘are drivers – office staff – that kind of thing. None of them have regular access to the product.’

  Shaw sent Valentine ahead to organize interviews and get an overview of the production process so that they could pinpoint areas where the cans could have been tampered with. Shaw rang Max Warren and brought him up to date, then made a request to combine the two inquiries. It was a formality. Warren’s maths were no better than his golf card demanded – one of the reasons he loathed attending finance committee meetings – but he distrusted coincidence as much as Peter Shaw.

  ‘Autopsies are crucial, Peter,’ said Warren. ‘Get Justina on it – and if you need fancy stuff we’ve got the budget. Just don’t go fucking mad. All right?’ He’d put the phone down before he got an answer.

  Shaw rang Paul Twine, whom he’d chosen to head up a unit at Sam Venn’s flat. The DC already had a timeline for Venn from the moment the soup had been served at the Shipwrights’ Hall at 1.25 p.m. the previous day. Venn had passed out at the table and been attended to in situ by paramedics from the Queen Victoria. He’d recovered well, but had been distressed by the condition of Freddie Fletcher. Offered a seat in one of the ambulances ferrying people to the Queen Vic’s A&E, he’d declined, and instead caught a cab on the corner of Norfolk Street. He’d kept the receipt, which was in his wallet. They’d interviewed the cabbie and he said Venn had been silent until he’d asked for the receipt. Then he’d appeared agitated, sweating badly. According to one of the volunteers at London Road Venn had gone to his office and booked the takings from the shelter’s 10p lunches: the nominal charge allowed them to monitor numbers and book the clients in by name, each one entitled to a ticket for a twice-yearly food draw.

  At four that afternoon he’d declined a cup of tea from the kitchen supervisor. She said he had been on the phone when she’d knocked on his door, but that he’d put down the receiver when she’d opened it. She said he looked pale, distracted, and she had the impression he’d declined the tea because his good hand was shaking. She’d heard about the Shipwrights’ Hall lunch on the radio and was concerned for his health. Venn said he was fine now – or he would be, after a good night’s sl
eep. He’d asked her to lock up and said he was going up to his flat.

  She offered to fetch the centre’s on-call GP but he’d said no. He’d left the office at 4.35 p.m. and walked round to his flat, which he was seen entering by a volunteer cleaning waste bins in the yard. A few minutes after he’d gone inside there was a hailstorm; the volunteer took cover initially, then abandoned work outside altogether.

  Forensic evidence suggested that Venn had collapsed on the stairs on the way up to his flat and been sick. There were also traces of vomit in the toilet and washbasin. A plastic bag of 10p pieces was found by the toilet. He’d died at some point between 8.00 p.m. and 1.00 a.m. in his bed. His mobile phone was under the bed cover. His mobile service provider was tracing any calls he’d made that day. A copy of the Bible was on his chest, upside down, open at Leviticus. Shaw hadn’t asked for that detail, and he was quietly impressed Twine had included it in his short summary.

  The key forensic evidence at the scene was a set of footprints on the stairs, along the landing and into Venn’s bedroom. While the prints – too large to be Venn’s – were now dry, a muddy imprint remained of each step, indicating that they had been made by wet boots. Since it had been dry for twenty-four hours before the hailstorm at 4.35 p.m., and given the route the steps took, it appeared that this unknown party had entered the flat, gone to Venn’s room and left immediately. The entrance door to the flat hadn’t been forced. Cause of death was unknown but there were no exterior wounds. The locum pathologist, Dr John Blacker, had given them a preliminary cause of death as myocardial infarction. The symptoms exhibited matched those for poisoning and a preliminary examination of the vomit revealed traces of an aluminium-based contaminant. There were no bruises, no abrasions of any kind except a slight scuffing of the skin on the knuckles of the right hand consistent with stumbling on the stairs.