Death Toll

by Jim Kelly

  ‘How did Mary die?’ he asked.

  For a moment Tilden’s face reminded Shaw of Sam Venn’s – the right side appearing to slump, one eye filling with water until a tear spilt out.

  He shook his head, speechless.

  ‘Mr Tilden – you’re asking me to believe that you happily risked the lives of more than a hundred people. You’re not a doctor, you didn’t know how much to give them. You didn’t know the dose you did give them wasn’t lethal. If you’d do that, is it really beyond belief that you’d kill your own daughter? Did you hate the child? Did you think you’d never be able to leave while Mary lived – that you’d have to stay?’

  Tilden looked through Shaw. ‘Nora,’ he said. ‘She hated the baby. Hated me for giving it to her. These days they’d call it something – a fancy-named depression. I didn’t know what to do; she’d look at her sometimes, look at the cot, and I could see the murder in her eyes. I’d hold her.’ His elbows sagged slightly, as if taking the weight, accommodating the bundle of bone and flesh. ‘But I couldn’t be there all the time. The child was sickly. I didn’t kill her. I don’t know how she died, but that night Nora went to bed and slept well – I think for the first time since the birth. I always thought she’d willed her to death.’ He clenched his teeth. ‘Sometimes I thought she’d done it – you know, with a pillow. That’s why I left, in the end. It took seven years, but I couldn’t look at her and not see her standing over the cot with the pillow in her hand. I had nowhere to go but the sea. A nightmare, I know, all that space. I signed on for the engine room. I could live with that for a few years. Then, even that became too much, so I came home. Thank God I came home. Otherwise there’d be no Lizzie.’

  ‘Mr Tilden,’ said Shaw. ‘I think you decided to kill Fletcher, Venn and Murray. I don’t think you did any of this on your own. So we’re going to take you upstairs now, and down to St James’s, and we’re going to have this conversation again. We’re going to go on having it until I get the truth.’

  As Alby Tilden dressed and packed a single holdall Shaw and Valentine looked around the room, then the furnace floor, and the single WC beside the lift. In the room they found a line of books on a bare plank shelf, held up on bricks. The titles were maritime – from Hornblower to Master and Commander – but there were surprises: Typhoon, by Conrad, and Heart of Darkness. It was as if Tilden had decided to live out the life he’d wanted through books from within his self-made cell.

  In the furnace room they found a line of traps; in one a rat lay dead, its teeth as white as pearls. Valentine found the poison bin: a single wooden box with a padlocked lid and a stencilled skull and crossbones.

  The key was in the padlock. Inside the box was a jar full of white powder. The label read ALUMINIUM PHOSPHIDE.

  ‘Bingo,’ said Valentine.

  But even as he said it they heard the scampering in the shadows. Shaw played a torch beam down the long basement floor and saw a chain of rats, nose to tail, emerging as if from the wall itself, dashing twenty yards, then disappearing. Shaw couldn’t suppress the image that entered his head like a subliminal advert – the image of a rat that had taken the bait he’d laid under the cottage. He’d heard it shrieking, the poison shredding its nervous system, and when he’d found it with the torch beam he’d seen the blood was vivid, seeping from the nose and mouth. It had shaken itself to death, trying to throw off the pain, as if death was clinging to its back.

  ‘He wants to put more down,’ said Valentine.

  Then they brought Tilden out through the tarpaulin door, struggling now, the panic gripping. They heard his first scream rise in the lift shaft.

  32

  The interview rooms at St James’s had been built in the fifties and smacked of utility Britain. No two-way mirrors, intercom or dark, non-reflective surfaces here; just tiled walls decorated with a single line of brown paint at knee-height, cheap furniture screwed down and light bulbs encased in miniature iron maidens. This was Shaw’s third interview in an hour, and it was difficult to imagine they’d all been in different rooms. First: Kath Robinson. She’d reiterated the story Valentine’s sister had heard. She’d seen Fletcher, Murray and Venn leaving the Flask at around ten fifteen on the evening of Nora Tilden’s wake. She was sure of the time, because she’d gone back in to listen to the choir begin their second session, and she knew that was set for half past because Lizzie had said they’d keep to the timetable to allow the staff time to clear glasses and circulate sandwiches. But going in she’d bumped into Pat Garrison leaving, coat on and saying he was heading home.

  ‘He didn’t say anything else,’ she said. No bitterness, no recrimination, just a statement of fact.

  Two questions: Did she tell Freddie Fletcher that night the secret she shared with Lizzie Murray – that Lizzie was pregnant?

  She’d shrugged, seemingly confused by the straightforward question. She curled her bottom lip over her teeth. ‘I don’t even like Freddie. I wouldn’t share that with him. Would I?’ In Shaw’s experience that was a bad sign – answering one question with another.

  And if it was true that she’d seen them all heading out towards the cemetery – and she’d just admitted she didn’t like Fletcher – why didn’t she raise some kind of alarm the next morning, or in the following days, when it became obvious that Pat Garrison had gone? Her answer, this time, was persuasive: yes, she’d suspected the three men were going to waylay Pat Garrison. A beating? Maybe. Worse? She didn’t think so. Perhaps they’d run him out of town. But either way he deserved it, she said. She wasn’t the only one he’d tried his luck with, and he’d been reluctant to take no for an answer more than once.

  Had he forced himself on any of these girls? On her?

  ‘Never,’ she said. ‘Not really …’ she added, realizing perhaps that she’d gone too far. ‘He didn’t force me to do anything.’ For once the pale, translucent skin of her face reddened.

  The second interview was with Alby Tilden. He’d made a statement repeating the story he’d told them at the Clockcase Cannery. He’d admitted industrial sabotage, denied he’d had an accomplice. During the later stages of the interview he began to show signs of distress: shallow breathing and chest pains. The on-call GP was with him within twenty minutes and recommended hospitalization. The paperwork was under way, and he’d been sedated and taken to the sick bay. Uniformed branch would provide cover at the Queen Victoria after his transfer. Shaw asked Valentine to have a chat with one of the hospital administrators to see if they could find him a room of his own. One with blinds.

  And now the third interview. Bea Garrison didn’t look good under a shadeless electric light. She’d chosen a formal suit in charcoal, the skirt to her calves, and it didn’t suit her. The silver rings looked gaudy in contrast, and make-up buried her natural colour.

  Shaw had already established the basic facts after making it clear they knew she’d lied to them about her relationship with Alby Tilden: she admitted that for the past year she’d been the one contact between the Murray family and Alby. She collected his pension and his post and took them to the Clockcase Cannery once a month. Every first Tuesday Alby would meet her up by the goods-in bay and they’d share a bottle of wine in the strange room he’d built in the basement. But when Alby’s former cellmate from Lincoln had been alive she’d sent all the letters to him to pass on to Alby. Even she didn’t know Alby was in Lynn. She’d pick up his pension, bank it to his account. That’s how he’d always wanted it – distant. He thought about his family every moment of every day, she said. But he didn’t want them to see him.

  But when he did need a go-between, asked Shaw, why her? Why not Lizzie, or Ian, or John Joe?

  ‘Alby knows I don’t find his …’ she searched for the appropriate word, ‘his decline, upsetting. I’m ageing too, Inspector. But it’s more than that. It’s the seediness of it – isn’t it? The failure. He’s always wanted to protect them from that – and perhaps protect himself against the knowledge that he’d know what they thought, even i
f they pretended otherwise. And I’ve always thought he deserved our indulgence. And that’s why I didn’t tell you. I didn’t think it was important to your inquiry – but Alby’s privacy was important to him.’ It was an oddly formal word to use, thought Shaw. ‘I wouldn’t have wished Nora on anyone,’ she said. ‘And losing the child turned his mind – on top of the war. I think he’s suffered. I wanted to help. We all did.’

  But Shaw was still struggling with the notion that this woman was so close to her sister’s murderer.

  ‘So – you’ve forgiven Alby? For what he did?’

  ‘Have I? Yes – I suppose I have. But what did he do? Pushed his wife down the stairs in a violent argument at worst? Or watched her fall down them accidentally after a row on the landing? Living with Nora was a sentence, Inspector. I know – I served my time. She was bitter, cold and calculating. Alby married her for money, so he never had my sympathy, but I liked him because he was everything she wasn’t. Warm, open, spontaneous. I was just a girl when I first met him. I was charmed, excited. I was always charmed. And he was colour-blind when it came to people. Again, a stark contrast with my sister.’

  It was quite a speech but Shaw didn’t miss a beat. ‘When did you tell Alby we’d found Pat’s bones in Nora’s grave?’

  They’d given her a sweet tea in a plastic cup and at that her fingers pressed in slightly, Shaw noted, distorting the shape.

  ‘Immediately. I went that night – unannounced. There’s a bell at the loading bay and he came and rolled the doors back. I’m sorry. I didn’t think he’d do what he did …’

  ‘You told him Kath’s story?’

  She looked from Shaw to Valentine, calculating. ‘Yes. Of course – Kath told me that afternoon, as soon as we’d got Lizzie to rest. It was an odd secret to keep all those years.’ She shook her head. ‘Stupid girl.’

  ‘And Alby’s reaction?’

  ‘Anger. I don’t think Fletcher and Venn made him angry. He knew them, of course, knew their deficiencies. He could despise them. But John Joe – that’s what hurt. Because as far as Alby saw it, you see, it was two crimes. He’d robbed us of Pat – robbed Lizzie, and Ian. And then he’d taken his place. A father’s love for his daughter is very intense, isn’t it? The thought that she’d spent her life with that man – touching him, letting him share her bed. Alby’s not mad – he’s ill. But that thought shook him, shook his mind.’

  ‘Did he tell you what he planned to do?’

  ‘No. Never.’

  ‘Kath’s a stupid girl,’ said Shaw. ‘But Alby’s not stupid, is he? And yet what he did was stupid …We were bound to find him in the end. He’ll go to prison. He’s unlikely to survive that experience at his age, and with his health. Is that clever?’

  She set her hands on the wooden table, the rings striking the Formica.

  ‘Prison holds no horrors for Alby, Inspector. Quite the opposite. And with the Clockcase closing, perhaps he understood that. Perhaps he wanted you to find him. And that night – the night I told him – he asked about Kath, about whether she’d tell her story to you, to everyone. I said she wouldn’t. Which is what she’d promised me. I thought the past should be a closed book. But she didn’t keep her secret, did she? I don’t blame her, really. But there we are. If she had kept it to herself, Alby thought you’d have never known about the three of them lying in wait for Pat that night. So what happened at the Shipwrights’ Hall might have ended up being what it started out as – simple food poisoning. So perhaps he isn’t that stupid after all. Just unlucky.’

  It was a neat summary and Shaw wondered how long she’d had it prepared. Because he didn’t believe that was how it had happened.

  ‘This is nonsense,’ he said, standing. ‘I think Alby wanted to kill the three of them – Fletcher, Venn and Murray. I don’t know how – but I think you do, and I think you helped him. Because where’s your anger? The anger of a mother who discovers that her son has been murdered.’

  She reacted physically to the words, rocking back slightly on the chair, but she didn’t speak. To buy herself time she tried to smooth out the skirt over her knees.

  ‘My sergeant here will take a statement – but remember, if you are lying, that’s an offence in itself, and the law will take no account of your age.’ He leant over the table so that he could see her eyes. ‘I’d ask you to imagine what it will be like for Lizzie and Ian if they have to visit you in jail. If they have to watch you die there. Ask yourself if they’ll survive that. If the family will survive that.’

  Shaw waited for Valentine in the CID suite on the top floor.

  It took his DS twenty minutes to take the statement which he slid across Shaw’s desk. ‘She’s sticking. No change. We have to let her go.’

  ‘Yes, we do. But here’s what we do next,’ said Shaw. He asked Valentine to get the incident room to liaise with Interpol, the US Bureau of Immigration and the North Dakota State Police. He wanted everything they had on Bea Garrison’s life in Hartsville during the sixties and seventies. It was a big slice of her life, and it was missing. Did her story really add up? Something she’d said about her life back then, when they’d first talked to her at the Flask, still jarred in Shaw’s memory. Infuriatingly, he couldn’t recall the detail, but it was something about that small town in the Midwest. Something that didn’t fit. Something about the little drugstore. He tried to imagine her life with Latrell, the GI returned home, but the picture wouldn’t form.

  33

  The neon lights hanging from the wooden roof beams of the Ark made a sharp contrast with the day outside: stillborn, fading to an early dusk. Tom Hadden was at his desk and Shaw guessed he hadn’t slept properly since they’d found Pat Garrison’s bones. He was pale, his red hair losing its colour too, the freckled skin as lifeless as masking tape. Shaw reflected that he’d known Hadden for three years and that the sum of his knowledge of this man’s life was less than what he knew about their victim.

  ‘I’ve been working on MOT – the letters on the scrap of paper we found in the victim’s wallet?’ said Hadden. ‘Well, it isn’t an MOT certificate. Paper’s all wrong. Plus his mother tells us he didn’t drive. So, we’ve done all the usual searches and got nowhere. Ministry of Tourism? MOT is the New York Stock Exchange symbol for Motorola Corporation. I guess that’s possible – they’re based in Chicago, which in US terms isn’t that far from where the kid came from. But why? Other than that, it’s a blank – sorry.’

  Shaw looked at a sheet of white A4 paper lying on the desk in front of Hadden, in the centre of which he’d written MOT. Shaw couldn’t help thinking that if it had just been any three letters the puzzle would be simpler – that it was the association of the Ministry of Transport vehicle test which was clouding their thinking. They should be thinking sideways. He picked up Hadden’s pencil and wrote MTO, then ACB, HTV, ZCO. That was better. He didn’t have the answer, but he felt closer to it. He picked up the paper, made a ball and lobbed it into the basket.

  Beyond the plastic swing doors they heard Justina Kazimierz and her assistant preparing for the autopsies following the Shipwrights’ Hall poisoning. As Shaw parted the doors he felt his heartbeat quicken, as it always did. Both mortuary tables were covered by sheets. Over them, on the east wall of the original church, the stone angel stood on its niche, both hands pressed to its eyes.

  The assistant removed the first sheet as if uncovering a sofa in a dusty summer villa.

  Shaw reminded himself of the short conversation he’d just had with Valentine as they’d walked across the yard of St James’s towards the Ark. They’d decided to leave the pathologist to come to her initial findings before telling her of the link between the victims. That way they’d get a clear scientific judgement, unclouded by a conspiracy theory. It was what Justina Kazimierz would have done, but that wouldn’t make her any happier that they’d done it.

  Freddie Fletcher lay naked, the black swirls of his hair covering most of the body, a tattoo revealed on his shoulder: Royal Artillery. He’d died
, as they’d known he would, shortly after they’d left the hospital. Shaw recalled he’d talked proudly of his father’s military record. He thought it was probably one of the many tragedies of Fletcher’s life that he hadn’t been able to fight for what he believed in – however misplaced that belief had been.

  ‘Gentlemen?’ asked Kazimierz. The assistant set the Stryker saw whirring and handed it to her. Valentine concentrated on the moving hands of the clock on the wall, trying to imagine the mechanism within, the cog wheels interlacing, the steel parts clean, oiled and precise.

  Shaw watched the saw slicing through the bloodless flesh, the breast bone severed, the ribs cut, the chest plate lifted clear to allow access to the principal organs. His own work in forensic art had entailed many hours alone in the morgue at Quantico – the FBI’s training centre in Virginia. He’d very quickly learned to see a corpse as simply the body in death – the once-living chamber of the soul. He didn’t believe in God, but he’d always believed in souls; a contradiction he’d be happy to die with.

  Fifteen minutes later the pathologist stood back, picked the bloodstained gloves from her hands and poured a dark black coffee from a Thermos into a small glass.

  ‘This man was a dying man,’ she said. ‘There’s evidence of the initial stages of lung cancer – the left lung. The heart is diseased. The brain shows signs of a recent stroke, but it isn’t the first he’d suffered. But none of that killed him. Whatever killed him, however, did so very quickly. According to the witness report …’ She snapped a single sheet of A4 upright in her hand. ‘The sequence of events was thus: nausea, vomiting, stomach pain, internal bleeding, shock, then a period of nearly twenty-four hours in which his body tried to fight back. His lungs filled with fluid, then death. Even after death the toxin has continued to attack the kidneys – they would have failed if he’d lived long enough.’