by Jim Kelly
He ran up the wooden steps and pushed open the café door.
They were all sitting around a table, Lena and Fran and Justina, and on the polished floorboards over by the stove, the dogs. Lena had made tea and there was a plate of sliced cake in the middle of the table, but no one had taken any. So he knew something was wrong because the cake was simnel, his daughter’s favourite, and her plate was clean.
Before he could sit down Lena shook her head.
‘It’s Dawid, Peter,’ she said. ‘He died.’
Justina looked pathetically grateful that someone else had said it.
Shaw knew that if he didn’t touch Justina now he never would again: that it was one of those moments in a friendship when you have to redraw the boundaries.
He knelt beside her seat and put an arm around her shoulders.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He saw Dawid, sat at this table, and the sudden unanticipated sight of blood on his gum.
‘It’s not unexpected, Peter,’ she said, but her eyes filled as she spoke, one spilling tears. But the shock was real enough, and had changed her face so that it was much more mobile than usual, the emotions running across it like a wind over wheat. She drank her tea, declining Shaw’s offer to stiffen it with a whisky shot.
Dawid had been diagnosed eight months earlier, she explained. Polycythaemia vera, PV to a doctor. A rare blood disease in which the body makes too many red blood cells. The extra red blood cells make your blood sticky. The thickened blood flows more slowly through your small blood vessels and forms clots. They cause heart attack and stroke. They knew he wouldn’t live – not for long; there isn’t a cure, just treatment.
Dawid had always wanted to live by the sea. They’d been saving the move for retirement, but after his diagnosis they’d sold up immediately and moved to the coast. The end had come a few hours ago. A sudden massive stroke as Dawid slept by the picture window. She’d been with him, watching his face change as gravity took control.
They’d taken the body away, leaving Justina a lonely widow in an empty house.
‘So I came here,’ she said. She paused then and Shaw sensed that if she didn’t go on immediately she’d cry. She took in a breath. ‘I had a favour to ask,’ she said. Her hand crept towards the tea cup, then pulled back. ‘I wondered – if you didn’t mind – if I could take Fran out. Not now,’ she added, laughing tightly. ‘I don’t know – once a week? Whenever it’s OK with you. Only, there’s no family, some cousins in Poland. But no family really. And I’d enjoy that. Only if she wants? We could walk the dogs.’
Fran nodded her head quickly. Justina leant forward, took a slice of simnel and put it on Fran’s plate.
Shaw stood. ‘I’m sorry. I’d have liked to have known Dawid better.’ He zipped up his jacket, looking back along the beach. ‘George’s waiting. I’ve got to go. I should be taking Fran to the Christmastide at Wells. But work …and Lena has to stay here. Work too.’
Fran studied her simnel cake.
Justina stood. ‘I’ll take her,’ she said, as Shaw had known she would.
‘I can drop you both off, but I can’t stay.’
‘Peter …’ said Lena, taking Justina’s hand. ‘For goodness’ sake.’
Justina stood. ‘I’d like that. That’s a good idea.’ She turned to Lena. ‘What else am I going to do tonight?’
‘There’ll be crowds – can you take that?’ cautioned Shaw.
‘Crowds are best,’ said Justina. ‘Really.’
Ten minutes later Fran got in the back of the Porsche, Valentine squeezed in beside her, while Justina took the passenger seat in the front, because Shaw asked her to sit and talk. When they were up on the coast road he was the first to speak.
‘This isn’t just for Fran,’ he said, looking in the rear-view. ‘It’s the case. I need you to tell me something, Justina.’ In the back he could hear Fran cross-examining Valentine about what he remembered about her grandfather. She’d always known Valentine had been a friend. When she asked Shaw she got the same anecdotes each time. She thought Valentine might know something new.
Justina’s body language was clear. Shaw was pretty certain she was in shock. Her left arm kept rising, the hand seeking a place to rest. But he didn’t have time to camouflage the question.
‘When I was at Hendon I did a course on poisons. But I’ve forgotten almost everything. I just need the basics – quickly.’ The road was Roman-straight for half a mile, so he took his eyes off the road and looked at her. ‘Tell me about toxic synergy.’
41
The Porsche purred in a traffic jam, and Shaw could see ahead the line of cars snaking down towards the waterfront at Wells-next-the-Sea. The car in front lurched, trundled six feet then braked sharply, the back bumper rising with the abruptly arrested forward motion. In the distance he could see the high mast of the Dutch barge by the quay, decked with fairy lights. On both sides of the line of cars children and parents walked past, bundled in winter clothes. Everyone was late. The snow had stopped, swelling the crowd, but the temperature had dropped with the loss of the cloud cover, and steam rose from the people as if they were cattle in a winter field.
‘Remind me why we’re here,’ said Valentine, leaning forward, while Fran looked out at the crowds. The car crawled past a shopfront where a man shared a match with a woman, the resulting halo of cigarette smoke embracing them both.
‘Because if our witness is correct, then a woman tried to dig up Pat Garrison’s impromptu grave,’ said Shaw, answering his question but speaking to Justina. He tried and failed to hide the excitement in his voice, the surge of adrenaline which had been triggered in his system by the pathologist’s brief description of the principles of toxic synergy.
He took a deep breath. ‘Up until now we had three male suspects for the murder of Pat Garrison: three suspects someone has tried to kill – so I suspect we weren’t the only ones who had them lined up for it. But the point is, we now have a woman involved. A woman suspect. Question: which woman?’
The line of traffic juddered forward and Shaw swung the car right, along the road which led to the nearest car park, giving up any chance of getting through the centre of town to Morston House.
Shaw struggled to concentrate, half of his conscious mind recovering from his memory a long-lost lecture on toxic synergy. It had been in the main lecture theatre at Hendon, an old-fashioned 1930s amphitheatre. The science staff at the college had substances in glass jars on the scarred wooden bench at the front. An overhead projector showed atoms and molecules colliding, reforming. And one image of a victim. It was a woman in her fifties, the body lying in a damp cellar, the limbs held in awkward semaphore positions.
‘So if we’re looking for a woman, then – again – we have three possible suspects,’ continued Shaw. ‘First, Lizzie Murray. Jealous, maybe – perhaps there was another woman? Sounds like Pat inherited his father’s eye for the girls. But it doesn’t look likely – first off, she wanted to ring the police next morning, long before there was any real need, and long before she could be sure the grave had been filled in completely by Fletcher and his mate. And then there’s the child – Pat’s child, their child. She’d be unlikely to kill the father. And all the witnesses are clear on her state of mind later that evening: Bea said she was happy, and, more to the point, your sister Jean – our unbelievably valuable objective witness – said Lizzie was positively luminous that night. She didn’t shut the pub till after midnight, and we can assume Pat was dead by then, because we’ve got witness statements from people who walked through the cemetery after closing time and didn’t see him. So – we shouldn’t forget Lizzie, but it’s unlikely she wielded the billhook.
‘Then there’s Bea. Motive? Maybe she hoped her son wouldn’t get involved with Lizzie. She likes Lizzie – no doubt about that – but she hates the Flask and all it stands for. And, of course, the two were cousins. Did she follow him out that night to try to cool him down only to find she was too late, that there was a child on the way? Perhaps
tempers were frayed. Pat had come to England unwillingly – we know that. His mum had tried to keep him happy – there was always cash in his pocket. Did he blame her for the mess he was in? It could have happened. And there’s something else – I’m certain …’ He thought about that. ‘Yes, certain, that Bea helped Alby poison Fletcher and Venn, and that she’d have happily poisoned John Joe too. She thought the three of them killed her son because Kath Robinson told her they’d gone ahead to wait for him in the cemetery. Think about that, George. If Bea’s behind the killings, which are clearly an act of revenge by someone who thinks Fletcher, Venn and Murray killed Pat Garrison, then she’s pretty much clear of the original murder.’
‘Could have been a cover,’ said Valentine. ‘Perhaps she did both: killed Pat, then helped Alby take revenge on three innocent men – which threw all of us off the scent, didn’t it?’ Valentine held up both hands. ‘And how’d she target the three of them? How did she help Alby?’
‘OK – I’ll deal with that. But let me finish. Because that leaves the best suspect for Pat Garrison’s murder – Kath Robinson.’
The first firework went off in the clear sky over the dunes – a yellow expanding glove of light. Fran screamed in the back. They felt the thud of the explosion and then a long drawn-out cheer, like a wave breaking.
They were still bumper to bumper on the approach road to the car park. Shaw checked his watch: high tide, and 8.45 p.m. His temper finally snapped, because he couldn’t sit still with this much adrenaline in his bloodstream. He gently rolled the Porsche up on to the pavement, jumped out and retrieved a magnetic flashing warning light from the boot and put it on the roof, instantly quelling a protest from the driver behind – a father in a people carrier with children packed on the back seats and the head of a red setter sticking out of the passenger-side window.
They abandoned the car, cut down an alleyway between two shops and found themselves on the edge of the dockside. But they couldn’t see the black water for the crowd, already ten deep at the iron railings.
Shaw put a hand on Justina’s shoulder. ‘I’m fine,’ she said.
Shaw showed her his mobile. ‘We’ll give you a lift home. Stay at the cottage tonight. Lena’s getting a bed ready. I insist. Fran, you help Justina have a lovely time.’
‘I promise,’ she said seriously, taking the pathologist by the hand and leading her away.
Valentine stopped, lit up.
‘Why Kath Robinson?’
‘Come on,’ said Shaw, cutting along the back of the crowd, talking over his shoulder, forcing himself to slow down so that Valentine could keep up. ‘Lot of reasons, but most of all because she’s the wellspring – if she hadn’t conveniently recalled what she’d seen that night, Fletcher and Venn would still be alive. It’s a vivid picture, right – seeing the three of them set out, planning to teach Pat Garrison a lesson, and then she bumps into the victim leaving the Flask, just at the right time. And who’d she tell? The family – talk about lighting the blue touch paper.’
They heard a firework, like machine-gun fire.
‘Then she comes down to Lynn and tells her mum – who’s one of Jean’s best friends, the widow of a copper, the sister of a copper, someone she could trust to pass the information along. If not straight to us then out into the community, out into the rumour mill. The only person who wasn’t going to hear it was John Joe. No one’s going to tell him, are they?’
Shaw looked over the heads of the throng towards the waterfront, past the brightly lit fish ’n’ chip shops and the pubs towards Morston House. He pressed on through the crowd. Fireworks thudded with a regular beat now, and somewhere down by the harbour office a brass band played ‘In the Deep Midwinter’.
‘And Kath had a motive, George,’ he said, suddenly brought up short by a family of six strung across the pavement, holding hands. ‘I don’t think Pat raped her, or even touched her. I just think he may have been her first love. Whatever happened changed her life. Rejection is what happened, and she’s not exactly well equipped to deal with emotion, any emotion. Perhaps she’s telling the truth, perhaps Fletcher and Venn did talk to her that night, telling her what was up. And maybe that was the trigger. That and being told – by Lizzie herself – that there was a baby on the way. Perhaps she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life watching Pat and Lizzie play happy families. Maybe that was a prospect she couldn’t live with. I don’t think she set out to kill him, but she must have been angry. Burning angry. And she could have gone upstairs just as easily as John Joe. She’d have seen Alby wielding the gun. She could have taken the billhook.’
They skirted round a stage which had been set up to welcome Santa Claus when his boat came in on the tide. As they did so, more fireworks broke over the sea and they could see the white yachts along the channel, most of them lit with Chinese lanterns.
Valentine put a hand on Shaw’s shoulder from behind, a rare physical contact. ‘And Bea – how did she target them? How’d she get them and not the rest?’
Shaw was going to tell him then, but he was looking across the road, back up the little high street that led away from the water, a narrow cobbled lane crowded on either side with old-fashioned shops, lit by a zigzag string of white lights.
Looking their way, but past them out to sea, was Kath Robinson. There was a sudden cheer and she smiled, because out along the channel, near the lifeboat station, Santa’s ship had come into view, pulled by a pair of inflatable reindeer and surrounded by a flotilla of small boats. Then she turned and began to walk away, pulling a suitcase on wheels.
42
As Shaw ran after Kath Robinson he heard the double echo of his boots hitting cobbles, bouncing off the shopfronts of the narrow high street. The crowd on the quayside was cheering now, a constant ebb and flow of sound like the sea on the sand. A family ran past them down the street, the father with a baby held in a carrier on his shoulders, one of the children crying. The street was so narrow, almost too narrow for a single car, that the shops seemed to reach out to each other, trying to touch – a toy shop unlit, a bakery, a hardware store with empty hooks above a bay window. An ageing Labrador swung its head from side to side, padding down towards the crowd, pursuing the running family.
‘Miss Robinson!’ Shaw didn’t call out until they were almost with her, because even then he thought she might just run, ditch the suitcase, so he was already on his toes.
She turned and Shaw saw the disappointment in her eyes, but nothing else, so that he wondered for the first time if he might be wrong.
‘Yes,’ she said, setting the suitcase upright.
She looked at her watch. ‘I’ve not much time,’ she said. ‘My car’s up by the church and this crowd will be on its way home soon.’
In the white light she should have looked pale, but her face was flushed, and Shaw thought that for the first time she might have the capacity to be happy. Her blonde hair was pinned back, her head bare despite the cold. She wore a quilted jacket, good quality, but shapeless.
‘I thought you lived at Morston House,’ said Shaw.
She settled back on her heels, crossing her arms across her breasts. In most people it was a stance that radiated confidence. But, as always with this woman, Shaw thought it looked like an impersonation of confidence rather than the real thing. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said.
Shaw looked up and down the empty street. ‘Someone – a woman – was seen digging up Nora Tilden’s grave last June. We think she was trying to recover something; something incriminating, perhaps. We think she may have been Pat Garrison’s killer.’
Her face was blank, and Shaw wondered what kind of mind worked behind that perfect skin.
‘I thought that woman might be you. And that would explain why you were running away.’
‘I told you the truth,’ she said. She blinked several times and Shaw was certain she hadn’t understood the accusation. It was the kind of misunderstanding only the innocent make.
She unzipped a pocket on the su
itcase, took out a travel wallet and gave it to Shaw.
As he reached into his jacket for a torch she looked back down the high street to where Santa’s boat had just arrived at the quay: a figure clad not in the usual Disney scarlet but in russet, with a crown of winter berries and what looked like a real white beard. Camera flashlights popped and someone out of sight began to address the crowd through a megaphone.
Inside the travel wallet was a return ticket to Tenerife, boat tickets to Gomera and a brochure for a holiday village – whitewashed apartments beside a beach dotted with parasols.
‘It’s a present from Bea,’ she said. ‘I’ve always said she owes me nothing but she’s been good – more than that, she’s been family, really. Finding Pat, finding his bones, brought it back for both of us. We’ve both been bad. She was going to come …’ She nodded at the tickets. ‘But she wants to be near Lizzie – and Lizzie won’t leave the Flask.’
Shaw didn’t answer. He was looking at the plane ticket. London Heathrow to Tenerife North. LHR to TFN.
Valentine filled in the gap. ‘It must have been bitter news – when Lizzie told you she was pregnant, that Pat was the father. Is that why you tried to stir it up with Freddie Fletcher, telling him the black kid had his feet under the table? That he was family now. That one day he’d be running the Flask. Did you follow them out there? Did you take the billhook with you?’ He stopped, dragging in a fresh breath. ‘Did you finish it when they wouldn’t?’
She looked suddenly genuinely exhausted. ‘No. Really. I don’t – didn’t – hate Pat. Freddie was a friend. I knew him from school – he was a couple of years above Lizzie and me. I just wanted to share it – like you do, when you get news.’
Valentine noted that she hadn’t said ‘good’ news.
‘It was supposed to be a secret, wasn’t it?’ pressed Valentine. ‘Lizzie’s secret.’