Death Toll

by Jim Kelly

  ‘She told me fast enough,’ said Robinson, unable to keep the bitterness out of her voice. ‘I thought she’d tell everyone by last orders.’

  ‘What did you think Fletcher would do – start knitting socks?’ said Valentine, concerned that Shaw seemed to have given up on the cross-examination. The DI was still studying Robinson’s airline reservation.

  Kath Robinson looked at her watch. Shaw handed back the travel wallet. ‘You can go,’ he said. ‘We know where you are. We’ll need to speak when you get back.’

  ‘Perhaps I should stay?’ Not a statement, a question.

  ‘No. It’s OK,’ said Shaw.

  She looked at Valentine, as if asking his permission as well, then flipped the suitcase back on its wheels. Down by the water’s edge the civic party had welcomed Santa Claus aboard a tractor-drawn float. It turned, heading for the church, and behind it the crowd scrambled to squeeze between the narrow shopfronts of the high street.

  ‘You’d better go,’ said Shaw. He tried to smile, but an image of Dawid Kazimierz looking out to sea made him give it up half done. They watched her hurry away, one of the wheels on the suitcase trolley squealing. Valentine waited for an explanation – several explanations – but Shaw turned towards the oncoming crowd and plunged in, his mobile already at his ear.

  43

  Bea Garrison was standing on the balcony of Morston House wrapped in a Barbour, looking out over the now deserted waterfront. Santa’s boat lay moored, the inflatable reindeer buckling slightly on the ebbing tide, a light wind exhaling from the streets of the town as if it were preparing for sleep. On a yacht out in the channel a family sat in the cockpit eating, the sound of a champagne cork bouncing back off the façades of the fish ’n’ chip shops.

  There were three flights of stairs to the balcony and Shaw reached the top well before Valentine.

  ‘Alone?’ asked Shaw.

  Bea turned her face, the ship’s fine figurehead, away from the sea to look at him. Below they heard Valentine’s mobile ring, followed by a whispered conversation.

  ‘Always,’ she said. ‘It’s not a problem.’ She touched a finger to her face, smoothing the single patch of makeup she wore.

  She was standing, leaning easily on the low wall, a glass of white wine on the ledge. Shaw guessed it was a favourite spot; an escape from the people she had to let into her home.

  ‘We don’t have time,’ said Shaw. ‘John Joe’s life is in danger – it may even be too late. But you know that. You tried to kill him before, at the Shipwrights’ Hall lunch.’

  She was prepared for that. Sipping the white wine, she used one hand to fasten the top button at her chin, then tighten a cashmere scarf.

  ‘It’s a cliché – but I really do have no idea what you’re talking about, Inspector.’

  ‘Toxic synergy,’ said Shaw. She was a very still person, but even Shaw sensed an instant immobility, as if those two words had turned her to stone.

  Valentine arrived, out of breath, a thin veneer of sweat on his narrow forehead and showing through the thinning hair. He still held the mobile in his hand. ‘No sign of John Joe,’ he said. ‘Lizzie’s frightened now. Jacky Lau says she thinks that if he’s gone anywhere in the boat it would be here.’

  Bea Garrison had spent her life maintaining an impenetrable exterior, but Shaw could see she was struggling now, her eyes drawn back out to sea, to the lights in the channel and beyond, to the darkness of the marshes. Shaw scanned the quayside, the mid-channel moorings, but there was no sign of John Joe’s clinker-built sailing boat.

  ‘We don’t have time for this, Mrs Garrison. If John Joe Murray dies, you will be responsible. Where is he?’

  She set her hard face to the sea. Out along the quayside a council Scarab swirled up the rubbish. Towards the dunes a bonfire flickered. Shaw was struck again by how imperious Bea Garrison was, how she’d carved a life for herself, a woman alone, deserted by men: first a husband she didn’t love who drank himself to death, and then – as far as she’d known for the last three decades – by the son she did love. But she’d survived, prospered in a way, and then, provided with the names of the men who’d killed that son, she’d organized a clinical and lethal revenge.

  ‘We know you told Alby that night – at the Clockcase – about what Kath had seen,’ said Shaw. ‘Did he mention the Shipwrights’ Hall lunch then? It’s an annual affair. Every year he’d worked at the cannery he’d have seen the order go through. So he knew the Flask would have a table and that all three of your targets would be there. And I think it was you who thought of revenge – an almost instant retaliation. You asked Kath Robinson not to tell us what happened, didn’t you? What did you say? That after all those years it was unlikely – nearly impossible – that we’d be able to make a case against them? But she didn’t listen. That’s the neighbourhood vice around the Flask – gossip.

  ‘But that didn’t mean the three of them couldn’t be punished. That they couldn’t suffer. So you told Alby to lace the cans. You knew they’d have the soup, of course – they eat at the Flask every week, so you knew they were all keen on seafood. And local fare. It’s a guess, but I think you didn’t tell him how it would work, or that they’d die. He’d have to trust you – trust that only they would really suffer. And anyway, he knew that the dose he was giving them wasn’t lethal – it doesn’t even work on the rats every time.’

  She turned her back on the sea and looked up at the tower of Morston House, and Shaw wondered if she was saying goodbye, trying to imprint a memory that she could take with her.

  ‘Toxic synergy,’ he said. ‘Occupational hazard if you’re a chemist. Which you were, of course. You, Mrs Garrison, not Latrell. That was a lie – and a desperate one. So I think you suggested using the rat poison to make them suffer, then went out to the poison bin to check on its chemical composition. And perhaps that’s when you realized you could do it. Kill just those three and nobody else.’

  Across the water the sound of a second champagne bottle opening bounded to them.

  ‘The real question,’ said Shaw, ‘is what did you tell Ian.’

  Shaw smiled and took one of the wooden chairs. Out in the channel a water rat surfaced and swam towards the open sea, leaving a perfect V-shaped wake.

  ‘Because that was part two of the plan – the part Alby didn’t know about. Before they got to Alby’s rat poison at the Shipwrights’ Hall you needed to make sure they each had a dose of mercury in their bloodstream. Just a bit – nothing fatal. Again, a non-lethal dose. And they got that, I’d guess, at lunch on Tuesday at the Flask. A lunch Ian cooked. Angry, bitter, Ian. Three daily specials: grilled salmon with bubble and squeak and winter vegetables. And here I’m guessing again. I don’t think Ian knew the two halves of the plan, did he? You asked him to trust you, just like you’d asked Alby.

  ‘It’s the ultimate toxic synergy: aluminium and mercury. Individually slow acting and non-lethal, but put them together and the result is guaranteed. It’s a textbook study: give a hundred rats a dose of aluminium and on average one will die; give a hundred rats a dose of mercury and on average one will die; give a hundred rats a dose of both and they’ll all die. Every time.’

  Valentine lit a Silk Cut, absorbed by Shaw’s account.

  Bea turned towards them, a hand finding the wooden shelf on the low balcony wall without looking, an action of familiarity which reminded Shaw of Lizzie Murray reaching for the fruit-machine switch behind the bar of the Flask.

  An ice bucket stood in the corner, and she walked to it now and refilled the glass of wine.

  ‘I like it cold,’ she said. ‘Icy.’

  She stared Shaw in his blind eye.

  ‘I’m not sure you have a single item of evidence to support this fanciful scenario,’ she said. But her age betrayed her: the wine glass rocking as the tendons in her arm failed to smoothly elevate it to her lips.

  ‘You have three problems,’ said Shaw. ‘Alby is happy to confess to his side of the plan – although I will conce
de that he’ll never implicate you directly, as he is actually pretty keen to spend the rest of his life in a secure cell at Lincoln. I just wonder how coherent his testimony would be under cross-examination. Especially as his sabotage was carried out before the discovery of Pat Garrison’s bones was made public, and he admits to seeing you only hours before he laced the cans. Second, I think Freddie Fletcher fell ill during his lunch at the Flask. I think the mercury was in the salmon – he started feeling nauseous before he’d finished, so he used the foil from his sweetcorn cob to wrap up the fish. It’s a generation thing: waste not, want not. He wouldn’t have suspected the meal he was currently eating. Probably blamed it on a dodgy curry the night before. It’s in his fridge, the salmon. Well, it was in his fridge – it’s in our forensic lab now. Where we will also be spending some of our budget on a more thorough examination of the stomach contents of Fletcher and Venn. We’ll find the mercury, although I suspect the amounts will be truly microscopic. Because that’s the dreadful beauty of toxic synergy – the traces of the two poisons can be almost undetectable, especially if you’re not looking for them.

  ‘And third, and most importantly, Fletcher, Venn and Murray didn’t kill your son.’

  She shook her head and tried a laugh, but it died in her throat.

  ‘How do we know this? Well, initially we ignored several pieces of evidence which didn’t fit the scenario painted by Kath Robinson – a story, by the way, which I’m sure was genuine in outline.’

  ‘Such as?’ She tried to make the question sound casual, but even Valentine detected the edge in her voice, as if she was about to choke.

  ‘The two green glasses we found with Pat’s bones, for a start. Why two?’

  Bea took a sip of wine.

  ‘But the real breakthrough came just a few minutes ago. Right here. We bumped into Kath Robinson. She showed us the airline ticket you’d bought her. A kindness you will regret.’

  Valentine’s mobile rang and he turned away, walking down a few steps.

  ‘Your son died with a piece of paper in his pocket. There’s not much left now – shreds. But we could see three letters: bold capitals. MOT – not part of a word, there were no letters missing just those three, so that was it – like a code for something. Something like an airport.’

  Valentine came back. ‘The Flask – 999 call: ambulance, police, the lot.’

  Bea Garrison held the wine glass, poised, but the rim dipped and the liquid began to fall to the ground. Shaw thought she’d be cold now: icy. He couldn’t imagine the thoughts she must be struggling with, but he sensed there would be an image in her mind of the home she’d once had on the other side of the world, and perhaps the last time she’d left it, rising through the thin Midwestern clouds above North Dakota.

  Shaw showed her his mobile. ‘I’ve just checked MOT is the airport code for Minot, North Dakota. A small municipal airport then, but the one Pat would have used to go home. And that’s what he had in his pocket that night. His ticket home. Away from the Flask, and you, and the life you’d tried to make for him. But most of all it was a ticket home away from Lizzie.’

  44

  A crowd of sixty or seventy stood outside the Flask. The snow fell now as if with relief; a teeming blizzard of wet flakes, the clouds so low that the top floor of the former council flats was lost in the gloom. When he’d dropped Justina and Fran at the lifeboat house on the way into town they’d seen the overburdened clouds banked on the horizon, lit by the moon, edging towards the coast. Most of the spectators had brought their drinks out with them, and as Shaw parked the Porsche he heard laughter, thrilling through the crowd like electricity. The Flask looked as it would have looked when the whalers were still stripping flesh on the fields beyond, the snow masking any hint of the twenty-first century, hanging off the rough brickwork and the timbered frame.

  The front door of the pub swung open as Shaw and Valentine made their way through the crowd to a halfhearted chorus of boos.

  Fiona Campbell shut the door behind them. ‘Sir.’

  Shaw looked round. The inside of the pub looked like the Mary Celeste. The empty tables dotted with drinks, a tape still playing Christmas favourites, the tree in one corner decked with flickering lights.

  ‘The barman opened up at six,’ said Campbell. ‘Lizzie Murray was here – but no sign of John Joe or the son, Ian. Mrs Murray went down to change a barrel and found the watergate open …’

  They heard noises from behind the bar but saw nothing until a paramedic appeared from the cellar. He brushed past them, out to the ambulance, without speaking.

  Shaw led the way. The trapdoor was open, the cool dampness of the cellar welling up into the close humidity of the bar. The narrow space between the barrels was full of ambulance gear: a stretcher, a mobile cardiac unit, blankets, a medicine chest. In the gutter lay the thick spillage from the beer. Yeast, thought Shaw. It had been Murray’s footprints on Sam Venn’s stairs.

  The semicircular watergate was still open, framing the dark river on which the snowflakes settled like miniature lilies. On the far side they could see the Clockcase Cannery, just visible, the illusion almost complete now: that it was a liner, edging from the quayside, bound for an Atlantic crossing.

  Shaw stepped out on to the stone quay. Below him lay the wooden clinker-built sailing boat they’d seen when they’d first come down to interview John Joe Murray. He was in it, lying on an overcoat, wrapped in blankets. His eyes were open, but studied the falling snow. One ankle was bare, and Shaw winced at the sight of the raw wound where a rope had cut down through the flesh. He pushed aside an image of Jimmy Voyce’s shattered leg, his broken, transparent body.

  A paramedic was kneeling beside Murray, checking his pulse.

  Shaw put a foot in the boat, expertly counterbalancing his weight by putting a hand on the far gunwale. He squatted down, trying to get close to Murray’s face. The smell was extraordinary – the smell of the sea, like the crushed ice on a fishmonger’s stall. Shaw noted the salt drying on his face.

  ‘Where’s Ian?’ he asked, close enough now to see that there was still life in those remarkable green eyes.

  ‘The sea chest,’ said Murray, and Shaw realized he wasn’t watching the snow fall, he was studying the lit attic windows above. ‘He’s up there now. He knows the truth.’ He licked his cracked upper lip. ‘Keep Lizzie away.’

  Shaw sensed someone at his back and turned to see paramedics, the stretcher between them. He retreated to the cellar, where Valentine was briefing Fiona Campbell. ‘Get a description out to St James’s,’ Valentine told her, then, noting Shaw, added, ‘Landlady’s missing. Shortly after he turned up,’ he said, nodding to the watergate. ‘Barman said she’d been hit – bloody lip, and she was crying – pretty much out of control.’

  They heard the water slapping against the quay outside.

  ‘Get a unit along the riverside, Fiona,’ said Shaw. ‘She might do something stupid. George – follow me.’

  As they climbed the narrow wooden stairs behind the bar Shaw looked over the banisters and saw John Joe, flat on the stretcher, being carried out through the coffin-shaped door to the bar. Even in the minute since he’d last seen him the colour had returned to his face, the flesh three-dimensional, alive again. A few seconds later the distant sound of the crowd, joyful, festive, died instantly.

  At the first landing Shaw halted, unable to suppress the image of Nora Tilden falling, her bones breaking, until she lay in a jagged heap on the floorboards below. The last flight, a corkscrew, climbed into the roof of the old building to the door like a man-sized cat-flap, hinged at the top. Shaw pushed his way through, stooping, his hand on the smooth surface of the old oak floor.

  Ian was kneeling in front of his grandfather’s sea chest. His hands, palms up, were pale in the light that poured in through one of the dormer windows from the street lamp outside, casting deep shadows in the otherwise unlighted attic. The heavy, silently falling snow produced an odd effect, dappling the orange light as if r
eflected off moving water.

  With a sudden burst of sound the ambulance pulled away from the front of the pub, the siren ringing out briefly.

  ‘What happened to John Joe?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘He told the truth,’ he said. ‘At last. It’s only taken twenty-eight years.’

  Ian looked at his hand and Shaw saw a dark stain. ‘You hit your mother?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s all. Just once.’ He looked about him as if only now aware of where he was. His body turned at the hips, and Shaw noticed for the first time that on his lap was a silver flask: oddly designed, the body in thick glass, the stopper and base metallic.

  Ian picked it up. ‘Strange where you find the truth,’ he said. ‘Even John Joe didn’t know, because he didn’t know what this meant …’ He put the flask on top of the sea chest.

  ‘I come up here a lot,’ he said, settling back on his heels. ‘It’s like a link – to family. I’ve always had Mum – but I felt she was always holding back, as if any display of emotion would let something out, something she wanted to keep inside.’ He nodded, seeing how true that was. ‘So I’d come up here, see if I could feel the past. Last night I came up again. The ship’s log is my favourite because Grandad filled it in, after they found the ship again. They saw an iceberg – did you know that? Just, like, there, one morning, a few hundred yards from the ship. He says they could feel it – the cold – on their faces.’ He shook his head in wonder. ‘I understand why he doesn’t want to see me – but I think it’s unfair. Selfish.’

  Shaw didn’t answer. Valentine was wondering how hard he’d hit his mother.

  ‘Because it’s like Grandad has run away, too, just like I thought Dad did. But it’s worse, because I know he’s been near, watching, and there’s been so many times I wanted to speak to him but I couldn’t. So …’ He looked around, seeing his fixation as pathetic. ‘I used to come up here, though not for a while. But last night I came up for a lantern – a storm lantern. I knew where John Joe was – out at the old coal barn at Wells, on the marshes. Aunt Bea rang. I needed the light. And there was something right about taking Grandad’s lantern. It was like it made it official – a ceremony. Because it was going to be a trial, of sorts. And then an execution.