by Jim Kelly
She walked to Osbourne, who’d slumped back into his seat, and knelt down so that they could hold on to each other. Osbourne slipped from the chair to his knees and Tilly took his weight, letting his head sink to her shoulder.
A woman stood at the doorway. Shaw could see the resemblance to the dead woman in her too, in the colouring – the auburn hair, the green eyes. This had to be Ruth, Marianne Osbourne’s next-door sister. But she was also a striking opposite to her sibling: fleshy and rounded, the skin tanned from the wind and sun, so that she had no hint of tragic paleness. Shaw recalled that she worked at the Lido at Wells, and he could imagine her, executing an efficient breaststroke, effortlessly covering length after length, her head clear of the water. She looked at Shaw. ‘I told her,’ she said, ‘that Marianne’s gone.’
They heard Joe Osbourne thank her, his mouth buried in the nape of his daughter’s neck. Osbourne, sitting back now on his haunches, was sobbing, his hands fluttering in front of his face like a pair of bird’s wings. He kept saying, ‘Thank God’, and touching his daughter on her head, as if giving her a blessing.
Shaw and Valentine went out into the hallway. By the front door, thrown down, was a placard with a wooden stump.
Save Our Unspoilt Landscape.
SOUL
Ruth followed them out. Up close Shaw could see her skin was unnaturally clean and slightly rucked, like corrugated paper. ‘I don’t think she can face any questions tonight,’ she said. ‘But she did say they argued this morning because she didn’t want to revise for the resits. She wanted to go with her mates – that’s what she said. In fact, she wanted to go up to Docking Hill, to the wind farm demo. But she didn’t tell Marianne that, or Joe.’
Shaw thought how odd it was that no one in the family ever shortened the victim’s name to something less formal, less cool. Marie, perhaps. And he wondered if Tilly had been there, up by the wind farm gates, when he and Valentine had driven through on the way down to the coast.
‘She’s been up there all day,’ added Ruth, answering a question Shaw hadn’t asked. ‘Till four. Then she went to the boyfriend’s down in Wells and they went for a drink on the front – The Harbour Lights. Marianne wouldn’t have approved of that either.’ Ruth looked down the short corridor to the bedroom, where the door was open but still blocked with the yellow and black tape. ‘It’s an awful shock,’ she said. ‘But the worse thing is she’s going to think it’s her fault.’
SIX
Shaw parked the Porsche by the lifeboat station at Old Hunstanton. It was past nine but a necklace of beach fires still sparkled along the dunes. He shrugged himself into his rucksack and began to run north along the high-water mark. Out at sea the spot where the sun had set was marked by a flash of green-yellow light, and silhouetted in it were the wind farms off the Lincolnshire coast. As he picked up speed he passed the new lifeboat station, built to house the inshore hovercraft. He’d been the pilot for nearly four years and the radio call-out pager was strapped to his belt, but the summer had been quiet and they hadn’t had a single shout in July. Tonight the sea was a sheet of mercury, untroubled by any wave.
The halfway point to his house was marked by a single stone pine, the branches buckled by the wind, thrown back as if in shock at the sight of the sea. He stopped, climbing the low dunes, to breathe in the view. He filled his lungs with the air that he always imagined had arrived direct from the distant Pole – a 3,000-mile fetch uninterrupted by any landfall. He unpacked the parcel of air he’d drawn into his lungs: salt, ozone and a trace of the exposed seaweed on the cockle beds. But with the wind following the shore there were other elements – a hint of a chemical barbecue tray, the strangely inert aroma of sand itself and a citrus edge from the lone pine.
He could see his wife and daughter long before they saw him, in chairs set out in front of the Beach Café. Lena had bought the old shop, derelict, two years earlier, a job lot with a small cottage to the rear and an old boathouse beside it, now transformed into from beach windmills at seventy-nine pence to a sand-yacht at £3,999. Wetsuits had got them through the first year because the surfing revolution had transformed the British beach into a stretch of sand dotted with human dolphins. And while surfing and the North Sea were not natural companions the north-west-facing beach at Hunstanton did catch a decent swell if the wind was right. Next year they planned to open the café in the evenings, thanks to a newly acquired alcohol licence. Supplies for the cafe and shop were currently ferried along the sand in an old Land Rover that Lena drove. But they’d need a new 4x4 van to run daily deliveries if they opened late, using the wet, hard sand below the waterline when they could. They’d made the most of this last summer of perfect sunsets because next year Lena might be struggling to serve iced Chardonnay, or bottled Adnams, to thirsty trippers.Surf!, selling anything
His wife stood, black skin showing off the white bikini. Five foot three inches tall, a full figure, but the skin taut and lustrous, especially at the close of a sunny summer. She’d just been in the sea and as she shook her hair Fran screamed, jumping away, the old dog their daughter loved barking at the sudden movement.
Lena brought him a glass of wine, standing close with a hand pressed against his stomach, insinuated through the gap between the buttons on his shirt. Her face was made up of curves, not slight subtle lines but bold, strong facets, so that sometimes he thought of an African mask, the curves around the eyes defining the face. She had a slight cast in her right eye, an odd match for Shaw’s blindness in the left.
They watched Fran taking a Chinese lantern on a string out on the sand. She lit the candle within and it rose, just beyond her reach, and in the windless air drifted at walking pace to the north. She followed it, trying to coax it round, so that she could bring it back to show them. Shaw noted that she walked as he did, as if she might at any step float free of the earth, her elbows slightly out from her narrow body. It was one of many physical similarities: the fair hair, the wide cheekbones, the almost colourless pale blue eyes. One of the mild complications of having an only child was that discussions about which side of the family she took after were loaded. It wasn’t as if the fact that she looked like Shaw – the light brown-sugar skin aside – would one day be outweighed by another sibling’s likeness to Lena. Thankfully Fran’s psychological make-up was entirely in her mother’s mould: forthright, outgoing, matter-of-fact – with just the same added ingredient: an ability to step back and watch the world go by.
He sipped his wine, his hand on the back of Lena’s neck. This was the moment he had to fight the urge to talk about work, because Lena had left the city, left Brixton and an urban life, to get away from the kind of lives people had to lead there. She didn’t believe in trying to create a paradise, Shaw understood that, but she didn’t want any glimpses of hell either. In the winter they’d be lucky to sell a pot of tea, let alone a beach yacht, so there was nothing easy about it. On a wet Tuesday in February, under a grey sky, it could be soul destroying, watching the sea through rain-streaked glass. It was going to be a struggle, but she was prepared for that. She didn’t think life owed her anything. But the lives that Shaw saw in his work were not everyday lives; they were a cross-section of the damaged, the cruel, the victimized. It was his job to deal with that, said Lena, not bring it all home.
When they’d met she’d been a lawyer for the Campaign for Racial Equality, picking through the London housing benefit system, trying to help families get a home. She’d always thought that if she immersed herself in that world, a world of poverty, crime and abuse, she’d be untainted by it – be able to just walk away at the end of a day’s work. By the time she met Shaw – on his first placement from the Met College at Hendon – she’d realized she was wrong. The sceptical, logical, forensic mind she’d trained so well was being coloured with cynicism. She always recalled something a judge had said in chambers. ‘To the jaundiced eye, Miss Braithwaite, everything is yellow.’ And that’s how her world looked: tainted. So they’d planned this: to live away fro
m the city, outside Shaw’s urban manor, and for Fran to have a childhood. Their daughter could do with her life what she wanted. but first they’d give her this: a wide sky and a beach.
Shaw looked out to sea, nothing in front of him and the world behind him. Lena pulled on a pair of Boden shorts. Shaw recognized the patterned material because Surf! sold the range. ‘Good day?’ he asked.
She thought about that. Lena’s attitude to the business was fiercely practical. This wasn’t a hobby, it was what she did, and it made her independent.‘£1,400 in the shop. I had Jon and Carole in the café and they took £550. Most of that was ice cream and coffee. A good day – up there in the top ten for turnover. Profits? Decent.’ Lena sat on the stoop steps, stretched her legs out and curled her toes into the sand: cold now the sun was gone. ‘You?’ she asked, a ritual invitation to talk about his day. Just the basics. If she wanted more, she’d ask again. There was no point Shaw hiding his life from his family.
Shaw told her about the death of Marianne Osbourne. The dynamic tension in their relationship sprang from his decision as to when to stop telling her about it. Shaw believed in the police, he thought they made people’s lives better. And he knew that Lena thought the same way. So most nights he told her what he’d done at work. Then they moved on. He outlined the case in two hundred words then stood, preparing to set out and join Fran at the edge of the motionless sea.
‘So this woman, Marianne, was on the beach at East Hills? Alone?’ said Lena. The moon was up now and she tilted her face to it as if it was the sun, so that the light gave her face an architectural quality.
‘Yeah.’ Shaw thought about that, sitting beside her. ‘Well, she said she hadn’t planned to be alone. Her friend just hadn’t turned up at the quay. And she may have met someone out there. But she said she was alone. I got George to read through her statement – the one she made at St James’ the day they took them off the island. She was sixteen, out of school, doing a course at the college, selling cosmetics door-to-door.’
‘Takes guts,’ said Lena, ‘at sixteen. Think back, how you’d feel, having to walk up strangers’ paths and just knock. That is a cold call.’
Shaw stopped, realizing that he hadn’t thought about Marianne Osbourne as a businesswoman: capable, competent, just like Lena, perhaps. His wife was right: it did take guts, a maturity as well, to work alone. Had a dream sustained her, as it did Lena?
His wife was shaking her head. ‘I’d have gone to the main beach – given the island a miss.’ She examined her toes, easily reaching to touch them. ‘Mind you, maybe there was someone she fancied on the boat? That would be perfect – she’d be alone, but she had a reason she was alone, ’coz her friend had let her down. Good opening line . . .’
‘In the statement she said she got there early,’ said Shaw. ‘Got herself a ticket because she didn’t want to miss out. It was a perfect day. She didn’t want to waste it if the friend didn’t turn up, and there was a crowd there already. And she liked East Hills more than the other beaches. She had a picnic, the lot. Anyway, she went. Says she sunbathed at the south end of the beach till lunch – had a swim just before – then read her book.’ Shaw slipped a notebook out of his pocket. ‘George says they took an inventory when they evacuated the island of what everyone had. This is Marianne’s . . .’ He handed her the notebook with the list. Towel. Bag. Bottle of made-up orange squash. Sandwich box – Tupperware, empty. One apple. Shell of a boiled egg in greaseproof paper. A yogurt carton – empty. One spoon. Radio. Paperback. Sun-tan oil. Lipstick. Vanity mirror. Eyeliner, Tissues, Daily Express. TV Times. Purse: eight pounds fifty-six pence in cash. Membership card for West Anglia College Students’ Union. What’s On leaflet for The Empire, King’s Lynn. ATM debit card – NatWest. Membership Card: Docking Lido.
Clothes: shorts, pants, T-shirt – Wham! sandals.
‘What’s missing?’ asked Shaw, not knowing if anything was missing.
Out on the sands Fran had corralled the Chinese lantern and was walking it back towards the house. The thought crossed Shaw’s mind that she was growing up an only child, and what would that do to her? They didn’t want another child; they felt comfortable, close-knit and intimate. But was it fair? Lena had siblings – two brothers, a sister. Being part of that family, embedded in it, was important. Why deny Fran that life?
‘You said she went swimming?’ she asked. ‘So where’s her costume?’
Shaw checked back: no costume. She’d come well prepared for the day – so she had one. A mistake on the list? Was it rolled in the towel and they didn’t unfurl it? Maybe.
‘Did they talk to the friend – the one that was supposed to turn up?’ Lena turned towards him, suddenly sure of herself. ‘Because that’s what’s odd, isn’t it? She’s brought her own food, like, one yogurt. Her own sandwiches. One boiled egg. But she said she always went with the friend – the girlfriend. You wouldn’t do that – you’d share. Like, this time I do the sweet stuff, you do the sarnies. That kind of thing. Food’s part of the fun, not fuel.’ Pleased with herself, she turned back to look at the sea.
‘Alright, why would you leave the kiss on a window?’ asked Shaw. He’d painted that image for her already – the image he couldn’t forget, the two lips forming a perfect bow.
Lena stiffened, knowing they were close to crossing the line, that they were going deeper into his world and he wanted her to follow.
‘It’s for her. A goodbye,’ said Lena, thinking it through.
‘A lover?’ asked Shaw. He studied her face.
‘A lover,’ she said, pulling a jumper on, letting her foot touch his in the sand.
‘Because?’
‘It’s for him, isn’t it? Because she’s dead. It helps him avoid the guilt.’ She stood, shivering slightly now the day’s heat was flooding out of the sand into the cloudless night. She took his hand, pulling him to his feet.
‘So she was dead already, and he’s outside the window, and he knows she’s dead, so he puts the last kiss on the glass?’
She took his face in her hands: ‘Yes. Now that’s it. Enough. Let’s eat.’
While the pasta cooked Shaw took a tennis ball and bounced it off the sidewall of the shop. Each night he did this 200 times – often more. Continuous practice developed innate skills which helped him to catch a moving object with 2D vision. As so often with the human brain it could develop astounding talents when faced with the challenge of operating normally despite disability. One trick he was working on was to move his head rhythmically side-to-side just a few inches – much in the way that a pigeon would – so that his one eye got two views of the moving ball, the brain putting them together as it would with two eyes, to create a 3D picture. He did it 300 times, dropping it twice, then went to his office and booted up the iMac. He used Skype to contact The Ark – the West Norfolk’s forensic lab. The screen flicked into life. Dr Kazimierz loomed then disappeared, and Shaw heard a chair being dragged into place. Shaw stood and closed the door. When he got back to the screen he could see the empty lab. The roof of the old chapel was original – carved beams, and the thin lancet windows were green-stained glass. On the far wall was a single carved angel, its hands over its eyes, as if in grief.
Kazimierz came back into view, both hands held up, one – gloved – smeared with blood. ‘Peter,’ she said. She looked beyond him, recognizing the cottage office. Since her husband had died the previous year the pathologist lived alone in a cottage further along the beach. They’d become friends, but no one at work would ever have guessed.
‘Anything?’ he asked.
She touched her forehead and Shaw thought for a moment she was going to cross herself. He’d seen her once, on the steps of the Catholic church in the centre of Lynn – a converted carpet warehouse. She’d stood for a second, bracing herself for the world.
‘I double-check the victim’s throat and mouth. We have a scenario – yes. She takes the cyanide pill, holds it in her mouth, goes to the bed, then she bites down. The poison stops her
swallowing entirely, but enough fluid is in her throat for the toxin to seep into the bloodstream.’
She leant out of the picture and reappeared with a skull – plastic, with movable joints for the jaw and upper neck. ‘Here . . .’ she said, pointing at the bony peg which joined the jaw to the skull. ‘There is a micro-fracture. I lift the skin and some of the muscle. On the other side there is no match. But broken capillaries here . . .’ She touched her own chin, fleshy, heavy-set. Shaw recalled the dead woman’s finer features, the narrow, elegant jawline, fragile even in death.
‘She broke her jaw then . . .’ said Shaw, ‘biting down?’
‘Not possible,’ said the pathologist, leaning back, a hand and coffee cup appearing from the left of the screen, the glove gone. She looked up into the rafters above her head. ‘Just possible,’ she conceded. ‘But one in a million chance. No. I think she put the capsule between her teeth, then someone do this . . .’ She put down the cup and slung one arm round her own neck.
‘A half Nelson,’ said Shaw.
‘Yes. Then the other hand presses the top of the cranium down as the grip tightens. That is when the jaw breaks. The pressure is very much . . . sustained. Maybe a strong man, maybe a strong woman. I could do this . . .’ She meant physically, not morally. ‘There are no signs she struggled. So I think she agreed in this, but only as a passive person. The word I don’t have . . .’
‘Acquiesced?’ suggested Shaw.