Jim Kelly - Death

‘Well done,’ said Shaw. But he was an honest enough copper to realize the information would now fatally colour his judgement when he met Joe Osbourne. It might have been best to find out afterwards. He wasn’t there to judge; he was there to enforce the law. All this told them was that if Joe Osbourne tried to tell them he had a perfect marriage they’d know he wasn’t telling the whole truth. Nothing more. His father’s maxim was a good one, even if it took a definite control of willpower to put into practice: never judge a marriage from the outside. After all, who would ever know what hatred, or love, had existed between Joe and Marianne Osbourne.

Osbourne was in the front room, bent forward in a wooden chair, elbows on the narrow arms, his head cradled in his hands. Lanky, slight, muscled; Shaw got the impression his body was folded into the chair, ready to spring out. For a man sat motionless in a seat he radiated a remarkable physicality, a latent energy. But he was also a living embodiment of the difference between fit and well. His skin was oddly lined, as if the wrinkles of his face had fallen in the wrong places, and his complexion matched the fat on dead meat. His eyes — a light grey — were lively enough, but the whites were bloodshot. Shaw had no doubt he could move like a thirty-year-old, but he looked a generation older.

Behind him against the wall stood two acoustic guitars, one battered, one almost new.

‘Mr Osbourne?’ said Shaw, sitting opposite, waiting for the head to come up. ‘We’re sorry for your loss, sir,’ he added, immediately regretting how little emotion he’d put in the sentence.

He coughed, ploughed on: ‘Your daughter, Mr Osbourne. We can’t find her. We’re concerned. One of the neighbours said she had an argument with your wife this morning. Was that common?’ Shaw checked a note. ‘She’d be just eighteen, I think?’

Osbourne’s eyes were grey and flooded, an echo of the North Sea in winter. ‘They clashed,’ he said. ‘She didn’t understand Tilly.’ He gave a small shrug, which Shaw guessed hid the unspoken addition ‘And neither do I.’ Osbourne looked round the room as if searching for more words. ‘They weren’t close.’

It was such an extraordinary thing to say about a mother and child that Shaw sat back, and he noticed Valentine, standing, edged back as well, as if they’d both decided to give him the time to carry on.

Osbourne began to cry, but the tears fell only from his left eye. ‘She wants a life of her own,’ he said. ‘To escape.’ He coughed once, which triggered a series, until he retrieved an inhaler from his pocket and took three breaths.

Shaw felt what he’d first felt standing by Marianne Osbourne’s bed: a sadness that seemed to permeate the house, seeping into each of the rooms, as if fingers of misery ran through the home, like strands of dry rot. He took an empty glass from Osbourne’s hand, locked eyes with him.

‘Any ideas where she might be, sir?’

He shook his head.

‘It’s possible she saw your wife’s body on the bed through the window,’ said Shaw. ‘A kiss was left on the glass. It may be hers. So you see, we really do need to find her quickly in case she hurts herself or does something stupid. .’

‘Oh, God,’ said Osbourne. He let his hands open and clench and Shaw saw he’d been holding a snapshot. The picture was of the two of them on a beach, Marianne in a bikini, him in trunks — trendy Speedos — his legs painfully thin, his taut frame strung with muscle and tendon. They looked like kids. They were kids. Shaw took the snapshot, flipped it over and read: Cromer. July 1994.

‘We’d asked Marianne to come to the police station tomorrow to be re-interviewed about the murder on East Hills in August 1994. Do you think that might have had something to do with her death, Mr Osbourne?’ asked Shaw.

‘She never swam after East Hills,’ said Osbourne. The voice was light, matching the slender hands. Shaw imagined the fingers manipulating the cogs of a lock. ‘I was working that day, the day of the murder; otherwise I’d have been there too,’ he said.

‘Your father’s shop — the locksmith’s?’

‘She went with a girlfriend,’ he said. Shaw and Valentine exchanged a glance, noting that Marianne had kept the precise truth from her husband: that she’d gone to East Hills alone, or at least without the friend she’d agreed to meet. Sometimes they had this ability, Shaw and Valentine, to know they were thinking the same thing. Did Marianne’s lie mean they were right? That she’d gone out to East Hills to meet a secret lover?

‘It really shook her up,’ said Osbourne. ‘Seeing the body — I suppose they all were. She’d have nightmares sometimes — always the same. She’d be swimming out and she’d get entangled in the body, in the arms and legs and she’d run out, covered in blood.’ He covered his mouth. ‘It was the blood — the sight of it. She wasn’t squeamish. But he bled to death. And she said you wouldn’t believe it — the amount of blood in the water, like a cloud, all along the beach. Like there were hundreds dead, or dying. She said one of the men on the beach said his father had been in Normandy for D-Day — on the beaches — and that the sea was red there too, for miles. It was like the colour was in her head, for ever.’

He coughed again, trying to limit it to one, but failing, so that he needed a second dose from the inhaler.

‘She never said anything else about that day? Perhaps she met another friend out on the beach by chance? Did she have lots of friends?’

‘She was popular,’ said Osbourne, his voice flat, atonal.

‘You were going out by then. .’

‘That’s right.’

‘So no other men?’

‘We were an item,’ said Osbourne, wiping tears from his face with the back of his hand, but there’d been a hint of bitterness in his voice.

Shaw decided then that they’d come back and interview him when he wasn’t still in shock.

Osbourne looked around the room, and Shaw sensed a kind of tedious hatred for what he saw. ‘It’s why we’re here, in this house, in this fucking house,’ said Osbourne. He spat the word out, as if his wife’s death gave him a sudden freedom.

‘Why?’ prompted Valentine.

‘After East Hills she couldn’t live by the sea. She couldn’t wait to get out of Wells. Ruth — that’s her sister — lives next door, has done since she was married, so when this one came on the market we pitched in. I’d have stayed. .’ He shrugged, as if he’d been happy to give up the sea. ‘But prices were soft so we got it.’

‘They must be close — the sisters?’ asked Valentine, thinking it was a kind of nightmare for him, the thought of relatives next door.

‘Ruth’s always been there for Marianne,’ he said. ‘And Tilly.’ Shaw considered the testimonial. In his experience people who were ‘always there’ for others got their satisfaction in life from not being somewhere else.

Robinson was up out of the chair, the spring uncoiled. He walked quickly to the makeshift bookcase and took a bottle out of a gap between two encyclopaedias, refilling his glass, his hands shaking rhythmically but slowly.

‘For the record, sir,’ said Valentine. ‘Today you were at the shop again, all day?’

He turned back to them. ‘Yes. I closed for lunch, but I was out the back in the workshop.’

‘And your wife worked at home?’

Osbourne nodded, but his jaw was straightening. ‘No. She was due in at Kelly’s — the funeral directors down in Wells. It’s a part-time job but we need the money. She got up, had a bath, got dressed. Then, after Tilly went, she got back into bed. Said she couldn’t — not today. You know. . she suffered.’ He drank, then added: ‘Low mood,’ making it clear he knew it was a euphemism.