Jim Kelly - Death

Shaw felt the change approaching before his skin felt the sun. The temperature rose, the damp, almost sulphurous smell of the mist dissolved, but most of all the acoustic world came back in sharp definition, as if the ‘treble’ had suddenly been switched up on a gigantic sound system. A gull shrieked, the branches on the stone pines whispered, and he opened his eyes to see East Hills bathed in sunshine, the image pin-sharp.

Then his mobile beeped. It was a text from Twine. He didn’t want to strain the eye by reading it so he handed the phone to Valentine. ‘It’s Joe Osbourne,’ he said. ‘He died an hour ago. Tilly was there.’

Shaw stood on the sand looking along the deserted beach towards the far point of East Hills. The pain in his blind eye was still there but blunted, distant. His vision had stabilized but the images were oddly vivid, as if his good eye was suddenly connected to a high-voltage cable. And his other senses, hearing and smell, were jangling, picking up too much information: he seemed to be able to track each gliding gull, catch the scent of every scrap of seaweed, every gull-pecked crab. From the trees on the crest of East Hills he caught the sharp scent of pinesap and the creaking of a crow’s wings as it clattered out of the high branches.

The sunlight seemed to flatten the island, driving away any shadows, while the mist lay behind them, obscuring the distant shore. Shaw knew that with the turn of the tide the mist would roll slowly out to sea, foot by foot, and would envelop them within the hour. Ruth Robinson sat in the boat, her hands seemingly too heavy to lift, her body rocked by the gentle nudging of the gunwale against the rubber buffers of the little pier.

‘If he wants you, will you come?’ Shaw asked her.

‘You won’t find him,’ she said. ‘I want to go back. Tilly needs me.’

It had been her first thought, on hearing of the death of her father, that Tilly would be alone. But Shaw couldn’t go back. ‘When the launch gets here, go back with them. And George, follow me up.’ He kept his voice low, and as flat as the sea. ‘Head for the pillbox. Until then, let’s keep it quiet.’ From his pocket Shaw retrieved a copy of the plan they’d found in the dugout of the small underground shelter, set relative to a six-sided building. ‘I think there’s one of these dugouts up by the pillbox,’ said Shaw. ‘That’s where he’s gone.’

‘You could leave him,’ said Ruth Robinson. ‘Let him do it. He’s got a pill left. Would that be a crime?’

It was an odd use of the word and it made Shaw pause. ‘Then we’d never know,’ said Shaw, feeling a wave of sympathy for this woman, trapped between two futures, both desperately dark. To let her husband die and to die herself, one day, in ignorance of what he’d done, what he’d hidden from her. Or to let him live, give him the chance of life, and then live with the consequences of that — to know the truth, to know why all those people had to die. In a way it was she who was in hell, a hell of his making.

He walked up the beach towards the ridge, checking his path against the plan. The pillbox was north, near the point, the secret dugout just off the path, between twenty and twenty-five feet short of the concrete octagonal perimeter wall. Within a minute he was close, walking through the dappled shadows of the pines, until the brutal concrete structure came into view. He stopped, looked back and saw the mist was closer, on the island already, amongst the trees, the whiteness tinged purple like a garlic clove. The air was hot and dry. the wind the slightest of zephyrs, which he could only feel if he stood still, judging which side of his face was the coolest.

In the stillness Shaw walked the path by placing each heel down, then the toes. He checked his mobile — there were no signal bars but he killed it anyway, waiting for the screen to blank out. As he took each step he thought about what might be beneath — the single room, a storm lantern, perhaps, and Robinson. Alive still?

The pillbox was thirty feet away when he dropped to his knees, feeling the sand at the side of the path with his hands, spreading it in fan-like patterns to either side. Fifteen feet from the pillbox he stopped, about to stand, about to retreat to search again, when his left hand connected with gritty sand — gritty and immovable , like sandpaper. The sand covered a trapdoor, wooden with an iron trim, and at its centre he found an iron handle.

The mist arrived, seeping through the trees, the temperature dropping instantly, the sunlight gone. In these few seconds Aidan Robinson could end it all, biting down on the lethal capsule. Shaw felt a growing dread that he was, perhaps, already too late, a fear that he’d find Robinson’s corpse, rigor creeping over him like the sea fret over East Hills.

He stood, feet together, astride the trapdoor, took the iron handle in both hands, bent his knees and leant back, letting the trapdoor balance his weight; then he pulled, flipping the heavy iron cover up on well-oiled hinges. The hole gaped, mist falling into it like dry ice. He dropped down, landed in sand, then turned quickly to face into a single room lit by a candle-stub, the light of which caught the ribs of corrugated iron in the roof. It was as if Shaw had been swallowed and was in the stomach of some metallic whale. The candle guttered with the impact of his fall.

Aidan Robinson sat in the only chair on the far side of a table, the edge of which pressed into his body. His arms hung by his side so that Shaw couldn’t see his hands. His face was glistening with sweat, the whites of his eyes catching the light. Under stress time slows down, and so for a second, or less, Shaw thought Robinson was dead because there was something frozen about his shoulders and neck, as if he’d been nailed to the rigid back of the chair. Then the large, broad skull rocked left and right, the eyes moving in and out of the light, from silver to black and back again.

There were no other chairs, just a rusted bed. What he noticed immediately was the tremendous thud of the falling waves out on the sandbanks at sea, even on this calmest of days. In a storm the noise would be overwhelming, sublime — an operatic backdrop. Each percussion made Shaw’s ears pop with the change in pressure.

Shaw could smell fear. Trapped fear. ‘Aidan,’ he said. The sand of the floor seemed to suck all the energy and edge from his voice, as if he was in an acoustic booth.

‘That night. While they searched the island above.’ Shaw manufactured a laugh. ‘You were down here. Tug came for you next day in his boat. This had been your secret — the grandsons’ secret, Tug Johns’ secret. He was in the unit up at Creak, wasn’t he? But being on the crew at the lifeboat he had a brilliant idea — why not a dugout here, too? The ultimate lookout, watching over the harbour.’

Shaw thought about sitting on the bed but there seemed to be a spell on the room, on Robinson, and he didn’t want to break it.‘You didn’t plan the murder did you? Either of you.’

Aidan Robinson shook his head, and for a moment Shaw thought he wouldn’t speak at all and that was because he had the sixth capsule ready, lodged between his back teeth, perhaps, or in one of the unseen hands? Yes, in a hand, hidden.

‘He pulled the knife,’ said Robinson. His voice, low, monotonal, was flattened further in this box, sunk deep in the sand. There was something in the way he spoke that suggested this man wasn’t contemplating death but that he had moved beyond it. The table held a tin cup, turned upside down, and a knife: mock antler handle, nine-inch blade, the metal oiled, but with traces and spots of dust, and stained slightly, possibly by rust.

‘The pictures were of you — you and Marianne,’ said Shaw. ‘Ruth’s here now, down on the beach. She’s guessed that. But she knows there’s more.’ Shaw judged the knowing inflexion of the sentence perfectly.