Jim Kelly - Death Toll

And now he saw another figure. He stopped, and for a second he heard twigs breaking as Valentine circled the spot. It was the angel. He walked towards it and put a hand on the pitted stone of the face. Turning slightly, he saw Lizzie Murray, sitting on the tomb. It was startling in this black-and-white world how much the blood on her face stood out, a line from the corner of her mouth down her neck, as if her skull was cracking to reveal the flesh and blood beneath. The light caught the diamond stud in her ear.

He walked forward, aware that the wind that had brought the blizzard along the coast had gone. The air was absolutely still, the snow propelled by gravity alone, wandering down, as if each flake had to find its own way.

‘You’re hurt,’ he said.

She tightened the belt at the waist of the overcoat, but that didn’t stop her shivering.

‘Ian — he had every right.’

Shaw could see the wooden planking over the open grave. He stepped forward and pulled it clear so that the sudden black square of the pit was before them, widened by Tom Hadden’s team so that they could take their pictures of the soil profile.

‘It was a stupid place to meet,’ she said.

‘What did he really say when you told him at the bar that night — that there was going to be a child?’

‘I told the truth,’ she said. And something about that statement made her cover her mouth. Taking her fingers away she examined a trace of cold pearl lipstick.

‘He said he was happy for us. But we should talk — not later, now. I said I couldn’t — just couldn’t. The choir had something for me. I couldn’t just not be there. So I said we’d meet later — at eleven, here, while they collected glasses and cleared the pub. I gave him the two glasses and filled the hip flask for him to take. I thought he’d hang around, then wait after closing — but he went then. He hated the bar. He said it was like being in a zoo, being the one in the cage. But he never really gave anyone a chance to like him.’

‘So you met here.’

‘Yes. We fought. I’m not going to tell you why,’ she said.

‘We found something in Pat’s pocket,’ said Shaw. ‘We didn’t know what it was — just shreds of paper. I know now. There were just three letters visible — MOT. It’s the airport code for his trip back to Hartsville.’

In the white gloom he saw Valentine’s silhouette move between a Celtic cross and a figure of the Virgin Mary in grey stone.

‘He was going home, wasn’t he? A one-way ticket. Bea was always going to stay and she thought Pat would too. But he wasn’t. He’d booked his flight. And it didn’t change anything, did it? That the child was coming?’

She stood at the grave’s edge and looked at the blood on her hand.

‘He was bleeding that night,’ she said. ‘Here,’ she added, touching her left cheekbone. ‘When he said he was going home I thought it was because of those three, and what they’d wanted to do. That he’d decided to leave behind all that hatred, not just those three, everyone — almost everyone. The way they looked at him. Everyone except Alby.

‘But it wasn’t. He’d decided weeks before because he showed me the ticket. Taunted me with it. Said the baby was my fault — that I hadn’t taken precautions and that I’d tried to trap him. He said babies were a kind of death. Those are the words I’ve always remembered.

‘He said there was a baby in this grave. I think Bea must have told him — about Mary, who would have been my sister. He said Mary had ruined Mother’s life, and Dad’s. Then he said it again, that babies were death, and he got up and stood by the grave and spat in it.’

She still hadn’t cried, and Shaw felt certain now that she never would.

‘So I just took the hook — it was lying here …’ She drew a circle in the snow on the stone tomb. ‘And I swung it. It was luck, really — catching his skull. I didn’t hit him hard.’ She looked at Shaw, still astonished by the ease of murder. ‘The point just sliced in.’

She was looking at a point in front of her now, the precise spot, Shaw thought, where Pat Garrison’s life had ended.

‘They’ll say he died instantly, won’t they? They always say that. But he didn’t. I don’t think he knew what had happened — just that something had happened. He was holding the flask and it fell from his hand to the grass. He turned to look at me, but I don’t think he could see at all, because the cruelty had gone from his eyes, and I thought perhaps he was dead then, dead standing. But he put his hand behind him and tried to reach the handle of the hook. He knelt, reached again, then fell sideways onto the grass.

‘I dragged him to the grave, took his keys out of his pocket, threw the glasses in after his body, then covered him with earth. Then I realized I’d missed the flask. That went in last, so it was nearer the surface. I found it almost straight away that night I tried to get his bones out.’ She shook her head.

She stood stiffly. ‘But before I dragged him to the grave,’ she said clearly, as if confessing, ‘I watched him die. He was curled up — on the grass, like a child himself. So maybe he was right — perhaps babies are death.’

Friday, 24 December

Christmas Eve: 10.00 a.m. sharp, the offices of Masters amp; Masters, solicitors, reached by Shaw and Valentine via a staircase through a door marked only with a brass plaque between W. H. Smith and Waterstone’s in the Vancouver Shopping Centre. The view from the one window in the office of Mr Jerrold Masters would, on most occasions, have been suicide-bleak — across the flat roofs dotted with air filters and flues, a copse of satellite dishes and a ramshackle night-watchman’s hut. But the snow had continued to fall overnight so that the cityscape was transformed into an Arctic scene — completed in the far distance by the three masts of a naval training ship on the quay. The cranes on the far bank of the Cut were decked out with fairy lights, immobile, like giant Meccano sets opened early for Christmas.

In the outside office Shaw had left his daughter with DC Fiona Campbell. He’d promised her a tour of St James’s, a look in the cells — an area she seemed particularly obsessed with — and breakfast in the canteen. Campbell had volunteered to be her guide, as Fran — no doubt prompted by his wife — seemed determined to see how women fitted into the West Norfolk Constabulary. After breakfast there’d be Christmas shopping for Lena’s presents, and for the dog a new winter jacket, then they’d all meet for lunch out on the coast. He had a week off. The thought of it made his blood buzz, as if he’d started to run.

‘Is Mrs Robins coming?’ asked Shaw.

‘A minute,’ Masters said, checking his watch, then setting a large envelope on his blotter beside a letter-knife in the shape of an eel.

Shaw considered Chris Robins’s last will and testament. For what could he hope? At best, a confession — a confession implicating Robert Mosse? Admissible in court? Hardly. If they had a new case to present to the CPS on Mosse a confession from Robins would be powerful corroborating testimony. But what they needed was evidence to get a new case in front of a judge and jury. Shaw looked around the shabby room and thought the chances of that were negligible, close to vanishing point, like the ghost-grey masts of the ship on the Cut. All they had was an envelope on a blotter.

‘Busy?’ said Masters, suddenly overcome with embarrassment at the silence. He held up the previous Tuesday’s edition of the Lynn News .

Lizzie Murray had been charged with the murder of Pat Garrison. She had insisted, despite counsel’s advice, on making a statement in which she confessed to the crime. Shaw had taken little pleasure from the moment, frustrated rather by the continuing silence of Alby Tilden and Ian Murray. They might face charges for what they’d done, but unless they confessed to the crucial intermediary role of Bea Garrison, all three would escape a charge of murder. Neither had administered a lethal poison, and Bea Garrison’s silence was impenetrable.