them up on the Formica table top, and was now constructing a third.
The two older men exchanged a quick glance but Shaw caught it — and a hint of what was in it: a flash of anger, something quick-witted and cynical.
Shaw let Campbell run with the questions, knowing that she’d realize she’d hit gold. ‘How d’you mean?’ she said, making her voice as light as possible, standing and buttoning up her coat to go, as if the answer didn’t matter.
The kid had picked up none of the vibes and was still looking at his rolling machine, smiling to himself. Dan and Michael — Shaw could see — were desperate to intervene, desperate to stop him talking, but unwilling to speak.
‘If there’s a wake close by — they might use the old chapel on Whitefriars, or the school hall at the primary, something like that — then we sometimes tag along, pall-bearers too. Put the board over and fill it in later. Like — you aren’t gonna get a complaint from whoever’s down there, are you? And you might get a glass, out the back. One of the perks. If it’s in the Flask, we always go — ’cos they serve out the yard window to the riverbank, and if there’s a free bar they just pass us a few bevvies. Does no harm.’
Shaw zipped up his jacket, the RNLI motif on the left breast pocket. ‘Nora Tilden — the woman in the grave we’re concerned with — she was the landlady at the Flask.’
The kid whistled. ‘Then that, my friend, was a piss-up to be at.’ He laughed, and it didn’t seem to worry him that he laughed alone.
7
‘Jason’s pretty much a tosser,’ said Michael, leading Shaw away through the tombstones, across the soaking grass. ‘But he’s right — you know, we’re all human. But it’s rare — really rare. It’s just in this job the perks are few and far between. So, chance of a free bevvy, course we go. But we’d be back in, what, an hour? Less. And we’d see, we’d look — if there was anything there, we’d see it.’
Shaw didn’t answer as he followed the track Michael was making through the grass. He doubted very much that they would notice if the level of the grave was higher than they’d left it. And after a skinful of free beer he didn’t think they’d be at their most observant. A winter’s afternoon, the light fading, keen to get by a fire, or back to the wake. It might have happened like that. It could well have happened like that. He’d left Campbell to take a statement from Jason, just for the record.
He rang Valentine on the mobile for an update. The surveillance squad on Voyce had struck lucky — he’d gone out first thing for breakfast in town so they’d slipped in and wired the single room — two mics, one in the light fitting, one in the bedside phone. They’d set up in a room on the same floor and were monitoring round the clock. Shaw decided not to ask if the warrant had arrived in time. They arranged to meet at the Flask in an hour.
The mist in the cemetery seemed to be closing in, and all Shaw could see was gravestones and the figure ahead, making a track through the snow.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Shaw. ‘It’s Michael …’
‘Brindle,’ he said, stopping suddenly and looking around at the tombstones in the mist. ‘There,’ he said, pointing to the outline of a stone wall which had come into sight. ‘The east gate.’ He led the way to an ironwork door set in the wall and selected a key from the bunch hanging from his belt.
‘It’s a short cut,’ he said, motioning Shaw through. They emerged onto one of South Lynn’s dead-end streets, one of many in a dead-end town. To the left Shaw could hear the traffic on the distant London Road, lorries churning gears in the mist, but to the right the street ran into a wall of white, where he knew the edge of the Nar would lie in its deep channel. Opposite was a small cafe Shaw had never seen before: a converted front room, the condensation obscuring the interior.
A handwritten sign above the door read tinos.
Inside, eight tables were crammed full, largely with council workmen in road-digger gear. Full English breakfasts congealed on off-white plates, while behind the metal-topped counter a man in a vest was squirting steam into a pot, the sound obliterating the nasal whine of KL.FM — the town’s local radio station.
Brindle nodded to the man, ordered three breakfast baps and led Shaw through a door marked toilet into a hallway, then doubled back up a narrow staircase. The door at the top was preceded by a metal security frame on which had been fastened a hand-painted sign.
P.E.N.
THE PARTY OF ENGLISH NATIONALISM
LYNN FOR OUR OWN FOLK
‘Keeps Freddie busy,’ said Brindle, grinning at Shaw but giving up on the conspiracy when he saw the expression on the DI’s face. As they waited outside the locked door he looked down at his feet.
Their footsteps had announced their arrival, and Shaw could hear someone turning a key. By the time the office door was open he had his warrant card out, straight-armed, in the occupant’s face.
‘DI Shaw, King’s Lynn CID. Just a few questions, sir.’
Freddie Fletcher was bald, a sculpted head, bony, like a clenched fist, the skin shiny as if it had been polished. In contrast, the visible skin that wasn’t on his head was covered in black hair — his chest where the shirt was open, his wrists, and the backs of his hands. He was in his fifties, perhaps younger, and remarkably alive — grey eyes, dove-grey, which locked onto Shaw’s without flinching.
Shaw looked around the room. In the centre was an oak desk. One wall was dominated by a map of Lynn, the various council wards marked out. He knew that in the last district elections the BNP had done well in Gaywood, one of the wards on the outskirts of town. The town was on the edge of the new BNP heartland — rural East Anglia — where the party could tap into anxieties about migrant farm workers. And there had been a charm offensive, too; an attempt to play down the party’s violent and racist past — lots of community work, helping the elderly, fundraising for the local working-men’s club. Not a word about repatriation for blacks and Asians — but then in Lynn, as in much of the surrounding area, that wasn’t an issue. But he’d never heard of the PEN. A splinter group, perhaps.
‘Give me a sec,’ said Fletcher, walking away to the window with a mobile to his ear. Shaw judged his height at five-eight, five-ten at most.
On the desk was a pile of leaflets, fliers for a forthcoming concert:
THE OLD SONGS ARE THE BEST
The PEN motif was in the bottom right-hand corner, the size of a thumbprint.
Fletcher killed his call and took the captain’s chair behind the desk. Shaw and Brindle sat on a short bench against one wall.
‘Can I help?’ He picked up a pen and leant back, like a bank manager considering a loan. But his fingers were a working-man’s fingers — fat and inflexible. On the desk was a framed picture, turned to face visitors, showing Fletcher at a back-garden barbecue, his arms round two children.
‘Maybe,’ said Shaw. ‘It’s about a burial on Flensing Meadow — 1982. The graves are being exhumed because of the flooding, and something has been found — something that shouldn’t have been there. A body.’
‘It’s a graveyard — what did you expect to find?’
‘An
Fletcher’s fleshy eyelids slid down, fluttered, as if he’d been asked a tricky maths question. ‘Oh, right. Where, exactly?’
‘Down towards the riverbank, a few feet from a big Victorian stone tomb.’
‘Yeah, I know where you mean. Well, in that case there’s a good chance it’s one of mine.’
Brindle shifted on the pew. ‘It’s Nora Tilden’s — Lizzie’s mum.’
