Beyond the pub lay Flensing Meadow, and through the cemetery a riverside walk the council had cleared in the 1980s. Vandals had ripped up the wooden benches, and a plinth which told the story of Lynn’s whaling fleet was drenched in graffiti. Dog bins gave off a pungent scent, even in winter.
The pub sign hung from the first tier of the building and depicted a whaling ship. Over the beamed doorway a small plaque read ELIZABETH AND JOHN JOE MURRAY; LICENSED TO SELL BEERS, WINES AND SPIRITS.
In front of the door stood DC Fiona Campbell.
‘Sir — Tom wanted you to see something.’
Valentine put a hand on the pub door, pushing it open. ‘I’ll suss the place out.’
Shaw led Campbell round the building to a wooden deck which held six picnic tables, all dripping, snow melting from the slated tops. They stood looking out at the grey water. Just below them was an old stone wharf, a small clinker-built sailing boat moored by a frayed rope, the deck enclosed within a stretched tarpaulin. On the far side of the river they could hear the mechanical grinding of a conveyor belt in the cannery. Shaw thought about Freddie Fletcher’s ‘good British fare’ — local shellfish, cooked and canned. In midstream the trawler stood silently, while mist lingered on the water like steam drifting from a hot spa.
‘Fiona?’ He looked her in the eyes, which were brown and liquid and unflinching. Shaw had noticed that several people he knew well had developed a strategy when looking into his eyes. They focused only on the undamaged left, never the moon-like right. It gave him the impression she was looking over his shoulder.
Campbell flipped open her notebook to show Shaw a picture she’d drawn: a child’s image of a gibbet, a stickman hanging by the neck, but unfinished, with no legs and just one arm.
‘Tom found this drawing — well, one just like it — in the victim’s wallet. It’s my copy. The wallet had given it some protection from the water, but the paper’s virtually dust after the drying out. Tom could see some ink marks — used a box of tricks to get the image. There were other pieces of paper, all in a bundle, all the same size, but he couldn’t lift an image except for this one, which was halfway down. But there are ink traces on all the pages.’
Shaw tried to think straight, aware this might be important but irritated by the playfulness of the little drawing.
‘It’s from a game of hangman, isn’t it?’ asked Campbell.
‘It looks like it,’ said Shaw. He’d always found hangman macabre, a vicious echo of Victorian childhood, with its humourless grinning clowns and nightmare automata. ‘But it isn’t — is it? In the game you have to try to guess a word, and that’s usually spelt out on the same piece of paper. So it probably isn’t a game.’
Campbell looked at the sketch she’d drawn, baffled.
‘And our victim’s how old — twenty, twenty-five? A bit old for games, anyway.’
‘Keeping them in your wallet’s a bit weird, too,’ she said.
‘The paper?’
‘Tom says standard notebook — each sheet a torn-out page. The ink could have come from any high-street biro.’
Shaw looked up at the riverside facade of the pub. It hadn’t been a thought that had even crossed his mind, the idea that the pub had been home to children — first the infant Mary, then Lizzie. He’d always thought of pubs as being aggressively adult, having spent many hours in his childhood sitting outside them.
‘Circulate a copy of this to the team, Fiona. For now I can’t think of anything else we can do with it.’ He put a finger to his left temple. ‘Just keep it here.’
He led the way back to the front of the pub, letting Campbell go in first. It had just turned twenty past eleven but the only customer was George Valentine. He pushed a half-empty pint glass away from himself as if it wasn’t his. Music played, filling up the empty room with something melodious from The Jam: ‘That’s Entertainment’.
The quarry-tiled floor had been mopped, though the disinfectant hadn’t quite erased the fug of the cellar, or the odours of a fried breakfast. But there was another smell — a scent — which drifted from a vase of white orchids on the bar. The room was panelled, wooden settles running round the walls, the windows glazed with coloured Victorian glass. Old prints crowded the walls — whaling ships, dockside scenes. Christmas decorations gilded the woodwork and ceiling beams. There was a large brass gong at the foot of the stairs, mounted on a dark wood frame, and Shaw recalled Sam Venn’s words: that when Alby Tilden had returned from his exotic travels he brought back a cargo of equally exotic memorabilia.
Two bay windows looked out on the wide river, the clear glass engraved with the name of Lynn’s Victorian brewers — Cutlack amp; Sons — now long defunct.
The barman did a little routine out of central casting: rearranging the beer cloths on the bar, touching one of the pumps, trying out a smile. He was in his late forties, early fifties, but clearly clung to the years of his youth — a vain shock of greying black hair swept back to flop over both ears, and he wore a T-shirt emblazoned with a bleached-out portrait of Ian Dury. The bones of his skull had once supported a handsome face: a narrow pointed chin, high cheekbones and a thin, fine nose. On his neck was a tattoo of an electric guitar in a vivid moss green. His eyes were green too, bright and youthful, but his skin had all the surface tension of a week-old party balloon.
The little ceremony of welcome didn’t include saying anything, while his right hand picked out a complicated beat to match the track playing through the speakers.
‘Coffee?’ asked Shaw, nodding at a well-used Italian coffee machine. He ordered an espresso. Campbell went for fizzy water. Valentine got a second pint on Shaw’s round. As the barman pulled it Shaw noted a wedding ring and a bronze bracelet.
‘Landlady around?’ asked Shaw, laying his warrant card on the bar.
The smile on the barman’s face fell like a calving iceberg. Behind the bar was a small wooden door, as narrow as a coffin. The barman inched it open. ‘Lizzie,’ he shouted. They heard footsteps on the wooden floor above.
‘What?’ asked a disembodied voice.
‘Police, Lizzie. They want a word.’
‘I’ll be five.’
Everyone pretended to relax. Another customer came in — a pensioner in a threadbare jacket, shirt and tie. The barman pulled a pint without asking what he wanted, holding the finished article up against the light to check its clarity.
He turned to set up the coffee machine for Shaw’s espresso. ‘So, what’s up?’ he asked over his shoulder. ‘Postman said you’d found something in one of the graves — something you shouldn’t have. That right?’ Shaw noted that as the barman set aside the crockery he held it with both hands, one on the rim of the small cup, one on the saucer.
‘I’m sorry — you are …?’ asked Shaw.
‘John Joe Murray,’ he said. ‘It’s over the door. I’m the landlord.’
‘Ali, at the shop,’ said the man in the threadbare jacket, butting in, ‘he says it’s one of those Polish immigrants. Ali says they cut him up, in bits.’ He extended a purple bottom lip to the edge of his pint glass.
‘Ali’s talking out of his arse,’ said Valentine, reaching for his pint, then stopping himself. He was nearly at the bottom. Then his mobile rang and he got up and went into the back bar, which had once — he guessed — accommodated a full-sized billiards table, because a raised platform that had run around it for chairs and tables was still there, but it had all been cleared away to make a dining room. Each table was neatly laid for a meal. In one corner on a plinth was a gold Buddha, glowing against the polished dark wood.
Shaw and Campbell took a seat in one of the bay windows in the bar, the river at their backs. Valentine came back in, still rolling his shoulders to get rid of the morning’s damp. He waved the mobile at Shaw. ‘Voyce took the hired car out to the Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital to visit Chris Robins. Bit late — even for his funeral. He left flowers and fruit juice with the ward sister — so clearly Robins’s death was all news to him. Makes you wonder why, though. What did he think Robins could tell him? Anyway — it shook him up. He drove back, dumped the car, then bought a bottle of vodka from an offy on the London Road and drank it in the park. Then he walked back to the hotel and phoned Mosse.’
Campbell looked bemused as they beamed at each other.
Shaw thought about Chris Robins. An original member of Bobby Mosse’s little teenage gang, who’d lived a life of petty crime and diminishing mental powers until he’d been sectioned under the Mental Health Act.
‘What did he say?’ asked Shaw.
‘Didn’t use the phone in the room — he’s got a mobile. We’re trying to trace it. But we heard his end of the conversation: he said he was in town seeing family, thought they should catch up on old times.’
