Death Toll

‘The time’s important,’ said Shaw.

She looked up at him, struggling to keep focused on the question. ‘We had a party licence and we had the choir in — the sea-shanty choir. It’s sort of their home, really — they’ve always sung here and Mum liked to hear them. Some of them sang at the Free too, so they’d all been close. We all listened to the first half of that, so …I don’t know. Ten fifteen, bit earlier. Ten thirty they’d start up again — so, before that.’

‘And he just walked out — didn’t speak to anyone else?’

‘No — he went and got his coat. That was behind the bar, upstairs. Then we talked a bit more. He held my hand.’ She brightened at the memory. ‘Just for a second, over the bar. In public. We’d never done that before. And then he did go.’

She picked up Shaw’s sketch. ‘Can I keep this?’

‘What happened then — the following morning?’ asked Shaw, nodding.

‘When Pat didn’t show up, I just thought the worst of him …’

Campbell held up a hand. ‘Sorry — just a detail, where did you arrange to meet?’

Lizzie’s eyes glazed. ‘The Walks — we had a place, a bench, by the Red Tower, where we’d sit.’

Lizzie folded the sketch, looking at Bea. ‘We thought he couldn’t face it. That now there’d be this child, it wasn’t a game any more. That we should marry. That it was up to us. He was very young, we both were, and I’ve always clung to that. That he couldn’t handle it — so he ran away.’

She said it in a flat voice, without emotion. But Bea, who’d been looking through the window, suddenly buckled. Kath went to her, holding her up, bringing her back to the sofa.

‘And you didn’t report the fact that Pat was missing?’ asked Shaw. ‘Either of you?’

‘That was my fault,’ said Bea quickly, wiping tears from her eyes, talking over Lizzie, the Midwestern accent suddenly sharper. ‘Lizzie — she wanted to go to the police, didn’t you?’

‘I couldn’t believe he’d gone — that he’d deserted us,’ said Lizzie. ‘I went to the park. I waited, and he didn’t come, so I went to the flat. But I never had a key. And there was no answer. So I came back here. I thought we should report it. If he wasn’t at home — where was he? Where was he?’ she repeated, almost shouting now, almost out of control.

‘He’d only been gone a few hours,’ said Bea. ‘You’d have laughed at us if we’d panicked. Lizzie told me then — what she’d told him, about the baby. I said he’d be confused. I knew Pat better than he knew himself. He was like his father. Neither of them ever grew up. I thought he’d be frightened too. That he might want me with him — to talk about it. This was what? Noon, Lizzie? So I went home — I had a flat on Explorer Street, where we’d both lodged when we came over. There was a note on the mat, addressed to Lizzie. I took it back to her.’

‘He said he was sorry,’ said Lizzie. ‘That’s what it said. A lot more words, but that’s what it boiled down to. I’m sorry. Poor Ian — when he was growing up he’d say that, too. I’m sorry, Mommy. And I’d scream at him all the more. Because it’s such an empty thing to say.’

‘No explanation?’ prompted Campbell.

‘Just that he couldn’t stay — that this wasn’t his home, and he didn’t belong here. That he wouldn’t be back. I burnt it …’

‘But you recognized the handwriting?’ asked Shaw.

She didn’t seem to understand the question, looking from Campbell to Shaw and back again. ‘Handwriting? No. Pat typed everything — didn’t he, Bea? But the signature was his — it looked like his? Next day I went round to the flat again — there was a woman who cleaned the place and she let me in. Everything was gone — including the typewriter.’

She seemed to weigh the folded sketch. ‘I’ve always thought he didn’t want our child, that he had that in him — to just walk away from me.’ She smiled. ‘And now I know none of that’s true, is it? For nearly thirty years I’ve thought about his other life — the life he had without us. I thought he was out there, loving other people. I used to think, in those first few years, that he might be thinking of me, and that if I did the same, at exactly the same moment, we’d connect.’ She smiled at the picture, and Shaw noted that her fingers had tightened on the paper. ‘I know now he loved us.’ She looked at Shaw. ‘But someone hated him — hated him enough to kill him.’

‘Someone like Freddie Fletcher?’ asked Shaw.

Lizzie’s eyes widened and Shaw sensed she was seeing something again, an image from the past.

Then she shook her head. ‘Freddie’s harmless. Nasty. Bigoted. Ignorant. But harmless. They chucked him out of the BNP because he wouldn’t shut up about the blacks. Loose cannon. But it was all talk — always has been.’

‘People like Freddie? Back then — Freddie wasn’t alone, was he? Who did he used to hang around with? Can you give us the names?’ Shaw glanced at Bea. ‘Can you?’

Both women nodded, apparently eager to help, but perhaps just eager to be left alone.

‘My DC here will organize statements — I want you both to try to put a list together for us. We need to piece together what happened that night: minute by minute.’

Fiona Campbell had been thinking about the choir, the packed back room, the music.

‘Didn’t the Whitefriars Choir record itself? I thought I’d heard them on a CD or something — at the folk festival?’

Bea was nodding, suddenly animated, but Lizzie examined a tissue she’d been shredding in her hands.

‘That’s right. In fact, that night there was a camera. A cine camera, on a tripod — remember?’ Bea asked.

Lizzie’s shook her head, neither yes or no.

‘That must be right because we asked people not to move around between the songs,’ said Bea. ‘It was special that night, because Nora had been good to them. They always sang in that room, and I don’t think she charged them, did she, Lizzie?’

Lizzie shrugged.

‘A film? There’s a film of the night of Nora’s wake?’ pressed Shaw.

‘Somewhere,’ said Bea.

They left them then, the three women huddled on the sofa, and let themselves out, down the narrow wooden stairs and through the coffin-like door into the bar. Outside, Shaw buttoned up his overcoat and considered the eccentric facade of the Flask — the crazy angle of the tortured beams, the 1970s steel buttresses holding up the gable end. He’d left Campbell inside, trying to fix a time to take statements from John Joe and Ian, and picking up a contact for the Whitefriars Choir. If that recording had survived, they needed to see it. But Shaw doubted their luck would stretch that far.

He walked out to the edge of the cemetery and looked back at the Flask. Bea Garrison’s face was at the mullioned glass of the room above, and then it was gone.

11

Shaw parked the Porsche on the slipway beside the old lifeboat house at Hunstanton and walked down to the new building. Through the small observation portholes in the metal doors he could see the hovercraft within, the diffuse glow of the security lighting picking out the polished yellow and blue of the housing in the nest of the deflated skirt. He checked his RNLI pager, anxious that it was now more than a fortnight since the last ‘shout’, when they’d taken Flyer out over Holkham Sands to lift a two-man crew off a yacht foundering near the entrance to Wells at low tide. He thought about letting himself in, then thought about the rigmarole of resetting the security system, the safety gear, and how he should be home because he might just catch Fran before bedtime. And that was why he was here — why he’d made himself walk out of the incident room after the late-night briefing. But he sensed the silence within the boathouse, like a magnet, promising a space to think inside. It was irresistible.

He used an electronic key to open the data pad and punched in the code, rolling up the door. He didn’t bother to roll it down. After dark, in winter, the beach was deserted, the white line of surf shifting, insubstantial in the gloom. He swung a leg over the side of the skirt and slipped into the pilot’s chair — his chair. He flicked on the power so that the sonar and radar screens filled the cockpit with a luminous green light. The radio automatically scanned the emergency bands. He heard a snatch of Dutch, then something else — possibly Russian. But nothing