a book which had been covered in brown paper. But as soon as she moved, something about the way her shoulders slumped reminded him of the Westmead: as if — like the community of women who’d fought to bring up children in its warren of concrete — she was braced for something, always waiting to absorb the next blow. Old age hadn’t made her movements any less brisk or workmanlike, as if she didn’t have the luxury of a retirement ahead. She had a slight cast in one eye, which Shaw noticed because she looked directly at him as she took his hand. It reminded him of Lena, so that he couldn’t restrain the smile he gave her.
She thanked him for coming, asked about his journey, apologized for the icy cold and for dragging him out of town.
‘It’s a dreadful place,’ she said, but somehow she seemed to hint at some kind of affection for it, as if it was an errant child.
She’d taken a job in the kitchens, she said, both because she’d needed the money and so that she could see Chris every day. Although his death — she avoided the word suicide — had removed one incentive, she couldn’t afford not to work, so now spent her days eternally reminded of her loss in this place where her son’s life had ended.
Shaw thought of the grainy CCTV footage of the car crash at Castle Rising, wondering which of the peak- capped figures had been Chris Robins. He was fighting to keep hold of that scene, and what it said about this woman’s son: that however blameless she might be, he had been guilty of a particularly ruthless crime, even if it had been a crime of omission. He’d driven away from that buckled car and left three people to die. Only fate had limited the death toll to two.
‘I can’t stand it inside once I’m done working,’ she said, looking back over her shoulder at the red-brick mass of the old hospital. ‘When Chris was alive it seemed worth the effort. Is it all right if we stay out here?’
Shaw said he was happiest outside.
Fumbling inside a heavy coat she produced a white envelope with Shaw’s name on the front — in full and typed: Peter Summerville Shaw — his middle name being his mother’s maiden one.
Shaw tore it open. It was a one-line letter asking him to attend the reading of the last will and testament of Christopher Alan Robins at the offices of Masters amp; Masters on 24 December at 10.00 a.m.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said.
‘Chris appointed me as executor. There’ll be some money. It can’t be much. Bloody bank and the lawyers have had most of it already. It’s been a nightmare. There was the coroner’s court too, that held things up. Then I couldn’t find the will.
‘But, like I said, there’ll be a little cash. Chris always said we might have the chance to make amends. He always said “we”. Now I know why — because he wasn’t planning on being here.’
Her jaw line set firmly. ‘I think he wanted me to confess on his behalf. Which isn’t easy — because he never really confessed to me.’
She turned slightly and looked at Shaw’s face, momentarily distracted by the moon-eye. ‘It was your father, wasn’t it, who arrested Bobby Mosse? Yes. The link’s important. Chris was like that, good with people.’
She smiled. Somewhere in the building behind them an electronic bell rang. Shaw thought of the two-tone Mini driving away from the lonely T-junction.
‘I think you know the truth, anyway. I guessed it long ago, I think, by instalments over the years. I didn’t ask Chris about it — but towards the end he couldn’t stop himself talking, spilling it out. That was part of his illness.’
She thrust her hands deep into the overcoat pockets and took a deep breath. Shaw remained silent, allowing her to order her thoughts.
‘The police said they were a gang. One of the community coppers came to the flat a few times, asking us to keep Chris in at night, to stop him playing with the rotten apples. He’d be thirteen, something like that. But I’d always thought of them as friends, because that’s how it started. They’d meet in our kitchen and I’d make them egg and chips. I knew Bobby was the smart one from the start, and in a secret way I hated him back then, because I knew he’d escape one day, get away from the Westmead, make the most of life. Alex — Alex Cosyns — was a tyke, and a crook in the making. He’d be, what, ten, eleven, when he and Chris fetched up at the school together. I knew the first time he came into the flat he was going to be bad news for Chris, because Chris wanted friends — needed them, really — and he let Alex be his hero. It was Alex who’d cheek the police who were sent in when there was trouble; it was Alex who took him shoplifting. By the time they were teenagers they were like that …’
She took out her hand, held it in a fist, and Shaw noticed the slim band of a wedding ring.
‘Chris was a timid kid. Quiet. Drove his dad to distraction because we had ambitions for him.’ She turned on the seat to look Shaw in the face. ‘People seem to think that if you live on the Westmead, you don’t want better for your kids. But you do. We did. But Chris was scared of anything that was big.’ She laughed, looking up into the trees. ‘Like life. Like getting a job. Marriage — commitments. Anyway, life was easier for him when he was with the others, so that’s where he stayed. The four of them. Like the police said, I suppose — a gang.’
Shaw nodded in agreement.
‘When your dad arrested Bobby Mosse for killing that little boy, everything changed. Chris never said anything, but I could see the fear in him — feel it. Those months before the trial, he never got over that. He’d sit in the front room watching the TV — anything, sound down. I didn’t see Alex at all, or Bobby, or Jimmy Voyce, and that was what made me think the worst. One day I took Chris’s dad out along the riverbank — he was in a wheelchair after a stroke, the year he died — so we went out along the towpath by the Boal Quay and I saw the three of them on the scrub there, sat in the wreck of a boat. I didn’t get close but I know my son — he was crying, and Alex had an arm round him, and Jimmy was drinking cider from a big bottle.’
She stopped. Shaw let the silence stretch. Snow thudded down off one of the trees.
‘When he got off — Bobby — things changed again. He went back to university, of course — escaped, like I knew he would. Jimmy Voyce was the next to get out — running off to New Zealand. Then one night there was a uniformed PC on my doorstep. They had Chris down at St James’s — they needed me to come down. He’d been caught climbing out of a back window of a house in the North End with a video recorder under his arm. I’m pretty sure Alex was with him — but he’d got away, of course. Chris got a suspended for that, but he got caught again within weeks so they sent him down. Durham. When he got out he didn’t come home. He never came home. I tried to keep in touch but he was in and out for years until one of the judges ordered a mental-health review — that was in 2003. They sent him here. He’d tried suicide before, inside, and he tried again and again here, but he just couldn’t make the cuts deep enough.’
Shaw wondered how many times a mother had to repeat that before she could say the words without tears.
‘I used to look at his wrists when I came, to see if he’d tried again. They kept knives away from him in the end, so he’d try to make one out of bits of metal, or sharpened nails. Alex Cosyns came to see him a few times. I don’t know why. They had a secret — not just the past — but something else they wouldn’t share. About three months after Alex’s last visit I got a cheque — drawn on Alex’s personal account — for?1,000. There was a note. He said he’d keep in touch with Chris, but that he didn’t think there was much point giving him any money, so I might as well have it, because it was his due. He said there’d be more. A few weeks later Chris was dead. He finally had another visitor just before he did it. Whoever it was didn’t sign in, so they never got a name — they’ve upped the security since; anyone visiting a patient has to fill in a form now. But I think it was Bobby Mosse who came to see him, and I think he gave Chris the knife.’ Shaw went to speak but she carried on. ‘And now he’s had another visitor.’ She laughed, shaking her head. ‘The woman on the ward who looked after Chris — kept an eye on him for me. She said Jimmy Voyce had been looking for him, all the way from New Zealand. He left a card, some grapes. She said Jimmy cried, which is nice, but I wonder who he was crying for?’
She flattened and folded a sheet of greaseproof paper that had been on the bench beside her — the remains of a packed lunch.
‘I said I understood things, Inspector, and I do. But some things are frightening still. I had Chris cremated. There was just me and my sister at the service. When we got home someone had been through the flat — torn it apart. I had a tea chest from the ward, with Chris’s stuff, and they’d literally taken it apart — the wood, smashed it up. I don’t understand that.’
She stood and offered her hand. She seemed light on her feet, suddenly weightless. ‘That’s odd,’ she said. ‘I somehow feel better for talking about it. I thought I didn’t care any more.’
‘Is your shift finished? I can run you back to town,’ said Shaw.
