the room, which was in shadow. ‘Like I said, Ian’s across the way, but these days he stays with the girlfriend — she’s got her own flat.’ She looked down at the uncarpeted boards. ‘This place gives me the creeps.’
The bed was modern, and out of scale with the room.
Under one of the windows was a sea chest.
Shaw walked to it, then knelt, as if before an altar. He held out the billhook in its forensic envelope. ‘This is what killed Pat that night — the night of Nora’s wake. Bea thinks it came out of the chest.’
Lizzie walked over but didn’t take it. The colour seemed to drain out of her under the electric light, the sparky eyes reduced to speckled grey and green.
‘Can you open it?’ asked Shaw.
Valentine stood at one of the other windows, looking down into the cemetery, his hand on the cot, until he remembered that Nora Tilden’s baby daughter had died in this room.
Lizzie pulled a key ring from her pocket. The keys and the ivory fob jangled against the wood of the sea chest, but the lock was oiled, Shaw noted, and when the lid flipped back there was no dust.
Lizzie stood back, nodding. ‘It’s Dad’s stuff from the war. Way back — twenty years ago — I had it valued. There’s an auction room in Stamford that does military stuff. It’s insured for?10,000 — that’s because of Dad’s story, of course, and the ship. I thought that Ian could decide, when the time comes.’
‘What time?’ asked Valentine, looking at a framed press cutting on the wall. The paper was yellow, but the picture was clear enough — a crowd on the quayside, the stunted superstructure of the
HEROES BRING STRICKEN SHIP HOME
‘The time when we leave this place. Ian’s got plans — with Bea. He doesn’t want the business. So one day we’ll sell. Pack it in. Maybe sometime soon.’
Shaw began to pick out items: the
‘Sorry,’ said Lizzie. ‘There’s a knack to that.’ She worked her fingers around the wood until the lid opened. Inside, set on green baize, was a revolver.
‘Ship’s purser’s,’ said Lizzie. ‘Dad used to bring it out, wave it about, for the crack. I don’t think it’s loaded, but you’d better check.’
‘It’s been polished,’ said Valentine.
‘Ian,’ she said. ‘He played up here as a kid and he’s proud of his grandfather. Like I said — it’s his inheritance. He looks after it.’
Shaw handled the gun, using the cloth from the ship’s bell. It wasn’t loaded, and the mechanism was rusted, but the leather handgrip was supple with beeswax.
‘On the night of your mother’s wake, where were the keys?’ he asked.
‘Where they always were, I imagine. They hang behind the bar. There’s keys to the cellar, the spirit store, they need to be where anyone can get them. Anyone who’s on the staff.’ She looked at Shaw, then at Valentine. ‘You think someone took the keys, came up here and found that?’ She looked again at the hook, appalled. She took one step back and stumbled, reaching out a hand behind her to find the edge of the bed.
Shaw sat beside her, and he could hear her breathing. ‘That night — of the wake — the staff would be you …?’ Shaw recalled the cine film they’d watched at the chapel. ‘And John Joe — he helped out too, didn’t he?’
She nodded, pulling down the skin over her cheekbones. Squaring her shoulders, she seemed to regain control of herself, but instead of answering the question she moved on. ‘And the kitchen staff. Jean Walker was in, Kath was helping — Kath Robinson — a whole gaggle of women from the church who did the food. The two Bowles brothers — they worked as barmen. They’re all on the list I gave you …’
‘But John Joe could have taken the key, couldn’t he?’ pressed Shaw.
Her jaw was set straight, defiant. The idea that she might have spent nearly thirty years living with a killer didn’t seem to shock her at all, Shaw sensed. It was only, perhaps, the suggestion that she wouldn’t have known, that she’d been hoodwinked, fooled. She clutched at the blanket on the bed, crushing the material. ‘John Joe’s never really done hatred — plenty of other emotions, but never that. I think he despised Pat — a lot of men did. But he didn’t kill him.’
They heard a door creak below and there was a footfall on the stair. Lizzie stood quickly, the clutch of keys falling to the floorboards. A voice Shaw didn’t know shouted, ‘Lizzie! We’re taking a car up the Queen Victoria — I need to leave the bar. It’s Freddie Fletcher — he’s still poorly. You want to come?’
‘Later,’ she said.
Shaw had a final question.
The Department of Work and Pensions had finally released details on its pension payments to Lizzie’s father — now aged eighty-two. The monthly pension was deposited in an account registered at the post office on the corner of Explorer Street, right here in South Lynn. A special account, with Lizzie Murray listed as an authorized signatory. Paul Twine had checked with the manager: she picked up the cash in person on the first Tuesday of every month. Including this one.
‘You lied to us about your father. You do know where he is — you pick up his pension.’
Lizzie looked younger, the skin taut on the figurehead face. Shaw thought it was the stress that had peeled back the years and that she was a born fighter.
‘No. I said, didn’t I, that Dad just wants to be left alone. Yes, I pick up his pension. I give the cash to Bea and she gives it to him. Bea’s the one person he’ll see — it’s always been like that. She’s the go-between.’
26
Shaw parked the Porsche on the sandy lane that led down to the sea, a mile south of the beach house and cafe. He sat in the sudden silence and let the face of his mobile light his face, punching in Paul Twine’s number. In the background he could still hear voices in the incident room at the cemetery — and a computer keyboard being tapped. Two things: first, he wanted Twine to arrange a fresh interview, under caution, at St James’s for Bea Garrison. She’d lied about not knowing the whereabouts of Alby Tilden. She took him his pension. He was local — how local? Second, he wanted the latest on Freddie Fletcher’s condition, and he waited while Twine contacted the uniformed officer they’d left up at the hospital overnight. ‘Stable, but still in intensive care.’ He felt a creeping anxiety about Freddie Fletcher’s illness. If he died he’d lose a prime suspect. And his death would prompt a pertinent question — was there any reason someone would want Fletcher dead, and if there was, could he have been murdered? The answer to the first question was revenge, if he really was Pat Garrison’s killer. The answer to the second question was surely no — unless the killer was prepared to risk murdering a hundred innocent people just to get at one man. Even then there appeared no logical reason why Fletcher should die — along with the ailing Charlie Clarke — while everyone else recovered. No, Fletcher’s illness had to be a random event. But still the creeping anxiety remained.
Shaw killed the signal and drank in the dark and the silence. He thought about checking
At that precise point he picked up speed, so that when he saw — in the sudden glare of white light — who was waiting for him, the shock made him stumble, one knee taking the strain so that he felt a pain shoot to his back.
Robert Mosse stood on the line of dry weed and flotsam that marked the last high tide. He wore a full-length black overcoat, but his head was bare, and there were snowflakes in the luxuriant black hair, so that Shaw knew he’d been standing there for some time, waiting.
