the shoes. The laces were still done up. He shouted up the stairs. On the fifth step there was a pool of something viscous, a pale fluid which he thought gave off the faint odour of high tide.
He climbed the stairs, stepping over the little puddle, and shouted again. The door slammed at the bottom and that made him jump so badly that he could hear his heart lurching in his chest like a rocking horse.
He found Sam Venn in his bed. He’d died with a bible on his chest, open at Leviticus. Vomit lay in a pool by his neck where it had run from his mouth. John Joe looked at him for only a moment, just long enough to know that he was looking at a dead man, and just long enough to think how odd that was — that as the rigor mortis had taken hold it had equalized the features of his face, so that the lop-sidedness had gone. And the left arm, his good arm, was held as awkwardly as the right, both half-crossed over his chest, resting on the Bible, holding it open. He knew Sam Venn well, and guessed that he’d arranged himself to be found like this, like a martyr. And he thought how pathetic it was that he’d got the Bible upside down, so that he couldn’t have been reading it at all.
Standing there, his blood had run cold: ice in his veins. Because now the impossible was just a bit more possible. If death had come for Sam Venn, and death was waiting for Freddie Fletcher, then perhaps it would come for him. Perhaps someone did know. Perhaps someone wanted revenge. But he asked himself the question again. Who? Kath had seen them go. But there must have been others. And Kath wasn’t his enemy. She was family. But he did wonder then, standing at the foot of Sam Venn’s deathbed, if that was enough.
The tide was drawing him out from the land, so he stowed the oars and let the boat drift. The salty air and the fear had made him thirsty, and he wondered if there was anything to drink in the picnic basket Bea had given him. And food — he hadn’t eaten all day, because there was a coldness in the pit of his stomach. His boat edged seaward, so silently, so effortlessly, that he had the brief illusion he wasn’t moving at all, but that the world was slipping under him, sliding past, so that it felt as if the island which held the old coal barn was edging towards him under its own power.
He waited for the inevitable meeting of wood and stone, then edged the boat along the rubble quay, using an oar like a punting pole, around the barn until he was on the north side, hidden from the coast. It was high tide, but the coal barn, all that was left of an old harbour, stood clear of the water. Rising sea levels had inundated the rest since the last boats had brought in coal in the early twentieth century. Now it provided John Joe with all he needed: a place to be, where no one came.
As he tied up his boat snowflakes fell out of a clear night sky. The door, still weatherproof, swung easily on iron hinges, and by torchlight he climbed the stone stairs to the first floor, spread a blanket on a pile of nets and opened the picnic basket. Inside he found food in a supermarket bag, which he hung from a hook in one of the roof beams, and a two-litre bottle of water from which he drank immediately. Then he looked about him: a pile of firewood was stacked along one wall and the fireplace was clean. By the time he’d gathered some dry reed heads from the bank outside and set the fire with shreds of old newspaper it was nearly midnight.
Only when the red light from the flames began to flicker and light the room did the old memories come alive: he saw, strobe-lit, Lizzie’s naked back, arched with pleasure, a leg stretched wantonly across a warm blue blanket. He felt guilt then: that he’d just left her without a word. There would be a time for the truth when he was safe, but not now.
He wrapped himself up in the blanket by the fire but couldn’t sleep, so he went outside and sat on the stone step looking at the frosty planetarium of stars, and wished he’d had the presence of mind to bring his guitar. But he did have the penny whistle, he always had that, and so he sat and played a tune. He’d played only one verse when he remembered the signal — so he went and got the boat’s lantern and set it on the south bank, facing the coast, and sat beside it, feeling better, content that the only person in the world who knew where he was, was Bea. She’d be there, looking north, because she’d promised to wait until she saw the light. And of all the people he trusted, he trusted Bea the most.
29
Freddie Fletcher lay on his hospital bed, his chest bare, the black hair swirled in spirals on his damp skin. The sheet that should have covered him from the waist down was tangled, so that they could see some of his pubic hair, and an old scar like a lipstick kiss on his thigh. His eyes were the only part of him that moved, up to the ceiling, focused on the light fitting, then down, around the bed, and back to the ceiling, as if there was something up there he wanted to hold on to, something that would save him.
There was sunlight in the room, the kind of cheerless sunlight that only hospitals allow. But the most remarkable effect of the light was that Fletcher’s skin seemed luminous, so that he appeared to float apart from the drab bed, with its steel frame and stiff sheets. It was a precarious state, Shaw thought, as if he was held there by his own determination not to die, anchored by the image of the light above.
The contaminated food he’d ingested had prompted a series of minor strokes in the early hours of that morning, and the shock had flooded his lungs with fluid, so that pneumonia was now established in the left, and the right was deteriorating too. Freddie Fletcher was suffocating by degrees. But it wouldn’t be the lack of air that would kill him, thought Shaw, it would be his in-ability to maintain the concentration required to stay alive, an effort which patently was growing with each passing minute. His condition had been weak anyway, the doctor had explained, as he’d apparently gone to the Shipwrights’ Hall dinner suffering from some kind of gastric illness which had put him in bed for the previous twenty-four hours. While his fellow patients had been able to call on their own internal resources to repel the effects of the poison, he had been at its mercy from the first mouthful of the tainted fish soup.
Fletcher kicked out, revealing a foot, and Shaw looked away, embarrassed by sight of the pale withered flesh. Valentine stood by the door, trying not to think how much less frightening this would be for Fletcher if he could have held someone he loved by the hand. Shaw was struggling to dispel the idea that because he disliked this man, in several deeply interlocking ways, he would find his death less shocking — viewing it not as a death at all, in fact, but as retribution. He thought about Fletcher lying in wait that night for Pat Garrison, made brave by being in a crowd of three. George Valentine had expanded on the message he’d left after he’d spoken to Jean. They’d dispatched a car to pick up Kath Robinson and Bea Garrison, another to the London Road Shelter to check on Sam Venn, and if he was well enough to bring him in too. They’d got a squad car out to the Flask as well. If they couldn’t produce John Joe Murray then he was officially a missing person: TV, radio and the local papers would get a mug shot within hours.
Shaw was troubled again by this complex interlocking jigsaw of a world within a world — the community of South Lynn. The picture depicted was a shifting one. But now, at least, they had a clear snapshot of that fateful night: the three men setting out to teach Pat Garrison a lesson he’d never forget — to teach him he was an outsider, and that he’d always be an outsider.
Shaw looked at Fletcher and tried to imagine that moment when the billhook had swung down against the stars and buried itself in Pat Garrison’s skull, slicing down through his brain, so that he would never feel the drop into the open grave. He tried to imagine Fletcher holding the weapon — but again, it wouldn’t come. And again, like a tap dripping, his doubts impinged, undermining this all-too-simple solution to the question of who killed Pat Garrison. Three men, each with a motive, setting out on their victim’s heels.
Shaw checked his mobile at the sound of an incoming text. It was from Guy Poole: the latest from the Environmental Health laboratory was that the soup had been contaminated by a base metal — a compound of aluminium — which had seeped into the soup, probably from the cans in which it had been delivered. They had a team down at the Clockcase Cannery and they were running tests on the unopened can recovered from the Shipwrights’ Hall. Poole’s text wasn’t just to share the latest news — he wanted advice. Management at the Clockcase refused to believe the fault was with their product. They suspected sabotage by a disgruntled workforce facing redundancies as the factory closed. Poole said it was an incident he couldn’t afford to ignore. He needed to seal off the works and get a full team on to the premises. In the circumstances he couldn’t trust the company’s day time security — and the resident factory watchman was a pensioner. Could Shaw liaise with St James’s and get him a couple of uniformed officers to secure the factory?
Shaw relayed the text to the duty desk at St James’s with a recommendation to pull in a squad car off the ring-road traffic patrol.
