He killed the phone, then the power, and slipped the dead mobile into the zip pocket on his RNLI jacket. On the bedside table someone had neatly laid out Fletcher’s personal possessions: a watch, a wallet and a menu card for the Shipwrights’ Hall lunch. Turning the card over, he found a printed seating plan: Fletcher had shared a table with eleven others, including Pastor John Abney, Sam Venn and John Joe Murray — although they knew Lizzie’s husband had ducked the meal and given his ticket away before disappearing.
Fletcher’s eyes left the ceiling and locked on Shaw. ‘Worked it out?’ he asked next, trying a smile. His voice was surprisingly clear, but then he gulped in air, as if he’d forgotten how to breathe. His eyes went back to the ceiling. His body stiffened with the effort of reconnecting with that point above his head.
Shaw sat, pulled the chair so close to the bed frame that the wood hit the metal, and spoke into Fletcher’s ear. ‘We know you were in the cemetery that night, waiting for Garrison. You, Sam Venn and John Joe Murray. We know the billhook you used to kill him was from the sea chest in the loft — Alby’s chest. We know you tumbled Garrison’s body into the open grave. What more do we need to know?’
‘You know fuck-all,’ he said. Fletcher clawed at the stiff sheet. ‘Sam drew him little pictures,’ and the smile came this time, because it was cruel, and just slid into place. ‘Just a line on the first one. Two lines on the next one — the start of the gibbet, then the hanging man, because I told him one night, in the dark out by the river. I said we’d lynch him. I said that when they found him swinging they could cut him down with that penknife he always had with him — the one his GI dad left him; the one he was always flashing about to impress the girls.’
He passed out then, a fleeting few seconds of unconsciousness. When he opened his eyes, Shaw knew he’d no idea there’d been a break.
‘But that’s all Sam was gonna do about it — draw little pictures. At the wake I said that all he believed in was talk. That’s why they had their little church — inside it they could hide from the real world the rest of us had to live in. Pathetic. Just because he had a withered arm didn’t mean he couldn’t act. Do something.’
He took a careful breath this time, sipping the air. ‘I said we should teach him a lesson.’ His breathing began to dip into the shallows, picking up speed. ‘And I’d have done it too, but I was outside, smoking, waiting for the kid to go home when Kath Robinson came up. Bit of gossip for me — she said Lizzie was pregnant. That the black was the father. She thought I’d like to know. Thought that might fire me up …’
He licked his lips. The heart monitor by the bed began to buzz and the consultant was beside them. ‘I think that’s it,’ he said. ‘Mr Fletcher can’t do this — not now.’
Fletcher smiled at the notion of ‘now’ — suspecting, perhaps, that there might not be a ‘later’. He held up a hand, and the doctor shrugged, silently mouthing ‘five minutes’ to Shaw.
Fletcher tore his eyes from his anchor above and looked Shaw in the face.
‘I couldn’t do it — not then, not when I knew there was a family. Lizzie’s kid deserved a father — even if it was scum like Garrison.’
Fletcher’s eyes swam, and Shaw recalled his story. The child who’d seen his mother desert the family, then watched the failure of his father to hold what remained of it together. A childhood in care, separated from his only sister. He remembered the single picture on his mantelpiece, his arm thrown round the woman in the cheap shell suit. Reunited. But he could imagine the damage that had been done to both, struggling through separate childhoods.
‘I left them, Sam and John Joe, just inside the cemetery gates. Went home.’ His eyes spilt tears. ‘I said it wasn’t right, told ’em what Kath had said. John Joe said it was rubbish, that she’d made it up because she wanted us to scare Pat off good and proper. Because if she couldn’t have him, why should Lizzie? That she might be simple but she wasn’t stupid. But John Joe knew Kath was right, deep down he knew, so he was really up for it — he had the billhook under his jacket, and he was high all right, like he’d been doused in the whisky. So I left them.’
He shifted his eyes back to the ceiling.
‘Next day I went up with Will Stokes and filled the grave in. We’d covered Nora’s coffin the day before, we just had to finish the job. Took us an hour — with a couple of fag breaks. That night I was in the Flask and the rumour was round that Pat had gone. It didn’t take long to find out why. Sammy and John Joe always had the same story, that they’d lost their nerve too. Too scared. So I never knew — never guessed. But I was always scared — of what I came close to doing.’
He looked at Shaw again. ‘I’m scared now,’ he said.
They left him asleep. In the corridor outside Shaw checked his mobile as he watched the patient through a glass porthole. The doctor appeared at his shoulder.
‘What are his chances?’ asked Shaw.
The doctor was reading a set of medical notes. He didn’t look up. ‘He hasn’t got chances, Inspector. Death’s a process — like life. It’s started. Miracles happen — but up till now, never on my shift.’ He pushed Fletcher’s door open and went in to check the bedside monitors.
There was a text on the phone from Paul Twine.
SAM VENN DEAD AT HOME. TOM AT SCENE.
30
The Clockcase Cannery stood against a winter postcard: the black river, the Old Town waterfront beyond, stretching from the needle spire of St Nicholas, past the old Custom House and the mismatched towers of St Margaret’s to the Flask on its lonely promontory — gateway to the Flensing Meadow and the low hill of the chapel. It was a panorama in grisaille, viewed through mist, under a grey sky low enough to tear at the single chimney of the old Campbell’s soup factory downriver. The only light came from the snow-covered ground.
Shaw drove the Porsche at speed into the empty car park past an unmanned checkpoint and skidded on the gravel, bringing the rear of the car round in an arc. He got out, took a lungful of iced air, an antidote to the smell in Sam Venn’s flat: the vomit on the stairs, round the washbasin. And Venn’s corpse, decaying already in the overheated room, the features of his face pressed flat, as if he’d lost a fight with gravity which was pushing him down into the mattress.
Shaw took a second lungful of the clean air.
The cannery was a single factory block of three floors, as substantial as an ocean liner, the single stub of a chimney leaking fumes from the boiler. A vast hoarding hanging from the gutter read FOR SALE. Shaw thought that it was a depressing sight — a building, built to work, standing suddenly idle like a man in a dole queue. A short line of HGVs waited silently at the goods-in loading dock, a council Transit van blocking any others from entering the site. A group of cannery workers stood by the gates arguing with a man in a smart green safety jacket who was handing out a printed A4 sheet.
Shaw was struck by just how narrow the river was at this point: he could see the tombstones of the Flensing Meadow clearly. It was one of the aspects of the case which unsettled him, the tight geographical compression of events within this small area of the town. It was as if all their witnesses, all their suspects, were doomed to live and die within sight of each other, as if the buildings themselves — and particularly the Flask — had some kind of magnetic attraction that bound them with an invisible force.
‘Let’s do it, George,’ he said. Valentine considered the dilapidated factory with distaste, and had made no move to get out of the car.
Across the yard Guy Poole was in his 4x4, speaking on his mobile. The health officer cut the line and jumped down.
‘Bad news, Peter,’ he said.
‘You first,’ said Shaw.
Valentine lit up, flicking his match into an empty skip.
‘Lab’s just finished a preliminary sweep through all the food at the lunch: so that’s everything from the bread rolls and the butter pats to the tap water in the jugs. Only contaminant was in the soup — that’s all the soup, by the way, every bowl we collected, the saucepans and the unopened can. The level of contamination varies very little in the samples taken from the bowls. So that’s suspicious for a start. If this was from the cans, from metal fatigue — which, given we’re looking for an aluminium compound, would be our prime suspect — then you’d expect some cans to be worse than others. You’d expect variation. There is none. Then there’s the actual level of contamination — it’s very high, high enough to produce symptoms in almost anyone who took any of this stuff down into their
