Death Toll

Alby Tilden lifted a pillow and retrieved a pair of grubby socks.

Valentine stood at the narrow window vent of frosted glass. ‘You never go out. How did you know we’d found Pat Garrison’s bones?’

‘Local rag — one of the late-shift men always leaves a copy by the Ascot in the washroom. Not always, but mostly.’ He looked down at his hands. ‘It’s a kindness.’

‘No,’ said Shaw. ‘The paper ran the story on Tuesday evening — the cans went through on the Tuesday morning. So you couldn’t have read it in the paper until after you’d laced the cans.’

‘Maybe.’ Tilden looked to the side, to the mirror, and seemed to smile.

‘You get a pension, Mr Tilden,’ said Shaw. ‘And letters. Bea Garrison brings them to you. And it was her, wasn’t it, who told you we’d found Pat. She told you the day we told her — on Monday.’

He wouldn’t meet their eyes. Shaw thought he’d be trying to work out what Bea had told them.

Tilden looked to the tarpaulin door. ‘When you take me outside, can it be at night?’

‘Does night help?’ asked Shaw. ‘Did you try to dig up Nora’s grave at night?’

Tilden dropped a shoulder so that he could see his back in the mirror, and Shaw guessed that he was comforting himself, that it didn’t matter where they took him, he’d always have her for company.

‘Why would I do that?’

Shaw changed tack, trying to find a lever, anything with which to prise open Tilden’s inner life. ‘Why did you leave home — why go back to sea if all that space was so terrifying?’

Shaw squatted down on his haunches so that he could look up into Tilden’s face. This close he could smell the sweat on him and his clothes, and he thought he’d never encountered anything so … stale.

‘How did Mary die?’ he asked.

For a moment Tilden’s face reminded Shaw of Sam Venn’s — the right side appearing to slump, one eye filling with water until a tear spilt out.

He shook his head, speechless.

‘Mr Tilden — you’re asking me to believe that you happily risked the lives of more than a hundred people. You’re not a doctor, you didn’t know how much to give them. You didn’t know the dose you did give them wasn’t lethal. If you’d do that, is it really beyond belief that you’d kill your own daughter? Did you hate the child? Did you think you’d never be able to leave while Mary lived — that you’d have to stay?’

Tilden looked through Shaw. ‘Nora,’ he said. ‘She hated the baby. Hated me for giving it to her. These days they’d call it something — a fancy-named depression. I didn’t know what to do; she’d look at her sometimes, look at the cot, and I could see the murder in her eyes. I’d hold her.’ His elbows sagged slightly, as if taking the weight, accommodating the bundle of bone and flesh. ‘But I couldn’t be there all the time. The child was sickly. I didn’t kill her. I don’t know how she died, but that night Nora went to bed and slept well — I think for the first time since the birth. I always thought she’d willed her to death.’ He clenched his teeth. ‘Sometimes I thought she’d done it — you know, with a pillow. That’s why I left, in the end. It took seven years, but I couldn’t look at her and not see her standing over the cot with the pillow in her hand. I had nowhere to go but the sea. A nightmare, I know, all that space. I signed on for the engine room. I could live with that for a few years. Then, even that became too much, so I came home. Thank God I came home. Otherwise there’d be no Lizzie.’

‘Mr Tilden,’ said Shaw. ‘I think you decided to kill Fletcher, Venn and Murray. I don’t think you did any of this on your own. So we’re going to take you upstairs now, and down to St James’s, and we’re going to have this conversation again. We’re going to go on having it until I get the truth.’

As Alby Tilden dressed and packed a single holdall Shaw and Valentine looked around the room, then the furnace floor, and the single WC beside the lift. In the room they found a line of books on a bare plank shelf, held up on bricks. The titles were maritime — from Hornblower to Master and Commander — but there were surprises: Typhoon, by Conrad, and Heart of Darkness. It was as if Tilden had decided to live out the life he’d wanted through books from within his self-made cell.

In the furnace room they found a line of traps; in one a rat lay dead, its teeth as white as pearls. Valentine found the poison bin: a single wooden box with a padlocked lid and a stencilled skull and crossbones.

The key was in the padlock. Inside the box was a jar full of white powder. The label read ALUMINIUM PHOSPHIDE.

‘Bingo,’ said Valentine.

But even as he said it they heard the scampering in the shadows. Shaw played a torch beam down the long basement floor and saw a chain of rats, nose to tail, emerging as if from the wall itself, dashing twenty yards, then disappearing. Shaw couldn’t suppress the image that entered his head like a subliminal advert — the image of a rat that had taken the bait he’d laid under the cottage. He’d heard it shrieking, the poison shredding its nervous system, and when he’d found it with the torch beam he’d seen the blood was vivid, seeping from the nose and mouth. It had shaken itself to death, trying to throw off the pain, as if death was clinging to its back.

‘He wants to put more down,’ said Valentine.

Then they brought Tilden out through the tarpaulin door, struggling now, the panic gripping. They heard his first scream rise in the lift shaft.

32

The interview rooms at St James’s had been built in the fifties and smacked of utility Britain. No two-way mirrors, intercom or dark, non-reflective surfaces here; just tiled walls decorated with a single line of brown paint at knee-height, cheap furniture screwed down and light bulbs encased in miniature iron maidens. This was Shaw’s third interview in an hour, and it was difficult to imagine they’d all been in different rooms. First: Kath Robinson. She’d reiterated the story Valentine’s sister had heard. She’d seen Fletcher, Murray and Venn leaving the Flask at around ten fifteen on the evening of Nora Tilden’s wake. She was sure of the time, because she’d gone back in to listen to the choir begin their second session, and she knew that was set for half past because Lizzie had said they’d keep to the timetable to allow the staff time to clear glasses and circulate sandwiches. But going in she’d bumped into Pat Garrison leaving, coat on and saying he was heading home.

‘He didn’t say anything else,’ she said. No bitterness, no recrimination, just a statement of fact.

Two questions: Did she tell Freddie Fletcher that night the secret she shared with Lizzie Murray — that Lizzie was pregnant?

She’d shrugged, seemingly confused by the straightforward question. She curled her bottom lip over her teeth. ‘I don’t even like Freddie. I wouldn’t share that with him. Would I?’ In Shaw’s experience that was a bad sign — answering one question with another.

And if it was true that she’d seen them all heading out towards the cemetery — and she’d just admitted she didn’t like Fletcher — why didn’t she raise some kind of alarm the next morning, or in the following days, when it became obvious that Pat Garrison had gone? Her answer, this time, was persuasive: yes, she’d suspected the three men were going to waylay Pat Garrison. A beating? Maybe. Worse? She didn’t think so. Perhaps they’d run him out of town. But either way he deserved it, she said. She wasn’t the only one he’d tried his luck with, and he’d been reluctant to take no for an answer more than once.

Had he forced himself on any of these girls? On her?

‘Never,’ she said. ‘Not really …’ she added, realizing perhaps that she’d gone too far. ‘He didn’t force me to do anything.’ For once the pale, translucent skin of her face reddened.

The second interview was with Alby Tilden. He’d made a statement repeating the story he’d told them at the Clockcase Cannery. He’d admitted industrial sabotage, denied he’d had an accomplice. During the later stages of the interview he began to show signs of distress: shallow breathing and chest pains. The on-call GP was with him within twenty minutes and recommended hospitalization. The paperwork was under way, and he’d been sedated and taken to the sick bay. Uniformed branch would provide cover at the Queen Victoria after his transfer. Shaw asked Valentine to have a chat with one of the hospital administrators to see if they could find him a room of his own. One with blinds.

And now the third interview. Bea Garrison didn’t look good under a shadeless electric light. She’d chosen a