‘
‘Yeah — I said that.’ She looked at her mother. ‘I said that. I did.’
Jade Moore passed a hand over her eyes. ‘Christ!’
‘And where can we find this Gav?’ said Valentine, taking out his notebook as she reeled off the details.
‘A question,’ said Shaw, holding up his hand. ‘Did you disturb her, Jilly? The woman in the grave. Did she know you were there?’
‘No way. Gav said it was like well creepy, and we should get out. So we slipped back round the trees and away. I didn’t get a proper look at her, but he said it was definitely a woman, ’cos she seemed to be really struggling with the spade.’
Outside, they let PC Bright go home to his bed. Valentine placed a call to the boyfriend — who lived up in the North End and was probably still in bed, according to Jilly. After a pause he left a message on an answerphone, telling the teenager to ring St James’s as soon as he picked up the call. Shaw stood in the porch of All Saints, trying to think it through. A woman. Which woman? It was a fact that didn’t fit his theory in so many different ways.
38
John Joe Murray’s body was earthbound, weighted at each limb, so that he lay spreadeagled on the floor of the old coal barn, spatchcocked, but with his head raised on the stone shelf so that he could see through the doorway to the north, and to open water. The cold, which seemed to be concentrated in the stone floor beneath his back, made his bones ache. But it wasn’t the cold or the swirling snow which blew in squalls over the grey sea that made him want to scream. It was the tide, edging towards the doorway. The flood boards had been taken away so that the view was clear, right to the cold horizon. Dusk was falling, the sea turning inky black. He looked at the old stone walls of the barn for the thousandth time, running his eye along the mark that clearly delineated the line of the highest tide. It was a foot above his head.
He’d come to after the attack in the hour before dawn, lying on the cold stone stairs, his hands and legs tied in rough fisherman’s rope. A light had seeped through the floorboards above. Calling out, he’d felt the blood in his throat, and the stab of pain over his eye where the blow had fallen. Mid-morning his stepson had come down the steps and stood looking out to sea. Then he’d turned and made a decision: ‘We’ll wait,’ he said. ‘For tonight.’ He’d given him tea to sip, and some tortilla. John Joe asked him why this was happening but Ian wouldn’t meet his eyes, let alone answer his questions. After that, time dissolved into patches of consciousness and nightmarish dreams. Mid-afternoon, Ian had given him some more food, then moved him to the floor of the barn and he’d lost consciousness again.
When he saw the first star — Venus, surely, rising with the moon — Ian had come down and removed the flood boards, taking them with him back up the stairs. He tried to raise his head to see the sea more clearly, but when he moved his skull he could hear — through the bone — the slight crunch of something broken in his jaw. The injury, the impact of the blow, had made his right eye swell, so that his vision was murky on that side. But with his left eye he could see the waves sharply. It was a spring tide, and it had already breached the protective arc of dunes, so that the waves he could see were breaking in open water. Not a wild sea, despite the snowstorm, but winter-choppy, flecked, disturbed. When he’d come to, the sand bars were standing out at sea, dusted with snow. But now they’d gone, the grey sea swallowing each one until all he could see through the door was a world of water, the horizon coming and going with the snow squalls.
The first wave that came through the door broke his resolve to stay calm. He screamed, the water white, foaming, laced with ozone, seething over his legs, then flowing out.
When he stopped screaming he heard the foot steps over his head, and then Ian’s narrow slender legs appeared on the ladder-stairs.
His stepson watched him dispassionately, like a fisherman eyeing a float.
John Joe went to speak but the pain made the urge to scream again so insistent he swallowed back the words.
Ian raised a hand, as if asking for time in a polite conversation. It was an oddly civilized mannerism, coldly frightening in its intense self-possession.
‘Let me,’ he said. ‘You must have questions.’
John Joe pulled with his right hand until he felt the skin part at the wrist. He felt his guts turn to water, heavy water, like mercury that wanted to fall through his body and wash out to sea.
‘Kath Robinson saw you,’ said Ian, momentarily troubled by the congestion of blood in his stepfather’s face, the strange mottling, the stress which had tightened his skin and made him look younger, less dissolute.
‘The night they buried Grandma. Dad came into the bar to talk to Mum — and Kath didn’t want to see that, did she?’ He smiled, and despite his terror John Joe was reminded of the boy’s father — that same cynicism, almost older than it could be in one so young, as if he’d inherited a distrust of life along with the colour of his skin. The casual use of the word ‘Dad’ was a calculated cruelty and Ian looked pleased with the effect: John Joe’s feet had jerked together, making the rope creak.
‘Christ,’ he said. ‘What do you want?’
‘I want — wanted — to see you dead. I tried — we tried — to make sure you died with the others, with Fletcher and Venn. But actually, this is better. Much better, because I get to ask you questions, and you get to answer them. We’ve got one last chance to find out the one thing we don’t know: who struck the killing blow? Mum said we didn’t need to know. That you were all guilty, all cowards. And I’d have been happy if you’d died with them. But now we’ve got this time. And maybe — maybe — I’ll let you walk away from this when I know. But I need the truth, and I’ll know it when I hear it. And if you lie, you surely won’t walk away. They’ll find you one day. But it won’t be this winter. Or next.’
He sat on the stone steps, the movement of his limbs as fluid and unhurried as always.
‘I know you were there when he died, because the billhook was from Grandad’s chest. And you’d taken the key from behind the bar. But not alone, right? Kath said the three of you went together. And she’d added fuel to the fire, because she’d told Freddie about the baby coming. About me. Stupid, timid girl. If she’d told us then …But we can’t change the past.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said John Joe.
Ian’s temper snapped and he threw the piece of timber he was holding so that it cartwheeled, hitting the stone wall. Then he walked slowly back up the stairs.
He didn’t return for twenty minutes. At first the water only came in once every few minutes, swirling, but no worse, no deeper. But the tide didn’t work like that. It surged after falling back, gathering its strength. John Joe had surfed as a teenager, and he’d taught Ian, out on the windswept sands at Holkham. He knew all about the seventh wave. So there was a lull, and then a sudden curtain of white water at the door, and the room was full of the sea: not white this time but a livid green, a foot deep all around him, so that he had to jerk his neck up off the stone step. And cold, just above freezing. The first time he got his breathing just right, but the second time he swallowed a mouthful of seawater and he choked, spewing up over his chin and chest. This time, when the sea sucked out, it left kelp behind, and the white, dirty foam.
Then he heard the question again, although he hadn’t heard Ian’s footsteps on the stone stairs. Tears welled in his eyes and he shook his head, believing still perhaps that there was a way out, a stratagem that avoided confession. The next wave washed in, and this time when it ebbed there remained a foot of water in the room, a darker green this time, a hint of the pitch blackness of the deeper sea. John Joe could suck in air only if he held his head up, straining the neck muscles so that his body shook with the effort. Darkness was gathering outside the door, as if the bitter cold was extinguishing the light.
Ian came down the steps and with a knife from his back pocket cut the rope at his stepfather’s left wrist so that he could roll on to one side, lifting his head slightly.
‘There,’ he said. ‘A reprieve of sorts. For a while. A thank you — if you like, for bringing me up, for the kindnesses; and there’s been love — hasn’t there? I can’t deny that. But that’s all over, gone.’ He looked out of the open door at the sea. ‘Tell me,’ he said.
‘It was Fletcher’s idea,’ said John Joe, and he said it quickly, because he believed now; believed his stepson would do this, leave him twisting here, roped down, so that he’d drown, sucking down mouthfuls of brine.
