‘He asked one of the waitresses for Pat’s address; I heard him. So I knew he was planning something. That night — the night of the wake — we talked, out on the stoop. I loved Lizzie. I could see what was happening; I knew what was going on. I saw her once — when she thought no one was looking. She just reached forward and took something from the corner of his eye. It was a kiss — but with her fingertips. So I said to Fletcher we should teach Pat a lesson — scare him off. That was the plan.’
‘And Venn?’
‘He’d sent Pat those pictures — the hangman. Fletcher knew that. He said he didn’t have the guts to actually
The sea washed in, round the room, funnelling out, but each time now leaving enough behind to lift John Joe’s body, so that he was beginning to feel his weight seep away with his life.
‘We were waiting for Pat in the cemetery — I could see him coming, walking: that walk of his, that swagger.’ He looked at Ian, desperate to see if his confession was softening the young man’s eyes. ‘Then he stopped. He didn’t see us — it wasn’t that. He’d got to the open grave, Nora’s grave. There’s a box tomb there, in stone. He sat there like it was a park bench.
‘There was moonlight. But we were in shadows, by a cypress tree. The choir was singing and you could hear that, so the night wasn’t silent.’ He used his free hand to pat down the imaginary earth. ‘We got down, on the grass. Fletcher said it was up to me and Sam to start it — to strike the first blow. We’d get him down, kick him. Freddie said he knew how to break a few bones, make him bleed, once he was down.’
Until that moment, Ian thought, John Joe had a life in front of him.
‘But Sam said Fletcher should start it, because he knew the words: we’d heard him on the corner with his mates, calling at the blacks. How they should go home, how they weren’t like us, how they were scum. So he should start — because it was important that Pat should know why we wanted him to go.’
John Joe heard laughter and realized it was his own, and how inappropriate it was.
‘But Freddie wouldn’t start it. He said I’d got the billhook — it was down to me. And it wasn’t just about Pat’s skin, was it? That wasn’t why Sam was there. So why should it be him to start it? And the weird thing was, he was crying — Freddie — weeping. He said he’d do time if he got caught. He’d been rounded up the year before with some skinheads, for kicking this Indian kid down by the docks. He’d got a fine, community service, and if he was caught doing it again there’d be time to do — eighteen months. He didn’t fancy that. That’s what he said — but I didn’t believe it, I still don’t. I think he just lost his nerve, and so he was ashamed.
‘When he stopped crying he said to me not to hit Pat on the head — to go for an arm or a leg or the shoulder — that was good because the collarbone would snap like a chicken wing. Then he just walked away — through the gravestones, towards the east gate. We couldn’t believe it. All that talk. All that hate.’
Ian watched the sea, a big wave buckling up on the grey horizon. ‘So that left you and Sam Venn?’ he said, edging a step higher, away from the water.
John Joe pulled frantically at the fastened wrist so that blood appeared where the skin was breaking.
‘Sam did it. He just walked out in the moonlight, before I could stop him, so Pat could see him. And Pat just smiled — like he was expecting it. He just sat there in his silk shirt, looking at Sam. He’d brought a couple of glasses with him — the green, etched ones, and a hip flask. He’d drink a bit, then kind of wince, then smile.’
‘Hip flask?’
Before John Joe could answer the sea washed in, the seventh wave, the one that surges forward up the beach. Two feet, three feet, swirling round the room so that Murray was gone, lost in the water, which wasn’t green any more but a dark blue, and black in the shadows. And when it sucked out he was just lying there, swamped, so Ian stepped off the ladder and got him by the shirt at the neck and held him up, so their faces were close. He could smell his stepfather’s hair, the natural oils set against the sharp saltiness of the water.
‘Quickly,’ he said. ‘The hip flask.’ He put his hand to his back pocket and slipped something out to hold just a few inches from John Joe’s drenched face. It was a silver hip flask. The design was unusual — a silver stopper and a silver base, but the main body was of green glass, thick and old, with an etched picture of a whale pursued by a boat, the harpoonist’s arm tensed for the lethal shot.
John Joe’s eyes didn’t understand. ‘Yeah, like the glasses — old Melville’s green glasses. Lizzie must have given it to Pat.’
Ian unscrewed the top and put it to John Joe’s lips. It was another kindness, and it gave him time to think. The flask contained a malt, and John Joe choked, but he drank too. Ian cut the other wrist free, then the ankles, and dragged his stepfather’s body to the steps and up, clear of the sea, which had begun to turn in the room now like a whirlpool. He held his stepfather under the arms so that the older man lay on him, and the water seeped down.
It took Ian a minute to work it out, so that the past he’d imagined was transformed, like a landscape through tinted glass. ‘Just tell me, John Joe,’ he said. ‘All of it.’
John Joe’s chin vibrated with the cold, so Ian left him and came back down with a blanket.
‘I stepped out into the open too,’ he said, holding the corner of the warm wool to his throat. ‘But Pat hardly noticed, because Sam went up to him and he took Pat’s hand, like taking a child’s, and he put it on his face, so that he could feel the damage that he’d been born with. Sam didn’t say anything — I think he was too scared to speak. But I knew what it meant, and I think Pat did somehow, too. That it was evil, cousins together, and this was like God’s punishment. I think that got to Pat — which was a victory for Sam, because nothing got to him. Not the taunts, not the way people looked at him. Nothing.’
They sat together for a few minutes without speaking. Outside the tide was moving rocks, so that intermittently the whole building resonated with the boom of stone on stone.
‘He slapped Sam with that hand, the hand he’d touched him with,’ said John Joe, breaking their silence. ‘He slapped him hard. Pat was a big man, powerful, and it took Sam down. And then Pat got Sam’s leg and he dragged him through the spoil around Nora’s grave to the edge of the pit and he let him slip in. I heard the splash — ’cos by then it was full of water. Sam was screaming, pleading, but when he went in he was silent. I remember that because I heard the choir again — from the pub.
‘I saw Sam’s hands come up, scrabbling in the wet soil.’ John Joe shook his head at the memory. ‘Pat stamped on them, kicked soil in. Then he laughed and turned to me, walking away from the grave. Sam got out then, hauled himself out, and ran — along the river …so there was just me.’
Ian gave him the hip flask to drink again.
‘I ran at Pat and swung the billhook; he swayed back, so I missed him. He just stood there, laughing in my face. I dropped the hook. I left him there, alive. I swear to God I did. I ran. Like we all ran.’
Ian held John Joe’s head.
‘Later — when Pat disappeared we thought he’d just got tired of Lizzie. Then the baby came and we thought that explained it. He’d run for it too. And the three of us thought we’d helped push him away. Helped him run.’
John Joe looked at his wrists where the blood was beginning to ooze from the wounds made by the rope.
‘When they found Pat — Pat’s bones — they thought I’d done it: both of them, Fletcher and Venn. I said I hadn’t. I said I’d always told the truth, but they didn’t believe me.’
Outside the door the snow had suddenly stopped, leaving the air clear, the horizon as sharp as a knife edge. ‘I don’t know who killed him, Son — I really don’t.’
Ian looked at the hip flask in his hand.
‘I do,’ he said.
39
Shaw waited in the Porsche for Valentine, parked in the shadow of the industrial crane on the Lynn town quay side. Angular, black and towering, it stood out against a field of frosty stars. It seemed to reflect Shaw’s mood of gloomy introspection. It had not been a good day: it had taken them until mid-afternoon to track down ‘Gav’ — aka Gavin Andrew Peck — their one vital witness to the reopening of Nora Tilden’s grave. He had been staying at a
