escape.’ He coughed once, which triggered a series, until he retrieved an inhaler from his pocket and took three breaths.
Shaw felt what he’d first felt standing by Marianne Osbourne’s bed: a sadness that seemed to permeate the house, seeping into each of the rooms, as if fingers of misery ran through the home, like strands of dry rot. He took an empty glass from Osbourne’s hand, locked eyes with him.
‘Any ideas where she might be, sir?’
He shook his head.
‘It’s possible she saw your wife’s body on the bed through the window,’ said Shaw. ‘A kiss was left on the glass. It may be hers. So you see, we really do need to find her quickly in case she hurts herself or does something stupid. .’
‘Oh, God,’ said Osbourne. He let his hands open and clench and Shaw saw he’d been holding a snapshot. The picture was of the two of them on a beach, Marianne in a bikini, him in trunks — trendy Speedos — his legs painfully thin, his taut frame strung with muscle and tendon. They looked like kids. They were kids. Shaw took the snapshot, flipped it over and read:
‘We’d asked Marianne to come to the police station tomorrow to be re-interviewed about the murder on East Hills in August 1994. Do you think that might have had something to do with her death, Mr Osbourne?’ asked Shaw.
‘She never swam after East Hills,’ said Osbourne. The voice was light, matching the slender hands. Shaw imagined the fingers manipulating the cogs of a lock. ‘I was working that day, the day of the murder; otherwise I’d have been there too,’ he said.
‘Your father’s shop — the locksmith’s?’
‘She went with a girlfriend,’ he said. Shaw and Valentine exchanged a glance, noting that Marianne had kept the precise truth from her husband: that she’d gone to East Hills alone, or at least without the friend she’d agreed to meet. Sometimes they had this ability, Shaw and Valentine, to know they were thinking the same thing. Did Marianne’s lie mean they were right? That she’d gone out to East Hills to meet a secret lover?
‘It really shook her up,’ said Osbourne. ‘Seeing the body — I suppose they all were. She’d have nightmares sometimes — always the same. She’d be swimming out and she’d get entangled in the body, in the arms and legs and she’d run out, covered in blood.’ He covered his mouth. ‘It was the blood — the sight of it. She wasn’t squeamish. But he bled to death. And she said you wouldn’t believe it — the amount of blood in the water, like a cloud, all along the beach. Like there were hundreds dead, or dying. She said one of the men on the beach said his father had been in Normandy for D-Day — on the beaches — and that the sea was red there too, for miles. It was like the colour was in her head, for ever.’
He coughed again, trying to limit it to one, but failing, so that he needed a second dose from the inhaler.
‘She never said anything else about that day? Perhaps she met another friend out on the beach by chance? Did she have lots of friends?’
‘She was popular,’ said Osbourne, his voice flat, atonal.
‘You were going out by then. .’
‘That’s right.’
‘So no other men?’
‘We were an item,’ said Osbourne, wiping tears from his face with the back of his hand, but there’d been a hint of bitterness in his voice.
Shaw decided then that they’d come back and interview him when he wasn’t still in shock.
Osbourne looked around the room, and Shaw sensed a kind of tedious hatred for what he saw. ‘It’s why we’re here, in this house, in this
‘Why?’ prompted Valentine.
‘After East Hills she couldn’t live by the sea. She couldn’t wait to get out of Wells. Ruth — that’s her sister — lives next door, has done since she was married, so when this one came on the market we pitched in. I’d have stayed. .’ He shrugged, as if he’d been happy to give up the sea. ‘But prices were soft so we got it.’
‘They must be close — the sisters?’ asked Valentine, thinking it was a kind of nightmare for him, the thought of relatives next door.
‘Ruth’s always been there for Marianne,’ he said. ‘And Tilly.’ Shaw considered the testimonial. In his experience people who were ‘always there’ for others got their satisfaction in life from not being somewhere else.
Robinson was up out of the chair, the spring uncoiled. He walked quickly to the makeshift bookcase and took a bottle out of a gap between two encyclopaedias, refilling his glass, his hands shaking rhythmically but slowly.
‘For the record, sir,’ said Valentine. ‘Today you were at the shop again, all day?’
He turned back to them. ‘Yes. I closed for lunch, but I was out the back in the workshop.’
‘And your wife worked at home?’
Osbourne nodded, but his jaw was straightening. ‘No. She was due in at Kelly’s — the funeral directors down in Wells. It’s a part-time job but we need the money. She got up, had a bath, got dressed. Then, after Tilly went, she got back into bed. Said she couldn’t — not today. You know. . she suffered.’ He drank, then added: ‘Low mood,’ making it clear he knew it was a euphemism.
He let the words hang there. ‘So I made the call for her — told ’em she was ill. That’s where I left her. . in bed, about nine.’
Shaw watched Osbourne sip the whisky. Each mouthful was substantial and he didn’t gag. Shaw got the impression he was in it for the long run, and that he’d been down the road before.
Osbourne filled his narrow chest with air, squaring the fragile shoulders. ‘How did she do it?’ he asked. ‘This time.’ He sat, rocking slightly in his chair, and Shaw thought how tiring it would be to live with his bristling energy, the lack of peace.
‘We’re pretty certain that she swallowed poison, a cyanide capsule. A suicide pill. Have you any idea where she could have got such a thing?’
‘I don’t understand.’ But he did, Shaw could see, it was just that he didn’t have an answer.
‘And we believe that she may not have been alone when she died,’ added Shaw. ‘Have you any idea who might have been with her, Mr Osbourne?’
‘Not alone?’ Osbourne stood, as if he’d suddenly found the strength to be upright. He put the whisky glass down with exaggerated care. It was as if he hadn’t heard the question. ‘Can I see her — Marianne? I should.’ His voice was rising, taking on a note of panic. ‘I want to see her.’ His head, which was small and compact, seemed to shake at a very high frequency.
Before Shaw could answer they heard voices in the front garden — women’s voices — and then the door opened and slammed and they heard heavy footsteps in the hall, and a teenage girl appeared in the doorway. Her face was already disfigured by shock — the mouth hung open, the micro-muscles beneath the skin malfunctioning, so that her face seemed to shimmer and distort. But even in distress Shaw could see the resemblance to the dead woman: the colouring, although the hair was dyed a more striking red, and the fine bone structure, which seemed to stretch translucent skin.
She walked to Osbourne, who’d slumped back into his seat, and knelt down so that they could hold on to each other. Osbourne slipped from the chair to his knees and Tilly took his weight, letting his head sink to her shoulder.
A woman stood at the doorway. Shaw could see the resemblance to the dead woman in her too, in the colouring — the auburn hair, the green eyes. This had to be Ruth, Marianne Osbourne’s next-door sister. But she was also a striking opposite to her sibling: fleshy and rounded, the skin tanned from the wind and sun, so that she had no hint of tragic paleness. Shaw recalled that she worked at the Lido at Wells, and he could imagine her, executing an efficient breaststroke, effortlessly covering length after length, her head clear of the water. She looked at Shaw. ‘I told her,’ she said, ‘that Marianne’s gone.’
They heard Joe Osbourne thank her, his mouth buried in the nape of his daughter’s neck. Osbourne, sitting back now on his haunches, was sobbing, his hands fluttering in front of his face like a pair of bird’s wings. He kept saying, ‘Thank God’, and touching his daughter on her head, as if giving her a blessing.
Shaw and Valentine went out into the hallway. By the front door, thrown down, was a placard with a wooden
