Fran ran towards them from the beach, the board held sideways in the surf. Up at the cafe the OPEN flag was being lowered from its pole.
‘How’s business?’ asked Justina, waving at Fran. Shaw thought how odd it was that he couldn’t remember when they hadn’t been friends with the pathologist. She’d been a distant, brittle character, but her husband’s illness had brought the couple out to the coast for the final months of Dawid’s life. She’d bought a house up behind the dunes and walked a dog on the beach. Since her husband’s death she’d slotted into their lives as if she’d always been there. The perfect neighbour, because she never outstayed a welcome.
‘Fantastic,’ he said. ‘People told us, along at Hunstanton, the fairground, the pier; they said one good day can make a summer and they’re right. It’s been good, but today. . The world and his wife, and the kids. All spending. It’s like the beach,’ he turned his back on the swell, waving a hand along the coast, ‘doesn’t change for a year. Sand, sandbars, pools. Nothing changes. Then one night there’s a storm and you wake up and it’s a different beach. Trade’s the same. We take a hundred quid a day for six weeks then?5,000 in one afternoon. Suddenly it’s a different business.’
Looking up at the cafe Shaw saw Lena come out on to the stoop with a bottle of wine in a cooler. ‘This time next year we’ll be open for drinks too — wine and beer. Keep going on the good days. Catch the evening crowd.’ Shaw put his feet down and turned shorewards but Justina held up her hand.
‘One thing,’ she said. The pathologist hated herself for doing it, for stopping him having the rest of the day that he’d been looking forward to. But her job was her life, even more now that Dawid was gone, and she was nothing if she wasn’t a professional. So she didn’t have a choice. ‘I am not here by an accident, not completely. I knew I would find you — Tom asked me too. I think, yes, you should concentrate. .’ She often did this, sifting through some mental thesaurus for the right word from a language she’d never quiet mastered. ‘Focus — yes, you should focus — on the Osbourne case. The woman in the bed. You know this is important. But I think perhaps it is the key.’
She looked into Shaw’s good eye, sinking in the water, ducking her head, then standing. ‘There was a gas explosion in the village, close to the house where she died?’
Shaw nodded, studying Justina’s face, ignoring the long arc of the beach behind her, the sea dotted with swimmers, inflatables, surf and body boards. His good eye was sharp now, painless, and the anguish he’d felt just that morning was now a cloud on the horizon, distant, retreating. He thought of the black smudged ruins of the house they’d past after leaving The Circle that first morning, the road surface buckled by the blast.
‘The explosion,’ said the pathologist. ‘Tom’s team is still on the site but they say the heart of it was in an upstairs bedroom. They’re helping the fire brigade unit now. The house is dangerous — you cannot go now. Not today. The blast goes up through the floor.’ She held both hands up, elbows down, as she often did in the autopsy room. ‘The victim — an eighty-seven-year-old man — was in bed at the time. His body did not survive. Just pieces. Already they have two men who need help.’ She searched for the right word again, this time finding it first time. ‘Harrowing?’
Shaw nodded. The sound of the beach, of children screaming with fun, had receded.
‘What there is of this man is on a table at The Ark.’ It was a starkly brutal sentence.
Shaw thought of the cold green light coming through the old chapel windows: the aluminium autopsy tables set out below the single stone angel, its hands covering its face.
‘The physics I do not understand. But in such cases, often, you are surprised what survives. The blast blew out the candle which lit the gas, you see? Only a few seconds of heat, then gone. So some things survive. A newspaper, perhaps. A picture on a wall. Here, this time, this candle. No — a tea light. Set in a saucer.’
Shaw thought about that.
‘Where?’
‘By the bed.’
‘Power supply?’
‘The house next door is on the same circuit and when they go to bed the night before they have lights.’
‘Perhaps he was afraid of the dark,’ offered Shaw, but he didn’t believe it.
She lifted a hand from the sea and held two fingers together, as if she was moving a chess piece.
‘It was set on a small table. Still in the ruins.’ She shook her head, amazed at how lucky they’d been. ‘So, I look more carefully at what is left of this man,’ she said. ‘I have the skull — in part. Some fatty tissue. The torso — two pieces. The test results are very clear but I can not confirm before tomorrow.’
‘Confirm what?’ asked Shaw.
‘Cyanide. Bloodstream — anterior chamber of the heart.’
Shaw saw the summer’s day in the pathologist’s eyes but it was only a reflection.
On the beach Lena was waving to them both. She stopped suddenly, dropped her arms, and Shaw knew she’d seen the stiffness in his body by the way she held her jaw up, like a challenge, as if she’d been excluded. She began to wade in, Fran running ahead up the beach to meet her.
Justina shook her short hair. ‘I’ve just left Tom at the house — what is left of the house. Even he cannot go in yet. The neighbours talk. This man — Patch — he was well known in Wells. He took tickets, Peter, for the car park — the one by the quay? Where the ferry leaves for the island, I think? For East Hills. For twenty years, more, he did this.’
Justina filled her swimming cap with water.
Shaw heard Lena call his name. He turned, manufacturing a smile he knew would disappoint her.
SEVENTEEN
A tramp played a penny whistle in the doorway of a furniture showroom as George Valentine walked past; head down, so that the smoke from his cigarette seemed to caress his face like cool white hands. Night had fallen as he’d driven west along the coast, and by the time he’d dumped the Mazda outside his house in South Lynn the stars were clear despite the orange reflection of the street lights. He walked into town, strolling in the middle of the narrow medieval streets, well away from the shadowy shop fronts and alleyways. He walked the white dotted line, the roads empty of traffic, and had gone twenty yards past the tramp before he recognized the song:
The only thing moving in town was the neon sign on the tower of The Majestic cinema, which flickered electric blue. Valentine cut through the memorial gardens by the central library to the ruins of Greyfriar’s Abbey, a few pillars of a nave and the leaning Greyfriar’s Tower, a floodlit eccentricity which Valentine hadn’t consciously noticed in thirty years. What did he notice? A single hypodermic syringe by a bench catching the light, a discarded mobile phone on the grass and some graffiti on a wall by the library which read simply JayGo. He had an eye for crime, but little else. And it was often at its sharpest when he was off duty, and after dark.
His mobile rang and he stopped to take the call. It was Shaw, the sound of the sea in the background, bad news in the foreground: the old man who’d died in the explosion in Creake on the day they’d found Marianne Osbourne in her deathbed had been murdered, probably with a cyanide pill. And there was another, circumstantial link to East Hills. The dead man had run the council car park by the quay for thirty years. He’d have been there that day as the
Shaw gave him what facts he had, then fixed to meet at the scene of the explosion at seven — they’d move on to interview Joe Osbourne afterwards.
As they talked a new thought emerged: perhaps, oddly, it was good news, not bad. They were looking for a fresh start, after all. Now they had a double killing, a
Shaw was going to ring off but couldn’t resist the idea that Valentine was working. ‘You?’
