Death

with a heart so black they hinted at purple. On the breeze, thrillingly, he scented rain.

TWENTY-NINE

The storm was still at sea as Shaw drove the coast road. Clouds churned over sunlit water. Thunder and lightning crackled together, the sound so immediate it appeared to be inside his head. The coast road was busy with holidaymakers quitting the beaches, heading back to cottages or the amusements at Wells. He turned off at the village of Morston, waiting several minutes for a break in the bumper-to-bumper traffic. A lane led past a line of stone houses and a small caravan site down to Morston Quay. Getting out of the car on the grass beside the wooden dock Shaw could see grey parallelograms of falling rain on the horizon, like solid ladders between sea and cloud. The wide expanse of water trapped in Blakeney Pit — the tidal waters between the coast and the long shingle spit of Blakeney Point — churned with energy, creating thousands of small pyramid shaped waves, slapping randomly at the boats tied along the quay.

Morston House was the last in the village, set on its own at the far end of the quay, with just the marshes beyond. Two storey, with playful Naval detail in the bay-windows and balcony, it commanded the landscape before it, and Shaw was not surprised to find a small blue plaque on the stone gatepost:

Harbour House

Official residence of Morston’s Excise Office.

1823–1941.

In the window by the front door was a poster for the Labour Party candidate in the forthcoming district council elections and a SOUL! placard, just like the one Tilly Osbourne had brought home the day her mother died. Shaw pulled a manual brass doorbell and stood back. The exterior woodwork of the house was bleached white, like whalebone, and unvarnished. There were no net curtains at all, but it was impossible to look in because the immaculately clean glass reflected the choppy water and the chaotic sky.

Jeanette Holtby, Paul Holtby’s aunt, answered the door and took Shaw through to the kitchen. The house had wooden parquet floors and high ceilings. Despite the summer the rooms were cool, a lot of the furniture stylish but threadbare. In the wide hall there was a grandmother clock, but there was no sound of it working. Ms Holtby was a small, sinewy woman in a darned skirt and a man’s linen shirt, and cork deck-shoes. Making Shaw tea, mashing a bag in the mug, she added milk from a plastic half-pint carton.

‘I’m sorry about Paul. You must have been close.’ He’d meant it as a statement but he could see her considering it as a question. She said it was oppressive inside, would he mind talking outside, at least until the storm broke? There was a deck beyond the kitchen, looking out over the marshes to the north. Thunder rumbled in steady beats, but the sky directly above was blue by contrast.

‘A policewoman called,’ she said, looking out to sea. ‘I told her. .’ She didn’t finish the sentence, letting the cool airlift her short, workaday hair.

‘Yes,’ said Shaw. ‘I just wanted to see for myself.’ He looked out beyond the reeds to a narrow shell beach.

She gave Shaw a potted family history. Paul’s parents had split up and she’d offered to take the boy in the summer holidays. It had become a ritual, one of the fixed points in his life. The house was full of cousins in the summer. She’d left his room in the barn untouched so he’d returned after university. His mother sent him money, the room was rent-free and he cooked his own food.

‘And you remember the East Hills murder in 1994 — a lifeguard, stabbed out on the island?’ asked Shaw.

She turned towards him then and for the first time Shaw could see she’d spotted his blind eye. ‘Of course — an Australian? And there was something in the paper on Monday. The Guardian.’ She glanced back at the kitchen door. The newspapers had been spread over a plane deal table.

‘Well, we think — just think — that the killer may have swum ashore from East Hills. If he did, then he might have come ashore here. And we thought there was a chance that Paul saw him. Or saw something. The killer may have been injured, you see. Bloodied.’

She shook her head. ‘There’d have been no blood, would there?’ she said. ‘What would it take to swim — forty minutes, an hour? That time the salt would have cleaned a wound — unless it was bad, really bad.’ Shaw thought she’d have made a good copper.

‘And that’s why he died — because he saw this man?’ she said, a note of disbelief in her voice. Another long pause. ‘It would be good to have a reason,’ she said at last. ‘Because as a random act of violence it’s pretty appalling isn’t it? So disproportionate.’

‘Were you born here?’ asked Shaw, thinking the only way he’d find out anything now, after all these years was by chance, by giving her time to talk. He’d been taught this at Quantico, at the FBI school. Accessing someone’s memory wasn’t like putting a key in a lock, it was like getting a cat to come to your hand.

‘Good God, no.’ She talked about her life while Shaw watched the storm clouds darken. A degree in law, a career in the City, getting out before the stress killed her.

Finished, she looked out to sea with a smile on her dry lips.

‘I met Paul just a few days ago, up at the wind farm protest,’ said Shaw. ‘He tried to give us a leaflet through the car window.’

‘Well he was nothing like that, not really. .’ she said. ‘That was an act, a performance. I mean that, precisely. Psychologically it was actually a performance, as if he’d fooled himself into thinking the real world was a stage. Inside, privately, he was fantastically self-conscious — the birthmark, I suppose, but maybe there was something else, something more rooted. Or uprooted.’ The laugh again.

‘He played on the beach — alone?’

‘Well, not quite. The house was always lively in summer. Family, friends. But books were the thing for Paul. Later, politics and books. But back then, just books. Science fiction — that got him started. Clarke, Dick, Huxley. Then the classics — Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, Conrad, Faulkner, anything he could pick up. We talked about books and politics. Thank God we had that.’

Which was odd, thought Shaw, because he hadn’t seen a book in the house, let alone a bookcase.

‘But he wasn’t a book worm — not a little nerd,’ she said. ‘He loved all this — the sea, the beach. So he’d have gone down with the rest — over there? Do you see? There’s a slip of sand at low tide. The seals come in too and they used to swim with them. But Paul just used to sit; make himself a chair out of the sand. I did see him swim but it was pretty rare. Usually he was wrapped up — clothes, books, just wrapped up.’

Shaw felt the first rain drop on his head. It felt as big as a marble, and icy.

He didn’t even have to ask to see his room. Behind the house was the barn, half brick, the loft converted to a bedsit with shower and loo. One wall was a scrapbook of political activism — an old poster from the Grunwick dispute, the Miners’ Strike of ’82, a black and white print of Castro. The bed was unmade, like a human nest, the sheets swirled. In the corner was a mechanical poster printer and fresh pile of SOUL! placards.

Ms Holtby flipped the window open from the bottom so that it lifted up, like the shutter on a counter, and at that moment the first lightning struck down to the marshes — forking like a synapse. The light lit the room as if it was a flashgun, and Shaw saw again what wasn’t there.

‘There’s no books. .’

‘There’ll be a few,’ she said, flipping back the duvet. Two books: a study on green power and a biography of Ghandi.

Shaw recognized the cellophane binding, the Dewey Decimal code number on the spine. ‘Library books?’

‘Always. Paul grew up in a single parent household, Inspector. No money for books. And I’ve always been a big fan of libraries — the public services. We take them for granted, don’t we? With the cuts and everything we won’t have any left in ten years. Odd, isn’t it, people always think civilization goes forward. But it can go backwards too.’ She looked at the bed, as if seeing it for the first time. ‘Libraries were an escape for both of us. So we went every week to stock up.’