Death

she’d unflexed the fingers and they’d seen what she held: a single cyanide pill.

‘He said I should take it,’ she’d said, sitting at the table, her voice dull with shock. ‘That it was for the best because he wouldn’t be coming back. He said you’d never find his body. Why was that important?’ She looked at Shaw, appearing to search his face for the answer. ‘He said that he’d done it all for me. All? I don’t dare think what he meant.’ She covered her mouth with both hands. ‘I won’t dare.’ She’d shaken her head, struggling to understand. ‘We said goodbye,’ she added, pushing the pill away. ‘I couldn’t take it.’ Shaw noticed the patina of tiny cracks in the seventy-year-old rubber casing of the pill. ‘I said I’d be here for Tilly, now Marianne’s gone, and I will be. I told Aidan that and it seemed to suck the life out of him. I’ve never seen him so. .’ She searched for the word, her eyes filling with water. ‘Crushed.’ She brushed the tears from her eyes roughly with the back of her hand. ‘I can’t understand what’s happened to us; what’s happening to me.’

Since then, silence. But she hadn’t complained, following them to the Porsche and then sitting quietly as Shaw drove down to Wells. No questions, which told Shaw he was right. Using the hands-free he arranged for the RNLI’s inshore boat to be at the quay. And he’d summoned back-up — the police launch from Lynn, but they’d be an hour. The coastal forecast he’d picked up from Petersen on duty watch at the lifeboat house. The fret was thickening and ran out for nearly a mile, nearly to East Hills, but not quite.

When he said the words ‘East Hills’ on the mobile he looked in the rear-view mirror and watched her close her eyes. At the lifeboathouse they said that ‘Tug’ Coyle’s boat had gone from its buoy in The Cut. Petersen had heard an engine chugging past about two hours ago, just seen, off the point. ‘A small fishing boat, but not Coyle at the helm,’ he said.

‘We know,’ said Shaw, seeing again the body strapped to its chair, the heels bloody. Shaw looked ahead into the mist. On the port side he could see the first of the buoys leading out of the harbour: green, the size of a small car, rusted. He steered the boat a few degrees to starboard and let the engine pick up a few revs. A pain cut across his blind eye but it bled away as soon as he closed it, and he was relieved to feel that his heartbeat remained stable.

The second green buoy came into sight just as he lost contact with the grey outline of the pinewoods on shore. Now there was nothing but the buoy itself in the circular, colourless world which surrounded the boat. He cut the engine and started using the single paddle, switching from port to starboard expertly, guiding the boat ahead. The only chance he had, thought Shaw, was to approach the island silently. Visibility was about thirty yards but it seemed to lessen unpredictably, the mist suddenly closing around them. It was like a pulse — the mist thickening, then thinning, as if the fret was breathing.

The foghorn boomed.

Valentine had rooted out a flask in her kitchen before they left and made tea — dark, steeped with tannin. He poured some into the cap and offered it to her. When she took it her hand was steady, but she didn’t raise it to her lips, she just cradled it for warmth.

The foghorn boomed again and this time it seemed to release something within her, as if a lock had been picked. She looked about her for the first time and saw nothing but the circular grey horizon. ‘He never did tell me everything,’ she said, her voice a whisper, as if she were holding a conversation in her own head. ‘But I trusted him.’ She hauled in some air. ‘The night of the East Hills killing, the day of the murder,’ she added, as if it was an accusation, ‘I couldn’t find Aidan. He wasn’t up at the house, at The Circle. His Mum said Tug Coyle had phoned from a call box, and they were going out night fishing, and that Aidan was in town getting bait. That she wasn’t to worry. I was hurt. They did go fishing, the two of them, but I was only back for the summer and it was Saturday night, so it felt like he didn’t care. It was Mum who told me about East Hills because it was on the radio. She’d had a call from Lynn to say Marianne would be dropped home after she’d given a statement; they were all giving statements, so there was nothing to worry about. So we waited. She was in bits, really, hysterical, when the police dropped her at our house. Dad gave her a drink and I got her to bed. It was late — after eleven — and there was another call. It was Tug again — he didn’t say where he was, just that I was to meet Aidan the next evening at dusk on Holkham Beach. There was no need to worry or mention the call to anyone else, Tug said, but I should bring the first aid kit from the Lido.’

She’d been staring into the mist but now she glanced back to Shaw. ‘I did a course when I got the job — the summer before Durham. So Aidan knew I could do stitches.’

Ahead Shaw caught sight of the pines on East Hills, then lost them again in the fold of the mist.

‘Tug brought him ashore — they were in his fishing boat, not the ferry. Aidan looked dreadful — dirty, like he hadn’t slept. And pale — almost bloodless. We went into the woods and he took his shirt off and there was this knife wound — a few inches, clean but deep, and there’d been lots of blood. I said I wouldn’t do anything unless he told me what had happened. He said he couldn’t tell me.’

Valentine lit a match and the sound made her jump. Shaw noticed that the flame burnt upright, unmoved by the slightest wind. If he examined the silence he could just hear the whisper of the sea falling on unseen sands.

‘I put in the butterfly stitches, cleaned him up. Then I asked again. Told him I had a right to know. That did it — he just snapped. I didn’t expect it to happen — I thought I knew him so well. Looking back it was the pressure, the fear. But at the time it was so frightening. He had a knife in his belt — a knife I didn’t recognize — and he drew it and cut the air between us, back and forth, twice. His eyes. .’ She had a look of horror on her face, as if she could see him there.

‘It was supposed to be a warning. But when I looked down my hand was half red below a razor-sharp wound, the blood dripping into the pine needles.’ She looked at her hands. ‘And when he looked down there was a spray of blood on his legs and feet.’ She peered into the mist: ‘I couldn’t stitch the wound with one hand. So he drove me to A amp;E.’ She dipped her hand in the sea, then lifted it out, letting droplets fall into the perfectly calm, oily, water. ‘Years later, he’d often take my hand and say sorry again. He said he was sorry that day too. When I came out of A amp;E he was there in the car. That was when he told me why he’d gone out to East Hills. The lifeguard, White, had taken pictures of Marianne with men and he was after money. Marianne had come to Aidan for a loan —?50.’ She laughed at the amount. ‘Of course, that would have just been the start of it. He’d have been back. Aidan gave her the money. He said he didn’t want to worry me about it, which I understood.’ She nodded to herself. ‘But I was hurt Marianne hadn’t come to me first. She was going to give White the cash that Saturday out on East Hills. Aidan’s always been very protective of Marianne, like a big brother. He wasn’t worried about the money but he thought White would want something else in payment — sex. So Aidan went out on the boat that day to have it out with him, to try and end it.

‘When Marianne walked off into the dunes he followed. White was waiting for her, but when Aidan arrived he was angry that she wasn’t alone. Aidan told White it was over — that he wanted the negatives and then he didn’t want to hear from him again. White just laughed in his face, pulled the knife.

‘Aidan didn’t plan to hurt him, let alone kill him. That’s what he always said and I believe him. There’s a cold streak in Aidan — I know that. Something died inside him when he had that accident. He lost a life then — a life he’d imagined was his to live. But he’s not a calculating man. Never that.

‘He said there was a lot of blood — that they’d both been wounded. The only thing he really remembered was the slipperiness of that boy’s skin, covered in blood. It had never bothered him until then, the sight of blood. But after that it was like a phobia. That’s why he always wrung the chickens by the neck.’ She looked over the grey water where a seal had broken the surface and was poised, scanning them.

They heard the dull percussion of a diesel turbine and the silhouette of a trawler slid by, fifty yards off the port side. The base note of vibration made a small bone buzz in Valentine’s ear. Another fishing boat went past, this time unseen, but the wake reached them and rocked them, the noise of oily water slapping unnaturally loud.

‘It wasn’t the truth, was it? Not all the truth?’ she asked. ‘Since Marianne died he hasn’t talked to me. Nothing. He won’t touch me.’ She looked from Valentine to Shaw, her face suddenly wet with tears. ‘I can feel the lies. I can imagine what it is — that he was in those pictures with Marianne. I’m not stupid. I heard the rumours when I came back from Durham: that she’d gone after what was mine. But I could live with it; I’ve always lived with it. What really frightened me, what’s frightening me now, is that there’s another lie worse than that lie. That there’s something else he didn’t tell me.’

She cupped her face, an almost theatrical gesture, as if she’d run out of ways to react to what was happening to her life. ‘I think he was there when Marianne died. .’ She covered her mouth as if retrieving the words. ‘So I can see that might be the truth, but somehow even that doesn’t seem enough.’ She