Death

black and back again.

There were no other chairs, just a rusted bed. What he noticed immediately was the tremendous thud of the falling waves out on the sandbanks at sea, even on this calmest of days. In a storm the noise would be overwhelming, sublime — an operatic backdrop. Each percussion made Shaw’s ears pop with the change in pressure.

Shaw could smell fear. Trapped fear. ‘Aidan,’ he said. The sand of the floor seemed to suck all the energy and edge from his voice, as if he was in an acoustic booth.

‘That night. While they searched the island above.’ Shaw manufactured a laugh. ‘You were down here. Tug came for you next day in his boat. This had been your secret — the grandsons’ secret, Tug Johns’ secret. He was in the unit up at Creak, wasn’t he? But being on the crew at the lifeboat he had a brilliant idea — why not a dugout here, too? The ultimate lookout, watching over the harbour.’

Shaw thought about sitting on the bed but there seemed to be a spell on the room, on Robinson, and he didn’t want to break it.‘You didn’t plan the murder did you? Either of you.’

Aidan Robinson shook his head, and for a moment Shaw thought he wouldn’t speak at all and that was because he had the sixth capsule ready, lodged between his back teeth, perhaps, or in one of the unseen hands? Yes, in a hand, hidden.

‘He pulled the knife,’ said Robinson. His voice, low, monotonal, was flattened further in this box, sunk deep in the sand. There was something in the way he spoke that suggested this man wasn’t contemplating death but that he had moved beyond it. The table held a tin cup, turned upside down, and a knife: mock antler handle, nine-inch blade, the metal oiled, but with traces and spots of dust, and stained slightly, possibly by rust.

‘The pictures were of you — you and Marianne,’ said Shaw. ‘Ruth’s here now, down on the beach. She’s guessed that. But she knows there’s more.’ Shaw judged the knowing inflexion of the sentence perfectly.

Robinson’s muscles went into spasm, so that a fleeting expression of pure surprise seemed to cross that normally placid, fleshy, face. But the eyes were still dead and Shaw had a sudden insight into this man’s life — the years of humiliating work in the battery sheds of the poultry farm, the stench of the caged birds, the bloodless cull.

The foghorn sounded, making Shaw’s eyes flicker towards the pale square of light above the doorway through which the mist was tumbling. Shaw told himself he didn’t have long: that this man was strong enough to break, and that he’d kill himself and anyone who tried to stop him. ‘Why did Marianne have to die?’ asked Shaw, finally, judging it the one question that might unlock the motives behind Robinson’s crimes.

Robinson’s face seemed to freeze, as if his skin had tightened. Shaw watched his tongue licking his lower lip. His shoulders dipped forward. For the first time Shaw picked up a scent in the room: subtle and exotic, so that the closest Shaw could get to describing it was liquid iron.

The question seemed to be provoking a crisis in Robinson, so Shaw moved on: ‘I understand why the old man had to die.’

Robinson’s eyes locked on his.

‘Tug Coyle’s son was the burglar who knocked down Arthur Patch. You were close friends, cousins, so he’d have mentioned the ID parade. The youngster would have been picked out, then we’d have taken his DNA and put it on the database. And you thought we’d run a check — for family — after we got a clean sweep on the mass screening. There’d have been a match of sorts between Sample X and young Coyle, and so we’d have started looking at the family. Eventually we’d have got to you. But first we’d have got to Tug. He was prepared to lie for you back in ’94, but he wasn’t going to go on doing that, was he? And he cracked in the end, which is why he’s sitting in the dugout up in the pinewoods. Somewhere else that Granddad showed you. of course.’

Robinson didn’t seem to react. He was quite clearly in a separate world. and Shaw had the strong feeling that he was waiting for something to happen there. Flexing his jaw, the joint cracked and Shaw saw it then — the terracotta pill, lodged in the back of Robinson’s mouth. So what was in the hidden hands?

‘But Holtby’s death is the key to this,’ said Shaw. ‘Or rather, the motive for his death is the key.’

He reached into his wallet and took out the snapshot of Tilly he’d found beneath the pillow in the dugout and put it on the table — face up, turned to Robinson, whose eyes fixed on it with a look of terror.

‘You’ll know where I found this, of course. Perfectly natural — a doting uncle, a favourite niece. But it made me remember another picture. Tug’s been sleeping rough in one of the beach huts along towards Holkham. He had some snap shots pinned up over the door. There was one with two kids, ten-year-olds or close, with an elderly man. I guess that was granddad, Tug Johns, and his two grandsons, Aidan and Tug Junior. You were very different then, Aidan — thin, gawky. But it was the face that reminded me. .’

He touched the picture of Tilly with the tip of a finger. ‘We’ve just checked with the chicken farm,’ said Shaw. ‘They tell us you’ve been off work for several days — since the day Marianne died, in fact. So, you’ve been up in the woods, in your secret place. Did you sleep? It’s on odd image to keep with you. Your niece. But she’s not your niece, is she?’

Robinson’s tilted his head back into shadow, then forward a second later, but even in that brief time there had been a transformation. The muscle structure had collapsed, the eyes welling over, the lips wet. And his body seemed to have given up its fight as well, the shoulders slumped, the torso twisted slightly to one side, but still the hands held out of sight.

‘You’re her father.’

Robinson sobbed, his chest heaving, saliva spilling from his gaping mouth.

‘Holtby died to stop the demo up at the wind farm. Tilly was determined to get arrested — all of them were. And we’d have taken DNA and we’d have got our familial match with Sample X, eventually, once we’d discovered her father wasn’t Joe Osbourne.’

‘I gave him money to go away, just walk away and forget about the wind farm,’ said Robinson, not bothering to deny it, the sentence erratic and breathless. ‘A grand in twenty-pound notes. He threw them at me.’

‘That’s the problem with some people — they just won’t be bribed,’ Shaw said, undeflected. ‘But that wasn’t why he died, was it? It wasn’t to save your neck at all. It was to make sure Ruth never knew you’d had the child. Because while you were fascinated by Marianne, you only ever loved Ruth.

‘Does she think it’s your fault there are no children? It must have seemed like a kind lie. They can be the worse. She couldn’t get pregnant and that was the tragedy of her life. And it was the tragedy of yours that you could, and that the woman ended up living next door. And that’s why you wanted to die here, where you thought we couldn’t find your body, so we’d never be able to prove it — not beyond all doubt prove that you were her father.’

Robinson was shivering, so that when he went to nod it turned into a jerk of the jaw to the side.

‘How long did it last — your affair with Marianne?’

‘She said she needed me.’ He looked up at the curved metal roof, gathering himself, edging back from the emotional brink. ‘She wouldn’t let me go. It was never blackmail, I can’t claim that.’

‘But how long? Years? And then when we reopened East Hills you called in to make sure she still had her story straight. But she wouldn’t lie again so you helped her take the poison. Did she change her mind, Aidan? Did she want to live at the last moment? Her jaw was broken. Is that what the kiss was for — to say sorry, sorry that for you she was better dead than alive?’

He’d shot the question and Robinson shook his head before he could stop himself. Then he squeezed his eyes shut and Shaw was shocked by the tears that fell, soaking the round, plump, face. ‘I didn’t kill White — Marianne did. That’s what haunted her. That was our secret.’

‘Why would I believe that?’ asked Shaw, tired now of the self-pitying tone and reminded of the lies this man had told already. The military man above The Circle. That was clever. A half-truth, because it had been him, steeped in everything his grandfather had taught him.

The fog horn again, but oddly distant, as if the mist was thickening. ‘She did kill him,’ said Robinson. ‘I tried to beat him up — the muscles were all for show. The kid was a coward. But it was tough because the foot drags and he was quick and he had the knife. He cut me — once, across the stomach. In the end I got him down in the sand, told him he wasn’t to speak to Marianne again, ever. I’d been round his flat; I had the pictures and the negs. Marianne was just there, watching.’

The candle-stub was beginning to gutter so that the room was filling with shifting shadows. The blade of the knife hardly shone at all now.

‘I hit him then — knuckles in his eye socket. I heard the bone crunch. I’d knocked the knife out of his hand but