Death

I didn’t see Marianne pick it up. I was wounded, standing there, the blood just oozing out of my side. I knelt down and when I looked up she’d done it. In a second. A single wound, slashed sideways, and her face empty of everything. And his face — white, and gone — already gone, so that his eyes were dead. I tried to stop the blood with my hands.’

Robinson looked at Shaw, his eyes catching the light, as if the scene was playing out between them on an invisible screen.

‘We dragged him down to the sea — the beach is steep there. I couldn’t go back on the boat, the wound was bad, but it wouldn’t kill me, I knew that. Then I told her about this place — that I’d stay, that there was a medical kit here so I could put on a bandage, keep the wound clean. She had to go. I told her to go straight in the sea and wash her costume because it was stained too. Then she should bury it deep. And I gave her my towel to bury because it was soaked in the blood I cleaned off my hands. When she could she was to tell Tug what had happened and get him to come back when the island was safe. He knew where to find me.’

Shaw listened to the silence and was convinced that there was a noise embedded in it — a very light noise, as if invisible feathers were falling on the tabletop between them.

‘And you came back to die,’ said Shaw. ‘But you’re still alive.’

Robinson leant forward until his head almost touched the table. When he straightened up the cyanide capsule was there, between his lips. It glistened, obscenely, like something visceral, something, Shaw felt, internal. Then he spat it out. ‘I knew I couldn’t do it. I’d seen the others. .’ He said it with absolute conviction, as matter-of-fact as reciting his own name. ‘But I won’t leave here alive.’

Shaw tried to judge how quickly he could get to the knife.

‘Marianne couldn’t do it either. She begged me to help, so I did,’ said Robinson. ‘I left the curtains open so she’d always see the flowers. And then the kiss.’

‘I can’t pretend you won’t get life,’ said Shaw. ‘But think about Tilly, Aidan. Your daughter. She’s lost her mother. Today, Aidan, she lost the man she thought was her father. Joe’s dead.’

Aidan’s eyes widened. ‘I don’t. . ’

‘Stress, shock, the asthma. I think he just gave up. Tilly was with him. But she’s alone. And you’re going to leave her now?’

‘She’s got Ruth,’ said Robinson.

He saw it then as clearly as Aidan Robinson had seen it. The future: Ruth with the daughter she’d always wanted, Tilly untainted by the knowledge that she was Aidan’s child. An impossible future, but the only hope this man could imagine, Gone now.

Very slowly Shaw let his hand move towards the knife. Robinson didn’t move, or even follow the movement with his eyes. He retained the rigid pose he’d kept, as if trying to sit to attention. ‘You can bring them together,’ said Shaw, trying to make himself believe it. ‘That’s what you should do with the time you’ve got left.’ Shaw took the knife from the tabletop and held it in both hands, like a ceremonial dagger. ‘We should go to them,’ he said.

But there was something wrong because as Shaw turned the blade in his hands he saw that it left a bloodstain on his fingers.

‘Too late,’ said Robinson, lifting both arms and putting his hands, palm up, on the tabletop. Both wrists were cut to the bone.

FORTY-FOUR

Shaw left the Porsche on a double-yellow line outside St James and ran up the semicircular steps to the front doors of police headquarters, Valentine, wheezing, just behind. The sergeant on the main reception desk was one of Shaw’s father’s old colleagues: Sgt Timber Woods. He’d taken retirement ten years earlier, it being plain that he couldn’t catch a cold without uniformed assistance, and was eking out a decade until his sixty-fifth birthday working in the records office downstairs and taking shifts on the front desk. As one of the senior DI’s had said at Timber’s retirement party, he might not live longer, but it was certainly going to feel that way.

‘Bloody hell, Peter.’ Woods looked up at the hall clock — a Victorian original, big enough for a mainline railway station platform. It was 3.14 p.m. Not only was Shaw late for the press conference, he’d also failed to file the chief constable a summary brief of developments, leaving him to face the great unwashed of Fleet Street alone and unprepared.

‘Presser started on time,’ added Woods. ‘O’Hare’s had all units out for you. He’s ballistic. If you haven’t got a good excuse I’d make one up,’ said Woods, clearly energized by the misfortunes of others.

Shaw’s mobile had contained so many messages when he’d turned it back on he hadn’t bothered to read any of them. He headed for the lifts, knowing Valentine might not make the stairs to the seventh floor. There was piped-in music in the lift: Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. ‘You got him?’ asked Shaw, his heart pounding smoothly, his blood making an oily churning noise in his eardrums.

Valentine was bent double, but he held out his mobile. ‘Yup.’

Once they’d got Aidan Robinson into the RNLI launch Shaw had asked Valentine to wait for his phone signal to return on the trip back, then try and get through to Lionel Smyth, reporter at large for The Daily Telegraph. They needed to plant a question with him to ask at the East Hills press conference. Several questions — a series, interlinked. Valentine had got Smyth first ring; he was with the press pack at St James, grazing on sausage rolls, waiting for the briefing to start. Valentine got him to find a quiet corner out in the corridor and carefully marked his card: three questions. The last one was the best one. In its own way, a killer question.

As they came out of the lift Shaw got a text from DC Campbell at A amp;E at the Queen Vic. ROBINSON STABLE. ROTA 24/7.

Campbell would stay with Robinson, then they’d run shifts until they got him charged and to court. One of the medics who helped load Robinson, lifeless, on to the force helicopter on the beach at Wells had told Shaw the cuts at the wrist were deep but had missed both the brachial arteries, so there was hope, because while he’d bled for a long time into the sandy floor, he’d bled slowly. That had been the liquid, iron, smell: dripping blood.

The Norfolk Suite was decked out in oak panels and fitted with a conference table at the front, microphones, full multimedia, including a whiteboard and acoustic ceiling. It was where O’Hare held his senior management meetings and was one of half a dozen rooms in Peter Shaw’s life he hated with a passion equal to the love he felt for being outside, on the beach. It was packed — maybe fifty reporters, with a TV camera and radio at the back. A table of coffee cups and biscuits. Wine bottles ready for the post-conference drinks.

As Shaw burst through the doors O’Hare was on his feet. The chief constable’s voice was barely more civilized than a snarl. ‘So that completes our summary of the mass screening. I was hoping. .’ He caught sight of Shaw, then Valentine.

‘Ah. DI Shaw. Sergeant. Please. .’ He held a hand out, indicating the empty seats at the front, facing the press. Shaw walked down the middle of the room between the rows, Valentine took cover along the wall, but they met at the front. The force’s press officer was nominally the chair, seated in the middle of the row facing the reporters. She was sporting a weary smile. Valentine sat on the desk edge despite a glare from the chief constable.

‘Great,’ said O’Hare. ‘Good of you to make it, Peter.’

There was nervous laughter from the press. Shaw noted Smyth, from The Daily Telegraph, in the front row. The nervous woman from the Guardian was in the second row, notebook poised.

O’Hare couldn’t stop his body language betraying him. His shoulders had relaxed and the forward, aggressive, angle of his head and neck had returned to upright. He’d been facing an uphill struggle to convince Fleet Street’s best the North Norfolk Constabulary was only just a step behind the East Hill’s killer. Now that job was Shaw’s.

‘So. If I can introduce DI Peter Shaw,’ said the chief constable, ‘investigating officer in the reopened East Hills inquiry. Peter, perhaps you could get us all up to speed and then. .’

‘Sir,’ said Shaw, holding up a hand, cutting him dead.