Death

SIXTEEN

Shaw was always surprised by the flowery swim cap: blue, with white and pink primroses. He watched it as she swam towards him through the breakers with a lazy breaststroke, each rhythmic action ducking the head. When she was twenty foot away she was in her depth so she stood, pale shoulders exposed to the evening sun. Dr Justina Kazimierz, St James’ resident pathologist, was smiling. ‘I find you here,’ she said. ‘Always.’

Shaw let his body sway as the swell passed by, breaking on the shore side, sweeping across the sands. The tide was coming in, compacting the summer Sunday crowd into an ever-narrower stretch of dry sand. It was a very British scene: families getting closer, renegotiating personal spaces, apologizing for accidental encroachments, games of football turning into water polo.

‘Drink?’ he asked. They’d just shut the cafe after an afternoon of almost chaotic business. A queue had snaked out on the stoop and along the high-water mark for hours. They were there for ice creams mainly, or the tea trays Lena had bought in the winter: a red plastic tea pot, red milk jug, cups and saucers, and a plate for biscuits, saffron cake extra. Five quid. A deposit on the tray of five quid. Gold mine.

Shaw had got home, changed and dashed out to catch the sun for a swim, leaving Lena with two of the part-time staff loading up the double dishwasher in the utility room. Fran was amongst the waves with Shaw, which is why he was standing in his depth, watching her feet disappear shorewards on the back of a belly-board.

‘A drink — yes,’ she said, pulling off her hat. Her face was intensely pale, a middle European pallor, slightly plump. In a year she appeared to have recovered from the death of her partner, although she did hold part of herself so privately they would never know how she felt to be alone. They’d met Dawid, her husband, just once — a quiet man, intensely thoughtful behind dark grey eyes. Her eyes were brown, and the single feature of her face which always reminded Shaw that perhaps she’d been beautiful once. Shaw imagined her as a child pictured in a stiff Polish family tableau: the adults seated, the child held to the side of the father by a hand on the shoulder.

She adjusted the strap on her one-piece swimsuit — the blue a perfect match for the hat. ‘Tom told me — the screening results,’ she said. ‘Not Roundhay then, or any of them. I’m sorry. A mess?’

Shaw sank in the water so that his body floated, his knees up. Weightless, he always felt oddly elated, as if he’d achieved some kind of freedom. ‘Pretty much. It’s not official. Paperwork drops tomorrow. So that’s something to look forward to. Then we start again. Least we know the names of seventy-four people who didn’t do it.’

They shared a brave smile.

‘Rerun the screening?’ she asked, filling the swimming cap with water.

‘No way,’ said Shaw. ‘Out of the question. O’Hare’s already bleating about the costs. The only reason we got DNA profiles from the five men who’d died since 1994 by using familial samples was to keep the cost down. He’s watching his back, and I don’t blame him. He’s got to find ten million quid’s worth of cuts this year on the budget. He’s looking at every penny. Which is why he’s going to be so pleased when he finds out the mass screening is a wipeout. So, rerunning is out of the question. But we’ll double-check the samples we got from relatives. Maybe there’s a blip, a mistake. If not we’re looking at a swimming killer. .’ He put the palms of his hands on the surface of the water and slapped down, producing two small splashes.

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.