Death

FORTY-THREE

Shaw stood on the sand looking along the deserted beach towards the far point of East Hills. The pain in his blind eye was still there but blunted, distant. His vision had stabilized but the images were oddly vivid, as if his good eye was suddenly connected to a high-voltage cable. And his other senses, hearing and smell, were jangling, picking up too much information: he seemed to be able to track each gliding gull, catch the scent of every scrap of seaweed, every gull-pecked crab. From the trees on the crest of East Hills he caught the sharp scent of pinesap and the creaking of a crow’s wings as it clattered out of the high branches.

The sunlight seemed to flatten the island, driving away any shadows, while the mist lay behind them, obscuring the distant shore. Shaw knew that with the turn of the tide the mist would roll slowly out to sea, foot by foot, and would envelop them within the hour. Ruth Robinson sat in the boat, her hands seemingly too heavy to lift, her body rocked by the gentle nudging of the gunwale against the rubber buffers of the little pier.

‘If he wants you, will you come?’ Shaw asked her.

‘You won’t find him,’ she said. ‘I want to go back. Tilly needs me.’

It had been her first thought, on hearing of the death of her father, that Tilly would be alone. But Shaw couldn’t go back. ‘When the launch gets here, go back with them. And George, follow me up.’ He kept his voice low, and as flat as the sea. ‘Head for the pillbox. Until then, let’s keep it quiet.’ From his pocket Shaw retrieved a copy of the plan they’d found in the dugout of the small underground shelter, set relative to a six-sided building. ‘I think there’s one of these dugouts up by the pillbox,’ said Shaw. ‘That’s where he’s gone.’

‘You could leave him,’ said Ruth Robinson. ‘Let him do it. He’s got a pill left. Would that be a crime?’

It was an odd use of the word and it made Shaw pause. ‘Then we’d never know,’ said Shaw, feeling a wave of sympathy for this woman, trapped between two futures, both desperately dark. To let her husband die and to die herself, one day, in ignorance of what he’d done, what he’d hidden from her. Or to let him live, give him the chance of life, and then live with the consequences of that — to know the truth, to know why all those people had to die. In a way it was she who was in hell, a hell of his making.

He walked up the beach towards the ridge, checking his path against the plan. The pillbox was north, near the point, the secret dugout just off the path, between twenty and twenty-five feet short of the concrete octagonal perimeter wall. Within a minute he was close, walking through the dappled shadows of the pines, until the brutal concrete structure came into view. He stopped, looked back and saw the mist was closer, on the island already, amongst the trees, the whiteness tinged purple like a garlic clove. The air was hot and dry. the wind the slightest of zephyrs, which he could only feel if he stood still, judging which side of his face was the coolest.

In the stillness Shaw walked the path by placing each heel down, then the toes. He checked his mobile — there were no signal bars but he killed it anyway, waiting for the screen to blank out. As he took each step he thought about what might be beneath — the single room, a storm lantern, perhaps, and Robinson. Alive still?

The pillbox was thirty feet away when he dropped to his knees, feeling the sand at the side of the path with his hands, spreading it in fan-like patterns to either side. Fifteen feet from the pillbox he stopped, about to stand, about to retreat to search again, when his left hand connected with gritty sand — gritty and immovable, like sandpaper. The sand covered a trapdoor, wooden with an iron trim, and at its centre he found an iron handle.

The mist arrived, seeping through the trees, the temperature dropping instantly, the sunlight gone. In these few seconds Aidan Robinson could end it all, biting down on the lethal capsule. Shaw felt a growing dread that he was, perhaps, already too late, a fear that he’d find Robinson’s corpse, rigor creeping over him like the sea fret over East Hills.

He stood, feet together, astride the trapdoor, took the iron handle in both hands, bent his knees and leant back, letting the trapdoor balance his weight; then he pulled, flipping the heavy iron cover up on well-oiled hinges. The hole gaped, mist falling into it like dry ice. He dropped down, landed in sand, then turned quickly to face into a single room lit by a candle-stub, the light of which caught the ribs of corrugated iron in the roof. It was as if Shaw had been swallowed and was in the stomach of some metallic whale. The candle guttered with the impact of his fall.

Aidan Robinson sat in the only chair on the far side of a table, the edge of which pressed into his body. His arms hung by his side so that Shaw couldn’t see his hands. His face was glistening with sweat, the whites of his eyes catching the light. Under stress time slows down, and so for a second, or less, Shaw thought Robinson was dead because there was something frozen about his shoulders and neck, as if he’d been nailed to the rigid back of the chair. Then the large, broad skull rocked left and right, the eyes moving in and out of the light, from silver to 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 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.