Death Toll

18

The cellar of the Flask was a barrelled vault, with a shuttered watergate at one end leading out to the river. The brickwork had been plastered and whitewashed, the barrels raised on stone stoops on either side. A central gutter ran to the river, a sluggish trickle of stale beer foaming slightly. Shaw noted a plastic rat trap. He watched as John Joe Murray drank a pint of bitter drawn directly from the barrel he’d just tapped.

‘Perks,’ he said, sitting on the stoop, his legs straight out to reach the other stoop. Shaw wondered how many hours he’d spent there, perfecting this exact position for maximum comfort. He tried not to judge John Joe as Ian, his stepson, had done. He didn’t bring judgement, he brought questions. Had John Joe married Lizzie for love or fortune? Had he become a father to the infant Ian out of love for his mother, or expediency? Had he taken the chance that fate had given him to become Lizzie’s husband — or had he tried to force Patrice Garrison to leave? Could he have murdered him that night in 1982 to get her? Now, nearly thirty years later, it seemed impossible that this greying, diminished man had followed his rival out into the night and driven a billhook into his skull. But Shaw recalled the image on the cine film they’d all watched — the murderous look in the young John Joe’s eyes as he contemplated Pat Garrison, cradling his glass, surveying the back room at the Flask like an estate agent assessing a property ripe for development.

‘What’s this about?’ asked John Joe. He ran a hand along his hair to the black pigtail band and pulled it clear, letting the lifeless tresses flop over either ear. It reminded Shaw of one of Lena’s many fashion edicts: that no man over twenty looks good in a ponytail. John Joe rubbed the green guitar tattoo on his throat and the friction brought a flush to his pallid skin. His face had not aged well — narrow, fleshless faces seldom do. The bone structure, the feline cheekbones, were pushing out beneath the dry skin.

Shaw studied John Joe while DC Birley asked a list of routine questions about the night of Nora Tilden’s wake. Shaw tried to concentrate on the answers but kept thinking about the still-missing Jimmy Voyce. George Valentine had radioed the incident room shortly after the screening of the DVD. They’d found Voyce’s hire car, burnt out, in a lane near Holkham, up on the coast. No sign of Voyce. Valentine would set up a couple of search units to check the area, then come back to Lynn. Tom Hadden’s team were on their way to the scene. Shaw didn’t know what that abandoned car signified, but he was pretty sure it didn’t improve the likelihood of Jimmy Voyce being alive.

While the questions continued Shaw also checked a text from DC Twine. Sam Venn had been taken down to St James’s and cautioned before repeating his statement that he’d been singing with the choir at the Flask all evening on the night of Nora Tilden’s wake. He’d left at closing time and walked home. They were now showing him the film of that night they’d watched on DVD in the incident room. He’d text again with Venn’s reaction to the proof that he was lying.

Above their heads they could hear footfalls, furniture being hauled over the quarry-tile floor as preparations were made for the opening of the inquest into the death of Pat Garrison.

Birley finished questioning Murray. They had a brief outline of his movements that night: he hadn’t gone to the funeral because he didn’t like Nora Tilden and she didn’t like him. The year before her death he’d tried to get a spot at the Flask for his band but she’d stuck with the choirs, folk music, nothing electric. He’d come along to the wake because he knew the crack would be good and because Lizzie said they needed people to collect glasses, wash up, if things got really busy, and he needed the cash. There’d been food, and at the end a free drink or two. He’d lingered, talking to friends, and wandered home about midnight to his parents’ house in Gayton, a leafy suburb. He’d been born and raised in South Lynn, but his father had got a better job and they’d moved up in the world. Up and out. He had his own key so hadn’t woken them up that night when he got home.

He’d been there all evening, in the back room? No — he hadn’t seen the choir’s second session because he’d found the atmosphere stifling, fevered; so he’d gone out on the riverside stoop to smoke in the crisp November air. That’s all he could remember — except that he had talked to Pat Garrison, information he volunteered before he’d been asked. There was a gig coming up at the Lattice House and he’d asked Pat if he’d come along because the tickets weren’t selling. Pat said he would — he liked John Joe’s music and he’d heard the band at the festival on The Walks that summer.

‘The kid knew his music,’ said John Joe. ‘Graham Parker, Ian Dury — that’s the kind of thing we were into. And he got it, which is more than the losers here did. No, Pat was OK. I liked the kid.’

Which was odd, thought Shaw, because no on else seemed to have liked him. He’d been variously described to them as arrogant and selfish. It was illustrative that John Joe had felt the need to point out that he was perhaps alone in valuing the young man’s company.

John Joe stood, walked the central gutter between the barrels, his boots in the bubbling spilt beer, to a door at the opposite end to the watergate, and pushing it open stood back to let them see. Beyond was another vaulted cellar, but the brickwork here was lost behind stippled soundproofing board.

‘Wedding present from Lizzie — sound studio. We cut a disc, tried the labels, but they all passed. Everyone’s got a dream, right? This was mine.’

Shaw could almost hear it, as if the brick walls were a solid-state tape, replaying those years again, the countless demos, the draining repetitive sessions, the dream slowly fading, until one day they’d all convinced themselves they’d never shared one, that it was just a hobby, a way of staying sane. That it had all been for fun.

‘Did you know Mrs Murray well then — in 1982?’ asked Birley. The narrow vaulted space of the cellar seemed to accentuate the DC’s muscled bulk. He stood, his backbone curved to match the wall, taking up too much space.

‘Lizzie? Went to school with her. Fancied her then, along with most of my mates and half the town. She stopped the traffic, that girl. Still stops mine.’

John Joe flipped open a wallet to reveal a black-and-white snapshot — Lizzie, in a bikini on a sandy beach, her legs folded underneath her. ‘That’s Lizzie — twenty-first birthday. Talk about turning heads.’ He let his eyes linger on the picture, but Shaw noticed instead the ticket tucked into the other side of the wallet — the charity Christmas lunch at the Shipwrights’ Hall.

John Joe let the door to the old studio close.

‘And you were married when?’ asked Shaw.

‘In 1983 — the summer. Ninth of June. Just after she’d had Ian.’

‘That’s quick work,’ said Birley.

John Joe gave him an old-fashioned look. ‘Yeah. Well, I tried my luck with Lizzie — a few times. When Nora died we were going out, but that kind of faded away. No hard feelings. It happens. When she fell pregnant, when the baby arrived, I understood why she’d been different that summer. I went back — told her I didn’t care what had happened. That I could live with that if she could. Ian’s my son. Has been pretty much from the day he was born. So that’s our story. You got it now. Satisfied?’

Birley didn’t flinch. ‘Did you try your luck that night — the night of the wake?’

Shaw admired Birley’s direct approach, and he couldn’t help thinking John Joe’s indignation at the question was manufactured.

He shook his head and walked to the watergate, unbolting the two quarter-circle doors. The light flooded in with the cold, straight off the water, which lapped at the stone edge. They all stepped out on the stone wharf. The tide was full. On the water bobbed a small sailing boat, clinker-built, covered in with a tarpaulin, the one that Shaw had seen the day before, moored to a single bollard.

‘The beer came in this way back in the eighties — always had done, I guess. Now the cellar floods once a year, sometimes more. We’ll have to do something about it — God knows what.’

He dipped the toe of his boot in the grey water. Across the river was the brick river frontage of the cannery. Shaw thought again of the Shipwrights’ Hall Christmas dinner, the promise of ‘local fare’.

‘The boat?’ asked Shaw.

‘Mine. I fish — up along the coast, days off. It’s an escape. Used to take Ian when he was a kid.’

Shaw wondered what he’d had to escape from.

‘One last question, Mr Murray,’ said Shaw. ‘Did you suspect that Lizzie and Pat were an item before the wake?’

John Joe spat in the water. ‘Others did — coupla my mates said later they knew. But me — no.’

The sailing boat nudged the quay, unsettled by the wake of a passing tug.

‘I tell you what I did know, mind …’ He smiled, tapping a finger to his temple. ‘Still laugh about it. I knew about the baby. She looked incredible that night — Lizzie. Like I said, she was a stunner anyway, but that night, Nora’s wake, she just kind of radiated something.’ He shook his head, eyes closed, as if to see her more clearly. ‘Everyone was watching her that night. It was her mother’s wake, for Christ’s sake. But everyone knew where her sympathies lay. She loved her father. I’m not sure she felt anything about Nora. I never saw them swap a word that wasn’t …’ he hesitated, looking for the right word, ‘businesslike. So she kind of bottled up her real emotions. But there was something in her eyes. Just amazing. I’ve got sisters — I’ve seen it before. It’s like her whole face was plugged into some kind of power supply. I thought — there’s a baby. I didn’t say it — but I knew. And you know what? I bet I wasn’t the only one.’