Death Toll

27

At nearly midnight George Valentine walked past the house on the corner of Greenland Street. The sign was in the window, so the game was open, the game was on, but he wanted his bed. He walked on, looking at his shoes and the ice on the pavement. He’d spent the last hour with Freddie Fletcher in a room at the intensive care unit at the Queen Victoria. Visitors had come and gone but he hadn’t said a word. The doctors said his body was in shock from the poison he’d ingested, that the dawn would show if he was winning the battle or losing it. Of the other five patients in intensive care brought in from the Shipwrights’ Hall four were recovering fast, one was stable — all those five had come from one table, sponsored by Age Concern, and were aged between eighty-five and ninety.

He stopped outside his house. There was a light on, shining through the fanlight.

It had been seventeen years since his wife had died and in those years he’d never come home to a light. He opened the front door and looked down the short corridor into the kitchen. For a second — which he tried to stretch — he thought it was Julie sitting there, her hands on the table top around a mug, the steam from it hanging in the air like smoke from a gunshot.

‘Georgie,’ said Jean Walker. ‘I’m sorry, kid. I didn’t know how to get you — they give you my message at St James’s?’

Valentine shook his head, walking towards her, concealing as he did so that the shock had made his knees weak, trying to remember when he’d given his sister a key. He put his mobile on the table. He’d switched it to silent when they’d been in the Flask and forgotten to switch it back. The little message symbol flashed.

He felt the pot. ‘What’s up?’ He turned his back to pour himself a cup.

‘Gossip is all it is. But I knew you’d want to know.’ She watched him sit down, the cup in two hands, so she looked away in case his hands shook.

Valentine sipped the tea.

‘First off, there’s a real panic on at the Flask, Georgie, ’cos John Joe’s on walkabout. They didn’t see him overnight. Not the first time, mind you, but before they’ve found him pretty quick — down at the Globe or the Sailing Club.’ She shook her head. ‘Lizzie’s always taken him back. Christ knows where he sleeps when he’s out overnight. But this time there’s no sign of him. Ian was sent out to check the neighbours, round the streets. He said they didn’t want a fuss — just asked people to keep an eye out. Then tonight I heard they’d found his boat was gone from the cellar wharf. I’ve seen him out in it — in the summer he goes up to the coast, but winter’s different. They’ve got a few of the locals together to check the river — moorings, marinas, that kind of thing. But nothing — not yet.’

‘Any reason he goes off?’ asked Valentine.

‘Moods — always has been a difficult bugger. This time it’s pretty easy to see why, isn’t it? He’s always been the hero, the decent man; stepped in to help Lizzie out, brought up the bastard half-caste.’ She winced at her own crassness. ‘Sorry — but that’s what they say. Now it’s different. Seems like the kid’s real dad didn’t desert the ship — that he’d have hung around if someone hadn’t stuck a hook though his skull.’

Valentine noticed for the first time in years that there was no shade on the kitchen light, and that the glare was unforgiving.

‘And that’s the other piece of gossip. Kath Robinson — Bea’s housekeeper up on the coast? Well, Kath comes down most days to shop for food and stuff, goes for the fresh fish by the dock gates there? Well, her mum’s still alive — I see quite a bit of her, she lives on Gladstone Street — and she’s been saying that Kath saw Pat Garrison leaving the Flask that night. That’ll be right, because she never took her eyes off that boy, I can tell you. But …’ She sipped her tea, milking the moment. ‘But …ahead of him, going out along the path to the cemetery, she’d seen Freddie Fletcher and Sam Venn together — this’d be ten, half ten, before the do was over. And guess who was with them, kidda? John Joe Murray.’

Valentine knew that Shaw had his doubts about casting Fletcher, Venn and Murray as killers. That it was all too easy with twenty-twenty hindsight to put them in the frame. But the picture they were building up was compelling. And unlike Shaw, George Valentine had nothing against an easy life.

‘Thanks, Jean,’ he said, wondering where John Joe was, and why he was running. But he found it hard to focus on the case. Jean had called him ‘kidda’ for as long as he could remember. She’d gone on calling him ‘kidda’ after he started courting Julie. But she’d never played the big sister. She and Julie had got on fine, and they’d ended up close, often, he thought, because they had one thing in common — trying to work out what was going on inside George Valentine’s head.

Valentine smoked, but his hand was unsteady as he lit up.

Jean stood, put the mugs on the draining board and kissed him on the hair by holding his face. She looked around the empty kitchen. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think. I’ve always had the key. Years.’

She let herself out and then he saw she’d left the key on the table, a dull gold. When she shut the door her hand slipped so that it banged shut, which made the silence that followed overpowering, so he got out his mobile and phoned Shaw. There was no answer, so he left a message, telling him what Kath Robinson said she’d seen that night. That they needed to get her into St James’s the next morning for a formal statement. He tried to concentrate on what he was saying, but he’d always found answering machines unnerving, and be sides, after all these years alone, he suddenly felt distracted by the empty house around him.