Death Toll

38

John Joe Murray’s body was earthbound, weighted at each limb, so that he lay spreadeagled on the floor of the old coal barn, spatchcocked, but with his head raised on the stone shelf so that he could see through the doorway to the north, and to open water. The cold, which seemed to be concentrated in the stone floor beneath his back, made his bones ache. But it wasn’t the cold or the swirling snow which blew in squalls over the grey sea that made him want to scream. It was the tide, edging towards the doorway. The flood boards had been taken away so that the view was clear, right to the cold horizon. Dusk was falling, the sea turning inky black. He looked at the old stone walls of the barn for the thousandth time, running his eye along the mark that clearly delineated the line of the highest tide. It was a foot above his head.

He’d come to after the attack in the hour before dawn, lying on the cold stone stairs, his hands and legs tied in rough fisherman’s rope. A light had seeped through the floorboards above. Calling out, he’d felt the blood in his throat, and the stab of pain over his eye where the blow had fallen. Mid-morning his stepson had come down the steps and stood looking out to sea. Then he’d turned and made a decision: ‘We’ll wait,’ he said. ‘For tonight.’ He’d given him tea to sip, and some tortilla. John Joe asked him why this was happening but Ian wouldn’t meet his eyes, let alone answer his questions. After that, time dissolved into patches of consciousness and nightmarish dreams. Mid-afternoon, Ian had given him some more food, then moved him to the floor of the barn and he’d lost consciousness again.

When he saw the first star — Venus, surely, rising with the moon — Ian had come down and removed the flood boards, taking them with him back up the stairs. He tried to raise his head to see the sea more clearly, but when he moved his skull he could hear — through the bone — the slight crunch of something broken in his jaw. The injury, the impact of the blow, had made his right eye swell, so that his vision was murky on that side. But with his left eye he could see the waves sharply. It was a spring tide, and it had already breached the protective arc of dunes, so that the waves he could see were breaking in open water. Not a wild sea, despite the snowstorm, but winter-choppy, flecked, disturbed. When he’d come to, the sand bars were standing out at sea, dusted with snow. But now they’d gone, the grey sea swallowing each one until all he could see through the door was a world of water, the horizon coming and going with the snow squalls.

The first wave that came through the door broke his resolve to stay calm. He screamed, the water white, foaming, laced with ozone, seething over his legs, then flowing out.

When he stopped screaming he heard the foot steps over his head, and then Ian’s narrow slender legs appeared on the ladder-stairs.

His stepson watched him dispassionately, like a fisherman eyeing a float.

John Joe went to speak but the pain made the urge to scream again so insistent he swallowed back the words.

Ian raised a hand, as if asking for time in a polite conversation. It was an oddly civilized mannerism, coldly frightening in its intense self-possession.

‘Let me,’ he said. ‘You must have questions.’

John Joe pulled with his right hand until he felt the skin part at the wrist. He felt his guts turn to water, heavy water, like mercury that wanted to fall through his body and wash out to sea.

‘Kath Robinson saw you,’ said Ian, momentarily troubled by the congestion of blood in his stepfather’s face, the strange mottling, the stress which had tightened his skin and made him look younger, less dissolute.

‘The night they buried Grandma. Dad came into the bar to talk to Mum — and Kath didn’t want to see that, did she?’ He smiled, and despite his terror John Joe was reminded of the boy’s father — that same cynicism, almost older than it could be in one so young, as if he’d inherited a distrust of life along with the colour of his skin. The casual use of the word ‘Dad’ was a calculated cruelty and Ian looked pleased with the effect: John Joe’s feet had jerked together, making the rope creak.

‘Christ,’ he said. ‘What do you want?’

‘I want — wanted — to see you dead. I tried — we tried — to make sure you died with the others, with Fletcher and Venn. But actually, this is better. Much better, because I get to ask you questions, and you get to answer them. We’ve got one last chance to find out the one thing we don’t know: who struck the killing blow? Mum said we didn’t need to know. That you were all guilty, all cowards. And I’d have been happy if you’d died with them. But now we’ve got this time. And maybe — maybe — I’ll let you walk away from this when I know. But I need the truth, and I’ll know it when I hear it. And if you lie, you surely won’t walk away. They’ll find you one day. But it won’t be this winter. Or next.’

He sat on the stone steps, the movement of his limbs as fluid and unhurried as always.

‘I know you were there when he died, because the billhook was from Grandad’s chest. And you’d taken the key from behind the bar. But not alone, right? Kath said the three of you went together. And she’d added fuel to the fire, because she’d told Freddie about the baby coming. About me. Stupid, timid girl. If she’d told us then …But we can’t change the past.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said John Joe.

Ian’s temper snapped and he threw the piece of timber he was holding so that it cartwheeled, hitting the stone wall. Then he walked slowly back up the stairs.

He didn’t return for twenty minutes. At first the water only came in once every few minutes, swirling, but no worse, no deeper. But the tide didn’t work like that. It surged after falling back, gathering its strength. John Joe had surfed as a teenager, and he’d taught Ian, out on the windswept sands at Holkham. He knew all about the seventh wave. So there was a lull, and then a sudden curtain of white water at the door, and the room was full of the sea: not white this time but a livid green, a foot deep all around him, so that he had to jerk his neck up off the stone step. And cold, just above freezing. The first time he got his breathing just right, but the second time he swallowed a mouthful of seawater and he choked, spewing up over his chin and chest. This time, when the sea sucked out, it left kelp behind, and the white, dirty foam.

Then he heard the question again, although he hadn’t heard Ian’s footsteps on the stone stairs. Tears welled in his eyes and he shook his head, believing still perhaps that there was a way out, a stratagem that avoided confession. The next wave washed in, and this time when it ebbed there remained a foot of water in the room, a darker green this time, a hint of the pitch blackness of the deeper sea. John Joe could suck in air only if he held his head up, straining the neck muscles so that his body shook with the effort. Darkness was gathering outside the door, as if the bitter cold was extinguishing the light.

Ian came down the steps and with a knife from his back pocket cut the rope at his stepfather’s left wrist so that he could roll on to one side, lifting his head slightly.

‘There,’ he said. ‘A reprieve of sorts. For a while. A thank you — if you like, for bringing me up, for the kindnesses; and there’s been love — hasn’t there? I can’t deny that. But that’s all over, gone.’ He looked out of the open door at the sea. ‘Tell me,’ he said.

‘It was Fletcher’s idea,’ said John Joe, and he said it quickly, because he believed now; believed his stepson would do this, leave him twisting here, roped down, so that he’d drown, sucking down mouthfuls of brine.

‘He asked one of the waitresses for Pat’s address; I heard him. So I knew he was planning something. That night — the night of the wake — we talked, out on the stoop. I loved Lizzie. I could see what was happening; I knew what was going on. I saw her once — when she thought no one was looking. She just reached forward and took something from the corner of his eye. It was a kiss — but with her fingertips. So I said to Fletcher we should teach Pat a lesson — scare him off. That was the plan.’

‘And Venn?’

‘He’d sent Pat those pictures — the hangman. Fletcher knew that. He said he didn’t have the guts to actually do something, because the church was all talk — all sermon. It was all very well reading Leviticus, but what about living the book — Fletcher had picked that up, see? The phrase. He could play Sam like a fish on a line. So Sam came too.’

The sea washed in, round the room, funnelling out, but each time now leaving enough behind to lift John Joe’s body, so that he was beginning to feel his weight seep away with his life.

‘We were waiting for Pat in the cemetery — I could see him coming, walking: that walk of his, that swagger.’ He looked at Ian, desperate to see if his confession was softening the young man’s eyes. ‘Then he stopped. He didn’t see us — it wasn’t that. He’d got to the open grave, Nora’s grave. There’s a box tomb there, in stone. He sat there like it was a park bench.

‘There was moonlight. But we were in shadows, by a cypress tree. The choir was singing and you could hear that, so the night wasn’t silent.’ He used his free hand to pat down the imaginary earth. ‘We got down, on the grass. Fletcher said it was up to me and Sam to start it — to strike the first blow. We’d get him down, kick him. Freddie said he knew how to break a few bones, make him bleed, once he was down.’

Until that moment, Ian thought, John Joe had a life in front of him.

‘But Sam said Fletcher should start it, because he knew the words: we’d heard him on the corner with his mates, calling at the blacks. How they should go home, how they weren’t like us, how they were scum. So he should start — because it was important that Pat should know why we wanted him to go.’

John Joe heard laughter and realized it was his own, and how inappropriate it was.

‘But Freddie wouldn’t start it. He said I’d got the billhook — it was down to me. And it wasn’t just about Pat’s skin, was it? That wasn’t why Sam was there. So why should it be him to start it? And the weird thing was, he was crying — Freddie — weeping. He said he’d do time if he got caught. He’d been rounded up the year before with some skinheads, for kicking this Indian kid down by the docks. He’d got a fine, community service, and if he was caught doing it again there’d be time to do — eighteen months. He didn’t fancy that. That’s what he said — but I didn’t believe it, I still don’t. I think he just lost his nerve, and so he was ashamed.

‘When he stopped crying he said to me not to hit Pat on the head — to go for an arm or a leg or the shoulder — that was good because the collarbone would snap like a chicken wing. Then he just walked away — through the gravestones, towards the east gate. We couldn’t believe it. All that talk. All that hate.’

Ian watched the sea, a big wave buckling up on the grey horizon. ‘So that left you and Sam Venn?’ he said, edging a step higher, away from the water.

John Joe pulled frantically at the fastened wrist so that blood appeared where the skin was breaking.

‘Sam did it. He just walked out in the moonlight, before I could stop him, so Pat could see him. And Pat just smiled — like he was expecting it. He just sat there in his silk shirt, looking at Sam. He’d brought a couple of glasses with him — the green, etched ones, and a hip flask. He’d drink a bit, then kind of wince, then smile.’

‘Hip flask?’

Before John Joe could answer the sea washed in, the seventh wave, the one that surges forward up the beach. Two feet, three feet, swirling round the room so that Murray was gone, lost in the water, which wasn’t green any more but a dark blue, and black in the shadows. And when it sucked out he was just lying there, swamped, so Ian stepped off the ladder and got him by the shirt at the neck and held him up, so their faces were close. He could smell his stepfather’s hair, the natural oils set against the sharp saltiness of the water.

‘Quickly,’ he said. ‘The hip flask.’ He put his hand to his back pocket and slipped something out to hold just a few inches from John Joe’s drenched face. It was a silver hip flask. The design was unusual — a silver stopper and a silver base, but the main body was of green glass, thick and old, with an etched picture of a whale pursued by a boat, the harpoonist’s arm tensed for the lethal shot.

John Joe’s eyes didn’t understand. ‘Yeah, like the glasses — old Melville’s green glasses. Lizzie must have given it to Pat.’

Ian unscrewed the top and put it to John Joe’s lips. It was another kindness, and it gave him time to think. The flask contained a malt, and John Joe choked, but he drank too. Ian cut the other wrist free, then the ankles, and dragged his stepfather’s body to the steps and up, clear of the sea, which had begun to turn in the room now like a whirlpool. He held his stepfather under the arms so that the older man lay on him, and the water seeped down.

It took Ian a minute to work it out, so that the past he’d imagined was transformed, like a landscape through tinted glass. ‘Just tell me, John Joe,’ he said. ‘All of it.’

John Joe’s chin vibrated with the cold, so Ian left him and came back down with a blanket.

‘I stepped out into the open too,’ he said, holding the corner of the warm wool to his throat. ‘But Pat hardly noticed, because Sam went up to him and he took Pat’s hand, like taking a child’s, and he put it on his face, so that he could feel the damage that he’d been born with. Sam didn’t say anything — I think he was too scared to speak. But I knew what it meant, and I think Pat did somehow, too. That it was evil, cousins together, and this was like God’s punishment. I think that got to Pat — which was a victory for Sam, because nothing got to him. Not the taunts, not the way people looked at him. Nothing.’

They sat together for a few minutes without speaking. Outside the tide was moving rocks, so that intermittently the whole building resonated with the boom of stone on stone.

‘He slapped Sam with that hand, the hand he’d touched him with,’ said John Joe, breaking their silence. ‘He slapped him hard. Pat was a big man, powerful, and it took Sam down. And then Pat got Sam’s leg and he dragged him through the spoil around Nora’s grave to the edge of the pit and he let him slip in. I heard the splash — ’cos by then it was full of water. Sam was screaming, pleading, but when he went in he was silent. I remember that because I heard the choir again — from the pub.

‘I saw Sam’s hands come up, scrabbling in the wet soil.’ John Joe shook his head at the memory. ‘Pat stamped on them, kicked soil in. Then he laughed and turned to me, walking away from the grave. Sam got out then, hauled himself out, and ran — along the river …so there was just me.’

Ian gave him the hip flask to drink again.

‘I ran at Pat and swung the billhook; he swayed back, so I missed him. He just stood there, laughing in my face. I dropped the hook. I left him there, alive. I swear to God I did. I ran. Like we all ran.’

Ian held John Joe’s head.

‘Later — when Pat disappeared we thought he’d just got tired of Lizzie. Then the baby came and we thought that explained it. He’d run for it too. And the three of us thought we’d helped push him away. Helped him run.’

John Joe looked at his wrists where the blood was beginning to ooze from the wounds made by the rope.

‘When they found Pat — Pat’s bones — they thought I’d done it: both of them, Fletcher and Venn. I said I hadn’t. I said I’d always told the truth, but they didn’t believe me.’

Outside the door the snow had suddenly stopped, leaving the air clear, the horizon as sharp as a knife edge. ‘I don’t know who killed him, Son — I really don’t.’

Ian looked at the hip flask in his hand.

‘I do,’ he said.