Death Toll

41

The Porsche purred in a traffic jam, and Shaw could see ahead the line of cars snaking down towards the waterfront at Wells-next-the-Sea. The car in front lurched, trundled six feet then braked sharply, the back bumper rising with the abruptly arrested forward motion. In the distance he could see the high mast of the Dutch barge by the quay, decked with fairy lights. On both sides of the line of cars children and parents walked past, bundled in winter clothes. Everyone was late. The snow had stopped, swelling the crowd, but the temperature had dropped with the loss of the cloud cover, and steam rose from the people as if they were cattle in a winter field.

‘Remind me why we’re here,’ said Valentine, leaning forward, while Fran looked out at the crowds. The car crawled past a shopfront where a man shared a match with a woman, the resulting halo of cigarette smoke embracing them both.

‘Because if our witness is correct, then a woman tried to dig up Pat Garrison’s impromptu grave,’ said Shaw, answering his question but speaking to Justina. He tried and failed to hide the excitement in his voice, the surge of adrenaline which had been triggered in his system by the pathologist’s brief description of the principles of toxic synergy.

He took a deep breath. ‘Up until now we had three male suspects for the murder of Pat Garrison: three suspects someone has tried to kill — so I suspect we weren’t the only ones who had them lined up for it. But the point is, we now have a woman involved. A woman suspect. Question: which woman?’

The line of traffic juddered forward and Shaw swung the car right, along the road which led to the nearest car park, giving up any chance of getting through the centre of town to Morston House.

Shaw struggled to concentrate, half of his conscious mind recovering from his memory a long-lost lecture on toxic synergy. It had been in the main lecture theatre at Hendon, an old-fashioned 1930s amphitheatre. The science staff at the college had substances in glass jars on the scarred wooden bench at the front. An overhead projector showed atoms and molecules colliding, reforming. And one image of a victim. It was a woman in her fifties, the body lying in a damp cellar, the limbs held in awkward semaphore positions.

‘So if we’re looking for a woman, then — again — we have three possible suspects,’ continued Shaw. ‘First, Lizzie Murray. Jealous, maybe — perhaps there was another woman? Sounds like Pat inherited his father’s eye for the girls. But it doesn’t look likely — first off, she wanted to ring the police next morning, long before there was any real need, and long before she could be sure the grave had been filled in completely by Fletcher and his mate. And then there’s the child — Pat’s child, their child. She’d be unlikely to kill the father. And all the witnesses are clear on her state of mind later that evening: Bea said she was happy, and, more to the point, your sister Jean — our unbelievably valuable objective witness — said Lizzie was positively luminous that night. She didn’t shut the pub till after midnight, and we can assume Pat was dead by then, because we’ve got witness statements from people who walked through the cemetery after closing time and didn’t see him. So — we shouldn’t forget Lizzie, but it’s unlikely she wielded the billhook.

‘Then there’s Bea. Motive? Maybe she hoped her son wouldn’t get involved with Lizzie. She likes Lizzie — no doubt about that — but she hates the Flask and all it stands for. And, of course, the two were cousins. Did she follow him out that night to try to cool him down only to find she was too late, that there was a child on the way? Perhaps tempers were frayed. Pat had come to England unwillingly — we know that. His mum had tried to keep him happy — there was always cash in his pocket. Did he blame her for the mess he was in? It could have happened. And there’s something else — I’m certain …’ He thought about that. ‘Yes, certain, that Bea helped Alby poison Fletcher and Venn, and that she’d have happily poisoned John Joe too. She thought the three of them killed her son because Kath Robinson told her they’d gone ahead to wait for him in the cemetery. Think about that, George. If Bea’s behind the killings, which are clearly an act of revenge by someone who thinks Fletcher, Venn and Murray killed Pat Garrison, then she’s pretty much clear of the original murder.’

‘Could have been a cover,’ said Valentine. ‘Perhaps she did both: killed Pat, then helped Alby take revenge on three innocent men — which threw all of us off the scent, didn’t it?’ Valentine held up both hands. ‘And how’d she target the three of them? How did she help Alby?’

‘OK — I’ll deal with that. But let me finish. Because that leaves the best suspect for Pat Garrison’s murder — Kath Robinson.’

The first firework went off in the clear sky over the dunes — a yellow expanding glove of light. Fran screamed in the back. They felt the thud of the explosion and then a long drawn-out cheer, like a wave breaking.

They were still bumper to bumper on the approach road to the car park. Shaw checked his watch: high tide, and 8.45 p.m. His temper finally snapped, because he couldn’t sit still with this much adrenaline in his bloodstream. He gently rolled the Porsche up on to the pavement, jumped out and retrieved a magnetic flashing warning light from the boot and put it on the roof, instantly quelling a protest from the driver behind — a father in a people carrier with children packed on the back seats and the head of a red setter sticking out of the passenger-side window.

They abandoned the car, cut down an alleyway between two shops and found themselves on the edge of the dockside. But they couldn’t see the black water for the crowd, already ten deep at the iron railings.

Shaw put a hand on Justina’s shoulder. ‘I’m fine,’ she said.

Shaw showed her his mobile. ‘We’ll give you a lift home. Stay at the cottage tonight. Lena’s getting a bed ready. I insist. Fran, you help Justina have a lovely time.’

‘I promise,’ she said seriously, taking the pathologist by the hand and leading her away.

Valentine stopped, lit up.

‘Why Kath Robinson?’

‘Come on,’ said Shaw, cutting along the back of the crowd, talking over his shoulder, forcing himself to slow down so that Valentine could keep up. ‘Lot of reasons, but most of all because she’s the wellspring — if she hadn’t conveniently recalled what she’d seen that night, Fletcher and Venn would still be alive. It’s a vivid picture, right — seeing the three of them set out, planning to teach Pat Garrison a lesson, and then she bumps into the victim leaving the Flask, just at the right time. And who’d she tell? The family — talk about lighting the blue touch paper.’

They heard a firework, like machine-gun fire.

‘Then she comes down to Lynn and tells her mum — who’s one of Jean’s best friends, the widow of a copper, the sister of a copper, someone she could trust to pass the information along. If not straight to us then out into the community, out into the rumour mill. The only person who wasn’t going to hear it was John Joe. No one’s going to tell him, are they?’

Shaw looked over the heads of the throng towards the waterfront, past the brightly lit fish ’n’ chip shops and the pubs towards Morston House. He pressed on through the crowd. Fireworks thudded with a regular beat now, and somewhere down by the harbour office a brass band played ‘In the Deep Midwinter’.

‘And Kath had a motive, George,’ he said, suddenly brought up short by a family of six strung across the pavement, holding hands. ‘I don’t think Pat raped her, or even touched her. I just think he may have been her first love. Whatever happened changed her life. Rejection is what happened, and she’s not exactly well equipped to deal with emotion, any emotion. Perhaps she’s telling the truth, perhaps Fletcher and Venn did talk to her that night, telling her what was up. And maybe that was the trigger. That and being told — by Lizzie herself — that there was a baby on the way. Perhaps she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life watching Pat and Lizzie play happy families. Maybe that was a prospect she couldn’t live with. I don’t think she set out to kill him, but she must have been angry. Burning angry. And she could have gone upstairs just as easily as John Joe. She’d have seen Alby wielding the gun. She could have taken the billhook.’

They skirted round a stage which had been set up to welcome Santa Claus when his boat came in on the tide. As they did so, more fireworks broke over the sea and they could see the white yachts along the channel, most of them lit with Chinese lanterns.

Valentine put a hand on Shaw’s shoulder from behind, a rare physical contact. ‘And Bea — how did she target them? How’d she get them and not the rest?’

Shaw was going to tell him then, but he was looking across the road, back up the little high street that led away from the water, a narrow cobbled lane crowded on either side with old-fashioned shops, lit by a zigzag string of white lights.

Looking their way, but past them out to sea, was Kath Robinson. There was a sudden cheer and she smiled, because out along the channel, near the lifeboat station, Santa’s ship had come into view, pulled by a pair of inflatable reindeer and surrounded by a flotilla of small boats. Then she turned and began to walk away, pulling a suitcase on wheels.