Death Toll

42

As Shaw ran after Kath Robinson he heard the double echo of his boots hitting cobbles, bouncing off the shopfronts of the narrow high street. The crowd on the quayside was cheering now, a constant ebb and flow of sound like the sea on the sand. A family ran past them down the street, the father with a baby held in a carrier on his shoulders, one of the children crying. The street was so narrow, almost too narrow for a single car, that the shops seemed to reach out to each other, trying to touch — a toy shop unlit, a bakery, a hardware store with empty hooks above a bay window. An ageing Labrador swung its head from side to side, padding down towards the crowd, pursuing the running family.

‘Miss Robinson!’ Shaw didn’t call out until they were almost with her, because even then he thought she might just run, ditch the suitcase, so he was already on his toes.

She turned and Shaw saw the disappointment in her eyes, but nothing else, so that he wondered for the first time if he might be wrong.

‘Yes,’ she said, setting the suitcase upright.

She looked at her watch. ‘I’ve not much time,’ she said. ‘My car’s up by the church and this crowd will be on its way home soon.’

In the white light she should have looked pale, but her face was flushed, and Shaw thought that for the first time she might have the capacity to be happy. Her blonde hair was pinned back, her head bare despite the cold. She wore a quilted jacket, good quality, but shapeless.

‘I thought you lived at Morston House,’ said Shaw.

She settled back on her heels, crossing her arms across her breasts. In most people it was a stance that radiated confidence. But, as always with this woman, Shaw thought it looked like an impersonation of confidence rather than the real thing. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

Shaw looked up and down the empty street. ‘Someone — a woman — was seen digging up Nora Tilden’s grave last June. We think she was trying to recover something; something incriminating, perhaps. We think she may have been Pat Garrison’s killer.’

Her face was blank, and Shaw wondered what kind of mind worked behind that perfect skin.

‘I thought that woman might be you. And that would explain why you were running away.’

‘I told you the truth,’ she said. She blinked several times and Shaw was certain she hadn’t understood the accusation. It was the kind of misunderstanding only the innocent make.

She unzipped a pocket on the suitcase, took out a travel wallet and gave it to Shaw.

As he reached into his jacket for a torch she looked back down the high street to where Santa’s boat had just arrived at the quay: a figure clad not in the usual Disney scarlet but in russet, with a crown of winter berries and what looked like a real white beard. Camera flashlights popped and someone out of sight began to address the crowd through a megaphone.

Inside the travel wallet was a return ticket to Tenerife, boat tickets to Gomera and a brochure for a holiday village — whitewashed apartments beside a beach dotted with parasols.

‘It’s a present from Bea,’ she said. ‘I’ve always said she owes me nothing but she’s been good — more than that, she’s been family, really. Finding Pat, finding his bones, brought it back for both of us. We’ve both been bad. She was going to come …’ She nodded at the tickets. ‘But she wants to be near Lizzie — and Lizzie won’t leave the Flask.’

Shaw didn’t answer. He was looking at the plane ticket. London Heathrow to Tenerife North. LHR to TFN.

Valentine filled in the gap. ‘It must have been bitter news — when Lizzie told you she was pregnant, that Pat was the father. Is that why you tried to stir it up with Freddie Fletcher, telling him the black kid had his feet under the table? That he was family now. That one day he’d be running the Flask. Did you follow them out there? Did you take the billhook with you?’ He stopped, dragging in a fresh breath. ‘Did you finish it when they wouldn’t?’

She looked suddenly genuinely exhausted. ‘No. Really. I don’t — didn’t — hate Pat. Freddie was a friend. I knew him from school — he was a couple of years above Lizzie and me. I just wanted to share it — like you do, when you get news.’

Valentine noted that she hadn’t said ‘good’ news.

‘It was supposed to be a secret, wasn’t it?’ pressed Valentine. ‘Lizzie’s secret.’

‘She told me fast enough,’ said Robinson, unable to keep the bitterness out of her voice. ‘I thought she’d tell everyone by last orders.’

‘What did you think Fletcher would do — start knitting socks?’ said Valentine, concerned that Shaw seemed to have given up on the cross-examination. The DI was still studying Robinson’s airline reservation.

Kath Robinson looked at her watch. Shaw handed back the travel wallet. ‘You can go,’ he said. ‘We know where you are. We’ll need to speak when you get back.’

‘Perhaps I should stay?’ Not a statement, a question.

‘No. It’s OK,’ said Shaw.

She looked at Valentine, as if asking his permission as well, then flipped the suitcase back on its wheels. Down by the water’s edge the civic party had welcomed Santa Claus aboard a tractor-drawn float. It turned, heading for the church, and behind it the crowd scrambled to squeeze between the narrow shopfronts of the high street.

‘You’d better go,’ said Shaw. He tried to smile, but an image of Dawid Kazimierz looking out to sea made him give it up half done. They watched her hurry away, one of the wheels on the suitcase trolley squealing. Valentine waited for an explanation — several explanations — but Shaw turned towards the oncoming crowd and plunged in, his mobile already at his ear.