Death Toll

45

They found Lizzie Murray on the Flensing Meadow — Jacky Lau, checking the footpath, saw her sitting on the box tomb through the trees, so still that the snow had collected on the shoulders of the overcoat she wore, and on her knees, so that for a second she confused her with the stone angel that stood nearby, its hands cupped to catch water, a single small finger broken. Visibility was just a few feet, so she’d retreated, sent a text to Twine and waited by the railings on the riverbank.

Valentine had appeared first, a narrow figure, sloping shoulders, the collar of his raincoat turned up, one hand at his neck, holding the lapels together. When he reached DC Lau he didn’t speak, but pointed towards the spot where he knew Nora Tilden’s grave lay, still open, covered in boards, ringed with scene-of-crime tape.

She nodded.

Shaw appeared almost supernaturally, as if he’d just risen straight up out of the ground, at the DS’s shoulder.

‘Well done,’ he said to Lau, then checked his mobile, the screen lit with a blue light.

‘Get close,’ he said to Valentine. ‘But don’t spook her.’

Shaw stepped off the path into the undergrowth around a line of Victorian headstones which had so far escaped the council’s exhumations. His boots sank down in nearly a foot of snow. The gentle sound, the compression of snow, flooded his mind with an image from childhood. The beach again, on Christmas Day. They’d always gone down to the slipway, to the cafe which opened even on that day. His father would buy teas and they’d take them down to the sand, and Shaw would play with whatever had been under the tree that morning — there’d always be something for the beach: a kite, a model aeroplane, a cricket bat. But that day the snow had lain right down to the water’s edge and they’d built a snowman, just in time before a fresh blizzard had swept in off the North Sea. He’d been dragged away crying, because he could see the grey figure of the snowman disappearing in the storm, the waves beginning to break around it.

And now he saw another figure. He stopped, and for a second he heard twigs breaking as Valentine circled the spot. It was the angel. He walked towards it and put a hand on the pitted stone of the face. Turning slightly, he saw Lizzie Murray, sitting on the tomb. It was startling in this black-and-white world how much the blood on her face stood out, a line from the corner of her mouth down her neck, as if her skull was cracking to reveal the flesh and blood beneath. The light caught the diamond stud in her ear.

He walked forward, aware that the wind that had brought the blizzard along the coast had gone. The air was absolutely still, the snow propelled by gravity alone, wandering down, as if each flake had to find its own way.

‘You’re hurt,’ he said.

She tightened the belt at the waist of the overcoat, but that didn’t stop her shivering.

‘Ian — he had every right.’

Shaw could see the wooden planking over the open grave. He stepped forward and pulled it clear so that the sudden black square of the pit was before them, widened by Tom Hadden’s team so that they could take their pictures of the soil profile.

‘It was a stupid place to meet,’ she said.

‘What did he really say when you told him at the bar that night — that there was going to be a child?’

‘I told the truth,’ she said. And something about that statement made her cover her mouth. Taking her fingers away she examined a trace of cold pearl lipstick.

‘He said he was happy for us. But we should talk — not later, now. I said I couldn’t — just couldn’t. The choir had something for me. I couldn’t just not be there. So I said we’d meet later — at eleven, here, while they collected glasses and cleared the pub. I gave him the two glasses and filled the hip flask for him to take. I thought he’d hang around, then wait after closing — but he went then. He hated the bar. He said it was like being in a zoo, being the one in the cage. But he never really gave anyone a chance to like him.’

‘So you met here.’

‘Yes. We fought. I’m not going to tell you why,’ she said.

‘We found something in Pat’s pocket,’ said Shaw. ‘We didn’t know what it was — just shreds of paper. I know now. There were just three letters visible — MOT. It’s the airport code for his trip back to Hartsville.’

In the white gloom he saw Valentine’s silhouette move between a Celtic cross and a figure of the Virgin Mary in grey stone.

‘He was going home, wasn’t he? A one-way ticket. Bea was always going to stay and she thought Pat would too. But he wasn’t. He’d booked his flight. And it didn’t change anything, did it? That the child was coming?’

She stood at the grave’s edge and looked at the blood on her hand.

‘He was bleeding that night,’ she said. ‘Here,’ she added, touching her left cheekbone. ‘When he said he was going home I thought it was because of those three, and what they’d wanted to do. That he’d decided to leave behind all that hatred, not just those three, everyone — almost everyone. The way they looked at him. Everyone except Alby.

‘But it wasn’t. He’d decided weeks before because he showed me the ticket. Taunted me with it. Said the baby was my fault — that I hadn’t taken precautions and that I’d tried to trap him. He said babies were a kind of death. Those are the words I’ve always remembered.

‘He said there was a baby in this grave. I think Bea must have told him — about Mary, who would have been my sister. He said Mary had ruined Mother’s life, and Dad’s. Then he said it again, that babies were death, and he got up and stood by the grave and spat in it.’

She still hadn’t cried, and Shaw felt certain now that she never would.

‘So I just took the hook — it was lying here …’ She drew a circle in the snow on the stone tomb. ‘And I swung it. It was luck, really — catching his skull. I didn’t hit him hard.’ She looked at Shaw, still astonished by the ease of murder. ‘The point just sliced in.’

She was looking at a point in front of her now, the precise spot, Shaw thought, where Pat Garrison’s life had ended.

‘They’ll say he died instantly, won’t they? They always say that. But he didn’t. I don’t think he knew what had happened — just that something had happened. He was holding the flask and it fell from his hand to the grass. He turned to look at me, but I don’t think he could see at all, because the cruelty had gone from his eyes, and I thought perhaps he was dead then, dead standing. But he put his hand behind him and tried to reach the handle of the hook. He knelt, reached again, then fell sideways onto the grass.

‘I dragged him to the grave, took his keys out of his pocket, threw the glasses in after his body, then covered him with earth. Then I realized I’d missed the flask. That went in last, so it was nearer the surface. I found it almost straight away that night I tried to get his bones out.’ She shook her head.

She stood stiffly. ‘But before I dragged him to the grave,’ she said clearly, as if confessing, ‘I watched him die. He was curled up — on the grass, like a child himself. So maybe he was right — perhaps babies are death.’