Death Toll

9

The Flask stood on a slight rise by the river, a small clay cliff holding it clear of the tidal reach of the sea, four miles distant along the Cut. It was impossible to hide the building’s architectural heritage: the second floor jutting out above the first, the third above the second, the original beams exposed between the intricate brickwork. It stood at the end of Greenland Street, a stub of terraced houses petering out a hundred yards short of the river, leaving the pub to stand alone — the one property left behind when a line of slum tenements had been cleared. The demolition had left the Flask without vital support, hence the two steel buttresses which held up the end wall. Beyond the pub lay Flensing Meadow, and through the cemetery a riverside walk the council had cleared in the 1980s. Vandals had ripped up the wooden benches, and a plinth which told the story of Lynn’s whaling fleet was drenched in graffiti. Dog bins gave off a pungent scent, even in winter.

The pub sign hung from the first tier of the building and depicted a whaling ship. Over the beamed doorway a small plaque read ELIZABETH AND JOHN JOE MURRAY; LICENSED TO SELL BEERS, WINES AND SPIRITS.

In front of the door stood DC Fiona Campbell.

‘Sir — Tom wanted you to see something.’

Valentine put a hand on the pub door, pushing it open. ‘I’ll suss the place out.’

Shaw led Campbell round the building to a wooden deck which held six picnic tables, all dripping, snow melting from the slated tops. They stood looking out at the grey water. Just below them was an old stone wharf, a small clinker-built sailing boat moored by a frayed rope, the deck enclosed within a stretched tarpaulin. On the far side of the river they could hear the mechanical grinding of a conveyor belt in the cannery. Shaw thought about Freddie Fletcher’s ‘good British fare’ — local shellfish, cooked and canned. In midstream the trawler stood silently, while mist lingered on the water like steam drifting from a hot spa.

‘Fiona?’ He looked her in the eyes, which were brown and liquid and unflinching. Shaw had noticed that several people he knew well had developed a strategy when looking into his eyes. They focused only on the undamaged left, never the moon-like right. It gave him the impression she was looking over his shoulder.

Campbell flipped open her notebook to show Shaw a picture she’d drawn: a child’s image of a gibbet, a stickman hanging by the neck, but unfinished, with no legs and just one arm.

‘Tom found this drawing — well, one just like it — in the victim’s wallet. It’s my copy. The wallet had given it some protection from the water, but the paper’s virtually dust after the drying out. Tom could see some ink marks — used a box of tricks to get the image. There were other pieces of paper, all in a bundle, all the same size, but he couldn’t lift an image except for this one, which was halfway down. But there are ink traces on all the pages.’

Shaw tried to think straight, aware this might be important but irritated by the playfulness of the little drawing.

‘It’s from a game of hangman, isn’t it?’ asked Campbell.

‘It looks like it,’ said Shaw. He’d always found hangman macabre, a vicious echo of Victorian childhood, with its humourless grinning clowns and nightmare automata. ‘But it isn’t — is it? In the game you have to try to guess a word, and that’s usually spelt out on the same piece of paper. So it probably isn’t a game.’

Campbell looked at the sketch she’d drawn, baffled.

‘And our victim’s how old — twenty, twenty-five? A bit old for games, anyway.’

‘Keeping them in your wallet’s a bit weird, too,’ she said.

‘The paper?’

‘Tom says standard notebook — each sheet a torn-out page. The ink could have come from any high-street biro.’

Shaw looked up at the riverside facade of the pub. It hadn’t been a thought that had even crossed his mind, the idea that the pub had been home to children — first the infant Mary, then Lizzie. He’d always thought of pubs as being aggressively adult, having spent many hours in his childhood sitting outside them.

‘Circulate a copy of this to the team, Fiona. For now I can’t think of anything else we can do with it.’ He put a finger to his left temple. ‘Just keep it here.’

He led the way back to the front of the pub, letting Campbell go in first. It had just turned twenty past eleven but the only customer was George Valentine. He pushed a half-empty pint glass away from himself as if it wasn’t his. Music played, filling up the empty room with something melodious from The Jam: ‘That’s Entertainment’.

The quarry-tiled floor had been mopped, though the disinfectant hadn’t quite erased the fug of the cellar, or the odours of a fried breakfast. But there was another smell — a scent — which drifted from a vase of white orchids on the bar. The room was panelled, wooden settles running round the walls, the windows glazed with coloured Victorian glass. Old prints crowded the walls — whaling ships, dockside scenes. Christmas decorations gilded the woodwork and ceiling beams. There was a large brass gong at the foot of the stairs, mounted on a dark wood frame, and Shaw recalled Sam Venn’s words: that when Alby Tilden had returned from his exotic travels he brought back a cargo of equally exotic memorabilia.

Two bay windows looked out on the wide river, the clear glass engraved with the name of Lynn’s Victorian brewers — Cutlack amp; Sons — now long defunct.

The barman did a little routine out of central casting: rearranging the beer cloths on the bar, touching one of the pumps, trying out a smile. He was in his late forties, early fifties, but clearly clung to the years of his youth — a vain shock of greying black hair swept back to flop over both ears, and he wore a T-shirt emblazoned with a bleached-out portrait of Ian Dury. The bones of his skull had once supported a handsome face: a narrow pointed chin, high cheekbones and a thin, fine nose. On his neck was a tattoo of an electric guitar in a vivid moss green. His eyes were green too, bright and youthful, but his skin had all the surface tension of a week-old party balloon.

The little ceremony of welcome didn’t include saying anything, while his right hand picked out a complicated beat to match the track playing through the speakers.

‘Coffee?’ asked Shaw, nodding at a well-used Italian coffee machine. He ordered an espresso. Campbell went for fizzy water. Valentine got a second pint on Shaw’s round. As the barman pulled it Shaw noted a wedding ring and a bronze bracelet.

‘Landlady around?’ asked Shaw, laying his warrant card on the bar.

The smile on the barman’s face fell like a calving iceberg. Behind the bar was a small wooden door, as narrow as a coffin. The barman inched it open. ‘Lizzie,’ he shouted. They heard footsteps on the wooden floor above.

‘What?’ asked a disembodied voice.

‘Police, Lizzie. They want a word.’

‘I’ll be five.’

Everyone pretended to relax. Another customer came in — a pensioner in a threadbare jacket, shirt and tie. The barman pulled a pint without asking what he wanted, holding the finished article up against the light to check its clarity.

He turned to set up the coffee machine for Shaw’s espresso. ‘So, what’s up?’ he asked over his shoulder. ‘Postman said you’d found something in one of the graves — something you shouldn’t have. That right?’ Shaw noted that as the barman set aside the crockery he held it with both hands, one on the rim of the small cup, one on the saucer.

‘I’m sorry — you are …?’ asked Shaw.

‘John Joe Murray,’ he said. ‘It’s over the door. I’m the landlord.’

‘Ali, at the shop,’ said the man in the threadbare jacket, butting in, ‘he says it’s one of those Polish immigrants. Ali says they cut him up, in bits.’ He extended a purple bottom lip to the edge of his pint glass.

‘Ali’s talking out of his arse,’ said Valentine, reaching for his pint, then stopping himself. He was nearly at the bottom. Then his mobile rang and he got up and went into the back bar, which had once — he guessed — accommodated a full-sized billiards table, because a raised platform that had run around it for chairs and tables was still there, but it had all been cleared away to make a dining room. Each table was neatly laid for a meal. In one corner on a plinth was a gold Buddha, glowing against the polished dark wood.

Shaw and Campbell took a seat in one of the bay windows in the bar, the river at their backs. Valentine came back in, still rolling his shoulders to get rid of the morning’s damp. He waved the mobile at Shaw. ‘Voyce took the hired car out to the Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital to visit Chris Robins. Bit late — even for his funeral. He left flowers and fruit juice with the ward sister — so clearly Robins’s death was all news to him. Makes you wonder why, though. What did he think Robins could tell him? Anyway — it shook him up. He drove back, dumped the car, then bought a bottle of vodka from an offy on the London Road and drank it in the park. Then he walked back to the hotel and phoned Mosse.’

Campbell looked bemused as they beamed at each other.

Shaw thought about Chris Robins. An original member of Bobby Mosse’s little teenage gang, who’d lived a life of petty crime and diminishing mental powers until he’d been sectioned under the Mental Health Act.

‘What did he say?’ asked Shaw.

‘Didn’t use the phone in the room — he’s got a mobile. We’re trying to trace it. But we heard his end of the conversation: he said he was in town seeing family, thought they should catch up on old times.’

‘Where?’

‘Pier at Hunstanton — six tomorrow night.’

‘It’s all shut up.’

‘I guess. They’ll go somewhere — a pub? Car?’

‘OK. We need to be there. Sort it, George.’

Shaw watched Valentine’s narrow back as he retreated to the bar, downed the rest of his pint, then left, holding the lapels of his raincoat tight to his throat, braced for the cold outside. Campbell shifted uneasily in her seat, aware she’d been shut out of something but equally aware she shouldn’t try to muscle her way into another inquiry.

They heard a door hinge scream and turned to see a woman appear behind the bar, through the coffin-top door, coolly assessing the clientele while trying to get an earring in place: a diamond stud just catching the light. She was about John Joe Murray’s age, but her hair was still a lustrous black, like a patent-leather shoe. Her face looked hard, but not effortlessly so. Shaw thought she betrayed not the slightest remnant of the DNA which had built the face of her mother, Nora Tilden. This face was a fine one, sculptural, like a ship’s figurehead. Keeping her eyes on Shaw and Campbell she let her hand rise to find a switch she knew was there, and a one-armed bandit in the corner flickered into life.

‘Someone wants to see me?’ she asked, resting a hand on the bar, demanding an answer, radiating the kind of self-assurance that women rarely feel in a pub bar unless they own it. Her voice helped: it was furred by nicotine and had an edge, like corrugated paper. She rearranged one of the bar towels, again without looking at it, and Shaw reminded himself that she’d probably spent her entire life in this building, and that she must know every nail and latch, like a ship’s cabin.

John Joe nodded at Shaw. ‘Coffee, love?’

She didn’t answer but glanced up at the optics behind the bar, which seemed to be a signal. A crew of four men came in, all in overalls. John Joe turned away to serve them.

Lizzie Murray flipped up the bar top and walked to Shaw’s table. She had a good figure still, a narrow waist, and something of a catwalk step. She wore black trousers and a fitted top with a V-neck, in butterscotch, and practical plain court shoes. As she walked she smoothed down the material, and Shaw noted the absence of a visible panty line, imagining something in Lycra beneath, comfortable and snug. When she sat he saw a necklace in gold, again with a single diamond.

‘Is there somewhere private?’ asked Shaw.

‘Not really,’ she said, sitting. She licked at the pearly lipstick at the corner of her mouth. ‘This’ll do. Sorry — it’s just that Mondays are hell. Brewery delivers at noon — then comes the frozen food for the week. So …’ She briefly held Shaw’s good eye. Hers were green, like her husband’s, but flecked with brown and blue, catching the Victorian colours of the bar’s windows. ‘What’s this about?’

Shaw wondered if she was like this with everyone she met. Despite her manners, which were coolly professional, she radiated an almost tangible sense that she didn’t have time to waste.

John Joe brought her a drink, a gin with ice, lots of ice, so that you couldn’t see how much spirit was in the glass. Shaw watched her raise it to her lips and sip. The glass was green, with an etched drawing on it of a whaling scene. DC Campbell went to speak but Shaw, almost imperceptibly, shook his head.

‘It’s about your mother …’ said Shaw.

‘The cemetery?’

‘You’ll know the graves are being emptied and the bones reinterred because of the flooding. You’d have had a letter about it, from the council?’

She shrugged. ‘Maybe. So what?’

‘I wanted to talk to you about her death — specifically, the funeral. I realize that might be painful …’

‘Not particularly,’ she said. ‘We weren’t close.’

‘OK,’ said Shaw, taking her answer in his stride. ‘I just need to know what happened that night of the wake. She was murdered, your mother — by your father. There must have been tensions. Did anything boil over? Anyone have too much to drink, perhaps? We understand there were two black men at the graveside — from your mother’s church. Did they come back to the pub? Were they welcome?’

She looked out at the Russian trawler which was venting water, taking a swig from the glass, letting one of the ice cubes click against her teeth. ‘I don’t know about tensions. Dad was in Lincoln — they’d held on to Mother’s body until after the trial.’

Shaw noted the clash of idioms: ‘Dad’ — but ‘Mother’.

‘She’d been dead for months. The family all came — her side — the Melvilles, but nobody from the Tildens. There’d have been a riot, so they kept away. It was a party. Sorry, but that’s the truth. I don’t remember anyone from the church staying late, black or white. We don’t run a colour bar — now or then. There’d have been no trouble. They might have been here earlier, I suppose. I was upstairs with Mother’s friends from the church. We gave them tea, sandwiches. I left Bea in charge behind the bar.’

‘Bea?’

‘Mother’s sister. She came back to look after me when they took Dad away. Well …’ She looked at her empty drink. ‘I was nineteen, so I didn’t really need looking after. She came back because she was a widow, and she was lonely. But it was a big help — having her around. Dad phoned her, from Bedford when he was on remand, asked her to help. That’s what family’s for.’ She caught Shaw’s eye but couldn’t hold his gaze, looking away instantly. ‘After that, she stayed. She runs a B amp;B up on the coast at Wells.’ Shaw thought she was lying, or only telling them a facet of the truth, and that in some people that became a practised skill — concealing reality behind a screen of small, partial, truths.

She drained melted ice from the glass, rattling what was left, and glanced at the bar. The drink had brought colour to her face to go with the hint of blusher she’d applied. John Joe was looking at her directly and nodded once, coming over with another identical drink in an identical etched green glass.

Campbell had slipped out her notebook and they could hear her pen scratching over the paper.

‘Look — what is this about? I’ve got a pub to run.’

‘Just a few questions,’ said Shaw, sipping the espresso, which was excellent: potent and bitter. He retrieved his sketch pad from the leather satchel he’d brought with him and set it on the table top, closed.

‘I wanted to show you something,’ he said. ‘Something we found in your mother’s grave. On top of your mother’s coffin …’

She ran the top of her tongue along her upper lip, and Shaw noticed how hurriedly she’d applied the lipstick, so that it spilt beyond the vermilion border, the dividing line between the skin and the fleshy tissue around the mouth. He briefly tried to imagine what it was like to look at that face in a mirror each morning, thinking about going downstairs to face the customers, most of whom she’d probably known all her life. This was a woman, he thought, who lived her life in public.

‘We found another body in your mother’s grave,’ he said. ‘Bones.’ He watched her fingers tighten around the glass. ‘He — it’s the remains of a man — would have been thrown into the grave, we think, possibly shortly after your mother was buried. Perhaps that very day, or the next, before the gravediggers filled it in.’

She looked over Shaw’s shoulder and he half turned to see her husband standing behind them. ‘Ian can run the bar,’ he said, sliding onto the settle beside his wife, but their bodies didn’t touch.

Shaw flipped the pages of the sketch book until he got to the facial reconstruction he’d finished that morning in DCS Warren’s office.

She fished out a pair of reading glasses and took the piece of cartridge paper, snapping it once so that it stood upright in her hand.

‘This is a very rough idea of what he might have looked like,’ said Shaw. ‘You probably won’t recognize the face — but try to see if it reminds you of someone. Anyone.’

She nodded several times. Blood drained from her skin, as if she’d been turned into a monochrome snapshot. ‘God,’ she said. But it wasn’t an exclamation, just a statement. Her husband took one corner of the piece of paper. Her eyes flooded and her body slumped, so that she seemed to shrink. ‘Oh, God,’ she said, again, still staring at the image. John Joe put an arm round her, drawing her upright. She half-turned to look at the bar. It was such an extraordinary look in her eyes — a kind of bitter pity, that Shaw turned to follow her gaze. The barman was in his late twenties, close-shaven hair, a symmetrical handsome face, a cook’s white smock, and skin the colour of Caramac chocolate: like golden syrup, as exotic in the Flask as the vase of pale orchids.