Death Toll (17 page)

DC Birley waylaid Jayne Flowers, taking her to a table to fix a time for a formal statement. The room emptied quickly, many people staying out in the bar. Ian Murray appeared, helping two waitresses quickly set out the tables for lunch.

Shaw took a chair and walked over to Lizzie. ‘A quick word,' he said, and sat beside her. She shook out her hair, then ran a hand through it. Over their heads was a loudspeaker and they heard the opening piano chords of ‘Oliver's Army' from the juke box
.
There was a wire hanging loose from the speaker, within reach, and she took it and with one abrupt tug pulled it out, cutting the music dead.

Shaw waited for her to speak but the figurehead face remained immobile, the piercing green eyes locked on Shaw's.

‘Pat saw other girls, then?' he said.

‘I need a smoke – so can we keep this short?' she asked. She knocked out a cigarette and held it in her lips, and Shaw thought that was one of the reasons her beauty had diminished over the years, that she'd taken on the manners of men, living and working in a man's world.

‘Kath Robinson?' Shaw suggested. ‘Was she one of the others?'

Lizzie smiled. ‘Yup – she was the first. Nothing happened. Kath's always been a bit slow, a bit trusting. These days they'd have a word for it. But we just looked out for her. She fell for Pat. Pat should have walked away, but he didn't. She tried to play him along a bit. Not clever. She was just looking forward to a first kiss, I think – but Pat had other ideas. Like I said, nothing happened. But Kath was upset. Confused.'

‘She told you this?'

‘She's always told me everything – we were best friends at school. She spent more time here as a kid than she did at home. Mind you, her old man was in the bar most of his life.' She took the cigarette out of her mouth. ‘Yes, she told me. This wasn't long after Pat had arrived. We hadn't started seeing each other then. I had words. Pat was sorry – he said he hadn't understood.'

‘She's a quiet girl,' said Shaw, offering her the chance to paint a fuller picture.

‘Cursed with beauty,' she said bitterly, and Shaw thought Lizzie's abrupt and tetchy manner might hide a fine mind. ‘She wants someone to love her – always has. But men can't see past the boobs and the Barbie-doll looks. Married a couple of times but she's not interested any more – she's taken refuge as Bea's housekeeper up at the B&B, does most of the cleaning, cooking and stuff. She wears a wedding ring – it's like mosquito repellent. Works, too.'

‘So, despite Pat's reputation – I presume there were others if Mrs Flowers's statement is true – you became lovers?'

‘He didn't cheat on me, if that's what you're after,' she said. ‘Once we were together, that was it. When he went, disappeared, I thought he had found someone else. I admit that. But it turns out we were all wrong. He didn't run away, did he? He would have stayed if someone hadn't killed him. So perhaps I was right to trust him.' She took in a ragged breath, her fingers working at the skin of her neck.

Through the door marked staff her son Ian appeared in his chef's whites, using his back to push through, with three plates effortlessly held. ‘Three daily specials,' he announced before heading across the room in response to a waved arm.

The place had filled up quickly with lunch tables and diners. At one of the tables Shaw recognized Pastor Abney from the Free Church, and at another Michael Brindle, the chargehand from the cemetery labour gang who'd walked him to Freddie Fletcher's office that first morning of the investigation. Shaw was struck again by the claustrophobic intimacy of this small community, even now, in the first years of the twenty-first century, as incestuous as it had been, perhaps, when the whaling fleet was still coming home.

Lizzie's eyes followed her son across the room.

‘Presumably Pat carried keys, Mrs Murray? A key ring?'

‘Yes. Flashy – like fake gold, in the shape of that mountain with the presidents' heads on it …'

‘No spare?'

‘No. But he had one for here – Bea gave it him.'

Shaw's mobile rang so he stood and apologized, walking to the window that looked out onto the cemetery. It was DC Twine: Sam Venn had changed his story. He remembered now. He'd been ill that night – and it wasn't the first time. His illness, the cerebral palsy, made standing for long periods of time difficult, and he'd often had to leave midway through public performances, because the effort of keeping his bones still, and the stress, made him feel sick. So, yes – he'd gone early that night, after the break, and walked alone to his uncle's house. But his uncle was dead now, so they'd have to take his word for it.

Shaw agreed with Twine's recommendation that they release Venn for now; they had no evidence he'd followed Pat Garrison to the cemetery that night, none that would get them past a magistrate's court hearing, let alone to a trial. Shaw cut the line, troubled that they were uncovering so many lies, and troubled also by that strange detail – that Venn had gone to his uncle's house rather than his own home. But Pastor Abney had said his parents lived locally, that his father had been a member of the Elect
.

When he turned back to Lizzie Murray she was gone.

Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital stood on a wooded hill overlooking the estuary of the River Welland – a culvert of glistening black mud with boats beached in pools of water left by the outflowing tide. It was the bleakest spot in a bleak landscape. A stand of cedar trees on its southwest side had been bent over the building by the wind like thinning hair over a skull. Snow and ice lay in the ditches – a mathematical grid traced over a landscape rolled flat by steel-grey snow clouds blowing in from the sea. As Shaw approached in the Porsche he thought how the hospital's position, eight miles from the nearest town at Sutton Bridge, encapsulated the planners' attitudes to mental health. Bellevue was as far away from anything as anything could be. And, despite its name, the view was a study in melancholia.

He swung the Porsche over to the opposite side of the road to avoid a patch of ice. The days of the warm snow had gone. Shaw had the window down and the wind smelt of iced ozone and carried a Polar chill. He'd just been out to Holkham woods to see how the search for Jimmy Voyce was going. Beneath the canopy of pines the dry needles on the forest floor had been frozen too. And so far, no trace of Voyce, but he'd left Valentine in charge, organizing a systematic trawl though the Holkham estate, around the great eighteenth-century hall. In winter, a few estate workers were the only people to wander the acres of parkland. If Voyce was in there it could take them months before he was discovered. The problem was that, if he
was
in there, he was almost certainly dead.

Then Shaw got the call. A firm of solicitors called Masters & Masters
.
Apologies for the short notice, but could he make a meeting with a client? The client was Mrs Peggy Robins – the mother of Chris Robins, one of the four young hoodlums who'd made up Bobby Mosse's juvenile gang on the Westmead Estate. Chris Robins had died in Bellevue. His mother had a part-time job in the kitchens at the hospital. Shaw didn't really have time for the diversion, but the idea of escaping the twisted maze of Lizzie Murray's family history, even for an hour, was irresistible. And getting closer to Robins – and, through him, Mosse – was too good an opportunity to pass up. What did Peggy Robins have to tell him? And why was she telling him now?

The Porsche slipped between the twin pillars of the hospital gates and Shaw pulled up at a brick kiosk, flashing his warrant card to a man behind glass. The gravel drive snaked up to the main building: a residential facility for patients with chronic mental health problems. A hundred years earlier it had been Bellevue Lunatic Asylum, and the word Bellevue had since become a Fenland euphemism for madhouse. Shaw had checked the hospital's website before setting out: there were rooms for 132 patients, and a training unit for nurses wishing to gain accreditation in the care of the mentally ill. Half of the original building was mothballed, the windows covered in metal shutters. The only press cutting he'd found was of a coroner's court hearing on a patient who'd been found in the mud down by the river. There had been the usual ritual calls from relatives for tighter security and surveillance.

He went to reception in the main block, an echoing marble hall with a black-and-white chequered floor. A child's mural of a townscape covered one wall in primary colours. Mrs Robins was in the grounds, he was told. She had left a note for him with a sketch map attached showing where Shaw could find her. He followed a sinuous path through snow-laden cedars. With the sudden Arctic cold had come a preternatural calm, so that when a crow flapped its way from a branch the dislodged snow fell straight to earth.

Shaw saw her before she heard his snow-quietened footsteps. A small woman, neat, self-contained, reading a book which had been covered in brown paper. But as soon as she moved, something about the way her shoulders slumped reminded him of the Westmead: as if – like the community of women who'd fought to bring up children in its warren of concrete – she was braced for something, always waiting to absorb the next blow. Old age hadn't made her movements any less brisk or workmanlike, as if she didn't have the luxury of a retirement ahead. She had a slight cast in one eye, which Shaw noticed because she looked directly at him as she took his hand. It reminded him of Lena, so that he couldn't restrain the smile he gave her.

She thanked him for coming, asked about his journey, apologized for the icy cold and for dragging him out of town.

‘It's a dreadful place,' she said, but somehow she seemed to hint at some kind of affection for it, as if it was an errant child.

She'd taken a job in the kitchens, she said, both because she'd needed the money and so that she could see Chris every day. Although his death – she avoided the word suicide – had removed one incentive, she couldn't afford not to work, so now spent her days eternally reminded of her loss in this place where her son's life had ended.

Shaw thought of the grainy CCTV footage of the car crash at Castle Rising, wondering which of the peak-capped figures had been Chris Robins. He was fighting to keep hold of that scene, and what it said about this woman's son: that however blameless she might be, he had been guilty of a particularly ruthless crime, even if it had been a crime of omission. He'd driven away from that buckled car and left three people to die. Only fate had limited the death toll to two.

‘I can't stand it inside once I'm done working,' she said, looking back over her shoulder at the red-brick mass of the old hospital. ‘When Chris was alive it seemed worth the effort. Is it all right if we stay out here?'

Shaw said he was happiest outside.

Fumbling inside a heavy coat she produced a white envelope with Shaw's name on the front – in full and typed: Peter Summerville Shaw – his middle name being his mother's maiden one.

Shaw tore it open. It was a one-line letter asking him to attend the reading of the last will and testament of Christopher Alan Robins at the offices of Masters & Masters on 24 December at 10.00 a.m.

‘I don't understand,' he said.

‘Chris appointed me as executor. There'll be some money. It can't be much. Bloody bank and the lawyers have had most of it already. It's been a nightmare. There was the coroner's court too, that held things up. Then I couldn't find the will.

‘But, like I said, there'll be a little cash. Chris always said we might have the chance to make amends. He always said “we”. Now I know why – because he wasn't planning on being here.'

Her jaw line set firmly. ‘I think he wanted me to confess on his behalf. Which isn't easy – because he never really confessed to me.'

She turned slightly and looked at Shaw's face, momentarily distracted by the moon-eye. ‘It was your father, wasn't it, who arrested Bobby Mosse? Yes. The link's important. Chris was like that, good with people.'

She smiled. Somewhere in the building behind them an electronic bell rang. Shaw thought of the two-tone Mini driving away from the lonely T-junction.

‘I think you know the truth, anyway. I guessed it long ago, I think, by instalments over the years. I didn't ask Chris about it – but towards the end he couldn't stop himself talking, spilling it out. That was part of his illness.'

She thrust her hands deep into the overcoat pockets and took a deep breath. Shaw remained silent, allowing her to order her thoughts.

‘The police said they were a gang. One of the community coppers came to the flat a few times, asking us to keep Chris in at night, to stop him playing with the rotten apples. He'd be thirteen, something like that. But I'd always thought of them as friends, because that's how it started. They'd meet in our kitchen and I'd make them egg and chips. I knew Bobby was the smart one from the start, and in a secret way I hated him back then, because I knew he'd escape one day, get away from the Westmead, make the most of life. Alex – Alex Cosyns – was a tyke, and a crook in the making. He'd be, what, ten, eleven, when he and Chris fetched up at the school together. I knew the first time he came into the flat he was going to be bad news for Chris, because Chris wanted friends – needed them, really – and he let Alex be his hero. It was Alex who'd cheek the police who were sent in when there was trouble; it was Alex who took him shoplifting. By the time they were teenagers they were like that …'

She took out her hand, held it in a fist, and Shaw noticed the slim band of a wedding ring.

‘Chris was a timid kid. Quiet. Drove his dad to distraction because we had ambitions for him.' She turned on the seat to look Shaw in the face. ‘People seem to think that if you live on the Westmead, you don't want better for your kids. But you do. We did. But Chris was scared of anything that was big.' She laughed, looking up into the trees. ‘Like life. Like getting a job. Marriage – commitments. Anyway, life was easier for him when he was with the others, so that's where he stayed. The four of them. Like the police said, I suppose – a gang.'

Shaw nodded in agreement.

‘When your dad arrested Bobby Mosse for killing that little boy, everything changed. Chris never said anything, but I could see the fear in him – feel it. Those months before the trial, he never got over that. He'd sit in the front room watching the TV – anything, sound down. I didn't see Alex at all, or Bobby, or Jimmy Voyce, and that was what made me think the worst. One day I took Chris's dad out along the riverbank – he was in a wheelchair after a stroke, the year he died – so we went out along the towpath by the Boal Quay and I saw the three of them on the scrub there, sat in the wreck of a boat. I didn't get close but I know my son – he was crying, and Alex had an arm round him, and Jimmy was drinking cider from a big bottle.'

She stopped. Shaw let the silence stretch. Snow thudded down off one of the trees.

‘When he got off – Bobby – things changed again. He went back to university, of course – escaped, like I knew he would. Jimmy Voyce was the next to get out – running off to New Zealand. Then one night there was a uniformed PC on my doorstep. They had Chris down at St James's – they needed me to come down. He'd been caught climbing out of a back window of a house in the North End with a video recorder under his arm. I'm pretty sure Alex was with him – but he'd got away, of course. Chris got a suspended for that, but he got caught again within weeks so they sent him down. Durham. When he got out he didn't come home. He never came home. I tried to keep in touch but he was in and out for years until one of the judges ordered a mental-health review – that was in 2003. They sent him here. He'd tried suicide before, inside, and he tried again and again here, but he just couldn't make the cuts deep enough.'

Shaw wondered how many times a mother had to repeat that before she could say the words without tears.

‘I used to look at his wrists when I came, to see if he'd tried again. They kept knives away from him in the end, so he'd try to make one out of bits of metal, or sharpened nails. Alex Cosyns came to see him a few times. I don't know why. They had a secret – not just the past – but something else they wouldn't share. About three months after Alex's last visit I got a cheque – drawn on Alex's personal account – for £1,000. There was a note. He said he'd keep in touch with Chris, but that he didn't think there was much point giving him any money, so I might as well have it, because it was his due. He said there'd be more. A few weeks later Chris was dead. He finally had another visitor just before he did it. Whoever it was didn't sign in, so they never got a name – they've upped the security since; anyone visiting a patient has to fill in a form now. But I think it was Bobby Mosse who came to see him, and I think he gave Chris the knife.' Shaw went to speak but she carried on. ‘And now he's had another visitor.' She laughed, shaking her head. ‘The woman on the ward who looked after Chris – kept an eye on him for me. She said Jimmy Voyce had been looking for him, all the way from New Zealand. He left a card, some grapes. She said Jimmy cried, which is nice, but I wonder who he was crying for?'

She flattened and folded a sheet of greaseproof paper that had been on the bench beside her – the remains of a packed lunch.

‘I said I understood things, Inspector, and I do. But some things are frightening still. I had Chris cremated. There was just me and my sister at the service. When we got home someone had been through the flat – torn it apart. I had a tea chest from the ward, with Chris's stuff, and they'd literally taken it apart – the wood, smashed it up. I don't understand that.'

She stood and offered her hand. She seemed light on her feet, suddenly weightless. ‘That's odd,' she said. ‘I somehow feel better for talking about it. I thought I didn't care any more.'

‘Is your shift finished? I can run you back to town,' said Shaw.

Peggy Robins shook her head. ‘There's a mini-bus, on the hour.' She rearranged her scarf. ‘The Westmead's changed over the years, Inspector, but it's still not very clever to let anyone see you being dropped off by a DI from St James's. It's still my world, and it's a world away from yours.'