Death Toll (8 page)

Shaw checked his watch, frustrated by a sense that Venn was deliberately skirting direct answers to his questions.

‘But you'd have known Alby, when he came back from his travels?'

‘Yes. Some of his stuff used to clutter up the pub, I remember.' Venn closed his eyes, as if trying to see into the past. ‘I recall a gong which stood in the billiard room. Vast thing. And some prints. And a gold Buddha he had up on a shelf – that always scandalized our church councillors. It's still there.'

‘You used the pub?' asked Valentine, surprised.

‘Yes. Still do. Two or three times a week for lunch. I was born here, Sergeant; went to the school. I see old friends. The Flask's a special place, you see – it's pretty much all that's left of the community, except for our little church.'

He didn't volunteer any more information, although Shaw felt certain he knew more than he'd said.

‘Thank you for your time, sir. Those names – the two black men who attended the Tilden funeral. We really do need to check them out. So, if you can …'

Venn looked at the coal scuttle he'd set at his feet. ‘I need to ring our archivist – she keeps the records. Every church member makes a tithe, so we should have something written down. Today, with luck?'

‘Please – soon as you can,' said Shaw, turning towards the door. Under the twin portraits he stopped and turned. ‘Did Alby Tilden attend church?'

Venn laughed. ‘Er, no. Alby was one of those men who thinks that it doesn't matter what they do, what rules they break, they should always be welcome in their own homes. I have no idea what he was like
before
he left …but we all knew the stories, the war hero. What's that terrible euphemism: a man's man?' Venn looked up at the ceiling, the lightest of blues. ‘Some nights, if he'd had enough beer, he'd show you. Show anyone.' He arched the brow over his good eye.

‘Show you what?' prompted Valentine.

Venn glanced past them at the portrait of Equiano.

‘He had this tattoo, on his back, of a woman. A black woman. She was naked – a loose woman, I suppose. He could make her move with his muscles. Locals loved it. As party tricks went it was a winner every time. He'd do it in front of Nora …' He shook his head, looking at the parquet floor. ‘I was there to witness this and I think it is one of the cruellest things I have ever seen. She was a hard woman, and she set her face against the world. But she didn't deserve that. I thought it was …' As he searched for the word he cradled his damaged arm. Then he looked with his good eye into Shaw's. ‘Evil. Which is a rare thing, thanks be to God.'

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 façade 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 & 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.'