Death Toll (9 page)

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&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.

Lizzie Murray led them behind the bar, and she managed to close the coffin-lid door behind her before she fainted, kneeling then keeling, so that her head came to rest quite gently on the bottom step of the stairs. Her husband sat with her while DC Campbell fetched a glass of water. Shaw sat halfway up the flight of wooden steps, the steps down which this woman's mother had fallen, bones breaking with each twist of her brittle body. They made her drink, then John Joe carried her up. Ian, the barman, watching from below, was told to mind the bar until noon, then take over in the kitchen, and he should call Aunt Bea, tell her to come, tell her she needed to be with the family.

‘It's all right, Ian,' said John Joe. ‘Just get Bea – then we'll explain.'

They sat Lizzie on a tattered floral sofa in the sitting room of the Flask, looking out through two identical bay windows at the river, now filling with the tide, the mudbanks shrinking. From below they could hear the sounds of the bar: a tape playing Elvis Costello, the clunk of pool balls, and from the kitchen the crackle of a deep fat fryer.

The room they were in was a collection of an achronisms: an Artexed ceiling, a Victorian chandelier and peeling fake Regency wallpaper: Shaw guessed it had been used for functions over the years, an endless unbroken series of wedding receptions, parties and christenings – and, no doubt, the wake for the members of the Free Church after the funeral of Nora Tilden, while downstairs the real party was waiting to begin.

The furniture was out of scale: the modern sofa and two armchairs lost in the space, the disconnect between the room and its furniture driven home by the fireplace, which was big enough for an ox-roasting. A flat-screen TV sat on a flat-pack unit. Next to it was a small table upon which stood an electric kettle, cups, sachets – Shaw was reminded of a B&B's tea-making kit A birdcage hung from a gilded wrought-iron stand; the bird within was white and hit the same note rhythmically, like an alarm clock.

Lizzie drank coffee and more water, and seemed not to notice that they were all watching her. The touch of mascara on her upper lashes had run. She set Shaw's sketch on the coffee table and every few seconds adjusted it slightly, as if it had three dimensions and she might see more if she altered the angle.

‘I've got to tell Ian,' she said eventually to John Joe, and the thought seemed to release the tears, bringing her eyes alight.

‘Christ, Lizzie – just take a moment,' said John Joe, shaking his head. ‘Bea can tell him – she's on her way.'

‘Who is this?' asked Shaw, impatient, tapping the sketch.

She wiped her lips, smudging the lipstick.

‘It's Patrice – Pat – Aunt Bea's son. My cousin. Bea married a GI – a black GI. She brought Pat back when she came home from the States to look after me. Pat was twenty.' She looked at her hands, the fingers working in knots. She looked at Shaw's picture with a kind of fond fear.

‘And Ian?' asked Campbell. ‘The barman?'

‘Yes – Ian's his son.'

Shaw let the silence stretch out until she answered the question they hadn't asked.

‘And I'm his mother.' Her chin came up then, rekindling the figurehead defiance, daring them to tell her it had been wrong. Shaw worked it out: she'd have been nineteen, maybe twenty. They were cousins – first cousins. In some areas of the States the relationship would have been illegal on three counts: age, race and consanguinity. And here in Lynn, in 1982, it would have raised a few eyebrows too, not least in the God-fearing Melville family. Shaw thought about Alby Tilden and his lost years at sea, and the tattooed image he'd brought back home. Lizzie had grown up in a house where the issue of race was a toxic one: a running sore on the family's collective skin.

They heard a car engine ticking outside the pub's front door and a minute later Aunt Bea was with them. Shaw knew she had to be in her late sixties, but she looked and moved like a fifty-year-old; a bustling, sinewy woman, with grey hair cut short but expertly. She wore knee-high brown leather boots and woollen tights under a knitted skirt, and she had a vivid blue pashmina wrapped round her neck. No necklace or earrings, but Shaw noticed that both hands bristled with silver rings.

Of Nora, her sister, there was hardly an echo. Shaw worked out a rough age difference – the two sisters would have been born more than a decade apart. But the resemblance to Lizzie was striking: two figureheads. Bea's face was set against the world too, but it was open, challenging perhaps, and devoid of the bitter irritation that seemed to disfigure her niece.

She came into the centre of the room, dusting snow from the shoulders of a heavy Barbour which she had already taken off. She wasn't alone. The woman with her was Lizzie's age, late forties, but blonde, with the kind of skin that reveals the veins beneath, especially on the high forehead, which was only partly hidden by a fringe. Unlike Lizzie she wasn't dressed for customers, but in a pair of faded jeans and a T-shirt. Shaw sensed immediately that she was a rare woman – unaware, to some extent, of her own beauty, as if her own self-image didn't match the reality. She hung back, one arm held awkwardly just beneath her breast. She radiated a strange anxiety, as if she perpetually thought she didn't belong. Shaw was reminded of the embarrassed hesitancy of a teenage child.

Aunt Bea walked forward and picked up the sketch on the table. Shaw noted that she hadn't even looked at Lizzie. ‘John Joe told me,' she said. ‘It's true?' she asked, looking at Shaw and then, finally, at her niece. Shaw noted she wore no make-up except a dash of concealer, and a smudge of foundation on her cheek, perhaps to cover a liver spot.

Shaw showed his warrant card.

‘I'm Bea Garrison – Lizzie's aunt.' Her voice still held the unmistakable twang of the American Midwest. ‘This is my son,' she added, gripping the sheet of paper so tightly it buckled. She flattened the vowel in ‘son' – making it rhyme with run. The other woman, whom nobody had bothered to introduce, had slipped round behind the sofa and put a hand on each of Lizzie's shoulders.

‘This is Kath – Kath Robinson,' said Bea. ‘She drove me down. She knows us – she's always known us.' They watched Robinson kiss Lizzie's hair, but all the emotion of the moment seemed to be lop-sided, as if only Kath actually felt it.

‘That's true,' said Lizzie as her aunt sat beside her and took her hand.

Bea studied the image, her brown eyes softening, but free of any hint of a tear. ‘I knew he must be dead. Even if I never said,' she looked at Lizzie and Kath. ‘It's been too long, hasn't it? Nearly thirty years. He's just faded away for me, like an old photo.' She shook her head, putting the sketch back on the table, letting Lizzie's hand fall free.

Bea looked at Shaw. ‘I'll tell the story. It's my story in a way, as much as Lizzie's, as much as anyone's.'

John Joe came into the room. Bea looked at him. ‘Stay with Ian, John Joe. He's young, the words won't mean anything.' Shaw noted her easy authority in this house, the almost casual power of the true matriarch.

He nodded, leaving, as if he recognized the wisdom of her words. But Shaw couldn't entirely disregard the idea that he'd been dismissed, as if he was outside some privileged female circle.

Bea went to the bay window.

‘So what
is
the story?' said Shaw, his tone softer, because he knew now that these women held the truth, and that if he was going to get to it quickly, it would be only with their help.

‘I married here in Lynn in 1959,' she said. ‘Latrell Garrison – a US GI. I was just a teenager. He was older – twenty years older. He'd been in Lynn ahead of D-Day. After the war he went home, but stayed in the army, then got a posting back here – up at the airfield at Bircham. He was lonely – so he worked his way through his old girlfriends, and then he got to me.' It was said as a joke, but even she didn't laugh. ‘We went to the Free together, too – that was his kind of church.'

Bea looked Shaw straight in his blind eye. ‘I didn't love him. But I hated …' She looked around the room. ‘This. Nora got the pub after Dad died, and whatever he'd said about this always being our home I knew Nora better than that. No – this was hers. I knew she'd never wanted it, so that helped.' She shook her head. ‘There's nothing quite like the hatred between sisters.'

She turned, taking a deep breath, rearranging the pashmina. ‘Alby was on the scene by the end of the war.
He
loved the place. I liked Alby – we all did. But we knew why he'd married Nora, and love didn't come into that, either. He'd take her money, take all this, then live his life the way he wanted too. But then the child came – Mary – and they lost her, and he never really got over it – did he, Lizzie?'

Lizzie's head was down, but she shook it.

‘So he went back to sea. And that left the two of us, sisters, here, together. Latrell was good-looking – you can see that in Ian. So we got married at the register office one afternoon. It's crazy – you think your life gets changed by the big events, the big decisions. Then you do something like that – on a whim, just because it feels right.'

Bea was quite calm – at ease, even – and Shaw thought she had a rare gift of being truthful to strangers about her own life. She touched her bottom lip and Shaw saw he'd been wrong, that there was lipstick, but just the subtlest of touches.

‘When Nora found out she said she'd never talk to me again, and that was one virtue she had, Inspector: she kept her promises. And you know – this is difficult to believe – I don't think then it was about the colour of Latrell's skin. I think it was the fact that he was going to take me away. And she wanted me here – in my place.'

Bea turned her back on them. Kath picked up the coffee pot, swilled what was left around. ‘I'll get a fresh one,' she said, and went to the kitchen.

‘Latrell applied for a posting back home. We flew to the States on a military transport,' continued Bea. ‘I wasn't going to be able to live here anyway, was I? Not with a black man. During the war it might have been OK – people like Latrell were considered exotic, exciting. But when the local men came back, things changed. What had happened was forgotten. So we had to go.'

She held out her hands so that they could see her silver rings more clearly.

‘Latrell took me home – to Hartsville, North Dakota. Small-town America's smallest town.' She laughed, but caught sight of the sketch on the coffee table and turned away again.

‘Latrell's father ran the town drugstore. Latrell trained up as a pharmacist – there was a programme for GIs – and I just helped out in the shop. We tried for kids, but it didn't work. I'd pretty much given up, and then Pat was born – in 1962.' She stopped for a few seconds, and Shaw knew what she was doing – working out how old he would have been now, if he'd lived.

‘Latrell died in 1980 – cancer of the liver. He was fifty-nine. He drank. Everyone drank in Hartsville because of the winters. You've never seen snow like it – and nobody moves, especially if they're snowed in at the town bar. The thing that really got me in the end was the quietness of winter. It just sucks the life right out of the day, that blanket of suffocating snow.'

She walked to the window again. Outside, big wet flakes were falling. ‘I tried to stay, I thought I wanted to stay, after he died. I kept the business going. There was someone new, someone I'd known but who'd kept their distance in those last years. Pat was at high school in Bushell – he was a bright kid. Journalism – that was the big thing. But suddenly, the second winter after Latrell died, I just couldn't stand it any more. It's such a mundane emotion, homesickness. I'd lived in Hartsville all those years and then woken up to find it was a foreign place – just like that. One moment home, the next minute somewhere I couldn't stand to be.'

She looked around the room. ‘Then I got a call from Alby. He was at Bedford, before the trial. He told me what had happened. He said he wanted to tell me the truth before someone else poured poison in my ear – that's what he said –
poured poison
. He asked me to come home – just for a while – and look after Lizzie. She was only nineteen, she couldn't run the pub on her own. A year, maybe three, she'd be OK. He couldn't live with it, he said – the thought that she was on her own. I couldn't say no – not to Alby.'

Kath had been standing on the threshold unseen, holding a fresh pot of coffee.

When Bea saw her she seemed to change tack. ‘She wasn't on her own, of course – she had friends, people like Kath. But I came back and brought Pat with me. I told him it would be like a holiday, just a couple of years. An adventure. He was Lizzie's age. But the tickets were one way. Pat resented the move – he didn't really like Lynn. I got him a place at the college – on the media studies course. I got him his own flat – well, a bedsit. I sold up the drugstore in Hartsville, so I wasn't short of money – Pat always had cash in his pocket.'

She stopped at that, thinking about what to say next. ‘He was popular with the girls. I knew that.'

Shaw looked at Lizzie but she, oddly, was looking at Kath Robinson, who'd sat down with the coffee pot. Lizzie pressed her hand and the other woman's pale skin suddenly flushed.

There was an awkward silence, then Bea went on. ‘He was growing up, he had a family around him, so it wasn't such a bad life. Then, when he went missing, Lizzie told me what I hadn't seen – what had been so obvious, but unnoticed.'

Kath stood quickly, started moving things about on the table to set down the coffee. She didn't seem able to create a space. Bea gently took over, taking the pot. Kath retreated, looking at her shoes, to stand at the window.

‘Pat and I fell in love,' said Lizzie, then covered her mouth as if she wanted to claw back the words. ‘It was a secret.' She touched the sketch. ‘We thought it was a secret.'