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.
10
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 amp;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.