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 amp; 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 amp; 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.’