She turned to him then, her face slumping, her mouth open in a silent scream. ‘It’s what nearly killed Fran,’ she said again deliberately, knowing that despite the word ‘nearly’, this was still a form of punishment.
‘Lena – tell me. Tell me now.’ He’d have given anything to keep the threat out of his voice.
Her eyes blazed in response. ‘Now.’ It was close to a shout. ‘Now – it’s convenient now? What about five hours ago when I phoned – I never phone, Peter. You know I never phone.’
He’d been waiting in the dark on the edge of the gas holder for Valentine. He’d clocked the number; why hadn’t he rung back? He’d been in two minds because he’d promised himself that second viewing of the CCTV from Castle Rising.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, knowing instantly that he’d done the right thing – got the word out before it was too late. ‘Jesus. Lena – what happened?’
‘She ate the yogurt,’ she said, hitting out, knocking her glass over, sending the carton out into the sand.
‘Get it back,’ she said. ‘The nurse said we should keep it. Make a note.’ Her voice was cold and hard, the anger washing out of it like the tide over the sand.
Shaw fetched it, then sat down on the wine-damp wood, not quite touching her.
‘How bad?’ asked Shaw, quickly throwing an arm round Lena’s shoulders, tight enough so that she couldn’t pull away.
‘Bad. It’s my fault. This crowd was in from Burnham Thorpe – a family of six. They all wanted suits, they all wanted boards – the final bill was nearly four thousand pounds – so I did her a pizza and put it out in the kitchen and just called her in off the sands. So when I found her…’
She covered her mouth, rocking slightly with the memory, and Shaw understood that part of this was her guilt, not just his. ‘I didn’t know if it had been too long. If she was… So I felt for her pulse. I couldn’t find it. And she was puffed up – the way she used to – her eyes closed. And there’s no Piriton in the cupboard.’ She kicked out, sending a sheet of fine sand forward like a shell burst.
‘I rang you. Then I rang Scott on the mobile – he ran down with some from the lifeguard post at Hunstanton. And then, just for no reason, she was conscious – right then, when he got here. So we gave her the Piriton.’ She laughed, and Shaw felt her shoulders relax an inch, the blades moving beneath the skin. ‘Five minutes later she was running about like a rabbit.’ She laughed again,
‘I’ll check,’ he said, lifting a knee.
But she held on to him. ‘I have – every ten minutes. She’s sleeping. Leave her.’
She let out a long breath, like a death rattle, and buried her eyes in the crook of his neck.
‘I want you to end this obsession with the child,’ she said. ‘One way or another. Either drop it or end it quickly, one way or another. Solve it, Peter, or walk away.’ She lifted her head and looked into his good eye. ‘Jack destroyed his life for this, Peter. And we know why – because the boy looked like you, because it could have been you. Have you ever thought why that was – why he was…’ she searched for the word. ‘Unbalanced by that?’ She held his head. ‘It was guilt – because he’d let you grow up without being there. He couldn’t be there for you, so in a rush he thought he’d make up for it by being there for Jonathan Tessier. Which was selfish, because it only made him feel better, not you. Don’t let this happen to us.’
Later, as he lay in bed, listening to the sea creep back up the beach, Shaw realized how much of a relief that word had been: ‘Us.’
He’d woken at dawn, listening to the seagulls scratching on the roof. He didn’t need to recall specifically what had been said between them – it was there, already part of the memory bank he’d carry with him for the rest of his life. And it wasn’t his life that was the point. It was Fran’s. She could have died, and that would have destroyed them, because he wouldn’t have been there. He always answered if Lena phoned. But he’d been blinded – she was right – blinded by the conflicting pressures in his life, between his home and his job, and between his case and his father’s case. And the Tessier killing was an obsession; dangerous and disfiguring in so many ways. His problem was that he could no more walk away from it than walk away from himself. But in the darkness before dawn he had made a fresh appraisal of his failure to solve the case so far. Was it really such a baffling crime? Or was his inability to make progress really a reflection of his own inner conflict: the fear that if he found the truth, it would be an uncomfortable one?
He’d swum then, at dawn, seeing now that Lena was right, he’d overlooked so many more direct avenues of inquiry. It was a case he’d worried at, like a sore. Watching his hands rise above his head as his backstroke took him out to sea, he decided he must return to first principles, and talk to those with a direct recall of the night Jonathan would walk away. For Lena’s sake he’d walk away – even if he did leave part of himself behind.
He’d decided to start here, on the Westmead, because he wanted an answer to Lena’s original, and perceptive, question: why would a gang caught on CCTV at the fatal crash at Castle Rising go on to murder a nine-year-old boy just because he stumbled on them respraying the car? There had been reports of the accident in the local paper, and on the radio and TV – but why would a boy take any notice of that? It was nothing to do with him, or the small world in which he was living out his summer holidays. Even if he had sensed something sinister, and children were certainly gifted at that, he could have been bought off with a crisp £10 note. There had to be another motive.
In the block of flats opposite an alarm rang, the sound travelling across the concrete canyon to Shaw as he stood on the balcony outside Flat 43. A seagull glided between the high-rise blocks, below him, so that he could see the feathers on its back ruffled by the breeze. The digital numbers on his watch flashed seven o’clock, so he knocked on the plywood door, knowing she’d be up, because he’d checked out her shift pattern with a quick call to the Queen Vic.
Angela Tessier, the dead boy’s mother, answered the door with a toothbrush sticking out of her mouth. ‘What?’
‘I’m sorry – I wondered if you had a few moments.
She turned on her heel without a word and walked into the shadows of the flat. Shaw followed, down the corridor into the front room, which faced east and caught the full sun. There was a flat-screen TV, sound-deck DVD/CD player, a poster of Amy Winehouse.
‘You’ve got a minute,’ said a voice, echoing slightly in a bathroom. She came in, bustling, picking up a mobile, an iPod. Shaw knew from the file she was forty-three, a nurse at the Queen Victoria. But she looked thirty-five, the face animated by a sense of purpose. Her waist was narrow, circumnavigated by a thick leather belt. She’d looked after her figure and her eyes were a stunning green, like snooker-table baize. They looked at each other, and she didn’t seem fazed by Shaw’s lunar eye. She went out, then came back with a small cup of pitch-black coffee.
‘Fifty seconds,’ she said, but her voice wasn’t unfriendly.
In the file on the Tessier killing there’d been a husband mentioned, Mike, a salesman with a carpet warehouse. But this was her world now, and Shaw sensed there was no one else in it, not even the ghost of Jonathan.