Authors: Jim Kelly
‘Show time,’ said Shaw.
Twine already had a desk in the Warrener’s Lodge, a laptop working on battery. The rest of the team had gone – all except Valentine, who was inputting the team’s mobile numbers to his own phone. Shaw gave Twine the DVD to fire up, while he flicked through the newspaper cuttings in Osbourne’s CV. Most were local – a couple from advertising free sheets with adverts ringed in lipstick. One was for kitchen units and he recognized Marianne Osbourne poised expertly, one hand caressing a fake-marble work surface. There was one shot from a national newspaper –
The Mirror
, 1995, just six months after the East Hills killing: Marianne Osbourne, in a bikini, lying down, propped up on one elbow, a miniature chocolate car in her hand, held towards the camera. The story said one of the big Japanese car makers had got Cadbury’s to make replicas of their forthcoming four-by-four to send out to garages as a publicity stunt.
The caption read: ‘Two new models: curvy Marianne Pritchard, eighteen, test drives the tastiest new car on the road.’
‘Lied about her age,’ said Shaw, passing the cutting to Twine.
The DVD flickered into life on the laptop showing the featureless white contours of a photographer’s studio.
‘Alright sweetheart,’ said a voice off-camera.
Valentine stood, his backbone creaking, and came over to the screen to stand beside Shaw.
Marianne Osbourne walked into the shot, turned, and looked back at the camera. Shaw guessed the stills camera was set next to the video. Her face was extraordinarily blank. Her arms were held awkwardly, her bare feet slightly pigeon-toed, and she looked – maybe – eighteen. Still holding the camera’s eye she slipped the bikini top off, revealing small breasts, but no variation in her lightly tanned skin.
‘No, no, kid.’ A laugh, slightly furred by age or nicotine. ‘Keep your kit on.’
As she fumbled with the strap they heard the voice, but a whisper this time: ‘Jesus.’
The photographer came into shot – middle-aged, pepper-and-salt hair, avuncular. He arranged Marianne lying down, in the pose Shaw had seen in
The Mirror
. Then he produced a box of the chocolate cars and set them in a line, beginning at her foot, up the narrow leg, over the very slight bulge of the hip, then up an arm to end at the shoulder, which she tucked under her chin.
Alone in the shot, Marianne spoke for the first time. ‘Tell me.’
‘Tell you what, darling?’
‘When you’re taking a shot.’
The blank face stared into the lens.
‘Alright, here we go.’ They heard the whirr of a camera taking multiple shots.
Marianne’s face was transformed. The chin dropped, the eyes looked up, the body tightened slightly so that the skin seemed to attain a sudden surface tension. Then the smile, a hint at first in the eyes, then breaking the lips apart to reveal the small, white, perfect teeth.
‘There ya go,’ said the voice, genuine now, excited.
And then the smile opened, like an orchid in time-lapse photography: a full hundred-watt transmission of what looked like joy.
The photographer came into shot, on his knees, his upper body swinging from left to right as he took his pictures. He got close, and Marianne didn’t register the intrusion into her personal space, just kept the smile tracking the lens. He gave her one of the chocolate cars and she opened her mouth, holding the fragile carapace of the model between her teeth, giggling, then crunching down so that a crumb or two of chocolate fell on her chin and she had to use a finger to push them back between her lips.
The photographer leant back on his haunches, still on his knees, laughing too.
‘Right – some black and whites next. Alright?’
He’d turned away before she answered, clipping a lens cap over his camera, otherwise he would have seen the smile leave her face, falling away like a mask.
ELEVEN
‘
R
ight here?’ asked Shaw, standing in the deep, cool shadow of the edge of the pinewood above The Circle. The field of sunflowers was in gloom, the heads closed now for the night. Below them they could see lights in the Warrener’s House, and spilling from the mobile incident room. Evening noises rose up gently – a radio, a chip pan, a swing creaking. In the Robinsons’ back garden – next to Marianne’s – chickens gossiped, unsettled. The run took up most of the space between the house and the open ground that led to the woods – all, in fact, except for a large woodpile.
Aidan Robinson stood beside him in the shadows, looking down on his house. Even in the half-light it was impossible to ignore his huge hands which hung at his sides, like weapons.
‘Yes. Right here, or close. I was down by the back door so he was a way off, but yes. It looked like he was looking at us, but now, now I think, it could have been the back of Joe’s he was watching – their bedroom.’
Shaw could just see the bedroom window behind which Marianne Osbourne had died, a flash of silver, reflecting a ribbon of red sky. Aidan Robinson had seen the stranger, a rare sight on The Circle, on the Wednesday afternoon at about twelve fifteen – it had to be then, because he’d been doing a long shift at the poultry farm and he always took lunch at noon and it was only five minutes away by car. ‘I need the break,’ he said. ‘I’m inside all day.’ There was something understated about that description which made it sound, to Shaw, like hell. The noise, the heat, the
smell.
And no glimpse of the sky.
Shaw walked to the precise spot Robinson had indicated and looked down. He was trying to draw out the moment because he wanted the witness to relive what he’d seen, just in case there was a detail buried in his memory. All they had was a crude outline: a man, possibly fair hair, stood still, then retreating into the wood after two or three minutes. Really? Shaw had pressed him on that point. Did he mean he’d stood still for two or three minutes? Because that’s a very rare thing – to be still. But Aidan Robinson was sure, and even in the few moments he’d been talking to him Shaw could see that this man knew more than enough about stillness. He wondered if he’d learnt the skill: fly-fishing, perhaps, or poaching in the woods, or standing watching the sky with a shotgun broken over his arm. He didn’t think it was a quality you’d pick up in a battery farm.
‘So, just a figure?’ asked Shaw.
The technique required to bring a memory alive had been a key skill Shaw had learnt at Quantico with the FBI, because getting witnesses to remember faces was a subtle, even fragile, thing. Memory recall was not a linear, absolute, process but rather piecemeal, flashes illuminating lost fragments which could be retrieved, then reassembled.
‘A man,’ said Robinson, stepping out of the shadows so that the last of the day’s light lit his face. ‘Sturdy.’ He shook his head, looking about, embarrassed. ‘That’s it. Sorry.’
‘That’s OK,’ said Shaw. And it was, because Robinson had already added to the picture he’d given with the word ‘sturdy’. If Shaw took it gently he might recall more.
Robinson shifted from his right boot, to his left, and back again. As they’d climbed the hill Shaw had noticed the lameness in his right leg, the foot seemed to hang from the right ankle, as if broken. He was broad, an agricultural frame, heavy and powerful, so that it was easy to underestimate his height, which had to be six-one or two. When he walked the injured leg made his shoulders rock from side to side, like a human pendulum. His face was wind-tanned; his hair brown without a trace of grey, but it was the eyes which held a surprise – a shade of grey that suggested silver, unnaturally light.
‘And you were down there?’ asked Shaw.
They both glanced at the Robinson’s back garden a hundred foot below them. Up by the kitchen door, beyond the chicken run, they could see Ruth, sat at a picnic table with Tilly. They had their arms around each other and in front of them a candle flickered in a glass cylinder, growing brighter as the day died around them.
‘Yeah. And he was up here. That’s what was odd. I just watched, thinking he’d move on.’
‘Do you think he saw you?’
‘Doubt it. Like I said, I was down by the back door. Ruth brings a paper home if she’s up at the lido in the morning and it was stifling indoors, so I got the kitchen chair out, but right on the hardstanding, in the shadows.’
‘Definitely a man?’ repeated Shaw.
‘Sure,’ said Robinson, but he didn’t sound it.
‘Fair?’
Those oddly colourless eyes focused on the mid-distance. ‘Like I said, maybe.’
The heat of the day was flooding out into the sky but there was no wind here, in the lee of the hill. Shaw didn’t like the sound of the ‘maybe’ – suddenly they were going backwards, losing the memory.
‘Did Ruth see him?’
‘Yeah. I told her, and she glanced up the hill. But she was busy in the kitchen so she saw less than I did.’
Shaw changed tack. ‘And then he took a path?’
Robinson nodded, but seemed reluctant to enter the woods. He looked down at his wife, comforting his niece. ‘They’ve always been good together,’ he said. As they watched, Ruth Robinson lit a second candle lantern, embracing Tilly. She drew a cork from a bottle and they heard the pop a second later.
‘Where’s Joe?’ asked Shaw, not to get an answer, but to make the point that he wasn’t there, below, with his daughter.
‘Asleep on our couch. We’ll wake him later, for food. He needs to eat. He doesn’t want to go home.’
Shaw wondered what Aidan Robinson had done with his memory of the summer of 1994. The time he’d spent with Marianne Osbourne as her secret lover. Perhaps he’d locked that image away, so that he could get on with the rest of his life. How else could he have lived here – a single course of bricks between his own bed and Marianne’s? How had he lived with that memory, lying next to her sister Ruth?
Robinson didn’t say another word until he’d led Shaw deep into the woods, perhaps a quarter of a mile, up towards the crest of the hill. He hadn’t asked to go this far and so Shaw wondered if Robinson was buying time. Despite the gathering dusk Shaw didn’t rush, negotiating the half-light as well as his single eye would allow. One of the unexpected repercussions of losing his eye had been the loss of light due to the ‘shadow’ cast by the nose on the one remaining eye – as if a screen hung to his right. And not just light. One eye left him with ten to fifteen per cent less peripheral vision. So he took his time, one hand raised constantly to ward off any stray branches on his sighted side. Losing his good eye in another freak accident would be a disaster which would pretty clearly end his career. He’d had to sit a series of medical boards to stay on active duty, even now, after the first accident.
They made their way over the brow of the hill and then reached the tumbledown wall DC Twine had mentioned – the edge of the large estate which ran south from Creake. It was the kind of wall nobody could afford to build any more: four bricks deep, fired locally, with a stone coping. But it had not been repaired for years, and at regular intervals had been breached. Beyond it the trees opened out into a clearing, at the centre of which stood a tree without bark, blanched, but scarred down one side with a black charcoal seam. It was leafless, architectural; a fossil tree. Around the tree were a series of stumps.
‘You think he came here?’ asked Shaw.
Robinson sat on one of the stumps. Then he put his hands together and, using his left, pulled the index finger on the right, producing a crack of cartilage: a sickening noise, and a habit Shaw loathed. And with Robinson it conjured up an image: the same hands, pulling a neck straight on a chicken at the poultry farm.
‘Little choice.’ His voice was gentle, like most of his movements. Gentle giant was a cliché but, thought Shaw, that didn’t mean it couldn’t be true. ‘You’d end up here whatever – the paths all take you down to the old house.’ He rolled a cigarette with one hand and pointed north. ‘That way you’d be able to walk for about 300 yards, but then you’d hit the security fence at Docking Hill – the wind farm?’
Shaw nodded, unfolding an OS map, trying to orientate it to unseen compass points.
Robinson lit the cigarette he’d fashioned, squinting as it flared. He didn’t say anything more and was clearly unembarrassed by silence. Lifting his right leg he adjusted the angle of the damaged foot and then set it back on the ground. The silver-grey eyes seemed to help suck what light was left out of the air. ‘I don’t come up here – not anymore,’ he said, and there was a sudden note of bitterness in his voice. ‘Not for years. But you get poachers – we hear the guns at night. And kids from the village.’ Robinson pointed into the edge of the trees where a rope swing hung.
Shaw looked around, thinking of his own childhood, played out in a block of flats in North London. ‘Great place to play.’
‘I came up here with dad and granddad. We always had guns – we’d take rabbit, a few pheasant, set traps. Even then there were outsiders – professional poachers. They’d come for the venison on Old Hall. These days you’d get fifty quid for a carcass – if you can drag 600lb out of the woods without being seen. They come over from the Midlands – a white van – bag a few and then go. High velocity rifles – night sights. Old days it was all traps. That’s how I did this . . .’ He jerked up his trouser leg to reveal the calf, lacerated by an old circular wound, triangular teeth scars cut deep into the muscle. Shaw winced at the thought of the trap shutting, the bone shattering, the energy in the springs enough to bring down a stag.
‘Here?’ Shaw asked, almost in a whisper.
‘Blicking – the big wood.’ Shaw knew the spot, acres of estate around a fine Jacobean house. ‘We went everywhere, me and dad that was – granddad was dead. Gun went off when the trap sprang – I nearly blew dad’s head off.’ He laughed, but his eyes didn’t join in.
‘When was that?’
‘November ’93.’ Shaw looked at Robinson; the grey eyes seemed colder, like ice on the river. So the accident had happened while Ruth was away at university for her first year, and before East Hills and the year of his affair with Marianne. Shaw thought that for him, and for Marianne, the year had been a fulcrum: one of those points in your life when the number of possible futures suddenly narrows, as if the path ahead has been chosen.