He shifted his eyes back to the ceiling.
‘Next day I went up with Will Stokes and filled the grave in. We’d covered Nora’s coffin the day before, we just had to finish the job. Took us an hour — with a couple of fag breaks. That night I was in the Flask and the rumour was round that Pat had gone. It didn’t take long to find out why. Sammy and John Joe always had the same story, that they’d lost their nerve too. Too scared. So I never knew — never guessed. But I was always scared — of what I came close to doing.’
He looked at Shaw again. ‘I’m scared now,’ he said.
They left him asleep. In the corridor outside Shaw checked his mobile as he watched the patient through a glass porthole. The doctor appeared at his shoulder.
‘What are his chances?’ asked Shaw.
The doctor was reading a set of medical notes. He didn’t look up. ‘He hasn’t got chances, Inspector. Death’s a process — like life. It’s started. Miracles happen — but up till now, never on my shift.’ He pushed Fletcher’s door open and went in to check the bedside monitors.
There was a text on the phone from Paul Twine.
SAM VENN DEAD AT HOME. TOM AT SCENE.
30
The Clockcase Cannery stood against a winter postcard: the black river, the Old Town waterfront beyond, stretching from the needle spire of St Nicholas, past the old Custom House and the mismatched towers of St Margaret’s to the Flask on its lonely promontory — gateway to the Flensing Meadow and the low hill of the chapel. It was a panorama in grisaille, viewed through mist, under a grey sky low enough to tear at the single chimney of the old Campbell’s soup factory downriver. The only light came from the snow-covered ground.
Shaw drove the Porsche at speed into the empty car park past an unmanned checkpoint and skidded on the gravel, bringing the rear of the car round in an arc. He got out, took a lungful of iced air, an antidote to the smell in Sam Venn’s flat: the vomit on the stairs, round the washbasin. And Venn’s corpse, decaying already in the overheated room, the features of his face pressed flat, as if he’d lost a fight with gravity which was pushing him down into the mattress.
Shaw took a second lungful of the clean air.
The cannery was a single factory block of three floors, as substantial as an ocean liner, the single stub of a chimney leaking fumes from the boiler. A vast hoarding hanging from the gutter read FOR SALE. Shaw thought that it was a depressing sight — a building, built to work, standing suddenly idle like a man in a dole queue. A short line of HGVs waited silently at the goods-in loading dock, a council Transit van blocking any others from entering the site. A group of cannery workers stood by the gates arguing with a man in a smart green safety jacket who was handing out a printed A4 sheet.
Shaw was struck by just how narrow the river was at this point: he could see the tombstones of the Flensing Meadow clearly. It was one of the aspects of the case which unsettled him, the tight geographical compression of events within this small area of the town. It was as if all their witnesses, all their suspects, were doomed to live and die within sight of each other, as if the buildings themselves — and particularly the Flask — had some kind of magnetic attraction that bound them with an invisible force.
‘Let’s do it, George,’ he said. Valentine considered the dilapidated factory with distaste, and had made no move to get out of the car.
Across the yard Guy Poole was in his 4x4, speaking on his mobile. The health officer cut the line and jumped down.
‘Bad news, Peter,’ he said.
‘You first,’ said Shaw.
Valentine lit up, flicking his match into an empty skip.
‘Lab’s just finished a preliminary sweep through all the food at the lunch: so that’s everything from the bread rolls and the butter pats to the tap water in the jugs. Only contaminant was in the soup — that’s all the soup, by the way, every bowl we collected, the saucepans and the unopened can. The level of contamination varies very little in the samples taken from the bowls. So that’s suspicious for a start. If this was from the cans, from metal fatigue — which, given we’re looking for an aluminium compound, would be our prime suspect — then you’d expect some cans to be worse than others. You’d expect variation. There is none. Then there’s the actual level of contamination — it’s very high, high enough to produce symptoms in almost anyone who took any of this stuff down into their stomachs. High enough to rule out metal fatigue. But not high enough to kill — well, not on its own.’
Valentine felt his guts contort, buckling like a garden hose.
‘What are we saying?’ said Shaw. ‘Off the record.’
‘We’re saying the management might have a point. This looks like sabotage. These guys are all losing their jobs. So someone with a grudge laced the cans with a metal-based poison. Through either luck or judgement it wasn’t enough to be fatal. The death at the scene looks like a result of the victim’s underlying condition. Coroner will have the last word, of course, but that’s my call.’
‘There’s been another death,’ said Shaw. ‘And there’s another in the wings.’
Poole’s eyes hardened, angry that he’d been allowed to float his theory without all the available information.
Shaw placed his feet squarely apart. ‘A man called Venn — he didn’t drink and he didn’t smoke. And he’s as dead as a can of soup, Guy. He was found this morning but he’d been dead all night. In his bed. And another up at the hospital’s heading for the morgue. Slowly, but there’s no other destination.’
Poole shrugged, fitting the facts to the theory. ‘Two out of a possible hundred. It’s a random shot. Let’s see what the coroner says. Poisoning is a two-part process, Peter. It’s all about how your body reacts. I’m sticking with my first guess: I think we’ve got an industrial saboteur, in the factory. The whole batch was laced, but with no intent to kill. What the culprit didn’t know is that any contaminant can be enough to kill in certain circumstances. This other victim — any unusual medical factors?’
Shaw saw Sam Venn’s face, up close, skewed. ‘Maybe. Cerebral palsy,’ he said.
Poole leant back on the 4x4, his arms crossed, more confident now in his theory. ‘I’ve interviewed the caterers — the staff. The soup was made up in three batches. Apart from the mayor’s party at the top table, no tables were allocated to any particular sponsor; the caterers just put the reservation cards where they felt like it. And although each table had a suggested seating plan, hardly anybody seems to have followed it. So it looks like these are three random victims. Let’s hope it stays that way.’
Valentine coughed, looking at his black slip-ons.
‘I don’t think they’re random victims,’ said Shaw.
Poole stared into Shaw’s good eye.
Shaw had the grace to look up at the sky. ‘OK — this Charlie Clarke, the one who died on the spot, I think his death was an accident. But Venn and the man who’s fighting for his life — a man called Fletcher — are two of the three main suspects in our current murder inquiry. The third should have been sitting with them. Was anyone else on the Flask’s table affected badly?’ He checked his notebook. ‘The man who stepped in to take the third suspect’s ticket was called Howe.’
Poole retrieved a pile of paperwork from the passenger seat of the 4x4.
‘No. Howe went up to the hospital — but symptoms are listed as nausea and vomiting. He wasn’t kept in.’ He punched in a number on the mobile and turned away.
‘How’s your maths?’ Shaw asked Valentine as they walked away to the riverside. Upriver they could see the ferry crossing, packed with Christmas shoppers.
‘Crap,’ said Valentine.