Hadden edged the light nearer so that the grave was lit. The corpse was slight, five feet tall, the skull complete, the teeth still in place, all in place, but ugly in the lipless mouth.
Hadden squatted down beside him. ‘Andersen, the engineer, says they found some bones late yesterday. St James’s rang me – you were on the ship. And she’s not going anywhere. It’s a girl – yes. Early teens.’
‘I think I know her name,’ said Shaw. ‘There’s something on the chest,’ he said. Hadden stepped down beside the body.
Hadden slipped something into a plastic evidence envelope and reached up – laying it on the ground with a kind of reverence that Shaw didn’t understand until he saw what it was.
‘Fish skeleton,’ said Hadden. ‘There’s twenty – twenty-five. I’m no expert but they’re bony fish – tropical.’ He held another in a second bag in his hand. This one was as delicate as a ship in a bottle.
Shaw told him what he knew of Jan Orzsak’s obsession with his tropical fish; the favour he’d asked of Norma Jean that last summer of her life – that she feed them while he was away. How she’d promised she would and how, on the day she died, Orzsak had confronted her with the consequences of her failure to keep that promise: the dead, resplendent fish.
‘I see,’ said Hadden. ‘There was one in her throat. I think he pushed her down, Peter, pushed her head down into the tank of water, amongst the dead fish she’d killed with her neglect. There’s a crack in the jawbone too. That’s typical if she was held under; she’d strain for air until the bone broke.’
Shaw took the envelope and held the tiny skeleton up to the light. ‘It’s a beautiful thing to be buried with,’ he said.
Shaw understood now why Jan Orzsak hadn’t left the street in all those years, why he’d taken the opportunity to move next door to the site. He was his victim’s guardian, and the keeper of his own secret. But for this, the chance discovery of her bones, he’d have lived out the rest of his years knowing she was there, knowing Andy Judd was hated by his own children – condemned to a lifetime under suspicion – for what he, Jan Orzsak, had done. And he’d persisted with this lie knowing that Andy Judd’s world had been reduced to a single wish: to bury his daughter, to know, finally, that her body was at peace.
But Orzsak wasn’t at home now. He’d been brought back to Erebus Street by community ambulance at six the previous evening. He’d made himself a simple meal – two boiled eggs, with the stale sliced bread toasted. Then he’d selected the best bottle of wine he had left in the rack. He’d gone to bed, knowing sleep was a mercy he was denied. At just after six that morning DC Lau, in an unmarked car by the dock gates, had seen him leave his house, walk the street and weave his way through the tombstones towards the presbytery of the Sacred Heart of Mary. Ten minutes later she’d watched as Orzsak retraced his steps through the graveyard, followed by the priest, who’d opened up the church.
The small neo-Gothic side door was still open, the
Shaw stood in the silence, listening, managing to pick out a steady, insistent whisper. Three confessional boxes stood to one side, but there was light in none of them. Looking back up the aisle towards the great doors and the shadowy mural, he saw Orzsak, kneeling in a pew, Father Martin beside him, a hand on his shoulder. As Shaw walked towards them Orzsak stood, and Shaw felt that gravity had won whatever battle it had been fighting with this man for a lifetime. He stepped out into the aisle, moving as if he was under water, the folds of fat on his face looser, his jaw slack, his bottom lip down, wet and pink.
Shaw stood in his path. Orzsak almost fell, then steadied himself by holding on to the end of a pew.
‘An honest confession?’ he asked, and Orzsak couldn’t stop himself nodding.
‘Really?’ He turned to Martin, who wore a confessional stole over a white T-shirt and jeans. ‘So he’s forgiven?’
‘Absolution isn’t mine to give,’ he said. ‘That will come later, possibly. In another life.’
‘I know how you did it, Mr Orzsak. You hid her body in the basement that first night,’ Shaw said. ‘I checked the original report of the officers who searched the houses.
Orzsak moved his knee, a tiny stamp. ‘A trapdoor,’ he said.
‘And you had time; she died at – what – six? We didn’t get to the house before ten. And after that you had all the time you needed not to hurry, not to make a mistake. Her body was in the basement; they were rebuilding the electricity sub-station – that’s right, isn’t it? Sometime then – ’92, ’93?’
‘The next spring,’ said Orzsak, a slight sibilance on the ‘s’.
‘So easy enough for you, because you were in the industry – power supply. In fact, were you on the job?’
Orzsak looked away, suddenly tired of the questions.
‘So one night you ran a car to the dock gates and slipped her body into the waiting footings of the floor – an extra foot, beneath the clay. Then you just sat back and waited for them to pour the concrete. Your secret then, until Andy Judd’s little spasm of vengeance led us all to this…’
Shaw looked up at the mural of the wedding feast around the doors.
‘What I don’t understand is why,’ said Shaw. ‘Why she had to die.’
Orzsak considered the implied question, as if it were an abstruse point of contention in a philosophical debate.
‘She came to me crying,’ he said. ‘Not for what she’d done to me, but for what she wanted to do to her child. The unborn child. She’d taken all this life from me
Shaw didn’t believe most of that. ‘So you killed her – drowned her – held her head under the water of the tank. But you killed the child as well – that doesn’t make sense.’
‘I was angry.’
‘Just angry?’ asked Shaw. He thought about the relationship between the lonely bachelor and the child who had become a woman. ‘Or jealousy? You didn’t know about Ben Ruddle, did you? You didn’t know that Norma Jean wasn’t a child any more. What did you really feel?’
‘I won’t speak, not again,’ said Orzsak. ‘Not about this.’
Father Martin sat, pulling the purple stole of confession from around his neck. He’d heard many confessions, Shaw guessed, but none that had taken him so far into the depths of human pain: Orzsak’s pain, the pain of the teenager who had died that night at his hands, and the pain of the father, an outcast even to his children.
Ally handed out coffees. Orzsak shook his head so Shaw took his. The liquid was hot, gritty, and pungent. Shaw was always astonished at how such a simple thing could make him feel a splinter of joy, even here.
Kennedy stood watching the men sleep.
‘And what do the voices say today?’ asked Shaw of Kennedy.
He shook his head, as if clearing it of other thoughts. ‘They’ve been silent.’
Shaw stood and looked back down the nave to Kennedy’s painting, completed now to the halfway stage above the pointed arch of the main doors – Patigno’s Miracle at Cana.
‘I did wonder why you’d left it out – the candle, the ultimate symbol of memento mori, of the passing of time, of death. In the original there’s a rather fine one, in a gold holder, at the centre of the table… just there, to the right of the skull.’ He walked to the wall, pointing up at the velvet-covered table, heavy with rotting fruit.