Death Toll by Jim Kelly

Author:Jim Kelly [Kelly, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: C429, Kat, Extratorrents
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2011-06-20T14:00:00+00:00

20

Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital stood on a wooded hill overlooking the estuary of the River Welland – a culvert of glistening black mud with boats beached in pools of water left by the outflowing tide. It was the bleakest spot in a bleak landscape. A stand of cedar trees on its southwest side had been bent over the building by the wind like thinning hair over a skull. Snow and ice lay in the ditches – a mathematical grid traced over a landscape rolled flat by steel-grey snow clouds blowing in from the sea. As Shaw approached in the Porsche he thought how the hospital’s position, eight miles from the nearest town at Sutton Bridge, encapsulated the planners’ attitudes to mental health. Bellevue was as far away from anything as anything could be. And, despite its name, the view was a study in melancholia.

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 & 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

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