Death Toll

13

Inside the Ark the lights were neon; a bank of them hung from the old roof beams. The old chapel was partitioned across the middle. On the far side of a set of plastic swing doors was the force’s mortuary and autopsy suite. This side was Tom Hadden’s forensics lab complete with a ballistics chute, mass spectrometer, fume cupboard and a bank of computers. The team ‘hot-desked’, so that the nest of tables was paperless and clinical. Stores and files were kept in the old organ loft, reached via a metal spiral staircase.

Hadden was at one of the desks as they came in, his monitor showing a flock of Arctic tern in flight as a screen-saver.

‘Peter — for you,’ he said, closing his eyes to concentrate on what he was going to say. ‘Something you really need to see, I’m afraid.’ The way he said it stopped them in their tracks.

‘Soil profile from the grave,’ said Hadden. ‘I’ve got some graphics here. Take a seat — you’ll need it. Both of you.’

The lab had a large whiteboard for showing computer images. Shaw and Valentine dragged up some chairs and Hadden tapped a button on his keyboard to project a single picture of Nora Tilden’s empty grave. In order to get a flat shot of the long side of the grave it had been dug out so that the hole was nine feet by nine feet — a square, with three of the original sides preserved.

‘We do this so that we can get back far enough to see the wood for the trees and get a good shot of the soil profile.’ He tapped the button again and the next shot came up: a flat-on picture of the grave profile. Shaw could see the various layers of the soil — the black decaying humus at the top, a dark layer of soil, a thin yellow line where the clay began and then the grey, almost silvery, waterlogged strata below.

Valentine yawned so wide that a bone in his jaw cracked.

Hadden looked at the DS’s exposed teeth. ‘A soil profile can tell you as much as a fingerprint. It’s evidence, very compelling evidence, if you read it properly, and interpret what it’s telling us.’

Valentine looked at the screen.

‘Now,’ said Hadden, his eyelids closing, then fluttering slightly as he concentrated. ‘You need to recognize that you’ve had a big slice of luck here, because the archaeologists who found our victim’s bones dug out the grave using a mechanical digger, so it’s really precise — engineered, if you like. What this picture shows, I believe, is that before they dug their hole someone else had dug down into the same grave, by hand, with a spade, about four feet, then stopped, then filled it in. This earlier hand-dug hole was not as true as the one made with the digger. It’s slightly to one side, slightly slewed, so you can still see the ghost of it, if you like, in the profile that’s left, cutting through the nice neat strata of the profile. You see?’

Shaw stood, staring into the bright image. Hadden was right, because the neat wedding-cake layers had been disrupted, the shadow of the hole breaking the thin yellow clay line.

Which left them with one key question. ‘When?’ asked Shaw.

‘Well, I know someone at Cambridge’s soil-science lab who can give us a better call, but I’d guess — and it’s a good guess — that we’re talking between six and eight months.’

‘This year?’ said Shaw, his voice sharp and energized. Suddenly he felt ten years younger. ‘We’re saying someone dug down towards those bones this year — then filled it in, then along came the digger?’

‘The disturbed soil,’ said Hadden, pointing at what he’d called the ‘ghost’ of the hole revealed in the soil profile, ‘has been settling for one winter, and almost certainly only one. That’s when a lot of the soil processes work through the strata — forming layers, rotting the leaves to form the mulch at the top, creating the soil.’

He interlaced his hands, turning them upside down to form a basket, to show that science could do miracles too. ‘This part of the profile, where’s there’s been disruption, is just a jumble of soil — there’s hardly any stratification.’

Valentine tried to concentrate, distracted by the gurgle of a coffee machine on the next desk. ‘We’re saying someone dug down into this grave sometime this year and then gave up?’

‘Yes. That’s right. Or they found what they were looking for and stopped,’ said Hadden. ‘Four feet brings you pretty close to the bones we found. They could have got close, then just dug at a precise spot — further down. We’ll never know because the archaeologists just ejected the spoil, as you would expect. They weren’t interested in the graves, just what was supposed to be at the bottom of them.’

‘Animals? Natural subsidence?’ asked Shaw, aware that the basis of his inquiry had just been shifted twenty-eight years closer. He felt his bloodstream coursing, as if he’d just finished his morning mile.

Hadden held up a hand, closed his eyes, thinking through Shaw’s multiple question. ‘No. Animal damage would be much more localized. Subsidence is out — you can see the underlying clay base is solid.’

Shaw tried to imagine the scene. At night, perhaps? One or more men, working by a small light, digging down towards the three buried bodies.

He clicked his fingers. Valentine winced. ‘Hold on. What about the archaeologists? Perhaps they did it, filled it in, then came back, like a trial dig to see what the soil conditions were like.’

Hadden shook his head. ‘’Fraid not, Peter. Nice try. I’ve checked.’

Shaw was still thinking. ‘George — when did the council announce the programme of reinterment? Can you find out for me …’ He held Valentine’s eyes, so that he saw the DS’s eyebrows rising slightly at the insistent tone. Valentine stood, walked towards the partition with the mortuary and flicked open his mobile.

‘They were after something,’ said Shaw, tapping the whiteboard. ‘And if they gave up at four feet, and what they wanted was at six feet, then what they wanted was still in the grave when we opened it. Or — they got close, knew exactly what they were after, and just dug down to get it — like a miniature well. To do that they’d need to know precisely its location — but then that’s not difficult if you know a few basics: like which end of the grave the head lies, that kind of thing?’

Hadden nodded and took Shaw to one of the lab tables which had been cleared and covered with a white plastic sheet. On it were the items they’d extracted from Nora Tilden’s coffin and from amongst the bones found on the coffin lid.

Each one had been labelled, numbered, dated. The green glasses with the engraved whaling scene first, the penknife, the wallet, the few coins. And from between the coffin lid and the bones, the billhook. And finally, from inside Nora’s coffin, the silver brooch.

‘No wedding ring on Nora’s hand?’ asked Shaw.

Hadden shook his head. ‘Then we go inside the wallet,’ he said. He’d set the contents out separately, under a single sheet of glass: the rotted pieces of paper, one with the faint pen strokes of the gibbet and hanging man just visible. There was one rectangular piece of paper, white, as if it had been leached of colour. ‘I’m working on that — maybe a receipt?’ said Hadden. ‘The paper’s shiny, like …I don’t know — a football match ticket? A concert? I can’t raise any images at the moment but it’s early days. Just a three-letter grouping — MOT, just that — with a space before and a space after. That’s all I can get — MOT. It could be an MOT certificate, I suppose — I’ve asked someone to track down a copy of the standard form from 1982, see if it matches.’ He let Shaw think about that, rearranging the remains of a ten-pound note and three fives.

‘Big question is — if they were after one of these items, which one was it?’ asked Hadden, smiling broadly, enjoying himself.

‘The penknife,’ said Shaw. ‘George says it’s a collector’s item — and a link to the GIs. So maybe that?’

‘Maybe.’

‘The billhook?’

Hadden picked up the bagged item and turned it so that Shaw could read the word stamped into the metal haft, where it sank into the wooden handle.

STANLEY

‘Toolmaker’s name,’ said Hadden. ‘No other marks.’

Valentine came back, his mobile extended with a straight arm. There was a text on screen from Paul Twine: 18 JUNE 2010.

‘Bang on six months,’ said Valentine.

‘So, last June the council announces the coffins are coming up, someone panics, thinks we’ll find the bones and some evidence which points to the identity of the killer. They go to the cemetery after dark, dig down. Someone, clearly, with a lot to lose,’ said Shaw, turning to Hadden.

Hadden nodded. ‘Maybe. I just do the science, Peter. The clever stuff’s all yours.’

‘There was something else in the grave,’ said Valentine. ‘Garrison’s bones. Perhaps they wanted to get him out. Then there’d be no inquiry at all. Fuck all. But they gave up.’

Dr Kazimierz pushed her way through the swing doors and helped herself to coffee. She caught Shaw’s eye, smiled, then retreated back through the doors. The greeting had been warmer than usual, and Shaw wondered if the meeting with Dawid on the beach had been a rite of passage, an entry into a different circle of friendship.

‘George,’ said Shaw. ‘After we’re done, ring Paul. I want everyone to know that we need to focus on this attempt to reopen the grave. The timeline is pretty conclusive. Night time? Almost certainly. How’d they do that? Let’s crawl all over this — local uniformed squad cars, beat, council security, any local low life that hangs out in the cemetery after dark — you know the score, brief everyone. This may well be a cold case, George — but it just got a whole lot hotter. And tell Jacky to rerun the door-to-door in the immediate vicinity — someone must have seen or heard something.’

Shaw took a deep breath. Beside the swing doors there was a tray of boiled sweets. He took one, passed another to Valentine.

‘Ready?’ he asked, with the surfer’s smile. ‘Or are you going to fit in a quick bacon sandwich?’

Valentine didn’t smile back. ‘On the subject of food …’ He took out his wallet and slipped out a ticket, handing it to Shaw. It was for the Shipwrights’ Hall Christmas dinner they’d seen advertised on Freddie Fletcher’s wall at the PEN office.

‘Traffic division have taken a table — that’s how it works. You buy a table, then flog your tickets. I thought I’d go along, Thursday lunchtime, so we can see who Fletcher’s mates are. The Flask’s got a table, too.’

‘Enjoy,’ said Shaw, pushing his way through the doors into the autopsy suite, unhappy that the thought of the Shipwrights’ Hall lunch conjured up an image of turkey and gravy on Christmas morning, his father attacking the bird’s carcass with a carving knife.

There were three metal tables in the autopsy suite, all occupied. The rest of the room was metallic and cold, except for the stone walls and the single statue, left from the original chapel, of an angel high on the apex of the wall, its hands covering sightless eyes.

They moved to the first table. Shaw’s blood had begun to migrate to his heart, leaving his fingers cold, because on the brushed aluminium slab lay a tiny coffin, and beside it a shroud, wrapped — he guessed — around an infant’s body. He hadn’t been expecting this, and the tattered intimacy of the small bundle made him feel like a grave robber.

The pathologist carefully unwrapped the shroud to reveal the skeleton of a child wrapped in a second, rotten cloth.

‘We know the story — there’s nothing new to tell. I’ll do some toxicology but cot deaths were just as inexplicable then as they are now.’

‘It happens,’ said Valentine, unable to prevent his words sounding harsh and cynical.

Hardly any of the child-sized bones remained intact. That didn’t stop Shaw trying to clothe them in flesh, seeing the baby flexing its limbs in a cot. For the first time he thought that his gift, to see the flesh on bones, might be a curse as well as a blessing.

Kazimierz moved to the second mortuary table and uncovered the body of Nora Tilden: the skeletal frame stripped of the remnants of clothes and funeral wear, the bones held together by wire. Kazimierz put her hand on a brown blotched file at the head of the table. ‘These are the original records used at Albert Tilden’s trial,’ she said. ‘Everything is consistent: the leg bones are shattered, as is one arm, the collarbones, the lower spine.’ Shaw thought about the narrow steep staircase at the Flask. He thought of tumbling down, his limbs cracking against the wall, the wooden banisters. Sympathetic pains ran through his nervous system.

‘She’s not been disturbed in any way since burial?’ he asked.

‘Tom’s your man on that,’ she said. ‘But there are no breaks or fractures other than those listed.’ She looked at the bones, shaking her head. ‘No. I think she’s lain like this for twenty-eight years. There’s no soft tissue, so I can’t tell you anything else. But I’ve analysed the bones, and I can tell you one thing — she was suffering from osteoporosis.’

She picked a photograph out of the file of a woman, late middle age, greying hair tied back, a broad match for the one they’d got up in the incident room, but younger. ‘This is her,’ she said. In this photograph the lighting was better, so that it was possible to see the eyes, which were humourless, and the lips, too thin to support any kind of smile. But there was a hint of something else — an earlier beauty, perhaps; a delicate, rounded, childlike grace.

‘What age was she when the child was born?’ asked Shaw.

Kazimierz worked it out from the file. ‘Twenty — just.’

Shaw looked again at the face, trying to run it backwards in time, trying to retrieve the young mother who’d lost her first child after just a few weeks.

They moved to the corpse provisionally identified as Patrice Garrison.

‘I’ve extracted a sample of marrow for DNA analysis. Tom’s got the ID in hand. My initial summary of the cause of death stands. In fact, I can show you …’

She leant forward and lifted the top of the trepanned skull so that they could see into the brain cavity. Shaw couldn’t help noticing how at ease Kazimierz was dealing with the dead, and recalled how awkward she’d been the night before at the cafe, clutching her husband by the arm.

Shaw got close, but Valentine looked at the clock on the wall, concentrating on the shuddering second hand, thinking only of the clean metallic mechanism within.

‘You can see here,’ said the pathologist, ‘where the tip of the billhook curved right round through the brain and actually indented the inside of the right parietal bone.’

‘This would take force?’ asked Shaw. ‘A man — a powerful man?’

‘No. I don’t think you can make any such surmise. The physics of this are complex, Shaw. You’ve got a swinging blow with a curved weapon meeting a round object. It’s all luck. Catch it just right and you’d slice through the bone like butter. An inch to one side, a few seconds later, it would sheer off, leaving only a flesh wound.’

Shaw filed that detail in his memory, noting only that it clashed with the two etched green glasses, which had suggested a ritual: something planned and meticulous.

Kazimierz turned her back to fill in some paperwork on a lab bench, dismissing them without a word.

Hadden’s suite on the far side of the partition was empty, so Shaw pulled out from the wall a blackboard on hinges. Taking a piece of chalk from the runnel he wrote ‘Arthur Melville’ at the top, followed by Nora, then ‘Albert Tilden’ and their dates.

‘What’s this?’ asked Valentine. ‘Hi-tech policing?’

‘Just keeping it simple.’ Shaw drew the rest of the family tree. The result was starkly instructive, because it didn’t look like a family tree. ‘It’s like the old Norfolk joke,’ said Shaw. ‘Everyone in the village has got a family tree — it’s just that they don’t have any branches.’

Valentine put a Silk Cut between his lips.

Shaw underlined Nora Tilden’s name.

Valentine stood and drew circles around three others. ‘Three of them are black,’ he said. ‘Latrell — Bea’s husband, their son Patrice, who becomes our victim in Nora’s grave, and then his son Ian. Three generations.’

Shaw stubbed the chalk on Ian’s name, breaking it. ‘What do we know about him? This isn’t all about the past, is it, George? Because we know that someone was out there in Flensing Meadow digging up that grave just six months ago. Which transforms the inquiry — even Max Warren would have to admit that. Someone alive, someone with enough youth left to dig a four-foot hole after dark, someone who feared what we’d find in that grave.’

He stood back. ‘So perhaps it’s a family secret, and Ian knows what it is.’

Valentine checked his notebook. ‘Ian Murray. He’s twenty-seven. School at Whitefriars primary, just round the corner. Then Springwood High. Trained as a chef at the college. Works in the kitchens at the Flask lunch-times — then evenings and Sundays at Kirkpatrick’s — the posh wine bar on the quay. Holidays, days off — that’s Monday and Tuesday — he cooks up at Bea Garrison’s B amp;B. Single — girlfriend works at Kirkpatrick’s too. Name of Sharon Hare; she’s local as well. He lives at the Flask, in the attic.’

‘OK. We’ll catch him later. I fancy an oyster.’

Valentine pulled a face. He didn’t do wine bars.

Shaw checked his watch and chucked the chalk back in the runnel. Outside the green glass windows of the Ark the dusk was gathering, so that they could see a scattering of Christmas lights in the gloom decorating a crane. They’d got a second interview set with Sam Venn at the London Road Shelter in an hour. Freddie Fletcher had eluded them: he was either out or ignoring the hammering on his door. The owner of Tinos, the greasy spoon downstairs, said he often went out canvassing for hours. He could be anywhere on the street. Shaw had asked for a uniformed PC to stay on his doorstep. Twine had overnight orders to put most of the manpower on the door-to-doors in the morning, in and around the cemetery, because they needed to throw everything they had at trying to find out who had dug up Nora’s grave in the last few months.

Shaw felt good. The inquiry was humming now: efficient, logical and professional. They’d got their break — thanks to Tom Hadden’s brilliant forensic work. Now, Shaw sensed, Pat Garrison’s killer was no longer an insubstantial ghost from the past. Whoever it was, Shaw felt that soon he’d be able to reach out and touch them.