Death Toll

4

Monday, 13 December

Shaw and Valentine sat on identical straight-backed chairs in Detective Chief Superintendent Max Warren’s office. A single picture window gave a view over the rooftops to the church of St James — stark Victorian neo-Gothic, with a neon cross on the roof in lurid green, lit now, but only just visible in a light snow shower that looked like the fallout from a pillow fight. Out in the adjoining office DCS Warren was dictating a letter to his secretary: he’d be with them in a minute, he’d said, offering coffee, which they’d turned down. So they sat, each alone, despite being together. One wall of the office held a bookcase, Christmas cards crowded on the shelves. Shaw thought, not for the first time, what a depressing word ‘festive’ could be.

Shaw had his right leg crossed over his left to support a sketch pad. He’d spent an hour in the Ark the night before, after leaving the CID suite at St James’s. Dr Kazimierz had been finishing her preliminary report: she was happy for him to photograph the skull, as long as she was present. His forensic art kit was always on hand — stashed in the boot of his car. It included a tripod camera and a perspex stand on which the skull could be supported, then angled precisely to meet the Frankfurt horizontal plane — the internationally agreed angle of tilt which allowed for the uniform comparison of all skulls.

Even then, with just the bones set at the correct angle, he could see the face. He’d noted, for example, the asymmetry of the eye sockets, the left a few millimetres above the right, the narrow mastoid process on both the left and right sides of the skull, a formation that would have made the ears almost impossible to see fully from the frontal view. And the slight gap in the front teeth: a defect that would have been notable as part of the victim’s essential ‘lifelong look’ — the subtle alignment of features by which he would have always been recognizable to family and friends. The kind of facial feature everyone uses, often without thinking, to spot a loved one in an old snapshot.

Shaw had left St James’s at 2.00 a.m. with a complete set of digital images of the skull. He’d driven to the lifeboat house at Hunstanton, parked the car, then ran the mile along the sands to home in four minutes and forty-two seconds: six seconds slower than his average. The Beach Cafe’s security light had thudded on as he’d stepped up on to the wooden verandah. The cottage, to the rear in the dunes, had been in darkness, the shop boarded up out of season to protect it from the winter gales.

Letting himself into the cottage, he’d stopped for a second inside the closed door to smell the scents of home: pasta, paint, washing powder and — best of all — wood. He’d checked on his daughter Francesca, the terrier at the foot of her bed only raising its old head as Shaw looked in. He’d left Lena to sleep and taken a shower. In the bathroom, on the window ledge, had been a line of pillboxes he hadn’t seen before: he’d counted them — eight, each marked with the logo of the local allergy clinic. He’d let the water run down his skin, washing away the day, until he’d felt clean.

Dry, in shorts and a T-shirt, he’d unlocked the door that led to the cafe down the short connecting corridor they’d built between the two buildings. Reflections from the cafe’s neon lights would have concealed the view outside, so he’d used the small light above the counter, then fired up the Italian coffee machine. Through the windows he’d just been able to see the ghostly white lines of the waves breaking out on the far sands, snow clouds beginning to blot out the moon.

Booting up the laptop, he’d scanned in the pictures from the camera, then printed them out at precisely life-size. He’d taped up two of the pictures on an easel retrieved from the deckchair store, and illuminated them using an anglepoise lamp from the office, then stood back with his coffee to study them.

He’d covered the two images on the easel with sheets of tracing paper and opened his copy of Rhines Tables: the standard set of multiples which would allow him to put flesh on bones. Then he’d worked on each set of features using Krogman’s Rule of Thumb to add fleshy details not dictated by skull structure — the mouth set at six teeth wide, the angle of the nose extrapolated from the nasal spine. He’d modified the rules, using some educated guesses based on the mixed ethnicity — for example he’d set the nose at 16mm wide compared to the standard 10mm for Caucasians. He’d made the eyes dark in the black-and-white image, but left the hair indistinct, reduced to just a few pencil lines. The pathologist had considered the clothing to be of good quality, so Shaw presumed a healthy weight, and he’d taken her guesstimate of the age at between twenty and twenty-five.

He’d been brushing in the tonal shadows, adding art to the science, when Lena had wandered down the connecting corridor and stood at the door in a short silk nightdress the colour of antique silver. They’d kissed and stood back from the easel, Shaw holding her waist close, so that he could feel their hips touching.

‘A brother,’ she’d said, and they’d laughed. Lena’s own skin was darker than the tone he’d chosen for the victim: Jamaican brown, though not so lustrous as it would be in the summer months, when it picked up a distinct bronze tint.

‘The pills — in the bathroom?’ he’d asked, looking her in the eyes, one of which had a slight cast.

‘Oh, yeah — for Fran. We’ve got to try each one — see what she’s allergic to. One a week.’

Their daughter had been allergic to milk at birth — but the reactions, once violent, had dimmed over time. Then, suddenly, the previous September, she’d had a full-blown anaphylactic reaction to a pot of yoghurt.

‘It’s the milk — right?’ asked Shaw, aware that there was too much aggression in his voice, which betrayed the guilt he felt for being absent that day, out on a case. No — that was self-delusion, out on the case, his father’s last, unsolved, murder inquiry, the case that seemed to run through his life like letters through seaside rock.

‘No, Peter, it isn’t the milk,’ said Lena, failing to hide her anxiety. ‘She still has a slight sensitivity to it but now there’s something else, probably something benign, and when you put the two together you get the reaction we got. So it’s milk plus X. We just don’t know what X is. It could be anything in the yoghurt I gave her. Flavourings, colourings — the usual stuff. So we’re trying them out. Till we find out, she has to keep off real milk. It’s back to soya and rice substitutes.’

Her shoulders had sagged and Shaw had guessed she was thinking about the first few months of Fran’s life — the endless vigilance required to make sure a small child didn’t ingest anything containing milk.

He hugged her too hard. ‘OK.’

‘Handsome,’ she’d said then, nodding back at the picture. ‘Innocent.’

‘Interesting word,’ said Shaw, adding shadow beneath the broad chin. ‘Why innocent?’

‘It’s a presumption — the dead are innocent, aren’t they?’

They’d chatted for a while over fresh coffees before going to bed. An hour together before the day began. When Shaw had walked back into the cafe to retrieve the sketches at dawn he’d stopped six feet from them, aware that he’d recreated someone who had once been alive. The face of this man who had died so violently looked at him over the twenty-eight years separating that last terrifying moment from this one.

‘All you need is a name,’ said Shaw out loud. Then he’d held out his hands, as if pleading before a jury, laughing at himself. ‘And justice.’

And now, sitting in Max Warren’s office, he looked again at the sketch. The adrenaline of the murder inquiry had dispelled all tiredness, despite the lack of sleep, but he did feel that nauseous buzz, his blood rushing with the effects of several doses of strong coffee.

He handed the frontal view to Valentine, who took it, then held it out at arm’s length.

‘Get it out for me, George. Usual suspects — TV, radio, Lynn News. We’ll give it twenty-four hours and if nothing bites, let’s go for posters — five hundred will do.’

Valentine pushed his bottom lip forward. ‘Reckon the Old Man will pay up? Posters cost a fortune.’

In the outer office Max Warren was finishing his dictation.

‘He won’t know until it’s too late,’ said Shaw, flicking over the sketch pad to work on the side view.

Valentine rubbed his eyes, feeling a gritty resistance. He hadn’t slept after leaving St James’s either. It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted to — he’d walked into South Lynn by the towpath until he’d reached the ruins of Whitefriars Abbey, then turned into the network of streets in which he’d been born, married and widowed, and where he still lived. The cemetery in which they’d found their victims that night was less than half a mile away. He’d considered returning there, but thought better of it. Instead, he’d walked to the church of All Saints and stood before his wife’s headstone:

JULIE ANNE VALENTINE

1955–1993

Asleep

The stone was mottled with moss and the inscription partly obscured by the charity lapel stickers he’d stuck on it. He added wood green animal shelter, thinking how, like him, she’d hated dogs. It always annoyed him, that cloying euphemism — Asleep. He wondered who’d chosen it, because it hadn’t been him. But then he’d walked through her death, and the funeral, as if it had all been happening to someone else.

On the corner of Greenland Street he’d stopped outside an old shop. His house was in sight, but he often lost the will to go home at this precise point. The old shop’s double doors were glass and curved gracefully. Within was a second door, with a fanlight, from which shone a green light. And a sign hung from a hook up against the glass. Chinese characters, but ones that Valentine could pronounce.

Yat ye hoi p’i

The game is on, the game is open

He’d looked up and down the street, then knocked twice and waited; then twice again. A man had quickly opened the door, and Valentine had slipped in like a cat. Inside, enveloped in the scented warmth, the man they called the sentinel had taken his raincoat. Valentine had held on to his wallet, keys and mobile. The den was on three floors, but he always went down to the basement for fan-tan. He’d taken a glass of tea from the pot set on a table in the hall — there was no alcohol at the house on Greenland Street — and that suited him well, because he’d always liked to enjoy his vices serially.

In the basement room were a dozen men sitting on high stools around the gambling table. There was a room to one side for smoking, but Valentine never went over the threshold.

On the table he’d bought?60 worth of chips and put?5 on the number 2. The dealer had swirled a pile of golden coins and covered them with an ornamental lid. Then the sharing out began — in little collections of three — until only three or fewer were left. On the table sat two coins. Valentine had picked up his winnings and bet again — this time on 1. An hour later he’d won?30. He’d taken a break, going upstairs to drink more tea, then returning to stand on the edge of the circle of light which blazed down on the fan-tan table. His bladder had been aching so he’d slipped out of the basement door into the yard. There had been ice in the toilet pan, and as he’d stood there he’d felt that his life was raw, and that he’d never wanted it to be like that — he’d sought warmth, but it had been denied him.

He’d cashed his winnings and walked out into the street, the snow falling steadily now, muffling the noises of the town at night. Sleep had become a distant dream. He’d walked briskly past his house. In the next street there had been a single light in the bedroom of number 89 — his sister Jean’s. He didn’t see her much. He told himself he didn’t like her husband, but the real reason was that she was an echo of his past, because she’d been a good friend to Julie, and so a reminder of what might have been. But he found the light comforting because he liked to know she was still here, in the streets where they’d all grown up.

He’d walked on down to the quayside. Greyfriars Tower provided the only light in the sky, a lighthouse in a gentle snowstorm. He’d checked his watch: 2.30 a.m. The St James’s canteen opened at 5.30 a.m. and the thought of a cooked breakfast made him feel better about the day to come. He’d zigzagged towards the tower through the Old Town, past the Jewish Cemetery where the fine blown snow lay in the chiselled Hebrew inscriptions. When he’d reached St James’s he’d taken the curved steps two at a time and breezed past the front desk, where the duty sergeant had nodded once before returning his attention to the previous day’s Daily Mail.

He’d gone back to his desk in the open-plan CID room and swung open the window to smoke. Then he’d flicked through a shelf of reference books until he’d found what he was looking for …Old Lynn — A Social History.

The Flask appeared once in the index.

Of South Lynn’s whaling past, little is left except in the street names. The dockside for the whaling fleet was on Blubber Creek, now just a grassy, reedy, inlet off the Nar, opposite the end of Explorer Street. The only physical reminder of this once lucrative trade is the Flask — the pub named for one of the fleet’s most famous ships. The building is much altered but the main structure is still the timber-framed inn set up on the edge of the flensing grounds in 1776, possibly on an older site. It very soon fell into the hands of the Melville family — wealthy merchants who had moved south from Boston, Lincolnshire. Originally called the Jetty, the pub was renamed to mark the?6,000 profit made by the Flask when she returned to port at the end of the whaling season in 1848. Court records show that an action was brought against the Melville family because of the stench of blubber boiling in the vats on open ground for more than six weeks as the eleven ‘fish’ aboard were rendered. In 1885 the building was renovated after one wall collapsed in a storm. In the 1950s the pub became famous as one of the last outposts of the sea shanty. Local choirs were recorded — preserving for posterity Lynn’s unique tradition of whaling songs. Ralph Vaughan Williams came to the pub on several occasions in the summer of 1947. Several of the songs Vaughan Williams recorded in his notebook were to reappear in his later works: particularly A Sea Symphony and Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1. In 1976 the neighbouring houses were demolished, leaving the building to stand alone with the help of steel buttresses. In the 1980s the Arts Council funded further recordings of the Whitefriars Choir. A documentary film was produced in 1993 and shown on Anglia TV — called The Song of the Sea.

Valentine had checked the date of publication: 1995.

He’d stood, stretching, wishing it was dawn. Shaw’s office was to one side, behind a glass partition. On the desk Valentine had spotted a set of forensics reports. He’d let himself in, sat in Shaw’s seat and flicked through them. There was no new relevant information from Hadden’s team — just a set of pictures of the evidence removed from the victim’s clothing, including a single shot of the pocket knife, opened out to reveal all the blades and tools. There was a handwritten note from one of Hadden’s assistants to say that the wallet was in a precarious condition and would have to be dried in a vacuum before any attempt was made to prise it open.

Valentine had seen Twine using a Swiss Army knife to cut open a package in the CID room a week earlier so he’d gone to the young DC’s desk and slipped open the top drawer. The knife, glinting, had caught the light. But it wasn’t a match to the one in the grave, although that was clearly a forerunner of the modern iconic model.

Back at his own desk he’d gone online and found the home page for Victorinox, the makers of the Swiss Army knife. He clicked the ‘History’ link. The knife was first produced for the Swiss military in the late nineteenth century after it was discovered that its men were being supplied with German-made models. In an ironic twist, by the time of the Second World War German soldiers were carrying them because they were so much better than the ones with which they were issued. American infantrymen — obsessed with collecting souvenirs on the long march from the D-Day landings to Berlin — would often pick the pockets of their dead enemies. The knives they collected were taken back to the US and fired up the market for what became known as the Swiss Army knife. There was a picture of one of the wartime knives, and it was a direct match for the one retrieved from the cemetery.

Valentine had smiled, thrown open the window and enjoyed another Silk Cut. Lynn had plenty of GI connections — there were two US air bases within twenty miles, and during the war one of Lynn’s cinemas — the Pilot — had been a popular haunt for GIs and local girls. He’d retrieved the social-history book and found a picture of the Pilot: couples in a queue along the pavement, the GIs in smart uniforms, all smoking, the girls — some of them — daringly cheek-to-cheek with black partners.

The only problem was the age of the victim: between twenty and twenty-five in 1982. But then he looked again at those couples cheek-to-cheek, and thought about the children to come.