Death Watch

The Ark stood just off the inner ring road, a broad avenue of swirling carbon monoxide and dusty plane trees which bypassed the medieval town centre. A former Nonconformist chapel, it had been converted into the West Norfolk Constabulary’s forensic laboratory in the nineties. Like most of the town’s Victorian red-brick buildings it seemed to suck up the heat on a summer’s day, its simple architectural lines buckling slightly in an exhaust-induced mirage. Shaw parked the Land Rover at St James’s and they walked across for their appointment with the pathologist, Dr Justina Kazimierz.

Inside the Ark the light was sea-green, filtered in through the original Victorian glass. The rectangular box-like nave – the origin, with its simple pitched roof, of the building’s nickname – was divided by a metal partition six feet high. Beyond was the pathologist’s lab: a small morgue, six dissecting tables, and the only piece of the original statuary to remain in the building – a stone angel, set on the wall, its hands covering its face. On this side of the partition was Tom Hadden’s kingdom – six ‘hot-desk’ PC stations, two lab tables bristling with racks of test-tubes, and an array of forensic kit. Along one wall, running through the partition, was a heavily lagged horizontal chute – a closed shooting gallery for the

Hadden sat at a desk, a laptop open, the screen saver a flock of marsh birds over a Norfolk beach.

‘Toy shop’s open, then,’ said Shaw.

‘Justina’s ready,’ Hadden said, closing his eyes, as he always did when he was thinking. ‘Then I’ve got something for you. You’ll like it – not all of it – but some.’

Dr Kazimierz pushed her way through a pair of barroom doors, topped up a mug of coffee, and retreated without a word.

They followed her through. The blackened corpse of Bryan Judd lay on the central autopsy table. To one side a white sheet covered another corpse – two limbs partially visible: a foot, the veins marbled blue, and an arm and hand, fallen to one side and outwards, as if the victim were signalling a left turn.

Dr Kazimierz saw Shaw’s interest. ‘That’s the floater. One of Rigby’s.’ Dr Lance Rigby was a former Manchester pathologist who had retired to the north Norfolk coast to be close to his boat. He picked up routine cases, private work, and consultancy. Dr Kazimierz had expressed the view to Shaw at the St James’s CID Christmas party that she knew several high-street butchers who were better qualified pathologists.

Something had caught Shaw’s eye. He knelt by the hand. The skin around the wrist was rucked, red, and showed the distinct imprint of a band of some sort. ‘Watch?’ he asked.

‘Maybe,’ said Kazimierz, refusing to quit her position

Shaw looked again. It didn’t look as if a watch strap had made the mark.

He put the detail aside and joined them. A mortuary assistant fussed, setting out instruments on an aluminium side-table. Valentine found himself a spot to one side where he could see Judd’s corpse, but where he could also see the clock which had been fixed on the chapel wall. He concentrated on the second hand, the juddering, metronomic movement. If he felt sick he’d look at this, thinking about the clockwork within, imagining the interleaving cogs, clean, crisp, and inhuman.

‘So – externals first,’ said the pathologist. She tapped the teeth with a metal tweezer. ‘Perfect match, by the way, for Judd’s dental records – so there’s no doubt, if there ever was any.’

She’d reconstructed the broken skull – as neat as a child’s jigsaw in 3D, held together with a plastic glue, clearly showing the small puncture-hole depression at the rear towards the apex of the spine.

‘This is an impact point,’ she said. ‘Don’t ask me what – I can’t tell. Tom says you’ve got a ball-head switch? Well, I couldn’t rule that out. But that’s as far as I’ll go.

‘One surprise is this…’ She had a large magnifying lens on a tripod which she positioned over the chest. The blackened skin was taut, but just below the collarbone on the left side was a small hole. She worked the tweezers into the wound. ‘I need to cut through the tissue here to

‘Knife?’

‘Yes. Maybe. But it’s not a traditional kitchen knife, or a switchblade. The point is very narrow, almost like an épée – the heavier of the fencing weapons. So something very sharp, and narrow. It’s not fatal – that’s the skull wound, then the furnace. But it’s traumatic. His blood pressure would have collapsed pretty quickly if it severed any major arteries.

‘Now for inside.’ She began work, opening up the abdomen to gain access to the principal organs. While the exterior of the corpse had been sucked dry of any moisture the chest cavity had survived largely intact. The sound of trickling body fluids was set against the swish of cars on the ring road outside.

‘I’ve tested the blood,’ said Kazimierz. ‘We’re talking high levels of alcohol – twice the limit for driving, plus cannabis.’

‘Really?’ said Shaw. ‘Ingested when?’

She spilt the contents of the stomach into a metal bowl. ‘Here’s the culprit,’ she said, drawing off a sample by pipette from the pool of vivid green liquid. She removed a length of intestine and, effecting a precise longitudinal incision, examined the contents.

‘Well – it’s mostly still in the stomach. Let’s say eighty per cent – with the rest in the small intestine. There’s nothing in the colon…’ She held a length of large intestine up to the light and Valentine watched the second hand of the clock judder.

‘So – two hours maximum.’

‘We’re saying he was dead by the time he went in?’ asked Valentine, switching tack, trying to see what had happened beyond the technical jargon. He risked a glance at the blackened canines.

‘Yes. Or past saving. The lungs…’ She used her gloved hands to spread out the tissue on a metal drainage board. ‘The lungs have some toxic contents, I would say – but we need to test for that. There’s a tiny bit of inhalation from inside the furnace. Ash – as hot as any ash in any fire. He’d have taken half a breath, maybe less. The heat has scorched the tissue.’

Shaw imagined being half-conscious for that excruciating second as the body jerked along the incinerator belt, then in through the opening to the furnace. Darkness, then heat, with a soundtrack out of hell.

‘Hell,’ said Valentine, seeing the same image.

Dr Kazimierz removed the major organs and trepanned the skull, setting what was left of the brain in a glass dish. In another thirty-five minutes she was done. Valentine led the dash back to the coffee machine. As they turned away Shaw caught the movement in the pathologist’s right hand. A sign of the cross.

She followed them back to her desk on the far side of the partition and speed-read a page of handwritten notes.

She nodded once at Shaw, then at Tom Hadden. ‘That’s it.’ She turned away without another word.

Hadden sipped a cup of espresso from the Italian coffee-maker on the desktop. ‘No joy on the snapped match, I’m afraid. Dry as bone. I thought we’d get some saliva if he held it in his teeth, but no go.’

On Hadden’s desk lay an evidence bag holding the torch they’d found beside the hubcap ashtray. ‘Bad news first. I’ve checked MVR online and it’s not a company. We’re talking to the manufacturers of the torch – they’re Finnish.’

That was a detail Shaw liked, so he filed it away.

‘But it’s the dust on the torch itself that’s interesting…’ He touched a key on his laptop and the screen filled with a microscope shot. A mass of fibre, unspeakable horror-movie bugs, chips of material.

‘It’s smeared in this stuff. This is it at ten thousand. All dust is different – like a fingerprint. This sample is very low on human tissue – skin and the like. It’s very high on two things…’

He brought up another shot. ‘This is some kind of fibre – man made, like a polythene. I don’t know, maybe wrapping or packaging of some sort. And this…’

The third shot. Splinters of something red.

‘It’s wood dust – sawdust. But really, really, fine. But it’s the wood that’s odd – Muirapiranga. Bloodwood. A South

‘Right,’ said Shaw. Another detail that didn’t fit. Or did it? He thought of Father Thiago Martin, an exile from Brazil. He’d get Twine to organize a background check on the priest.

‘Other results…’ Hadden flipped a file. ‘The blood on the conveyor is Judd’s – and his alone. The rice you found at the Sacred Heart of Mary is a match for the grains at the scene. But it’s a standard import long-grain variety from the US – Tesco stocks it. Cash ’n’ carry warehouses too. So it helps, but I wouldn’t dream of taking it into court. And we’re still struggling with the waste in the bag under the body. Another twenty-four hours – maybe less. Oh, and I’ve sent the milk bottle away – the one from the electricity sub-station. There’s a trace of saliva round the neck.’

Shaw thought of Andy Judd in his alpha male’s armchair, the pint of milk empty by his foot.

Hadden smiled, as rare a sight as one of his beloved Ospreys. ‘Where we did strike lucky, however, was with this.’ Hadden scrolled through his image file on the laptop until he reached a picture of the metal seat they’d found on the balcony by the hubcap. ‘This was covered with Judd’s prints – and those of his colleagues who cover the other two shifts. But there was a print that didn’t match – and it was on top of Judd’s… It was very

Valentine whistled, delighted that wasn’t going to be his job.

‘Anyway, once we’d got it, I ran it through the database Twine’s set up of all prints taken in the case so far. Suspects, witnesses, victim. I got a direct match.’ He let them sweat for a full second. ‘It’s Aidan Holme’s.’

Valentine clapped once, and started searching for a Silk Cut. At last, a solid piece of forensics which put one of their prime suspects on the spot. Shaw let his naturally contrarian nature kick in, because that single print proved only that Aidan Holme had been there. It didn’t prove he was a killer. But then he told himself that a break was a break and he should be thankful for that.

‘Let’s hope Holme lives,’ he said.