Death Toll Read online

  They heard footsteps through the drier grass up the bank, and for the first time the slight crunch of frost. Walking towards them, hauling a leather bag, was Justina Kazimierz. She didn’t say hello to anyone, simply put the bag down and opened it up, retrieving a set of forensic gloves and a mask. When Shaw had first met her he’d attributed her taciturn manner to the language barrier – she’d just arrived from Poland, via the Home Office. He’d been too kind. The pathologist didn’t do pleasantries, and didn’t suffer fools. Only once had Shaw seen her with her guard down in public, dancing with her diminutive husband at the Polish Club, drinking lighter-fuel vodka from a half-pint tumbler. But last summer she and her husband had moved out of town to a house on the coast near Shaw’s, and she often came past now, on long walks, circled by a Labrador. Always alone, and always with an ice-cream for his daughter. A friendship had begun, if you could build a friendship on so few words. She took less than a minute to scan the body. ‘I need him inside – quickly. Can we use the chapel?’

  She hadn’t looked at Hadden when she asked the question but he nodded.

  She tapped the coffin. ‘Wood’s in good condition – under water most of the time? Maybe.’ Even when she did talk to others she seemed to limit the conversation to a question-and-answer session with herself.

  ‘Unscrew the coffin lid, then slide the lid and the corpse into a body-bag,’ she said. ‘Then we’ll look inside.’ She stood back, waiting for her instructions to be carried out.

  ‘But from the general position of the body we’d conclude … ?’ asked Shaw.

  She sighed, circumnavigating the bones. ‘I’d guess – and that’s what it is, Shaw: a guess – that he was dead when he was thrown in the grave. The body twisted as it fell – hence the posture. That’ll have to do you for now, although I could say more about the wound.’

  She’d called him Shaw, although in private it was Peter now. She plucked the forensic glove from her right hand as they gathered behind the head.

  ‘The weapon was curved – you see?’ she said. ‘The blade is triangular in its cross-section. As it’s gone through the bone it’s exerted more pressure on the lower edge of the puncture wound – that’s why the cracks radiate from that point. So the weapon’s gone in, and then turned downwards through the brain, during the blow, so that there’s virtually no pressure on the two upward sides of the triangle. Very unusual – very distinctive.’

  ‘What are we looking for?’ asked Valentine.

  Dr Kazimierz straightened. ‘No idea. Don’t push me. A scythe would show the same pressures – but it’s not triangular, and it’s not this narrow. I need to get him back to the Ark. Ask me then.’

  The Ark was West Norfolk’s pathology and forensic laboratory, set in an abandoned nonconformist chapel on the ring road, close to police headquarters at St James’s. It was Tom Hadden’s kingdom, and housed the force’s own mortuary. Kazimierz was a consultant, working on contract, but she used an office at the Ark too, and West Norfolk provided most of her caseload. It was a haven for the pathologist, Shaw sensed, wherein logic and reason reigned.

  She pulled off the other forensic glove. ‘The lid?’

  Two of Hadden’s team arrived with a stretcher and a body-bag and set up another wooden trestle to take the lid and the skeleton when it was lifted clear. One of the forensics officers, a woman entirely encased in a white SOC suit, worked steadily round the coffin, unscrewing screws, easing them out of the wood.

  Shaw walked away, breathing in the freezing air. He thought about his father’s funeral, out at Gayton, and the family in a line like a firing squad by the grave. Beyond them, uniformed officers at attention, and under a cypress tree the whole of the CID from St James’s, most of them looking at their feet as the first spadefuls of earth were thrown in to thud on the coffin top. And with them, but a few yards apart, George Valentine, smoke drifting from a cigarette cupped in one hand.

  ‘One, two, and three …’ said Hadden. Shaw turned as they lifted the coffin lid. Valentine looked at his shoes. As the lid was being slipped into the body-bag Shaw glimpsed the pathologist tracing a hurried sign of the cross.

  Hadden pulled a spotlight over the now-open coffin. Long grey hair still clung to the skull revealed. Shaw noted the toothless jaws. ‘Well – an elderly woman?’ he asked.

  Kazimierz pulled her gloves back on, making them tight at the base of each finger. Shaw was shocked by the realization that the movement was a feint, a cover, to allow the pathologist to gather herself, and for the first time he noticed how much she’d aged in this last year – the year in which they’d become friends. Her face had always been heavy, flesh obscuring what had once perhaps been a precarious beauty. But now the skin looked wasted, hanging from the bones of her face.

  She took a piece of mouldered cloth from around the neck bone and a spider crept out from the shadow beneath the jaw, then scuttled back. Most of the bones were hidden beneath a velvet drape which had been folded over the body like a pair of rotting scarlet wings. On one fold of the drape, near the neck, was a silver brooch, two simple curved lines intersecting to form a fish. One hand, each finger intact, had been laid across the heart.

  The pathologist began to work at the edge of the drape with a gloved hand, trying to reveal the bones beneath.

  Shaw walked away and stood by the empty grave to look down. It was dark down there, an almost magnetic black. He hoped the victim had been dead when the killers had tossed him into the grave, but knew the real crime was the knowledge, the near certainty, that they probably didn’t care.

  ‘God.’ The word had come from the pathologist and as Shaw turned he saw the rapid supplication again, the hand moving swiftly in front of her face. She held her hands high, elbows down, like a surgeon. She’d parted the velvet drape and most of the bones beneath were broken, the left upper thigh, several of the ribs, the lower left arm – not just broken, but shattered, so that each was a jigsaw of fractures.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Valentine. ‘She’s in bits.’

  2

  Standing on the stone step of the cemetery chapel was DC Paul Twine, an iPhone glowing in his palm.

  ‘Sir,’ he said, nodding at Shaw, catching Valentine’s eye, then freezing when he saw what was behind them: the impromptu funeral procession climbing the rise, appearing out of the mist, led by forensics-team pall-bearers carrying the black body-bag, then the open coffin behind. The mist closed behind them like a liquid, as if they’d risen out of a lake.

  Twine had his free hand on a gravestone, propped up against the wall of the chapel. There was a line of them, perhaps thirty, each leaning on each like folded deckchairs.

  ‘This is our one …’ said Twine.

  MARY TILDEN

  Born 3 January 1948

  Died 13 February 1948

  Cruelly taken, too soon, to God’s abode

  NORA ELIZABETH TILDEN

  Born 8 February 1928

  Died 1 June 1982

  Loose the shoes from thy feet

  Shaw noted the stonemason’s single addition: the double strokes of the Christian fish symbol which had been on Nora Tilden’s shroud.

  ‘I ran the name through the system, sir,’ added Twine. ‘She’s got a file in records with a “V” number.’

  Shaw stopped in his tracks and studied Twine’s face. The DC had a ski tan and expensive skin and wore a body-warmer under a quilted jacket. Shaw had been on Paul Twine’s last two failed promotion boards and he recalled the CV: a philosophy student from Bristol with a mind like a Swiss watch, but in terms of life on the streets he didn’t know what time it was. But he’d already made a significant contribution to this inquiry: a ‘V’ number meant Nora Elizabeth Tilden was somewhere in the St James’s computer system because she’d been the victim of a serious crime. Her crushed bones, thought Shaw, were perhaps a testimony to that.

  ‘But 1982?’ said Valentine, knowing that records from that time were still on paper in the basement under police HQ. The only reference on the
computer would be the file number.

  ‘I’ve got someone on it,’ said Twine. ‘An hour – maybe less. Plus, I know someone down at the Lynn News …’ He held up his iPhone. ‘They’re tracking back through their computer archive. Might work. And the paperwork here gives us an address, sir – the Flask, the pub along the riverbank.’ He nodded to the north.

  Shaw looked again at the building he’d noticed when standing on top of the box tomb – the Gothic outline, floating over the mist, of the whalers’ inn.

  He led the way into the chapel through a door the shape of a church window. Within, coffins already exhumed by the council were laid out in military rows: six across, ten deep. Processed remains had been repackaged in small wooden ossuaries, stacked against one wall. On a set of three tables at the front skeletons had been laid out for examination.

  Twine explained, while using his thumb to text on the iPhone. ‘A team from St John’s in Cambridge are here doing a study on Victorian diseases – taking their chance, I guess. They’ve been examining the bones, measurements, density, chemical composition – that kind of thing. When they’re done the council boxes up what’s left. A Professor John G. Carstairs is leading the group. I’ve rung his home number but it’s on answerphone. I left a message, asking him to contact us.’

  Nora Tilden’s open coffin had been set on a table at the foot of the nave. Under the stark overhead lights it looked as if most of the woman’s bones had been fed through a car-cruncher: one ankle was just a collection of small shards, although the entire lower right leg had escaped destruction, as had the skull, and the spine above the middle back.

  ‘What are we looking at here?’ Dr Kazimierz asked herself. ‘A massive trauma of some kind, certainly – a car crash?’ She extracted a short length of bone which had broken and dropped into the ribcage. ‘Bones show some evidence of the early onset of osteoporosis – so they would have been brittle. Add a high-pressure impact and the skeleton effectively shatters, like a glass.’ She looked Shaw in the eye and they seemed to share the image, a bone exploding into shards.

  Shaw thought about the ‘V’ number – a hit-and-run victim? A passenger in a drink-driving case?

  The pathologist turned to the next table where they’d set down the coffin lid. Two of the forensic officers slipped the black bag away to reveal the skeleton. These bones were darker, still damp from the soil that had clagged the ribs and joints. The pathologist removed the skull and set it on a small plastic pillow she’d taken out of her bag, using a spirit level to angle it precisely. Beside the skull she laid a tape measure, a pair of calipers and a camera tripod.

  Shaw smiled, nodding.

  The pathologist straightened her back. ‘I presume you have made a preliminary examination yourself, Shaw?’

  ‘Sorry.’ He made a conscious effort to take any tuneful tone out of his voice, trying instead to hit a flat, matter-of-fact, note. ‘I didn’t think you’d welcome my thoughts before you’d taken a look.’

  Shaw couldn’t see Valentine, but he could feel him smiling.

  ‘So – why don’t you talk us through it?’ she asked, producing a digital camera from the black orchid bag and screwing it into a tripod holder. Stepping back, she poured a small cup of equally black tea from a Thermos, adding a dash of something colourless from a hip flask. She adjusted a wedding ring, which Shaw hadn’t noticed before. The invitation was an honour in itself, a recognition that the pathologist saw in Shaw’s skills as a forensic artist a professional complement to her own. It was also an invitation to fail, publicly.

  Shaw took a step towards a table the Cambridge team had been using to examine the exhumed remains and picked up a skull at random: tagged with a label which read XX 88/901 – M. He held the skull on the palm of his hand and lowered it until it was set beside the victim’s.

  ‘The shallow forehead in our victim is the most obvious point of difference. And here, around the jaws, the bones project forward, and there’s the eye sockets – that’s the real giveaway. In this labelled skull – in all these skulls, I suspect – the sockets are roughly triangular. But with our friend here, they’re essentially square, and set more broadly leaving this gap for the nose, which is set flat and wide. See?’

  Valentine did see, and he couldn’t stop himself nodding, fascinated.

  ‘He was almost certainly of African descent,’ said Shaw. ‘It’s not absolutely clear cut – the genetic pool’s complex. The teeth – for example, are large, but smaller than the stereotype would suggest. There’s some Caucasian influence …’ He stopped talking as one of the civilian staff from the St James’s mobile canteen came in with a tray of teas. Mugs were taken, then cradled.

  Kazimierz’s face simply registered her pleasure at the contents of her own cup. Shaw, forcing himself to be cautious, added a rider. ‘Picking race from bones is dodgy territory, but the signs are difficult to ignore.’

  She screwed the top back on the Thermos. ‘Bravo. African, indeed. Bone lengths are very pronounced as well – long arms relative to the skeleton. And the skull shape’s classic as you said – alveolar prognathism,’ she said, indicating the protruding lower jaw. ‘A big man, maybe six feet two.’ She ran the retractable tape measure along the femur. ‘Less – but not much. As you also observed – there’s some conflicting evidence. The teeth – yes. And the forehead is actually higher than you’d expect, given the prognathism.’

  ‘Should make him easy to find,’ said Valentine, stretching until one of the vertebra in his back gave way with a plastic thud. ‘If he was buried at the same time as the coffin in 1982 he’d have stood out like a spot on a domino round here. Peterborough, the East Midlands, loads of ’em – but Lynn …nah.’

  Valentine shifted feet, knowing he’d combined insensitivity with a dollop of non-PC language. He thought of Shaw’s daughter, playing on the beach at the CID summer picnic, her skin a subtle shade of butterscotch. In the awkward silence he edged a finger round the collar of his shirt, and pulled at the knot in his tie. One of the other things that really annoyed him about Shaw was that he never wore a tie: just a crisp white creaseless shirt, open at the neck.

  Dr Kazimierz began talking into a digital voice recorder that hung round her neck. ‘According to Mr Hadden and his team, the clothes on our coffin-lid victim here are right for the 1980s or late 1970s. Quality is good – possibly very good.’ She held up a shred of material, the original mercury red still visible. ‘In fact this shred – removed from the left side of the chest – is silk. I am entering it into the evidence.’ Rummaging in the black bag she found a batch of forensic envelopes and bagged the item.

  ‘And three further items,’ said the pathologist. ‘Which are from the area alongside the right hip, where a jacket pocket would have been.’ She lifted a wallet and a multi-bladed pocket knife, encrusted with mud, and a few coins, describing them as she did so.

  She placed the wallet on an evidence bag and briefly teased at the leather with her gloved fingers. She switched off the recorder and spoke to Shaw. ‘We have a wallet, leather, once black, pretty much rotten. Anything left inside? I doubt it. The leather will fall apart if I try to empty it here, so unless it’s a matter of life and death – literally – I’ll get this to the lab. Inspector?’

  Shaw nodded reluctantly. But he couldn’t argue with the judgement. This man had probably died more than two decades ago. Getting inside his wallet now rather than in six hours’ time was hardly a priority.

  ‘The coins all dated before 1982. Several from the 1970s. One 1969 shilling,’ she added, setting them out.

  She shone a pencil light on what looked like a shard of green glass embedded in clay next to the victim’s right leg. Using a bowl of water and a paint brush she gradually softened the clay, then let it dissolve. Gradually a broken glass began to appear. Below it was another – this time apparently unbroken. It took her a minute to work it clear, and when she held it to the light they could all see it was a Victorian-style tumbler, etched with an illustration of a
whale at sea being pursued by an open boat. The whale was exquisitely drawn, each flute engraved, as was the single staring eye of the whale, and there was a tense energy in the harpooner’s arm, ready to unleash his weapon from the small boat in which crowded a dozen hunters. In the background, on a still horizon, stood the distant mother ship, a frail outline of masts and rigging.

  The pathologist set the glass aside, and beside it the broken shards of its sister.

  Shaw and Valentine tried to see what might have happened: the victim offered a final drink? Or the killers, administering Dutch courage before the fatal attack – or a stiff drink to calm their nerves after it was over? But why bring glasses – why not drink from the bottle? It added, thought Shaw, an almost ceremonial detail.

  ‘What’s missing?’ asked Shaw, looking at the bagged items.

  Valentine bit his lip, trying to think. He’d been up in front of a promotion panel a week earlier and they’d turned him down. Senior officers needed more evidence that he was committed to the CID after a decade out in the sticks. So far tonight he hadn’t done his chances a lot of good. He took a breath, his shoulders aching with fatigue.

  Clarity under pressure was essential if progress was to be made in the first few hours of a murder inquiry, even one that had taken place nearly thirty years ago. ‘Keys,’ he said, with a flood of relief. ‘You’ve got a wallet, coins. You’d expect keys.’ He massaged his neck. ‘Either he didn’t need keys, or whoever dumped him took the keys first.’

  ‘Tom’s boys and girls will sieve the earth – every last ounce,’ said Shaw. ‘They might be in there. They’re heavier; perhaps they fell out of the pocket on the way down.’

  Kazimierz raised a gloved hand. ‘Or …’

  She was down on one knee, working away at the clay under the knee joint. Poking from the soil was a curve of metal, gleaming dully. It took her a minute, perhaps two, to work enough clear space to edge it out.