‘But there’s two other corpses with no apparent link to your amorous driver,’ countered Shaw. ‘One on the beach — and then a few hours later our friend out on Styleman’s Middle.’
Hadden’s team had recovered the body from the sands an hour before full tide slipped over his grave. No forensic evidence had been found at all on the sands: no sign of
The Mazda’s heater was pumping out warm dust into the car and Valentine sneezed, prompting a series of metronomic sniffs which Shaw tried hard to ignore.
The clock at St Margaret’s on the Tuesday Market struck the hour and they got out, ducking through the snow towards the chapel’s double doors. Inside they pushed open a heavy perspex hinged screen into the main body of the old chapel. A low metal partition divided the room, continuing in glass up to the vault of the wooden roof. The windows spilt underwater light into the echoing space. The floor at this end was the original parquet, polished to reflect the stained glass, and on it stood three rows of lab tables, centrifuges, a computer suite, and a small conference area to one side beside a bank of sinks along one wall. Tom Hadden’s team ‘hot?desked’, so there were no offices as such. A filter coffee machine coughed its way to the end of its cycle and Dr Justina Kazimierz emerged from the area beyond the partition to refill her cup. Valentine was already at the machine, helping himself. The pathologist worked on contract with the West Norfolk force but she’d been on enough cases in the last ten years for the Ark to have become a second home.
‘Tom’s back out at Ingol Beach,’ she said. ‘If you want coffee, help yourself,’ she added pointedly, but Valentine just sipped noisily from the mug.
Shaw saw that here, on familiar ground, she moved lightly, reminding him of her canteen dance. She led them into the second room beyond the partition. A single stone
Shaw could see a foot showing on the nearest table and he thought the stone angel’s flesh had a more appealing colour. Valentine gulped coffee, the shock of the caffeine failing to overcome his anxiety at being in the mortuary. He didn’t like death, it marked the end of the game, the moment when there was nothing left to gamble with, let alone on.
Their footsteps grated on the concrete floor, which was criss?crossed with aluminium gutters so that the room could be sluiced. Each dissection table was in polished steel. Mobile surgical lights provided an almost unbearable blaze of electricity over each occupied table, driving away shadows where shadows should be.
Dr Kazimierz leant on one of the tables, her weight on one leg, the other shoe raised behind her so that she could tap the concrete with the toe.
‘OK. I said I’d walk you through what we’ve got. That was before the latest on Styleman’s Middle. So I’ve got even less time than I thought. I’ll start the internal autopsies with the first victim tonight — bit later than I thought — seven thirty. Be prompt.’
‘We appreciate it,’ said Shaw.
‘Right. Let’s start with the latest, shall we? Not much to say.’ She swished a plastic sheet back from the first table. The man from Styleman’s Middle had been unfolded,
‘So no prizes,’ she said, sliding on forensic gloves. ‘A blow to the head here…’ She placed both hands on the skull, turned it to one side, revealing the bruised wound. Shaw’s stomach shifted at the plastic sound of a click from the neck. Valentine took a step back. ‘This would have resulted in unconsciousness certainly — perhaps for several hours,’ she said. ‘Weapon? Wound’s odd — considerable force, but a cushioned effect. A blunt instrument wrapped in something, perhaps — or a rubber mallet, one of those you use to knock in tent posts? The prints are difficult to lift because of the saturation of the skin — but I’ve got a set. We’ll check them on records. Clothes are expensive. The polo shirt is interesting — it appears to be much older than the trousers, shorts, socks. Tom can do some more work on that. I’d say 1970s. The badge on the collar is Royal Navy.’
‘Just that,’ said Shaw. ‘Not a ship?’
‘No — just the badge.’
Shaw looked at the face, trying to memorize the features. The neatly layered hair, the unblemished skin, the fine bones, the unscarred fingers, the burnless tan. He might have been handsome, he’d certainly had money. Royal Navy — that rang a bell, a ship’s bell, but he couldn’t place it.
‘Other than being dead he’s a healthy specimen,’ added the pathologist. ‘He’s taken a whack around the liver, but nothing too serious. We’ll need to get the lungs out to be
Dr Kazimierz went to move on.
‘Can you get me a set of shots?’ asked Shaw. ‘Black and white, frontal?’
She filed the request in her head, then let the lab assistant who’d been working at one of the computer screens draw the plastic sheet back over the body. Shaw liked the gesture, a nod to the value of life, even when someone had succeeded in brutally destroying it with a single blow.
‘This is much more interesting,’ said the pathologist, her fingers interlaced, then free, then laced again.
The corpse from the child’s raft was as pallid as it had been when Shaw had dragged it ashore on Ingol Beach. The shadow of a tan perhaps, but one that had faded since an English summer. He lay as if asleep, the white sheet drawn up halfway across the chest, both arms extended down and over the plastic. A crusader, laid to rest in stone. Shaw had noted the muscular physique on the beach, but here, under the laboratory’s unforgiving lights, it was even more apparent that this man’s body may well have been his business. The shoulders were wide and muscle tissue largely obscured the angle where the neck met the flesh of the shoulder blades.
Dr Kazimierz stood, contemplating the face, a smile on her lips.
‘You’ve got a passport?’ said Shaw. ‘Prints?’
She touched a small metal cabinet where a red light winked. ‘The paper’s virtually disintegrated so Tom’s
Shaw studied the face of the victim again. The hair was black and thick, dark stubble on the chin and neck, blood vessels broken in the nose and cheeks. The brown eyes were flat and fish?like, the nails on the fingers and feet grimy despite the scrubbed skin. There was a signet ring on the right hand. A black stone with a carved surface. Shaw bent closer, trying to see it clearly.
‘It’s the figure of a man,’ said the pathologist. ‘With a dragon’s tail.’
‘Chinese?’ asked Valentine. He sniffed, aware that some chemical in the room was attacking his sinuses. The presence of the corpses on the mortuary tables was making it difficult for him to think. He needed something inanimate to focus on. The pathologist slipped the ring off the finger and dropped it in a metal dish. Valentine prodded it with a wooden spatula.
‘You’ll get a picture of it, ‘ said Kazimierz.
‘Cause of death?’ asked Shaw, turning back to the body.
Beside the table stood a spot lamp and a large magnifying glass mounted on a flexible arm. ‘Here.’ She lit the lamp by switch and poised the glass over the wound on the arm. ‘It’s a match for his teeth, by the way, so it is his bite.’
Shaw and Valentine leant in together, the DS retreating just in time to avoid a collision.
Two interlocking sets of teeth marks — the top and bottom sets — had come together to lift the skin. The wound was an inch deep at its heart, revealing the muscle
Shaw was unsettled that he’d missed it at the time. ‘And here,’ said the pathologist, resetting the lamp and glass.
Another little colony of pustules, perhaps six inches from the wound, further up the arm.
Shaw saw again the toxic yellow oil drum and readjusted the dressing on his eye. ‘A burn — chemicals?’
She shrugged and took a phial from her lab coat. A few drops of an almost colourless liquid, perhaps slightly blue, lay within. ‘I got this out of the wound and we did run all the industrial tests… but it turns out to be organic. Analysis of the organs may give us more. I’ve got some samples from the drum for comparison and we’ll run it through the spectrometer. But my guess is it won’t be a match. Do you know what I think this is?’
They shook their heads like schoolchildren.
‘Venom.’
‘A bite, then,’ said Shaw. ‘And he knew, didn’t he? So he tried to suck it out, stop it getting into his bloodstream.’ He imagined the pain, the panic which would make a man drive his own teeth into his flesh. ‘From what?’
‘Certainly nothing native to the British Isles. There are two small fang marks at the centre of the lesion, so I’d say a snake. But which one? That’s more difficult.’
‘Are there any databases for this sort of thing?’
