scar on her throat — an eight-inch knife wound from ear to collarbone — was a livid blue. She’d received a Police Bravery Award for trying to disarm a man with a knife who had been determined to take his own life. She’d put the medal in a box, but she’d wear the scar for ever.
‘Sir. You wanted to talk to the gravediggers?’ she asked, shuffling a handful of papers. ‘All gravedigging was done by the council’s Direct Labour Unit until five years ago. Now it’s contracted out to a private outfit, but it’s the same people doing the digging. There’s a hut …’
Shaw let her lead the way. Shrugging on a full-length overcoat, she pushed open the door of the old chapel and walked out into the mist. She hunched her shoulders a bit more once they were out in the cold. The damp was extraordinary this close to the river. Droplets covered Campbell’s coat like sequins. They walked together away from the chapel on a slowly curving path edged with savagely pruned rose bushes. In the folded silence of the mist they could hear the forensic team still working down by Nora Tilden’s grave, the sharp metallic tap of a tool striking a pebble preternaturally clear.
‘Anything from Tom?’ asked Shaw. This was the third major inquiry Shaw had led with this team and they’d learned the value of sharing information within a tight-knit circle. He was confident DC Campbell would be up to speed.
‘No — nothing. Paul says everything the Cambridge team has found so far has been
Soon a stand of pine trees came into view, shielding a set of ramshackle outbuildings lit by a security light that struggled to penetrate the fog. A Portakabin door opened, letting a cat slip out, its black fur bristling. They caught a thin blast of a radio tuned to Classic FM. A man appeared on the threshold in a Day-Glo yellow workman’s jacket, tipping out a coffee mug.
‘Hey up,’ he said over his shoulder. He stood aside to let Shaw and Campbell into the single room. It had no windows, only air vents that did little to disperse the fug of heat and burning paraffin from the enclosed space. A single neon tube provided scant illumination.
Shaw closed the door and leant against it while Campbell took the one vacant seat. The room was chaotic. Against one wall stood a row of metal lockers. There was a table around which three men sat, a bench holding a kettle and mugs, and a gas ring attached to a fuel bottle. Waves of heat rolled out of an industrial paraffin heater. The floor was crowded with tools, coats, stuffed black bin-liners, here and there split to reveal the rubbish inside them. The space the men occupied was reduced to where they sat. The metal walls were damp with condensation, their only adornment a calendar, curled so much that Shaw could see only the girl’s face, a fake smile failing to mask her boredom.
‘This won’t take long,’ said Shaw, addressing them all. ‘You’ll know what we’ve found — a body on top of a coffin, sharing a grave it had no right to be in. So I need to know the usual procedure before and after a funeral.’
The three men looked at each other and the youngest, who drank from a tin of Red Bull, began to fiddle with a roll-up machine and a tin of Golden Virginia. ‘Yeah, procedure,’ he said. ‘Got to follow the rules.’
The man in the Day-Glo jacket, who appeared to be in charge, introduced himself simply as ‘Michael’ and said he’d been working in the town’s cemeteries for thirty years — first at Gayton and now Flensing Meadow — and the routine for a burial was unchanged. The council had set down procedures, as had their union — and everyone was a member.
They all nodded at that, the youngster licking his roll-up.
‘Mind you,’ said Michael, ‘the crew they’ve got in to move the bones off the riverside, they’re not union — just cheap labour. No rules for them.’
‘Scabs,’ said the kid with the Red Bull.
‘Right,’ said Shaw. ‘I see. But the normal procedure for burial …’
Michael composed himself. First thing on the day of the funeral the grave was dug by two men. Nine feet by four feet, he said. If the grave was for one coffin then it was five feet deep — allowing the statutory three feet of clearance above. One of the men operated the mechanical digger, the other set down duckboards for access to the graveside. In the days before the digger it took two men two hours to dig by hand. The union had managed to keep it a two-man job — but only on safety grounds. With one man on the digger, there had to be a standby in case of accidents.
In poor weather a shelter could be set over the open grave to stop flooding.
They all laughed, but it was the third man, who hadn’t spoken until then, who said, ‘Useless — they’re all wet here. Every one. Down with a splash.’ He was in his mid-twenties, with hair prematurely slate grey; handsome, but when he told Shaw his name was Dan he revealed broken teeth.
‘Then we cover the grave with a board,’ said Michael, nodding back down the shadowy room to the far end where they could see a set of reinforced wooden panels. ‘These days we put artificial turf at the edges and lay some over the spoil. The pall-bearers arrange the floral tributes on the turf. Some mourners scatter earth in — or throw a flower, that kind of thing. Since Diana, all sorts goes on.’
The three of them nodded at this truth.
‘We fill the grave in at the end of the service. We don’t rush people, but some days it’s busy. So we keep an eye out; then, when the mourners leave, we fill in the grave — usually with the digger again. Takes ten minutes.’
‘But you always wait?’ asked Campbell.
‘Absolutely — don’t want to upset no one.’
Campbell nodded, knowing that wasn’t true. She’d been to an aunt’s funeral at Gayton the month before and she’d had to walk her mother away from the graveside, away from the sound of the earth and pebbles falling on her sister’s coffin.
‘Then what?’ asked Shaw, rolling his shoulders. Michael looked at him and Shaw guessed that for the first time he’d noticed the detective’s moon-eye.
He stabbed a finger at a piece of A3 paper Sellotaped to the wall. ‘There’s a schedule. We go back to check on subsidence — after twenty-four hours, then a week, then every fortnight. When there’s no more movement we let the masons know and they put the stone in — that’s usually a good six months, maybe more. Then we hand over to the gardeners. If the family’s paid, they keep it tidy, maybe even plant flowers. If not, they just gang mow the grass.’
He laughed, and there was something in his eyes that Shaw thought was more than graveyard humour. ‘Then they rot.’
Dan lit the gas ring and set the kettle on it, the hissing sound loud in the enclosed space. As he waited for it to boil he stood, running a hand through the slate-grey hair.
‘So this grave — the one we’re interested in. This was 1982 — anyone we could talk to who might have been there?’ asked Shaw.
Michael rubbed the heel of his palm into his chin, across a week’s worth of stubble. ‘Freddie Fletcher’s your only chance. He packed his job in a few years ago — before I came in from Gayton. He took the redundancy money when we all got switched to the private sector. He’s kept himself busy.’
All three workmen smiled in precisely the same way, inwardly sharing a secret.
‘Where can I find him?’ asked Shaw.
‘Not far. He’s got an office — but you’ll never find it. I’ll take you. I need to get breakfast for these boys, anyway.’
He stood, putting a donkey jacket over his Day-Glo tunic.
But Shaw hadn’t finished. ‘Sorry — this grave — the one we’re interested in down by the river. The burial was the second in the plot — there’d been a child in 1948. Then the mother in 1982. So, how does that change things?’
‘The kid’s coffin would have been sunk lower,’ said Michael. ‘Parents often want to go with their kids, so they’d have dug it deeper to start with, leaving room for another one on top.’
Shaw went to open the door but DC Campbell had one last question. ‘The gravedigging procedure — you’re saying it wouldn’t have been any different in 1982?’
Michael shook his head. ‘Apart from they’d have dug it by hand — and filled it by hand, too. Takes longer. But otherwise, no — just the same.’
‘Unless there’s a piss-up,’ said the kid with the roll-up machine, who’d made two cigarettes already, lining
