‘What’s your story?’ he said in a whisper, lowering his own face to within a few inches of the skull. Close up, the disadvantage of having sight in only one eye was at its most pronounced, so that he had to move his head constantly an inch to the left, an inch to the right, to allow his brain to construct a 3D image. He could smell death: the rich scent of decay — a human compost. Earwigs, beetles and spiders dropped from the coffin top to the turf below, their descent caught by the searing light.
Tom Hadden, head of St James’s forensics unit, stood back, letting Shaw do his job, his own face aged by the horizontal light. He was a pale man, with strawberry blond hair thinning above a freckled face, his forehead marked by the lesions of skin cancer. A small scar indicated that at least one had been removed surgically.
‘Peter,’ he said, beckoning Shaw to his position behind the skull. He closed his eyes before he spoke, a mannerism that indicated he was deep in thought and was about to deliver a statement of fact. ‘Now that,’ he said, when Shaw arrived, ‘is a lethal blow.’
There was a single puncture hole in the left parietal bone, close to the sagittal suture — the line that marks the division between the two halves of the skull. The impact had left a small, neat, triangular hole, but had shattered the lower cranium like crazy-paving.
‘What did that?’ asked Valentine, who’d joined them, his slip-ons damp in the long wet grass.
‘Weapons aren’t my territory,’ said Hadden. ‘As you well know, George. Justina’s on her way. Till then, chummy stays put.’ Dr Justina Kazimierz, St James’s regular consultant pathologist, had begun her career working with Shaw’s father — Detective Chief Inspector Jack Shaw — back in the 1980s. She demanded respect, and got it.
‘So — a male, then?’ asked Valentine, pleased he’d spotted Hadden’s implicit judgement of the sex of their victim. He was standing at Hadden’s shoulder now, and unless asked he’d be keeping a good distance between himself and the bones. Despite over thirty years on the force, George Valentine was never happier than when he was walking
‘Who’s in the box?’ he asked, coughing with a sound like coal being shot from a scuttle. Valentine told himself he smoked twenty cigarettes a day, ignoring the fact that he seemed to always need to buy an extra packet before bedtime. He knew it was killing him, but he couldn’t stop, and he was angry, in a listless way, with this constant reminder that he was a weak man.
Hadden checked a clipboard. ‘Gravestones are either up against the railings or along the chapel wall up the hill — but the council officer’s got a plan, and if it’s telling the truth …’ he double-checked the clipboard, ‘… then this should be the grave of Nora Elizabeth Tilden. Born eighth of February 1928. Died first of June 1982,’ he said. He held up crossed fingers. ‘Let’s hope. It’s certainly not her on top. And she’s not the only occupant of the plot, according to the records. There’s an earlier burial — February 1948. A child. Mary Tilden. Aged six weeks.’
Hadden nodded at the open grave. ‘She’ll be three feet deeper — that’s the law.’ They heard earth slipping into the grave, splashing into water.
‘We’ll need to see her, too,’ said Shaw.
Hadden nodded, unhappy with the thought. ‘I’ll need daylight for that, and a pump.’
Three men in white suits began to construct a lightweight SOC tent out of aluminium poles and nylon. Hadden stood back from the coffin. ‘Notice what’s under the skeleton?’ he asked.
Shaw looked, circling the bones. ‘A few inches of soil?’
‘Exactly. Given the downward weight and the settlement of the grave, that few inches was probably more like a foot, maybe more, when he went in. So he’s been buried in the grave — but not
Hadden cast a torch beam down into the misty hole. ‘There’s a soil profile — soon as we’ve got it dry tomorrow I’ll get down there and get some photos.’
Valentine shivered — a big, awkward, jolt of his thin shoulders.
‘With luck I’ll be able to tell you the answer to the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,’ added Hadden.
He smiled at Valentine, but the DS had no idea what he was talking about.
Shaw nodded. ‘Was our man buried at the same time as Nora Tilden?’
‘Exactly,’ said Hadden. ‘Or did someone dig down, chuck him in, and then refill the grave?’
‘What was the date of the original burial?’ asked Shaw. Valentine noticed that Shaw often did that — asked a question, of no one in particular, but expected an answer. It really pissed him off.
‘First of November 1982,’ said Hadden. ‘According to the cemetery records.’
Shaw looked up at the stars. ‘That’s odd. A five-month gap after death. Why would that be?’
Hadden started taking flash pictures of the open grave. ‘Well,’ he said, straightening his back, ‘it’s not that rare these days. Relatives have to travel — who knows, Australia, New Zealand — that takes time. Or there’s a dispute over the will — that can sometimes hold it up. Or it was a job for a coroner and he didn’t release the body until the court had sat. Which would make it a violent, sudden or unnatural death. Take your pick.’
‘We need to find some family, George,’ said Shaw. ‘Get some answers.’
‘I’ve got Paul Twine standing by,’ said Valentine. Twine was a relatively new member of the squad, graduate entry, smart and keen, direct from the Met’s training school at Hendon. Valentine reckoned he didn’t have a social life so he’d rung him earlier as soon as he knew he might need some back-up in the office. At work Twine was professional, clean-cut, almost antiseptic, and Valentine had been astonished when a woman answered the phone.
Shaw looked around. It was one of his father’s maxims — passed on during one of those rare moments when he’d talked about the job to his son — that any decent detective should have a picture of the scene of the crime imprinted on his memory bank, as tangible and to hand as the coins in his pocket.
The mist was thickening, rising slightly, so that thin strands seemed to claw listlessly at their belts. Shaw stood, partly disembodied, surrounded by the empty graves of the dead. Beside the stone angel there was a box tomb lit by the halogen lamp: it was in granite, with engraved cherubs, and had a flat top on which was etched:
Et in arcadia ego
Shaw stepped up onto it effortlessly. The lid rocked slightly, like a boulder in a stream. He let his single eye tour the horizon. The loss of his right eye two years earlier in an accident might have destroyed his ability to see in 3D at close range, but over twenty-five feet his eyesight was as good as anyone with two eyes: better, because he’d had to train himself in other ways to judge distance and perspective — such as using the way colours merge towards blue as they approach the horizon to judge distance. But that was no good at night: the view from the tomb, above the mist, was of a piebald world, just black and white. The night-watchman’s light at the cannery was gone. To the north, half a mile away, he could see a light on a building — a pitched roof, gables and beams; a building that seemed to crouch beyond the cemetery gates, like a mourner returning to grieve after dark.
‘What’s that?’ he asked.
‘The Flask,’ said Valentine, looking at his shoes. ‘Boozer — bit rough now. Used to be all right.’
Shaw’s knowledge of Lynn’s pubs was restricted to the Red House, the CID’s haunt off St James’s. Hadden unplucked the forensic glove from his right hand. ‘It was named after a ship,’ he said. Hadden was a Londoner who’d come north to escape an ugly divorce and find peace spotting birds on the north Norfolk sands. Like most incomers, he knew more about local history than the natives. And he spent some of his time here, on the tidal path, looking for oystercatchers. ‘A whaler back in the 1880s. This was where they used to take the flesh off the carcasses — the flensing grounds. Between us and the pub is a narrow inlet — pretty much silted up now. Blubber Creek.’
Shaw looked around, trying to imagine the whaling fleet in the river after its nine-month voyage back from the Arctic, the fires on the bank heating the cauldrons in which the meat was reduced to oil. Flesh pots.
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
