‘Traffic division have taken a table — that’s how it works. You buy a table, then flog your tickets. I thought I’d go along, Thursday lunchtime, so we can see who Fletcher’s mates are. The Flask’s got a table, too.’
‘Enjoy,’ said Shaw, pushing his way through the doors into the autopsy suite, unhappy that the thought of the Shipwrights’ Hall lunch conjured up an image of turkey and gravy on Christmas morning, his father attacking the bird’s carcass with a carving knife.
There were three metal tables in the autopsy suite, all occupied. The rest of the room was metallic and cold, except for the stone walls and the single statue, left from the original chapel, of an angel high on the apex of the wall, its hands covering sightless eyes.
They moved to the first table. Shaw’s blood had begun to migrate to his heart, leaving his fingers cold, because on the brushed aluminium slab lay a tiny coffin, and beside it a shroud, wrapped — he guessed — around an infant’s body. He hadn’t been expecting this, and the tattered intimacy of the small bundle made him feel like a grave robber.
The pathologist carefully unwrapped the shroud to reveal the skeleton of a child wrapped in a second, rotten cloth.
‘We know the story — there’s nothing new to tell. I’ll do some toxicology but cot deaths were just as inexplicable then as they are now.’
‘It happens,’ said Valentine, unable to prevent his words sounding harsh and cynical.
Hardly any of the child-sized bones remained intact. That didn’t stop Shaw trying to clothe them in flesh, seeing the baby flexing its limbs in a cot. For the first time he thought that his gift, to see the flesh on bones, might be a curse as well as a blessing.
Kazimierz moved to the second mortuary table and uncovered the body of Nora Tilden: the skeletal frame stripped of the remnants of clothes and funeral wear, the bones held together by wire. Kazimierz put her hand on a brown blotched file at the head of the table. ‘These are the original records used at Albert Tilden’s trial,’ she said. ‘Everything is consistent: the leg bones are shattered, as is one arm, the collarbones, the lower spine.’ Shaw thought about the narrow steep staircase at the Flask. He thought of tumbling down, his limbs cracking against the wall, the wooden banisters. Sympathetic pains ran through his nervous system.
‘She’s not been disturbed in any way since burial?’ he asked.
‘Tom’s your man on that,’ she said. ‘But there are no breaks or fractures other than those listed.’ She looked at the bones, shaking her head. ‘No. I think she’s lain like this for twenty-eight years. There’s no soft tissue, so I can’t tell you anything else. But I’ve analysed the bones, and I can tell you one thing — she was suffering from osteoporosis.’
She picked a photograph out of the file of a woman, late middle age, greying hair tied back, a broad match for the one they’d got up in the incident room, but younger. ‘This is her,’ she said. In this photograph the lighting was better, so that it was possible to see the eyes, which were humourless, and the lips, too thin to support any kind of smile. But there was a hint of something else — an earlier beauty, perhaps; a delicate, rounded, childlike grace.
‘What age was she when the child was born?’ asked Shaw.
Kazimierz worked it out from the file. ‘Twenty — just.’
Shaw looked again at the face, trying to run it backwards in time, trying to retrieve the young mother who’d lost her first child after just a few weeks.
They moved to the corpse provisionally identified as Patrice Garrison.
‘I’ve extracted a sample of marrow for DNA analysis. Tom’s got the ID in hand. My initial summary of the cause of death stands. In fact, I can show you …’
She leant forward and lifted the top of the trepanned skull so that they could see into the brain cavity. Shaw couldn’t help noticing how at ease Kazimierz was dealing with the dead, and recalled how awkward she’d been the night before at the cafe, clutching her husband by the arm.
Shaw got close, but Valentine looked at the clock on the wall, concentrating on the shuddering second hand, thinking only of the clean metallic mechanism within.
‘You can see here,’ said the pathologist, ‘where the tip of the billhook curved right round through the brain and actually indented the inside of the right parietal bone.’
‘This would take force?’ asked Shaw. ‘A man — a powerful man?’
‘No. I don’t think you can make any such surmise. The physics of this are complex, Shaw. You’ve got a swinging blow with a curved weapon meeting a round object. It’s all luck. Catch it just right and you’d slice through the bone like butter. An inch to one side, a few seconds later, it would sheer off, leaving only a flesh wound.’
Shaw filed that detail in his memory, noting only that it clashed with the two etched green glasses, which had suggested a ritual: something planned and meticulous.
Kazimierz turned her back to fill in some paperwork on a lab bench, dismissing them without a word.
Hadden’s suite on the far side of the partition was empty, so Shaw pulled out from the wall a blackboard on hinges. Taking a piece of chalk from the runnel he wrote ‘Arthur Melville’ at the top, followed by Nora, then ‘Albert Tilden’ and their dates.
‘What’s this?’ asked Valentine. ‘Hi-tech policing?’
‘Just keeping it simple.’ Shaw drew the rest of the family tree. The result was starkly instructive, because it didn’t look like a family tree. ‘It’s like the old Norfolk joke,’ said Shaw. ‘Everyone in the village has got a family tree — it’s just that they don’t have any branches.’
Valentine put a Silk Cut between his lips.
Shaw underlined Nora Tilden’s name.
Valentine stood and drew circles around three others. ‘Three of them are black,’ he said. ‘Latrell — Bea’s husband, their son Patrice, who becomes our victim in Nora’s grave, and then his son Ian. Three generations.’
Shaw stubbed the chalk on Ian’s name, breaking it. ‘What do we know about him? This isn’t all about the past, is it, George? Because we know that someone was out there in Flensing Meadow digging up that grave just six months ago. Which transforms the inquiry — even Max Warren would have to admit that. Someone alive, someone with enough youth left to dig a four-foot hole after dark, someone who feared what we’d find in that grave.’
He stood back. ‘So perhaps it’s a family secret, and Ian knows what it is.’
Valentine checked his notebook. ‘Ian Murray. He’s twenty-seven. School at Whitefriars primary, just round the corner. Then Springwood High. Trained as a chef at the college. Works in the kitchens at the Flask lunch-times — then evenings and Sundays at Kirkpatrick’s — the posh wine bar on the quay. Holidays, days off — that’s Monday and Tuesday — he cooks up at Bea Garrison’s B amp;B. Single — girlfriend works at Kirkpatrick’s too. Name of Sharon Hare; she’s local as well. He lives at the Flask, in the attic.’
‘OK. We’ll catch him later. I fancy an oyster.’
Valentine pulled a face. He didn’t do wine bars.
Shaw checked his watch and chucked the chalk back in the runnel. Outside the green glass windows of the Ark the dusk was gathering, so that they could see a scattering of Christmas lights in the gloom decorating a crane. They’d got a second interview set with Sam Venn at the London Road Shelter in an hour. Freddie Fletcher had eluded them: he was either out or ignoring the hammering on his door. The owner of Tinos, the greasy spoon downstairs, said he often went out canvassing for hours. He could be anywhere on the street. Shaw had asked for a uniformed PC to stay on his doorstep. Twine had overnight orders to put most of the manpower on the door-to- doors in the morning, in and around the cemetery, because they needed to throw everything they had at trying to find out who had dug up Nora’s grave in the last few months.
Shaw felt good. The inquiry was humming now: efficient, logical and professional. They’d got their break — thanks to Tom Hadden’s brilliant forensic work. Now, Shaw sensed, Pat Garrison’s killer was no longer an insubstantial ghost from the past. Whoever it was, Shaw felt that soon he’d be able to reach out and touch them.
14
