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
NORA ELIZABETH TILDEN
Born 8 February 1928
Died 1 June 1982
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
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
