heavier; perhaps they fell out of the pocket on the way down.’
Kazimierz raised a gloved hand. ‘Or …’
She was down on one knee, working away at the clay under the knee joint. Poking from the soil was a curve of metal, gleaming dully. It took her a minute, perhaps two, to work enough clear space to edge it out.
It was a billhook, the metal rusted, the handle rotted to a stump.
‘Perfect,’ she said. ‘Your murder weapon — almost certainly. Fits the wound like a glove.’
It was an odd metaphor, and it made Shaw shiver.
‘Like this,’ she said, taking Valentine by the shoulder and turning him away, so that he faced the serried rows of coffins. She bagged the billhook, held it lightly in her hand, and then brought her arm over like a fast bowler until the tip touched the DS’s skull where the hair had thinned. ‘Maybe just to one side …an inch, maybe less. This kind of blow — he’d have been dead before he hit the ground. The hook would have cut through the brain. It’s like throwing a light switch.’
She clicked her fingers and Valentine felt his legs give way, just for a second, as if he too were falling into his grave.
3
Greyfriars Tower stood floodlit opposite police HQ, the frost picking out the medieval stonework. The old monastic bell tower leant at a heart-stopping angle, its fall to earth arrested by a million-pound restoration scheme. It stood on the Lynn skyline like a grounded ship’s mast, tilted seawards. Valentine stood at an open window of the CID suite, smoking into the night. The tower had cast a shadow over his life since he’d gone to school a few hundred yards from the crumbling walls of the old monastery. He didn’t see it any more, like so many things.
Shaw sat at a computer screen scrolling through missing persons for 1982 — the year Nora Tilden had died and been buried. There were eight, six of them young girls. Of the two males, one was a sixteen-year-old from the North End, white, with a tattooed Union Flag under his left eye. More to the point, he was only four feet eight inches tall. He was still missing. The other was a sixty-three-year-old man from Gayton, diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, who’d put the rubbish out in the side alley by his house one night in August and not been seen again until 1993, when his remains were discovered on a railway embankment 200 yards from his front door by a courting couple. He was identified from dental records.
‘Nothing,’ said Shaw, pushing himself back from the desk and massaging his neck, then his injured eye.
He examined Valentine’s back. Shaw, too tired to prevent his mind wandering, analysed what he felt about George Valentine: irritation — always that — because he was a living relic of the kind of old-fashioned copper Shaw despised. A man who thought the rule book was useful only if you needed to wedge a door open. But beyond irritation there was envy, and guilt.
George Valentine had been a DI once, and his DCI had been Shaw’s father, Jack. Both of them had been on a skyward career path until one fatal misjudgement had brought them to earth. Accused of planting evidence in a murder trial, they had been suspended: Shaw’s father had died after taking early retirement, Valentine had lost a rank and been exiled to the wilderness of the north Norfolk coast, and a decade of policing beach yobs, small-time burglars and the odd credit-card fraudster. So, envy because Valentine had known his father so well, while his own relationship had been distant, cool, a reflection, perhaps, of his father’s determination to shield his family from the realities of police work. And guilt because Shaw had failed to fulfil a promise: that one day he would clear his father’s name, remove from the record that withering epithet ‘bent copper’. George Valentine was a living reminder of that failure.
The internal phone rang. It was DC Twine, down in records. ‘Sir? Just got the “V” files on our victim. She was murdered by her husband. He got life. Eight case files — a dozen on the trial.’
Shaw thought of one of his father’s maxims: delegate, don’t try to process all the information yourself. ‘Read what you can in twenty minutes, Paul, then come up and give us a summary. Relevant details only. We’re just waiting for Tom — he’s got some preliminaries from the scene.’
Shaw cut the line and checked his watch, which not only showed the time and the phase of the moon but was set to give the state of the tide at Hunstanton — just up the coast from his house.
The display read 11.48 p.m. High tide.
This is what he really hated about CID. The joyless time wasted waiting for other people to do their jobs. He thought about Lena, wrapped up, watching the beach through the double-glazed windows of the Beach Cafe, the icy rollers pounding on the sand. They’d bought the then derelict Old Beach Cafe three years ago. No access road — just the hard sand of the beach at low tide — no mains electricity, and accounts that showed an annual trading loss of?2,000 per annum. The stone cottage to the rear, in the dunes, and the old boathouse to the side, were all part of the?80,000 deal: both listed, both dilapidated. But the purchase had fulfilled two dreams in one go — Shaw got to live on his beloved beach where he’d played as a child; Lena got the independence she wanted and a business that filled nearly every waking hour. The cottage was now watertight, the cafe made-over in stripped pine, with an Italian coffee-making machine glinting behind the counter like a vintage motorbike. The boathouse was now Surf — a beach shop selling everything from?1,000 diver’s watches to 50p plastic windmills.
The urge to go home, park by the lifeboat house and run the mile to the cottage, was so strong that one of the muscles in his leg flexed involuntarily. Just the thought of it made his heartbeat skip, adrenaline seeping into his system at the prospect of exercise.
Despite the open window the CID room was hot and airless, the stale smell of sweat engrained in papers spilt across desktops. Valentine ditched a cigarette and closed the window as they heard the lift doors clash in the corridor and Tom Hadden’s unhurried steps echoing off the bare walls. He came through the doors backwards, because he held in his hands two glass trays. Wordlessly he set them on the desk in front of Shaw, tapping one with a ballpoint pen: a jumble of clods of clay mixed with a few pebbles and some darker humus.
‘This is some of the spoil from this woman’s grave — the soil the council workmen dug out today. They used a digger, then spades. It was in a pile by the graveside. It’s from the top of the pile — so that’s the earth just above the point where they stopped because they saw the bones on top of Nora Tilden’s coffin.’
He tapped the other glass. ‘This is a sample from underneath the skeleton — the strata sandwiched, as it were, between him and the coffin below. The science here is dull …’ He paused, and Shaw knew that was a lie, because Hadden lived for the science. ‘But the principles involved are very helpful. Soil, undisturbed, evolves …it becomes stratified, some minerals are drawn up, nutrients washed down, clay forms distinct layers — like those bottled sands you see in souvenirs from the Isle of Wight, a kind of natural layer cake. There’s one other useful process — the cemetery uses a chemical weedkiller. That washes down through the soil at a steady rate. Broadly, all this means that I can put an age on soil — in the sense that I can tell you how long it has remained undisturbed.’
He closed his eyes, considering exactly what he was about to say.
‘In this case the major finding — taking into account the way the skeleton itself has affected the soil — is that these two samples are the
‘What’s your instinct?’ asked Shaw.
‘Well, I’d rule out the possibility this happened on the day of the funeral,’ said Hadden. ‘Given that this woman was undoubtedly buried in front of her family and friends. In broad daylight. In fact, given that I’m told she was murdered, and the killer convicted, there were almost certainly members of the CID present as well. So it’s pretty unlikely someone was able to slip a second corpse into the grave by sleight of hand.’
‘Why go dig up an old grave to hide a body — if you’re going to dig a hole, dig it somewhere hidden. Right?’ asked Valentine, adjusting his tie.
‘It makes more sense than you think,’ said Shaw. ‘Dig a hole anywhere and it can be found — OK, you can
