Death Toll

by Jim Kelly

  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 Café, the icy rollers pounding on the sand. They’d bought the then derelict Old Beach Café 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 café 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 same age. In soil terms, “same” means give or take a year, probably less. The actual age will take a lot more science than I can bring to bear in an hour. But in many ways that doesn’t matter – the fact is, the earth thrown on top of the coffin has lain undisturbed for the same amount of time as the earth above the bones. So we have a clear picture. Imagine you’re there. If you looked in the grave you’d see Nora Tilden’s coffin at the bottom. Then a few feet of earth goes in. Then the corpse of the second victim. Then the rest of the earth. The only question is when. Did this happen on the day Nora Tilden was buried – before, in effect, the burial was complete, or did it happen at a later date – within a year of the burial?’

  ‘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 f
act, 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 pick a bit of woodland, sand dunes, whatever. But someone might find it, because the ground’s disturbed. A dog, maybe. But if you think about it, the best place to hide a hole is in a cemetery. And for six months – longer – there’s nothing on the grave – no stone, usually nothing except rotting flowers. They let the soil settle first. So if you can do it without being seen it’s nearly perfect. And that’s the best opportunity – the first year.’

  Shaw picked up one of the glass trays. ‘And that would remove any necessity for there to be a link between the two victims – because the grave might well have been chosen simply because it was fresh.’

  Twine came through the door, a pile of files only just wedged under one arm. He ditched them on a desk, took a marker pen and wrote the name Nora Tilden on one of the perspex display boards. He looked at Shaw, Hadden and Valentine, confident enough to wait until they were ready for him to speak.

  Shaw nodded.

  ‘Our victim was Nora Elizabeth Tilden. Her husband was Albert Ellis Tilden,’ said Twine, adding the name next to hers. ‘He pushed her down a flight of stairs, and as we’ve seen, broke nearly every bone in her body.’

  ‘OK – just a summary, Paul, please,’ said Shaw. ‘Relevant details. Tom’s in a hurry.’

  Hadden sat, his shoulders slumping. Shaw guessed he wouldn’t sleep for days now – not in a bed, just snatching naps in the lab. Valentine took a seat and crossed his arms, thinking that they were about to find out how smart Paul Twine really was, because at this stage of a murder inquiry almost all the details were relevant.

  Twine wrote Nora Tilden’s dates on the board: 1928–1982.

  ‘She inherited the Flask – the pub down on the riverside – from her father – Arthur Melville, in 1947. She was just nineteen.’

  First mistake, thought Valentine. We can all add up.

  Twine put her father’s name on the board above Nora’s, in the style of a family tree. ‘Nora married Albert – a sailor – after the war – he was merchant navy. Always known as Alby, by the way. Became a bit of a hero, apparently, sailing with the Arctic convoys. He was twenty when they married. They had a daughter, but the kid died within a few weeks of being born. Cot death, it looks like. That’s Mary – buried in the same plot.’

  Hadden raised a hand from the desktop. ‘We’ll have her up in the morning – but the team down in the meadow say there’s definitely another coffin there. And it’s pint-sized.’

  Twine added the child’s name under her father and mother’s.

  ‘Alby Tilden left home – went back to sea in 1955,’ he looked down at his notes. ‘Didn’t come back for six years. This all came out at the trial. When he did turn up he was on his uppers. Looks like he spent most of his time in Gibraltar and North Africa. Bit of a colourful time there, apparently – not so much hero any more as villain. Court was told he’d contracted various venereal diseases on his travels. There were also signs of mental illness. Anxiety attacks – agoraphobia. He was an engineer at sea, stayed below decks. On deck he freaked out. Nora took him back – but plenty of witnesses said the marriage was always rocky, although they had another child – Elizabeth, known as Lizzie. She was born in 1962.

  ‘During the year Nora was killed the rows with Alby had been getting worse – physical, not just verbal sniping from prepared positions. She stopped Alby working behind the bar of the Flask because he kept giving the booze away – so he got a day job in one of the canneries to put beer money in his pocket. Locals said they could often hear the china breaking upstairs. Witnesses were happy to talk about that, but the reason for the rows – the specific reason – never came out. The daughter, Lizzie, said they’d always fought.’

  Twine added Lizzie to the family tree.

  ‘The night Nora Tilden died, the first of June 1982, Alby had been drinking heavily in the bar. He had mates on the ships in the new docks and they all used to drink in the pub. Lizzie was working behind the bar. Nora was upstairs. Apparently she kept out of the way when he was on a bender. Alby went up himself about nine o’clock for food and several witnesses said they heard the familiar sounds of an argument, then stuff being thrown, then a scream.

  ‘Lizzie told the court she ran from the bar to the bottom of the stairs. She found her mother in a heap – dad standing at the top. The pub’s stairs are as steep as a ladder, so the fall could easily have killed her, but the pathologist said there were pressure marks around the dead woman’s neck – as though she’d been throttled. Alby said they’d argued because he wanted to go downstairs, back to his mates. She followed him, caught him at the top step, and they started pushing and shoving. According to Alby, she lost her footing and fell. According to the jury, he either pushed her or throttled her or both. The judge gave him life.’

  ‘So he’s probably out by now, then,’ said Valentine.

  ‘Home Office link is down,’ said Twine. ‘I’ll check first thing, but yes, he’s very likely free – if he’s still alive. With good behaviour he could have been out in fifteen. He’d be in his early eighties now. If we do find him there should be no problem recognizing him.’ He waved a piece of paper. ‘This is the original warrant. It lists any identifying marks. Tilden was covered in them. It wasn’t just VD he brought back from the East – nearly thirty tattoos are listed, over most of his body. He’s the illustrated man.’

  4

  Monday, 13 December

  Shaw and Valentine sat on identical straight-backed chairs in Detective Chief Superintendent Max Warren’s office. A single picture window gave a view over the rooftops to the church of St James – stark Victorian neo-Gothic, with a neon cross on the roof in lurid green, lit now, but only just visible in a light snow shower that looked like the fallout from a pillow fight. Out in the adjoining office DCS Warren was dictating a letter to his secretary: he’d be with them in a minute, he’d said, offering coffee, which they’d turned down. So they sat, each alone, despite being together. One wall of the office held a bookcase, Christmas cards crowded on the shelves. Shaw thought, not for the first time, what a depressing word ‘festive’ could be.

  Shaw had his right leg crossed over his left to support a sketch pad. He’d spent an hour in the Ark the night before, after leaving the CID suite at St James’s. Dr Kazimierz had been finishing her preliminary report: she was happy for him to photograph the skull, as long as she was present. His forensic art kit was always on hand – stashed in the boot of his car. It included a tripod camera and a perspex stand on which the skull could be supported, then angled precisely to meet the Frankfurt horizontal plane – the internationally agreed angle of tilt which allowed for the uniform comparison of all skulls.

  Even then, with just the bones set at the correct angle, he could see the face. He’d noted, for example, the asymmetry of the eye sockets, the left a few millimetres above the right, the narrow mastoid process on both the left and right sides of the skull, a formation that would have made the ears almost impossible to see fully from the frontal view. And the slight gap in the front teeth: a defect that would have been notable as part of the victim’s essential ‘lifelong look’ – the subtle alignment of features by which he would have always been recognizable to family and friends. The kind of facial feature everyone uses, often without thinking, to spot a loved one in an old snapshot.

  Shaw had left St James’s at 2.00 a.m. with a complete set of digital images of the skull. He’d driven to the lifeboat house at Hunstanton, parked the car, then ran the mile along the sands to home in four minutes and forty-two seconds:
six seconds slower than his average. The Beach Café’s security light had thudded on as he’d stepped up on to the wooden verandah. The cottage, to the rear in the dunes, had been in darkness, the shop boarded up out of season to protect it from the winter gales.

  Letting himself into the cottage, he’d stopped for a second inside the closed door to smell the scents of home: pasta, paint, washing powder and – best of all – wood. He’d checked on his daughter Francesca, the terrier at the foot of her bed only raising its old head as Shaw looked in. He’d left Lena to sleep and taken a shower. In the bathroom, on the window ledge, had been a line of pillboxes he hadn’t seen before: he’d counted them – eight, each marked with the logo of the local allergy clinic. He’d let the water run down his skin, washing away the day, until he’d felt clean.

  Dry, in shorts and a T-shirt, he’d unlocked the door that led to the café down the short connecting corridor they’d built between the two buildings. Reflections from the café’s neon lights would have concealed the view outside, so he’d used the small light above the counter, then fired up the Italian coffee machine. Through the windows he’d just been able to see the ghostly white lines of the waves breaking out on the far sands, snow clouds beginning to blot out the moon.

  Booting up the laptop, he’d scanned in the pictures from the camera, then printed them out at precisely life-size. He’d taped up two of the pictures on an easel retrieved from the deckchair store, and illuminated them using an anglepoise lamp from the office, then stood back with his coffee to study them.

  He’d covered the two images on the easel with sheets of tracing paper and opened his copy of Rhines Tables: the standard set of multiples which would allow him to put flesh on bones. Then he’d worked on each set of features using Krogman’s Rule of Thumb to add fleshy details not dictated by skull structure – the mouth set at six teeth wide, the angle of the nose extrapolated from the nasal spine. He’d modified the rules, using some educated guesses based on the mixed ethnicity – for example he’d set the nose at 16mm wide compared to the standard 10mm for Caucasians. He’d made the eyes dark in the black-and-white image, but left the hair indistinct, reduced to just a few pencil lines. The pathologist had considered the clothing to be of good quality, so Shaw presumed a healthy weight, and he’d taken her guesstimate of the age at between twenty and twenty-five.