Death Toll

by Jim Kelly

  6

  A freezing fog the colour of pickled eggs had fallen on the waterfront as Shaw drove alone down to South Lynn: under the black bones of the quayside cranes, a Meccano set lost in the gloom, then round at the Millfleet into the gridiron of streets around All Saints. He was aware that the Porsche – black, polished and sleek – turned heads in this poor neighbourhood. He’d chosen it because it had a narrow ‘A’ bar – the stanchion which separates the windscreen from the side windows. In most modern cars the ‘A’ bar was at least a couple of inches thick – a considerable handicap for someone with only one eye. He’d taken advice from websites set up to help the partially sighted and found the cash to pick the car up third-hand. The bodywork was dented here and there, the engine well past its sell-by date, but even so, parked overnight on these streets it would be gone by daybreak, or up on bricks minus its spoked alloy wheels.

  He slowed to take a corner by Whitefriars primary school and noted a man standing back on the pavement, most of his body hidden in an overhanging hedge of copper beech laced with snow. He wasn’t standing still: one arm jerked without rhythm, his head ticking like a metronome, and he was greeting the freezing fog in a T-shirt emblazoned with red letters that spelt españa. He watched the Porsche balefully as it crept past.

  Shaw rang the control room at St James’s on his hands-free mobile, reporting the dealer’s presence. Most of Lynn’s drugs came in off the ships, peddled in pubs and a handful of town-centre clubs. Street-selling was rare, and Shaw guessed this man was desperate to fund his own habit; desperate and disorientated, because trying to peddle outside a primary school was not the recommended first step in a career as a drug baron. The lack of topcoat suggested he hadn’t come far to his pitch, so he was probably a resident of the brutal block of low-rise flats which clustered around All Saints – a cordon of concrete that effectively encircled the medieval splendour of the old church.

  The Porsche cut through the street-mist until the lines of terraced houses petered out. Shaw trundled the car forward along the narrow quay – the river to one side, the tide low enough to reveal the thin grey outline of a wrecked wooden barge on the near sandbank, the cemetery on his left showing glimpses of hawthorn and cedar crated with snow. Early-morning dog walkers had hung plastic bags on the railings, like offerings for the dead. He could just see the outline of the Flask, no lights showing in the three floors of its timbered façade.

  At the cemetery gates he found DC Jacky Lau by her parked Mégane. Lau’s car was adapted for rallying, with a complete set of spoilers, multiple spotlights and a trio of go-faster stripes. She was leaning on the car, staring into her mobile phone. Outside the office she always wore reflective sunglasses. She was ethnic Chinese, and possessed a kind of unpredictable energy which matched her driving. She was respected in the squad, but not especially liked. Her ambition, to make DI within five years, was naked. When she wasn’t pursuing that ambition she was wrapped up in her hobby: cars, and the men who drove them.

  ‘Sir,’ she pushed herself off the car’s bonnet with her thighs. ‘Paul said to meet you here. Cemetery’s still sealed off. Forensics are down by the open graves. I’m leading house-to-house, starting at nine – St James’s are sending a dozen uniforms down for the day. What are we looking for here?’

  It was a good question. Shaw took in a lungful of fog. ‘For now, stick to the houses overlooking the cemetery. Anything over the years, I suppose …’ He suddenly felt the weight of the task before them – solving a crime at a distance of nearly three decades. ‘See if any group is known to hang around the place regularly after dark – druggies, lovers etc. We don’t know when chummy got dumped, but it’s probably way back. Throw in Nora Tilden’s name – if anyone remembers the funeral, get a full account. Names, anything unusual …you know the routine.’

  He wondered what was going on behind the reflective glasses. ‘We should have more from Tom and Justina to go on later.’

  He left her making a note and walked on through the open gates of Flensing Meadow Cemetery, the visibility down to twenty yards so that his world was reduced to a circular arena of tombstones and the path cutting through them, the only movement coming from the crows that flitted in and out of view over his head as they swapped branches in the trees, prompting showers of damp snowflakes. He wondered whether the silence of graveyards was an illusion. He strained his ears to catch the swish of traffic on the new bridge and – just once – the distant crackle of a police radio.

  He’d left Valentine back at St James’s organizing the bugging and surveillance of Jimmy Voyce. Max Warren had given them ten days and it would take twenty-four hours to put a unit fully in place. The priority was to get listening devices into Voyce’s hotel room and, if they could, into the car he’d hired. Twine had been scouring the airline passenger lists and had just discovered that Voyce was booked on a flight to Auckland via Hong Kong leaving in six days’ time.

  That was a break: if Voyce was going to try to blackmail Robert Mosse his timetable was actually narrower than theirs. Today they needed to get a rough idea of Voyce’s movements so that they could time the bugging operation – and obtain a court order allowing them to carry it out. Once Valentine had got the ball rolling he was due to meet Shaw at eleven to interview Lizzie Tilden, now Lizzie Murray – Nora Tilden’s daughter and, in her own turn, owner and landlady of the Flask.

  The cemetery chapel came into view. When Shaw pushed open the Gothic-arched door he was surprised by the efficient hum of activity, and the mechanical gasps of a coffee maker. Twine had put in place a standard incident room in record time: desks, phone lines, internet link and a screened area for interviews. Outside, the St James’s mobile canteen was still on site; beside it was a 4x4 Ford with CAMBRIDGE ARCHAEOLOGICAL TRUST tastefully signwritten in gold on the passenger door. Despite the early hour Twine had found two civilian switchboard operators to answer the phones. A perspex display board in front of the altar was covered in photographs taken at the graveside and one that Shaw hadn’t expected – an enlarged black-and-white shot of a woman in her mid-fifties, greying hair pulled back off her face. It was a hard face, and no doubt she’d had a hard life to go with it, but Shaw doubted it had been that hard. A Victorian face, shipwrecked in the twenty-first century: a round head, puffy, with no discernible bone structure; a cannonball, the small black eyes lost in the flesh.

  Twine brought him a coffee.

  ‘Paul,’ said Shaw, looking round. ‘Well done. This her?’

  ‘Nora Elizabeth Tilden. Lynn News archive, 1981 – just a year before she died. Taken at a charity presentation at the Flask – raised three hundred pounds for Barnardo’s. Looks like a tough bit of work,’ he added.

  Shaw took a closer look, thinking for the first time what a mismatched couple they seemed: Nora Tilden and her fun-loving errant husband, Alby.

  DC Fiona Campbell unfolded herself from the nearest desk. She stood six feet two but tried to look shorter, shoulders slightly rounded, always in sensible flat shoes. Campbell was a copper from a family of coppers – her father a DCI at Norwich. She’d come out of school with the kind of A-levels that could have got her into university – any university. But this was her life. And she wasn’t just smart. She’d earned her street stripes the hard way. The scar on her throat – an eight-inch knife wound from ear to collarbone – was a livid blue. She’d received a Police Bravery Award for trying to disarm a man with a knife who had been determined to take his own life. She’d put the medal in a box, but she’d wear the scar for ever.

  ‘Sir. You wanted to talk to the gravediggers?’ she asked, shuffling a handful of papers. ‘All gravedigging was done by the council’s Direct Labour Unit until five years ago. Now it’s contracted out to a private outfit, but it’s the same people doing the digging. There’s a hut …’

  Shaw let her lead the way. Shrugging on a full-length overcoat, she pushed open the door of the old chapel and walked out into the mist. She hunched her shoulders a bit more once they wer
e out in the cold. The damp was extraordinary this close to the river. Droplets covered Campbell’s coat like sequins. They walked together away from the chapel on a slowly curving path edged with savagely pruned rose bushes. In the folded silence of the mist they could hear the forensic team still working down by Nora Tilden’s grave, the sharp metallic tap of a tool striking a pebble preternaturally clear.

  ‘Anything from Tom?’ asked Shaw. This was the third major inquiry Shaw had led with this team and they’d learned the value of sharing information within a tight-knit circle. He was confident DC Campbell would be up to speed.

  ‘No – nothing. Paul says everything the Cambridge team has found so far has been inside the coffins, with documentation to match.’

  Soon a stand of pine trees came into view, shielding a set of ramshackle outbuildings lit by a security light that struggled to penetrate the fog. A Portakabin door opened, letting a cat slip out, its black fur bristling. They caught a thin blast of a radio tuned to Classic FM. A man appeared on the threshold in a Day-Glo yellow workman’s jacket, tipping out a coffee mug.

  ‘Hey up,’ he said over his shoulder. He stood aside to let Shaw and Campbell into the single room. It had no windows, only air vents that did little to disperse the fug of heat and burning paraffin from the enclosed space. A single neon tube provided scant illumination.

  Shaw closed the door and leant against it while Campbell took the one vacant seat. The room was chaotic. Against one wall stood a row of metal lockers. There was a table around which three men sat, a bench holding a kettle and mugs, and a gas ring attached to a fuel bottle. Waves of heat rolled out of an industrial paraffin heater. The floor was crowded with tools, coats, stuffed black bin-liners, here and there split to reveal the rubbish inside them. The space the men occupied was reduced to where they sat. The metal walls were damp with condensation, their only adornment a calendar, curled so much that Shaw could see only the girl’s face, a fake smile failing to mask her boredom.

  ‘This won’t take long,’ said Shaw, addressing them all. ‘You’ll know what we’ve found – a body on top of a coffin, sharing a grave it had no right to be in. So I need to know the usual procedure before and after a funeral.’

  The three men looked at each other and the youngest, who drank from a tin of Red Bull, began to fiddle with a roll-up machine and a tin of Golden Virginia. ‘Yeah, procedure,’ he said. ‘Got to follow the rules.’

  The man in the Day-Glo jacket, who appeared to be in charge, introduced himself simply as ‘Michael’ and said he’d been working in the town’s cemeteries for thirty years – first at Gayton and now Flensing Meadow – and the routine for a burial was unchanged. The council had set down procedures, as had their union – and everyone was a member.

  They all nodded at that, the youngster licking his roll-up.

  ‘Mind you,’ said Michael, ‘the crew they’ve got in to move the bones off the riverside, they’re not union – just cheap labour. No rules for them.’

  ‘Scabs,’ said the kid with the Red Bull.

  ‘Right,’ said Shaw. ‘I see. But the normal procedure for burial …’

  Michael composed himself. First thing on the day of the funeral the grave was dug by two men. Nine feet by four feet, he said. If the grave was for one coffin then it was five feet deep – allowing the statutory three feet of clearance above. One of the men operated the mechanical digger, the other set down duckboards for access to the graveside. In the days before the digger it took two men two hours to dig by hand. The union had managed to keep it a two-man job – but only on safety grounds. With one man on the digger, there had to be a standby in case of accidents.

  In poor weather a shelter could be set over the open grave to stop flooding.

  They all laughed, but it was the third man, who hadn’t spoken until then, who said, ‘Useless – they’re all wet here. Every one. Down with a splash.’ He was in his mid-twenties, with hair prematurely slate grey; handsome, but when he told Shaw his name was Dan he revealed broken teeth.

  ‘Then we cover the grave with a board,’ said Michael, nodding back down the shadowy room to the far end where they could see a set of reinforced wooden panels. ‘These days we put artificial turf at the edges and lay some over the spoil. The pall-bearers arrange the floral tributes on the turf. Some mourners scatter earth in – or throw a flower, that kind of thing. Since Diana, all sorts goes on.’

  The three of them nodded at this truth.

  ‘We fill the grave in at the end of the service. We don’t rush people, but some days it’s busy. So we keep an eye out; then, when the mourners leave, we fill in the grave – usually with the digger again. Takes ten minutes.’

  ‘But you always wait?’ asked Campbell.

  ‘Absolutely – don’t want to upset no one.’

  Campbell nodded, knowing that wasn’t true. She’d been to an aunt’s funeral at Gayton the month before and she’d had to walk her mother away from the graveside, away from the sound of the earth and pebbles falling on her sister’s coffin.

  ‘Then what?’ asked Shaw, rolling his shoulders. Michael looked at him and Shaw guessed that for the first time he’d noticed the detective’s moon-eye.

  He stabbed a finger at a piece of A3 paper Sellotaped to the wall. ‘There’s a schedule. We go back to check on subsidence – after twenty-four hours, then a week, then every fortnight. When there’s no more movement we let the masons know and they put the stone in – that’s usually a good six months, maybe more. Then we hand over to the gardeners. If the family’s paid, they keep it tidy, maybe even plant flowers. If not, they just gang mow the grass.’

  He laughed, and there was something in his eyes that Shaw thought was more than graveyard humour. ‘Then they rot.’

  Dan lit the gas ring and set the kettle on it, the hissing sound loud in the enclosed space. As he waited for it to boil he stood, running a hand through the slate-grey hair.

  ‘So this grave – the one we’re interested in. This was 1982 – anyone we could talk to who might have been there?’ asked Shaw.

  Michael rubbed the heel of his palm into his chin, across a week’s worth of stubble. ‘Freddie Fletcher’s your only chance. He packed his job in a few years ago – before I came in from Gayton. He took the redundancy money when we all got switched to the private sector. He’s kept himself busy.’

  All three workmen smiled in precisely the same way, inwardly sharing a secret.

  ‘Where can I find him?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘Not far. He’s got an office – but you’ll never find it. I’ll take you. I need to get breakfast for these boys, anyway.’

  He stood, putting a donkey jacket over his Day-Glo tunic.

  But Shaw hadn’t finished. ‘Sorry – this grave – the one we’re interested in down by the river. The burial was the second in the plot – there’d been a child in 1948. Then the mother in 1982. So, how does that change things?’

  ‘The kid’s coffin would have been sunk lower,’ said Michael. ‘Parents often want to go with their kids, so they’d have dug it deeper to start with, leaving room for another one on top.’

  Shaw went to open the door but DC Campbell had one last question. ‘The gravedigging procedure – you’re saying it wouldn’t have been any different in 1982?’

  Michael shook his head. ‘Apart from they’d have dug it by hand – and filled it by hand, too. Takes longer. But otherwise, no – just the same.’

  ‘Unless there’s a piss-up,’ said the kid with the roll-up machine, who’d made two cigarettes already, lining them up on the Formica table top, and was now constructing a third.

  The two older men exchanged a quick glance but Shaw caught it – and a hint of what was in it: a flash of anger, something quick-witted and cynical.

  Shaw let Campbell run with the questions, knowing that she’d realize she’d hit gold. ‘How d’you mean?’ she said, making her voice as light as possible, standing and buttoning up her coat to go, as if the answer didn’t matter.

&n
bsp; The kid had picked up none of the vibes and was still looking at his rolling machine, smiling to himself. Dan and Michael – Shaw could see – were desperate to intervene, desperate to stop him talking, but unwilling to speak.

  ‘If there’s a wake close by – they might use the old chapel on Whitefriars, or the school hall at the primary, something like that – then we sometimes tag along, pall-bearers too. Put the board over and fill it in later. Like – you aren’t gonna get a complaint from whoever’s down there, are you? And you might get a glass, out the back. One of the perks. If it’s in the Flask, we always go – ’cos they serve out the yard window to the riverbank, and if there’s a free bar they just pass us a few bevvies. Does no harm.’

  Shaw zipped up his jacket, the RNLI motif on the left breast pocket. ‘Nora Tilden – the woman in the grave we’re concerned with – she was the landlady at the Flask.’

  The kid whistled. ‘Then that, my friend, was a piss-up to be at.’ He laughed, and it didn’t seem to worry him that he laughed alone.

  7

  ‘Jason’s pretty much a tosser,’ said Michael, leading Shaw away through the tombstones, across the soaking grass. ‘But he’s right – you know, we’re all human. But it’s rare – really rare. It’s just in this job the perks are few and far between. So, chance of a free bevvy, course we go. But we’d be back in, what, an hour? Less. And we’d see, we’d look – if there was anything there, we’d see it.’

  Shaw didn’t answer as he followed the track Michael was making through the grass. He doubted very much that they would notice if the level of the grave was higher than they’d left it. And after a skinful of free beer he didn’t think they’d be at their most observant. A winter’s afternoon, the light fading, keen to get by a fire, or back to the wake. It might have happened like that. It could well have happened like that. He’d left Campbell to take a statement from Jason, just for the record.