Death Toll

by Jim Kelly

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I think the killer was at the party. I don’t think anyone in the family is telling us the whole truth – but that’s because there are family secrets, and they’re not sure what’s coming out in the wash and what isn’t. But the heart of it’s clear …’ He heaved in a lungful of air, but it wasn’t enough, so he flicked a switch to drop the passenger side window to cover up a second breath. ‘It’s dynamite, isn’t it? Black kid …’ He held up both hands. ‘Black American kid starts pawing white barmaid,’ he said. ‘We know Fletcher was there – maybe some of his chums share his political beliefs. Pat Garrison was just the perfect target – black and foreign. How excited can a bunch of bigots get? It’s racial – I know Max don’t want to hear that, but you know, it’s pretty much screaming at us.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Shaw, knowing he was right, knowing this is what he could learn from Valentine, the ability to hold on to the obvious in the middle of a complex murder inquiry.

  ‘Pat leaves the pub,’ said Valentine. ‘A couple of people who think like Fletcher are beered-up; they follow him out along the riverbank through the cemetery. Maybe Fletcher goes too. They confront him – they’d do that, right? That’s how they think – they need to tell him why they want him out, to his face, like it’s a form of courage or something, even though they’ve turned up mob-handed. So they tell him that he’s trash. Spit in his face. Then – from behind – one blow. Lights out. Then they chuck the body in the grave and shovel in some topsoil off the pile.’ He pointed forward through the windscreen, suddenly animated. ‘In fact, Fletcher was there – had to be, because he knows the grave is still open, and knows he’ll have to fill it in.’

  Shaw found he could imagine it happening. ‘We need to see if that works – on the ground. Let’s get an address for Garrison’s flat. See if it makes sense that he’d walk home that way.’

  Shaw closed his eyes, his nerves were making him fidget. One of the reasons he was finding it an effort to concentrate was that he hadn’t had his early morning swim, and he hadn’t run to the Porsche, because the tide had been too high and he’d had to pick his way through the dunes, so there was a lot of bottled energy in his system that needed to be dissipated. He’d spent the morning doing what he hated most: admin. Running a murder inquiry from behind a desk. His foot jiggled uselessly on the accelerator.

  ‘What about the cousins thing?’ said Shaw. ‘Nora was a regular at the church. It’s only a guess, but I reckon the Free Church of Christ the Fisherman doesn’t take too kindly to that sort of relationship. Sleeping with your relatives. It’s all part of the don’t do list. So, don’t marry your cousin. And Lizzie told her dad, who probably told everyone else, which was helpful.’

  Valentine thrust his head forward, his narrow shoulders squaring off. ‘So the Elect, or whatever, they get to know about it and they get uptight. Perhaps one of them decides to stop it – dead.’ He hit the dashboard with the heel of his palm. But it was a halfhearted blow. He didn’t believe it himself.

  ‘Doesn’t add up, does it?’ said Shaw. ‘It’s been legal to marry your cousin in this country since the reign of Henry the Eighth. Back then, big issue. Now – no issue. OK, this isn’t now – it’s 1982 – but it’s still thirteen years after we put a man on the moon. I’m not saying it wasn’t a principle that was important to the believers. But killing someone? I don’t think so. If this lot think Leviticus bans marriage between cousins then they sure as hell know their ten commandments. I don’t think murder’s an option.’

  Valentine set the cigarette packet on its head. ‘What about money? You’ve got a nineteen-year-old girl like Lizzie – she’s not bad looking now, back then she must have been turning heads since she was fourteen. All of a sudden her mum dies and she’s left the pub. That ain’t gonna make her look any uglier, is it? I bet the likely lads were all over her like a horse blanket. This black kid was lining himself up for the money too, right? If he marries Lizzie, he gets the lot. And don’t give me any of that “it’s all a secret” tosh, either. I don’t think anyone had to tell anyone else what was going on – including the mother – Bea Garrison. She knew, betcha. Which means she’s lying. If they fancied each other then everyone knew – it didn’t need Alby to let his mates know from jail. I bet they all knew – just no one said. That’s what they say, right – you suspect it, then it’s happening. That’s a powerful motive.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Valentine put a cigarette in his mouth but didn’t light it.

  Shaw took pity on him, kicking open his door. ‘Let’s get some air,’ he said.

  They stood together in the street, their feet on the circumference of an imaginary circle six feet wide, their bodies angled in different directions. Flecks of snow began to fall.

  Shaw took a fridgeful of cold air into his lungs. Valentine inhaled half of his Silk Cut.

  ‘Couple of things,’ said Shaw, holding up a handful of fingers. ‘Press Twine to track me down Alby Tilden, will you – it’s a loose end, and I don’t like loose ends. In her statement, Lizzie says her dad stopped seeing visitors in the late eighties. She said his mental condition was poor, and he was ashamed of what he’d done. He wanted her to remember him as he was. According to Paul, the Prison Service says he got out in the late nineties. Since then, nothing. Lizzie gets letters – his are postmarked Peterborough. She keeps them – it’s all pretty innocuous stuff, and no hint as to where he is. Return post goes via Bea Garrison to an address up north – then they’re passed on. Nothing for a year now, by the way. We’ve got the address off Bea Garrison and Paul’s been on to the local nick; they’ll go round, see if we can get the forwarding details. But he clearly doesn’t want to be found. And he’s got the perfect alibi as he was banged up in Lincoln jail on the night of his wife’s wake – but I want words, if he’s alive. Paul said he was going after the pension records – see how far he got.’

  He thrust his hands down deep into the pockets of his RNLI jacket.

  ‘But the key is that night: the wake. The problem is, we can round up witnesses – and we will – but they’re all family and friends; that’s why they were there. Who do we trust? What we need is a reliable witness with nothing to gain from lying. Still no luck with the choir?’

  ‘It’ll take time,’ said Valentine. ‘One thought. My sister, Jean? She knew your dad. I think she did some kitchen work at the Flask, right through the eighties. Functions, parties, that kind of thing.’

  Shaw remembered her: when Shaw’s father was alive his DI had been a regular visitor at the house, usually late at night, so that Shaw would hear them downstairs, talking over a whisky bottle, worrying away at a case. Jean had come to family celebrations because she’d married a copper: a DS from Peterborough. Shaw recalled a stoical woman, always in the background, helping in the kitchen, the kind of woman who only spoke to annotate her husband’s stories: a series of well-rehearsed asides.

  ‘She about?’ asked Shaw. A pair of seagulls dive-bombed the squabbling cats.

  ‘Yeah. Don Walker – the copper – he died years ago. But she’s about. Lives in the next street. I’ll ask her. Even if she wasn’t there, she might know someone who was. South Lynn’s a tight community – there’ll be someone.’

  Shaw’s mobile buzzed. It was a text from Twine. Sam Venn at the Free Church had given them the names of two black men who’d been members of the Elect in 1982 and might have been at Nora Tilden’s funeral. St James’s had tracked them down through the old electoral roll and found a relative at the same address. Jesse and Emmanuel Rogers, father and son, were both alive and well in Northampton; Jesse retired, a widower, Emmanuel working as a hospital porter.

  He handed the phone to Valentine to read.

  ‘They both lied,’ said Shaw.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Venn and Fletcher. Venn was happy to track down the two black men – but he didn’t mention, when he could have, that there were three. Pat was at the graveside. So was Venn. An oversight – maybe? But what abo
ut Fletcher? He said there were two faces – and only two. He led us away from Pat Garrison.’

  Valentine shrugged, judging whether he had time for another smoke. ‘It’s twenty-eight years. People forget.’

  ‘Maybe – like I said, maybe Venn forgot. But Fletcher? There’s a lot of things wrong with Freddie Fletcher, but being colour blind isn’t one of them.’

  13

  Inside the Ark the lights were neon; a bank of them hung from the old roof beams. The old chapel was partitioned across the middle. On the far side of a set of plastic swing doors was the force’s mortuary and autopsy suite. This side was Tom Hadden’s forensics lab complete with a ballistics chute, mass spectrometer, fume cupboard and a bank of computers. The team ‘hot-desked’, so that the nest of tables was paperless and clinical. Stores and files were kept in the old organ loft, reached via a metal spiral staircase.

  Hadden was at one of the desks as they came in, his monitor showing a flock of Arctic tern in flight as a screen-saver.

  ‘Peter – for you,’ he said, closing his eyes to concentrate on what he was going to say. ‘Something you really need to see, I’m afraid.’ The way he said it stopped them in their tracks.

  ‘Soil profile from the grave,’ said Hadden. ‘I’ve got some graphics here. Take a seat – you’ll need it. Both of you.’

  The lab had a large whiteboard for showing computer images. Shaw and Valentine dragged up some chairs and Hadden tapped a button on his keyboard to project a single picture of Nora Tilden’s empty grave. In order to get a flat shot of the long side of the grave it had been dug out so that the hole was nine feet by nine feet – a square, with three of the original sides preserved.

  ‘We do this so that we can get back far enough to see the wood for the trees and get a good shot of the soil profile.’ He tapped the button again and the next shot came up: a flat-on picture of the grave profile. Shaw could see the various layers of the soil – the black decaying humus at the top, a dark layer of soil, a thin yellow line where the clay began and then the grey, almost silvery, waterlogged strata below.

  Valentine yawned so wide that a bone in his jaw cracked.

  Hadden looked at the DS’s exposed teeth. ‘A soil profile can tell you as much as a fingerprint. It’s evidence, very compelling evidence, if you read it properly, and interpret what it’s telling us.’

  Valentine looked at the screen.

  ‘Now,’ said Hadden, his eyelids closing, then fluttering slightly as he concentrated. ‘You need to recognize that you’ve had a big slice of luck here, because the archaeologists who found our victim’s bones dug out the grave using a mechanical digger, so it’s really precise – engineered, if you like. What this picture shows, I believe, is that before they dug their hole someone else had dug down into the same grave, by hand, with a spade, about four feet, then stopped, then filled it in. This earlier hand-dug hole was not as true as the one made with the digger. It’s slightly to one side, slightly slewed, so you can still see the ghost of it, if you like, in the profile that’s left, cutting through the nice neat strata of the profile. You see?’

  Shaw stood, staring into the bright image. Hadden was right, because the neat wedding-cake layers had been disrupted, the shadow of the hole breaking the thin yellow clay line.

  Which left them with one key question. ‘When?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘Well, I know someone at Cambridge’s soil-science lab who can give us a better call, but I’d guess – and it’s a good guess – that we’re talking between six and eight months.’

  ‘This year?’ said Shaw, his voice sharp and energized. Suddenly he felt ten years younger. ‘We’re saying someone dug down towards those bones this year – then filled it in, then along came the digger?’

  ‘The disturbed soil,’ said Hadden, pointing at what he’d called the ‘ghost’ of the hole revealed in the soil profile, ‘has been settling for one winter, and almost certainly only one. That’s when a lot of the soil processes work through the strata – forming layers, rotting the leaves to form the mulch at the top, creating the soil.’

  He interlaced his hands, turning them upside down to form a basket, to show that science could do miracles too. ‘This part of the profile, where’s there’s been disruption, is just a jumble of soil – there’s hardly any stratification.’

  Valentine tried to concentrate, distracted by the gurgle of a coffee machine on the next desk. ‘We’re saying someone dug down into this grave sometime this year and then gave up?’

  ‘Yes. That’s right. Or they found what they were looking for and stopped,’ said Hadden. ‘Four feet brings you pretty close to the bones we found. They could have got close, then just dug at a precise spot – further down. We’ll never know because the archaeologists just ejected the spoil, as you would expect. They weren’t interested in the graves, just what was supposed to be at the bottom of them.’

  ‘Animals? Natural subsidence?’ asked Shaw, aware that the basis of his inquiry had just been shifted twenty-eight years closer. He felt his bloodstream coursing, as if he’d just finished his morning mile.

  Hadden held up a hand, closed his eyes, thinking through Shaw’s multiple question. ‘No. Animal damage would be much more localized. Subsidence is out – you can see the underlying clay base is solid.’

  Shaw tried to imagine the scene. At night, perhaps? One or more men, working by a small light, digging down towards the three buried bodies.

  He clicked his fingers. Valentine winced. ‘Hold on. What about the archaeologists? Perhaps they did it, filled it in, then came back, like a trial dig to see what the soil conditions were like.’

  Hadden shook his head. ‘’Fraid not, Peter. Nice try. I’ve checked.’

  Shaw was still thinking. ‘George – when did the council announce the programme of reinterment? Can you find out for me …’ He held Valentine’s eyes, so that he saw the DS’s eyebrows rising slightly at the insistent tone. Valentine stood, walked towards the partition with the mortuary and flicked open his mobile.

  ‘They were after something,’ said Shaw, tapping the whiteboard. ‘And if they gave up at four feet, and what they wanted was at six feet, then what they wanted was still in the grave when we opened it. Or – they got close, knew exactly what they were after, and just dug down to get it – like a miniature well. To do that they’d need to know precisely its location – but then that’s not difficult if you know a few basics: like which end of the grave the head lies, that kind of thing?’

  Hadden nodded and took Shaw to one of the lab tables which had been cleared and covered with a white plastic sheet. On it were the items they’d extracted from Nora Tilden’s coffin and from amongst the bones found on the coffin lid.

  Each one had been labelled, numbered, dated. The green glasses with the engraved whaling scene first, the penknife, the wallet, the few coins. And from between the coffin lid and the bones, the billhook. And finally, from inside Nora’s coffin, the silver brooch.

  ‘No wedding ring on Nora’s hand?’ asked Shaw.

  Hadden shook his head. ‘Then we go inside the wallet,’ he said. He’d set the contents out separately, under a single sheet of glass: the rotted pieces of paper, one with the faint pen strokes of the gibbet and hanging man just visible. There was one rectangular piece of paper, white, as if it had been leached of colour. ‘I’m working on that – maybe a receipt?’ said Hadden. ‘The paper’s shiny, like …I don’t know – a football match ticket? A concert? I can’t raise any images at the moment but it’s early days. Just a three-letter grouping – MOT, just that – with a space before and a space after. That’s all I can get – MOT. It could be an MOT certificate, I suppose – I’ve asked someone to track down a copy of the standard form from 1982, see if it matches.’ He let Shaw think about that, rearranging the remains of a ten-pound note and three fives.

  ‘Big question is – if they were after one of these items, which one was it?’ asked Hadden, smiling broadly, enjoying himself.

  ‘The penknife,�
�� said Shaw. ‘George says it’s a collector’s item – and a link to the GIs. So maybe that?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘The billhook?’

  Hadden picked up the bagged item and turned it so that Shaw could read the word stamped into the metal haft, where it sank into the wooden handle.

  STANLEY

  ‘Toolmaker’s name,’ said Hadden. ‘No other marks.’

  Valentine came back, his mobile extended with a straight arm. There was a text on screen from Paul Twine: 18 JUNE 2010.

  ‘Bang on six months,’ said Valentine.

  ‘So, last June the council announces the coffins are coming up, someone panics, thinks we’ll find the bones and some evidence which points to the identity of the killer. They go to the cemetery after dark, dig down. Someone, clearly, with a lot to lose,’ said Shaw, turning to Hadden.

  Hadden nodded. ‘Maybe. I just do the science, Peter. The clever stuff’s all yours.’

  ‘There was something else in the grave,’ said Valentine. ‘Garrison’s bones. Perhaps they wanted to get him out. Then there’d be no inquiry at all. Fuck all. But they gave up.’

  Dr Kazimierz pushed her way through the swing doors and helped herself to coffee. She caught Shaw’s eye, smiled, then retreated back through the doors. The greeting had been warmer than usual, and Shaw wondered if the meeting with Dawid on the beach had been a rite of passage, an entry into a different circle of friendship.

  ‘George,’ said Shaw. ‘After we’re done, ring Paul. I want everyone to know that we need to focus on this attempt to reopen the grave. The timeline is pretty conclusive. Night time? Almost certainly. How’d they do that? Let’s crawl all over this – local uniformed squad cars, beat, council security, any local low life that hangs out in the cemetery after dark – you know the score, brief everyone. This may well be a cold case, George – but it just got a whole lot hotter. And tell Jacky to rerun the door-to-door in the immediate vicinity – someone must have seen or heard something.’