Death Toll

by Jim Kelly

  Shaw took a deep breath. Beside the swing doors there was a tray of boiled sweets. He took one, passed another to Valentine.

  ‘Ready?’ he asked, with the surfer’s smile. ‘Or are you going to fit in a quick bacon sandwich?’

  Valentine didn’t smile back. ‘On the subject of food …’ He took out his wallet and slipped out a ticket, handing it to Shaw. It was for the Shipwrights’ Hall Christmas dinner they’d seen advertised on Freddie Fletcher’s wall at the PEN office.

  ‘Traffic division have taken a table – that’s how it works. You buy a table, then flog your tickets. I thought I’d go along, Thursday lunchtime, so we can see who Fletcher’s mates are. The Flask’s got a table, too.’

  ‘Enjoy,’ said Shaw, pushing his way through the doors into the autopsy suite, unhappy that the thought of the Shipwrights’ Hall lunch conjured up an image of turkey and gravy on Christmas morning, his father attacking the bird’s carcass with a carving knife.

  There were three metal tables in the autopsy suite, all occupied. The rest of the room was metallic and cold, except for the stone walls and the single statue, left from the original chapel, of an angel high on the apex of the wall, its hands covering sightless eyes.

  They moved to the first table. Shaw’s blood had begun to migrate to his heart, leaving his fingers cold, because on the brushed aluminium slab lay a tiny coffin, and beside it a shroud, wrapped – he guessed – around an infant’s body. He hadn’t been expecting this, and the tattered intimacy of the small bundle made him feel like a grave robber.

  The pathologist carefully unwrapped the shroud to reveal the skeleton of a child wrapped in a second, rotten cloth.

  ‘We know the story – there’s nothing new to tell. I’ll do some toxicology but cot deaths were just as inexplicable then as they are now.’

  ‘It happens,’ said Valentine, unable to prevent his words sounding harsh and cynical.

  Hardly any of the child-sized bones remained intact. That didn’t stop Shaw trying to clothe them in flesh, seeing the baby flexing its limbs in a cot. For the first time he thought that his gift, to see the flesh on bones, might be a curse as well as a blessing.

  Kazimierz moved to the second mortuary table and uncovered the body of Nora Tilden: the skeletal frame stripped of the remnants of clothes and funeral wear, the bones held together by wire. Kazimierz put her hand on a brown blotched file at the head of the table. ‘These are the original records used at Albert Tilden’s trial,’ she said. ‘Everything is consistent: the leg bones are shattered, as is one arm, the collarbones, the lower spine.’ Shaw thought about the narrow steep staircase at the Flask. He thought of tumbling down, his limbs cracking against the wall, the wooden banisters. Sympathetic pains ran through his nervous system.

  ‘She’s not been disturbed in any way since burial?’ he asked.

  ‘Tom’s your man on that,’ she said. ‘But there are no breaks or fractures other than those listed.’ She looked at the bones, shaking her head. ‘No. I think she’s lain like this for twenty-eight years. There’s no soft tissue, so I can’t tell you anything else. But I’ve analysed the bones, and I can tell you one thing – she was suffering from osteoporosis.’

  She picked a photograph out of the file of a woman, late middle age, greying hair tied back, a broad match for the one they’d got up in the incident room, but younger. ‘This is her,’ she said. In this photograph the lighting was better, so that it was possible to see the eyes, which were humourless, and the lips, too thin to support any kind of smile. But there was a hint of something else – an earlier beauty, perhaps; a delicate, rounded, childlike grace.

  ‘What age was she when the child was born?’ asked Shaw.

  Kazimierz worked it out from the file. ‘Twenty – just.’

  Shaw looked again at the face, trying to run it backwards in time, trying to retrieve the young mother who’d lost her first child after just a few weeks.

  They moved to the corpse provisionally identified as Patrice Garrison.

  ‘I’ve extracted a sample of marrow for DNA analysis. Tom’s got the ID in hand. My initial summary of the cause of death stands. In fact, I can show you …’

  She leant forward and lifted the top of the trepanned skull so that they could see into the brain cavity. Shaw couldn’t help noticing how at ease Kazimierz was dealing with the dead, and recalled how awkward she’d been the night before at the café, clutching her husband by the arm.

  Shaw got close, but Valentine looked at the clock on the wall, concentrating on the shuddering second hand, thinking only of the clean metallic mechanism within.

  ‘You can see here,’ said the pathologist, ‘where the tip of the billhook curved right round through the brain and actually indented the inside of the right parietal bone.’

  ‘This would take force?’ asked Shaw. ‘A man – a powerful man?’

  ‘No. I don’t think you can make any such surmise. The physics of this are complex, Shaw. You’ve got a swinging blow with a curved weapon meeting a round object. It’s all luck. Catch it just right and you’d slice through the bone like butter. An inch to one side, a few seconds later, it would sheer off, leaving only a flesh wound.’

  Shaw filed that detail in his memory, noting only that it clashed with the two etched green glasses, which had suggested a ritual: something planned and meticulous.

  Kazimierz turned her back to fill in some paperwork on a lab bench, dismissing them without a word.

  Hadden’s suite on the far side of the partition was empty, so Shaw pulled out from the wall a blackboard on hinges. Taking a piece of chalk from the runnel he wrote ‘Arthur Melville’ at the top, followed by Nora, then ‘Albert Tilden’ and their dates.

  ‘What’s this?’ asked Valentine. ‘Hi-tech policing?’

  ‘Just keeping it simple.’ Shaw drew the rest of the family tree. The result was starkly instructive, because it didn’t look like a family tree. ‘It’s like the old Norfolk joke,’ said Shaw. ‘Everyone in the village has got a family tree – it’s just that they don’t have any branches.’

  Valentine put a Silk Cut between his lips.

  Shaw underlined Nora Tilden’s name.

  Valentine stood and drew circles around three others. ‘Three of them are black,’ he said. ‘Latrell – Bea’s husband, their son Patrice, who becomes our victim in Nora’s grave, and then his son Ian. Three generations.’

  Shaw stubbed the chalk on Ian’s name, breaking it. ‘What do we know about him? This isn’t all about the past, is it, George? Because we know that someone was out there in Flensing Meadow digging up that grave just six months ago. Which transforms the inquiry – even Max Warren would have to admit that. Someone alive, someone with enough youth left to dig a four-foot hole after dark, someone who feared what we’d find in that grave.’

  He stood back. ‘So perhaps it’s a family secret, and Ian knows what it is.’

  Valentine checked his notebook. ‘Ian Murray. He’s twenty-seven. School at Whitefriars primary, just round the corner. Then Springwood High. Trained as a chef at the college. Works in the kitchens at the Flask lunch-times – then evenings and Sundays at Kirkpatrick’s – the posh wine bar on the quay. Holidays, days off – that’s Monday and Tuesday – he cooks up at Bea Garrison’s B&B. Single – girlfriend works at Kirkpatrick’s too. Name of Sharon Hare; she’s local as well. He lives at the Flask, in the attic.’

  ‘OK. We’ll catch him later. I fancy an oyster.’

  Valentine pulled a face. He didn’t do wine bars.

  Shaw checked his watch and chucked the chalk back in the runnel. Outside the green glass windows of the Ark the dusk was gathering, so that they could see a scattering of Christmas lights in the gloom decorating a crane. They’d got a second interview set with Sam Venn at the London Road Shelter in an hour. Freddie Fletcher had eluded them: he was either out or ignoring the hammering on his door. The owner of Tinos, the greasy spoon downstairs, said he often went out canvassing for hours. He could be anywhere on
the street. Shaw had asked for a uniformed PC to stay on his doorstep. Twine had overnight orders to put most of the manpower on the door-to-doors in the morning, in and around the cemetery, because they needed to throw everything they had at trying to find out who had dug up Nora’s grave in the last few months.

  Shaw felt good. The inquiry was humming now: efficient, logical and professional. They’d got their break – thanks to Tom Hadden’s brilliant forensic work. Now, Shaw sensed, Pat Garrison’s killer was no longer an insubstantial ghost from the past. Whoever it was, Shaw felt that soon he’d be able to reach out and touch them.

  14

  The stumpy remains of Hunstanton’s pier shook with the impact of a storm wave, the white water erupting around the metal legs, spilling across the promenade. It was dark and starless, but the town’s streetlights caught the seawater in the air, a cloud like smoke, drifting in from a sea the colour of mulligatawny soup, and turned to orange the patches of snow in the ornamental gardens. Winter had turned violent. A single string of coloured Christmas lights swung and snapped in the wind between lamp posts.

  Shaw had agreed to sit out the surveillance as a passenger in Valentine’s Mazda, and he was unhappy with the heating system, fiddling constantly with the switches. Valentine smoked with the unhurried focus of the true addict. Shaw’s mobile phone buzzed and he brought up a text message and picture from Lena – a shot of Fran out on the snow-covered beach at dusk, standing by a snowman with a snorkel.

  Shaw checked his watch. It was five forty. Twenty minutes until Robert Mosse’s appointment with Jimmy Voyce. They’d agreed to meet at the pier head – but all that was left of the pier was a café and a bowling alley, both closed for the winter. The main pier had largely burnt down in 1939, and what was left had been similarly damaged during the 1950s, leaving the superstructure to be washed away in a storm in 1978. An attempted partial rebuild in 2002 burnt down, too. The people of Hunstanton – who included Shaw after his parents had moved out of town when he was a kid – could be forgiven for thinking someone was trying to tell them something: that perhaps they could do without a pier. But no. Shaw noted a developers’ billboard advertising the project for a new one, the finance provided by the EU.

  In a peculiar way Shaw was proud of the place. Because of its position on the coast of The Wash, looking west, it had a unique claim to fame. ‘It’s the only pier on the east coast that faces the setting sun,’ he said.

  Valentine stirred in his seat. ‘Far as I’m concerned, if it’s facing the sea, it’s facing the wrong way.’ Valentine had always hated the beach – any beach. There was the grittiness of it, and the sunburn on the tops of his feet, and the cloying scent of cooking flesh. As a child he’d come here from South Lynn on school trips and with his parents. The best part of the day was the ride home. He’d never admitted, even to himself, that it was the sea that really made him anxious: the way it seemed to draw you away from the promenade towards its dangerous, shifting edge. He always thought it was a bit like a net, being cast and recast on to the shore, as if the ocean was fishing for him.

  They heard the town clock at the top of the green strike a quarter to the hour. Snow began to fall in the gusts of wind off the sea. All they had to do was wait. One unit had tracked Voyce north in his hired car to the edge of town, then backed off before they’d seen him park. Mosse had left home an hour ago, driven north, but the unit had lost him on the road. Mosse was here, they were sure of that, they just didn’t know where. But they knew where he’d agreed to be at 6.00 p.m. precisely. By the pier head Shaw watched a flock of seagulls land, fighting over scraps, then tumbling on to the green, standing – each one – identically angled into the onshore wind.

  Shaw reviewed the interview they’d just completed with Sam Venn, warden of the London Road Shelter and a member of the Elect of the Free Church of Christ the Fisherman. DC Twine had provided them with a brief CV culled from Venn’s employers, the Vancouver Trust. Born in Lynn in 1959, both parents members of the church, attended the grammar school and took a degree in sociology at Lampeter College, University of Wales. He’d worked in the voluntary sector since graduating – Age Concern, Shelter in Leicester, then back to Lynn to take over as warden at London Road. He also worked two days a week for the council’s housing department, with a remit to oversee social housing in the town. Unmarried, he lived alone, in a flat at the shelter, which provided food and a warm place for the homeless from 6.30 a.m. to 8.00 p.m.

  Venn had been in an office behind the kitchen, working through the order book for foodstuffs. Shaw had been struck again by his first mistake – that he’d underestimated this man’s intelligence because of that face, one side sloping down, as if gravity was stronger on the left than the right, and the hand, held awkwardly on the lap or set on the desktop like a paperweight.

  Shaw wasted no time: Why had Venn failed to mention the presence of Patrice Garrison at Nora Tilden’s wake?

  Venn’s answer was smooth and plausible. He knew Pat Garrison, he’d talked to him in the pub that summer, seen him about the town. Bea Garrison had even come to the church one Sunday with her son. They’d joined in the prayers for Nora, although Venn said he suspected they’d come to pray for Alby. He hadn’t mentioned Pat Garrison because he didn’t think of him in terms of his colour, but in terms of his character, which was typically American – brash, confident, focused. But, Venn admitted, vanity was his principle vice. Shaw guessed it was a characteristic to which Venn was acutely tuned.

  ‘That happens, doesn’t it?’ he’d asked Shaw. ‘That you just forget the colour of someone’s skin.’

  Yes, thought Shaw, it happens. It should happen. The question was, had it happened to Sam Venn?

  Venn denied that he, or anyone else in the church, knew about Lizzie’s affair with her cousin. But he was happy to expatiate on the Free Church’s attitude to the marriage of cousins.

  ‘That’s forbidden – yes, absolutely. We believe that Leviticus is clear on that point, and as I’ve said to you, Inspector, we live only by the Word.’

  Shaw, faced with dogma, failed to mask an aggressive tension in the next question. ‘I see. And what does that mean? If cousins did marry – and they were members of the church – what would happen?’

  ‘Cast out,’ he’d said. And that’s when the mask – the lop-sided, damaged mask – slipped. There was a flash of real anger, and he’d had to swallow hard, and Shaw got the sense he was fighting to keep his breathing shallow.

  ‘And that’s happened, has it?’ Shaw asked.

  Venn’s eyes were blank, windows obscured by reflections. ‘Yes. But Pastor Abney would have the details. It was some years ago, certainly. Years ago.’ He rearranged papers on his desktop, appearing to resist the temptation to read a bank statement.

  ‘And the children of the Elect are bound by the same rules, Mr Venn? But if they’re outside the church, presumably they are beyond the church’s punishment?’ asked Shaw, pleased with the question.

  Venn had smiled then, a smile quite devoid of humour, or even the semblance of humour. ‘The world is full of evil. We seek only to keep it outside our church. We are a beacon. An example of the way the world should be, not of the world that is.’

  Valentine had ascertained Venn’s movements on the night of the wake. He’d gone straight from the graveside to the pub, stayed for food, then taken his place in the choir. He thought he’d left about eleven, but he couldn’t be sure. He hadn’t noticed Pat Garrison in the bar, though he thought he’d probably been there. Venn had asked then – outright – if he was a suspect. Valentine had noted down the question, because in his experience anyone who asked it was rarely guilty. Shaw had given him the answer: No – he wasn’t a suspect, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be. The inquiry was ongoing. Shaw felt Venn was an unlikely killer, but he was as sure as he could be that he was lying to them about something. When asked, he denied all knowledge of an attempt to reopen Nora Tilden’s grave in the last year. He seemed genuinely astonished a
t the idea.

  Once they’d left Venn’s office Shaw had called Twine: he wanted more on Venn, anything they could find from his university days, perhaps. Or one of his earlier employers. Family history, too: his parents, siblings. People like Sam Venn worried him; an incomplete character, as if presenting only two dimensions to the world, an image without depth. It was too easy to see in his religious fervour a reaction to his disability. Shaw sensed something else, something less passive.

  ‘Here’s someone,’ said Valentine, leaning his head forward until it touched the windscreen of the Mazda. A figure walked the snowy promenade of Hunstanton, slanted seaward into the wind, in a thin and cheap thigh-length cagoule. Valentine flicked a pen torch into life, illuminating a black-and-white picture the Auckland police had faxed them. Voyce was a member of the British Legion in Hamilton, the small town in which he lived, on the strength of his father’s wartime service in the Royal Artillery, and they’d lifted his son’s mug shot from his application form. He was fifty yards away but they could see the distinctive bald dome of the head, and the heavy bone structure of the face.

  And then, eerily, there were two of them.

  ‘Where did he come from?’ said Shaw, sitting forward, his voice shredded with anxiety.

  His radio buzzed and he heard DC Birley’s voice. ‘Must have been under the pier, on the prom, waiting. We’ve got him now.’ Mark Birley was ex-uniform branch, a heavily built rugby player who’d originally only joined the force for the weekend matches with the St James’s XV. But it hadn’t taken long to discover that he could transfer the ruthless focus of his game to a major inquiry. Birley was ‘point’ for the operation – the kingpin, ensconsed in a surveillance van up at the end of the green with a live feed into the town’s half-dozen CCTV cameras. He alerted the other two units on the open channel and asked them to stand by.