Jim Kelly - Death Toll

Shaw knelt to look at the skull, now at the height of a hospital patient lying in bed. Shaw’s whiz-kid reputation was partly based on being a fast-track graduate, but mostly on the fact that his degree was in art — a course which had included a year out at the FBI college at Quantico, Virginia, where he’d specialized in forensic art. He was one of only three serving police officers in the country with the ability to recreate an accurate hand-drawn image of a face from a set of skull bones, or produce a fifty-year-old face from a nine-year-old’s snapshot, or draw the image of a suspect from an interview with a witness.

The human face had become Shaw’s obsession, his area of expertise, his touchstone as a detective. He could read this skull as if it was a book: he could see, in his mind, what it had been, and what it might have become. And almost instantly he knew that this was a set of bones that would be defined by its exotic DNA. Even encased in clay the skull was dominated by the broad nasal aperture, in which nestled a fat orange slug, the prominent chin and jaws, with several large teeth still in situ, contrasting with the shallow sloping forehead.

‘What’s your story?’ he said in a whisper, lowering his own face to within a few inches of the skull. Close up, the disadvantage of having sight in only one eye was at its most pronounced, so that he had to move his head constantly an inch to the left, an inch to the right, to allow his brain to construct a 3D image. He could smell death: the rich scent of decay — a human compost. Earwigs, beetles and spiders dropped from the coffin top to the turf below, their descent caught by the searing light.

Tom Hadden, head of St James’s forensics unit, stood back, letting Shaw do his job, his own face aged by the horizontal light. He was a pale man, with strawberry blond hair thinning above a freckled face, his forehead marked by the lesions of skin cancer. A small scar indicated that at least one had been removed surgically.

‘Peter,’ he said, beckoning Shaw to his position behind the skull. He closed his eyes before he spoke, a mannerism that indicated he was deep in thought and was about to deliver a statement of fact. ‘Now that,’ he said, when Shaw arrived, ‘is a lethal blow.’

There was a single puncture hole in the left parietal bone, close to the sagittal suture — the line that marks the division between the two halves of the skull. The impact had left a small, neat, triangular hole, but had shattered the lower cranium like crazy-paving.

‘What did that?’ asked Valentine, who’d joined them, his slip-ons damp in the long wet grass.

‘Weapons aren’t my territory,’ said Hadden. ‘As you well know, George. Justina’s on her way. Till then, chummy stays put.’ Dr Justina Kazimierz, St James’s regular consultant pathologist, had begun her career working with Shaw’s father — Detective Chief Inspector Jack Shaw — back in the 1980s. She demanded respect, and got it.

‘So — a male, then?’ asked Valentine, pleased he’d spotted Hadden’s implicit judgement of the sex of their victim. He was standing at Hadden’s shoulder now, and unless asked he’d be keeping a good distance between himself and the bones. Despite over thirty years on the force, George Valentine was never happier than when he was walking away from a corpse. The absence of life made his mouth dry with fear: an irresistible vacuum that seemed to tug at his raincoat.

‘Who’s in the box?’ he asked, coughing with a sound like coal being shot from a scuttle. Valentine told himself he smoked twenty cigarettes a day, ignoring the fact that he seemed to always need to buy an extra packet before bedtime. He knew it was killing him, but he couldn’t stop, and he was angry, in a listless way, with this constant reminder that he was a weak man.

Hadden checked a clipboard. ‘Gravestones are either up against the railings or along the chapel wall up the hill — but the council officer’s got a plan, and if it’s telling the truth …’ he double-checked the clipboard, ‘… then this should be the grave of Nora Elizabeth Tilden. Born eighth of February 1928. Died first of June 1982,’ he said. He held up crossed fingers. ‘Let’s hope. It’s certainly not her on top. And she’s not the only occupant of the plot, according to the records. There’s an earlier burial — February 1948. A child. Mary Tilden. Aged six weeks.’

Hadden nodded at the open grave. ‘She’ll be three feet deeper — that’s the law.’ They heard earth slipping into the grave, splashing into water.

‘We’ll need to see her, too,’ said Shaw.

Hadden nodded, unhappy with the thought. ‘I’ll need daylight for that, and a pump.’

Three men in white suits began to construct a lightweight SOC tent out of aluminium poles and nylon. Hadden stood back from the coffin. ‘Notice what’s under the skeleton?’ he asked.

Shaw looked, circling the bones. ‘A few inches of soil?’

‘Exactly. Given the downward weight and the settlement of the grave, that few inches was probably more like a foot, maybe more, when he went in. So he’s been buried in the grave — but not directly on the coffin top.’

Hadden cast a torch beam down into the misty hole. ‘There’s a soil profile — soon as we’ve got it dry tomorrow I’ll get down there and get some photos.’

Valentine shivered — a big, awkward, jolt of his thin shoulders.

‘With luck I’ll be able to tell you the answer to the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,’ added Hadden.

He smiled at Valentine, but the DS had no idea what he was talking about.

Shaw nodded. ‘Was our man buried at the same time as Nora Tilden?’

‘Exactly,’ said Hadden. ‘Or did someone dig down, chuck him in, and then refill the grave?’

‘What was the date of the original burial?’ asked Shaw. Valentine noticed that Shaw often did that — asked a question, of no one in particular, but expected an answer. It really pissed him off.

‘First of November 1982,’ said Hadden. ‘According to the cemetery records.’

Shaw looked up at the stars. ‘That’s odd. A five-month gap after death. Why would that be?’

Hadden started taking flash pictures of the open grave. ‘Well,’ he said, straightening his back, ‘it’s not that rare these days. Relatives have to travel — who knows, Australia, New Zealand — that takes time. Or there’s a dispute over the will — that can sometimes hold it up. Or it was a job for a coroner and he didn’t release the body until the court had sat. Which would make it a violent, sudden or unnatural death. Take your pick.’

‘We need to find some family, George,’ said Shaw. ‘Get some answers.’

‘I’ve got Paul Twine standing by,’ said Valentine. Twine was a relatively new member of the squad, graduate entry, smart and keen, direct from the Met’s training school at Hendon. Valentine reckoned he didn’t have a social life so he’d rung him earlier as soon as he knew he might need some back-up in the office. At work Twine was professional, clean-cut, almost antiseptic, and Valentine had been astonished when a woman answered the phone.

Shaw looked around. It was one of his father’s maxims — passed on during one of those rare moments when he’d talked about the job to his son — that any decent detective should have a picture of the scene of the crime imprinted on his memory bank, as tangible and to hand as the coins in his pocket.

The mist was thickening, rising slightly, so that thin strands seemed to claw listlessly at their belts. Shaw stood, partly disembodied, surrounded by the empty graves of the dead. Beside the stone angel there was a box tomb lit by the halogen lamp: it was in granite, with engraved cherubs, and had a flat top on which was etched: