Jim Kelly - Death Toll

Et in arcadia ego

Shaw stepped up onto it effortlessly. The lid rocked slightly, like a boulder in a stream. He let his single eye tour the horizon. The loss of his right eye two years earlier in an accident might have destroyed his ability to see in 3D at close range, but over twenty-five feet his eyesight was as good as anyone with two eyes: better, because he’d had to train himself in other ways to judge distance and perspective — such as using the way colours merge towards blue as they approach the horizon to judge distance. But that was no good at night: the view from the tomb, above the mist, was of a piebald world, just black and white. The night-watchman’s light at the cannery was gone. To the north, half a mile away, he could see a light on a building — a pitched roof, gables and beams; a building that seemed to crouch beyond the cemetery gates, like a mourner returning to grieve after dark.

‘What’s that?’ he asked.

‘The Flask,’ said Valentine, looking at his shoes. ‘Boozer — bit rough now. Used to be all right.’

Shaw’s knowledge of Lynn’s pubs was restricted to the Red House, the CID’s haunt off St James’s. Hadden unplucked the forensic glove from his right hand. ‘It was named after a ship,’ he said. Hadden was a Londoner who’d come north to escape an ugly divorce and find peace spotting birds on the north Norfolk sands. Like most incomers, he knew more about local history than the natives. And he spent some of his time here, on the tidal path, looking for oystercatchers. ‘A whaler back in the 1880s. This was where they used to take the flesh off the carcasses — the flensing grounds. Between us and the pub is a narrow inlet — pretty much silted up now. Blubber Creek.’

Shaw looked around, trying to imagine the whaling fleet in the river after its nine-month voyage back from the Arctic, the fires on the bank heating the cauldrons in which the meat was reduced to oil. Flesh pots.

They heard footsteps through the drier grass up the bank, and for the first time the slight crunch of frost. Walking towards them, hauling a leather bag, was Justina Kazimierz. She didn’t say hello to anyone, simply put the bag down and opened it up, retrieving a set of forensic gloves and a mask. When Shaw had first met her he’d attributed her taciturn manner to the language barrier — she’d just arrived from Poland, via the Home Office. He’d been too kind. The pathologist didn’t do pleasantries, and didn’t suffer fools. Only once had Shaw seen her with her guard down in public, dancing with her diminutive husband at the Polish Club, drinking lighter-fuel vodka from a half-pint tumbler. But last summer she and her husband had moved out of town to a house on the coast near Shaw’s, and she often came past now, on long walks, circled by a Labrador. Always alone, and always with an ice-cream for his daughter. A friendship had begun, if you could build a friendship on so few words. She took less than a minute to scan the body. ‘I need him inside — quickly. Can we use the chapel?’

She hadn’t looked at Hadden when she asked the question but he nodded.

She tapped the coffin. ‘Wood’s in good condition — under water most of the time? Maybe.’ Even when she did talk to others she seemed to limit the conversation to a question-and-answer session with herself.

‘Unscrew the coffin lid, then slide the lid and the corpse into a body-bag,’ she said. ‘Then we’ll look inside.’ She stood back, waiting for her instructions to be carried out.

‘But from the general position of the body we’d conclude …?’ asked Shaw.

She sighed, circumnavigating the bones. ‘I’d guess — and that’s what it is, Shaw: a guess — that he was dead when he was thrown in the grave. The body twisted as it fell — hence the posture. That’ll have to do you for now, although I could say more about the wound.’

She’d called him Shaw, although in private it was Peter now. She plucked the forensic glove from her right hand as they gathered behind the head.

‘The weapon was curved — you see?’ she said. ‘The blade is triangular in its cross-section. As it’s gone through the bone it’s exerted more pressure on the lower edge of the puncture wound — that’s why the cracks radiate from that point. So the weapon’s gone in, and then turned downwards through the brain, during the blow, so that there’s virtually no pressure on the two upward sides of the triangle. Very unusual — very distinctive.’

‘What are we looking for?’ asked Valentine.

Dr Kazimierz straightened. ‘No idea. Don’t push me. A scythe would show the same pressures — but it’s not triangular, and it’s not this narrow. I need to get him back to the Ark. Ask me then.’

The Ark was West Norfolk’s pathology and forensic laboratory, set in an abandoned nonconformist chapel on the ring road, close to police headquarters at St James’s. It was Tom Hadden’s kingdom, and housed the force’s own mortuary. Kazimierz was a consultant, working on contract, but she used an office at the Ark too, and West Norfolk provided most of her caseload. It was a haven for the pathologist, Shaw sensed, wherein logic and reason reigned.

She pulled off the other forensic glove. ‘The lid?’

Two of Hadden’s team arrived with a stretcher and a body-bag and set up another wooden trestle to take the lid and the skeleton when it was lifted clear. One of the forensics officers, a woman entirely encased in a white SOC suit, worked steadily round the coffin, unscrewing screws, easing them out of the wood.

Shaw walked away, breathing in the freezing air. He thought about his father’s funeral, out at Gayton, and the family in a line like a firing squad by the grave. Beyond them, uniformed officers at attention, and under a cypress tree the whole of the CID from St James’s, most of them looking at their feet as the first spadefuls of earth were thrown in to thud on the coffin top. And with them, but a few yards apart, George Valentine, smoke drifting from a cigarette cupped in one hand.

‘One, two, and three …’ said Hadden. Shaw turned as they lifted the coffin lid. Valentine looked at his shoes. As the lid was being slipped into the body-bag Shaw glimpsed the pathologist tracing a hurried sign of the cross.

Hadden pulled a spotlight over the now-open coffin. Long grey hair still clung to the skull revealed. Shaw noted the toothless jaws. ‘Well — an elderly woman?’ he asked.

Kazimierz pulled her gloves back on, making them tight at the base of each finger. Shaw was shocked by the realization that the movement was a feint, a cover, to allow the pathologist to gather herself, and for the first time he noticed how much she’d aged in this last year — the year in which they’d become friends. Her face had always been heavy, flesh obscuring what had once perhaps been a precarious beauty. But now the skin looked wasted, hanging from the bones of her face.

She took a piece of mouldered cloth from around the neck bone and a spider crept out from the shadow beneath the jaw, then scuttled back. Most of the bones were hidden beneath a velvet drape which had been folded over the body like a pair of rotting scarlet wings. On one fold of the drape, near the neck, was a silver brooch, two simple curved lines intersecting to form a fish. One hand, each finger intact, had been laid across the heart.

The pathologist began to work at the edge of the drape with a gloved hand, trying to reveal the bones beneath.

Shaw walked away and stood by the empty grave to look down. It was dark down there, an almost magnetic black. He hoped the victim had been dead when the killers had tossed him into the grave, but knew the real crime was the knowledge, the near certainty, that they probably didn’t care.