Jim Kelly - Death Toll

Hadden raised a hand from the desktop. ‘We’ll have her up in the morning — but the team down in the meadow say there’s definitely another coffin there. And it’s pint-sized.’

Twine added the child’s name under her father and mother’s.

‘Alby Tilden left home — went back to sea in 1955,’ he looked down at his notes. ‘Didn’t come back for six years. This all came out at the trial. When he did turn up he was on his uppers. Looks like he spent most of his time in Gibraltar and North Africa. Bit of a colourful time there, apparently — not so much hero any more as villain. Court was told he’d contracted various venereal diseases on his travels. There were also signs of mental illness. Anxiety attacks — agoraphobia. He was an engineer at sea, stayed below decks. On deck he freaked out. Nora took him back — but plenty of witnesses said the marriage was always rocky, although they had another child — Elizabeth, known as Lizzie. She was born in 1962.

‘During the year Nora was killed the rows with Alby had been getting worse — physical, not just verbal sniping from prepared positions. She stopped Alby working behind the bar of the Flask because he kept giving the booze away — so he got a day job in one of the canneries to put beer money in his pocket. Locals said they could often hear the china breaking upstairs. Witnesses were happy to talk about that, but the reason for the rows — the specific reason — never came out. The daughter, Lizzie, said they’d always fought.’

Twine added Lizzie to the family tree.

‘The night Nora Tilden died, the first of June 1982, Alby had been drinking heavily in the bar. He had mates on the ships in the new docks and they all used to drink in the pub. Lizzie was working behind the bar. Nora was upstairs. Apparently she kept out of the way when he was on a bender. Alby went up himself about nine o’clock for food and several witnesses said they heard the familiar sounds of an argument, then stuff being thrown, then a scream.

‘Lizzie told the court she ran from the bar to the bottom of the stairs. She found her mother in a heap — dad standing at the top. The pub’s stairs are as steep as a ladder, so the fall could easily have killed her, but the pathologist said there were pressure marks around the dead woman’s neck — as though she’d been throttled. Alby said they’d argued because he wanted to go downstairs, back to his mates. She followed him, caught him at the top step, and they started pushing and shoving. According to Alby, she lost her footing and fell. According to the jury, he either pushed her or throttled her or both. The judge gave him life.’

‘So he’s probably out by now, then,’ said Valentine.

‘Home Office link is down,’ said Twine. ‘I’ll check first thing, but yes, he’s very likely free — if he’s still alive. With good behaviour he could have been out in fifteen. He’d be in his early eighties now. If we do find him there should be no problem recognizing him.’ He waved a piece of paper. ‘This is the original warrant. It lists any identifying marks. Tilden was covered in them. It wasn’t just VD he brought back from the East — nearly thirty tattoos are listed, over most of his body. He’s the illustrated man.’

Monday, 13 December

Shaw and Valentine sat on identical straight-backed chairs in Detective Chief Superintendent Max Warren’s office. A single picture window gave a view over the rooftops to the church of St James — stark Victorian neo-Gothic, with a neon cross on the roof in lurid green, lit now, but only just visible in a light snow shower that looked like the fallout from a pillow fight. Out in the adjoining office DCS Warren was dictating a letter to his secretary: he’d be with them in a minute, he’d said, offering coffee, which they’d turned down. So they sat, each alone, despite being together. One wall of the office held a bookcase, Christmas cards crowded on the shelves. Shaw thought, not for the first time, what a depressing word ‘festive’ could be.

Shaw had his right leg crossed over his left to support a sketch pad. He’d spent an hour in the Ark the night before, after leaving the CID suite at St James’s. Dr Kazimierz had been finishing her preliminary report: she was happy for him to photograph the skull, as long as she was present. His forensic art kit was always on hand — stashed in the boot of his car. It included a tripod camera and a perspex stand on which the skull could be supported, then angled precisely to meet the Frankfurt horizontal plane — the internationally agreed angle of tilt which allowed for the uniform comparison of all skulls.

Even then, with just the bones set at the correct angle, he could see the face. He’d noted, for example, the asymmetry of the eye sockets, the left a few millimetres above the right, the narrow mastoid process on both the left and right sides of the skull, a formation that would have made the ears almost impossible to see fully from the frontal view. And the slight gap in the front teeth: a defect that would have been notable as part of the victim’s essential ‘lifelong look’ — the subtle alignment of features by which he would have always been recognizable to family and friends. The kind of facial feature everyone uses, often without thinking, to spot a loved one in an old snapshot.

Shaw had left St James’s at 2.00 a.m. with a complete set of digital images of the skull. He’d driven to the lifeboat house at Hunstanton, parked the car, then ran the mile along the sands to home in four minutes and forty-two seconds: six seconds slower than his average. The Beach Cafe’s security light had thudded on as he’d stepped up on to the wooden verandah. The cottage, to the rear in the dunes, had been in darkness, the shop boarded up out of season to protect it from the winter gales.

Letting himself into the cottage, he’d stopped for a second inside the closed door to smell the scents of home: pasta, paint, washing powder and — best of all — wood. He’d checked on his daughter Francesca, the terrier at the foot of her bed only raising its old head as Shaw looked in. He’d left Lena to sleep and taken a shower. In the bathroom, on the window ledge, had been a line of pillboxes he hadn’t seen before: he’d counted them — eight, each marked with the logo of the local allergy clinic. He’d let the water run down his skin, washing away the day, until he’d felt clean.

Dry, in shorts and a T-shirt, he’d unlocked the door that led to the cafe down the short connecting corridor they’d built between the two buildings. Reflections from the cafe’s neon lights would have concealed the view outside, so he’d used the small light above the counter, then fired up the Italian coffee machine. Through the windows he’d just been able to see the ghostly white lines of the waves breaking out on the far sands, snow clouds beginning to blot out the moon.

Booting up the laptop, he’d scanned in the pictures from the camera, then printed them out at precisely life-size. He’d taped up two of the pictures on an easel retrieved from the deckchair store, and illuminated them using an anglepoise lamp from the office, then stood back with his coffee to study them.

He’d covered the two images on the easel with sheets of tracing paper and opened his copy of Rhines Tables: the standard set of multiples which would allow him to put flesh on bones. Then he’d worked on each set of features using Krogman’s Rule of Thumb to add fleshy details not dictated by skull structure — the mouth set at six teeth wide, the angle of the nose extrapolated from the nasal spine. He’d modified the rules, using some educated guesses based on the mixed ethnicity — for example he’d set the nose at 16mm wide compared to the standard 10mm for Caucasians. He’d made the eyes dark in the black-and-white image, but left the hair indistinct, reduced to just a few pencil lines. The pathologist had considered the clothing to be of good quality, so Shaw presumed a healthy weight, and he’d taken her guesstimate of the age at between twenty and twenty-five.