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 about 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.