‘Big question is — if they were after one of these items, which one was it?’ asked Hadden, smiling broadly, enjoying himself.
‘The penknife,’ said Shaw. ‘George says it’s a collector’s item — and a link to the GIs. So maybe that?’
‘Maybe.’
‘The billhook?’
Hadden picked up the bagged item and turned it so that Shaw could read the word stamped into the metal haft, where it sank into the wooden handle.
STANLEY
‘Toolmaker’s name,’ said Hadden. ‘No other marks.’
Valentine came back, his mobile extended with a straight arm. There was a text on screen from Paul Twine: 18 JUNE 2010.
‘Bang on six months,’ said Valentine.
‘So, last June the council announces the coffins are coming up, someone panics, thinks we’ll find the bones and some evidence which points to the identity of the killer. They go to the cemetery after dark, dig down. Someone, clearly, with a lot to lose,’ said Shaw, turning to Hadden.
Hadden nodded. ‘Maybe. I just do the science, Peter. The clever stuff’s all yours.’
‘There was something else in the grave,’ said Valentine. ‘Garrison’s bones. Perhaps they wanted to get him out. Then there’d be no inquiry at all. Fuck all. But they gave up.’
Dr Kazimierz pushed her way through the swing doors and helped herself to coffee. She caught Shaw’s eye, smiled, then retreated back through the doors. The greeting had been warmer than usual, and Shaw wondered if the meeting with Dawid on the beach had been a rite of passage, an entry into a different circle of friendship.
‘George,’ said Shaw. ‘After we’re done, ring Paul. I want everyone to know that we need to focus on this attempt to reopen the grave. The timeline is pretty conclusive. Night time? Almost certainly. How’d they do that? Let’s crawl all over this — local uniformed squad cars, beat, council security, any local low life that hangs out in the cemetery after dark — you know the score, brief everyone. This may well be a cold case, George — but it just got a whole lot hotter. And tell Jacky to rerun the door-to-door in the immediate vicinity — someone must have seen or heard something.’
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 cafe, 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 rituaclass="underline" 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.’