Kazimierz came back into view, both hands held up, one — gloved — smeared with blood. ‘Peter,’ she said. She looked beyond him, recognizing the cottage office. Since her husband had died the previous year the pathologist lived alone in a cottage further along the beach. They’d become friends, but no one at work would ever have guessed.
‘Anything?’ he asked.
She touched her forehead and Shaw thought for a moment she was going to cross herself. He’d seen her once, on the steps of the Catholic church in the centre of Lynn — a converted carpet warehouse. She’d stood for a second, bracing herself for the world.
‘I double-check the victim’s throat and mouth. We have a scenario — yes. She takes the cyanide pill, holds it in her mouth, goes to the bed, then she bites down. The poison stops her swallowing entirely, but enough fluid is in her throat for the toxin to seep into the bloodstream.’
She leant out of the picture and reappeared with a skull — plastic, with movable joints for the jaw and upper neck. ‘Here. .’ she said, pointing at the bony peg which joined the jaw to the skull. ‘There is a micro-fracture. I lift the skin and some of the muscle. On the other side there is no match. But broken capillaries here. .’ She touched her own chin, fleshy, heavy-set. Shaw recalled the dead woman’s finer features, the narrow, elegant jawline, fragile even in death.
‘She broke her jaw then. .’ said Shaw, ‘biting down?’
‘Not possible,’ said the pathologist, leaning back, a hand and coffee cup appearing from the left of the screen, the glove gone. She looked up into the rafters above her head. ‘Just possible,’ she conceded. ‘But one in a million chance. No. I think she put the capsule between her teeth, then someone do this. .’ She put down the cup and slung one arm round her own neck.
‘A half Nelson,’ said Shaw.
‘Yes. Then the other hand presses the top of the cranium down as the grip tightens. That is when the jaw breaks. The pressure is very much. . sustained. Maybe a strong man, maybe a strong woman. I could do this. .’ She meant physically, not morally. ‘There are no signs she struggled. So I think she agreed in this, but only as a passive person. The word I don’t have. .’
‘Acquiesced?’ suggested Shaw.
‘Thank you. Certainly up to the point when this other person applies this pressure. After that she has no choice. You understand this, Peter?’
Shaw thought that this was what Justina Kazimierz did welclass="underline" the picture she’d painted was authoritative, clear and finaclass="underline" it was what made her a first-class prosecution witness. He heard Fran’s dog barking out in the corridor, the paws scrabbling at the door.
‘And these things. .’ He struggled for the right word. ‘The capsules. They keep. They don’t perish?’
‘Tom is looking at this. Certainly they perish, but as long as the internal seal is intact then they still can be used. Constant temperature, out of sunlight, that would help. Fiona emailed me — you are already begun on this? She have the same question. I gave her the same answer. I need to get on,’ she said. The screen blanked.
Shaw heard the door open behind him and suddenly Fran was on his lap.
SEVEN
Saturday
Twenty-two semicircular York stone steps led up to the main doors of the West Norfolk Constabulary’s headquarters, St James’ Street, King’s Lynn. St James’ had once been an imposing Victorian edifice, built at the junction of two of the town’s main streets, a bold statement of order amidst chaos. It had been cruelly used by the advent of the motor car, which had left it isolated, beleaguered on a traffic island. The inner ring road swept by on one side, enveloped in a perpetual blue cloud of carbon dioxide, while the street that led into the town centre had been unable to save itself from a long and seedy decline: kebab shops jostled with a brace of burger bars and one of Lynn’s roughest pubs — The Angel, the regulars of which saw the proximity of the police HQ as an incitement to riot. The sun was up and already high enough to penetrate the cool shadows in the old streets. Across the thoroughfare stood Greyfriar’s Tower, a remnant of the abbey which had once stood on the edge of the medieval town. A ruin, restored, it stood at a giddy angle, Lynn’s very own leaning tower.
Shaw savoured the moment of sudden silence as he pushed his way through the revolving doors and into the hush of the main reception area — a high ornate hall with busts of long-dead civic dignitaries in niches beneath a painted dome.
It was 8.15 a.m. A large white sign stood in the middle of the floor marked with an arrow, pointing left, and the words, EAST HILLS INQUIRY. Shaw walked lightly down a marble corridor. There were two doors at the end: one led into a spiral staircase, down into the old basement of the building and the cells; the other — marked with a second East Hills’ sign — into a courtyard, already splashed with sunlight, bouncing off freshly polished squad cars. Shaw noted that the chief constable’s limousine was in its reserved space.
On the far side of the car park stood The Ark, the West Norfolk’s forensic lab and in-house mortuary, converted from a nineteenth-century nonconformist chapel. The original church’s nickname came from its resemblance to Noah’s floating quarters — the box-like deckhouse of the Biblical boat. The only hints that it had been given a new role for the twenty-first century were an aluminium flu, a bristling communications aerial and a set of three new garage ports, currently housing two of the CSI mobile units and a hearse.
The East Hills mass screening had required the addition of three standard Portacabin blocks: one for re-interviews and for all those called to reread their original statements, one for the DNA swab tests, and one for witnesses not amongst those evacuated from East Hills on the day of the murder — the original CID team, the RNLI crew who turned out to help, the harbour master, the local uniformed officers who’d secured and searched East Hills. Each of these would also be asked to reread their original statements. Shaw might have a reputation as a whizz-kid but it was mostly built on being thorough. He had a talent for organization but a genius for not letting it get in the way of inspired detection.
One of the West Norfolk’s mobile canteens was also set up to provide tea and coffee, completing a temporary East Hills ‘village’.
Shaw bounced on his toes as he walked, feeling good. He’d swum that morning as the sun rose, the sea still deep summer warm, his hands rising and falling over his head as he let a rhythmic backstroke take him out to sea. Then he’d run to the Porsche — his measured mile, and clocked six minutes eighteen seconds, a new record. He could still feel his blood coursing, and the burst of endorphins had cleared his mind. It had taken nearly a month to organize the East Hills mass screening, a constant low-level stress that had been difficult to accommodate with his everyday caseload. Now the day was here he felt the thrill of liberation and the freedom which comes from reaching the point of no return. By Monday they’d have their DNA results — and the name of the man who had killed Shane White and had probably helped Marianne Osbourne take her own life with a cyanide pill. A large A-board stood before The Ark with an arrow pointing towards its Gothic double doors.
EAST HILLS INQUIRY
ALL VISITORS PLEASE SIGN IN AT RECEPTION
Inside, Valentine was talking to two women at a desk set in the vestibule of the chapel — a room panelled in mahogany, a simple board listing the ministers from the first incumbent in 1823. Shaw’s DS was perched on the table edge, his face relaxed, in mid-anecdote — some Byzantine story about a DNA sample that got mixed up with some dog food that Shaw had heard him tell before at one of the CID’s ritual parties at the Red House — the St James’ boozer-of-choice. Shaw had noticed that Valentine seemed to be able to relax in female company. Surrounded by men he always maintained a mildly irritable exterior. Shaw’s father had once told him that the tragedy of George Valentine’s life was losing his wife in a car crash. Shaw had tried, but never succeeded, in trying to imagine what she’d been like. It didn’t help that as a child he had met her — probably many times. He just couldn’t remember her. In truth, he couldn’t remember George Valentine either, not in those early years. But then perhaps he’d been a different person.