‘And three further items,’ said the pathologist. ‘Which are from the area alongside the right hip, where a jacket pocket would have been.’ She lifted a wallet and a multi-bladed pocket knife, encrusted with mud, and a few coins, describing them as she did so.
She placed the wallet on an evidence bag and briefly teased at the leather with her gloved fingers. She switched off the recorder and spoke to Shaw. ‘We have a wallet, leather, once black, pretty much rotten. Anything left inside? I doubt it. The leather will fall apart if I try to empty it here, so unless it’s a matter of life and death — literally — I’ll get this to the lab. Inspector?’
Shaw nodded reluctantly. But he couldn’t argue with the judgement. This man had probably died more than two decades ago. Getting inside his wallet now rather than in six hours’ time was hardly a priority.
‘The coins all dated before 1982. Several from the 1970s. One 1969 shilling,’ she added, setting them out.
She shone a pencil light on what looked like a shard of green glass embedded in clay next to the victim’s right leg. Using a bowl of water and a paint brush she gradually softened the clay, then let it dissolve. Gradually a broken glass began to appear. Below it was another — this time apparently unbroken. It took her a minute to work it clear, and when she held it to the light they could all see it was a Victorian-style tumbler, etched with an illustration of a whale at sea being pursued by an open boat. The whale was exquisitely drawn, each flute engraved, as was the single staring eye of the whale, and there was a tense energy in the harpooner’s arm, ready to unleash his weapon from the small boat in which crowded a dozen hunters. In the background, on a still horizon, stood the distant mother ship, a frail outline of masts and rigging.
The pathologist set the glass aside, and beside it the broken shards of its sister.
Shaw and Valentine tried to see what might have happened: the victim offered a final drink? Or the killers, administering Dutch courage before the fatal attack — or a stiff drink to calm their nerves after it was over? But why bring glasses — why not drink from the bottle? It added, thought Shaw, an almost ceremonial detail.
‘What’s missing?’ asked Shaw, looking at the bagged items.
Valentine bit his lip, trying to think. He’d been up in front of a promotion panel a week earlier and they’d turned him down. Senior officers needed more evidence that he was committed to the CID after a decade out in the sticks. So far tonight he hadn’t done his chances a lot of good. He took a breath, his shoulders aching with fatigue.
Clarity under pressure was essential if progress was to be made in the first few hours of a murder inquiry, even one that had taken place nearly thirty years ago. ‘Keys,’ he said, with a flood of relief. ‘You’ve got a wallet, coins. You’d expect keys.’ He massaged his neck. ‘Either he didn’t need keys, or whoever dumped him took the keys first.’
‘Tom’s boys and girls will sieve the earth — every last ounce,’ said Shaw. ‘They might be in there. They’re heavier; perhaps they fell out of the pocket on the way down.’
Kazimierz raised a gloved hand. ‘Or …’
She was down on one knee, working away at the clay under the knee joint. Poking from the soil was a curve of metal, gleaming dully. It took her a minute, perhaps two, to work enough clear space to edge it out.
It was a billhook, the metal rusted, the handle rotted to a stump.
‘Perfect,’ she said. ‘Your murder weapon — almost certainly. Fits the wound like a glove.’
It was an odd metaphor, and it made Shaw shiver.
‘Like this,’ she said, taking Valentine by the shoulder and turning him away, so that he faced the serried rows of coffins. She bagged the billhook, held it lightly in her hand, and then brought her arm over like a fast bowler until the tip touched the DS’s skull where the hair had thinned. ‘Maybe just to one side …an inch, maybe less. This kind of blow — he’d have been dead before he hit the ground. The hook would have cut through the brain. It’s like throwing a light switch.’
She clicked her fingers and Valentine felt his legs give way, just for a second, as if he too were falling into his grave.
3
Greyfriars Tower stood floodlit opposite police HQ, the frost picking out the medieval stonework. The old monastic bell tower leant at a heart-stopping angle, its fall to earth arrested by a million-pound restoration scheme. It stood on the Lynn skyline like a grounded ship’s mast, tilted seawards. Valentine stood at an open window of the CID suite, smoking into the night. The tower had cast a shadow over his life since he’d gone to school a few hundred yards from the crumbling walls of the old monastery. He didn’t see it any more, like so many things.
Shaw sat at a computer screen scrolling through missing persons for 1982 — the year Nora Tilden had died and been buried. There were eight, six of them young girls. Of the two males, one was a sixteen-year-old from the North End, white, with a tattooed Union Flag under his left eye. More to the point, he was only four feet eight inches tall. He was still missing. The other was a sixty-three-year-old man from Gayton, diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, who’d put the rubbish out in the side alley by his house one night in August and not been seen again until 1993, when his remains were discovered on a railway embankment 200 yards from his front door by a courting couple. He was identified from dental records.
‘Nothing,’ said Shaw, pushing himself back from the desk and massaging his neck, then his injured eye.
He examined Valentine’s back. Shaw, too tired to prevent his mind wandering, analysed what he felt about George Valentine: irritation — always that — because he was a living relic of the kind of old-fashioned copper Shaw despised. A man who thought the rule book was useful only if you needed to wedge a door open. But beyond irritation there was envy, and guilt.
George Valentine had been a DI once, and his DCI had been Shaw’s father, Jack. Both of them had been on a skyward career path until one fatal misjudgement had brought them to earth. Accused of planting evidence in a murder trial, they had been suspended: Shaw’s father had died after taking early retirement, Valentine had lost a rank and been exiled to the wilderness of the north Norfolk coast, and a decade of policing beach yobs, small-time burglars and the odd credit-card fraudster. So, envy because Valentine had known his father so well, while his own relationship had been distant, cool, a reflection, perhaps, of his father’s determination to shield his family from the realities of police work. And guilt because Shaw had failed to fulfil a promise: that one day he would clear his father’s name, remove from the record that withering epithet ‘bent copper’. George Valentine was a living reminder of that failure.
The internal phone rang. It was DC Twine, down in records. ‘Sir? Just got the “V” files on our victim. She was murdered by her husband. He got life. Eight case files — a dozen on the trial.’
Shaw thought of one of his father’s maxims: delegate, don’t try to process all the information yourself. ‘Read what you can in twenty minutes, Paul, then come up and give us a summary. Relevant details only. We’re just waiting for Tom — he’s got some preliminaries from the scene.’
Shaw cut the line and checked his watch, which not only showed the time and the phase of the moon but was set to give the state of the tide at Hunstanton — just up the coast from his house.
The display read 11.48 p.m. High tide.
This is what he really hated about CID. The joyless time wasted waiting for other people to do their jobs. He thought about Lena, wrapped up, watching the beach through the double-glazed windows of the Beach Cafe, the icy rollers pounding on the sand. They’d bought the then derelict Old Beach Cafe three years ago. No access road — just the hard sand of the beach at low tide — no mains electricity, and accounts that showed an annual trading loss of?2,000 per annum. The stone cottage to the rear, in the dunes, and the old boathouse to the side, were all part of the?80,000 deaclass="underline" both listed, both dilapidated. But the purchase had fulfilled two dreams in one go — Shaw got to live on his beloved beach where he’d played as a child; Lena got the independence she wanted and a business that filled nearly every waking hour. The cottage was now watertight, the cafe made-over in stripped pine, with an Italian coffee-making machine glinting behind the counter like a vintage motorbike. The boathouse was now Surf — a beach shop selling everything from?1,000 diver’s watches to 50p plastic windmills.