Shaw had done a degree in art. That had kept his father happy. Anything but the police force would have kept him happy. But what his father didn’t know was that the course his son had chosen at Southampton University included a year out at the FBI College in Quantico, Virginia, studying forensic art. It had been straight from there to the Metropolitan Police College at Hendon.
‘A man…’ he said over his shoulder to Valentine. ‘Plenty of hair. The forehead’s exceptionally high, a ridge above the eyes – a bony ridge, but muscular too – the corrugator is pronounced.’ That would be the crucial element of the dead man’s ‘lifelong look’ – thought Shaw – the particular arrangement of features by which he’d always been recognized. Deep-set eyes, the brow dominant. Shaw would have called it a Celtic face.
Valentine hadn’t said a word.
‘Irish?’ asked Shaw. ‘Heavy build. Large head. Nothing of the nose left, or lips. Teeth charred, but we might get a dental match.’
Valentine stood at the tape. ‘’Bout right. Foreman said the Judds were Irish – face like a front-row forward. Thirty-five, something like that.’ He picked at a bit of tobacco on his lip.
‘Justina on her way?’
‘Ten minutes,’ said Valentine. He’d be gone by then, he’d make sure of that. He’d kept his beer down so far, but watching the pathologist at work always brought on a sweeping nausea. It was something to do with the way she dealt with the corpse, like it wasn’t a human being there at all, but some interesting fossil. ‘I should get down
Tom Hadden, the head of the force’s CSI unit, came over to the crime tape. He was ten years short of retirement, thin red hair now strawberry blond, with a scar just below his hairline where a skin cancer had been removed a year before. Freckles crowded round intelligent green eyes. Hadden had fled a broken marriage and a high-profile job at the Home Office for the West Norfolk Constabulary. A keen bird watcher and expert naturalist, he spent his spare time on the dunes and in the marshes, a solitary but never lonely figure, weighed down with binoculars.
‘This is odd,’ he said. He held up an evidence bag. ‘Found these just by the conveyor belt where the victim worked. Don’t quote me, but I’d say they were grains of rice.’
‘Rice?’ asked Shaw. ‘So – he’s a healthy eater, one of those salads you can get from M&S?’
‘That would work nicely, if, and only if, it was cooked rice. Which it isn’t.’
Shaw took the evidence bag. Three grains, almost translucent, twenty minutes short of al dente.
‘There’s blood on the conveyor belt, by the way – plenty of it,’ said Hadden.
‘That survived the heat?’
‘No. There’s two conveyor belts, Peter. This one,’ he said, touching the belt in front of them with a hand inside a forensic glove. ‘This one… runs into the furnace, and then turns back under itself. Anything on it gets dropped onto an internal conveyor which moves the
They looked at the victim in silence. ‘Justina will talk you through chummy here,’ said Hadden. ‘But I’d caution against any amateur assessments at this stage.’
‘Meaning?’ asked Shaw.
‘The hole in the skull. I don’t think it’s what it looks like. We can’t get into the furnace yet to retrieve the blown bits of cranium, but one shard is here…’
It was on the belt, about six feet from the body, already in an evidence bag, its original location marked with a white circle and the letter ‘D’.
Hadden tipped it slightly with a metal stylus, like a fragment of ancient pottery. ‘You’ll notice that there is a depression fracture on this piece of bone – just here.’
‘Someone hit him?’
‘Maybe. But we need the science to back that up, and at the moment, we don’t have the science.’
Shaw brushed a finger along a gull’s feather he’d put in his pocket from the beach. ‘But blood suggests a struggle?’
‘Or one of the waste bags burst a week ago. Don’t assume it’s his blood. I need to get the evidence back to the Ark.’
The Ark was West Norfolk’s forensic lab, situated in an old Nonconformist chapel beside St James’s – the force HQ in Lynn. It was Tom Hadden’s kingdom, and the only place he was happy other than the saltmarshes on the coast. He plucked at his forensic gloves. ‘You’ll need to see outside too.’
He led the way to a door in one of the metal walls,
‘This door was unlocked when we got here, by the way,’ said Hadden.
Outside was a small steel platform, an eyrie, at the base of the incinerator chimney. It housed one of the atmospheric testing units for the furnace. An encased stepladder led up, another down into the floodlit goods yard below. A line of yellow waste tugs waited, backing up now the furnace was cold.
Valentine pointed up. ‘Is this how the running man got out?’
Hadden craned his neck. ‘That’s it – a small door, an emergency exit, about fifty feet above us. Again, unlocked.’
They were a hundred feet up with a view west over the town. Although the sun had gone there was still light in the west. A perfect night sky turned over their heads like a planetarium. The air was warm and sweet. There was a single chair on the little platform, office metal with the stuffing coming out of the seat, beside it a hubcap full of cigarette butts.
‘Bourne, the foreman, says they knew Judd smoked out here – strictly against the rules, but it’s a shitty job, so they bend them,’ said Hadden.
‘Yeah,’ said Valentine. ‘’Cos you wouldn’t want to pollute the atmosphere,’ he added, spitting over the side.
‘OK,’ said Shaw. ‘Let’s arrest George.’
Valentine peered pointedly up at the distant apex of the incinerator chimney.
‘One oddity,’ said Hadden. He knelt by the hubcap. ‘There was only one match. I’ve sent it down to the lab with a runner – single match, broken in the middle to form a V. We might get something off it. Potts, the engineer, says Judd used a lighter.’ He stood, closed his eyes to think. ‘And this doesn’t help,’ he added, producing another evidence bag from his overalls leg pocket. A torch in yellow and black plastic, hefty, as good as a cosh.
‘Hospital issue?’ asked Shaw.
‘Nope. Not according to Potts. It was by the chair.’
Valentine took the torch in the bag and turned it 360 degrees. On one side there was a stick-on fluorescent label which bore the letters MVR in black marker pen. He held it up for Shaw. ‘A company? Initials?’ he asked. ‘I’ll check,’ he added, beating Shaw to it.
Shaw took the evidence bag. ‘It’s dusty,’ he said, noting that the matt black surface of the torch was scuffed.
‘Yes – I’ll let you know what kind of dust it is when I get it to the lab,’ said Hadden. ‘But visually I’d agree – dust, lots of it.’
‘It’s not white – the dust,’ said Shaw, worrying at the detail that didn’t fit.
But Hadden wouldn’t be drawn. ‘I’ll get it analysed. No point in guessing.’
Shaw took one more look round, trying to imprint a
Valentine didn’t like puzzles. He didn’t think police work was a set of crossword clues. He leant back, his spine creaking. Up above them condensation still trickled out of the chimney, a thin line unmoved by any breeze, like a 747 contrail.
‘It’s nasty, clinical – it isn’t amateur,’ he said. ‘If they hadn’t shown the kid inside the furnace we’d have no idea the bloke was ash. So it’s organized. Premeditated.’ He shifted weight, trying to lessen the pressure on his bladder. ‘But an inside job, ’cos you’d have to know the layout. So – a grudge. Sex is top of any list – we should check out wives, girlfriends. See who’s knobbing who.’