Death Toll Read Free

that thin strands seemed to claw listlessly at their belts. Shaw stood, partly disembodied, surrounded by the empty graves of the dead. Beside the stone angel there was a box tomb lit by the halogen lamp: it was in granite, with engraved cherubs, and had a flat top on which was etched:
    Et in arcadia ego
    Shaw stepped up onto it effortlessly. The lid rocked slightly, like a boulder in a stream. He let his single eye tour the horizon. The loss of his right eye two years earlier in an accident might have destroyed his ability to see in 3D at close range, but over twenty-five feet his eyesight was as good as anyone with two eyes: better, because he’d had to train himself in other ways to judge distance and perspective – such as using the way colours merge towards blue as they approach the horizon to judge distance. But that was no good at night: the view from the tomb, above the mist, was of a piebald world, just black and white. The night-watchman’s light at the cannery was gone. To the north, half a mile away, he could see a light on a building – a pitched roof, gables and beams; a building that seemed to crouch beyond the cemetery gates, like a mourner returning to grieve after dark.
    â€˜What’s that?’ he asked.
    â€˜The Flask,’ said Valentine, looking at his shoes. ‘Boozer – bit rough now. Used to be all right.’
    Shaw’s knowledge of Lynn’s pubs was restricted to the Red House, the CID’s haunt off St James’s. Hadden unplucked the forensic glove from his right hand. ‘It was named after a ship,’ he said. Hadden was a Londoner who’d come north to escape an ugly divorce and find peace spotting birds on the north Norfolk sands. Like most incomers, he knew more about local history than the natives. And he spent some of his time here, on the tidal path, looking for oystercatchers. ‘A whaler back in the 1880s. This was where they used to take the flesh off the carcasses – the flensing grounds. Between us and the pub is a narrow inlet – pretty much silted up now. Blubber Creek.’
    Shaw looked around, trying to imagine the whaling fleet in the river after its nine-month voyage back from the Arctic, the fires on the bank heating the cauldrons in which the meat was reduced to oil. Flesh pots.
    They heard footsteps through the drier grass up the bank, and for the first time the slight crunch of frost. Walking towards them, hauling a leather bag, was Justina Kazimierz. She didn’t say hello to anyone, simply put the bag down and opened it up, retrieving a set of forensic gloves and a mask. When Shaw had first met her he’d attributed her taciturn manner to the language barrier – she’d just arrived from Poland, via the Home Office. He’d been too kind. The pathologist didn’t do pleasantries, and didn’t suffer fools. Only once had Shaw seen her with her guard down in public, dancing with her diminutive husband at the Polish Club, drinking lighter-fuel vodka from a half-pint tumbler. But last summer she and her husband had moved out of town to a house on the coast near Shaw’s, and she often came past now, on long walks, circled by a Labrador. Always alone, and always with an ice-cream for his daughter. A friendship had begun, if you could build a friendship on so few words. She took less than a minute to scan the body. ‘I need him inside – quickly. Can we use the chapel?’
    She hadn’t looked at Hadden when she asked the question but he nodded.
    She tapped the coffin. ‘Wood’s in good condition – under water most of the time? Maybe.’ Even when she did talk to others she seemed to limit the conversation to a question-and-answer session with herself.
    â€˜Unscrew the coffin lid, then slide the lid and the corpse into a body-bag,’ she said. ‘Then we’ll look inside.’ She stood back, waiting for her instructions to be carried out.
    â€˜But from