Death Toll Read Free Page A

the general position of the body we’d conclude … ?’ asked Shaw.
    She sighed, circumnavigating the bones. ‘I’d guess – and that’s what it is, Shaw: a guess – that he was dead when he was thrown in the grave. The body twisted as it fell – hence the posture. That’ll have to do you for now, although I could say more about the wound.’
    She’d called him Shaw, although in private it was Peter now. She plucked the forensic glove from her right hand as they gathered behind the head.
    â€˜The weapon was curved – you see?’ she said. ‘The blade is triangular in its cross-section. As it’s gone through the bone it’s exerted more pressure on the lower edge of the puncture wound – that’s why the cracks radiate from that point. So the weapon’s gone in, and then turned downwards through the brain, during the blow, so that there’s virtually no pressure on the two upward sides of the triangle. Very unusual – very distinctive.’
    â€˜What are we looking for?’ asked Valentine.
    Dr Kazimierz straightened. ‘No idea. Don’t push me. A scythe would show the same pressures – but it’s not triangular, and it’s not this narrow. I need to get him back to the Ark. Ask me then.’
    The Ark was West Norfolk’s pathology and forensic laboratory, set in an abandoned nonconformist chapel on the ring road, close to police headquarters at St James’s. It was Tom Hadden’s kingdom, and housed the force’s own mortuary. Kazimierz was a consultant, working on contract, but she used an office at the Ark too, and West Norfolk provided most of her caseload. It was a haven for the pathologist, Shaw sensed, wherein logic and reason reigned.
    She pulled off the other forensic glove. ‘The lid?’
    Two of Hadden’s team arrived with a stretcher and a body-bag and set up another wooden trestle to take the lid and the skeleton when it was lifted clear. One of the forensics officers, a woman entirely encased in a white SOC suit, worked steadily round the coffin, unscrewing screws, easing them out of the wood.
    Shaw walked away, breathing in the freezing air. He thought about his father’s funeral, out at Gayton, and the family in a line like a firing squad by the grave. Beyond them, uniformed officers at attention, and under a cypress tree the whole of the CID from St James’s, most of them looking at their feet as the first spadefuls of earth were thrown in to thud on the coffin top. And with them, but a few yards apart, George Valentine, smoke drifting from a cigarette cupped in one hand.
    â€˜One, two, and three …’ said Hadden. Shaw turned as they lifted the coffin lid. Valentine looked at his shoes. As the lid was being slipped into the body-bag Shaw glimpsed the pathologist tracing a hurried sign of the cross.
    Hadden pulled a spotlight over the now-open coffin. Long grey hair still clung to the skull revealed. Shaw noted the toothless jaws. ‘Well – an elderly woman?’ he asked.
    Kazimierz pulled her gloves back on, making them tight at the base of each finger. Shaw was shocked by the realization that the movement was a feint, a cover, to allow the pathologist to gather herself, and for the first time he noticed how much she’d aged in this last year – the year in which they’d become friends. Her face had always been heavy, flesh obscuring what had once perhaps been a precarious beauty. But now the skin looked wasted, hanging from the bones of her face.
    She took a piece of mouldered cloth from around the neck bone and a spider crept out from the shadow beneath the jaw, then scuttled back. Most of the bones were hidden beneath a velvet drape which had been folded over the body like a pair of rotting scarlet wings. On one fold of the drape, near the neck, was a silver brooch, two simple curved lines intersecting to form a fish. One hand, each