Death Toll Read Online Free

‘A team from St John’s in Cambridge are here doing a study on Victorian diseases – taking their chance, I guess. They’ve been examining the bones, measurements, density, chemical composition – that kind of thing. When they’re done the council boxes up what’s left. A Professor John G. Carstairs is leading the group. I’ve rung his home number but it’s on answerphone. I left a message, asking him to contact us.’
    Nora Tilden’s open coffin had been set on a table at the foot of the nave. Under the stark overhead lights it looked as if most of the woman’s bones had been fed through a car-cruncher: one ankle was just a collection of small shards, although the entire lower right leg had escaped destruction, as had the skull, and the spine above the middle back.
    â€˜What are we looking at here?’ Dr Kazimierz asked herself. ‘A massive trauma of some kind, certainly – a car crash?’ She extracted a short length of bone which had broken and dropped into the ribcage. ‘Bones show some evidence of the early onset of osteoporosis – so they would have been brittle. Add a high-pressure impact and the skeleton effectively shatters, like a glass.’ She looked Shaw in the eye and they seemed to share the image, a bone exploding into shards.
    Shaw thought about the ‘V’ number – a hit-and-run victim? A passenger in a drink-driving case?
    The pathologist turned to the next table where they’d set down the coffin lid. Two of the forensic officers slipped the black bag away to reveal the skeleton. These bones were darker, still damp from the soil that had clagged the ribs and joints. The pathologist removed the skull and set it on a small plastic pillow she’d taken out of her bag, using a spirit level to angle it precisely. Beside the skull she laid a tape measure, a pair of calipers and a camera tripod.
    Shaw smiled, nodding.
    The pathologist straightened her back. ‘I presume you have made a preliminary examination yourself, Shaw?’
    â€˜Sorry.’ He made a conscious effort to take any tuneful tone out of his voice, trying instead to hit a flat, matter-of-fact, note. ‘I didn’t think you’d welcome my thoughts before you’d taken a look.’
    Shaw couldn’t see Valentine, but he could feel him smiling.
    â€˜So – why don’t you talk us through it?’ she asked, producing a digital camera from the black orchid bag and screwing it into a tripod holder. Stepping back, she poured a small cup of equally black tea from a Thermos, adding a dash of something colourless from a hip flask. She adjusted a wedding ring, which Shaw hadn’t noticed before. The invitation was an honour in itself, a recognition that the pathologist saw in Shaw’s skills as a forensic artist a professional complement to her own. It was also an invitation to fail, publicly.
    Shaw took a step towards a table the Cambridge team had been using to examine the exhumed remains and picked up a skull at random: tagged with a label which read XX 88/901 – M. He held the skull on the palm of his hand and lowered it until it was set beside the victim’s.
    â€˜The shallow forehead in our victim is the most obvious point of difference. And here, around the jaws, the bones project forward, and there’s the eye sockets – that’s the real giveaway. In this labelled skull – in all these skulls, I suspect – the sockets are roughly triangular. But with our friend here, they’re essentially square, and set more broadly leaving this gap for the nose, which is set flat and wide. See?’
    Valentine did see, and he couldn’t stop himself nodding, fascinated.
    â€˜He was almost certainly of African descent,’ said Shaw. ‘It’s not absolutely clear cut – the genetic pool’s complex. The teeth – for example, are large, but smaller than the stereotype would suggest.