Death Toll Read Online Free Page B

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.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Perfect,’ she said. ‘Your murder weapon – almost certainly. Fits the wound like a glove.’
    It was an odd metaphor, and it made Shaw shiver.
    â€˜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