Free Death Toll by Jim Kelly Page A

James’s mobile canteen was still on site; beside it was a 4x4 Ford with CAMBRIDGE ARCHAEOLOGICAL TRUST tastefully signwritten in gold on the passenger door. Despite the early hour Twine had found two civilian switchboard operators to answer the phones. A perspex display board in front of the altar was covered in photographs taken at the graveside and one that Shaw hadn’t expected – an enlarged black-and-white shot of a woman in her mid-fifties, greying hair pulled back off her face. It was a hard face, and no doubt she’d had a hard life to go with it, but Shaw doubted it had been that hard. A Victorian face, shipwrecked in the twenty-first century: a round head, puffy, with no discernible bone structure; a cannonball, the small black eyes lost in the flesh.
    Twine brought him a coffee.
    â€˜Paul,’ said Shaw, looking round. ‘Well done. This her?’
    â€˜Nora Elizabeth Tilden. Lynn News archive, 1981 – just a year before she died. Taken at a charity presentation at the Flask – raised three hundred pounds for Barnardo’s. Looks like a tough bit of work,’ he added.
    Shaw took a closer look, thinking for the first time what a mismatched couple they seemed: Nora Tilden and her fun-loving errant husband, Alby.
    DC Fiona Campbell unfolded herself from the nearest desk. She stood six feet two but tried to look shorter, shoulders slightly rounded, always in sensible flat shoes. Campbell was a copper from a family of coppers – her father a DCI at Norwich. She’d come out of school with the kind of A-levels that could have got her into university – any university. But this was her life. And she wasn’t just smart. She’d earned her street stripes the hard way. The scar on her throat – an eight-inch knife wound from ear to collarbone – was a livid blue. She’d received a Police Bravery Award for trying to disarm a man with a knife who had been determined to take his own life. She’d put the medal in a box, but she’d wear the scar for ever.
    â€˜Sir. You wanted to talk to the gravediggers?’ she asked, shuffling a handful of papers. ‘All gravedigging was done by the council’s Direct Labour Unit until five years ago. Now it’s contracted out to a private outfit, but it’s the same people doing the digging. There’s a hut …’
    Shaw let her lead the way. Shrugging on a full-length overcoat, she pushed open the door of the old chapel and walked out into the mist. She hunched her shoulders a bit more once they were out in the cold. The damp was extraordinary this close to the river. Droplets covered Campbell’s coat like sequins. They walked together away from the chapel on a slowly curving path edged with savagely pruned rose bushes. In the folded silence of the mist they could hear the forensic team still working down by Nora Tilden’s grave, the sharp metallic tap of a tool striking a pebble preternaturally clear.
    â€˜Anything from Tom?’ asked Shaw. This was the third major inquiry Shaw had led with this team and they’d learned the value of sharing information within a tight-knit circle. He was confident DC Campbell would be up to speed.
    â€˜No – nothing. Paul says everything the Cambridge team has found so far has been inside the coffins, with documentation to match.’
    Soon a stand of pine trees came into view, shielding a set of ramshackle outbuildings lit by a security light that struggled to penetrate the fog. A Portakabin door opened, letting a cat slip out, its black fur bristling. They caught a thin blast of a radio tuned to Classic FM. A man appeared on the threshold in a Day-Glo yellow workman’s jacket, tipping out a coffee mug.
    â€˜Hey up,’ he said over his shoulder. He stood aside to let Shaw and Campbell into the single room. It had no windows, only air vents that did little to disperse the fug of heat and burning paraffin from the enclosed