Read Death Toll for Free Online

thrown, then a scream.
    â€˜Lizzie told the court she ran from the bar to the bottom of the stairs. She found her mother in a heap – dad standing at the top. The pub’s stairs are as steep as a ladder, so the fall could easily have killed her, but the pathologist said there were pressure marks around the dead woman’s neck – as though she’d been throttled. Alby said they’d argued because he wanted to go downstairs, back to his mates. She followed him, caught him at the top step, and they started pushing and shoving. According to Alby, she lost her footing and fell. According to the jury, he either pushed her or throttled her or both. The judge gave him life.’
    â€˜So he’s probably out by now, then,’ said Valentine.
    â€˜Home Office link is down,’ said Twine. ‘I’ll check first thing, but yes, he’s very likely free – if he’s still alive. With good behaviour he could have been out in fifteen. He’d be in his early eighties now. If we do find him there should be no problem recognizing him.’ He waved a piece of paper. ‘This is the original warrant. It lists any identifying marks. Tilden was covered in them. It wasn’t just VD he brought back from the East – nearly thirty tattoos are listed, over most of his body. He’s the illustrated man.’

4
    Monday, 13 December
    Shaw and Valentine sat on identical straight-backed chairs in Detective Chief Superintendent Max Warren’s office. A single picture window gave a view over the rooftops to the church of St James – stark Victorian neo-Gothic, with a neon cross on the roof in lurid green, lit now, but only just visible in a light snow shower that looked like the fallout from a pillow fight. Out in the adjoining office DCS Warren was dictating a letter to his secretary: he’d be with them in a minute, he’d said, offering coffee, which they’d turned down. So they sat, each alone, despite being together. One wall of the office held a bookcase, Christmas cards crowded on the shelves. Shaw thought, not for the first time, what a depressing word ‘festive’ could be.
    Shaw had his right leg crossed over his left to support a sketch pad. He’d spent an hour in the Ark the night before, after leaving the CID suite at St James’s. Dr Kazimierz had been finishing her preliminary report: she was happy for him to photograph the skull, as long as she was present. His forensic art kit was always on hand – stashed in the boot of his car. It included a tripod camera and a perspex stand on which the skull could be supported, then angled precisely to meet the Frankfurt horizontal plane – the internationally agreed angle of tilt which allowed for the uniform comparison of all skulls.
    Even then, with just the bones set at the correct angle, he could see the face. He’d noted, for example, the asymmetry of the eye sockets, the left a few millimetres above the right, the narrow mastoid process on both the left and right sides of the skull, a formation that would have made the ears almost impossible to see fully from the frontal view. And the slight gap in the front teeth: a defect that would have been notable as part of the victim’s essential ‘lifelong look’ – the subtle alignment of features by which he would have always been recognizable to family and friends. The kind of facial feature everyone uses, often without thinking, to spot a loved one in an old snapshot.
    Shaw had left St James’s at 2.00 a.m. with a complete set of digital images of the skull. He’d driven to the lifeboat house at Hunstanton, parked the car, then ran the mile along the sands to home in four minutes and forty-two seconds: six seconds slower than his average. The Beach Café’s security light had thudded on as he’d stepped up on to the wooden verandah. The cottage, to the rear in the dunes, had been in darkness, the shop boarded up