Death Toll (5 page)

‘We think Jonathan ended up down by the lock-up garages on the edge of the Westmead. We think that somehow he stumbled on the missing puppy. Maybe one of the gang was taking it for a walk – after all, our press statements hadn't mentioned the dog, so the gang probably thought we weren't going to be bothered about a missing terrier when two people had died in the crash. Or maybe it just got out of the lock-up, I don't know. But what I do know is, as soon as that boy saw the dog, sir, he was dead.'

Shaw let the silence stretch so that all they could hear was the tap, tap of Warren's secretary typing on her keyboard.

‘No one could have stopped that child going home and telling his parents he'd found the dog. We can be pretty sure Jonathan never left the lock-up alive. It would have been impossible for the gang to let him leave: the only thing he wanted in life was the puppy. If they gave it to him the police would be at the lock-up within hours. So they couldn't give it to him, and they couldn't let him tell anyone he'd seen it. They could have told him it wasn't his grandma's dog, but he wouldn't have believed them. They could have tried a bribe, but it wouldn't have worked, and they knew it.'

The door opened and Warren's secretary put three cups and a cafetière of coffee on the desk. Shaw poured, added sugar for Valentine, milk for Warren, taking his own black and unsweetened.

Shaw let the silence re-establish itself. There was absolutely no doubt now that he had Warren's full attention.

Shaw sat down. ‘For nearly fifteen years Robert Mosse, and the rest of them, thought they'd got away with it,' said Shaw. ‘Two members of the gang left Lynn: James Voyce emigrated to New Zealand and Chris Robins moved to the Midlands and a life of petty crime that deteriorated into mental illness. Alex Cosyns stayed. And we know now why, in part, he did stay. Subtly but persistently he milked Mosse for cash. Mosse is clearly in a vulnerable position. He has a thriving career in the law, a position that makes him a prime target for blackmail. The gang were all fans of stock-car racing – speed and cars is what brought them together – and Mosse set up a team under the name “Team Mosse” about ten years ago. Cosyns was his only driver. In effect, he bankrolled Cosyns's hobby. And we think that, over the years, he'd been giving him money as well.'

Warren slapped his fist down on the desk. ‘Hold on. This is nonsense. How could Cosyns have blackmailed Mosse? He could have come to us, told us the truth, but then he'd have been in the dock too. Doesn't add up, Peter.'

‘Well …no. Not completely. But consider this: Mosse's career is over if there is any hint of scandal. He's up for the Bar this year. He's got a lot to lose. Plus, we don't know which of the gang killed the child. What if it was Mosse, and only Mosse? That changes things.' Shaw thought about that. ‘No – it
transforms
things. And remember, this is a gentle, persistent, form of blackmail, not the usual one-off demand. A grand here, a grand there. Worth it, surely, from Mosse's point of view, for a quiet life? But I agree – Cosyns would still have been facing some very serious charges if he'd informed on Mosse. No, there's something else at the heart of this relationship. We just don't know what it is yet.'

Shaw sipped the coffee, holding it just below his mouth so that the steam played on his lips.

‘What we do know is that, as soon as George and I started to come close to the truth, Mosse decided he needed to improve his security. By this time Robins was in a secure psychiatric unit not far from here – near Sutton Bridge. As you know, Robins took his own life last May by cutting his wrists with a pocket knife – a brand-new one. He had a visitor shortly before he died. One of the orderlies recalls the face – and says it could have been Mosse.'

‘“Could have been” isn't good enough,' said Warren. ‘We've already been through this –'

‘So that was Robins out of the way,' said Shaw, pressing on. ‘As you also know, I found Cosyns dead in the lock-up garage last September when we found the Mini.'

Warren slopped coffee into his cup and struggled with a tube of sweeteners. Shaw couldn't stop an image from that day surfacing – Cosyns lying under the exhaust of his stock car, its engine running. He'd tried to revive him but had been attacked by an unseen assailant. He'd have died right there if George Valentine hadn't turned up at the scene, having trailed Mosse's BMW to the lock-ups. It was an unpalatable fact, but he owed Valentine his life.

‘Mosse had ample time to stage Cosyns's suicide,' he continued. ‘There is no evidence that Cosyns had any reason to kill himself. There is, however, evidence that Cosyns was force-fed narcotics prior to the “attempt” to take his own life.'

Warren leant back in his chair, the legs creaking. ‘But we can't stick it on Mosse, can we? Otherwise we wouldn't be here.'

‘Doesn't mean the fucker didn't do it. Sir,' said Valentine, shifting his weight on his thigh bone to ease the pressure on his bladder.

Warren gave Valentine a look which constituted a written warning.

‘I beg your pardon?'

Shaw raised a hand. ‘You'll recall that Mosse says he went to the lock-up that evening after the stock-car racing at the Norfolk Arena to talk about the performance of the car Cosyns had driven that day. He'd won. Mosse says he wanted to enter the car at a meeting in Peterborough the following weekend. All explicable as part of “Team Mosse”. Then he left. He said Cosyns was depressed about the failure of his marriage and the continuing financial burden of the regular maintenance payments he was being forced to make. He admits giving £1,000 to Cosyns shortly before his death as a favour. He admits he'd done it before. He says they were friends. More than that – family.'

Shaw finished the coffee. ‘So: a gang of four. Guilty of murder. Two dead.'

‘So where's the third man?' asked Warren, hooked now by the narrative, despite himself.

‘Voyce arrived back in the UK from New Zealand three months ago,' said Valentine. His bladder ached like a bad tooth now and his craving for nicotine was making the saliva drain from his mouth.

‘Since then we'd lost him,' added Shaw. ‘Until two days ago, when he checked into the Novotel on the bypass here in Lynn.'

He'd deliberately left this new information until last and he could see that Warren was furious that he was being manipulated.

‘Why wasn't I informed about this?'

‘It's taken us that long to be sure it's our man. We had an alert out with all the hotels, B&Bs, the lot.'

Warren looked from Shaw's face to Valentine's and back again.

‘The Auckland police tell us that Voyce is married, with one child,' said Shaw. ‘He's a garage attendant – pump man, cashier, low-end mechanics. Earns a pittance. His wife works at the local supermarket. It's pretty clear he could do with a bit more money. My guess …' Shaw looked at his hands, then at Valentine. ‘
Our
guess is that's why he's back here – to tap Mosse, just like Cosyns did. We think he knew Cosyns was getting cash out of Mosse, and we're pretty sure he now knows he's dead – which might explain the three months lying low before making his move and coming back to Lynn.

‘I don't think he can afford to go home empty handed. We reckon he's been biding his time, coming up with a plan, and now he's ready. As far as we know he hasn't made contact with Mosse yet. We propose round-the-clock surveillance. If he makes a move on Mosse then his life will undoubtedly be in danger. We can bug Voyce's hotel room, maybe his car, and hope that Mosse incriminates himself on tape.'

Warren reached for the cafetière, then shook it, annoyed that only the dregs remained. ‘So. You think that's smart …Police entrapment with a corpse as a possible first prize?'

Shaw looked through Warren, focusing on a point just behind his head, a technique his father had used to effect on his only son. ‘With respect, sir. If we're right – and we are – Mosse is responsible, either solely or collectively, for the deaths of at least four people: Jonathan Tessier, the elderly passengers left to die at Castle Rising and Alex Cosyns. He also very probably assisted the suicide of Chris Robins. And there are …' he searched for the words, ‘other consequences of this man's perjury.'

Shaw thought of the last time he'd seen his father, lying propped up in a hospital bed after a third, massive, stroke, his face already undergoing the process which would transform it into a death mask.

Valentine shifted in his seat. It was a measure of the degree to which he'd buried his emotions for the last thirteen years that the simple fact that they might at last bring Robert Mosse to justice had made his eyes flood.

Warren looked at his watch, frustrated to find that so much of his life seemed to be about stopping one thing he didn't like doing in order to start something he didn't like doing even more. He went to a mirror on the wall and set his peaked cap straight, but Shaw calculated that his superior officer was carefully considering what he said next.

‘All right. I'll give you ten days. You can peel off the manpower from the murder unit. Then that's it. Case closed. If it's not wrapped up by then, I'll burn the sodding file myself.'

He stood and looked at Shaw, some of the belligerence which had once made him such an effective police officer returning. ‘I am making you, Peter, personally responsible for Voyce's safety. Screw up and you will look upon George's career as a sparkling success. The highlight of your working week for the next twenty years will be lecturing on speed awareness courses to spotty boy-racers. And I'm still expecting a result on the body in the cemetery. Now, get out, both of you.'

A freezing fog the colour of pickled eggs had fallen on the waterfront as Shaw drove alone down to South Lynn: under the black bones of the quayside cranes, a Meccano set lost in the gloom, then round at the Millfleet into the gridiron of streets around All Saints. He was aware that the Porsche – black, polished and sleek – turned heads in this poor neighbourhood. He'd chosen it because it had a narrow ‘A' bar – the stanchion which separates the windscreen from the side windows. In most modern cars the ‘A' bar was at least a couple of inches thick – a considerable handicap for someone with only one eye. He'd taken advice from websites set up to help the partially sighted and found the cash to pick the car up third-hand. The bodywork was dented here and there, the engine well past its sell-by date, but even so, parked overnight on these streets it would be gone by daybreak, or up on bricks minus its spoked alloy wheels.

He slowed to take a corner by Whitefriars primary school and noted a man standing back on the pavement, most of his body hidden in an overhanging hedge of copper beech laced with snow. He wasn't standing still: one arm jerked without rhythm, his head ticking like a metronome, and he was greeting the freezing fog in a T-shirt emblazoned with red letters that spelt españa
.
He watched the Porsche balefully as it crept past.

Shaw rang the control room at St James's on his hands-free mobile, reporting the dealer's presence. Most of Lynn's drugs came in off the ships, peddled in pubs and a handful of town-centre clubs. Street-selling was rare, and Shaw guessed this man was desperate to fund his own habit; desperate and disorientated, because trying to peddle outside a primary school was not the recommended first step in a career as a drug baron. The lack of topcoat suggested he hadn't come far to his pitch, so he was probably a resident of the brutal block of low-rise flats which clustered around All Saints – a cordon of concrete that effectively encircled the medieval splendour of the old church.

The Porsche cut through the street-mist until the lines of terraced houses petered out. Shaw trundled the car forward along the narrow quay – the river to one side, the tide low enough to reveal the thin grey outline of a wrecked wooden barge on the near sandbank, the cemetery on his left showing glimpses of hawthorn and cedar crated with snow. Early-morning dog walkers had hung plastic bags on the railings, like offerings for the dead. He could just see the outline of the Flask, no lights showing in the three floors of its timbered façade.

At the cemetery gates he found DC Jacky Lau by her parked Mégane. Lau's car was adapted for rallying, with a complete set of spoilers, multiple spotlights and a trio of go-faster stripes. She was leaning on the car, staring into her mobile phone. Outside the office she always wore reflective sunglasses. She was ethnic Chinese, and possessed a kind of unpredictable energy which matched her driving. She was respected in the squad, but not especially liked. Her ambition, to make DI within five years, was naked. When she wasn't pursuing that ambition she was wrapped up in her hobby: cars, and the men who drove them.

‘Sir,' she pushed herself off the car's bonnet with her thighs. ‘Paul said to meet you here. Cemetery's still sealed off. Forensics are down by the open graves. I'm leading house-to-house, starting at nine – St James's are sending a dozen uniforms down for the day. What are we looking for here?'

It was a good question. Shaw took in a lungful of fog. ‘For now, stick to the houses overlooking the cemetery. Anything over the years, I suppose …' He suddenly felt the weight of the task before them – solving a crime at a distance of nearly three decades. ‘See if any group is known to hang around the place regularly after dark – druggies, lovers etc. We don't know when chummy got dumped, but it's probably way back. Throw in Nora Tilden's name – if anyone remembers the funeral, get a full account. Names, anything unusual …you know the routine.'

He wondered what was going on behind the reflective glasses. ‘We should have more from Tom and Justina to go on later.'

He left her making a note and walked on through the open gates of Flensing Meadow Cemetery, the visibility down to twenty yards so that his world was reduced to a circular arena of tombstones and the path cutting through them, the only movement coming from the crows that flitted in and out of view over his head as they swapped branches in the trees, prompting showers of damp snowflakes. He wondered whether the silence of graveyards was an illusion. He strained his ears to catch the swish of traffic on the new bridge and – just once – the distant crackle of a police radio.

He'd left Valentine back at St James's organizing the bugging and surveillance of Jimmy Voyce. Max Warren had given them ten days and it would take twenty-four hours to put a unit fully in place. The priority was to get listening devices into Voyce's hotel room and, if they could, into the car he'd hired. Twine had been scouring the airline passenger lists and had just discovered that Voyce was booked on a flight to Auckland via Hong Kong leaving in six days' time.

That was a break: if Voyce was going to try to blackmail Robert Mosse his timetable was actually narrower than theirs. Today they needed to get a rough idea of Voyce's movements so that they could time the bugging operation – and obtain a court order allowing them to carry it out. Once Valentine had got the ball rolling he was due to meet Shaw at eleven to interview Lizzie Tilden, now Lizzie Murray – Nora Tilden's daughter and, in her own turn, owner and landlady of the Flask.

The cemetery chapel came into view. When Shaw pushed open the Gothic-arched door he was surprised by the efficient hum of activity, and the mechanical gasps of a coffee maker. Twine had put in place a standard incident room in record time: desks, phone lines, internet link and a screened area for interviews. Outside, the St 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.

‘Paul,' said Shaw, looking round. ‘Well done. This her?'

‘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.

‘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.

‘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.

‘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.

‘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 space. A single neon tube provided scant illumination.

Shaw closed the door and leant against it while Campbell took the one vacant seat. The room was chaotic. Against one wall stood a row of metal lockers. There was a table around which three men sat, a bench holding a kettle and mugs, and a gas ring attached to a fuel bottle. Waves of heat rolled out of an industrial paraffin heater. The floor was crowded with tools, coats, stuffed black bin-liners, here and there split to reveal the rubbish inside them. The space the men occupied was reduced to where they sat. The metal walls were damp with condensation, their only adornment a calendar, curled so much that Shaw could see only the girl's face, a fake smile failing to mask her boredom.

‘This won't take long,' said Shaw, addressing them all. ‘You'll know what we've found – a body on top of a coffin, sharing a grave it had no right to be in. So I need to know the usual procedure before and after a funeral.'

The three men looked at each other and the youngest, who drank from a tin of Red Bull, began to fiddle with a roll-up machine and a tin of Golden Virginia. ‘Yeah, procedure,' he said. ‘Got to follow the rules.'

The man in the Day-Glo jacket, who appeared to be in charge, introduced himself simply as ‘Michael' and said he'd been working in the town's cemeteries for thirty years – first at Gayton and now Flensing Meadow – and the routine for a burial was unchanged. The council had set down procedures, as had their union – and everyone was a member.

They all nodded at that, the youngster licking his roll-up.

‘Mind you,' said Michael, ‘the crew they've got in to move the bones off the riverside, they're not union – just cheap labour. No rules for them.'

‘Scabs,' said the kid with the Red Bull.

‘Right,' said Shaw. ‘I see. But the normal procedure for burial …'

Michael composed himself. First thing on the day of the funeral the grave was dug by two men. Nine feet by four feet, he said. If the grave was for one coffin then it was five feet deep – allowing the statutory three feet of clearance above. One of the men operated the mechanical digger, the other set down duckboards for access to the graveside. In the days before the digger it took two men two hours to dig by hand. The union had managed to keep it a two-man job – but only on safety grounds. With one man on the digger, there had to be a standby in case of accidents.

In poor weather a shelter could be set over the open grave to stop flooding.

They all laughed, but it was the third man, who hadn't spoken until then, who said, ‘Useless – they're all wet here. Every one. Down with a splash.' He was in his mid-twenties, with hair prematurely slate grey; handsome, but when he told Shaw his name was Dan he revealed broken teeth.

‘Then we cover the grave with a board,' said Michael, nodding back down the shadowy room to the far end where they could see a set of reinforced wooden panels. ‘These days we put artificial turf at the edges and lay some over the spoil. The pall-bearers arrange the floral tributes on the turf. Some mourners scatter earth in – or throw a flower, that kind of thing. Since Diana, all sorts goes on.'

The three of them nodded at this truth.

‘We fill the grave in at the end of the service. We don't rush people, but some days it's busy. So we keep an eye out; then, when the mourners leave, we fill in the grave – usually with the digger again. Takes ten minutes.'

‘But you always wait?' asked Campbell.

‘Absolutely – don't want to upset no one.'

Campbell nodded, knowing that wasn't true. She'd been to an aunt's funeral at Gayton the month before and she'd had to walk her mother away from the graveside, away from the sound of the earth and pebbles falling on her sister's coffin.

‘Then what?' asked Shaw, rolling his shoulders. Michael looked at him and Shaw guessed that for the first time he'd noticed the detective's moon-eye.

He stabbed a finger at a piece of A3 paper Sellotaped to the wall. ‘There's a schedule. We go back to check on subsidence – after twenty-four hours, then a week, then every fortnight. When there's no more movement we let the masons know and they put the stone in – that's usually a good six months, maybe more. Then we hand over to the gardeners. If the family's paid, they keep it tidy, maybe even plant flowers. If not, they just gang mow the grass.'