Death Toll

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DI Peter Shaw stood amongst the gravestones of Flensing Meadow Cemetery, his walking boots invisible in a ground mist that had slipped off the river with the tide and trickled over the grass, filling the reopened graves. High tide: and on that high tide an Icelandic trawler was coming up the river in the night, a house of lights and rasping chains, and bouncing across the moonlit water the voices of men speaking a savage language. Stars turned above Shaw’s head like a planetarium. The mist was damp and it made the meadow smell of rotting earth. Frost was in the air. Winter was hardening by the day, and snow was forecast before New Year. But Shaw had told his daughter not to get her hopes up, because it never snowed on Christmas Day.

The clock of All Saints Church, lost amongst the ugly egg-boxes of the old council flats, chimed ten o’clock. Shaw shifted his feet, aware of what lay beneath the damp cemetery grass. Fifty yards away stood a forensic scene-of-crime lamp, a splash of grass illuminated St-Patrick’s-Day green. The light left the gravestones in stark contrast, casting ink-black shadows.

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