CUT DEAD: A DI Charlotte Savage Novel Page 6

  ‘The rail company? I was hoping to avoid them.’

  ‘Not now, boss. Can’t have my guys and girls on the line with trains coming back and forth. We’re at least going to need some guidance on how to proceed. My guess is they’ll send a crew down. Be some jobsworth in charge as well. Sorry.’

  Layton shrugged and began to punch in a number as Savage strolled up the muddy track. The direct link into Plymouth crystallised the problems they were up against, she thought. ‘Anywhere in Devon’ Layton had said. Which meant anyone in Devon. And the population of the county was well over one million people.

  Chapter Six

  Back home after your trip to town and your mate Mikey holds up the Sun, grins an inane smirk and points to the headline.

  ‘Scream Teas.’

  You like it. Trust the nation’s favourite rag to come up with something special for you. This isn’t what it’s about – the fame and glory – but you’re flattered nonetheless. However, you know you mustn’t believe your own press. You’re not some preening celebrity or a politician bending to every whim.

  Mikey points to the date on the paper’s masthead and shrugs, making a mock, clown-like sad face. The poor mutt can’t say much, doesn’t really understand the Gregorian calendar, but he knows the Special Day is coming soon. He puts the paper down and slips one hand inside his trousers and you see him begin to move his hand rhythmically.

  ‘Outside!’ you say, pointing to the door and Mikey scampers from the room, his demeanour somewhere between a monkey and a stallion.

  You shake your head. The boy is crazy, but he helps you run the place, provides the muscle power. His strength is frightening at times, but he’s as good a guard dog as your Rottweiler, his blank staring eyes and gaping mouth usually enough to put off casual visitors even before they’ve opened the gate to the yard.

  Yesterday it was a rep selling solar panels. Some rip-off scheme no doubt. From the kitchen window you watched the man get out of his Audi and move to the gate. Mikey was chopping logs in the shed, but he must have heard the car because out he came, scampering across the yard with the dog alongside, a big smile on his face.

  The bunch of colourful brochures under the rep’s arm slipped down and, caught by the breeze, they whisked themselves through the bars of the gate and landed in a large puddle. The man opened his mouth to say something as Mikey uttered one of his guttural wails and then thought better of it. He moved back to the car, jumped in and reversed along the track even as Mikey was picking up the soggy brochures and raising a thumb in appreciation of the glossy pictures.

  Now, you shake your head as you watch Mikey cross the yard. The dog scampers out of its kennel and barks, wanting to play, but right now Mikey’s not interested. He shouts at the dog and enters his little shiplap shed. He keeps his puzzle magazines and God-knows-what-else in there. The rep’s brochures are probably in there too, although you doubt Mikey is going to look at them now.

  Ten minutes later and he’s in the yard again. On his pogo stick. Boing, boing, boing. That great grin of his, the lopsided face, tongue hanging out, his mind concentrating on staying upright. But upright doesn’t last for long. He falls and smacks his head on the ground, the mark of the graze visible. The pogo stick gets flung to one side and Mikey scrabbles in a clump of dock. ‘That’s for nettles, you idiot,’ you feel like shouting out the window, but maybe you’re wrong and anyway, it will save on the cost of a plaster.

  Mikey wipes a piece of dock leaf on his forehead and then looks over to the window. You tap the glass and point at the pile of white silica gravel sparkling at one side of the yard. ‘Get on with your job,’ you mouth. Mikey shrugs and goes back to moving the stones from one side of the yard to the other. He takes up his shovel and begins to load the wheelbarrow. You are not really sure why you asked him to move the stuff, but it gives him something to do.

  Best not wear out your workhorse though, as you’re going to need his help and you don’t want him tired. Not with what’s coming.

  Chapter Seven

  Princetown, Dartmoor. Monday 16th June. 12.37 p.m.

  As Enders drove out of the prison car park and back through Princetown, Riley opened the file the Governor had given them and began to leaf through the bundle of paper.

  ‘Not much more in here, Patrick. Nothing to suggest a reason for him going missing. Not on his kid’s fifth birthday. I mean, even if you are having an affair or something you don’t leave like that, do you?’

  ‘Darius?’ Enders jabbed a finger at the windscreen.

  They had left Princetown and were heading westward across the moor. The road wound into the distance, climbing a low rise next to a stand of pines. A queue of cars snaked back towards them. At its head a patrol car was drawn across the road, blue light strobing. A Volvo estate had pulled onto the verge near the copse, the rear door up, a jumble of plastic containers and toolboxes in the back.

  They approached the queue and overtook, coasting by on the right and ignoring the glares from inside the stationary cars. They stopped next to the patrol car and got out. There was no sign of Campbell and the rescue group, but it appeared as if they’d found something. The patrol officer inspected Riley’s ID and pointed down the road. A series of white lines had been spray-painted onto the tarmac and John Layton knelt next to one of them, tweezers in one hand, plastic container in the other. Riley walked down the road to the CSI officer. Layton glanced up as he neared, tipped his battered Tilley hat back with one finger and held up the tweezers.

  ‘Good of you to come out, John,’ Riley said. ‘From what I hear you’ve got a lot on your plate.’

  ‘Dog’s dinner, mate, but I didn’t have much choice. Got a call on my phone. Only the bloody CC. He was quite firm on the matter.’ Layton’s eagle-like eyes darted from Riley back to the tweezers as he held them over the container and dropped a glittering shard of plastic in. He screwed on a lid and shoved the container into one of the many deep pockets in his tan raincoat. ‘Red and silver plastic. From a reflector. Some metallic blue paint on there. Could have come from a collision with a car.’

  ‘Bit of a long shot, isn’t it?’ Riley said. ‘It might be from anywhere.’

  ‘There’s some blood on the road surface too. Plus the rescue bods found a bicycle pump away from the road, down in a clump of heather, as if it had been thrown there.’

  ‘Corran’s?’

  ‘A Bontrager Air Support pump. Distinctive, and according to his missus, Corran’s bike had one.’

  ‘No sign of the bike though?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘So what do you think happened?’

  ‘Well …’ Layton spotted another piece of plastic on the road and bent and repeated his tweezer, container, pocket action of earlier before standing and pointing to a clump of heather encircled with blue and white tape. ‘That’s where the pump was found. Apart from the marks made by the person who found the pump, nobody has walked the ground nearby in the last few days. My guess is Corran was knocked off his bike and whoever hit him picked up the bike and took it with them. Corran as well. The pump probably came dislodged from the bike and they flung the pump out there thinking no one would ever find the thing.’

  ‘Or Corran did.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Corran knew what was happening,’ Riley said. ‘He flung the pump away thinking it might be the only thing marking the spot where he’d disappeared.’

  ‘You’re implying this wasn’t an accident, not a hit and run?’

  ‘Can you get some prints off the pump?’

  ‘If there are any, yes. I’ve got a team coming from Plymouth. We’ll do a search of two hundred metres of the road either side of the probable collision point. After that everything will go back to the lab and we’ll see what we’ve got.’

  ‘Thanks, John. Good work.’

  ‘Don’t thank me, thank Campbell. That bicycle pump. We’re talking needles and haystacks. Bloody miracle.’

  Riley stood still for a moment an
d then turned three-sixty, scanning the desolate moorland. Heather, rock, bog and a few trees, the road slicing through the middle of the wilderness, a tenuous link to civilisation. The black line of tarmac marking Corran’s route back to his home and wife and kid. His route to somewhere else as well. Maybe somewhere he hadn’t wanted to go.

  Sometimes Paula Rowland wondered if she was cut out to be a teacher. Surely there were easier jobs? Jobs where people did what you told them to instead of giving you backchat and filthy looks. Jobs where the government wasn’t constantly on your back telling you how useless your profession was. Jobs where the coffee machine worked.

  Paula peered down at the paper cup beneath the dispenser nozzle. A brown slick rose from the bottom of the cup as water trickled in. She touched the side of the cup. Cold.

  ‘Heater’s packed up again,’ a voice at her shoulder said. Cath. Her best mate. Best mate at the school, anyway. ‘Here, have one of these.’

  Cath held out a small carton of orange juice, part of her extensive packed lunch. Paula smiled and took the carton.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Been a tough morning. Year Ten girls.’

  Cath nodded. Paula didn’t need to say any more. The Year Ten girls were notorious. With knickers full of hormones, their antics left some of the more developed boys with their tongues hanging out. Controlling the two groups was akin to trying to keep a pack of dogs and bitches apart when the bitches were on heat.

  ‘It’s the language of love, miss,’ Kelly Jones had said when Paula snapped at her. ‘French kissing and all that.’

  ‘French letters more like,’ another girl blurted out.

  Things got worse from there on in as the class tried to come up with as many names for condoms as they could. She’d smiled to herself; she hadn’t known half of the slang names. Love glove? Well, at least it was better than the dirt the boys had come out with.

  Paula slumped down on one of the sofas, Cath joining her, other teachers saying ‘hello’ to the pair and then carrying on with their conversation.

  The topic, for once, didn’t revolve around problems with specific children, government education policy or Ofsted. Over the weekend the news had broken that a sicko had abducted several women and dumped them at some farm out in the countryside. He was on the prowl. No woman was safe now the Candle Cake Killer was back.

  The name rang a bell somewhere inside Paula’s head but she couldn’t remember the specifics.

  ‘Can’t remember?’ There was astonishment from the other teachers. Paula smiled. Tried to explain that she had been a student up in Newcastle. She’d spent a year abroad in France and most of the rest of her degree course had been conducted in a drunken haze.

  ‘But it was here,’ Cath said. ‘Plymouth. Your hometown!’

  She dimly remembered her mother warning her to be careful when she’d returned home after her finals.

  ‘Yes,’ someone else said. ‘The twenty-first of June. The longest day. This weekend.’

  Well, she told them, her boyfriend was coming over on Saturday. He was a PE teacher. Worked out. He could handle anyone.

  The rest of the lunch break descended into a string of ‘ooohs’ and ‘aaahs’ as her female colleagues begged to be introduced to any hunky mates her boyfriend might have, and Paula forgot all about the Candle Cake Killer until home time. It was when she was pulling out of the car park and joining the main road that she noticed a battered pickup truck. The truck had every right to be on the road, of course, and there was nothing particularly odd about it.

  Except she’d seen the very same vehicle driving down her street when she left for school that morning.

  Back at Major Crimes by mid-afternoon Savage took an unwanted call from Hardin. Due to technical issues at the hospital the first post-mortem had been delayed from the morning. He and Garrett had been due to attend, but the DCI had left to conduct a media briefing. Would she like to take his place?

  Savage didn’t think she had much choice in the matter so she said ‘yes’.

  ‘Of course, ma’am,’ Calter said when Savage had hung up. ‘I mean, you wouldn’t want to be at home with your feet up with the newspaper and a glass of white in your hand, would you? Not when the alternative is watching a decomposing corpse being sliced and diced.’

  Savage returned to her car and drove the short distance to Derriford. As was customary, when she arrived at the mortuary Nesbit greeted her with a joke.

  ‘Ran out of coins for the meter,’ he said, peering over the top of his glasses and giving a little smile. ‘The result being the entire refrigeration system has ceased to function. We’ve been having to stuff ice bags into the drawers to keep everything sweet. My PM schedule has gone haywire. The best thing to happen is if people would stop dying.’

  It appeared as if the pathologist was only half-joking, because to one side of the main anteroom several wall panels lay on the floor and two technicians fiddled with a bundle of multi-coloured wiring and circuit board. A cleaner mopped a puddle of brown liquid from around the base of one of the big body storage cabinets and Savage wondered if the odour assailing her nostrils wasn’t even more acrid than usual. In Nesbit’s office Hardin sat munching on a biscuit, oblivious to the smell, steam curling from a cup of coffee.

  ‘Good to see you, Charlotte,’ Hardin said as she entered. ‘Long time since we’ve done one of these together, hey? Makes a nice change from paperwork.’

  Lovely, Savage thought. Much better than wine and a newspaper.

  Hardin wiped some crumbs from his mouth, took a final slurp from his cup and rose from his seat. The two of them returned to the anteroom where Nesbit was scrubbing up at a sink.

  ‘What did you mean Saturday night,’ Savage asked him, ‘when you said you’d seen this sort of thing before?’

  ‘Exactly that.’ Nesbit dried his hands and then pulled on gloves. He looked at Savage. ‘Mandy Glastone. Tangled in some unlucky fisherman’s line, she’s pulled up from the murky depths of a pool on the river Dart on Dartmoor. Those marks … we thought at first they’d been made by crayfish, although a biologist doubted it. Then I wondered if they could have been caused by a thin piece of monofilament moving back and forwards in motion with the river current. Once she was on the table though I could tell she’d been cut with a knife. A sharp knife.’

  Nesbit gestured with an arm and the three of them walked through into the PM room proper. The cadaver was already in position, the waft of the fans failing to do much to take away the despair in the air. Savage regretted not bringing any mints with her, the feeling doubling when she approached the body.

  ‘Remarkably well-preserved, isn’t she?’ Nesbit said. ‘Considering she has probably been dead for a fair number of months.’

  If this was well-preserved then Savage didn’t think she wanted to see the other two bodies. She peered at the corpse on the table. The woman was partly still covered in sludge, the mud drying to a light grey. The angular shapes of the bones rose as the translucent skin sagged around them like papier-mâché on a wire frame. In places subcutaneous fat had slipped down and collected in weird globule-like formations. Cellulite for zombies.

  ‘As long as a year?’ Savage said, thinking of the date fast approaching.

  ‘Possible. The anaerobic conditions have slowed the decomposition process. No air equals no bugs and no microbes. It’s why the other two bodies are still more than just skeletons.’ Nesbit paused, and noticing Savage swallowing a gulp, he smiled. ‘Something to look forward to, hey?’

  ‘Can’t wait,’ Savage said as she ran her eyes over the corpse again, thinking the dried mud resembled the war paint of some primitive aboriginal warrior about to go into battle. Except this woman wasn’t going anywhere. Not without her head.

  ‘Tricky to determine what exactly killed her,’ Nesbit said as he began a preliminary examination, dictating a few notes as he worked his way around the body. ‘Possibly the decapitation, but as with Mandy Glastone, the first victim, we can’t know if that caused d
eath or not.’

  He indicated to one of the mortuary technicians to wash down the body and soon water was sluicing the mud away, revealing the odd cuts across the torso, some lines curving this way and that, some going straight across and meeting or bisecting each other. The other technician began to take pictures, the light from the flash sparkling in the flowing water.

  ‘What do you think, Charlotte?’ Hardin said, speaking for the first time. ‘Dan bloody Brown?’

  Savage had to concede the patterns were like nothing she’d seen before. For all she knew they could well be some ancient language, hieroglyphics written on skin instead of stone. Although that didn’t make much sense.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘If you are leaving a message you don’t bury it away six foot under.’

  ‘Why do it then?’ Hardin shook his head and moved closer. ‘Unless you’re a bloody loon.’

  ‘I think with this killer that’s a given, sir.’ Savage turned to Nesbit. ‘Do the older bodies have the cuts?’

  ‘In places, yes,’ the pathologist said. ‘The skin is not intact so if the markings were ever as extensive as these ones they are gone now.’

  ‘Then I think the act was the thing, not what resulted.’

  ‘Interesting theory.’ Hardin cocked his head, as if trying to view the markings from a different angle. ‘So we’d be wasting our time trying to deduce anything from them. They’re meaningless.’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘No, Charlotte, I know you didn’t,’ Hardin said. ‘There’ll be some photographs somewhere of Mandy Glastone, but if I remember rightly there were more cuts on her.’

  ‘So this latest attack is less frenzied? Strange, as a serial killer develops he often goes further.’

  ‘But these aren’t frenzied, are they?’ Nesbit said. He picked up a plastic spatula and traced one of the cuts. It curved from the side of the woman’s left breast down to the belly button and around her waist in a sweeping, graceful arc. ‘These are, I hate to say … artistic?’