CUT DEAD: A DI Charlotte Savage Novel Read online

  ‘Carol Glastone,’ Savage said. ‘She’s a teaching assistant here, correct?’

  ‘Carol’s great. Really involved. Treats the school like family. She should be here this afternoon, actually.’ Jenny raised a hand to her mouth. ‘Oh my God, has something happened to her?’

  ‘No. We spoke to Carol this morning. We just wanted to confirm whether she was working last year around the twenty-first of June.’

  ‘She’s had quite a bit of time off recently. I’m sure we can check.’

  Jenny got up from her desk and went through to the admin area. A couple of minutes later she was back with a large hardback record book.

  ‘As I say, she was ill at the start of this year, fell down the stairs at home and broke an arm, but last year …’ Jenny paused, fingers turning pages in the book. ‘Of course! Yes, she was working all through that week.’

  ‘You sure? There can be no mistake?’

  ‘No.’ Jenny closed the book. ‘Might I know why you’re asking? Is it for an alibi of some kind?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Savage said. ‘I can’t disclose that. What time does Carol usually work to … I mean, does she stay on at the end of the school day?’

  ‘She might if there is a staff meeting or something. For instance today many of us will stay behind afterwards clearing up. Usually we’ll be out of here by four.’

  Savage nodded and turned to Calter. The DC made a mark in her notebook and then looked up at Savage as if to say ‘I told you so.’

  ‘OK, thank you, Jenny.’ Savage stood up and offered a hand.

  ‘But …’ Jenny glanced at Calter and then back to Savage. ‘I thought you might … perhaps …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The husband. He … I don’t know how to say it. Maybe I’m being silly, Carol’s life is really none of my business, is it?’

  ‘This kind of thing is all of our business. I can tell you we’re aware of Carol’s domestic issues, but we can’t do anything until she makes a complaint.’

  ‘So the alibi wasn’t for Carol. It was for him.’

  ‘We just wanted to know at what times Carol would have arrived home on the days concerned last year. You’ve answered that. She was here all day and would have left for home around four.’

  ‘Home? No, you asked me whether she was working and then you went on to some more general point about what time we get out of school. Last year she and Mrs Williams took the Year Sixes down to St Ives for their residential. Carol wouldn’t have been at home at all that week.’

  As they walked back to their car Calter apologised to Savage. Maybe Glastone was back in the frame after all.

  ‘But why if it’s him,’ Calter said, ‘has he started killing again? He doesn’t fit our profile of somebody who’s been out of action for some reason. Mr Glastone has been living and working in Salcombe the whole time.’

  ‘Carol Glastone?’

  ‘Hey?’

  ‘He got married to Carol Glastone two years ago. Maybe that has something to do with it.’

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind, ma’am, should I decide to get hitched. Another reason not to if married life is going to turn your husband into a serial killer.’

  ‘So far, touch wood,’ Savage said, opening the car door and climbing in, ‘mine hasn’t yet.’

  Devlyn Corran’s house lay on the edge of a lane about half a mile from the village of Dousland. The little cottage sat back from the road at the top of a steep, grassy bank. Riley and Enders parked alongside the bank behind a shiny new Mini and got out. Brick steps led up the bank to a plateau with a vegetable garden on one side and a small area of lawn on the other. A child’s swing hung from the branch of an old tree and the yellow seat moved in the wind. A pink and silver helium balloon tugged at its string trying to free itself from where it had been tied to the side of the porch and Riley could see a banner hanging in a downstairs window, gold lettering which read ‘Happy Fifth Birthday Emily’.

  He pushed the gate open and reflected the day probably hadn’t been happy at all. Riley didn’t have kids so he had no idea if going ahead with the party would have been right or not. He wondered aloud to Enders what he would have done. Would he have continued with the celebration? Carried on as normal? Mrs Corran would have had a difficult time explaining to young Emily why Daddy wasn’t coming home.

  ‘Lies,’ Enders said. ‘When you’ve got kids you get used to making them. “TV’s not working”, “we can’t afford it”, “the sweet shop’s closed”. That’s apart from the Father Christmas, Tooth Fairy sort of bollocks. She’d have thought of something.’

  ‘Patrick?’ Riley gestured at a bedroom window where a streak of blonde hair and a tear-stained face poked from behind a curtain. ‘Must be the daughter.’

  ‘Heartbreaking, Darius. Heartbreaking.’

  Mrs Corran answered the door and she’d been crying too. Without the tears her face would have been attractive, with full lips, a perfect nose and blue eyes framed with a mass of flaxen hair, but compared to her head the woman’s body seemed a little too slim and the black denim dress and black leggings she wore hung on her like clothes on a rail. She guided them into the front room where a large tropical fish tank and a big television jostled for primacy either side of a fireplace, the grate choked with soot and as cold as the atmosphere. The woman introduced herself as Cassie and gestured to the sofa. She asked the inevitable question, was there any news?

  ‘No, Cassie, I am afraid not,’ Riley said as he and Enders sat down.

  ‘Still no sign of his bike then? I mean if it had been an accident …’ Cassie went and stood by the fish tank. A vivid orange and white clownfish nosed against the glass and Cassie looked down, almost as if the fish would provide her with an answer.

  ‘We would have found his bike.’ Riley filled in the words, but didn’t mention anything about hit and run drivers being a bit more wised-up these days. Even to the extent where someone might pick a body up from the road and move it away from the scene. ‘I am keeping an open mind at the moment. This could be an accident, it could be something else.’

  If the news provided any sort of comfort to Cassie it wasn’t evident from the tears which welled in her eyes.

  ‘You mean … he …’ Cassie’s voice trailed off again.

  ‘I know you’ve told the story to the officers who came yesterday, but I’d like to go over one or two areas again and get some more background information.’

  ‘OK.’ Cassie sounded unsure. She moved from the fish tank and perched on the edge of an armchair. ‘But I don’t know what else I can tell you. Devlyn went to work as usual Saturday night and never turned up Sunday morning.’

  ‘So there was nothing different you remember about Devlyn on Saturday? Nothing bothering him?’

  ‘He was a bit withdrawn, tired perhaps, but he got up lunch time and went fishing in the afternoon. Down to Bigbury-on-Sea, I think he said. Then he helped me with some of the things for the party, played with Emily and went off to work.’

  ‘And when did you realise he was missing?’

  ‘His shift was supposed to end at eight a.m., but sometimes he’ll stay on for a chat afterwards or maybe something will come up and he’ll need to work an extra hour to cover for an absence. By ten I thought something wasn’t quite right so I phoned the prison. They said he’d clocked off on time and someone had seen him getting on his bike. I gave it a little longer and then I put Emily in the car and we went looking for him. When I got back to the house an hour or so later I phoned you lot. Felt stupid at the time, as if I was causing a bother over nothing, but now …’

  ‘Usually people turn up after a few hours. We simply don’t have the resources to send officers out looking for everyone who goes missing. I understand the rescue group began their search late on Sunday afternoon?’

  ‘Yes. The ironic thing is Devlyn wanted to be a member, but he didn’t think he would be able to spare the time and being on call wouldn’t fit in with his job.’

  Cassie’s eyes
glazed and she turned her head towards the mantelpiece where a picture showed a figure in walking gear standing on a snow slope. The man’s bright red cagoule and over-trousers stood out against the white and he held a snowball in his right hand, making to throw it at the camera.

  ‘Is that Devlyn?’ Riley said.

  ‘Yes. In the Dales, Ingleborough. Before we had Emily. Years ago.’ Cassie looked away from the picture and down at the floor where specks of multi-coloured confetti were dotted across the white carpet. It appeared as if Emily had had some sort of party after all.

  ‘When Devlyn worked at Full Sutton?’

  ‘Yes. We loved our life up there with the moors and York and everything.’

  ‘So why did you leave?’

  ‘I … Devlyn …’ Cassie clasped her hands together, not in prayer but clenched in anger, the skin on the knuckles tightening to white over bone.

  ‘Cassie?’

  ‘Devlyn had an affair. Afterwards he was sorry about straying, they always are, aren’t they? He said he would never be unfaithful again and suggested we leave the area and move away. Far away. So here we are.’

  ‘So the reason was nothing to do with the prison or his work?’

  ‘No.’ Cassie paused for a moment and Riley thought she was going to say something else. Instead she leant forward and picked up some of the confetti from the floor. She stared at the pieces as they lay in her palm before raising her hand to her mouth and blowing hard. The confetti rose in the air and then fell to the floor in a flutter of pastel colours. ‘Happy ever after, isn’t that what they say? As long as you both shall live?’

  Joanne Black and her farmworker, Jody, stood on the slab of concrete not far from the crime scene tent. A couple of CSIs were still working around the hole and when Joanne had come from the house she’d seen someone in the mobile incident room. Other than that most of the police had disappeared in search of lunch.

  ‘What’ll we say?’ Jody had asked as they walked down the track into the field. ‘I mean when they ask us why we’re down here.’

  ‘Farming, Jody,’ Joanne replied. ‘It’s what we do, remember?’

  Once at the slab Joanne had waved her arms around, talked loudly about crop rotation, drill depth and spraying cycles. She’d pointed out various areas of the field, sounding exasperated as she worried about how they were going to clear up all the mess. Looked to the hedge. Wandered around.

  When the CSIs had stopped paying attention, one bent to a trowel, the other operating some sort of probe, she’d confronted Jody.

  ‘It was here,’ she said. ‘A bungalow. I remember. Wood-panelled sides, asbestos roof, a little veranda.’

  ‘Yes.’ Jody peered down at his feet and pointed out a line of holes in the concrete. ‘All these, they’re from a shed we put up after the house was demolished. Lasted a couple of years but it got torn down in a storm. Cursed, your uncle said.’

  ‘Pah.’ Joanne paced along the edge of the slab. ‘So tell me again, the bungalow, when did you take it down?’

  ‘Be soon after I started working here.’

  ‘Something like twenty-five years ago then?’ Joanne looked to Jody for confirmation and he nodded. ‘And you don’t know why?’

  ‘It had got in a right state, beyond saving. When I asked your uncle, he said the place was haunted. Bad memories.’

  ‘Double pah.’

  ‘You don’t believe it was haunted or you don’t believe he said it?’

  ‘I don’t believe he believed the place was haunted.’ Joanne reached one side of the slab. Toed the edge. Turned. ‘Jody, I used to come down here when I was little. I played with a girl who lived here. She was older than me – I’d have been six or seven, she was early to mid-teens. Those days kids did that, played across age groups. Anyway, when I came back one summer after not having been to the farm for a year, my uncle said the family had moved away. I remember being disappointed my friend wasn’t here but I never thought any more of it. Years later there was gossip about the girl, why she’d left. Gossip about my uncle.’

  ‘That’s villages for you, Joanne. A load of tittle-tattle. Houses might not be cheap round here, but talk is.’

  ‘No smoke, Jody. Something went on.’

  ‘But that was long before this.’ Jody stared down to the white forensic shelter. ‘Decades. What makes you think there’s any kind of connection to the girl?’

  ‘When did I inherit the farm, Jody?’

  ‘Let’s see … be around 2006. We had a dry start to the summer and I remember you wanted to invest in some irrigation equipment, you all keen but knowing nothing. I told you it were a waste of money. The rain came in July and we had a bumper harvest.’

  ‘Yes. My uncle died that spring, the way old people seem to. Waited until the lambs were frolicking, the daffs in bloom, and then popped off.’ Joanne pointed down to the shelter. ‘Know when the Candle Cake Killer committed his first murder?’

  ‘No, but I reckon you’re going to tell me.’

  ‘Same year.’

  ‘A coincidence. Nothing more. Also, that first one, she was found on Dartmoor.’

  ‘And I know why, Jody. It was because we had the caravan down here sat on the plinth. When William and I took over we renovated the house, didn’t we? Lived in the caravan for three months when the floors were being renewed. The following year the caravan had gone and we were back in the house, well out of it.’

  ‘So the next body goes in the hole?’

  ‘Yes. The hole standing only a few paces from the bungalow. The bungalow where a girl and her family left one spring in a hurry to get away. The girl who had something to do with my uncle.’

  ‘It’s a stretch, Joanne,’ Jody said. ‘Anyway, who was she? I mean I’m from Yelverton, didn’t come here as a kid. Your uncle never said either.’

  ‘Laura or Lauren. A name like that. Someone in the village must remember who lived here.’

  ‘You’re talking well over forty years ago and the family may have been transient. The house was a tied bungalow. Farmworkers.’

  ‘Someone, Jody. Even after all this time.’

  ‘Ms Black?’ Jody glanced over at the CSIs. ‘You going to tell this lot?’

  Joanne paused. Walked across to Jody, raised a finger and reached out and touched him on the lips. Smiled.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not just yet.’

  Chapter Eleven

  You sit in the car, Mikey alongside you. The glow from a street lamp washes the interior, turning the pages of Mikey’s magazine yellow. Puzzles. Colouring-in, spot the difference, tic, tac, toe. Not crosswords or word games, anything with letters is much too complicated for Mikey. You glance over. He’s working on a join the dots picture. It’s a mess of spidery lines, each dot on the page joined to every other dot. Like the wires in the dishwasher, you think. Or the road. Any place in the world joined to you here, any time linked somehow through history. All you have to do is work out the route to where you want to go.

  The girl.

  You look over to the house. A glow at a downstairs window quickly fades to darkness. You count to ten. Raise your eyes to the top floor. A white light comes on, a figure silhouetted for a second as somebody reaches and draws the curtains across.

  ‘Wait here,’ you say to Mikey. ‘Finish your drawing. I’m going round the back for a closer look.’

  Mikey nods and you get out of the car and cross the street. The house is a little terrace, but there’s a passage down the side, a tall gate which isn’t locked.

  Careless, you think.

  You open the gate and step through, groping down through the black in the passage until you emerge into a little garden. A patio, beyond a handkerchief-sized lawn. From somewhere close by there’s a gurgle of water swirling round a drainpipe. Your eyes follow the pipe upwards to where a half-open window splays light into the night. She’s up there in the bathroom. Taking a shower.

  You shift sideways, move out onto the patio, stand on the tips of your toes. Now you can see
her reflected in a mirror, although the image is blurring as the surface of the mirror clouds with condensation.

  Never mind. You’re not here for that.

  You move across the patio to the back door. There are several plant pots to the right beneath a window. A couple of begonias – tuberhybrida if you’re not mistaken – and three succulents. You lift the pot nearest the door and shake your head with disbelief as a glint of silver shines up from the paving slab beneath.

  Two keys on a ring.

  The back gate and now the keys. Beyond careless. More like an invitation.

  You bend and pick up the keys, move to the door, try one of them in the lock.

  Click. Click.

  The lock is one of those double ones and you have to revolve the key twice. Then you push the handle down. Swing the door open. Step up into the kitchen.

  Quiet and dark. Dim light through the door into the hallway coming down from upstairs. Air tinged with scent wafting down too. A fragrance. Shower gel? Shampoo?

  She’s up there in the bathroom. Water running over her body. Soft bubbles on her skin. You imagine your hands reaching out and grabbing her, the soap slippery under your fingertips, the girl struggling, screaming.

  Stop!

  Really, you shouldn’t be thinking like this. You should be checking a couple of things and getting out of here. Taking the keys to one of those late-night places to get copies made and then returning the originals to their rightful place under the pot.

  But where’s the fun in that?

  Ignoring your better judgement, you ease yourself out of the kitchen and into the hall. The stairs rise to your right, carpet deep and silent. So easy to glide down the hall and climb up towards the woman, towards heaven.

  ‘Get guuurrrlll!’

  Mikey!

  You spin around and there in the kitchen is the lad. He has a grin on his face and he points at the ceiling.

  ‘Guuurrr—’

  You bound towards him and place your hand over his mouth.