by Mark Sennen
Operational officer.
Savage thought the term was a neat way for Fox to exclude himself from the equation, the buck-passing already in full swing. The police commissioner would do the same thing, leaving the troops on the ground to wonder what exactly the guys at the top did for their pay packets.
Fox was leaving now, his PA alongside muttering something about a few words for a press release as they hurried into the corridor. Savage was curious to know what the CC would say to the media. That the team were a bunch of incompetents?
Hardin was hot on Fox’s tail, but he paused to speak to Savage and Wilson.
‘Charlotte,’ he said. ‘We need something by tonight, understand?’
Savage nodded and was about to ask when the post-mortem would be taking place when Hardin turned to Wilson.
‘And you.’ Hardin jabbed a finger at the psychologist. ‘Get me the bloody report by tomorrow or you’re fucking history, OK?’
With that Hardin was off, lumbering down the corridor after Fox. Wilson shook his head.
‘Charming,’ he said.
Riley regretted asking Enders if he knew what he was doing as soon as the words left his mouth.
‘Look, city boy,’ Enders said as he glanced down at the screen on the handheld GPS. ‘You’re the one who doesn’t know what you’re talking about. This is my new baby. She’s accurate down to a metre or so on a good day.’
‘Your girlfriend, does she have a name?’ Riley laughed and bent to turn over another rock. When he saw there was nothing underneath he let the rock down with a clatter. ‘Nothing doing, Patrick. We’ll keep trying for another ten minutes and call it a day.’
There’s a plastic container under a flat rock at 50.2847 North 03.8977 West. Put £5000 cash in it by Friday.
Riley shook his head and wondered if the coordinates in the document on Corran’s laptop were bogus. Perhaps some sort of misdirection. They’d been searching for half an hour already, working their way into a ravine on the west side of Burgh Island. The narrow cove had a little beach, the top end of which was littered with large stones. Riley reckoned he must have turned over almost all of them. Enders hadn’t done so many. Mostly he’d just stood holding his precious GPS and pointed.
When they’d arrived they’d parked the car at Bigbury-on-Sea and stood and looked across the strip of sand which joined the island to the mainland. Hundreds, probably thousands, of holidaymakers packed the beach and to the left of the island the water thronged with surfers. Every now and then one managed to stand on their board for a few seconds, but even Riley could tell the waves weren’t up to much today. The island itself was a few acres of rough grassland sat atop steep cliffs. On the east side the white of the art deco hotel glared in the sun, the place a popular venue for weddings. Riley couldn’t quite understand why, for a stream of tourists snaked their way past the hotel, gawping as they climbed to the top of the island. True, when the tide was high enough the island was cut off from the mainland with the only access on a weird sea-tractor, but even then the privacy lasted for an hour or two at most. To Riley’s eyes, a more inviting option was the Pilchard Inn sat right on the shoreline. Riley glanced at his watch. Not long until opening time.
‘Gold!’ Enders said, face all grin. ‘Told you this baby would find the goods.’
Riley shook his head and then clambered across the rocks and patted Enders on the back. At Enders’ feet lay a translucent Tupperware box with a green lid. As the DC reached for the box Riley caught his arm.
‘Prints,’ Riley said. He pulled a pair of latex gloves from his pocket and stretched them onto each hand. He lifted the box and peered through the side. There didn’t seem to be much inside, certainly not five thousand pounds.
‘You going to open it?’
‘Tell me, Patrick,’ Riley said turning the box over and checking it. ‘When you go geocaching with the kids, what do you find inside?’
‘Trinkets, mostly. Key-rings, little plastic toys, similar things. That’s not the point though, it’s finding the hiding place which is the big thrill.’
‘Strange nobody found this then.’ Riley began to lever off the top, working his fingers around the edge. ‘All these people.’
‘Not really. They didn’t know where to look. We did and it still took us a while. Plus this cove is relatively inaccessible. Private land.’
‘True.’ Riley snapped off the lid. Inside was a single piece of paper, folded in half. Riley took the paper out, unfolded it and read the single word written in large bold sweeps of black marker pen.
‘What does it say, Darius?’
‘Not funny,’ Riley said as he held out the paper for Enders to see. ‘But the joke’s backfired. This is as good as a confession from the person Corran was blackmailing that they killed him.’
Riley found Davies in the crime suite hunched over a stack of Corran’s bank statements. He showed the DI the find from Burgh Island.
‘“Bang”?’ Davies said, staring down at the plastic evidence bag. ‘Is that all?’
‘All that was in the box. Just a single piece of paper.’ Riley pointed at the bag. ‘No prints on the paper. Some on the box, but they’re Corran’s.’
‘You sure there was nothing else in there?’ Davies turned his head and gave a little sneer. ‘Not five Ks you and Enders decided to divvy up? A new three-piece for his wife, a smart set of new rags for yourself? Bung me a monkey and nobody will be any the wiser.’
Riley wasn’t sure if Davies was joking or not but he didn’t deign to answer. He just picked up the bag and moved it over to another one containing the box the paper had come in.
‘I don’t understand,’ Davies said. ‘The note I mean. Why was it still there?’
‘Corran must have left it. The message probably unnerved him, we know he was a little withdrawn Saturday afternoon. Cassie Corran said he’d been off fishing. We can guess his trip to the sea didn’t revolve around piscatorial pursuits.’
‘Hey?’
‘He went to Burgh Island and found the note. He must have realised he was in trouble, but he probably didn’t think his cover had been blown.’
‘You think somebody was watching?’
‘As Doug Hamill told me, it’s hard to know how. Corran had posted the letter several weeks before.’ Riley thought about the hours he’d spent in various ditches on the diesel investigation. ‘Even with a full team we’d have a job keeping up a surveillance op like that. On your own you’d have to be some sort of obsessive. It would be mind-numbing.’
‘Must have been some other way then.’ Davies itched his chin. ‘The question is “how?” And, as Hardin keeps asking me, “who?”’
‘The wife,’ Riley said. ‘Are we going to tell her? Maybe when she sees it in black and white like this she’ll come to her senses and tell us what she knows.’
‘Yeah,’ Davies said rising from his chair. ‘Let’s get up to Dousland and do just that.’
Late morning, and Savage took a call from Wilson. After the meeting with Simon Fox he’d visited the railway bridge with John Layton. Last night’s events, together with the trip that morning had crystallised his thoughts. Plus they’d never had a chance to discuss his new theory concerning the burial site and the placement of the bodies. She had to come and see what he was talking about.
Wilson gave her the directions to a rendezvous and ended the conversation, saying he wouldn’t stand her up this time. Savage went in search of the DSupt but when she found him he wasn’t enthusiastic to join her.
‘Dartmoor?’ Hardin’s eyes roved to his cup of tea on his desk. Alongside, a fan of chocolate digestives lay across a plate. ‘Not my thing to be honest. Besides, I’m working flat out on a brief for the CC. If you don’t mind I’ll give it a miss.’
Thirty minutes later Savage parked up on the moor at a pull-in off the main Princeton road. The moor fell away on all sides except one where a grassy slope rose to a distant tor, the green changing to grey near the top. There was one other car in the l
ayby – a Mercedes SUV – but out on the moor a group of walkers trudged the path up to the summit.
Next to the pull-in a tiny lake, more a puddle, reflected a big sky. Ripples ran across the water distorting the scene, splintering the light into a thousand pieces. Savage looked towards the tor where a wisp of mist curled around the rocks before being dragged away by the wind. Thicker clumps of cloud marched in a procession from the west, building on the horizon. Sunshine and showers, the forecast said, no mention of which would be in the ascendancy.
She got out of the car and called Wilson. There was a gargled answer.
‘Where are you?’ she said into the dead air of her phone. She pulled it away from her ear and looked at the signal indicator. One bar. None. One again.
‘Bloody hell.’
Then the phone rang. Wilson back on the line.
‘I’m on the top. Sharpitor. I can see you. It’s only about half a mile or so.’
Savage turned from her car and peered across the moor to a craggy outcrop. There was somebody up there in amongst the mist. Red waterproof. Arms waving. The figure disappeared as another finger of cloud caressed the top.
‘What the … OK. I’m on my way.’
Savage slammed the door of her car and retrieved her walking boots and her own waterproof. Back end of the year just gone, she’d learnt the hard way that you needed the right equipment out on Dartmoor. Things could go wrong quickly up here. Even a short distance from the road. Even in summer.
She shut the boot, bleeped the locks and set off after the walkers, soon realising the group were fitter than her. They’d reached the top and disappeared from view before she’d got halfway up.
Minutes later, waterproof now loosened and flapping in the wind, she arrived at the clump of rocks. Granite boulders spilt down from the tor and speckled the grass with grey.
Dr Wilson sat on top of the rocks looking to the south-west. He shouted to her without turning his head.
‘The Bere Peninsula. About eight miles that way.’ His hand shot out and pointed. ‘You can make out Tavy View Farm in the V of the river.’
Savage looked in the direction Wilson was pointing. Close by, around a mile distant but way below, the blue of Burrator Reservoir. Further off, the village of Yelverton and south of that along the A386, the outskirts of Plymouth. Beyond Plymouth, the river. Follow the grey-blue swathe back north and Wilson was right; the farm lay between the short stub of the Tavy Estuary and the Tamar. The railway bridge cut a black line across the river Tavy and then drew a smooth curve around the edge of the farm.
‘Point being?’ Savage clambered across the final few boulders and sat next to Wilson. ‘Assuming you didn’t drag me up here just for the view.’
‘Just for the view?’ Wilson crooked his head round at her. Then looked back west. ‘This is not just a view. This is spectacular. A spectacle which encapsulates everything the killer sees, everything which is on his stage. The farm with the body dump, the railway line the killer walks along, representing some kind of journey. We can see Plymouth, the city of bright lights and the home of the victims. Our killer works down there, but lives away from the light, out in the countryside. He wouldn’t like being near other people. He values his solitude. He’ll have a big house in a posh village. You see, Charlotte, how from up here, given the right clues, we can determine everything. A bit like God really. Or, continuing my metaphor, the audience. Pure theatre.’
‘A map?’ Savage said, trying to bring Wilson down from his flight of fancy. Wondering if Walsh’s observations about all psychologists being not right in the head wasn’t far short of the mark.
‘Yes. Geographical profiling. The killer is not spatially aware but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t affect and in turn be affected by the space. What happened down there moulded our killer. You said something about babies to me. Could be, but there’s more. The killer enjoys what he does, enjoys the torture and the suffering. Cutting those girls, mutilating them. Stripping them naked to expose them. But the enjoyment is forced onto him, he has to do what he does. Has to. Understand me?’
Wilson spat the last few sentences out and then picked up a small stone and lobbed it a few feet. The stone clattered onto a boulder and bounced away. Savage wondered what had got into Wilson. She knew profilers sometimes worked in strange ways, a kind of method acting where they would try to reproduce the offender’s emotional state so they could get inside the killer’s mindset. Was he doing so now? Or was he just bonkers?
Wilson took up a bigger rock. A piece of stone the size of a house brick.
‘Granite,’ he said. ‘Hydrothermal activity causes the granite to decompose. That or other processes lead to the formation of clay. Funny how we’re back to clay again, isn’t it? The way the killer silences his victims, stops them protesting their innocence.’
Savage nodded, wondering what on earth Wilson was on about.
‘Do you think we’re close?’ Wilson whispered.
‘Sorry?’ Savage said. ‘Do you mean personally?’
‘No, Inspector Savage.’ Wilson laughed. ‘I didn’t mean close sexually.’
‘What then?’ The word ‘sexually’ had come out of Wilson’s mouth with a slither. Like a snake. ‘Close in what way?’
‘Close to solving the case. Close to catching the killer.’ Wilson weighed the rock in one hand and shifted, pushing himself up with the other and standing above Savage. ‘You see, I don’t think we are. Not close at all.’
Calter scrunched her eyes up and then released them, hoping the tension would dissipate. One too many beers last night when she should have been getting some shut-eye. The names and offences on the screen in front of her had long since blurred and become bastardised: James Cock-Out-In-The-Bushes Williams, Frederick Fondled-A-School-Girl Jenkins, Graham Two-Rapes-But-Out-In-Four Cansome.
She shook her head. None of these people were credible suspects. No matter how many times she worked the list nothing changed. The victims didn’t match the profiles, the methods didn’t match the offenders’ behaviour and too many of them had full or partial alibis.
Calter kicked back her chair. Stood. The other people in the suite were heads down, fingers clattering over keyboards or voices talking into phones.
Enders was away with DS Riley on some other job. Whatever, she missed him and his humour, his apparent stupidity, the latter, she had come to realise, an affectation.
DI Savage was up on the moor somewhere and DCI Garrett had been summoned to Hardin’s office.
‘Coffee?’ she called out to nobody in particular. A couple of hands went up and she acknowledged them and pushed through the double doors and headed for the canteen.
In the corridor outside John Layton scurried towards her, Tilley hat askew, a clear plastic evidence bag in each hand.
‘DI Savage about?’ he said, holding out the bags. ‘Got these for her.’
Calter stared at the bags for a moment. A handful of brown-grey mud smeared the insides. She looked down the corridor and then at Layton’s feet. His walking boots had left a trail of similar coloured mud on the floor.
‘That’s not like you, John. What’s up?’
‘Charlotte? Where is she?’
‘She’s gone off to meet Dr Wilson. Another one of his crazy theories.’
‘Wilson?’ Layton bit his lip and then shook his head. ‘Here, come with me.’
Layton shouldered through the doors and into the crime suite. He went to the nearest desk, put both of the bags down and beckoned Calter over. He pushed a finger onto the surface of one bag, squashing the contents to reveal a claggy soil with streaks of brown.
‘This sample,’ he said, ‘comes from the track on the far side of the railway bridge. The place we suspect the killer parked up before carrying the bodies across the bridge and dumping them at the farm.’
Calter nodded and Layton moved his finger to the other bag. He pressed down again until a lump of the mud broke away revealing the same colour brown.
‘They
’re the same?’ Calter said.
‘I haven’t done a proper analysis yet, but they look pretty much identical to me.’
‘So? I don’t understand …’
‘I obtained the first sample this morning when I accompanied Dr Wilson down to the Plymouth side of the bridge. He picked me up and we drove down there, walked across and he spun a few ideas. The second sample came from under the front nearside wheel arch on Wilson’s car.’
‘So you’re saying whoever drove down there last night to dump the body would have accumulated mud on their car?’
‘Yes, but that’s not the point.’ Layton prodded the bag once again. ‘I didn’t return with Wilson. He went back across the bridge while I got a lift with one of my CSIs who was at the farm. When we got back to the car park here at Crownhill I noticed the lump of mud in the bay where Wilson had parked earlier. When he came by to pick me up first thing.’
‘I’m lost. Your mind is—’
‘Wilson’s car collected the mud before we went down the track. It must have fallen from his car while he was waiting for me to emerge from the station first thing this morning. From the freshness of the sample – the consistency – the mud attached itself to the car recently. Wilson had already been down the track in the previous day or so.’
‘And he didn’t say anything to you?’
‘No. When we drove down there and explored the bridge, crossed over, it all appeared new to him.’
‘Wait-wait-wait. Slow down.’ Calter shook her head, the hangover still fuzzing her thinking. ‘Can’t there be a rational explanation for this? Could the mud have come from somewhere else?’
‘Look.’ Layton prodded the second sample again, moved his finger back and forth until he revealed a crushed pale yellow flower. ‘Melampyrum pratense or cow wheat. There’s a stand of willow at the end of the track. Cow wheat is a parasitical plant which attaches itself to the roots—’
‘Stop!’ Calter held out her hands. ‘Chase. Cut to. You’re saying this plant grows down there. There’s one in the sample from Wilson’s car. Combined with the mud it means Wilson had been down the track recently and lied about it.’
