by Mark Sennen
‘Are you sure about that?’
‘Of course I’m sure. What’s happened to the lad?’
‘We’re trying to find out. He vanished Monday evening while digging bait.’
‘Gone in the water, has he?’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘No reason. Just from what you said.’
‘You’ve got several convictions, Ned.’ Calter again. ‘One for beating your ex-wife black and blue.’
‘It wasn’t like that. She went off with another guy, the two-timing bitch. She didn’t realise how lucky she was to be with me.’
‘Lucky?’ Calter huffed. She cast a glance around the room. ‘Yeah, I guess you’re quite a catch. If you’re fishing for worms.’
‘Look, bitch, what’s your problem?’
Calter stepped towards the mattress. She raised a hand. ‘Nobody—’
‘DC Calter!’ Savage moved across to Calter. ‘Enough. Wait outside.’
‘Ma’am, I only—’
‘Out! That’s an order.’
The DC shrugged and lurched from the room. Savage sighed. Calter had taken an understandable dislike to Stone and the man had got under her skin. That was all very well, but confrontation wouldn’t work here. Subtlety was needed.
‘Let’s get back to the subject of Jason,’ Savage said. ‘Are you sure you haven’t seen him?’
‘Of course I’m sure.’ Stone stared at the open door after Calter, shaking his head. ‘I haven’t been over the river since the weekend. I was in Plymouth all day Monday and in the evening.’
‘How well did you get on with Jason, Ned?’ Savage dropped to the floor in a crouch so she was at the same level as Stone. She wanted to change the parameters of the interview. Become the man’s friend. ‘Did you ever go digging bait with him, fishing maybe?’
‘Fishing?’ Stone had sat upright now. He glared across at Savage. ‘You’ve got to be fucking joking. I’m not his dad, am I? The kid’s all right, but he stays out of my way and that’s how I like it.’
‘So if you’re not in the relationship for an instant family, why exactly are you with Mrs Hobb?’
Stone cocked his head and half opened his mouth as if Savage had lost the plot. ‘Why is anybody with anyone? It’s a laugh, isn’t it? Angie turns me on. She might have had a kid but she’s got a great body.’
‘So it’s about the sex, is it?’
‘Yeah.’ Stone smiled. He stared at Savage as if he fancied his chances. ‘When we met she hadn’t been with anyone for a couple of years. She was gagging for it.’
‘I bet she was.’ Savage returned Stone’s smile. ‘And you gave her what she wanted, right?’
‘Yeah. She loved it. Still does. Can’t get enough, know what I mean?’
‘Yes.’ Savage nodded. ‘So you think you’ve got a long-term thing going with Angie? You’ll move in, make an honest woman of her. Contribute to the household. Pay the mortgage.’
‘Nah, don’t think so.’ Stone paused. Cocked his head. ‘Haven’t you heard that expression? Treat ’em mean and keep ’em keen? I don’t want to go getting all lovey-dovey.’
‘Nice. You should write a book on the subject, Ned. You’d make a fortune. And that’s what this is all about, isn’t it?’
‘Hey?’
‘I believe she owns her own house. Most of it, anyway. OK, so Torpoint isn’t exactly Salcombe, but with a little work the place is worth a couple of hundred K. But Angie’s mum sussed you out. You told Angie you had a job in the Navy dockyards, but you don’t have a job at all. What’s more, you did three years for assaulting your ex.’
‘Fu …’ Stone paused and said nothing for a moment. ‘You’ve got it wrong. I love Angie. We’re made for each other.’
‘Right.’ A few seconds ago Stone had said he didn’t want to get lovey-dovey; now, apparently, she was his soulmate. Savage stood. She walked across to the door. ‘You should know she’s worried sick. Angie. We are too, to be honest.’
‘And me.’
‘Really?’ Savage shook her head as if she didn’t believe Stone. ‘If you mean that then I suggest you tell me what you were doing Monday so we can eliminate you from our enquiries.’
‘I was out in town drinking all day. Various pubs. Had a right skinful.’
‘On your own?’
‘Yeah. Sad fucker, ain’t I?’
‘And then you came home?’
‘Yes.’ Stone paused. ‘No. I kipped round a mate’s flat in Stonehouse.’
‘You’d better start thinking about the pubs you visited. We’ll want a list. The name of your mate too.’ Stone nodded as Savage stood in the doorway for a moment. ‘And don’t think about doing a runner either, OK?’
‘A runner?’ Stone cocked his head on one side. ‘Why on earth would I do that?’
Savage didn’t stop to give an answer. She went outside and found Calter peering into the rear of Stone’s car.
‘We should have this in, ma’am,’ Calter said, tapping the rear window. ‘The CSIs should be giving the vehicle the once-over in case the boy was in there.’
Savage thought for a moment. She glanced back at Stone’s place. The curtain twitched, Stone’s face visible for a moment before he ducked back from view.
‘I don’t think so, Jane. Not yet at least.’
The wooden raft was all but forgotten by Wednesday. Riley had arranged for the coastguard to take care of its disposal, while he’d handed the aluminium tube, complete with contents, to the Scientific and Technical Services Unit. His concern now was coordinating some intel on a forthcoming drugs raid. A pet grooming parlour in the Stoke area of the city was doubling as a distribution centre for cannabis. Bring your pooch in for a shampoo and leave with a quarter of resin hidden in a bag of dog treats. The place had been under surveillance for the past week and alongside the regular clientele the visitors had included a number of unsavoury characters who wouldn’t normally bother to wash themselves, let alone their mutts.
Riley sat at a terminal in the crime suite and peered at the screen. The surveillance logs, he hoped, would show some sort of pattern which might indicate the best time to make the raid. The last thing they wanted was a dozen dogs scampering out the front door and onto the main road. Mayhem. It didn’t bear thinking about.
‘Darius?’ The voice came from Gareth Collier, the office manager. Collier was ex-military and his voice always had a smidgen of the tone of a sergeant major layered within. His appearance, with a severe haircut and a couple of tats on each forearm, gave no doubt as to the world he’d once inhabited. Collier’s investigations always ran on rails, but unlike with trains, tardiness was something he didn’t allow. ‘Can I have a word?’
‘Sure,’ Riley said as Collier came over. ‘What’s up?’
‘This guy is what’s up.’ Collier slid a piece of paper onto the desk in front of Riley. ‘He’s gone missing on Dartmoor.’
‘What’s this?’ Riley said, as he looked at the thumbnail photograph and digested the information on the sheet. Perry Sleet. Forty-one. An animal drug salesman. In the photo, Sleet was wearing a rugby top and a cheeky grin. God’s gift. ‘Déjà vu?’
‘Yeah, you might say so. All over again.’
Riley nodded. A while back he’d been involved in a missing persons case concerning a prison officer from HMP Dartmoor. The man had vanished on his journey home, turning up some days later at the bottom of a mineshaft in a remote part of the moor, a bullet in his brain for good measure.
‘Isn’t this one for mountain rescue?’ Riley looked up at Collier. ‘It’s not as if I’m some kind of expert on moorland disappearances.’
‘Not an expert, no, but the right man for the job undoubtedly.’ Collier nodded at the piece of paper on the desk in front of Riley. ‘You see, there are problems.’
‘Problems?’ Riley said, hoping he’d be able to deflect whatever Collier was trying to push his way. He gestured at his monitor. ‘Only I’m bit stretched for time on this one.’
‘All
taken care of, mate.’ Collier turned his head and indicated a couple of young DCs three desks over. ‘Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Keen as the proverbial. You can brief them when I’ve finished with you.’
‘Gareth, I—’
‘Sleet’s car was found yesterday evening up on Dartmoor. Door open, radio still on, a cup of coffee in the drinks holder on the dash. There’s been a cursory search of the area but no sign of the man. This is a guy who, according to his wife, is not an outdoor type.’ Collier nodded over to DC Enders. ‘Not like our man over there. Sleet didn’t have any walking gear. No GPS. No waterproofs. He had some wellies for traipsing across muddy farmyards, but they were still in the boot with the rest of his things.’
‘The drugs?’
‘Sleet carries samples only. Food supplements, that sort of thing.’ Collier shrugged. ‘We’ve got some right smackheads in Plymouth, but I think topping someone for a mineral lick is beyond even their stupidity. Anyway, if this was about the gear he was carrying, then where’s Sleet?’
‘So what’s your hunch?’
‘Hunches aren’t my job, they’re yours.’
‘Huh?’ Riley looked up at Collier. The man’s eyes narrowed and there was a thin smile on his lips. The office manager was teasing him, of that Riley had no doubt. He’d fed him a little nugget of information. Bait to see if Riley would bite. ‘There’s more, isn’t there? Tell me.’
‘Sleet’s married with two kids. Just bought a nice new house in Plymstock. Playing at happy families. Only I’m wondering if it’s an act. See, we’ve found Sleet’s mobile. At just after one o’clock he received a call from a particular number. The name listed alongside the number in his address book is “Sarah”. Just the woman’s first name, no other contact details. The call logs show that was the only call from or to the number.’
‘The wife found out then. Blew her top and went a little OTT. Or maybe it was this Sarah’s other half.’ Riley thought of his own girlfriend. Wondered about the kind of jealousy he’d feel if he discovered she’d been having an affair. ‘Do we know who this Sarah is?’
‘No. As I said, there’s no other details on Sleet’s phone and all calls to the woman’s number go through to voicemail. The phone is a pay as you go, but we’re working on tracing it.’ Collier shrugged and pointed down to the sheet of paper on the desk. ‘Meantime, see what you can come up with.’
As Collier strode away, Riley glanced down at the paper and took in the full details. Perry Sleet had disappeared some time on Tuesday afternoon. He’d been up Tavistock way in the morning and kept two appointments. He’d had lunch at the Elephant’s Nest, a mile or so from the village of Mary Tavy – the receipt was in Sleet’s wallet in a jacket on the back seat – but had failed to turn up for a three o’clock meeting. His car had been found at the end of a little-used lane a few miles to the north-west of his lunch stop. A walker, suspicious that the door was open and nobody around, called 101. By six the local policing team had become concerned enough to send for the Dartmoor Rescue Group.
Riley turned to the next sheet where Collier had helpfully added a couple of photographs harvested from Sleet’s Facebook page. The Sleet family on holiday. Catherine – the wife – with two young kids; Perry himself, grinning as he rode a jet ski. Riley focused on the picture of Catherine Sleet. High cheekbones, brown eyes matching her wavy shoulder-length hair, a see-through shift over a bikini revealing full breasts. This, he thought, wasn’t a woman you’d want to cheat on. Was she, though, somebody you might kill for?
Jason woke to a night so dark that there was nothing but black. He opened and closed his eyes but it made no difference. If anything, the grey milkiness when he scrunched his eyes tight shut was more comforting than the blackness. If the absence of any light was frightening, so too was the lack of any sound. When he shifted his body he scraped on some kind of wooden floor, but that was the only noise.
He lay still, listening, His heart thumped, but the thud, thud, thud was a sensation rather than anything audible.
Silence. Deathly silence.
Jason stared as hard as he could but the blackness was still absolute. This was a dream, he thought. He’d wake up soon. Then he reached down and pinched himself on the thigh, his fingers slipping on his jeans before he managed to catch a bunch of skin underneath.
Ouch!
This was no dream. Even though there was nothing to see, he was wide awake. He quivered slightly. Recently, he’d stayed up watching movies with Ned Stone. Not Disney though. These had been horror movies. Zombies, vampires, dead things which came in the night and dragged you screaming from under your duvet. Now he wished he’d listened to his mother who’d kept telling him to go upstairs to bed.
He pushed himself up and sat for a moment or two. He tried to recall what had happened. The last thing he could remember was being on the shoreline with his bait bucket. He reached up and touched his neck. Sore. Somebody had grabbed him. Was it Lobster Larry or some other pervert? Perhaps his grandfather’s stories had a ring of truth about them after all. Still, it was no good worrying now. Wherever he was, he needed to escape. He’d watched enough of Stone’s movies to know that at some point they always came back. The perverts, the zombies, the grey ghouls frothing at the mouth.
Jason tried to stand and promptly smashed his head on something above. Fuck! He tried again, feeling his way with his hands. Shit. He was in some sort of tunnel, probably no more than a metre high. He began to crawl instead, but his hand came up against wood.
What the …?
He spun round in the darkness, feeling in all directions. There was a side wall. And there. And there. And there. He ran his hands over the surface. He rapped with his knuckles. Wood. The same as the floor and the ceiling. He was trapped in some sort of box or crate. A metre high by one and a half wide by two long.
He moved to one side of his little prison and tried kicking at the wooden wall. A dull thump was the only result.
‘Help!’ Jason shouted as loud as he could, but his voice came back to him muffled in the same way as his kick had. ‘Help! Heeelllppp!’
All of a sudden he had trouble breathing. He gasped, but each breath seemed to draw in less and less oxygen. He moved to one side and bashed the wooden wall with his fists. Bang! Bang! Bang!
It was no good. He was trapped. Trapped in something resembling a coffin.
A coffin?
In the darkness he thought he heard some kind of groaning and then his nostrils caught a whiff of decay, of rotting flesh.
The dead were coming to get him. The zombies, the ghouls, the vampires.
Jason crawled into one corner of the box and began to cry.
Chapter Seven
Near Mary Tavy, Dartmoor, Devon. Wednesday 21st October. 11.39 a.m.
It took Riley forty-five minutes to get to the remote piece of moorland where Perry Sleet’s car had been found. He brought Enders with him, aware the DC had an innate sense of direction and knew his way around the moor. Still, even Enders had trouble navigating to the exact spot, confessing that the northern part of the moor was pretty much unknown to him.
‘Pure wilderness,’ Enders said as they turned up a lane which climbed the side of a steep valley. ‘If matey boy’s gone a-wandering out here then he might not turn up for days.’
As they crested a rise, Riley’s eyes followed Enders’ hand gesture. The moor spread out before them in a splurge of greys and browns, not a tree or a building in sight. The terrain lay in great folds like a series of soft pillows plumped up and placed in a near endless succession as they tumbled into the distance.
‘Jesus.’ Riley shook his head. ‘According to Collier, the helicopter was out this morning. Didn’t spot anything.’
‘Doesn’t surprise me. Unless he was wearing some kind of high-visibility clothing, they could fly within a hundred metres and not spot him. Imagine he’s face down in a stream bed or at the bottom of a tor. Maybe he’s even gone down a mineshaft like that prison officer we found earlier in the year.�
��
‘His death wasn’t an accident, remember?’
‘And this is?’
Riley didn’t say anything. He just stared ahead as the lane curled left around a small hill and then ran down to a five-bar gate where a blue Audi A3 Sportback sat on the verge, a big ‘Police Aware’ sticker plastered over the windscreen.
‘Dead end.’ Riley eased the car to a stop twenty metres from the Audi. ‘And no farm or anything beyond that gate.’
‘So what was he doing here?’ Enders clicked open his door and a gust of wind instantly cooled the inside of the car. ‘Bit exposed for a spot of al fresco sex, I’d have thought.’
‘Takes all sorts,’ Riley said as he got out too. He pointed at the Audi. ‘Anyway, perhaps they did it in the car.’
‘They?’
‘Sleet and this Sarah woman.’
‘And then what? Her hubby arrives at an inconvenient moment and boshes Sleet?’
‘Something like that.’ Riley began to walk down the lane towards the gate. ‘If Sleet hasn’t turned up by the end of today, the car’s coming in for a good going-over. We’ll know more then.’
As Enders began to complain about their trip being a waste of time, Riley tried to focus on the surroundings. While remote, this wasn’t a good place for an assignation. You were out in the open and it would be pretty obvious what you were up to should anyone come along. On the other hand, who would come along? He asked Enders whether this was a good spot for walking.
Enders laughed. ‘Does it look like a good spot for walking? No. Too bleak. There’s no tors, nothing of interest. I doubt anyone but the most hardened would bother coming here. Besides, you’ve got ranges all around. Live firing. Weekdays most of the moor round this way would be off-limits.’
‘Army?’
‘Yes.’ Enders gazed around at the dreek weather. A thin mist of rain curtained sideways in the wind. ‘And much as I love the outdoors, I don’t think I’ll be signing up to yomp over this part of the moor any time soon.’
