by Mark Sennen
She took another sip of coffee. Hardin was wearing the guilt like a set of heavy chains.
‘That might not have made any difference, sir,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure I’d have been any better at finding Abigail than anyone else.’
Even as she said the words, she knew that wasn’t true. If she’d been given a chance, she’d have moved heaven and earth to find Duffy’s daughter. Whether or not she’d have succeeded, well now they’d never know.
‘Jack thinks Abigail was targeted because of who he is.’ Hardin gazed blankly into the trees. ‘He long feared something like this would happen.’
‘Organised crime?’
‘Or some weirdo with a grudge.’
‘But if it was either of those, then why hide the body out here? And there’s been no message or threat.’
‘Perhaps it’s still to come. Perhaps they were playing the long game, making Duffy and his wife suffer.’
‘Does he have any ideas who it might be?’
‘There was a major dealer Jack nabbed a dozen years back. Went down for dealing, money laundering and a string of assaults.’
‘And he’s still inside?’
‘Yes, but that wouldn’t stop him issuing orders.’ Hardin raised an arm and waved at the darkness. ‘Then there’s a nutter Duffy helped put away some two decades ago. He was released around the time Abigail went missing. He was originally convicted of several sexual assaults on young women. He abducted them and kept them captive for days before dumping them.’
‘Alive?’
‘Yes.’ Hardin turned to Savage. ‘Although several of them wished otherwise. The ordeal was horrendous. When he released them, he told them he regarded their bodies as fresh meat, there for the taking. He said he might come back at any time to get them. It was a struggle to persuade the victims to come forward and testify.’
‘But they did?’
‘Yes.’ Hardin peered into the shadows beneath the trees once more. ‘But if this is down to him, then I wonder if they might be regretting that now.’
Chapter 4
Thomas Raymond was in an upstairs room in Oddities, peeking through a slit in the sheet of brown paper stuck over the window. He had a perfect view of the cafes on the quayside. Tables and chairs sat outside each establishment, a handful of customers enjoying the spring sunshine now the overnight rain had blown through. A trio of businessmen shared a plate of pastries. A couple of fishermen from a crab boat, tied up at the nearby quay, dug into a full English breakfast. Four smart office girls, all smiles and giggles and full of the joys of life, sipped from tall latte glasses.
Raymond tilted his head to get a better view of the brunette with the short skirt and the tight top. Not even May yet, and the pretty birds were displaying their wares. He was so looking forward to summer.
Careful. You don’t want anyone to think you’re a pervert.
Raymond jerked back from the window, guilty he’d been caught spying.
‘Oh no, Jakab,’ he said. ‘Not me. I was simply checking if I needed a coat for my morning stroll, my clever little friend.’
Jakab was prone to offering a word of advice here and there, often a harsh reprimand, but then he’d be gone. This time it was no different, and when Raymond turned from the window, there was nothing but an empty room, Jakab scampering away into the bowels of the shop. Raymond sighed. Outside of his occasional customers, Jakab was the only person he ever spoke to. Otherwise, when the shop was empty, he was prone to chatter to himself. Now, as he began to sort through a box from a house clearance, he carried on a one-sided conversation.
‘Trinkets, mostly,’ he said, pulling various pieces of tat from the box. ‘But here’s the thing, now and then there’s something worth a bit more, and once in a blue moon there’s something worth a small fortune. You’ve just got to bide your time.’
Raymond was good at biding his time. A lengthy period in prison had taught him to be patient. Chalk off the days, weeks and months, and let the years take care of themselves. Not that there’d been any alternative aside from a loop of bedding around his neck.
He shivered at the thought, shook his head and delved into the box. ‘Ah! Here we go!’
A length of blue and white ribbon poked from beneath the lid of an old cigarette tin, and when Raymond prised the lid off, he knew the hassle involved in doing the house clearance had been worth it. Inside the tin, a medal in the shape of a square cross lay surrounded by cotton wool. There was an inscription on the back of the medal.
‘A military cross,’ Raymond said. ‘First World War. Close to a thousand if we can get the full details. Good things indeed.’
The box had come from the loft of an elderly woman who’d recently died, and Raymond had told the woman’s sister there didn’t look to be anything of much value in the house. It was his standard line, and usually nobody was any the wiser. Jakab disapproved of such tactics, and he’d censured Raymond on several occasions.
‘It’s payment, Jakab,’ Raymond shouted, hoping his words would echo through the shop to his friend. ‘For all those clearances where I only get a few battered Dinky toys or a handful of crappy old coins. That costs me in time and fuel and backbreaking labour. Fairs fair and it all evens itself out in the end.’
Except it didn’t. Life was distinctly unfair. All he’d done was a little touching, and he’d ended up spending years locked behind bars.
Someone has been touching up on the moor. Other things too.
‘Jakab?’ The whisper had seeped from outside the room as if his friend had been watching all along. ‘You know that wasn’t me.’
Raymond had seen the news on the tiny black-and-white TV that sat on the desk in his office. The police had found a girl in some barn up on the moor. Found her dead. It was worrying. There were other news stories too. Something about the Forder Valley link road. A report on an initiative to attract more tourists to the area. A piece featuring a fisherman who’d caught a deformed pollack that was the spitting image of the council leader. Those stories were also disturbing, but they didn’t make Raymond as anxious as the one about the girl.
You know where don’t you?
‘They said, but I don’t recall.’
That’s convenient.
‘Shut up,’ Raymond snapped. Of course he remembered where the body had been found, and the location was worrying. Very worrying.
Yes. Very worrying.
***
Riley pulled the car into the driveway of number seven Chestnut Boulevard. A police car and a CSI van sat parked in front of the double garage, a uniformed officer sitting in the car dozing. The place looked even grander in the daylight than the previous evening, although the trail of fast-food detritus strewn across the front lawn detracted somewhat from the ambience.
‘Nice.’ That from DC Patrick Enders. The DC was in his late twenties but already married with several kids, although you’d have been hard put to guess from his happy-go-lucky attitude. He flicked the fringe of his unruly black hair. ‘Not the usual place we turn up to on blues and twos, is it?’
Blues and twos meaning lights and sirens. The expression brought the previous night back to Riley with a flash of colour. He remembered Hester lying on the floor in a pool of red blood. The two medics in their green uniforms rushing into the bathroom. The fluorescent yellow ambulance that had raced to the hospital.
‘No,’ Riley said. And there’s the rub, he thought. If the place had been a block of manky flats, he’d never have allowed DC Hester to go in there alone. He, of all people, had let a kind of reverse prejudice get the better of him.
Bad logic.
They got out of the car and strolled across to the house. Somebody had created an elaborate pyramid of beer cans near the front step, and in a rare moment of preservation, the kids had left the precarious structure standing.
‘Tells you all you need to know about the youth of today.’ Enders gestured at the beer cans. ‘They stab a police officer, wreck the house, but leave that.’
/> Inside the front door, a white-suited CSI stood next to a small table. She was dusting a telephone for fingerprints.
‘Twenty-one calls were made from this phone to various numbers,’ she said, looking up as Riley and Enders came in. ‘Including the tipoff that brought the ambulance here. Not hopeful of getting much, though.’
‘Those beer cans will need checking.’ Riley nodded back through the doorway. ‘Whatever’s inside them too. Cigarette butts, spliff ends, you know?’
‘There must be well over a hundred.’
‘Yes.’ Riley gave her his best and most encouraging smile and moved farther in.
The hallway stank of stale alcohol and fresh piss, and the carpet was ruffled up and thick with mud tramped in from the garden. To the right, an arch led into a vast living room where an impromptu dance floor had been created by pushing the furniture back against the walls. The carpet here was in a similar state to the hallway, and there was further damage evident in a swathe of wallpaper that hung down from one wall. More beer cans had been heaped in a pile in one corner, and a mass of clothing and bedding lay strewn everywhere.
‘Jeez,’ Enders said. ‘Animals, the lot of them.’
As a teenager, Riley had been to similar parties where high spirits had got out of hand. It was easy for one or two uninvited guests to lead to a rush of other party-goers. With no connection to the hosts, they had little concern for what they got up to. The result was a war zone and, later, shell shock for whoever’s house it was. He noted the conflict metaphors: war zone; shell shock. Sometimes in policing, that’s what the morning after felt like.
Patio doors from the living room led out onto a terrace that edged a decent-sized swimming pool. The morning sun sent rays sparkling across the surface to the far end where a sofa lay water logged amid a mass of floating beer bottles. To one side, two people wrapped in heavy coats sat at a garden table. An old man, balding, sunken eyes peeking from behind little round glasses, and a woman in her fifties with highlights in her hair and too much makeup on her face.
Riley and Enders trudged through the mess in the living room and emerged onto the terrace.
‘Mr and Mrs Baker?’ Riley said, extending a hand. ‘DI Darius Riley and DC Patrick Enders.’
As Mr Baker struggled to his feet, Riley realised the man wasn’t old so much as ill. The thinning grey hair looked to be the result of chemo or something, and Riley felt a moment of compassion.
‘We’re so sorry to hear about your colleague,’ Mr Baker said. He appeared diminished, as if the stabbing of DC Hester was yet another worry layered on the many he already wore. ‘So very sorry.’
Even as Mr Baker shrank back into his chair, his wife appeared to grow larger, the anger palpable.
‘We drove back from Bristol first thing,’ she said. ‘We were staying with friends and had to cut our visit short. It was most inconvenient.’
‘Sorry to hear that.’ Riley tried to appear sympathetic, but the concern he’d felt moments earlier vanished.
‘If Sam hadn’t been so stupid as to throw the party, none of this would have happened. Our house wouldn’t have been wrecked, and your officer wouldn’t have been hurt.’
Sam was the couple’s sixteen-year-old son. He’d been the lad Riley had found in the bathroom providing first aid to DC Hester.
‘The good news is it looks like she’s going to make a full recovery.’ Riley felt blaming the lad wouldn’t serve anyone. ‘I’m here to find out Sam’s side of the story and see if he can help me catch the person who assaulted our officer.’
‘And if nobody had been stabbed?’ Mrs Baker was in a combative mood. ‘Would you still be here investigating the damage and searching for the culprits who destroyed our home?’
‘We try to solve every crime, Mrs Baker.’
Even as Riley said the words, he could see she didn’t believe them. And why should she? Solving every crime was a mantra trotted out by the police but was far from the truth. There weren’t enough hours in the day to even log every crime, let alone investigate the circumstances and bring all the perpetrators to justice. They had to concentrate resources on serious incidents, and while the stabbing of a police officer certainly counted as that, damage to property did not.
‘Don’t blame him, darling.’ Mr Baker shifted in his chair with a wheeze. ‘He’s doing his best.’
‘Thanks,’ Riley said. ‘If we could speak to your son?’
‘Sam’s upstairs.’ Mrs Baker turned her head to the patio doors. ‘Second room on the right at the top. If he’s stopped being sick, then you might get something from him. And when you’ve finished, you can tell him he’s got a lot of clearing up to do.’
***
Savage woke exhausted and a little hungover. She hadn’t arrived home until four in the morning and had set her alarm for eight. She washed and dressed and went downstairs. She grabbed a cereal bar from a drawer in the kitchen, stole a couple of mouthfuls of coffee from Pete’s cup, and was ready to go.
‘Do we get a goodbye?’ Pete said, glancing across at Jamie, who was head down in an Iron Man graphic novel.
‘Sure.’ Savage kissed her husband and gave Jamie a squeeze since he’d recently decided kisses were yuk. ‘Say “bye” to Sam too, if she ever gets up.’
She headed into the station at Crownhill, the first time she’d made the journey for months. The place looked as uninviting as ever. A square cube of speckled concrete and tiny windows, the building was an architectural experiment in brutalism. It resembled an oversized Second World War pillbox, but perhaps that was the point. A police station wasn’t supposed to come across as all cuddly and friendly. Its purpose was to reassure the law-abiding and strike fear into criminals. Crownhill certainly did that.
In the lobby, the desk sergeant had a wry smile as he prepared a temporary ID badge for Savage.
‘Don’t seem right you being away all this time, ma’am,’ he said. He swivelled a little desk-mounted camera and took a picture, moments later pulling an image from a mini-printer and attaching it to a plastic ID badge with a lanyard. ‘You’re part of the furniture here.’
‘Thanks.’ Savage took the lanyard and looped the cord around her neck. ‘But this particular piece was, for a while, like one of those ancient VHS corner units: redundant.’
‘Nonsense.’ The desk sergeant leaned forwards and lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘The old methods work best, right? Knock ’em down and bang ’em up. Job done. And if you can’t bang ’em up then…’ The sergeant’s words hung suspended, and he winked.
As Savage pushed through the doors into the station proper, she wondered exactly what fellow officers knew of the circumstances of Malcolm Kendwick’s disappearance. That rumours were still flying around the station after all this time didn’t bode well.
Up in Hardin’s office, she had a brief conversation with him about what they’d found last night, and then he confirmed what she’d hoped: she’d be leading the investigation into the murder of Abigail Duffy.
‘You’re the one to catch Abigail’s killer and deliver justice,’ Hardin said in what Savage thought was a rare moment of confidence in her abilities. ‘But you’ll play by the rules. You’re back in the spotlight, and the Chief Constable is going to be watching. One false move and she’ll have you.’
‘Understood, sir,’ Savage said. ‘And what about the missing persons team over at Exeter?’
‘They’re all Jack’s people, but he’s lost faith in them. Besides, the girl was found on our patch. It won’t be a problem.’ Hardin paused for a moment. Cleared his throat. ‘Are you going back up to the scene?’
‘Yes. I want to see the place in daylight.’
‘Good idea. I’ll arrange for Collier to get things moving while you’re gone.’
Gareth Collier was the office manager. As an ex-military man, he was good at detail and dealing with the minutiae of complex operations. He also shouted a lot, which tended to focus minds on the job at hand.
Savage left the statio
n and drove down the A38, retracing the route Hardin had taken the evening before. At Lee Mill, she left the dual carriageway and followed the lanes back to the crime scene. This time, with a low sun filtering across the landscape, the moor and the woods didn’t seem so bleak. Still, the sun did nothing to erase the horror of what she’d seen last night.
A patrol car sat at the end of the forestry track, and a woman stood next to the car talking to the officer inside. The woman was tall with a blonde bob, a big smile as Savage pulled over and lowered the car window. It was DS Jane Calter. Like Riley, while Savage had been away, she’d been promoted. She had the potential to go further, Savage thought. Brains, compassion and a black belt in taekwondo for when the softly softly approach didn’t work.
‘Blimey, ma’am,’ Calter said. ‘Long time no see. I thought you’d been put out to grass.’
‘I had,’ Savage said. ‘But now I’m back on the hard stuff.’
‘Well, that’s good to hear.’
‘I was going to head back to the barn for a look round in daylight. Do you want to come up there with me?’
‘Yes, ma’am, but could I ask a favour first? I need a lift over to Penn Haven. It’s a little settlement over the ridge and the nearest place to the crime scene.’ Calter jerked a thumb in the direction of the patrol car. ‘Matey boy says he can’t do it because he needs to stay at the checkpoint. Patrick was here at first light, but he’s gone off in our car.’
‘DC Enders is with you?’
‘Was. He’s returned to Plymouth to help DI Riley on the Hester stabbing case.’
‘I heard about that. Let’s hope Naomi’s going to be OK.’ Savage patted the passenger seat. ‘Hop in.’
Calter got in and Savage turned the car round.
‘How far?’ she said.
‘A mile and a half. Take the next right and follow the lane to the end.’
They chatted as she drove, Savage asking about Calter’s promotion to DS, Calter wondering how Savage had coped with nearly two years away from the front line.’
