MARK SENNEN
Cut Dead

Copyright

Avon

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014

Copyright © Mark Sennen

Mark Sennen asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007518197

Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007518203

Version: 2016-06-28

Dedication

To the real Charlotte Savage

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Mark Sennen

About the Publisher

Prologue
Back Then

The song ends and Mummy and Daddy clap. The candles on the cake flicker in the draught and Mummy tells you to blow them out. You lean forward and purse your lips, your brother moving alongside you to help, and you both puff with all your might. One, two, three, four, five, six. All out. The room plunges into darkness and you feel a sudden fear.

‘Lights on!’ Mummy says and Daddy switches the light on and marches forward, the big knife in his hand, the blade shiny, sharp, ready for cutting.

The big knife lives in the kitchen, stuck to the wall above the cooker by magic. At least that’s what Daddy calls it. The knife winks at you every time you pass by, a flash of light reflecting off the stainless steel, the glare mesmerising. You don’t like being in the kitchen alone with the knife, especially not at night.

Because that’s when the big knife talks to you.

‘I am temptation,’ it says. ‘I am the explorer. I am the light.’

You’ve heard someone else speak like that too, in the cold of the church, but although the words are similar you don’t think they can mean the same thing.

‘OK, so who’s going to have the first piece?’ Daddy says and for a moment you forget about the knife and instead concentrate on Daddy’s words, knowing he is trying to trick you. You mustn’t be greedy, must always be polite; if you aren’t, you’ll get hit. You point to your brother. He smiles and claps his hands.

‘Can I, Daddy, can I?’

‘Of course you can, here, let’s see.’

Daddy takes the knife and rests it on the white icing, using his other hand to push the blade down into the cake. He cuts again and then slides the knife under the cake and withdraws the slice. He stops. Doesn’t give the piece to your brother after all. Daddy frowns. The inside doesn’t look right, the yellow sponge is soft and mushy, not cooked properly. Daddy doesn’t like that. He turns to Mummy and sneers at her.

‘What’s this?’ Daddy’s face reddens. ‘I’m out working all day and you can’t prepare a cake on this, of all days. Our special day. What do you think, boys?’

‘Naughty Mummy, bad Mummy, naughty Mummy, bad Mummy.’ You and your brother start the chant, the chant your Daddy has taught you. You hate singing the words, but if you don’t there’ll be trouble. There’s been a lot of trouble in recent months because Daddy’s changed in some way. You don’t understand why, but you wonder if it’s your fault, something you’ve done.

‘Yes, boys. Naughty Mummy.’

Daddy steps forwards and slaps Mummy in the face. She raises her hands, but it’s too late. The blow catches her and knocks her sideways. Then Daddy has her by the hair. He is dragging her out of the room into the hall, pulling her up the stairs. Mummy is screaming and Daddy is shouting. They are upstairs now, the door to their bedroom slamming shut. You know what’s going on up there because once you peeked through the keyhole. Daddy is doing something to Mummy and she doesn’t like it. Afterwards Daddy will be sorry and Mummy will say everything is going to be alright, but this time you wonder if Mummy’s words will come true because the big knife has gone. Daddy has taken it with him. You wonder how you will be able to cut the cake without it, but then you remember the cake is bad.

Your brother is crying and you tell him to pull himself together. You whisper the words Mummy says about everything being OK, but even as you say them you know they are lies. Parents lie to their children all the time. They tell them things called white lies. But there are other types of lies as well, other colours. You’ve learnt that.

‘It’s OK.’ You repeat the words to your brother as you touch him on the shoulder, but you know something has changed today and nothing is ever going to be OK again.

Now

‘Evening, Charlotte,’ someone says as she climbs from the car. Another person nods. Not a greeting, just a simple recognition that she’s here to share the load. The dirty work.

She walks across the field. Except it isn’t a field, the mud more sludge than earth, pools of water in footprints showing her the way from the gate to the tent. Not a tent for camping. Not sleeping bags to slip into at night, snuggle down, cool air on face, stars above visible through the opening of the tent.

No, there are no stars tonight, only cloud from which rain tumbles in streams, as if from a million hosepipes. There are bags, yes, although these ones are black, the tent white, vertical sides flapping in the breeze, and inside, the light comes not from a weak torch but from halogens. The people here aren’t on holiday, not smiling, not laughing apart from one joke about the weather, the incessant rain. Even then the laughter is nervous, not genuine, as if the banter which preceded the joke was merely to take minds off the task in hand, away from the hole in the ground which the tent covers. But words can’t do that, can’t take her thoughts away from the horror down in the pit where a pump thrums, slurping water up a hose to discharge it a few metres away. A generator chugs somewhere in the background and every now and then the halogens dim for a moment as the engine misses a beat.

She wonders who set this all up, who coordinated everything, who the hell is in charge of this nightmare. But really, those details don’t matter at the moment. The only thing which matters is that she doesn’t throw up, doesn’t cry, that she keeps her mind on the job.

Job, what a laugh. They don’t pay her enough for this; couldn’t. Nothing is worth this. Staring down into the hole, seeing the pitiful sight within, smelling the decomposing flesh, thinking about her own little girl, dead years now. Thinking about her other children too, knowing she loves them more than anything. Knowing nothing can be worse than this for a mother, for a parent, for anyone with an ounce of humanity inside them.

And while the others are talking, making comments, offering suggestions, she’s letting her mind go blank, allowing just one thought through: a promise to the three souls dissolving down there in the mud that she will find who did this. A promise she will do more than just find them.

Chapter One
Bere Ferrers, Devon. Saturday 14th June. 11.20 a.m.

Joanne Black had managed the farm for more than half a dozen years, ever since her husband had run off and left her for a younger model. At first it had been a real struggle, a steep learning curve for a woman who had never even liked gardening and who used to get squeamish if the cat brought in a mouse. Needs must, though, and within a couple of years she was looking after the five hundred acres as if she had been born to the task. Help had come from a neighbouring farmer and from her farmworker and if either had been sceptical at first, they’d never showed it.

Joanne had inherited the farm from an uncle who had no other relatives. At first the plan had been to sell the place and do something with the money, but somewhere down inside Joanne had felt that was wrong. As a child she’d often visited Uncle Johnny. She remembered one occasion when she helped him bottle feed an orphan lamb. ‘He needs you, he does,’ her uncle had said and Joanne felt a warmth in knowing that. Back home her mother said her eyes had sparkled when the lamb nuzzled the bottle and sucked down the milk. Somehow the uncle had seen that sparkle and years later, when writing his will, he’d taken a gamble. Right at the moment she and William, her ex, had been going to consult the land agent about selling the farm, Joanne had changed her mind. Taken a gamble too. Uncle Johnny may have believed Joanne was a long shot, but hell, she was going to see to it his bet paid off.

William’s view was that she’d gone mad. What did they know about farming? Wouldn’t a couple of million in the bank be better than feeding lambs on a cold, frosty January morning?

No, it wouldn’t.

Joanne chuckled to herself now as she opened the post. Bills, yes, but a letter from Tesco confirming a contract to supply them with organic lamb, and two bookings for the holiday cottages. There was also a large cardboard tube. Joanne pulled off the end-caps and extracted a roll of paper which turned out to be a poster. A note slipped out from the tube too and she recognised her brother’s handwriting: ‘Hope you like this, sis. Happy Birthday, love Hal.’ Hal lived in the US and worked for a large software company. Joanne unrolled the poster and gasped when she realised it was an aerial photograph of the entire farm. She had looked at maps on the web where you could load up such an image, but this was much better quality and at poster-size the detail was amazing.

Spreading the picture out on the kitchen table, Joanne spent a good ten minutes examining every last nook and cranny on the farm. As she worked her way down one edge of the poster, where a corner of a field had been left to seed because the combine harvester couldn’t turn in the odd little space, she spotted a strange marking on the ground. She remembered how archaeologists used aerial pictures to find and map the extent of prehistoric monuments and wondered if the markings could be something similar. If it had been in the middle of the field she would have been worried about preservation orders, but this lay in the centre of a useless patch of scrub.

Interesting.

She’d finish her coffee and then head out on the quad bike, see what the ground looked like up close. There might even be something worth finding down there, she thought. Something like buried gold.

Two hours later, and if gold had been buried in the field, then Joanne was wondering whether somebody had got to the treasure before her.

‘Here, Joanne?’

Jody, her farmworker, was manoeuvring the little mini-excavator into position at one end of the patch of earth. The excavator had a bucket claw on the end of an arm, the machine most often in use for digging drainage channels, and now Jody placed the claw above an area of disturbed ground.

Earlier, Joanne had zoomed down to the corner of the field on the quad bike and found the spot easily enough. She was surprised she had never seen it before, since the outline of a rectangle showed where the dock and nettle and seedlings grew at a different density from the rest of the scrub. At one end of the rectangle the seedlings were this year’s, the grass and weeds not so well established. Somebody had dug the muddy earth within the last twelve months or so. It was then she’d decided to get Jody down with the digger.

Joanne nodded at Jody and the mechanical arm creaked as the claw hit the ground, the digger lifting for a moment before the shiny steel blades penetrated the topsoil and Jody scooped up a bucketful of earth, swinging the digger round and dumping the spoil to one side.

Twenty minutes later the hole stood a metre deep and about the same square, and still they could tell they hadn’t reached the bottom of the disturbance. Joanne began to think the exercise was futile, not the best use of Jody’s time nor hers. She looked at the heavy clouds: imminent rain. Time to give up and head for a cup of tea. Even as she thought it, little specks started to fall from the sky. ‘Pittering’ her uncle used to say. Next it would be pattering and then the heavens would open.

‘Joanne?’

She turned to where Jody had deposited the last bucket of soil. Amongst the earth and stones a piece of fabric stood out, the shiny red incongruous against the grey-brown sludge. She moved over to the spoil heap and peered at the scrap of material. Roman? Viking? Saxon? Unlikely, she thought, not in nylon. And not with a Topshop label either.

Joanne looked back into the hole to see if there might be anything else down there.

The arm had pushed up through the mud, as if reaching out and upwards, trying to escape from entombment or perhaps trying to cling on to the piece of clothing, the last vestiges of their dignity. Slimy water sloshed around the limb and nearby the round curve of a breast stuck out like a white sandy island on an ocean of grey. Joanne stared into the abyss, for all of a sudden that’s what the hole had become, at the same time groping in her coat pocket for her mobile. She dialled 999 and when a man with a calm voice answered, she was surprised to find she responded in the same manner.

‘Police,’ she said.

And then she began to scream.

DI Charlotte Savage carried yet another plastic crate from the car into the house and through to the kitchen where her husband, Pete, stood unpacking. She dumped the crate on the floor and he looked over at her and shook his head.

‘One more and that’s the lot,’ Savage said, before turning and heading back outside.

The summer half-term holiday had turned sour after the weather had delivered nearly a week of blustery conditions. Sunshine and showers would have been OK had they remained at home, but instead they’d opted to have a week sailing. Their little boat was cosy with two, but cramped with four – and if you added in a good measure of rain, a moody teenage daughter and a bored six-year-old son the situation became more of an ordeal than anything approaching fun.

Pete had insisted on sailing east from Plymouth rather than begin the holiday with a beat into the wind, saying the weather was forecast to change, giving them an easy run home. They had stopped overnight at Salcombe and Dartmouth, ending their journey at Brixham. But the promised north-easterlies never developed. Instead the weather worsened as two lows in quick succession came from out of the west, the second developing into a nasty gale. Because of time constraints they’d set out from Brixham as soon as the second low passed, intending to do the journey back to Plymouth in one hop. Once they’d rounded Berry Head though the weather deteriorated further and they put into Dartmouth again. A phone call home and Stefan came out in their car and swapped places with Savage and the kids, the idea being that Pete and Stefan would bring the boat back, whatever the conditions, while she took the kids home. Stefan was the family’s unofficial Swedish au pair and a semi-professional sailor. With Pete having been twenty years in the Royal Navy – the last five as commander of a frigate – the two of them thought nothing of bringing the boat back to Plymouth in a near gale.

At home she waited for hours until at last a call came through from Pete saying they were passing the breakwater at the edge of Plymouth Sound. Twenty minutes later Savage stood on the marina pontoon and took their lines, Samantha, her daughter, shouting to her dad that he didn’t look so clever. Stefan was grinning.

‘Remind me never to go to sea with him again.’ Pete pointed at Stefan. ‘He’s crazy.’

‘The trouble with you, you old softy,’ Stefan said, ‘is you’re used to wearing your carpet slippers when you helm a boat.’

‘The forecast said seven decreasing five or six,’ Pete said, as he repositioned a fender. ‘But it was a full gale force eight and the waves came up from the south out of nowhere.’

‘They look a bit bigger when you’re looking up at them instead of down, don’t they?’ Stefan said, still smiling as he threw Savage another rope.

The phone rang at around seven in the evening as she was clearing the last of an enormous spaghetti bolognese from her plate. The brusque tone of Detective Superintendent Conrad Hardin rumbled down the line, his voice breaking up as he tried to find a signal for his mobile.

‘Three of them, Charlotte,’ he said. ‘Three. Understand? Never seen anything like … don’t know how … need to try and …’

‘Sir?’

‘Bere Peninsula, Charlotte.’ The signal strong for a moment, Hardin’s voice clear. ‘Tavy View Farm. Nesbit is there, John Layton too, a whole contingent descending on the place, media as well. Bloody nightmare. Meet you in an hour, OK?’

Savage eased the car down the lane past a BBC outside broadcast vehicle and a white van, nudged into a space behind the familiar shape of John Layton’s Volvo, and killed the engine. The car settled into the soft verge, the rain glittering in the headlights before she switched them off too. She sat still for a moment, a tingle of excitement creeping down her spine. Breathing slowly in and out, she let the memories of the past week with Pete and the kids slip away, clearing her thoughts for the task in hand. Her mind had to become a blank canvas, ready for the first wash of colour, the broad brush strokes, the intricate detailing.

A bang on the roof startled her, and she squinted through the window to see the bulky figure of DSupt Hardin standing alongside. He tapped on the glass and she lowered the window.

‘Sorry for calling you out, Charlotte,’ he said. ‘But you know how it is. Thing like this needs quality officers on board. Can’t afford to muck this one up, because the case is going to be something big. And I don’t mean in a good way, get my drift?’

‘Sir?’ Savage felt her heart rate rise. Was this the case which would dispel the boredom of the last few months? She hoped so, because since early in the new year she’d been on what she classed as menial duties; Hardin’s punishment for straying from the straight and narrow.

‘Best see for yourself. Across the field. Hope you brought your wellies.’

Hardin stood and walked away, disappearing into the dark for a moment before he reached a circle of light where a uniformed officer in a yellow waterproof was arguing with a woman. Savage noted the little black on white letters on the woman’s jacket: BBC. Seemed like even the Beeb didn’t respect the right for privacy these days.

Savage got out of the car, put on waterproofs, a white coverall over the top. A pair of boots completed the outfit and she trudged down the lane to where the uniformed officer guarded the gate to a farmyard. Through the gate and Savage approached a police Transit, one of the rear doors of the van standing open. Inside, the interior resembled a mini-office and John Layton, their senior Crime Scene Investigator, sat at a desk with another officer. Layton’s trademark Tilley hat was perched on his head and little globules of water glistened where they had beaded on the canvas material. Below the hat was a thin face with a Roman nose and intense eyes which took in everything. Right now those eyes were scanning the screen of a laptop which displayed a schematic drawing of some kind, overlaying a large-scale map of the area.

‘Charlotte,’ he said, noticing her for the first time. ‘Go and take a look.’

‘You sure?’

‘Sure I’m sure. The place is a complete mess already, nothing left to preserve. Besides, we’ve established a safe entry route. The field is too wet for my stepping plates – stupid little things are sinking right down into the mud – but we nicked a load of pallets from up in the farmyard and laid them down. Looks bloody stupid, but it was all I could think of. Got some proper walkways coming later, if we need them, but doing any type of fingertip search in this quagmire is going to be nigh on impossible. Here, sign yourself in. You’ll need this too.’

Layton handed her a torch and an electronic pad and she scrawled her name before turning away and walking past the van to another gateway. A second uniformed officer in bright waterproofs stood in the gateway, water running down off the peak of his hood and dripping onto his nose.

‘Evening, ma’am,’ he sniffed. ‘One week until midsummer, so I heard. Reckon my calendar must have been printed wrong.’

Savage nodded and continued past, switching on the torch and following a line of tape leading into the darkness. Several sets of footprints had filled with water and the torchlight picked out their muddied surface. In the distance something glowed white, almost welcoming in the way it provided a beacon to aim for.

She squelched on until she came to Layton’s makeshift stepping plates: a number of pallets laid in a line which curled away from the edge of the field and towards the white glow. Closer now, and Savage could see what she already knew: the glow came from a forensic shelter. White nylon with blue mudflaps at the base. The chug, chug, chug of a small generator didn’t blot out the noise of rain on the shelter’s fabric, nor the low hum of conversation coming from within the tent.

A figure in a white coverall stood at the entrance and Savage was pleased to see that the wisp of blonde hair coming from beneath the hood belonged to Detective Constable Jane Calter. Calter was always as keen as mustard and hadn’t yet acquired the cynicism which afflicted longer-serving members of CID. When Savage reached the shelter she tapped the young detective on the shoulder. Calter turned.

‘Hello, ma’am.’ Calter pointed to the centre of the tent. ‘Not my idea of a Saturday night out to be honest.’

Savage peered through the opening, shielding her eyes against the glare from the halogen lights within, painful after the darkness. You could only call the excavation a pit; ‘hole’ didn’t do the yawning void justice. One of Layton’s CSIs stood up to her neck in the pit, her protective suit splattered grey-brown with gunge. Savage moved closer, realising as she did so that somebody else was down there. A face looked up at her, mud caked thick on grey eyebrows above little round glasses.

‘Charlotte.’ Dr Andrew Nesbit, the pathologist, knelt at the bottom of the shaft. No jokes today. Face as grim as the weather. ‘Never a nice time, but this …’

Savage stepped over to the edge of the hole, where scaffold boards had been placed around the top to stop the edges giving way. Nesbit’s arm gestured across the sludge and Savage breathed in hard at what she saw.

Three of them, Hardin had said. But ‘them’ implied something you could recognise as human. Whatever was down there in the mud looked a long, long way from that.

‘Bodies only,’ Nesbit said. ‘No heads. And by the look of things on this first one, no genitals either.’

‘Christ,’ Savage heard herself mutter under her breath, not really knowing why. The reference to a higher being was futile. No God could exist in a world alongside this sort of horror. ‘Male? Female?’

‘All females I think and they’re …’

‘What?’

‘Markings, I guess. On one of them at least.’ Nesbit moved a hand down and wiped sludge away from one of the grey forms. ‘Cut lines. All over.’

‘Was that what killed them?’

‘No idea, not here. We’ll need to get them out to discover that, only …’

‘Only what?’

‘I think I’ve seen this before. Years ago.’ Nesbit stood, shook his head and then moved to the aluminium ladder and began to clamber from the hole. ‘I’m sure of one thing though.’

‘Andrew?’ Savage cursed Nesbit, hoped he wasn’t playing games with her. ‘What is it?’

Nesbit stared down into the mud, shook his head once more and then looked at Savage, something like desperation in his eyes. Then he seemed to get hold of himself. Smiled.

‘I’m getting too old for this, Charlotte. Much too old.’

Chapter Two
Nr Bovisand, Devon. Sunday 15th June. 3.04 p.m.

In the early hours of Sunday Hardin had sent most of the team home. Not much they could do, he said. Better to take some time off while they could, because from now on they’d be working flat out. Plans for Sunday onward were to be shelved, all leave cancelled. Savage managed a few hours’ broken sleep and then she was up, the morning passing in a blur of unpacking, cleaning and sorting. Jamie and Samantha were happy to be back from the trip; not so happy it was school the next day, the holiday gone, their precious time wasted in the rain-soaked ports of Brixham and Dartmouth.

By Sunday afternoon the bad weather had blown through and at three o’clock Savage left home. Passing a supermarket on the outskirts of town, she could see the car park was packed. With the forecast promising sun if not warmth, people were out shopping for food for their barbecues. Sausages, burgers, baps, cheap lager and warm white wine. Perhaps later, when the full news about what had been found at the farm broke, appetites would be tempered, fires doused, parties moved inside, excuses made so people might return home and lock their doors.

She drove through Plymouth and headed for the Bere Peninsula. The finger of land was almost encircled by the Tamar and Tavy rivers and where they met the confluence formed a ‘V’ shape pointing towards the city, with the village of Bere Ferrers stuck right down at the bottom. The rivers left the eight or so square miles of the peninsula all but cut off by water. This meant that although Tavy View Farm lay only a couple of miles north of the city, getting there involved a circuitous journey first to the north and then through a maze of country roads, the whole route putting a dozen miles on the clock. Isolated, Savage thought as she headed to the village. And maybe that was the point.

As she coasted down the lane to the farm, high clouds drifted above, their lower sections tinged with darkness, every now and then blotting out the sun. Various police vehicles occupied most of the farmyard so she parked in the lane. A train trundled out from Bere Ferrers as she walked through the gateway into the farmyard, the low rumble causing people to lift their heads and watch as it took the slow curve down to the railway bridge across the Tavy and disappeared into the woods on the far side. Just beyond the bridge, the smaller river joined the wide expanse of the Tamar and downstream towards Plymouth, Savage could see the span of the Tamar Bridge. Upstream, the banks closed in beyond Weir Quay and began a great ‘S’ curve, Amazon-like, before reaching Cotehele and Morwellam. Later, if the weather held, there’d be tourists and locals thronging the National Trust properties up there.

In the farmyard Savage found the incident room Transit van jammed between a stack of black-clad silage bales and a muck-spreader. Hardin and Detective Chief Inspector Mike Garrett sat inside, Hardin pouring coffee from a thermos into a plastic cup. Savage stepped up into the van and perched on one of the stools alongside Garrett, just touching distance to Hardin on the other side of the van. Garrett was an older detective, nearing retirement. His dress sense was as impeccable as his manners, his record as unblemished as his neat white hair. DSupt Hardin sat sideways to a desk, unable to get his bulk comfortable in the small space, his face reddened by the close atmosphere. On the desk sat two laptops and numerous files. One laptop showed the same large-scale map Layton had been looking at the previous night.

‘Thank goodness the bloody rain stopped earlier,’ Hardin said to Savage. ‘The hole was becoming like a swimming pool.’

‘Some swimming pool,’ Savage said. ‘Anything turn up overnight?’

‘Not much.’ Hardin took a slurp of his coffee, made a face and peered at some notes on one of the laptops. ‘Now, preliminaries: enquiry teams to interview the villagers and residents in outlying properties; widen the forensic search to include areas of interest both on the farm and beyond; go over our records and see what the hell we missed last time around.’

Hardin stopped. Nodded with a wry smile at Savage.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ he said, lowering his voice and reaching across and tapping the laptop screen. ‘Which means this thing has the potential to go worldwide. Unless we’re careful the investigation will balloon out of control and we’ll no longer be able to set the agenda. That’s why I want you, Mike, on the media side of things. They won’t mess with you. You’ll need kid gloves though. One wrong word and you’ll see it repeated across a million copies of The Sun. You and Charlotte will share the deputy role with me as Senior Investigating Officer. Charlotte, you’ll liaise with your old boss, ex-DCI Derek Walsh. He, of course, was the lead last time around.’

‘Last time around. I’m guessing you’re talking about the cuts on the body?’

‘Yes. Nesbit’s retreating a little now. Wants to get through the post-mortems first. Won’t say one way or another. Me? – I think our notorious cold case just turned hot.’

He’s back, Charlotte, he’s back.

Savage recalled the pathologist’s whisper to her as he bent his wiry frame into his car in the small hours of Sunday morning. He’d closed the door, and for a moment she’d seen a haunted look in his eyes before he started up and pulled away into the night.

‘The Candle Cake Killer,’ Savage said, for a second feeling an icy chill. ‘I was on maternity leave and on my return I joined Vice for a while so I wasn’t on Walsh’s team. Of course I know all about the case.’

‘Charlotte,’ Hardin said, pointing an accusing finger at her. ‘I do not, repeat do not want that moniker used again, understand? First, we don’t know for sure if this is the same killer, and second, the name is too cheery by half. As if there was something to celebrate.’

Savage nodded, seeing the pit and the mud and the grey forms lying in the sludge, thinking Hardin was right, cheery wasn’t it at all.

‘Now, these bodies,’ Hardin handed them each a checklist and then scratched an ear and grimaced. ‘Three of them. I was hoping, praying even, they were all from way back. If this investigation remained a cold case we could simply assign a few officers to it. New evidence, fresh look, blah, blah, blah. Perhaps we might come up with a lead, perhaps not. No matter. Job done, public satisfied. However, from what I’m hearing from Nesbit, that’s not the case. Two of the victims could be the missing women from the original case. They disappeared in 2007 and 2008. But Nesbit says even considering the favourable conditions, the third body wouldn’t have survived so well-preserved. The corpse is much more recent. We’ll have to wait for the post-mortem but it’s likely been buried just a year or so ago.’

‘Which means trouble,’ Garrett said, looking across at Savage and smiling. ‘Media-wise. They’ll say he might have been killing all this time.’

‘Unless he has been away somewhere,’ Savage said. ‘Prison, abroad.’

‘Possible,’ Hardin said. ‘Let’s hope so. Otherwise there are a whole load more bodies buried somewhere.’

‘There’s another problem with the media,’ Garrett said. ‘No escaping the issue either. A ticking time bomb.’

‘Well?’ Hardin’s fingers drummed the table. ‘Spit it out.’

‘The date,’ Savage said, spoiling Garrett’s punchline. ‘The killer takes his victims on the longest day of the year. There’s just six days until the twenty-first of June. Meaning that’s how much time we’ve got before he strikes again.’

Hardin looked down at the screen on his laptop, eyes moving to the bottom right-hand corner. He clicked. Stared at the date in the pop-up window. Shook his head, as if not quite believing he had missed something so blindingly obvious.

‘Fuck,’ he said.

A specialist recovery team had arrived at the farm along with the light on Sunday morning. They’d brought with them vanfuls of equipment and a temporary roadway to allow access across the now quagmire-like field. The twin strips of the aluminium track undulated their way over the ground, down to the dump site where a yellow JCB stood. The digger’s bucket hung in the air, suspended over a new hole which ran parallel to one side of the crime scene tent. Savage clumped down the metal track to where Layton stood talking to one of his CSIs. Off to one side a large patch of concrete – the remnants of some old building – provided a convenient and mud-free storage area for several of Layton’s crates and much forensic equipment.

‘John?’ Savage said pointing to the new hole. ‘What’s that?’

‘Control trench,’ Layton said. ‘The ground’s not been disturbed there, you can see the layering and the way the soil is compacted. There’s also mature tree roots from the nearby hedge. The trench marks the boundary and we’ll dig back in from there once the recovery crew have finished.’

‘How long will they be?’ Savage said, looking across at the tent, inside which several figures worked.

‘Another hour or so. We’ve removed the first victim but the other two are in a very delicate condition. The crew are having to bring much of the mud along with the bodies. From what I’ve seen they’re well-preserved but fragile. That deep, there were no worms or anything and they existed in an anaerobic state. With no air, there was little decay. They’re the consistency of butter though.’

Savage walked forwards and peered through the entrance of the tent. Unlike Nesbit and the CSI team from last night, the recovery crew were taking no chances, and the two people down in the hole wore drysuits with breathing apparatus. They moved back and forth, sluicing, shovelling and wiping the mud from the two remaining corpses. Little by little they were exposing the bodies and inching a large stainless steel tray beneath each one. Once the bodies were atop the trays, they could be lifted and taken to the mortuary.

‘You think you’ll get much from there?’ Savage said as she moved back to Layton. ‘Forensics I mean.’

‘When the bodies are out we’ll begin to sift through the spoil and then dig out further in all directions. The first thing it would be nice to find would be the heads. If you’re talking about something which might point to the killer we’ll have to wait and see. The killer might be forensically aware but on the other hand why bother taking precautions here? I would have thought it was likely they assumed the dump site would never be found.’

Savage pondered Layton’s point as she went back up to the farmyard. It was possible the killer chose the burial site because of the remoteness, but in Devon there were numerous places just as remote, if not more so. Most of them didn’t involve having to trespass on private land, with all the risks that would bring. Which meant the choice of dump site was a decision the killer had made for other reasons; something, perhaps, to do with the farm. There was also the matter of the practicalities of burying the bodies. How were the victims buried over so many years, without the farmer knowing?

If she didn’t know, that was.

Joanne Black had spent the night at a friend’s house at the far end of the village. The constant noise and commotion had become too much. That, and the thought of the horrors in the field. She’d returned to the farm in the morning and shown willing, answering questions and attempting to provide teas and bacon butties for the never-ending stream of police and ancillary workers who continued to arrive.

By lunch time she was exhausted, so when Jody suggested they head up to Yelverton to the Rock Inn for a pub lunch she jumped at the chance. It was only after they’d finished their meal and Jody was on his second pint of Jail Ale that she posed the obvious question.

‘Where the fuck did those bodies come from, Jody?’

‘Hey?’ Jody raised an eyebrow and turned his head to take in a nearby family with preschool children. They’d heard the profanity, if nothing else. He nodded over to an empty table tucked away in a far corner. ‘Over there, Ms Black. Be better. Anonymous.’

Anonymous was not something she’d ever be again, Joanne thought. Infamous more like. Once the news filtered out. Tongues wagging, curtains twitching, rumours spreading like foot rot in a flock of sheep.

‘So?’ Joanne whispered once they’d relocated. ‘What do you know?’

‘Nothing, Joanne.’

‘You’ve been at the farm, what? – twenty years?’

‘Longer.’ Jody smiled. Shook his head, as if not quite believing the passage of time. ‘Twenty-five this August. Left school at sixteen and my dad said I had four weeks to find a job or else he’d find one for me. I was sweet on a girl up Calstock way so I spent the time chasing her instead of looking for work. First week in August Dad told me to come and see your uncle. Been here ever since.’

‘Well, Jody, I couldn’t have made the farm the success it is without your help.’

‘It was nothing.’ Jody smiled, winked and then took a sup of his beer. When he lowered the glass the jovial expression had gone. ‘But if you’re implying I know something about them people down in the hole then you’re wrong.’

‘Of course not.’

‘Well then, what are you on about?’

Joanne stared at Jody for a moment. Held his eyes. Then she looked around. Dark wood, brass trinkets on the red walls, black and white photographs from pre-war Devon. Parts of the pub, she knew, even went back as far as Drake.

‘History. My uncle. Things which happened at the farm long before I took over.’ Joanne picked up her glass and drained the remaining beer in one. ‘That’s what I’m on about.’

Savage didn’t catch up with the farmer until mid-afternoon. As they walked down to the crime scene together, she made a visual assessment of Joanne Black. In her early fifties, she had hair matching her name. Dark in thick strands, streaks of grey in there, but glamorous with it. The Hunter boots and stretch jeans helped, as did a figure kept in shape by manual work. The woman’s face wore the signs of days spent outside and under the sun but Savage thought the lines around her eyes showed far more character and beauty than the smooth glacial skin of a Photoshopped cover model ever would. She strode down the track, chatting to Savage about the farm. Casual and confident, but a hint of nervousness. Perhaps that was no more than to be expected.

A couple of paces behind them DC Patrick Enders puffed along, unwrapping and eating a Mars Bar as he walked. How the young detective managed to retain his boyish good looks on the diet he ate, Savage had no idea. Maybe his wife ensured he ate healthily at home. Then again, the lad had three young kids. Savage knew from her own experiences that burgers and chips would appear more frequently on the menu than three-bean salads.

As the three of them carried on down the track Joanne explained to Savage that the field had been used for silage, swedes and wheat over the past few years. However, the odd little corner formed by the river edge and the railway line as the embankment approached the bridge had always been left to scrub. The patch was not only tight to get the tractor in but there was also a spring which made the ground cut up something awful.

The spring explained the need for the pump, and as they approached the tent the noise of the generator drifted across. They left the metal track, their feet sucking in the mud with every step until they reached the pallets. Joanne paused some way from the tent and turned to Savage.

‘They’re gone, right?’ she said. ‘I really don’t want to see anything like that ever again.’

‘Yes,’ Savage said. ‘The bodies were removed an hour or so ago.’

Two CSIs were poking around in the nearby hedge, but there was nobody in the tent as Savage pushed the flap to one side.

‘We don’t need to go in. I just wanted you to see how big a hole had to be dug. It will give you some idea of the disturbance that must have made when the bodies were buried.’

‘Urgh, to think they’ve been there all the time.’ Joanne shook her head as she glanced into the tent, then turned away and looked back up the field to where they had come from. A number of police vehicles clustered in the farmyard, alongside a big green John Deere tractor. ‘But the distance. We’d never have heard anything at night and the scrub here would have shielded any digging from the eyes of whoever was working the field.’

‘Even high up in the tractor?’

‘With the mess you lot have made it’s hard to imagine what the ground was like.’ Joanne pointed over to the hedge. ‘See there. The nettles and brambles are almost head height.’

‘I guess it would also depend on the time of year, right?’ Savage said. ‘I mean, how often would you be driving past the corner?’

‘This has been down to winter wheat the last two years. We drill in the autumn. Then we spray several times and spread fertiliser too. That would be up until May or June. We harvest in August. But you’re too focused on the job in hand to be looking around you.’

Savage did just that. Looked around. The hedge Joanne had pointed to was thorn, thick on the field side with brambles and nettles. Down at the bottom of the field the estuary mud came right up to the edge. At any other time than spring high tide access from the water would be near impossible. The fortnightly spring high tides in Plymouth occurred in the morning and evening. Meaning, Savage reckoned, that apart from in the depths of winter, it would be daylight at high tide. If the killer hadn’t come through the farmyard then the only other way in was to carry the bodies along the railway line. It would have been hard work, but flat.

Savage nodded over at the track. Explained her thinking about the railway line to Enders.

‘What, risk getting electrocuted, ma’am?’ Enders said, the wrapper from his Mars Bar slipping from his hand. He bent to pick it up. ‘Or run over by a train?’

‘There are only a few a day,’ Joanne said. ‘None at night. And they’re diesels.’

‘So,’ Savage said, ‘someone could walk across the bridge or down from the village with no worries. They could have parked somewhere adjacent to the line and then climbed over the fence. After dark it would be unlikely they’d be spotted.’

‘But why me? Why my farm?’

‘There could be a reason, but maybe this just seemed like a good place.’

‘Fantastic.’ Joanne moved away from the tent and gazed across the field. ‘How long are you going to be here? I’ve got people in the holiday cottages from the middle of the week.’

‘You’ll have to put them off, I’m afraid. Sorry.’

‘Bugger.’ Joanne shook her head. ‘You must think me heartless, thinking about my own financial worries after what’s happened to those people.’

‘Not at all. After all, none of this is your fault and it must be hard—’

‘Being a woman? Would you say that if I was a man?’

‘No,’ Savage smiled, ‘but then your life wouldn’t be so hard, would it?’

‘It’s the attitude which gets me. I am not sure why a woman shouldn’t be able to drive a tractor or worm a cow. I’ll admit I leave banging in fence posts to Jody, but other than that I’m as good as the next.’ Joanne turned to Enders. ‘Dear Lord, listen to me, I sound like some ball-breaker from the last century.’

‘Don’t mind me.’ Enders raised his hands. ‘I’m only against feminists when they come armed with scissors.’

‘I’m not that type. Although I might make an exception for blokes who drop litter …’

‘Never again,’ Enders said as he fumbled in his pocket to check he still had the wrapper. ‘Promise.’

Chapter Three

Today the Big Knife is safe at home. You never take it with you on your reconnaissance missions. That would be much too dangerous. The knife has a mind of its own and can only be allowed to come out on one day a year. The Special Day. Not far off now. Not long to wait. There’s just the small matter of selecting your victim. Truth be told though, this one, like the others, selected herself. Free will. A wonderful thing. But people should use it wisely, make their choices with care. And accept the consequences of their decisions.

You watch as she steps out of her house. A lovely young woman. Slim, slight even. Long brown hair tied back. A white blouse hiding small breasts. A grey skirt hiding dirty secrets. The blue gloss door swinging shut, closing on the life she led before. She turns to lock the deadlock. Click. Can’t be too careful these days. Not that it makes any difference. She’s yours – and nothing anyone can do or say will make any difference. She made the only decision which matters years ago. No going back now.

At the kerb she looks up the street and waves at a neighbour. Exchanges a greeting. An au revoir, she’d call it, being a French teacher. You’d call it a goodbye.

The little blue Toyota she gets into matches the colour of the front door. It’s a Yaris. 1.2 sixteen valve. The colour match is a nice touch, intentional or not. It’s little things like that which catch your attention. Simple things. Serendipity. Chance. These days so much else is too complicated to understand.

Like your dishwasher.

The thought comes to your mind even as you know you should be concentrating on the girl. Only you can’t now. Not when you are considering the dishwasher problem.

This morning you came down to breakfast to find the machine had gone wrong. You took a screwdriver to the rear and pulled the cover off, expecting to find a few tubes and a motor, something easy to fix.

No.

Microchips. And wire. Little incy-wincy threads of blue and gold and red and black and green and yellow and purple weaving amongst plastic actuator switches and shut-off valves. Pumps and control units, fuses and God-knows-what.

Except God doesn’t know. Not anymore. That’s the problem.

Once he knew everything. Then man came along and took over God’s throne, claimed to know everything. Now nobody knows everything.

You called the dishwasher repair guy out to take a look. He knows dishwashers. What about TVs?

You asked him as he worked on the machine and he said ‘No, not TVs.’

His words worried you, but then you remembered you don’t have a TV. You never liked the way the bits of the picture fly through the air into the set. That means pieces of people’s bodies are passing through you. Not just their teeth and hair – the nice bits you see on the screen – but their shit and piss, their stomach contents. All of it has to come from the studio to your house and the thought of the stuff floating around your living room makes you gag.

‘Fridges?’ you said, swallowing a mouthful of spit.

‘Yes, fridges. Can find my way around a fridge. At least to grab a tinny or two.’

The way he smiled and then laughed you weren’t sure if he was joking or not. Hope not. You don’t like jokes. At least, not ones like that.

‘Microwave ovens? Specifically a Zanussi nine hundred watt with browning control. The turntable doesn’t work.’

‘Not really, no.’

‘What about chainsaws? I’ve got a Stihl MS241. Eighteen-inch blade. Runs but there is a lack of power when cutting through anything thicker than your arm. Having to use my axe. And that’s not half as much fun.’

The dishwasher man didn’t answer, just gave you an odd look and put his tools away. Drew up an invoice which you paid in cash.

You looked at the invoice and noted the man’s address in case the machine went wrong again. The man left the house and got in a white Citroën Berlingo van with the registration WL63 DMR. Drove off. As the van pulled away, the wheels slipping on the white gravel, you saw it was a 1.6 HDi. 90 hp. Nice. Useful to have a van like that if you need to move something heavy around.

The girl!

She’s driving off too, the blue Toyota disappearing round the corner.

That’s OK. Cars run on roads the way the electricity flows in wires inside the dishwasher. Each wire goes to the correct place and each road does too. The road you are interested in goes left at the end, then straight on through three sets of traffic lights. Third exit on the roundabout. First right, second left and pull up in the car park. Usually she takes the first bay next to the big metal bin, unless it’s taken. Then she’ll have a dilemma and might park in any one of the other fifty-seven spaces. But you really don’t need to worry about that now.

No, you’ll see her again in a few days. Up close. And personal. Very personal.

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