CUT DEAD: A DI Charlotte Savage Novel

by Mark Sennen

  ‘And Paula was inside?’

  ‘Couldn’t say beyond there was at least one other person. An alert has gone out but it’s more in hope than anticipation. The bad news is that the locals had spoken to the woman Friday afternoon. She reported a possible stalker.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And nothing. A patrol car came down the street a couple of times last night. That’s it. The alert was made by the woman’s fiancé. He arrived from Exeter, where he lives. Found the front door not latched properly, went inside and saw signs of a struggle and the cake. Called it in. He’s pretty shaken up from the sound of things.’

  ‘Shit.’ Savage nodded across to the front door. ‘Inside?’

  ‘Can’t let you in yet. You can either take a look at the video we’ve shot or scoot round the back and peer in the rear window.’

  Layton nodded and then pointed to a passage down one side of the house. Savage and Calter went down the passage and turned left at the end onto a gravel patio. A number of plastic crates and toolboxes sat on the gravel and the back door was open, a white-suited figure visible inside.

  The woman looked up as Savage’s feet crunched on the gravel. A blue-gloved hand came up to form a stop sign and then she gestured to the large window.

  Savage and Calter went across and peered through.

  ‘Ma’am. The cake.’ Calter tapped the glass and then moved her hand down to her stomach. ‘Don’t think I am going to be able to look at a slice in quite the same way again. Do wonders for my training regime.’

  The sponge sat on the table, a dusting of icing sugar. A slice missing. Pink candles.

  ‘Fourteen,’ Savage said, as she counted. ‘We’re still no nearer to understanding the meaning of the numbers.’

  ‘Beats me, ma’am. But then maths never was my strong point.’

  ‘And the colours. Victim number two had blue candles, all the others pink.’

  ‘Pink – blue, girl – boy isn’t it?’

  ‘We’re missing something here.’

  ‘Are we, ma’am? Couldn’t this just be some sort of ruse, something to throw us as a curve ball? I mean the person who did this is a madman. Grade one. I doubt we could fathom him even if we catch him.’

  ‘When, Jane. Not if, when.’ Savage snapped the words out but she wasn’t sure she believed them. They’d known the killer had been going to strike on the twenty-first – Paula Rowland had even tipped them off – but still he’d evaded them. For a moment a wash of abject failure came over her. Savage thought about the misery the Candle Cake Killer had already caused and the knowledge that there was still more to come angered and depressed her. Was this how DCI Walsh had felt each year when yet another woman went missing? She shook her head, cursed and reminded herself there was only one person to blame. And moping wouldn’t catch them.

  She moved over to the door and called out to the CSI. Was there anything else? The CSI reached for a clear plastic container and passed it across. Inside several slivers of dried mud lay cushioned in cotton wool. One piece was in a ‘V’ shape.

  ‘Left behind from a boot. There’s a chance we can get the size and possibly the brand. Analysis of the soil might pin down the area it has come from. There’s bits of white gravel in there. Like something from a fish tank.’

  The way the woman said ‘might’ didn’t lend much hope. Savage thanked her and turned to the garden. Calter had plonked herself down in a wrought-iron chair – one of four clustered round a little table which stood on a circle of grey paving stones.

  ‘How long,’ Calter said, looking up at the first-floor windows, ‘before Mr High and Mighty Layton allows us to get in and have a nose around?’

  Long enough, it turned out, for Hardin to arrive, the DSupt stomping round the back and peering through the window, glass misting as he huffed at the sight of the cake.

  ‘Shit luck,’ he said, stepping back. ‘For us and the girl. Layton told me there’s a boyfriend. Can we see him doing this? Copycat?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Savage said. ‘The locals have spoken to him. He lives over in Exeter. He’s a PE teacher and he’d taken an under-twelve football team to Torquay this morning. He was with a fellow teacher when he came to the house. Alibi’s solid. And you’re not going to like this, but the local lads had already been out here to visit Ms Rowland. Apparently she called 101 to report she’d been followed. Advice was given, but no other action taken other than a patrol car swinging by last night.’

  ‘Fuck.’ Hardin moved farther away from the window and joined Savage at the edge of the patio. The little area was a suntrap, warmth washing up from the slabs beneath them. Hardin stood and gazed into the distance. ‘Evening like this, the young lass should be out here with a glass of wine, maybe using that barbecue over there to cook a couple of sausages for her tea. Friends round. You know the sort of thing?’

  Savage looked across at the barbecue. It appeared as if Hardin’s hunch might have been correct because a wisp of smoke rose from beneath the grill. Savage stepped over and saw the white of burnt charcoal, felt the radiant heat.

  ‘There’s …’ On the wire frame something remained of Paula’s meal, overcooked, the food blackened round the edges. Savage reached for a pair of tongs which lay to one side. She picked them up and prodded the meat. Only it wasn’t meat. It was something a couple of inches long, almost like a sausage in the way the skin had burst in one place. But it wasn’t a sausage, not with the little arms and legs and the head with tiny black holes where the eyes had once been.

  Layton used a pair of forceps rather than the tongs to move the object on the grill. Then he touched the meat with the back of his gloved hand.

  ‘Hot,’ he said, gently closing the forceps, picking the thing up and popping it into a polygrip bag. The heat from the meat caused steam to condense on the inside of the polythene as he held the bag up and examined the creature within. ‘Not what you were thinking.’

  ‘Not an embryo?’ Savage said. The sheer horror had gone, but looking again brought back the disgust.

  ‘No.’ Layton turned the bag around. ‘My guess is the animal is a baby rabbit. A few days old at the most. They’re naked and hairless when born. All burnt up like this, you can be forgiven for jumping to conclusions.’

  ‘I’m glad I was wrong.’ Savage looked back at the barbecue. The charcoal had gone white and ashy. ‘From the look of it the barbie has been going for a couple of hours. Paula probably lit it when she got home in anticipation of her boyfriend arriving. Can we get a time for when the rabbit was put on the grill?’

  ‘Hmm.’ Layton removed a glove from one hand and then held it over the grill. He waited several seconds before pulling it back. ‘The coals are still pretty hot.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Hang on.’ Layton walked away to where he’d left a large toolbox on the other side of the patio. He removed something the size of a small phone and then returned and pointed the device at the grill. ‘One twenty. Hottish, but cooling. Without doing some kind of experiment it’s a guess, but I’d say the rabbit has been on there for an hour and a half, perhaps a little longer. The flesh is overcooked, but it’s not completely burnt because the grill was well above the coals.’

  ‘Which matches with the time the next-door neighbour saw Paula leave.’

  ‘Yes.’ Layton held up the bag again.

  ‘Well?’ Hardin spoke for the first time. He stood several metres away, as if getting closer might mean he had to join Layton in prodding the bag. ‘Um, bad news, yes? Cooking things like this.’

  ‘The kidnapper put this on the barbecue. Unless,’ Layton said, waggling the bag in Hardin’s direction, ‘Paula Rowland was partial to baby rabbit fritters.’

  Hardin turned his head away. ‘John, that isn’t even remotely funny. Charlotte?’

  ‘A whole new ball game,’ Savage said. ‘Suggests a change in the pattern.’

  ‘Something for Dr Wilson to get his teeth into then?’

  Savage looked again at the bag, visions of W
ilson’s pearlers munching down on the little rabbit, juice oozing from between his lips as he went on about his value to the FBI.

  ‘Yes, I guess so.’

  ‘Talk to him. Now.’

  ‘Wilson?’

  ‘This is way beyond what I’m used to dealing with, Charlotte. What any of us are used to dealing with. Dr Wilson’s been there. He’s studied serial killers, both in the States and here. Do you know he published a paper on an American killer who ate fifteen people? The killer used to fry the kidneys with a couple of eggs for his breakfast. Wilson interviewed the man apparently. Other nutters too.’ Hardin stopped. Stared across at the bag containing the rabbit. Swallowed. ‘This is awful, but he’s worked on cases in the US which, quite frankly, are in a different league from the Candle Cake Killer. Whatever happened at the time of the first investigation we’ve got to put aside. We’re all older and wiser now. He’s in. Officially.’

  ‘But DCI Walsh said—’

  ‘I don’t care what Walsh said. If we don’t bring Wilson in then the Home Office will foist somebody upon us.’

  ‘Better the devil you know?’

  ‘Something like that. Call him.’

  Savage glanced across at Layton. He shrugged.

  ‘We’re out of our depth,’ Layton said. ‘Love him or loathe him, Wilson knows his stuff.’

  Savage nodded and then stepped away, pulling her gloves off and reaching for her phone. Wilson answered in seconds, the hum of a crowd in the background, somebody shouting a drinks order.

  ‘There’s been a development,’ Savage said. ‘A possible kidnapping. The DSupt would like you on board as part of the team.’

  ‘About time,’ Wilson said. ‘I’m not glad to be proved right, but I guessed another killing was coming.’

  When Savage told him what had happened and about the discovery they’d made round the back of the house he was nonplussed.

  ‘A rabbit?’ he said. ‘You mean a pet one?’

  ‘No,’ Savage said. ‘A baby one. Could have been a pet or a wild rabbit. I thought the animal looked like an embryo. I don’t know if that was the intention. If it was then I’m putting the birthday cake and the embryo together and wondering if this isn’t something to do with abortions. Possibly the work of a pro-life fanatic.’

  ‘Choose your words carefully, DI Savage. Just because somebody holds particular views it doesn’t make them a nutter. Slavery was once legal, now the practice is abhorrent.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘Have you any evidence Paula Rowland had an abortion? Or any of the other women?’

  ‘We’re working on it. Getting medical records is, as you probably know, difficult.’

  ‘Quite rightly in my opinion. I think you’ll find the line of enquiry a waste of time in this case. Dead end.’

  ‘OK,’ Savage said, exasperated. ‘So tell me, why would the killer go to the trouble of toasting a rabbit on Paula’s barbecue?’

  ‘I’ll do some work on it. See what I can come up with.’

  ‘You do that. And make it quick. The girl’s missing and you might be her only hope.’

  God help her, Savage thought as she hung up. Wilson would take days to produce anything and then his report would probably consist of page after page of psychobabble.

  She stared at the barbecue where two CSIs were examining the ground around the base and then went round to the front of the house where a DS was coordinating the door-to-door teams. So far, apart from the next-door neighbour, they’d found no one with anything useful to say.

  ‘Most people were home, but with windows closed and doors bolted,’ the DS said. ‘From what I can gather folks were as scared of those guys.’

  The DS pointed up the street to where a huddle of men stood on the corner. The impromptu vigilante group had already been questioned. At first they’d been reluctant to talk and it had taken the threat of a trip down the station to loosen tongues.

  ‘Turns out the plonkers had got a little fed up with the heat.’ The DS wiped his brow. ‘They did what I’d like to do now and went for a breather just round the corner. The Fortescue. Came out when they heard the sirens. So much for reclaiming the streets.’

  An hour later and Savage was in the pub herself. Hardin had come over all generous and put a fifty behind the bar so the door-to-door teams could grab a drink. ‘Shandies only,’ the barman said to Savage and nodded over to a corner where Hardin sat with half a bitter talking to the DtoD coordinator.

  ‘Wilson any good?’ Hardin said, as she came over, the other officer nodding a ‘hello’.

  ‘What do you think, sir?’

  ‘Charlotte, I don’t like the guy, but you can’t expect him to provide us with a postcode. His analysis is only guidance.’

  ‘Well, sir, to use your analogy, his guidance is about as useful as trying to give someone directions to your house in Plymouth using a London tube map.’

  Hardin shook his head but didn’t say anything. The DSupt was all quick-fix, instant solution, got-it-in-one. His mental inbox remained resolutely empty because he dealt with anything as it happened. If there was a quick-fix solution to finding Paula Rowland, that would be great, Savage thought, but she didn’t think they’d come across one brooding in the pub.

  ‘This rabbit thing,’ she said. ‘It’s a new development, obviously. The cake is the killer’s main motif, but for some reason he’s decided to add to it.’

  ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘The cake is a message, but back when the first killings occurred we never worked out what the cake meant. With Kat Mallory we’ve got no closer.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So the killer’s message was lost in translation. We didn’t get it. We couldn’t get it. Impossible when we hadn’t found the bodies. Now he’s giving us additional clues to decode that message.’

  ‘He wants us to work out what he’s up to?’

  ‘Yes,’ Savage said. ‘There’s no escalation in the conventional sense. There’s nothing to suggest Kat Mallory’s killing was any worse than the previous ones and he’s sticking to the same pattern of one a year. For some reason he doesn’t want to break that. Wilson told me killers get careless because they think they’re invincible, but the cake and the rabbit aren’t carelessness, they’re very deliberate messages. We just don’t know the meaning yet.’

  ‘Well why doesn’t he just come out and bloody well tell us?’ Hardin said, necking the remains of his beer and then standing up to leave. ‘It would save everyone an awful lot of grief, hey?’

  As Hardin strode off Savage looked across at the coordinator, expecting some sympathy, perhaps a joke. The man shrugged. Said nothing.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Crownhill Police Station, Plymouth. Sunday 22nd June. 7.45 a.m.

  Savage was at the station by seven-thirty the next morning. She wanted to clear some of the endless admin work before the nine a.m. briefing. Earlier, as she’d climbed out of bed, Pete had moaned about yet another weekend without her around. Could she, by any chance, remember the names of her children?

  Coming from him Savage had thought the jibe unfair. Who was it who had been away on his ship for half the kids’ lives? Besides, work had been slack recently and she had been around. Anyway, a week ago, staring down into the hole at Tavy View Farm, she’d made a promise to the bodies lying in the sludge. Family or no family, she intended to fulfil it.

  In her office, she’d read halfway through one email when a knock at the door brought Calter in.

  ‘Phil Glastone, ma’am. The DSupt says we’re to go and question him again.’

  ‘Really?’ Savage said, thinking Hardin must have been lying awake brooding half the night. ‘Glastone knew we were on to him, I’m sure of it. I can’t see him committing a crime when he was aware he was being tailed. Also, the car the witness spotted bears no resemblance to his Alfa. The fact a kidnapping took place yesterday almost confirms he isn’t the Candle Cake Killer.’

  ‘Hardin’s adamant, ma’am.
He wants something for the media. They’re asking about previous suspects and he’s worried it won’t be long before they doorstep Glastone.’

  ‘Right.’ Questioning Glastone would at least put him from the frame once and for all, Savage thought. TIE. Trace, interview, eliminate. Repeat a million and a half times across Devon and Cornwall and they’d be left with the killer. ‘But at least let’s take a pool car today. I need aircon.’

  Calter drove the Focus while Savage pondered the possibility that Glastone could have anything to do with the disappearance of Paula Rowland.

  ‘If he did do it then he’ll have an alibi,’ she said. ‘If we can’t get round that then there’s not much we can do.’

  ‘Might be like the other time, ma’am. The wife. If she’s scared of him she’ll say or do anything.’

  ‘She can say what she likes, but her story will need to hold water. Phil Glastone can’t get out of this with mere fairy tales.’

  ‘So if she doesn’t come up with something substantial we’ll bring him in?’

  ‘Let’s see.’

  Savage stared out at the countryside as they crawled out of Plymouth. Traffic snaked from the city and onto the country roads as people looked to take advantage of the hot weather. Locals heading for the beaches at Bigbury-on-Sea and Bantham, tourists intent on reaching Kingsbridge, Salcombe or Dartmouth for lunch. She wondered if people now felt safe knowing the killer had taken his victim. Safe, at least, until next year.

  They pulled up on Devon Road a little after nine, Calter slotting the car in behind Glastone’s Alfa. As they got out of the car a shout echoed down from the house. The sound of something breaking too. Then more shouting and a scream. Calter beat Savage up the front steps and then she was round and in through the patio doors. Savage arrived a moment later.

  Phil Glastone stood to one side of the living room next to a glass-fronted cabinet. The glass had disintegrated and lay in shards at his feet, along with several ornaments and a couple of photo frames.

  ‘A stupid accident,’ Glastone said, turning to Savage and Calter. ‘Nothing to get excited about.’