by Mark Sennen
She moved across the front of the house to the porch and as she did so she heard a sound. She whirled round to see a large black shape shooting out from an open barn door, a chain rattling out from behind.
A dog!
The chain pulled the animal up with a jerk, wrenching it round. The thing was huge, some sort of Rottweiler crossed with a mammoth, and it snarled at Savage, drool spraying from foaming jaws. The chain led to a hook screwed into one side of the barn door and Savage could see the metal bending under the strain. Then there was a crack and the wood around the ring split, the hook catapulting out. For a second the dog stopped, as if unsure of what to do, but then it bolted forwards, the chain bouncing along behind.
Savage moved to the door, reached for the handle and pushed down. The door swung open and she stepped inside, slamming it shut. Outside, the dog snarled and then barked. There was a snuffling at the door, followed by a whining. Savage breathed out and then made sure the door had latched.
Inside, a hallway led to the rear of the house. A doorway at the end revealed a kitchen. To her left was the room she’d seen the display case in, some sort of dining room. She stepped in and pulled out her mobile. The room was dominated by a large oak table around which were several chairs, but the table had been covered with a plastic sheet. As Savage walked in the floor crackled and she looked down to see another sheet had been spread out there too.
She turned to the display case on the wall. Plastic plants and a mock riverbed along with a blue background suggested the case once held a stuffed fish. No longer. There was something else in there. Not a fish. A knife. The shiny steel blade was nine inches long with a handle stained darker than the oak furniture. The blade winked as she moved across and blocked the light for a moment and then flashed again. Almost like a warning.
Savage looked down at her phone. No signal now, not even for emergency calls. The walls of the house must be preventing reception. She crossed to the window. The dog was sniffing the ground near the gate, but should she open the door the animal would cover the space in a second.
She returned to the hall hoping to find a phone, but a little table against one wall was bare apart from a kid’s puzzle magazine. She moved down the hall to the back of the house and entered the kitchen. Small windows above the sink and drainer looked onto an almost sheer face of spoil, the crystals of silica sparkling in the evening sun. The brightness outside made the room seem dark, gloom hanging in the air along with a taint of iron. To the right a wicker chair and a rocker stood either side of an ancient Aga, the stove from an age when such things were functional rather than trendy. Still no sign of a phone.
Savage crossed the kitchen to a door thick with faded white gloss. She lifted the latch and peered in. Some kind of pantry, light coming from a tiny grilled window. To either side jars, cans and dried foodstuffs stood on shelves, on the floor a large bag of potatoes, shoots sprouting from the tubers at the top. She bent to look closer at something in the shadows. Several Kilner jars. At the front a number of small ones, holding perhaps a couple of litres. Behind, some huge ones, almost bucket-sized. The liquid within each jar was murky, like a pickle fluid gone bad. Savage reached for one of the smaller jars and pulled it out. The contents floated in the liquid, indistinct, refusing to come close to the side. She turned the jar over in her hands until she could see what was within: pieces of meat, bits of flesh and gristle.
Savage felt her legs go weak and she dumped the jar back on the shelf. She bent farther down and reached for one of the larger jars. Filled with liquid, the container was heavy and she wrestled it bit by bit to the front of the shelf. Something moved inside, something the size of a football, strands of fibrous material floating. She squinted and put her face closer. The fibres weren’t fibres at all, they were hair. Savage pulled her face back as eyes, a nose and a gaping mouth loomed through the strands of hair and rested against the glass.
Jesus!
The large jars contained the missing heads. The contents of the smaller ones had to be the genitals, hacked off in some mad frenzy.
From the kitchen came a ringing. Savage whirled round and left the pantry. There, on the dresser half-hidden behind a rusty microwave, was a phone on a charging unit. She moved towards the phone but the ringing stopped as she reached out her hand. An answer machine kicked in, a generic voice asking the caller to leave a message. Then a beep and somebody was speaking.
Mikey? You there? Wake up you lazy shit. I’m home in five minutes and twenty seconds.
The caller hung up. Savage waited for a moment and then reached for the phone again. A creak came from upstairs somewhere. Then footsteps padding across the ceiling. Savage looked at the phone, but didn’t pick it up. She moved back to the pantry door, slipped through and pulled the handle shut. She scanned around for something she might use as a weapon. She selected a jumbo-sized tin of tomatoes from a low shelf.
Someone moved out in the kitchen, shoes on the quarry tile floor. There was a beep and the answerphone repeated the message.
Mikey? You there? Wake up you lazy shit. I’m home in five minutes and twenty seconds.
A sigh, and then the shoes tapping on the floor again. Savage heard the front door click open.
‘Daaawwwggg!’
The door slammed and Savage paused for a moment. She lifted the latch and opened the pantry door. Nothing. Across the kitchen the hallway appeared dark. The front door was closed. She raced through the kitchen and down the hall. At the front door a glance showed a big bolt placed in the centre. She drew the bolt across and then ran back to the kitchen and picked up the phone.
One ring. Two rings. Three rings. Come on, answer!
‘Major Crimes?’
Savage blurted out her name and the address of the farm. Told the surprised young detective to call Response and send a TAG team out immediately. She chucked the phone on the side and rushed back to the front of the house and looked through the dining room window. The man outside was some kind of freak of nature. Hair like crumpled-up brown paper sat above a round face, nose like a mushroom. He was huge and lumbering, stooping slightly as he walked across the yard and back to the house. Savage moved forwards to peer round the edge of the curtain. The man pushed against the front door and then stepped back, puzzled. He tried again and then glanced to his left. He caught Savage’s eye and then exploded with rage. He bent and picked up something just to one side of the front porch: a pogo stick. Then he swung the metal pole at the window. The glass shattered and the guy swung the pogo stick again to clear the remaining glass from the window. He began to clamber through the frame.
Savage turned and ran from the room, sprinting back down the hall to the kitchen. To the right of the pantry was a door to the backyard. She rushed across and tried it. Deadlocked. No key. Down the hallway something was moving, dragging itself along the corridor. Savage moved to the pantry, clicked open the latch, stepped inside and closed the door.
Out in the kitchen, nothing. Not a sound. Savage put her ear to the door. Silence. A minute passed, then another, and another. She waited, wanting to be sure. Where had he gone? Was he hiding out there, ready to surprise her? Maybe he’d retrieved the knife from the display cabinet and even now was standing behind the door. After a couple more minutes she moved to lift the latch. As she did so something scraped on the tiles in the kitchen. A chair being moved. She stepped back and reached for one of the large Kilners. The head inside bobbed as she heaved the huge jar from the shelf. The latch on the door rattled, lifted, and then the door swung open, Savage behind it. A swathe of light painted the floor, a long shadow in the centre. The shadow grew in size. Savage tensed, raised the jar above her head, ready to bring it down.
‘Ma’am?’ a voice said.
Riley!
Riley stepped into the pantry, putting his hands up when he saw Savage with the jar.
‘What the hell is that?’ he said, his mouth hanging open as his eyes rose to the contents of the jar. ‘My God.’
‘Out. Befo
re I drop this thing.’ Savage lowered the jar and followed Riley into the kitchen where she clumped the jar down on the table. The head bobbed and rotated inside. ‘Where’s the nutter?’
‘Didn’t see anyone. I parked behind your car. Could hear sirens coming up the track so I didn’t bother waiting. I got in through the broken window.’
‘Dog?’
‘Uh-uh. Didn’t see a dog either.’ Riley shook his head and then moved forwards to the table. ‘Bloody hell. Is that one of the victims?’
‘You should be a detective,’ Savage said and then nodded back into the pantry. ‘There’s more in there. Body parts too. Genitals. John Layton was spot on. He told me the killer would have kept them as trophies.’
‘Armed police!’ The shout floated down the hallway.
‘DI Savage and DS Riley,’ Savage said. ‘In here!’
A TAG team member, all in black and holding a pistol, ran into the room, whirled left and right and then lowered his weapon.
‘Check upstairs,’ Savage said. ‘And then we need dogs. He’s probably gone off out the back somewhere.’
The officer left and Riley moved to the table.
‘Have you found Lucy Hale?’ he said.
‘No, but there are other jars in the pantry.’ Savage pointed at the head inside the jar on the table. Long brown hair. ‘This one’s Paula Rowland.’
‘Jesus, poor kid.’ Riley bent to peer closer. ‘I was going to say I hope she didn’t suffer, but she did, didn’t she?’
‘From the looks of the cuts on the body, yes.’ Savage gestured to the door. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here and leave all this to Layton. It’s just his idea of fun.’
An hour later, and the TAG team had declared the property secure. John Layton and members of his team arrived, keen to pick the house and outbuildings to pieces. The hum of a generator floated in the air as the CSIs began to set up several sets of floodlights to illuminate the yard as it grew dark.
Calter, Enders and numerous other detectives from the team had sauntered along as well. Faces tinged with a hint of guilt as there was no real reason for them to be here, yet no one wanted to miss out on being a little part of history.
Of Lucy Hale, there was no sign.
‘Butchered,’ Hardin said when he turned up. He gestured around at the spoil heaps, the white clay beginning to turn to grey in the dusk. ‘Body somewhere out there for the crows to pick at.’
‘Well if she’s around here the dogs will find her.’
Three dog handlers had arrived with specialist search dogs. Two would try to pick up the trail of the man who’d attacked Savage while the third would work the area near the farm. While the two tracker dogs would need a bit of luck to catch up with the suspect, the handler looking for Lucy Hale was confident that if she was on the farm – alive or dead – the dog would find her.
Hardin, thankfully, was wrong. Lucy Hale hadn’t been butchered. Twenty minutes after the dog team’s arrival an excited yapping announced the discovery of the woman cowering in the recesses of an old pumphouse halfway round the back of one of the spoil heaps. She was frightened and hungry, but otherwise unharmed.
‘They never touched her,’ Savage said to Hardin once she’d talked to the woman. ‘They locked her up Tuesday night and left her. Never came back.’
‘Huh?’ Hardin raised his eyebrows. ‘Doesn’t make sense.’
‘Who cares if it doesn’t make sense?’ Savage said. ‘She’s alive and she wasn’t raped or assaulted. I’d call that good news.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Something else was confusing Hardin. ‘Hang on, you said “they”?’
‘She said there were two men, yes.’
‘Charlotte, I hope you’re joking. Three of them in all?’
‘It makes sense. The man who attacked me wasn’t Wilson’s twin brother and he was … how can I say this in a politically correct manner? He was subnormal. A loony.’
‘Well he’d have to be to go chopping people up.’
‘No. I mean he was mentally and physically ill.’ Savage pointed down at the trout pools where moonlit water swirled. ‘There’s no way he’d be able to look after all this on his own. Plus, while I was inside somebody rang. I heard them leave a message on the phone for the guy, called him Mikey. They said they’d be back in five minutes. Obviously they turned up and found the place swarming with us lot.’
‘Possibly picked up this Mikey?’
‘Since the truck is still here then either he got a lift from someone or he’s out on the moor.’ Savage looked around. The spoil heaps of clay and silica reflected the light from a rising moon, their surfaces almost glowing, something demonic about them. ‘Whatever, he’s long gone.’
End of play the next day – Friday – and Savage sat alone in her office working on a report. A few minutes earlier DI Maynard had been in to collect some of his files.
‘Credit goes to Operation Cowbell,’ he said. ‘Bit of luck we were there, hey? And that DS Riley. Not a bad lad for a city boy.’
Maynard picked up his papers and left with a chuckle and a shake of his head.
Luck? Or was it, to use Hardin’s well-worn phrase, bloody good policing? Whatever, it was going to take a little good fortune to catch Wilson’s brother and the man known as Mikey. A force-wide manhunt had been initiated but so far they had nothing. The Radial team had worked through the day trying to get more information on the brothers and the full story didn’t differ markedly from the one Wilson had told Savage before he killed himself. The murder of his wife by Wilson’s adopted father, had taken place up country, London way. Not such a big event up there, not surprising nobody remembered about the adopted twins. Especially as the case was several decades ago.
Peter and his twin, who they now knew was called Ronald, had been given new surnames and identities to protect them from press intrusion and fostered out to various families. Coming of age, the twins had left the care of the state and went about their lives. Peter went to university and having graduated built himself a career as a psychologist, indulged in some private practice. Ronald, however, found life more difficult. Petty crime and casual violence in his early twenties led in the end to a conviction for a string of vicious sexual attacks on prostitutes in towns and cities along the M4/M5 corridor. He served fifteen years, much of the time spent at Full Sutton in a unit dealing with severe personality disorders.
When Ronald was released he returned to Plymouth and he and Peter were reunited. What happened then was conjecture, but Lara Bailey had been killed on the longest day of the year, the date coinciding with the twins’ birthday. There was no direct evidence to link either brother to the murder and yet that one or both of them had killed her seemed self-evident.
Revenge taken, demons exorcised; that should have been that. Ronald ended up in the clay pit, trout farming an unlikely choice of profession. Peter continued in private practice but may well have been the one to instigate the Candle Cake killings, the woman who rejected him being all the excuse he needed. He never took part in the actual murders – they knew that from the alibis – but he as good as signed the victims’ death warrants when he provided Ronald with a name each year. Likely as not after the torture and killings he helped Ronald bury the bodies on the farm, the sight of each woman being entombed on the spot where his life began bringing some sort of catharsis.
Savage shook her head as she read through the report on the screen once more. Then she closed the document, switched off her computer and gathered together her things.
He found the love of a good woman.
As she left the office and went down to her car she recalled Wilson’s words to her about a serial killer in the States who stopped killing when he got married. Wilson hadn’t found the love of a woman though. What the hell was wrong with some men, Savage thought, that if they didn’t get what they wanted, they took it anyway?
Chapter Forty-Two
Basically, she’s ruined everything. She killed Peter. Turfed you and Mikey from your home
, left you with nothing. And thanks to you giving Mikey a few too many Moxis he slept for thirty-six hours solid, so you didn’t even get to have some fun with the new girl.
Which means the bitch has got to pay.
But it won’t be so easy. Not with her being a police officer. Finding her place wasn’t difficult. Bit out of the way. Off the beaten track. But you like that. Quiet. You won’t be disturbed. You move down the footpath which skirts the property. A thick hedge conceals you from the family larking about in the garden, but you doubt they’d notice you anyway. They’re too busy having fun.
Fun. It’s what’s been lacking from your life, you think. Apart from those moments of sublime transcendence when your victims squirm beneath the knife. Then again, it’s not really fun. Except for Mikey. But then, one of his hobbies is chopping up earthworms.
You nestle down behind a bush, the pair of binoculars heavy round your neck. If anyone should come along the coast path you’ll just seem like a crazy birdwatcher. You don’t need them to see what’s going on in the garden though. Two kids. An older girl and a boy. He’s probably around six years old. The sort of age you were when Daddy slipped the Big Knife into Mummy’s stomach. The laughter stops now and there’s only the occasional noise from the garden. You see the mummy has brought some ice creams out and everyone is sitting on the grass eating.
Yummy, yummy, yummy. Sweet. Not like the cake which went bad.
You raise the binoculars and pull the focus. The image blurs and then the woman snaps sharp. Red hair. Red-handed. The woman’s guilty. Killed Peter. End of story. End of her story, anyway.
You lower the binoculars and pull yourself up from the brambles. This is going to be fun after all, you decide.
Now you just need a plan.
An hour later and you’ve got one.
‘Mobile phone data eliminated him from the inquiry.’ You snigger to yourself, remembering a newspaper report about Glastone, the guy over in Salcombe they fingered for the killings a week ago. He got off. Thanks to a phone. Which gave you an idea. ‘Hear that, Mikey? A mobile phone.’