by Mark Sennen
She reconsidered her earlier judgement. Why would Samuel be exploring his own property in the middle of the night? If he was looking for intruders he’d surely have a big torch and he wouldn’t be creeping around. She slipped along the landing and peered up the twisting stairway. An ethereal light painted the walls with a pale lustre. For a second she shivered, but then realised the clouds had broken and the glow was nothing more than the light from the moon.
Then she heard something.
A whisper.
Then another.
She placed a foot on the bottom stair and began to move up. Step by step she went, her back pressed against the wall so she could see as far round the curving stairwell as possible. A couple of steps from the top she hesitated. The whispering was close now, just beyond the landing, probably inside the room where she’d found the bed with the writing scratched into the frame. She cocked her head in an attempt to decipher the words.
We’ll be friends forever, won’t we?
Yes!
Promise?
Yes!
Cross your heart and hope to die?
Yes! Yes! Yes! Especially the hoping to die bit.
Don’t worry, the dying stuff is my speciality. But then you’d remember that, wouldn’t you?
The whispers came one after another, some sort of conversation going on, only there was just the one voice, somebody talking to himself.
Savage took another step and as she did so a creak eased from beneath her foot. The whispering stopped, leaving total silence. She took shallow breaths, her heart pumping as she weighed her options. Moonlight flooded through a dormer to her left, illuminating the landing. Her shadow would fall across the entrance to the room and whoever was within would know she was coming. The surprise could cause an unnecessary confrontation.
‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Who’s there?’
Nothing.
And then something came from the room, a shadow sprinting across the landing and barrelling into her. She fell sideways, her body scraping down the wall. The dark form leapt past, taking several stairs in a single bound. Then they were gone.
Savage tumbled over, stair-surfing down several steps, her hands out in front of her, each bump knocking the wind from her lungs. She came to rest halfway down.
‘Calter!’ she shouted, a pain in her ribs coming as she yelled.
A screech came from the first floor. Not Calter, something else. Savage pulled her legs round in front of her and stood up. Nothing broken, thank God. She descended the rest of the stairs and as she ran along the first-floor landing she heard DC Calter call out from below.
‘Ma’am? Are you all right?’
‘Yes. Did anyone come down?’
‘No.’
Savage groped in her pocket and found her torch. She flicked it on and illuminated the landing in front of her. Calter crunched up the stairs and they met at the top.
‘Gone,’ Savage said, feeling a cold draught on her face. She pointed the torch and a reflection flashed out a few metres away. A sash window, the bottom half pulled up. ‘Through there.’
The two of them walked forward and at the window Savage peered out. Moonlight flooded a bare concrete yard; beyond lay a hedge and on the other side of the hedge nothing but empty fields.
Chapter Seventeen
Near Bovisand, Devon. Saturday 24th October. 10.29 a.m.
Saturday morning found Savage trying to run the Curlew investigation from her front room. Pete was out racing their little yacht, Puffin, so she was attempting to be both a mother and a police officer. She sat at a little desk in one corner while Samantha and Jamie played on Jamie’s new Xbox. The device had been a birthday present from grandparents and had entered the household against Savage’s better judgement.
‘He’ll grow up wanting to shoot things,’ Savage had said to Pete.
‘So?’ Pete had replied. ‘What’s wrong with that?’
On the far side of the room a wail came from Jamie. Savage looked across to the screen where an innocuous and rather vacuous game appeared to involve nothing more than a furry monster jumping from platform to platform on an endless scrolling screen. As she watched, Jamie’s avatar fell from a walkway into a pool of sharks and Jamie squealed again. Savage shook her head. Still, at least the thing was keeping him out of her hair.
Her mobile bleeped a tune and she picked the phone up.
‘John, you’ve got it?’ she said. ‘The warrant?’
‘Yes,’ Layton said. ‘At least it’s all been OK’d. Just dotting the i’s, etcetera.’
The flat tone suggested the outcome was never in doubt, but Savage knew different. The search warrant relied on there being reasonable grounds for believing an offence had been committed and there being material on site which would be of substantial value to the investigation. A complication was that the home had been searched before, albeit many years ago, so the police needed to argue this was either new evidence or something which had been missed previously.
‘And you didn’t mention my visit?’
‘No, not the second one.’
‘So how did you wing it?’
‘The old “anonymous tip-off” routine. Worked a treat. Shall we say one o’clock at Elijah Samuel’s place?’
Savage glanced at her watch. Pete wouldn’t be back until one at the earliest and she needed to drive over there. ‘Make it two, OK?’
Layton agreed and hung up.
She turned back to Jamie and Samantha. On screen, Jamie’s furry creature had met yet another grisly demise, this time at the bottom of a rocky chasm. Luckily for Jamie and Samantha, the game had given them multiple lives. Savage smiled for a moment and then looked back at the Curlew papers, her mind returning to the two boys, Jason Caldwell and Liam Hayskith. They hadn’t been so fortunate, she thought. They’d had just the one life each.
Elijah Samuel lived in a tiny thatched cottage in the village of Bolberry, just half a mile from the children’s home. Savage stood in the lane as Layton and a uniformed PC went to the front door, Layton with the warrant in his hand.
The door swung wide and Samuel stood hunched in the low porch. He nodded as Layton told him of their intention to search Woodland Heights.
‘I won’t bloody have it,’ he said, gesturing over Layton’s shoulder to Savage. ‘I let her look round in good faith. If I’d known you’d hold it against me I’d have had her for trespassing.’
Then Samuel snatched the piece of paper from Layton’s hand, retreated into the cottage and slammed the door.
With the warrant served, Layton led a procession of cars and vans to the home. He chatted to Savage as his CSIs unloaded the equipment.
‘Shouldn’t take long this, Charlotte,’ Layton said. He pointed over to where two men were readying a compressor and a jackhammer. ‘Unless the concrete is really thick, that’ll break through it in no time.’
‘Good. The sooner we can discover the truth about what went on here, the better.’
‘Yes.’ Layton gazed over at the house. ‘Have you notified the coroner?’
‘I’ve alerted him to the possibility we might find something. I’ve had Luke Farrell contact the relatives too. There’ll be a lot of media interest when this gets out and I don’t want them doorstepped.’
Layton nodded. ‘Closure. That’s what they want. The paradox is, only a positive result gives them peace. Anything else and they go on wondering.’
Closure. Savage had found some sort of closure for herself and her family, but it hadn’t stopped her wondering.
Layton had moved over to one of the vans. More tools. Shovels, pickaxes, a couple of big dumpy bags to put the spoil in. Savage was glad everything was now official, that she was moving beyond the paper-chase Hardin had set her. There was no more hiding, no more covering things up. If they found something, there’d not only be the chance of criminal prosecutions, there would also be major repercussions across a number of agencies.
She got suited up in her PPE gear and followed Layton in
to the house. The CSIs had located the compressor outside the back door and a long hose snaked into the kitchen and down into the cellar. The motor on the compressor chugged rhythmically, a slight hiss audible.
She descended into the cellar, where the darkness had been banished by a white glare from several sets of lights on tripods. Layton cast a black shadow on one wall as he examined the bed and the manacles.
‘You said you thought there was something odd about these, right?’ Layton said. He held up one of the cuffs. ‘Well, you’re correct. They aren’t thirty years old.’
‘How can you tell?’ Savage said, moving across to Layton.
‘Look.’ Layton held out the piece of metal. ‘It’s not tarnished or rusty, although the cellar is as damp as anything. Then there’s where the chain is fixed to the wall. The mortar has been disturbed recently.’
Savage peered at the iron ring holding the chain. Where the shaft of the bolt penetrated the wall, the cement was a lighter colour. The surface layer had crumbled away as somebody had fixed the bolt in place.
‘How long?’
‘A couple of weeks, a few months. Sorry to be so imprecise, but I can tell you we’re not talking years. The bed probably comes from one of the rooms upstairs. What’s more, both the shackles and the bed have been wiped over. Whoever put them down here made sure to cover their tracks.’
‘So they’ve been left as clues. Like the writing I found upstairs.’
‘Perhaps.’ Layton gestured over to the arched doorway. ‘Come through here, there’s more weirdness.’
Layton led the way through to the little room. Inside, one of the CSIs was making an adjustment to the jackhammer before he started on the floor. There was a low throbbing sound and the hiss of air escaping. The room was lit by another set of halogen lights on a stand, the glare unbearably harsh.
‘Over here.’ Layton moved across to the left-hand side where a broom leant against the wall. A pile of dirt had been swept away from the concrete into a little pile. ‘Jim was just clearing the floor when we found this.’
Layton tapped the concrete with his foot and then pointed, circling the area with his finger. Savage could see that on the outside of the area the concrete was white. However, the patch which Layton was indicating was a darker colour.
‘I’m sorry, John,’ Savage said. ‘I’m not big on ready-mix, you’ll have to explain.’
‘The white concrete was laid years ago. The date you found over in the corner is probably accurate. The darker area, although hard, hasn’t fully cured yet. It’s months old at the most.’ Layton shrugged apologetically. ‘I reckon somebody’s beaten us to it.’
Layton hadn’t been kidding about the length of time it would take to dig up the floor. Within ten minutes several square metres had been broken into large slabs. The sound had been unbearable and Savage, not having ear defenders, retreated upstairs to the kitchen. A little while later, Layton called her back down. She descended into a miasma of dust, the air thick with particles of concrete and a smell Savage knew from experience was anything but wholesome.
In the little room, the broken concrete had been piled into one of the dumpy bags. The halogen lights shone into the resultant hole, illuminating a thick tar-like gloop.
‘You can smell it, yes?’ Layton said. ‘Unmistakable.’
Savage sniffed the air and nodded. Adipocere. A substance formed from the body’s fat during decomposition in wet and anaerobic conditions. Sealed under the concrete, the adipocere had persisted for over two and a half decades.
‘Anything in there?’ Savage leant forward and stared at the dark liquid. The liquid had an almost mirror-like quality, the white lights reflecting on the black surface.
‘One of the lads has gone to get a pump. We’ll get a hose in here. Won’t take long to drain the water.’
Again Layton was right. Once the pump had been brought in, the liquid was soon sucked out.
‘Got a filter on the end,’ Layton said as he knelt at the hole and moved the hose around in the rapidly diminishing puddle at the bottom. ‘Haven’t come across anything yet though.’
The hose made a slurping sound as the last of the black gloop disappeared. Layton positioned the hose to one side of the hole, where it continued to gurgle away. He leant over and braced himself with one hand on the other side of the hole. He reached down with the other hand, feeling around in what was now just mud. He pulled out a handful of debris and one of the other CSIs held out a bucket.
Savage tried not to show her disappointment as the bits of stone and concrete splattered into the bucket. Maybe the smell was just a broken sewer pipe. Maybe she’d got this completely wrong. She sighed.
‘Don’t worry, Charlotte.’ Layton turned his head, precarious above the hole. He smiled at her. ‘We’ll take this outside and sieve it. You know my motto. We’ll find something, we always do.’
Savage nodded and left Layton to it. She went outside to find the sky darkening. A persistent drizzle swirled in the air, almost as if the dank weather was mimicking the atmosphere in the cellar. She returned to her car and waited as the CSIs brought out bucket after bucket of sludge from the house. After a while, Layton came over and tapped on the window. Savage opened the door.
‘There was more than at first sight,’ Layton said. ‘Kept bubbling up from the bottom of the hole. Probably some sort of watercourse down there. A spring maybe. You want to come across? We’re going to start sieving the material now.’
Savage got out of the car and followed Layton to where the sludge had been poured into two large plastic builder’s trugs. Someone had rustled up a length of hose and connected one end to an outside tap and now two CSIs were beginning to process the black goo. Bit by bit they scooped the sludge from the trugs onto a sieve and one of them worked the hose back and forth, washing the mud away.
Savage’s heart jumped as she saw bits of white reveal themselves in the mud. Layton shook his head, explained the bits were pieces of concrete. The work continued, the CSIs painstaking in their attention to detail. As they reached the bottom of the first trug, Layton lowered his shoulders and shook his head.
‘Maybe I was wrong,’ he said. ‘Maybe we won’t find anything this time.’
‘Never mind, John—’
‘Ma’am?’ One of the CSIs was sieving the last of the material from the trug, washing dirt from yet another piece of concrete debris. Only this wasn’t concrete. He pointed down to the sieve where the clear water swirled over something brown. ‘Here we go.’
‘What is it?’ Savage peered down. The thing looked like a little stick.
‘Bone.’ Layton picked the stick from the surface of the sieve. ‘At least, a fragment of bone.’
‘Human?’
‘No idea, we’ll need to get it to Nesbit.’ Layton held the fragment between his thumb and forefinger. ‘But given the circumstances, I’d say it might well be, don’t you think?’
Savage left Layton to his work and drove the short distance to the village. Now there was potential evidence, Elijah Samuel had some questions to answer. The property was his, after all. Since he had been a resident at the home, then the caretaker and now the owner, it seemed inconceivable he didn’t know at least some of what really went on there.
A knock on the oak door of the thatched cottage brought Samuel out into the drizzle. He stared beyond Savage towards the home, something like hatred in his eyes.
‘You again,’ he said, continuing to gaze into the murk. ‘I told you before that you’ll get nothing from me.’
‘We’ve found a bone, Mr Samuel. In the cellar. My chief CSI reckons it’s human. Given your connection with Woodland Heights, that puts you in the frame.’
‘In the frame for what?’
‘Murder, Mr Samuel.’ Savage glanced back at the house. ‘You told me it was hell in there. You need to explain what you meant by that. You can invite me in or you can come down the station and make a statement. Your choice.’
‘Fine.’ Samuel pushed the do
or wide and gestured for Savage to enter. The door opened directly into a living room. A large inglenook held a wood burner, an orange glow visible through the glass door. Two armchairs and a sofa sat arranged around the room, a TV in one corner. On one wall hung a number of photographs. Blokes in army gear on mountain tops. Some on a beach with palms in the background, a blue ocean looking a lot warmer than the sea off the Devon coastline. A group shot with a desert and ruined buildings in the background.
‘You said you were in the army,’ Savage said, indicating the pictures. ‘When was that?’
‘After the home closed down.’ Samuel seemed to relax slightly. He indicated that Savage should sit and took the armchair closest to the fire for himself. ‘Four Two Commando.’
‘Right.’ Four Two Commando were based at Bickleigh Barracks, not far from the Shaugh Prior tunnel where Liam Clough’s body had been found. Savage pointed to the desert picture. ‘Iraq?’
‘Yeah. My last tour.’
‘And then?’
‘Property development. Being handy means I can do up places myself. Started with just one, but I’ve got several properties now.’
‘Including Woodland Heights?’
‘Not for long. I had dreams of renovating it, now I just want shot.’
‘You said it was hell there, Mr Samuel. What did you mean?’
‘What I said. It wasn’t a pleasant place. Parker was a right one. Ruled with a rod of iron. And I mean that literally.’
‘So why did you stay on and become the caretaker? I mean, if it was as bad as you said, why didn’t you leave?’
‘You wouldn’t understand, love. Family, weren’t they? Maybe not Parker, but the others. His wife, the boys.’ Samuel turned to the fire and held out his hands to the warmth. ‘Besides, I had nowhere else to go. It seemed as good an option as any. I went to college a couple of days a week and learnt a trade. Carpentry. Turned out to be useful back then, and now. When the home closed, I found a new family in the army. There were tyrants there too, but you stick with your mates and look out for one another. I guess that’s why I stayed at the home despite Parker. I was looking out for my mates.’