by Mark Sennen
The notion was a depressing one, but when he put the options to Enders, hoping he might make a joke of it, the DC wasn’t much help.
‘Not necessarily a better place, sir,’ he said. ‘Tim Benedict might be going to hell for all we know.’
‘Hell? He’s a vicar, don’t they get a VIP service?’
‘Depends. Say he’s done something to deserve this. Say him and Sleet are mixed up in some funny business.’
‘Funny business? What are you talking about, Patrick? We’ve nothing to link the two men and I fail to see what sort of business could justify torturing Benedict and chopping him up.’
‘Well, there’s one thing I can think of.’ Enders nodded his head over towards where several members of the Lacuna team were standing round a whiteboard. ‘Abuse. Kiddie fiddling. Child pornography. I’d say that would justify topping Benedict.’
‘He’s a member of the clergy for God’s sake!’
‘My point exactly.’
‘You’re jumping to conclusions with no good evidence.’
‘Still, don’t you think it might be a good idea to get Benedict and Sleet’s computers in to Hi-Tech Crimes? Wouldn’t take Doug Hamill more than an hour or two and then we’d know.’
Riley sighed. ‘OK. Just to keep you happy. Get on to that PC Sidwell and ask him to send Benedict’s laptop down here. And then you’re coming with me to Derriford. We’ve got to pay our respects.’
‘Hey?’
‘The last rites. Tim Benedict’s post-mortem.’
Layton’s tour of the house convinced Savage that Woodland Heights had given up all its secrets and any further work would be pointless. She drove away from the place feeling dejected. Forensic evidence in both the Lacuna and Curlew investigations had been in short supply, neither having provided a decisive lead which could take them to the killer or killers. Finding Ned Stone was now the top priority. When she got back to the station, she’d suggest to Hardin that they needed to pile all their available resources into tracking him down.
In Bolberry she turned left and headed parallel with the coast towards Hope Cove. DC Calter was down in the village with two local officers, going door to door trying to jog old memories. Savage had arranged to rendezvous with Calter at the pub for a quick lunch and afterwards she fancied a walk on the beach to clear her head.
The lane left the village and threaded between tall hedges. The car crested a small rise, off to the left open fields rolling to the coast. Savage pulled the car to the side of the road and into a gateway, intending to take one last glance at Woodland Heights from a distance. She got out of the car and moved to the gate. The home lay a mile away across the fields and she realised she was looking at the rear of the house. The other night her assailant had jumped from a window into the backyard and he’d have run across fields to the west. She traced an imaginary line away from the house until her eyes came to a small clump of trees and scrub surrounded by farmland, perhaps half a mile distant. Had the man gone to ground there? Was it even possible he’d run on past, ending up at Parker’s house?
Savage remembered Parker. He used a stick and had appeared frail. She couldn’t see him being able to shimmy down a drainpipe and sprint across open countryside.
She climbed over the gate and began to walk across the fields towards the wood, her mind working overtime. The concrete in the cellar had been laid in 1988, just over two months after the disappearance of the boys. Recently, the cellar had been disturbed and human remains removed. Yet at some date between the boys going missing and the date written in the concrete, a body or bodies had been brought to the cellar after having been hidden somewhere else first.
She reached a hedge with a fence, the fence topped with barbed wire. She scouted to the right until she came to an open gate. Beyond, a field of corn stubble stretched to the wood. Was it possible the remains had been hidden there and brought back once the initial search had finished?
Five minutes later she stood under a huge oak at the edge of the copse where a broken fence marked the boundary. Within lay a dense thicket of hazel coppice, gangly ash trees, small pines and a mass of brambles and other scrub plants. In the field a stiff breeze had been sweeping across from the south-west. Here nothing moved, the tangle so impenetrable it shielded what was within from the rest of the world.
For a moment she paused, enjoying the peace and solitude. The week since the inquest into the death of Simon Fox had flown by and she’d barely had a minute to reflect on the outcome. Nor had she spent much time with Pete and the children, something she had promised herself she’d do once the inquest was done and dusted. Work had, as usual, got in the way. Damn it, she thought, life passed so quickly. It seemed only yesterday that Clarissa and Samantha were starting school. Now Jamie himself was in primary school and Samantha three years into secondary. Her daughter was a typical teenager: moody, headstrong, reactive. There were days when anything Savage or Pete said seemed to cause her great consternation. And yet, Savage reflected, her own behaviour at that age had been similar. ‘I blame your family’s hair,’ Pete often joked. ‘Red and fiery and does exactly what it says on the tin.’
Savage smiled and then blinked herself back into the present. She stepped over the broken fence and moved into the wood. She wondered if any reports of the searches from years ago remained in the files. Even if the reports were there, she doubted if exact details had been logged. Still, the woodland would have been searched, she thought.
The copse covered an area about the size of a couple of football pitches. She could call out a police search advisor and a search team, but it hardly seemed worth the bother. In half an hour she could quarter the woodland and satisfy herself there was nothing here.
Ten minutes later, on her hands and knees as she crawled beneath the bough of a fallen beech, she realised she’d vastly underestimated the time needed. She pushed herself up from the ground and ran a hand through her hair. A couple of leaves and a twig tumbled to the ground. She peered down to where the twig lay at right angles across a small depression. She bent to get a closer look. Not a depression, a trail.
A little way to her right, the trail skirted a patch of brambles. She straightened. The track had probably been made by rabbits or pheasants. Still, it might make her progress a little easier, might even lead to the edge of the wood where she could reconsider whether to continue the search.
She followed the trail to the brambles and beyond to where it wound into a stand of hazel. An animal had been digging at the base of the hazel and a scattering of rabbit droppings on the fresh soil hinted at the culprit. Savage moved forward and then looked down to where a pristine Mars bar wrapper sat plumb centre on the rabbit’s spoil heap. She bent and pinched the wrapper between her fingernails so as not to touch the surface, and lifted it to her nose. The chocolate smell was distinct. Somebody had been here recently.
All of a sudden she felt a little nervous. The hazels crowded overhead, a thicket of bramble all around. Running anywhere in this would be impossible. She patted her jacket pocket for her phone. Nothing. She’d left the bloody thing on the passenger seat of the car.
She told herself not to panic. She was in a woodland in the English countryside. John Layton and several officers were not more than half a mile away. Nothing to worry about.
A few more steps and she’d rounded the hazel. On the other side she expected to find the edge of the woodland; instead, standing several metres tall, stood a wall of laurel. Savage moved closer. This was no manicured garden hedge and within it boughs tangled this way and that, twisting in the dark shadows. Unlike the hazel and ash trees, the laurel was evergreen and the denseness of the leaves stopped the light from penetrating. Still, the lack of light meant nothing grew at ground level. She could slip through the clump, duck under a couple of the larger branches, and find her way to the other side. Then she’d call it a day.
Savage moved under the canopy, her feet scuffing in the leaves shed from the laurel. She blinked. This place, she thought, w
as like some huge cave, a tunnel perhaps. She stepped forward and swatted at a solitary fly which buzzed at her face. A few more strides, most taken at a crouch, and she realised she’d come to some sort of dead end. The laurel here was tangled around a small clearing and there was no way out. She looked closer. No, not tangled, the branches had been woven together like a willow plait. Some of the larger ones had even fused into an almighty knot of wood. The process had taken years, decades perhaps. To one side of the clearing a house brick lay on its side, while nearby something else had disturbed the soil.
She examined the ground more closely. She bent and knelt in the leaves and mulch and swept the leaves with her hands, pushing away the loose material. Soon she’d cleared a patch of ground. Somebody had moved the leaves to conceal where they’d been digging. She began to scrape in the soil itself. By rights the entire area should be thick with laurel roots. Back home at Bovisand, she and Pete had spent a whole weekend removing a laurel bush and the roots had made the job near to impossible. Here though, the soil was soft and she was able to dig easily.
Savage’s hands grew dirty as the soil began to pile up at one side of the clearing. Earth gathered beneath her nails and she felt damp seep through to her knees. Within a couple of minutes she’d dug several inches down and came up against a piece of slate. She worked her way across until she found the edges and then lifted the slate.
For a second she stared at what was underneath, unable to comprehend what she was looking at. A hemisphere. Round, white, shiny and the size of a small football. A couple of lines crazing their way across the surface. She reached out a finger and then stopped, her finger hovering in mid-air, suddenly aware she was shaking slightly.
Bone.
She realised she was looking at the top of a skull, the whole thing sitting in a neat hole capped by the piece of slate.
Savage moved backwards. Not only because she was frightened, but also because the clearing had become a crime scene. Everything she did from now on could compromise the work of Layton and his CSIs. She cursed. She should have gone with her gut instinct and called the PolSA at the outset. She stood and edged back some more, trying to leave the clearing the way she had come. She remained in a crouch and placed her feet in the prints she had made.
Then she heard a sound. Something in the undergrowth. She turned around in the tunnel of laurel stems to see a dark shape pressing forward, hunched over. In the gloom she could tell the figure was male, but his face was swathed in a black scarf and the hood of an anorak covered his head. For a moment the eyes held still, gazing straight at her. Then the man came charging forward.
Savage didn’t have room to turn around so she backed up as fast as she could. She tripped on a root and fell over, immediately turning herself to try to scrabble away.
‘Arrrggghhh!’
She curled herself into a ball as the man yelled and leapt on her, fists pummelling into her back. She tried to shout herself, but a hand grabbed her hair and slammed her face down into the soil. Then he was sitting astride her as she lay on her front. Something brushed against her neck and then she felt a piece of thin material slide around her throat. She put her hands up but it was too late. The man shifted his position, a knee now pressing down in the small of her back. Savage turned her head. She could see the man’s hands pulling on a strip of leather, choking the life out of her. She tried to kick out and then to turn herself, but the ground beneath was soft and provided no purchase. She blinked, aware of the world beginning to fade away. She realised there was something she should remember. Her husband, her children – Jamie and Samantha. And Clarissa of course. Poor. Dead. Clarissa.
For an instant, Savage pictured her daughter, Clarissa’s face framed with hair like her own.
Red hair like her own …
Red?
Savage flicked her eyes towards the hole in the ground. Beyond the skull, out of focus, was something red. She stretched her fingers out, scrabbling past the hole and reaching for the red blur, reaching for the one thing which could save her. Her fingers grasped the rough surface, but now the red colour was dissolving into grey. Everything was becoming grey. The green leaves, the flecks of white sky visible through the canopy above, the brown soil. Colour sloughed away, leaving a world leached of contrast, of life itself.
She stopped struggling and let herself go limp. For a split second she felt a change in her attacker as he reacted to her apparent death.
Which was when she rolled onto her side and swung her arm backwards, bringing the brick in her right hand up and round so it slammed into the side of the man’s head.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Near Bolberry, South Hams, Devon. Tuesday 27th October. 1.31 p.m.
‘Charlotte!’
Savage opened her eyes to see the skull lying a foot away from her nose. The mouth wore a wide grin and the right eye blinked at her, a light in the eyeball flashing like a drop of water caught in a sunbeam.
‘Hello!’
The skull spoke again and the eye blinked. The other socket remained unseeing, empty and black.
‘Charlotte!’
The voice was insistent, the smile appearing to get even fuller along with the accent. Female. A West Country drawl.
‘Ma’am, where the bloody heck are you?’
Not the skull. DC Calter.
‘In here, Jane,’ Savage said as she pushed herself up into a sitting position, nausea sweeping over her as she did so. She rubbed her neck and gulped. ‘I’m OK.’
The skull lay next to the hole she had dug. There was no sign of her attacker or the brick she’d hit him with. The man must have pulled the skull from the ground, perhaps intending to take it with him. For some reason he hadn’t.
Then she saw why.
An area of disturbed ground stretched away from the hole for a metre or so and several brown and stained objects poked above the soil. Bones. Whoever had attacked her had intended to retrieve not just the skull but the bones as well. Calter’s arrival must have scared him off.
‘Ma’am?’ Calter’s voice came through the dense laurel from a few metres away. ‘What are you doing in there?’
‘It’s a long story, Jane.’ Savage swallowed again and tried to blink away the fuzziness which clouded her vision. ‘Have you got your phone?’
‘Yes, ma’am. But you haven’t got yours. When you didn’t turn up at the pub, I called John Layton. He said you’d left Woodland Heights some time ago, so I drove up from Hope Cove to see where you’d got to. I found your car and spotted the phone on the front seat. Thought you’d nipped into the field to take a wee. Only you hadn’t, had you?’
‘No.’ Savage shook her head and, despite the grim surroundings and her injuries, smiled to herself. She could well imagine Calter leaping a gate and squatting in a field with her knickers round her ankles. ‘Call Layton again, would you?’
‘Right.’
Savage turned and half stood. In a crouching position, she moved from the clearing and through the laurel tunnel. She found Calter standing next to the clump of hazel, phone in hand.
‘Did you see anyone?’ Savage straightened and let out a groan as a spasm of pain shot up her back. She gestured at the woodland. ‘In here or in the fields?’
‘No, ma’am.’ She handed Savage the phone, but not before taking in Savage’s dishevelled appearance. ‘Why?’
‘John?’ Savage waved a hand, dismissing Calter as Layton answered. ‘I think I’ve found one of the boys.’
The post-mortem lasted several hours and it was well after lunch before Riley and Enders emerged into the daylight. The ordeal had been made worse by the fact that the pathologist had been a stand-in for Nesbit. Gone were the dry jokes, intelligent repartee and amusing anecdotes. Instead Riley had to endure a conversation almost entirely focused on the man’s passion for wine, a subject Riley knew next to nothing about.
‘I was going to mention the nice white I bought at Lidl the other day,’ Enders said as they walked to their car. ‘Three nine
ty-nine. A little sharp, but a dash of lemonade cured that. Lovely.’
Riley shook his head. He was still thinking about the state Benedict had been in even before the pathologist had started his work. In the end his verdict had pretty much matched that of the consultant. Benedict had died from exsanguination and traumatic shock. How that had happened wasn’t in any doubt as the pathologist had painstakingly noted every cut and slice and blow. There had been some conjecture as to how each individual injury had been caused, but the attack had likely involved a variety of workshop devices, including a drill, a circular saw and a router.
Outside, Riley glanced up at the sky where the sun was already heading towards the horizon, an autumn chill in the air to match the cold of the mortuary. He remembered his own close shave with power tools – an angle grinder wielded by Ricky Budgeon, a crook he’d once crossed. He’d walked away, unhurt, thanks to DI Davies and DI Savage. Benedict hadn’t had Davies and Savage on his side though, he’d relied on God and God hadn’t showed up in time. What had the man done to deserve to be put through such terror? And what about Perry Sleet? Was he still alive and awaiting the same fate as Benedict?
On the short drive back to the station, one avenue appeared to be closed. Riley took a call from Doug Hamill, their Hi-Tech Crimes guru. Benedict’s laptop had been driven down from North Devon in a squad car and Hamill had made a preliminary examination.
‘No porn,’ he said. ‘Either of the legal or illegal kind. Not much on there at all to be honest. Some sermons, part of a book Benedict was writing, emails, some family snaps.’
‘Nothing dubious there? No pictures of kids?’