by Jacqui Rose
The celebrations had run on into the Christmas period, the result one long spell of parties, relatives, more parties and more relatives. Now the holiday season was over Savage was pleased for life to settle down a little. Pleased too the spring had arrived early in Devon. The forecasters had spoken of a hard winter, but despite some snow in November, so far they had got it wrong. Out of the kitchen window the sun hung low in the sky, a cool yellow rather than the deep red of a summer sunset. Below the sun the Sound lay placid, only a hint of a swell disturbing the surface. A yacht, black against the light, motored in past the eastern end of the breakwater. The crew on the yacht waved to a trio of dinghy sailors struggling to catch a zephyr of wind to take them home before the chill of nightfall. Last night the frost had returned, but the first two weeks of January had been unseasonably warm, pushing the temperatures close to the mid-teens. Weather more suited to t-shirts than to a gift of hats and gloves.
A couple of days earlier Savage had received an altogether different type of Christmas present. One of the best ever, although Pete hadn’t seen it that way. He told her in the kitchen, as she prepared a pizza, her hands floured with dough. The news stunned her and she could hardly take his words in.
‘Scrapped?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ Pete said. ‘Decommissioned. Mothballed. Sold-off. Cut up and made into plough shares for all I know. Seems as if I’m to be based ashore now. For good. Bloody stupid cuts.’ Pete’s face looked ashen and his eyes brimmed with emotion.
‘I’m sorry.’ Even as she said the words she knew she wasn’t. Pete might be losing his ship but for the past fifteen years and more she had lost her husband — and the kids their dad — for months and months on end. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t known what she was getting herself into when they got married, but back then heart very definitely ruled head and the day-to-day practicalities of juggling a job and young children appeared to be years off. Pretty soon though, the twins, Samantha and Clarissa had come along, unplanned, and mid-twenties she’d found herself with two babies and an absent father. Later she’d had Jamie and then the tragedy of Clarissa’s death to cope with, Pete around for what seemed like mere fleeting moments.
‘You’re not,’ Pete said.
‘No.’ Savage moved over and hugged him, pressing her face into his neck and kissing him, aware of her floury hands making prints on his jumper. ‘I’m sad for you, of course, sad for your crew too, but I’m not sorry. Have you known long?’
‘Before the last voyage I got an inkling of what might happen. At least the old girl went on a grand final trip.’
Pete had taken the frigate on a circumnavigation of South America, cruising down to the Falklands, through the Straits of Magellan and up the Pacific coast of Chile, using the Panama Canal to get back to the Atlantic. Before that the ship had been on patrol in the Gulf and seen action in pirate alley. As with every warship returning to Devonport after active service, she had steamed into the Sound to a hero’s welcome, although one unnoticed by anyone living outside the city.
Now, as Savage poured water into the big blue teapot, she felt a warmth from knowing Pete would be in Plymouth and bound to a desk for the foreseeable future. With a more normal job perhaps they could have some sort of existence like a normal family. For years she’d coped on her own, but combining her job and home life was almost impossible. Having her and Pete’s parents living close by helped, and more recently they’d employed Stefan. It still wasn’t easy though, and with Jamie being six and Samantha thirteen there was hardly ever a time when she could relax.
The steam from the pot curled upwards and she chinked the lid in place, watching the final wisp of vapour dissipate along with her thoughts as the phone rang. DC Patrick Enders calling from Major Crimes.
‘Don’t you ever have days off, Patrick?’ Savage said.
‘It’s the overtime, ma’am. Worth its weight. If there’s any available I snap it up. I can always take a day off in the week when the kids are at school. So much more peaceful.’
Enders was late twenties, already with three children and a mortgage, designs on a four bedroomed place in Mannamead where his family could spread out and not live cheek-by-jowl. But then when she’d been that age, Savage thought, she’d had the same aspirations. When the twins were born, she and Pete had been lucky enough to find a large wreck of a house on the coast before prices sky-rocketed and such properties became unaffordable to all but the very few.
‘Well, what can I do for you?’ Savage said. ‘I’m just about to sit down with my own kids and have cake and tea so you had better not have something for me.’
‘No, just a reminder, ma’am. The DSupt says not to forget about the Sternway meeting tomorrow. He’s sending you a bunch of stuff, so check your email.’
‘Great,’ Savage said without much enthusiasm. She already had a mountain of papers to read concerning Operation Sternway — the force’s long-term drugs operation — but she promised Enders she would check her email, hung up, and gave a silent ‘thank you’ she didn’t have to rush out. The irony, given her recent talk to Pete about how much his job had taken over his life, wouldn’t be welcomed.
The call from Enders reminded her there was other paperwork to complete too: notes for an upcoming PSD inquiry. The Professional Standards Department wanted to know why she had left the scene of a car accident in which a man had been killed. No matter that the man had been a serial killer who had tried to abduct her own daughter Samantha, Standards wanted answers. Over Christmas and the New Year she had pushed all thoughts of the inquiry to the back of her mind, but now, with the interview looming, she knew she needed to spend time preparing.
She sighed and then went back to the living room to find Stefan teaching the kids some toilet humour. The scatological references sounded twice as funny in Swedish and soon all five of them were conversing in a mixture of languages interspersed with prolonged periods of giggling. Savage turned from the mayhem and looked out through the big window. Shadows crept across the lawn, painting black shapes on the grass which glistened with silver moisture in the fading light. Beyond the garden, the cliff fell away to a mirror which stretched to the horizon where the sun was just kissing the sea somewhere out past Edison Rocks. Sunday afternoon bliss.
Chapter 2
Efford, Plymouth. Monday 14th January. 8.35 am
On any other Monday the three builders cradling mugs of steaming tea and sitting on the low brick wall outside seventy-five Lester Close, might well have been discussing the weekend’s footie. Plymouth had gone down three nil at home and the handful of points the team had collected in their last ten games wasn’t enough to appease the fans. A demo had been arranged and there were calls to sack the manager, the players, the board, the boot-boy, anyone who could conceivably be to blame for the team’s recent abject performance.
On any other Monday.
Jed Rammel was the oldest of the three, twenty years the oldest, and he’d never seen anything like it. Except, of course, when he’d been over in Iraq, but that was different. You expected things like that there. Not here, not on a Monday morning when all you’d come to do was dig up somebody’s back yard to put some concrete footings in, preparatory work for a new conservatory. Jed guessed the owner would be cancelling the work now. Nobody in their right mind would want to be sitting out the back any more. Lying bathed in sunlight, relaxing, dreaming, and sipping a beer. Thinking about what had once been buried there. Give over.
Jed scratched his head, slurped another gulp of tea, tried to forget the toothy smile showing from behind the dried-up lips and those empty eye sockets which he knew sure as hell couldn’t see and yet seemed to be staring right out at him.
They’d started that morning at seven thirty with barely enough light to work by. Carted picks, crowbars, sledgehammers and shovels round the back. Jed had checked the instructions and marked out the limits of where they were to dig with lines of chalk powder and a couple of stakes. Young Ryan had first dibs, lifting the broken paving s
labs with the edge of his pickaxe and then going ten-to-the-dozen with the crowbar on the old concrete beneath.
Youth, Jed had thought, all now-now-now, no care for the future. And so it proved. Ten minutes later and Ryan was knackered so Jed and Barry took over, breaking the concrete while Ryan shovelled the residue out the way.
They’d found the bones of a small dog soon after. Nothing to get excited about, Jed said, even as Ryan began to lark around. The larking ended when they found the box nearby. Plastic, buried in the soil under the layer of concrete about two feet from the dog. Jed wondered if the thing wasn’t some sort of drainage sump, but when they took off the lid and saw the contents they realised it wasn’t. They’d thought the thing inside was a doll at first. A big doll, sure, but a doll nonetheless. Jed’s granddaughter had one, a large, life-like thing he and the wife had bought the kid the Christmas before last. But no, it wasn’t a doll. They’d known that when Ryan’s spade pierced a hole in the chest where he poked it. Crackled like parchment the skin had and through the split the three of them had seen the bones of the ribcage.
Definitely not a doll.
Jed sipped his tea again. Thought about Iraq. About things he’d never told his work mates nor his wife. Things he’d only shared with the men he’d served with. The type of horror he’d thought belonged thousands of miles away in another country.
‘Losing three nil,’ Ryan said. ‘At home. You can hardly fucking believe it, can you?’
No, Jed thought, you couldn’t.
*
Savage drove into the car park at Crownhill police station a little after eight fifty-five to see DC Jane Calter jogging over, her breath steaming out in the cold air. She pulled the passenger door open and collapsed in the front seat.
‘Off to a property in Efford, ma’am. Right next to the cemetery. Handy, because there’s a body under the patio. And I’m not joking. Wish I was.’
‘Right,’ Savage said. ‘You sure you’re OK? You don’t look so good.’
‘Bad weekend, ma’am.’
‘Oh?’
‘Brilliant, I mean.’ Calter pulled the sun visor down to shield her eyes from the glare as they headed back towards town, the sun still low in the south east. ‘Too much booze, not enough sleep. I never learn.’
The DC leant back in her seat and ran both hands through her blonde bob, pulling at a couple of tangles and squinting at the vanity mirror on the back of the visor.
‘I barely managed a shower this morning, let alone a hair wash, and these clothes are the first ones that fell out of the wardrobe.’ Calter indicated her rather crumpled grey skirt and jacket.
‘I hope you didn’t get into too much trouble.’
‘No,’ Calter grinned, ‘unfortunately not. But I am seeing him again next week.’
As they drove to Efford Calter sat quietly, fumbling once in a pocket for some painkillers, dry-swallowing them and then closing her eyes. Only a dozen years or so difference in their respective ages, Savage thought, but Calter’s lifestyle a world away from her own. Not that she was beyond getting drunk herself, having a good time, partying — Christmas being a case in point. But there was always the knowledge that the next morning any hangover would be punctuated by a seven o’clock visit from Jamie wanting to be up and at the world, Samantha needing a lift somewhere and Pete feigning his own hangover as near life-threatening.
Efford was an innocuous part of Plymouth sandwiched between the A38 and the Plym estuary. A mixture of older social housing, now mostly owner-occupied, and some newer but smaller properties, made the place out to be working class. Really though, Savage thought as they negotiated streets still busy with school-run traffic, you couldn’t tell anymore. Even the tiniest flat cost a small fortune these days.
The web of crescents and avenues which made up the area was interspersed with plenty of green space, the largest being the twenty acre cemetery which Lester Close backed on to. The close itself had been cordoned off, already a number of people hanging round the junction with the main road. Heads turned as Savage was waved through and drove into the close. The road rose in a gentle slope, the houses on each side post-war semidetached, pebble-dashed, uPVC windows with net curtains. The front gardens neat little patches of lawn with a shrub or two for good measure.
‘Pleasant,’ Calter said opening her eyes, ‘but I’m more of a penthouse flat type of girl myself.’
‘Rich is he?’
‘Forces.’
‘Don’t go there,’ Savage said, smiling. ‘And as you know I speak from experience.’
Calter laughed as they reached the far end of the narrow cul-de-sac where a patrol car on the left hand side marked the property, a house in need of some TLC, the front garden full of clutter stripped from inside. Behind the patrol car a Volvo estate straddled the kerb, the rear door up, a jumble of plastic containers and toolboxes crammed in the back.
‘Layton,’ Savage said. ‘The sooner he gets to a scene the happier he is.’
John Layton was their senior CSI and where crime scenes were concerned he could be labelled a misanthrope, believing only himself and his team had any right to be present and hating all other invaders. Especially interfering detectives. Savage got out and retrieved her protective clothing from the boot.
‘You might as well start with them, Jane,’ Savage said, pointing to the builders sitting on the front garden wall as she suited up. ‘I’ll risk Layton’s wrath.’
At the house the youngest of the builders nodded a greeting as Savage went down the passage to the side. The other two stared into their mugs, one of them shaking his head and muttering something under his breath.
Round the back a patio stretched the width of the plot. Or rather it once had because one end was now a mass of broken slabs and concrete, the spoil from a large hole creeping across the postage stamp sized lawn beyond. Beside the hole Layton and Andrew Nesbit, the pathologist, knelt, peering down into the mud. Layton stood up as Savage neared, tipped his battered Tilley back with the finger of a blue-gloved hand and pointed at the brown goo.
‘Bloody mess.’ Layton scratched his roman nose with the back of his hand and shook his head. ‘Builders don’t wear ballet shoes, do they?’
Nesbit glanced round and smiled, his eyes sparkling behind his half-round glasses. He raised his bushy eyebrows, looked at Layton and then turned back to the hole.
‘Mondays, Charlotte,’ he said. ‘What is it about Mondays?’
Savage walked over and peered at the puddle forming down in the excavation, a grey sludge-like liquid which oozed from the surrounding soil.
‘The thing on the right is a dog,’ Layton said. ‘The builders found the animal first. But that wasn’t why they called us.’
Savage could see a set of tiny bones and a pointed skull. A leather collar had rotted to almost nothing but the buckle and a little brass name tag. Next to the skeleton a large translucent plastic storage box, the kind you shoved under the bed or stacked up in the garage full of junk, lay close to the concrete foundations for the boundary wall. A snap-on lid concealed the contents, something pale and indistinct pushing up against one side promising nightmares for weeks to come.
‘According to the ID disc the dog’s name is Florence,’ Layton said. ‘Don’t know if she is named after the place or the character from the Magic Roundabout. Whatever, I’d say the animal was buried a good few years ago. The crate was probably only buried within the last few months.’
‘The lid?’ Savage asked.
‘The builders removed the top of the box. I put it back so the photographer could take some pictures. Andrew?’
Nesbit reached down, long fingers inside his nitrile gloves feeling around the edge of the lid, clicking the plastic back, lifting it off.
Savage gasped at the tangle of flesh and bones inside, the tiny hands clutching at a red house-brick, the torso curled round in the box, foetal-like. The child’s skull had plenty of skin left on, hair twisted in long, curly strands, teeth bared in a mocking grin. The
flesh on the limbs and body hung loose, looking stiff and like starched clothing or light brown paper. The child was naked, but there was a bundle of rags up one end of the box. That fact alone spoke volumes to Savage. Unlikely this was a terrible accident, somebody trying to cover up an RTC for instance. Not when the infant had been stripped. She considered the skin again, gone tan, the colour and consistency of filo pastry. The corpse reminded her of mummies she had seen in a museum and she said as much.
‘Desiccated,’ Nesbit said. ‘The body was kept somewhere hot and dry after death and that caused the effect you are looking at.’
‘So how long?’
‘Very difficult to know at this stage. Maybe we will find some entomology or something else organic to help us establish the time the death. All I can tell you for sure is that she was buried here a good while later.’
‘She?’ Nesbit’s confirmation of the gender chilled her, not that ‘he’ would have been any less horrific. It was the fact an identity was even now beginning to take form, a life created from the sad heap of skin and bone. Something solid to mourn over. Something solid to try and seek justice for. If possible.
‘The hair looks like a girl’s and then there’s that.’ Nesbit pointed down to one side of the plastic box next to the rags. A patch of pink flashed out, vivid and incongruous alongside the bone and flesh. ‘It’s a trainer. I didn’t want to disturb anything too much, but I managed to note the size. Twelve. Children’s that is.’
Twelve. Which would mean the child would be half that: five, six or seven. Savage peered down again at the body in its makeshift plastic coffin. Once the girl would have snuggled up to her mummy or daddy, perhaps clutched a teddy to her for comfort as she fell to dreaming. Now she only had a brick to cuddle.
‘We’ll move the box and all to Derriford,’ Nesbit said, standing and nodding to the two mortuary technicians who had come round the corner of the house. ‘It will save disturbing her. Better that way.’