Touch (DI Charlotte Savage)

by Mark Sennen

  Do you mean Easy Emma, Harry?

  Trinny. Still butting in with the occasional comment. He had heard her less and less though and soon, he thought, she would be gone for good.

  Don’t know about that, Harry. Anyway, there will always be one of us to keep you company.

  Trinny’s words disturbed him. He didn’t want voices. He would need to think of a way of keeping the next one he had to deal with quiet.

  You mean Legs Apart Lucy? Did she turn out as slutty as me then? Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

  Harry grunted. Trinny was only jealous. She had no interest in his project now she was not to be the one.

  And neither does Lucy. I feel sorry for her so I think I will help her to stay around too. With both of us here I think we can stop you getting into so much mischief.

  That was not good news. If Emma turned out not to be the one either there could be three voices in his head. And who knows how many more to come?

  There are only six of us, Harry.

  Yes. Six. A magical number.

  Carmel had been the first of course. The first to come back to him. Rediscovered after all those years yet still looking exactly as she had done, as if time had merely breezed by in an instant. Mitchell and RT spoilt her though, and in the end desire killed her and now desire itself was the enemy.

  Poor call girl, Carmel, couldn’t contemplate cock. Now sadly Carmel has ceased.

  Trinny was too much. Harry jumped out of the car and stormed into the cottage, leaving her sniggering outside in the drizzle. She had never understood him properly and he wondered how he ever thought she could possibly be the one for him. He remembered she had been the last girl his parents employed, the one who had caused all the trouble, so maybe that had something to do with her attitude. Some months after she arrived she had an argument with his mother and later the same evening the police came calling. That night Harry watched his mother and father being led out of the house in handcuffs, a crowd jeering and throwing stones as they were driven away. He went up to his bedroom to wait and shiver in the darkness and before long the light came on and a policewoman arrived to take him away to a new home.

  Ah didums. Poor Harry.

  Trinny had come inside to tease him. He would ignore her.

  Temper, temper.

  He wished she would go away. He didn’t want to remember.

  But remember you must. Remember the children’s home.

  There he hoped to find some relief from the terrors inflicted by his father.

  Wrong.

  He remembered the shock at the end of his first day when three boys he thought of as new friends had beaten him half-senseless and proceeded to shove his head down a toilet. And then there was Mr Grimes, the Principal. His name was only the sub-plot, his after-dark activities the main story. How could Harry have been so mistaken? But then hadn’t he also been badly misled by the girls who looked after him as well? Each seemed to be the one who would give him love, but in the end each left to find it somewhere else.

  I had to leave.

  Now he had guessed why Trinny had left, dirty girl.

  I was assaulted by your father. Raped. I was a young woman, a girl.

  Exactly. Dirty.

  So why are you still chasing after us?

  He wanted what he had back then. He wanted the closeness of the flesh without the perversion of desire.

  You’ve got a funny way of showing it.

  That was because they were all sluts. He couldn’t help himself.

  Looney tunes, Harry.

  Yes, a lunatic. Trinny had it about right, Harry reckoned. But he was right too. He couldn’t help himself because madness was like a one-way street. Once you had started down it you couldn’t turn around or else you would smash into the oncoming traffic. He thought about this as he busied himself laying a fire in the front room. He wanted it warm for later. For Lucy. Then he thought about Emma. Up there in the room all alone. He hoped she was OK. And, because he was thinking of what was upstairs, he thought of THEM. They lived upstairs too. In the attic. How appropriate. He gave them water and some stale bread a few times a week, but they didn’t have much of a life. They must be cold and frightened and in the deepest despair imaginable.

  The thought lifted his mood. He felt happy and quite content. He struck a match and the fire burst into life, darting yellow and orange, little popping sounds coming from the kindling. The room began to warm and his mind turned to Emma once again. He hoped she was the one.

  She isn’t, Harry. You know that.

  It wouldn’t matter. There were plenty more out there.

  Only two left, Harry.

  Two would be enough if Emma didn’t work out. Still, he wished Trinny hadn’t reminded him the project was finite.

  And where will you find them?

  The same place he had found Trinny. And Lucy and Emma.

  And Carmel?

  Carmel, yes, but she never had a chance, she became Mitchell’s girl.

  Unlucky for her.

  And unlucky for him as well because he didn’t like things dying. Especially not things he loved. When things died they didn’t stay around anymore and that was sad. The tabby cat he killed when he was a child had rotted away until there had been nothing left to touch, nothing to speak to either. Now he knew he could preserve things by taking pictures of them, but you would have to be crazy to speak to an image and you couldn’t touch it either. You needed three dimensions for that. Luckily he had found a way to keep the girls, and if Emma didn’t prove to be the one then at least she could stay for a while and have some fun. She wouldn’t mind, wouldn’t say a word. Not one.

  Chapter 20

  Derriford Hospital, Plymouth. Monday 1st November. 9.00 am

  Forester’s post-mortem was scheduled for first thing Monday morning but Savage lost no sleep over it. The jaunt on the moor on Thursday combined with Saturday night’s late shift had left her shattered. Not to mention that she had spent the whole of Sunday trying to keep Samantha and Jamie entertained. The day had been fun, but she hadn’t had any time to relax.

  Doctor Nesbit emerged from his office in his green robes, bright eyes glinting as if he couldn’t wait to get started. He spotted Savage leaning against a wall and sent her and Enders away to fuel up on coffee and buns while he and his assistant prepared for the PM. The coffee came strong, black and acrid, but the iced buns tasted lovely and when she returned the combined caffeine and sugar rush had heightened her senses to beyond the point she had wished for. The stench from the morgue lingered in the air, despite the whirr of the extractors, and not for the first time in her life Savage remembered the fact that all odour was particulate based.

  Nesbit greeted them in a contemplative mood.

  ‘I have hypothesised a direct correlation between the number of times I encounter you chaps each month and the state of British society. Recently I find myself wondering if things aren’t getting a little bit worse.’

  Nesbit moved over to the body of David Forester, or rather the remains of Forester, for the heap of skin and bones didn’t resemble a man in any meaningful way. The body had been up on the rock for weeks and the sun, wind and rain had been hard at work. Not to mention the crows and other scavengers. Bits of flesh hung on bleached white bones and the grin on the face and the staring empty eye sockets looked like something from a zombie movie. Under the glare of the lights and before a small, select audience, Forester prepared to make his final performance.

  After the discovery on Caglin Tor they’d had no time to contemplate the scene. The wind had picked up even more and the snow fell in large flakes. Campbell said they should head back before the weather got even worse. Savage had noted the state of the body and little else. Not until the next day, when John Layton called, had the full horror of what Forester had been through become apparent.

  ‘Chained round the neck to the rock. Handcuffs behind the back. Not a scrap of clothing on him. I’m not doing the pathologist’s job but I’d stake my pen
sion on him having been alive up there at some point.’

  Layton had said they had found faeces on the rock beneath the body and what appeared to be urine stains too.

  ‘So you think he starved to death? Or died of thirst?’ Savage had asked.

  ‘Luckily for him I reckon the exposure got him before he reached that point. Hypothermia, I’d say. Death would have been a relief.’

  Looking at the body now, lying half-curled on the post-mortem table, hands still cuffed behind the back, Savage wondered if Forester had died in the same position. Alive a thug, but dying like a baby in the womb. She thought the tableau in front of her showed a sort of poetic justice, but she couldn’t quite figure how

  Nesbit peered into the chest cavity and prodded about between the ribs with a long pair of forceps.

  ‘Not much of interest for us, Charlotte. All the internal organs are gone or virtually so. My job here is more like archaeology than pathology.’

  ‘No chance of testing if he had been drugged then?’

  ‘Not today, no. We’ll open up his skull in a moment and get a peek at what’s left. Not that there will be much I would think.’

  Nesbit poked his forceps into the left eye socket and bent over to look right inside.

  ‘Hah! Something the crows didn’t get at least.’ He uttered a cry of delight and withdrew the forceps. Clasped in the end was a small, clear and shrivelled piece of plastic. ‘Contact lens.’

  The lab assistant held out a dish and Nesbit dropped the lens in.

  ‘Not that it tells us anything, I am afraid.’

  ‘Except he was short-sighted,’ Enders said.

  ‘Does that help?’

  ‘In fact I suppose it could be helpful,’ Savage said. ‘The lens tells us he may have been out and about when he was kidnapped. He wouldn’t wear contacts while asleep and depending on his prescription he might not have worn them at home.’

  ‘Now then.’ Nesbit was making a second pass over the body. ‘What is this?’ He pointed down at the left leg where the flesh and muscle had rotted away to leave nothing but bone.

  Savage moved closer than she wanted to and saw a line where the bone was broken.

  ‘Observe.’ Nesbit tapped his forceps on both sides of the leg. ‘Both tibia and fibula are fractured.’

  ‘RTC?’

  ‘Common when a pedestrian is hit by a vehicle, yes. As to whether the break is a result of a road traffic accident...’

  Nesbit was now working his way up the body, examining the other bones one by one.

  ‘Ah, look at the shoulder.’ He used the forceps to peel back a piece of stringy muscle. ‘The left clavicle is badly broken, smashed even. I can’t see this amount of damage having come from a collision with a car though. If the pedestrian was walking across the road and was hit on the left hand side he would be thrown on the bonnet, or against the front of the car. This injury appears as if inflicted from above.’ Nesbit made a chopping movement down on his own shoulder to illustrate.

  ‘Something like a baseball bat or a sledgehammer handle?’ Savage asked.

  ‘Not out of the question. With this little flesh to examine I can’t say much, but he was probably hit from behind. If this had been a high speed collision with a car I think we would be looking at other fractures too.’

  ‘That wouldn’t be the cause of death?’

  ‘No. He’d be in a lot of pain though. An awful lot. From the leg too. Plus any other injuries we can no longer ascertain.’

  Savage grimaced, imagining Forester chained in the cold and dark and shitting himself, literally, as he was dying.

  ‘So Forester crosses a road and is hit by a car. As he lies on the ground or as he rises someone attacks him with a baseball bat. They put him in the car and drive him up to Dartmoor where they chain him and leave him to die. Anything wrong with my hypothesis?’

  ‘Nothing at all, Charlotte.’

  ‘And if they had wanted to kill Forester they only needed to run him over with the car or batter him further while he lay on the road.’

  ‘Hitting him over the head would have finished him then and there and saved the attacker a lot of trouble.’

  ‘So the manner of Forester’s death was premeditated?’

  ‘That’s your job to determine, Charlotte, not mine.’

  Savage considered the sad heap of bones, once a man, now an exhibit. Forester didn’t deserve much sympathy, but nobody should have to die like this she thought. Enders seemed to be reading her mind.

  ‘Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, ma’am,’ he said, as if his words provided some comfort.

  Savage ignored him.

  ‘What about when he died?’ she asked.

  ‘Time of death is going to be difficult. We won’t find any entomological clues to help us after this period has elapsed. The body has been exposed and partially disturbed by animals; the wind, sun and rain have done their worst as well. My best guess is somewhere between two and four months. Possibly the faecal deposits might yield a more accurate span.’

  ‘The date is essential, ma’am, isn’t it?’ Enders asked.

  ‘Yes. If Forester died after Kelly Donal we can posit Forester killed Donal and was himself killed as an act of revenge.’

  ‘If he died at the same time then we are looking for just the one killer?’

  ‘And a very dangerous one at that.’

  *

  Back at Crownhill and Nesbit was on the phone barely a minute after Savage had sat down at her desk.

  ‘Something else about Forester you forgot to tell me?’ she asked.

  ‘No. I’ve got some toxicology results on Kelly Donal. Told the lab to fast-track them for you. Looks like they worked over the weekend.’

  Savage groaned. Fast-tracking would add hundreds of pounds to the invoice, an amount she would have to justify to Hardin.

  ‘Sorry, Charlotte, I should have asked first, but I think you’ll agree it was worth it.’

  ‘OK, Doc, spill the beans.’

  ‘I asked for a detailed segmentation test on the hair sample. That means the hair is cut into lengths and each section tested. The result is a historical map, if you like, of any drug use. An analogy would be the rings you see in a cross-section of a tree trunk.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘She was a heroin user and had been for several months. I had already hypothesised that from the injection marks on her arms. However, she had also taken gamma-hydroxybutyrate some time between seven and fourteen days before her death. It takes around seven days for the drug to show in the hair sample, so that is the minimum period. Longer than fourteen days and it would have been in the next segment of hair. Can you see where I am going with this?’

  ‘That the GHB was used in her kidnapping?’

  ‘Yes. But more than that. Remember I couldn’t tell you how long she had been frozen for? Well, if the drug was given to her when she was abducted then we can posit that she only remained alive for a maximum of fourteen days before she was killed and frozen.’

  ‘You mean–’

  ‘I understand there is another girl missing...’

  She thanked Nesbit and hung up. Then she worked through the dates in her head. Alice Nash had been missing for seven days. It was possible that she only had another seven to live.

  Pondering that awful thought, Savage went to the canteen for a late lunch and found the room buzzing with the aftermath of Saturday night’s little debacle. The worst of it was that two Special Constables had spotted a man trying to drag a girl into the back of a car across town near the railway station. The Specials shouted a warning and the man drove off leaving the distressed student lying in the road. One of the officers managed to note the registration and got a good look at the car, a blue coloured BMW. Volunteers one, professionals nil. CID was a laughing stock.

  ‘“Clubbing Idiot Dickheads” is the one currently doing the rounds’, grunted Davies as he, Savage and Garrett gathered later in Hardin’s office for a meeting. On the wall the c
alendar of Greek Islands was still stuck on December last year: Santorini, the white buildings cascading down the side of the island’s caldera like Christmas snow. Clever. Four weeks time and at least it would show the right month, Savage thought.

  Davies appeared rougher than usual, which meant he’d probably done a bottle of whisky after his stint in the CCTV room on Saturday night and slept in the clothes he was now wearing. Garrett looked like he’d spent Sunday at a health spa and then returned home to iron shirts and press trousers. Some of the worry lines had faded too. Other peoples arses were on the line now.

  The initial PNC check on the vehicle registration on Saturday night had found nothing. The plates turned out to be false. However, the next morning a Leash team member fired up the Vehicle Online Descriptive Search application to pull out a bunch of results.

  ‘Two hundred and sixty-two matches registered within twenty-five miles of Plymouth according to VODS,’ Hardin said, looking up from his laptop and beaming as if he had tracked down the Holy Grail.

  Needles in haystacks more like, Savage thought. The amount of work to visit, interview and collate all those leads would mean the Leash team were going to be doing nothing else for the next week.

  Hardin focused on the positives and the fiasco of Saturday night didn’t seem to be affecting his mood at all.

  ‘Doesn’t matter how much foot work we need to do now,’ Hardin said. ‘We are close, I can sense it. Big Night Out was a bloody disaster, but some good old-fashioned policing produced the goods. Now, what about Mr and Mrs Kinky, any word from the lab yet, Mike?’