Touch (DI Charlotte Savage)

by Mark Sennen

  He had managed to find out that they originally came from near Plymouth, another Devon link. The wife had been born in a small village on Dartmoor where the couple had later married at the local church, but beyond those bare facts nothing. Without a trip across to Devon, he thought, he couldn’t proceed further, certainly not if the local police were going to be as obstinate as DC Lees.

  Reviewing the notes on his pad again brought to his attention the one nugget of information of any use so far. The location of Netherston Cottage. The place had been easy to find. A quick Google had revealed the hamlet of Netherston buried in the deepest part of the South Hams, an area of Devon which lay to the south of Dartmoor and took in the coastline from Plymouth to Dartmouth. Examining the aerial photograph overlaid on the map and comparing the lie of the land with the image on the painting he was pretty sure he had identified the exact location. The cottage lay nestled up against a wood in a valley only accessible along a mile or so of track. Even compared with places he knew in Cornwall the location was remote. Was it possible his mispers were there? Considering the health of the husband and his need for regular drugs and treatment Tatershall could think of only one reason why they would be.

  The thought depressed him some more. But kicking the idea around in his head the notion didn’t quite make sense. The couple had moved to St Ives presumably because they liked the area. The view from the big window in the flat suggested an appreciation of the scale and beauty of the landscape and the wife’s paintings, however bland, indicated some sort of affinity for the place too. The gallery gave them a social connection right into the heart of the town and meant they would be able to get help and support. Why choose to go to some isolated cottage to die? Even if the couple had planned some suicide pact it would have been just as easy to carry it out in their own home. Unless they needed help, of course.

  From their enquiries they had discovered the couple had no close friends in the area and no immediate family either. Could that explain the need to return to Devon, the county where they were born? Tatershall had brought the cardboard box with all their papers back to the station and he had started to go through the material again. This time he took each piece of paper out, checking between sheets and making sure he wasn’t missing anything. The pile on the desk beside him grew until the entire contents of the box had been removed. He sighed, disappointed he had found nothing new, but satisfied he had done a thorough job. He started to put the pile back in the box when he noticed a piece of paper wedged under one of the flaps at the bottom. He lifted the flap and pulled out the page of an old newspaper, which had been folded several times. As he unfolded the newsprint another piece of paper fell out. It was a birth certificate. Tatershall smoothed the document on the desk in front of him and read the details.

  ‘They’ve got a son,’ he said to himself.

  ‘Huh?’ Simbeck had been working at her desk opposite answering emails, but now she looked up.

  ‘Born in 1971, registered in Totnes.’ Tatershall read the name. ‘Can you do a search on the PNC for me?’

  Tatershall spelled out the name and then inspected the page from the newspaper. As he digested the headline and associated story the sympathy he had for the couple began to drain away to be replaced by a wave of emotion comprised of both anger and sadness. He felt sick and all of a sudden wished he was out of the force and just an ordinary bloke who could go home and cuddle his kids without having to think about this stuff.

  ‘Boss?’

  ‘Rape and child-abuse. He got fifteen years. And there was me worrying about the cancer. Bastard.’ Tatershall put his head in his hands for a moment and then sighed. ‘Right, Kate. Do you know what I am going to do? I am going to go to the new coffee shop across the road and get a coffee and a cake. Afterwards I am going to come back here and complete the paperwork on this case and be done with the bloody thing.’

  He stood up and went to the door.

  ‘Coming?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I have found the son.’ Simbeck pointed to the screen displaying the results of her search. ‘Matthew Harrison. There was an entry made yesterday. He is wanted for murder.’

  *

  So cold, I’m so very cold. And I am going to die.

  Alice Nash knew that now. For certain. For a while she had clung to the hope she had been kidnapped, that a ransom demand would be issued and some rich benefactor would pay up.

  Idiot. There is no kidnapper.

  No, the house belonged to Matt Harrison, part-time photographer’s assistant, full-time madman, rapist and killer. The nutter wouldn’t be letting her go, not now, not after what he’d done.

  After. At least now was after.

  She had run from him and he’d caught her, smashing her down with a horrifying violence. She’d felt him against her, his naked body all over her as she squirmed underneath, and she waited for him to rape her. But he hadn’t. He had been aroused, but for some reason he stopped himself and had simply stroked her head as she had lain on the bare floor and sobbed.

  ‘There, Emma, sweet Emma. Don’t worry. Everything is going to be fine. I promise. Just you wait and see.’

  Back in the little room she fell asleep and when she woke the hallucinations had started. Daytimes passed by in a whirl of colour and dizzy spells and the nights brought sweat and muscle spasms. She guessed Harrison had drugged her food or drink, but she had no choice but to consume what he provided each morning. Eat and drink or starve and die. Then one day she awoke from a deep sleep and the nightmare seemed to be over. Bright lights and white walls, not the old house she had been imprisoned in. A hospital. She had been rescued! The blurry images snapped into focus.

  Flash!

  ‘Emma! You are back!’ Harrison smiled at her as he put the camera down. He wore casual clothes with a white coat over the top, like a doctor or one of those people who sliced up animals in a laboratory.

  She screamed and tried to move, struggling against the ties holding her hands fast and the straps on her legs spreading them...

  Oh my God no!

  ... wide apart.

  ‘Please no, don’t hurt me!’

  Harrison bent over some kind of trolley, gleaming tools of stainless steel clinking together in his shaking hands as he sorted through them.

  ‘Hurt you?’ He turned round, shocked, mortified. ‘I am not going to hurt you. You are lovely, perfect, look at you.’

  He moved his hand over and touched her breasts, cupping each in turn.

  ‘Yes, yes. Perfect. And clean. I hope!’

  His hand began tracing its way down across her stomach and lower and Alice closed her eyes to try and blot out Harrison’s caress.

  ‘No, not yet my love. Soon, I promise. And the wait will be worth it, I know.’

  When she opened her eyes he stood over at the trolley, holding some kind of medical device shaped something like a giant stainless steel dildo.

  ‘But first a couple of tests, just to check. You see the trouble is dirt gets everywhere these days. Into everything. Nothing stays pure. Nothing stays untouched. You must understand I need to make sure. Yes, yes. Surety and purity. I must not be corrupted by your flesh. Desire must come later, not now. I don’t want to get dirty again.’

  He moved between her legs.

  ‘NO!’

  *

  Now the cold slipped into her skull, deadening the memory somewhat but freezing the images too, as if to stop her forgetting.

  He had examined her for a few minutes, pausing every so often to scribble in a notebook. Then his expression changed, something had annoyed him and, without a word, his coat fell from his shoulders and he tore at his clothes until he had stripped himself naked. He stood between her spread-eagled legs with his hands grasping her waist and raped her. Horrid grunting sounds spluttered from him with each thrust and he came with a gasp and shouted that name again.

  ‘Emma! Emma! Emma!’

  When it was all over he woul
dn’t meet her gaze. He took a cloth from the trolley, held the bitter smelling material over her face and she drifted to sleep.

  She woke to complete darkness, freezing cold and the knowledge of certain death. But that was OK because she was more scared of living now. She had seen the other instruments on the table and the look of utter depravity in Harrison’s eyes. Death would be a release. Except... except...?

  Dad, I love you.

  If she died she wouldn’t see him again, would she? The thought of him grieving so soon after her mother’s death, of him never knowing how much she loved him overwhelmed her and she began to sob.

  No, I am not going to die!

  Calmer now, but still very cold, she reached her hands out to explore the dark space. Tiny, not the room where she had spent the last dozen or so days. She stretched her legs out in front of her, but when she tried to sit up she banged her head. To either side of her she touched some sort of wall.

  Like plastic?

  When she knocked her fist on the surface she was sure. She was in a kind of large plastic box.

  Cold?

  Yes, ice cold. A humming noise as well, like an electric motor or something.

  She scrabbled around with her hands and feet, trying to find the limits of her confinement. To one side of her she discovered a small grill-like opening in the plastic. She tried to get her fingers through the grill but the openings were way too small. There seemed to be an air flow coming through the slits though, cold air, freezing air... a freezer! She was locked in a freezer!

  She put her head in her hands and let all the air flood from her lungs in a long sigh. With the extreme cold there wouldn’t be too many more breaths, and naked there was little she could do to conserve her body heat. She thought she remembered something from childhood swimming lessons where you were supposed to curl yourself in a ball so she tried that, putting her hands behind her head and pushing it down between her knees. That was when she found something.

  A hairclip.

  They insisted on your hair being tied back at work and she wore both a hair band and a couple of metal clips. The clip had been tangled in her hair for all these days. She pulled it out and turned in the small space to get at the grill. The clip slipped between the little slits and she poked it in farther and began to wiggle it around.

  Bang! A bright blue flash and her body slamming back against the side of the box. A tingling shot along her arm and a convulsion ran through her chest and something smelt bad. Like when the toaster had gone wrong at home and tripped the cut-out switch. A pungent odour reached her nostrils, a mixture of electrical components having shorted out and organic material burning.

  My hand.

  It hurt now, a searing pain along the backs of her fingers. She slumped down, knocking her head on the side of the box. An extreme drowsiness overcame her and in front of her eyes stars flared in a dark night sky. The sky span round and round and round and then the stars were fading to an inky black nothing, like when the lights in the theatre went down at the end of a play. Silence, everything quiet and she was aware that even the humming of the electric motor had stopped.

  Chapter 34

  Laira Bridge Road, Plymouth. Tuesday 9th November. 8.05 am

  Savage yawned. Bed late and up early yet again wasn’t doing her any good at all. And crawling through the morning traffic didn’t help either. Stop, start, green light, red light, some tosser cutting her up on the bridge. She wanted a clear road, a smooth ride, but somehow the option had been left off the menu, at least with this case.

  She mulled over the possible actions open to the team now they had all but confirmed Matthew Harrison as the killer of Kelly Donal and Simone Ashton. Tracing Harrison was the force’s highest priority, but the empty fridge and half a dozen pieces of mail behind the front door suggested he hadn’t been in his flat for a few days. Had he somehow got wind of details of the investigation and cut and run? If so, what did that do for their chances of finding Alice Nash alive now fourteen days were up? The chilling picture of Simone Ashton on the camera Enders had found pointed to Harrison carrying out some sort of procedure on the girls. God help Alice, Savage thought.

  The jam cleared and Savage got to the station just in time for the morning briefing in the Major Crimes suite. She squeezed in past the overflow of officers crammed in the corridor, and when Enders spotted her entering he let out a cheer that was followed up by everyone else in the room. Hardin beamed at her and bounced across like a gas-filled party balloon, knocking into desks and causing coffees to spill and computer monitors to wobble.

  ‘What can I say? Congratulations to everyone. Case solved. Now we just need to catch the bastard!’

  To that end he detailed the liaisons he was setting up with other forces and with the port authorities. Savage reckoned a more likely result would come from the crime scene trawl which had been going on all night and would continue throughout the day. So far only the pictures linked any of the girls with Harrison’s house. After Hardin had shaken hands with everyone and returned to his office to work on his media briefing Savage sat down with Riley, Calter and Enders and they began to work up possible actions.

  ‘He must have another place, ma’am.’ Riley said. ‘A garage, a lockup, a boat even.’

  Riley was right. The girls hadn’t been murdered at the house in Plymouth. Harrison would have dealt with them somewhere else. Somewhere quiet.

  Savage instructed Riley to get over to Harrison's flat on Grand Parade and try to find anything which might indicate a location he could have used. She would take Calter and Enders back to Malstead Down and see if they could dig anything up in the village.

  ‘It doesn’t appear as if Harrison had any connection to Malstead, but the evidence points to something. He dumped Kelly in the wood on the evening of the twenty-fifth of October, the night the village held its bonfire party. However, Simone is left in the church. On the twenty-fifth Harrison would have found it impossible to leave Kelly in the church, but my hunch is that is what he intended. The question is, why? Now we have a name we can do some door-to-doors and maybe drive around the area and see what we can pick up.’

  ‘The old lady, ma’am,’ Calter said.

  ‘Which one? Old ladies are not in short supply in Malstead.’

  ‘The one at the top of the green. The little cottage with the tumble down porch thingy. Mrs Harbersher I think her name was. She said she had lived in the village all her life. Born and bred. If anyone could remember Harrison she might. If she can remember anything, that is. When I visited she thought I had come to read the electric meter until I showed my ID.’

  *

  Calter was right about the old lady. When she opened the door to Calter again she behaved as if there had been some problem with her bill payment.

  ‘The standing order went through, I am sure. I checked online yesterday. We are not all fuddy-duddies you know.’

  Calter tried to explain about the return visit, but it took Savage’s intervention to get them an invite into Mrs Harbersher’s front room, Enders made to wait outside because the cottage didn’t appear big enough for the three of them. Net curtains, porcelain figures of dogs and cats, old-fashioned upholstered chairs, a carpet with patterns on and a coal fire with heat so intense it hurt to look at. Mrs Harbersher had been young in the sixties and yet the room matched Savage’s childhood memories of her own grandmother’s parlour.

  Tea and biscuits took an age to arrive, but when they did the tea came in fine china and the biscuits in a Tesco’s luxury brand tin. Savage glared at Calter as she grabbed two at a time. No wonder the electricity company aroused such suspicion if this was how they acted.

  ‘Mrs Harbersher,’ Savage began. ‘You’ll know we are here about the murders and the body discovered in the church?’

  ‘Shocking business. In my time we behaved with a little more care. These days the young ones can’t wait to get their knickers off and this is the result, mark my words.’

  ‘We are trying to find
out some information about a man who may have had something to do with the area at one time or another. He is called Matthew Harrison. Does the name ring any bells with you?’

  ‘Matthew?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s a good old fashioned name, isn’t it? Part of the problem these days is those silly names parents come up with. I am sure that is why there is so much bad behaviour.’

  ‘So you don’t recognise it?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. I do recognise it. Matthew Harrison. Elizabeth Foulds was his mother. She came from Bridge Farm. Those Foulds are all dead, and now it’s just a house with a couple of barn conversions since they parcelled the land off.’

  ‘And? This Elizabeth Foulds?’

  ‘Lizzy? An attractive girl, very pretty, but a bit quiet and in her own head. She was a few years below me when I left the local school. That’s closed now. Not enough children in the village, you see? Everyone moves away or dies.’

  ‘What happened to Lizzy?’

  ‘She left too. Got married and moved to a remote little cottage somewhere over Totnes way. She visited a few times, but as her parents got older she came less and less. When they died she inherited a tidy sum from the sale of the farm, her being an only child.’

  ‘And her husband?’

  ‘Richard Harrison his name was. A draughtsman by trade or an architect or something similar. He’d come to the farm to plan out a milking parlour and found a bride instead. Very romantic. At least we all thought so at the time.’

  The information was coming, but was taking an age to arrive. Calter wriggled on the edge of her seat, itching to ask the obvious question, but Savage didn’t give her a chance.