Cut Dead (12 page)

‘Pah.’ Joanne paced along the edge of the slab. ‘So tell me again, the bungalow, when did you take it down?’

‘Be soon after I started working here.’

‘Something like twenty-five years ago then?’ Joanne looked to Jody for confirmation and he nodded. ‘And you don’t know why?’

‘It had got in a right state, beyond saving. When I asked your uncle, he said the place was haunted. Bad memories.’

‘Double pah.’

‘You don’t believe it was haunted or you don’t believe he said it?’

‘I don’t believe
he
believed the place was haunted.’ Joanne reached one side of the slab. Toed the edge. Turned. ‘Jody, I used to come down here when I was little. I played with a girl who lived here. She was older than me – I’d have been six or seven, she was early to mid-teens. Those days kids did that, played across age groups. Anyway, when I came back one summer after not having been to the farm for a year, my uncle said the family had moved away. I remember being disappointed my friend wasn’t here but I never thought any more of it. Years later there was gossip about the girl, why she’d left. Gossip about my uncle.’

‘That’s villages for you, Joanne. A load of tittle-tattle. Houses might not be cheap round here, but talk is.’

‘No smoke, Jody.
Something
went on.’

‘But that was long before this.’ Jody stared down to the white forensic shelter. ‘Decades. What makes you think there’s any kind of connection to the girl?’

‘When did I inherit the farm, Jody?’

‘Let’s see … be around 2006. We had a dry start to the summer and I remember you wanted to invest in some irrigation equipment, you all keen but knowing nothing. I told you it were a waste of money. The rain came in July and we had a bumper harvest.’

‘Yes. My uncle died that spring, the way old people seem to. Waited until the lambs were frolicking, the daffs in bloom, and then popped off.’ Joanne pointed down to the shelter. ‘Know when the Candle Cake Killer committed his first murder?’

‘No, but I reckon you’re going to tell me.’

‘Same year.’

‘A coincidence. Nothing more. Also, that first one, she was found on Dartmoor.’

‘And I know why, Jody. It was because we had the caravan down here sat on the plinth. When William and I took over we renovated the house, didn’t we? Lived in the caravan for three months when the floors were being renewed. The following year the caravan had gone and we were back in the house, well out of it.’

‘So the next body goes in the hole?’

‘Yes. The hole standing only a few paces from the bungalow. The bungalow where a girl and her family left one spring in a hurry to get away. The girl who had something to do with my uncle.’

‘It’s a stretch, Joanne,’ Jody said. ‘Anyway, who was she? I mean I’m from Yelverton, didn’t come here as a kid. Your uncle never said either.’

‘Laura or Lauren. A name like that. Someone in the village must remember who lived here.’

‘You’re talking well over forty years ago and the family may have been transient. The house was a tied bungalow. Farmworkers.’

‘
Someone
, Jody. Even after all this time.’

‘Ms Black?’ Jody glanced over at the CSIs. ‘You going to tell this lot?’

Joanne paused. Walked across to Jody, raised a finger and reached out and touched him on the lips. Smiled.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Not just yet.’

Chapter Eleven

You sit in the car, Mikey alongside you. The glow from a street lamp washes the interior, turning the pages of Mikey’s magazine yellow. Puzzles. Colouring-in, spot the difference, tic, tac, toe. Not crosswords or word games, anything with letters is much too complicated for Mikey. You glance over. He’s working on a join the dots picture. It’s a mess of spidery lines, each dot on the page joined to every other dot. Like the wires in the dishwasher, you think. Or the road. Any place in the world joined to you here, any time linked somehow through history. All you have to do is work out the route to where you want to go.

The girl.

You look over to the house. A glow at a downstairs window quickly fades to darkness. You count to ten. Raise your eyes to the top floor. A white light comes on, a figure silhouetted for a second as somebody reaches and draws the curtains across.

‘Wait here,’ you say to Mikey. ‘Finish your drawing. I’m going round the back for a closer look.’

Mikey nods and you get out of the car and cross the street. The house is a little terrace, but there’s a passage down the side, a tall gate which isn’t locked.

Careless, you think.

You open the gate and step through, groping down through the black in the passage until you emerge into a little garden. A patio, beyond a handkerchief-sized lawn. From somewhere close by there’s a gurgle of water swirling round a drainpipe. Your eyes follow the pipe upwards to where a half-open window splays light into the night. She’s up there in the bathroom. Taking a shower.

You shift sideways, move out onto the patio, stand on the tips of your toes. Now you can see her reflected in a mirror, although the image is blurring as the surface of the mirror clouds with condensation.

Never mind. You’re not here for that.

You move across the patio to the back door. There are several plant pots to the right beneath a window. A couple of begonias – tuberhybrida if you’re not mistaken – and three succulents. You lift the pot nearest the door and shake your head with disbelief as a glint of silver shines up from the paving slab beneath.

Two keys on a ring.

The back gate and now the keys. Beyond careless. More like an invitation.

You bend and pick up the keys, move to the door, try one of them in the lock.

Click. Click.

The lock is one of those double ones and you have to revolve the key twice. Then you push the handle down. Swing the door open. Step up into the kitchen.

Quiet and dark. Dim light through the door into the hallway coming down from upstairs. Air tinged with scent wafting down too. A fragrance. Shower gel? Shampoo?

She’s up there in the bathroom. Water running over her body. Soft bubbles on her skin. You imagine your hands reaching out and grabbing her, the soap slippery under your fingertips, the girl struggling, screaming.

Stop!

Really, you shouldn’t be thinking like this. You should be checking a couple of things and getting out of here. Taking the keys to one of those late-night places to get copies made and then returning the originals to their rightful place under the pot.

But where’s the fun in that?

Ignoring your better judgement, you ease yourself out of the kitchen and into the hall. The stairs rise to your right, carpet deep and silent. So easy to glide down the hall and climb up towards the woman, towards heaven.

‘Get guuurrrlll!’

Mikey!

You spin around and there in the kitchen is the lad. He has a grin on his face and he points at the ceiling.

‘Guuurrr—’

You bound towards him and place your hand over his mouth.

‘Shhhhush,’ you say. ‘Not now. Out.’

You spin him round to face the door and give him a shove. Follow. Back on the patio you push the door shut and lock it. Glance up at the window. Still the noise of running water in the drainpipe. Steam coming from the window. A faint humming.

She didn’t see you and she’s quite safe.

For the moment.

Chapter Twelve

Mutley Plain, Plymouth. Wednesday 18th June. 7.23 a.m.

Paula Rowland came down to the sight of some mud and gravel on the floor in the kitchen, a strange musty smell lingering in the air.

Cats?

She’d left a window open a fraction a few weeks ago and a tom had squeezed in and urinated on her living room floor. Several applications of carpet cleaner had left the room smelling of chemicals. If the cat had sneaked in again somehow she’d kill the bloody animal.

The kitchen window was closed, as were all the other downstairs windows. She’d left the bathroom one ajar last night to clear the steam from her shower. Had the animal managed to get in that way? She opened the back door and stepped out onto the patio. The window was high above her. Unless a cat could climb a drainpipe there was no way in up there.

She went back inside and cleared up the mess, wondering where the clay and tiny white crystal-like gravel had come from. Maybe, she thought, she’d got some stuck to her feet somewhere and the gravel had fallen off in the kitchen. She washed her hands and made herself a bowl of cereal, switching the radio on and changing from BBC Devon to a non-stop music station when she realised the breakfast show was doing nothing else but talk about the Candle Cake Killer.

Paula was fed up with the over-the-top reporting of the last couple of days. On and on they went, almost as if they wanted something to happen. Even the children at school had picked up on the media response, the older and hardened kids all jokes and bravado, but one or two of the younger ones distressed. The headmaster had said he’d work something into Friday’s assembly, make sure everyone went home for the weekend vigilant but reassured. ‘I want them to know,’ he’d told teachers at a staff meeting, ‘that none of us needs to be worried.’

Paula switched the radio off as a One Direction song came on, the boys’ crooning not suiting her mood any more than the rant of the news programme. She finished her breakfast with the head’s little speech still in her head.

None of us needs to be worried.

Sensible words, Paula thought as she spotted something glittering on the floor. She bent to pick up the piece of gravel and then dropped it in the sink. She turned the cold tap on and the crystal swirled around with the water for a moment before disappearing down the plughole, out of sight and mind.

First thing Wednesday, Hardin called a meeting in briefing room A to discuss the strategy for the twenty-first of June, along with the current state of play. A dozen members of the team squeezed themselves round the big table, the rest sat on rows of chairs, a lucky few with a view out the window. Gareth Collier had reproduced his countdown chart, the number ‘3’ scrawled on a piece of paper and stuck on the wall at the end of the room.

Savage pulled up a chair alongside DCI Garrett as Hardin rose from his seat and moved to a whiteboard sat on an easel.

‘This,’ Hardin said, ‘is my plan for D-Day.’

Hardin had linked his laptop to a projector and the first slide glared white on the board, blank apart from a single line of text which read ‘June 21st. Tactics.’ Somebody down the far end of the table murmured ‘pray’ but Hardin didn’t hear.

‘The media.’ Hardin keyed the laptop and revealed a series of bullet points. ‘I’ve drawn up a series of releases which will be given to the newspapers and put on our website. Senior officers will take to the airwaves and TV screens to explain and answer questions. The key to everything will be to seek to reassure people and prevent panic. Public order and safety will be dealt with by uniforms and they’ve got their own briefs. However, Major Crimes has a role to play. We can use the media as a positive force to help further the investigation. What we don’t want is anyone deciding to take the law into their own hands. We don’t want trial by social media. I’ve tailored the texts we’ll be using to be measured but at the same time stressing the importance of following our recommended precautions. The Chief Constable will mention the investigative strand in his announcement, but he wants to restrict himself to the one appearance for the moment. We need an air of normality and to avoid chaos at all costs.’

Hardin paused for breath and then began to outline his thinking on policing and detection. There was a balance to be struck, he said as the existing slide dissolved and was replaced by another set of bullet points, between reassuring the public, protecting them and catching the perpetrator. The three strands were essentially incompatible. Reassurance came from bobbies on the beat and patrol cars up and down every street. In the real world – a world unfettered by such political niceties – protecting the public depended on an efficient response. Units spread across the city and the county might look good, but responding to an incident would be a logistical nightmare. Finally, catching the killer required a breakthrough to be made before the twenty-first or the setting of some kind of trap which could be sprung on the day. Both methods would require huge resources which couldn’t be spared from the other two objectives.

Hardin raised a hand to wipe his brow and reached for his glass of water.

‘Thankfully the deployment issue is out of my hands. The Chief Constable will be making such decisions. All we have to do is get on with the job in hand. Which is catching the bastard. To which end; Charlotte, Mike?’

Thanks a bundle, Savage thought as she got to her feet.

‘Phil Glastone. He’s a database programmer. He lives over in Salcombe.’

‘Guilty!’ somebody shouted from the back of the room.

‘Very probably,’ Savage said. ‘At least of having too much money. Apart from that you’ll all know he was fingered for the killing of Mandy Glastone the first time around. He wasn’t charged and had an alibi for the Sue Kendle disappearance.’

‘Good?’ an officer said.

‘Yes. He doesn’t have a plausible alibi for last year though so it’s imperative we go back and see if we can find any new evidence which might disprove his original statements.’

‘Shaky ground, Charlotte,’ Garrett said. ‘The CPS didn’t want to proceed back then. I can’t see them being very happy with us trying to disprove an old alibi. Then there’s the intervening time gap. Why did he stop?’

‘We don’t know. I’m seeing the psychologist, Dr Wilson, later. I hope he’ll shed some light on possible scenarios.’