Touch (12 page)

He would have thought of that.

He? It must be a ‘he’ mustn’t it? They always were. Apart from Rose West or the Myra woman who’d died in prison from cancer because they didn’t ever let anyone like her out.

She wished she hadn’t thought of that. Not just of those women, although the image of them was bad enough. It was also the thought of prison, being trapped in a small room and dying without ever knowing freedom again.

Hang on, who said you were in prison, stupid?

She shook herself and laughed at her wild imagination. Maybe she had crashed out at some party or dossed down in some student’s room. She moved off the mattress and stood up, wrapping the duvet around herself like an over-sized toga. She walked over to the door and reached for the handle. The cold metal made a slight squeak as she pushed it down and tried to pull the door towards her.

It was locked.

*

They drove from North Prospect to the top end of St Budeaux, the nicer part, which wasn’t saying much. However, on Waverley Road neat little bungalows and semis jostled for position and some care and attention had been paid to the properties by their owners. The line of mid-range cars – some new – parked on the road testified to the fact that the area had aspirations. Still on-street though, Savage noted. Only once you parked your car on your own land could you finally say you had arrived in true middle class suburban heaven.

Number sixty-two had a tiny pond in the front garden and a black and white porcelain cat dipped a paw in the water, intent on catching one of the goldfish swimming under the dying lily pads. The house backed onto some woodland, almost a rural idyll, Savage thought. But not quite. When she and Calter got out of the car the roar of the traffic became all too apparent. The A38 lay the other side of the trees and the noise of the cars rushing down the hill towards the Tamar Bridge crossing into Cornwall was quite intolerable.

The bright red front door reeked of fresh paint and was opened by Mrs Forester, an overweight woman in her seventies. She held onto the door for support with one hand and with the other tried to button her mauve cardigan against the chill. The cardigan was loose-knit and the sleeves looked like they had expanded over the years to accommodate her pudgy arms and body to the extent that the garment now resembled a purple fishing net. She gave up fumbling with the buttons and accepted the need for further questioning with a weary nod of her head. Savage got the impression the woman had dealt with the police many times before.

She led them through into the lounge, a simple, neat little room, probably unchanged for decades. Apart from the huge flat screen TV standing half in front of the fireplace. Older houses hadn’t been designed with such monstrosities in mind and it looked ridiculous.

‘Present from David,’ Mrs Forester said, noting Savage’s interest. ‘He was always good to me when he was around.’ She nodded at the sole picture on the mantelpiece. A teenage boy in football kit, one foot on a ball, hands on hips. Defiant.

‘Is that him?’ Savage asked.

‘Yes. Years ago.’ The old lady smiled. Then her face turned sour. ‘Before you lot started hassling him.’

Savage ignored the dig and began to ask about David’s childhood. It soon became evident Mrs Forester was not David’s mother after all, rather she was his grandmother. Savage asked her how she had come to care for David.

‘Clary, my daughter, had David when she was fifteen and still at home. By seventeen she had got bored with the baby and buggered off. We got the occasional letter for the first few years, then nothing. Don’t even know where she is now.’

‘So you had to bring up David all on your own?’

‘Well, with my husband Vic, but he wasn’t much help. He hit David hard enough but he never changed a nappy, never fed him, never read a bedtime book.’

Mrs Forester stared out of the bay window with a blank expression Savage had seen countless times before. The empty eyes almost always belonged to a woman, and Savage could usually sense regret and resignation in them. Regret at who the woman had married, resignation to their fate and the fact that prince charming was not about to rescue them.

‘And David? Bringing him up must have been difficult.’

‘Difficult! What would you lot know about difficult? Does your husband come home drunk and slap you around? Do the kids round you shoot cats with airguns? Do your neighbours fight on the street outside?’

‘Mrs Forester we are not here to judge you, we just want to find out what happened to David.’

The old lady ignored Savage and carried on.

‘Initiatives and targets then back to your nice house with a driveway and a bloody people carrier, I’ll bet. Good school round the corner where the teachers can teach rather than spend their time searching the kids for knives or drugs.’

‘We are police officers, Mrs Forester, we are not social workers or politicians. We are trying to find David and Kelly.’

‘Kelly? Oh, it’s about her is it? I seen on the news she was dead. No one cared before, no one bothered about what had happened to my David.’ The woman’s eyes filled with tears and her head went down, a hand scrabbling in her sleeve for a handkerchief.

Savage made a gesture to Calter and the younger officer moved to comfort the old woman. Savage left the room and went back to the kitchen to see about rustling up a pot of tea. The kitchen was a surprise after the staid lounge: modern, everything clean and tidy. Through the window to the back Savage saw a pretty garden. You’d have to be deaf to enjoy sitting out on the patio, but the plants appeared well-tended and a lot of work had gone into laying out the lawn and the neat flowerbeds. Mrs Forester must be proud of it. Savage wondered if she could say the same about her grandson.

When Savage returned with the tea Mrs Forester had composed herself. She had suggested to Calter that they might like to see David’s room.

‘Room?’ Savage asked. ‘I thought he lived at the flat in North Prospect?’

‘He does. But he only moved out three years ago and I’ve kept his room for him. He likes to crash here sometimes and he’s still got his photo stuff up there so he is round a couple of times a week. Or rather, he used to be.’

‘If you don’t mind, Mrs Forester, it might be useful.’

‘Not at all.’ The old lady’s face brightened for a moment. ‘First on the left at the top of the stairs.’

Savage and Calter climbed the stairs and heard Mrs Forester call out after them. ‘The pictures on the wall are all his own work. He’s quite good with a camera. He was with a club you know?’

‘Which club, Mrs Forester?’ Savage called down.

‘A photography club. I can’t remember the name, but it is in Plymouth. He used to go there before he got interested in video. After that he preferred to make movies.’

Calter mouthed a silent, ‘Did he now?’ to Savage as they entered the bedroom.

The single bed had a faded Chelsea duvet on it and football stickers covered the flat-pack off-white wardrobe and chest of drawers. Over to one side of a window that overlooked the back garden was a desk on which sat with three flatscreen monitors. A jumble of leads snaked down from the monitors to a computer base unit tucked away underneath. Calter moved to the desk and reached down to switch the unit on.

‘Result, ma’am. You don’t have three big screens connected to one machine just to waste your life on Facebook.’

Savage let Calter get on with searching the computer and scanned the pictures on the walls of the room. Large sized black and white prints of women, naked or partially clothed, dark shadows, pale skin, almost abstract and not in any way pornographic. They weren’t even in that category called tasteful, which was merely an excuse for sad wankers to display them without appearing sexist. These were innocent, naturalistic and the women were not looking at the camera. They wouldn’t have been out of place at a local gallery, except Plymouth didn’t do such things very well. Take them up to Salcombe or Dartmouth though and the grockles swarming round the streets in the summer would snatch them up.

Mrs Forester was right, her grandson had talent. But that didn’t square with what the manager of Tamar Yacht Fitters had told DS Riley. Savage looked at the pictures again. They were a world away from a sordid video of a girl shoving a beer bottle up between her legs.

‘Password protected, ma’am.’ Calter interrupted Savage’s thoughts. ‘I’ve tried the usual tricks but I can’t get in. Have to take it to the lads in hi-tech crimes.’

‘Right.’ Savage was browsing through some CDs on a tall rack. Nirvana, Stone Roses, Radiohead, REM. Pretty standard fare for a kid who was a teenager a dozen or more years ago.

‘What kind of twenty something year old has a Chelsea duvet spread?’ Calter asked. ‘And all those stickers? They are the kind of thing an adolescent would have, not a young man.’

‘You’re a profiler now, are you? Chelsea bedspread equals criminal behaviour?’

‘No, ma’am,’ Calter giggled. ‘A bit odd though.’

‘I agree.’

Maybe David Forester hadn’t grown much beyond a teen until something had changed him. Savage looked at some of the football stickers again. Stuck on the wardrobe was an entire set of the 2006 Premiership winning team. From the smiling faces of Lampard, Cole and Drogba to hard-core pornography, drug dealing and violence. In just a few short years.

Derriford Hospital, Plymouth. Wednesday 27th October. 5.25 pm

The post-mortem on Kelly Donal had been scheduled for twelve thirty and DS Riley had been booked to attend. Savage said she would be along later. If being late had been her intention, missing the whole affair had not. Now that seemed possible because they got stuck in a jam on the A38 not long after they left St Budeaux.

On the dual-carriageway heading east cars sat nose-to-tail and according to their police radio the cause was a major RTC up ahead. Half a dozen ambulances and two fire engines blocked the road creating traffic chaos and leaving a good proportion of Plymouth in total gridlock. At one point even the air ambulance buzzed overhead to land somewhere out of sight, its distinctive blue and red livery striking against the tomb grey sky.

After thirty minutes Calter got bored and said she would walk out of the queue and back to the station. Savage could do nothing but wait, and after another hour the traffic dissolved away and she drove the remaining couple of miles to Derriford Hospital. She struggled to find a space for the car despite the acres of parking that surrounded the ugly, brutal looking complex. Notwithstanding the hospital’s primary purpose, it was no place to be born, be ill or to die. For post-mortems the ambience could not have been better.

Doctor Andrew Nesbit was perfect for PMs too. His straightforward and methodical manner gave him a detachment that at times like these Savage envied. She didn’t think anybody enjoyed eviscerating the dead, but if anyone did it was Nesbit. Savage put her gown and mask on in the anteroom and went into the lab proper where the pathologist hunkered over a stainless steel gurney, his long arms working the corpse like a mantis playing with a fly.

‘Ah, Charlotte, your DS left a while ago but you are welcome to stay for this one if you like.’ Nesbit looked up from the cadaver, an old man with severe facial injuries, body gone a sort of yellowish-white, the veins and bones visible through the translucent skin.

‘Did this man fall into the gutter in a drunken stupor or did he get waylaid and set about by a group of bored youths? Twenty years ago I’d have said the former, these days the latter explanation seems more likely. What do you think?’

‘You tell me, Doc, I thought that was your job.’ Savage moved closer to the dead man. Seventy or so and looking like age would have caught up with him sometime soon anyway had the tarmac not intervened first.

‘Not a pleasant way to die.’ Nesbit bent down again and using a pair of tweezers extracted a piece of grit from the man’s discoloured cheek. ‘Lying in the roadway having a cerebral haemorrhage while the good folk of Plymouth go about their business unaware you are anything other than another homeless statistic sleeping off a drunken binge. Whether an accident or foul play, either way his death was not a glorious ending.’

‘I don’t suppose such a thing exists for any of your patients.’

‘Or for any of us. There are good ways and bad ways but only one exit.’

‘If you added a line about “many path’s to the Lord’s feet” you’d be a passable preacher.’

‘As you know, Charlotte, I’m of an entirely scientific bent. As far as I am aware the only journey this man can make is one involving the breakdown of his biological components into their constituent molecules. Of souls I know nothing.’

That was Nesbit through and through. He had once joked to Savage that the inscription on his gravestone would be ‘Observation, Hypothesis, Prediction, Experiment, Results, Conclusion.’ He dealt with cold bodies and cold facts with no place for emotion. Savage thought Nesbit’s approach admirable because it prevented the niggling little thoughts from burgeoning into nightmares. It washed away the doubt, the fear and the uncertainty from death in the same way his assistants would hose the blood from the dissection table after an autopsy. Only sterile, gleaming, stainless steel remained, a shining truth developed from scientific reasoning rather than from a figure on the cross. It left no room for tears and perhaps that was the point. Savage didn’t care much for religion either, but she knew such detachment wouldn’t work for her and already the emotion was rising within.

‘You’ve got some results on the girl?’

Nesbit sighed, paused, and with a theatrical flourish worthy of a RSC veteran he turned and dropped the piece of grit into a stainless steel kidney dish on a side bench. The bowl rang out a clear note that sounded quite haunting. Nesbit let the note ring for a second or so and touched the bowl to bring an end to the unknown man’s elegy. He put the tweezers down with a further flourish and turned to Savage.

‘Well?’ she asked.

‘Now, I found no sign of trauma causing death, externally or internally. You might be surprised to hear that, given the cut on the stomach we noticed at the scene, more of which later. I also discovered something quite fascinating, intriguing possibly.’ Nesbit moved over to another body, this one covered with a green cloth.