Touch (8 page)

‘What’s your hunch, Jane?’ Savage asked Calter.

‘I am not sure, ma’am. Why would he call us and tell us about the girl? Why would he leave her on his land in the first place? On the other hand, he’s got previous and by assaulting the corpse he has put himself in the frame forensically.’

‘You don’t sound convinced though?’

‘Anything is possible, but all in all I don’t think he is seriously up for it. Not at this early stage anyway.’

‘Really? If the sexual offence from thirty years ago had been committed today he’d be on the sex offenders list. That, and his mental condition, should make us look twice.’

‘He’s not right in the head, ma’am,’ Riley said. ‘One raisin short of a fruitcake, I’d say. When we asked him about the previous conviction he went off on some rant about how the whole world was becoming soft and filled with poofters and that we needed to get back to a time where men could be men and not ponce about like girls.’

‘We’ve got the underwear to consider too, ma’am,’ Calter said. ‘I mean if the knickers and bra didn’t belong to the girl then where did they come from?’

When John Layton had arrived at the farm to collect the underwear he had shown Savage the clothing. Through the polythene of the evidence bag he folded the material, hunting for the label.

‘Sainsbury’s girls’ range, ma’am. Suitable for a twelve to thirteen year old. They wouldn’t be the right size for the victim.’

Now Savage thought about the underwear again. The knickers would fit her own daughter and although the young woman in the copse could have squeezed into them they didn’t belong to her.

‘But Isaacs has sworn he removed them from the girl,’ Riley said. ‘I can’t see any reason for him to lie.’

‘Unless he bought them to
put on
the girl,’ Savage said. ‘In that case he would want to remove the evidence after he’d had his fun.’

‘Some sort of fetish?’ Calter said, wrinkling her nose in mock disgust.

‘Whatever. The search team are going over the farm at the moment in the hope of finding the rest of the girl’s clothing. Come up trumps and we’ve got him. You two can have another go at him later this morning. Some extra pressure this time, please, I want him unsettled a little bit more. If that’s possible.’

She could imagine poor old Isaacs squirming at the sight of his interviewers returning for a second round. A man like that, whatever he had done, had pride, and he wouldn’t be comfortable with Riley and Calter squashing him underfoot.

‘Ma’am?’ Riley pointed to the terminal in front of him on which he’d pulled up a map of the area in a browser window. ‘The underwear was from Sainsbury’s, right?’

‘Yes. So?’

‘The closest supermarket to Isaacs’s place would be the Tesco Megastore at Lee Mill, near Ivybridge. Sainsbury’s is much farther away.’

‘You are right. And the more I think about it the more I can’t imagine Mr Isaacs trooping up and down the aisles searching for girls’ knickers. I bet he doesn’t even do any of the shopping, that would be Mrs Isaacs’s job and she’d use the local shops. He’d be lost in a supermarket.’

‘Well, if he didn’t buy the underwear then he is out of the frame, isn’t he?’ Riley clicked the browser window shut as if that was the end of the matter and that further questioning of Isaacs would be pointless.

The immediate priority, apart from dealing with Isaacs, was to identify the girl. Often murder victims knew their killers, so establishing the victim’s network could be the key to finding the murderer. Isaacs had said he had never seen her before he came across her in the wood, but if he was lying he would be in deeper shit than the muck in his farmyard.

A steady trickle of calls were coming into the incident room hotline about the girl and two officers logged the details into the system. DC Susan Bridge, an older officer recently transferred out of uniform, was raising actions on those calls, arranging for follow-up interviews or passing information to Savage if she wasn’t sure further investigation was needed. She was spot on when she had asked if they weren’t up against two problems at once.

‘I mean, ma’am, that we have a sort of reverse missing person case as well as the murder,’ she said. ‘We need to find out who the girl is, but that is being coloured by the fact she is dead.’

She was right. Already there had been a fair number of reports from people who claimed to know the girl, where she had been and what she had done. All of them, so far as the team knew, were plain incorrect. Well-meaning but misguided members of the public often did that sort of thing. They wanted a resolution to the story and the gaps were like missing an episode of Eastenders. In this case you couldn’t catch up on iPlayer or ask your friends what had happened so your mind filled in the blanks for you.

‘Ma’am?’ Enders broke into her train of thought. ‘I’ve got the results on screen.’

Savage had asked Enders to come up with a list of mispers reported in the last week and now she went over to where he was sitting in front of a terminal navigating through the missing person register on the COMPACT MISPER system. Riley and Calter came over too and the three of them peered over Enders’s shoulders at the screen.

‘Four on my shortlist, ma’am.’ Enders said as if announcing the winner of the Christmas raffle.

‘Number one, Alice Nash. She’s sixteen, from Ashburton, a town not far from Malstead, just along the A38 from Buckfastleigh. There seems to be some real concern about her. She left her work place in Ivybridge and never boarded the bus to Ashburton. When her dad realised that she hadn’t got her usual bus or the following two he called us. Some report of her possibly accepting a lift from–’

‘Idiot!’ Calter said, flicking the top of Enders’s head with her hand. ‘Read the date, Sherlock. She went missing Monday evening. Isaacs had found the body by then. Worrying for the parents, sure, but no way she can be our victim.’

Enders looked sheepish before carrying on.

‘Lindsey Nation, nineteen, I can see it’s not her. She’s blonde, not dark-haired like the girl in the wood.’

Enders clicked through his list.

‘Um, Jenny Smith?’

‘No.’

‘Simone Ashton?’

‘No.’

‘That’s your lot from round here.’

‘We need to widen the area or the timeframe or both.’ Calter chipped in.

‘Evidently.’

Enders went back to the search page where he changed some of the parameters.

‘Still sticking to Devon and Cornwall, but extending the date range to six months.’

‘That’s long enough. The girl died in the last week or so.’

‘Right.’ Enders hit the return key and data filled the screen. ‘Bloody hell. Eighty-four names.’

‘I’ll get some coffees, ma’am,’ Calter said as Enders began to scroll through the results.

Savage nodded and examined the list. They had searched for females between the age of fifteen and twenty-five missing in Devon and Cornwall in the past six months and the results were staggering. The figures would be distorted by the fact that the area was a tourist destination; many on the list would have gone missing while on holiday and turned up later back on their own patch. The problem was nobody bothered to inform the police. Even so the number seemed high. Savage knew a couple of hundred thousand people went missing in the UK each year but she’d always mistrusted the figure. Most would turn up, but the official guidance set down in procedure was clear: if the investigator had any doubt then they were to think murder. Her thoughts were interrupted by Enders jabbing at the screen.

‘Don’t bother with the coffees, I’ve found her.’

It was too late as Calter had already gone, but Enders was right. Savage looked at the record and the dead girl’s face stared out at her. Kelly Donal, eighteen years old, enrolled on an Early Childhood Studies course at the university with a work placement at Little Angels nursery. Her address was listed as Beacon Park, Plymouth. She had been reported missing thirteen weeks ago.

Enders gave a quick précis of the notes.

‘We have a report of an incident at the flat in the city that Kelly shared with a friend – this was the day before Kelly went missing – but by the time officers arrived it was over. According to the friend it was something to do with Kelly’s glamour modelling. A guy had turned up demanding to see Kelly and she wouldn’t let him in. There was a row in the street and a neighbour called the police. When they arrived a man known to them as David Forester was hanging about outside. He was allowed to leave when Kelly insisted she was not making a formal complaint. Forester had already received a conviction for ABH in late spring of this year. Managed to avoid a custodial, got a CSO instead. Before that he had a caution for possession. Let’s see, yes, registered address is in North Prospect. A right swillite by the sound of it.’

‘If he’s implicated there is going to be some serious press heat,’ Riley said.

‘Yes, but for once it won’t be on us. Should have been banged up.’

‘Go on,’ Savage said. ‘There’s more.’

Enders continued reading from the notes.

‘Seems like Kelly told the flatmate she was going to a friend’s house for the weekend, something she often did. The next day was a Friday and the flatmate came back to find Kelly gone.’

‘And she didn’t worry because she thought she had gone away?’

‘Precisely.’ Enders pointed at the screen again. ‘It wasn’t until Monday evening that she called Kelly’s parents to ask them if Kelly had been there. They said that they hadn’t seen her and in turn called us.’

‘Appears we did bugger all,’ Riley said.

‘They were told to call again at the end of the week and did so. Seems like someone then decided the girl had gone off to London modelling. She mentioned something about an agent to the flatmate and in the weeks before she had fallen out with her parents. Further investigation led to the incident being classified as low risk with a flag to review the case and reassess it at a later date. As of today it doesn’t seem as if that has happened.’

Savage could understand why. The amount of resources needing to be deployed was not inconsiderable. They would need to get search teams into Donal’s property, obtain the necessary permission to access landline and mobile telephone records and bank accounts, check with the ferry companies to see if she had hopped on the cross channel link from Plymouth, maybe even widening that to include all UK points of exit... Now those resources would be forthcoming, but Savage wondered if the officers on Kelly’s case had been hesitant in taking the investigation to the next stage because of cost worries or if the error was down to negligence.

‘This is all news to me,’ Savage said. ‘I think I was on holiday at the time.’

‘You’d flown out to Brazil to meet your husband,’ Riley said. ‘I remember the sun, sea and sand on the postcard made us all depressed.’

‘You shouldn’t have transferred down here if you like the weather sunny and warm.’

‘It was a little
too
hot in London, I was in danger of getting burnt,’ Riley said, without explanation. ‘Anyway, where does Forester fit into all this?’

‘I am on the case, Darius,’ Enders said. He typed and clicked and the results of a new search for male mispers came up. He pointed to the screen. ‘David Forester, twenty-nine, of North Prospect. Reported missing by his parents on the fifteenth of August.’

‘Damn. Why didn’t that get linked in with Kelly’s case?’ Savage said. The date was several weeks after Kelly’s disappearance, but there should have been some sort of flag in the system to draw attention to the previous incident; a definite mistake on somebody’s part.

‘Someone missed the connection,’ Riley said. ‘For a mispers case it doesn’t seem much of an oversight, but now we’ve got a body...’

‘Exactly. Forester is now the prime suspect,’ Savage said. ‘Right, we need to generate some action points on this. One, get family liaison to inform Kelly’s parents and arrange for formal identification of the body. Two, let’s get the Beacon Park officers involved in the domestic and ABH incidents in, plus those on the Kelly mispers case, we need their input. Three, get a search team into Kelly’s and Forester’s properties. Four, re-interview Kelly’s parents and her flatmate. Five, interview Forester’s parents and employer.’

‘He was unemployed,’ Enders said, pointing to the screen again. ‘Used to work at Tamar Yacht Fitters, but was dismissed after the conviction for ABH.’

‘Still, might be worth a word. You and Darius will take that one and I’ll see what I can get out of his parents. I also think we need to make an appeal for David Forester to come forward. This isn’t a missing person inquiry anymore, it’s murder. Let’s ditch the interview with Isaacs and ask the CPS if they want to charge him with the sexual offence on the body. Then we can concentrate on Forester.’

‘But taking Kelly all the way over to Malstead Down? Forester? We don’t know much about him, but he doesn’t seem the type to go to all that trouble.’ Enders sounded sceptical, as if he didn’t agree with Savage.

‘Taking her over there might have seemed like a good way of misdirecting us. But first we find Forester and then let’s see where we are. It is my guess he is our man.’

St Ives, Cornwall. Wednesday 27th October. 10.40 pm

The damp shirt stuck to DS Kevin Tatershall’s skin as he shifted in his seat, trying to get comfortable. The heater had been going full-blast on the twenty minute drive from Penzance but the fan hadn’t dried him much and he was still soaking. The downpour had started first thing in the morning and he’d got wet on the walk to work. He’d just about got dry when DI Peters came across with a piece of paper and a nasty smile, which Tatershall guessed meant an assignment outside of the station. The run from the building to the pool car left him at square one all over again.

In St Ives the rain continued to fall. Cats, dogs and pretty much everything else tumbled from the sky, and lashings of water filled the roads with runoff. Tatershall didn’t want to think about leaving the warm cocoon of the car and he pitied the tourists working their way up and down the streets with their odd shuffle, looking as if they were in harness rather than on holiday. They must be crazy to bother coming to Cornwall at this time of year.