Two Evils: A DI Charlotte Savage Novel (14 page)

The female mannequin in the box on the raft had been burned and hacked about. The arm had been severed. Could the damage be illustrative of what might happen to the cowardly and faithless mentioned in the text? If so, then was the whole set-up a message or a threat? On the other hand, perhaps Enders’ initial hunch had been correct and the thing was some kind of prank.

‘We need to impound the raft as evidence,’ Riley had said to Enders once Layton had gone. ‘Get the CSIs to work over it to see what else they can find.’

A phone call to the harbour master revealed the final resting place for the raft. The makeshift craft had been towed round to a boatyard up the Plym. There it had been craned from the water and broken up.

‘That was the deal.’ The harbour master sounded apologetic as he explained. ‘If they took the raft off our hands they could do what they wanted with it. Boatyards always have a use for this sort of stuff. Odd pieces of wood, plastic barrels, sheets of ply. I daresay bits and pieces of it are stacked up somewhere, if you want to take a look.’

Riley did and an hour later he stood in the boatyard with Enders. The yard sat on the west side of the Plym, tucked between the Laira Bridge and a scrap metal merchant. Boats of all sorts stood on the shore in various states of disrepair, while others floated on the river tied up to a couple of long pontoons. This, Riley could see, was the other end of the market from the posh marinas with their huge gleaming yachts; G and Ts and tanned women lounging on spotless aft decks were in short supply.

The yard hand who’d accompanied them coughed and Riley brought his mind back to the job. He pointed at the pile of wood stacked up against a rusting shipping container.

‘Is that the lot?’ Riley said.

‘Yup. Apart from the barrels.’ The yard hand gestured over to a skip. ‘I opened one up and didn’t like the smell of what was inside. I was going to wash them out but then thought better of it.’

‘Why?’

‘Contamination.’ The man turned and looked towards the estuary. ‘Doesn’t bear thinking about. We put anything in the river which causes problems and we’d have all sorts of environmental fines slapped on us.’

‘And the stuff in the barrels, any ideas?’

‘Some chemical. None of the barrels had any labels, so it wasn’t worth taking the risk.’

‘We’ll need to take a look at them and get a sample for the lab.’ Riley pointed at the pile of wood. ‘And all this, it’s not to be touched, understood?’

The man nodded and then stared at Enders. The DC had pulled a roll of blue and white police tape from his pocket and was draping great streams of the stuff over the remains of the raft.

‘Crime scene?’ the yard hand said, reading the words printed on the tape. ‘What crime’s that then?’

Riley thought for a moment. He wanted to make sure the man knew this wasn’t a trivial issue, but he didn’t want to give anything away.

‘A serious one,’ he said.

After lunch and another skim through the
Curlew
summary file, Savage headed to Woodland Heights. The children’s home sat in an isolated position on the coast between Salcombe and Hope Cove, some fifteen miles east of Plymouth. A long driveway passed a static caravan park and ambled down across several fields, curling round to arrive at the big old house. Savage drove along the track, pausing to open and close a gate on the way. As her car bumped the final quarter of a mile down the pothole-strewn drive, the coastal panorama opened out and she could see the home stood close to a jagged outcrop a little to the west of Soar Mill Cove. Farther to the east, cliffs staggered round and into the Salcombe estuary in a series of dramatic rock abutments.

She pulled her car onto a large gravel area to one side of the building and got out. Situated just a few hundred metres from the high cliffs, the house had a commanding view to the south, where Savage could see several huge ships riding the horizon. Closer in, the strong breeze disturbed the sea, and the sunlight made the surface sparkle like a million blue diamonds.

She walked round to the front of the house, where a grand stairway led up to the entrance porch. Looking at the facade, she guessed the place must be Victorian, although later additions to the house had been cobbled onto the side and rear. Now there was an air of decay about the structure. Plywood panels had been nailed over the lower windows, ‘Keep Out’ stencilled on each in spray paint. The first-floor windows had no such protection and several had been broken. Above that there were a number of dormers poking from the slate roof. Considering the size of the house, she was surprised the place hadn’t been snapped up by developers.

The property sat plumb in the centre of a large field and, aside from a small patch which looked like it had once been a vegetable garden, the area was down to grass. In the summer this would have been a great place to be. She closed her eyes for a moment and imagined groups of boys running free, playing football, making their way down to the nearby beach and swimming in the sea. Perhaps she was painting too idyllic a picture. Perhaps the freedom this place offered had turned into something else. There were no other dwellings in the vicinity, nobody to see anything untoward, no one to hear the screams.

Savage opened her eyes and shook her head. She was jumping to conclusions. Possibly nothing had happened here and the two boys had just run away. But if so, where had they been for the past two and a half decades?

She climbed the steps. White paint peeled away from the surface of the front door, revealing dark oak beneath, while a huge brass knob in the centre had tarnished green in the sea air. On the floor of the porch lay a plastic estate agent’s sign: Marchand Petit, Salcombe. There were marks on the surface of the front door where the sign had been stapled to the wood. Somebody had torn it down.

She knew the home had closed the year after the boys had gone missing. The building had already been in quite a state and the council had sold it for a song. Over the intervening years there’d been talk of the place being turned into a hotel. The property was an eyesore, but Savage could imagine a developer reworking the inside into a number of luxury apartments. Second-homers would fall over themselves to buy a slice of seaside living. So far though, it didn’t look like any sale had taken place.

She looked again at the door. There was splintering around the lock. The door had been forced. She grasped the brass knob and pushed. The door opened.

Inside, a long hallway led to the rear. On the floor, dust and debris lay scattered across red quarry tiles. A pile of bird droppings sat against one wall, black and white streaks leading up to a light fitting where a bundle of sticks marked an old nest. The air was damp, the scent heavy with mildew and mould. Savage stepped in, avoiding a large lump of plaster which had fallen from the ceiling. Both to the right and the left, huge portals opened to large reception rooms where there were more signs of decay. In one room, great swathes of wallpaper had peeled away from the walls, while in the other, part of the floor was missing, a dark, dank hole revealing some sort of cellar beneath.

She moved down the hallway to the rear of the house where she found another set of rooms: a kitchen, a dining room complete with several tables and benches, and a number of smaller rooms obviously once used for storage. She also found the door to the cellar, steps leading downward, a faint light from the hole in the floor of the room above.

Savage thought about going down there but then changed her mind. She had a torch in the car. She’d do the rest of the house first and then get the torch. Now she was inside though she couldn’t imagine what she might find which could help the investigation. In fact, she began to wonder what on earth she was doing here at all. There wasn’t going to be any evidence, not after all this time. Anyway, the police had presumably been through the property back when the boys had gone missing.

She returned to the hallway and climbed the stairs, placing each foot tentatively on the steps, worried about rotten floorboards. At the top, a landing ran in two directions, a number of corridors leading off the landing. She took a look in several of the rooms. Two had one or more bunk beds in. The others were empty. There was also a separate suite of rooms which looked as if it could be living accommodation for the staff. Although she was getting a sense of what the place must have been like, so far nothing struck her as out of the ordinary.

At one end of the landing a narrow staircase climbed to the attic rooms. Savage tested the stairs and then went up. The stairs curled round and ended at another landing, several doors opening into three small box rooms. Who slept up here? Savage wondered. Was it a privilege to be placed high under the rafters or possibly a punishment? She went into each room in turn. In the first two there was nothing of interest and the rooms seemed to have been recently inhabited by pigeons. There were droppings everywhere, feathers too. On one of the windowsills the skeleton of a bird sat next to a broken pane. In the third room there were two single beds, barely space to walk between them. Each had an old mattress, but mice or rats had been at the material and not much remained other than torn-up shreds. Savage stepped over to one of the beds. On the headboard she could see the boys had carved their names into the wood. When the mattress had been in place the carvings would have been hidden. Now the mattress had rotted away the list was a roll call of boys who’d slept in this room. Savage bent and looked at the names. There amongst them was Jason Caldwell.

The boy had been up here, but presumably the police had known that. When the boy had run away they’d have examined the attic rooms and questioned his roommate. There couldn’t be any evidence here to help her now, could there?

She knelt by the bed and peered underneath the frame. There didn’t seem to be anything under the bed. She put her hand beneath the bed and ran her fingers around the underside of the frame. There was nothing concealed there but she did feel a rough patch of wood on one of the legs. She lowered her head further. There, carved in the bed leg, were some more words. Not names this time but a sentence.

Savage let out a long breath and bit her lip. She quickly examined the rest of the frame and then moved to the second bed. Nothing. She crawled back across the floor and looked at the words again. There was something wrong here, she thought. She peered at the bed for a moment and then she had it. The wood of the frame was dirty, covered in dust and here and there smeared with bird droppings. However, the leg with the writing was clear, as if it had been cleaned, possibly prior to the name being carved into the wood.

Savage stood, not knowing if this was evidence or not. She moved to one of the dormer windows and stared out at the view. Was it possible somebody had got wind of the case review and had come here to leave her a clue? She didn’t know but, since Hardin had only decided to investigate not more than a couple of hours ago, it seemed unlikely.

She was about to step back from the window and head for the stairs when something caught her eye. A car coming along the track. The car pulled into the car park and stopped next to Savage’s vehicle. The driver’s door opened and a man got out. Early fifties, cropped brown hair and rough-shaven, an old jacket over a lumberjack shirt, a muscular builder’s physique bulging beneath the clothing. The man stood by Savage’s car for a moment before spitting on the ground. He went to the rear of his own car, sprang the boot and pulled something out. Then he turned towards the house and glanced up at the attic windows. Savage jumped back, her heart pounding. She moved her head slowly forward and looked out again. The man was heading for the front door, a long metal bar in his right hand.

After visiting the boatyard, Riley and Enders headed across the Plym and round to Jennycliff for another recce. It was a little after two thirty when Enders pulled the pool Focus into the car park. A dozen other vehicles sat in a line on one side of the gravel expanse, windscreens glinting in the low winter sun. Several of the occupants were having a late lunch break. Fish and chips in a cardboard tray. Cheap junk food bought for a few quid. But, Riley thought, the view across Plymouth Sound was priceless.