Two Evils: A DI Charlotte Savage Novel (19 page)

‘I think we might have something else, Jane,’ Savage shouted out. ‘In here.’

There was a clanking as Calter released the chains. She came into the little room and Savage pointed down at the floor.

‘Ma’am?’

‘If the date on this concrete is correct, the floor was put down not long after Hayskith and Caldwell went missing. Suspicious, don’t you think?’

‘More than suspicious.’ Calter peered down. ‘But who laid the floor?’

‘No idea, but they wouldn’t have been able to mix this amount of concrete in secret.’

‘And you really think they’re under here? The two boys?’

‘It’s possible.’ Savage stood and waved the torch round the room once more. ‘Say someone killed them. They temporarily secrete the bodies elsewhere. A search takes place of the house and the local area. More than one search, according to the files. When everything is done and dusted, the bodies are brought back and buried in the cellar. Concrete is poured on top for good measure. The place has already been turned upside down, right? No way anyone is coming back again, and if they do, there’s nothing to find.’

‘Except those.’ Calter swung her torch so the beam pierced the arch and shone into the next room. ‘The manacles.’

‘Yes, there’s something not right about that. But it doesn’t change the evidence here.’

‘So what do we do now?’

‘We get a warrant.’ Savage waved her arm at the floor. ‘To dig this lot up.’

‘Really? Do you think there’s enough—’ Calter stopped. She glanced at the ceiling and then lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘Did you hear that, ma’am? There’s somebody up there!’

Savage followed Calter’s gaze. She swung her torch upwards. A tiny shower of dust crossed the beam of light as the floor above creaked.

‘Come on.’ Savage moved from the little room into the main area, covering the end of her torch so only a tiny glow could be seen. ‘Let’s go upstairs.’

‘This is the bit where you tell me the Force Support Group is on standby outside,’ Calter said. ‘Right?’

‘Wrong, Jane. We’re on our own.’

Savage began to climb the steps towards the rectangle of grey at the top. Halfway up she paused and listened. Nothing but the sound of the dripping tap. At the top she stopped again. There. Another creak, this time from somewhere on the first floor.

‘They’ve gone upstairs,’ Savage whispered. She turned to Calter. ‘We go up. Once we see what they’re doing, we announce ourselves.’

Calter nodded and followed Savage as she tiptoed from the kitchen and into the corridor. Plaster debris crunched under their feet and at one point a loud crack echoed through the hallway as Calter stepped on a piece of wood.

‘Sorry, ma’am,’ Calter said. ‘I think we should rush them. Stealth mode’s impossible.’

‘OK, I’ll go up, you stay here.’ Savage indicated a door near the bottom of the stairway. ‘Remain hidden, but if I shout, be prepared to tackle them, OK?’

‘Yeah, but what about you?’

‘I’ll be fine, don’t worry.’

Savage began to ascend the stairway. This was Elijah Samuel, she figured. He’d be furious that she was nosing around, but he’d hardly attack her, would he?

Every step she made brought a new noise: a creak, a rustle from a pile of newspaper, something dislodged which bounced down the stairs, clatter, clatter, clatter. On the landing she stood stock-still and held her breath. Whoever was up here had climbed to the attic and she could hear the scrape as one of the beds was being pulled across the floor.

She reconsidered her earlier judgement. Why would Samuel be exploring his own property in the middle of the night? If he was looking for intruders he’d surely have a big torch and he wouldn’t be creeping around. She slipped along the landing and peered up the twisting stairway. An ethereal light painted the walls with a pale lustre. For a second she shivered, but then realised the clouds had broken and the glow was nothing more than the light from the moon.

Then she heard something.

A whisper.

Then another.

She placed a foot on the bottom stair and began to move up. Step by step she went, her back pressed against the wall so she could see as far round the curving stairwell as possible. A couple of steps from the top she hesitated. The whispering was close now, just beyond the landing, probably inside the room where she’d found the bed with the writing scratched into the frame. She cocked her head in an attempt to decipher the words.

We’ll be friends forever, won’t we?

Yes!

Promise?

Yes!

Cross your heart and hope to die?

Yes! Yes! Yes! Especially the hoping to die bit.

Don’t worry, the dying stuff is my speciality. But then you’d remember that, wouldn’t you?

The whispers came one after another, some sort of conversation going on, only there was just the one voice, somebody talking to himself.

Savage took another step and as she did so a creak eased from beneath her foot. The whispering stopped, leaving total silence. She took shallow breaths, her heart pumping as she weighed her options. Moonlight flooded through a dormer to her left, illuminating the landing. Her shadow would fall across the entrance to the room and whoever was within would know she was coming. The surprise could cause an unnecessary confrontation.

‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Who’s there?’

Nothing.

And then something came from the room, a shadow sprinting across the landing and barrelling into her. She fell sideways, her body scraping down the wall. The dark form leapt past, taking several stairs in a single bound. Then they were gone.

Savage tumbled over, stair-surfing down several steps, her hands out in front of her, each bump knocking the wind from her lungs. She came to rest halfway down.

‘Calter!’ she shouted, a pain in her ribs coming as she yelled.

A screech came from the first floor. Not Calter, something else. Savage pulled her legs round in front of her and stood up. Nothing broken, thank God. She descended the rest of the stairs and as she ran along the first-floor landing she heard DC Calter call out from below.

‘Ma’am? Are you all right?’

‘Yes. Did anyone come down?’

‘No.’

Savage groped in her pocket and found her torch. She flicked it on and illuminated the landing in front of her. Calter crunched up the stairs and they met at the top.

‘Gone,’ Savage said, feeling a cold draught on her face. She pointed the torch and a reflection flashed out a few metres away. A sash window, the bottom half pulled up. ‘Through there.’

The two of them walked forward and at the window Savage peered out. Moonlight flooded a bare concrete yard; beyond lay a hedge and on the other side of the hedge nothing but empty fields.

Chapter Seventeen

Near Bovisand, Devon. Saturday 24th October. 10.29 a.m.

Saturday morning found Savage trying to run the
Curlew
investigation from her front room. Pete was out racing their little yacht,
Puffin
, so she was attempting to be both a mother and a police officer. She sat at a little desk in one corner while Samantha and Jamie played on Jamie’s new Xbox. The device had been a birthday present from grandparents and had entered the household against Savage’s better judgement.

‘He’ll grow up wanting to shoot things,’ Savage had said to Pete.

‘So?’ Pete had replied. ‘What’s wrong with that?’

On the far side of the room a wail came from Jamie. Savage looked across to the screen where an innocuous and rather vacuous game appeared to involve nothing more than a furry monster jumping from platform to platform on an endless scrolling screen. As she watched, Jamie’s avatar fell from a walkway into a pool of sharks and Jamie squealed again. Savage shook her head. Still, at least the thing was keeping him out of her hair.

Her mobile bleeped a tune and she picked the phone up.

‘John, you’ve got it?’ she said. ‘The warrant?’

‘Yes,’ Layton said. ‘At least it’s all been OK’d. Just dotting the i
’
s, etcetera.’

The flat tone suggested the outcome was never in doubt, but Savage knew different. The search warrant relied on there being reasonable grounds for believing an offence had been committed and there being material on site which would be of substantial value to the investigation. A complication was that the home had been searched before, albeit many years ago, so the police needed to argue this was either new evidence or something which had been missed previously.

‘And you didn’t mention my visit?’

‘No, not the second one.’

‘So how did you wing it?’

‘The old “anonymous tip-off” routine. Worked a treat. Shall we say one o’clock at Elijah Samuel’s place?’

Savage glanced at her watch. Pete wouldn’t be back until one at the earliest and she needed to drive over there. ‘Make it two, OK?’

Layton agreed and hung up.

She turned back to Jamie and Samantha. On screen, Jamie’s furry creature had met yet another grisly demise, this time at the bottom of a rocky chasm. Luckily for Jamie and Samantha, the game had given them multiple lives. Savage smiled for a moment and then looked back at the
Curlew
papers, her mind returning to the two boys, Jason Caldwell and Liam Hayskith. They hadn’t been so fortunate, she thought. They’d had just the one life each.

Elijah Samuel lived in a tiny thatched cottage in the village of Bolberry, just half a mile from the children’s home. Savage stood in the lane as Layton and a uniformed PC went to the front door, Layton with the warrant in his hand.

The door swung wide and Samuel stood hunched in the low porch. He nodded as Layton told him of their intention to search Woodland Heights.

‘I won’t bloody have it,’ he said, gesturing over Layton’s shoulder to Savage. ‘I let her look round in good faith. If I’d known you’d hold it against me I’d have had her for trespassing.’

Then Samuel snatched the piece of paper from Layton’s hand, retreated into the cottage and slammed the door.

With the warrant served, Layton led a procession of cars and vans to the home. He chatted to Savage as his CSIs unloaded the equipment.

‘Shouldn’t take long this, Charlotte,’ Layton said. He pointed over to where two men were readying a compressor and a jackhammer. ‘Unless the concrete is really thick, that’ll break through it in no time.’

‘Good. The sooner we can discover the truth about what went on here, the better.’

‘Yes.’ Layton gazed over at the house. ‘Have you notified the coroner?’

‘I’ve alerted him to the possibility we might find something. I’ve had Luke Farrell contact the relatives too. There’ll be a lot of media interest when this gets out and I don’t want them doorstepped.’

Layton nodded. ‘Closure. That’s what they want. The paradox is, only a positive result gives them peace. Anything else and they go on wondering.’

Closure. Savage had found some sort of closure for herself and her family, but it hadn’t stopped her wondering.

Layton had moved over to one of the vans. More tools. Shovels, pickaxes, a couple of big dumpy bags to put the spoil in. Savage was glad everything was now official, that she was moving beyond the paper-chase Hardin had set her. There was no more hiding, no more covering things up. If they found something, there’d not only be the chance of criminal prosecutions, there would also be major repercussions across a number of agencies.

She got suited up in her PPE gear and followed Layton into the house. The CSIs had located the compressor outside the back door and a long hose snaked into the kitchen and down into the cellar. The motor on the compressor chugged rhythmically, a slight hiss audible.

She descended into the cellar, where the darkness had been banished by a white glare from several sets of lights on tripods. Layton cast a black shadow on one wall as he examined the bed and the manacles.

‘You said you thought there was something odd about these, right?’ Layton said. He held up one of the cuffs. ‘Well, you’re correct. They aren’t thirty years old.’

‘How can you tell?’ Savage said, moving across to Layton.

‘Look.’ Layton held out the piece of metal. ‘It’s not tarnished or rusty, although the cellar is as damp as anything. Then there’s where the chain is fixed to the wall. The mortar has been disturbed recently.’

Savage peered at the iron ring holding the chain. Where the shaft of the bolt penetrated the wall, the cement was a lighter colour. The surface layer had crumbled away as somebody had fixed the bolt in place.

‘How long?’

‘A couple of weeks, a few months. Sorry to be so imprecise, but I can tell you we’re not talking years. The bed probably comes from one of the rooms upstairs. What’s more, both the shackles and the bed have been wiped over. Whoever put them down here made sure to cover their tracks.’

‘So they’ve been left as clues. Like the writing I found upstairs.’

‘Perhaps.’ Layton gestured over to the arched doorway. ‘Come through here, there’s more weirdness.’

Layton led the way through to the little room. Inside, one of the CSIs was making an adjustment to the jackhammer before he started on the floor. There was a low throbbing sound and the hiss of air escaping. The room was lit by another set of halogen lights on a stand, the glare unbearably harsh.

‘Over here.’ Layton moved across to the left-hand side where a broom leant against the wall. A pile of dirt had been swept away from the concrete into a little pile. ‘Jim was just clearing the floor when we found this.’

Layton tapped the concrete with his foot and then pointed, circling the area with his finger. Savage could see that on the outside of the area the concrete was white. However, the patch which Layton was indicating was a darker colour.

‘I’m sorry, John,’ Savage said. ‘I’m not big on ready-mix, you’ll have to explain.’

‘The white concrete was laid years ago. The date you found over in the corner is probably accurate. The darker area, although hard, hasn’t fully cured yet. It’s months old at the most.’ Layton shrugged apologetically. ‘I reckon somebody’s beaten us to it.’