Two Evils: A DI Charlotte Savage Novel (39 page)

‘Empty, ma’am,’ Calter said. She pointed into the room on the right. Bare floorboards, an old rocking chair, a monk’s bench, a huge but plain dresser, some moth-eaten velvet curtains. ‘Just a load of ancient furniture. I reckon whoever lived here is long gone.’

Savage took a glance into the room to the left. It was the same story. Empty. Peeling wallpaper on the wall next to the window where the rain had come through a broken pane.

‘Somebody’s here.’ Savage sniffed the air and pointed down the hallway. ‘In the kitchen.’

She moved along the hall to where a glass-fronted door stood half open, beads of moisture streaming down the pane. She pushed and the door swung to reveal a farmhouse kitchen. To one side stood an Aga, steam hissing from beneath the lid of a large pot.

‘Careful,’ Savage said. ‘We don’t know who we’re dealing with. They could be armed with a Taser. Whatever, they’re very dangerous.’

Calter strolled across to a door, but there was nothing behind except a small larder. She shrugged and then looked to the ceiling.

‘Right, there’s nothing here.’ Savage gestured back the way they had come. ‘We’ll try the first floor.’

She moved back down the hallway to the stairs and began to climb. Beneath her feet the treads creaked in protest, but otherwise appeared sound.

‘More blood, ma’am.’ Calter pointed to another dark stain as she followed Savage up the stairs. ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t belong to Jason.’

Every few steps there was another spot of blood. On the landing the trail turned left and led into a large double-aspect bedroom.

‘Careful, ma’am.’ Calter reached out and grabbed Savage by the shoulder. ‘No floorboards.’

‘Thanks.’ Savage’s attention had been drawn to the ceiling which was covered in hundreds of pages of tiny print. She peered up. The pages were thin, like cigarette paper. ‘These are pages from the Bible.’

‘What the hell is this, ma’am?’

‘No idea.’ Savage turned her gaze to the floor. Or rather, the lack of one. The floorboards had been removed, leaving only the joists. Beneath the joists she could see the slim wooden wattles running back and forth. They wouldn’t be that strong. Step in the gap between the joists and your foot would go right through the plaster. ‘But let’s be careful, OK?’

Unlike the rooms downstairs, this one had furniture. A huge cast-iron bedstead straddled the joists, the bed’s feet carefully positioned on two floorboards which had been left in place. On the far side of the room, beside the window, stood a tall, heavy wardrobe.

‘Christ Almighty!’ Calter leant in through the doorway and pointed across to the bed. ‘What the heck …?’

Savage stepped into the room, making sure she planted her feet firmly on the joists. She walked across half a dozen of them until she stood alongside the bed. Someone was lying there, the bedclothes pulled up to the person’s neck. Grey hair tumbled over the pillow, spread in a fan-like fashion and framing a face of cracked skin. The nose had gone, the nasal bone exposed. Likewise the lips had dried to nothing, revealing white teeth, a golden flash of filling top right.

‘From the grave in the orchard,’ Savage said. ‘She’s obviously been dead for a while.’

‘She?’ Calter tiptoed across the joists. ‘I know it’s got long hair, but how do you know it’s not a man?’

‘There’s a photograph on the pillow.’ Savage pointed to a picture in a small gold frame which lay to the right side of the head. A woman with a mass of long blonde hair was sitting in a chair, a small boy of eleven or twelve on her lap. ‘I think that’s her.’

‘So who’s the boy?’

‘Brenden Parker, of course. This woman must be his mother.’

‘Bloody hell.’ Calter shook her head. ‘Sleeping Beauty, she isn’t.’

‘The question is, where’s Jason? Check the wardrobe, would you?’

Calter nodded and worked her way across to the huge piece of furniture. She fiddled with a key which was in the lock, and then opened the door.

‘Oh God!’ Calter turned her head away from the wardrobe for a moment. ‘You’d better come and look at this, ma’am.’

Savage stepped across the joists until she stood alongside Calter. The DC pointed inside. At the bottom of the wardrobe a pile of clothes lay in a jumble. A dark navy cag with a matching inner fleece. A pair of jeans and an Argyll shirt, tie-dyed with fresh red blood. Above the clothes, several dresses hung on wooden hangers.

‘Looks like Jason’s coat and shirt. From the amount of blood on the shirt and the trail on the way up here, I’d say he’s seriously wounded.’

‘But where?’ Calter spun on her heels, almost losing her balance on the joists. ‘The trail of blood leads into this room.’

Savage turned too. The bed and wardrobe were the only pieces of furniture in the room. There was no loft hatch and both windows were closed. The bed was high off the ground and Savage didn’t have to lean over far to be able to see right underneath. Nothing. She stood upright and stared at the bed again. A tingle spread from her fingertips all the way along her arms. The tingle became a chill which washed across her chest. The thin corpse was too bulky. There was something else beneath the bedclothes.

She stepped back across the joists until she reached the bed. Atop lay a crocheted blanket, beneath another blanket, this one wool. Beneath that, and turned over at the top, was a white sheet. The whole lot was tucked in neatly down the sides and at the end of the bed. Savage grasped the linen up near the pillow and pulled the material out from beneath the mattress. With a flick she threw the whole lot back.

‘Oh fuck!’ Calter stood, mouth open. ‘No!’

The corpse was unclothed. Skin, aged and dry and yellowing, hung in crumpled folds. Here and there, white bones protruded through cracks in the skin. It was hard to believe this thing had ever been living, Savage thought, that the corpse wasn’t some alien zombie creature about to rise from the dead. Harder still to realise the woman wasn’t alone in the bed. That her shrivelled arms were cradling the naked, headless body of a child, hugging the poor creature close to her dried and barren breasts.

The shock of seeing the corpse of Deborah Parker was as nothing to the realisation that the body she was holding in her arms had no head. As the horrific vision sunk in, a chill slipped down Savage’s back.

‘Ma’am!’ Calter put a hand to her chest. ‘Oh God, ma’am … I’ve never …’

‘Easy, Jane.’ Savage moved from the bed and tiptoed her way across the rafters. ‘Back downstairs, quick.’

‘Was that him, ma’am?’ Calter said when they’d made it down to the hallway. The DC shook her head and took several deep breaths. ‘Poor Jason Hobb?’

‘Yes, I think so.’ Savage paused for a moment. She wondered whether Calter had recovered sufficiently for what she had in mind next. ‘If you’re up to it, then with me, OK?’

‘Sure, ma’am.’ Calter took one long breath. ‘Never better.’

Savage turned and went down the hallway towards the kitchen, Calter close behind. The kitchen was much as they’d left it. The larder door still half ajar, the pan on the stove still bubbling away.

‘Ma’am?’ Calter said. ‘What is it?’

‘That.’ Savage gestured over towards the Aga. ‘The pot.’

‘Hey?’ Calter moved past her and strode into the room. ‘The pot? I don’t get it.’

‘You don’t want to know.’ Savage came in and walked over to the stove. She reached for an oven glove which was wrapped round the cooker rail. ‘Here, take this.’

‘What do you want me to do with it?’ Calter said as she took the glove.

‘I want you to lift the lid on the pot. Look away when you do so. There’s no need for you to see.’

‘Oh Christ, ma’am. You’re fucking joking me, right?’

‘No, Jane, I’m not. Now just lift the lid.’

Calter slipped the glove onto her right hand and reached across the stove. Her hand curled as she grasped the handle on the lid. As she lifted the lid a whoosh of steam rose upward like a mushroom cloud and she stepped back to avoid being burned.

Savage moved closer. Inside the pot the water was on a rolling boil, bubbles tumbling over and over. And in amongst the turbulence, Savage could see a mass of blond hair swirling back and forth.

‘Sickening,’ Hardin said. ‘The worst possible news imaginable.’

Savage stood with Hardin and DC Calter on the track leading to the house. The garden, orchard and house were out of bounds. John Layton’s territory. No argument. He’d already investigated a lean-to at the side of the house and found a whole host of woodworking tools and now he was up in the bedroom with Nesbit and a photographer. He’d commented that the joists wouldn’t take any more weight.

‘Wouldn’t want the whole lot to come crashing down into the living room, would we?’ he’d said.

Hardin was off on one of his rants about managing media expectations. They’d played this wrong, he said. The pressure arising from the discovery of Tim Benedict had meant they’d taken their eyes off the ball. The grisly discovery of Jason’s body would refocus the media’s attention. When it came to light that the police had questioned the killer but done nothing, all hell would break loose.

‘Fucking nightmare.’ Hardin shook his head and then stared at Savage. ‘You were there. At Brenden Parker’s place. How come you never twigged? You, of all people, Charlotte. Hunting killers was in your blood, you said. You had a track record, you said. Well, I never should have listened to you. Get this – Parker admitted to you that he killed Jason Caldwell, but you didn’t think to take it further. Sussing out Parker was the only chance we had of finding Jason. Except now we’ve bloody found him, haven’t we?’

Savage tried not to stare at the ground. This wasn’t her fault, she thought. Hardin was out of order. Brenden Parker hadn’t killed Caldwell, it had been his dad. Sure, the incident must have affected the boy and the guilt he’d carried all these years had probably led to his current mind state, but was there any way she could have known?

‘Sir?’ Savage decided to try to calm the DSupt down. ‘If it hadn’t been for a member of the public coming forward, we’d never have found this place. It’s off the radar, not in any of our evidence.’

‘Well, why the bloody hell wasn’t it in any of our evidence?’ Hardin swept his arm around and jabbed at the house. ‘One look at the house and even the dimmest DC would realise this is the lair of some fucking nutter. If somebody had an ounce of brains, Jason Hobb would still be alive.’

‘Presumably the killer chose his mother’s place because he thought we’d never discover it without his help.’

‘Don’t get clever with me, DI Savage. If we start waiting for criminals to help us out, we may as well pack up and go home now. Pathetic.’

Savage was about to say something else when Layton and Nesbit came out of the house. It was the signal for the mortuary attendants to go in. Savage shivered, thinking of having to separate the two bodies from each other and pack the dried, shrivelled corpse into a body bag. And then there was the pot with the head in. She didn’t even want to think about how they’d deal with that.

‘A stab wound in the stomach,’ Nesbit said as he approached. ‘Went deep enough to sever the aorta. Jason Hobb likely died in a similar manner to Jason Caldwell.’

‘Like father like son,’ Hardin said. ‘Brenden Parker is one fucked-up individual.’

‘Quite, Conrad.’ Nesbit half smiled. ‘Anyway, the trail of blood you saw was superficial. My hypothesis is Jason Hobb died from massive internal bleeding. His head, thank God, was almost certainly removed after death. We’ll know for sure after the post-mortem.’

‘And the woman?’ Savage said. ‘Natural causes?’

‘Much trickier to know. There aren’t any visible signs of death. Maybe the post-mortem will throw up something, maybe not. To judge by the state of the corpse, she’s been dead for a good few months. Assuming the grave in the orchard was dug at the time of death, we may be able to get something from that. What do you think, John?’

‘Yes. Soil samples and bugs,’ Layton said by way of explanation. ‘We’ll check out the rest of the orchard and blitz the house as soon as the bodies have been removed.’

‘Charlotte,’ Hardin said, pulling Savage away to one side and lowering his voice. ‘The minister, what do we know of his connection to this woman?’

‘According to Frank Parker, Deborah Parker had some form of relationship with the minister. Obviously when the boys went missing the heat became too much and he never came back to the home. Anyway, the place shut down not long after.’

‘But here?’ Hardin glanced back at the house. ‘Could there be anything we could use?’

‘I doubt it. The place has been stripped. There might be something at Brenden Parker’s house in Ivybridge.’

‘Talking of Parker, where is he? I thought he’d been Tasered by the nutter who’d captured Sleet and Benedict?’

‘I don’t know, sir. I think we’re close to the endgame though. Perhaps Parker knew he was in danger himself, knew his time was up. That could be why he killed Jason Hobb and placed him in the arms of his mother, almost as if she would protect him from any further harm.’

‘Jesus.’ Hardin shook his head. ‘So, taking stock, Brenden Parker is still somewhere out there. There are two dead boys, a dead woman, a dead clergyman and a man who’s still missing. Not to mention the historical abuse and murder and the involvement of a top government minister. Quite how I explain this to Heldon, I really don’t know.’

With that, Hardin wheeled about and headed towards several officers who were smoking next to the gateway. When he reached them he laid into the group with a torrent of expletives.

‘It’s getting to him,’ Calter said as Savage went over. ‘Think I’ll try and keep my distance for the rest of the day.’

‘It’s getting to us all,’ Savage said. ‘But this is personal not professional.’

‘Personal? You mean he’s connected to this somehow?’

‘Way back, yes.’ Savage turned to face the house. ‘When he was a young PC.’

Calter nodded, as if Savage had explained everything. She hadn’t, though. The burden of a secret, she thought. She of all people should know what that felt like.

She turned to the house where the two mortuary assistants had reappeared at the front door, a body bag slung between them. From the ease with which they were carrying the bag, she guessed it contained the old woman. Dry skin and bone and not much else, apart from Deborah Parker’s own secrets which she’d carried with her to her grave in the orchard.