Cut Dead (2 page)

‘Joanne?’

She turned to where Jody had deposited the last bucket of soil. Amongst the earth and stones a piece of fabric stood out, the shiny red incongruous against the grey-brown sludge. She moved over to the spoil heap and peered at the scrap of material. Roman? Viking? Saxon? Unlikely, she thought, not in nylon. And not with a Topshop label either.

Joanne looked back into the hole to see if there might be anything else down there.

The arm had pushed up through the mud, as if reaching out and upwards, trying to escape from entombment or perhaps trying to cling on to the piece of clothing, the last vestiges of their dignity. Slimy water sloshed around the limb and nearby the round curve of a breast stuck out like a white sandy island on an ocean of grey. Joanne stared into the abyss, for all of a sudden that’s what the hole had become, at the same time groping in her coat pocket for her mobile. She dialled 999 and when a man with a calm voice answered, she was surprised to find she responded in the same manner.

‘Police,’ she said.

And then she began to scream.

DI Charlotte Savage carried yet another plastic crate from the car into the house and through to the kitchen where her husband, Pete, stood unpacking. She dumped the crate on the floor and he looked over at her and shook his head.

‘One more and that’s the lot,’ Savage said, before turning and heading back outside.

The summer half-term holiday had turned sour after the weather had delivered nearly a week of blustery conditions. Sunshine and showers would have been OK had they remained at home, but instead they’d opted to have a week sailing. Their little boat was cosy with two, but cramped with four – and if you added in a good measure of rain, a moody teenage daughter and a bored six-year-old son the situation became more of an ordeal than anything approaching fun.

Pete had insisted on sailing east from Plymouth rather than begin the holiday with a beat into the wind, saying the weather was forecast to change, giving them an easy run home. They had stopped overnight at Salcombe and Dartmouth, ending their journey at Brixham. But the promised north-easterlies never developed. Instead the weather worsened as two lows in quick succession came from out of the west, the second developing into a nasty gale. Because of time constraints they’d set out from Brixham as soon as the second low passed, intending to do the journey back to Plymouth in one hop. Once they’d rounded Berry Head though the weather deteriorated further and they put into Dartmouth again. A phone call home and Stefan came out in their car and swapped places with Savage and the kids, the idea being that Pete and Stefan would bring the boat back, whatever the conditions, while she took the kids home. Stefan was the family’s unofficial Swedish au pair and a semi-professional sailor. With Pete having been twenty years in the Royal Navy – the last five as commander of a frigate – the two of them thought nothing of bringing the boat back to Plymouth in a near gale.

At home she waited for hours until at last a call came through from Pete saying they were passing the breakwater at the edge of Plymouth Sound. Twenty minutes later Savage stood on the marina pontoon and took their lines, Samantha, her daughter, shouting to her dad that he didn’t look so clever. Stefan was grinning.

‘Remind me never to go to sea with him again.’ Pete pointed at Stefan. ‘He’s crazy.’

‘The trouble with you, you old softy,’ Stefan said, ‘is you’re used to wearing your carpet slippers when you helm a boat.’

‘The forecast said seven decreasing five or six,’ Pete said, as he repositioned a fender. ‘But it was a full gale force eight and the waves came up from the south out of nowhere.’

‘They look a bit bigger when you’re looking up at them instead of down, don’t they?’ Stefan said, still smiling as he threw Savage another rope.

The phone rang at around seven in the evening as she was clearing the last of an enormous spaghetti bolognese from her plate. The brusque tone of Detective Superintendent Conrad Hardin rumbled down the line, his voice breaking up as he tried to find a signal for his mobile.

‘Three of them, Charlotte,’ he said. ‘Three. Understand? Never seen anything like … don’t know how … need to try and …’

‘Sir?’

‘Bere Peninsula, Charlotte.’ The signal strong for a moment, Hardin’s voice clear. ‘Tavy View Farm. Nesbit is there, John Layton too, a whole contingent descending on the place, media as well. Bloody nightmare. Meet you in an hour, OK?’

Savage eased the car down the lane past a BBC outside broadcast vehicle and a white van, nudged into a space behind the familiar shape of John Layton’s Volvo, and killed the engine. The car settled into the soft verge, the rain glittering in the headlights before she switched them off too. She sat still for a moment, a tingle of excitement creeping down her spine. Breathing slowly in and out, she let the memories of the past week with Pete and the kids slip away, clearing her thoughts for the task in hand. Her mind had to become a blank canvas, ready for the first wash of colour, the broad brush strokes, the intricate detailing.

A bang on the roof startled her, and she squinted through the window to see the bulky figure of DSupt Hardin standing alongside. He tapped on the glass and she lowered the window.

‘Sorry for calling you out, Charlotte,’ he said. ‘But you know how it is. Thing like this needs quality officers on board. Can’t afford to muck this one up, because the case is going to be something big. And I don’t mean in a good way, get my drift?’

‘Sir?’ Savage felt her heart rate rise. Was this the case which would dispel the boredom of the last few months? She hoped so, because since early in the new year she’d been on what she classed as menial duties; Hardin’s punishment for straying from the straight and narrow.

‘Best see for yourself. Across the field. Hope you brought your wellies.’

Hardin stood and walked away, disappearing into the dark for a moment before he reached a circle of light where a uniformed officer in a yellow waterproof was arguing with a woman. Savage noted the little black on white letters on the woman’s jacket: BBC. Seemed like even the Beeb didn’t respect the right for privacy these days.

Savage got out of the car, put on waterproofs, a white coverall over the top. A pair of boots completed the outfit and she trudged down the lane to where the uniformed officer guarded the gate to a farmyard. Through the gate and Savage approached a police Transit, one of the rear doors of the van standing open. Inside, the interior resembled a mini-office and John Layton, their senior Crime Scene Investigator, sat at a desk with another officer. Layton’s trademark Tilley hat was perched on his head and little globules of water glistened where they had beaded on the canvas material. Below the hat was a thin face with a Roman nose and intense eyes which took in everything. Right now those eyes were scanning the screen of a laptop which displayed a schematic drawing of some kind, overlaying a large-scale map of the area.

‘Charlotte,’ he said, noticing her for the first time. ‘Go and take a look.’

‘You sure?’

‘Sure I’m sure. The place is a complete mess already, nothing left to preserve. Besides, we’ve established a safe entry route. The field is too wet for my stepping plates – stupid little things are sinking right down into the mud – but we nicked a load of pallets from up in the farmyard and laid them down. Looks bloody stupid, but it was all I could think of. Got some proper walkways coming later, if we need them, but doing any type of fingertip search in this quagmire is going to be nigh on impossible. Here, sign yourself in. You’ll need this too.’

Layton handed her a torch and an electronic pad and she scrawled her name before turning away and walking past the van to another gateway. A second uniformed officer in bright waterproofs stood in the gateway, water running down off the peak of his hood and dripping onto his nose.

‘Evening, ma’am,’ he sniffed. ‘One week until midsummer, so I heard. Reckon my calendar must have been printed wrong.’

Savage nodded and continued past, switching on the torch and following a line of tape leading into the darkness. Several sets of footprints had filled with water and the torchlight picked out their muddied surface. In the distance something glowed white, almost welcoming in the way it provided a beacon to aim for.

She squelched on until she came to Layton’s makeshift stepping plates: a number of pallets laid in a line which curled away from the edge of the field and towards the white glow. Closer now, and Savage could see what she already knew: the glow came from a forensic shelter. White nylon with blue mudflaps at the base. The chug, chug, chug of a small generator didn’t blot out the noise of rain on the shelter’s fabric, nor the low hum of conversation coming from within the tent.

A figure in a white coverall stood at the entrance and Savage was pleased to see that the wisp of blonde hair coming from beneath the hood belonged to Detective Constable Jane Calter. Calter was always as keen as mustard and hadn’t yet acquired the cynicism which afflicted longer-serving members of CID. When Savage reached the shelter she tapped the young detective on the shoulder. Calter turned.

‘Hello, ma’am.’ Calter pointed to the centre of the tent. ‘Not my idea of a Saturday night out to be honest.’

Savage peered through the opening, shielding her eyes against the glare from the halogen lights within, painful after the darkness. You could only call the excavation a pit; ‘hole’ didn’t do the yawning void justice. One of Layton’s CSIs stood up to her neck in the pit, her protective suit splattered grey-brown with gunge. Savage moved closer, realising as she did so that somebody else was down there. A face looked up at her, mud caked thick on grey eyebrows above little round glasses.

‘Charlotte.’ Dr Andrew Nesbit, the pathologist, knelt at the bottom of the shaft. No jokes today. Face as grim as the weather. ‘Never a nice time, but this …’

Savage stepped over to the edge of the hole, where scaffold boards had been placed around the top to stop the edges giving way. Nesbit’s arm gestured across the sludge and Savage breathed in hard at what she saw.

Three of them, Hardin had said. But ‘them’ implied something you could recognise as human. Whatever was down there in the mud looked a long, long way from that.

‘Bodies only,’ Nesbit said. ‘No heads. And by the look of things on this first one, no genitals either.’

‘Christ,’ Savage heard herself mutter under her breath, not really knowing why. The reference to a higher being was futile. No God could exist in a world alongside this sort of horror. ‘Male? Female?’

‘All females I think and they’re …’

‘What?’

‘Markings, I guess. On one of them at least.’ Nesbit moved a hand down and wiped sludge away from one of the grey forms. ‘Cut lines. All over.’

‘Was that what killed them?’

‘No idea, not here. We’ll need to get them out to discover that, only …’

‘Only what?’

‘I think I’ve seen this before. Years ago.’ Nesbit stood, shook his head and then moved to the aluminium ladder and began to clamber from the hole. ‘I’m sure of one thing though.’

‘Andrew?’ Savage cursed Nesbit, hoped he wasn’t playing games with her. ‘What is it?’

Nesbit stared down into the mud, shook his head once more and then looked at Savage, something like desperation in his eyes. Then he seemed to get hold of himself. Smiled.

‘I’m getting too old for this, Charlotte. Much too old.’

Chapter Two

Nr Bovisand, Devon. Sunday 15th June. 3.04 p.m.

In the early hours of Sunday Hardin had sent most of the team home. Not much they could do, he said. Better to take some time off while they could, because from now on they’d be working flat out. Plans for Sunday onward were to be shelved, all leave cancelled. Savage managed a few hours’ broken sleep and then she was up, the morning passing in a blur of unpacking, cleaning and sorting. Jamie and Samantha were happy to be back from the trip; not so happy it was school the next day, the holiday gone, their precious time wasted in the rain-soaked ports of Brixham and Dartmouth.

By Sunday afternoon the bad weather had blown through and at three o’clock Savage left home. Passing a supermarket on the outskirts of town, she could see the car park was packed. With the forecast promising sun if not warmth, people were out shopping for food for their barbecues. Sausages, burgers, baps, cheap lager and warm white wine. Perhaps later, when the full news about what had been found at the farm broke, appetites would be tempered, fires doused, parties moved inside, excuses made so people might return home and lock their doors.

She drove through Plymouth and headed for the Bere Peninsula. The finger of land was almost encircled by the Tamar and Tavy rivers and where they met the confluence formed a ‘V’ shape pointing towards the city, with the village of Bere Ferrers stuck right down at the bottom. The rivers left the eight or so square miles of the peninsula all but cut off by water. This meant that although Tavy View Farm lay only a couple of miles north of the city, getting there involved a circuitous journey first to the north and then through a maze of country roads, the whole route putting a dozen miles on the clock. Isolated, Savage thought as she headed to the village. And maybe that was the point.

As she coasted down the lane to the farm, high clouds drifted above, their lower sections tinged with darkness, every now and then blotting out the sun. Various police vehicles occupied most of the farmyard so she parked in the lane. A train trundled out from Bere Ferrers as she walked through the gateway into the farmyard, the low rumble causing people to lift their heads and watch as it took the slow curve down to the railway bridge across the Tavy and disappeared into the woods on the far side. Just beyond the bridge, the smaller river joined the wide expanse of the Tamar and downstream towards Plymouth, Savage could see the span of the Tamar Bridge. Upstream, the banks closed in beyond Weir Quay and began a great ‘S’ curve, Amazon-like, before reaching Cotehele and Morwellam. Later, if the weather held, there’d be tourists and locals thronging the National Trust properties up there.