Cut Dead (32 page)

‘Must have been some other way then.’ Davies itched his chin. ‘The question is “how?” And, as Hardin keeps asking me, “who?”’

‘The wife,’ Riley said. ‘Are we going to tell her? Maybe when she sees it in black and white like this she’ll come to her senses and tell us what she knows.’

‘Yeah,’ Davies said rising from his chair. ‘Let’s get up to Dousland and do just that.’

Late morning, and Savage took a call from Wilson. After the meeting with Simon Fox he’d visited the railway bridge with John Layton. Last night’s events, together with the trip that morning had crystallised his thoughts. Plus they’d never had a chance to discuss his new theory concerning the burial site and the placement of the bodies. She had to come and see what he was talking about.

Wilson gave her the directions to a rendezvous and ended the conversation, saying he wouldn’t stand her up this time. Savage went in search of the DSupt but when she found him he wasn’t enthusiastic to join her.

‘Dartmoor?’ Hardin’s eyes roved to his cup of tea on his desk. Alongside, a fan of chocolate digestives lay across a plate. ‘Not my thing to be honest. Besides, I’m working flat out on a brief for the CC. If you don’t mind I’ll give it a miss.’

Thirty minutes later Savage parked up on the moor at a pull-in off the main Princeton road. The moor fell away on all sides except one where a grassy slope rose to a distant tor, the green changing to grey near the top. There was one other car in the layby – a Mercedes SUV – but out on the moor a group of walkers trudged the path up to the summit.

Next to the pull-in a tiny lake, more a puddle, reflected a big sky. Ripples ran across the water distorting the scene, splintering the light into a thousand pieces. Savage looked towards the tor where a wisp of mist curled around the rocks before being dragged away by the wind. Thicker clumps of cloud marched in a procession from the west, building on the horizon. Sunshine and showers, the forecast said, no mention of which would be in the ascendancy.

She got out of the car and called Wilson. There was a gargled answer.

‘Where are you?’ she said into the dead air of her phone. She pulled it away from her ear and looked at the signal indicator. One bar. None. One again.

‘Bloody hell.’

Then the phone rang. Wilson back on the line.

‘I’m on the top. Sharpitor. I can see you. It’s only about half a mile or so.’

Savage turned from her car and peered across the moor to a craggy outcrop. There
was
somebody up there in amongst the mist. Red waterproof. Arms waving. The figure disappeared as another finger of cloud caressed the top.

‘What the … OK. I’m on my way.’

Savage slammed the door of her car and retrieved her walking boots and her own waterproof. Back end of the year just gone, she’d learnt the hard way that you needed the right equipment out on Dartmoor. Things could go wrong quickly up here. Even a short distance from the road. Even in summer.

She shut the boot, bleeped the locks and set off after the walkers, soon realising the group were fitter than her. They’d reached the top and disappeared from view before she’d got halfway up.

Minutes later, waterproof now loosened and flapping in the wind, she arrived at the clump of rocks. Granite boulders spilt down from the tor and speckled the grass with grey.

Dr Wilson sat on top of the rocks looking to the south-west. He shouted to her without turning his head.

‘The Bere Peninsula. About eight miles that way.’ His hand shot out and pointed. ‘You can make out Tavy View Farm in the V of the river.’

Savage looked in the direction Wilson was pointing. Close by, around a mile distant but way below, the blue of Burrator Reservoir. Further off, the village of Yelverton and south of that along the A386, the outskirts of Plymouth. Beyond Plymouth, the river. Follow the grey-blue swathe back north and Wilson was right; the farm lay between the short stub of the Tavy Estuary and the Tamar. The railway bridge cut a black line across the river Tavy and then drew a smooth curve around the edge of the farm.

‘Point being?’ Savage clambered across the final few boulders and sat next to Wilson. ‘Assuming you didn’t drag me up here just for the view.’

‘Just for the view?’ Wilson crooked his head round at her. Then looked back west. ‘This is not just a view. This is
spectacular
. A spectacle which encapsulates everything the killer sees, everything which is on his stage. The farm with the body dump, the railway line the killer walks along, representing some kind of journey. We can see Plymouth, the city of bright lights and the home of the victims. Our killer works down there, but lives away from the light, out in the countryside. He wouldn’t like being near other people. He values his solitude. He’ll have a big house in a posh village. You see, Charlotte, how from up here, given the right clues, we can determine everything. A bit like God really. Or, continuing my metaphor, the audience. Pure theatre.’

‘A map?’ Savage said, trying to bring Wilson down from his flight of fancy. Wondering if Walsh’s observations about all psychologists being not right in the head wasn’t far short of the mark.

‘Yes. Geographical profiling. The killer is not spatially aware
but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t affect and in turn be affected by the space. What happened down there moulded our killer. You said something about babies to me. Could be, but there’s more. The killer enjoys what he does, enjoys the torture and the suffering. Cutting those girls, mutilating them. Stripping them naked to expose them. But the enjoyment is forced onto him, he has to do what he does.
Has to
. Understand me?’

Wilson spat the last few sentences out and then picked up a small stone and lobbed it a few feet. The stone clattered onto a boulder and bounced away. Savage wondered what had got into Wilson. She knew profilers sometimes worked in strange ways, a kind of method acting where they would try to reproduce the offender’s emotional state so they could get inside the killer’s mindset. Was he doing so now? Or was he just bonkers?

Wilson took up a bigger rock. A piece of stone the size of a house brick.

‘Granite,’ he said. ‘Hydrothermal activity causes the granite to decompose. That or other processes lead to the formation of clay. Funny how we’re back to clay again, isn’t it? The way the killer silences his victims, stops them protesting their innocence.’

Savage nodded, wondering what on earth Wilson was on about.

‘Do you think we’re close?’ Wilson whispered.

‘Sorry?’ Savage said. ‘Do you mean personally?’

‘No, Inspector Savage.’ Wilson laughed. ‘I didn’t mean close
sexually
.’

‘What then?’ The word ‘sexually’ had come out of Wilson’s mouth with a slither. Like a snake. ‘Close in what way?’

‘Close to solving the case. Close to catching the killer.’ Wilson weighed the rock in one hand and shifted, pushing himself up with the other and standing above Savage. ‘You see, I don’t think we are. Not close at all.’

Calter scrunched her eyes up and then released them, hoping the tension would dissipate. One too many beers last night when she should have been getting some shut-eye. The names and offences on the screen in front of her had long since blurred and become bastardised: James Cock-Out-In-The-Bushes Williams, Frederick Fondled-A-School-Girl Jenkins, Graham Two-Rapes-But-Out-In-Four Cansome.

She shook her head. None of these people were credible suspects. No matter how many times she worked the list nothing changed. The victims didn’t match the profiles, the methods didn’t match the offenders’ behaviour and too many of them had full or partial alibis.

Calter kicked back her chair. Stood. The other people in the suite were heads down, fingers clattering over keyboards or voices talking into phones.

Enders was away with DS Riley on some other job. Whatever, she missed him and his humour, his apparent stupidity, the latter, she had come to realise, an affectation.

DI Savage was up on the moor somewhere and DCI Garrett had been summoned to Hardin’s office.

‘Coffee?’ she called out to nobody in particular. A couple of hands went up and she acknowledged them and pushed through the double doors and headed for the canteen.

In the corridor outside John Layton scurried towards her, Tilley hat askew, a clear plastic evidence bag in each hand.

‘DI Savage about?’ he said, holding out the bags. ‘Got these for her.’

Calter stared at the bags for a moment. A handful of brown-grey mud smeared the insides. She looked down the corridor and then at Layton’s feet. His walking boots had left a trail of similar coloured mud on the floor.

‘That’s not like you, John. What’s up?’

‘Charlotte? Where is she?’

‘She’s gone off to meet Dr Wilson. Another one of his crazy theories.’

‘
Wilson
?’ Layton bit his lip and then shook his head. ‘Here, come with me.’

Layton shouldered through the doors and into the crime suite. He went to the nearest desk, put both of the bags down and beckoned Calter over. He pushed a finger onto the surface of one bag, squashing the contents to reveal a claggy soil with streaks of brown.

‘This sample,’ he said, ‘comes from the track on the far side of the railway bridge. The place we suspect the killer parked up before carrying the bodies across the bridge and dumping them at the farm.’

Calter nodded and Layton moved his finger to the other bag. He pressed down again until a lump of the mud broke away revealing the same colour brown.

‘They’re the same?’ Calter said.

‘I haven’t done a proper analysis yet, but they look pretty much identical to me.’

‘So? I don’t understand …’

‘I obtained the first sample this morning when I accompanied Dr Wilson down to the Plymouth side of the bridge. He picked me up and we drove down there, walked across and he spun a few ideas. The second sample came from under the front nearside wheel arch on Wilson’s car.’

‘So you’re saying whoever drove down there last night to dump the body would have accumulated mud on their car?’

‘Yes, but that’s not the point.’ Layton prodded the bag once again. ‘I didn’t return with Wilson. He went back across the bridge while I got a lift with one of my CSIs who was at the farm. When we got back to the car park here at Crownhill I noticed the lump of mud in the bay where Wilson had parked earlier. When he came by to pick me up first thing.’

‘I’m lost. Your mind is—’

‘Wilson’s car collected the mud
before
we went down the track. It must have fallen from his car while he was waiting for me to emerge from the station first thing this morning. From the freshness of the sample – the consistency – the mud attached itself to the car recently. Wilson had already been down the track in the previous day or so.’

‘And he didn’t say anything to you?’

‘No. When we drove down there and explored the bridge, crossed over, it all appeared new to him.’

‘Wait-wait-wait. Slow down.’ Calter shook her head, the hangover still fuzzing her thinking. ‘Can’t there be a rational explanation for this? Could the mud have come from somewhere else?’

‘Look.’ Layton prodded the second sample again, moved his finger back and forth until he revealed a crushed pale yellow flower. ‘
Melampyrum pratense
or cow wheat. There’s a stand of willow at the end of the track. Cow wheat is a parasitical plant which attaches itself to the roots—’

‘Stop!’ Calter held out her hands. ‘Chase. Cut to. You’re saying this plant grows down there. There’s one in the sample from Wilson’s car. Combined with the mud it means Wilson had been down the track recently and lied about it.’

‘Pretty much, yes.’

‘So he’s the killer?’

‘I didn’t say that, but …’ Layton looked down at his finger and the yellow flower smeared with mud. ‘Where’s Charlotte?’

‘DI Savage is with Wilson at this moment. Up on the moor. Alone.’

‘Call her,’ Layton said moving his finger from the bag and thrusting it towards a nearby phone. ‘Now.’

‘Let’s walk a little. Over there.’ Wilson pointed to another tor a few hundred metres off. ‘It’s a little remote but there’s something I want to show you.’

Savage slid off the boulder she was on, the rough surface grazing her shin. Stepped back. Wilson still had the piece of granite and now he held the rock out in front of him. He smiled.

‘The good thing about being a psychologist is you get to be nosey. You find out all sorts of interesting things about people. Must be the same being a detective I guess.’

Savage nodded, stepped away across a patch of grass and headed for the tor. Something wasn’t quite right with Wilson, she thought. On every occasion they’d met previously she’d wondered if he wasn’t on the verge of some kind of psychosis but each time she’d put his strange behaviour down to the way he liked to work. Now she wasn’t so sure.

‘The thing is,’ Wilson continued, ‘you also learn about the lies people tell. Again, must be similar when you’re a police officer. Lies are things we tell when we are too embarrassed to admit to the truth.’

‘Dr Wilson, is this relevant?’

‘Oh yes. Not to the case, but to us, yes.’

‘
Us
?’ Savage half-turned towards the psychologist.

‘Yes, us,’ Wilson said, his face burning with an intense expression. ‘I … I … I was wondering if you would like to have dinner with me tonight. We could talk about something other than the Candle Cake Killer. Let our hair down. Get to know each other better. Perhaps afterwards … Well … You could come over to my place.’

‘Sorry, no,’ Savage said, beginning to regret having agreed to meet in such a deserted spot. ‘I’m married. Happily. I’m not looking for anything else.’

‘Really?’ Wilson shook his head. Smiled. ‘Don’t try to hide your feelings. Don’t bottle up your desires. You see I think we
are
close. Sexually. I’ve fancied you from the first day you walked into my office. I know you’ve felt the same. The coy, offhand way you speak to me, trying to act aloof. Your behaviour is all an act, a lie. Admit it, tell the truth. I for one am not ashamed of anything. I feel a burning desire for you. I want you. I want you now.’