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Copyright
AVON
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2013
Copyright © Mark Sennen 2013
Mark Sennen asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007518166
Ebook Edition © 2013 ISBN: 9780007518180
Version: 2019-03-01
Dedication
For Gitte. Thank you!
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Afterwards
Keep Reading
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Mark Sennen
About the Publisher
Prologue
The pain always came when Ricky Budgeon least expected it. Right now a wave swept from within and hit him between the eyes like a needle pushing hard into the bridge of his nose. He put his hands up and gripped his scalp, pulling and clawing at the burning sensation which spread across his forehead to his temples. The last attack had had him writhing on the floor, but this time the jabbing ceased after a few seconds and he merely needed to steady himself. He moved his hands from his head, clasped them tight around the cool metal bar of the gate, and stared across the field into the night.
A scan had showed nothing but the old scarring, afterwards the doctor muttering reassuring words about migraine and mentioning therapy, maybe acupuncture.
Crap.
The idiots must have missed whatever was in there that was causing him such misery. Some sort of mutation of the cells, a cancer or a tumour, the latter growing fat on bad memories, enmity and bitterness.
When the doctor disagreed with his self-diagnosis and said surgery was out of the question he’d thought of taking a drill to his own skull, imagined placing the bit against his head and pressing the trigger. The whine of the motor would come first, followed by agony as the drill ripped into skin and bone. Then the spinning metal would seek out the tumour and chew it to a pulp. The pain would be gone forever. He had even gone so far as to go to his workshop and set up the equipment. With the drill in its stand all he had to do was press the switch, put his head beneath the bit and pull down on the lever. Eventually he had decided against it. Whatever the thing was inside his head frightened him, but it motivated him too. Remove the pain, and what would drive him forwards?
Budgeon stood in the darkness, gulping air and then biting his lip until he tasted blood. The throbbing in his head subsided and ebbed away. He bent and picked up his fag: a half-smoked roll-up, dropped as the agony had come on. Drawing on the cigarette, he looked out again and took in the landscape spread before him.
Close at hand, the hedges and trees appeared black against the sky. In a nearby field, the occasional sheep bleated, and from a copse off to his right the hoot of an owl rang out. But beyond the empty countryside lay the city, a corona of brightness where a thousand glittering lights promised excitement and danger, their individual pinpricks of heat coalescing like a mass of stars at the centre of a distant galaxy. Moving outward from the core, white dots crawled between avenues of static orange; cars heading for the soft radiance of the suburbs and home.
A twinge in his forehead caused him to screw his eyes shut.
Home.
He opened his eyes again and took another drag from the roll-up, pinching the end between the tips of his thumb and forefinger so he could extract every last piece of worth without burning himself. The way he had smoked in prison.
Years ago, before he had gone down, he’d had friends in the city. Friends who’d grown up on the same street as him. As kids they’d pinched sweets from the same shop and sworn at the same old ladies whose flowerbeds they trampled across. Later on, as young men, they’d thrown bricks at the same police cars, shared the same prison cells and sworn vengeance on the same enemies. They’d been like brothers, the three of them. Blood brothers.
Those days seemed so long ago now. As if someone else had lived the time for him.
Budgeon took a final drag from his fag and then dropped the butt to the floor, stamping the orange glow into the mud.
Everything had been fine until she came along.
Why did it always come down to a woman? Almost biblical. Garden of fucking Eden and all that shit.
In the end, he had been the lucky one, sliding around on silk sheets, relishing how sweet she tasted, promising her everything. But afterwards, as they shared a cigarette, he realised things weren’t going to be the same. Not with the others wanting her too.
He shook his head and took one last look at the distant lights, before moving back to the van and clambering in. The thin, pale man in the driver’s seat grunted and asked him if he was ready to go.
Was he? Peering down on the city and reminiscing about his childhood, thinking about the group of them as little boys, without a care in the world, had made him reconsider for a moment. Now, as the warmth of the van slipped around him, he felt cocooned and cut off from everything but those memories. He could easily get misty-eyed again. Half a lifetime later perhaps it was time to forgive and forget, move on.
An ache flickered across his brow.
No, life didn’t reward that kind of thinking. He’d gone soft over the girl and when his guard had been down he’d been betrayed. There were rules, unwritten maybe, but rules all the same. If you broke them, you paid; and some debts took more than money to settle.
Much more.
Of course he was ready to go. And the sooner they got the show on the road, the better.
Chapter One
Nr Bovisand, Plymouth. Sunday 13th January. 4.05 p.m.
The noise carried through to Savage in the kitchen. Laughter. Samantha and Jamie’s high-pitched squeals layered over her husband’s voice as he sang an inane song in a mock-Swedish accent. The cause of the frivolity was Stefan, the family’s unofficial au pair, who had just returned from his home country laden with chocolates for the kids and two matching sets of stupid-looking knitted gloves and hats for Savage and Pete. Pete had shoved the hat down on his head, pointed out the window at the daffodils in the garden, and teased Stefan about being a little late with the winter gear. Stefan responded in kind, putting on a thick West Country drawl, muttering something about pilchards.
Savage had retreated to the kitchen to make a pot of tea, thinking Pete was right about the change of season. Mid-January, Christmas not much more than a few weeks ago, and already the east side of their garden a swath of gold, ochre and lemon. Other changes too: Pete returning from deployment at the back end of November, after nearly nine months away.
The celebrations had run on into the Christmas period, resulting in one long spell of parties, relatives, more parties and more relatives. Now the holiday season was over Savage was pleased for life to settle down a little. Pleased too that spring had arrived early in Devon. The forecasters had spoken of a hard winter, but despite some snow in November, so far they had got it wrong. Out of the kitchen window the sun hung low in the sky, a cool yellow rather than the deep red of a summer sunset. Below the sun the Sound lay placid, only a hint of a swell disturbing the surface. A yacht, black against the light, motored in past the eastern end of the breakwater. The crew on the yacht waved to a trio of dinghy sailors struggling to catch a zephyr to take them home before the chill of nightfall. Last night the frost had returned, but the first two weeks of January had been unseasonably warm, pushing the temperatures close to the mid-teens. Weather more suited to t-shirts than to a gift of hats and gloves.
A couple of days earlier Savage had received an altogether different type of Christmas present. One of the best ever, although Pete hadn’t seen it that way. He told her in the kitchen, as she prepared a pizza, her hands floured with dough. The news stunned her and she could hardly take his words in.
‘Scrapped?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ Pete said. ‘Decommissioned. Mothballed. Sold off. Cut up and made into ploughshares for all I know. Seems as if I’m to be based ashore now. For good. Bloody stupid cuts.’ Pete’s face looked ashen and his eyes brimmed with emotion.
‘I’m sorry.’ Even as she said the words she knew she wasn’t. Pete might be losing his ship but for the past fifteen years and more she had lost her husband – and the kids their dad – for months and months on end. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t known what she was getting herself into when they got married, but back then heart very definitely ruled head, and the day-to-day practicalities of juggling a job and young children appeared to be years off. Pretty soon though, the twins, Samantha and Clarissa, had come along, unplanned, and in her mid-twenties she’d found herself with two babies and an absent father. Later she’d had Jamie and then the tragedy of Clarissa’s death to cope with, Pete around for what seemed like mere fleeting moments.
‘You’re not,’ Pete said.
‘No.’ Savage moved over and hugged him, pressing her face into his neck and kissing him, aware of her floury hands making prints on his jumper. ‘I’m sad for you, of course, sad for your crew too, but I’m not sorry. Have you known long?’
‘Before the last voyage I got an inkling of what might happen. At least the old girl went on a grand final trip.’
Pete had taken the frigate on a circumnavigation of South America, cruising down to the Falklands, through the Straits of Magellan and up the Pacific coast of Chile, using the Panama Canal to get back to the Atlantic. Before that the ship had been on patrol in the Gulf and seen action in Pirate Alley. As with every warship returning to Devonport after active service, she had steamed into the Sound to a hero’s welcome, although one unnoticed by anyone living outside the city.
Now, as Savage poured water into the big blue teapot, she felt a warmth from knowing Pete would be in Plymouth and bound to a desk for the foreseeable future. With a more normal job perhaps they could have some sort of existence like a normal family. For years she’d coped on her own, but combining her job and home life was almost impossible. Having her and Pete’s parents living close by helped, and more recently they’d employed Stefan. It still wasn’t easy though, and with Jamie being six and Samantha thirteen, there was hardly ever a time when she could relax.
The steam from the pot curled upwards and she chinked the lid in place, watching the final wisp of vapour dissipate, along with her thoughts, as the phone rang. DC Patrick Enders calling from Major Crimes.
‘Don’t you ever have days off, Patrick?’ Savage said.
‘It’s the overtime, ma’am. Worth its weight. If there’s any available I snap it up. I can always take a day off in the week when the kids are at school. So much more peaceful.’
Enders was late twenties, already with three children and a mortgage and designs on a four-bedroomed place in Mannamead where his family could spread out. But then, Savage thought, when she’d been that age she’d had the same aspirations. When the twins were born, she and Pete had been lucky enough to find a large wreck of a house on the coast, before prices sky rocketed and such properties became unaffordable to all but the very few.
‘Well, what can I do for you?’ Savage said. ‘I’m just about to sit down with my own kids and have cake and tea so you had better not have something for me.’
‘No, just a reminder, ma’am. The DSupt says not to forget about the Sternway meeting tomorrow. He’s sending you a bunch of stuff, so check your email.’
‘Great,’ Savage said, without much enthusiasm. She already had a mountain of papers to read concerning Operation Sternway – the force’s long-term drugs operation – but she promised Enders she would check her email, hung up, and gave a silent ‘thank you’ that she didn’t have to rush out. The irony, given her recent talk to Pete about how much his job had taken over his life, wouldn’t be welcomed.
The call from Enders reminded her there was other paperwork to complete too: notes for an upcoming PSD inquiry. The Professional Standards Department wanted to know why she had left the scene of a car accident in which a man had been killed. No matter that the man had been a serial killer who had tried to abduct her own daughter Samantha, Standards wanted answers. Over Christmas and New Year she had pushed all thoughts of the inquiry to the back of her mind, but now, with the interview looming, she knew she needed to spend time preparing.
Savage sighed and then went back to the living room, to find Stefan teaching the kids some toilet humour. The scatological references sounded twice as funny in Swedish and soon all five of them were conversing in a mixture of languages, interspersed with prolonged periods of giggling. Savage turned from the mayhem and looked out through the big window. Shadows crept across the lawn, painting black shapes on the grass which glistened with silver moisture in the fading light. Beyond the garden, the cliff fell away to a mirror which stretched to the horizon where the sun was just kissing the sea, somewhere out past Edison Rocks. Sunday afternoon bliss.
Chapter Two
Efford, Plymouth. Monday 14th January. 8.35 a.m.
On any other Monday, the three builders cradling mugs of steaming tea and sitting on the low brick wall outside seventy-five Lester Close might well have been discussing the weekend’s footie. Plymouth had gone down three-nil at home and the handful of points the team had collected in their last ten games wasn’t enough to appease the fans. A demo had been arranged and there were calls to sack the manager, the players, the board, the boot boy, anyone who could conceivably be to blame for the team’s recent abject performance.
On any other Monday.
Jed Rammel was the oldest of the three – twenty years the oldest – and he’d never seen anything like it. Except, of course, when he’d been over in Iraq, but that was different. You expected things like that there. Not here, not on a Monday morning when all you’d come to do was dig up somebody’s back yard to put some concrete footings in, preparatory work for a new conservatory. Jed guessed the owner would be cancelling the work now. Nobody in their right mind would want to be sitting out the back any more. Lying bathed in sunlight, relaxing, dreaming, and sipping a beer. Thinking about what had once been buried there. Give over.
Jed scratched his head, slurped another gulp of tea, tried to forget the toothy smile showing from behind the dried-up lips, and those empty eye sockets which seemed to be staring right out at him.
They’d started that morning at seven-thirty, with barely enough light to work by. Carted picks, crowbars, sledgehammers and shovels round the back. Jed had checked the instructions and marked out the limits of where they were to dig with lines of chalk powder and a couple of stakes. Young Ryan had first dibs, lifting the broken paving slabs with the edge of his pickaxe and then going ten-to-the-dozen with the crowbar on the old concrete beneath.
Youth, Jed had thought, all now-now-now, no care for the future. And so it proved. Ten minutes later and Ryan was knackered, so Jed and Barry took over, breaking the concrete while Ryan shovelled the residue out the way.
They’d found the bones of a small dog soon after. Nothing to get excited about, Jed said, even as Ryan began to lark around. The larking ended when they found the box nearby. Plastic, buried in the soil under the layer of concrete about two feet from the dog. Jed wondered if the thing wasn’t some sort of drainage sump, but when they took off the lid and saw the contents they realised it wasn’t. They’d thought the thing inside was a doll at first. A big doll, sure, but a doll nonetheless. Jed’s granddaughter had one, a large, lifelike thing he and the wife had bought the kid the Christmas before last. But no, it wasn’t a doll. They’d realised that when Ryan’s spade pierced a hole in the chest where he poked it. Crackled like parchment the skin had, and through the split the three of them had seen the bones of the ribcage.
Definitely not a doll.
Jed sipped his tea again. Thought about Iraq. About things he’d never told his workmates, nor his wife. Things he’d only shared with the men he’d served with. The type of horror he’d thought belonged thousands of miles away, in another country.
‘Losing three-nil,’ Ryan said. ‘At home. You can hardly fucking believe it, can you?’
No, Jed thought, you couldn’t.
Savage drove into the car park at Crownhill Police Station a little after eight fifty-five to see DC Jane Calter jogging over, her breath steaming out in the cold air. She pulled the passenger door open and collapsed in the front seat.
‘Off to a property in Efford, ma’am. Right next to the cemetery. Handy, because there’s a body under the patio. And I’m not joking. Wish I was.’
‘Who’s in charge?’ Savage said.
‘DCI Garrett.’ Calter raised a hand and thumbed in the direction of the station. ‘He’s inside sorting things. We’re to get over to the scene right away.’
‘Right,’ Savage said. ‘You sure you’re OK? You don’t look so good.’
‘Bad weekend, ma’am.’
‘Oh?’
‘Brilliant, I mean.’ Calter pulled the sun visor down to shield her eyes from the glare as they headed back towards town, the sun still low in the south-east. ‘Too much booze, not enough sleep. I never learn.’
The DC leant back in her seat and ran both hands through her blonde bob, pulling at a couple of tangles and squinting at the vanity mirror on the back of the visor.
‘I barely managed a shower this morning, let alone a hair wash, and these clothes are the first ones that fell out of the wardrobe.’ Calter indicated her rather crumpled grey skirt and jacket.
‘I hope you didn’t get into too much trouble.’
‘No,’ Calter grinned, ‘unfortunately not. But I am seeing him again next week.’
As they drove to Efford Calter sat quietly, fumbling once in a pocket for some painkillers, dry-swallowing them and then closing her eyes. Only a dozen years or so difference in their respective ages, Savage thought, but Calter’s lifestyle was a world away from her own. Not that she was beyond getting drunk herself, having a good time, partying – Christmas being a case in point. But there was always the knowledge that the next morning any hangover would be punctuated by a seven o’clock visit from Jamie wanting to be up and at the world, Samantha needing a lift somewhere, and Pete feigning his own hangover as near life-threatening.
Efford was an innocuous part of Plymouth sandwiched between the A38 and the Plym estuary. A mixture of older social housing, now mostly owner-occupied, and some newer but smaller properties, made the place out to be working class. Really though, Savage thought as they negotiated streets still busy with school-run traffic, you couldn’t tell any more.
The web of crescents and avenues which made up the area was interspersed with plenty of green space, the largest being the twenty-acre cemetery which Lester Close backed on to. The close itself had been cordoned off, already a number of people hanging round the junction with the main road. Heads turned as Savage was waved through and drove into the close. The road rose in a gentle slope, the houses on each side post-war semi-detached, pebble-dashed, and featuring uPVC windows with net curtains. The front gardens, neat little patches of lawn, with a shrub or two for good measure.
‘Pleasant,’ Calter said, opening her eyes, ‘but I’m more of a penthouse flat type of girl myself.’
‘Rich, is he?’
‘Forces.’
‘Don’t go there,’ Savage said, smiling. ‘And as you know I speak from experience.’
Calter laughed as they reached the far end of the narrow cul-de-sac, where a patrol car on the left hand side marked the property; a house in need of some TLC, the front garden full of clutter stripped from inside. Behind the patrol car a Volvo estate straddled the kerb, the rear door up, a jumble of plastic containers and toolboxes crammed in the back.
‘Layton,’ Savage said. ‘The sooner he gets to a scene the happier he is.’
John Layton was their senior CSI and where crime scenes were concerned he could be labelled a misanthrope, believing only himself and his team had any right to be present and hating all other invaders. Especially interfering detectives. Savage got out and retrieved her protective clothing from the boot.
‘You might as well start with them, Jane,’ Savage said, pointing to the builders sitting on the front garden wall as she suited up. ‘I’ll risk Layton’s wrath.’
At the house, the youngest of the builders nodded a greeting as Savage went down the passage to the side. The other two stared into their mugs, one of them shaking his head and muttering something under his breath.
Round the back, a patio stretched the width of the plot. Or rather, it once had, because one end was now a mass of broken slabs and concrete, the spoil from a large hole creeping across the postage-stamp-sized lawn beyond. Beside the hole, Layton and Andrew Nesbit, the pathologist, knelt, peering down into the mud. Layton stood up as Savage neared, tipped his battered Tilley back with the finger of a blue-gloved hand and pointed at the brown goo.