MARK SENNEN
Bad Blood

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.

‘Bloody mess.’ Layton scratched his roman nose with the back of his hand and shook his head. ‘Builders don’t wear ballet shoes, do they?’

Nesbit glanced round and smiled, his eyes sparkling behind his half-round glasses. He raised his bushy eyebrows, looked at Layton and then turned back to the hole.

‘Mondays, Charlotte,’ he said. ‘What is it about Mondays?’

Savage walked over and peered at the puddle forming down in the excavation, a grey sludge-like liquid which oozed from the surrounding soil.

‘The thing on the right is a dog,’ Layton said. ‘The builders found the animal first. But that wasn’t why they called us.’

Savage could see a set of tiny bones and a pointed skull. A leather collar had rotted to almost nothing but the buckle and a little brass name tag. Next to the skeleton, a large translucent plastic storage box, the kind you shoved under the bed or stacked up in the garage full of junk, lay close to the concrete foundations for the boundary wall. A snap-on lid concealed the contents, something pale and indistinct pushing up against one side, promising nightmares for weeks to come.

‘According to the ID disc the dog’s name is Florence,’ Layton said. ‘Don’t know if she is named after the place or the character from the Magic Roundabout. Whatever, I’d say the animal was buried a good few years ago. The crate was probably only buried within the last few months.’

‘The lid?’ Savage asked.

‘The builders removed the top of the box. I put it back so the photographer could take some pictures. Andrew?’

Nesbit reached down, long fingers inside his nitrile gloves feeling around the edge of the lid, clicking the plastic back, lifting it off.

Savage gasped at the tangle of flesh and bones inside, the tiny hands clutching at a red house-brick, the torso curled round in the box, foetal-like. The child’s skull had plenty of skin left on, hair twisted in long, curly strands, teeth bared in a mocking grin. The flesh on the limbs and body hung loose, looking stiff and like starched clothing or light brown paper. The child was naked, but there was a bundle of rags up one end of the box. That fact alone spoke volumes to Savage. It was unlikely this was a terrible accident, somebody trying to cover up an RTC for instance; not when the infant had been stripped. She considered the skin again, which was the colour and consistency of filo pastry. The corpse reminded her of mummies she had seen in a museum and she said as much.

‘Desiccated,’ Nesbit said. ‘The body was kept somewhere hot and dry after death and that caused the effect you are looking at.’

‘So how long?’

‘Very difficult to know at this stage. Maybe we will find some entomology or something else organic to help us establish the time of death. All I can tell you for sure is that she was buried here a good while later.’

‘She?’ Nesbit’s confirmation of the gender chilled Savage; not that ‘he’ would have been any less horrific. It was the fact an identity was now beginning to take form, a life created from the sad heap of skin and bone. Something solid to mourn over. Something solid to try and seek justice for. If possible.

‘The hair looks like a girl’s, and then there’s that,’ Nesbit pointed down to one side of the plastic box next to the rags. A patch of pink flashed out, vivid and incongruous alongside the bone and flesh. ‘It’s a trainer. I didn’t want to disturb anything too much, but I managed to note the size. Twelve. Children’s that is.’

Twelve. Which would mean the child would be half that: five, six or seven. Savage peered down again at the body in its makeshift plastic coffin. Once the girl would have snuggled up to her mummy or daddy, perhaps clutched a teddy to her for comfort as she fell to dreaming. Now she only had a brick to cuddle.

‘We’ll move the box and all to Derriford,’ Nesbit said, standing and nodding to the two mortuary technicians who had come round the corner of the house. ‘It will save disturbing her. Better that way.’

‘Yes, better,’ Savage said, wondering how anything could be much worse.

When Savage went back round to the front of the house, she found Calter doing her best to intervene in an argument between one of the builders and a young man in a smart suit.

‘Mr Evershed, ma’am,’ Calter said, and then nodded to a little way down the road, where a heavily-pregnant woman was leaning against a big BMW with a high-end paint job and a massive spoiler on the rear. ‘And his wife.’

Evershed couldn’t have been more than early twenties. He had close-cropped dark hair and a brash suit with lapels which were too wide. His wrist bore a chunky watch, gold like his cufflinks. He gave little more than a flick of the head to acknowledge Savage as Calter introduced her.

Calter explained that Mr and Mrs Evershed were the owners of number seventy-five. They had bought the property only a month ago with the intention of renovating, but hadn’t yet moved in.

‘Waiting until the sprog is born,’ Evershed said, turning to Savage now. ‘Once that’s out the way I’ll be free to deal with this. We’ll do the place up, add fifty K to the value, sell it on and move up. Easy money.’

‘So you were getting some work done before you moved in?’ Savage asked.

‘That’s just the point.’ Evershed raised an accusing finger at the builder. Bared his teeth like a dog. ‘I don’t know what the hell these cowboys are doing here. I never asked them to do any work. First thing I know about it is when I get a call from our new next-door neighbour saying there’s a police car parked out front. As far as I am concerned these idiots are bloody trespassing on private property and you should arrest them for criminal damage.’

‘And?’ Savage turned to the builder, a man in his fifties, weary, as if he’d seen it all.

‘Don’t blame me.’ The man held one hand up and then reached into the breast pocket of his donkey jacket, pulled out a little spiral-bound notepad and showed the booklet to Savage. ‘Job’s down on my worksheet. Number seventy-five Lester Close. Pull up old patio slabs and remove soil and rubble. Dig holes for footings and lay concrete in preparation for new conservatory. Boss fixed us up with it Friday. Short notice, like, but he said it was an urgent job. We had to be in and out by the end of today.’

‘Well you’ve got the wrong address, haven’t you?’ Evershed said, jabbing his finger again. ‘So I suggest you call your boss and tell him he’s cocked up. Then you can go round the back and clear up whatever mess you’ve made.’

‘That won’t be possible, I’m afraid,’ Savage said. ‘Not for a day or two at least. The whole of this property is now a crime scene.’

‘What? You’re joking, right?’

‘Sorry, no.’ Savage closed her eyes for a second and wondered how to explain about the little girl. She decided something approaching the truth was best. ‘We’ve found the body of a child beneath the patio.’

Evershed’s wife had walked up from the car and now she reached out for her husband, grasping for his arm with one hand, the other moving to her swollen belly.

‘Nightmare,’ Evershed said, shaking his head and wondering aloud about the resale value of the place.

Ten minutes later he was still talking figures as he ducked into his car. His wife stood on the other side of the vehicle for a moment, looking first at the house, then Savage, and then staring far into the distance at something beyond the rooftops at the end of the street. She got in, the door clunking shut with a noise which had a finality about it, Savage thinking about endings in her own life too.

Chapter Three

Mount Edgcumbe, Plymouth. Monday 14th January. 11.30 a.m.

‘Ready to say goodbye to Martin Kemp then?’ DS Darius Riley said, leaning against the railings and gazing across the river Tamar. Drake’s Island and Plymouth Sound lay to the right, the Torpoint chain ferries and the dockyards to the left. Just behind the two men, a black flag with a white cross hung limply from a flagpole next to the Edgcumbe Arms. The flag was there to remind anyone, should they need reminding, that they were standing on Cornish soil, another county from that which lay across the water. For some, it was another country.

For a moment Riley’s companion said nothing, his eyes focusing on a patch of water midstream where a buoy, stationary against the tidal flow, had created a downstream eddy. Small pieces of flotsam swirled into the centre of the eddy and disappeared beneath the surface.

‘Yes. Just a little joke that. Something to add a bit of flavour, a name to hang a conversation around, should I ever need to. But you can still call me Marty. If it helps.’

The man pulled a packet of cigarettes from his leather jacket and offered Riley one.

‘No thanks … Marty.’ Riley shook his head and smiled as the man lit up. Since their last meeting just before Christmas, Kemp’s hair had changed somehow, losing the greasy blackness and taking on a cleaner sheen. The clothing was more subtle now as well; no longer the flashy suit, the bracelet on the wrist, the rings on his fingers, instead just a plain leather jacket worn over a sweatshirt and jeans. Riley had been there, done it himself, knew about the little details which made for a convincing act. And Kemp’s act was good. Very good. It had to be, because one slip and not only would the whole of Operation Sternway be jeopardised, but the man’s life would be in danger as well. Riley was all too aware of that aspect of undercover work, having been on the wrong side of a beating when he’d been in London.

He had handled Kemp for the past couple of months, always meeting the man well away from Plymouth, usually at an anonymous pub or roadside café, but now Kemp’s time was over and the officer could let the mask slip a little before returning to his own force. Riley knew Kemp was based in the North West, but he didn’t know the name of the force, nor did he have any idea of the man’s real identity. ‘Better that way,’ Kemp had said when they first met, and Riley agreed. If he’d been half as cautious as Kemp then maybe he’d still have been on the Met, still ducking and diving in his old haunts, playing the game. Instead he’d been transferred away.

‘Best for you, Riley. We can’t be too careful,’ his boss had said, placing a little too much emphasis on the word ‘careful’. And ‘best for you’ meant best for the rest of them, the team he’d let down. It had been tough at first, moving to what his old friends would have described as the back of beyond. Now though, after more than a year down in Devon, he’d settled in. And getting the chance to put his old skills to use on a case like the one he was working on with Kemp was a real bonus.

Riley watched as a light wind began to ruffle the ebbing tide, throwing up little wavelets as the water slipped out of the river and eased its way past the Mayflower Marina, the surface roughing up in the narrows between Royal William Yard and Mount Edgcumbe. He had come across on the Cremyll ferry, Kemp arriving in his car from the Cornish side. The ferry was mid stream now, heading back across the quarter-mile stretch of water to Devon, the steep landing ramp Riley had jumped down onto lengthening by the minute as the tide fell away, swathes of mud either side exposed to the attentions of numerous gulls.

‘There, it’s up the top of the creek.’ Riley pointed across the river to a sliver of water which snaked between the marina and the stone quays of Royal William Yard. ‘Beyond the Princess Yachts’ hangar. Tamar Yachts is the one with the green roof. Considering what they do the business couldn’t be better positioned.’

‘Nice to put a face to a name,’ Kemp said. ‘During my trips down here I stayed away from the place deliberately.’

Riley had been over at Tamar Yachts back in the autumn and had interviewed the owner and a number of employees. The visit had been unrelated to Operation Sternway, at the time Riley not even realising the place was under surveillance. He had been impressed with the set-up, the way Tamar retro fitted kit to luxury motor yachts, exactly the kind of boats which the Princess factory produced. Given a tour of a huge gin palace – now to be equipped with the latest radar, communications hardware and security systems – Riley had calculated how long he’d have to save to afford such a beast, shaking his head when he realised retirement would loom long before he reached the sum required. To his uneducated eye the business seemed on a sound footing, with half a dozen craft in for antifouling or engine maintenance and a number of charter boats bobbing alongside a pontoon, prepped and ready for corporate days out.

‘Bizarre,’ Riley said, thinking aloud. ‘I still can’t get my head around it. When I was there everything seemed above board.’

‘They always do. That’s the point.’

It turned out that Gavin Redmond, the managing director of Tamar Yachts, was anything but above board. Discrepancies in his financial affairs had led to the tax authorities alerting police to the possibility that the business might be washing drugs money through its books. The economic crime section of Major Crimes soon realised what Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs had not: Tamar Yachts not only provided a means for money laundering, it was also the perfect cover for a smuggling operation. Proving it was another matter entirely. Which was where Kemp came in.

Kemp had spent the previous eighteen months inveigling his way into the Plymouth underworld, playing a Scouse drug dealer keen to find new supplies. He’d spent tens of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money convincing local middlemen he was genuine, all the time waiting for the big fish to take the bait. The big fish being a villain named Kenny Fallon, who just happened to own fifty per cent of Redmond’s business.

Depending on how you viewed him, Fallon was either a visionary property developer, entrepreneur and investor with a knack of always being in phase with the market, or a lowlife scum who funded his legitimate businesses with a web of illegal activities ranging from protection rackets to scams to drugs. Every city had a Kenny Fallon, a piece of dirt that somehow managed to climb from the gutter and establish itself as the kingpin. The skill they all shared was to stay one step removed from the dodgy activities and hold the shit they dealt with at arm’s length. Fallon achieved that through a mixture of shrewd decision-making and creative accounting. So far neither the police nor HMRC had managed to make the necessary connections to trap him.

‘We’ll get him,’ Kemp said, almost as if he’d read Riley’s mind. ‘The delivery is due soon. A big one, according to my contact. He’ll text me, we swoop, Fallon goes down. Fairytale ending.’

‘Can we trust your contact though? When push comes to shove will he come good?’

‘He wants out, doesn’t he? He either helps us …’ Kemp scuffed his foot on the ground, kicking a small stone out through the railings. The stone hit the mud, sending little splatters of liquid out around it. ‘Or he’s a dead man.’

An hour later and the owner of the building company turned up at Lester Close. Peter Serling drove an immaculate bright red Audi TT with plastic covers on the seats, the material crackling as he eased his bulky frame out of the vehicle to speak to Savage. If the car was an unusual choice of transport for a builder, the man’s attire wasn’t; he wore a lumberjack shirt, a dusty fleece, jeans and tan boots. Specks of sawdust clung to scraggy brown hair and white paint flecks on the back of his hands contrasted with a healthy tan. Serling apologised for not arriving sooner, explaining he’d been up on a roof without his phone.

‘Susie from the office had to drive round and get me. Right state she were in. Can’t say I blame her, if what she told me is true. I nearly fell off the roof when she shouted the news up. I’m hoping she got the wrong end of the stick and there’s another explanation.’

Savage said there wasn’t and asked about the mix-up. Had his men got the wrong address?

‘No, love.’ Serling looked over to the house where two CSIs were carrying a large box of equipment round to the rear. ‘I was here last week speaking to Mr Evershed. Went into the back garden and he explained exactly what he wanted doing. He’d been let down by another builder, apparently, and needed some groundwork done quick in preparation for a conservatory. The company were coming to erect it later this week and he’d told them the patio would be cleared and the area readied in time.’

‘Mr Evershed denies that,’ Savage said. ‘He says he never asked you to do any work. In fact he denies even knowing you.’

‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he? Considering what my lads have found.’

‘And you’re positive there couldn’t have been some mistake?’

‘Yes.’ Serling closed his eyes and kept them shut. ‘There’s a patio round the back. Stretches the width of the plot. Kitchen door’s pale green with a glass panel, in need of a paint. I noticed some rising damp to the right of the kitchen window, probably caused by the downpipe from the guttering not discharging into the drain properly. I asked Mr Evershed if he wanted me to fix it. He said “no”, he was quite capable of doing that himself. He said he would have lifted the patio slabs, but at his age he needed to start to take it easy. I said “me too” and we had a laugh about that.’

‘At his age? What sort of age would that be?’ Savage replied.

‘Hey?’ Serling opened his eyes. ‘About mine. Mid-forties. Looked pretty fit to me. Short and stocky, not much hair, but plenty of muscles, not running to fat like most of the rest of the world.’

‘What about payment? Contact details?’

‘He gave me a mobile number and he paid cash, upfront.’

‘Isn’t that unusual these days?’

‘Yeah,’ Serling smiled. ‘But not without some advantages.’

‘Tax?’

‘Yes. Forget I told you.’ Serling raised a hand and brushed his hair. A few pieces of sawdust fell on to his shoulder like flakes of oversized dandruff. ‘Mr Evershed said he was going to be away for a while and thought it best to settle up beforehand. Seven fifty in an envelope. He said he was trusting me and that I wasn’t to mess him around. The job had to be done Monday, come rain or shine. Well, I thought, for seven fifty you could add in hell or high water too.’

‘Wasn’t it over the odds? Seven hundred and fifty?’

‘Yes. Although to be fair it was going to take my lads all day to lift the slabs and dig out to the required depth.’

‘Have you still got the envelope or the money?’

‘What? You want it back?’

‘For fingerprints. You’ll get a receipt.’

‘Yes. It’s at home.’ Serling smiled again. ‘I wasn’t going to bank it, was I?’

Savage thanked Serling and directed Calter to go with him, retrieve the money and take a full statement. Then she went back to the rear of the house where the entire panoply of police resources were now in evidence. Three of Layton’s team of CSIs were working on excavating the rest of the patio, carting barrow-loads of soil round to the front of the house where they were sieved into a skip. A photographer recorded any item recovered as it was removed and an exhibits officer bagged and catalogued those of interest. Away from the patio a woman pushed what looked like a small grass mower back and forth over the lawn.

‘Ground-penetrating radar,’ Layton said when Savage asked. ‘Should tell us if anything else is buried there. Let’s hope she’s wasting her time.’

‘And inside?’

‘We’ll see.’ Layton turned to look at the house. ‘The place is due for a refurb which means, luckily, the decor hasn’t been touched for years. We should be able to ascertain if anything has been disturbed recently. And before you ask, no, nothing in the loft. Thank God.’

DCI Mike Garrett turned up an hour later, looking, as always, as if he had arrived direct from an upmarket tailor. Not so much as a piece of fluff on the dark surface of his suit, his shirt brilliant white, the collar starched, tie perfect, Garrett’s hair not far off the colour of the shirt. Unblemished was a moniker which could be applied to the older detective’s career too. He had taken a while to climb to the rank of Chief Inspector but had done so without stepping on toes, without getting his fingers dirty. Colleagues respected him and he was well-liked among all ranks. Sometimes though, Savage found him a little too stuffy.

Once Garret had clambered into his protective clothing, he came round to the back armed with a friendly greeting and a name for the operation.

‘Brougham,’ he said, as he stood over the hole, gazing down at the rubble. The plastic crate and its contents had gone, accompanied to the morgue by Nesbit and Layton, but several numbered markers lay scattered around, and Garrett’s eyes moved from one to another as if he was playing a perverse game of join the dots. ‘I’m Senior Investigating Officer,’ he said to Savage, ‘you’re my deputy. As you can imagine, Hardin wants a quick result on this one. Have you seen the Herald’s special on their website?’

‘No.’ Savage shook her head. She hadn’t seen the local paper’s website but she guessed the media would be one reason Hardin had made Garrett Senior Investigating Officer. Garrett wasn’t exactly media-savvy, but he played with a straight bat and had the appropriate gravitas. And then there were those suits he wore: black with no colour. The murder of a child – if that was what this was – had to be handled differently. A soft tone, but serious, determined and with a get-the-bastard-whatever-it-takes attitude.

‘Cromwell Street is what they are saying. House of Horrors. That sort of thing. Someone spotted the plastic box being loaded into the mortuary van. Body parts being the inference.’

‘Layton doesn’t think there are any more.’

‘Really?’ Garrett looked up to the lawn where the GPR operative was packing away her equipment, then turned to Savage and arched an eyebrow. ‘I hope he’s bloody right. If he is we might just keep the national media away from this one. Have you traced the previous occupier yet?’

Savage told Garrett what she knew from Mr Evershed and his wife. Prior to their purchase the house had been a rental property. The landlord, fed up with ongoing repairs, had been wanting to get the house off his hands. The couple had no idea who the last tenant was, but they knew the name of the letting agency.

‘Dream Lets,’ Savage said. ‘It’s just round the corner, top of Efford Road. I’ve been leaving messages on their phone for the last couple of hours. Nobody has got back to me yet. I’m going up there now.’

‘Dream Lets?’ Garrett said, glancing up at the brown pebble-dash house and then back to the hole where the bones of the dog poked out of the sludge. ‘Do you think we should do them under the Trade Descriptions Act?’

Dream Lets sat above a bookmakers’ at the top of Efford Road. The location didn’t do much to lend any credence to the salubrious name, nor did the young woman smoking a cigarette next to the agency’s entrance. Short skirt, big tattoo on a bare calf above a gold ankle chain and blonde hair from a bottle, with four weeks’ worth of dark roots showing. She glanced over as Savage and Calter approached, hacked out a globule of phlegm and then flicked the cigarette butt to the floor before opening the door and going inside.

Savage caught the door before it closed and she and Calter followed the woman up some stairs to a small office, where a handwritten notice on one wall announced what was obviously the agency motto: ‘We Let, No Sweat.’ The woman didn’t seem to be surprised to be followed and she manoeuvred her large frame in past a filing cabinet and a bookshelf. She plonked herself down at a desk, scrabbling amongst a mess of papers and folders until she found a biro.

‘Alright?’ she said. ‘What can I do for you ladies?’

The voice, low and coarse, came from a forty-a-day habit. Savage reflected sadly that the woman wasn’t much more than a girl and probably no older than Calter.

‘Seventy-five Lester Close,’ Savage said, pulling out her warrant card. ‘We know the property was one of yours until recently and we’d like a list of the previous tenants.’

‘Is there a problem?’ The woman ruffled the mess on the desk again before retrieving a folder from an ocean of manila. She lifted the flap and extracted a single sheet.

‘You could say that.’

‘Right. A problem.’ The woman paused, but when Savage didn’t fill in the dead air she peered down at the piece of paper for a moment before continuing. The way she scrutinised the few lines of type on the page it almost seemed as if she was translating the text from ancient Egyptian. After half a minute she continued. ‘Mr Franklin Owers was the last tenant before the property was sold. He’d been there for a number of years. I remember he wasn’t best pleased to be leaving, but the owner was looking to make a few quid before the market tumbled again.’

‘Do you have a forwarding address?’

‘Mr Owers is still one of ours. Unfortunately.’ The woman grimaced, and then realising Savage didn’t get her joke she added: ‘He rents a property over in Stonehouse, on Durnford Street. One twenty-one B.’

The woman scribbled on a piece of scrap paper and handed it to Savage. Savage passed the slip across to Calter, who took out her phone and left the room.

‘Is there a problem?’ The same words, but this time a quiver in amongst the gruffness. ‘Only maybe I should inform my boss. If you could just tell me what this is all about?’

‘Your tenant did some building work at the property in Lester Close. In the garden.’

‘Did he? They’re not supposed to you know, not without permission. Anything like that has to be authorised, otherwise we can get into all sorts of legal difficulties. The tenant can create a right mess and eventually their DIY efforts come back to haunt us. Is that what has happened?’

‘Haunt you?’ Savage said. ‘Yes, you could say so.’

‘Well, are you going to tell me the details?’

‘No. Do you have a spare key for the Durnford Street property by any chance?’

‘Would it help? You know, keep things quiet?’

‘It might,’ Savage said, knowing nothing would keep what she had seen at Lester Close quiet.

The woman reached across to a cupboard, and opened the door to reveal a pegboard with dozens of keys hanging on numbered hooks. She thought for a moment and then grabbed a set and handed them over, her eyes still asking for more.

‘Watch the news tonight.’ Savage turned and opened the door to leave. ‘Spotlight if you’re lucky. News at Ten if not. Thanks for your help.’

Downstairs Calter stood talking into her phone, nodding every so often as she paced back and forth in front of the bookies. She ended the call and then told Savage what she knew.

‘Franklin Owers has got previous, ma’am. He did seven years for sexual activity with a child. A six-year-old. Spent time up at Full Sutton. You know, where they keep the real nutters. It was a while ago though, he was out a few years back. On the sex offenders’ register for life, of course. Apparently his MAPPA status was downgraded to level one several years ago.’

Savage nodded. MAPPA stood for Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements. Any sex offender had a long list of people involved in their life on the outside, with everyone from probation officers and social workers to housing and health professionals having a say in managing the offender’s activities. The idea was to share resources and information across agencies. Savage suspected a by-product was the ease with which the buck could be passed along the line.

‘We’d better get over to his place now,’ Savage said, glancing up at the window of Dream Lets. The agent stood gazing down at them, a sliver of black pressed against one ear and an unlit cigarette in her other hand. ‘Before anyone else gets wind of the story.’

Chapter Four

Mount Edgcumbe, Plymouth. Monday 14th January. 12.21 p.m.

Later, Riley and Kemp went into the Edgcumbe Arms and ordered lunch, Kemp going for a beef stew, Riley choosing the Thai sweet chilli chicken. Two beers as well, Kemp laughing at Riley’s lager top as he supped his bitter.

‘How did you come to be down here then?’ Kemp said, polishing off the mushroom sauce with the last of his new potatoes. ‘I mean …’

‘You mean because I’m black?’

‘Well, not exactly wall-to-wall diversity in this part of the world, is it? And your accent, posh, educated, but London in there somewhere. South of the river?’

‘Good, Marty. Postcode?’

‘Given enough time I can come up with the colour of your first fuck’s knickers. Still thinking about my original question though. Why?’

‘Nosey, aren’t you?’ Riley said, taking a mouthful of noodles before considering his answer. ‘Let’s just say circumstances.’

‘Oh, those. Plenty of the buggers around. Work related?’

‘Yeah, work related.’

‘Enough said. I’ll not intrude on your misery any further.’ Kemp took a drink of his beer. ‘You settled down here? Got a girlfriend? Plans?’

‘Yes,’ Riley said, thinking of Julie Meadows, the woman he’d met a couple of months ago and had been seeing ever since. Julie worked for NeatStreet, a charity dealing with deprived youngsters on some of Plymouth’s worst estates, and at the tail end of last year she’d wangled him into taking a group of boys from North Prospect up to London to watch his beloved Chelsea play. From that day on he’d been smitten. Now he was unable to prevent a smile forming and, embarrassed, he looked away and out through the pub window. On the far bank of the river Plymouth shone gold in the light from the low winter sun. He turned back to Kemp. ‘For the first time in a long time I suppose I do feel settled. I guess it’s not having to do what you do any more. You know, undercover. I’m not sure I could deal with the crap any more, the fear. Getting settled is easier now I’m away from all that.’

‘Here,’ Kemp reached into his jacket, pulled out his wallet and slipped it across to Riley. ‘My little girl.’

‘Thought you were offering to pay for a moment there.’ Riley opened the wallet, saw the smile before anything else, then the blonde hair and the blue eyes.

‘Elsie. She’s eight. Keeps me grounded. Her and her mother. Trouble, both of them. Trouble you get to love.’

‘Elsie. That in real life?’

‘Not the name, but the picture, yes. Makes it easier to play the part, doesn’t it?’

Easier to play the part, Riley thought, his mind slipping back to his time in London again. Sometimes playing the part was all too easy. You forgot who you were in real life, you went native. And when that happened the inevitable followed: circumstances. He shook his head as he passed the wallet back to Kemp, and bent to his food again.

After the meal they went back outside so Kemp could have another smoke. They watched as a tiny sailing yacht nosed its way out from the Mayflower Marina and into the main channel, one of thousands of boats of all sizes that used Plymouth Sound as a base.

‘If Gavin Redmond had kept a low profile, stuck to something like that, we might never have known.’ Kemp waved his cigarette at the boat. ‘It’s those bloody gin palaces. You can smell the illegality in the fumes whenever one passes. From Russian oligarchs to small-time dodgy car ringers, they all want the same thing: a tanned blonde and a penis substitute.’

As if in response to Kemp’s statement, a loud parp from an airhorn caused them both to look to their right. The sailing boat was drifting in the channel as the skipper fought with a line which trailed behind the boat. Blue language drifted across the water and Riley guessed the rope may have fouled the prop. The horn came from a large motor boat, forty foot or more, moving up the main river and into the pool. On the flybridge a man gestured at the little boat and it wasn’t the friendly greeting of one seafarer to another.

‘Talk of the devil.’ Kemp turned away from the water and leant on the railings, his back to the action. ‘That’s Redmond.’

‘He’s got other things to worry about than spotting us,’ Riley said as the motor boat spurted forward, lifting its nose and sweeping round the sailing boat. A large bow wave washed across and rocked the little yacht and the man hung onto the backstay for balance. He returned Redmond’s gesture with interest, the single finger held aloft followed by a string of obscenities.

A rigid inflatable boat appeared from between the pontoons with two Mayflower staff on board. They nosed up to the yacht and began to guide the disabled vessel back to the marina.

‘Cocky fucker, isn’t he?’ Riley said.

‘All on the surface,’ Kemp said, watching as the white hulk of Redmond’s boat glided up the pool to the Tamar Yacht pontoons, leaving behind a swirling vortex of water. ‘Underneath he can barely hold it together. The business is on the rocks – excuse the pun – and Kenny Fallon has him by the bollocks.’

With the boat gone, Kemp turned to Riley, hand outstretched.

‘Well, I’m off, back up the motorway. Pity I won’t be here for the bust, but Mr Kemp needs to stay low in case he’s needed again. I’ll be seeing you. In court, I hope. When it’s all over we’ll have some more beers and you can introduce me to your girl. She must be sweet if she can make you smile like you did just now.’

He shook Riley’s hand and walked away without looking back, disappearing round the corner of the pub and into another life.

‘Cocky fucker,’ Riley said again.

Durnford Street was in the Stonehouse area of the city, on an odd-shaped piece of land reached by an isthmus running between the ferry terminal and the Royal Marine Barracks on one side and a creek on the other. Surrounded by water on three sides, and accessible only across the isthmus, the location had risen in affluence relative to the rest of Stonehouse. The latter had acquired a reputation for vice, hardly helped by the presence of Union Street and its array of nightclubs at its centre.

‘We’re too late,’ Savage said to Calter as they parked up.

They got out of the car and approached the imposing terrace of four-storey houses. At number one twenty-three a young woman stood holding a baby. She was talking to Dan Phillips, the Herald’s crime reporter, while a photographer took shots of the next door property, where someone had spray-painted the immaculate gloss-white door with the vivid red words ‘Paedos rot in hell’.

‘Detective Inspector?’ Phillips turned and came down the steps, blocking her way along the pavement to one twenty-one. Pinprick eyes scanned her face trying to read her mind from her expression. ‘A child’s body is found under a patio and next, the police are visiting the house of a certain Mr Franklin Owers. According to my sources he’s a known paedophile. Anything to say on the matter?’

‘Give us a chance, Dan.’ Savage wanted to ask him how the hell he had got here before them, but instead she pointed to the graffiti. ‘I can tell you the idiots who did that have got the wrong address. Or maybe I should say you have got the wrong address.’

‘Hey!’ Phillips said. ‘You don’t think I would do such a thing, surely?’

Savage pushed past the smiling reporter, knowing that spraying the door himself just to get a good picture was exactly the sort of thing he would do. She opened the little iron gate to one side of one twenty-one and descended a narrow set of steps, leading down to a basement flat which lay below the level of the road. At the bottom, the small concrete area had flooded at one end and a plastic bin had fallen on its side, disgorging its contents to float on the grimy liquid. A distinct odour of dog shit hung in the air, overpowering the whiff of the rubbish, and Savage spotted little piles of the stuff half-submerged in the water.

‘Ma’am?’ Calter had joined Savage at the bottom of the steps and now she crouched in front of the frosted-glass door, peering through the letter box. ‘Doesn’t smell too nice inside either.’

Savage rapped on the glass and waited. Nothing. She tried again, and when a third lot of knocks failed to produce an answer she pulled out the set of keys.

‘Let’s try these, shall we?’

She snapped on a pair of latex gloves before inserting the key into the lock.

The door opened into a hallway, a sheet of pale blue lino leading towards the rear of the property, the edges torn and cracked. Three piles of dog shit lay near to a doorway to the right where a pool of yellow liquid flowed across the lino and off the edge. The urine had seeped into the pine floorboards, turning the wood dark.

‘Police, Mr Owers,’ Savage said. ‘We’d like a word.’

Nothing.

Then they heard a yapping and a noise halfway between a purr and a growl.

‘You don’t like dogs, do you, ma’am?’ Calter said, moving past Savage and into the flat. ‘Better let me deal with this.’

At that moment something the size of a large cat came shooting at them from the rear of the hallway. A pink tongue lolled from jaws surrounded by a black face, atop a fat and stocky tan body. The thing stopped a couple of metres away and horrid little round eyes stared at Savage for a moment before she stepped aside to let the dog run through the front door. The animal scampered by, splashing through the flood and up the stairs to the street.

‘Pug, ma’am. Poor little thing. Must have been shut in here all the time. Lovely breed of—’ Calter stopped as Savage glared at her. ‘Anyway, now we know about the dog shit.’

Thank you, Jane.’ Savage said, closing the door. ‘Let’s stop the bloody creature getting back inside at least.’

‘Three piles of poop. I’d say that means the dog has been shut in here for a while.’

‘Feel free to investigate further. Personally I am going to leave that to John Layton. I am sure he is an expert in canine faecal deposits.’

Savage negotiated a way between the piles of poo and the pool of urine and went into the room to the right, a living room with thin, moth-eaten curtains and a raffia rug. One corner of the rug had been chewed and bits of palm leaf lay scattered around. A television stood in the corner on a triangular pine video cabinet which was trying its best to look antique. Judging from the age of the television it wasn’t far off. The only other piece of furniture in the room was a sofa covered with a tatty blanket. A Freemans clothing catalogue lay open on the sofa, faces of little girls smiling, happy. The coloured tab at the top of the page said ‘Ages 5-7’.

‘Bloody pervert,’ Calter said, coming into the room and wrinkling her nose as she peered at the glossy pictures. ‘Still up to his games, I reckon. So much for that downgrade to MAPPA level one.’

‘Have a look through those, would you?’ Savage pointed at the row of DVDs stacked on a rack beside the TV and DVD player. She left Calter and went down the hallway. At the rear of the property, a doorway to the right had a ribboned fly curtain and no door. Behind the curtain a minuscule kitchenette contained a grubby and dangerous-looking gas cooker and a little fridge sitting on a stained worktop. To the left was the bedroom. A single duvet, out of place on the double mattress lying on the floor, wore a Barbie cover. Savage’s stomach churned; until a few years ago her own daughter had had exactly the same one. In the centre of the duvet a small depression had been formed right on Barbie’s impossibly thin waist and a few black and tan hairs were visible on the cotton.

To one side of the bed a tea chest appeared to function as a linen bin and was full to the brim with jogging bottoms, jeans, shirts and underwear. The stench from the unwashed clothes invaded Savage’s nostrils and she tried to breathe through her mouth, but that just meant she gagged on the smell instead.

Apart from the bed and tea chest the bedroom was bare like the living room. Either Franklin Owers hadn’t believed in having possessions or else he couldn’t afford them. All in all it seemed a depressing existence, and for a moment Savage sensed the man’s need for the uncritical type of companionship which perhaps might only come from a dog. Or a child. But then, for a man like Owers, mere companionship with a child wouldn’t be enough. Savage turned from the room and shook her head. Haunting wasn’t the half of it.

Ricky Budgeon stared out of the window to where a patch of late afternoon sunlight painted a nearby field, the warm glow in stark contrast to the dark patterns cast by the clouds. He guessed the harsh light presaged a bout of heavy rain. The stream which ran past the rear of the house would fill, bank-full, and gurgle through the night. If he left the window open the noise might help him sleep. Assuming the pain stayed away, that was.

The headaches had got worse in recent weeks and moments when he was free of worry were like the brush-strokes of gold on the field, either side of which were black shadows. One day those shadows would close in for good.

He reached out for the rough wall to the side of the window and touched the lacquered stonework. The barn conversion had been nicely done, the place luxurious. A rich man’s pad. Not home though. Never that.

From another room he could hear the sounds of the boy, gurgling like the stream, his mother clucking to him in Spanish as she prepared a meal. He should be in there with them, playing with the boy, pulling him close with one hand, the other reaching out for the girl. They were family after all, living with him, and Budgeon knew he should be trying to make the place more of a home. Somehow he couldn’t bring himself to do that. They meant something to him, sure, but he knew the woman only hung around because of the money. An ugly mug like him with a pretty girl on his arm? He’d seen it often enough in his line of work. When she was on her knees in front of him, head bobbing, he didn’t kid himself that her actions were anything to do with love or attraction.

And the boy?

The boy was cute. Dark hair, dark skin, a real punchy little kid with an iron grip and eyes that promised an intelligence which Budgeon knew he himself lacked. The boy would be someone, wouldn’t spend half his life inside. Not if Budgeon had anything to do with it.

He wasn’t sure if the feeling he felt for the little lad was love or some kind of vicarious ambition. Still, the next week or so, if things went well, would see the kid sorted, the boy and his mother set up for life. One worry gone, one ache salved.

Budgeon sighed and then reached forward and picked up the local paper from the windowsill. The lead story was of a dead girl beneath a suburban patio, a paedophile missing, police doing all they could to find the man, confident they would be making an arrest soon.

Fat Frankie.

Budgeon had never liked him. He remembered an argument with Big K one night way back, must have been twenty years ago. The three of them in the little room Big K had above the offy. Handy for free takeouts. Round the corner from the massage parlour too, often a couple of girls spreading themselves over one of the sofas, lips pouting like fish in a tank wanting a mouthful of food.

‘It’s the figures.’ Big K looks up from the table, chucks his cards in. Folding. Nodding across to the third guy in the game. ‘Lexi, he’s canny with the politicos, you and me, we know the streets, and Frankie does the numbers.’

‘He’ll be on the numbers before long. Frankie Fiddler – and I ain’t talking an Irish jig.’

‘You’re right there, Ricky.’ Lexi this time. All too friendly. Collecting up the chips in the centre. ‘Trouser dance while watching the kiddies is the only rhythm he’s beating out. We still need him though.’

‘Look at it this way.’ Big K points to the pile of chips next to Lexi. ‘Tonight, you and me lost. Lexi’s taken me for a oner, you the same twice over. Tomorrow he’ll let us win it back because he knows if he doesn’t we’ll beat the shit out of him. But real life doesn’t work like that. The house never loses unless you’ve got an edge. Frankie is the edge.’

‘Still don’t like him.’

‘I’m not asking you to eat grapes from between his arse cheeks. All you’ve got to do is tolerate him.’

‘Think you can do that, Ricky?’ Lexi again. Smiling. Big K as well. Like they are sharing the punchline to some joke you don’t understand.

Lexi and Big K. Too close sometimes. All that talking and planning. Lexi in particular has a face with two sides. Trying to work him out is like trying to catch hold of a fart; for a moment there’s a stink but then comes a quick burst of air freshener and nobody is any the wiser.

‘The amount of money Frankie has saved us,’ Big K says, starting to laugh, ‘he’s worth his weight.’

‘Even if he is particular to kiddies?’

‘It’s a fuck or be fucked world, Ricky. You told me that.’

From the kitchen a clatter of pans brought Budgeon back to the present, the noise jarring through his head. He raised a hand and squeezed his temples to try and relieve the building pressure, then looked through the window where he could see the sun had been swallowed up by a mass of cloud which brooded on the horizon, far to the west.

Frankie should have stayed in Plymouth and not come west last summer. Once he’d been given a tour of the area, shown the tourist hotspots, he’d been gagging for it. Let loose for a few hours, the pervert had been in little-girl heaven.

‘Urges, Ricky,’ Frankie said afterwards, eyes downcast, knowing he’d walked into a trap. ‘They’re prick-teasers. All of them. She was cute, so very cute. I couldn’t help myself.’

So Frankie had helped himself.

The pans clattered again and Budgeon closed his eyes. This time the noise caused white light to crackle across a grey background, and he balled his fists as needles of agony pierced his temples. He clenched his teeth and swallowed. He wanted to go into the kitchen and hit the woman. Slap her for being so clumsy. Instead he opened his eyes and lashed out with his arm, sweeping a vase of daffodils from a nearby table. The flowers fell in slow motion and then the vase exploded on the slate floor.

A second later and the girl was at the door with the child on her hips. A hand went to her mouth, lips quivering, tears forming at the corners of her eyes. The kid smiled across, for a split second his expression reminding Budgeon of someone from his past. He creased his forehead, willed the kid to repeat the smile, tried to recall the face again but the moment was gone. Then the boy sensed the tension and began to cry.

Budgeon nodded at the girl. Remembered to breathe. Said it was OK and then waved her away. He stepped from the window, crunched over the remains of the vase and eased himself down into the creaking leather of the big sofa. Tucked down behind a cushion he found his bottle of Scotch. He pulled the bottle out and fumbled with the screw top, necked a draught straight from the bottle. A burning sensation caressed the back of his throat and he felt the tension fall away. He cradled the bottle in his lap like a newborn and closed his eyes again.

Big K’s face floated in the grey mist, mouthing the words from all those years ago: fuck or be fucked. Well, what goes around comes around, Budgeon thought. Payback time; the stuff with Frankie only the start, an illustration that he was serious and a prelude to something much grander. Something to take away his final worry and which would bring his old pals a whole symphony of pain and misery and suffering.

Chapter Five

Crownhill Police Station, Plymouth. Monday 14th January. 2.10 p.m.

Early afternoon, and Savage headed back to Crownhill. Inside the Major Crimes suite Operation Brougham was in full swing, the information discovered earlier in the day entered into the system by the indexers, actions already mounting up as each incoming lead generated numerous tasks for the inquiry teams. Three pairs of DCs had begun working the area around Lester Close. So far they had nothing but gossip. The story coming out of the neighbourhood was that Franklin Owers was a loner, frequented local playgrounds and by common consent, deserved castration. People were glad he’d moved away. The tale was similar over Stonehouse way, in the maze of streets surrounding his flat. Owers had only moved in a couple of months back, but already someone had noticed him hanging around outside the local primary school. Nobody questioned in either area had any idea where he might be and his MAPPA team were equally clueless. So much for monitoring sex offenders, Savage thought.

‘Naughty, Charlotte, naughty,’ Garrett said, entering the Crime Suite a few minutes later. ‘I should slap your wrist. More, according to John Layton.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Owers’ flat. Scene of crime. Layton has gone ballistic.’

‘Shit.’

‘Kept on talking about first dibs for him and his team. Muttered something about cross-contamination too. I told him to calm down but he stormed off.’

‘So John’s gone over there now?’

‘Going to “rip the fucker apart” were his exact words. I hope Owers is our man or else we are going to face one hell of a repair bill.’

‘And Lester Close?’

‘Clean. Nothing else there, he reckons. At least nothing we can find without bringing in the bulldozers, and I’m not ready to do that. Not until we’ve got something more on Mr Owers.’

‘It’s beyond reasonable doubt though, sir. The fact he’s offended before, the stuff we found at the flat, local people saying he acted suspiciously.’

‘Depends whose reasonable doubt we’re talking about.’ Garrett raised a finger and tapped his nose. ‘Everything so far is circumstantial.’

Savage disagreed, thinking a body beneath a patio was way more than circumstantial. She said nothing, guessing the real reason for Layton’s anger was the lack of anything incriminating from Lester Close. Now he’d be hoping to find something in Owers’ current residence, hoping Savage hadn’t mucked things up. She was sorry she had pissed him off. They were on the same side, after all.

Garrett was still talking, moving around the room and raising his voice to include everyone in the conversation. There were three main questions, he said. Who was the little girl in the box, who was the man that Peter Serling, the builder, had met at Lester Close, and where was Mr Franklin Owers? Answer any one of those and they’d be well on their way to cracking the case.

Early days, but so far the inquiry teams had nothing on Owers. Where he was remained a mystery.

Peter Serling would be coming in to give a more detailed statement and to work with the team’s e-Fit specialist to compile a likeness of the man who had impersonated Mr Evershed. The mobile number the man had given him was being traced, but likely as not would turn out to be a pay as you go and worthless.

That left the girl.

Garrett was off to the post-mortem, saying he hoped to return with information which would aid the identification. They already knew she was aged around six, had brown curly hair and a gap in her front teeth where two milk teeth had fallen out. There were so few missing persons of that age that establishing the girl’s identity should have been easy. However, the missing persons’ list didn’t contain any young children.

It wasn’t until Garrett had been gone for half an hour that Savage remembered a news story from last summer.

‘Missing, presumed dead,’ she said to herself. ‘Not on the misper list.’

‘Huh?’ DC Enders looked up from his screen and ruffled his brown hair with one hand. ‘Not following you, ma’am.’

‘Last summer. Pete was away but I’d persuaded Stefan to accompany me for a week-long cruise with the kids. We went down in convoy with another family boat and ended up getting stuck down in Newlyn. A big depression had cleared through, but the sea state kept us in harbour for a couple of days.’

‘Sorry, ma’am. I don’t get it.’

‘I remember the local newspaper headlines. A young girl had gone missing a few miles to the east at the Lizard. The lifeboat, coastguard and an army of volunteers searched the sea, cliffs and coast path, but she was never found. The conclusion was that she must have slipped over the cliff edge while her parents were having a picnic. There was something else too which I can’t quite—’

‘It’s here, ma’am,’ Enders said, pointing to his screen where he had brought up the local police file on the incident. ‘Simza Ellis was her name. Her parents were travellers, down in Cornwall for seasonal work. Ditto everything you said, but apparently the parents claimed there was somebody taking photographs of children, a “weirdo” in their words. There was also the fact that her sun hat was found in a car park set back from the coast. It says here investigating officers concluded the hat had been dropped by a dog or a gull or maybe had been carried there by an updraught from the cliffs, the hat coming off as the girl fell. The facts were considered at the inquest, but the overwhelming evidence pointed to Simza falling into the sea … shit!’

‘Patrick?’

‘… including the discovery of a pink trainer-type shoe by the lifeboat crew.’ Enders shook his head, an expression of distaste spreading across his face. ‘Because they were travellers nobody fucking believed them, did they? If they had then maybe she would be alive today.’

‘It’s easy to be wise after the fact,’ Savage said, moving over to Enders and patting him on the back.

‘Sorry, ma’am, but look at her.’ Enders pointed to a picture of the girl on the screen and clicked to make it bigger. ‘Didn’t she deserve a bit more?’

Brown curls cascaded to the edges of the image and a red tongue poked out from a pretty, playful face intent on mischief or fun, or both.

‘She’ll get the attention now, of course,’ Enders said, clicking the image shut.

Savage turned away, thinking that the young DC was right. Traveller or not, cute or not – and she was very cute – the girl had deserved more. But now was too late. Way too late.

Later, Savage climbed the stairs to Detective Superintendent Conrad Hardin’s office to give him the news on the situation at Lester Close. Hardin resembled a beached whale as he tipped his office chair backwards, interlocking his hands around his stomach and groaning.

‘Went to an afternoon buffet at the Guildhall. Bloody councillors, wasting public money on pointless functions.’ Hardin’s eyes roved to the jar of liquorice sticks he kept on his desk as part of his diet regime. He shook his head and huffed out a gallon of air. ‘Good food though.’

Being in Hardin’s office alone with the DSupt always made Savage feel uncomfortable. The sheer physical bulk of the man led to the illusion of him filling the room entirely, and in any prolonged silence the stark walls offered few distractions. At least the out-of-date calendar of Greek islands Hardin had had on the wall for the past two years had been replaced. The new one was of Dartmoor landscapes and January’s picture showed a suitably wintery scene with two children and a pony in the snow, the dark rocks of Haytor brooding in the background.

‘The girl in the box,’ Hardin said, following her gaze. ‘Where are we at?’

Savage filled Hardin in on the details, noting his eyes narrowing with anger when she told him about the pink training shoe, as if somehow the physical object made the horror more real.

‘Any ideas who she is?’ Hardin gritted his teeth and reached for his mouse. ‘And more importantly, who put her there?’

‘We’ve got a hunch she could be a girl who was thought missing after supposedly falling from a cliff down in Cornwall. As for a suspect, a previous tenant at the property turns out to be on the register. Committed a serious sexual offence a few years back. Layton and his team are all over the man’s place now, but there is no sign of him as of yet.’

Savage continued talking as there was a knock and DCI Garrett entered. Garrett, despite having spent the day tramping around a muddy patio and attending the post-mortem, looked immaculate as ever. Savage went on to outline the steps the inquiry was taking, Garrett nodding every now and then but seeing no need to interject. At the end of Savage’s summation Hardin looked at Garrett for his opinion.

‘A tragedy,’ Garrett said, ‘but no accident. Preliminary findings from the PM suggest the girl was strangled. Nesbit couldn’t say if she was sexually assaulted or not, but if we assume she was I don’t think we’d be going out on a limb. Could well be this Franklin Owers is our man, but first we’ve got to find him.’

‘To which end,’ Hardin said, ‘the media is not bloody helping.’

Hardin reached to one side of his desk where a folded newspaper stuck out of his wastepaper bin. He pulled the paper out and laid it on the desk. Dan Phillips’ headline had done the Herald proud. ‘Get Him!’ Below the headline was a picture of Franklin Owers’ grafittied front door, with an inset thumbnail of Owers himself. Hardin thumped the desk and then pointed to a subheading beneath the pictures: ‘Police Clueless in Hunt for Paedophile Killer.’

‘That,’ Hardin said, looking at Savage and Garrett in turn, his face beginning to redden, ‘is nonsense, isn’t it?’

Savage said nothing.

The Sternway meeting went ahead at six-thirty in Briefing Room A, the acronym for which never failed to raise a smile from the more infantile of the Crownhill officers. Darius Riley liked to think he was above such things.

He’d spent the afternoon summarising Kemp’s final report and dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s on a longer document which pulled together a whole mass of intelligence from numerous sources. Now he slid copies of the document across the table to DSupt Hardin, DCI Garrett, DI Phil Davies and DI Savage. Savage smiled at him and Riley thought she looked happier than she had for a while. Her husband had returned from a long stint away so maybe that was the reason. It could certainly explain the sheen of her red hair and the smartness of her attire; Riley couldn’t remember seeing her appearing quite so attractive before.

He leant back in his seat and wondered if he might be considered infantile himself for thinking his boss was looking sexy. Davies sat opposite and he glanced at Savage and then looked across at Riley and winked. There was no chance of anyone thinking Davies was sexy, Riley thought. He slumped down in his chair in a crumpled brown number which Riley wouldn’t have been surprised to learn had come from a charity shop running a discount promotion for items they couldn’t clear. Even from across the table Riley could smell several nights’ worth of beer and fags in the clothing.

Mike Garrett’s clothing had, literally, been cut from a different cloth. Riley didn’t think much of the older detective’s abilities – the man was too cautious, too rule-bound – but he’d always admired his suits.

Hardin was Hardin. Bursting out of his shirt, almost knocking over the pot of coffee when it arrived, and then grabbing a couple of biscuits with one hand while typing on his laptop with the other.

‘OK, Sternway.’ Hardin turned to his laptop and clicked again. He reached out and adjusted the angle of the screen, and for a moment Riley feared he was going to swing the computer towards them and show one of his dreary PowerPoint presentations. Instead he leant back in his chair and ran his tongue over his lips before continuing.

‘So, Darius had his final meeting with our undercover officer earlier, nom de plume Mr Martin Kemp. Mr Kemp is returning to his force and Darius,’ Hardin nodded over at Riley, ‘is off on holiday in a couple of days. Now we’re just waiting on the intel. As soon as Kemp gets the word he’ll let us know. I’m pleased to say Sternway is finally drawing to a close and there will be no happy ending for Mr Kenny Fallon. Not this time.’

Riley switched off as Hardin began to map out the final stages of the operation. He knew the details back to front, had worked on them with Kemp and Hardin. As the DSupt elaborated on the endgame Riley hoped his words wouldn’t come back to haunt them, since Hardin had been placed in charge of Sternway precisely because of the failure of previous investigations. Usually an operation focusing on somebody such as Fallon would have been dealt with by SOCIT – the Serious and Organised Crime Investigations Team – however, rumours had been spreading of one or two bad apples within the police, someone even going so far as to distribute flyers around city car parks which accused the team of corruption. The allegations were without any evidence or reason, but the brass over at force HQ in Exeter had panicked and decreed the next major operation dealing with organised crime would be run independently of SOCIT and by someone with an unimpeachable record. Enter DSupt Conrad Hardin, mates with Simon Fox – the Chief Constable, friends in the local military and bogey golfer who could cheerfully lose to the worst. With Mr Clipboard, checkbox, do-it-by-the-book Hardin in charge, what could possibly go wrong?

Riley blinked as he heard Hardin mutter his ‘bloody good policing’ catchphrase and peer over at him for an answer. He had no idea what he was talking about but he managed a ‘yes, sir’, and Hardin continued.

‘If our intelligence is correct, the cargo vessel we are interested in may even now be loading in Rotterdam. At some point in the next few days the vessel will be passing approximately ten miles south of Plymouth, where it will drop a package overboard. Once the vessel is well clear, Gavin Redmond will head out in one of those f-off yachts of his and pick up the goods.’

When Riley had first come onto Sternway and heard of the arrangement he’d had to concede it was clever. The pickup boat never had to go more than a few miles offshore and never anywhere near the ship which dropped the drugs. All it required was knowledge of the tidal streams and a short-range tracking device. Plus a little faith from the crew on the cargo vessel that the millions of pounds worth of drugs they were heaving overboard were going to end up in the right hands. All Customs and Excise’s fancy plotting equipment – which mapped out the closest point of approach of suspect vessels and watched for small boats making regular trips across channel – proved useless against such a tactic.

The ploy might have gone unnoticed if Fallon hadn’t made the mistake of using Tamar Yachts and Redmond as a way of washing money too. Tamar owned a subsidiary charter company in Nassau, out in the Bahamas. A swish website showed a number of top-end crewed yachts costing tens of thousands of dollars a week to hire and every month a payment appeared in Tamar’s bank account, the funds originating from a Bahamian bank. Twice a year Tamar Yachts paid Fallon a hefty dividend from his shares, the sums involved matching the supposed income from the charter business. An HMRC investigator, risking the wrath of her boss, decided to take an unauthorised trip to the Bahamas. She discovered nothing. Literally. The charter company didn’t exist, other than as a managed office sharing an address with hundreds of other companies. It was then that HMRC had contacted the police, realising the income flowing in from the dummy charter operation was most likely drugs money.

‘You all know your roles,’ Hardin said, leaning forward and jabbing a finger at each officer in turn. ‘Phil will liaise on additional evidence, Mike will run the interviews, Charlotte will manage the post-arrest local inquiry teams, and Darius, when you return from your jaunt, you’ll be collating the threads and working with the team to turn what we have into something the CPS will wet their knickers over. Finally the Tactical Aid Group will be carrying out the raids and you can bet I want you guys there as well to prevent the trigger-happy cowboys messing everything up. Apart from that it is just a waiting game. Questions?’

There were dozens. Operational, technical, legal, Hardin dealing with each in turn in his methodical manner. An hour later and he wrapped the meeting up with a final pep talk.

‘The objective is to shut down the city’s drug supply network and catch Fallon red-handed. Once we have Fallon we will be able to round up everyone from him down. It’s been tried before and we’ve always made a hash of the endgame; Fallon has always evaded us.’ Hardin paused, looking gloomy, before smiling and adding with a whisper: ‘Until now.’

Riley glanced across at his fellow officers. Garrett wore a serious expression whereas Davies grinned, eager to be up and at them, kicking down doors and smashing heads. DI Savage smiled at him again.

Afterwards, as they left the room, Savage came across to them.

‘If, Darius – God forbid – this all goes wrong, you’ll be glad to be on a beach four thousand miles from here.’

‘If this goes wrong, ma’am,’ Riley said, ‘I think a million miles might be a safer distance.’

Alec Jackman lay back on the bed in a state of post-orgasmic exhaustion. The girl beside him slept, almost silent, the only noise the faint sound of her shallow breathing. Jackman traced the line of the sheet as the material rose along her legs to her hips and fell down to her waist. She had pushed the sheet down from the top half of her body and Jackman let his eyes rest on her breasts. Round, but small and pert. Tiny goosebumps marked the mesmerising curves and her nipples stood erect.

As Jackman pulled the sheet up to cover her, the girl stirred and yawned, but she didn’t wake. She would be tired. Worn out. Sometimes the young ones were shocked at what he could do. What he could still do. Most men of his age weren’t as fit as him, most were heading downhill toward a six-foot hole in the ground and oblivion. At times like this Jackman almost believed he would live forever. Rubbish, of course, but there was no reason he shouldn’t go on enjoying himself as long as possible. And he usually went on a long while. The coke helped, although he hadn’t done much. The drug was mostly for the girl’s benefit. A little inducement to keep her sweet.

Jackman glanced at the bedside clock. He ought to be out of here, he had an important meeting to get to and then home to his wife, Gill. He had promised he wouldn’t be too late and he didn’t want to push things, even though he realised she probably had an inkling of what was going on. She knew the score. Understood the price to pay. All those shoes, handbags, the hired help, the nice house. The goodies cost money and the girl was payback. One squeak from Gill and she could say goodbye to the little treats and the lifestyle as well. Glamour, parties, trips abroad, local recognition. Without him she had nothing.

Then there was his brother-in-law, Gavin Redmond. Gill owed Jackman for him too. The idiot should have been rolling in dough with the yacht business he ran, but he seemed to piss away the stuff. A few years back Jackman had helped him get the company back on a sound footing by finding a new investor and an extra revenue stream. The sideline was far from legal, but nobody got rich keeping to the rules. The bankers proved that.

He sighed and got out of the bed, found his jacket and rummaged in a pocket for his pack of cigarettes. Like the cocaine, he knew he shouldn’t, but this would be the first of the day. Self-control. Like with the girl. He’d come as the gasp from her own orgasm spread a smile across her face. Now Jackman smiled too. A real cutie, this one.

The lighter flared and he drew on the cigarette. Redmond was pissed off about the girl. As he would be, the girl being his own daughter, Jackman’s niece. Not blood related of course, but still, the frisson was there. Something to do with some of his wife’s genes being in the girl, Jackman suspected. He thought about Redmond again. In truth the idiot worried him. Lately he’d looked tired and nervous. Jackman had told him to get a grip. He only had to hold himself together for a few days and then they’d be quids in. All of them. On the other hand, one wrong move and everybody was going to get screwed.

Unless …

The meeting could change things and swing the possibility of success their way. Jackman went to the bathroom and then quickly got dressed.

Thirty minutes later he pulled into the car park at Jennycliff, a parkland area to the south of the city which sat above cliffs on the eastern edge of Plymouth Sound. Over the sea the light had long gone from the sky. The daylight, anyway; a swathe of orange off to his right painted the underside of the clouds and below, the city glowed.

Jackman sat in his car, tapped his watch, waited. He shivered as the air in the car cooled. Early evening dog-walkers returned from the park and loaded their charges into the back of cars. A couple of hardy runners headed home.

The minutes ticked by and the legitimate visitors all left. A car cruised in, followed by another, and then another. They parked up one end, the interior light in one car flicking on, a woman and a man visible inside, while a couple of men climbed from the other cars and skirted the vehicle, cameras in hand.

Usually the proximity of sex would have aroused Jackman, but not tonight. He turned his attention away from the free show and towards the car park entrance where a pair of headlights announced a new arrival. This time the vehicle didn’t head up the slope to the top but pulled alongside Jackman’s car. Even in silhouette the pickup looked like it had seen better days. Patches of white filler adorned the dark bodywork and one wing had a large dent. When the interior light went on it illuminated a bulky man with a beard. A woolly hat perched on his head struggled to cover large ears.

The man nodded across at Jackman and then reached over and opened the passenger door. Jackman got out of his car and ducked down into the passenger seat, closing the door. The light went off and Jackman heard the man sniff and cough, a waft of bad air coming Jackman’s way a few moments later.

‘Well?’ Jackman said. ‘This isn’t the sort of place I usually come for a meeting so let’s get on with it.’

‘It?’ the man said.

‘Kenny Fallon said you had something for me. You hand it over and he lets you go about your business.’

‘Cash. Up front. He promised.’

‘Look, you’re a poacher, a petty housebreaker when you get the chance. Some pheasants, a rabbit or two, a laptop or phone if you spot an opportunity when you’re out and about. I can’t see what you can have come up with that’s got Kenny so excited, but if it’s good you’ll get your money.’

The man stirred, shifted in his seat as he retrieved something from a pocket. A little screen popped into life in the gloom.

‘A phone? I hope you’re not winding us up. Where did you nick it from?’

‘I didn’t, it’s mine.’ Fingers swept over the surface of the phone and a movie clip started to play. ‘I want five thousand for this.’

‘Five thousand? You’re crazy.’

‘When you’ve watched it, you’ll pay.’

‘Let me see then.’ Jackman leant over, trying not to inhale the mixture of bad breath and sweat.

Poor quality video played on the screen. Black and grey chunks of pixels swirling. Static on the audio track. That, and the sound of heavy breathing. Jackman was about to ask the man what the hell he was playing at when a bloom of light grew and danced in the centre of the picture as the camera zoomed and struggled to focus. Then the image steadied and Jackman was able to resolve the jumble of light and shadow. As the film ran on he realised this was dynamite, and a minute or so later when the clip finished he had to struggle to contain his excitement.

‘Good, eh?’ A finger touched the screen and the man pocketed the phone. ‘Five thousand.’

‘How the hell did you get that?’ Jackman felt his heart beating, but tried to remain calm. ‘I mean, were you waiting there or what?’

‘I was in the area on business. There’s a holiday home, couple from London. They’re down here every weekend and they’ve got careless. They started to leave a few things around the place and I spied them through the window. There’s a key under the flowerpot for the cleaner. They’ve got the brains to earn all that money but really they’re as thick as they come. I—’

‘Alright, I understand. Get on with it.’

‘I heard an almighty smash as I was going through their stuff. When I rush out I see the car upside down. I recognised her immediately. I was about to make a run back into the woods when something made me stop. I whipped out the phone and started to film. Twenty minutes later the place was crawling with police, the fire brigade, ambos, everything. That’s when I legged it.’

‘Give me the phone.’ Jackman reached into his back pocket and extracted his wallet. Pulled out all the cash he had. Two fifties and a bunch of tens. ‘Here.’

‘A couple of long’uns? You must be fucking joking.’

‘I don’t carry five K around. You’ll get the rest once Kenny’s seen it.’

‘But I need my phone. Anyway, how do I know I can trust you?’

‘It’s not me, it’s Kenny. He plays fair. And when he doesn’t play fair he sends someone round to kick your head in. You don’t have a choice. You’ll get your phone back tomorrow.’

‘Alright.’ The man grunted, retrieved his phone and dumped it in Jackman’s hand, in exchange for the money. ‘Five thousand. Remember?’

‘Sure,’ Jackman said pushing the door open and gulping fresh air. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

The engine started up as Jackman slammed the door and the car jerked forwards and then slewed out of the car park.

Jackman stood still for a moment. Let out a breath. Felt in his pocket for the phone. The smooth surface tingled the ends of his fingers, almost as if there was something magical about the object. He smiled, glanced up to the doggers at the top of the hill and then thought of the girl waiting for him back at his flat.

‘You lucky, lucky boy,’ he said to himself as he climbed back into his car.

Chapter Six

Nr Bovisand, Plymouth. Tuesday 15th January. 6.45 a.m.

Tuesday morning, Savage was roused early by Jamie snuggling into the bed and wanting to know when Father Christmas was coming again. Pete muttered something along the lines of ‘never, if you don’t let him get some more shut-eye’, but by then Savage was wide awake, all chance of further sleep gone.

Down in the kitchen for breakfast Pete stifled a yawn, let it slip into a smile and then put his arm around her when she came over. He was finding it difficult, she knew. Adapting to a permanent life ashore was always going to be tricky after the routine of his previous existence. He loved Samantha and Jamie as much as she did, but often he’d only seen them at their best. Day-to-day was a totally different experience for him.

As Savage drove in to the Stonehouse area of the city to catch up with the inquiry teams, she let her thoughts mill around. Concluded that although things could be better, they could be a whole lot worse too.

By the time she arrived the sun had crawled up over the horizon into a clear sky, a smudge of cloud off to the south-west and a change in the wind direction hinting at an end to the cold conditions of the last couple of days. A call to DCI Garrett informed her that yesterday’s door-to-door trawl hadn’t produced anything fresh, so she made her way back to Owers’ flat at one twenty-one Durnford Street. John Layton’s Volvo stood alongside a resident’s parking sign, an ‘On Police Business’ sticker on the inside of the windscreen. Layton sat in the front passenger seat, spooning something from a pot into his mouth.

‘Yogurt and muesli,’ he said as the window slipped down. ‘A bit nineteen eighties but still as good for you now as it was back then.’

‘Sorry,’ said Savage. ‘I messed up. Too eager I suppose.’

‘And I apologise for getting angry,’ Layton said, finishing the last of the yogurt and stuffing the plastic pot and spoon in a paper evidence bag. He took his Tilley from the dashboard, got out of the car and plonked the hat on his head. ‘I blame it on my daughter. Ever since she was born … well, you know, don’t you?’

Savage did know. When her own daughters, the twins, Samantha and Clarissa, had been born, something had changed in the way she approached police work. Cases involving violence towards the innocent or powerless became magnified in their importance. The crimes became personal, as if they had been committed against her own family, and the anger and despair could only be ameliorated by catching the perpetrators. Or, as in the case of the man who’d tried to abduct her daughter Samantha – the serial killer Matthew Harrison – seeing that he received a fiery retribution.

‘Can I go in?’ Savage asked, swallowing a lump of emotion.

‘Yes, of course. I’ve nearly finished so there’s no need to worry about suiting up this time. Just about to check the U-bends in the bathroom and then I’m done.’

‘U-bends?’ Savage said. ‘As in plumbing?’

‘Yes. You get hair and nail clippings and all sorts in them. You should have a gander at yours sometime, you’d be surprised how much gets stuck down in amongst the sludge and gunge.’

‘Yuck,’ Savage wrinkled her nose. ‘I don’t want to think about it. If I want to get them cleaned I’ll call a plumber.’

‘If you can find one.’

They went down the steps and into the basement flat where Layton disappeared to his plumbing duties. Savage went into the living room, where a set of floodlights on a stand illuminated several boxes of papers and files stacked ready for dispatch to the station.

She wandered out of the living room and down the corridor. Floorboards had been pulled up in places and a section of plasterboard cut away from a wall where a patch of paint appeared fresher than the rest of the flat. In the bathroom the white floor tiles gleamed under the glare of another set of lights. Layton’s legs sprawled across the tiles, scrabbling for purchase on the shiny surface. His body was wedged under the bath where he’d removed a panel from the side. Banging, huffing and the occasional swear word came floating out. Savage left him to it and moved onto the bedroom. The bed had been stripped of the Barbie cover and sheets and the tea chest Owers used as a linen bin contained nothing but air. Savage wasn’t sure what she was looking for; Layton and his team usually went through a crime scene like locusts through a field of crops and it was unlikely they would miss anything.

She stood in the centre of the bare room, thinking how Owers’ life was being taken apart. He’d probably killed Simza Ellis so he deserved all that was coming to him, but it looked as if he had been living a bleak, empty existence for years. He may have gained some perverse pleasure from his paedophilia, but was the pleasure so great it was worth sacrificing everything for?

She went back into the living room again. The blanket covering the sofa had gone, however the Freemans catalogue remained. The catalogue no longer lay open but sat placed on one arm of the sofa, as if someone had forgotten to pack it away in one of the boxes. Savage went over, picked it up and began to flick through the first few pages. As she perused the dresses she looked at the models – teens and early twenties most of them – and thought about herself at a younger age. Back then, when she’d first got together with Pete, she remembered he’d often teased her about her scruffy attire, but then conceded he preferred her without clothes anyway.

Savage smiled to herself at the memory and then shook her head. For too long her life had been on autopilot, her relationship with Pete the same. Passion had been fuelled by distance, love by his absence. Now he was back for good they’d have to work on things, make an effort. She wondered if that might include needing a change of wardrobe.

She moved on through the various sections, but nothing grabbed her. Then she reached the children’s clothes, spotting the page which had been open the first time she had seen the catalogue. She flicked on, and a few pages later the catalogue opened at a slip of paper wedged deep in the seam. At the top of the page two girls dressed in vests and knickers stood against a pastel background. Savage removed the paper. Nothing on either side. She looked back at the catalogue. Near the seam there was a hollow space, a recess cut away, inside which was the distinctive shape of a USB memory stick.

After handing Layton the catalogue with the cut-out and the USB stick, Savage left the property, strolled down Durnford Street and then up to Admiralty Street, looking to see where the inquiry teams had got to. At St George’s Primary the shrieks of children floated out from the playground at the rear. They were out of view, safe from the prying eyes of a pervert like Owers, but a minor inconvenience like that wouldn’t stop someone like him. He’d find a way. The question was, had he gone down to the Lizard in Cornwall for just that reason?

Up the street she could see two members of the inquiry team talking to Enders. Enders waved and then jogged towards her, a wide grin on his face. He reached her, breathless, words pouring out. Savage told him to calm down. Take it slowly. Enders explained the two officers he’d been talking to had scored big time.

‘We’ve got a reliable sighting of Mr Owers. He was seen scuttling up the cut at the back of Admiralty Street early Sunday evening, something about a confrontation with two other men. Then a white van drives off at speed.’

‘Have we got anything else on the van?’

‘Of course.’ The grin widened and Enders nodded over at a small sign attached to a nearby lamp post. ‘Neighbourhood Watch. The van was double-parked near the school and somebody snapped a pic with their phone. We’ve got the index.’

‘And?’

‘Registered owner is a Stuart Chaffe. Turns out he has form. Major. Went down for assaulting a police officer after being stopped on the motorway during a drugs bust. The assault was a knifing. Sliced the officer open and pulled the man’s guts out with his bare hands. Chaffe spent five years in Broadmoor before being moved to an ordinary prison to complete his sentence. He was only released last year after an eighteen-year stretch inside.’

‘Sounds like he could be old enough to be our mystery man, the one who impersonated Mr Evershed. Do we have an address?’

‘Southway, ma’am. Kinnaird Crescent. Since he’s only just out of the nick he’ll have a probation officer. Shall I try to make contact and get some sort of lowdown before we head out there?’

Savage thought back to an incident a couple of years ago. In a similar situation she’d gone by the book and had a quiet word with somebody on the offender management side of things. When she’d turned up at the suspect’s house – a youth wanted for attacking a mum-to-be with a hammer – the door had been opened by a local solicitor, the lad already briefed to keep his mouth shut.

‘No,’ Savage said. ‘Better if our visit comes as a complete surprise to Mr Chaffe, don’t you think?’

Kinnaird Crescent lay on the northern edge of the city in the maze of Drives, Closes, Walks and Gardens which made up the district of Southway. Stuart Chaffe lived in a block of flats on the north side of the crescent, one of a number of five-storey blocks dotted every fifty metres or so. The road traversed a slope and the flats had been built on the lower side, meaning the ground floor – which consisted of garages – and the first floor lay below street level. Each block had a concrete bridge which led across to the entrance door. Net curtains adorned the lower windows of the flats, hiding away whatever grimness lay within. Depressing, Savage thought, as Enders drove along the crescent, past block after block of identical buildings.

Halfway along they came to the correct block. They parked up and strolled across the strange little bridge to the glass-fronted lobby area, where a list of names ran down a column of bell-pushes to the right of the locked door. ‘Chaffe’ had been scribbled in pencil alongside the number ‘324’. Three presses of the bell later, the third with Enders keeping his finger held down for a good thirty seconds, and a lanky figure shuffled down into the foyer from a stairwell to the right. Stuart Chaffe wore ill-fitting jeans and a denim jacket, his wrists and ankles protruding from the sleeves and the bottom of the trousers, as if he was a kid growing too fast for his parents to keep him in clothes. In his early forties, he appeared older, with greying hair and bloodshot eyes, his skin bearing an unhealthy pallor, as if he had returned from a long sea voyage where fruit and vegetables were in short supply. He gazed through the glass before leaning against the wall next to a bare noticeboard.

‘If you are from the good Lord Jehovah you can fuck off.’ Chaffe rubbed his eyes and yawned.

‘I have heard my boss called many things, Mr Chaffe,’ Savage said, ‘but God isn’t one of them.’

‘Pigs then? These days only pigs and religious folk dress like you two twats.’

‘Let us in, Stuart,’ Enders said, pressing his warrant card up to the glass. ‘We want a word. Or two.’

‘I was right then. All that time inside and I’ve still got a good sense of smell for crap.’ Chaffe made no move to open the door, instead he straightened and gestured around the hall. ‘Talk away. No one around to hear, just a few deaf old coots. The rest are out at work.’

‘And you, Stuart?’ Savage said. ‘Have you got a job?’

‘The name’s Stuey, not Stuart, and “Had” is the word. Gutting chickens in a factory wasn’t my idea of fun. Not after having spent the last eighteen years in a battery farm myself. Jacked it. You should have seen my proby’s face when I said I’d had enough, you’d have thought I’d knocked one out over her.’

‘Let’s talk about this inside, Stuart. You can make us a nice cup of tea and we can ask you a few questions.’

‘Tea? You’re joking, right? Believe me, sweetheart, when you’ve done a stretch like I have the last thing you are going to be drinking on the outside is tea. So, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go back and fix myself something a little stronger before you guys bore me back to sleep.’

Chaffe turned and began to move towards the stairs. Enders grabbed the door handle and rattled the door, the noise echoing around the bare hallway.

‘You own a white van,’ Savage said. ‘Were you out and about in it on Sunday evening? Maybe around the Stonehouse area?’

‘So what if I was? Got to make a living somehow.’

‘Do you have any friends who live over that way, Stuart? On the gross side, the type who like to play with kiddies?’

‘Hey?’

‘A man known as Franklin Owers. You’ll likely as not have seen his picture in the Herald. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of him, have you?’

Chaffe stood for a moment, a smirk creeping across his lips. Then he turned and walked across the hallway, his beanpole-like frame disappearing as he went down the stairs.

‘Ma’am?’ Enders had stepped back from the door and pointed to a white plate on the outside wall of the flat. ‘Says numbers two ninety-four to three twenty-four. Which means Chaffe’s flat is on the top floor, and if you remember he came down the steps.’

‘Shit.’ Savage moved back onto the bridge and peered over. A row of windows marked the first floor flats and then, below, the grass slope led down to rendered wall with a couple of smaller windows and some pipes. Somewhere out the back of the flats an engine coughed into life, followed by a squeal of tyres.

Enders was already running for their car, key fob in an outstretched hand. A white transit van came from behind the flats, shooting up the access road and sweeping round and up to join Kinnaird Crescent proper. The vehicle skidded into the road, turning sharp left and roared back towards where Enders was crossing over. He dashed across, diving for the pavement as the van sped past, Chaffe leaning forwards in the front seat, mouth hanging open, eyes wide. Enders picked himself up as Savage arrived at the car and jumped in the passenger side. Enders was in the car and starting the engine as Savage reached for the radio.

They had parked facing the direction they had come so Enders floored the accelerator and spun the wheel. The back end of the car slid round but not quite enough to prevent him from having to engage reverse gear and back up. Then they were going forwards again, Savage spotting the van disappearing over a rise a couple of hundred metres away. The crescent curled up to the right, meeting the larger Clittaford Road at a mini-roundabout. Chaffe went left, screeching across the roundabout and clipping a car parked a short distance up the road. Enders had the headlights on and the grille-mounted blue strobe flashed in response to the warble of the siren. A motorcyclist came from the right and Enders had to thump the horn to prevent the rider from venturing into their path.

‘Idiot!’

Savage had control on the radio and swore when the dispatcher said the nearest unit was at the Crownhill station. It would be at least a couple of minutes before back up would arrive.

Clittaford Road had speed bumps for the first quarter of a mile, but Enders took them at full pelt, the car’s suspension bottoming with a jar each time they hit one. Another mini-roundabout marked the end of the residential area and the start of an industrial complex on the right, a number of vast warehouses standing like sad monoliths. The road continued to bend to the right, looping in a great circle until houses once again appeared on the left and the road came to the much busier Southway Drive where a queue of cars waited at a red light.

Up ahead, Chaffe swung over to the wrong side of the carriageway and steamed by the queue, hanging a right and speeding onto the main road. Enders followed and they joined the road just in time to see Chaffe slow down and take a sneaky left up a side street.

‘Got him,’ Enders said, flooring the accelerator once again. They shot along the main road and Enders took the left turn at speed, careering round and bumping the curb. Out of the corner of her eye Savage spotted a sign: two figures holding hands – one taller than the other – inside a red triangle.

‘No!’ she screamed.

The dad in the middle of the road grabbed his three-year-old and leapt for the pavement, but an older child stood rigid with fright. Enders wrenched the wheel and stamped on the brake pedal. The ABS juddered as the car began to turn and then the whole of the vehicle was sliding sideways, the back end swinging round so when they stopped they were pointing back the way they had come.

Savage looked over her shoulder but couldn’t see the child. She jumped out and ran to the rear of the car. The girl knelt on the ground crying, pointing down into the road where a little black cat lay squashed under a wheel, a mass of polystyrene beads escaping from the soft toy’s stomach.

By the time they had waited for a Traffic unit to arrive so the incident could be logged and assessed – the attending officers taking photographs and measuring the marks on the road as well as interviewing the available witnesses – the day was fast disappearing.

When Savage had seen the little girl standing there she had been transported back through the years to when her daughter Clarissa – Samantha’s twin – had been killed in a hit and run up on Dartmoor. The accident had been altogether different, of course: Clarissa had been on her bike and the driver hadn’t been a skilled officer who had completed several pursuit courses but a maniac handling his car with no respect for other road users. The investigation had been much more involved too, but despite numerous leads the driver had never been traced, Clarissa’s death – or murder, as Savage saw it – unattributed and unavenged.

Savage took the wheel for the short drive back to Crownhill and as they drove away from the scene, Enders stared down at his lap. She knew Enders understood about Clarissa and he also had young children of his own.

‘It’s OK, Patrick. She didn’t have a mark on her. The only thing damaged is your pride.’

‘Inches, ma’am, inches.’ Enders shook his head. ‘I should have made a judgement of the risk. Time of day, the weather, danger to other road users, the seriousness of the offence the suspect we were pursuing may have committed …’

‘Textbook rubbish. Impossible for us to do if we were to have any chance of catching up with Chaffe. Anyway, I think murder is serious enough for a high-speed pursuit, and Chaffe is mixed up in this somehow.’

‘You think Chaffe is a paedophile like Owers? Maybe involved in killing Simza Ellis?’

‘No idea. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think the fact he’s done eighteen years makes him a reformed character. He doesn’t exactly look like a complete innocent either, does he? And if he is, then why on earth did he do a runner?’

The call had come from a policeman in Plymouth. Unexpected.

‘Simza,’ the voice said; Tony Ellis listening but not needing to know, not wanting to know either.

‘Back then,’ the policeman continued. ‘Well, it turns out you might have been right all along.’

Ellis opened the front door and stepped on to the veranda of his little park home, out of earshot of Lisa, his wife. A cold dampness touched his face and he heard the roar of the traffic on the M5. A blur of cars and lorries sped by on the embankment above, the monotonous whooshing like waves pounding a beach.

Back then. Last summer. No beach, but a series of jagged rocks at the bottom of the steep cliffs of the Lizard. A huge swell from a distant storm way off in the Atlantic crashing into the shore, the spray misting his face but the water warmer than today’s drizzle. Rainbows dancing in the morning sun, and Simza laughing as he had thrown sandwiches out into the void where gulls swooped and caught them.

Then she was gone. Just like that, when their backs had been turned for one moment.

Within minutes the Lizard lifeboat had been launched, the orange craft rising and falling on the waves as it searched the water below the cliffs. Fifteen minutes later and a rescue helicopter roared overhead, the tourists gawping at the free airshow. Within an hour a coastguard cliff-rescue team and half a dozen police officers were scouring the clifftops too, guys in harnesses abseiling down to check unseen ledges, voices crackling in radios.

‘That’s a negative down here, repeat, negative.’

‘What about the fat guy with the camera?’ Lisa had whispered to him. The one with the strange smile, all-too friendly as he patted Simza on the head as he passed by on the coast path.

A word to the officer in charge had brought a shake of the head. That sort of thing didn’t happen down here. Not in Cornwall. He promised to organise a search of the nearby car parks and maybe station a patrol car up the lane. However, when Simza’s pink trainer was plucked from the sea by the lifeboat crew all efforts were once again concentrated on the water.

‘But he’d been taking pictures,’ Lisa said. She remembered him leering from behind a white van parked down by the gift shop.

‘No, love,’ the officer said. ‘I can understand why you’d want to think that, to cling onto some glimmer of hope, but no, she’s gone over the edge. Happens every so often. It’s why we have the fence. People don’t realise how dangerous the coastline is.’

‘Mr Ellis?’ The voice was still on the line as Ellis collapsed onto the white plastic chair on the veranda. Now the officer was asking Ellis some questions, mentioning a name or two, did they sound familiar?

You might have been right all along.

‘Do they sound familiar, Mr Ellis?’

Ellis could barely hear the voice above the traffic roaring past on the motorway, the noise of waves pounding a beach. His fists pounding to a bloody pulp the face of some pervert who’d taken his little girl.

Chapter Seven

Nr Bovisand, Plymouth. Wednesday 16th January. 8.27 a.m.

Wednesday morning, and Savage stood outside with Pete waiting for the kids to emerge from the hallway for the trip to school. Pete was shaking his head, pointing at various bits of the house which needed attention. Roof, guttering, windowsills, the damp-proof course, they all needed work. He took Savage’s hand and smiled at her. Lucky he was going to be around for a bit, he said.

Peregrines was a sprawling structure, hardly beautiful except in its oddity. The original open-plan single-storey building had been added to over the years, growing various appendages until it had a number of different levels and wings and more resembled a bodged-up Greek island villa than a house. The previous occupant had been an admiral and at first Savage and Pete had rented the property from him while he embarked on a round-the-world sailing trip with his second, and somewhat younger, wife. Three years in, still not having fully explored the Caribbean, he decided he was never coming back and sold them the house. Over the years they’d reached the conclusion that the place hadn’t been so much a bargain as a gift horse, but short of doing what the admiral himself had done, Savage didn’t think they’d be leaving anytime soon.

The position, high on the eastern side of the Sound near Bovisand, was incredible. Surrounded by fields on three sides, and on the fourth, the sea. Cliffs plunged to the surf line, and were home to numerous birds, including the occasional marauder, the eponymous peregrine. The only downside to the position was the westerly wind which battered the house in bad weather.

Right now the air was still, the sky clear and cold. Pete went to start the car and Savage shouted in at Jamie not to forget his scarf and gloves. Jamie came running out of the front door whirling the scarf around his head and then skidded on the lawn, landing on top of a molehill.

‘I’ll get some diesel,’ Pete said, climbing back out of the car. ‘That will teach the little blighter. Half a litre and he’ll think twice about doing it again.’

‘Diesel?’ Stefan came out onto the porch, raised his eyebrows and held the front door open for Jamie as he trooped in to get a fresh pair of trousers. ‘Is that the British way? Wouldn’t be allowed in Sweden.’

‘The mole, you daft turnip. You pour it down the hole and they bugger off.’ Pete grinned. ‘Although now you mention it perhaps I could spare a bit for Jamie. Might have the same effect.’

‘Cool,’ Samantha said emerging from inside, fingers pressing keys on her phone as she spoke. ‘I’m going to post that right now.’

Savage stood on the doorstep, shaking her head at her family’s antics, reaching for her own phone as it trilled out.

‘DC Enders, ma’am,’ the voice said. ‘We’ve found Franklin Owers.’

‘Great. Are they taking him to Charles Cross? Tell DC Calter I’ll meet her there and we can work out an interview strategy together. Make sure DCI Garrett is informed too. Better get onto his MAPPA contact as well.’

‘He’s not going to the custody centre. He’ll be going to Derriford,’ Enders said.

‘Resist arrest did he? Get hurt in the struggle?’ Savage followed Jamie upstairs to help him get changed. ‘Well make sure somebody stays with him at the hospital, we don’t want him slipping away.’

‘Not A and E, ma’am, the mortuary,’ Enders said. ‘He’s dead.’

In a tower block in Plymouth city centre, Jackman glanced at the bedside clock. He groaned. Despite his intentions of the previous night he’d stayed over, phoning his wife and telling her he’d met an old colleague and they needed to catch up. After his meeting at Jennycliffe he’d returned to his flat, woken the girl and entered her, fucking her slowly for a good thirty minutes. Afterwards he had done a few hours’ work while the girl slept and then they’d ordered some food in, fucked again, slept.

Fantastic, last night. And not just the stuff with the girl.

He couldn’t resist viewing the material once more, so he heaved himself out of the bed and, naked, padded across to the desk next to the window where his laptop sat. He glanced out for a moment, taking in the grey morning, before he flipped up the lid on the machine and logged in. Last night he’d transferred the movie from the poacher’s phone to his computer and deleted the original file. Now he navigated to the folder he wanted and opened the new copy.

Full screen on the laptop the quality of the video was worse than ever, but after a few seconds the image was unmistakable: a woman stood next to the wreckage of an upside down car, bathed in a headlight beam coming from somewhere off-camera. Her bright red hair nicely foretold what was about to happen, Jackman thought, as he heard a man’s voice echoing out, pleading for help. The woman ignored the pleas and turned and walked away. A little later the car exploded in a fireball which overloaded the camera’s sensor in a white flare, before the exposure compensated and the raw beauty of the yellow and orange flames became visible. For a few seconds an awful screaming rent the air, but the noise didn’t last long. Jackman knew from the newspaper reports that there hadn’t been much left by the time the fire brigade had arrived; only a set of charred bones, the flesh and fat having burned and bubbled away.

Even though he had watched the film several times the footage was still causing Jackman’s heart to thump. Not that he was concerned about the man in the car. No, he’d been a murderer and burning was almost too good for him. What raised Jackman’s pulse, what made him think life might be about to get even sweeter, was the woman. She shouldn’t have walked away and she shouldn’t have lied about doing so either. Not when she was a Detective Inspector with Plymouth CID.

Jackman closed the movie file, flipped the lid on the laptop down and smiled. Power and control was what the movie gave him. Given the situation with Redmond, the poacher’s night-time encounter had brought some timely good fortune.

Thinking of Redmond, his mind turned to the girl. He looked over to the bed and feasted his eyes on her body. Curves not yet fully developed, face angelic, mind uncorrupted. He liked them that way. She was seventeen and legal, of course. He was no pervert and it was best to keep things above board, even if the affair with the girl – his niece – would be an unforgivable misdemeanour. Especially for a married man who was the deputy leader of Plymouth City Council, and a member of the Devon and Cornwall Police and Crime Panel.

Two words were all the directions Savage needed from Enders to reach the crime scene: ‘The Hoe.’ Fifteen minutes later and she drove up Hoe Road, swung past the army fort and turned right up the narrow access ramp onto the Hoe. A row of flagpoles bordered a huge expanse of tarmac, the flags hanging down, sad and unmoving. In summer the place thronged with pedestrians, kids on bikes, roller skaters, skateboarders and dog walkers. A grassy slope to one side of the tarmac was a fine place for picnicking and offered fantastic views over the Sound. Right now the area was deserted apart from a BBC outside broadcast car, a cameraman taking some establishing shots, and a pretty young female reporter in a hideous purple coat. Behind them stood the iconic red and white lighthouse. Whether it acted as a beacon or a warning probably depended upon your view of the city.

Savage parked alongside a patrol car, a van and Layton’s Volvo. Layton stood next to the car, phone pressed to ear, his free hand agitated, the crime scene manager doing most of the talking. As Savage got out he looked across at her, nodded and pointed over towards the public toilets. The toilets lay at the eastern end of the Hoe, not far from the Hoe Lodge Restaurant, which, notwithstanding the grand name, was in reality nothing much more than a snack bar. Despite the weather a number of people were sitting outside, DC Enders and a uniformed PC weaving between the tables, taking statements.

Savage retrieved her PPE kit from the boot and struggled into a white coverall before crossing the tarmac to the path which led round to the toilet block, a low, brick building which had a number of roof lanterns poking up from a flat roof. One of Layton’s CSIs stood next to a couple of poles with blue and white tape and he proffered a log, which Savage signed, before pointing down the path to the male toilets. DC Carl Denton was waiting at the entrance, a couple of strands of his hair falling loose from the hood on the white suit.

‘Ma’am, shall we?’ Denton rubbed his hands and stamped his feet as Savage approached. ‘Only I’ve been here for ages and I’m dying for a cup of coffee.’ He nodded in the direction of the Lodge. ‘I hear the café is giving out free ones to our lads.’

‘Is it Mr Owers?’ she asked as she led the way in, padding across the damp floor of the entrance and into the toilets proper.

‘I think so. The body matches the description anyway. Take a look. Third one along,’ Denton said. ‘Not that you need telling.’

‘So somebody caught up with him before we did,’ Savage said. ‘Rough justice.’

‘Not really rough. All things considered.’

‘No.’ Savage thought of Simza Ellis. Missing, presumed drowned. Never, until Monday morning, assumed sexually assaulted and murdered by some pervert. ‘You’re right. Simply justice.’

The man’s body almost filled the cubicle, a mass of flesh the colour of lard prostrate before the toilet. On the seat a dusting of white powder contrasted with the black plastic, but the man’s head was bent forwards, away from the powder, his face down in the bowl, as if he had been trying to get a drink of water, like a cat lapping up milk. His faded blue jeans and grey boxer shorts had been pulled down to his ankles, exposing a brown mess which had exploded from the deep cleavage of his bottom and been smeared all over the buttocks. The left arm hung down and brushed the wet floor while the right one lay at a funny angle up by the head, as if trying to grope for something. Impossible, since the forearm ended with two sticks of bone surrounded by ripped and bloodied flesh.

Jesus, Savage thought, life or death didn’t get much more appalling than this. Or if it did, she really didn’t want to know about it.

‘Glad I’m not doing the recovery, ma’am,’ Denton said. ‘They’ll need a bloody crane to get him out.’

Denton was right, Savage thought. The man must weigh thirty stone at least. Extracting him from the toilet would be tricky. If they were to use any sense of decorum in retrieving the corpse the team would need to dismantle the cubicle. The alternative would be to dismember the body.

Savage moved closer, not wanting to, but needing to see more. She held onto the door for support as she leant in. Franklin Owers, definitely. The mugshot which had been distributed hadn’t been a good one, but there was no mistaking the round face, the receding hairline and the little goatee beard. Now she was closer she spotted a short piece of black cardboard, rolled in a tube, protruding from the man’s left nostril. Gold print ran across the glossy surface, but Savage couldn’t make out the words.

‘He’s got a business card shoved up his nose.’ Savage pointed to the powder on the seat. ‘Do you think that’s cocaine?’

‘Forgive me, ma’am. Given the circumstances, I didn’t want to taste it to find out. However, down in the bowl there’s a bag floating in the water and it’s stuffed with white powder too. I’d say the bag contains four ounces or so.’

‘A hundred grams? That’s several thousand pounds street value. Tends to suggest whoever killed this guy didn’t care for drugs.’

‘If it’s coke. Anyway, the stuff has gone in the bowl. Would you want to use it?’

‘Not really. Besides, red wine and caffeine are my drugs of choice.’ Savage moved back from the corpse to where Denton stood next to a row of urinals, her nose detecting a sweet smell of citrus lemon mingled with piss. ‘Who found him?’

‘The attendant. Came to unlock the toilets at eight-thirty this morning and found they were already open. He noticed water overflowing from inside one of the cubicles and went to investigate. He swears the body wasn’t in the loos last night when he closed up after the place had been cleaned. He’s sure the door was locked properly too.’

‘Well the victim didn’t squeeze in through a window, did he?’ Savage glanced up at the narrow slits above the urinals and at the overhead roof lanterns. ‘But then again he didn’t walk in here either. You saw the hand?’

‘I saw one hand.’

‘Exactly. I wonder what the pathologist will make of that.’

Minutes later and the white-suited figure of Dr Andrew Nesbit shuffled in, displaying his characteristic stoop and offering a little homily by way of a greeting as he glanced over the top of his glasses.

‘Wednesdays are all very well, Charlotte, but they are only two better than Mondays. Whether you like them depends if you are a glass half full person or not.’ Nesbit edged round a large puddle of water and peered into the cubicle at the body. ‘What have we here? A suicide?’

‘That’s what the toilet attendant thought when he phoned triple nine. But us amateurs guess not.’

‘Let’s see then, shall we?’ Nesbit put his black bag down in a dry patch and shuffled closer. He spotted the white powder. ‘Drugs OD?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Ah, no!’ Nesbit had seen the arm. ‘Silly me. Not a suicide either. I don’t think anyone would choose to kill themselves by cutting their hand off and if they did, my hunch is they would find it impossible to walk very far once they’d done so.’

‘Doc?’

‘He didn’t die here.’ Nesbit moved the left arm. ‘He’s in rigor, but he must have been brought here before the stiffness set in. And there is no blood, or very little. With both the ulnar and radial arteries in the arm severed, blood would be gushing everywhere. I can see some splatter marks on the man’s right leg but not much on the floor. The hand was removed somewhere else.’

‘How long before rigor sets in?’

‘A few hours, but look at the lividity in the lower legs and the left arm. Some blood has oozed from the right too. I’d say the body was moved shortly after death. One to two hours at the most. To sum up, before rigor mortis but prior to livor mortis.’

‘And the severing of the hand caused death?’ Savage asked.

‘Too early to say that, Charlotte, but it is possible.’ Nesbit stared at the body for a moment and then reached forward and pulled the man’s right sleeve up. ‘There’s something else here. Strange.’

Savage moved closer and Nesbit pointed at the forearm. There was a rectangle of skin marked with black and white stripes in a crude pattern resembling a zebra crossing.

‘Appears to be paint,’ Nesbit said touching the arm with a gloved finger. ‘Dry too. Never seen anything quite like it.’

‘Not a tattoo?’

‘No, this is on the surface of the skin.’

‘Can you get that thing out of his nose? The business card?’

‘Let’s see …’ Nesbit reached for the black tube and teased it from the nostril and then flattened the card and showed it to Savage.

‘Fastwerk Bookkeeping,’ Savage said. ‘Notte Street. That’s close to here, back down Hoe Road.’

Nesbit turned to Savage. ‘Can you pass me my thermometer and some wipes from my case please. An evidence bag too. I am going to take a rectal temperature reading, but I’ll need to clean up a bit first.’

Savage opened the bag and found the thermometer unit with its remote probe and a packet of wipes. She handed them to Nesbit. Denton grimaced as the pathologist began to wipe the excrement from between the man’s buttocks.

‘And I used to think nappies were bad,’ Savage said.

‘How’s Pete, Charlotte?’ Nesbit said in an upbeat tone, the question sounding the sort which might be posed at a dinner party. ‘I completely forgot to ask you on Monday. Rude of me, I know. I read in the paper he’d returned. Hero’s welcome, razzmatazz and all.’

The switch from professional to personal matters caught Savage off guard, but she knew Nesbit was prone to small talk in an effort to distract from the task in hand.

‘Fine. Getting cabin fever from being ashore, but the kids love him being back. I am trying to persuade him to swallow the hook.’

‘Hey?’

‘Meaning to give up his command. A desk job would be better for the children and my stress levels.’

‘Come on, Charlotte,’ Nesbit stopped wiping and turned to give her a quizzical look. ‘Pete giving up the sea would be like you giving up all this.’

Nesbit returned his attention to the body and shoved the white probe of the thermometer between the man’s buttocks.

Savage burst out laughing.

Budgeon played the pressure-washer jet across the concrete floor of the barn. Full power, red water sluicing away in rivulets, specks of white bone gliding along them until they disappeared down the drain. As he worked, a distant ache inched its way across his forehead, all the time diminishing until the feeling became not much more than a mild irritation.

It felt good. Fucking good.

At last, things were in motion and he’d made a start. Wheels were turning, the freight train on the move. Nothing was going to stop him now. Nothing.

The last of the fat bastard’s blood swirled around the drain cover, a gurgling echoing Frankie’s last sounds.

Please, Ricky, please!

He’d screamed plenty before the final words, blood spurting everywhere as he thrashed around like a fat, sloppy fish flapping on the riverbank. He’d talked too. Plenty. Facts and figures. Everything Budgeon needed to know about Big K’s business, from turnover to throughput. Budgeon had been impressed. Big K had quite an operation running and Budgeon’s South American friends would be keen to get some of the action.

Payday.

Budgeon tidied away the pressure washer and went inside. He’d recorded the local lunchtime news bulletin, and now, back in the house, he played the programme back on the big screen above the fireplace. He sat down on the sofa, cradled a glass of Scotch in his hand and sat back to watch the show.

An establishing shot panned across the scene before the girlie reporter did her piece to camera. Behind her a sign read ‘Public Conveniences’ and the viewer’s eye was drawn over her shoulder, following in the sign’s direction to alight on the dank building in the background. You could almost smell the piss.

Nice camerawork, he thought. The guy should win an award. Nice use of the words ‘toilets’ and ‘paedophile’ by the reporter too. And when they cut away to Lester Close and pictures of the little girl flashed up, Budgeon knew the stuff with Frankie had been genius. The message was clear, and there were those out there who would understand it all too well.

You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; you shall not lie to one another.

Lexi, Big K. They knew the code. And they knew the consequences if you broke it. The thief would lose his hand, the betrayer his life.

He rubbed his forehead, aware of a slight discomfort, then he touched the remote, pausing the playback as the reporter began to hand back to the studio.

He took another swig of his drink and swirled the liquid across his teeth before swallowing. The reporter stared out from the TV, smile frozen. She was a pretty one, for sure. A local girl made good, but she wouldn’t be around here for long. London calling and all that.

London.

Another home, and more memories.

After prison, London had seemed the best place to start again. You were anonymous up there, nobody nosing into your affairs, no history to worry about. He’d done fine, made a lot of money. Enough to buy some investment property out in Spain and start to think about retiring to the sun. But then he’d been well and truly screwed and that was what this was all about too.

Why him? It was a question Budgeon had asked himself before. Did he look like the type of guy who enjoyed taking it up the arse? Did he look like a pushover? Of course not. Just the opposite. The only explanation could be that those who’d wronged him were stupid or mean, or both.

Tossers.

The discomfort had turned into a soreness now, a prickly feeling he knew presaged another attack. A few more gulps of Scotch eased the tension and then he pushed himself up from the sofa. He went over to the fireplace, picked a log from the basket and placed it on the fire. A shower of orange sparks flared for a moment before being sucked up the chimney. He glanced up from the fire to the screen just a few inches from his head. This close the pixels on the display were distinct, like thousands of coloured crystals on some sort of collage, each one a part of a bigger picture. If he pressed ‘play’ on the remote, the scene would spring into action again, people would move, speak, smile. Life would go on.

But that wasn’t going to happen. Not for those who’d crossed him.

Budgeon reached across for a phone on a nearby table. Punched out a number, and when someone answered, he spoke.

‘The cop. We set him up next.’

He hung up and put the phone down. Then he took up his glass and gulped the rest of the Scotch, unable to suppress a smile at the serendipity of the situation. He supposed he ought to thank the Herald for printing the picture. A minibus full of kids from North Prospect, Chelsea scarves waving, the pig standing there smiling, along with a couple of PCSOs. Who would have thought he would turn up right on the doorstep like a meek lamb walking to the slaughterhouse?

He returned to the sofa, pointed the remote at the screen and pressed ‘standby’. The reporter’s frozen smile beamed down for a moment before the screen went black.

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