Tell Tale: A DI Charlotte Savage Novel

‘Oh well,’ Chubber says aloud. ‘Faint heart never won fair maiden.’

‘Pardon?’ An elderly woman sitting at the next table looks across. ‘Did you say something?’

‘Huh?’ Chubber says and then crunches his nose in a sneer. ‘My business. Not your business. You mind yours and I’ll mind mine, OK?’

He scrapes his chair around so he won’t have to look at the crone. Concentrates instead on the waitress. He can see her in the cafe, talking to a customer. Then she slips behind the counter. Uses a pair of tongs to retrieve a cream éclair from the cake cabinet. The tongs squeeze the cake, the cake lets out a long sigh and the cream oozes out.

‘Ah!’ Chubber says. ‘Lovely. What a lovely, lovely girly girl.’

A snuffle comes from behind him. Chubber hopes the old dear is choking on her dentures. He pauses. He really shouldn’t be doing this, shouldn’t even be here. If Antler Man knew, he’d be angry. Very angry. Still, he can’t know, can he? Chubber reaches into his pocket and pulls out his pencil. Licks the tip. Takes a napkin and flattens it. Bends to the table and writes a note to the waitress. She’ll read the note and maybe next time he comes into the coffee shop she’ll ask him out.

He slips a ten-pound note on top of the napkin and moves back his chair. The girl looks over from another table, mouths a ‘thank you’ and starts to move towards him.

‘Oh Chubber-Chub-Chubs,’ Chubber says as he hurries away. ‘Chubber’s been a bad boy. Naughty Chubber. Bad Chubber.’

He doesn’t look back as he pushes across the plaza. He kicks the side of a pushchair as a young mum comes by. Barges past an elderly man who is as slow as a snail on coarse-grit sandpaper.

Sand again, Chubber? It’s slip, slip, slipping away. Marking time. Hours rushing past.

‘Busy, busy, busy,’ Chubber says as he skitters away and turns off the plaza, heading down Royal Parade. ‘Got things to do today. At home. Best get back. Kettle on the boil. Things on the go. Deary, deary, deary me my Chubber-Chub-Chubs.’

Major Crimes operated out of Crownhill Police Station, located on the north side of the city, away from the centre. The building was a modernist brute of a structure in brown concrete, the colour choice not lost on the officers within or on a number of the more quick-witted of their clients. Savage arrived back from the moor mid-afternoon and went straight to the crime suite, where a DC informed her that DSupt Hardin wanted to see her.

‘Pronto, ma’am,’ the DC added. ‘As in, now.’

Savage about-turned, headed to Hardin’s office and rapped on the door. Hardin’s ‘enter’ came with a splutter and when Savage pushed the door open she found him attempting to pat himself on the back with one hand while wiping up a pool of coffee on the desk with a bunch of tissues held in the other. The DSupt’s bulk filled his chair and most of the space behind the desk. He was a big man, often mistaken for an ex-rugby player. However, Savage reckoned Hardin would never have had the dexterity for ball games; tug-of-war would have been much more his thing.

‘Just had a phone call, Charlotte,’ Hardin said, screwing up the tissue paper and chucking the soggy mess in the bin. ‘Dan-bloody-Phillips, the crime reporter on the Herald. He tells me they’re going to town with this one. “Moorland Killer on the Rampage” is to be the headline. Nightmare.’

‘“Killer”? Where did he get that from? I’m still hoping the girl is alive and there’s some rational explanation for her disappearance.’

‘Hey?’ Hardin raised one eyebrow. ‘Come on. You and I both know it’s only a matter of time.’

Savage sighed. ‘Yes, sir. You’re right. But how does Phillips know that?’

‘That photographer of his. He’s been up at the reservoir. Got some shots of Frey retrieving the webbing strap. Phillips reckons lorry driver. Only he’s made the leap from there to killer. He tells me the Yorkshire Ripper was a truck driver. That right, Charlotte?’

‘Yes, but it’s a stretch isn’t it?’

‘Not really.’ Hardin leant over the desk, careful to avoid the damp patch. ‘You see, Phillips reckons the presence of a certain female officer lends credence to his argument. DI Charlotte Savage is, apparently, Devon’s hotshot detective. When she turns up, you know the bodies can’t be far behind.’

‘Fiction, sir. Headlines to sell newspapers.’

‘Of course,’ Hardin clucked. ‘Anyway, he wants an interview with you. A feature with pictures and everything. He told me he’s already come up with some taglines. “Killer Thriller”. “Red Handed”. “Juliet Bravo”. I’m thinking of passing this one to the PR guys. They love this sort of stuff. If you’re up for it?’

Savage cocked her head on one side and tried to read the grin that had appeared on Hardin’s face. ‘Respectfully, sir, I’d rather resign from the Force than do that sort of publicity shit.’

‘Ha!’ Hardin laughed. ‘That’s what I told him you’d say. Now, about this lorry driver business. Phillips may have something there. I’ve got the preliminary report on the webbing from John Layton. It’s a heavy-duty tie-down most often used by hauliers to secure loads. The hair is still being analysed, but the stain is most likely a commercial oil of some type. That does say lorry driver to me.’

‘Possibly. But he didn’t drive up to Fernworthy Reservoir in his vehicle, did he? The roads on that part of the moor are way too narrow. If you did somehow get up there you’d struggle to turn around. And whoever dumped Ana’s clothing up at Fernworthy Reservoir knows the area well. I think they’re local.’

‘What about these boys on North Hill? Reckon it could be something to do with them?’

Hardin was referring to an as-yet unidentified group of men who were targeting female students walking home from the centre of town. The police suspected that the men were using mobile phones to communicate information about women who looked so drunk they could barely walk. They’d identify those women as easy targets and one of the gang would home in and persuade – or force – the victim to have sex with them.

‘There have been a number of rapes, but nothing like this.’

‘Maybe something went wrong. The girl banged her head or choked on her own vomit. Somebody decided to hide the body.’

‘Possible, but there’s no evidence to suggest she was out on that night. True, if she was she would have walked home along North Hill, but Fernworthy is a heck of a long way to go to dispose of a body. If, of course, a body is what we are looking for. But then the clothes by the lake are pretty conclusive. She had no transport of her own so I can’t see how she could have got there without someone else’s involvement. This doesn’t look like suicide to me, nor do I think she’s gone back home to Hungary.’

‘So where the hell do you think she is?’

‘Well, Inspector Frey is almost positive she’s not in the reservoir. Which just leaves the woods, the rest of the moor and anywhere else that might have taken the killer’s fancy. I understand the search and rescue teams are out today and the helicopter is going to be taking a second look too, but to be honest, sir, Frey is right when he says searching for her without a better idea of where to focus is a complete waste of time.’

‘Bloody gun-touting idiot. I’ll decide whether it’s a waste of time or not. The man’s not happy unless he’s steaming in somewhere with a machine gun nestled under one arm and an Andy McNab paperback under the other.’

Savage tried not to smile. Hardin’s view of the tactical support group was that they were a bunch of trigger-happy nutters.

‘The police search adviser pretty much concurs, sir,’ she said. ‘Until we get some more information, we are better off not spreading our resources.’

‘The PolSA? Right.’ Hardin drummed his fingers on the desk. ‘Well if we’re not going to look for the girl just what the heck should we be doing? Appealing to the killer’s better nature and asking him to turn himself in?’

‘An appeal is a good idea. Finding the clothes means we might be able to put together some form of reconstruction. Fernworthy is a busy place this time of year, so if anybody saw Ana there an appeal will jog their memories.’

‘Relying on the public. You know I don’t like that, Charlotte.’ Hardin nodded over at his phone. ‘All we ever get are hoax calls, dreamers and people with nothing better to do than waste our time. Sure, we’ll go with an appeal, but have you got any better ideas?’

Savage almost snapped back, ‘have you?’ But instead she said: ‘We need the usual pulling-in of known sex offenders and then I think we should conduct a full-scale search of Ana’s house, forensics and everything. When the initial misper report came in there was a cursory examination of her room but that was the extent of it. Now we can ratchet up the investigation a level or two.’

‘Three or four I think,’ Hardin said. ‘We just so happen to have the honour of the Crime Commissioner visiting us for a tour tomorrow. And he’s bringing some other dignitaries with him. Charles Milner for one.’

‘The MP?’

‘Yes. Milner’s local, of course, but he’s also on the bloody Home Office Select Committee. He can pull strings and raise budgets. Conversely, he can cut them. So for the moment, this case is a priority, right? I want officers redeployed from the stabbing on Union Street and see if you can draft people from some other lesser investigations too. We need to sort this fast – and establish Anasztáz Róka’s disappearance has nothing to do with any kind of serial killing. That should wipe the smile from Dan Phillips’ face and hopefully put this station in the Crime Commissioner’s good books.’

Simon Fox, the Chief Constable of Devon and Cornwall Police, sat inside his car in his garage. He wore his full uniform, the silver buttons reflecting the sterile light from a fluorescent tube mounted on the wall above a workbench. On the bench an array of tools lay in neat rows, the light glittering off them too. He’d spent many happy hours in here, the bonnet up on whichever car he happened to own at the time, tools clinking on metal, an oily rag to wipe his hands on. In the end though, he couldn’t kid himself he was doing much more than tinkering. These days modern cars were so complicated that tinkering was all you could really do.

Fox reached over to the passenger seat for the bottle of whiskey. He’d drunk half the contents but he needed more. Dutch courage. Hell, any sort of courage. He unscrewed the cap and took a deep draught. He’d long ago passed the drunk stage and now every extra gulp added clarity to the situation. And the clearer things became, the clearer the solution to his problems.

He peered over his shoulder into the rear of the Jaguar. The car was an estate, an XF Sportbrake. Perhaps it was a bit of a cliché for a senior officer to have such a vehicle, but Fox didn’t care. His grandfather had owned an XK150 from new. Fox wondered what might have happened to the car, where it was now, how much it would be worth. There was of course nothing to say the car was still around. It could have rusted away, crashed, or been crushed.

In the rear of the car a vacuum cleaner hose tumbled over the back seat. Fox had attached the hose to the exhaust pipe using gaffer tape and then led the tube up through the hatchback. He’d pulled the hatch shut as best he could and secured it with a bungee cord. Then he’d stuffed a couple of blankets in the gap. Not airtight, perhaps a bit of a bodge job, but good enough.

Tinkering.

The word summed up his career, his life. Fox wondered whether fiddling around was all anyone could hope to do. You tried to make a difference, to change people’s lives for the better. In the end though, whatever you did, you ended as dust. Atoms spinning in the infinite void, never again to experience anything. Fox wallowed in a growing feeling of despair. Many years ago he’d been faced with depression, but he hadn’t let it get the better of him; he’d beaten it and come out stronger. This time, he knew it was different. This sort of depression couldn’t be beaten. This time he couldn’t win.

Fox took a final swig from the bottle and then screwed the cap back on. He placed the bottle carefully on the passenger seat and then his hand strayed to the keys in the ignition. He turned them a notch. The lights on the dash lit up, the aircon began to hum and the navigation system came on. A blinking icon indicated that the sat-nav couldn’t lock onto any satellites to fix its position. Lost, Fox thought. Completely and utterly lost.

The wrong turn had come miles back, an error of judgement undoubtedly, but one made with what at the time had seemed the best of intentions. Covering up his son Owen’s involvement in a hit-and-run accident in which a young girl had died had been a remarkably easy decision to make. Owen had been high on drink and drugs, and the effect on Fox’s career had the truth come out would have been cataclysmic. At the time Fox had told himself he’d done it for Owen and his young fiancée – Lauren, pregnant with the couple’s first child – and not for his own selfish reasons, but deep down he now wondered at the veracity of that. Sure, Owen had reformed. Fox had forced him into a boring job, forced him to begin to accept the responsibilities that came with fatherhood. The lad had abandoned his old friends and was now a model citizen. Still, there’d been a heavy price to pay. Fox had had to call in favours and make promises to keep the truth from coming out. The problem was corruption had a stink about it and however hard you tried to keep things airtight, sooner or later there was always a leak.

There was the human cost as well, not just to his own sense of psychological wellbeing but to the parents of the victim. And that the mother should be one of his own workforce compounded the situation. Every time he met her he worried that she could read the guilt on his face. He, in turn, could see the pain on hers. She’d never got justice, never found peace. The latter, Fox reckoned, would never come, but justice? Well, some sort of resolution to the whole stinking mess lay just around the corner, the next turn on his journey.

Fox lay back in the seat and closed his eyes. Imagined the classic XK150 with his grandfather at the wheel. Soon, perhaps, he’d be sitting beside him, rolling through countryside bathed in the sunlight of an endless childhood summer. They’d park up somewhere on a village green where they could watch a game of cricket. His grandfather would reach into the glove compartment and pull out two tins and his pipe. The first tin contained boiled sweets, and Fox was allowed one every time a four or a six was scored or a wicket went down. His grandfather would take the other tin and tap his pipe on the lid three times, open it and fill the pipe with tobacco. Then he’d light up and they’d talk about the game in front of them or football or rugger. Whether Simon would like to come fishing with him. The same life but another time, a simpler time. A better time.

Fox felt tears welling in his eyes. Disgusted with himself for his lack of courage he blinked the moisture away. Then he turned the keys another notch. The engine started and exhaust fumes began to pump into the car.

Chapter Five

When Savage pulled the car into her driveway, the sun hovered low above the Cornish coast; Plymouth Sound bathed in light. Sunday was all but gone. Back at Fernworthy the search teams had given up for the day, the latest report from Frey stating there was a high probability Anasztáz Róka wasn’t in the reservoir. The bankside and woodland area designated by the PolSA had been scoured inch by inch and nothing had been found. Results from the search and rescue groups engaged in a wider sweep of the moor were equally disappointing.

Savage paused at the front door, taking a moment to switch off and leave the day’s events behind. Her kids didn’t need to know that a girl was probably lying naked and dead in a shallow grave somewhere on Dartmoor. Her husband wouldn’t want to be filled in on the minutiae of misper procedures. Her role as a police officer ended at the threshold to the house. And yet she couldn’t leave behind everything that had happened today. Seeing Owen Fox, holding the pistol in her hand as she’d watched him go about his business, unfettered by guilt, had made her realise she couldn’t let things go on as they had. She owed it to herself, to her family and most of all to Clarissa, to find a way to make Owen pay for what he’d done. She just needed to think of a way to do it without endangering everything she loved. Savage took a deep breath and then went inside.

In the house she found Pete in the kitchen tossing a salad, an apron tied round his waist. Pete was the epitome of a good-looking, clean-cut naval officer, but he still looked ridiculous wearing the apron.

‘From absent husband to househusband in just a few months,’ Savage teased. ‘I might just be the only person in Plymouth grateful for the defence cuts.’

‘Careful,’ Pete said, waving a wooden salad spoon at her. ‘I still hold a high rank in the Navy and as such am in charge of an array of formidable weapons.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’ Savage ducked as Pete used the spoon to launch a cherry tomato across the room. ‘Mind you, I might be in need of some gunnery practice.’

Savage laughed and then picked the tomato up and lobbed it back at Pete, running from the kitchen before he had a chance to retaliate. In the living room, Jamie and Samantha were arguing over which movie the family were going to watch for their regular Sunday film night. Jamie wanted something with cartoon animals while Samantha was keen on anything with vampires and pale, unhealthy-looking males. By dinner time they’d plumped for some Disney movie and they sat with bowls of pasta on their laps, pigging out.

An hour and a half later, with the end titles streaming up the screen, Savage’s mobile rang. She pushed herself up from the sofa, reached for the phone and stumbled out of the darkened room and into the hallway.

‘Ma’am, it’s me.’ It was DC Enders, his Irish accent providing all the introduction needed.

‘Yes, Patrick?’ Savage said, closing the door to the living room to shut out the kids’ conversation as they played out the funnier bits of the movie.

‘The Hungarian girl.’ Enders paused, but Savage knew what was coming next. ‘We’ve found her.’

Savage sighed, the laughter coming from the children suddenly grating. She walked into the kitchen, opened the back door and went out into the garden. Pete had set a sprinkler to water the lawn and as she walked across the grass a fine mist caressed her face.

‘Tell me.’

‘At the reservoir. Not far from where the fisherman found her clothes. In fact, he was the one who found the body. Dodgy, if you ask me, ma’am.’

‘Right. Are you up there now?’

‘No, I’m at the station. John Layton and Inspector Frey are there though. The pathologist has been called.’

‘Thanks, Patrick. I’m leaving now, tell them I’ll be there in an hour.’

Savage hung up and stared across Plymouth Sound towards the lights of the city where, despite it being a Sunday, the night would be getting into full swing. A wash of tiredness swept over her. A fitful night had been followed by a long day. The stress of seeing Owen Fox had worn her out and the news about the Hungarian girl was the last straw. She felt as if she barely had the energy to climb the stairs to bed. For a moment she considered phoning Enders back and telling him she couldn’t make it, that a family crisis had intervened. Then she remembered the passport photograph of Anasztáz Róka. A blonde girl far from home. Lost and now dead. She was somebody’s daughter too.

‘You selfish cow,’ Savage said to herself.

Then she wiped the moisture from her face and went back inside.

Darkness had enveloped the moor when Savage arrived at Fernworthy. A patrol car guarded the lane to the reservoir, its blue strobing light casting pale fingers into the trees. An officer waved Savage through and she drove to the car park. Then she was directed to where the body lay, some two hundred metres west of the reservoir in dense woodland, in an area that had supposedly been searched at least once.

‘It’s not good enough, Nigel,’ Savage said, trying to contain her anger as she walked up to Frey in the near blackness beneath the canopy of trees. ‘The girl should have been found at the first attempt. Your search pattern was mucked up or somebody boobed.’

‘No,’ Frey said. ‘I won’t have that. You can see the paperwork if you like. The quadrants the PolSA laid out were dealt with methodically. I’ll stake my job on it.’

‘Well, you may have to.’

John Layton had insisted on a fifty-metre perimeter around the scene, and from where she stood Savage could see a patch of bright light in which several suited figures worked. The CSIs were moving away from the body, trying to establish a safe route back and forth. It was another thirty minutes before Layton came across to Savage and Frey. The senior CSI had abandoned the Tilley hat he was usually seen in because it wouldn’t fit beneath the hood of his white suit. As he approached, he pulled the hood down. Layton was mid-thirties, maybe a little older. He had dark hair and a slim face, beady eyes that missed nothing. The eyes flicked back and forth between Savage and Frey. Then he scratched his pointed nose and nodded at Frey.

‘You’re off the hook,’ he said. ‘She’s not been there long. An hour or two at the most. She’s lying on several fronds of bracken that have only been crushed recently. There’s no way she was here this morning.’

‘That doesn’t make sense,’ Savage said. ‘Are you saying she was dumped after the initial search?’

‘Yes. Right under our noses. Sense and science can sometimes contradict each other, however difficult that makes things for us.’

‘Nigel,’ Savage said, turning to Frey. ‘I guess I owe you an apology.’

‘Accepted, Charlotte,’ Frey said.

‘How long has she been dead?’ Savage turned back to Layton.

‘You’ll have to wait for Nesbit for an estimate, but nothing like a week for sure. The body’s in a bit of a state though. Little cuts and scratches all over her. Something like she was running through the woods naked and the branches and brambles scoured her skin.’

‘Cause of death?’

‘Haven’t got a whiskers. There don’t seem to be any major external injuries. I guess she could have been strangled. Do you want to take a look?’

Savage nodded and went to find a suit and all the other paraphernalia. Suitably attired, she followed Layton down the little trail he had prepared. Festoon lights had been hung between the trees, creating a corridor of luminance which wound through the woodland, almost as if the path was leading to a fairy grotto. At the end of the path the burning glare of several halogen bulbs turned night into day. Beyond the circle of light the surrounding forest disappeared into utter blackness. As they approached the CSIs, Layton put out a hand.

‘Close enough, Charlotte,’ Layton said. ‘We haven’t completed our detailed search of the immediate area yet.’

Savage nodded and stared through the undergrowth to where white skin contrasted with black peat. The body lay half in a drainage ditch, the face partially submerged in the dirty water. The right eye was open and gazed out across a film of scum and forest detritus, while the left was below the surface. The girl’s peroxide-blonde hair floated in a fan-like pattern, individual strands moving as a slight current washed past. A blob of dark mud had splattered one cheek and several pine needles had drifted into a nostril. Savage looked closer. The girl’s body was tumbled in an odd way. The right leg came out at a weird angle to the body while the right arm was twisted underneath her head. A contortionist would have struggled to adopt such a pose.

‘It’s a strange position,’ Savage said. ‘Whatever the killer meant by posing her like that is beyond me. If she was posed.’

‘I can’t see how she fell with the arm behind her head,’ Layton said. He gestured at the trees and the undergrowth. ‘It would take some effort to force it into that position. I don’t think it could have happened by accident.’