Cut Dead (17 page)

‘And this time you’d also had an argument?’

‘Yes, a silly one really, about me flirting with another girl. Well, as I said, the relationship was physical. For me it was going to be good while it lasted, but it wouldn’t last. If you get my meaning.’

‘So she wasn’t your soulmate or anything,’ Savage said. ‘I can understand that. But she was your friend, right?’

‘Yes. Obviously. I’m not heartless.’

‘Did she confide in you, perhaps tell you secrets about her past life?’

‘About lovers and stuff?’ Rachel considered the question for a moment before answering. ‘No, not really. I knew she came from a privileged background, that her parents were stinking rich and didn’t care much about her.’

‘Did you know Kat had a baby when she was fifteen? That she gave it up for adoption?’

‘But …’ Rachel’s face bore a genuine look of astonishment which then slipped into understanding. ‘You’ve thrown me, but it makes sense. Like I said, Kat was childlike herself. Clingy at times, aloof and moody at others. I thought it was the lack of love from her parents. I can see now it could have been to do with the baby.’

‘Yes.’ Savage got up and moved to the window. Calter was right about the zoo. Over the high wall Savage could see the gardens spread out, people wandering the paths, kids running ahead of their parents, eager to chalk up another animal to the day’s tally. Close at hand there was some sort of enclosure with water, a series of interlinked pools with walkways between them. A dark shape came to the surface and the smooth black head of a seal emerged before sliding under again and leaving nothing but a ripple. Not much more than that for Kat Mallory. Savage turned back to Rachel. ‘And apart from the argument there was nothing else amiss, nothing unusual?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Any odd behaviour, something she may have said, something worrying her.’

‘No. And to be honest the argument was over and she’d already apologised in her own way.’

‘Sorry? I thought you said you didn’t see her again.’

‘I didn’t. But she left me a present. After I realised she wasn’t coming back I began to see it as a leaving present rather than a kiss and make up present. Now I don’t know what to think.’

‘Can we see it?’ Calter said, looking up from her pad, shifting to let the steel frame dig into a different part of her back. ‘The present?’

‘No, of course not.’ Rachel laughed, but all of a sudden Savage could see tears in her eyes as well, the recollection of the gift bringing forth memories of Kat. ‘You don’t keep something like that, do you?’

‘I don’t know, Rachel,’ Savage said. ‘Perhaps you’d better tell us what it was and what you did with it?’

‘I ate it, of course.’ Rachel shook her head, the tears gone in an instant, the contempt for the oh-so-stupid police back. ‘What else would you do with a bloody cake?’

So far Thursday had, in Riley’s opinion, been a waste of time. There was still no sign of Corran and no further developments. Leads were drying up.

‘Like my throat,’ Davies said at five o’clock. ‘Fancy stopping off for one on the way home?’

Riley declined. He had something else in mind.

He found John Layton in the canteen enjoying a glass of orange juice and a light read. The light read being dozens of photographs of the bodies from Tavy View Farm.

‘What’s this?’ Layton asked, nodding a ‘thanks’ when Riley placed a new glass of juice in front of him. ‘Something about the Dartmoor hit and run?’

‘Yes,’ Riley said, ‘but not the one the other day.’

Layton cocked his head, puzzled. He reached for the orange juice.

‘Go on.’

‘DI Savage. The RTC which killed her daughter.’

‘Forget it.’ Layton placed the glass back on the table. Looked like he was going to get up and walk away. ‘The whole thing is done and dusted. We found nothing.’

‘But it’s not done and dusted, is it? Not for DI Savage.’

Layton sighed, shook his head and reached out and tidied the crime scene photographs into a neat pile. He gestured at Riley to sit down.

‘Darius,’ Layton said. ‘Don’t you think we tried? More than just about any other case, we tried. The poor woman. Her husband, Pete, away, her working all hours doing the job, having to look after three kids and then suddenly only two. I’ve got a daughter near the same age. Tugged at my heart, I can tell you.’

‘From the start, John, if you please.’

For a moment Riley thought Layton was going to refuse. The frown on his face suggested some sort of inner conflict, as if he didn’t want to go over the affair again. But then he took a deep breath. Exhaled.

‘Yes. OK,’ he said. He reached for the fresh glass of juice again and took a sip. Put the glass down and looked across at Riley. ‘August. Charlotte is on Dartmoor with the three kids. It’s a beautiful sunny day and the four of them are picnicking beside a stream.’

‘Pete?’

‘He’s away. For the moment.’ Layton took another sip of juice. ‘The twins – that’s Samantha and Clarissa – are nine. I can tell you that age they’re a handful, think they know everything. Anyway, Clarissa is on her bike on the road. The lane’s a very quiet one, not the sort of place you’d go speeding along.’

‘But someone did?’

‘Yup. Fifty to sixty miles an hour-plus, I reckoned from the damage to the bike. Clarissa is knocked off, she’s unconscious and in a critical condition. An air ambulance arrives within fifteen minutes, but Charlotte can’t go with the crew, she has to stay with her children. Eventually she gets to the hospital. Pete, by a stroke of luck, is on his frigate in Gibraltar. He’s able to get a military flight back. The little girl is in a bad way, brain dead the doctors say. She never recovers consciousness and the life support is switched off a day later.’

Riley drew in a breath, closed his eyes for a second, seeking some sort of answer from somewhere. When he opened them he could see Layton staring forward into space, his own eyes focused on thin air.

‘And you never traced the car?’

‘Self-bloody-evident that, Darius,’ Layton said. ‘Believe me, no stone was left unturned. At least not on the scientific side of things. DI Savage didn’t get the index but she’d clocked the make: a Subaru Impreza. From a scrap of paint on the bike we worked out the car was a second generation model constructed sometime between 2001 and 2007. There were fifty-seven matching cars registered in Devon and Cornwall. Another twenty-five in Somerset. All the owners were visited and their cars checked for damage. Four of the cars had evidence of nearside damage or repair. One had been damaged before the incident in a crash Traffic had attended, leaving three possible suspects. One had a cast-iron alibi and the other two were questioned, but in the end to no avail. It wasn’t considered feasible or – get this – economically worthwhile, to extend the search beyond that. Still, there were people putting in dozens of extra hours unpaid. Detectives took it upon themselves to visit cars farther afield. One of my CSIs spent the next year tracing every V5C2s and 3s that flagged up on the DVLA system.’

‘Sorry?’

‘A transfer to a new owner or to a motor trader or dismantler. The lad followed up each form submitted countrywide and there were hundreds.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing.’ Layton shook his head. ‘Same for the other investigative avenues. Was this some kind of revenge attack? Was it deliberate? In the end no one knew.’

‘Still open then?’

Layton nodded. He reached for his drink and necked the remaining couple of inches in one go. Picked up his photographs. Stood.

‘Your heart’s in the right place, Darius, but I’d forget trying to resurrect the case. For one thing you’ll be wasting your time. For another it will only cause Charlotte more agony. No way any of us want that, do we?’

No, Riley thought as Layton walked off. Of course not. But if he owed Davies for saving his life he owed Savage too, and somehow he was going to find a way to pay her back.

‘Bloody hell,’ Calter said as they got back into the car for the drive back to Devon. ‘She never realised and nor did the police.’

‘They didn’t know about the candles,’ Savage said. ‘By the time they’d turned up she’d eaten half the cake and chucked the candles in the bin. She told them about the cake alright but they never questioned that it had been baked by Katherine. Why would they? Our case was five years ago in time and a hundred miles down the motorway away in distance. Katherine Mallory was just another person on the misper list. No reason to think she was connected with the Candle Cake Killer.’

‘Those candles, ma’am, why eleven? Not, as Rachel suspected, the eleven weeks that they’d been together, obviously.’

‘Fifteen, seven, nineteen and now eleven. I’ve no idea.’

‘I heard this guy on the radio the other day, ma’am.’ As Calter started the car and pulled out she nodded towards the zoo. ‘He was talking about monkeys and typewriters. Enough of them working away one-fingered and you’d get a Shakespeare play. We get enough candles we’ll be seeing patterns left, right and centre.’

Savage looked at Calter, thinking she had the wrong metaphor but the right idea. The numbers didn’t mean anything together, the number of candles somehow related only to each individual woman. But the previous investigation had gone over everything: birth date, age, height, weight, address, telephone numbers and combinations of those and other numbers.

‘Something is missing,’ she said. ‘Forget your monkeys and Shakespeare, we simply need more information.’

‘Good,’ Calter said. ‘Myself? All that flouncing around and stupid language, always thought it was total crap.’

The week seemed interminable. Maybe it was coming back after the break, Paula thought, maybe it was the fact the rain and grey clouds of the half-term holiday had turned into beautiful blue skies. Nothing could make the school day drag like beach weather, the idea she could be somewhere else rather than stuck in a classroom with a bunch of rowdy teenagers.

At least she’d had the chance to sample some of the fine weather. After school on Thursday she and two other teachers made a beeline for the nearest pub with a garden and the single bottle of chilled white they ordered quickly became two. They stayed to eat and then Paula had the sense to move on to soft drinks because the evening didn’t show any sign of ending.

By ten they began to say their goodbyes and by ten-thirty Paula was walking back across Central Park towards her house in Peverell. The sky above was still pale with the remnants of the day and a lazy moon slipped above the horizon in the east. A couple of late-evening runners padded by, one puffing hard, not much more than shuffling along. Call that good for you? Paula thought, putting the wine, the plate full of nachos draped with cheese and the fact it wasn’t even the weekend out of her mind.

She paused to chat to an older man with a dog who lived around the corner from her and then she was onto the final stretch where the trees crowded in on the right before the path exited onto Trelawney Road near her place, just a few houses down from the end.

Until this evening she’d forgotten about the incident earlier in the week. Seeing the tow truck twice was probably a coincidence, her anxiety heightened by the gossip in the staffroom. But now, walking across the park, her mind began to wander. Somewhere out there the killer was waiting to claim another victim. She’d seen the papers in the corner shop, the salacious headlines, the countdown to the weekend, the lurid speculation as to what he might be thinking, what he might be planning.

Silly, Paula said to herself. You’ve nothing to worry about. Just a couple of minutes to home.

The lamps along the path edge glowed, but the light they cast only served to emphasise the shadows beneath the trees. She quickened her pace, aware of a rustle in the undergrowth. And then, in amongst the trunks and low shrubs, Paula saw someone –
something
– move. Possibly it was a dog, a large one, bounding along for a second in a wash from one of the lights before it disappeared, a shout from the owner calling the animal away.

Paula walked on, half-trotting, feeling the sensation of eyes upon her. As she reached the end of the path, near now to the road and safety, she looked over her shoulder. Fifty metres or so away, masked by the gloom, there
was
someone. A man stepped out of the shadows onto the path and stared at her. Then the figure turned and walked away, clicking his fingers as he did so. Paula backed up, but kept looking, seeing a shape come from the trees and bound across to the figure. Not a dog, but a human, half-running, half-scampering until it reached the man and the pair of them moved away along the path, two shadows, one tall and thin, the other stooped and shambling.

Back home, front door locked and the bolts drawn across top and bottom, Paula made herself a cup of coffee. Sipping the drink with her legs curled up under her on the sofa, she wondered what she had seen. Some sex game? Two gays cruising? A couple out dogging? The word drew a smile until she remembered the shape, the man or woman on all fours, moving like a cross between a baboon and a huge hound.

The coffee tasted bitter now and she got up, went into the kitchen and poured it away, staring at her reflection in the glass of the window behind the sink. A mirror image, part of her. For a moment the wine clouded in, fuzzing her head. Memories bubbled up. The woman in front of her became a girl. Another part of her. How old would she be now? Fourteen?

Paula shook her head. Alcohol. Fun to start with but in the end a depressant. In the last couple of years she’d had enough of being down. She’d tried to deal with the issues through therapy and talking things through, unburdening herself of the guilt, had helped. Now she had a good relationship with her parents and at last a boyfriend who cared about her.

She ran water into the sink to flush away the coffee. She took some in her hand and splashed her face. Sobered up. Thought again of what she’d seen in the park. She looked at the window once more, this time trying to see beyond her reflection and into the small area she called a garden. If there was someone or something out there she’d never know. The Candle Cake Killer could be watching her every move, dribbling spittle from a demented and twisted face, putting a hand down his trousers …