Tell Tale (3 page)

Half an hour later, Savage stood staring out across Brixham. A jumble of white houses tumbled down the hillside to the harbour while seagulls wheeled above fishing boats unloading their catch. Tourists thronged the harbour walls, many with ice creams or chips in hand, even though it was still only mid-morning; Brixham was a downmarket version of Dartmouth, not quite as picturesque and strictly for the kiss-me-quick brigade.

Savage turned from the view and eyed a row of shops on the quayside. At the far end of the row stood an estate agency, one belonging to a local firm with a sprinkling of offices in South Devon. There were branches in Exeter, Sidmouth, Teignmouth and here, in Brixham. Inside the tiny waterfront box a shape moved. Somebody fiddling with the window display.

Owen Fox.

Owen resembled his father, the Chief Constable, only in the fact that he had jet-black hair. His facial features were much softer, a cherub-like face reminding Savage that the lad was only in his early twenties. He already had a wife, two children, a mortgage to pay. He’d already killed someone.

Fallon had dropped her at the harbour a little while earlier, giving her directions and another pep talk.

‘Take a look, Charlotte. See what you think. The lad took away something you loved and in my book that makes what you’ve planned legit. I’ll park up and grab myself some breakfast. Call me when you’re done.’

Now, her eyes still on Owen, Savage let her hand go to her pocket. Her fingers closed around the grip. Killing Owen, or even just hurting him, wouldn’t bring Clarissa back, but only a fool would say it wouldn’t make things a whole lot better. Savage had never had a liberal view of punishment. Too often the bad guys served a few years while the victims and the families received a life sentence. If that was what justice was then the whole system needed ripping up.

Owen Fox, of course, had never even been caught. He’d escaped punishment entirely.

Savage blinked as the door to the estate agency opened. Owen strode out and wheeled to the left, a set of keys in his hand. Brixham was all steep hills and tiny streets and suffered from a lack of parking. Owen was walking to an appointment.

Her heart rate rose and she moved away from the quay wall and followed as Owen strolled along the edge of the marina and then turned left. He headed up a steep hill and turned left again. A couple of hundred yards later he swung right into the driveway of a large detached house. On the opposite side of the road there was only a stone wall. The house had an amazing view over the harbour, was right in the centre of the town and yet the location was secluded. Perfect, Savage thought, just perfect. Owen’s clients would arrive. He’d show them around and then they’d leave. He’d go back into the house to check it over. Savage could slip inside and confront him. No one would see her. No one would know.

She put her hand in her pocket and touched the gun. Fallon said one bullet was all it took and he was right. One bullet to end all her worries. She carried on walking and went past the house without looking up. At the end of the street a bench on the pavement faced the sea. She went over and sat down and stared across the harbour. Barely a minute went by before something vibrated in her pocket. Not the gun, her phone.

Shit. Her phone. All of a sudden she realised her mistake. The phone could be tracked, her location pinpointed. If anything happened to Owen Fox in Brixham today she’d be the first person his father suspected.

Savage pulled the phone out and glanced at the display. DC Calter. She answered, then rose from the bench and began to walk back down the hill towards the town.

Savage arrived at Fernworthy Reservoir shortly before midday. The drive up from Brixham had given her time to ponder. What would she have done if her phone hadn’t gone off? If she’d come face-to-face with Owen Fox today? As her car climbed onto the moor her mood darkened to match the black of the granite tors. Up here was where Clarissa was killed and where a sort of living hell had started for Savage. By the time the road wound up towards Fernworthy she knew she had to do something. One day soon she’d return to Brixham with Fallon and confront Owen. Hurt him over and over. Maybe, if he begged, she’d stop. Then again, maybe she wouldn’t.

The car thrummed across a cattle grid and a minute later she was turning into the car park at the reservoir. On the far side of the car park a young female DC sat behind the wheel of her car with the door wide open and the seat reclined. The woman’s eyes were shut, the officer enjoying forty winks in the sunshine. A blonde bob curled round her cheeks and the short-sleeved shirt revealed healthy biceps.

DC Calter.

Savage got out and strolled over. Her shadow fell across Calter’s body.

‘Don’t tell me, Patrick,’ Calter said, her eyes still closed. ‘You’ve just wet yourself because you’ve found some fucking geocache.’

‘Is that what he’s up to then?’ Savage said.

‘Ma’am!’ Calter opened her eyes and sat up. ‘Sorry, just taking a break.’

‘And DC Enders?’

‘He’s off somewhere with his precious GPS. Something about search parameters.’

‘That’s the PolSA’s job, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah, but the search adviser hasn’t turned up yet. Inspector Frey’s taken control of the lake but we’re at sixes and sevens about the rest.’ Calter climbed out of the car and Savage listened as Calter explained about the discovery of the bag of clothes. The PC who’d first attended the scene had found the driving licence and called the details in, flagging up Ana’s name on the missing person list.

‘Remember her passport was missing?’ Calter said. ‘We concluded she’d probably returned to Hungary. Seems unlikely now.’

‘Yes,’ Savage said. ‘The driving licence changes everything.’

‘She’s got to be here somewhere.’ Calter swung her arms wide to encompass the water, the forest, and the surrounding moorland. ‘But to be honest I don’t think she’ll be alive when we find her.’

Savage followed Calter’s gesture. The lake was cold and deep, the forest a vast area criss-crossed with tracks and paths. And then there was the moorland, an upland wilderness of tors and bogs stretching for miles in three directions. Only to the east was there the comfort of civilisation. A few farms and hamlets and then the town of Chagford. Was it possible the girl had gone that way? Or maybe that’s where she’d come from. Chagford was a little bit of London on the moor. Hideaways for the rich and famous. Perhaps Ana had been at a house party which had turned sour. Drugs or sex, she’d overdosed or been raped. Either way, the hosts had ended the night with a body on their hands. In London you’d struggle to dispose of the evidence, but up here?

Savage kept silent, not wanting to confirm Calter’s suspicions. Then she nodded towards the entrance to the car park as a vehicle swung in past the two uniformed officers.

‘About bloody time. The PolSA. Let’s see what he has to say.’

The police search adviser turned out to be new in the job. He’d done half a dozen courses and knew a string of buzzwords, but by the end of the conversation with him Savage wasn’t convinced by his proposed strategy. And neither was Calter.

‘He couldn’t locate a burger in a bun,’ Calter said, as the PolSA went to find Frey. ‘Search the lake and five hundred metres around where the bag of clothes were found? I could have told you that. But where else?’

‘He doesn’t want to squander resources, Jane,’ Savage said. She pointed up at the forest rising from the far side of the lake. ‘And you can see his point. It would take hundreds of officers to search the woodland, and with the density of the trees and scrub you could pass within a couple of metres of a body without seeing anything. On the other hand you’re right; what he’s come up with is hardly rocket science. I’d have liked something else.’

Savage left Calter at the car park and strolled along the road which bordered the reservoir. To the left the woodland was a mixture of new plantings, half-grown trees, and full-grown pines. Beneath the mature trees light scrub hugged the ground, but the canopy high above prevented much of it from growing. Searching those areas would be easy. Likewise with the sections of forest which had been clear felled. It was the areas with half-grown trees that would prove a problem for the search teams. The pines were five to ten metres high and their branches reached down to near ground level. The result was a mass of almost impenetrable greenery. Anything other than a cursory search would prove near impossible. In its entirety Fernworthy comprised several square kilometres and the terrain was by no means flat. There was steep hillside, streams and gullies, and here and there rocks pushed up from the peaty ground. Although there were a few forest tracks, access along those would need to be in four-wheel-drive vehicles and the majority of the searching would have to be done on foot.

Savage paused and felt the warmth of the sun. With the water and the forest this place was as perfect a beauty spot as one could imagine. And yet there was something unsettling about the place. She looked into the tree line on the other side of the reservoir. Beyond the first few trunks there was nothing but shadow, thick, black and impenetrable. She blinked and turned away, her eyes drawn to a movement on the water. For a second her heart skipped a beat as a monster-like hump rose from the reservoir near the centre. But the black bump was no beast, rather, it was one of Frey’s men. The man raised his arm and made a signal. At once a whine from an outboard filled the air as the officer in charge of the dinghy gunned the engine and surged towards the diver. It looked, to Savage’s uneducated eye, as if the diver had found something.

The sunken treasure lay on the bank side, stretched out on a blue tarp. A long strip of green webbing with a loop and a ratchet mechanism at one end and a big hook at the other.

‘A tie-down,’ Frey said. ‘Not been in the water long. No weed or slime and no tarnishing of the metal.’

‘What makes you think this has anything to do with the girl?’ Savage said as she knelt at the edge of the tarp. ‘Looks like a piece of rubbish to me.’

‘Maybe. But if so then it’s expensive rubbish. Do you know how much a set of good quality tie-downs cost?’

‘Tell me.’

‘A lot. Certainly enough that you don’t chuck one away without good reason.’

‘So what would that “good reason” be?’

‘Say if it’s broken. Which this one isn’t. Or if the material has some sort of incriminating evidence on it.’ Frey knelt alongside Savage and pointed to the end of the tie-down with the hook. ‘There, take a look.’

‘There’s a stain.’ Savage could see a discoloration where some sort of liquid had worked its way into the webbing. ‘Blood?’

‘Could be.’ Frey stood. ‘But I think it looks more like oil. Examine the material near to the hook. What do you see?’

‘Not a lot.’ Savage leaned in closer and shielded her eyes from the sun. Now she could see some fraying on one side of the webbing. A wisp of material like fine fishing line. No, not fishing line. ‘A hair?’

‘Yes.’ Frey stared across the water. ‘If we can find a matching one amongst the girl’s clothing or maybe at her lodgings, then we’ve got our first major lead.’

‘So she’s tied up with the webbing and brought out here.’ Savage followed Frey’s gaze and then looked back to the bank to where the bag of clothes had been found. ‘He strips her, kills her and throws the webbing out into the lake.’

‘Which leads me to think she’s not out there.’ Frey turned from the water and looked towards the forest. ‘If she was then surely she would be with the webbing. But my diver says there’s nothing else down there.’

‘Unless the perp forgot about the webbing until the last minute and then had to dispose of it in a hurry. Either way we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves. I guess we’ll need to wait to see if the CSIs can get some sort of match on the hair.’

‘And then?’

‘Then I’ll get onto that idiot PolSA and get him to widen the search.’

Charlie Kinver was the fisherman who’d found the bag of clothes and yet, apart from his initial statement to the PC, he’d not been questioned. Savage berated Calter and went off to do the job herself.

The man’s place lay about three miles from Fernworthy. A narrow lane ducked into a tunnel of trees and emerged after a quarter of a mile into a tiny valley where a stone cottage sat beside a brook. Ducks muddied the shallows as they probed beds of watercress and as Savage slowed the car, a heron rose from the water and flapped away. The house was from a postcard, honeysuckle climbing over a wooden porch, flowers in bright window boxes, a vegetable garden with rows of produce bursting from the neatly tended beds. To one side a number of chickens scratched bare earth in a pen, while a cat watched from the shade of a nearby fruit tree.

Savage got out of the car and went across to the front door. The door stood open and she knocked and called out a ‘hello’. Someone answered from the gloom inside and a figure stooped forward down the hall and held out a hand.

‘Charlie Kinver,’ the man said. The hand was dinner plate-sized and felt rough and calloused as Savage shook it. Kinver was in his forties but with a weathered face, short hair prematurely greying. ‘You must be the police, right?’

Savage nodded and introduced herself as Kinver led her through to the back of the house. The kitchen had oak units and wooden worktops with a deep sink and an old Rayburn stove. Very rustic, Savage thought, wondering if rustic wasn’t exactly the right word to describe Kinver too.

‘Made them myself, I did,’ Kinver said, noting Savage’s interest. ‘Carpentry. About all I’m good for. At least that’s what the wife says.’

‘They’re beautiful,’ Savage said. Kinver’s eyes had wandered to the window and she followed his gaze. In the back garden a woman lay on a sun lounger positioned beneath the shade of a tree, a book in one hand. ‘Is that your wife?’

‘Yes. She’s had a hard morning baking bread and then singing in the choir. Not like me, off for a spot of fishing, catching our food.’

Savage looked back into the room. On the kitchen table a hunk of bread smeared with butter and layered with cheese lay half-uneaten, while a salad had wilted in the heat. Kinver, for some reason, hadn’t been able to finish his meal.

‘Can you go through it again for me? What happened this morning?’ Since Kinver didn’t offer, Savage pulled a chair out from the table and sat down. ‘It must have been a shock, finding the girl’s clothes.’

‘Sorry.’ Kinver appeared to realise he’d neglected to be a good host and now he moved to pick the kettle up and fill it at the sink. ‘No, not a shock. At least not at first. I didn’t think much of it until I saw the underwear. Then the logic sunk in. She was either in the lake or lying naked and dead somewhere in the woods.’

‘Why did you think that?’

‘Well, there weren’t any other possibilities which came to mind. I could see she wasn’t close by sunbathing. Anyway it was too early for that.’

‘How often do you go fishing, Charlie?’

‘This time of year it’d be a couple of times a week, sometimes three. I don’t catch something every trip, but when I do it’s nice to have a piece of fresh fish for lunch. Only today I didn’t feel hungry. I cut off their heads, gutted them, gave the scraps to the cat and put them in the freezer for another day.’

‘When you were last at Fernworthy did you fish the same spot?’

‘Yes, as a matter of fact I did. Usually I’ll try to vary which swims I fish from, but this was only a short trip and I couldn’t be bothered to walk round the lake.’

‘And that was when?’

‘Day before yesterday. I had no luck but I spotted a couple of nice fish. That’s partly why I returned to the same place. And no, the bag definitely wasn’t there.’

‘And in your recent trips you haven’t noticed anybody acting suspiciously?’

‘I’m usually there too early to notice anyone. The tourists don’t start arriving until mid-morning. There’ll be some walkers, of course, but it’s rare I see anybody before eight. Once the kids start splashing in the shallows you can say goodbye to any chance of a bite so I usually try to do morning or evening sessions. This morning I didn’t see anyone and if I recall t’was the same the day before yesterday.’

‘You said you sometimes do evening sessions?’ Kinver nodded. ‘Do you ever get people at the reservoir then? Couples maybe?’

Kinver smiled. ‘Sometimes. They’ll turn up at dusk usually. They might take a walk but if they were thinking of a spot of alfresco the mossies usually put them off. All that bare flesh? – supper time for the little vampires, isn’t it?’

‘You’ve seen them though?’

‘Sure. Stood and watched a few times.’ Kinver held up his hands. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m no perv, but when I’m stalking fish round the edge of the lake I’m invisible, hardly make a sound. Once, late evening, I came across two guys and a woman. She were being spit-roasted, I think that’s what they call it. Me and the wife had a good laugh about it when I came home. Spit-roasted the brace of brownies I caught too.’

Savage shifted in her chair, aware that Kinver was leering. The man was a little free and easy with his descriptions for her liking. She was glad his wife was out in the back garden.

‘And apart from that one time, have you ever seen anything dodgy?’

‘The occasional couple in a car. With the lights on you can see everything. I’ve reported a vehicle that’s been broken into a couple of times. Once I rang the rangers to alert them to a bunch of teens who were camping and had lit a big fire. The camping was fine, but I reckoned the fire was a bad idea considering the dry weather we were having. I’d have had words myself but I didn’t want no trouble.’

‘And that’s the extent of it?’

‘As far as I know. I’ve never seen a guy in an old mac, hands down his trousers, leering after young girls.’ Kinver looked up from his tea-making duties and leered himself. ‘Young,
pretty
girls, know what I mean?’