Two Evils: A DI Charlotte Savage Novel (7 page)

Silence. Deathly silence.

Jason stared as hard as he could but the blackness was still absolute. This was a dream, he thought. He’d wake up soon. Then he reached down and pinched himself on the thigh, his fingers slipping on his jeans before he managed to catch a bunch of skin underneath.

Ouch!

This was no dream. Even though there was nothing to see, he was wide awake. He quivered slightly. Recently, he’d stayed up watching movies with Ned Stone. Not Disney though. These had been horror movies. Zombies, vampires, dead things which came in the night and dragged you screaming from under your duvet. Now he wished he’d listened to his mother who’d kept telling him to go upstairs to bed.

He pushed himself up and sat for a moment or two. He tried to recall what had happened. The last thing he could remember was being on the shoreline with his bait bucket. He reached up and touched his neck. Sore. Somebody had grabbed him. Was it Lobster Larry or some other pervert? Perhaps his grandfather’s stories had a ring of truth about them after all. Still, it was no good worrying now. Wherever he was, he needed to escape. He’d watched enough of Stone’s movies to know that at some point they always came back. The perverts, the zombies, the grey ghouls frothing at the mouth.

Jason tried to stand and promptly smashed his head on something above. Fuck! He tried again, feeling his way with his hands. Shit. He was in some sort of tunnel, probably no more than a metre high. He began to crawl instead, but his hand came up against wood.

What the …?

He spun round in the darkness, feeling in all directions. There was a side wall. And there. And there. And there. He ran his hands over the surface. He rapped with his knuckles. Wood. The same as the floor and the ceiling. He was trapped in some sort of box or crate. A metre high by one and a half wide by two long.

He moved to one side of his little prison and tried kicking at the wooden wall. A dull thump was the only result.

‘Help!’ Jason shouted as loud as he could, but his voice came back to him muffled in the same way as his kick had. ‘Help! Heeelllppp!’

All of a sudden he had trouble breathing. He gasped, but each breath seemed to draw in less and less oxygen. He moved to one side and bashed the wooden wall with his fists. Bang! Bang! Bang!

It was no good. He was trapped. Trapped in something resembling a coffin.

A coffin?

In the darkness he thought he heard some kind of groaning and then his nostrils caught a whiff of decay, of rotting flesh.

The dead were coming to get him. The zombies, the ghouls, the vampires.

Jason crawled into one corner of the box and began to cry.

Chapter Seven

Near Mary Tavy, Dartmoor, Devon. Wednesday 21st October. 11.39 a.m.

It took Riley forty-five minutes to get to the remote piece of moorland where Perry Sleet’s car had been found. He brought Enders with him, aware the DC had an innate sense of direction and knew his way around the moor. Still, even Enders had trouble navigating to the exact spot, confessing that the northern part of the moor was pretty much unknown to him.

‘Pure wilderness,’ Enders said as they turned up a lane which climbed the side of a steep valley. ‘If matey boy’s gone a-wandering out here then he might not turn up for days.’

As they crested a rise, Riley’s eyes followed Enders’ hand gesture. The moor spread out before them in a splurge of greys and browns, not a tree or a building in sight. The terrain lay in great folds like a series of soft pillows plumped up and placed in a near endless succession as they tumbled into the distance.

‘Jesus.’ Riley shook his head. ‘According to Collier, the helicopter was out this morning. Didn’t spot anything.’

‘Doesn’t surprise me. Unless he was wearing some kind of high-visibility clothing, they could fly within a hundred metres and not spot him. Imagine he’s face down in a stream bed or at the bottom of a tor. Maybe he’s even gone down a mineshaft like that prison officer we found earlier in the year.’

‘His death wasn’t an accident, remember?’

‘And this is?’

Riley didn’t say anything. He just stared ahead as the lane curled left around a small hill and then ran down to a five-bar gate where a blue Audi A3 Sportback sat on the verge, a big ‘Police Aware’ sticker plastered over the windscreen.

‘Dead end.’ Riley eased the car to a stop twenty metres from the Audi. ‘And no farm or anything beyond that gate.’

‘So what was he doing here?’ Enders clicked open his door and a gust of wind instantly cooled the inside of the car. ‘Bit exposed for a spot of al fresco sex, I’d have thought.’

‘Takes all sorts,’ Riley said as he got out too. He pointed at the Audi. ‘Anyway, perhaps they did it in the car.’

‘They?’

‘Sleet and this Sarah woman.’

‘And then what? Her hubby arrives at an inconvenient moment and boshes Sleet?’

‘Something like that.’ Riley began to walk down the lane towards the gate. ‘If Sleet hasn’t turned up by the end of today, the car’s coming in for a good going-over. We’ll know more then.’

As Enders began to complain about their trip being a waste of time, Riley tried to focus on the surroundings. While remote, this wasn’t a good place for an assignation. You were out in the open and it would be pretty obvious what you were up to should anyone come along. On the other hand, who
would
come along? He asked Enders whether this was a good spot for walking.

Enders laughed. ‘Does it
look
like a good spot for walking? No. Too bleak. There’s no tors, nothing of interest. I doubt anyone but the most hardened would bother coming here. Besides, you’ve got ranges all around. Live firing. Weekdays most of the moor round this way would be off-limits.’

‘Army?’

‘Yes.’ Enders gazed around at the dreek weather. A thin mist of rain curtained sideways in the wind. ‘And much as I love the outdoors, I don’t think I’ll be signing up to yomp over this part of the moor any time soon.’

Was that it? Had Sleet somehow got mixed up in something he shouldn’t have? Had some Royal Marine training exercise gone horribly wrong? Riley put the thought from his mind and moved across to the Audi. Collier hadn’t said anything about the keys, but then, even if Riley had had them, he wouldn’t have risked opening the car for fear of contaminating the inside. He peered in through the driver’s window. As noted on the sheet of information, there was a cup of coffee in the drinks holder, the flask the cup had come from sitting on the passenger seat. It seemed unlikely Sleet had been indulging in a bout of passionate sex. More likely he’d poured the cup while waiting for somebody, or perhaps he’d simply come up here after his lunch at the pub in order to pass the time until his next appointment.

There didn’t seem to be anything untoward inside the car. Sleet’s jacket was lying on the rear seat. A briefcase poked up from the rear footwell. The report mentioned that the boot contained several boxes of samples and Riley recalled a wallet had been found in the jacket. There had been no blood or any sign of a struggle.

He straightened. If something had happened, it had happened away from the car. Riley looked to the sides of the lane. There was plenty of room to pull off the road, but none of the indentations in the grass appeared fresh. If somebody had arrived after Sleet then they had made sure their vehicle remained on the hard tarmac.

He peered back towards their own car. Imagined Sleet sitting drinking coffee and spying a vehicle in his rear mirror. He’d have placed the cup in the holder and got out of the car. He’d left his jacket behind, so he’d either expected the rendezvous to be over quickly or his emotions had overcome any thoughts about getting cold. If it had been a woman, perhaps Sleet had leapt from his seat and run to meet her.

Riley paced back up the road a few metres. He examined the verges again. Nothing except some pieces of litter. No, not litter. Confetti. Confetti?

He moved to the side of the road where several pieces of yellow and pink paper lay on the verge. Sodden with rain, they’d stuck to the sparse vegetation. He tried to get his head around what might have occurred here. Confetti suggested a birthday or some kind of a celebration. Then Riley thought of a present on a nest of the little pieces of paper. An item of jewellery? He imagined a woman opening a velvet case and seeing a sparkling ring, Sleet scattering a handful of confetti in the air as some kind of symbolic gesture.

‘Patrick?’ Riley knelt and beckoned the DC over. ‘What do you make of this?’

Enders strolled up the lane and hunkered down next to Riley. He picked up a couple of the pieces of paper.

‘From a hole punch, sir?’ Enders placed the pieces on his hand and examined them. ‘That’s my guess.’

‘Hey?’

‘They’ve been cut from a sheet of paper. Look, there’s letters on the surface.’

Riley stared down at Enders’ hand. Not letters, letters
and
numbers. And not from a hole punch either. Shit, he had it now. He glanced down at the ground and picked another piece from the grass.

‘Know what these are, Patrick?’ Enders shook his head as Riley showed him the pink dot on the end of his finger. ‘They’re AFIDs. Anti-felon identification tags. They’re ejected whenever a Taser weapon is fired. Each carries a code to identify the particular Taser which was used.’

‘Are you telling me this guy was
Tasered
?’

‘Look. Over there.’ Riley pointed to a clump of heather where a flash of yellow lay amongst purple flowers. Still on his knees, he shuffled closer, feeling the damp of the moor seep through to his skin. The sliver of bright yellow plastic looked something like a piece of disposable packaging. ‘That’s part of a Taser cartridge. Totally illegal for private use of course.’

Riley didn’t pick up the plastic. Instead he stood. This put a whole different slant on the situation. Not only would Sleet’s car need to be gone over by the CSIs, now they’d need a team up on the moor too.

‘So Sleet’s …’ Enders stood as well and turned his head back and forth. ‘Where?’

‘Fuck knows,’ Riley said.

The day had been long and largely fruitless, Savage thought as she traipsed across the car park about to head home in the gathering gloom. There’d been some excitement when it turned out Jason’s father, like Ned Stone, also had several convictions for assault, less when he was tracked down to a cell in HMP Exeter. As for Stone, he was certainly an unpleasant piece of work, but she remained to be convinced he had anything to do with Jason’s disappearance.

‘Ma’am!’ The shout came from DC Calter, half tripping down the steps from the entrance to the station. She jogged across the car park and stood next to her, shoulders down. ‘It’s the boy, ma’am. A body. Sorry.’

‘Oh.’ Savage put out a hand and steadied herself against her car. For a moment anger welled inside, but she was surprised how quickly the feeling was replaced with resignation. As if, deep down, she’d known the probable outcome all along. She stared past Calter towards the concrete monstrosity of the station. ‘Sometimes I wonder why we do this job.’

‘Me too.’

Savage shook her head. Focused on Calter. ‘Where?’

‘On the Drake’s Trail cycle path. The Shaugh Prior tunnel. In there.’

‘Get back inside the station,’ Savage said as she opened the car door. She ducked in. ‘Find Gareth Collier and start setting things in motion. I want Ned Stone brought in and questioned too. Oh, and if no one else has, then you’d better call the DSupt as well.’

‘In hand, ma’am. Apparently he’s heading out to the crime scene himself.’

‘Hardin? Great, that’s all we need.’

Savage slammed the door, started up, and swung the car out of the station car park. She headed north up the Tavistock Road, swept along in the dwindling traffic of the rush hour. She then turned right down past Bickleigh Barracks. After passing the entrance to the army base, the road narrowed and turned left and then right before crossing over the disused railway line, now a cycle trail. The lane followed a strip of woodland and then crossed back over the line at the entrance to the Shaugh Prior tunnel. She pulled over to the left-hand side of the road and parked behind a marked police car. The lights on top flashed, each flash painting the surroundings with a blue-grey streak. As she got out, the door to the car opened and a uniformed officer emerged.

‘Evening,’ he said. He nodded into the car where a woman officer sat in the passenger seat half turned so she could watch the middle-aged man slumped in the rear. ‘PC Dawson, ma’am. I’ll take you down to the scene while Lisa here stays with the gentleman who found him.’

‘No one remained with the body then?’ Savage said.

‘Er, no.’ The officer reached up and scratched the back of his neck. ‘Bit nippy. Plus somebody had to stay up here with this fella.’

‘Both of you?’

‘Yes. Backup in case he got nasty or tried to do a runner.’

‘I see.’ Savage peered in the window again at the man in the back. He appeared too shell-shocked to do anything much. She gestured to where a narrow path led from the road down to the cycle track. ‘Shall we?’

PC Dawson nodded and then tramped along the road and down the path. Savage followed. The path curled round and down into the railway cutting. As they reached the bottom a cyclist swished past, the taillight on the bike blinking into the distance in the near dusk.

‘Jesus!’ Savage said. ‘We need to close this as soon as possible. Where’s the body?’

‘Way up in the tunnel,’ Dawson said, pulling out a penlight torch and handing it to Savage. ‘Our witness says he found it when he stopped halfway to take a leak. I left a fluorescent safety vest next to the boy.’

Savage moved forward, Dawson just behind her. Deep in the cutting the light was fading and Savage wanted to get her bearings before night came. She’d been up and down the cycle path many times with her children. On most of the route the gradient was easy and with several tunnels and viaducts there was always something for the kids to get excited about.

A graceful horseshoe curve of granite blocks marked the entrance to the tunnel, the surface of the stones covered with moss and ivy. Inside the mouth, a strip of concrete stretched into the darkness, ballast to either side. Water dripped from the ceiling and splashed on the floor.