Читать книгу Tell Tale: A DI Charlotte Savage Novel - Mark Sennen, Mark Sennen - Страница 11

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?’

‘I’m not sure I do, Mr Kinver,’ Savage said, thinking Kinver was again giving her way too much information. He seemed keen to show her the extent of his lasciviousness. Was it an act? – or maybe he was trying to flirt, even though his wife was but steps away. ‘Anyway, what makes you think this girl was young and pretty?’

‘Hey?’ Kinver cocked his head, nonplussed. Then he returned his attention to the kettle and poured water into two mugs, adding teabags to each afterwards. ‘Her picture, of course. On the driving licence. Cute little thing, I thought.’

Shit, Savage had forgotten about the licence. For a moment she’d thought Kinver had let slip something. Kinver was squeezing the teabags with a spoon while gazing out the window at his wife. He was mumbling about how he was very much in favour of the EU if the migrants were all like Ana.

‘Send ’em over, I say,’ he said as he turned and deposited the mugs on the table. ‘The more the merrier.’

‘But you’ve never seen her before?’

‘No.’ Kinver grimaced. ‘And I don’t reckon I’m likely to get the chance now, am I?’

‘You’re jumping to conclusions. Most missing persons turn up at some point. Fingers crossed this girl does too.’

‘Oh she’ll turn up all right.’ Kinver pulled out a chair and sat down. He raised a finger to his mouth, licked the tip and then lowered his hand and ran his finger along the smooth edge of the tabletop. ‘But she won’t be winning any beauty contests when she does, will she?’

Irina Kryukov sat on a bench on the Hoe and cried. The sun shone down from a clear blue sky and out to sea the water sparkled. Yachts crawled back and forth, wallowing in the light airs. A rib loaded with divers carved a foamy white trail in the water as it sped towards the breakwater. Close at hand, on the huge grassy expanse of the Hoe, people lounged around with ice creams or a beer or two. A family had just unpacked a substantial picnic and a young kid of three or four was grasping for the bottle of Coke. Nobody seemed to be taking any notice of Irina, everybody seemed to be enjoying themselves. But they hadn’t had to find out what she just had.

The knock on the door had come first thing in the morning. A uniformed female police officer stood on the step outside, reluctance written all over her face.

‘It’s about your housemate, love,’ the officer said. ‘Anasztáz Róka? We’ve found some of her things on Dartmoor. Somebody will be round to take a statement later, OK?’

Job done, the woman had turned and walked away.

Irina sniffed and used a paper tissue to wipe away some of her tears. The little boy with the picnicking family looked up and pointed at Irina, but his mother grabbed his arm and wheeled him round. Irina felt completely alone, as if nobody cared.

It was a feeling she’d had when she’d first come to the UK from Russia a couple of years ago. She’d arrived in London pretty much penniless, planning to spend a few days there before heading off to start her course at Plymouth University. After seeing the sights of London, which – truth be told – were pretty poor fare compared to Moscow, she’d hitch-hiked west. A lorry driver had offered her a lift and then halfway down the M4 he’d pulled off at Membury services and asked for payment. ‘I’m going as far as Bristol. A blow job’ll get you there. Or you could let me fuck you and I’ll bung you twenty quid so you can get a train the rest of the way.’

Irina had wrenched the door of the cab open and tumbled out into the drizzle. The man had cursed and asked her what the problem was? After all, weren’t all Russian girls whores? Then he’d chucked her rucksack down, started the truck and roared off. Irina had lain on the wet tarmac, nursing a bruise and a bunch of shattered illusions. Maybe, after all, England wasn’t the Promised Land. Maybe people were pretty much the same wherever you went.

She remembered her father’s reaction on hearing the news she intended to leave Russia. ‘Different seas,’ he’d said. ‘Different salt in the water. You either like the taste or you don’t.’ Certainly her first taste had been sour, but after a nightmare few weeks things had improved, and over time some of her faith had been restored. She had a nice room in a shared house and a part-time job in a cafe. The winters were warmer, if wetter, than Moscow, and this year the British summer had been a scorcher. She’d had a brief fling with a lifeguard who’d taught her how to surf and although the relationship had ended she’d enjoyed herself while it lasted. The UK, all in all, wasn’t so bad.

Until now.

Although Ana Róka had only come to Devon half a year or so ago, the Hungarian girl had quickly become Irina’s best friend. She guessed it was because they shared a common experience in making the physical and psychological journey from East to West. When Ana had gone missing, Irina had been distraught. But the police had seemed uninterested. They had carried out a few checks and then told her they could do nothing more. People went missing all the time, they had said. Especially foreign immigrants. She’ll likely as not turn up. That story seemed to have changed now.

Irina screwed up the paper tissue and lobbed it into a nearby bin. She stood and weaved her way across the Hoe, dodging the picnickers. Perhaps in the UK people did go missing all the time, she thought. But in Russia, when somebody went missing you knew something very, very bad had happened to them.