Читать книгу Two Evils: A DI Charlotte Savage Novel - Mark Sennen, Mark Sennen - Страница 16

The alarm on her phone went off at six thirty, Savage reaching across to silence the crescendo before the noise could wake Pete. She blinked in the darkness and then got out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom. Peered at herself in the mirror. She hardly recognised the eyes which stared back. The past few months had changed her, she thought, and maybe not for the better. She’d come close to killing Owen Fox, a young man who, it turned out, was innocent of anything but protecting his girlfriend. If it hadn’t been for the timely intervention of Kenny Fallon, she’d have pulled the trigger on the gun. Would she be feeling better if she had? Would she be staring at herself in the same way?

An hour later and the melancholy was subsumed by the usual pre-school hell and the need to get the children ready. Samantha had lost her phone and was refusing to leave home without it, while Jamie had – in his own words – ‘bastard growing pains’. Savage had dosed him with Calpol but was more concerned with his ever expanding vocabulary of bad language.

‘I’m innocent, officer,’ Pete said, holding his hands up before scouring through the debris on the kitchen table as he searched for the phone. ‘He didn’t get the word from me. Must be on the National Curriculum list.’

‘Right.’ Savage replaced the bottle of Calpol in the cupboard and put the spoon in the dishwasher. ‘Sam?’

‘Huh?’ Her daughter looked up from a pile of schoolwork and shook her head. ‘Not me, Mum.’

Samantha gathered up her things, stuffed them into her bag and left the room.

‘You all right?’ Pete said. ‘This kid and all?’

‘Not really.’ Savage shook her head. She’d told Pete about finding the boy in the tunnel when she’d crawled into bed in the small hours. ‘I’ve got to attend the post-mortem this morning and you know how I hate them.’

‘But it’s not just that, is it?’ Pete moved across the room and stood beside Savage. ‘Love, you’ve either got to let go of Clarissa or accept you can no longer work these type of cases. Tell HR it’s affecting your health. Any sense they might have to pay some sort of compensation and they’ll move you like a shot.’

‘But there’s the rub, I don’t want to be moved. I want to get the bastard sicko who’s responsible.’

‘Bastard?’ Pete grinned. ‘Well there’s one case closed at least.’

‘What?’ Savage managed a half smile. ‘Oh, right.’

‘Look, however many nutters you bang up, she’s never coming back, is she?’

‘No.’ Savage remembered the look on her face in the mirror that morning. ‘I thought things would change after …’

‘After what?’

‘After …’ She sighed. Pete knew nothing of her involvement with Simon Fox and his son. Perhaps one day she’d need to come clean. But now wasn’t the time. ‘After the girl on the moor.’

‘Which one? You saved that Russian woman from the Satanists. Then there was the lass captured by those twins. Not to mention the girl you pulled from that psychopath’s freezer. How many does it take before the guilt’s gone?’

Savage shook her head. She didn’t like the way the conversation was heading.

‘Face it, Charlotte. There was nothing you could have done to prevent Clarissa dying and however many cases you solve, however many kids you save, it won’t make any difference.’

‘It makes a difference to them, doesn’t it? And to me.’

‘Sometimes I wonder if it does.’ Pete stood for a moment, staring at her intently as if he didn’t want the conversation to end on a negative. But then he turned and stomped from the room.

An hour later Savage stood in the anteroom at the mortuary thinking the white lights had taken the colour from DSupt Hardin’s face. He looked – appropriately – like a corpse.

‘Hate these bloody things, Charlotte,’ Hardin said, both his hands wrapped around a paper cup of coffee as if the warmth from the liquid inside might take away some of the chill in the air. ‘So early in the morning too. Didn’t even have time for breakfast.’

‘Maybe that’s a good thing, sir,’ Savage said.

‘Nonsense. Line the stomach. The old-fashioned way. The only way.’

No, Savage thought. The only real way was to avoid attending post-mortems at all. She’d never been to one which she could call ‘nice’. The experience always lay on a continuum from horrible to downright appalling. She was not looking forward to seeing the victim from the tunnel dissected, and the argument with Pete hadn’t improved the prospect.

‘Mind you,’ Hardin said. ‘I wouldn’t be here at all if it wasn’t for that bloody woman. At least I’ll lose some weight from all this running around.’

‘People.’ Nesbit emerged from the main PM room. ‘We’re ready for you now.’

Hardin huffed and then poured the remainder of his coffee into a nearby waste bin. ‘Ladies first,’ he said, gesturing to Savage.

Savage followed Nesbit into the room, Hardin shuffling along behind her.

Nesbit had once told her they were ‘blessed’ in having three post-mortem tables. ‘A conveyor belt of corpses,’ he’d said. Savage could see nothing good about it. At least today the only body in the room was that of the boy. He lay on the central table, the others nothing but gleaming stainless steel.

At one end of the table a small block held the boy’s head. At the other the wellingtons now looked even more incongruous than they had in the tunnel. Aside from the footwear, he had on a pair of Y-fronts and nothing else, and in the glare from the overhead lights Savage could see the lividity in his buttocks and thighs where the blood had pooled by gravity. In addition, every inch of exposed skin glistened with the slick, oil-like substance Nesbit had noted in the tunnel. Several deep cuts criss-crossed the boy’s palms. The light also made a mockery of their mistakes of the previous night. Even allowing for the poor mugshot, there was no way this boy could be confused with Jason Hobb.

‘Do you have a name for him yet?’ Nesbit said as he came over to the body. ‘Or is he still John Doe masquerading as Jason?’

‘Moot bloody point,’ Hardin said. He looked across at Savage. ‘The confusion caused us a lot of problems.’

‘Quite.’ Nesbit turned to Savage, bent his head and looked at her over the top of his glasses. ‘And since I know the two people involved, I think I can say that misidentification was understandable, given the circumstances. Now then, shall we?’

The pathologist reached up and turned on the overhead microphone and began to make some initial observations. He noted the boy’s height and weight and made a guess as to his age.

‘Somewhere around eleven or twelve years old, I should think. Similar to Jason.’

‘Which raises a question,’ Hardin said. ‘We’ve no other missing children of this age, as far as I know. Not here or nationally.’