Mark Sennen - Touch

‘Something like a baseball bat or a sledgehammer handle?’ Savage asked.

‘Not out of the question. With this little flesh to examine I can’t say much, but he was probably hit from behind. If this had been a high speed collision with a car I think we would be looking at other fractures too.’

‘That wouldn’t be the cause of death?’

‘No. He’d be in a lot of pain though. An awful lot. From the leg too. Plus any other injuries we can no longer ascertain.’

Savage grimaced, imagining Forester chained in the cold and dark and shitting himself, literally, as he was dying.

‘So Forester crosses a road and is hit by a car. As he lies on the ground or as he rises someone attacks him with a baseball bat. They put him in the car and drive him up to Dartmoor where they chain him and leave him to die. Anything wrong with my hypothesis?’

‘Nothing at all, Charlotte.’

‘And if they had wanted to kill Forester they only needed to run him over with the car or batter him further while he lay on the road.’

‘Hitting him over the head would have finished him then and there and saved the attacker a lot of trouble.’

‘So the manner of Forester’s death was premeditated?’

‘That’s your job to determine, Charlotte, not mine.’

Savage considered the sad heap of bones, once a man, now an exhibit. Forester didn’t deserve much sympathy, but nobody should have to die like this she thought. Enders seemed to be reading her mind.

‘Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, ma’am,’ he said, as if his words provided some comfort.

Savage ignored him.

‘What about when he died?’ she asked.

‘Time of death is going to be difficult. We won’t find any entomological clues to help us after this period has elapsed. The body has been exposed and partially disturbed by animals; the wind, sun and rain have done their worst as well. My best guess is somewhere between two and four months. Possibly the faecal deposits might yield a more accurate span.’

‘The date is essential, ma’am, isn’t it?’ Enders asked.

‘Yes. If Forester died after Kelly Donal we can posit Forester killed Donal and was himself killed as an act of revenge.’

‘If he died at the same time then we are looking for just the one killer?’

‘And a very dangerous one at that.’

*

Back at Crownhill and Nesbit was on the phone barely a minute after Savage had sat down at her desk.

‘Something else about Forester you forgot to tell me?’ she asked.

‘No. I’ve got some toxicology results on Kelly Donal. Told the lab to fast-track them for you. Looks like they worked over the weekend.’

Savage groaned. Fast-tracking would add hundreds of pounds to the invoice, an amount she would have to justify to Hardin.

‘Sorry, Charlotte, I should have asked first, but I think you’ll agree it was worth it.’

‘OK, Doc, spill the beans.’

‘I asked for a detailed segmentation test on the hair sample. That means the hair is cut into lengths and each section tested. The result is a historical map, if you like, of any drug use. An analogy would be the rings you see in a cross-section of a tree trunk.’

‘Go on.’

‘She was a heroin user and had been for several months. I had already hypothesised that from the injection marks on her arms. However, she had also taken gamma-hydroxybutyrate some time between seven and fourteen days before her death. It takes around seven days for the drug to show in the hair sample, so that is the minimum period. Longer than fourteen days and it would have been in the next segment of hair. Can you see where I am going with this?’

‘That the GHB was used in her kidnapping?’

‘Yes. But more than that. Remember I couldn’t tell you how long she had been frozen for? Well, if the drug was given to her when she was abducted then we can posit that she only remained alive for a maximum of fourteen days before she was killed and frozen.’

‘You mean-’

‘I understand there is another girl missing…’

She thanked Nesbit and hung up. Then she worked through the dates in her head. Alice Nash had been missing for seven days. It was possible that she only had another seven to live.

Pondering that awful thought, Savage went to the canteen for a late lunch and found the room buzzing with the aftermath of Saturday night’s little debacle. The worst of it was that two Special Constables had spotted a man trying to drag a girl into the back of a car across town near the railway station. The Specials shouted a warning and the man drove off leaving the distressed student lying in the road. One of the officers managed to note the registration and got a good look at the car, a blue coloured BMW. Volunteers one, professionals nil. CID was a laughing stock.

‘“Clubbing Idiot Dickheads” is the one currently doing the rounds’, grunted Davies as he, Savage and Garrett gathered later in Hardin’s office for a meeting. On the wall the calendar of Greek Islands was still stuck on December last year: Santorini, the white buildings cascading down the side of the island’s caldera like Christmas snow. Clever. Four weeks time and at least it would show the right month, Savage thought.

Davies appeared rougher than usual, which meant he’d probably done a bottle of whisky after his stint in the CCTV room on Saturday night and slept in the clothes he was now wearing. Garrett looked like he’d spent Sunday at a health spa and then returned home to iron shirts and press trousers. Some of the worry lines had faded too. Other peoples arses were on the line now.

The initial PNC check on the vehicle registration on Saturday night had found nothing. The plates turned out to be false. However, the next morning a Leash team member fired up the Vehicle Online Descriptive Search application to pull out a bunch of results.

‘Two hundred and sixty-two matches registered within twenty-five miles of Plymouth according to VODS,’ Hardin said, looking up from his laptop and beaming as if he had tracked down the Holy Grail.

Needles in haystacks more like, Savage thought. The amount of work to visit, interview and collate all those leads would mean the Leash team were going to be doing nothing else for the next week.

Hardin focused on the positives and the fiasco of Saturday night didn’t seem to be affecting his mood at all.

‘Doesn’t matter how much foot work we need to do now,’ Hardin said. ‘We are close, I can sense it. Big Night Out was a bloody disaster, but some good old-fashioned policing produced the goods. Now, what about Mr and Mrs Kinky, any word from the lab yet, Mike?’

‘Colin and Jessica Abbott are their names,’ Garrett said, turning a page in his notebook, ‘and I am still waiting for the results. Using one of our own testing kits we got a negative, but we will have to wait for the full analysis to come back.’

‘So we think the drink contained what?’

‘Sugar. Mr Abbott said he poured a sachet into the drink. When his wife returned from the toilet she tasted the drink had been spiked with something and role-played as if she had been drugged.’

Hardin bit his top lip and grabbed one of his liquorice sticks.

‘And they maintained the whole thing was a mock kidnapping scenario, a game?’

‘Consensual, yes. If we hadn’t intervened they would have woken up Sunday morning with the papers as usual.’

Hardin ruffled his notes, scanned his monitor screen for inspiration and shook his head. No wonder, Savage thought, he would be having a hard time understanding this one. Especially since the couple hadn’t been charged.

‘Resisting arrest and trying to run Charlotte down?’ Hardin said, turning to Savage and sounding hopeful.

‘He thought Mike and I were carjackers,’ she answered. ‘That’s what the solicitor is going with. Mr Abbott wasn’t even over the limit. To be honest we will be lucky to get away with just a car repair bill.’