Mark Sennen - Touch

Looking closer now Savage could see that dozens of the pictures had been annotated in black marker. An arrow drawn on pointing to a bra strap showing, a flash of panties, a glimpse of inner thigh, a trio of drunken girls staggering down the street with their breasts half hanging out. At the end of the arrow a word: ‘Slut?’, ‘Tart?’, ‘Whore?’, ‘Dirty?’

The words shocked her as much as the sheer number of images, but most of all she found herself shocked by the actual image content. These were ordinary girls Harrison had snapped outside his house and on the Hoe, not some fantasy from a magazine, but real. The message didn’t need much decoding in Savage’s mind. Out there, in the streets and the parks and the clubs flesh displayed itself, advertised the availability of easy sex and longed to be touched, to be consumed.

Savage saw Riley shifting his stance, his face grimacing at each new image.

‘Is that what you think? Those words?’ Savage said. ‘I mean “you” as in “men”?’

‘It’s not what we think rationally, ma’am, but maybe it’s how we think when we look. You are in a sweet shop, you expect the sweets to taste nice, right?’

‘And nice is slutty?’

‘Nice is available.’

‘But possibly not to Harrison.’

‘It could explain a lot.’

Savage examined the images for a second time. If so much unavailable flesh had flashed in front of Harrison perhaps frustration had made him go mad, but then again maybe the pictures on the wall comprised a mere sideshow and something deeper drove him to kill.

‘Ma’am?’

Riley pointed to a row of framed prints on the shelf above the printer. Rosina Salgado Olivarez, Kelly Donal, Simone Ashton and Alice Nash. They were formal pictures, each girl dressed in her nursery uniform, smiling and looking straight at the camera. Donal and Ashton can’t have realised their killer peered back through the lens at them.

On a higher shelf golden writing sparkled on a set of hardback notebooks. Four altogether, each with a girl’s name embossed in gold on the spine: Trinny, Lucy, Deborah and Katya. None of the names matched the victims nor any of the women on the mispers list.

Savage took the first book, the one with Trinny written on the spine. Inside narrow ruled lines were filled with an almost impenetrable scrawl in black ink. Harrison had never thought of using blotting paper and the resulting ink smudges everywhere made deciphering the writing even more difficult. She skimmed through the lines of facts and figures about Trinny, whoever she was. Height, weight, eye colour, those made sense, but the rest of the text just waffled. Page after page describing, in minute detail, Trinny’s clothing, her shopping habits, her food preferences. Then came other ramblings, Harrison’s explanation of the love he felt for Trinny, what he was going to do with and to her. Some of it was impassioned, half poetry, half florid prose, the rest was pornographic, sick. After thirty or so pages the writing ended with a single word on an otherwise blank page: ‘Sorry.’

Savage scanned back through the text. Who was Trinny? Might she be another victim they had yet to discover? Savage shuddered at the thought and skipped back through some more pages. Then she spotted it: an address.

‘Beacon Park. It’s Kelly Donal.’

‘Trinny is Kelly?’ asked Riley.

‘Yes.’ She handed the book to Riley. ‘Read the description of her, first page.’

‘My dream lovely dream with the long brown hair and that starched white shirt top buttons undone and those heaving breasts pushing outwards wishing to be free and in my hands hazel eyes with plucked eyebrows narrow lips and white teeth the cutest nose that can smell my desire you sweet for me alone and your young innocence that longs for the closeness of my lonely flesh with your purity wrapped around me so safely.’

‘You’ve seen the shots of Kelly? The description matches,’ Savage said.

‘Perfectly. Anyway the address says everything, ma’am. Congratulations.’

Savage nodded. ‘In the circumstances I am not celebrating. Especially since we have two big unanswered questions.’

‘Which are?’

‘Where is Harrison and where the hell is Alice Nash?’

Penzance Police Station, Cornwall. Tuesday 9th November. 8.41 am

Tatershall slammed the phone down and thumped the desk. First thing Tuesday and the day turning crap already. He had called a certain DC Nikki Lees at Dartmouth nick and unhelpful appeared to be her middle name. Rude too, treating him like an out-of-town hillbilly deputy. She hadn’t known the owners of Netherston Cottage, hadn’t been willing to try and find out either and didn’t seem at all interested in his mispers.

‘Stupid idiots,’ Tatershall said to Simbeck. ‘A few boats, a bit of sun and some rich ponces flashing their money around and they think they are living in bloody Monaco. The likes of them are obviously too busy licking some yachtie’s arse to have time to bother with us thickos down here in Cornwall.’

‘A yacht, a bit of sun and a rich ponce would do me fine, boss,’ Simbeck said. ‘Even if I did have to lick his arse occasionally.’

Tatershall groaned at the thought and picked up a pad from his desk. Jottings, doodles and random thoughts covered the paper, all connected to the couple from St Ives. What had started out as another boring mispers inquiry had now begun to fascinate him. The couple weren’t the sort of people he would usually feel much empathy for. Incomers rankled with him and rich ones twice over, but something about the couple drew a strand of compassion from him. At first glance they appeared to be not so different from the hundreds of retirees Tatershall came across in his work. Yet they had got under his skin. The husband, a cancer patient with not much time left, his wife a painter of dull landscapes, nothing unique there. But when he had read the letter from the hospital and stared out of the big window across the bay some of the emptiness from their lives washed over him. The trawl through their papers that revealed little, the sterile paintings, the flat devoid of memories, the story spoke to Tatershall of a couple who didn’t want to look back but had nothing to look forward to either.

He had managed to find out that they originally came from near Plymouth, another Devon link. The wife had been born in a small village on Dartmoor where the couple had later married at the local church, but beyond those bare facts nothing. Without a trip across to Devon, he thought, he couldn’t proceed further, certainly not if the local police were going to be as obstinate as DC Lees.

Reviewing the notes on his pad again brought to his attention the one nugget of information of any use so far. The location of Netherston Cottage. The place had been easy to find. A quick Google had revealed the hamlet of Netherston buried in the deepest part of the South Hams, an area of Devon which lay to the south of Dartmoor and took in the coastline from Plymouth to Dartmouth. Examining the aerial photograph overlaid on the map and comparing the lie of the land with the image on the painting he was pretty sure he had identified the exact location. The cottage lay nestled up against a wood in a valley only accessible along a mile or so of track. Even compared with places he knew in Cornwall the location was remote. Was it possible his mispers were there? Considering the health of the husband and his need for regular drugs and treatment Tatershall could think of only one reason why they would be.

The thought depressed him some more. But kicking the idea around in his head the notion didn’t quite make sense. The couple had moved to St Ives presumably because they liked the area. The view from the big window in the flat suggested an appreciation of the scale and beauty of the landscape and the wife’s paintings, however bland, indicated some sort of affinity for the place too. The gallery gave them a social connection right into the heart of the town and meant they would be able to get help and support. Why choose to go to some isolated cottage to die? Even if the couple had planned some suicide pact it would have been just as easy to carry it out in their own home. Unless they needed help, of course.