Mark Sennen - Touch

A hairclip.

They insisted on your hair being tied back at work and she wore both a hair band and a couple of metal clips. The clip had been tangled in her hair for all these days. She pulled it out and turned in the small space to get at the grill. The clip slipped between the little slits and she poked it in farther and began to wiggle it around.

Bang! A bright blue flash and her body slamming back against the side of the box. A tingling shot along her arm and a convulsion ran through her chest and something smelt bad. Like when the toaster had gone wrong at home and tripped the cut-out switch. A pungent odour reached her nostrils, a mixture of electrical components having shorted out and organic material burning.

My hand.

It hurt now, a searing pain along the backs of her fingers. She slumped down, knocking her head on the side of the box. An extreme drowsiness overcame her and in front of her eyes stars flared in a dark night sky. The sky span round and round and round and then the stars were fading to an inky black nothing, like when the lights in the theatre went down at the end of a play. Silence, everything quiet and she was aware that even the humming of the electric motor had stopped.

Laira Bridge Road, Plymouth. Tuesday 9th November. 8.05 am

Savage yawned. Bed late and up early yet again wasn’t doing her any good at all. And crawling through the morning traffic didn’t help either. Stop, start, green light, red light, some tosser cutting her up on the bridge. She wanted a clear road, a smooth ride, but somehow the option had been left off the menu, at least with this case.

She mulled over the possible actions open to the team now they had all but confirmed Matthew Harrison as the killer of Kelly Donal and Simone Ashton. Tracing Harrison was the force’s highest priority, but the empty fridge and half a dozen pieces of mail behind the front door suggested he hadn’t been in his flat for a few days. Had he somehow got wind of details of the investigation and cut and run? If so, what did that do for their chances of finding Alice Nash alive now fourteen days were up? The chilling picture of Simone Ashton on the camera Enders had found pointed to Harrison carrying out some sort of procedure on the girls. God help Alice, Savage thought.

The jam cleared and Savage got to the station just in time for the morning briefing in the Major Crimes suite. She squeezed in past the overflow of officers crammed in the corridor, and when Enders spotted her entering he let out a cheer that was followed up by everyone else in the room. Hardin beamed at her and bounced across like a gas-filled party balloon, knocking into desks and causing coffees to spill and computer monitors to wobble.

‘What can I say? Congratulations to everyone. Case solved. Now we just need to catch the bastard!’

To that end he detailed the liaisons he was setting up with other forces and with the port authorities. Savage reckoned a more likely result would come from the crime scene trawl which had been going on all night and would continue throughout the day. So far only the pictures linked any of the girls with Harrison’s house. After Hardin had shaken hands with everyone and returned to his office to work on his media briefing Savage sat down with Riley, Calter and Enders and they began to work up possible actions.

‘He must have another place, ma’am.’ Riley said. ‘A garage, a lockup, a boat even.’

Riley was right. The girls hadn’t been murdered at the house in Plymouth. Harrison would have dealt with them somewhere else. Somewhere quiet.

Savage instructed Riley to get over to Harrison's flat on Grand Parade and try to find anything which might indicate a location he could have used. She would take Calter and Enders back to Malstead Down and see if they could dig anything up in the village.

‘It doesn’t appear as if Harrison had any connection to Malstead, but the evidence points to something. He dumped Kelly in the wood on the evening of the twenty-fifth of October, the night the village held its bonfire party. However, Simone is left in the church. On the twenty-fifth Harrison would have found it impossible to leave Kelly in the church, but my hunch is that is what he intended. The question is, why? Now we have a name we can do some door-to-doors and maybe drive around the area and see what we can pick up.’

‘The old lady, ma’am,’ Calter said.

‘Which one? Old ladies are not in short supply in Malstead.’

‘The one at the top of the green. The little cottage with the tumble down porch thingy. Mrs Harbersher I think her name was. She said she had lived in the village all her life. Born and bred. If anyone could remember Harrison she might. If she can remember anything, that is. When I visited she thought I had come to read the electric meter until I showed my ID.’

*

Calter was right about the old lady. When she opened the door to Calter again she behaved as if there had been some problem with her bill payment.

‘The standing order went through, I am sure. I checked online yesterday. We are not all fuddy-duddies you know.’

Calter tried to explain about the return visit, but it took Savage’s intervention to get them an invite into Mrs Harbersher’s front room, Enders made to wait outside because the cottage didn’t appear big enough for the three of them. Net curtains, porcelain figures of dogs and cats, old-fashioned upholstered chairs, a carpet with patterns on and a coal fire with heat so intense it hurt to look at. Mrs Harbersher had been young in the sixties and yet the room matched Savage’s childhood memories of her own grandmother’s parlour.

Tea and biscuits took an age to arrive, but when they did the tea came in fine china and the biscuits in a Tesco’s luxury brand tin. Savage glared at Calter as she grabbed two at a time. No wonder the electricity company aroused such suspicion if this was how they acted.

‘Mrs Harbersher,’ Savage began. ‘You’ll know we are here about the murders and the body discovered in the church?’

‘Shocking business. In my time we behaved with a little more care. These days the young ones can’t wait to get their knickers off and this is the result, mark my words.’

‘We are trying to find out some information about a man who may have had something to do with the area at one time or another. He is called Matthew Harrison. Does the name ring any bells with you?’

‘Matthew?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s a good old fashioned name, isn’t it? Part of the problem these days is those silly names parents come up with. I am sure that is why there is so much bad behaviour.’

‘So you don’t recognise it?’

‘I didn’t say that. I do recognise it. Matthew Harrison. Elizabeth Foulds was his mother. She came from Bridge Farm. Those Foulds are all dead, and now it’s just a house with a couple of barn conversions since they parcelled the land off.’

‘And? This Elizabeth Foulds?’

‘Lizzy? An attractive girl, very pretty, but a bit quiet and in her own head. She was a few years below me when I left the local school. That’s closed now. Not enough children in the village, you see? Everyone moves away or dies.’

‘What happened to Lizzy?’

‘She left too. Got married and moved to a remote little cottage somewhere over Totnes way. She visited a few times, but as her parents got older she came less and less. When they died she inherited a tidy sum from the sale of the farm, her being an only child.’

‘And her husband?’

‘Richard Harrison his name was. A draughtsman by trade or an architect or something similar. He’d come to the farm to plan out a milking parlour and found a bride instead. Very romantic. At least we all thought so at the time.’