Mark Sennen - CUT DEAD - A DI Charlotte Savage Novel

Savage nodded and continued past, switching on the torch and following a line of tape leading into the darkness. Several sets of footprints had filled with water and the torchlight picked out their muddied surface. In the distance something glowed white, almost welcoming in the way it provided a beacon to aim for.

She squelched on until she came to Layton’s makeshift stepping plates: a number of pallets laid in a line which curled away from the edge of the field and towards the white glow. Closer now, and Savage could see what she already knew: the glow came from a forensic shelter. White nylon with blue mudflaps at the base. The chug, chug, chug of a small generator didn’t blot out the noise of rain on the shelter’s fabric, nor the low hum of conversation coming from within the tent.

A figure in a white coverall stood at the entrance and Savage was pleased to see that the wisp of blonde hair coming from beneath the hood belonged to Detective Constable Jane Calter. Calter was always as keen as mustard and hadn’t yet acquired the cynicism which afflicted longer-serving members of CID. When Savage reached the shelter she tapped the young detective on the shoulder. Calter turned.

‘Hello, ma’am.’ Calter pointed to the centre of the tent. ‘Not my idea of a Saturday night out to be honest.’

Savage peered through the opening, shielding her eyes against the glare from the halogen lights within, painful after the darkness. You could only call the excavation a pit; ‘hole’ didn’t do the yawning void justice. One of Layton’s CSIs stood up to her neck in the pit, her protective suit splattered grey-brown with gunge. Savage moved closer, realising as she did so that somebody else was down there. A face looked up at her, mud caked thick on grey eyebrows above little round glasses.

‘Charlotte.’ Dr Andrew Nesbit, the pathologist, knelt at the bottom of the shaft. No jokes today. Face as grim as the weather. ‘Never a nice time, but this …’

Savage stepped over to the edge of the hole, where scaffold boards had been placed around the top to stop the edges giving way. Nesbit’s arm gestured across the sludge and Savage breathed in hard at what she saw.

Three of them, Hardin had said. But ‘them’ implied something you could recognise as human. Whatever was down there in the mud looked a long, long way from that.

‘Bodies only,’ Nesbit said. ‘No heads. And by the look of things on this first one, no genitals either.’

‘Christ,’ Savage heard herself mutter under her breath, not really knowing why. The reference to a higher being was futile. No God could exist in a world alongside this sort of horror. ‘Male? Female?’

‘All females I think and they’re …’

‘What?’

‘Markings, I guess. On one of them at least.’ Nesbit moved a hand down and wiped sludge away from one of the grey forms. ‘Cut lines. All over.’

‘Was that what killed them?’

‘No idea, not here. We’ll need to get them out to discover that, only …’

‘Only what?’

‘I think I’ve seen this before. Years ago.’ Nesbit stood, shook his head and then moved to the aluminium ladder and began to clamber from the hole. ‘I’m sure of one thing though.’

‘Andrew?’ Savage cursed Nesbit, hoped he wasn’t playing games with her. ‘What is it?’

Nesbit stared down into the mud, shook his head once more and then looked at Savage, something like desperation in his eyes. Then he seemed to get hold of himself. Smiled.

‘I’m getting too old for this, Charlotte. Much too old.’

In the early hours of Sunday Hardin had sent most of the team home. Not much they could do, he said. Better to take some time off while they could, because from now on they’d be working flat out. Plans for Sunday onward were to be shelved, all leave cancelled. Savage managed a few hours’ broken sleep and then she was up, the morning passing in a blur of unpacking, cleaning and sorting. Jamie and Samantha were happy to be back from the trip; not so happy it was school the next day, the holiday gone, their precious time wasted in the rain-soaked ports of Brixham and Dartmouth.

By Sunday afternoon the bad weather had blown through and at three o’clock Savage left home. Passing a supermarket on the outskirts of town, she could see the car park was packed. With the forecast promising sun if not warmth, people were out shopping for food for their barbecues. Sausages, burgers, baps, cheap lager and warm white wine. Perhaps later, when the full news about what had been found at the farm broke, appetites would be tempered, fires doused, parties moved inside, excuses made so people might return home and lock their doors.

She drove through Plymouth and headed for the Bere Peninsula. The finger of land was almost encircled by the Tamar and Tavy rivers and where they met the confluence formed a ‘V’ shape pointing towards the city, with the village of Bere Ferrers stuck right down at the bottom. The rivers left the eight or so square miles of the peninsula all but cut off by water. This meant that although Tavy View Farm lay only a couple of miles north of the city, getting there involved a circuitous journey first to the north and then through a maze of country roads, the whole route putting a dozen miles on the clock. Isolated, Savage thought as she headed to the village. And maybe that was the point.

As she coasted down the lane to the farm, high clouds drifted above, their lower sections tinged with darkness, every now and then blotting out the sun. Various police vehicles occupied most of the farmyard so she parked in the lane. A train trundled out from Bere Ferrers as she walked through the gateway into the farmyard, the low rumble causing people to lift their heads and watch as it took the slow curve down to the railway bridge across the Tavy and disappeared into the woods on the far side. Just beyond the bridge, the smaller river joined the wide expanse of the Tamar and downstream towards Plymouth, Savage could see the span of the Tamar Bridge. Upstream, the banks closed in beyond Weir Quay and began a great ‘S’ curve, Amazon-like, before reaching Cotehele and Morwellam. Later, if the weather held, there’d be tourists and locals thronging the National Trust properties up there.

In the farmyard Savage found the incident room Transit van jammed between a stack of black-clad silage bales and a muck-spreader. Hardin and Detective Chief Inspector Mike Garrett sat inside, Hardin pouring coffee from a thermos into a plastic cup. Savage stepped up into the van and perched on one of the stools alongside Garrett, just touching distance to Hardin on the other side of the van. Garrett was an older detective, nearing retirement. His dress sense was as impeccable as his manners, his record as unblemished as his neat white hair. DSupt Hardin sat sideways to a desk, unable to get his bulk comfortable in the small space, his face reddened by the close atmosphere. On the desk sat two laptops and numerous files. One laptop showed the same large-scale map Layton had been looking at the previous night.

‘Thank goodness the bloody rain stopped earlier,’ Hardin said to Savage. ‘The hole was becoming like a swimming pool.’

‘Some swimming pool,’ Savage said. ‘Anything turn up overnight?’

‘Not much.’ Hardin took a slurp of his coffee, made a face and peered at some notes on one of the laptops. ‘Now, preliminaries: enquiry teams to interview the villagers and residents in outlying properties; widen the forensic search to include areas of interest both on the farm and beyond; go over our records and see what the hell we missed last time around.’

Hardin stopped. Nodded with a wry smile at Savage.