Mark Sennen - Tell Tale - A DI Charlotte Savage Novel

‘The PolSA? Right.’ Hardin drummed his fingers on the desk. ‘Well if we’re not going to look for the girl just what the heck should we be doing? Appealing to the killer’s better nature and asking him to turn himself in?’

‘An appeal is a good idea. Finding the clothes means we might be able to put together some form of reconstruction. Fernworthy is a busy place this time of year, so if anybody saw Ana there an appeal will jog their memories.’

‘Relying on the public. You know I don’t like that, Charlotte.’ Hardin nodded over at his phone. ‘All we ever get are hoax calls, dreamers and people with nothing better to do than waste our time. Sure, we’ll go with an appeal, but have you got any better ideas?’

Savage almost snapped back, ‘have you?’ But instead she said: ‘We need the usual pulling-in of known sex offenders and then I think we should conduct a full-scale search of Ana’s house, forensics and everything. When the initial misper report came in there was a cursory examination of her room but that was the extent of it. Now we can ratchet up the investigation a level or two.’

‘Three or four I think,’ Hardin said. ‘We just so happen to have the honour of the Crime Commissioner visiting us for a tour tomorrow. And he’s bringing some other dignitaries with him. Charles Milner for one.’

‘The MP?’

‘Yes. Milner’s local, of course, but he’s also on the bloody Home Office Select Committee. He can pull strings and raise budgets. Conversely, he can cut them. So for the moment, this case is a priority, right? I want officers redeployed from the stabbing on Union Street and see if you can draft people from some other lesser investigations too. We need to sort this fast – and establish Anasztáz Róka’s disappearance has nothing to do with any kind of serial killing. That should wipe the smile from Dan Phillips’ face and hopefully put this station in the Crime Commissioner’s good books.’

Simon Fox, the Chief Constable of Devon and Cornwall Police, sat inside his car in his garage. He wore his full uniform, the silver buttons reflecting the sterile light from a fluorescent tube mounted on the wall above a workbench. On the bench an array of tools lay in neat rows, the light glittering off them too. He’d spent many happy hours in here, the bonnet up on whichever car he happened to own at the time, tools clinking on metal, an oily rag to wipe his hands on. In the end though, he couldn’t kid himself he was doing much more than tinkering. These days modern cars were so complicated that tinkering was all you could really do.

Fox reached over to the passenger seat for the bottle of whiskey. He’d drunk half the contents but he needed more. Dutch courage. Hell, any sort of courage. He unscrewed the cap and took a deep draught. He’d long ago passed the drunk stage and now every extra gulp added clarity to the situation. And the clearer things became, the clearer the solution to his problems.

He peered over his shoulder into the rear of the Jaguar. The car was an estate, an XF Sportbrake. Perhaps it was a bit of a cliché for a senior officer to have such a vehicle, but Fox didn’t care. His grandfather had owned an XK150 from new. Fox wondered what might have happened to the car, where it was now, how much it would be worth. There was of course nothing to say the car was still around. It could have rusted away, crashed, or been crushed.

In the rear of the car a vacuum cleaner hose tumbled over the back seat. Fox had attached the hose to the exhaust pipe using gaffer tape and then led the tube up through the hatchback. He’d pulled the hatch shut as best he could and secured it with a bungee cord. Then he’d stuffed a couple of blankets in the gap. Not airtight, perhaps a bit of a bodge job, but good enough.

Tinkering.

The word summed up his career, his life. Fox wondered whether fiddling around was all anyone could hope to do. You tried to make a difference, to change people’s lives for the better. In the end though, whatever you did, you ended as dust. Atoms spinning in the infinite void, never again to experience anything. Fox wallowed in a growing feeling of despair. Many years ago he’d been faced with depression, but he hadn’t let it get the better of him; he’d beaten it and come out stronger. This time, he knew it was different. This sort of depression couldn’t be beaten. This time he couldn’t win.

Fox took a final swig from the bottle and then screwed the cap back on. He placed the bottle carefully on the passenger seat and then his hand strayed to the keys in the ignition. He turned them a notch. The lights on the dash lit up, the aircon began to hum and the navigation system came on. A blinking icon indicated that the sat-nav couldn’t lock onto any satellites to fix its position. Lost, Fox thought. Completely and utterly lost.

The wrong turn had come miles back, an error of judgement undoubtedly, but one made with what at the time had seemed the best of intentions. Covering up his son Owen’s involvement in a hit-and-run accident in which a young girl had died had been a remarkably easy decision to make. Owen had been high on drink and drugs, and the effect on Fox’s career had the truth come out would have been cataclysmic. At the time Fox had told himself he’d done it for Owen and his young fiancée – Lauren, pregnant with the couple’s first child – and not for his own selfish reasons, but deep down he now wondered at the veracity of that. Sure, Owen had reformed. Fox had forced him into a boring job, forced him to begin to accept the responsibilities that came with fatherhood. The lad had abandoned his old friends and was now a model citizen. Still, there’d been a heavy price to pay. Fox had had to call in favours and make promises to keep the truth from coming out. The problem was corruption had a stink about it and however hard you tried to keep things airtight, sooner or later there was always a leak.

There was the human cost as well, not just to his own sense of psychological wellbeing but to the parents of the victim. And that the mother should be one of his own workforce compounded the situation. Every time he met her he worried that she could read the guilt on his face. He, in turn, could see the pain on hers. She’d never got justice, never found peace. The latter, Fox reckoned, would never come, but justice? Well, some sort of resolution to the whole stinking mess lay just around the corner, the next turn on his journey.

Fox lay back in the seat and closed his eyes. Imagined the classic XK150 with his grandfather at the wheel. Soon, perhaps, he’d be sitting beside him, rolling through countryside bathed in the sunlight of an endless childhood summer. They’d park up somewhere on a village green where they could watch a game of cricket. His grandfather would reach into the glove compartment and pull out two tins and his pipe. The first tin contained boiled sweets, and Fox was allowed one every time a four or a six was scored or a wicket went down. His grandfather would take the other tin and tap his pipe on the lid three times, open it and fill the pipe with tobacco. Then he’d light up and they’d talk about the game in front of them or football or rugger. Whether Simon would like to come fishing with him. The same life but another time, a simpler time. A better time.

Fox felt tears welling in his eyes. Disgusted with himself for his lack of courage he blinked the moisture away. Then he turned the keys another notch. The engine started and exhaust fumes began to pump into the car.

When Savage pulled the car into her driveway, the sun hovered low above the Cornish coast; Plymouth Sound bathed in light. Sunday was all but gone. Back at Fernworthy the search teams had given up for the day, the latest report from Frey stating there was a high probability Anasztáz Róka wasn’t in the reservoir. The bankside and woodland area designated by the PolSA had been scoured inch by inch and nothing had been found. Results from the search and rescue groups engaged in a wider sweep of the moor were equally disappointing.