Cut Dead (8 page)

‘Or Corran did.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Corran knew what was happening,’ Riley said. ‘He flung the pump away thinking it might be the only thing marking the spot where he’d disappeared.’

‘You’re implying this wasn’t an accident, not a hit and run?’

‘Can you get some prints off the pump?’

‘If there are any, yes. I’ve got a team coming from Plymouth. We’ll do a search of two hundred metres of the road either side of the probable collision point. After that everything will go back to the lab and we’ll see what we’ve got.’

‘Thanks, John. Good work.’

‘Don’t thank me, thank Campbell. That bicycle pump. We’re talking needles and haystacks. Bloody miracle.’

Riley stood still for a moment and then turned three-sixty, scanning the desolate moorland. Heather, rock, bog and a few trees, the road slicing through the middle of the wilderness, a tenuous link to civilisation. The black line of tarmac marking Corran’s route back to his home and wife and kid. His route to somewhere else as well. Maybe somewhere he hadn’t wanted to go.

Sometimes Paula Rowland wondered if she was cut out to be a teacher. Surely there were easier jobs? Jobs where people did what you told them to instead of giving you backchat and filthy looks. Jobs where the government wasn’t constantly on your back telling you how useless your profession was. Jobs where the coffee machine worked.

Paula peered down at the paper cup beneath the dispenser nozzle. A brown slick rose from the bottom of the cup as water trickled in. She touched the side of the cup. Cold.

‘Heater’s packed up again,’ a voice at her shoulder said. Cath. Her best mate. Best mate at the school, anyway. ‘Here, have one of these.’

Cath held out a small carton of orange juice, part of her extensive packed lunch. Paula smiled and took the carton.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Been a tough morning. Year Ten girls.’

Cath nodded. Paula didn’t need to say any more. The Year Ten girls were notorious. With knickers full of hormones, their antics left some of the more developed boys with their tongues hanging out. Controlling the two groups was akin to trying to keep a pack of dogs and bitches apart when the bitches were on heat.

‘It’s the language of love, miss,’ Kelly Jones had said when Paula snapped at her. ‘French kissing and all that.’

‘French letters more like,’ another girl blurted out.

Things got worse from there on in as the class tried to come up with as many names for condoms as they could. She’d smiled to herself; she hadn’t known half of the slang names. Love glove? Well, at least it was better than the dirt the boys had come out with.

Paula slumped down on one of the sofas, Cath joining her, other teachers saying ‘hello’ to the pair and then carrying on with their conversation.

The topic, for once, didn’t revolve around problems with specific children, government education policy or Ofsted. Over the weekend the news had broken that a sicko had abducted several women and dumped them at some farm out in the countryside. He was on the prowl. No woman was safe now the Candle Cake Killer was back.

The name rang a bell somewhere inside Paula’s head but she couldn’t remember the specifics.

‘Can’t remember?’ There was astonishment from the other teachers. Paula smiled. Tried to explain that she had been a student up in Newcastle. She’d spent a year abroad in France and most of the rest of her degree course had been conducted in a drunken haze.

‘But it was here,’ Cath said. ‘Plymouth. Your hometown!’

She dimly remembered her mother warning her to be careful when she’d returned home after her finals.

‘Yes,’ someone else said. ‘The twenty-first of June. The longest day. This weekend.’

Well, she told them, her boyfriend was coming over on Saturday. He was a PE teacher. Worked out. He could handle anyone.

The rest of the lunch break descended into a string of ‘ooohs’ and ‘aaahs’ as her female colleagues begged to be introduced to any hunky mates her boyfriend might have, and Paula forgot all about the Candle Cake Killer until home time. It was when she was pulling out of the car park and joining the main road that she noticed a battered pickup truck. The truck had every right to be on the road, of course, and there was nothing particularly odd about it.

Except she’d seen the very same vehicle driving down her street when she left for school that morning.

Back at Major Crimes by mid-afternoon Savage took an unwanted call from Hardin. Due to technical issues at the hospital the first post-mortem had been delayed from the morning. He and Garrett had been due to attend, but the DCI had left to conduct a media briefing. Would she like to take his place?

Savage didn’t think she had much choice in the matter so she said ‘yes’.

‘Of course, ma’am,’ Calter said when Savage had hung up. ‘I mean, you wouldn’t want to be at home with your feet up with the newspaper and a glass of white in your hand, would you? Not when the alternative is watching a decomposing corpse being sliced and diced.’

Savage returned to her car and drove the short distance to Derriford. As was customary, when she arrived at the mortuary Nesbit greeted her with a joke.

‘Ran out of coins for the meter,’ he said, peering over the top of his glasses and giving a little smile. ‘The result being the entire refrigeration system has ceased to function. We’ve been having to stuff ice bags into the drawers to keep everything sweet. My PM schedule has gone haywire. The best thing to happen is if people would stop dying.’

It appeared as if the pathologist was only half-joking, because to one side of the main anteroom several wall panels lay on the floor and two technicians fiddled with a bundle of multi-coloured wiring and circuit board. A cleaner mopped a puddle of brown liquid from around the base of one of the big body storage cabinets and Savage wondered if the odour assailing her nostrils wasn’t even more acrid than usual. In Nesbit’s office Hardin sat munching on a biscuit, oblivious to the smell, steam curling from a cup of coffee.

‘Good to see you, Charlotte,’ Hardin said as she entered. ‘Long time since we’ve done one of these together, hey? Makes a nice change from paperwork.’

Lovely, Savage thought. Much better than wine and a newspaper.

Hardin wiped some crumbs from his mouth, took a final slurp from his cup and rose from his seat. The two of them returned to the anteroom where Nesbit was scrubbing up at a sink.

‘What did you mean Saturday night,’ Savage asked him, ‘when you said you’d seen this sort of thing before?’

‘Exactly that.’ Nesbit dried his hands and then pulled on gloves. He looked at Savage. ‘Mandy Glastone. Tangled in some unlucky fisherman’s line, she’s pulled up from the murky depths of a pool on the river Dart on Dartmoor. Those marks … we thought at first they’d been made by crayfish, although a biologist doubted it. Then I wondered if they could have been caused by a thin piece of monofilament moving back and forwards in motion with the river current. Once she was on the table though I could tell she’d been cut with a knife. A sharp knife.’

Nesbit gestured with an arm and the three of them walked through into the PM room proper. The cadaver was already in position, the waft of the fans failing to do much to take away the despair in the air. Savage regretted not bringing any mints with her, the feeling doubling when she approached the body.

‘Remarkably well-preserved, isn’t she?’ Nesbit said. ‘Considering she has probably been dead for a fair number of months.’

If this was well-preserved then Savage didn’t think she wanted to see the other two bodies. She peered at the corpse on the table. The woman was partly still covered in sludge, the mud drying to a light grey. The angular shapes of the bones rose as the translucent skin sagged around them like papier-mâché on a wire frame. In places subcutaneous fat had slipped down and collected in weird globule-like formations. Cellulite for zombies.

‘As long as a year?’ Savage said, thinking of the date fast approaching.

‘Possible. The anaerobic conditions have slowed the decomposition process. No air equals no bugs and no microbes. It’s why the other two bodies are still more than just skeletons.’ Nesbit paused, and noticing Savage swallowing a gulp, he smiled. ‘Something to look forward to, hey?’

‘Can’t wait,’ Savage said as she ran her eyes over the corpse again, thinking the dried mud resembled the war paint of some primitive aboriginal warrior about to go into battle. Except this woman wasn’t going anywhere. Not without her head.

‘Tricky to determine what exactly killed her,’ Nesbit said as he began a preliminary examination, dictating a few notes as he worked his way around the body. ‘Possibly the decapitation, but as with Mandy Glastone, the first victim, we can’t know if that caused death or not.’

He indicated to one of the mortuary technicians to wash down the body and soon water was sluicing the mud away, revealing the odd cuts across the torso, some lines curving this way and that, some going straight across and meeting or bisecting each other. The other technician began to take pictures, the light from the flash sparkling in the flowing water.

‘What do you think, Charlotte?’ Hardin said, speaking for the first time. ‘Dan bloody Brown?’

Savage had to concede the patterns were like nothing she’d seen before. For all she knew they could well be some ancient language, hieroglyphics written on skin instead of stone. Although that didn’t make much sense.

‘No,’ she said. ‘If you are leaving a message you don’t bury it away six foot under.’

‘Why do it then?’ Hardin shook his head and moved closer. ‘Unless you’re a bloody loon.’

‘I think with this killer that’s a given, sir.’ Savage turned to Nesbit. ‘Do the older bodies have the cuts?’

‘In places, yes,’ the pathologist said. ‘The skin is not intact so if the markings were ever as extensive as these ones they are gone now.’

‘Then I think the act was the thing, not what resulted.’

‘Interesting theory.’ Hardin cocked his head, as if trying to view the markings from a different angle. ‘So we’d be wasting our time trying to deduce anything from them. They’re meaningless.’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘No, Charlotte, I know you didn’t,’ Hardin said. ‘There’ll be some photographs somewhere of Mandy Glastone, but if I remember rightly there were more cuts on her.’

‘So this latest attack is less frenzied? Strange, as a serial killer develops he often goes further.’

‘But these aren’t frenzied, are they?’ Nesbit said. He picked up a plastic spatula and traced one of the cuts. It curved from the side of the woman’s left breast down to the belly button and around her waist in a sweeping, graceful arc. ‘These are, I hate to say … artistic?’

‘Done with care?’ Savage said.

‘No care for the victim, obviously, but care for the precision of the line, yes.’ Nesbit looked up at Savage. ‘We considered the cuts with the Glastone woman, wondered about the date, the summer solstice. Some sort of ritual. To be honest, back then I thought it was the stuff of fiction, but …’

‘But what?’

‘This girl. The two others. Could be something to ponder.’

‘Was she …’ Savage began to think on Nesbit’s words. Had the girl been sacrificed? Perhaps tortured? ‘Was she alive?’

‘See there and there and there?’ Nesbit indicated dark brown splodges on the abdomen. ‘Blood has come from all the cuts but here it has flowed rather more freely and stained the skin. That couldn’t have happened after death.’

‘Shit,’ Hardin said. ‘I just remembered why I don’t like attending these things. I’ll need a couple of extra glasses of sherry this evening.’

‘You’ll be lucky to get home in time for drinks, Conrad. We’ve a few hours to go before I finish up.’ Nesbit glanced at Hardin and then across to Savage. ‘If it’s any consolation she might not have been conscious when the cutting took place, but unless the killer tells us we’ll never know.’

‘We can hope though,’ Savage said. ‘Can’t we?’

Nesbit didn’t answer. Hope, Savage thought, probably didn’t play much of a part in his professional life because invariably there was none for the people who appeared before him. Hope was an emotion for the living, those left behind, those praying for some sort of resolution.

Nesbit was poring over the cuts, making measurements and counting the number. The way he moved the spatula, the tape measure, was ordered, done with
care
. The killer had done the same, Savage realised. She was wrong earlier, Nesbit right as usual. There was no frenzy here, only purpose. The killer wasn’t driven by a homicidal rage, they were driven by their
craft
. Was it possible the art angle which Dr Wilson, the psychologist, had suggested at the time of the earlier disappearances was correct? Unlike an artist though they didn’t worry about whether anyone would see their endeavours. Their work displayed the pleasure they took in the task at hand, but to do it was all they needed.

Savage wondered what sort of person could kill in such a way? Maybe a better question was what sort of
thing
? Surely not anyone with a scrap of humanity. For a moment she looked heavenward, an almost involuntary action, and the harsh overhead lights made her blink. What had this woman and the other victims done which could merit such violence being done to them?

‘Charlotte?’ Nesbit walked across to her. ‘We’ll open her up now. See what else we can find. Are you OK?’

‘Sure, Andrew,’ Savage said, not feeling at all sure. ‘Never been better.’

Towards the end of the PM Savage took a call from Calter. She muttered her apologies to Nesbit and headed from the room, glad of a breather. After the cool of the autopsy suite the heat of the summer evening outside the building hit her like a wave.

‘Phil Glastone, ma’am,’ Calter said. ‘The first victim’s husband. I’ve just spoken to him. To say he sounded aggrieved that we want to talk to him about the latest developments would be an understatement. He was bloody livid.’

‘Abusive?’ Savage said.

‘Yes, although I’ve heard worse. The gist of it, once the swearing was over, is that he can see no reason to cooperate with us this time round. I told him he had no choice. Made an appointment for tomorrow morning, OK?’