Forester’s post-mortem was scheduled for first thing Monday morning but Savage lost no sleep over it. The jaunt on the moor on Thursday combined with Saturday night’s late shift had left her shattered. Not to mention that she had spent the whole of Sunday trying to keep Samantha and Jamie entertained. The day had been fun, but she hadn’t had any time to relax.
Doctor Nesbit emerged from his office in his green robes, bright eyes glinting as if he couldn’t wait to get started. He spotted Savage leaning against a wall and sent her and Enders away to fuel up on coffee and buns while he and his assistant prepared for the PM. The coffee came strong, black and acrid, but the iced buns tasted lovely and when she returned the combined caffeine and sugar rush had heightened her senses to beyond the point she had wished for. The stench from the morgue lingered in the air, despite the whirr of the extractors, and not for the first time in her life Savage remembered the fact that all odour was particulate based.
Nesbit greeted them in a contemplative mood.
‘I have hypothesised a direct correlation between the number of times I encounter you chaps each month and the state of British society. Recently I find myself wondering if things aren’t getting a little bit worse.’
Nesbit moved over to the body of David Forester, or rather the remains of Forester, for the heap of skin and bones didn’t resemble a man in any meaningful way. The body had been up on the rock for weeks and the sun, wind and rain had been hard at work. Not to mention the crows and other scavengers. Bits of flesh hung on bleached white bones and the grin on the face and the staring empty eye sockets looked like something from a zombie movie. Under the glare of the lights and before a small, select audience, Forester prepared to make his final performance.
After the discovery on Fur Tor they’d had no time to contemplate the scene. The wind had picked up even more and the snow fell in large flakes. Campbell said they should head back before the weather got even worse. Savage had noted the state of the body and little else. Not until the next day, when John Layton called, had the full horror of what Forester had been through become apparent.
‘Chained round the neck to the rock. Handcuffs behind the back. Not a scrap of clothing on him. I’m not doing the pathologist’s job but I’d stake my pension on him having been alive up there at some point.’
Layton said they had found faeces on the rock beneath the body and what appeared to be urine stains too.
‘So you think he starved to death? Or died of thirst?’ Savage had asked.
‘Luckily for him I reckon the exposure got him before he reached that point. Hypothermia, I’d say. Death would have been a relief.’
The body lay half-curled on the post-mortem table, hands still cuffed behind the back. Savage wondered if Forester had died in the same position. Alive a thug, but dying like a baby in the womb, she thought the tableau in front of her showed a sort of poetic justice, but she couldn’t quite figure how.
Nesbit peered into the chest cavity and prodded about between the ribs with a long pair of forceps.
‘Not much of interest for us, Charlotte. All the internal organs are gone or virtually so. My job here is more like archaeology than pathology.’
‘No chance of testing if he had been drugged then?’
‘Not today, no. We’ll open up his skull in a moment and get a peek at what’s left. Not that there will be much I would think.’
Nesbit poked his forceps into the left eye socket and bent over to look right inside.
‘Hah! Something the crows didn’t get at least.’ He uttered a cry of delight and withdrew the forceps. Clasped in the end was a small, clear and shrivelled piece of plastic. ‘Contact lens.’
The lab assistant held out a dish and Nesbit dropped the lens in.
‘Not that it tells us anything, I’m afraid.’
‘Except he was short-sighted,’ Enders said.
‘Does that help?’
‘In fact I suppose it could be helpful,’ Savage said. ‘The lens tells us he may have been out and about when he was kidnapped. He wouldn’t wear contacts while asleep and depending on his prescription he might not have worn them at home.’
‘Now then.’ Nesbit was making a second pass over the body. ‘What is this?’ He pointed down at the left leg where the flesh and muscle had rotted away to leave nothing but bone.
Savage moved closer than she wanted to and saw a line where the bone was broken.
‘Observe.’ Nesbit tapped his forceps on both sides of the leg. ‘Both tibia and fibula are fractured.’
‘RTC?’
‘Common when a pedestrian is hit by a vehicle, yes. As to whether the break is a result of a road traffic accident …’
Nesbit was now working his way up the body, examining the other bones one by one.
‘Ah, look at the shoulder.’ He used the forceps to peel back a piece of stringy muscle. ‘The left clavicle is badly broken, smashed even. I can’t see this amount of damage having come from a collision with a car though. If the pedestrian was walking across the road and was hit on the left hand side he would be thrown on the bonnet, or against the front of the car. This injury appears as if inflicted from above.’ Nesbit made a chopping movement down on his own shoulder to illustrate.
‘Something like a baseball bat or a sledgehammer handle?’ Savage asked.
‘Not out of the question. With this little flesh to examine I can’t say much, but he was probably hit from behind. If this had been a high-speed collision with a car I think we would be looking at other fractures too.’
‘That wouldn’t be the cause of death?’
‘No. He’d be in a lot of pain though. An awful lot. From the leg too. Plus any other injuries we can no longer ascertain.’
Savage grimaced, imagining Forester chained in the cold and dark and shitting himself, literally, as he was dying.
‘So Forester crosses a road and is hit by a car. As he lies on the ground or as he rises someone attacks him with a baseball bat. They put him in the car and drive him up to Dartmoor where they chain him and leave him to die. Anything wrong with my hypothesis?’
‘Nothing at all, Charlotte.’
‘And if they had wanted to kill Forester they only needed to run him over with the car or batter him further while he lay on the road.’
‘Hitting him over the head would have finished him then and there and saved the attacker a lot of trouble.’
‘So the manner of Forester’s death was premeditated?’
‘That’s your job to determine, Charlotte, not mine.’
Savage considered the sad heap of bones, once a man, now an exhibit. Forester didn’t deserve much sympathy, but nobody should have to die like this she thought. Enders seemed to be reading her mind.
‘Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, ma’am,’ he said, as if his words provided some comfort.
Savage ignored him.
‘What about when he died?’ she asked.
‘Time of death is going to be difficult. We won’t find any entomological clues to help us after this period has elapsed. The body has been exposed and partially disturbed by animals; the wind, sun and rain have done their worst as well. My best guess is somewhere between two and four months. Possibly the faecal deposits might yield a more accurate span.’
‘The date is essential, ma’am, isn’t it?’ Enders asked.
‘Yes. If Forester died after Kelly Donal we can posit Forester killed Donal and was himself killed as an act of revenge.’
‘If he died at the same time then we are looking for just the one killer?’
‘And a very dangerous one at that.’
Back at Crownhill and Nesbit was on the phone barely a minute after Savage had sat down at her desk.
‘Something else about Forester you forgot to tell me?’ she asked.
‘No. I’ve got some toxicology results on Kelly Donal. Told the lab to fast-track them for you. Looks like they worked over the weekend.’
Savage groaned. Fast-tracking would add hundreds of pounds to the invoice, an amount she would have to justify to Hardin.
‘Sorry, Charlotte, I should have asked first, but I think you’ll agree it was worth it.’
‘OK, Doc, spill the beans.’
‘I asked for a detailed segmentation test on the hair sample. That means the hair is cut into lengths and each section tested. The result is a historical map, if you like, of any drug use. An analogy would be the rings you see in a cross-section of a tree trunk.’
‘Go on.’
‘She was a heroin user and had been for several months. I had already hypothesised that from the injection marks on her arms. However, she had also taken gamma-hydroxybutyrate some time between seven and fourteen days before her death. It takes around seven days for the drug to show in the hair sample, so that is the minimum period. Longer than fourteen days and it would have been in the next segment of hair. Can you see where I’m going with this?’
‘That the GHB was used in her kidnapping?’
‘Yes. But more than that. Remember I couldn’t tell you how long she had been frozen for? Well, if the drug was given to her when she was abducted then we can posit that she only remained alive for a maximum of fourteen days before she was killed and frozen.’
‘You mean—’
‘I understand there is another girl missing …’
She thanked Nesbit and hung up. Then she worked through the dates in her head. Alice Nash had been missing for seven days. It was possible that she only had another seven to live.
Pondering that awful thought, Savage went to the canteen for a late lunch and found the room buzzing with the aftermath of Saturday night’s little debacle. The worst of it was that two Special Constables had spotted a man trying to drag a girl into the back of a car across town near the railway station. The Specials shouted a warning and the man drove off leaving the distressed student lying in the road. One of the officers managed to note the registration and got a good look at the car, a blue-coloured BMW. Volunteers one, professionals nil. CID was a laughing stock.
‘Clubbing Idiot Dickheads is the one currently doing the rounds,’ grunted Davies as he, Savage and Garrett gathered later in Hardin’s office for a meeting. On the wall the calendar of Greek Islands was still stuck on December last year: Santorini, the white buildings cascading down the side of the island’s caldera like Christmas snow. Four weeks’ time and at least it would show the right month, Savage thought.
Davies appeared rougher than usual, which meant he’d probably done a bottle of whisky after his stint in the CCTV room on Saturday night and slept in the clothes he was now wearing. Garrett looked like he’d spent Sunday at a health spa and then returned home to iron shirts and press trousers. Some of the worry lines had faded too. Other people’s arses were on the line now.
The initial PNC check on the vehicle registration on Saturday night had found nothing. The plates turned out to be false. However, the next morning a Leash team member fired up the Vehicle Online Descriptive Search application to pull out a bunch of results.
‘Two hundred and sixty-two matches registered within twenty-five miles of Plymouth according to VODS,’ Hardin said, looking up from his laptop and beaming as if he had tracked down the Holy Grail.
Needles in haystacks more like, Savage thought. The amount of work to visit, interview and collate all those leads would mean the Leash team were going to be doing nothing else for the next week.
Hardin focused on the positives and the fiasco of Saturday night didn’t seem to be affecting his mood at all.
‘Doesn’t matter how much footwork we need to do now,’ Hardin said. ‘We are close, I can sense it. Big Night Out was a bloody disaster, but some good old-fashioned policing produced the goods. Now, what about Mr and Mrs Kinky, any word from the lab yet, Mike?’
‘Colin and Jessica Abbott are their names,’ Garrett said, turning a page in his notebook, ‘and I’m still waiting for the results. Using one of our own testing kits we got a negative, but we will have to wait for the full analysis to come back.’
‘So we think the drink contained what?’
‘Sugar. Mr Abbott said he poured a sachet into the drink. When his wife returned from the toilet she tasted the drink had been spiked with something and role-played as if she had been drugged.’
Hardin bit his top lip and grabbed one of his liquorice sticks.
‘And they maintained the whole thing was a mock kidnapping scenario, a game?’
‘Consensual, yes. If we hadn’t intervened they would have woken up Sunday morning with the papers as usual.’
Hardin ruffled his notes, scanned his monitor screen for inspiration and shook his head. No wonder, Savage thought, he would be having a hard time understanding this one. Especially since the couple hadn’t been charged.
‘Resisting arrest and trying to run Charlotte down?’ Hardin said, turning to Savage and sounding hopeful.
‘He thought Mike and I were carjackers,’ she answered. ‘That’s what the solicitor is going with. Mr Abbott wasn’t even over the limit. To be honest we will be lucky to get away with just a car repair bill.’
‘Bugger.’
Hardin made a hissing noise between clenched teeth, the big man diminishing in front of her eyes like a balloon with a leak, before perking for a second.
‘Never mind. Let’s hope the VODS data gets us somewhere.’
Hardin paused and any remaining signs of the euphoric mood from earlier slid away as he read the agenda on his screen.
‘Now to something as pressing, if not more so. Alice Nash and Zebo. We located Forester, but he’s dead so there is no chance he’s our man. That would have made things easier all round, hey Charlotte?’
‘Not really, sir,’ Savage said. ‘I mean, Forester was killed by someone. He didn’t volunteer to go for a jaunt on the moor. Whichever way you view it a brutal murderer is on the loose.’
‘Ah, yes, I suppose you are right.’ Hardin hissed again. ‘Where are we at then? Any news on the girl?’
‘Last week she was seen getting into Forester’s 4x4, but Forester has been dead for weeks so we are mystified as to who was driving. You probably watched the appeal her father made on TV over the weekend. So far that has produced nothing but crank calls. No reliable sightings of her or the Shogun.’
‘She’s only sixteen?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the forensics from over at Malstead put Forester’s car at the scene?’
‘I’m afraid so. Tyre tracks and paint match. Whoever dumped Kelly’s body in the field picked up Alice a day later. Nesbit has a theory and if it’s correct then things don’t look too good for Alice.’
‘Theory?’
‘He reckons Kelly was kept alive for anything up to fourteen days before she was killed. So far Alice has been missing for seven days.’
‘Jesus. This really can’t get any worse.’ Hardin pinched his top lip between his thumb and forefinger and made a sucking sound as he let it smack back against his teeth.
‘Let’s hope not, sir.’
‘What about Forester? You attended the PM this morning?’
‘Yes. The PM suggests Forester was run down and then beaten. There was little other forensic evidence and Nesbit isn’t hopeful of getting anything from the lab reports because the body had been out on the moor for some time and the foxes and rats have got at it.’
‘Lovely!’ Davies let out a little snort and grinned. ‘Wonder what the press will make of that when they find out?’
‘Quite,’ Hardin sighed. ‘If we hadn’t put out the appeal then they wouldn’t be able to make a connection between the Donal girl and Forester. They may have assumed his murder was some type of lowlife punishment killing.’
‘Still possible it is, sir,’ Garrett said. ‘The actual murders may not be linked at all. We’ve been picking up intelligence in recent months about some Bristol lads planning to make a move down here. They think the city is easy pickings; bit of a pushover is the word on the street.’
‘What, us?’ Hardin’s face creased, thinking about the headlines again no doubt.
‘No, sir,’ Garrett laughed. ‘The No Prospect lot. A complete bunch of smack heads. We can’t even produce any decent crimos round here.’
‘You could be right.’ Hardin looked hopeful for a moment. ‘Let’s keep our fingers crossed Doctor Nesbit can get some meaningful toxicology to give us something else to go on.’
It seemed to Savage that Hardin wanted to cling to anything that would steer them back to charted waters. He wanted something he understood, something he could deal with by piling in resources. A lone nutter was unfathomable and even a gang selling smack to twelve year olds was better.
‘We wondered whether Forester was mixed up in a porn or prostitution ring,’ Savage started to explain. ‘We’ve dispatched his computer to Hi-Tech Crimes and are awaiting results, but for now we know both he and Kelly were into glamour photography and he had managed to persuade her to do some hardcore videos. He’s done that before with other girls so what the difference is with Kelly we don’t know.’
‘Did the shoot go wrong somehow?’ Garrett said. ‘Could she have been killed by accident? Or deliberately, some sort of snuff film?’
‘I don’t buy the snuff angle, as I’ve said before, sir,’ Savage said, ‘but an accident is possible. However, whatever the reason for Kelly’s death Forester couldn’t have dumped her body. He’s been dead for weeks. A couple of my people are working up something around Mr Donal. Perhaps he killed Forester in revenge for Forester killing Kelly. How the theory fits in with Malstead Down, Kelly’s body being frozen and the picture that resembled Rosina Olivárez though …’
Hardin shook his head and made a final hiss, all the air gone out of him now. He didn’t move for a minute or so and Savage and the others sat waiting. Then he opened a drawer and fumbled in his desk for a moment. Savage half-expected him to pull out a bottle and offer it around. Instead he brought out a newspaper.
‘I am aware you guys laugh about my obsession with the media, but in this case it’s no joke. Did anyone see this morning’s Sun?’
Hardin held up the paper in front of them. The headline wasn’t one of the clever ones, it was just three words, but they took up the whole of the front page and the effect was chilling. The words had been superimposed over an outline map of Devon and Cornwall and said: ‘West Country Ripper?’