Cut Dead (18 page)

She pulled open the cutlery drawer, selected the biggest knife she could find and went and got ready for bed.

Chapter Seventeen

You’ve been watching her again and that’s excited you. Shouldn’t really, because it’s not about sexual gratification. You can get that any time with a yard of kitchen roll and your right hand. Back home now, and you need something to take your mind off the girl. A little preparation might do it.

Schlaaack, schlaaack, schlaaack.

The Big Knife slides across the whetstone, glinting with approval as each pass shaves a few microns from the steel and hones the blade to a razor edge.

The knife has to be sharp. Sharp means the skin parts as the knife glides across the body, cutting as you move your hand back and forth. No effort needed, just the weight of the blade. Like a razor cut, there’s no pain, only the sensation of warmth spreading across flesh, the poison oozing from within. You’ve seen the look on their faces as they realise what is happening. They begin to think then, think with absolute clarity. In the remaining minutes and hours of their existence, they come to understand the truth.

Schlaaack, schlaaack, schlaaack.

Mikey comes into the room. Stops when he sees what you are doing. Grins.

The boy’s only got two modes: happy or sad. Nothing between. You guess that’s because his limited IQ allows for only the basest of emotions. He’s never been officially diagnosed but he’s got learning difficulties, other sorts of difficulties too. It wouldn’t be PC to say so, but he is basically a dimwit. For your purposes, that’s perfect, because Mikey believes anything you say and will do just about anything you want him to.

Handy.

Mikey always does the girls with you. Loves it. Lends a hand. More than a hand if you are honest. Mikey likes his fun. He takes a long time and sometimes you wonder where he gets the energy from.

‘Got it?’ you say to him. Mikey nods and holds up a new roll of gaffer tape. He’s been helping you prepare things in the dining room. Spreading out the big plastic sheet. It covers the carpet completely and goes all the way to the walls where you fold the edges up and stick them with the tape. Then there’s a piece for the table. Again, taped into place. You move to the wall near the window and point down to a section which still needs fixing. ‘Over there, Mikey. Make sure it goes up to at least waist height.’

The plastic comes from a big roll you keep in the barn. One thousand gauge. Or 0.254 millimetres thick. When you’ve finished you can bundle the sheet up and burn the whole thing.

The plastic makes a crinkly sound as you walk back and forth, reminding you of the time when Mummy and Daddy decorated the house. Of course, that’s where you got the idea for the plastic from.

‘We don’t want any mess, do we?’ Mummy said. ‘Otherwise Daddy might get angry.’

That’s right. No mess.

If only Daddy had thought of that then he might not have ended his days in prison with a piece of electrical cord knotted round his neck.

You don’t intend to make the same mistake.

Schlaaack, schlaaack, schlaaack.

Back to the sharpening. Five more minutes and then you stop and scrape the blade across the back of your hand where the edge removes hairs as well as your Bic. Didn’t really need a sharpen, to be honest, but it’s part of the preparation, the ritual.

For now the Big Knife needs to be put away, but not in the kitchen. Kitchens are for cooking and eating. The Big Knife doesn’t do cooking, not now, not since the cake. The cake was the last piece of food it cut. Not the last
thing
it cut, but the last piece of food.

Now the knife does other things and lives somewhere else.

You say ‘live’ because that’s what it does. Not like ‘lives in the drawer’ – that’s just bad English. Nothing can live in a drawer because it’s dark and there’s no food. Living things need light and sustenance and sometimes they need a little bit of love too.

So you keep the knife in the dining room, where it sits in a wall-mounted glass display case. The knife looks a little out of place, almost like a surrealist piece of art. That’s because of the plastic plants, the rocks at the base and the blue background which simulates a flowing stream. The case once held a large stuffed trout, a fish your Daddy caught years ago. On the edge of your memory you remember the creature, all slimy, flapping on the bank of the river. Daddy taking the knife and sliding the point into the underside of the trout, the mouth still gasping for air as the guts slipped out.

You always point out the knife to your guests. You tell them the story about the knife being used to gut the trout. You see them thinking then. It’s the way you describe the gutting of the fish. Perhaps you use too much detail when you explain the way the blade slips into the soft belly because you can sense their fear. They don’t know about your past or your family history and yet you can tell they’re scared. They don’t want to hear any more. They don’t really want to understand, to empathise. In short, they don’t care.

Too bad. Once you’ve started the story you don’t like to stop, and if they were to ask you to that would be plain rude.

You don’t like rude. Plain or otherwise.

So you carry on. You tell them all about the cake and the birthday. You go over the bit about the trout again and then you tell them how your Daddy used the knife to gut your mother too.

That’s when they usually start to scream.

Chapter Eighteen

Central Plymouth. Friday 20th June. 4.07 a.m.

The call came before the light. Riley reached out for his mobile, knocking it to the floor. He rolled off the bed and scrabbled in the dark until he was able to grab the damn thing and silence it. His girlfriend, Julie, mumbled something as Riley left the room. He pressed the phone to his ear, Enders’ voice dragging the last remnants of sleep from him as he padded naked down the hall to the kitchen.

The line was intermittent and Riley struggled to understand what Enders was saying between the slices of silence and the pounding from his headache.

Red wine. Last night. Too much. Him and Julie giggling in the early hours as they’d gone to bed and tried to make love. Failing, but having hysterics doing so, they’d curled up together and fallen asleep, Riley as happy as he’d ever been.

Now though, he was paying the price.

‘Say again, Patrick,’ he said. ‘Slowly.’

Enders repeated the information and waited until Riley had repeated it back to him. Then he hung up.

Shit.

His day off gone. Just like that.

Along with every other officer, he was on duty on the twenty-first, tomorrow. Today he’d been expecting a lie-in, spending the morning in bed with Julie, getting up at lunch time. Riley looked at the glow from the clock on the oven. Not at four a.m.

He grabbed a glass, filled it from the tap, and gulped the liquid down. Again. Then he scribbled a note on a Post-it and stuck the message to the side of the kettle. Ten minutes later and he was driving through the empty streets of Plymouth, wondering if he’d pass a breathalyser test. Thirty and he’d reached a remote spot high on Dartmoor a few miles to the east of Burrator Reservoir. He couldn’t miss the rendezvous because several vehicles half blocked the road, Callum Campbell’s white Land Rover amongst them, Enders’ own Suzuki Jimny just behind.

Torch light picked out a huddle of bright clothing standing a couple of hundred metres from the road next to a mound of rocks, the group silhouetted against a lightening sky. Riley could see Enders up there on the mound next to the Dartmoor Rescue Group members. The lad would be soaking up the atmosphere, loving it. Riley killed the engine, pulled his own windcheater from the rear seat and got out of the car. A hint of dawn showed as an orange radiance to the east, but sunrise was half an hour away at least. Down in the city, Riley had clambered from his bed into a pre-dawn still warm and humid from the day before. Up here on the moor the air was fresher and he shivered, regretting he hadn’t put on an extra layer.

He walked up to the tor, the moorland grass and heather grey beneath his feet, hunks of bare granite a darker shade. When he reached the pile of rocks Riley could see they marked some sort of hole in the ground. More of a shaft really. A set of ropes disappeared down into a blackness pierced every now and then by white light moving back and forth.

‘Old mine working,’ Enders said as Riley came over. ‘Yesterday evening a couple of walkers reported a ewe circling the shaft and calling to her lamb. The animal had fallen in. The shepherd came out with a big torch and spotted Corran down there with the lamb. Called DRG.’

‘Bit of luck for us.’

‘Lucky for the lamb too.’

‘Yes.’ Riley leant forwards a little to see down the shaft. ‘How far down?’

‘Careful.’ Someone touched him on the shoulder. Riley turned to see Callum Campbell. ‘Don’t need another one going over the edge.’

‘Shit.’ Riley’s heart missed a beat and he stepped back. ‘And is that what happened? An accident?’

‘Not an accident, no.’ Campbell paused, gestured at the rocks and boulders. ‘His bike’s down there with him. Don’t think he was riding the thing at the time, not over this type of terrain. Besides, the bike’s totalled. Front wheel buckled and the frame bent.’

‘Hit and run then,’ Riley said, feeling a slight disappointment come over him. ‘A simple disposal of the evidence.’

‘Simple enough, yes. No less criminal.’

No, Riley thought. Someone had killed Corran, probably through careless driving. They’d compounded the situation by attempting to conceal Corran’s body. His wife and daughter were owed an explanation. And they’d want to see justice done too.

Riley and Enders moved away from the shaft as members of the rescue team began to set up an elaborate tripod over the hole. A rope and pulley system would be used to lower a stretcher down to retrieve the casualty. When the equipment was in place somebody shouted ‘below’ and the stretcher slipped down into the darkness.

‘Be more forensic, Darius,’ Enders said as the rope ran through the pulleys. ‘On the bike or the body. You run somebody off the road, it’s going to leave some evidence.’

Layton had already found a paint fragment and had failed to match it, but maybe Enders was right and they’d find something else. As in the case with Savage’s daughter Clarissa, a match could lead to a list of car models and from there to a bunch of owners via the vehicle database. Find them, check their alibis, examine their cars for signs of damage or recent repair. Boring, painstaking work, but necessary. In the end they’d maybe have a couple of suspects they could bring in. If they got lucky, one might confess. If they didn’t, it was going to be tricky. Even if somebody did own up they could claim Corran swerved out in front of them, that they’d panicked when they found he was dead. Serious business; obstructing police, concealing a body, but they’d be out in a couple of years at the most. Riley didn’t think Corran’s wife and daughter would call that justice.

‘Steady!’

Riley turned to see the stretcher swivelling just beneath the top of the tripod. Hands reached out and pulled the gurney to safety, the hard plastic underbelly scraping on rock.

Corran.

He lay on the stretcher, arms by his side, legs straight, secured by a number of straps. Grass stains and mud smeared his clothing and his mouth hung open. His cycle helmet sat at an odd angle but was still on his head. There were numerous scrapes on his face, his nose gone black and bent to one side. Farther down and his right leg was a mess of pulp, muscle and bone.

Campbell took a big torch and played the beam across the body. The light made the surrounding moor disappear into a world of shadows, Corran’s features now white like a ghoul’s.

‘Bloody hell.’ Campbell held the beam steady on the left side of Corran’s head.

Riley moved alongside and knelt, one hand shielding his eyes from the beam. Just forwards of the ear a circular patch of black with a red, fleshy centre. Not much blood. Some bruising.

‘Not an accident then?’ Campbell said.

‘No.’

Riley stood and took in the expressions on the faces of the rescue team. They were used to dealing with dead bodies, but this was beyond their experience. From the look of Enders’ face it was beyond his too.

Not beyond Riley’s though. He’d seen this before, up in London. This was a gunshot wound. Point blank. Devlyn Corran had been executed.

A couple of hours later Riley stood in a bathroom at Derriford Hospital. He splashed water from the tap against his forehead, the cool liquid for a moment soothing the pain of a headache. Chemicals from the pathology lab he reckoned. Some sort of allergy. That, the hangover and the thought of having to tell Corran’s wife her husband had been murdered. Assuming she didn’t already know, of course.

He left the bathroom and headed out into the foyer of the hospital. He went through the front doors and searched for Davies. The DI stood next to a ‘No Smoking’ sign, fingering an unlit cigarette.

‘Fucking hey, Darius,’ he said. ‘This is more like it!’

Riley had called Davies from up on the moor and he’d been waiting at the hospital when Riley arrived trailing the mortuary van. The full post-mortem would take place later, but for now Nesbit had made a preliminary examination. There’d been no point him coming out to the moor, much as Enders had joked about how he’d like to see the pathologist lowered into the abandoned mineshaft.

Davies was still ranting on. A gunshot wound. To the head. Point blank. All the hallmarks of a professional hit.

‘You and me, Riley, we’re back in business, right?’

Riley nodded and then flicked his phone on and called Hardin. The DSupt wasn’t one for small talk, especially at this time of the morning, so Riley gave him the news straight.