Cut Dead (44 page)

Revenge taken, demons exorcised; that should have been that. Ronald ended up in the clay pit, trout farming an unlikely choice of profession. Peter continued in private practice but may well have been the one to instigate the Candle Cake killings, the woman who rejected him being all the excuse he needed. He never took part in the actual murders – they knew that from the alibis – but he as good as signed the victims’ death warrants when he provided Ronald with a name each year. Likely as not after the torture and killings he helped Ronald bury the bodies on the farm, the sight of each woman being entombed on the spot where his life began bringing some sort of catharsis.

Savage shook her head as she read through the report on the screen once more. Then she closed the document, switched off her computer and gathered together her things.

He found the love of a good woman.

As she left the office and went down to her car she recalled Wilson’s words to her about a serial killer in the States who stopped killing when he got married. Wilson hadn’t found the love of a woman though. What the hell was wrong with some men, Savage thought, that if they didn’t get what they wanted, they took it anyway?

Chapter Forty-Two

Basically, she’s ruined everything. She killed Peter. Turfed you and Mikey from your home, left you with nothing. And thanks to you giving Mikey a few too many Moxis he slept for thirty-six hours solid, so you didn’t even get to have some fun with the new girl.

Which means the bitch has got to pay.

But it won’t be so easy. Not with her being a police officer. Finding her place wasn’t difficult. Bit out of the way. Off the beaten track. But you like that. Quiet. You won’t be disturbed. You move down the footpath which skirts the property. A thick hedge conceals you from the family larking about in the garden, but you doubt they’d notice you anyway. They’re too busy having fun.

Fun. It’s what’s been lacking from your life, you think. Apart from those moments of sublime transcendence when your victims squirm beneath the knife. Then again, it’s not really fun. Except for Mikey. But then, one of his hobbies is chopping up earthworms.

You nestle down behind a bush, the pair of binoculars heavy round your neck. If anyone should come along the coast path you’ll just seem like a crazy birdwatcher. You don’t need them to see what’s going on in the garden though. Two kids. An older girl and a boy. He’s probably around six years old. The sort of age you were when Daddy slipped the Big Knife into Mummy’s stomach. The laughter stops now and there’s only the occasional noise from the garden. You see the mummy has brought some ice creams out and everyone is sitting on the grass eating.

Yummy, yummy, yummy. Sweet. Not like the cake which went bad.

You raise the binoculars and pull the focus. The image blurs and then the woman snaps sharp. Red hair. Red-handed. The woman’s guilty. Killed Peter. End of story. End of her story, anyway.

You lower the binoculars and pull yourself up from the brambles. This is going to be fun after all, you decide.

Now you just need a plan.

An hour later and you’ve got one.

‘Mobile phone data eliminated him from the inquiry.’ You snigger to yourself, remembering a newspaper report about Glastone, the guy over in Salcombe they fingered for the killings a week ago. He got off. Thanks to a phone. Which gave you an idea. ‘Hear that, Mikey? A mobile phone.’

‘Ha, ha, ha!’ Mikey laughs. Grins. Dribbles. ‘Apple?’

‘No idea,’ you say. And to be honest you don’t care. Apple, Samsung, Nokia. Once you’ve seen one slim biscuit packed with those incy-wincy bits of circuit board, you’ve seen them all.

You stare down at the thing in your hand. It’s not a phone, although the device looks awfully like one. The wording on the box says ‘GPS tracker’ and that’s what it does. You’re in the big Go Outdoors store, the assistant demonstrating what the unit can do. He starts talking about satellites and text messages, WGS-84 and IPX7. You begin to move back, almost knocking over a display of aluminium water bottles.

‘Tracking,’ you say, ‘does it do tracking?’

‘Oh, yes. Updates on a map. Sends your location to Facebook or Twitter or by text to a phone. All sorts. You’ll need a service plan.’

Jesus, you think. Facebook. Twitter. This thing is evil. All those bits of information flying through the air. Still, you need to side with the devil. Just this once.

‘Battery life?’ you hear yourself say, as if you knew what the fuck you were talking about.

‘You should get several days’ continuous use from one set. But you can always carry spares.’

You’re sold. You reach into your coat pocket, pull out a bundle of notes and thrust them into the man’s hands. There’s a couple of hundred pounds at least. A twenty breaks free and flutters down to the floor.

‘Is this enough? For everything?’

The assistant looks at you and then bends and picks up the twenty. ‘Sure,’ he says.

You buy the thing and not long afterwards you’re at her place again, Mikey keeping watch in the lane. They’re out now, all of them, but you have no idea when they might return. The sports car is on the front drive. The husband washed it earlier and the paintwork gleams in the sunlight. The car’s an old one, nothing fancy and certainly no electronics. Not yet.

You approach the car and examine the front wheel arch. You run your hand underneath. All clean thanks to the wash. You take the GPS tracker from one coat pocket, a roll of gaffer tape from the other. You pull off a strip of tape and use it to attach the tracker under the wheel arch. The thing won’t have a clear view of the sky, but you’ve read the instruction booklet several times and you think it will work well enough.

You peer up at the heavens for a moment, thinking on the kind of madness needed to keep those infernal satellites hanging up there.

Beep.

You reach into your pocket and bring out the phone. It’s an ancient model, but it works. You peer down. There’s a text message. A load of numbers. Latitude longitude. To most people they’d be meaningless without a map but you can visualise a picture in your head. The contours, the spot heights, the terrain. Those roads, all different colours, connecting towns and villages and houses together. The text message means the tracker is working, sending coordinates into the sky where a satellite beams the data back to earth and the mobile network sends the numbers to you. All you need to do is wait until the woman goes somewhere quiet and then you’ll have her.

‘Whoooarrrhhh!’

A noise like a gorilla comes from near the front gate and you see Mikey waving his arms. You sprint to the gate and take his arm.

‘Walk, Mikey. This way. Slowly.’ You wheel Mikey round and begin to stroll down the lane. There’s an engine noise and then a red van is turning into the driveway. A man jumping out, slipping letters through the door as you and Mikey begin to hum the tune to
Postman Pat
.

Chapter Forty-Three

Bovisand, Plymouth. Saturday 5th July. 6.30 p.m.

The call Savage had almost given up waiting for came as she was sitting at home alone late Saturday afternoon. Pete, Stefan and the kids were out on the boat and were then going for a pizza. She’d cried off, wanting simply to relax for a few hours, not have to think about anything.

‘Charlotte?’ The voice was coarse. ‘Been a while, but we’re getting there.’

Fallon. Kenny Fallon. Plymouth’s high-flying, down-in-the-dirt crime boss.

‘Jesus, Kenny. It’s been months.’

‘Yes, love. Sorry. Took time. Time and help.’

There was a pause, Savage feeling Fallon was going to say something else. Nothing came.

‘So?’

‘So, we meet. You free today? Now?’

‘Of course,’ she heard herself say, only half listening as Fallon told her where and when. She felt her heart begin to race. All these years and now, in just an hour or two, she’d know who’d killed Clarissa.

Fallon hung up and Savage tidied away her simple dinner. She wrote a note for Pete, locked the house and then went and backed the MG out into the lane. Fallon wanted to meet on the moor, near to the spot where Clarissa had been hit by the car. Over the top, she thought, but then again, perhaps hearing the name out there would bring the events full circle.

An hour’s drive took her deep into the wilderness of Dartmoor, tors closing in all around as the route twisted into a valley. She pulled the car off the road and onto a patch of gravel, just enough room for two cars to park. A few hundred metres down the lane was the place where she’d picnicked with the kids, where Clarissa had been knocked off her bike by the hit and run driver. Savage clenched her fists and then released them. She breathed in and tried to stay calm as she waited. July had seen the weather return to more changeable conditions and low swirling cloud enveloped the moor around her, bringing a persistent drizzle which hung in the air. Earlier she’d driven past walkers, but the rain had sent them scurrying for the pubs or back to their campsites.

Fifteen minutes later, there was still no sign of Fallon. Savage pulled out her mobile, unsurprised when she saw there was no signal. A small tor rose from behind the car park and the top would offer a three hundred and sixty-degree panorama. If there wasn’t a signal up there then at least she’d be able to spot Fallon coming into the valley. Savage climbed out of the car. She didn’t have the right footwear but she’d brought along a waterproof. She set off for the top of the tor, following an easy path up through clumps of bracken and before long she was looking down at her car, looking down at her mobile too, cursing as there was still no signal.

Across the other side of the valley she could see somebody atop a similar tor. He or she was prostrate on a large rock, almost as if they were sunbathing in the rain. Then there was a ping from close to Savage’s feet, a piece of granite flying up, somehow dislodged from the rock. She glanced down and saw dust drift away from a small hole next to her right foot. She began to bend down and it was as she did so she heard the retort. A crack, like a whip. She looked again towards the figure on the rock. He had a beard and scraggy hair, but there was something familiar about him. The spindly limbs, a strange angular head …

Dr Wilson! How the hell …? No, of course not Savage thought. The man must be Wilson’s twin brother, Ronald. Then the ground exploded a metre to her left and she understood what the dust at her feet had meant: a gunshot.

The crack from the second shot came as she dived off the top of the tor and rolled down a slab. She slammed against a boulder, bruising her leg and elbow, and couldn’t stop herself letting out a gasp when she saw her bloodied knee poking from beneath the ripped material of her trousers. She moved her leg, flinching at the pain.

Ronald Wilson. He had a high-powered rifle. The gun was probably the rifle which had belonged to his brother. Savage moved a metre to her left, where a line of sky showed in a fissure between two boulders. She peered through. Ronald lay atop the tor, the rifle visible, the barrel on some kind of mini-tripod. The weapon would be difficult to aim without some sort of support, Savage thought, impossible to do so while the shooter was moving or standing on rough ground. She just had to wait because unless Ronald had a night-vision scope she’d be able to slip away come dark.

She took out her mobile. Eight o’clock. With the cloud dusk would fall in an hour or so. If Ronald moved she could make a run for the car, otherwise she’d stay put. She sighed, breathed out, tried to relax. Easy to say when a sniper was on a ridge a hundred and fifty metres away. She squinted through the crack again. Ronald was still there, but now he was waving at something or someone. Savage tried to follow his line of sight down the valley. There seemed to be nothing down there but bracken and sheep. And then she saw him. A man lumbering across the boulder field, hunched over, arms swinging, mouth set in a grimace. Even from a couple of hundred metres Savage could see the round face and the nose like a button mushroom.

Savage felt a wave of panic. It was the nutter from the farm. Mikey, Ronald had called him. Not right in the head. She looked again and saw the light glint off something in his right hand. A knife! She weighed her options. Run and risk getting shot by the one man. Wait and get gutted by the other one. Some choice.

She turned her back to the rock and scanned the landscape. Nothing but empty moor. To her right was another tor, higher than the one she was on. Could she find a mobile signal there? She peered through the crack again. Mikey was climbing her side of the valley, every now and then looking up, still with a demented grin on his face. A few more minutes and he’d be at the top and Savage would be forced to move anyway.

Mind made up, she jumped out from behind the rock and began to run at an angle down the valley. She was shortening the distance between herself and Mikey, but hopefully he’d not notice for a minute or two.

‘Miiikeeey!’ The shout from Ronnie echoed off the rocks. Mikey looked back over his shoulder. Ronald was on his feet, gesturing. Mikey turned, saw Savage and then let out a howl. He began to run again.

Savage cursed and went faster. Downhill, going fast wasn’t a problem. Tripping over and twisting an ankle was. She bounced from boulder to boulder, slipping on a patch of scree, but regaining her balance. At the bottom of the valley was a small stream. She jumped the water, squelched across a patch of mossy bog and then was climbing to the next tor.

At any second she expected to hear another shot, but none came. Perhaps Ronald wasn’t so stupid. Hitting a moving target with a long-range rifle was almost impossible. The climb sapped her energy and halfway up the tor she ducked behind a rock. Mikey was still coming, but for a moment she was protected from Ronald by several tonnes of granite. Savage looked farther away, back towards her car. With every step she was moving away from her means of escape. Then she saw something coming down the lane. Fallon’s Range Rover. Thank God!