TOUCH: A DI Charlotte Savage Novel. Mark Sennen
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AA badge must be the only thing you haven’t renewed.’
‘Very funny, Doc. But you are right, totting up the bills does make me feel like I have bought five cars’ worth of spare parts.’
‘What about your boat? I saw the picture in the paper back in the spring. You, Pete and the children.’
Savage remembered the Herald had done a feature on Pete before he set off for the South Atlantic, a photo shoot with the whole family on their tiny yacht. The journalist had been tickled pink by the contrast between helming the little coastal cruiser and commanding the oceangoing warship.
‘Took the children out a few times in the summer, but managing the boat on my own is a struggle and I can’t seem to persuade Stefan to join me. If he isn’t cold, wet and leaning over at forty-five degrees he doesn’t think he’s sailing.’
‘Samantha is growing up fast. And turning into the spitting image of you with all that red hair. Very beautiful.’ Nesbit smiled, a twinkle in his eyes.
Savage blushed, even though she knew Nesbit’s words were small talk intended to make everyone feel relaxed in a stressful situation.
‘Ah, well.’ Nesbit shrugged. Then he moved past Savage and walked over the stepping plates and into the tent to examine the body. ‘I overheard you telling Charlotte about drugs,’ he told Oliver as he bent over. ‘No way I can confirm that here of course. And looking at the body now I’m not sure you are right about there being no sign of obvious trauma.’
Nesbit knelt, opened his bag, put on some nitrile gloves and took out a flat wooden spatula. He pressed the rounded end against the girl’s stomach, opening the cut Oliver had pointed out.
‘The incision on the abdomen is deep, the hole goes right in. Hasn’t bled though. Strange.’ He moved his hands up and touched the girl’s breasts and then probed her right arm. ‘The skin doesn’t seem quite right either and there is an odd smell, more a fragrance.’
‘Soap?’ Savage suggested. ‘Could she have been washed?’
‘Possible, the skin is a bit puffy,’ Nesbit paused. ‘But there is something worrying me. Can’t quite figure it out at the moment.’
‘Do you think she was killed somewhere else?’
‘Appears that way. Note the lividity in the buttocks and upper thighs? She was in a sitting position at or soon after death because the blood has pooled there. Quite unusual.’ Nesbit looked around, eyes drinking in every little detail. ‘No sign of a struggle taking place here, but I noticed several sets of footprints in the moss.’
Nesbit pointed towards the path and Savage spotted some indentations in the bright, green carpet, a trail leading to and from the girl’s body. They would have to work out which belonged to the killer, which to the farmer, and which to the PC who had first attended the scene.
‘Finished for the moment?’ Nesbit asked Oliver.
‘Yes, got a camera full, close-ups of all of her from tip to toe.’
‘Good.’ Nesbit took a digital thermometer with a remote probe from his bag and called across to the CSI. ‘Can you help me, please?’
Nesbit instructed the CSI to roll over the body and then he bent and inserted the probe into the girl’s rectum. While Nesbit did this Savage reflected on the fact that dignity and suspicious death were incompatible and that there would be far worse to come on the post-mortem table. Nesbit told the CSI to let the body lie flat again and he placed the thermometer display down on the ground. A few seconds later the unit beeped and Nesbit peered at the screen and muttered something Savage didn’t catch.
‘Doc?’
‘Strange. The core body temperature is way below ambient which is … what? Eight, nine, ten? I’ll measure it in a moment. Overnight I am sure it wasn’t much lower, not with this weather coming in off the Atlantic. It’s evident she has been dead for a day or two and kept somewhere colder.’
‘We had frosty weather last week and into the weekend,’ Savage said.
‘Yes. Perhaps the body was outside in another location and was moved here. That would explain the low temperature.’
‘There’s no way this could be an accident, some kind of …’ Savage wasn’t sure how to finish the question, not even sure why she was trying to grasp for an explanation other than the obvious one.
‘I can’t tell that here can I, Charlotte? Given the sexual angle I wouldn’t have thought this is anything other than murder, would you? Sorry. I know you need some luck at the moment. For this girl though it has all run out.’
Nesbit glanced at his watch and then pulled out a little voice recorder and mumbled something into the microphone. Then he stood up straight and was silent, a sombre expression on his face. Savage knew he wasn’t religious, but it seemed as if he was waiting for someone to say a few words or for something to happen. As if on cue the church bell began to strike the hour.
Gordon Isaacs was the farmer who had discovered the body and even before she had met him alarm bells were ringing in Savage’s mind. Not reporting a minor car crash or a theft to the police might be understandable, but when you had found a naked and dead girl on your land such negligence was unfathomable.
Calter and Enders had arrived from Plymouth and they piled into Savage’s car and drove up to Isaacs’s farm to see what he had to say for himself. The holding stood alone with no near neighbours and the feeling of remoteness from the safe, modern world grew as they lurched along the concrete road leading up from the lane and climbed across open hillside to a huddle of barns and an old farmhouse. Three abandoned tractors and a multitude of rusting farm machinery lay either side of the track. Blue fertiliser sacks replaced windows in several of the barns, baler twine stitched holes in fences and nettle, dock and brambles vied for supremacy everywhere. The place looked more like the local tip than a farm. The only thing pretty was the view. The countryside rolled away to the south in a patchwork of fields, woodlands, hamlets and villages. Somewhere beyond lay the urban sprawl of Torbay, hidden in the murk that clouded anything more than a few miles distant.
‘Look at that, ma’am.’ Enders pointed to a bonfire where a blackened and bloated corpse of a sheep was smouldering on top.
‘Devon-style barbie,’ Calter said. ‘Lovely!’
A house stood to their right as they entered the farmyard, a pretty cottage built of stone with a thatched roof half-covered with moss. To their left a crumbling brick barn was a Health and Safety nightmare with a broken asbestos roof that had been patched with rusty corrugated iron. Ahead a traditional byre was also dilapidated, but surely ripe for conversion.
They parked next to an old Landrover with an out-of-date tax disc and a cracked side window. As they got out Savage caught a whiff of burning sheep mixed with an odour of cow shit and silage and the smell clawed at the back of her throat as they picked their way through the mud to the farmhouse front door. Savage knocked, and as they waited she heard loud classical music from inside the house. And the sound of machine gun fire.
‘Huh?’ Savage cocked her head on one side, trying to make out the cacophony coming from within. It sounded like a TV set on maximum volume.
‘Platoon, ma’am, the film, I recognise the theme,’ Enders said. ‘The DVD was free with the Mail a week or two back. I’d love to watch it again, but I don’t get the chance to see what I want these days. The missus seems to think the kids prefer In the sodding Night Garden.’
‘Sensible woman.’
‘Funny thing to be watching when you’ve just found a dead body on your land,’ Calter said.
The sound from inside stopped and a moment later the front door swung wide to reveal a short and rather portly man with a large reddened nose and a wheeze that came before he spoke.
‘Yes?’
‘Detective