BAD BLOOD: A DI Charlotte Savage Novel. Mark Sennen
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Gutting chickens in a factory wasn’t my idea of fun. Not after having spent the last eighteen years in a battery farm myself. Jacked it. You should have seen my proby’s face when I said I’d had enough, you’d have thought I’d knocked one out over her.’
‘Let’s talk about this inside, Stuart. You can make us a nice cup of tea and we can ask you a few questions.’
‘Tea? You’re joking, right? Believe me, sweetheart, when you’ve done a stretch like I have the last thing you are going to be drinking on the outside is tea. So, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go back and fix myself something a little stronger before you guys bore me back to sleep.’
Chaffe turned and began to move towards the stairs. Enders grabbed the door handle and rattled the door, the noise echoing around the bare hallway.
‘You own a white van,’ Savage said. ‘Were you out and about in it on Sunday evening? Maybe around the Stonehouse area?’
‘So what if I was? Got to make a living somehow.’
‘Do you have any friends who live over that way, Stuart? On the gross side, the type who like to play with kiddies?’
‘Hey?’
‘A man known as Franklin Owers. You’ll likely as not have seen his picture in the Herald. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of him, have you?’
Chaffe stood for a moment, a smirk creeping across his lips. Then he turned and walked across the hallway, his beanpole-like frame disappearing as he went down the stairs.
‘Ma’am?’ Enders had stepped back from the door and pointed to a white plate on the outside wall of the flat. ‘Says numbers two ninety-four to three twenty-four. Which means Chaffe’s flat is on the top floor, and if you remember he came down the steps.’
‘Shit.’ Savage moved back onto the bridge and peered over. A row of windows marked the first floor flats and then, below, the grass slope led down to rendered wall with a couple of smaller windows and some pipes. Somewhere out the back of the flats an engine coughed into life, followed by a squeal of tyres.
Enders was already running for their car, key fob in an outstretched hand. A white transit van came from behind the flats, shooting up the access road and sweeping round and up to join Kinnaird Crescent proper. The vehicle skidded into the road, turning sharp left and roared back towards where Enders was crossing over. He dashed across, diving for the pavement as the van sped past, Chaffe leaning forwards in the front seat, mouth hanging open, eyes wide. Enders picked himself up as Savage arrived at the car and jumped in the passenger side. Enders was in the car and starting the engine as Savage reached for the radio.
They had parked facing the direction they had come so Enders floored the accelerator and spun the wheel. The back end of the car slid round but not quite enough to prevent him from having to engage reverse gear and back up. Then they were going forwards again, Savage spotting the van disappearing over a rise a couple of hundred metres away. The crescent curled up to the right, meeting the larger Clittaford Road at a mini-roundabout. Chaffe went left, screeching across the roundabout and clipping a car parked a short distance up the road. Enders had the headlights on and the grille-mounted blue strobe flashed in response to the warble of the siren. A motorcyclist came from the right and Enders had to thump the horn to prevent the rider from venturing into their path.
‘Idiot!’
Savage had control on the radio and swore when the dispatcher said the nearest unit was at the Crownhill station. It would be at least a couple of minutes before back up would arrive.
Clittaford Road had speed bumps for the first quarter of a mile, but Enders took them at full pelt, the car’s suspension bottoming with a jar each time they hit one. Another mini-roundabout marked the end of the residential area and the start of an industrial complex on the right, a number of vast warehouses standing like sad monoliths. The road continued to bend to the right, looping in a great circle until houses once again appeared on the left and the road came to the much busier Southway Drive where a queue of cars waited at a red light.
Up ahead, Chaffe swung over to the wrong side of the carriageway and steamed by the queue, hanging a right and speeding onto the main road. Enders followed and they joined the road just in time to see Chaffe slow down and take a sneaky left up a side street.
‘Got him,’ Enders said, flooring the accelerator once again. They shot along the main road and Enders took the left turn at speed, careering round and bumping the curb. Out of the corner of her eye Savage spotted a sign: two figures holding hands – one taller than the other – inside a red triangle.
‘No!’ she screamed.
The dad in the middle of the road grabbed his three-year-old and leapt for the pavement, but an older child stood rigid with fright. Enders wrenched the wheel and stamped on the brake pedal. The ABS juddered as the car began to turn and then the whole of the vehicle was sliding sideways, the back end swinging round so when they stopped they were pointing back the way they had come.
Savage looked over her shoulder but couldn’t see the child. She jumped out and ran to the rear of the car. The girl knelt on the ground crying, pointing down into the road where a little black cat lay squashed under a wheel, a mass of polystyrene beads escaping from the soft toy’s stomach.
By the time they had waited for a Traffic unit to arrive so the incident could be logged and assessed – the attending officers taking photographs and measuring the marks on the road as well as interviewing the available witnesses – the day was fast disappearing.
When Savage had seen the little girl standing there she had been transported back through the years to when her daughter Clarissa – Samantha’s twin – had been killed in a hit and run up on Dartmoor. The accident had been altogether different, of course: Clarissa had been on her bike and the driver hadn’t been a skilled officer who had completed several pursuit courses but a maniac handling his car with no respect for other road users. The investigation had been much more involved too, but despite numerous leads the driver had never been traced, Clarissa’s death – or murder, as Savage saw it – unattributed and unavenged.
Savage took the wheel for the short drive back to Crownhill and as they drove away from the scene, Enders stared down at his lap. She knew Enders understood about Clarissa and he also had young children of his own.
‘It’s OK, Patrick. She didn’t have a mark on her. The only thing damaged is your pride.’
‘Inches, ma’am, inches.’ Enders shook his head. ‘I should have made a judgement of the risk. Time of day, the weather, danger to other road users, the seriousness of the offence the suspect we were pursuing may have committed …’
‘Textbook rubbish. Impossible for us to do if we were to have any chance of catching up with Chaffe. Anyway, I think murder is serious enough for a high-speed pursuit, and Chaffe is mixed up in this somehow.’
‘You think Chaffe is a paedophile like Owers? Maybe involved in killing Simza Ellis?’
‘No idea. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think the fact he’s done eighteen years makes him a reformed character. He doesn’t exactly look like a complete innocent either, does he? And if he is, then why on earth did he do a runner?’
The call had come from a policeman in Plymouth. Unexpected.
‘Simza,’ the voice said; Tony Ellis listening but not needing to know, not wanting to know either.
‘Back then,’ the policeman continued. ‘Well, it turns out you might have been right all along.’
Ellis opened the front door and stepped on to the veranda of his little park home, out of earshot of Lisa, his wife. A cold dampness touched his face and he heard the roar of the traffic on the M5. A blur of cars and lorries sped by on the embankment above, the monotonous whooshing like waves pounding a beach.
Back then. Last summer. No beach, but a series of jagged rocks at the bottom of the steep cliffs of the Lizard. A huge swell from a distant storm way off