CUT DEAD: A DI Charlotte Savage Novel. Mark Sennen

not warmth, people were out shopping for food for their barbecues. Sausages, burgers, baps, cheap lager and warm white wine. Perhaps later, when the full news about what had been found at the farm broke, appetites would be tempered, fires doused, parties moved inside, excuses made so people might return home and lock their doors.

      She drove through Plymouth and headed for the Bere Peninsula. The finger of land was almost encircled by the Tamar and Tavy rivers and where they met the confluence formed a ‘V’ shape pointing towards the city, with the village of Bere Ferrers stuck right down at the bottom. The rivers left the eight or so square miles of the peninsula all but cut off by water. This meant that although Tavy View Farm lay only a couple of miles north of the city, getting there involved a circuitous journey first to the north and then through a maze of country roads, the whole route putting a dozen miles on the clock. Isolated, Savage thought as she headed to the village. And maybe that was the point.

      As she coasted down the lane to the farm, high clouds drifted above, their lower sections tinged with darkness, every now and then blotting out the sun. Various police vehicles occupied most of the farmyard so she parked in the lane. A train trundled out from Bere Ferrers as she walked through the gateway into the farmyard, the low rumble causing people to lift their heads and watch as it took the slow curve down to the railway bridge across the Tavy and disappeared into the woods on the far side. Just beyond the bridge, the smaller river joined the wide expanse of the Tamar and downstream towards Plymouth, Savage could see the span of the Tamar Bridge. Upstream, the banks closed in beyond Weir Quay and began a great ‘S’ curve, Amazon-like, before reaching Cotehele and Morwellam. Later, if the weather held, there’d be tourists and locals thronging the National Trust properties up there.

      In the farmyard Savage found the incident room Transit van jammed between a stack of black-clad silage bales and a muck-spreader. Hardin and Detective Chief Inspector Mike Garrett sat inside, Hardin pouring coffee from a thermos into a plastic cup. Savage stepped up into the van and perched on one of the stools alongside Garrett, just touching distance to Hardin on the other side of the van. Garrett was an older detective, nearing retirement. His dress sense was as impeccable as his manners, his record as unblemished as his neat white hair. DSupt Hardin sat sideways to a desk, unable to get his bulk comfortable in the small space, his face reddened by the close atmosphere. On the desk sat two laptops and numerous files. One laptop showed the same large-scale map Layton had been looking at the previous night.

      ‘Thank goodness the bloody rain stopped earlier,’ Hardin said to Savage. ‘The hole was becoming like a swimming pool.’

      ‘Some swimming pool,’ Savage said. ‘Anything turn up overnight?’

      ‘Not much.’ Hardin took a slurp of his coffee, made a face and peered at some notes on one of the laptops. ‘Now, preliminaries: enquiry teams to interview the villagers and residents in outlying properties; widen the forensic search to include areas of interest both on the farm and beyond; go over our records and see what the hell we missed last time around.’

      Hardin stopped. Nodded with a wry smile at Savage.

      ‘Yes, that’s right,’ he said, lowering his voice and reaching across and tapping the laptop screen. ‘Which means this thing has the potential to go worldwide. Unless we’re careful the investigation will balloon out of control and we’ll no longer be able to set the agenda. That’s why I want you, Mike, on the media side of things. They won’t mess with you. You’ll need kid gloves though. One wrong word and you’ll see it repeated across a million copies of The Sun. You and Charlotte will share the deputy role with me as Senior Investigating Officer. Charlotte, you’ll liaise with your old boss, ex-DCI Derek Walsh. He, of course, was the lead last time around.’

      ‘Last time around. I’m guessing you’re talking about the cuts on the body?’

      ‘Yes. Nesbit’s retreating a little now. Wants to get through the post-mortems first. Won’t say one way or another. Me? – I think our notorious cold case just turned hot.’

       He’s back, Charlotte, he’s back.

      Savage recalled the pathologist’s whisper to her as he bent his wiry frame into his car in the small hours of Sunday morning. He’d closed the door, and for a moment she’d seen a haunted look in his eyes before he started up and pulled away into the night.

      ‘The Candle Cake Killer,’ Savage said, for a second feeling an icy chill. ‘I was on maternity leave and on my return I joined Vice for a while so I wasn’t on Walsh’s team. Of course I know all about the case.’

      ‘Charlotte,’ Hardin said, pointing an accusing finger at her. ‘I do not, repeat do not want that moniker used again, understand? First, we don’t know for sure if this is the same killer, and second, the name is too cheery by half. As if there was something to celebrate.’

      Savage nodded, seeing the pit and the mud and the grey forms lying in the sludge, thinking Hardin was right, cheery wasn’t it at all.

      ‘Now, these bodies,’ Hardin handed them each a checklist and then scratched an ear and grimaced. ‘Three of them. I was hoping, praying even, they were all from way back. If this investigation remained a cold case we could simply assign a few officers to it. New evidence, fresh look, blah, blah, blah. Perhaps we might come up with a lead, perhaps not. No matter. Job done, public satisfied. However, from what I’m hearing from Nesbit, that’s not the case. Two of the victims could be the missing women from the original case. They disappeared in 2007 and 2008. But Nesbit says even considering the favourable conditions, the third body wouldn’t have survived so well-preserved. The corpse is much more recent. We’ll have to wait for the post-mortem but it’s likely been buried just a year or so ago.’

      ‘Which means trouble,’ Garrett said, looking across at Savage and smiling. ‘Media-wise. They’ll say he might have been killing all this time.’

      ‘Unless he has been away somewhere,’ Savage said. ‘Prison, abroad.’

      ‘Possible,’ Hardin said. ‘Let’s hope so. Otherwise there are a whole load more bodies buried somewhere.’

      ‘There’s another problem with the media,’ Garrett said. ‘No escaping the issue either. A ticking time bomb.’

      ‘Well?’ Hardin’s fingers drummed the table. ‘Spit it out.’

      ‘The date,’ Savage said, spoiling Garrett’s punchline. ‘The killer takes his victims on the longest day of the year. There’s just six days until the twenty-first of June. Meaning that’s how much time we’ve got before he strikes again.’

      Hardin looked down at the screen on his laptop, eyes moving to the bottom right-hand corner. He clicked. Stared at the date in the pop-up window. Shook his head, as if not quite believing he had missed something so blindingly obvious.

      ‘Fuck,’ he said.

      A specialist recovery team had arrived at the farm along with the light on Sunday morning. They’d brought with them vanfuls of equipment and a temporary roadway to allow access across the now quagmire-like field. The twin strips of the aluminium track undulated their way over the ground, down to the dump site where a yellow JCB stood. The digger’s bucket hung in the air, suspended over a new hole which ran parallel to one side of the crime scene tent. Savage clumped down the metal track to where Layton stood talking to one of his CSIs. Off to one side a large patch of concrete – the remnants of some old building – provided a convenient and mud-free storage area for several of Layton’s crates and much forensic equipment.

      ‘John?’ Savage said pointing to the new hole. ‘What’s that?’

      ‘Control trench,’ Layton said. ‘The ground’s not been disturbed there, you can see the layering and the way the soil is compacted. There’s also mature tree roots from the nearby hedge. The trench marks the boundary and we’ll dig back in from there once the recovery crew have finished.’

      ‘How long will they be?’ Savage said, looking across at the tent, inside which several figures worked.

      ‘Another