CUT DEAD: A DI Charlotte Savage Novel. Mark Sennen

of you to come out, John,’ Riley said. ‘From what I hear you’ve got a lot on your plate.’

      ‘Dog’s dinner, mate, but I didn’t have much choice. Got a call on my phone. Only the bloody CC. He was quite firm on the matter.’ Layton’s eagle-like eyes darted from Riley back to the tweezers as he held them over the container and dropped a glittering shard of plastic in. He screwed on a lid and shoved the container into one of the many deep pockets in his tan raincoat. ‘Red and silver plastic. From a reflector. Some metallic blue paint on there. Could have come from a collision with a car.’

      ‘Bit of a long shot, isn’t it?’ Riley said. ‘It might be from anywhere.’

      ‘There’s some blood on the road surface too. Plus the rescue bods found a bicycle pump away from the road, down in a clump of heather, as if it had been thrown there.’

      ‘Corran’s?’

      ‘A Bontrager Air Support pump. Distinctive, and according to his missus, Corran’s bike had one.’

      ‘No sign of the bike though?’

      ‘Nothing.’

      ‘So what do you think happened?’

      ‘Well …’ Layton spotted another piece of plastic on the road and bent and repeated his tweezer, container, pocket action of earlier before standing and pointing to a clump of heather encircled with blue and white tape. ‘That’s where the pump was found. Apart from the marks made by the person who found the pump, nobody has walked the ground nearby in the last few days. My guess is Corran was knocked off his bike and whoever hit him picked up the bike and took it with them. Corran as well. The pump probably came dislodged from the bike and they flung the pump out there thinking no one would ever find the thing.’

      ‘Or Corran did.’

      ‘Sorry?’

      ‘Corran knew what was happening,’ Riley said. ‘He flung the pump away thinking it might be the only thing marking the spot where he’d disappeared.’

      ‘You’re implying this wasn’t an accident, not a hit and run?’

      ‘Can you get some prints off the pump?’

      ‘If there are any, yes. I’ve got a team coming from Plymouth. We’ll do a search of two hundred metres of the road either side of the probable collision point. After that everything will go back to the lab and we’ll see what we’ve got.’

      ‘Thanks, John. Good work.’

      ‘Don’t thank me, thank Campbell. That bicycle pump. We’re talking needles and haystacks. Bloody miracle.’

      Riley stood still for a moment and then turned three-sixty, scanning the desolate moorland. Heather, rock, bog and a few trees, the road slicing through the middle of the wilderness, a tenuous link to civilisation. The black line of tarmac marking Corran’s route back to his home and wife and kid. His route to somewhere else as well. Maybe somewhere he hadn’t wanted to go.

      Sometimes Paula Rowland wondered if she was cut out to be a teacher. Surely there were easier jobs? Jobs where people did what you told them to instead of giving you backchat and filthy looks. Jobs where the government wasn’t constantly on your back telling you how useless your profession was. Jobs where the coffee machine worked.

      Paula peered down at the paper cup beneath the dispenser nozzle. A brown slick rose from the bottom of the cup as water trickled in. She touched the side of the cup. Cold.

      ‘Heater’s packed up again,’ a voice at her shoulder said. Cath. Her best mate. Best mate at the school, anyway. ‘Here, have one of these.’

      Cath held out a small carton of orange juice, part of her extensive packed lunch. Paula smiled and took the carton.

      ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Been a tough morning. Year Ten girls.’

      Cath nodded. Paula didn’t need to say any more. The Year Ten girls were notorious. With knickers full of hormones, their antics left some of the more developed boys with their tongues hanging out. Controlling the two groups was akin to trying to keep a pack of dogs and bitches apart when the bitches were on heat.

      ‘It’s the language of love, miss,’ Kelly Jones had said when Paula snapped at her. ‘French kissing and all that.’

      ‘French letters more like,’ another girl blurted out.

      Things got worse from there on in as the class tried to come up with as many names for condoms as they could. She’d smiled to herself; she hadn’t known half of the slang names. Love glove? Well, at least it was better than the dirt the boys had come out with.

      Paula slumped down on one of the sofas, Cath joining her, other teachers saying ‘hello’ to the pair and then carrying on with their conversation.

      The topic, for once, didn’t revolve around problems with specific children, government education policy or Ofsted. Over the weekend the news had broken that a sicko had abducted several women and dumped them at some farm out in the countryside. He was on the prowl. No woman was safe now the Candle Cake Killer was back.

      The name rang a bell somewhere inside Paula’s head but she couldn’t remember the specifics.

      ‘Can’t remember?’ There was astonishment from the other teachers. Paula smiled. Tried to explain that she had been a student up in Newcastle. She’d spent a year abroad in France and most of the rest of her degree course had been conducted in a drunken haze.

      ‘But it was here,’ Cath said. ‘Plymouth. Your hometown!’

      She dimly remembered her mother warning her to be careful when she’d returned home after her finals.

      ‘Yes,’ someone else said. ‘The twenty-first of June. The longest day. This weekend.’

      Well, she told them, her boyfriend was coming over on Saturday. He was a PE teacher. Worked out. He could handle anyone.

      The rest of the lunch break descended into a string of ‘ooohs’ and ‘aaahs’ as her female colleagues begged to be introduced to any hunky mates her boyfriend might have, and Paula forgot all about the Candle Cake Killer until home time. It was when she was pulling out of the car park and joining the main road that she noticed a battered pickup truck. The truck had every right to be on the road, of course, and there was nothing particularly odd about it.

      Except she’d seen the very same vehicle driving down her street when she left for school that morning.

      Back at Major Crimes by mid-afternoon Savage took an unwanted call from Hardin. Due to technical issues at the hospital the first post-mortem had been delayed from the morning. He and Garrett had been due to attend, but the DCI had left to conduct a media briefing. Would she like to take his place?

      Savage didn’t think she had much choice in the matter so she said ‘yes’.

      ‘Of course, ma’am,’ Calter said when Savage had hung up. ‘I mean, you wouldn’t want to be at home with your feet up with the newspaper and a glass of white in your hand, would you? Not when the alternative is watching a decomposing corpse being sliced and diced.’

      Savage returned to her car and drove the short distance to Derriford. As was customary, when she arrived at the mortuary Nesbit greeted her with a joke.

      ‘Ran out of coins for the meter,’ he said, peering over the top of his glasses and giving a little smile. ‘The result being the entire refrigeration system has ceased to function. We’ve been having to stuff ice bags into the drawers to keep everything sweet. My PM schedule has gone haywire. The best thing to happen is if people would stop dying.’

      It appeared as if the pathologist was only half-joking, because to one side of the main anteroom several wall panels lay on the floor and two technicians fiddled with a bundle of multi-coloured wiring and circuit board. A cleaner mopped a puddle of brown liquid from around the base of one of the big body storage cabinets and Savage wondered if the odour