CUT DEAD: A DI Charlotte Savage Novel. Mark Sennen

since we’ve done one of these together, hey? Makes a nice change from paperwork.’

      Lovely, Savage thought. Much better than wine and a newspaper.

      Hardin wiped some crumbs from his mouth, took a final slurp from his cup and rose from his seat. The two of them returned to the anteroom where Nesbit was scrubbing up at a sink.

      ‘What did you mean Saturday night,’ Savage asked him, ‘when you said you’d seen this sort of thing before?’

      ‘Exactly that.’ Nesbit dried his hands and then pulled on gloves. He looked at Savage. ‘Mandy Glastone. Tangled in some unlucky fisherman’s line, she’s pulled up from the murky depths of a pool on the river Dart on Dartmoor. Those marks … we thought at first they’d been made by crayfish, although a biologist doubted it. Then I wondered if they could have been caused by a thin piece of monofilament moving back and forwards in motion with the river current. Once she was on the table though I could tell she’d been cut with a knife. A sharp knife.’

      Nesbit gestured with an arm and the three of them walked through into the PM room proper. The cadaver was already in position, the waft of the fans failing to do much to take away the despair in the air. Savage regretted not bringing any mints with her, the feeling doubling when she approached the body.

      ‘Remarkably well-preserved, isn’t she?’ Nesbit said. ‘Considering she has probably been dead for a fair number of months.’

      If this was well-preserved then Savage didn’t think she wanted to see the other two bodies. She peered at the corpse on the table. The woman was partly still covered in sludge, the mud drying to a light grey. The angular shapes of the bones rose as the translucent skin sagged around them like papier-mâché on a wire frame. In places subcutaneous fat had slipped down and collected in weird globule-like formations. Cellulite for zombies.

      ‘As long as a year?’ Savage said, thinking of the date fast approaching.

      ‘Possible. The anaerobic conditions have slowed the decomposition process. No air equals no bugs and no microbes. It’s why the other two bodies are still more than just skeletons.’ Nesbit paused, and noticing Savage swallowing a gulp, he smiled. ‘Something to look forward to, hey?’

      ‘Can’t wait,’ Savage said as she ran her eyes over the corpse again, thinking the dried mud resembled the war paint of some primitive aboriginal warrior about to go into battle. Except this woman wasn’t going anywhere. Not without her head.

      ‘Tricky to determine what exactly killed her,’ Nesbit said as he began a preliminary examination, dictating a few notes as he worked his way around the body. ‘Possibly the decapitation, but as with Mandy Glastone, the first victim, we can’t know if that caused death or not.’

      He indicated to one of the mortuary technicians to wash down the body and soon water was sluicing the mud away, revealing the odd cuts across the torso, some lines curving this way and that, some going straight across and meeting or bisecting each other. The other technician began to take pictures, the light from the flash sparkling in the flowing water.

      ‘What do you think, Charlotte?’ Hardin said, speaking for the first time. ‘Dan bloody Brown?’

      Savage had to concede the patterns were like nothing she’d seen before. For all she knew they could well be some ancient language, hieroglyphics written on skin instead of stone. Although that didn’t make much sense.

      ‘No,’ she said. ‘If you are leaving a message you don’t bury it away six foot under.’

      ‘Why do it then?’ Hardin shook his head and moved closer. ‘Unless you’re a bloody loon.’

      ‘I think with this killer that’s a given, sir.’ Savage turned to Nesbit. ‘Do the older bodies have the cuts?’

      ‘In places, yes,’ the pathologist said. ‘The skin is not intact so if the markings were ever as extensive as these ones they are gone now.’

      ‘Then I think the act was the thing, not what resulted.’

      ‘Interesting theory.’ Hardin cocked his head, as if trying to view the markings from a different angle. ‘So we’d be wasting our time trying to deduce anything from them. They’re meaningless.’

      ‘I didn’t say that.’

      ‘No, Charlotte, I know you didn’t,’ Hardin said. ‘There’ll be some photographs somewhere of Mandy Glastone, but if I remember rightly there were more cuts on her.’

      ‘So this latest attack is less frenzied? Strange, as a serial killer develops he often goes further.’

      ‘But these aren’t frenzied, are they?’ Nesbit said. He picked up a plastic spatula and traced one of the cuts. It curved from the side of the woman’s left breast down to the belly button and around her waist in a sweeping, graceful arc. ‘These are, I hate to say … artistic?’

      ‘Done with care?’ Savage said.

      ‘No care for the victim, obviously, but care for the precision of the line, yes.’ Nesbit looked up at Savage. ‘We considered the cuts with the Glastone woman, wondered about the date, the summer solstice. Some sort of ritual. To be honest, back then I thought it was the stuff of fiction, but …’

      ‘But what?’

      ‘This girl. The two others. Could be something to ponder.’

      ‘Was she …’ Savage began to think on Nesbit’s words. Had the girl been sacrificed? Perhaps tortured? ‘Was she alive?’

      ‘See there and there and there?’ Nesbit indicated dark brown splodges on the abdomen. ‘Blood has come from all the cuts but here it has flowed rather more freely and stained the skin. That couldn’t have happened after death.’

      ‘Shit,’ Hardin said. ‘I just remembered why I don’t like attending these things. I’ll need a couple of extra glasses of sherry this evening.’

      ‘You’ll be lucky to get home in time for drinks, Conrad. We’ve a few hours to go before I finish up.’ Nesbit glanced at Hardin and then across to Savage. ‘If it’s any consolation she might not have been conscious when the cutting took place, but unless the killer tells us we’ll never know.’

      ‘We can hope though,’ Savage said. ‘Can’t we?’

      Nesbit didn’t answer. Hope, Savage thought, probably didn’t play much of a part in his professional life because invariably there was none for the people who appeared before him. Hope was an emotion for the living, those left behind, those praying for some sort of resolution.

      Nesbit was poring over the cuts, making measurements and counting the number. The way he moved the spatula, the tape measure, was ordered, done with care. The killer had done the same, Savage realised. She was wrong earlier, Nesbit right as usual. There was no frenzy here, only purpose. The killer wasn’t driven by a homicidal rage, they were driven by their craft. Was it possible the art angle which Dr Wilson, the psychologist, had suggested at the time of the earlier disappearances was correct? Unlike an artist though they didn’t worry about whether anyone would see their endeavours. Their work displayed the pleasure they took in the task at hand, but to do it was all they needed.

      Savage wondered what sort of person could kill in such a way? Maybe a better question was what sort of thing? Surely not anyone with a scrap of humanity. For a moment she looked heavenward, an almost involuntary action, and the harsh overhead lights made her blink. What had this woman and the other victims done which could merit such violence being done to them?

      ‘Charlotte?’ Nesbit walked across to her. ‘We’ll open her up now. See what else we can find. Are you OK?’

      ‘Sure, Andrew,’ Savage said, not feeling at all sure. ‘Never been better.’

      Towards the end of the PM Savage took a call from Calter. She muttered her apologies to Nesbit and headed from the room, glad of a breather. After the cool of the autopsy suite the heat of the