CUT DEAD: A DI Charlotte Savage Novel. Mark Sennen

her mother said her eyes had sparkled when the lamb nuzzled the bottle and sucked down the milk. Somehow the uncle had seen that sparkle and years later, when writing his will, he’d taken a gamble. Right at the moment she and William, her ex, had been going to consult the land agent about selling the farm, Joanne had changed her mind. Taken a gamble too. Uncle Johnny may have believed Joanne was a long shot, but hell, she was going to see to it his bet paid off.

      William’s view was that she’d gone mad. What did they know about farming? Wouldn’t a couple of million in the bank be better than feeding lambs on a cold, frosty January morning?

      No, it wouldn’t.

      Joanne chuckled to herself now as she opened the post. Bills, yes, but a letter from Tesco confirming a contract to supply them with organic lamb, and two bookings for the holiday cottages. There was also a large cardboard tube. Joanne pulled off the end-caps and extracted a roll of paper which turned out to be a poster. A note slipped out from the tube too and she recognised her brother’s handwriting: ‘Hope you like this, sis. Happy Birthday, love Hal.’ Hal lived in the US and worked for a large software company. Joanne unrolled the poster and gasped when she realised it was an aerial photograph of the entire farm. She had looked at maps on the web where you could load up such an image, but this was much better quality and at poster-size the detail was amazing.

      Spreading the picture out on the kitchen table, Joanne spent a good ten minutes examining every last nook and cranny on the farm. As she worked her way down one edge of the poster, where a corner of a field had been left to seed because the combine harvester couldn’t turn in the odd little space, she spotted a strange marking on the ground. She remembered how archaeologists used aerial pictures to find and map the extent of prehistoric monuments and wondered if the markings could be something similar. If it had been in the middle of the field she would have been worried about preservation orders, but this lay in the centre of a useless patch of scrub.

      Interesting.

      She’d finish her coffee and then head out on the quad bike, see what the ground looked like up close. There might even be something worth finding down there, she thought. Something like buried gold.

      Two hours later, and if gold had been buried in the field, then Joanne was wondering whether somebody had got to the treasure before her.

      ‘Here, Joanne?’

      Jody, her farmworker, was manoeuvring the little mini-excavator into position at one end of the patch of earth. The excavator had a bucket claw on the end of an arm, the machine most often in use for digging drainage channels, and now Jody placed the claw above an area of disturbed ground.

      Earlier, Joanne had zoomed down to the corner of the field on the quad bike and found the spot easily enough. She was surprised she had never seen it before, since the outline of a rectangle showed where the dock and nettle and seedlings grew at a different density from the rest of the scrub. At one end of the rectangle the seedlings were this year’s, the grass and weeds not so well established. Somebody had dug the muddy earth within the last twelve months or so. It was then she’d decided to get Jody down with the digger.

      Joanne nodded at Jody and the mechanical arm creaked as the claw hit the ground, the digger lifting for a moment before the shiny steel blades penetrated the topsoil and Jody scooped up a bucketful of earth, swinging the digger round and dumping the spoil to one side.

      Twenty minutes later the hole stood a metre deep and about the same square, and still they could tell they hadn’t reached the bottom of the disturbance. Joanne began to think the exercise was futile, not the best use of Jody’s time nor hers. She looked at the heavy clouds: imminent rain. Time to give up and head for a cup of tea. Even as she thought it, little specks started to fall from the sky. ‘Pittering’ her uncle used to say. Next it would be pattering and then the heavens would open.

      ‘Joanne?’

      She turned to where Jody had deposited the last bucket of soil. Amongst the earth and stones a piece of fabric stood out, the shiny red incongruous against the grey-brown sludge. She moved over to the spoil heap and peered at the scrap of material. Roman? Viking? Saxon? Unlikely, she thought, not in nylon. And not with a Topshop label either.

      Joanne looked back into the hole to see if there might be anything else down there.

      The arm had pushed up through the mud, as if reaching out and upwards, trying to escape from entombment or perhaps trying to cling on to the piece of clothing, the last vestiges of their dignity. Slimy water sloshed around the limb and nearby the round curve of a breast stuck out like a white sandy island on an ocean of grey. Joanne stared into the abyss, for all of a sudden that’s what the hole had become, at the same time groping in her coat pocket for her mobile. She dialled 999 and when a man with a calm voice answered, she was surprised to find she responded in the same manner.

      ‘Police,’ she said.

      And then she began to scream.

      DI Charlotte Savage carried yet another plastic crate from the car into the house and through to the kitchen where her husband, Pete, stood unpacking. She dumped the crate on the floor and he looked over at her and shook his head.

      ‘One more and that’s the lot,’ Savage said, before turning and heading back outside.

      The summer half-term holiday had turned sour after the weather had delivered nearly a week of blustery conditions. Sunshine and showers would have been OK had they remained at home, but instead they’d opted to have a week sailing. Their little boat was cosy with two, but cramped with four – and if you added in a good measure of rain, a moody teenage daughter and a bored six-year-old son the situation became more of an ordeal than anything approaching fun.

      Pete had insisted on sailing east from Plymouth rather than begin the holiday with a beat into the wind, saying the weather was forecast to change, giving them an easy run home. They had stopped overnight at Salcombe and Dartmouth, ending their journey at Brixham. But the promised north-easterlies never developed. Instead the weather worsened as two lows in quick succession came from out of the west, the second developing into a nasty gale. Because of time constraints they’d set out from Brixham as soon as the second low passed, intending to do the journey back to Plymouth in one hop. Once they’d rounded Berry Head though the weather deteriorated further and they put into Dartmouth again. A phone call home and Stefan came out in their car and swapped places with Savage and the kids, the idea being that Pete and Stefan would bring the boat back, whatever the conditions, while she took the kids home. Stefan was the family’s unofficial Swedish au pair and a semi-professional sailor. With Pete having been twenty years in the Royal Navy – the last five as commander of a frigate – the two of them thought nothing of bringing the boat back to Plymouth in a near gale.

      At home she waited for hours until at last a call came through from Pete saying they were passing the breakwater at the edge of Plymouth Sound. Twenty minutes later Savage stood on the marina pontoon and took their lines, Samantha, her daughter, shouting to her dad that he didn’t look so clever. Stefan was grinning.

      ‘Remind me never to go to sea with him again.’ Pete pointed at Stefan. ‘He’s crazy.’

      ‘The trouble with you, you old softy,’ Stefan said, ‘is you’re used to wearing your carpet slippers when you helm a boat.’

      ‘The forecast said seven decreasing five or six,’ Pete said, as he repositioned a fender. ‘But it was a full gale force eight and the waves came up from the south out of nowhere.’

      ‘They look a bit bigger when you’re looking up at them instead of down, don’t they?’ Stefan said, still smiling as he threw Savage another rope.

      The phone rang at around seven in the evening as she was clearing the last of an enormous spaghetti bolognese from her plate. The brusque tone of Detective Superintendent Conrad Hardin rumbled down the line, his voice breaking up as he tried to find a signal for his mobile.

      ‘Three of them, Charlotte,’ he said. ‘Three. Understand? Never seen anything like … don’t know how … need to try and …’

      ‘Sir?’