CUT DEAD: A DI Charlotte Savage Novel. Mark Sennen

sign of yesterday’s sun, the air cold, the drizzle getting heavier by the minute. Covert ops, DS Darius Riley thought, meant sitting in a car, dry, if not warm, with a newspaper to read and food and drink on tap. Not this. Not freezing your nuts off on a summer’s day in wildest Devon.

      To his immediate left DI Frank Maynard sat grinning at him. The DI pulled the hood on his Berghaus up. Mumbled something about ‘the right equipment’, something else about ‘soft city boys’. The joke was wearing thin, but the fact Riley was both black and from London meant it was open season. In Maynard’s eyes, if you hadn’t grown up shagging sheep on Dartmoor then you were a ‘bloody foreigner’ and open to ridicule.

      Riley adjusted his position in an effort to make himself more comfortable. Difficult since he knelt in what he could only describe as a ditch, although Maynard had assured him the pile of stone and earth topped with scrub was in fact known as a Devon hedge. Whatever. The only good thing about the barrier was the cover it provided. Twenty metres farther along the hedge DI Phil Davies stood with a pair of binoculars peering through a gap in the vegetation, his grey hair wet and plastered to the top of his head like sticky rice. His stance suggested to Riley he wasn’t enjoying the outing much either. Chalk and cheese the pair of them, but Riley had to admit a certain grudging respect for Davies. Earlier in the year the DI had likely as not saved Riley’s skin, and although the task involved some very dodgy dealing, Riley owed the man. Even if Davies usually moved in circles something akin to the mud squelching beneath Riley’s knees – the murkiest depths of Plymouth’s underworld, a place of backroom bars, wraps handed over in alleyways and girls standing under street lamps waiting for their next trick. But at least there you stayed dry.

      Not here. Not on Operation Cowbell.

      No. Operation Cowbell meant getting cold, wet and miserable while waiting for people to turn up and buy illegal red diesel from some farmer who was just trying to scrape a living from a few hundred acres of poor quality land. True, the farmer, a man by the name of Tim McGann, had some connection to organised crime over in Exeter, but Riley thought the whole investigation would have been better left to Customs and Excise.

      A rustle came from Riley’s left and he turned to see Maynard unwrapping a foil package containing ham sandwiches. Maynard took one out and munched on the wholemeal bread. He’d not be happy either, Riley reflected. It wasn’t his idea to have Riley and Davies along; their assignment to the case was down to DSupt Hardin. Both Riley and Davies had been involved in a failed drugs operation and being shunted to the backwoods of Cowbell was punishment. Three months in and they’d identified a handful of farms selling diesel and recorded dozens of people buying. They’d trekked across muddy fields, staked out isolated barns, and visited parts of Devon and Cornwall so remote that to Riley’s mind they seemed like the wilds of America. They’d witnessed illegal activity, certainly. But was it worth the hours the team had spent compiling the information?

      Riley reached into his pocket for his own sustenance only to find the flapjack he’d brought along had got wet and crumbled into a thousand pieces. The mush now resembled porridge. In the back of Maynard’s car there was a bag containing Riley’s lunch – a triple cheese selection and a can of Coke purchased from the M&S close to the station – but the car was several fields away and he couldn’t see Maynard letting him off just yet.

      ‘How much longer, boss?’ Riley said. They’d been in the ditch since six-thirty and the only vehicle to come along the winding lane to the farm had been Postman Pat’s red van. ‘We’ve been watching McGann’s place for two days and not a snifter so far.’

      ‘Patience,’ Maynard said. ‘Don’t they teach you anything up at Hendon these days?’

      Riley shrugged his shoulders and was about to risk suggesting that when lunch time came they should adjourn to a nearby pub – if there was a nearby pub – when he felt the buzzing of his mobile. He pulled out the phone and squinted at the message.

      ‘Something’s come up, sir.’ Riley tried hard to suppress a smile as he read the text. ‘Missing person on Dartmoor. DC Enders is on his way and he’ll collect me from the bottom of the lane. Depending on how things work out I might not be back today.’

      Maynard screwed up the tin foil, put it carefully in his pocket and reached for his flask.

      ‘Pity,’ he said, smiling. ‘I was just about to pour you a cup of coffee.’

      Savage had woken to the radio.

       ‘The Candle Cake Killer …’

      BBC Devon were already using the name, despite the lack of any official confirmation. Callers to the station got the date thing too.

      ‘Five days,’ one said, anguish in her voice. ‘FIVE DAYS!’

      Somebody needed to put out a statement soon, Savage thought. Otherwise the media would be controlling the agenda from the get-go.

      Down in the kitchen she continued listening as she prepared breakfast. The station was running a morning special on the history of the case. A chance for listeners to catch up over their cornflakes. Pete hustled Samantha and Jamie to the table and tucked Jamie in. Not cornflakes: toast and Cheerios, fresh orange juice, strong coffee for Savage.

      ‘So?’ Pete said, buttering a piece of toast and gesturing at the radio with the knife. ‘This for real?’

      ‘Officially, no,’ Savage said. ‘But as you well know from your line of work since when has “officially” got anything to do with the truth?’

      Pete smiled. ‘Well, official or not, be careful, OK?’

      ‘Be careful?’ Savage went across and kissed Pete and the kids. ‘Makes a change that you’re the one who’s worrying.’

      ‘If you’d seen the Naval cadets I’m teaching at the moment you’d still worry. Last week a crash-gybe nearly had me—’

      Savage didn’t hear the rest of the story; she’d already waved goodbye and headed out the door.

      On the drive into the station the roads seemed quieter than usual first thing. Perhaps people were already being careful. They’d remember the last time, of course, memories which should have been consigned to history since the Candle Cake Killer case was dormant, the trail gone cold several years ago. Savage knew a statutory review took place annually, but the general consensus was that the killer was dead. It seemed the only explanation for the cessation of the crimes. At the time the story had been front page news, an unwelcome focus on Devon and Cornwall and one the tourist board wanted to erase all memory of.

      It had been the cake, of course, which had given him his name: a Victoria sponge, sprinkled with icing sugar, a varying number of blue or pink candles on top, the candles lit and blown out. The candles and holders were obtainable from any of the large supermarkets, the sponge homemade, rich and moist, baked with duck eggs in a nine-inch tin. One slice of cake cut and removed, crumbs on the floor indicating the missing piece may have been eaten there and then.

      Fifteen candles on the first cake, seven on the next, nineteen on the final one. Pink, blue, pink.

      Whether the cake was intended to wish someone happy birthday, represented another type of anniversary, or was something completely different, the police had no idea.

      The victims were females aged thirty-four, twenty-five and thirty-nine. Not known to each other and having no connections other than living in Devon.

      And they had all gone missing on the longest day of the year.

      Mandy Glastone had been the first. Thirty-four and recently married, no children, a nurse by profession, she had vanished on the twenty-first June 2006. Her husband had arrived home to find the cake on the kitchen table, along with his wife’s handbag containing car keys, house keys and mobile phone. Nobody on Devon Road in Salcombe, quiet in a summer rainstorm, had seen or heard anything.

      Phil Glastone had been the main suspect, a few years older than his wife and previously married to a woman who claimed she’d received