With that she dropped out of sight, disappearing behind the huge hunk of granite.
‘Shit. That’s all we need.’
Nathan and Jane strolled the short distance to the rocks. Nathan suggested they should split up, Jane going to the right and him to the left. Once his wife had disappeared round the side of the tor, Nathan unhooked the rucksack from his back and dropped it to the floor. He opened the top flap, pulled out a bottle of squash and took several swigs of liquid. Then he packed the drink away, hoisted up the rucksack and set off again.
‘Ready or not, here I come!’
Instead of circling the rocks, he headed straight to the tor and began to clamber up. He pulled himself onto a large boulder and then edged round between two more until he could climb up the rock his daughter had been on a couple of minutes before. He stood for a moment and then slowly turned on the spot. He saw his wife on the far side of the tor but there was no sign of the children. He jumped down and began to navigate between the granite columns. He thought about putting on a monster voice, but then reasoned against it. Luka, in particular, might panic and slip and hurt himself. Instead he repeated his shout of ‘ready or not, here I come’.
He’d just squeezed into a narrow passage between two rocks when he heard something which made his blood curdle. A scream. Long, drawn-out and unmistakably belonging to his daughter.
‘Abi!’ Nathan yelled as he pushed through the gap and then, finding himself with more space, spun round trying to find the direction the scream had come from. ‘I’m coming, Abi. Stay where you are.’
Nathan scrambled up and over a couple of smaller boulders, at the same time thanking God he’d packed the first-aid kit in his rucksack that morning. He just hoped his daughter hadn’t hurt herself too badly.
The scream came again, this time accompanied by the voice of his son.
‘Dad! Come quickly.’
Nathan hauled himself up a final piece of granite and saw, as he did so, that his son and daughter stood together on a large plateau of rock. Relief flooded over him as he realised that neither appeared to be injured. The relief quickly turned to anger.
‘What are you doing?’ he said. ‘I’ve told you we don’t joke about being hurt when we’re on the moor. Fooling around’s OK at home but when—’
‘Dad!’ Luka shouted again and pointed into a large crack between two boulders. ‘Down there.’
For a moment Nathan felt a wash of horror as he wondered if it had been his wife who’d slipped and fallen. But then Jane appeared a few metres away. She moved across to the children and stared down at where Luka was pointing.
‘My God!’ Jane reached her arms out and turned Abi and Luka away.
‘What is it?’ Nathan took a couple of strides and jumped across to the plateau the three of them were standing on. He looked at his wife for an explanation. ‘A sheep or something?’
Jane shook her head as she began to push the children down from the rock. ‘We need to phone the police.’
‘The police?’ Nathan stepped forward to peer into the shadows. He squinted and tried to take in what he was seeing. A hand with bright red fingernails, an arm leading to a bare shoulder and the round curve of a partially exposed breast, the skin pale and white. The rest of the woman’s body was hidden from sight beneath an overhanging ledge and for a split second Nathan found himself craning his neck in an effort to see more. Then he changed his mind and hurriedly stepped away, following his wife and kids down off the rocks and at the same time pulling his phone from his pocket.
Early Saturday evening found Savage standing in the kitchen with a glass of white wine in one hand, a bottle in the other. Pete worked vegetables back and forth in a large wok on the cooker, steam billowing up into the extractor hood. For somebody who’d spent several years commanding a frigate and having all his meals prepared for him, he wasn’t a bad cook. He reached out for the bottle of wine and took it from Savage, pouring a generous measure into the wok.
‘Careful,’ Savage said. ‘You’ll get the kids tipsy.’
‘Good, might help Jamie sleep,’ Pete said. ‘He seems to spend most of the small hours in our bed these days.’
‘Nightmares. It’s common enough at his age.’ Savage took a sip of her wine, thinking she could do with some sort of sedative too. Malcolm Kendwick had wormed his way into her dreams, his grinning face miraculously appearing as soon as she shut her eyes at night. ‘He’ll get over it.’
‘Well, I hope—’ Pete stopped mid-sentence as Savage’s work mobile rang. He cocked his head and sighed. ‘There goes another evening.’
By no means every call to her phone required immediate action, but Pete had an uncanny knack of guessing which did. Ten to seven on a Saturday evening, and it was a pretty good bet he was right. Savage moved over and picked the phone up from the kitchen table.
‘DI Savage,’ she said.
‘It’s DC Calter, ma’am,’ the voice on the end of the line said. ‘We’ve got a suspicious death on the moor. A young woman. From the sound of things it wasn’t an accident.’
Savage blinked, seeing Kendwick’s face fashion itself in the steam from the wok, mocking her for a second before dispersing. She listened as Calter explained the details and then hung up.
‘A pound in the cop box then?’ Pete said, referring to a piggy bank Jamie had plonked on the kitchen table one evening when Savage had been out. The fund, added to whenever Savage was called away, provided Jamie with crisps and sweets, a consolation – albeit a poor one – for the absence of his mother.
‘I’m afraid so,’ Savage said, nodding at her husband before knocking back her glass of wine and walking from the room.
The girl had been found at Combestone Tor, a lone set of rocks standing high above the steep-sided River Dart valley. Savage drove at speed along the A38 to Buckfastleigh and then turned off and negotiated the narrow lanes up onto the moor. Forty minutes after leaving home she was driving across the dam of the Avon reservoir and following a winding road which climbed towards the tor. As she neared the top, the last rays of sunlight were caressing the tip of the tor as the day took its leave. It was as if rocks were being devoured by a great black shadow, the warmth and brilliance of life being slowly extinguished. She knew photographers called this time of day the golden hour, a time when the light was warmer and redder. For police officers the term had a quite different meaning. The golden hour referred to the period immediately following the discovery of a crime. During this time information was available to the police in high volume and every effort had to be made to secure that information. Decisions made now would have consequences for the investigation later. Savage wondered about her own role and whether she would make the right choices.
The odd jumble of rocks which comprised the tor lay just a short walk from a gravel car park, but she could see that John Layton, their senior Crime Scene Investigator, was taking no chances. The road had been blocked off some two hundred metres from the tor where a couple of laybys provided parking for police vehicles. Hundreds of metres of blue and white tape lay pegged to the ground, the tape extending in a rough circle around the tor. Savage stopped the car and got out. DC Jane Calter was standing next to one of Layton’s white vans flirting with a young-looking CSI. The CSI had pulled his mask away from his face, but was otherwise fully clad in a white protective suit. He laughed at something Calter said, the laugh curtailed as Savage walked across.
‘Evening, ma’am,’ DC Calter said, her strong South-West accent somehow at one with the rural surroundings. She nodded a greeting, her blonde bob curling round the edges of her face. Calter was late twenties but highly experienced. An old head on young shoulders. She gestured towards the tor where the rocks were now almost devoid of sunlight, the shadow line moving across the moor on the other side of the valley. ‘Just waiting to be allowed up there. They’re finger-tipping a route in and once they’ve done that