‘Sure.’ Up ahead the Ford indicated left. Fallon drove straight on. ‘But you’re going to make him pay, aren’t you? After all, it would be a shame to waste all the effort me and DS Riley put into finding him.’
DS Darius Riley.
Working off his own bat, he had followed a lead provided by Fallon. The lead had led to Owen via a breaker’s yard and a dodgy car body repair shop. Riley was part of the problem, part of the reason Savage had spent so many nights lying awake trying to decide what to do. If Riley hadn’t been involved she was pretty sure she’d have done something by now. Something stupid.
Savage watched the Ford disappear down the side street.
‘It won’t be wasted,’ she said. ‘And I do mean to make him pay. I do.’
‘Well then, let’s go and find the lad shall we?’ Fallon slowed the Range Rover and pulled in at the entrance to a brown-field site where the gates to a half-completed development hung shut for the weekend. Savage stared at a big yellow digger and then at Fallon as he reached across and opened the glove compartment. ‘But first …’
‘What are you doing?’
‘This.’ Fallon pulled out something wrapped in an oily towel and plonked the parcel on Savage’s lap. ‘A present from Uncle Kenny. Birthday, Christmas, whatever.’
Savage felt the weight of the object on her legs. Knew what was inside the towel without looking. ‘Kenny?’
‘Untraceable. A full clip. More if you need them but one is all it takes.’
‘Shit. I don’t know if—’
‘Think on it.’ Fallon engaged first gear and eased the car back onto the road. ‘My old man always told me regrets are for losers. He was right. Winners don’t have doubts, do they?’
‘No,’ Savage said as she folded back the rag to reveal the automatic pistol. ‘I guess they don’t.’
Then she picked up the weapon and slipped the cold steel into her jacket pocket.
DS Darius Riley stood on a desolate stretch of moorland some five miles to the west of Fernworthy Reservoir. Apart from the track he’d driven down and the dark granite of a couple of nearby tors there was nothing but grass, low scrub and heather in all directions. Not for the first time since his arrival in Devon some two years ago, he reflected on the way his life had changed since then. South London seemed a very long way away, his Caribbean heritage even further.
For a moment Riley looked east where, far away, something hung in the air above the moor, hovering like a kestrel. But he knew the object wasn’t a bird. The smudge was a helicopter. Call sign NPAS-44. Air Operations. The helicopter was looking for the missing Hungarian girl, and there’d be people on the ground too. He shook his head. That’s where the action was. Officers hunting for clues, piecing the evidence together, coming up with theories. He gave a silent curse and turned back to the job in hand.
‘Crap.’ That from DI Phil Davies. Pissed-off too. He articulated Riley’s thoughts. ‘Call this police work? I don’t. We should be over at the reservoir or knocking on a few doors and unsettling some of the local nonces. Sort it, Darius, because I want to get back home in time for Sunday lunch.’
Davies turned and strolled away, hands reaching into his pocket for lighter and fags. Davies was something of an enigma. With his lack of respect for regulations, a well-worn face with a more-than-once broken nose, cheap shirts and aftershave and even cheaper jokes, the DI appeared to be a dinosaur from a previous age of policing. Davies was known to associate with various members of Plymouth’s criminal classes. ‘In the line of duty’ was his excuse. ‘Lining his pocket’ was how Riley saw it. But there was another side to Davies. He was the main carer for his wife, disabled after a riding accident. Riley rated her as one of the most attractive and graceful women he’d met. The contrast with Davies was unsettling.
Davies trudged away with a cigarette in his mouth, leaving Riley to continue.
‘Are you sure this wasn’t natural causes?’ Riley said to DC Carl Denton, walking in a circle around the body so he could view it from all angles. ‘Something getting at the corpse? A stray dog or a fox?’
‘Sorry, sir. The pony was slaughtered.’ Denton’s eyes moved to the rear of the animal. He reached up and scratched the pronounced scar on his cheek. ‘And worse.’
‘Tell me you’re joking?’ Riley said, wondering what his old friends on the Met would say if they could see him now. The sick jokes would be coming thick and fast.
‘No, sir. He’s been interfered with, something shoved up his rectum and the genitals cut off. No way a dog did that. Anyway, what about those burn marks on the ground?’
The burn marks were apparent in several places, piles of white ash surrounded by black earth and scorched grass. Boy racers up on the moor for a party, Riley had thought at first. But the positioning of the fires was too uniform. Five of them. Straight lines had been scratched in the earth from each fire to the ones opposite and a circle had been drawn through all the points too. The result was a pentagram with the dead animal in the centre.
‘Jesus,’ Riley said, shaking his head and then laughing at his use of the word. ‘Or not.’
‘Not, sir.’ Denton seemed unamused at Riley’s quip. The lad knelt at the head of the pony and peered at the neck, where the jugular vein had been severed. A pool of red-brown earth showed where the animal had bled out. Flies buzzed, flitting from the blood to the neck. There was already a whiff of something bad in the air. ‘Not Jesus by a long way.’
‘We’ve had this before though, yes? Animals being tortured?’
‘Sort of.’ Denton looked up at Riley and then stood. ‘But not like this. We had that deer with a crossbow bolt through the head in Plymbridge woods a while back. There was a horse shot with an air gun last year. Then there was a pony slashed in the genitals over on Bodmin Moor. The animal survived though. Not like this one.’
Denton stared past Riley, his eyes roaming the vista of moorland, farther away, a tor rising to pierce the blue sky. The poor lad looked shell-shocked, Riley thought. He knew Denton had been off sick for a couple of months. ‘Gone mental’ was the squad room gossip, but as one of the few people Denton confided in, Riley knew better. Denton had become infatuated with DC Calter but she’d been having none of it. A bunch of flowers bought as a Valentine’s present had been returned with a polite ‘no thank you’. An invitation to dinner had been rejected. Riley reckoned poor old Denton would have been OK, had a close relative not died soon after. Rejection followed by loss had pushed him over the edge and into full-blown clinical depression. On his return to duty he’d gone on various training courses and had come back to a new position working as a Wildlife and Countryside officer in DI Maynard’s newly formed Agricultural Crime Squad. The role was a largely solitary one and Riley wondered if Denton was coping with the isolation. At least Denton was his own boss. Riley and Davies came under the direct control of Maynard, and the DI never failed to let them know he was in charge. Thankfully Maynard was off on his annual birdwatching holiday, and for a couple of weeks at least Riley had a little more freedom.
‘So is this of interest to the ACS or not?’ Riley said. ‘Only we’ve got some sheep rustlers to catch.’
Denton turned back to Riley, not catching the irony. ‘Could be if we want it. Those other incidents were down to kids or bored city folk. “Having a laugh”, they’d call it. This is something different. I wouldn’t have thought the pentagram was the kind of thing some kids would think up. I reckon we’ve got something much more disturbing.’
‘You’re talking about the occult? Animal sacrifice? I thought that sort of stuff belonged in movies.’
‘That’s your job to find out, sir. If the ACS’s remit extends that far.’
‘Shit.’