Savage kept silent, not wanting to confirm Calter’s suspicions. Then she nodded towards the entrance to the car park as a vehicle swung in past the two uniformed officers.
‘About bloody time. The PolSA. Let’s see what he has to say.’
The police search adviser turned out to be new in the job. He’d done half a dozen courses and knew a string of buzzwords, but by the end of the conversation with him Savage wasn’t convinced by his proposed strategy. And neither was Calter.
‘He couldn’t locate a burger in a bun,’ Calter said, as the PolSA went to find Frey. ‘Search the lake and five hundred metres around where the bag of clothes were found? I could have told you that. But where else?’
‘He doesn’t want to squander resources, Jane,’ Savage said. She pointed up at the forest rising from the far side of the lake. ‘And you can see his point. It would take hundreds of officers to search the woodland, and with the density of the trees and scrub you could pass within a couple of metres of a body without seeing anything. On the other hand you’re right; what he’s come up with is hardly rocket science. I’d have liked something else.’
Savage left Calter at the car park and strolled along the road which bordered the reservoir. To the left the woodland was a mixture of new plantings, half-grown trees, and full-grown pines. Beneath the mature trees light scrub hugged the ground, but the canopy high above prevented much of it from growing. Searching those areas would be easy. Likewise with the sections of forest which had been clear felled. It was the areas with half-grown trees that would prove a problem for the search teams. The pines were five to ten metres high and their branches reached down to near ground level. The result was a mass of almost impenetrable greenery. Anything other than a cursory search would prove near impossible. In its entirety Fernworthy comprised several square kilometres and the terrain was by no means flat. There was steep hillside, streams and gullies, and here and there rocks pushed up from the peaty ground. Although there were a few forest tracks, access along those would need to be in four-wheel-drive vehicles and the majority of the searching would have to be done on foot.
Savage paused and felt the warmth of the sun. With the water and the forest this place was as perfect a beauty spot as one could imagine. And yet there was something unsettling about the place. She looked into the tree line on the other side of the reservoir. Beyond the first few trunks there was nothing but shadow, thick, black and impenetrable. She blinked and turned away, her eyes drawn to a movement on the water. For a second her heart skipped a beat as a monster-like hump rose from the reservoir near the centre. But the black bump was no beast, rather, it was one of Frey’s men. The man raised his arm and made a signal. At once a whine from an outboard filled the air as the officer in charge of the dinghy gunned the engine and surged towards the diver. It looked, to Savage’s uneducated eye, as if the diver had found something.
The sunken treasure lay on the bank side, stretched out on a blue tarp. A long strip of green webbing with a loop and a ratchet mechanism at one end and a big hook at the other.
‘A tie-down,’ Frey said. ‘Not been in the water long. No weed or slime and no tarnishing of the metal.’
‘What makes you think this has anything to do with the girl?’ Savage said as she knelt at the edge of the tarp. ‘Looks like a piece of rubbish to me.’
‘Maybe. But if so then it’s expensive rubbish. Do you know how much a set of good quality tie-downs cost?’
‘Tell me.’
‘A lot. Certainly enough that you don’t chuck one away without good reason.’
‘So what would that “good reason” be?’
‘Say if it’s broken. Which this one isn’t. Or if the material has some sort of incriminating evidence on it.’ Frey knelt alongside Savage and pointed to the end of the tie-down with the hook. ‘There, take a look.’
‘There’s a stain.’ Savage could see a discoloration where some sort of liquid had worked its way into the webbing. ‘Blood?’
‘Could be.’ Frey stood. ‘But I think it looks more like oil. Examine the material near to the hook. What do you see?’
‘Not a lot.’ Savage leaned in closer and shielded her eyes from the sun. Now she could see some fraying on one side of the webbing. A wisp of material like fine fishing line. No, not fishing line. ‘A hair?’
‘Yes.’ Frey stared across the water. ‘If we can find a matching one amongst the girl’s clothing or maybe at her lodgings, then we’ve got our first major lead.’
‘So she’s tied up with the webbing and brought out here.’ Savage followed Frey’s gaze and then looked back to the bank to where the bag of clothes had been found. ‘He strips her, kills her and throws the webbing out into the lake.’
‘Which leads me to think she’s not out there.’ Frey turned from the water and looked towards the forest. ‘If she was then surely she would be with the webbing. But my diver says there’s nothing else down there.’
‘Unless the perp forgot about the webbing until the last minute and then had to dispose of it in a hurry. Either way we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves. I guess we’ll need to wait to see if the CSIs can get some sort of match on the hair.’
‘And then?’
‘Then I’ll get onto that idiot PolSA and get him to widen the search.’
Charlie Kinver was the fisherman who’d found the bag of clothes and yet, apart from his initial statement to the PC, he’d not been questioned. Savage berated Calter and went off to do the job herself.
The man’s place lay about three miles from Fernworthy. A narrow lane ducked into a tunnel of trees and emerged after a quarter of a mile into a tiny valley where a stone cottage sat beside a brook. Ducks muddied the shallows as they probed beds of watercress and as Savage slowed the car, a heron rose from the water and flapped away. The house was from a postcard, honeysuckle climbing over a wooden porch, flowers in bright window boxes, a vegetable garden with rows of produce bursting from the neatly tended beds. To one side a number of chickens scratched bare earth in a pen, while a cat watched from the shade of a nearby fruit tree.
Savage got out of the car and went across to the front door. The door stood open and she knocked and called out a ‘hello’. Someone answered from the gloom inside and a figure stooped forward down the hall and held out a hand.
‘Charlie Kinver,’ the man said. The hand was dinner plate-sized and felt rough and calloused as Savage shook it. Kinver was in his forties but with a weathered face, short hair prematurely greying. ‘You must be the police, right?’
Savage nodded and introduced herself as Kinver led her through to the back of the house. The kitchen had oak units and wooden worktops with a deep sink and an old Rayburn stove. Very rustic, Savage thought, wondering if rustic wasn’t exactly the right word to describe Kinver too.
‘Made them myself, I did,’ Kinver said, noting Savage’s interest. ‘Carpentry. About all I’m good for. At least that’s what the wife says.’
‘They’re beautiful,’ Savage said. Kinver’s eyes had wandered to the window and she followed his gaze. In the back garden a woman lay on a sun lounger positioned beneath the shade of a tree, a book in one hand. ‘Is that your wife?’
‘Yes. She’s had a hard morning baking bread and then singing in the choir. Not like me, off for a spot of fishing, catching our food.’
Savage looked back into the room. On the kitchen table a hunk of bread smeared with butter and layered with cheese lay half-uneaten, while a salad had wilted in the heat. Kinver, for some reason, hadn’t been able to finish his meal.
‘Can you go through it again for me? What happened this morning?’ Since Kinver didn’t offer, Savage pulled a chair out from the table and sat down. ‘It