Thinking of Redmond, his mind turned to the girl. He looked over to the bed and feasted his eyes on her body. Curves not yet fully developed, face angelic, mind uncorrupted. He liked them that way. She was seventeen and legal, of course. He was no pervert and it was best to keep things above board, even if the affair with the girl – his niece – would be an unforgivable misdemeanour. Especially for a married man who was the deputy leader of Plymouth City Council, and a member of the Devon and Cornwall Police and Crime Panel.
Two words were all the directions Savage needed from Enders to reach the crime scene: ‘The Hoe.’ Fifteen minutes later and she drove up Hoe Road, swung past the army fort and turned right up the narrow access ramp onto the Hoe. A row of flagpoles bordered a huge expanse of tarmac, the flags hanging down, sad and unmoving. In summer the place thronged with pedestrians, kids on bikes, roller skaters, skateboarders and dog walkers. A grassy slope to one side of the tarmac was a fine place for picnicking and offered fantastic views over the Sound. Right now the area was deserted apart from a BBC outside broadcast car, a cameraman taking some establishing shots, and a pretty young female reporter in a hideous purple coat. Behind them stood the iconic red and white lighthouse. Whether it acted as a beacon or a warning probably depended upon your view of the city.
Savage parked alongside a patrol car, a van and Layton’s Volvo. Layton stood next to the car, phone pressed to ear, his free hand agitated, the crime scene manager doing most of the talking. As Savage got out he looked across at her, nodded and pointed over towards the public toilets. The toilets lay at the eastern end of the Hoe, not far from the Hoe Lodge Restaurant, which, notwithstanding the grand name, was in reality nothing much more than a snack bar. Despite the weather a number of people were sitting outside, DC Enders and a uniformed PC weaving between the tables, taking statements.
Savage retrieved her PPE kit from the boot and struggled into a white coverall before crossing the tarmac to the path which led round to the toilet block, a low, brick building which had a number of roof lanterns poking up from a flat roof. One of Layton’s CSIs stood next to a couple of poles with blue and white tape and he proffered a log, which Savage signed, before pointing down the path to the male toilets. DC Carl Denton was waiting at the entrance, a couple of strands of his hair falling loose from the hood on the white suit.
‘Ma’am, shall we?’ Denton rubbed his hands and stamped his feet as Savage approached. ‘Only I’ve been here for ages and I’m dying for a cup of coffee.’ He nodded in the direction of the Lodge. ‘I hear the café is giving out free ones to our lads.’
‘Is it Mr Owers?’ she asked as she led the way in, padding across the damp floor of the entrance and into the toilets proper.
‘I think so. The body matches the description anyway. Take a look. Third one along,’ Denton said. ‘Not that you need telling.’
‘So somebody caught up with him before we did,’ Savage said. ‘Rough justice.’
‘Not really rough. All things considered.’
‘No.’ Savage thought of Simza Ellis. Missing, presumed drowned. Never, until Monday morning, assumed sexually assaulted and murdered by some pervert. ‘You’re right. Simply justice.’
The man’s body almost filled the cubicle, a mass of flesh the colour of lard prostrate before the toilet. On the seat a dusting of white powder contrasted with the black plastic, but the man’s head was bent forwards, away from the powder, his face down in the bowl, as if he had been trying to get a drink of water, like a cat lapping up milk. His faded blue jeans and grey boxer shorts had been pulled down to his ankles, exposing a brown mess which had exploded from the deep cleavage of his bottom and been smeared all over the buttocks. The left arm hung down and brushed the wet floor while the right one lay at a funny angle up by the head, as if trying to grope for something. Impossible, since the forearm ended with two sticks of bone surrounded by ripped and bloodied flesh.
Jesus, Savage thought, life or death didn’t get much more appalling than this. Or if it did, she really didn’t want to know about it.
‘Glad I’m not doing the recovery, ma’am,’ Denton said. ‘They’ll need a bloody crane to get him out.’
Denton was right, Savage thought. The man must weigh thirty stone at least. Extracting him from the toilet would be tricky. If they were to use any sense of decorum in retrieving the corpse the team would need to dismantle the cubicle. The alternative would be to dismember the body.
Savage moved closer, not wanting to, but needing to see more. She held onto the door for support as she leant in. Franklin Owers, definitely. The mugshot which had been distributed hadn’t been a good one, but there was no mistaking the round face, the receding hairline and the little goatee beard. Now she was closer she spotted a short piece of black cardboard, rolled in a tube, protruding from the man’s left nostril. Gold print ran across the glossy surface, but Savage couldn’t make out the words.
‘He’s got a business card shoved up his nose.’ Savage pointed to the powder on the seat. ‘Do you think that’s cocaine?’
‘Forgive me, ma’am. Given the circumstances, I didn’t want to taste it to find out. However, down in the bowl there’s a bag floating in the water and it’s stuffed with white powder too. I’d say the bag contains four ounces or so.’
‘A hundred grams? That’s several thousand pounds street value. Tends to suggest whoever killed this guy didn’t care for drugs.’
‘If it’s coke. Anyway, the stuff has gone in the bowl. Would you want to use it?’
‘Not really. Besides, red wine and caffeine are my drugs of choice.’ Savage moved back from the corpse to where Denton stood next to a row of urinals, her nose detecting a sweet smell of citrus lemon mingled with piss. ‘Who found him?’
‘The attendant. Came to unlock the toilets at eight-thirty this morning and found they were already open. He noticed water overflowing from inside one of the cubicles and went to investigate. He swears the body wasn’t in the loos last night when he closed up after the place had been cleaned. He’s sure the door was locked properly too.’
‘Well the victim didn’t squeeze in through a window, did he?’ Savage glanced up at the narrow slits above the urinals and at the overhead roof lanterns. ‘But then again he didn’t walk in here either. You saw the hand?’
‘I saw one hand.’
‘Exactly. I wonder what the pathologist will make of that.’
Minutes later and the white-suited figure of Dr Andrew Nesbit shuffled in, displaying his characteristic stoop and offering a little homily by way of a greeting as he glanced over the top of his glasses.
‘Wednesdays are all very well, Charlotte, but they are only two better than Mondays. Whether you like them depends if you are a glass half full person or not.’ Nesbit edged round a large puddle of water and peered into the cubicle at the body. ‘What have we here? A suicide?’
‘That’s what the toilet attendant thought when he phoned triple nine. But us amateurs guess not.’
‘Let’s see then, shall we?’ Nesbit put his black bag down in a dry patch and shuffled closer. He spotted the white powder. ‘Drugs OD?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Ah, no!’ Nesbit had seen the arm. ‘Silly me. Not a suicide either. I don’t think anyone would choose to kill themselves by cutting their hand off and if they did, my hunch is they would find it impossible to walk very far once they’d done so.’
‘Doc?’
‘He didn’t die here.’ Nesbit moved the left arm. ‘He’s in rigor, but he must have been brought here before the stiffness set in. And there is no blood, or very little. With both the ulnar and radial arteries in the arm severed, blood would be gushing everywhere. I can see some splatter marks on the man’s right leg but not much on the floor. The hand was removed somewhere else.’
‘How