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A tray clicked down on the table beside her, the rattle of cutlery against crockery.
‘Jamie,’ Savage said, propping herself up on one elbow. ‘Darling, how sweet.’
‘It was his idea.’ A taller figure stood next to the bed. Pete, Savage’s husband. He removed a cup, plate and a cafetiére from the tray and then pressed down the handle on the coffee pot. ‘But all my work. That’s parenting, I guess.’
‘There’s a price to pay for everything.’ Savage sat up and Pete plonked a couple of pillows behind her back. She looked at Jamie as he climbed up onto the bed and slipped beneath the duvet to give her a cuddle. He was seven years old but still as needy as a toddler. Not that Savage minded. She ruffled his short, black hair and smiled at him. ‘I think it’s worth it, don’t you?’
‘That all depends on which one you’re talking about.’ Pete poured the coffee and handed Savage the cup. He nodded in the direction of the bedroom door. ‘Samantha’s in a right strop.’
Savage nodded. Samantha was her daughter. She’d just been dumped by her boyfriend and, being fifteen and full of hormones, the event had turned her world upside down. Pete and Savage were, unfathomably, largely to blame for all her woes.
‘She’ll get over him.’ Savage followed Pete’s gaze and then looked to the window. Outside, beyond their garden, she could see the waters of Plymouth Sound. A deep blue punctuated by the occasional snowflake of white sail, the early sun dancing on the gentle waves. ‘It’s a beautiful day, so why don’t we all go into town and grab something for lunch? If there’s any chance of a bit of shopping, especially with us paying, Sam will go for it. I’m sure that will cheer her up.’
An hour later, Savage regretted her suggestion. Detective Superintendent Conrad Hardin had phoned and lunch was most definitely off. She was wanted urgently at the station. She enquired as to what was pressing enough to require her presence on a Saturday. There hadn’t been a murder or any other serious crime, had there?
‘No, not yet,’ Hardin said cryptically. ‘And I can’t tell you what this is about on the phone. This is strictly a need-to-know situation. I don’t want anything getting out.’
Savage protested, exasperated at Hardin’s notion of phone taps, conspiracy theories and leaks to the media. He ignored her and refused to divulge any more information.
‘Oh,’ he added at the end of the call. ‘And pack for an overnight stay. You’re going on a little trip. You’ll be back tomorrow afternoon.’
‘Sir, tomorrow’s Easter Day.’
‘Off to church, are you, DI Savage? Seen the light?’
‘No, but—’
‘As I said, you’ll be back tomorrow afternoon. If all goes well.’
‘If all goes—?’
The DSupt ended the call, leaving Savage to apologise to her children and pack a few things into a bag.
‘So?’ Pete said. ‘Going to fill me in?’
‘I haven’t a clue.’ Savage shrugged as she stuffed some underwear into a side pocket on the bag. ‘An essential training course, I shouldn’t wonder. Probably some other lucky bugger has cried off and Hardin needs me to fill their shoes. Assuming, of course, that he isn’t intent on taking me on a dirty weekend.’
‘That’s not even remotely funny.’ Pete eyed a matching pair of black knickers and bra. ‘Are those new?’
‘Yes. I bought them especially for the DSupt. I’m calling them my promotion set.’
‘Stop it.’
Savage continued to rib her husband until Samantha came into the room and started a raging argument about parents and broken promises and how life really couldn’t get any worse. Savage tried to console her daughter, but the more she tried the more heated the conversation became. Eventually, she zipped up the bag, slung it on her shoulder and left Pete to bribe his way out of the situation.
The journey to the station was stop-start, the Saturday shopping traffic into Plymouth backing up across the Laira Bridge. Savage didn’t mind. She’d taken her little MG, a classic car older than she was, and with the mid-April morning being bright and warm, she’d put the hood down. She sat in the queue, enjoying the sun and watching the waterskiers on the expanse of estuary north of the bridge. Eventually, she cleared the traffic and headed up the A38 with the wind in her hair, arriving at Crownhill at a little after twelve.
After poking her head into the deserted crime suite, she went up to the DSupt’s office. She knocked and entered, surprised to see Detective Sergeant Darius Riley seated on one side of the desk. Shocked, too, to find herself thinking about the black underwear. She immediately censored herself.
‘Ma’am,’ Riley said with a smile. Hardin was over the far side of the room pouring coffee into three grotty looking mugs. Riley made a silent theatrical sigh and shook his head. ‘Hope you packed your toothbrush.’
Savage glanced down at Riley’s feet where he’d parked a small rucksack. She unshouldered her own bag and dumped it on the floor, before taking a chair.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Although I’m itching to know the destination for our little magical mystery tour.’
Riley nodded but said nothing more. He shifted in his seat and ran a finger up to his shirt collar where the bright white material met his black skin. The DS was, as usual, immaculately turned out, with his hair neat and short, his attire spotless. Savage had always figured that Riley had to go the extra mile to prove himself in a force which was overwhelmingly white. And prove himself he had. He’d been instrumental in the success of several operations including the capture of a multiple murderer which had nearly cost him his life. He’d also helped Savage track down the person who’d been involved in the hit-and-run which had killed her daughter, Samantha’s twin sister, Clarissa. Riley had become more than just a work colleague, he was a confidant and, she liked to think, a friend.
‘Ah, Charlotte.’ Hardin spun round, coffee slopping from the three cups as he tried to hold them in two hands. He squeezed his considerable bulk behind his desk and set the coffees down, before sinking into his chair. ‘Ready for the off?’
‘If I knew what the “off” was, it would be helpful, sir.’
‘In good time. I was hoping DC Enders would be here by now, but we’ll proceed without him. He’s only your driver so it’s not as if he needs to hear this briefing. You can fill him in later.’
‘Our driver?’ Savage glanced at Riley, but the DS only shrugged. He appeared to know little more than she did.
‘Malcolm Kendwick,’ Hardin said, rolling his eyes and shaking his head. Savage and Riley sat there in silence for a minute while Hardin shuffled through a load of papers on his desk. He pulled a stack of documents from a large FedEx envelope. Several of the documents bore a header with the graphic of an eagle. Below the eagle, large text with the words US Department of Justice, marched officially across the envelope. ‘As I was saying, Malcolm Kendwick. Know who he is?’
Savage nodded. ‘Yes. Sort of.’
‘Sort of’ meant she’d read the headlines in the tabloids, the longer pieces in the quality press. Malcolm Kendwick was, if you believed the paper who’d bought the rights to his story, an innocent British citizen abroad. Framed for the murder of several young women in the US, he had surely faced the death penalty until he’d been let off on a technicality. Several other newspapers naturally took the opposing viewpoint. For them, Kendwick was a serial killer who, with his good looks and charm, was following in the footsteps of Ted Bundy. What’s more, he was going to be deported from the States, which meant he’d be returning to the United Kingdom where he would undoubtedly wreak havoc. No female within fifty miles of wherever he ended up would be safe.
Hardin snorted. He picked up a sheaf of papers and waved them at Savage.
‘Funny, isn’t it, how when one of our own is in a foreign country they’re innocent, and yet when a foreigner commits a crime over here they’re guilty as sin.’
‘Sir?’ Savage was keen to get to the bottom of what Hardin was on about, why she and Riley had been called in.
‘Well, Charlotte, according to this Kendwick is guilty.’ Hardin waved the papers once more to emphasise his point. ‘It’s a transcript of the confession Kendwick gave to the cop. You’ve read the story, what was her name …?’
‘Janey. Janey Horton.’ Savage hadn’t cared much about the Kendwick case, but she had kept up with the news on Officer Horton. ‘Tough cookie. Dedicated.’
‘Trust you to know her name,’ Hardin said. ‘Five thousand miles but peas in a pod, hey?’
Officer Horton had been with the Fresno Police Department in California. Her daughter, Sara, had vanished, and Horton had become convinced that Malcolm Kendwick was responsible. Evidence – hard evidence – had been in short supply, but that hadn’t stopped Horton. She’d kidnapped Kendwick and imprisoned him in the basement of her house. Over a period of several days she’d extracted a confession from him along with the location of her daughter’s body. Leaving Kendwick tied up, she went out into the wilderness of the Sierra National Forest to find her daughter.
‘She did what any parent would do, sir.’ As she spoke, Savage was aware of Riley casting a glance in her direction. ‘Horton simply wanted the truth about what happened and justice for the man responsible.’
‘Well, she didn’t get it, did she?’
No, Savage thought, but not for want of trying.
Horton had spent two days searching, eventually discovering the corpse of a woman a good while dead, but definitely not her daughter. She returned to her house to find Kendwick had escaped. She hurried round to his apartment, but he’d fled from there too. Using contacts in the police department, she traced his credit card to a motel on the outskirts of Sacramento. She drove to the place intending to recapture Kendrick, but the owner of the motel grew suspicious when he saw her dragging Kendwick screaming from his room.
Local officers, responding to a 911 call from the owner, arrived and Kendwick pleaded innocence, claiming Horton was carrying out a vendetta against him. The officers were all for arresting Horton until she showed them a video on her phone. The video was the confession from Kendwick and once they’d seen it they arrested Kendwick instead. And that should have been that, the whole thing done and dusted. On the video, Kendwick admitted killing Horton’s daughter and several other girls. A forensic team hurried out into the wilderness and quickly located the remains of five women, including those of Sara Horton. All that remained was a lengthy trial and, hopefully, a minimal number of years on death row before Kendwick crapped himself as he was strapped to a gurney and given a lethal injection.
It wasn’t to be.
The evidence on the phone was inadmissible. No room for doubt. This wasn’t some obscure technicality which Kendwick’s lawyer had come up with. It was obvious. Horton had tortured Kendwick and filmed herself doing so. She’d sliced him with a knife and poured battery acid on his feet. Held a gun to his head and threatened to kill him. Anything Kendwick had said in the video couldn’t be used as evidence, couldn’t even be used as a lead to point to other evidence. Kendwick was untouchable.
Still, Fresno detectives worked double shifts for no extra pay trying to sift through the material Horton had gathered in her initial search for her daughter. The material which had led her to Kendwick in the first place. The problem was much of the evidence was circumstantial: Kendwick had been spotted at a park where Sara Horton often hung out with friends. He’d been seen jogging past the clothing store where she worked. He had a membership at a gym where she once had a part-time job. None of which was particularly incriminating. It looked at first as if Officer Horton had followed a hunch, used a dollop of female intuition, perhaps consulted the grounds in her morning coffee. Then Horton told her fellow officers about a rucksack she’d found in Kendwick’s car. Inside were handcuffs, a full-face balaclava and a pair of gloves, a roll of gaffer tape, some rope, a hammer and several trash bags. Kendwick claimed the items were nothing special, but Horton told the detectives they comprised a rape kit. It didn’t matter. Horton’s search of the car was ruled illegal and the evidence couldn’t be used.
All hope of a conviction now rested on a scrunchy discovered in Kendwick’s apartment, a single strand of blonde hair entangled in the shiny red material. A blonde hair which DNA analysis proved belonged to Sara Horton.
Kendwick was questioned about the scrunchy, but, as advised by his lawyer, said nothing more than he’d picked up the hairband in the park one day. Since Kendwick had long hair himself, which he kept tied back, the explanation was all too believable. Short of water boarding, which several detectives were keen to try, Kendwick was on the home straight. There was just a matter of another four girls linked with Kendwick, but while he couldn’t provide specific alibis, nor was there any direct evidence to suggest he’d been involved in their disappearances. After a year in limbo, the case against Kendwick was finally dropped on the provision that he wouldn’t bring charges against Fresno Police or Janey Horton. His lawyers advised him to get out of the country pronto, before circumstances could change.
‘That’s why this is short notice, Charlotte.’ Hardin was waving another piece of paper at Savage and Riley. This time Savage could see the initials NCA at the top. The National Crime Agency. The closest thing the UK had to the FBI. ‘We’ve got to make arrangements. We don’t want a media circus and we certainly don’t want a lynch mob. On the other hand, Kendwick needs to know that we’re watching him, that if he puts one foot out of line we’ll have him.’
‘Arrangements?’ Savage didn’t know where this was going. What could Malcolm Kendwick’s affairs have to do with Devon and Cornwall Police?
‘Yes.’ Hardin had begun to gather the papers together again. He slipped them back into the FedEx envelope. ‘The arrangements at Heathrow. Security on the journey back. What to do once the man is here.’
‘I don’t get it, sir.’ Savage turned to Riley but he could only shrug his shoulders again. ‘What do you mean, here?’
‘There’s no mystery, DI Savage. Here means here. Malcolm Kendwick is returning to the county of his birth. The fucker’s coming to Devon.’
‘Devon?’
‘Yes.’ Hardin stuck his tongue out over his bottom lip in consternation. ‘And you, DS Riley and DC Enders are the lucky buggers who have to go and get him.’
As he looked down from the plane, he could see the mountains below. Grey peaks poking above green forest. There were a million acres down there. A million acres of woodland and rock and dirt. Hundreds of streams and rivers, thousands of miles of tracks and trails, untold numbers of gullies and ravines and caves. By any measure, the Sierra National Forest was a true wilderness. A wilderness you could get lost in, a wilderness you could hide things in, a wilderness where searching was pretty much a waste of time. But they didn’t do much of that in the US anyway. Searching. Not in a country with well over ten thousand homicides a year. What was another handful to them? Nothing, that’s what.
Malcolm Kendwick eased himself back in his seat and thought about the horrors which had happened down there. The girls who had been murdered. Their faces had been all over the media. TV, newspapers, websites. Pictures culled from their friends and family or from the internet. Their names and biographies were indelibly fixed in Kendwick’s memories.
All five of them.
One: Stephanie Capillo, a student from Santa Barbara. Blonde hair. Slim, leggy, and with small, pert breasts. She’d been twenty-one. An English major at UCSB. Liked dogs and children. Helped out at an animal refuge. Went to church. Wore a purity ring. A fucking do-gooder by any standards.
Two: Amber Sullivan. A year younger than Stephanie. Long hair. Also blonde. A little chubby. Not quite the perfect all-American girl since she worked in a cheap burger joint and had a citation for smoking grass. Still, her mother’s pride and joy.
Three: Chrissy Morales. About as far removed from Stephanie as you could get. The most used image was one of the girl in leather thigh-highs and a PVC miniskirt. Petite and very cute and, yes, blonde again. Chrissy usually worked the streets near Highway 99 in Bakersfield. A hooker – the fact even acknowledged by her parents – she was inevitably at the bottom of any list of victims the media chose to display.
Four: Jessie Turner. Seventeen. Her pictures showed a fair-haired cheerleader with pom-poms and a lovely smile or else the news outlets played a video where she sang in a school musical. She’d auditioned for America’s Got Talent and, to hear her family talk, she was but one step away from superstardom.
Five: Sara Horton. Nineteen. Footloose. Had spent a year in South America. Just about holding down a job in some fashion outlet. Like all the others, blonde and a real beauty. Everything to live for, according to her mother.
Her mother …
He cast a glance at the window once more. The mountains were falling away now, the green forests gone as the aircraft crossed the state line and entered Nevada airspace. He shook his head. He wouldn’t see the wilderness again except in his memories. His life from now on would be like the land below: dusty, arid and dull. He sighed and then leaned back in his seat, closed his eyes, and slept.
Malcolm Kendwick was thirty-two years old. He’d lived in the US for ten years, moving from the UK when the internet start-up he’d founded had been bought up by a company in California. That company had itself been subsumed into the workings of one of the software giants and he’d moved on to another tech firm. He’d grown bored of that after several years and, having plenty of money, he’d jacked in the job and pursued other interests. A new start-up, some time spent catching waves on the coast, several months just bumming around. Now though, he was heading back across the Atlantic, and not through choice.
Janey Horton.
Sara’s mother had been blonde but she hadn’t been young. In her late thirties, Kendwick considered Janey Horton flesh gone sour, a world away from the smooth-skinned beauties who’d died down there in the wilderness, five miles below. Horton was one of the ones who did bother to search. But then you would, wouldn’t you? If it was your daughter who’d gone missing.
Sara had vanished from the small town of Morro Bay some one hundred and fifty miles up the coast from LA. Kendwick had been amused to hear she came from a little hamlet called Harmony a few miles along the Cabrillo Highway. Not that there was anything harmonious about her mother.
When her daughter had disappeared, Janey Horton had looked far and wide, but instead of finding Sara, she’d found him. And he hadn’t had any answers for her. Not at first. Later, when she’d begun to torture him, he’d blurted out stuff. About her daughter, about the others. Anything he could think of really.
And once she heard what he’d had to say, she’d decided to kill him.
You fuckin’ piece of crap. I’m goin’ to cut your fuckin’ dick off and feed it to you, understand?
He could well understand. She’d already carved three slices across his chest using a box knife, the thin blade like a razor the way the cuts opened up. Bloodless at first and then a weep of red painting thick lines down to his abdomen. He’d struggled, but try as he might, the ropes she’d secured him to the chair with held him tight. He’d opened up to her then, just like the cuts. Poured out what had happened, made up some story about how he’d been abused as a kid. Begged for his life. She wasn’t interested. She left him while she went to search for her daughter’s body. He’d been in that chair for two days. Crapping, pissing, bleeding. Crying, even.
Kendwick awoke from a fitful sleep. The horrors of the long hours he’d spent in Horton’s basement still haunted his dreams. He shivered and then pressed his face to the plane’s window once more. The aircraft had met the night now and straight out there was nothing but a winking of a light on the wing tip, beyond the light, blackness. The interior illumination made it impossible to see the stars, but peering down beneath the wing, a glow marked a small town. Surrounding villages and hamlets spread out below as if somebody had flicked fluorescent paint across a black canvas.
Or made a cut and watched blood spatter on the concrete floor of a dingy basement.
The girls had bled too. All over a vein of pure white quartz high in the Sierra Nevada, miles from any highway. The dried blood had been scraped from the rock by men and women in white suits, taken back to the lab and analysed. The blood belonged to the five missing girls, the DNA results said. According to the coroner, the sheer quantity suggested they’d died there.
You killed her, didn’t you? You raped her and then you fuckin’ killed her. Admit it, Malcolm. Tell me the fuckin’ truth! Tell me where my daughter is!
He hadn’t wanted to tell her anything. Not at first. He pleaded with her, tried to convince her she had the wrong man.
‘I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me. For God’s sake, you’ve got to believe me.’
‘I don’t believe you. You killed Sara, I know you did. Just like you killed Stephanie, Chrissy, Amber and Jessie.’
‘Honestly, I didn’t do it!’ Kendrick said again, in a vain attempt to convince Horton. ‘I never killed those girls!’
‘We’ll see about that …’
At which point she’d started to use the box knife on him. Not the chest to begin with, his right calf. Slicing the skin as if she was descaling a fish. Peeling back a layer and then digging the knife into the exposed muscle. Rotating the blade until—
‘Excuse me, sir?’
Kendwick flicked his eyes from the window. A hostess leaned in from the aisle. Gestured at the overhead locker. Reached across to open the locker and push back the strap of his bag which had jammed in the door.
He smelt the perfume and glanced up through the translucent material of her blouse at the magical swell of her breasts. Swallowed.
You fuckin’ piece of crap. I’m goin’ to cut your fuckin’ dick off and feed it to you, understand?
Kendwick managed a half smile at the girl and then looked away again. He stared into the dark sky beyond the wing tip and for a moment wished he was out there in the thin air. Falling, falling, falling to the ground below where the safety of death and oblivion waited.
Then he turned back and watched the hostess walk away down the aisle. Took in her nylon-encased legs, the wondrous shape of her hips beneath the navy-blue skirt, the way her long blonde hair lay curled in a bun beneath her cap. Wondered about letting the bun free so the golden strands could brush over her shoulders as she stood before him. Realised that oblivion wasn’t what he wanted at all.
The journey up had been easy. Saturday afternoon, light traffic, just a bit of a snarl-up at Cribbs Causeway in Bristol as those who had nothing better to do headed for the stores on a warm spring day. Nothing better to do such as driving to London to pick up a suspected serial killer.
They’d booked two rooms at the Premier Inn at Twin Bridges in Bracknell, Enders and Riley sharing, Savage on her own. The hotel was attached to a three-hundred-year-old coaching inn, now remodelled as a Beefeater. As they pulled into the car park and unloaded their overnight bags, Enders was keen to point out the name.
‘Twin Bridges, ma’am. Like Two Bridges back home on the moor.’ He stared out at the busy A322 where cars streamed past, their windscreens glinting in the late-afternoon sun. ‘Only not.’
‘Only not.’ Savage repeated Enders’ words as she wondered what travellers past would have made of modern-day developments.
Enders raised a hand and tousled his mop of black hair. He looked wistful for a moment. Unlike DS Riley, he’d come dressed casually and wore brown cords and a mustard-coloured pullover over a green T-shirt. Such sartorial blunders were common with Enders, but the DC was in his twenties and his youth, his cheeky boyish face and the Irish lilt to his voice allowed him to get away with the clothing mismatch.
‘Bet Darius feels at home though.’ Enders nodded across at Riley. ‘Don’t you, sir? Back to your roots?’
