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She held Kendwick’s gaze for several seconds but then had to turn away and stare through the window at the traffic. His eyes had told her everything she needed to know. Malcolm Kendwick was one of the most dangerous men she’d ever had the misfortune of meeting.
Chapter Three (#ulink_45e0873f-ff62-52a6-a538-558d279e6928)
M4 Motorway, west of Reading. Sunday 16th April. 10.34 a.m.
From Reading onward, Kendwick dozed. At some point, he jerked awake, disorientated, muttering a string of obscenities. He apologised. Jet lag, he explained, before slumping over and resting his head against the window.
In the front, Riley and Enders chatted in low whispers, but Savage found it impossible to follow the conversation enough to be able to join in. Instead, she tried to rest herself. An hour or so later, Kendwick woke and wanted to stop.
‘A comfort break,’ he said. ‘I could do with something to drink too.’
A few miles farther along the motorway, just beyond Bristol, Enders took the slip road to Gordano services and parked up a little way from the main building.
‘I’d forgotten how grim these places were,’ Kendwick said, as he climbed out of the car. ‘Piss-and-shit stops, overpriced confectionery and crap coffee, right?’
‘The coffee’s got marginally better, but everything else is just how you left it.’
‘Let’s hope the same applies back in Devon.’ Kendwick smiled and then strolled off towards the building.
‘Do you want me to go after him, ma’am?’ Enders said. ‘Check he doesn’t get up to no good?’
‘No. He’s not under arrest. Let him go to the toilet in peace. If bodies start turning up in the next half-hour then we’ll know who did it.’
Savage walked across to several picnic tables which sat on a patch of grass to one side of the car park. Riley remained to talk to Enders and then, after a moment or two, joined her.
‘I’ve sent Patrick for some coffees,’ Riley said. ‘Reckon we could all do with a pick-me-up.’
‘Thanks.’ Savage moved to one of the tables and sat down. She nodded at Riley to sit too. It was the first time they’d been able to talk since they’d picked Kendwick up. ‘What do you think of our passenger?’
‘He’s a cool one, for sure.’ Riley gazed towards the main entrance of the service station. Kendwick had just pushed in through the doors and disappeared from view. ‘All the joking and the double entendres. Would he really act like that if he’d killed those women?’
‘I think his behaviour is very carefully calculated. It’s a double bluff. Or even a double double bluff. He knows that we know that he knows that we know.’ Savage paused. ‘What about Kendwick as a man, as a person?’
‘Tosser.’ Riley smiled. ‘But then us blokes are pretty shallow when judging each other.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s about the competition for a mate, isn’t it? Kendwick’s got all the attributes: good-looking, intelligent, talkative, well-off. Lesser mortals, such as myself and DC Enders, feel threatened.’
‘Don’t put yourself down, Darius.’ Savage smiled back at Riley. ‘Women would be better off with you than Kendwick.’
‘They would be, yes, but that’s not how the female mind works. Ask yourself why so many women end up with unsuitable characters? We see it every day at work, the scrotes with a cute girl in tow, ready to do the scum’s bidding. There are plenty of nice guys out there, but a lot of women seem to be programmed to go for the arseholes.’
‘Perhaps you’re wrong about the number of nice guys. Perhaps there aren’t enough to go round and the reality is that most blokes are arseholes.’
‘Thanks.’ Riley looked wounded. ‘But back to Kendwick. He believes his charm will win out and he doesn’t seem to care what we think.’
‘Because he’s home free.’ Savage turned her head to where a soft-top BMW Z3 had slipped into a parking bay. Two young women climbed out. ‘As long as he keeps his hands to himself, he’s in no danger. He’s already laughed in the face of the US justice system so they won’t extradite him now, not without new evidence.’
‘And can he keep his hands to himself?’ Riley pointed discreetly at the women as they walked away. ‘I mean, he’s been inside for the past twelve months and now he’s going to encounter temptation daily.’
‘Recidivism is pretty much hard coded into people like Kendwick. If he is guilty, if he is a serial killer, then he’s going to commit another murder. More than one if he gets the chance.’
‘So we’ve got to stop him, is that Hardin’s idea?’
‘Probably. I think he planned this trip around some nebulous idea that everything would come good in the journey from Heathrow to Devon. He thinks I’ve got a handle on how men like Kendwick work.’
‘You have, haven’t you, ma’am?’
‘Perhaps.’ Savage nodded but didn’t say anything more. Hardin’s trust in her was a last-ditch percentage play, the best card in a bad hand. The only option he had remaining. Picking Kendwick up and ferrying him back to Devon was more about Devon and Cornwall Police being seen to do something. Anything.
A few minutes later, Enders appeared with three cups of coffee stuck in a cardboard tray.
‘You didn’t get one for matey boy, then?’ Riley said.
‘No I fucking didn’t,’ Enders said. ‘Besides, he’s happy as Larry in there, playing the slot machines.’
They sat in silence for a few minutes, drinking their coffees. As Savage drained the last dregs from her paper cup, Kendwick emerged from the services, a small bottle of Coke in one hand. He paused at the entrance, glancing at an attractive woman as she walked past him, before strolling over.
‘Made any money?’ Riley said.
‘Not a cent – or should I say penny.’ Kendwick shrugged his shoulders. ‘But that wasn’t the point. I was watching other people play. Trying to understand the motivation behind their actions. I must say I don’t get it.’
‘What don’t you get?’
‘The attraction of gambling.’ Kendwick took a sip from his bottle and turned his head back towards the service station. ‘Why do something which has failure built in?’
Savage turned away as Kendwick began to expound his theory on human nature to Riley. People, he said, turned to fantasies rather than pursue reality. The lottery was a case in point. A one in God-knows-how-many-million chance but you hang your dreams on that. Kendwick said he didn’t understand.
‘It’s the only hope some people have,’ Riley said. ‘Better that than nothing, surely?’
‘Nonsense. Opium for the masses, isn’t it? Fantasise about winning the lottery or becoming a YouTube sensation or appearing on some reality TV programme. They should try taking control of their lives instead of being pushed around by others. Make it real. Go out and get what you want. That’s what I did.’
‘Let’s go,’ Savage said, moving back to the car and opening the rear door. She’d had enough of Kendwick’s fatuous moralising. ‘We’ve still got at least an hour and a half left and I’d really like to get home in time for dinner.’
‘Me too!’ Kendwick beamed across at Savage. ‘What’s on offer?’
Savage didn’t respond. Instead she ducked into the car. Moments later they were driving off and she settled back into her seat. Not too long now, she thought. They’d leave the motorway at Exeter and head up onto the moor. Chagford was a little town on the eastern edge. They’d see Kendwick into his house and then be done with him.
Stop-start traffic around Weston-super-Mare and an RTC which blocked the motorway just past Taunton saw them delayed by some ninety minutes, so it wasn’t until after three o’clock that they took a winding road out onto the moor. As the countryside became wilder, Kendwick’s interest was piqued. He stared out at the stone walls surrounding the little fields, at the distant tors standing guard over the landscape.
‘Quaint, this,’ he said.
‘As DC Enders can tell you, the moor can be far from quaint in the wrong weather. There are areas of pure wilderness up there, right, Patrick?’
‘Yes.’ Enders gripped the steering wheel and stared ahead, apparently unwilling to elaborate further.
‘I know the moor from my childhood and it’s hardly a wilderness.’ Kendwick tapped the window. ‘What is it, a hundred square miles, two? The Sierra National Forest is ten times the size and you’ve got Yosemite and Kings Canyon National Parks right next door. Real wild country, not this cream-tea countryside.’
‘And that’s where the killer took them, is it?’ Savage said. ‘Out in the wilds?’
‘The girls?’ Kendwick turned back from the window and met her gaze. He didn’t blink. ‘That’s what they say. But to be honest, I’ve no idea, Charlotte. They found the bodies, but who can tell how they died or who killed them?’
Savage looked away. Kendwick’s eyes were beguiling, but not in a good way. Serial killers were supposed to be sociopaths, unable to discern or empathise with other people, but Kendwick seemed to see right inside her. She sensed he might be able to unearth her vulnerabilities and use them against her. She couldn’t allow that to happen.
They continued the journey in silence, eventually descending a twisty road and then climbing out of a valley and into the small town of Chagford. The place wasn’t much more than a handful of roads meeting at a square. A few tourists shuffled along the streets, heading for the pubs and restaurants, but otherwise the place was quiet. Kendwick said something about stopping and having a late lunch or early dinner; his treat, he insisted.
‘No,’ Savage said. ‘Not today.’
Kendwick nodded. ‘Next time then?’
No one said anything until Enders spoke.
‘Here,’ he said, pulling into a parking space in front of a short terrace on the edge of town. ‘And about bloody time too.’
Kendwick’s house was the one on the end. A little two-up and two-down cottage with a long strip of back garden which bordered open fields. Beyond the fields, the moor rolled into the distance beneath a bank of dark cloud.
‘Well,’ Kendwick said. ‘Despite what I said earlier, the view is certainly better than the one from the Fresno County Jail.’
They piled out of the car and Riley and Enders sprang the boot and retrieved Kendwick’s luggage. Savage went to the front door with Kendwick. She pulled out a set of keys Hardin had given her and unlocked the door. Kendwick pushed it open and stepped in, crouching to avoid banging his head on the low beams. There was no hallway, the door opened straight into the living room. A narrow open staircase led up one side of the room, while to the back, an arch divided the living room from the kitchen area. Two rather tired armchairs and a sofa clustered round a fireplace. A pile of magazines sat on a low table in the centre of the room. Atop the magazines lay a chunky key fob, a local car rental company’s name emblazoned over some paperwork beneath.
‘Looks like your sister’s thought of everything,’ Savage said. ‘Transport and a place to stay. You’re lucky to have her to look out for you. She must be giving up a small fortune by letting you stay here.’
‘It might surprise you to know I’m quite popular in some circles.’ Kendwick strolled in. He stared down at the brown carpet. ‘But I’ll have to have words with sis about the state of the place.’
Behind her, Enders and Riley clumped the bags down just inside the front door. Riley went upstairs and a minute or so later came back down.
‘Everything’s fine,’ he said. ‘Two bedrooms and micro bathroom. Regular cosy.’
Kendwick wandered through to the kitchen and popped the fridge open.
‘Sweet,’ he said, reappearing with a bottle of white wine in one hand. ‘If I can just find a corkscrew we can have a moving-in drink. You guys take a seat while I fetch some glasses.’
‘I don’t think so, Malcolm.’ Savage tapped Riley on the shoulder and pointed outside. ‘We’ve got better things to do. I can just about stomach being a taxi service, but I draw the line at socialising.’
‘Shame.’ Kendwick frowned and then cocked his head on one side. ‘We’ll meet again though, won’t we? You and I?’
‘I’m sure we will.’ Savage followed Riley and Enders through the door. ‘Try to be good, Mr Kendwick.’
‘Oh, I intend to.’ Kendwick grinned. ‘Very good.’
He peered out of the tiny window and watched as they drove off. The black guy, the annoying Irish git and the woman. Yes, the woman. Kendwick considered her for a moment. She was … interesting. Too old though. Not really his type. Still, he wouldn’t say no if he got the chance.
He turned to where his luggage stood in a heap. A flight bag, two Samsonite cases and a rucksack. He had a few books and some other oddments coming by freight but, aside from them, this was the sum of his ten years in the United States. Almost everything he valued was here.
What a waste. And all down to that bitch cop, Janey Horton. Kendwick shook his head. No good going over everything again. What was done was done.
He reached for a carrier bag which contained a litre of duty free rum. He still had most of the bottle of Coke he’d bought at the services so he took that and the rum into the kitchen, found a glass, and mixed himself a large drink.
Back in the living room he slumped down in one of the armchairs and sipped from the glass. His eyes were drawn to a map of Devon which hung above the mantelpiece. He found himself shaking his head once more. Strange to be back here. Where he’d grown up. Where it had all started.
He’d been born in an anonymous suburb of Torquay to what, from a casual glance, must have seemed loving parents. In reality their relationship to him was always somewhat distant. Later in life, Kendwick put that down to him being an accident, a conclusion he drew from the fact that his siblings were over ten years older than him. He was an afterthought and the young Kendwick had got in the way of his parents’ lifestyle. As he grew up, he often found himself offloaded onto various relatives as they went about their lives or took long holidays. Inevitably, when he asked, he was fobbed off with excuses: ‘You can’t ski well enough, darling.’ ‘It would be much too hot for you, Malc. You know how you hate the heat.’ ‘We’ll be gone for four weeks and that would mean missing school. Best not, hey, love? Maybe next year.’
Kendwick compensated for his parents’ behaviour by acting with a nonchalance intended to show an exterior face vastly different to the turmoil he felt within. He craved love, but didn’t know how to ask for it. The various relatives he stayed with thought him grown-up for his age, but he was an emotional retard, the sociopathic tendencies misread for maturity. He never cried, never seemed to anger or throw tantrums like other children did.
Mostly, when his parents went off on their jaunts, he stayed with his uncle. His uncle lived on Dartmoor and Kendwick credited that fact as nurturing his love of wild spaces. Out on the moor you had to be self-reliant. Alone with nothing but the wind for company, your thoughts turned inward. He found when he was on the moor he became overly reflective, trying to find a reason for everything, trying to understand life and the cards he’d been dealt.
As Kendwick entered his teenage years, his parents began to realise their son wasn’t like other boys. While adolescence had made his classmates go crazy, their bodies overladen with hormones, their minds stuffed with nonsense, Kendwick had passed the time more interested in chasing grades than chasing skirt. He didn’t appear to care a thing for anyone. He went for long walks on his own, disappearing for hours at a time. Yet he never stayed out late, never went to parties, never got even slightly tipsy.
But then he began to adorn his bedroom with gothic imagery. Vampires and graveyards. Girls in black PVC dresses swooning in the moonlight, breasts full and white, tears of blood weeping from their eyes. Mist rising around some forsaken tor, another girl draped over the granite with her head arched back.
His parents shook their heads, but at least this new behaviour was nothing out of the ordinary. Secretly they were glad about the girls appearing on the walls of his bedroom. The girls showed he wasn’t … wasn’t … well, they showed he was normal.
However, even back then, Kendwick had known he was far, far from normal and had his parents bothered to pay a little attention, they might have been a good deal more concerned.
He took another sip of his drink and then contemplated the glass for a moment. He knocked back the rest in one gulp and then stood. Time to unpack his life from his bags. Time to think about what the future might hold.
‘Thank fuck for that,’ Enders said as he steered the car through the narrow streets of Chagford. ‘Another minute in the company of Malcolm slimeball Kendwick and I’d have been committing murder myself. It’s only a shame he managed to get out of the US.’
‘You’d have liked him to face execution?’ Riley said. ‘With all the problems capital punishment brings?’
‘Such as?’
‘Miscarriages of justice for one. The fear of living on death row for years and years for another.’
‘Fear?’ Enders took his eyes off the road for several seconds and stared across at Riley. ‘I don’t think Kendwick bothered much about the fear his victims felt. He took them up into the mountains and did God-knows-what to them before killing them. If you want my view, a lethal injection would be letting him off lightly. I’d shave Kendwick’s head, plug old Sparky in and send a good jolt of electricity through him.’
‘Ma’am?’ Riley half turned to look into the rear of the car. ‘What’s your opinion?’
‘You don’t want to know, Darius.’ Savage stared out at the moorland now flashing past. ‘My answer might offend your delicate London sensibilities. But I don’t think what you said about miscarriage of justice applies to Kendwick. He killed those girls, I know he did.’
‘You can’t convict somebody on a hunch, ma’am. You need evidence.’
‘And Janey Horton found that evidence.’
‘As I understand US law, it wasn’t admissible. First, part was extracted by torture, second, Horton didn’t have probable cause to search Kendwick’s car. The rape kit she found could never be introduced at a trial. The hairband discovered in his apartment was circumstantial, and again, problems with probable cause to search. Anyway, aside from those issues, I don’t believe the threat of the death penalty is a deterrent.’
Savage shook her head. She wasn’t going to get into an argument with Riley. She liked him, but his views on criminal justice were way too liberal for her. The law wasn’t something which should be inked down on a page leaving clauses which offered get-out-of-jail cards to the guilty. People had suffered at Kendwick’s hands. Real people. Young women and their families. Lives had been changed, people emotionally scarred for life. If executing Kendwick could make things better for them in some small way then she was all for it. Deterrent or not.
‘Passed a polygraph test too, didn’t he?’ Riley wasn’t giving up. ‘Too much doubt in my mind. There are no second chances with the death penalty.’
What Riley said about the lie detector test was factually true, but Savage wasn’t convinced. Kendwick, as they had seen in the few hours they’d spent with him, was a manipulator. She wouldn’t put it past him to have somehow managed to skew the results of the test.
The rest of the journey passed in near silence. When they arrived at the station Enders parked up and the three of them got out.
‘Thanks, Darius, Patrick,’ Savage said. ‘Good work.’
‘No problem, ma’am,’ Enders said. ‘Nice bit of overtime. See you tomorrow.’
