placed the thermometer display down on the ground. A few seconds later the unit beeped and Nesbit peered at the screen and muttered something Savage didn’t catch.
‘Doc?’
‘Strange. The core body temperature is way below ambient which is… what? Eight, nine, ten? I’ll measure it in a moment. Overnight I am sure it wasn’t much lower, not with this weather coming in off the Atlantic. It is evident she has been dead for a day or two and kept somewhere colder.’
‘We had frosty weather last week and into the weekend,’ Savage said.
‘Yes. Perhaps the body was outside in another location and was moved here. That could explain the low temperature.’
‘There’s no way this could be…’ Savage wasn’t sure how to finish the question, but she didn’t need to as Nesbit already had an answer for her.
‘I can’t tell that here can I, Charlotte? Given the sexual angle I wouldn’t have thought this is anything other than murder, would you? Sorry. I know you need some luck at the moment. For this girl though it has all run out.’
Nesbit glanced at his watch and then pulled out a little voice recorder and mumbled something into the microphone. Then he stood up straight and was silent, a sombre expression on his face. Savage knew he wasn’t religious, but it seemed as if he was waiting for someone to say a few words or for something to happen. As if on cue the church bell began to strike the hour.
Gordon Isaacs was the farmer who had discovered the body and even before she had met him alarm bells were ringing in Savage’s mind. Not reporting a minor car crash or a theft to the police might be understandable, but when you had found a naked and dead girl on your land such negligence was unfathomable.
Calter and Enders had arrived from Plymouth and they piled into Savage’s car and drove up to Isaacs’s farm to see what he had to say for himself. The holding stood alone with no near neighbours and the feeling of remoteness from the safe, modern world grew as they lurched along the concrete road leading up from the lane and climbed across open hillside to a huddle of barns and an old farmhouse. Three abandoned tractors and a multitude of rusting farm machinery lay either side of the track. Blue fertiliser sacks replaced windows in several of the barns, baler twine stitched holes in fences and nettle, dock and brambles vied for supremacy everywhere. The place looked more like the local tip than a farm. The only thing pretty was the view. The countryside rolled away to the south in a patchwork of fields, woodlands, hamlets and villages. Somewhere beyond lay the urban sprawl of Torbay, hidden in the murk that clouded anything more than a few miles distant.
‘Look at that, ma’am.’ Enders pointed to a bonfire where a blackened and bloated corpse of a sheep was smouldering on top.
‘Devon-style barbie,’ Calter said. ‘Lovely!’
A house stood to their right as they entered the farmyard, a pretty cottage built of stone with a thatched roof half-covered with moss. To their left a crumbling brick barn was a Health and Safety nightmare with a broken asbestos roof that had been patched with rusty corrugated iron. Ahead a traditional byre was also dilapidated, but surely ripe for conversion.
They parked next to an old Landrover with an out of date tax disc and a cracked side window. As they got out Savage caught a whiff of burning sheep mixed with an odour of cow shit and silage and the smell clawed at the back of her throat as they picked their way through the mud to the farmhouse front door. Savage knocked, and as they waited she heard loud classical music from inside the house. And the sound of machine gun fire.
‘Huh?’ Savage cocked her head on one side, trying to make out the cacophony coming from within. It sounded like a TV set on maximum volume.
‘Platoon, ma’am, the film, I recognise the theme,’ Enders said. ‘The DVD was free with the Mail a week or two back. I’d love to watch it again, but I don’t get the chance to see what I want these days. The missus seems to think the kids prefer Balabloodymory.’
‘Sensible woman.’
‘Funny thing to be watching when you’ve just found a dead body on your land,’ Calter said.
The sound from inside stopped and a moment later the front door swung wide to reveal a short and rather portly man with a large reddened nose and a wheeze that came before he spoke.
‘Yes?’
‘Detective Inspector Charlotte Savage. Can we come in Mr Isaacs? We need to ask you a few questions.’
‘What more? I’ve had you guys trampling over my land, blocking the road so the feed lorry can’t get up here, and now you? I’ve got work to do, not time for questions to answer.’
‘You were watching a movie,’ Enders said.
‘None of your bloody business what I was doing, lad.’ Isaacs paused. ‘Anyway, the wife was doing the watching. She likes a good war film.’
As if to confirm what he said a figure appeared from the gloom inside and stood beside him. Mrs Isaacs had an appearance and stature not dissimilar to Mr Isaacs except her nose was dripping instead of red. She brought out a large stained handkerchief to deal with the drips and the tears running down her face.
‘Willem Dafoe. He just got shot to pieces by the slanties. Always affects me that bit,’ she sniffled. ‘Anyway, come in won’t you? If you wait for Gordon to ask you in you’ll be standing on the doorstep ‘til Santa gets here with pigs pulling his sleigh.’ With that she turned and beckoned them in.
Savage made a gesture for Calter to stay outside and nose around while she and Enders followed the couple into the hallway. Newspaper was strewn across the floor and she was aware of her muddy footprints as she walked in. Enders nudged her and pointed down at the papers. The Daily Mail. She smiled and mouthed a silent ‘good work’. To the left was a living room, cold and unused, the furniture adorned with white dust-covers. To the right a smaller room, a snug she guessed you would call it, was more welcoming. Two armchairs and a sofa were arranged around a hearth, the coals glowing red and orange. A corner held a little television screen, on it an explosion with the same colours as the fire was frozen mid blast.
‘You’ll have some tea?’ Mrs Isaacs asked.
‘Thank you. That would be great.’ Savage said.
Mr Isaacs went over and slumped in the armchair nearest the fire, but made no invitation to Savage or Enders to sit. The two of them took the sofa and Savage began to ask about the discovery of the body. Mr Isaacs wasn’t interested. He had explained to the response team what had happened and was buggered if he was going to go through it all over again. Savage pressed him.
‘The problem is you said you discovered the body last night and yet you didn’t call us until this morning. I am wondering why you took so long to phone us?’
‘Work to do. Things to sort. Animals and the like. Farm’s got to come first. Always has and always will. I still had loads of jobs to do and I thought if I called you lot I wouldn’t get the chance to finish any of them.’
‘But a dead girl, Mr Isaacs? Wasn’t that more important? Do you realise you have committed an offence by not reporting the discovery straight away?’
‘She wasn’t going anywhere was she? I could see she was dead because I…’ Isaacs paused and huffed. ‘Well, I touched her, didn’t I? Had to, see? Didn’t know, did I?’
‘Didn’t know what, Mr Isaacs?’
‘I didn’t know if she was dead, did I? She might have been sleeping.’
‘So when you realised she was dead, why didn’t you call us? I mean she was hardly likely to have died of natural causes, was she? It was obvious a crime had been committed.’
‘You’d know that, being police. I wouldn’t. I am a farmer. Just a farmer. Anyway, I see death all the time. It’s not something alarming when you’ve got animals. Only yesterday I had to collect a ewe from down by the brook. Daft bugger had drowned herself, see? Brought her up here for disposal.’
‘We’ve seen the sheep. It’s not legal is it? Burning them like that?’
Isaacs huffed again and started a rant on the European Union and politicians and how they knew bugger all about anything apart from lining their own pockets. Savage wasn’t unsympathetic when it came to the government meddling in affairs they didn’t understand, but the conversation was leading nowhere so she asked Isaacs if he had seen anyone yesterday, noticed anything suspicious, something out of the ordinary?
‘If I had seen anyone on my land they’d have known about it, so no, I didn’t see anyone.’
