around? Do the kids round you shoot cats with airguns? Do your neighbours fight on the street outside?’
‘Mrs Forester we are not here to judge you, we just want to find out what happened to David.’
The old lady ignored Savage and carried on.
‘Initiatives and targets then back to your nice house with a driveway and a bloody people carrier, I’ll bet. Good school round the corner where the teachers can teach rather than spend their time searching the kids for knives or drugs.’
‘We are police officers, Mrs Forester, we are not social workers or politicians. We are trying to find David and Kelly.’
‘Kelly? Oh, it’s about her is it? I seen on the news she was dead. No one cared before, no one bothered about what had happened to my David.’ The woman’s eyes filled with tears and her head went down, a hand scrabbling in her sleeve for a handkerchief.
Savage made a gesture to Calter and the younger officer moved to comfort the old woman. Savage left the room and went back to the kitchen to see about rustling up a pot of tea. The kitchen was a surprise after the staid lounge: modern, everything clean and tidy. Through the window to the back Savage saw a pretty garden. You’d have to be deaf to enjoy sitting out on the patio, but the plants appeared well-tended and a lot of work had gone into laying out the lawn and the neat flowerbeds. Mrs Forester must be proud of it. Savage wondered if she could say the same about her grandson.
When Savage returned with the tea Mrs Forester had composed herself. She had suggested to Calter that they might like to see David’s room.
‘Room?’ Savage asked. ‘I thought he lived at the flat in North Prospect?’
‘He does. But he only moved out three years ago and I’ve kept his room for him. He likes to crash here sometimes and he’s still got his photo stuff up there so he is round a couple of times a week. Or rather, he used to be.’
‘If you don’t mind, Mrs Forester, it might be useful.’
‘Not at all.’ The old lady’s face brightened for a moment. ‘First on the left at the top of the stairs.’
Savage and Calter climbed the stairs and heard Mrs Forester call out after them. ‘The pictures on the wall are all his own work. He’s quite good with a camera. He was with a club you know?’
‘Which club, Mrs Forester?’ Savage called down.
‘A photography club. I can’t remember the name, but it is in Plymouth. He used to go there before he got interested in video. After that he preferred to make movies.’
Calter mouthed a silent, ‘Did he now?’ to Savage as they entered the bedroom.
The single bed had a faded Chelsea duvet on it and football stickers covered the flat-pack off-white wardrobe and chest of drawers. Over to one side of a window that overlooked the back garden was a desk on which sat with three flatscreen monitors. A jumble of leads snaked down from the monitors to a computer base unit tucked away underneath. Calter moved to the desk and reached down to switch the unit on.
‘Result, ma’am. You don’t have three big screens connected to one machine just to waste your life on Facebook.’
Savage let Calter get on with searching the computer and scanned the pictures on the walls of the room. Large sized black and white prints of women, naked or partially clothed, dark shadows, pale skin, almost abstract and not in any way pornographic. They weren’t even in that category called tasteful, which was merely an excuse for sad wankers to display them without appearing sexist. These were innocent, naturalistic and the women were not looking at the camera. They wouldn’t have been out of place at a local gallery, except Plymouth didn’t do such things very well. Take them up to Salcombe or Dartmouth though and the grockles swarming round the streets in the summer would snatch them up.
Mrs Forester was right, her grandson had talent. But that didn’t square with what the manager of Tamar Yacht Fitters had told DS Riley. Savage looked at the pictures again. They were a world away from a sordid video of a girl shoving a beer bottle up between her legs.
‘Password protected, ma’am.’ Calter interrupted Savage’s thoughts. ‘I’ve tried the usual tricks but I can’t get in. Have to take it to the lads in hi-tech crimes.’
‘Right.’ Savage was browsing through some CDs on a tall rack. Nirvana, Stone Roses, Radiohead, REM. Pretty standard fare for a kid who was a teenager a dozen or more years ago.
‘What kind of twenty something year old has a Chelsea duvet spread?’ Calter asked. ‘And all those stickers? They are the kind of thing an adolescent would have, not a young man.’
‘You’re a profiler now, are you? Chelsea bedspread equals criminal behaviour?’
‘No, ma’am,’ Calter giggled. ‘A bit odd though.’
‘I agree.’
Maybe David Forester hadn’t grown much beyond a teen until something had changed him. Savage looked at some of the football stickers again. Stuck on the wardrobe was an entire set of the 2006 Premiership winning team. From the smiling faces of Lampard, Cole and Drogba to hard-core pornography, drug dealing and violence. In just a few short years.
Chapter 12
Derriford Hospital, Plymouth. Wednesday 27th October. 5.25 pm
The post-mortem on Kelly Donal had been scheduled for twelve thirty and DS Riley had been booked to attend. Savage said she would be along later. If being late had been her intention, missing the whole affair had not. Now that seemed possible because they got stuck in a jam on the A38 not long after they left St Budeaux.
On the dual-carriageway heading east cars sat nose-to-tail and according to their police radio the cause was a major RTC up ahead. Half a dozen ambulances and two fire engines blocked the road creating traffic chaos and leaving a good proportion of Plymouth in total gridlock. At one point even the air ambulance buzzed overhead to land somewhere out of sight, its distinctive blue and red livery striking against the tomb grey sky.
After thirty minutes Calter got bored and said she would walk out of the queue and back to the station. Savage could do nothing but wait, and after another hour the traffic dissolved away and she drove the remaining couple of miles to Derriford Hospital. She struggled to find a space for the car despite the acres of parking that surrounded the ugly, brutal looking complex. Notwithstanding the hospital’s primary purpose, it was no place to be born, be ill or to die. For post-mortems the ambience could not have been better.
Doctor Andrew Nesbit was perfect for PMs too. His straightforward and methodical manner gave him a detachment that at times like these Savage envied. She didn’t think anybody enjoyed eviscerating the dead, but if anyone did it was Nesbit. Savage put her gown and mask on in the anteroom and went into the lab proper where the pathologist hunkered over a stainless steel gurney, his long arms working the corpse like a mantis playing with a fly.
‘Ah, Charlotte, your DS left a while ago but you are welcome to stay for this one if you like.’ Nesbit looked up from the cadaver, an old man with severe facial injuries, body gone a sort of yellowish-white, the veins and bones visible through the translucent skin.
‘Did this man fall into the gutter in a drunken stupor or did he get waylaid and set about by a group of bored youths? Twenty years ago I’d have said the former, these days the latter explanation seems more likely. What do you think?’
‘You tell me, Doc, I thought that was your job.’ Savage moved closer to the dead man. Seventy or so and looking like age would have caught up with him sometime soon anyway had the tarmac not intervened first.
‘Not a pleasant way to die.’ Nesbit bent down again and using a pair of tweezers extracted a piece of grit from the man’s discoloured cheek. ‘Lying in the roadway having a cerebral haemorrhage while the good folk of Plymouth go about their business unaware you are anything other than another homeless statistic sleeping off a drunken binge. Whether an accident or foul play, either way his death was not a glorious ending.’
‘I don’t suppose such a thing exists for any of your patients.’
‘Or for any of us. There are good ways and bad ways but only one exit.’
‘If you added a line about “many path’s to the Lord’s feet” you’d be a passable preacher.’
‘As you know, Charlotte, I’m of an entirely scientific bent. As far as I am aware the only journey this man can
