‘Not much for us here. Let’s go upstairs.’
Savage led the way up to the next floor. A series of three rooms jigsawed themselves into the odd space. The master had a large double bed and inside the room a bad taste gagged at the back of Savage’s throat. Acrid, bitter, just plain off, she thought. Various items of clothing lay strewn around the floor and at the end of the bed two piles of white hand towels; one pile neatly folded, the other in a jumble.
‘Jesus wept,’ Riley poked the jumbled mess with his foot while covering his nose with his forearm. ‘This smells bloody disgusting.’
‘What is it?’
‘Semen I think, ma’am. The towels are absolutely saturated and the whole lot stinks as if it is rotting. Looks like he has been wanking for England.’
‘This is where we need DC Calter. I am sure she would be able to come up with something witty.’
‘”Come” being the operative word, ma’am.’
‘Quite.’ Savage turned and left the room. ‘Let’s move on, I promised Layton this would be a quick scan around.’
The next room was about half the size of the master and seemed to function as some kind of storage area. There were cardboard packing boxes, an old mattress on its side, a rolled up carpet, a computer base unit with no monitor, no leads.
‘Layton will take care of sifting through this lot,’ Savage said, moving to the final room.
The door opened and when she flicked the light switch she knew at once they had hit gold. ‘Box room’ would have been an honest estate agent’s description for the space measured no bigger than Savage’s arm span. A large window overlooked the road, but you wouldn’t know it because the glass was covered with thick black paint and not a chink of light penetrated from the outside.
‘Darkroom?’ Riley said. ‘Once anyway.’
With the advent of digital photography the darkroom had become redundant, but it appeared as if Harrison had elected to keep the room sealed to the outside world for other reasons. Against one wall a small computer workstation had a printer shelf to one side, a base unit below and two large widescreen monitors on the desk. Apart from the space taken by the workstation the rest of the walls were covered in prints. A4 in size, each print overlapped the next and ran up the wall in a column reaching all the way to the ceiling with no space between each column. In fact, Savage noted the ceiling had been plastered with prints as well. The prints seemed to bear down on the room, compressing the space and threatening to bury them in an avalanche. Of girls. Savage recognised some shots Harrison must have taken in the nurseries he visited because the girls sat staid and starched in formal poses. However, most of the shots appeared candid, many taken from Harrison’s front room. They showed girls passing by on the street or sunbathing on the Hoe, unaware of Harrison’s long lens sucking them in.
Looking closer now Savage could see that dozens of the pictures had been annotated in black marker. An arrow drawn on pointing to a bra strap showing, a flash of panties, a glimpse of inner thigh, a trio of drunken girls staggering down the street with their breasts half hanging out. At the end of the arrow a word: ‘Slut?’, ‘Tart?’, ‘Whore?’, ‘Dirty?’
The words shocked her as much as the sheer number of images, but most of all she found herself shocked by the actual image content. These were ordinary girls Harrison had snapped outside his house and on the Hoe, not some fantasy from a magazine, but real. The message didn’t need much decoding in Savage’s mind. Out there, in the streets and the parks and the clubs flesh displayed itself, advertised the availability of easy sex and longed to be touched, to be consumed.
Savage saw Riley shifting his stance, his face grimacing at each new image.
‘Is that what you think? Those words?’ Savage said. ‘I mean “you” as in “men”?’
‘It’s not what we think rationally, ma’am, but maybe it’s how we think when we look. You are in a sweet shop, you expect the sweets to taste nice, right?’
‘And nice is slutty?’
‘Nice is available.’
‘But possibly not to Harrison.’
‘It could explain a lot.’
Savage examined the images for a second time. If so much unavailable flesh had flashed in front of Harrison perhaps frustration had made him go mad, but then again maybe the pictures on the wall comprised a mere sideshow and something deeper drove him to kill.
‘Ma’am?’
Riley pointed to a row of framed prints on the shelf above the printer. Rosina Salgado Olivarez, Kelly Donal, Simone Ashton and Alice Nash. They were formal pictures, each girl dressed in her nursery uniform, smiling and looking straight at the camera. Donal and Ashton can’t have realised their killer peered back through the lens at them.
On a higher shelf golden writing sparkled on a set of hardback notebooks. Four altogether, each with a girl’s name embossed in gold on the spine: Trinny, Lucy, Deborah and Katya. None of the names matched the victims nor any of the women on the mispers list.
Savage took the first book, the one with Trinny written on the spine. Inside narrow ruled lines were filled with an almost impenetrable scrawl in black ink. Harrison had never thought of using blotting paper and the resulting ink smudges everywhere made deciphering the writing even more difficult. She skimmed through the lines of facts and figures about Trinny, whoever she was. Height, weight, eye colour, those made sense, but the rest of the text just waffled. Page after page describing, in minute detail, Trinny’s clothing, her shopping habits, her food preferences. Then came other ramblings, Harrison’s explanation of the love he felt for Trinny, what he was going to do with and to her. Some of it was impassioned, half poetry, half florid prose, the rest was pornographic, sick. After thirty or so pages the writing ended with a single word on an otherwise blank page: ‘Sorry.’
Savage scanned back through the text. Who was Trinny? Might she be another victim they had yet to discover? Savage shuddered at the thought and skipped back through some more pages. Then she spotted it: an address.
‘Beacon Park. It’s Kelly Donal.’
‘Trinny is Kelly?’ asked Riley.
‘Yes.’ She handed the book to Riley. ‘Read the description of her, first page.’
‘My dream lovely dream with the long brown hair and that starched white shirt top buttons undone and those heaving breasts pushing outwards wishing to be free and in my hands hazel eyes with plucked eyebrows narrow lips and white teeth the cutest nose that can smell my desire you sweet for me alone and your young innocence that longs for the closeness of my lonely flesh with your purity wrapped around me so safely.’
‘You’ve seen the shots of Kelly? The description matches,’ Savage said.
‘Perfectly. Anyway the address says everything, ma’am. Congratulations.’
Savage nodded. ‘In the circumstances I am not celebrating. Especially since we have two big unanswered questions.’
‘Which are?’
‘Where is Harrison and where the hell is Alice Nash?’
Chapter 33
Penzance Police Station, Cornwall. Tuesday 9th November. 8.41 am
Tatershall slammed the phone down and thumped the desk. First thing Tuesday and the day turning crap already. He had called a certain DC Nikki Lees at Dartmouth nick and unhelpful appeared to be her middle name. Rude too, treating him like an out-of-town hillbilly deputy. She hadn’t known the owners of Netherston Cottage, hadn’t been willing to try and find out either and didn’t seem at all interested in his mispers.
‘Stupid idiots,’ Tatershall said to Simbeck. ‘A few boats, a bit of sun and some rich ponces flashing their money around and they think they are living in bloody Monaco. The likes of them are obviously too busy licking some yachtie’s arse to have time to bother with us thickos down here in Cornwall.’
‘A yacht, a bit of sun and a rich ponce would do me fine, boss,’ Simbeck said. ‘Even if I did have to lick his
