Devils way, p.12
Devil's Way, page 12
The internet always fascinated Kate. It was possible to go into all kinds of weird places. She likened it to searching down the back of sofas. You never knew what people had left behind.
She decided to concentrate on discovering more about Anna Treadwell, but it looked like she’d never had any social media, no Facebook or Twitter, or if she did, it had been taken down. An image came up with her name in the Google search, a rather unflattering close-up picture taken from her social worker ID card. Anna had a broad face with a high forehead and a strong chin. Her blue eyes were piercing and set close together. In the ID photo, her forehead shone from the camera flash, her dark hair was tied back, and several strands had escaped, making a light corona of chestnut brown frizz around her head.
Kate did a reverse image search on the photo, but nothing came back. She then found a small obituary without a picture, which stated that the funeral of Anna Treadwell would take place on October 23rd 2007, at Exeter Cemetery. It must have been a few months after her death until the body was released. The text underneath read:
* * *
It is Anna’s wish that there are no flowers. Charitable donations can be made via Maureen.Cook@cranboroughwriters.com
* * *
She googled “Maureen Cook Cranborough Writers” and found a rather cheesy website with the words ‘Cranborough Writers Group’ spelt out in Scrabble tiles. It said the group met once every two weeks at a community centre in Cranborough, a small town close to Okehampton. Kate clicked on details of the group’s latest anthology collection. It was called The Seven, and it had its own page on the website, advertising a published version of the group’s work consisting of seven short stories.
The cover for the anthology looked amateurish. “The Seven” was written in typewriter font against a black background. Below was a line of seven glowing human figures in silhouette, standing in line with their arms outstretched. Underneath the cover image was written:
Seven dark tales to intrigue, move and amaze.
A young mother has to let go…
A secret box in a garden shed opens the door to a terrifying new world…
A long-lost friend appears at the door of an elderly gent and becomes his worst nightmare…
A bungee jumping accident leads back to a man hiding a pocket knife in his sock…
A married gay couple’s sleep is disturbed by mysterious bumps in the night…
And many more!
Are you ready to experience THE SEVEN?
* * *
Copies of THE SEVEN can be bought via Abble Graphics Ltd RRP £14.99
* * *
Kate noted that Anna wasn’t one of the seven authors included in the anthology, but she was intrigued that Maureen Cook had been close enough friends with Anna to organise tributes for her funeral. Kate thought back to what Gregory had told them: Anna had no friends.
Kate sent a short neutral message to Maureen’s email address, asking if she could speak to her in confidence about a former writing group member.
Kate turned her attention back to Anna. The newspapers didn’t give away much about her murder beyond it being a “vicious hammer attack”, but she figured this could attract the ghouls. It took a great deal of digging online over the next couple of hours, but she eventually found a Reddit blog where someone had uploaded the crime scene photos.
Kate had seen a lot as a police officer and a private investigator, but the pictures turned her stomach. Anna’s body lay on the carpet next to an unmade single bed. The wall and carpet were covered in blood spatter fanning out in all directions. The sheets and blankets were soaked in blood and bunched up at the end of the bed. Anna’s left leg was raised and tangled at the end of the sheets. She was lying face up, but her head and face were unrecognisable, such was the brutality of the attack.
Six photos were uploaded on the Reddit blog, and the other images showed the trail of blood spatter and bloody footprints leading from Anna’s body to the window and back out of the room. What surprised Kate was that two sets of footprints had been marked up and numbered. As she clicked back through the photos, the two sets were prominent, and their route was marked as coming in and leaving. These weren’t accidental footprints. Whoever came in and out didn’t skirt around the body, trying to avoid the blood. She made a note to ask Gregory, the neighbour, about this. Did he step in the blood when he found her body?
Anna’s bedroom was rather sad, with minimal furniture. In the final photo, the mirror above a vanity table in the corner of the room reflected a crime scene photographer in white overalls. She could clearly see his face when she zoomed in on the image. The mirror was angled so that his face was captured slightly side on, showing his entire face. Kate stared at it for a moment. She dragged the photo onto her computer desktop. She zoomed in on it, cropped the image and then sharpened it so that the picture of the man’s face was now in close-up and much clearer. Kate then opened Google Reverse Image, dropped in the file, and pressed search.
It only took a moment for Google to search for similar images using the man’s face. A grid of three images appeared: two from Facebook, where the same man was pictured behind a barbecue in his garden, posing with tongs and wearing a stripy apron. In the third, his photo was used in an interview with a forensics magazine.
‘Bingo,’ said Kate. His name was Bernard Crenshaw. She debated for a moment and then sent him a short message.
25
In the early afternoon, Kate had a message from Tristan that his meeting with Lewis was over, and he’d be heading back to the office. It was a hot day, and her house didn’t have air conditioning. Kate felt the heat was sapping her energy; she was still struggling to have any appetite and had to force herself to eat a slice of toast with a thin spread of butter, and she only ate because she had to put something in her stomach when she took her antibiotics.
Just after three, Kate left the house and went next door to their office. The campsite shop was busy with people going in and out. As Kate reached the steps leading up the side of the building to their office on the second floor, two shirtless young surfer guys in board shorts came out of the shop. They were both good-looking and in their twenties with shoulder-length dark hair.
‘Hey, how are you doing?’ said one of the guys. He had an American accent and seemed to know her.
‘Can I help you?’ she said. It came out a little more tartly than she’d intended. She’d just wanted to get to the office without someone from the campsite asking her about something.
‘I’m Dieter. This is Wolfgang. We found you in the water,’ he said. Kate stopped on the stairs, turned to face the young guys for a moment, and then felt her cheeks flush with embarrassment.
There was a ding as the door of the campsite shop opened, and an elderly British couple in walking gear came out of the shop with ice creams. Kate walked down the stairs and waited until they were out of earshot.
‘It was you who pulled me out of the water?’ she said.
‘Yeah. You were in real trouble,’ said Wolfgang. His bare legs were covered in a dusting of white sand.
The feeling came back to Kate of being dragged down into the water and turned over and over. The pain as her arm and face scraped along the seabed. And the horrible thought that her life would be over within a few seconds. Kate put her hands over her face. These two beautiful young men had saved her life.
‘Hey. Are you okay?’ asked Dieter.
‘No,’ said Kate, unable to stop the tears now. She didn’t know what else to say. How do you thank someone who saved your life? She had no memory of what happened. She took her hands away from her face and wiped her eyes. They were silent as they stared at her. ‘I’m sorry. I should have come over to speak to you both, to say thank you.’
Out of nowhere, a big sob rose from her chest, and she began crying. The guys looked around, clearly not knowing what to do.
‘What’s up there?’ asked Dieter.
‘My office,’ said Kate through her tears. They each grabbed an arm and helped her up the stairs to the office. The agency office space had been Myra’s living room, and it still had the old 1970s patterned carpet. A row of windows ran the length along the back of the building and looked out over the beach. Dieter and Wolfgang guided Kate to an armchair next to the big table in the middle of the room.
‘Get her a glass of water,’ said Dieter. He crouched beside Kate as Wolfgang went off to the small kitchen.
‘We heard you were in the hospital,’ he said. The water groaned in the pipes as Wolfgang filled a glass and returned, handing it to Kate.
‘Yeah. But I’m okay. I’ll be okay, thanks to you both. Bit of a chest infection.’ Kate took the glass in her shaking hands. She took a gulp of water and found a tissue in her pocket to blot her face and nose.
‘I don’t know what to say to you both, but thank you.’
Wolfgang crossed his arms over his bare chest and smiled.
‘We didn’t do anything, really. Do you know about rip tides? Do you know how dangerous they are?’
‘Yes, and that makes me feel all the more stupid. I’ve been swimming in the sea first thing every morning for years.’
‘Have you been back in the water since?’ asked Dieter.
‘No.’
‘You’ve got to get back on the horse. We’ve both been busted up bad by the sea.’
‘I fell off a fifty-foot wave in Portugal,’ said Wolfgang. ‘It’s like landing on concrete. I busted two ribs, and my pelvis bone broke and came through the skin.’ He pulled down the waistband of his shorts a little to show her a long curving scar above his pubic bone.
The door opened, and Tristan walked in. He didn’t seem to know what to say to this odd tableau of the two topless surfers standing over Kate sitting in the armchair, one of them with his shorts pulled down.
‘Is everything okay?’ said Tristan, looking at Wolfgang and Dieter.
‘Yes,’ said Kate, wiping her face and getting up. ‘These are the guys who pulled me out of the water.’
Wolfgang pulled up his waistband. Tristan’s demeanour changed, and they all shook hands.
‘I’ve seen you around,’ said Dieter to Tristan. ‘Sweet tattoos.’
‘Thanks,’ said Tristan.
‘Wolfgang was just telling me that he fell off a wave in Portugal,’ said Kate.
‘Yeah. I was in the hospital for a month. But I went back in the water, and you need to get back in there,’ he said.
Kate nodded.
‘How long are you both staying? I meant to tell you, I’m going to comp your week. You won’t have to pay,’ she said.
‘We’re going back tomorrow,’ said Dieter. There was another awkward beat.
‘Do you guys want coffee?’ asked Tristan. Dieter stretched his arms above his head.
‘It’s our last day, and we wanted to catch some surf before we left,’ he said. Wolfgang nodded.
‘Absolutely. You two, please go and have fun, and thank you again,’ said Kate.
The two guys went off, and Tristan watched them from the door before closing it.
‘That was mortifying,’ said Kate, crossing to the kitchen to put the kettle on.
‘Those were the guys who rescued you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did they give you mouth to mouth?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I think that’s something you’d want to remember if they did,’ he said. Kate laughed. She was feeling much better, but a part of her felt shabby and embarrassed that she hadn’t sought them out to say thank you. She made a pot of tea, and they sat down to discuss the day’s events.
‘I feel like you’ve done better than me,’ said Kate, looking at the map from Lewis. ‘This is the first time we’ve heard a direct theory from the police and how their investigation progressed. Do you think this Lewis guy is reliable?’
‘For the first half an hour of our meeting, I thought he was a bit of a twerp, and then when he started talking, I could see that he had been a dedicated police officer.’
‘Until he stole drugs,’ said Kate. ‘And how many pints did he drink during your meeting?’
‘Three, with whisky chasers. But he did tell us about a visit to the couple on the nearby smallholding, Danvers Farm, who were acting weirdly.’
‘From his perspective as a drunk and a drug addict?’
‘He did say that their car was in a right state. Muddy.’
‘They lived on a farm. Farms are muddy. And what was their motive or link to Charlie?’
‘Theirs was the closest dwelling to Devil’s Way Tor. Lewis said that they searched the farmhouse and buildings and they found nothing.’
‘Let’s focus back on the link to the social worker, Anna Treadwell. The fact she lived so close to the Coldharbour estate where Charlie lived. And also what Jean said about her fixation with him.’
‘What would be a motive for killing Anna? She didn’t have any money, that we know of.’
‘Isn’t that an assumption?’ asked Kate. ‘She bought a house in an okay area.’
‘You know about my past,’ said Tristan. ‘After my mum died and dad was AWOL, Sarah took on the role of parent. She was only sixteen, and we had an endless parade of social workers knocking on the door. I was fourteen, and at one point, I came close to being shipped off to a children’s home for a couple of years. Sarah had to fight to be my full-time guardian. Anyway, my point is that all those social workers came to see us; men, women, old and young, and none of them had the look of being rich. I think there are good and bad social workers, but none of them goes into it for the money.’
Kate got up and went to the window. She watched two families on two sides of the beach. In both places, the fathers were larking about with the kids, and the mothers were packing up the picnic baskets and organising everything. She thought back to her early years with Jake, and how the social workers she contacted were hostile to her, quite rightly, it turned out.
‘Okay, regarding Anna. Her neighbour said someone was on her property twice before she died. Someone tried the handle late at night, and she saw someone in the garden in the middle of the night a few days later. Why? If they weren’t after her money, what were they after?’
‘There could have been a vengeful father whose kids had been taken away from him or the mother. And she could have had an antagonistic personality. What if she did the same to other parents as she did with Charlie?’
Kate came and sat back down.
‘Jean said that Anna became obsessed with Charlie. She said to him that they would soon be together.’
‘Do you really think she abducted Charlie?’ asked Tristan. ‘Why would she abduct him if she already had the power to take him away from Jean and Becky? And she was a registered foster carer. If she wanted to, she could have had him removed from Becky’s care.’
‘I know. Whatever happened to Charlie, he was taken from here.’
Kate looked back at the map on the table, with Lewis’s writing on it, indicating the boggy land and the Pixie Tree leading off the tributary, where the police dogs had detected Charlie’s scent. ‘Right now, we’re waiting for Joel to return from his holiday, and I don’t know when these two people I emailed today will get back to me. We have this map and an idea of what the police did as part of their investigations. I’d like to go back to Devil’s Way. Do you think Ade would be up for coming with us? He was one of the first police officers on the scene. It could help us to have his perspective. I just need to see it all again.’
26
The mercury was already tipping twenty-eight degrees Celsius when they set off for Devil’s Way on Monday morning.
Kate was driving, and the air conditioning in her car had packed up so they had the windows wide open. Ade was sitting in the back, wagging a paper fan like an overheated señorita.
‘Sorry about the heat,’ she said, eyeing him in the mirror. His long hair, which he always blow-dried straight, was starting to curl up and frizz. And he was wearing some kind of long dress robe or kaftan with bright blue and green stripes.
‘I bought this from a souk when I went down the Nile,’ he said, seeing Kate studying his attire. ‘Very cooling. And this fan is from the pound shop in Ashdean.’
‘Did you like Egypt?’ asked Tristan.
‘I did. The landscape and people were so beautiful… The sense of being part of history, seeing the Pyramids. And I didn’t get the shits at all. Not once. Saying that, I washed everything with Palmolive hand soap, even lettuce,’ he said, fanning himself furiously as they bumped their way along the track. Tristan looked sideways at Kate, and they exchanged smiles.
‘I’ve been over my notes from my police pocket book, and I’ve got them with me,’ he said, patting a tote bag beside him. ‘Do you want me to run through what I can remember that day I got the call about Charlie being missing?’
‘Yes. Where were you coming from on that day?’ said Kate.
‘I was on the night shift in Okehampton, and we got the call at 4am. I can remember my heart sinking when I heard. I only had two hours left till clocking off.’
‘It’s around ten minutes from Okehampton town centre to where we are now,’ said Kate as they passed a fallen tree on the moor beside the road. Ade flicked his fan closed and tapped it on the back of Kate’s seat.
‘Stop the car!’
Kate hit the brakes, and they jolted to a stop. Tristan rubbed his neck and looked back at Ade. ‘Sorry, Tris. I’ve just realised it’s here where we found the bloke in the ditch in his car.’
They all got out. The heat was beating down on the dusty track. Pale grass lined the road on each side, and they could hear the crickets chirping. There was a large tree, which was broken in half. A few long-dead leaves clung to the branches, and the grass grew out of the trunk’s split. Next to it was a deep ditch.
