Two Evils: A DI Charlotte Savage Novel by Mark Sennen Page B

came up against wood.
    What the …?
    He spun round in the darkness, feeling in all directions. There was a side wall. And there. And there. And there. He ran his hands over the surface. He rapped with his knuckles. Wood. The same as the floor and the ceiling. He was trapped in some sort of box or crate. A metre high by one and a half wide by two long.

    He moved to one side of his little prison and tried kicking at the wooden wall. A dull thump was the only result.
    ‘Help!’ Jason shouted as loud as he could, but his voice came back to him muffled in the same way as his kick had. ‘Help! Heeelllppp!’
    All of a sudden he had trouble breathing. He gasped, but each breath seemed to draw in less and less oxygen. He moved to one side and bashed the wooden wall with his fists. Bang! Bang! Bang!
    It was no good. He was trapped. Trapped in something resembling a coffin.
    A coffin?
    In the darkness he thought he heard some kind of groaning and then his nostrils caught a whiff of decay, of rotting flesh.
    The dead were coming to get him. The zombies, the ghouls, the vampires.
    Jason crawled into one corner of the box and began to cry.

Chapter Seven
    Near Mary Tavy, Dartmoor, Devon. Wednesday 21st October. 11.39 a.m.
    It took Riley forty-five minutes to get to the remote piece of moorland where Perry Sleet’s car had been found. He brought Enders with him, aware the DC had an innate sense of direction and knew his way around the moor. Still, even Enders had trouble navigating to the exact spot, confessing that the northern part of the moor was pretty much unknown to him.
    ‘Pure wilderness,’ Enders said as they turned up a lane which climbed the side of a steep valley. ‘If matey boy’s gone a-wandering out here then he might not turn up for days.’
    As they crested a rise, Riley’s eyes followed Enders’ hand gesture. The moor spread out before them in a splurge of greys and browns, not a tree or a building in sight. The terrain lay in great folds like a series of soft pillows plumped up and placed in a near endless succession as they tumbled into the distance.
    ‘Jesus.’ Riley shook his head. ‘According to Collier, the helicopter was out this morning. Didn’t spot anything.’
    ‘Doesn’t surprise me. Unless he was wearing some kind of high-visibility clothing, they could fly within a hundred metres and not spot him. Imagine he’s face down in a stream bed or at the bottom of a tor. Maybe he’s even gone down a mineshaft like that prison officer we found earlier in the year.’

    ‘His death wasn’t an accident, remember?’
    ‘And this is?’
    Riley didn’t say anything. He just stared ahead as the lane curled left around a small hill and then ran down to a five-bar gate where a blue Audi A3 Sportback sat on the verge, a big ‘Police Aware’ sticker plastered over the windscreen.
    ‘Dead end.’ Riley eased the car to a stop twenty metres from the Audi. ‘And no farm or anything beyond that gate.’
    ‘So what was he doing here?’ Enders clicked open his door and a gust of wind instantly cooled the inside of the car. ‘Bit exposed for a spot of al fresco sex, I’d have thought.’
    ‘Takes all sorts,’ Riley said as he got out too. He pointed at the Audi. ‘Anyway, perhaps they did it in the car.’
    ‘They?’
    ‘Sleet and this Sarah woman.’
    ‘And then what? Her hubby arrives at an inconvenient moment and boshes Sleet?’
    ‘Something like that.’ Riley began to walk down the lane towards the gate. ‘If Sleet hasn’t turned up by the end of today, the car’s coming in for a good going-over. We’ll know more then.’
    As Enders began to complain about their trip being a waste of time, Riley tried to focus on the surroundings. While remote, this wasn’t a good place for an assignation. You were out in the open and it would be pretty obvious what you were up to should anyone come along. On the other hand, who would come along? He asked Enders whether this was a good spot for