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turned sour. Drugs or sex, she’d overdosed or been raped. Either way, the hosts had ended the night with a body on their hands. In London you’d struggle to dispose of the evidence, but up here?
    Savage kept silent, not wanting to confirm Calter’s suspicions. Then she nodded towards the entrance to the car park as a vehicle swung in past the two uniformed officers.
    ‘About bloody time. The PolSA. Let’s see what he has to say.’
    The police search adviser turned out to be new in the job. He’d done half a dozen courses and knew a string of buzzwords, but by the end of the conversation with him Savage wasn’t convinced by his proposed strategy. And neither was Calter.
    ‘He couldn’t locate a burger in a bun,’ Calter said, as the PolSA went to find Frey. ‘Search the lake and five hundred metres around where the bag of clothes were found? I could have told you that. But where else?’
    ‘He doesn’t want to squander resources, Jane,’ Savage said. She pointed up at the forest rising from the far side of the lake. ‘And you can see his point. It would take hundreds of officers to search the woodland, and with the density of the trees and scrub you could pass within a couple of metres of a body without seeing anything. On the other hand you’re right; what he’s come up with is hardly rocket science. I’d have liked something else.’
    Savage left Calter at the car park and strolled along the road which bordered the reservoir. To the left the woodland was a mixture of new plantings, half-grown trees, and full-grown pines. Beneath the mature trees light scrub hugged the ground, but the canopy high above prevented much of it from growing. Searching those areas would be easy. Likewise with the sections of forest which had been clear felled. It was the areas with half-grown trees that would prove a problem for the search teams. The pines were five to ten metres high and their branches reached down to near ground level. The result was a mass of almost impenetrable greenery. Anything other than a cursory search would prove near impossible. In its entirety Fernworthy comprised several square kilometres and the terrain was by no means flat. There was steep hillside, streams and gullies, and here and there rocks pushed up from the peaty ground. Although there were a few forest tracks, access along those would need to be in four-wheel-drive vehicles and the majority of the searching would have to be done on foot.
    Savage paused and felt the warmth of the sun. With the water and the forest this place was as perfect a beauty spot as one could imagine. And yet there was something unsettling about the place. She looked into the tree line on the other side of the reservoir. Beyond the first few trunks there was nothing but shadow, thick, black and impenetrable. She blinked and turned away, her eyes drawn to a movement on the water. For a second her heart skipped a beat as a monster-like hump rose from the reservoir near the centre. But the black bump was no beast, rather, it was one of Frey’s men. The man raised his arm and made a signal. At once a whine from an outboard filled the air as the officer in charge of the dinghy gunned the engine and surged towards the diver. It looked, to Savage’s uneducated eye, as if the diver had found something.
    The sunken treasure lay on the bank side, stretched out on a blue tarp. A long strip of green webbing with a loop and a ratchet mechanism at one end and a big hook at the other.
    ‘A tie-down,’ Frey said. ‘Not been in the water long. No weed or slime and no tarnishing of the metal.’
    ‘What makes you think this has anything to do with the girl?’ Savage said as she knelt at the edge of the tarp. ‘Looks like a piece of rubbish to me.’
    ‘Maybe. But if so then it’s expensive rubbish. Do you know how much a set of good quality tie-downs cost?’
    ‘Tell me.’
    ‘A lot. Certainly enough that you don’t chuck one away without good reason.’
    ‘So what would