Cold as Ice

Chapter 34

Robbo went to get a cup of water from the water dispenser by the door. He could hear a couple of officers talking way down the hall. He heard Bowie’s nervous cough. The one that sounded like he had a lump of phlegm in his throat which he hadn’t been able to shift for a decade or two. Every few moments he tried again.

Robbo knew he had gone past the point of being able to close his eyes. Now, he would have to knock himself out with sleeping pills to sleep and then he would sleep for a week, getting up only to eat, staying in his bedroom, sleeping so solidly that he wouldn’t even dream. But for now, he needed to be as mad as it took to see all the layers of the women’s suffering, to see into the mind of the man who caused it.

He got his water and went back to his desk; there were four pieces of jewellery in front of him: the charm bracelet, two rings and the chain. He ran the chain through his fingers over and over. He watched it coil onto the desk. It was mid-afternoon. Pam was watching him out of the corner of her eye. She was worried about him. She knew he needed to sleep so badly but she had seen him this way many times and she knew he would only catnap now until it was over and then he’d collapse for a week.

Robbo sat listening to the noise of the chain, a shushing noise that became loud in his head. He was waiting for HOLMES to finish a check. He picked up Emily Styles’ ring and turned it over in his hand. The sharp edges worn dull from years of use. HOLMES was finished; he printed off the pages he needed and smiled across at Pam, as taking the ring with him, he stood and stepped out into the corridor.

He felt calmer in the corridor. He walked down towards Bowie’s office. Robbo had no love for Bowie. Years ago they had worked together in CID. But Bowie had gone undercover and helped to end one of the biggest paedophile rings in the country. Robbo had been part of the surveillance team watching Bowie as he integrated into the ring. He had his methods but Robbo wasn’t always convinced they were by the book. Robbo was also not sure that anyone could do five years in undercover work and come out of it the same way they went in.

‘This is the new search that takes in the jewellery connection plus other things: age of kids, geographical location to college and within a mile of Hawk’s phone radius.’ Robbo slid a file across Bowie’s desk. On it he had the names of five women; clipped to their names were photos.

‘These women fit all the criteria. Three missing, two dead. All of these women are linked by the fact they are all in their twenties, they are single mums living in North London and they were all attending classes of some kind in order to retrain.’

Robbo handed him the print-out from HOLMES. ‘Two years ago this woman—’ he pointed to the photo of Charlotte Rogers – ‘disappeared and a year later her body was found in woodland belonging to the National Trust.’

‘What was the coroner’s verdict?’

‘Open verdict. The only thing on her was the bracelet but her mother didn’t recognize it. This is Sophie Vein.’ He pointed to another photo. ‘She was found decomposed in a forest in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire in February 2011. She’d been lying there for an estimated nine months. She disappeared a while before that, in the August of the previous summer.’

‘Anything found on her?’

‘Examination of the organs was not possible as they were too badly decomposed; there was evidence of deep ulcerated wounds, causing infections in the bone. Her mother said she always wore a small pink ring on her little finger. Could be the one we have.’

‘We’ll ask Harding to take another look at the post mortem results and get some re-analysis of the samples taken at the post mortem and the burial site. Was there nothing before 2010?’

‘Not that we can uncover. None of the women on the list who might possibly be a victim. If he follows the normal pattern of starting to kill in his early twenties then he is thirty at least.’

‘Something happened in the lead-up to that year then. Something flicked his switch,’ said Bowie.

‘He searches out single mothers; they have to have children. All the women have been described as strong women, determined, not easily fooled. None of these women were registered junkies. None of them were thought to be users of class A drugs.’

‘What were the ulcerated sites on the women’s bodies then? asked Bowie.

‘The results are still not in. But it’s certain that whatever it was started under the skin, localized; it ulcerated and then necrosis occurred,’ answered Robbo. ‘Harding said there was evidence of antibiotics in Pauline Murphy’s hair sample. Her doctor hadn’t prescribed them at the time of her disappearance – it’s the same scenario as Emily Styles. I think Hawk tries to control the infection.’

‘Did he infect them with something himself?’ Robbo shrugged.

‘I don’t know but I’m beginning to think it likely.’

‘He introduces it and then tries to control it?’ asked Bowie. ‘As in experimenting on people, watching them die? What is he, some type of Doctor Mengele?’

‘Could be,’ answered Robbo. ‘Every body is different and some organs will fail before others. When they can’t last any longer he finishes them off. He chooses the time for them to die.’

‘Do we have a DNA sample of Hawk from Pauline Murphy’s body?’

‘Yes we think we do. He left semen on Pauline Murphy’s body but he’s not a match for anyone in our system.’

‘All these women went to colleges within the North London college umbrella,’ said Bowie. ‘But we can’t bring in every male attending and working in the North London college network.’

‘I’ve worked out the dates for these missing women. They don’t just overlap; he doesn’t just replace, he keeps them together. They all cross over. Right now Danielle won’t be alone.’ He showed Bowie the last woman on the list of three.

‘Top photo is of Jenny Smith. A single parent with one child. She was attending a computer course at London Metropolitan University while staying in bed and breakfast accommodation. She left a little girl with friends overnight and failed to come in the morning to collect her. That was two years ago and she hasn’t been seen since.’

‘Eighteen months mean she would have crossed over with Pauline Murphy. Why haven’t we found her remains? He’s been leaving the others where they will be found.’

‘That’s a thing he’s grown into. Maybe that’s why he did it – because we never found her body. He wants attention. He wants recognition. What’s the point in going to all this attention to detail if no one knows about it?’

‘Yes, you could be right. Or maybe she hasn’t been killed yet.’

‘He gives a piece of jewellery to those he kills, doesn’t he?’ Bowie picked up the chain and turned it over in his hand.

‘Yes, but we don’t know what makes him choose a particular piece of jewellery to give to the women. We just know that it must be when he has decided to kill them. The chain around Emily Styles’ neck was enmeshed in her hair, caught at the back of her head where the clasp had become entangled with her hair and torn some out by the roots. The hair was torn from living flesh not dead. So he goes through a ceremony before death: mask of make-up, jewellery. He arranges them for death. I looked back through her file and Jenny Smith always wore her grandmother’s antique engagement ring. We have a photo of it.’ Robbo scrolled down the images on his laptop and stopped at the photo of the ring and then he opened his hand and placed the ring on the desk in front of Bowie. He turned it to show Bowie. ‘It’s the same one we found on Emily Styles.’

Robbo went back to his office and laid the two rings and the chain on the desk in front of him. He couldn’t stop staring at it. Something wasn’t right. He didn’t know what, though. He sat back in his chair and tried to close his eyes, tried to rest. More than anything Robbo had the image of Danielle Foster in the coffin. He started hyperventilating when he thought about it. He could see the body of Pauline Murphy in all its horror, inside the box. He saw the mask of make-up and a chain around her neck. The chain was enmeshed in her flesh and Robbo was trying to pick it out but it was so messy his fingers kept sliding. He looked up at Pauline Murphy’s face but suddenly it wasn’t her face he saw. It was Ebony’s.

‘Robbo?’

He opened his eyes; the smell of apple shampoo surrounded him and he saw Jeanie frowning at him, standing next to him at his desk. The next thing he heard was the almighty clamour of coffee beans being ground. He shot forward in his chair. Carter sniggered.

‘I told Jeanie not to creep up on you.’

‘Bastard.’

Robbo rubbed his face, picked up a handful of Haribo sweets and fed them into his mouth.

‘I saw your update about the ring,’ Carter said.

‘Yeah, the main thing we learn from that is that he wants to carve his name in history, have them include him in the book of serial killers. He’s making sure we know it’s him. He’s got a massive ego. He thinks he’s better than anyone else. He may have a string of short-term relationships but he can’t stay with someone long. He’s easily bored.’ Robbo slid his chair along the length of the desk and then stopped dead as he began furiously tapping on the keyboard. ‘Plus, he has a massively inflated idea of his self-worth; he’s callous, manipulative. These women he killed meant nothing to him as human beings, they were just vehicles towards his notoriety. He’s also irresponsible, impulsive. But he wanted us to find the rings.’

Jeanie picked up the chain and looked at the rings on the end. ‘The chain just doesn’t look right,’ she said.

‘He had no choice but to put them on a chain,’ Carter said as he made coffee. ‘They would have fallen off when the fingers were lost to pond life.’

‘Why didn’t he just put plastic bags over the hands like he did with the head?’ asked Jeanie.

Carter shook his head. ‘If her wrist was already opened by a wound, which it was, then it would have been got at quickly by feeders and she may have just lost her whole hand somewhere in the bottom of the canal, plus these rings were not hers, they probably didn’t fit her hand.’

‘So he had to put them on a chain. Any old chain?’

‘It’s never any old anything with him, is it? He takes months to kill, he’s not going to be rushed into anything, the smallest details matter to him,’ Robbo answered.

‘Then he chose a chain that doesn’t match the rings. It doesn’t look feminine,’ Jeanie said.

‘From another victim?’ asked Carter. ‘Or from him then?’ Carter had stopped making coffee and was focused on Jeanie. ‘Something which was his?’ Robbo was nodding.

Carter looked at his watch. ‘I have to go and meet Ebony. She’s making her way to my house.’

Jeanie’s eyes stayed on Carter as he got up to put his coat on. He looked her way and waited.

‘The more we find out about Hawk, the more nervous I become about Ebony undercover,’ Jeanie said eventually, looking from Carter to Robbo.

Carter put on his coat and stood for a few seconds in the middle of the office. He gave a small nod of the head.

‘That’s why we need her to succeed more than ever.’ He looked over at Robbo.

Robbo was swinging the chain from the ends of his fingers. He had a smile on his face.

‘Maybe we have a little piece of him here. Maybe this is his first mistake.’