Frozen Grave

Chapter 3

It was late morning when Carter and Willis arrived back at the office, both loaded down with boxes of Olivia Grantham’s paperwork taken from her flat. They parked in the car park alongside SOCO vans and squad cars and took the lift up to the third floor. They were part of MIT 17 – the murder squad – which was one of three Major Investigation Teams in Fletcher House. Fletcher House was a concrete three-storey building adjoining Archway Police Station, separated by just a door on level one. All the officers serving in Archway Police Station referred to the MIT teams as ‘the Dark Side’.

They carried the boxes down to the crime analyst Robbo’s office. It was the crime analyst’s job to work out the sequence of events, analyse statements, pull everything together and highlight any gaps in intelligence. It was his job to work out how it all fitted or didn’t. He worked in there with Pam, his ‘work wife’, and there was usually at least one other researcher working alongside them – at the moment it was Hector, a young detective constable who was recovering from a knee operation and on desk duty.

Hector looked up as Carter and Willis entered the room. The door to Robbo’s office was always propped open. Robbo had a desk from where he could look through the glass partition and right down the corridor but it was tucked back against the wall. Behind his chair was a large whiteboard, where he made notes on the case he was working on and pinned up photos and diagrams, location maps. Olivia Grantham’s name was written at the top of the board with photos of Parade Street and stills from the crime scene.

Pam looked up and smiled at Carter.

Carter winked at her. ‘All right, Pam? Have a nice holiday? Is that an all-over tan?’

Pam blushed. ‘It was. It’s fading already.’

‘Has the family been notified?’ Willis asked Robbo as she placed her boxes from Olivia Grantham’s flat on Hector’s desk.

‘Yes, we found a relative,’ he answered. ‘She has family in Yorkshire. Her dad is coming down late tonight and he’ll identify the body tomorrow morning.’

‘We need to get the post-mortem done before then,’ Carter said as he watched whilst Hector shifted the boxes on his desk. ‘Is Dr Kahn doing it?’

‘Yes,’ replied Robbo. ‘Dr Harding is handling the arrangements. She said it’s scheduled for this afternoon at two. Do you want to attend?’

‘Yeah, we have to; personally speaking, want has nothing to do with it. The top box is her bank statements,’ added Carter, as he placed his boxes beside the others.

‘She’s not the paperless type then,’ Hector said as he removed the top from the box and looked at the reams of statements.

Robbo came round to look at the boxes and their contents. ‘Solicitor, remember. Make a spreadsheet of her spending in the last six months, work backwards, Hector,’ said Robbo as he held out his hands for Hector to hand a box over to him. ‘Give one to me – I’ll make sure it’s in order for you.’

‘What have you found out about her, Pam?’ asked Carter.

Pam changed her reading glasses and skimmed down the research she’d done as she read out the bullet points from the page in front of her:

‘Age forty. Originally from Yorkshire. Only child. Solicitor in family law. Never married. I talked to work colleagues this morning. There doesn’t seem to be much of a social scene at her workplace. They didn’t know of any friends outside work. She was on Linkedin, so I’m tracing her contacts there. I’m still building up a picture of her but so far she seems a private person.’

‘Any boyfriend on the scene?’

‘Her work colleagues didn’t think so. She never brought anyone along to any company events.’

‘Okay, well, we need to keep digging.’

Robbo turned to Willis. ‘What were your thoughts when you saw the body?’

Willis was standing in the centre of the room. She hadn’t moved since she put the boxes down on Hector’s desk. She looked as if she were in a world of her own.

‘She was never meant to be in there,’ she replied.

‘What are we saying? Drugged, drunk, you think?’ asked Robbo looking at Carter.

Carter shook his head. ‘Our only suspects and witnesses are the people who sleep in there. They are not going to be the most reliable. We have to look to Olivia’s lifestyle for answers.’

‘I hear you had a run-in with one of the men?’ Robbo said, looking at Carter.

‘Willis did.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘He looked freaked out,’ she answered. ‘He was scared, hurt.’

‘Did he look like he slept rough every day?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well he won’t be able to get into most of the hostels with a dog so he’ll be on the streets somewhere. The Dogs’ Trust care for the dogs on the street. They might know this man,’ Robbo said. ‘Did he say anything?’

‘Nothing. He ran for it when I tried to approach him to bring him in. I pushed too fast. I was trying to catch him off-guard. I messed up.’

‘No, you misjudged – you didn’t mess up,’ corrected Carter.

Robbo was making notes as they talked.

‘We don’t know if he speaks English then. We need to find him and to know exactly who uses that building,’ he said. ‘There must be a mainstay of sleepers in there.’

‘The foreigners tend to stick together. The drinkers do too,’ said Hector.

Robbo made notes. ‘Right. People stay in their social groups,’ he said. ‘I’ll get hold of Social Services for the area and see if they have had any information about Parade Street.’

‘Hannover Estate is a rough one,’ said Carter. ‘Looks like the gangs are rife in there. There was graffiti everywhere.’

‘We know them,’ Robbo agreed. ‘The Hannover Boys are a well-established gang. There are sparodic outbursts of trouble in there. There has been a lot of activity there recently. Robbery around the neighbouring streets and the usual muggings, phone theft.’

‘What about the serious stuff?’ asked Carter.

‘They are thought to be responsible for three murders in the last two years – gangland turf wars – a beef about territory. Twelve rape charges down to them but didn’t make it to court. Gang rapes are their speciality. Five of them are in prison for the rape of two girls held hostage in a flat in the tower block. They were kept for thirty-six hours. Both families had to be given witness protection and moved out of the area. The girls were thirteen. Mahmet Balik is the man behind most of these attacks.’

‘Jesus – well within their capabilities then: murder, rape. Balik seems to be unchecked,’ said Carter.

‘Mahmet Balik and his deputies,’ said Hector. ‘I was part of the Met’s drive to sort out the gangs on that estate when the Trident Operation changed brief to include the gangs. I had to help a family there. The fourteen-year-old daughter had been caught carrying weapons for male gang members. She’d been passed around as a piece of meat within the gang, sexualized from the age of twelve. She was in a mess. Already on crack. We had to relocate the whole family because they lived in fear of reprisals. Mahmet Balik was the main one they were scared of. He’s escaped a murder charge a few times now. There’s been insufficient evidence to get him but he’s getting cockier all the time.’

‘Okay. We need house-to-house in there then. Let’s see what people are saying on the estate,’ said Carter. ‘We also need to find Olivia on CCTV on her way there, if we can.’

‘We have her car reg now,’ Robbo said as he went across to pour coffee into five mugs. ‘We have patrol cars looking out for it.’ He handed the mugs out.

Carter took his coffee and sipped appreciatively. Robbo was a coffee connoisseur. He had been given a machine that made it from pods for Christmas but it was still unopened in its box. He preferred to grind his mix of coffee beans and brew it in a cafetière. That and Haribo gummy bears were his biggest weakness, and added to his thick waistline. It didn’t help that he never wanted to move from his office. His agoraphobia was never completely under control. It took managing – it didn’t like surprises.

‘So…’ said Robbo. ‘Not only did she come to a derelict building in a condemned street, she came in a suspender belt and stockings.’ He turned to Willis. ‘She went in there by mistake? Was she meeting someone? Did someone take her in there?’

‘We looked in the drawers in her bedroom,’ said Carter. ‘Bondage gear and ball gags and some sort of complicated-looking harness.’

‘That’s why she went in there then, was it? The thrill of a lifetime?’ asked Robbo.

‘Maybe…’ said Carter. ‘She wasn’t careful what she wished for.’

‘What about the body itself?’ Robbo turned to ask Willis.

She walked across to the whiteboard and the crime-scene photos. A map of the area was pinned up and a close-up of Parade Street.

‘The area around the body was heavily scuffed – marks associated with kneeling, stamping, bootmarks, palm-prints, belonging to several different people,’ she said as she pointed to the diagram on the board. ‘Her collarbone was broken. Her jaw too. She had genital lacerations, not sure how deep they went – probably caused by an instrument. The amount of blood at the scene indicates that she was alive, her heart was still pumping blood around, for the duration of the attack. Large deep head wound, fractured skull and possible brain damage.The ligature around her neck was probably not sufficient to kill; although it might have cut off the blood supply to her brain and caused her temporary unconsciousness.’ The office went quiet.

Pam stopped typing. ‘Let’s hope so. Poor woman.’

‘Poor woman with a lot of money to spend on getting laid.’ Hector ruffled a sheet of paper in the air. ‘Were talking over a hundred quid a month on sex sites.’

Robbo walked back round his desk to take a call. Carter waited expectantly.

‘What’s up?’

‘They’ve found her car.’