Cold as Ice

Chapter 20

Carter was still out of the office when Ebony got a call from Robbo and headed down the corridor to see him. He was in there with Pam and one other researcher, a young graduate named James. The door was open as usual. Pam smiled. Robbo was sitting behind his desk, rocking his chair, and motioned for Ebony to come and sit beside him.

Robbo was giving James instructions. ‘Get a list of all of Danielle Foster’s contacts on Facebook, James, specifically the ones who are in the same circumstances as her – same age and with a child and keep it to North London for now. And concentrate on the ones that cross over with Emily Styles first. Hawk could have access to these women via a Facebook account. People have hundreds of friends on social media sites. Just a handful, maybe ten per cent, are real friends.’

He looked over his glasses at Pam and noted her disapproving look. Hacking into Facebook was not without its problems – getting permission from the American company was laborious at best. But then both Pam and Robbo knew there were other ways, not quite so legit.

He turned back to talk to Ebony.

‘Thought we could brainstorm.’

He picked up a highlighting pen and looked at the profiles of the two women as he highlighted the common traits. Robbo was making notes by hand, on his desk.

‘I want to go through the similarities between the two women and try to understand what Danielle is going through and what motivates Hawk. We can start with the info so far: age, physical type, lifestyle, family, relationship status. Emily and Danielle? What do they have in common physically?’

‘Physically? Just age, as far as I can tell,’ answered Ebony. ‘Emily was auburn, five foot seven, size twelve, and Danielle is dark-haired, five foot eight inches and very slim.’

‘So Hawk doesn’t go for a particular colouring in a woman. Personality-wise?’

‘We don’t know how similar they are really – we only have Tracy’s concept of her daughter and that’s based on a few meetings,’ said Ebony. ‘We do know that they liked one another. They were friends so they must have been alike in many ways or in the core things like the way they were towards people, their principles.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Robbo. ‘The core of a good friendship has to be common interests. Shared values. We have to talk to someone who really knew the women.’

‘Yes. It has to be another woman,’ agreed Ebony. ‘A friend from college, maybe.’

Robbo nodded. ‘We know that both women had been through a lot in their lives, both were starting over, trying to turn their lives around, and were tough women.’ He looked at Ebony.

She nodded her agreement.

‘Point is? You’d think they would have learnt not to trust?’

‘Yes, but something about Hawk made them think they were safe with him.’

‘He has some sort of affinity with them, with women – with children.’

‘But he feels something for the child, he doesn’t harm it. He didn’t harm Jackson,’ Ebony said. ‘He empathizes with the child. He relates to children better than adults. He identifies with the child. He takes pleasure from parting the mother and child. Something happened in his own childhood.’ Robbo was making notes: ‘Yes. Some parting with his mother. Some unnatural separation or betrayal in his childhood left him missing a piece of the emotional puzzle.’

Pam had stopped typing. Robbo heard it. He was used to her ways. She didn’t like to interrupt. But Robbo knew her silence meant she had something to add.

‘What you got for us, Pam?’

‘So many names – over fifty so far – women who went missing in their twenties with one child or more.’

‘Any of those turn up dead? Bodies found with splinters of wood in the skin, emaciated? Asphyxiation, strangulation suspected?’

‘The few that had turned up dead were too badly decomposed to know anything about how they died.’ Pam handed four files across to Robbo. ‘All of them dating from the last five years. I’ll keep searching through Mispers.’

Robbo read off the top few names:

‘Charlotte Rogers never returned from a night out, disappeared in 2011 from Finsbury Park. Her body found a year later in National Trust woodland in Bushey. She could fit the bill – so far as we can currently tell,’ Robbo said as he handed a photo to Ebony. ‘What month did she disappear?’

‘She disappeared in June of that year. That would cross over with another woman, Sophie Vein, found decomposed in Rickmansworth in February 2012, missing nine months.’ Ebony looked at the photo of the body.

‘Impossible to ascertain cause of death – her body was scattered by wildlife. There was very little of her left.’

‘We are going to have to get some other factors going to narrow this down.’

Ebony picked up photos passed over from Pam.

‘Pauline Murphy, Jenny Smith, Mispers. The list goes on and on.’ She opened her hands in the air, exasperated.

‘Okay. Thanks, Pam.’ Robbo passed the files over to James. ‘Make a list of links between these women for me, James. I want to see how many of them share more than five similarities.’

‘If Hawk is responsible for even one of these women it means he is how old?’ Ebony was making notes on a sheet of paper on Robbo’s desk.

‘We are going back five years. Let’s say he started killing when he was in his mid-twenties – hardly anyone starts before then – then he’s thirtyish now. We know he’s strong enough to haul Emily Styles’ body down to the canal and to drop it in.’

‘But she weighed no more than a child.’

‘Granted. Could be a father-figure type then?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Ebony. ‘Something tells me they would trust a man more who was their own age. There’s some sort of attraction there.’

‘What do we know about the geographical layout of these two crimes?’ Robbo laid out a map of North London on the desk. He drew a line from Regent’s Canal out to Emily Styles’ parents’ house in Camden, to where she was last seen and then he drew one out from Regent’s Canal again but this one was to Danielle Foster’s flat in Finsbury Park.

‘There was also the flat that Emily was about to move into.’ Ebony peered at the map. ‘That’s a fifteen-minute walk from her parents’ house the other side of Camden towards King’s Cross. There – Archer Street.’ She found it on the map. Robbo lined it up. ‘The nursery was in between the two.’

‘Was that council-owned?’ asked Robbo.

‘Housing association like Danielle’s,’ answered Pam.

‘James, add that to the list of similarities – they must be in social housing.’

‘Just added that,’ said Pam. ‘Now we’ve narrowed the list to twelve.’

Robbo gave Ebony a cautious smile.