Cold as Ice

Chapter 26

Robbo stood next to Carter, ready to speak at the meeting in the Enquiry Team Office. The place was packed. It was the largest of the offices and always used when a meeting of the entire team was necessary. With the discovery of a new victim even Chief Inspector Bowie was present. Behind Robbo the photos of Emily Styles and Danielle Foster were pinned to one of the many boards around the walls. He pinned a new photo next to them.

‘I’ve just got the results of the X-rays from Doctor Harding – taken while she’s waiting for the body to thaw. The victim had a history of traceable injuries from when she was hit by a car as a child and we have a match with dental records. It’s definitely this woman. Pauline Murphy.’ It was a photo of a dark-haired woman in her twenties taken at a winter wedding. ‘She went missing a year ago in December 2012.’

A murmur went around the office as the team took in the timescale being talked about. Ebony was sitting at her desk opposite Jeanie. Everyone had been called in to the meeting. Jeanie had a lot she wanted to say.

‘Pauline disappeared without trace after a night out with friends. It was believed that she had started to make her way home alone when she was abducted. She was last seen leaving a bar on Upper Street at one in the morning. Like the others, Pauline was a single parent. She had a child of three who has since moved to France with the father.

‘Pauline was described by those who knew her as a loyal friend; she was a sweet-natured woman who had struggled academically because she was dyslexic. She was attending an evening class once a week studying IT.’

Carter turned and looked at the map on the board behind him. ‘He dumps a body in the middle of one of London’s best-known open spaces. The Heath covers over seven hundred acres.’ It was colour-coded for the areas. ‘She was found here.’ There was a red sticker placed over where they found her body.

‘Who patrols the Heath? Who’s responsible for it?’ asked Bowie. Bowie was handed a mug of coffee. He looked like he needed it. He had large bags beneath his eyes.

‘There is the twelve-man constabulary with dogs that patrol it,’ answered Robbo. ‘They hadn’t been out in this particular section for forty-eight hours.’

Carter spoke: ‘We are still working our way through the list of groundsmen who might have had access to the Heath on that day.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t think we’ll find him that way. He could have easily impersonated a groundsman. I think if the Heath is familiar to him then he’s likely to be, or have been at some time in his life: a dog walker, a jogger, or maintenance personnel. I would say most people who use the Heath live within a two-mile radius of it; it takes too long to get through the traffic to it otherwise.’ Bowie was nodding.

Robbo took up where Carter left off. ‘He stays within his triangle of offences in North London. His territory may be small but it’s densely populated. The trouble is, I don’t think we’re going to get that lucky with him. He might make a small mistake. He’s never going to make a big one.’

‘What was the condition of the body?’ asked Bowie.

Carter answered: ‘We have to wait for the post mortem, but her injuries and the skeletal look of her body are the same as Emily Styles.’ Carter nodded to Robbo and waited to continue while he managed to load the images on his laptop and connect with the PCs on desks around the room. The officers crowded around the shared PC screens to view the images. ‘If you scroll the images that Robbo has just sent you, you will see. There are too many similarities for this not to be Hawk. A bag had been placed over her head. She has large open wounds, ulcerated, that expose the bone in some places. She has thick makeup on her face too – we believe that this is important to him.’

There was a silence in the room apart from the clicking of mice and the tapping on keyboards. A photo of the charm bracelet came up.

‘What about the jewellery? Is it significant?’ asked Bowie.

Carter answered: ‘We know it belongs to Danielle. So it confirms that he has her. Why he’s given Pauline Murphy the bracelet we don’t know but we presume it’s to show how clever he thinks he is. In this case he’s telling us that Danielle is still alive. We don’t know whether the rings found on Emily Styles signified the same thing. We know they probably belonged to women he had killed or was about to kill. Hopefully we are going to learn a lot more about Hawk from Pauline Murphy’s body.’ Carter looked at Robbo’s laptop and the images taken at the crime scene on Hampstead Heath. ‘I am hoping that the post mortem will reveal where she’s been, maybe through soil traces, particular fibres on her body, anything that can help us locate where he’s been keeping her.’

‘Does Pauline Murphy’s body tell us anything new about him as a person, Robbo?’ asked Bowie.

Robbo was resting his back on the wall beside the boards; he had wrapped his arms around himself.

‘It tells us something very worrying – that not only is he capable of extreme torture and cruelty, barbaric as it all seems, but his calculated cruelty is something that requires intelligence. He has a type – a social type but not a physical type. I don’t think it matters to him how tall they are, dark or fair, fat or thin. It matters to him what they are going through in their lives. They have to be single parents who are trying hard to make it on their own. None of these women were stupid. They all had a lot to lose and had a kid to stay alive for. It would take someone very special to lure them into this kind of trap.’

Bowie’s face was flushed and rubbery. He took another swig of coffee and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the palm of his hand. ‘So he’s slick enough to fool them all. That can’t have been easy. He must have some charm that they fell for. We need as complete a profile as possible of Hawk, Robbo.’

‘I’m working on it, Sir.’ Robbo read from his notes: ‘We think he’s going to seem like an honest member of society because he’s likely to have gained their trust. Lives alone because he’s been able to keep them for months undetected. So he’s really clever, our guy, socially adept, a smooth operator but with a dark side that might have started on the internet. It has echoes of fantasy figures with the way they are made up. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is an image somewhere that he has copied this look from, a film maybe. We know he engages in violent sex. The post mortem will tell us more but he’s very likely to have a stash of violent pornography in his house and on his computer.’

‘I think he takes particular pleasure in parting the mother and child. ‘He tortures them mentally and physically by keeping them alive for such a long period of time and them knowing that they have abandoned their child. That’s what’s so frightening about him,’ he added. ‘I think he’s evolving, getting cocky.’

‘You say it’s all about him – his ego,’ said Bowie.

‘Yes. Timing is important to him,’ answered Robbo. ‘He has to be the one to decide when someone dies. He has to play God.’

‘Two bodies found in less than two weeks and another woman kidnapped.’ Bowie was becoming agitated. ‘He’s sticking two fingers up at us. He can’t have slipped through the years unnoticed. He must have practised before: rape, assault, attempted kidnap. We should be looking for a rapist that has got away in the last few years. He may have been through some psychiatric home somewhere.’

‘We could be looking at several other victims here,’ said Carter.

‘If he’s been holding Pauline Murphy all this time it must have crossed over with Emily Styles. He must be able to hold more than one woman at once.’

‘Where’s he been, Robbo?’ said Bowie. ‘Find out. Trace similar crimes and let’s get a lead on him.’

‘I’m pretty sure he’s not in our system,’ answered Robbo. ‘Because he has definitely left forensic evidence on Pauline Murphy and he doesn’t care; he didn’t try to dispose of the body in such a way that it wouldn’t surface – the opposite. Plus, this time we have a witness and he’s calling the victim’s family to add to his game.’

‘Have we had any luck in tracing the calls?’ asked Bowie.

Carter answered: ‘No, Sir. I don’t think we will either, not unless he calls from a different phone. It’s not a contract phone. He never stays on the phone long enough.’

‘Well, then at least the phone calls give us an insight into him.’

‘Yes, Sir, if we listen to this…’

Carter pressed a button on Robbo’s laptop and the deep distorted voice of Hawk filled the breathless office. ‘Tracy? Are you listening to me?’ Carter paused it as Hawk began reciting the nursery rhyme about Baby Bunting.

‘Skin a rabbit. Hawk mentions skinning and that’s what he did to Pauline Murphy.’

Carter resumed play and screams from somewhere primeval filled the office. Jeanie flinched. She wished she hadn’t heard it. The sound of the woman screaming would stay in her memory banks, to be brought back on dark nights when she couldn’t sleep, or even worse when she was asleep and she couldn’t stop it coming. Jeanie seemed to be collecting bad memories in a nightmare scrapbook. But this would be nothing to what poor Tracy was having to deal with. It took someone with enormous strength to handle that.

‘He didn’t ring Emily Styles’ parents,’ said Carter. ‘He didn’t ring Pauline Murphy’s. He’s getting brazen, bold, reckless. He feels a connection to Tracy – I think we should use it. We have nothing to lose. I know Tracy has agreed to go on television and appeal directly to him. I think if he puts a face to Tracy, stripped bare, he might relent. He wants to play God, so we can appeal to that side of him – it’s all within his control. Let her go.’

Bowie was thinking it through: ‘We need to word it just right. Robbo?’ He looked across at Robbo who nodded.

‘I agree. It can’t make it worse. It might work for us. Things are different this time. Tracy seems to be significant. This time Hawk felt secure enough to take his victim from her home, in full view of Danielle’s son Jackson. Why? Maybe because Jackson has Down’s syndrome and our killer doesn’t think he’ll be able to remember things accurately enough to help. Maybe because he’s grown over-confident.’

Bowie shifted his perch on the desk, threw his coffee cup away and turned to Jeanie, who stood ready to speak.

‘First of all I want to clarify the position on Jackson’s abilities. He has learning difficulties but he’s bright. He is on the higher ability scale. I’ve learnt that he can tell right from wrong. He can count. He can draw really well for his age. There is nothing stopping us getting just as much information about what happened to his mum from Jackson as from any other kid of his age. And that’s the thing – he’s only four.’ Jeanie waited whilst Carter stepped outside to take a message from an officer from Archway police station. He apologized when he returned and said: ‘Whoever else is in the frame to be Hawk, Danielle Foster’s boyfriend Niall Manson is definitely out of it. He was killed yesterday afternoon. Someone dragged him down Balls Pond Road, left his head by the kebab shop and his body next to the Kenyos two-hour dry-cleaning shop. We’ve put up a roadblock to ask for help but I doubt his death has much to do with Danielle. He was a hit waiting to happen.’

He nodded to Jeanie to continue.

‘I believe we are slowly unravelling a description of the man who took Jackson’s mother and who he says his mother was shouting at and trying to get out of the house. As far as Jackson understands, the man is white, he has dark hair. But the most significant thing is that Jackson saw the same man when Scruffy the family pet was attacked. The way Jackson describes both the man who took his mummy away and the man who set the dog on fire is that he looks like the cartoon character “Daddy Pig”. This is a well-known character in a cartoon called Peppa Pig. The thing to say about this character is that he has round, black-rimmed glasses, designer stubble. He wears a T-shirt type of thing – usually turquoise, sometimes purple. He has a small smile.’

‘Do you have a picture?’ asked Bowie.

‘Yes.’ Jeanie tapped on her keyboard and brought up an image of Daddy Pig, which was shared with the other PCs in the room.

‘He has a sneaky-looking smile,’ Ebony said. ‘And the glasses are really fashionable now.

Jeanie looked across at Ebony and smiled gratefully. She’d worried unnecessarily about looking stupid.

Bowie stood up from his perch on the edge of the desk at the far side of the office across from Jeanie and Ebony.

‘Let’s presume Jackson is accurate and it is the same man. It’s Hawk. What does that mean to our investigation?’

Ebony spoke up. ‘If this proves to be a targeted attack on the dog then it means that Hawk has a lot more elements to his game. He might also be after Jackson or Tracy? He’s getting physically close to them.’

Carter spoke: ‘We’ll give her twenty-four hour surveillance on the house.’

Bowie nodded. ‘Why might Tracy interest him… Jeanie?’

Jeanie was reluctant to say that, ever since she’d seen the image of the make-up on Pauline Murphy’s dead face, she’d been reminded of Tracy.

‘Tracy’s make-up was really thick when I first met her,’ she said hesitantly. ‘It’s getting less every day but, if Hawk was watching her when she worked in Simmons department store at the beauty counter, if he has a thing about make-up, good or bad, he would definitely have been drawn to Tracy.’

‘So what we’re saying is that something about Tracy has made him change his MO – or has brought out some other element in it,’ said Bowie. ‘Tell us more about her. What is she like?’

Jeanie thought for a few seconds before she answered: ‘She is in a brittle marriage. I haven’t even seen her husband; he chooses to stay away, I think. Or Tracy chooses not to have him there while this is going on. It’s becoming obvious that things aren’t great between them. Steve, the husband, was obviously not keen on Tracy’s reunion with Danielle. She went to speak to him yesterday about coming home to support her but she returned saying he still wasn’t coming back. It’s a lot to cope with on her own. But… having said all that, I’m amazed the way that she does seems to cope with whatever is thrown at her. She is in the middle of the crisis of her life but she copes with it the way she would cope with the busiest day ever on the beauty counter where she works. But then, I’m not sure Tracy realizes that this might have become personal to her. She asks if Jackson is safe. She has never asked me if she is safe. She has agreed to the TV appeal. I think the sooner we do it the better. We just have to hope it makes things better, not worse.’

‘We’ll look into every angle and have something ready for Tracy as soon as possible and for you, Sir.’ Robbo addressed Bowie.

‘I hope it’s a good one, Robbo. The press will hound us. I don’t want us to look incompetent. I want to find a definite connection between these women. How does Pauline Murphy match the lives of the other two women?’ asked Bowie.

‘The college, definitely,’ answered Carter.

Robbo pinned up a diagram of three interlocking circles with the women’s names in the centre.

‘These women didn’t all know one another but where the circles cross they have a possible two hundred and forty shared contacts from the college that we can identify by the social network sites.’

Bowie stood.

‘We’ll call a conference later today. Get it over with. One thing we know is that at this very minute Danielle Foster will be in a coffin and she will have already started dying.’