Cold as Ice (22 page)

Jeanie shook her head. ‘Kids’ idea of a sick joke. Or someone off their head on something.’ She looked at Tracy’s hand. ‘We need to get that dressed.’

For once, Tracy didn’t object.

Jeanie took Tracy and Jackson up to A&E and they waited for an hour in Casualty for Tracy to be seen. Jeanie went to get something for Jackson to eat whilst they hung about. She bought him a
drawing book. He sat down on the floor of the waiting room and drew a picture. Jeanie could see the yellows and reds and she didn’t need to ask whether that was Scruffy in the middle. Poor
Jackson was going to have to get past another trauma. Jeanie wondered if it would set them back. They would have to pray Scruffy survived.

Tracy came back with her hand bandaged and instructions to come back in two days for her dressing to be changed. Jeanie drove them both home. The atmosphere in the car was pensive. Tracy had a
million things on her mind – none of them nice.

‘Is Jackson okay – he’s very quiet?’ Jeanie asked. Tracy looked behind her at Jackson on his booster seat.

‘He’s fast asleep.’

‘I have to talk to you about something, Tracy. There’s been another woman’s body found.’

‘Oh God.’ Tracy looked across at Jeanie.

‘It’s not Danielle but there is something I need to show you.’ Jeanie reached inside the glove compartment and pulled out a small brown crime scene bag. ‘Have a look at
what’s inside. Do you recognize it?’

Tracy anchored the bag using her bandaged left hand and opened it with her right. Jeanie heard her gasp.

‘It’s my bracelet.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course. Without a doubt. All of these charms mean something to me. I gave this bracelet to Danielle. Where did you get it?’

‘We found it on the woman’s body this morning.’

‘Then it must be Danielle.’ Tracy couldn’t keep the anguish from her voice.

Jeanie replied calmly. ‘No. It isn’t.’

‘Then why? How?’

Jeanie shook her head. ‘We don’t know but it’s a message from Hawk. That’s what we call him.’

In the gloom of the car Tracy was wide-eyed and whispering so as not to wake Jackson. ‘What kind of a message? What’s he saying?’

‘We think you should do a television appeal. Would you be up for it, Tracy? You don’t have to.’

‘What would it achieve?’

‘I think you’re caught in this triangle that the killer has created. He’s calling all the shots at the moment. If we put you on television and present him with a scenario,
that’s out of his control.’

‘What would I say?’

‘Leave that to us. Analysts are studying the phone calls and then we will decide.’

Tracy was thinking it over but she knew she had to do it. ‘Okay.’

‘Thanks, Tracy. I’ll let you know when it will be; probably in a couple of days – it takes time to organize. You should ask Steve to come home, Tracy, give you moral
support.’

She nodded. ‘First I want to see how Scruffy is doing. She took out her phone and dialled the number on a card. After a brief conversation she came off the phone. ‘He’s going
to be okay.’

Jeanie was relieved.

‘He wouldn’t have survived if it wasn’t for you and the sacrifice of your coat,’ she said.

‘Oh well, I can always get another coat. I’m just worried who’s going to pay the vet bills for Scruffy. I don’t have any money to do it.’

‘Don’t worry. He’ll be looked after by the police vet.’

‘Thank you. They said he should be able to come home in a week or two.’

‘As long as he’s going to be all right in the end, that’s the main thing. Jackson will be happy to have him back.’

Once they’d arrived at the house, Jeanie made tea for Jackson. Tracy was restless.

‘I want to go and see Steve now and tell him that I need him to come home. Is that okay?’

‘Can you drive like that?’

Tracy pulled a big mitten glove over her injured hand. ‘Should be fine. It’s an automatic.’ She hesitated. ‘But – I don’t have to go if you think I should
stay here, if it would be better for Jackson.’

‘No – you go.’

After Tracy had left, Jeanie gave a now wide-awake Jackson a snack and decided to have another session with him. She was aware of the ticking clock for memory recall with a child his age. She
also needed to ease his mind about what had happened with Scruffy. She cleared Jackson’s plate and moved him in to sit at the lounge table. She took the puppet of Scruffy out of the bag.

‘Who’s this, Jackson?’

Jackson looked at it – his mouth turned down and quivered: ‘Poor Scruffy.’

‘Yes – this is Scruffy and Scruffy had an accident today, didn’t he?’ Jackson nodded. ‘But do you know what, Jackson? He is such a strong little dog that Scruffy is
doing very well and should be back here very soon.’ She counted seven with him on his fingers. ‘Then we’ll have to look after him, won’t we?’

Jackson nodded. Jeanie wiped his eyes and nose.

‘Okay, Jackson you don’t need to worry now. And who’s this?’ She pulled out the next puppet, the small blond boy.

‘Jackson.’

‘Good boy. Yes, it’s Jackson and Scruffy. Here . . .’ She put the two together on the table and put her hand back into the bag. ‘See Jackson and Scruffy are playing
together?’ He wasn’t listening. ‘Jackson . . . listen to me a minute . . .’ He was distracted. His face had crumpled and big tears welled up in his eyes. He tried to get
down from the chair and accidentally knocked the bag of puppets out of Jeanie’s hand and onto the floor. The puppet with the Daddy Pig face fell out.

‘Listen, Jackson. Who’s this?’ She picked up the Daddy Pig puppet.

Jackson immediately screwed up his face in anger and shouted at the Daddy Pig puppet: ‘NO!’

‘What is it, Jackson?’

‘Poor Scruffy. What’s Scruffy barking at?’

‘Is that what Nanny said?’

He nodded, big moves of his head. ‘Scruffy doesn’t like that man.’

‘Which man is that?’

‘The man next to Scruffy in the park. Scruffy barking.’

‘Who was that man?’

‘Mummy said, “Get out. Get out.” Nanny said, “What’s Scruffy barking at?” Leave Scruffy alone. I banged my head.’ Jackson touched the bump on his
forehead.

‘Is that why you tried to get off Nanny’s lap? Because you saw the man hurting Scruffy?’ Jackson nodded. He was becoming upset.

‘Do you know the man who hurt Scruffy, Jackson?’

Jackson nodded. ‘Daddy Pig. No, no, NO!’

‘Was it the same man who hurt Mummy?’

He nodded, kept nodding; his eyes looking far away as they filled with tears.

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.’