Lee Weeks - Cold as Ice

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…’