Lee Weeks - Cold as Ice

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.’

‘Do I look okay?’ Tracy came out of the bathroom and stood in front of Jeanie.

Jeanie had asked Tracy to take off her false eyelashes, wear only a touch of mascara.

‘A youthful look, you mean?’ she’d asked.

‘I mean a stripped-back, no-time-for-make-up, couldn’t-care-less-about-make-up look.’

‘I feel naked without my make-up. I feel vulnerable.’

‘You don’t need it and especially not today. You look really lovely, Tracy: natural, young, with shiny skin.’