Robert Bryndza - The Girl in the Ice

‘Thank you,’ said Erika. ‘We tried.’

‘No. They tried,’ said Mike, pointing at the men. ‘I said to your boss, it was bloody hopeless, a wild goose chase.’

Erika wondered if that was the reason why Marsh had arranged it. As she walked home in the rain, she remained convinced that Andrea’s phone had to be found. She thought of the letter she’d received and the things left in her bed.

She felt like the only person who knew that the police had arrested the wrong man.

40

Three days passed with no word from Moss or Peterson. All Erika’s enthusiasm and positivity drained away, made worse by having nothing to do. On the third day, she was poised to call Edward and face up to visiting Mark’s headstone, when her phone rang in her hand.

‘Boss, you’re not going to believe this,’ said Moss. ‘Andrea’s phone has just shown up.’

‘What? In the sewer?’ asked Erika, gripping the pen.

‘No. A second-hand mobile phone shop in Anerley.’

‘That’s only a few miles away,’ said Erika.

‘Yeah. Crane circulated the IMEI number around local second-hand phone dealers, saying that if a handset with this number came into their shop they were to contact the incident room urgently.’

‘And they did?’

‘He also said they’d be paid the value of a new unlocked iPhone 5S, which must have sweetened the deal.’

‘How did it show up in Anerley?’ asked Erika.

‘A woman found it. The huge amount of rain and melt water last week caused the drains to overflow on the lower end of Forest Hill Road. The drains were so overloaded that high-pressure water was forced up through the sewage system, tearing through the tarmac. We’ve figured the phone came with it. She saw it, and even in the state it was in thought she could get a few bob for it.’

‘And it’s okay? It works?’

‘No, and the screen is badly cracked, but we’ve whisked it over to the cyber team who’ve put it at the top of their work queue. They’re trying to get everything they can off the internal memory.’

‘Moss, I’ll come in.’

‘No, boss, stay put. If you’re going to come down here, wait until you have a reason to storm in and read them the riot act.’

Erika started to protest.

‘Seriously, boss. I promise I’ll phone you the second I know anything.’ Moss hung up.

Six long, tense hours later, Moss called to say that the Cyber Crime Unit had pulled a substantial amount of data from Andrea’s phone.

Erika took a cab to the address Moss had given her, and met her outside the central London Cyber Crime Unit, which was based in a nondescript block of offices near Tower Bridge. They took the lift up to the top floor and emerged into a huge open-plan office. Every desk was busy; sitting at each was a weary officer poring over computer screens, beside them a phone or laptop in pieces, or a mess of wires and circuit boards.

On the far back wall was a row of what looked like viewing suites with tinted windows. Erika shuddered to think of the things these officers had to watch behind those screens.

A short, handsome man wearing a threadbare woolly jumper met them at the water cooler. He introduced himself as Lee Graham. They followed him through the office to a large storage room with racks and racks of computers, phones, and tablet computers, all bagged up and sealed. They passed one low shelf where a laptop was wrapped in plastic and encrusted with dried blood.

He took them over to a messy desk in the far corner where Andrea’s phone lay, battered and cracked. The back was off and it was hooked up to a large PC with twin screens.

‘We got a lot off this phone,’ said Lee, sitting and adjusting one of the screens. ‘The hard drive was in good condition.’

Moss pulled over a couple of chairs and they sat beside Lee.

‘There are three hundred and twelve photos,’ Lee continued, ‘sixteen videos, and hundreds of text messages going back from May 2012 to June 2014. I’ve run all the photos through our facial recognition software; this crunches through the national criminal database and uses facial recognition to look for any matches. It flagged up one name.’

Erika and Moss looked at each other, excited.

‘What was his name?’ asked Erika, keenly.

Lee tapped away at his keyboard. ‘It wasn’t a he, it was a she,’ he said.

‘What?’ said Erika and Moss in unison. Lee swiped his way through a series of thumbnail images, then clicked on one: a familiar face.

‘Linda Douglas-Brown is in the police database?’ asked Moss, in surprise. In the picture, Linda and Andrea sat at a table in a bar; Andrea stared confidently down the lens and looked immaculate in a cream blouse. The buttons were open, displaying a dark, full cleavage with a silver necklace nestling between her breasts. Linda, in comparison, was ruddy-faced with unkempt hair. She was wearing a roll-neck black jumper, which rode high enough to nestle just under her double chin. The jumper was embroidered with images of small poodles cavorting across the fabric. A large gold crucifix hung around her neck. Her hand was slung around Andrea’s and her face wore a drunken grin.

‘Is this is the victim’s mother?’ asked Lee.

‘No, the victim’s sister; there’s four years between them,’ said Erika. They let that hang for a moment.

‘Okay. Well, I’ve pulled her criminal record; it’s just printing off for you now,’ said Lee.

41

Lee found them a spare workstation in the office, where they first read through Linda’s file.

‘Jeez, Linda has a considerable record going back several years. Arson, theft, shoplifting . . .’ said Erika. ‘Between July and November last year, Andrea’s fiancé Giles Osborne made three complaints to the police, saying Linda was harassing him and sending him threatening mail.’

‘Officers spoke to her on all three occasions,’ said Moss, reading.

‘Yes, so no arrest. Giles Osborne’s first complaint was in July 2014, concerning abusive emails he received from Linda; in one she threatened to kill his cat first, and then him. The second complaint was a month later. His flat was broken into and his cat was poisoned . Linda’s fingerprints were found in the property, but her lawyer successfully claimed that her fingerprints would be in there because she had recently been a guest at the dinner party he threw to celebrate his engagement to Andrea.

‘Linda was also caught on CCTV in the next street to Giles Osborne’s flat within minutes of the break-in. She then capitulated and stated that she went into the house after the break-in to try and save the cat, who seemed in distress when she looked through the window.’

‘Sounds like she’s got a damn good lawyer,’ said Moss.

‘Perhaps, but there wasn’t enough proof to substantiate this either way. The third complaint was October last year when Linda caused eight thousand pounds’ worth of damage to Giles’s office. She threw a brick through one of the large glass window panels. Here, they even caught her on CCTV.’

The picture was over-exposed and black and white, but a bulky figure could be seen in a long overcoat, a baseball cap pulled down over her face. The coat had opened when the figure pulled back to throw the brick, and a jumper could be seen underneath, bearing an illustration of dancing poodles.

Moss was carrying her laptop in a bag. She pulled it out and switched it on. ‘Let’s work through the photos from Andrea’s phone,’ she said, fitting a USB key into the drive, which contained the contents of Andrea’s phone. They waited while the laptop whirred and hummed and booted up. The tiny little light on the USB key began to flicker, and then a scattergun of photos began to skim by on the screen.