Sergeant Woolf sat behind the front desk in the shabby reception area. He was a large man with pale blue eyes and a jowly white face with several chins which spilled over onto the front of his neatly pressed white shirt. A thin, horse-faced girl stood in front of him at the front desk, cradling a pudgy baby boy on her skinny hip. The baby had a huge bag of boiled sweets in his grip and was chewing nonchalantly, watching his mother’s exchange with Woolf.
‘How long you gonna keep us waiting?’ she demanded. ‘I got stuff to do.’
‘That depends on your boyfriend, and the 300 grams of cocaine we found up his bottom,’ said Woolf, cheerily.
‘You lot. I bet you’ve stitched him up,’ she said, jabbing at him with a long pink manicured fingernail.
‘Are you suggesting we planted it on him?’
‘Fuck off,’ she said.
‘Your mother wasted all that money sending you to finishing school.’
The girl looked confused. ‘What you talking about? I finished school, like, years ago.’
Woolf smiled amiably and indicated a long row of faded green plastic chairs under a board of leaflets. ‘Please take a seat, madam. I’ll let you know when I have more information.’ The girl looked Erika and Moss up and down and traipsed over, taking a seat under a noticeboard swamped with community information leaflets. Erika recalled her first day in London after being transferred from Greater Manchester Police. She had sat in the same seat and harangued Woolf about how long she had been waiting, although her circumstances had been different.
‘Afternoon, ladies. Raining outside, is it?’ said Woolf, seeing them both with wet hair plastered to their heads.
‘Nah, just spitting,’ grinned Moss.
‘Is she in?’ asked Erika.
‘Yes. The superintendent is warm and dry in her office,’ he said.
The girl sitting with the baby shoved a handful of the boiled sweets in her mouth and made a sucking noise, glowering at them.
‘Careful you don’t choke, madam; my recollection of the Heimlich manoeuvre is a bit hazy,’ said Woolf, buzzing Erika and Moss in through the door. He lowered his voice and leaned forward. ‘Retirement is so close I can almost touch it.’
‘How long?’ asked Erika.
‘Six months and counting,’ he said.
She smiled at him, and then the door clicked shut behind them. They moved down a long low corridor, past offices where phones rang and support officers worked. It was a busy station, the largest south of the river, serving a large swathe of London and the Kent borders. They hurried down to the locker room in the basement, saying hello to some of the uniformed officers who were coming in to start their shifts. They went to their lockers and pulled out towels to dry themselves off.
‘I’m going to hit up missing persons,’ said Moss, scrubbing at her hair and face and then stripping off her wet jumper and unbuttoning her blouse.
‘I’m going to beg for more officers,’ said Erika, drying herself off and sniffing a white blouse which she’d found at the back of her locker.
When Erika had dressed in dry clothes, she took the stairs up to the superintendent’s office. Lewisham Row was an old dilapidated 1970s building, and with the cuts to police budgets, the lifts were now something you avoided, if you didn’t fancy getting stuck for half the day. She hurried up the stairs two at a time and then emerged into the corridor of the eighth floor. A large window looked out over south London, stretching from the gridlocked ring road running through the heart of Lewisham, past rows of terraced housing, to the green of the Kent borders.
She knocked on the door and went inside. Superintendent Melanie Hudson sat behind her desk, partially obscured by a mound of paperwork. She was a small, thin woman with a bob of fine blonde hair, but looks could be deceiving and she could be a tough cookie when the situation warranted. Erika glanced around the office. It was just as shabby as the rest of the building. The shelves were still empty, and even though she’d been on the job for several months, Melanie still hadn’t unpacked a row of boxes against the back wall. Her coat hung neatly by the door on one of three hooks.
‘I’ve just come from a crime scene on the South Bank. Male, violently beaten, decapitated and dismembered, and then packed neatly in a suitcase.’
Melanie finished writing and looked up. ‘Was he white?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you wouldn’t say it was racially motivated?’
‘You can be white and still be killed in a racially motivated attack.’
Melanie gave her a look. ‘I know that, Erika. I just need to be kept in the loop. Top brass is carefully watching racially motived crime since Brexit.’
‘It’s still early days. It could be gangland, racially motivated, homophobic. It was brutal. He was packed in the case naked, with a watch, ring and chain. We don’t know if they were his. I’m waiting on the post-mortem and forensics. I’ll let you know which box you can tick when I have more information.’
‘What’s your caseload like, Erika?’
‘I’ve got an armed robbery murder I’ve just wound up. There are a couple of others bubbling away in the background. I need to get an ID on this body but it’s not going to be easy. The face is badly smashed up, and he’s been in the water a long time.’
Melanie nodded. ‘Was it a big suitcase?’
‘Yes.’
‘You can’t buy big suitcases anymore. I’ve been trying to get a family one for when we go away at half-term, but they don’t do them cos of the weight limits. Anything over twenty-five kilos they charge you a fortune.’
‘You want me to see if I can get you the suitcase when forensics finish up?’
‘Very funny. It’s a valid point though. Not many companies make suitcases big enough to fit two weeks’ worth of beach gear, let alone a full-grown man.’
‘What about staffing? How many officers can you give me? I’d like Moss and DC John McGorry; Sergeant Crane is a good team worker.’
Melanie blew out her cheeks and searched through the paperwork on her desk,
‘OK. I can give you Moss and McGorry… and a civilian support worker. Let’s see how this plays out.’
‘OK,’ said Erika. ‘But there’s something weird about this. I have a feeling I’ll need a bigger team.’
‘That’s all you’re getting for now. Keep me in the loop,’ said Melanie, and she went back to her paperwork.
Erika got up to leave and stopped at the door. ‘Where are you off on holiday?’
‘Yekaterinburg.’
Erika raised an eyebrow. ‘Yekaterinburg, Russia?’
Melanie rolled her eyes. ‘Don’t ask. My husband is obsessed with out-of-the-way holiday destinations.’
‘Well, you won’t need sun cream in October in Yekaterinburg.’
‘Close the door on your way out,’ she snapped.
Erika suppressed a grin and left her office.
Chapter Four
Erika grabbed a coffee and some chocolate from the vending machine, then took the stairs back up to the fourth floor where she had a small office. It was nothing more than a box, with a desk awash with paperwork, a computer, and a set of shelves. The rain rattled against a small window looking out over the car park. She closed the door and sat at her desk with her chocolate and steaming cup of coffee. She could hear distant phones ringing, and there was a creak as someone walked past in the corridor. She missed the open-plan offices she’d worked in over the past few years in Bromley Station and West End Central. The four walls closing in on her were a reminder it had been six long months since she’d last seen the inside of an incident room and had a big case to sink her teeth into.
There was an old map of the Thames on the wall in front of her desk, and she hadn’t paid it much notice until now. Tearing open the bar of chocolate, she took a large bite and moved around the desk to peer at it. It wasn’t an operational map, it was one of those arty ones, a black-and-white line drawing taking in the full length of the river. The source of the Thames is nea
r Oxford, and it runs 215 miles, through London, before emerging out to sea at the Thames Estuary. Erika traced her finger along its route to where it became tidal at Teddington Lock, and on, as it wound through Twickenham, Chiswick and Hammersmith, on to Battersea, and then through central London, where they had discovered the body in the suitcase.
‘Where was that suitcase thrown in?’ she said, through a mouthful of chocolate. She thought of the places along the river where someone could throw it in without being seen: Richmond? Chiswick? Chelsea Bridge? Battersea Park? She then thought of the South Bank, heavily overlooked and there was CCTV everywhere. She shoved the last of the chocolate in her mouth and turned, looking around the tiny office. The polystyrene ceiling tiles above were stained with brown watermarks, and the small shelves were packed with the crap of previous occupants: a small furry cactus; a green plastic hedgehog which held pens between plastic spines on its back; a row of dusty operating manuals for long-extinct software. A niggling voice piped up in her head: was I wrong not to take the promotion? Everyone had expected her to accept the promotion to superintendent, but it had dawned on her that she would be stuck behind a desk ticking boxes, prioritising, toeing the line, and worse, making others toe the line. Erika was aware she had a healthy ego, but it was never going to be massaged by increased power, a fancy title, or more money. Being out on the street, getting her fingers dirty, solving complex cases and locking up the bad guys: these were the things which got her out of bed every morning.
Also, feelings of guilt had stopped her from taking the promotion. She thought of her colleague, Detective Inspector James Peterson. He wasn’t just a colleague; he was also her… boyfriend? No. At forty-five years old she felt too old for boyfriends. Partner? Partners worked in legal firms. Anyhow, it didn’t matter, she’d screwed it up. Peterson had been shot in the stomach during their last big case, the rescue of a kidnap victim. As his senior officer, it had been her decision to go in without backup. He had survived the gunshot wound, just, and they had saved a young woman’s life, and arrested a crazed serial killer but, understandably, it had affected their relationship. Peterson had lost seven months of his life in painful recovery, and it was still unclear when he would return to work.
Erika screwed up the chocolate bar wrapper and pitched it into the wastepaper basket in the corner, but she missed, and it landed on the carpet. She moved over to pick it up, and as she bent down there was a knock at the door and it opened, bashing into the side of her head.
‘Jeez!’ she cried, clutching at her forehead.
Detective Sergeant John McGorry peered around the door; he was holding a file.
‘Sorry, boss. Bit tight in here, isn’t it?’ He was in his early twenties and had a handsome face and smooth, clear skin. His hair was dark and cropped short.
‘You don’t say,’ she replied, dropping the wrapper into the bin and straightening up, still rubbing at her head.
‘Moss just told me about the body in the suitcase, and said I’m being reassigned to work with you on it.’
Erika went back round her desk and sat down.
‘Yeah. If you could talk to Moss, she’s started on identifying the victim. Where have you been working for the last few months?’
‘On the second floor, with DS Lorna Mills and DS Dave Boon.’
‘Mills and Boon?’ she said, raising an eyebrow.
McGorry grinned. ‘Yeah, but it’s done nothing for my love life. I’ve been working late on cataloguing racially motivated Brexit-related crime.’
‘Doesn’t sound very sexy,’ said Erika.
‘I’m pleased to be reassigned. Thanks, boss.’
‘I’ll email you later, if you can crack on with Moss with the ID.’
‘That’s one of the reasons I came up. I’ve seen a load of case files over the past few weeks, and one stuck in my mind. A dog walker who found a suitcase by the Embankment, Chelsea, when the Thames was at low tide. Inside was the body of a white female, mid-thirties. Decapitated, dismembered.’
Erika sat back and stared at McGorry. ‘When was this?’
‘Just over a week ago, September 22nd. I pulled the case file,’ he said, handing it over.
‘Thanks, I’ll be in touch later today,’ she said.
She waited until he closed the door, then opened the file. The crime scene photos were just as grizzly as she had seen that morning, but the body was in a much better state, with little decay. The victim was a woman with long, filthy, ash-blonde hair. The legs had been dismembered just below the pelvis, and tucked in the two ends of the suitcase. The arms were folded against her chest; with a female victim, this looked as if the corpse was being modest, crossing her hands over her bare breasts. Her severed head had been tucked in under the torso, and like the male victim from the suitcase at the South Bank, her face was so badly battered it was unrecognisable.
Erika looked up at the map of the Thames on the wall. So many places to dump a body.
Or two.
Chapter Five
August 2016
Eighteen-year-old Nina Hargreaves heard about the summer job at Santino’s fish and chip shop from her best friend, Kath. They’d just finished high school and, whereas Kath was leaving for university in the autumn, she had no clue what she was going to do with her life. Nina was a pleasant-looking girl with a strong nose, pale freckled skin, long brown hair, and slightly bucked teeth. She wasn’t academic, and her careers advisor had suggested she might try office work, or train to be a hairdresser, but Nina hated those ideas. She hated the thought of being stuck in an office – her mother, Mandy, worked as a clerk in a local solicitor’s and complained constantly – and the thought of working in a hairdresser and being stuck with a load of bitchy women made her feel sick. She’d been picked on enough at school.
Nina was already frustrated with the world and her place in it. Her beloved father had died of a heart attack ten years earlier, and while she and her mother weren’t the closest, they’d stuck together. It had been a shock to Nina when Mandy had knocked on her bedroom door and said she wanted them to go out for lunch the following Saturday.
‘I want you to meet my new friend, Paul,’ she’d said.
‘A bloke?’ Nina had replied, confused. Mandy had shifted awkwardly, and perched on the end of the bed. They looked alike, but Nina wished she’d inherited her mother’s small nose and perfect teeth.
‘Yes, Paul is a special friend; well, more than a friend. He’s a solicitor at the firm,’ said Mandy, taking her hand.
‘You mean a boyfriend?’ said Nina, pulling it away.
‘Yes.’
‘Your boss?’
‘He’s not my boss. I work for him.’
‘What? So he chased you around the desk and now you’re a couple?’
‘Don’t be like that, Nina. I’ve been seeing Paul for a few months now, and I didn’t want to introduce him to you until I knew it was going somewhere.’
Nina stared at her mother, horrified. She’d teased her over the years about getting a boyfriend, even telling her she should date their handsome flirty postman, but Mandy had always shrugged this off saying it was still too soon.
‘Where is it going?’
‘Well, I hope, at some point, he’ll move in.’
‘What?’
‘Nina. You’re eighteen now, you won’t be at home for ever.’
‘Won’t I?’
‘Is that what you want? To stay in this bedroom for the rest of your life, still with the Hannah Montana wallpaper?’
‘’Course not.’
‘There we go then. I’m not chucking you out, I’d never do that, but you need to make your own life.’
Those words had hung in the air long after Mandy had left her bedroom. So, with nothing else on the horizon, Nina went for an interview and got the job working at Santino’s chip shop.
Santino’s was an old school British chip shop tucked at the end of the busy high street in Crouch End. It had a cracked green Formica counter, lined with j
ars of pickled eggs, and there was a long row of deep fat fryers where the battered fish, sausages, and scraps were cooked and kept in the glass-fronted warmer above. A few tables were dotted about inside, but Santino’s mainly did takeaway, and it was always busy. Shifts lasted eight hours, and four girls worked flat out, taking orders and wrapping fish under the watchful eye of the elderly Mrs Santino, a fearsome woman with a gravelly smoker’s voice. Mr Santino was quiet, in comparison, and fried the fish helped by a couple of lads.
Nina didn’t meet Max until her third shift. She was at the counter, taking an order, when he staggered up to the fryer with a huge bowl of chipped potatoes.
‘Get back!’ he growled, and as he tipped in the raw chips, boiling hot oil splashed her arm, making her cry out in pain. ‘I told you to get back!’ he said and stomped back to the kitchen holding the empty bowl.
Mrs Santino saw the large blister rapidly forming on Nina’s arm and pulled her through to the kitchen, shoving her arm under the cold tap.
‘I’ve told you, watch the hot fryer!’ shouted Mrs Santino. ‘I haven’t got time to spend filling in the accident book for stupid girls like you! Keep it under the cold water for fifteen minutes, and you’ll take it as your break!’
Mrs Santino went back into the front, and Nina felt tears prick her eyes. The huge potato chipper in the corner began to roar as Max and another lad emptied a giant sack of potatoes into the top. She watched Max as he heaved the huge 50 lb potato sacks from the loading bay, piling them up beside the chipper. He wasn’t like the other skinny spotty lads. His body was muscular and filled out. He had a rugged beauty, emphasised by a thin white scar running along his jawline, from his left earlobe to the cleft in his chin. His eyes were beautiful, a strange mix of orange and brown. The sleeves of his T-shirt were rolled up to the shoulder and the sweat glistened on his tanned skin. He caught her looking and glared at her.
Cold Blood: A gripping serial killer thriller that will take your breath away Page 2