Cold Blood: A gripping serial killer thriller that will take your breath away

by Robert Bryndza

  ‘Oh. Mummy, Mummy, Mummy, if only I had more time with you…’ he murmured, but saw that time was moving fast.

  He came back out into the hallway, opened the black toolbox, and pulled out a length of blue twine. Back in the kitchen he bound her legs at the ankle, flipped her over and bound her wrists behind her back. He shoved her bra into her mouth, and pulled a pair of tights over her head, fastening them at the neck. He stood back. Her face was distorted under the tight sheer material, but he could see the tights were cutting into her neck. He bent over and loosened them a little. He then parted her legs and took a photo of her splayed out and bound on the kitchen floor.

  Max dragged her by the ankles towards the open cupboard. He checked she was bound tightly, and pushed her far back, next to the boiler. Then he closed the door and locked it, pocketing the key. He went to the front door where the white van was now parked outside. The road was deserted. Nina got out of the van and came to the door.

  ‘It’s all clear. Her handbag is in the kitchen, find her phone,’ he said.

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Beryl Donahue was the manager and owner of The Acorns Nursery. She was an imposing matronly woman with short dark hair and a flamboyant dress sense. She had worked for many years as a nurse, and then a back injury had forced her to reassess her options. She was lucky that she’d bought her large end-terrace house in Forest Hill in the early eighties, when property was affordable, and she had decided to take the plunge and turn the house into a day nursery.

  It was just after ten in the morning, and she was on her third cup of coffee and wishing that it was later in the day and she could have something stronger. She’d just received an unwelcome letter informing her that Ofsted, the official inspector of schools and nurseries, would be coming next week for an on-site inspection of The Acorns Nursery. It was the last piece of news she needed so close to Christmas. The Acorns Nursery was excellent in many ways, but she had been complacent, and let some things slide. The one nursing assistant on her staff who was a qualified first aider had just quit, and she would have to quickly hire another nursery assistant qualified in first aid to keep with regulations. The Ofsted inspector could come down hard on her, and a bad inspection could result in parents pulling out their children. No children would mean no fees, and no fees meant missed mortgage payments. And her fire safety certificate had to be checked also; she had a nasty feeling she needed to get it renewed.

  All this was going through her mind when she received a call from Marcie Marsh. Marcie apologised profusely, and said that today she would have to send her housekeeper to pick up Mia and Sophie.

  ‘The builders next door have been knocking through, and they hit a water pipe! I have to deal with a flooded kitchen!’ she said, her posh voice sounding exaggerated and harassed.

  Beryl looked down at the caller ID screen, and saw that it was indeed Marcie Marsh calling.

  ‘Oh dear, Marcie, that’s terrible. What’s her name, please?’ asked Beryl.

  ‘Her name’s Emma Potter. She’s got very short blond hair, and she’s in her early twenties.’

  ‘You know our policy, Marcie, and we have to be strict. She’ll need to show some ID, and of course she’ll need to tell one of the girls the password.’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘Marcie? Are you still there? Is there a problem?’

  ‘No. That’s fine. I can give her the password, but she hasn’t got any ID on her. She doesn’t drive, and she’s coming round on foot to get the girls… Look, can I give her my ID? So sorry, but if she can’t come and get them then I’m a bit stuck! I can’t leave the house, with the builders here…’

  Beryl saw the Ofsted letter on the desk, and knew she’d have to start moving fast if she was going to sort things out before the end of the week. She knew Marcie Marsh in passing; she always paid on time, and she was the wife of a very senior policeman. The Marshes had also donated £500 to the nursery each Christmas for the past couple of years, and Beryl hoped they would again.

  ‘Okay. That’s fine, Marcie. As long as she has your ID and the current password, and I hope you get things sorted.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘But the floorboards will have to come up, and then I’ve got the bloody in-laws coming as well!’

  ‘Dear me, I’ll speak to you soon. Oh and text me a picture of her, would you? So we know when she comes to collect the girls.’

  Beryl hung up the phone and started to scroll through a recruitment website, rapidly forgetting the conversation she had just had.

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  On Monday morning, Erika asked her team to revisit Max Kirkham and look into his background. Isaac’s words had haunted her for most of the night, and she now had a gut feeling that she’d missed something. She took the original birth certificate they had on file for Max Kirkham, and she asked everyone to stop what they were doing and look deeper into his background.

  After phone calls back and forth with the national records office, they confirmed it was a genuine birth certificate. Janice Elise Kirkham gave birth to Maximilian Kirkham in 1983 in North Middlesex University Hospital.

  ‘Her name appears on the birth certificate,’ said Crane, reading off an email he’d received. ‘There’s no father listed. I’ve looked deeper into her history, and Janice gave Max up for adoption in 1986 when he was aged three, and now I’ll hand over to Mr McGorry here who has found her in the system.’

  ‘She has a record, shit,’ said Erika, shaking her head.

  McGorry stood up. ‘Janice Kirkham bounced around the benefits system, working sporadically, but was arrested for possession of cocaine with intent to sell in November 1988. She was given bail, and at the time she was living in a council house: 14 Wandsworth Street, in the east end. Shortly after she was bailed, the bedsit was devastated by fire. A woman’s body was found in the bedroom, badly burnt and lying in the remains of a bed. The fire was caused by a faulty heater, and as Janice Kirkham lived alone, it was ruled that she perished in the fire.’

  Erika looked at the photo of Max.

  ‘And there’s nothing about a father?’

  Crane shook his head.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Erika, putting her head in her hands.

  Moss volunteered to do the lunch run, and she returned half an hour later with sandwiches and a shopping bag from a toy shop in the One Shopping Centre. She tried to stash it under her desk before anyone saw, but McGorry cried out across the room: ‘Lego City Volcano Response Helicopter!’

  ‘Um, yes,’ she said as Erika glowered across the incident room. ‘My son is desperate for one, and everywhere is sold out. I just had a tip-off from my wife that they had some in the One Centre.’

  ‘My nephew is desperate for one too,’ said McGorry. ‘Can I?’ He didn’t wait to be asked and slipped the colourful box out of the plastic bag.

  Moss sloughed off her coat and rolled up her sleeves.

  ‘I worked during the London riots, in full protective gear, and I wish I’d just worn the same in the bloody toy shop! You should have seen it. Yummy mummies can be violent.’

  She started to pass out the sandwiches. Erika took one and started to unwrap it.

  ‘You’ve got one lucky little boy,’ said McGorry. ‘I used to love playing with my Lego.’

  ‘Don’t tell us when you used to play with Lego. It probably wasn’t that long ago,’ said Crane, unwrapping his sandwich.

  ‘It was twelve years ago, that’s a long time, isn’t it?’

  Some of the older staff members in the room smiled, but Erika remained stony-faced and was getting visibly irritated by the chatter.

  ‘Oh, my lord. Twelve years ago I was having my fiftieth birthday party,’ said Marta.

  McGorry shrugged his shoulders. ‘I used to buy Lego men and pimp them up and sell them at school. I did punk Lego men, and gay Lego men, probably not very PC.’

  ‘I use my son’s Wolverine Lego man as a keyring,’ said Temple, pulling it from his pocket. ‘And
my wife likes to change the hair on him every day. You know you can take off the hair and put different ones on. Look, today he’s got a little black bowl cut, yesterday he had Gandalf’s flowing locks. Same face, different hair.’

  ‘I wish I could do that,’ said Crane, stroking the top of his head, which was now bald. ‘Although with long hair I’d look like my sister!’

  Erika was about to snap at them all to shut up, when she looked over at the whiteboards and did a double take. She rushed over to the wall and grabbed the picture of Max Kirkham they’d lifted from his Jobseekers Allowance file. She moved along and grabbed the small driving licence photo of Mariette Hoffman. She came back to the team and held them up side by side.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Moss.

  ‘Have any of us considered how similar Mariette Hoffman looks to Max Kirkham? The Lego man thing you were just talking about, imagine her hair on his head and vice versa.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Moss.

  ‘Crane, you’ve got access to facial recognition software which does a point by point match of facial similarities. Can we compare Mariette and Max’s photos?’

  It took a little while for Crane to load up the two photos and run the software and there was silence in the incident room as everyone ate their lunch and waited.

  ‘Okay. It’s obviously not a match, but it’s flagging up similarities in space between eyes, length of nose and spacing on cheekbones,’ he said.

  ‘But that doesn’t mean anything; so they look alike,’ said Erika. ‘You say that Max’s mother, Janice Kirkham, died in a fire, but her body was so badly burnt they couldn’t identify her, yet they ruled that it was her body on the grounds that she lived alone?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Crane.

  ‘I want to see Janice Kirkham’s birth certificate, and Mariette Hoffman’s birth certificate,’ said Erika.

  It took a few more hours to find the relevant records office and track down the birth certificates. Erika saw it was very quiet in the incident room and everyone was watching with rapt attention as a series of documents came out of the printer. Erika placed them on one of the desks, and everyone gathered around.

  ‘OK, this is the birth certificate that Mariette Elise Hoffman has been using on applications for housing benefit, jobseekers allowance, and when she applied for her mortgage,’ said Erika. ‘It states that she was born Mariette Elise McArdle, on the 1st of March 1963 in a small village near Cambridgeshire. Mother was Laura McArdle; father was Arthur McArdle… Both now deceased, died in 1979 and 1989. The records office in Cambridgeshire has also sent over the same birth certificate. You can see the official registrar’s stamp is identical and so is his signature. There’s also an ink smudge on the paper, a few centimetres to the right of the stamp… The only problem is that on this version Mariette Elise McArdle died on the 4th of March 1963. Three days after being born.’

  ‘Look here, on the birth certificate Mariette has been using, there’s a faint outline of black in the box where the date of death is displayed,’ said Moss.

  There was silence in the incident room.

  ‘So, when Janice Kirkham was on bail for cocaine possession, and facing a hefty prison sentence, her bedsit burnt down, but it wasn’t her who got caught in the fire,’ said Erika.

  ‘But whoever’s body it was, they assumed it was Janice and she was certified as dead,’ said Moss.

  ‘And Janice used the opportunity to steal the identity of a dead baby and start again as Mariette McArdle, eventually becoming Mariette Hoffman,’ said Erika.

  There was a stunned silence.

  ‘I want her flat searched ASAP, I’ll bet you anything that’s where Max and Nina have been hiding out.’

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  It was late afternoon, but the light was already fading as the white van bumped along the dark roads, and there was just the sound of the windscreen wipers dragging across the glass.

  Nina sat in the back of the van, on the mattress, with Mia asleep cuddled up under her left arm, and Sophie her right. They moved with the bumps and sways. She could see the back of Max’s head through the small window of the partition into the cab at the front, lit up by the car headlights coming from the other direction.

  It had shocked Nina how easily the girls had come with her when she turned up at the nursery just before lunch.

  It had helped that Beryl Donahue, the manager, was unwittingly in on the lie.

  ‘Ah yes, Mummy called earlier to say Kelly here would be picking you up, and sent us through a lovely photo of her,’ she said, smiling at Nina. Nina smiled back and the girls seemed quite in awe of Beryl, and the authority she had over them. They obediently took Nina’s hands and followed her down the road and around the corner. What they were most bewildered about was walking. Nina could tell that they were the kind of kids who didn’t walk anywhere, and Marcie ferried them everywhere in the car.

  ‘This is my car,’ said Nina as they reached the van.

  ‘It’s tiny,’ said Sophie, shifting on her feet.

  ‘Don’t be rude,’ whispered Mia, giving her sister a stern little stare. Max had emerged from the driver’s side, and his presence had scared the girls a little, even though he’d done his best to smile.

  ‘Alright,’ he said. Then looking around he added: ‘Come on, Neen, there’s bloody houses everywhere, let’s get them inside.’

  When Nina had opened the back of the van and asked the girls to get in, they’d hesitated, but when sweets were added into the equation and Max had said they were going on an exciting trip, and meeting Mummy and Daddy there, the girls had climbed in and over the mattress.

  They were now four hours into the journey, and Nina was starting to feel a deep gnawing fear.

  ‘I need the toilet,’ whispered Mia into Nina’s neck.

  ‘Me too,’ said Sophie. Nina could smell their hair, such a sweet, innocent smell.

  Nina looked at the back of Max’s head, silhouetted against the glare of the oncoming headlights.

  ‘Max, the girls need the loo, and I could go too,’ she said. There was no response. ‘Max!’

  He glanced back. ‘We’re not stopping, we need to get some distance.’

  ‘Max, you said this would be… You said… Max let them go to the bloody toilet. Just pull over.’

  He eyeballed her in the rear-view mirror, and moments later pulled into a small lay-by surrounded by trees. It was now cold and very damp, and Max came round to open the back doors, waiting until two lorries had passed before opening the left-hand door and shielding them from the road as they climbed out.

  ‘Quickly, go on, in the trees,’ he said.

  Nina pulled the two girls around a bush, until they were out of sight, but he heard branches cracking and little girls whining about not having any loo roll, about the nasty mud, and how cold they were. A few cars sped past, rocking the van in the gusts of wind. He smoked a cigarette while he waited.

  ‘You took your time,’ he said when Nina came back holding the little girls’ hands. He could see one of them had ripped their tights. Max opened the left-hand side door as a lorry sped past, its lights on full beam. He shoved Mia inside the van and picked up Sophie and dumped her on the mattress.

  ‘Hey! You don’t touch them like that,’ said Nina. She poked her head inside and saw the two girls in the dark van, cowering on the mattress. It was dawning on them that something was wrong.

  ‘Nina, I’ve never seen you before, but you told Mrs Donahue that you were Mummy’s friend,’ said Mia.

  ‘I am Mummy’s friend, just hang on…’ said Nina, shutting the door. As she turned to face Max he punched her in the face and she went down on the wet tarmac.

  ‘You don’t fucking talk to me like that. And you keep those two little shits in line.’

  He walked off, and got into the driver’s seat. Nina felt water seeping through her jeans and pushed herself up off the tarmac. She wiped her hands on her jeans and felt her face. The left side was numb, but there wasn’t any blood. She
took a deep breath and wiped the tears away with the back of her hand. Then she got back into the van.

  The two little girls reached out for Nina in the darkness as the van pulled out onto the motorway, and they clung to her. She could smell their hair again, and felt their warm shaking bodies against hers. An overpowering feeling of guilt, shame and maternal love hit her like a tidal wave, and she knew that whatever happened to her, she had to try and reverse this situation. She had to make sure these two little girls survived.

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Erika was waiting for the vending machine to finish pouring her coffee when she bumped into Marsh on his way down the stairs from his office. It was coming up to six p.m.

  ‘Paul, can I just have a word?’ she said.

  ‘Erika, I’m just on my way home. I haven’t stopped.’

  ‘I have Max Kirkham’s mother, Mariette Hoffman in custody,’ she said. ‘We’ve also got forensics conducting an exhaustive search of the flat. She was alone when they arrested her, but we believe she’s sheltering Max Kirkham and Nina Hargreaves. They found long pieces of brown and blond hair in her rubbish bin, and a large amount of cash that we think is from the Daniel de Souza murder scene.’