The Girl in the Ice: A gripping serial killer thriller (Detective Erika Foster crime thriller novel Book 1)

by Robert Bryndza

‘As short as mine?’ asked Erika.

  The girl nodded.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘They had a drink, or two, I don’t know, it was a really busy night . . . and . . . and . . .’

  Erika could see she was becoming more worked up and scared,

  ‘Go on, Kristina. It’s okay, I promise.’

  ‘Then I don’t know when she went, her friend – but when I looked again, there was a man sitting with her.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  The woman shrugged. ‘Tall, dark . . . They argued.’

  ‘What do you mean, tall and dark? Can you be a bit more detailed?’ said Erika, trying to hide her frustration. This was a real breakthrough, but Kristina was being too vague. She made a decision and pulled out her phone.

  ‘Kristina, I want you to come with me to the station, and do what we call a photofit of the woman and man you saw Andrea sitting with.’

  ‘No, no, no, no,’ Kristina started, backing away.

  Erika dialled the number for the duty desk at Lewisham Row. It started to ring. ‘Your information could lead to us finding out who killed this woman, Andrea.’

  ‘But I’m at work . . . and . . .’

  ‘I can get the officers to come here. We can do this now.’ The duty officer picked up the phone. ‘It’s DCI Erika Foster. I need uniform and a squad car to The Glue Pot pub on London Road in Forest Hill, and who do we have on duty who can do a photofit?’

  There was a movement, and Erika realised Kristina had darted through a door at the back of the bar.

  ‘Shit! Hang on, I’ll call you back.’ Erika swung herself over the bar and through the doorway to a filthy little back kitchen. A door stood open. Erika stepped into the alleyway. It stretched away long and empty in both directions. A light dusting of snow began to fall. It was eerily silent.

  Erika walked the length of the alley in both directions. The houses backing onto it were dark, and the roads at either end were empty. The snow started to fall more heavily, and the wind whistled through the buildings. Erika pulled her coat around her against the freezing cold.

  She couldn’t shake off the feeling she was being watched.

  12

  Two uniformed police officers were called to The Glue Pot, but an extensive search came up with nothing. Kristina had vanished. The flat above the pub was unoccupied, filled with a mess of junk and old broken furniture. It was gone midnight by the time that the officers told Erika to knock off, and get some sleep. They would remain stationed at the pub, and at first light they would track down the landlord. If Kristina came back, they would bring her in.

  Erika still felt spooked when she returned to her car, parked a few streets away. The streets were silent, and every noise seemed amplified, the wind keening as it blew around the buildings, a wind chime on the porch of a house . . . She could almost feel the gaze from the black windows of the houses all around.

  From the corner of her eye, she saw a shadow move in one window. She turned, but there was nothing. Just a dark bay window. Was someone watching her from the shadows? She realised she was in desperate need of rest. She would find the first hotel and book in. She unlocked her car and climbed in, activating the central locking. She sank into the comfort of the seat, leaned back her head, and closed her eyes.

  It’s a baking hot day on a run-down street in Rochdale, and Erika’s protective police gear sticks to her skin. She shifts uncomfortably, crouched against the low wall of a terraced house looming tall in the heat. Two officers are beside her, mirrored by three officers on the other side of the front gate. Mark is with them. Second along.

  From weeks of surveillance, the terraced house is burned into her brain. Bare concrete out front, overflowing wheelie bins. A gas and electric meter on the wall with its cover ripped off.

  Through the front door, up the stairs, a door to the left of the landing leads through to the back bedroom. That’s where they cook the meth. A woman has been seen going in with a little kid. It’s a risk, but they are prepared. Erika has drilled the routine over and over to her team of eight officers. Only now, they are stationed outside. It is real. Fear threatens to roll over Erika, but she pulls back from it.

  She gives the nod, and her black-clad team moves stealthily, surging down the path to the front door. The sun glints off the disc in the meter as it spins. Once, twice, almost matching the thunk of the battering ram. On the third attempt, the wood splinters, and the front door bursts inwards with a clatter.

  Then all hell breaks loose.

  Shots are fired. The window above the electricity meter explodes inwards. Shots are coming from the house behind them. Erika’s head spins round. The nice house across the street. Sash windows. Brass numbers on the door. Farrow & Ball paint on the walls inside. The couple had been so welcoming, so unassuming when the police had carried out their surveillance.

  It falls into place as Erika’s eyes are drawn to their upstairs window. She sees a dark shadow, then pain explodes in her neck and she tastes blood. Mark is suddenly beside her, crouching down to help. She tries to speak, to tell him, ‘It’s behind you’ – but blood fills her throat. In the hysteria it’s almost funny. Then there is a cracking sound, and the side of Mark’s head is blown open . . .

  Erika woke with a gasp, trying to catch her breath. She was surrounded by an eerie brightness, pressing down. She exhaled, and her breath came out in a long stream. It was only when she saw the steering wheel in front of her that she got her bearings. She was back in the present. Sitting in the car. A fresh layer of snow had fallen, completely covering the windows.

  It was a familiar dream. She always woke up at the same point. Sometimes the dream was in black and white, and Mark’s blood looked like melted chocolate.

  She breathed in and out, her heart rate slowing, the reality sinking in. She heard muffled voices and footsteps; people walking past the car. The voices grew louder and receded.

  She looked at the digital clock on the dashboard. It was now almost five in the morning. She’d slept for hours, although she felt no better for it. She shifted in the seat, her body stiff and freezing, and started the engine. The air from the heaters came out in an icy jet.

  When the car had warmed up, Erika flicked on the windscreen wipers and waited as the road appeared, washed white by the fresh layer of snow. Noticing the plaster on the back of her hand, she remembered that she had to see a doctor, but the events of last night compelled her to keep going, for now.

  Andrea was in that pub . . . Who were the woman and man she had she spoken to? And why had the barmaid vanished?

  It was easier to force the dream to the back of her mind, now that she had a problem to solve. Erika put the car in gear and set off for the police station.

  13

  Lewisham Row Police Station was quiet at five-thirty in the morning. The only sound was the far-off hammering along the corridor from the cells. The women’s locker room was empty, and Erika stripped off her grubby clothes and went through to the huge communal showers, turning on the water as hot as she could bear. She stood under it, savouring the warmth, and as the steam rose, the tiled Victorian showers vanished, and Erika with them.

  By six, she was dressed in clean clothes, and alone in the incident room, nursing a cup of coffee and some chocolate from the vending machine. Andrea Douglas-Brown stared back at her from the wall, over-confident.

  Erika went to the desk she’d been allocated, located her password and logged on to the intranet. It had been eight months since she’d looked at her work email – not through any kind of abstinence; she’d not had access. Scrolling through, she saw messages from former colleagues, newsletters, junk mail, and a notice to attend a formal hearing. That almost made her laugh: she’d been notified of a formal disciplinary hearing through an internal mail system that she’d been barred from accessing.

  With a long sweep of the mouse, she highlighted all the old emails and pressed delete.

  There was now just one email from Sergeant Cr
ane, sent late the previous night:

  Find attached Andrea DB’s full Facebook profile history 2007 - 2014. Plus records from her phone recovered at the crime scene.

  CRANE

  Erika opened the attached file and clicked “print”. Moments later, the printer by the door whirred into life, rapidly spitting out paper. Erika grabbed the pile of pages and took them down to the staff canteen, hoping to find it open for a decent coffee – but it was in darkness. She found a chair at the back, clicked on the lights, and started to sift through Andrea Douglas-Brown’s Facebook profile.

  It spanned 217 pages, almost nine years, taking Andrea from a fresh-faced fourteen-year-old to a sultry siren of twenty-three. In her early posts she was quite a conservative young woman, but once boys had come on the scene, she had started to dress more provocatively.

  Andrea’s seven years of Facebook posts were an endless blur of party photos and selfies. Hundreds of photos with handsome men and beautiful girls, rarely the same people more than a few times. It seemed that she was a party animal, and one who partied at the expensive end of the spectrum. The clubs she frequented were the type where you needed to book a table, and there never seemed to be a shortage of champagne bottles littering those tables in the photos.

  Throughout the years, there was little interaction on Facebook with her siblings. Her older sister Linda seemed to ‘like’ a few of the family-related posts, as did her younger brother David, but these tended to be only the posts associated with the annual holidays the Douglas-Brown family took to Greece, and in later years, to a villa in Dubrovnik, Croatia.

  The holidays interested Erika the most. Taken every August for three weeks, they followed a similar pattern. At the start of each, Andrea would post some family-friendly pictures – a group photo during a meal in a nice restaurant, or the family gathered round a cabana having a casual lunch in their swimming costumes. At these lunches, Andrea always wore a bikini, and was striking a pose, her dark hair tumbling over one shoulder as she artfully picked at her food. In contrast, Linda would be hunched down, plate piled high, looking a little annoyed that she was being distracted from tucking in. Linda seemed to grow in girth as each holiday passed, and she always covered up in long T-shirts and leggings. David, in contrast, started out as an extremely skinny thirteen-year-old wearing glasses, huddled under his mother’s thin arm, and slowly morphed into a handsome young man.

  Andrea seemed closer to David; in many of the photos she had drawn him into a reluctant bear hug, his glasses askew. There were barely any photos of Linda and David together. Sir Simon and Lady Diana seemed to give nothing away in photographs, pulling the same faces year in, year out: broad, yet vacant smiles. Here was Lady Diana in a swimming suit and sarong combo. There was Sir Simon in baggy board shorts, pulled a little too high over his hairy belly.

  As each holiday progressed, Andrea would quickly lose interest in family time and start to post pictures she’d taken of local boys. At first they’d be a bit stalker-ish, the groups of boys unaware they were being photographed as they stood around smoking, or played football on the beach with their shirts off. Then Andrea would zone in on one boy in particular, spending the last week of the holidays seemingly obsessed, taking endless photos. She apparently liked the bad boys: older and darker with muscly torsos, tattoos and piercings. In one picture, taken in the summer of 2009, Andrea was pictured posing on the back of a giant Harley Davidson, wearing the tiniest bikini and miming driving, whilst a dark haired lad, who presumably owned the bike, was relegated to riding pillion. He had one hand on her bikini bottoms, and was holding a cigarette, its tip glowing close to Andrea’s tanned skin. She fixed the camera with a look that said, I’m in control.

  Erika wrote in the margin: Who took this picture?

  She barely noticed when the shutters went up on the canteen serving-hatch, and bleary-eyed officers began to file in for breakfast. She read on, fascinated by Andrea’s life.

  In 2012, a new friend appeared on the scene, a girl called Barbora Kardosova.

  Slovak name?? wrote Erika, in the margin.

  Barbora was dark and beautiful like Andrea, and rapidly seemed to become a close friend, even joining the family holiday in 2012 and 2013. In Barbora, Andrea seemed to have found a boy-hunting partner in crime. Although they now sought boys in a more sophisticated way, pictured together with a string of dark-haired hunks in expensive nightclubs, or around equally expensive sun loungers.

  Andrea seemed to have made Barbora a genuine friend, posting pictures where they shared downtime, in which Andrea wore no make-up and was much less conscious of the camera. In many ways, Andrea was prettier without her war paint, larking about with a genuine smile on her face. In one picture, the girls posed side-by-side in front of a mirror, wearing oversized pullovers that hung down to their knees. The huge pullovers were old lady-ish. Barbora’s was embroidered with cats chasing balls of wool, while Andrea’s was embroidered with a giant ginger cat reclining in its basket. The phone camera flash was reflected in the top corner of the mirror. Andrea’s sister Linda had commented, ‘Get out of my bedroom you fucking cow!’

  Andrea had liked the comment and posted :).

  Then, in late 2013, Barbora abruptly vanished without explanation, defriending Andrea. Erika flicked back through the pages to check nothing was missing. Barbora didn’t appear once in a photo after this point. She didn’t so much as ‘like’ a post. Around six months later, in June 2014, Andrea’s Facebook profile was deactivated. There was no explanation, or message to her friends saying she intended to leave Facebook.

  Erika shifted her attention to the phone records. In comparison, they were bland and sparse. Crane had annotated the numbers, which consisted of regular calls to Andrea’s fiancé, Giles Osborne; to a local Chinese takeaway on a Saturday; and on the same seven Saturdays leading up to Christmas, phone votes for The X Factor. The rest of the phone calls were to her family, to the florist her mother ran in Kensington, and to her father’s secretary. There were no calls the night she vanished, even though the phone was found with her at the murder scene. The phone records covered eight months, only going back to June 2014.

  There was a clattering as a cup was dropped and shattered on the stone floor. Erika looked up, realising that it was now light and the canteen was filling up. She checked her watch and saw that it was ten to nine. Not wanting to be late for the briefing, she gathered up her papers and left. She ran into Superintendent Marsh in the corridor.

  ‘I read last night’s log,’ he said, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘Yes, sir. All will be explained. I have a strong lead.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘I’ll tell you in the briefing,’ she said, as they reached the incident room. When they entered, Erika could see that the whole team had assembled at their desks. They fell silent.

  ‘Okay. Morning everyone. I’ll start by saying that Sergeant Crane managed to pull a full Facebook history for Andrea, and phone records, which is great, fast work. Andrea was very active on the site, and then last June she deactivated the profile. Also, her phone records only go back to June 2014. Why? Did she change her number?’

  ‘She met Giles Osborne last June,’ said DCI Sparks.

  ‘Yes. Now, why would she change her number and deactivate her profile around the same time?’

  ‘Maybe she was turning over a new leaf. Some guys get jealous if a woman has exes and a history,’ said Singh.

  ‘She obviously used Facebook to meet blokes, and then she got engaged and didn’t need it any more,’ said Sparks.

  ‘But her phone records are – well they’re almost too robotic. Are you telling me she met the man of her dreams and her life was complete; she needed no other interactions?’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ said Sparks.

  ‘No, but there’s something fishy about it. She made no calls the night she vanished. Let’s dig around. Find her old phone and pull the records, and see if she had a second phone we don’t know about? Also, find out
everything you can about a girl called Barbora Kardosova, pronounced “kardosh-ova”. She was a very close friend of Andrea between 2012 and 2013 and then she vanished. Did they fall out? Where is she now? Can we talk to her? Check her out. Find her. And also, any old boyfriends. Andrea wasn’t short of male attention; see what you can dig up.’

  ‘But be discreet about that,’ added Marsh, from the back of the room.

  Erika went on, ‘I paid a visit to The Glue Pot pub last night. I got a positive ID from a barmaid called Kristina that Andrea was there the night she vanished. She says that Andrea was with a short-haired blonde woman, and then later, a dark-haired man.’

  ‘Are you going to bring this Kristina in, get her to do a photofit?’ asked Sparks.

  ‘She got scared off when I suggested this.’

  ‘Okay, what’s her surname?’ asked Sparks.

  ‘Well, I didn’t get that far before . . .’

  Sparks smirked and nodded his head.

  Erika went on, ‘Another woman I spoke to, Ivy Norris—’

  Sparks interrupted. ‘Jeez. I wouldn’t believe anything Ivy Norris tells you. That old slapper is a known bullshitter and trouble maker.’

  ‘Yes, but Ivy Norris had a very weird reaction when I mentioned The Glue Pot. She was scared. Now, I want everything you can get on that pub. Find that barmaid, and interview the landlord. I believe there’s a link here to Andrea and we need to find it, fast, before things evaporate.’

  ‘DCI Foster. Can I have a word please?’ said Marsh.

  ‘Yes, sir . . . Moss and Peterson, I want you with me today; we’re going to get the results of the autopsy and the Douglas-Browns are doing the formal ID of the body.’

  The incident room burst into busy chatter. Erika followed Marsh up to his office. She closed the door and took a seat opposite him.

  ‘The Douglas-Browns are coming in for the formal ID this morning?’

  ‘Yes. At half-ten.’