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

by Robert Bryndza

  ‘Officially, you have no authority to be here. You’ve been removed from the case.’

  ‘Yep. No ID, no car. I’m just Jo Public.’

  Isaac paused, regarding her for a moment. ‘How about a cup of tea then?’ he said.

  He took her through to his office. The Girl From Tiger Bay was playing softly, and Erika chose a comfy armchair next to his desk. Isaac went to a kettle on a table in one corner. His neat office was crammed with bookshelves. An iPod glowed in a Bose sound system. The shelf next to the sound system differed from the others, which were filled with medical reference books. This shelf contained fiction – mainly crime thrillers.

  ‘Surely you don’t read police procedurals in your spare time?’ asked Erika.

  Isaac turned from switching on the kettle and laughed wryly. ‘No. They’re complimentary copies, sent from the publisher. I was an advisor on a couple of the DCI Bartholomew books . . . How does peppermint tea grab you? I’m afraid I try to avoid caffeine.’

  ‘Sounds good. I should have avoided caffeine today – she says, four coffees later.’

  There was a small tree of mint by a tiny high window. Isaac twisted the pot round and selected a couple of leaves.

  ‘My ex-partner is Stephen Linley, author of the DCI Bartholomew books,’ he said.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Oh, I’m gay, or oh, how odd to be with someone who writes crime thrillers?’

  ‘Oh, to neither.’

  Isaac dropped the leaf into the cup and waited for the kettle to boil.

  ‘Actually, that is a bit odd, that you dated someone who writes crime thrillers,’ said Erika.

  The kettle came to the boil and Isaac poured in water. ‘He based one of his forensic psychologists on me. Then killed the character off when our relationship ended.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Gay bashed and dumped in the Thames.’

  ‘Sadly the pen is mightier than the sword,’ said Erika, taking the steaming cup.

  Isaac took a seat at his desk and twirled the chair round to face her. ‘Ivy Norris had two types of semen inside her vagina. Her arms were bound, and she was strangled. Our attacker had not long departed. She’d been dead less than an hour.’

  ‘Anything from the DNA database?’

  ‘We’ve run both samples of semen, but nothing has come up.’

  Erika nodded, and almost subconsciously looked at the back of her hand.

  ‘Is that a bite mark?’ asked Isaac.

  ‘Yes. It was Ivy’s grandson.’

  ‘Ivy’s blood work came back. She was a heroin addict and HIV positive. It’s feasible she passed it on to her grandson.’

  ‘When he bit me, he broke the skin,’ said Erika, sipping her tea.

  ‘Then I’d advise an HIV test.’ Isaac wrote a number on a piece of paper and handed it to her. ‘Here, it’s the drop-in clinic I use when I get tested. It’s fast, clean and anonymous. It can take up to six or nine months for the virus to show itself, so to speak. You’ll have to get tested again.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I have to attend a formal hearing. Psychiatric evaluation. A medical, no doubt.’

  ‘If you are diagnosed with HIV . . .’

  ‘I’ll deal with that if it happens. Right now a fear of dying is well down my list.’

  The album had finished and there was a comfortable silence in the room. Isaac looked at her, debating whether or not to say anything.

  ‘Don’t give up on this case,’ said Isaac.

  ‘I think the case has given up on me,’ said Erika.

  ‘I’ve been back through my records. There were three cases, autopsies I conducted, where the victims were Eastern European girls, all suspected of having been trafficked to the UK. All three were found raped and strangled, hands bound, dumped in water around London, hair pulled out, no clothes below the waist.’

  ‘What? When?’ asked Erika.

  ‘The first was March 2013, the second was November of that year and the third was February 2014. Just under a year ago.’

  ‘What? Why was this never flagged?’ asked Erika, sitting forward.

  ‘Circumstance often overrides putting the evidence together. Sadly the three girls were all prostitutes, whether they’d had a choice in the matter or not. They got lost amongst all the other killings; a prostitute is almost expected to lose her life. They were never linked, and the cases remain open.’

  ‘Dirt-poor Eastern European prostitute found strangled – oh well, shit happens. Young daughter of titled millionaire found strangled . . .’

  ‘Yes, it reads rather differently, doesn’t it?’ agreed Isaac.

  ‘Why didn’t you mention it before?’ asked Erika.

  ‘Something about Ivy’s death flagged it in my mind. Of course, Andrea differs from these because she hadn’t been raped. However. The other three girls were found in a state of decay, and they were sex workers. It’s possible they had been raped, but not at the same time as being killed. Ivy Norris was also a prostitute and was found with two types of semen. It’s possible that her killer didn’t rape her, either.’

  ‘Jesus!’ said Erika, standing up. ‘This is a major breakthrough. We now have four deaths linked with Andrea.’

  ‘And I did, of course, pass this information across to DCI Sparks as soon as I made the discovery.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Yesterday morning.’

  ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘I haven’t heard anything. I think he’s concentrating on his prime suspect, the Italian lad.’

  ‘He should at least be running these dates, checking where Marco Frost was when these murders happened. Jesus! Can I see the file?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I thought about telling you. And I wasn’t going to. And then you show up, and, well I have a good instinct for people . . .’ His eyes travelled up to the shelf of crime thrillers. ‘Well, a good instinct for everyone except lovers.’

  ‘Please can I see the files?’

  ‘No. I’m sorry. I think it’s grossly unfair, what’s happened to you in the press, but you do need to cool down. You need to think tactically. Can’t one of your colleagues furnish you with the information?’

  ‘Possibly. And you’re really not going to tell me any more?’

  He reached for a pad of paper. ‘I’ll give you their names and date of birth. But this will not come back to me. Do you hear?’

  ‘I promise,’ said Erika.

  Isaac watched Erika through the CCTV monitor as she hurried off down the corridor, clutching the list of names, and hoped that she would remain true to her promise.

  35

  Erika went straight to the coffee shop when she got back to Brockley Station. She ordered a coffee, booted up her laptop and started to search the Internet. Armed with names and dates, it didn’t take her long to find details of the girls. The first victim was nineteen-year-old Tatiana Ivanova from Slovakia. A lone swimmer at Hampstead Heath ponds found her body in March 2013. It had been a warm start to spring, and her body was badly decayed. The press used a photo of Tatiana at a dance competition. She was dressed in a black leotard with sparkly silver fringing, striking a pose, hand on hip. She must have been part of a dance troupe, but the other girls had been cropped out. She was dark-haired, very beautiful, and looked younger than her years.

  The second victim was Mirka Bratova, aged eighteen. She was originally from the Czech Republic, and was found eight months after her disappearance, in November 2013. One of the park wardens in the Serpentine Lido discovered her body floating in the water amongst leaves and rubbish by the sluice gate. In the press photo, she was also dark-haired and very beautiful, and pictured holding a black kitten on a sunny balcony. Behind her, blocks of flats stretched away in the distance.

  The third victim was Karolina Todorova, again aged just eighteen. Her body was discovered in February 2014. A man was out walking early in the morning and his
dog found her body by the edge of one of the lakes in Regent’s Park. Karolina was originally from Bulgaria. The press had used a photo taken in an automatic photo booth. She was dressed up for a night out, in a white low-cut top, and she had a streak of pink in her dark hair. Another girl was hugging her in the picture, presumably a friend, but her face had been blurred out.

  It frustrated Erika that she couldn’t see more; details were sketchy and almost dismissive in the press reports of the deaths.

  One other thing mentioned about all the girls was that they had come to England to work as au pairs, and that they had then “fallen into” prostitution. Erika wondered if it had been that gradual. Had the girls been lured to the UK on the pretence of a better life, of a good job? The chance to learn English?

  Erika looked up from where she sat in the window of the café. Outside, it was raining hard. It hammered on the awning out front, where several people had gathered to shelter. She took a sip of her coffee, but it was cold.

  Erika had left Slovakia when she was just eighteen, for the same reason, to be an au pair. She’d left the bus station in Bratislava on a bleak November morning, travelling to Manchester in England with little knowledge of English.

  The family she’d worked for had been okay. The kids had been sweet, but the mother had had a cold attitude towards Erika, as if somehow Eastern Europeans were worth a bit less as human beings. Erika had found the suburban street where they lived to be sinister, and the atmosphere in the house was always tense between husband and wife. They’d refused to let her return home early that first Christmas, when Erika’s mother had fallen ill with cirrhosis of the liver, and eighteen months later, when they had decided they no longer needed an au pair, they had given Erika three days’ notice to leave. They hadn’t asked if she had anywhere to go.

  Erika realised she was lucky, though, and blessed in comparison. Had Tatiana, Mirka, and Karolina said goodbye to family just like she had? Erika remembered the crumbling bus terminal in Bratislava: rows and rows of bus platforms. Each platform had rusting metal poles holding up an enormous long shelter, and it had been so damp. She had wondered if it was damp from the tears of all those teenagers who had to say goodbye, to leave a beautiful country where the only way to succeed is to get out.

  Did the parents of the three dead girls cry? They had not known that their girls would never return. And what had happened when the girls arrived in London? How had they ended up working as prostitutes?

  Tears rolled down Erika’s face, and when the waiter came to take her coffee cup, she turned her head away and angrily dried her eyes.

  She had cried enough tears to last a lifetime. Now it was time for action.

  36

  The next afternoon, Erika felt like she had exhausted all the options she could take as a civilian. She was making another cup of coffee and weighing up her options, when she heard a bell ringing. It took her a few moments to realise it was the front door. She left her flat and went down to the communal front entrance. When she opened the door, Moss was waiting on the front step, her face giving nothing away.

  ‘Are you making home visits?’ asked Erika.

  ‘You make me sound like a bloody Avon lady,’ said Moss with a wry grin.

  Erika stood aside to let her in. She hadn’t expected to ever receive visitors in the flat, and had to clear off the sofa for Moss. She grabbed several days’ dirty plates off the coffee table, and the teacup overflowing with cigarette butts. Moss didn’t comment and sat down, shrugging off a backpack she was carrying.

  ‘Do you want some tea?’ asked Erika.

  ‘Yes please, boss.’

  ‘I’m not your boss anymore. Call me Erika,’ she said, tipping the dirty plates into the sink.

  ‘Let’s stick with boss. First names would be weird. I wouldn’t want you to call me Kate.’

  Erika stopped, her hand hovering over a box of teabags, ‘Your name is Kate Moss?’ She turned to see if she was joking, but Moss nodded ruefully. ‘Your mother called you Kate Moss?’

  ‘When I was given the name Kate, the other, slightly thinner . . .’

  ‘Slightly!’ laughed Erika, despite herself.

  ‘Yes, the slightly thinner Kate Moss wasn’t a famous supermodel.’

  ‘Milk?’ said Erika, grinning.

  ‘Yes, and two sugars.’

  She finished making the tea whilst Moss busied herself pulling paperwork from her backpack. Erika came over with mugs and biscuits.

  ‘That’s a good cup,’ said Moss, taking a sip. ‘How did you learn to make such a good tea? Not in Slovakia?’

  ‘No, Mark, my husband. He ingrained in me the tea ritual, and so did my father-in-law . . .’

  Moss looked uncomfortable that she’d led the conversation down this path. ‘Shit, sorry, boss. Look, none of the team at the station enjoyed reading about . . . about, well, you know. And we didn’t know about . . .’

  ‘Mark. I’ve got to start talking about him sometime. When you lose someone, not only are they gone, but everyone around you doesn’t want to talk about them. It drove me slightly crazy. It was like he’d been deleted . . . Anyway, why are you here, Moss?’

  ‘I think you’re on to something, boss. Isaac Strong sent some case files over. DCI Sparks is refusing to see the link, but there were three young girls killed in similar circumstances to Andrea and Ivy. All three found in water with their hands bound, hair missing from their scalp. They’d been strangled. There was evidence of rape, but they were sex workers.’

  ‘Yeah, I know about those,’ said Erika.

  ‘Okay, well, there’s more. The phone box we found under Andrea’s bed. Crane requested a trace on the IMEI number written on the box. It matches the IMEI number of Andrea’s old iPhone, the one she reported missing. Crane then got in contact with network providers and gave them the IMEI number. They’ve confirmed that the handset is still active.’

  ‘I knew it! So Andrea reported the phone missing, but kept it and bought a new SIM card,’ said Erika, triumphantly.

  ‘Yes. A signal was last traced for that handset near to London Road on the 12th of January,’ said Moss.

  ‘Someone’s nicked it and they’re using it?’

  ‘No,’ said Moss, pulling out a large ordinance survey map and starting to unfold it. ‘The signal came from a storm drain running twenty feet below ground. It runs off London Road, beside the train track to Forest Hill Station, and then on towards the next station on the line, Honor Oak Park.’

  Erika peered at the map.

  ‘The storm drain is a major tributary,’ Moss went on, ‘and over the past few days an enormous amount of meltwater from the snow and rain has seeped into the ground and will have rushed through the storm drain.’

  ‘Pushing anything with it, including a phone,’ finished Erika.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So the phone battery is now dead, obviously?’

  ‘Nothing has been detected. It’s an iPhone 5S, and the network tells us that it will still broadcast its location to phone masts for five days after the battery has discharged – of course, that’s now passed.’

  Erika looked at the map; she saw Moss had drawn a red line from London Road along to Honor Oak Park. It covered just over a mile and a half.

  ‘So, what? The theory is that the phone was chucked or dropped into a drain when Andrea was taken?’

  ‘Yeah. But it’s not a theory that DCI Sparks or Chief Superintendent Marsh want to hear. They’re convinced they have their man in Marco Frost, and they’re under pressure from Oakley et al to make a conviction. They’ve been through his laptop and there’s a lot of Andrea on there. Photos, letters he’d written to her, Google search history about places she’d been, and was going to . . .’

  ‘This is a major breakthrough, but why are you here, Moss?’ asked Erika, getting up to make more tea.

  ‘I’ve been there when we questioned Marco, and he is – was –

  obsessed by Andrea. But, he just doesn’t seem like he’s got i
t in him. He also has very large hands. Isaac showed us the handprints on Andrea. And I don’t know, it’s not much more than a hunch.’

  ‘You don’t think he did it.’

  ‘I have doubts, but they are a hunch. I think that this phone could open up the investigation,’ said Moss.

  ‘Well, you’ve got to get a team down in that drain, to at least have a look,’ said Erika.

  ‘Yeah, but under whose authority, boss? I haven’t got any. Your hands are tied. It would cost a huge amount, plus the manpower involved, who would sign off on either of those right now? The team is now focusing resources towards the prosecution of Marco Frost.’

  Erika thought. ‘Does anyone else share your doubts about Marco Frost?’

  Moss nodded.

  ‘Peterson? Crane?’

  ‘And others. We’ve made copies of the files on Tatiana Ivanova, Mirka Bratova and Karolina Todorova.’

  She handed them to Erika, who flicked through, looking at the photos of the girls – all lying on their backs, naked from the waist down, their wet hair plastered to their pale faces. Fear in their eyes.

  ‘Do you think he deliberately leaves their eyes open?’ asked Erika.

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘If it is the same killer, how the hell does Andrea fit in with this?’

  ‘Whoever it was ventured out of their comfort zone? She’s a different kind of girl,’ said Moss

  ‘Only because she was rich. The girls are all similar. Dark, beautiful, good figures.’

  ‘Do you think Andrea was working as a prostitute? Did you see the stuff in the papers?’

  ‘She didn’t need the money. I think first and foremost she saw sex as a thrill,’ said Erika.

  ‘The thrill of the chase,’ finished Moss.

  ‘What if Andrea had fallen for the man who is doing this? She’s attracted to dark, handsome men.’

  ‘But what about Ivy Norris? Her death bore hallmarks of the previous killings, but she doesn’t fit the pattern. She wasn’t young. Or attractive like the rest of these girls.’

  ‘Maybe it wasn’t about that? She shares the common thread that she was a prostitute. What if she saw Andrea with the killer, in the pub? And she was killed to shut her up.’