Cold to the Touch

by Cari Hunter

  “Did you request CCTV of the area?” Sanne asked George.

  He stopped wrestling with the top button on his shirt and opened a folder on his computer. She recognised the file names as areas local to the murder scene, the majority of them around shopping precincts and bus stops.

  “The recordings were sent through late last night, but we’ve only had time to look at three of them,” he said. “Quality is iffy at best. The most interesting thing we’ve seen so far is a shag behind a Biffa bin.”

  “Classy,” she said. “It might be worth going over them again to check if a dark-coloured Vauxhall Combo van shows up at any point. We have a note of one parked close to our scene on Monday night. It’s about the best lead we’ve got.”

  “Righto.” Fred licked chocolate off his fingers with the air of one prepared to get stuck in.

  “San, do you want to see how Mr. Burrows is getting on?” Nelson asked.

  She nodded, snagging the remaining Jaffa Cakes. “Incentive,” she said, in answer to Fred’s shocked reaction. “Nelson, if you can’t find a next of kin for Jones, Daniel Horst might be able to provide a more reliable ID.”

  “Good thinking.”

  “Yeah, I’m full of great ideas.” She kept her voice light, but she was beginning to wonder what the hell she had set into motion less than a week into her three-month improvement notice. Her suggestion that Sheffield harboured a multiple murderer had set half the department off on what was likely to be a wild goose chase. In terms of career enhancement, it probably wasn’t what Eleanor had had in mind.

  *

  Meg woke up ten minutes before her alarm with a thick head, her fingers curled around the hammer she had taken to bed. Had her mouth not been gummed shut, she would have cursed the world and everyone in it, but she settled instead for bashing the mattress a couple of times. She was due back at work in less than three hours, a killer turnaround that was the result of her shift-swap. Sleep deprivation and rotating shift patterns were things she had grown accustomed to over the years, but the stress of the last two days was gnawing at her, and she barely had the energy to drag herself upright.

  She was debating whether to sacrifice food for more sleep when a bang from downstairs made the decision for her. She shot out of bed, grabbing the hammer and getting her legs caught in the sheets. The combination of a head rush and the bedding almost put her on the floor. Having waited out the dizziness, she kicked free from the cotton and tiptoed across the carpet. The bedroom door creaked open, the rest of the house falling silent as if holding its breath. Three steps took her onto the landing, where she could hear what sounded like the rhythmic swish of a potato peeler. As the scent of spicy cooking began to waft up to her, the knot in her guts loosened slightly.

  “Em? Is that you?” she shouted from a safe distance, still clutching the hammer and within easy reach of the phone in her bedroom.

  “It’s me,” Emily called back. “Sorry, I dropped the lid from a jar. Did I wake you?”

  Meg stashed the hammer behind the laundry basket and forced her trembling legs to take the stairs at a trot. They were almost steady by the time she entered the kitchen.

  “Crikey, you’ve been busy.”

  The kitchen was spotless, apart from the unit where Emily had been preparing vegetables. A new set of crockery sat by the kettle, and a tea bag waited in a replica of Meg’s favourite mug.

  “Where on earth did you find this?” Weariness forgotten, Meg laughed and flicked the kettle on.

  “What? Oh, the mug? It was just hanging on the rack.”

  A pan on the hob began to spit out orange gloop. Turning away to adjust the heat, Emily missed Meg biting her tongue and mouthing the word “bollocks.” The mug’s original incarnation had been a Christmas gift from Sanne, who had apparently bought a replacement and left it for Meg to find. Meg assumed she had purchased the crockery on the same trip.

  “It’s a good thing you managed to get to the supermarket last night.” The pan crisis dealt with, Emily ushered Meg into a chair and set a bowl of homemade muesli in front of her. Fresh milk, sliced fruit, and yoghurt were arranged neatly on the table.

  Meg gave her best noncommittal smile, eyeing the seeds and nuts and hoping that Sanne had loaded her fridge with bacon and eggs. “This all looks great,” she said.

  By anyone’s standards, Emily was an excellent cook. She just preferred not to cook meat. Given that Meg’s repertoire amounted to eggy bread, Super Noodle surprise (the surprise came if she didn’t boil them dry), and a passable fry-up, she had been eating an unprecedented amount of vegetables and lentils over the last five months. Even now, the thought of her illicit late-night kebab left her drooling into her bowl.

  Emily brought Meg’s mug of tea over to the table and sat down. “I made sweet potato curry for your supper. Just give it three minutes in the microwave.” She helped herself to cereal. “How’s the wrist?”

  “Not too bad if I don’t move it.” Meg spoke through a mouthful, but swallowed when she saw Emily grimace. “Sorry.”

  She rolled up her pyjama sleeve and displayed her arm. The bruises had deepened overnight, mottling her skin with lines of livid purple. It had been years since she last had to choose an outfit to cover bruising, but fortunately she tended to wear a long-sleeved T-shirt beneath her scrubs top in winter.

  “Oh, sweetheart,” Emily whispered. She ran a careful finger over the swollen skin.

  Meg hitched her chair closer and pulled Emily into a hug. “Hey, I’m fine. These things happen. Come on. Don’t get all upset.”

  Emily sniffled. “He should go to prison for doing that.”

  “He probably wouldn’t even get a fine, Em.” She used her thumb to wipe Emily’s tears away. “He’d hire a good lawyer, who’d argue that I startled him or that the head injury made him confused. He’d be clean-shaven and contrite, dressed in his best suit, and I’d walk straight into court off a night shift, forget my own name, and accidentally say ‘fuck’ in front of the judge.”

  Emily laughed softly, her breath a warm tickle on Meg’s neck.

  Encouraged, Meg continued, “They’d end up fining me for contempt and awarding him compensation.”

  “Most likely.” Emily’s voice was still quiet, but she’d stopped crying. “How many times have you been hurt like this?”

  “Three,” Meg said. For the purposes of this conversation, three was all she was going to admit to. “One bloke had just come out of a seizure, though, so that couldn’t be helped.”

  “And the other?” Emily sat up ramrod straight, as if to steel herself.

  “Twenty-year-old who wasn’t happy that his drunk girlfriend had been kept waiting for almost half an hour. He walked round to Majors and punched the first medic he found. He pleaded guilty to common assault and spent a couple of months in jail. He’s come back in with a broken leg since then, but he didn’t recognise me.”

  Emily crinkled her nose and pushed her mug of tea away as if its smell was making her queasy. Her A&E rotation had lasted four months, and she’d already told Meg she had no desire to return to emergency medicine. Her ultimate goal was general practice in a village surgery, somewhere pleasant and rural where housewives came for regular doses of antidepressants and anyone seriously ill could be referred on to the hospital. It sounded like Meg’s worst nightmare, but there was certainly money in it. Emily’s mum had been a GP for most of her career and had retired at fifty to spend her days playing golf or heading off to far-flung parts. It was a fair bet that none of her patients had ever smacked her.

  “How can you be so blasé about it?” Emily asked.

  Meg readjusted her sleeve and wrapped her cold fingers around her mug. “I think you just get used to it.”

  *

  The man made no attempt to disguise what he was doing. He opened his trousers, took aim, gave it a shake when he’d finished, and tidied himself away again. Two minutes and forty seconds later, he caught the number fourteen bus. The remaining five minutes of film reco
rded the wanderings of a dog, far better mannered than most of the people with whom he was sharing his brief flush of fame, and then the grey fuzz indicating a full tape.

  Sanne rocked back on her chair, waiting out the end of the file before closing it down and adding it to her Watched folder. There were six files there now, all capturing Malory Park’s finest going about their nocturnal business, and all completely useless to the investigation.

  “There are only two shops in Sheffield that stock knives similar to the one used to kill Andrew Culver.” Nelson turned his monitor so Sanne could see the website for Streetz Emporium, a shop located in the trendy Hartfield Quarter, where small independent businesses flourished away from the high city centre rates. The page, headed Shit Kickers, categorised its weaponry according to “Fear Factor.” In the top corner, a knife with a savage serrated blade and an ornate handle scored ten out of ten.

  “Definitely worth sending a couple of unis round for a visit,” she said, “if only to piss the proprietors off.”

  Nelson chuckled. “The murder weapons were probably purchased online, but you never know, we might get lucky. How are you doing over there?”

  “Nil for six.” She stood and stretched her back, her muscles stiff and sore from sitting still for hours. She’d been looking forward to a run, but it was already dark, so that wasn’t going to happen. “I’ve learned that the number fourteen bus is reasonably punctual, that White Ace cider appears to be the Malory Park cheap booze of choice, and that The Frying Pickets outsells Trawlers chippy by about two to one.”

  “That’ll be down to its fabulous name.”

  “Quite possibly. Did you get hold of Daniel at the Mission?”

  “Not yet. A woman who may or may not have been Pauline said he was out on the estate delivering food and clothing. She didn’t know when he’d be back. George is still in with Liam Burrows, trying to dig out a next of kin for Marcus Jones and helping firm up Burrows’s alibi. ‘Asleep in the warehouse’ and ‘wasted out back of Bashir’s Kebabs’ are unlikely to convince the boss of his innocence.”

  Halfway toward touching her toes, Sanne shivered. “Please don’t mention the boss. If she gets wind of this and it turns out to be noth—”

  Nelson held up a hand to cut her off. “No one will say a word, and pooling resources for the afternoon hasn’t done us any harm.”

  Her fingers grazed her boots, the motion a pleasant pull on her back. “True, but she’ll think I got all giddy and jumped the gun, trying to be flash.”

  “Yes, because everyone knows you’re nothing but a glory hound.”

  “Oh aye.” She straightened up and reached for their mugs. “I love seeing my face plastered all over the papers and having reporters stake out my cottage.”

  He gave her a sympathetic smile. “Well, this one is unlikely to make the front page. It’s probably just a falling out between smackheads and nothing to do with Jones.”

  The sound of a toppling chair made them both look around. Fred was rapidly bearing down on their desks, his hands beckoning them over.

  “Got something!” he yelled. “Come and take a look!”

  Sanne glowered at Nelson. “You and your big mouth,” she muttered.

  Fred had rewound the CCTV file. For almost a minute, Sanne stared at the edge of a shopping precinct, the camera clipping the side of a Raja Brothers convenience store and the road that ran to the right of it.

  “This is from Wednesday night, one of the closest cameras to our scene. Just keep watching.” Fred’s feet played out a tap dance as the seconds ticked by. “There!”

  He paused the tape, prompting Sanne and Nelson to lean forward in unison. The time stamp in the corner of the screen read 23:27, just above the image of a dark-coloured mid-sized van.

  “Is that the same make and model?” Nelson asked.

  Fred maximised a website displaying a Vauxhall Combo and pulled the video file adjacent to it. “I’d say they’re a match.” He beamed at Sanne and pushed his phone toward her.

  “Buggeration,” she said.

  Chapter Eleven

  Sanne turned a deaf ear to Fred humming a funeral dirge and ignored Nelson’s enquiry as to what she’d order for her last supper. Despite their teasing, they were showing a lot of faith in her, and she wasn’t going to let herself or her team down by contacting Eleanor before she felt adequately prepared.

  “Did I miss anything?” she asked Nelson as he returned her notes.

  “Spot on,” he said. “Use the phone in Interview Two if you want some privacy.”

  “I will. Cheers, Nelson.”

  Interview Two was empty and quiet, a sodden tissue and a lipstick-smeared coffee cup all that remained of its last guest. Sanne shut the door and perched on the chair closest to the phone. Then she dialled Eleanor’s number from memory and began to count the rings. The call was answered after two with a terse “DI Stanhope.”

  Sanne dug her nails into the chair’s upholstery. “Boss, it’s Sanne. Sorry to disturb you at the weekend.”

  The voices in the background—one older male, a television, two lads arguing—faded, and she heard Eleanor shut a door.

  “What’s the problem?” Eleanor didn’t seem at all irritated by the disruption of her day off. She expected her team to be available around the clock, and she led by example. If anything, she sounded curious.

  “Boss, this murder at Malory Park that Nelson and I were assigned to, we think it might be connected to the one George and Fred are working.”

  There was a shuffle as if Eleanor had moved something, and then a rustle of cloth as she sat down. “Go on.”

  Although Eleanor pitched her tone halfway between a command and a request, the assertion of her authority had the incongruous effect of making Sanne feel calmer. With only the barest of glances at her notepad, she detailed the similarities and inconsistencies between the two murders, and the appearance of what was potentially the same vehicle close to both scenes. Eleanor listened without interrupting, and when Sanne had finished, the line remained so quiet that she checked the phone to make sure they were still connected.

  “So you have the Mission Cross, the van sightings, the victim profile, and the manner of death,” Eleanor said eventually.

  “Yes, ma’am. Those are the common factors.”

  “No motive?”

  “Not as yet, ma’am.”

  “No witnesses?”

  “No, ma’am.” Sanne could feel sweat trickling into her bra.

  “And Nelson, Fred, and George are in agreement with you on this?”

  The inference was clear: Sanne had made the call, therefore ownership of the initial theory must be hers.

  “Yes, ma’am. They’re all on board.”

  “Is it snowing over there?”

  “Uh…” The question left Sanne completely wrong-footed. She peered through the window and then in desperation opened it and stuck out her hand. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Excellent. I’ll be with you in about an hour.”

  “Right.” Sanne stood to attention, and then remembered that no one was there to see her, and felt stupid. “Apologies for wrecking your Saturday evening.”

  Eleanor’s laugh was short and dry. “The lads can’t decide which horror film to watch, and Doug is falling asleep in his popcorn. Coming in to work is no hardship.”

  She disconnected the call, and Sanne dropped the receiver back into its cradle as if it were a live snake whose jaws were closing in on her fingers. Outside the room, Nelson and Fred greeted her with pensive expressions.

  “Well?” Fred asked.

  “She’ll be here in an hour.”

  Nelson grinned and touched his knuckles to her jaw. He knew that Eleanor wouldn’t be making the trip if Sanne had fucked up.

  “Nice one, mate,” he said.

  *

  Eleanor was no idiot. She arrived bearing two bulging bags of fish and chips, along with fresh milk for brews. On the downside, she had also summoned Carlyle to her improm
ptu tea party.

  “Uh oh.” George waggled a piece of battered fish as Carlyle approached the desks they were picnicking around. “Have we dragged you away from a hot date, Sarge?”

  Dressed in a designer suit and gleaming shoes that tapped like high heels when he walked, Carlyle had evidently had plans for the evening. Gel darkened his ginger hair, and his aftershave was so strong that it almost put Sanne off her chips. Taking a seat next to Eleanor, he sulked into his mug of coffee and refused to engage with his subordinates. Eleanor passed him the file she’d finished reading and opened Marcus Jones’s instead.

  “I think the Mission Cross is our first obvious port of call,” she said, once the plates were cleared and she’d familiarised herself with the case details. “Whether or not the two deaths are related, both vics had that place in common, which means all the regular attendees and staff need interviewing in depth and their alibis verifying.”

  Nelson turned a page on his notepad and tracked a finger down the lines. “I thought we might be paying the shelter another visit, so I did a spot of research when I phoned. Sunday lunch is their busiest meal, which is very convenient for our purposes. After that, Monday and Friday evenings are the best attended.”

  “We need to move on this before word gets around,” Eleanor said. “Tomorrow’s lunch would be ideal. Where are we up to with Burrows?”

  Sanne handed her a typed summary. “His whereabouts for most of the last week are largely unverifiable. He spends much of his time alone or with people whose names he doesn’t know. All the same, I’m pretty certain he’s not our man for this.” Afraid she might have spoken out of turn, she glanced at Nelson and George, but both men nodded their agreement.

  Carlyle set down his mug with enough force to make it thud. “What did he do, Jensen, bat his eyelids at you and tell you a sob story about how wicked his daddy is?”

  “No, Sarge,” she said, holding his gaze. “I don’t think he mentioned his daddy. His sob story was all about his evil, drunken mum.”