Blood Runs Cold_A completely unputdownable mystery and suspense thriller

by Dylan Young

  Morton smoked aggressively, occasionally laughing at something said or possibly his own joke, the laugh segueing into a thick, chesty cough. The other smoker walked off. Six minutes after walking out, Morton took one long, final drag, blew out the smoke, exchanged a quip with one of the players on the putting green and stubbed out the cigarette. Holder noted its position, trying not to stare. There was a brief moment when Morton’s eyes and his met, but it was fleeting and meaningless. Holder waited until Morton had gone inside, then he stepped down off the patio and turned towards the litter bin, only to find the man in the lime-green sweater and sunglasses already there, leaning over it, peering at the butts.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Holder in a harsh whisper.

  The man looked up and over his shoulder, smiling. He was wearing golf gloves and had a plastic evidence bag in his hand. At the bottom of the bag was a cigarette stub. Holder looked from the bag to the face, confusion rendering him momentarily speechless. He felt a hand on his elbow and the man walked him away from the patio.

  ‘Good round?’

  ‘What?’

  Three steps and his elbow released, Holder watched as the sunglasses were whipped off to reveal Woakes under the hat.

  ‘Sarge?’ Holder stepped away, blinking, befuddled.

  ‘Sorry, Justin, mate. You won’t believe it but an old mate of mine plays up here. So I thought, why not? Help out, you know. Borrowed the kit and, Robert’s your father’s brother.’

  Holder looked at the evidence bag. ‘You’re sure you’ve got the right one?’

  ‘Of course. I was watching him all the time.’

  Holder exhaled. ‘Sorry, it’s just that DI Gwynne said—’

  ‘I know. I didn’t want to steal your thunder, Justin. Not trying to pull rank either. It was too good a chance to miss, is all.’

  Holder looked distinctly unconvinced.

  ‘Look, I’m not trying to make you look a mug, honest. At the end of the day we’ve got a result, yeah? Bish bosh. And Gwynne would have wanted me to make sure, you know?’

  Holder blinked. He didn’t know.

  ‘Great, now, come on. Where’s Ryia?’

  ‘She’s inside waiting for me.’

  ‘Right. It’s my round. We should do shots?’

  Holder’s face was a picture.

  ‘Only kidding, Justin. Come on, let’s give her the good news.’

  Eight

  That evening, Kate dragged Anna into the Milk Thistle. At a little after eight, it was still early for a Saturday night and the cocktails weren’t cheap, two good reasons why they succeeded in grabbing a corner table in the first-floor bar with low, opulent, green leather chairs. The crowd was noisy, young and not bothered by the prices. Oak-panelled walls, weird rabbit portraits and a speakeasy vibe, by ten it would be heaving. But for now, it was still manageable and they could at least hear each other speak.

  They’d met for a rare afternoon out. Rare in that no children were involved and it was as much an indulgence for Kate as it was a ‘treat’ for Anna. Rob, Kate’s husband, now running the family haulage business, was over networking at a commercial vehicle shindig and they’d caught the train. Rob had gone to play with trucks, and Kate, having offloaded both of her children with their grandmother back in Wales, met Anna in town for an afternoon of shopping, which usually meant Kate daring Anna to try on clothes she’d never consider for herself normally and then telling her how fantastic she looked in them. Some shoes, a cocktail dress and a sale handbag were the result. Kate had come away with plenty more swag, none of which was from a sale. Rob was doing well.

  They’d dined at the bar in the Riverstation on Harbourside early. Kate wasn’t staying overnight – that would have been too much to ask of their mother – and Rob had arranged to meet her at ten to nine at Temple Meads to catch the return to Cardiff.

  ‘We’ve got ages, yet, babe,’ Kate said as they taxied back into town. Anna knew there’d be no point arguing. Kate was nothing if not determined when it came to having a good time.

  The Milk Thistle’s daisy fizz was a heady mix of pear syrup, Tanqueray gin and some sort of bubbly. And even though there’d been wine with the meal, these were slipping down way too easily. Kate looked totally at ease, as if she did this sort of thing regularly. Anna knew she didn’t unless she had a doppelgänger who looked after her two toddlers while the real Kate hit the town. But this was Kate’s sort of place, not Anna’s. If asked, Anna would be hard pressed to tell anyone where her sort of place truly was.

  Anna glanced around. The bar sparkled with groups of people. Some couples, but mainly groups. Young women dressed – barely – in whatever fashion the current crop of reality show vixens were sponsored to wear, seated at the tables. The men, all gym-trimmed, tanned, white shirts and too tight jackets at the bar. This was how the evening courtship ritual started. Both groups ever hopeful.

  ‘Anything there you fancy? You’ve got to get back on that ’orse, girl.’ Kate delivered the statement in an exaggerated valleys, dropped ‘h’s accent that drew a few looks from the nearest group of men.

  ‘Stop it,’ Anna warned. Kate’s teasing barbs about Anna’s paltry dating history were a running theme. Whereas Kate, married with two children and still drawing stares, thrived in these environments, Anna found them barely tolerable, and then for only short periods. Relationships were not on Anna’s current agenda. People in general, come to that.

  Kate giggled. ‘Oh, God, remember when we sneaked out to Simon’s eighteenth at the rugby club?’

  ‘You sneaked out. I had an invite.’

  ‘Yeah, but we were both underage.’

  ‘I was underage by six months; you were only fifteen.’

  ‘Dad went ballistic.’

  Anna smiled. Ballistic, as applied to their father, was hyperbole of the nth degree. It had not been in Tom Gwynne’s nature to be ballistic. From what Anna could remember, he’d given them both a stern talking to, despite the fact that Anna’s only motivation had been to see and hear a local band that Simon had hired for the gig. Their mother, on the other hand, launched into a vehement and sustained dressing-down, ending up with the dread and dire warning that they would not be welcome in the house if they ever got pregnant.

  ‘Mum was the one who went ballistic,’ Anna corrected her.

  ‘Mum was always going ballistic. What about that time I lost a flip-flop out of the window of the car in north Wales. I thought she was going to have a stroke.’ Kate began giggling.

  ‘You were twenty-two at the time,’ Anna said.

  ‘Shut up. I was seven.’

  ‘She made Dad turn the car around and fetch it.’

  Kate doubled up. After several intakes of breath and in between groans she managed to say, ‘She was such a witch.’

  Is such a witch.

  ‘It’s a wonder she didn’t take a wand out and shout “Accio flip-flop”.’

  Kate’s laughter erupted, loud and sustained. Anna watched her and joined in. Subdued but genuine. Kate caught it. ‘It’s so good to see you smile, Anna. We really should do more of this.’

  Anna nodded. She was right. It had been a long slog after her attack. And though she got some relief from imagining that the pink rubber thing she kept in the bottom drawer of her bedside table might actually belong to one of several hot bodies she could see on screen in any of her favourite films, it wasn’t quite enough.

  ‘Hey, Anna, I wasn’t expecting to see you here.’

  The voice came from behind her. She saw Kate’s eyes flick up and then down, her eyebrows raised in puzzled surprise. The club chair made it awkward to swivel but then the man who’d spoken walked around to Anna’s line of sight.

  Woakes held a glass in his hand. Fizzy water, Anna guessed.

  ‘Dave? What are you doing here?’

  Woakes shrugged. ‘I’ve arranged to meet an old mate.’

  ‘Oh, this is Kate, my sister. Dave Woakes, our new detective sergeant.’

  He leaned over to shake K
ate’s hand. An aroma oozed off him. Notes of leather and bergamot.

  ‘How long have you been with the squad?’ Kate asked.

  Anna heard the emphasis Kate placed on the word ‘you’ and chose to ignore it. It might have simply been her accent, but then the flirting genes in the Gwynne pool had mostly settled in her sister.

  ‘Few days. Still finding my feet. You live in Bristol?’

  ‘No, I am here on a mission to get my sister back into the world of the living. I myself am the mother of two small children in that other place over the water.’

  ‘Wow, you don’t look like—’ Woakes caught himself. ‘That sounded all wrong.’

  ‘I take them where I find them,’ Kate said, grinning.

  Woakes turned his attention back to Anna. ‘This a regular watering hole for you, then?’

  ‘Never been here before in my life.’

  ‘S’nice. Pricey but nice. Can I get you two another round?’

  Anna glanced at her watch and held it up to Kate. It was after eight thirty.

  Kate nodded with a turned-down mouth.

  Anna said, ‘No, thanks anyway. I have to get my sister to the station for nine, otherwise she turns into a pumpkin.’

  ‘OK, well, later, if you change your mind, you know where I am.’

  Woakes drifted away. Kate called an Uber and Anna gathered up their shopping. Five minutes later they were on their way to Temple Meads in a Toyota Prius.

  Kate stayed surprisingly quiet for all of three minutes until she said, ‘So, is Dave attached?’

  ‘No, Kate, don’t.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Anna. Clean, fit-looking, nicely dressed – you could do a lot worse. And I saw the way he looked at your legs. Plus, you’re a genuine departmental hero.’

  ‘I work with him.’

  ‘So it’s not a definite no, then?’

  ‘It is. Definitely. Not my type.’

  ‘Oh yes, your type. Still waiting for the memo on that one.’

  ‘Kate, please.’

  ‘All I’m saying is that he’s there in that bar and has offered to buy you a drink. What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Nothing. But if it went beyond a drink, that wouldn’t be good because I have to see him every day and probably give him a bollocking now and again.’

  ‘Maybe you could do with a bollocking now and again. In a way of speaking.’ Kate grinned.

  ‘Don’t be so disgusting.’

  Kate shook her head, still grinning. ‘Come on, Anna. You’ve had a really rough time. I know you’re looking forward to burying yourself in work again, but there is life outside Avon and bloody Somerset. And not everyone is a villain. Don’t dismiss Dave,’ she made her eyes huge, ‘out of hand, that’s all I’m saying.’

  Rob was waiting for them in the station, flushed from a little too much lager. Anna hugged them both and waved them off as they walked arm in arm towards their platform.

  Woakes and the Milk Thistle were a ten-minute ride away. Home, Netflix and an already opened bottle of wine in a one-bed flat in Horfield twenty minutes in the other direction.

  She got in a cab, pushing her parcels in front of her. ‘Horfield, please.’

  Anna didn’t believe in mixing business with pleasure. In fact, she had a problem with pleasure full stop.

  At home, she did the sensible thing and drank a pint of water, keeping the Riesling corked for another evening. She knew she’d drunk a little too much and was glad she hadn’t drunk anymore. She wasn’t used to it, that was a fact. She switched on the TV, searching for something noir enough to get her teeth into. By eleven, she’d fallen asleep on the settee.

  * * *

  Her dream began as an all too familiar one. She was running through the woods and something was chasing her. Whenever she’d turn and look there’d be nothing there. Nothing to see. But she sensed a presence. An invisible threat. She kept on running.

  Most of the time, she got away.

  Sometimes, she didn’t.

  When that happened, she’d jerk awake, sweating, disorientated, full of dread, aware that no matter what time it was, she would not sleep again that night.

  But on this Saturday night, her dream changed. This time she ran out of the woods, out into the open air and onto the moorland, empty and vast. She knew that this was an older place, the foothills of the black mountains where she’d hiked with her sister and her father so many times before.

  She trod a winding path with vistas beyond, and in the distance she glimpsed a building, a church with a spire on the edge of a cluster of buildings. Generic markers in her dream world, dragged up from recent memory, and one of the few real pieces of evidence from the files she’d pored over that morning. The place where Rosie’s remains had been found. A place modified and twisted by her subconscious into this desolate landscape. She stopped walking and looked around. All was still and quiet except for a thin wind that blew consistently. And on that moaning wind there came a whispered voice.

  ‘Here, Anna. I’m here.’

  She turned, trying to locate the source.

  ‘Find me, Anna, I’m here.’

  She started running again, her eyes darting, seeing nothing until, at last, she came to the edge of a cliff, to a stuttering stop where she looked down from a precipitous height. And there, below her on a vast plateau she saw where the voices came from. A strange arrangement of potholes and sinkholes arranged in the shape of a flattened skull.

  ‘Here, Anna, here…’

  * * *

  She woke fully at six. Something in what she’d read and seen already about Rosie Dawson’s case was tugging at her, demanding to be digested and absorbed.

  When she’d worked with Shipwright, she’d been his deputy, learning, watching. She’d always kept her intuitive glimpses, these unformed convictions that plagued her sleep, to herself. She knew she’d revisit them and make the connections, but only in retrospect. As always, the peeling apart of these subconscious thoughts would reveal a pattern, a truth that she’d chosen to ignore.

  She’d dreamed of Charles Willis’s first victim half-buried in the earth when she’d been involved in his case. In her dream his first victim had risen and held out one hand, staring at Anna with dead, blind eyes. Seeing where it was impossible to see. It was Willis’s supposed blindness that had kept him hidden from the police for so long, and Anna couldn’t stop wondering if she should have spotted this. If in her dream her subconscious had tried to tell her.

  A degree in criminology and psychology had taught her that dreams were a way of assimilating and integrating new information, nothing more. But now, after Willis, she was more prepared to take notice and accept that this part of her process was as valid as knocking on doors and trawling through files.

  There might come a time when she’d make a leap, join a link that had always been there to join. Nothing mysterious, nothing supernatural, just the way her brain worked. Shipwright saw it. Encouraged it. And so had Hector Shaw, though in his case he’d needed to test her abilities in the most devious and almost fatal way. He’d taken a liking to her introversion, her need to be paradoxically analytical, to be detail-oriented. Seen how it might be a weakness, but also how it gave her an edge in her job.

  And now, Rosie Dawson needed her to do that job.

  Nine

  Sunday

  By way of penance, and as a distraction to her Milk Thistle-induced headache, after breakfast Anna did all the chores she should have done the day before. This was the same flat Hector Shaw had somehow managed to show to the world. Most people would have ended up traumatised by such an event. Some might have wanted to leave the flat, the neighbourhood, the city even. Certainly, that would have been a normal reaction.

  Normal. Not a word Anna considered applicable as she splashed water on her face and glanced up at her reflection in the bathroom mirror that morning. Other descriptors were available. Stubborn, hates crowds, mixes on her own terms, happy to be in her own head. She looked at her frown lines. Still there.
A tad deeper if anything. The little muscles under her eyes still bunched in a way that made it look like she was smiling a lot of the time, even when she wasn’t. Her face seemed puffy from the previous evening’s alcohol, but her skin was good and she didn’t need to tie her hair back anymore. During her recovery from the attack, as the stab wounds on her breasts healed and the neck bruises faded, Kate convinced her to cut it short and go the full platinum-white.

  ‘On trend,’ Kate called it. ‘Very House of Cards. And when your roots start showing you’ll look dirty enough to mingle perfectly undercover with the addicts down in St Paul’s.’

  Bruised and battered in her hospital bed, Anna had wondered, not for the first time, how this ebullient extrovert could possibly be her sister. Perhaps she’d been swapped at birth. Now, several weeks later, Anna still wasn’t sure about the hair. Kate called it unicorn-white. Who on earth would call a hair colour after a mythological horse?

  Restless and always in work mode, when her work phone rang with Holder’s number as the caller, she answered right away, keen to see how yesterday had gone with Morton.

  ‘Morning, ma’am.’

  She picked up on the downbeat tone right away.

  ‘What’s wrong, Justin?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’

  It was a little after eleven thirty and she’d made herself a coffee and wandered into the garden. The Nespresso machine was a present from Kate and Rob and had become a three a day vice. Outside, the sun was blazing. She’d bought a cheap wooden bistro set from B&Q and put it in a sunny corner. No one else used the garden, and the landlord had wisely used Cotswold chippings and flagstones in lieu of a lawn. Anna had added a few pots and done some planting, which she watered religiously. But something in Holder’s voice made her stop, put the coffee down on the table and concentrate.