Blood Runs Cold_A completely unputdownable mystery and suspense thriller

by Dylan Young

  ‘You were in the room?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Woakes put his coffee cup down before asking, ‘What did your girlfriend think about it?’

  ‘We split up. That’s what she thought about it.’

  ‘You were sharing a flat at the time?’

  ‘Yeah. About to get engaged.’

  ‘Must have been hard to take.’

  Hawley’s smile was thin and bitter. ‘It was and still is. And yes, I did not get the training contract I’d hoped for from the trust I was working for at the time, and yes, it ruined my life. Someone leaked it to the press. Of course, they also published the fact that I was released without charge, but on page eight in one paragraph. The first story was front page news in the local rag, three columns. That sort of dirt sticks. I don’t trust the police because, despite everything and for whatever reason, I’m clearly still on your lists as a suspect. I had to take some time off to recover. And now, when I see a kid, I’m paranoid about the same bloody thing happening all over again.’ He held up the index finger and thumb of his right hand separated by half an inch. ‘My solicitor told me I was this far from ending up on a sex offender list, for Christ’s sake. Anything else you want to know, sergeant?’

  Woakes didn’t bat an eyelid. ‘Did you own any other properties at the time?’

  ‘No.’

  Anna knew this had gone far enough. ‘Dr Hawley, thanks for coming—’

  Woakes interrupted her. ‘And now? Do you own anything now?’

  Hawley blew out air. ‘Yes. I inherited a cottage from an aunt.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Across the channel, a place called Sully in Wales.’ He paused and then asked, ‘Why would you want to know?’

  Yes, thought Anna. Why?

  ‘Just curious, Doctor. Or can I call you Ben?’

  ‘I don’t want you to call me full stop. Is there anything else?’

  ‘Yeah, you own a computer, right?’

  ‘Of course. Doesn’t everyone?’

  ‘Spend much time trawling the internet? Got any favourite sites?’

  Hawley blinked, his mouth open. Rightly offended.

  Anna took control, ‘OK, Dr Hawley. That’s all. Thanks for your cooperation. Sure we can’t tempt you to coffee?’

  Hawley stood, still looking at Woakes with disbelief as he picked up his messenger bag.

  Woakes returned the gaze with a smile. ‘Yeah, have a coffee. I’m sure we can think of something else to ask you.’

  Anna gave him one of her glaring death stares before turning back to Hawley. She stood and offered her hand. ‘We appreciate your cooperation,’ she said.

  Hawley looked at her. Belligerence fought with regret on his face. He nodded, shook briefly, turned away and left.

  Woakes waited until he’d gone and said. ‘Well?’

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘What do you reckon?’

  ‘I don’t reckon anything. He had an alibi. Rosie was an extrovert. Down’s patients are often disinhibited. They found nothing to link—’

  ‘His alibi is shit. He knows something,’ said Woakes, walking to the door and looking out at Hawley’s departing back.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s hiding something. I’m going to follow him to this cottage.’

  ‘Dave, this is insane. On what are you basing the assumption he’s hiding anything?’

  Woakes moved his head from side to side, weighing up his thoughts before answering. ‘He’s reticent and shifty. It’s a gut feeling.’

  Anna wanted to laugh out loud but then the conversation she’d had with Rainsford on Friday was still fresh in her memory. Unorthodox was the term they’d bandied about. Woakes was living up to his reputation.

  ‘He has every right to be both. I read the file. His name was leaked and the press got hold of it.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Hardly surprising he doesn’t want to talk to us, then, is it?’

  ‘I think there’s more.’

  Anna sighed. ‘You have nothing to go on.’

  ‘I’m suggesting a recce. See what sort of cottage this is. You’ll be OK, right? We can do the Charterhouse visit another time.’

  Anna blinked. ‘Of course, I mean, let’s not let real police work get in the way of your gut instinct.’

  ‘If I’m wrong, we’ll go to Charterhouse tomorrow.’

  Anna shook her head. ‘Is this the sort of bloody bish-bosh policing you did in the Midlands? Intimidate someone and see if they jump?’ She wanted to say more, to point out that Hawley didn’t look big or strong enough to march out of a park carrying an army backpack full of trussed-up little girl. He’d looked shell-shocked and anxious. But Woakes was already halfway out of the door.

  ‘If I don’t go now, I’ll lose him.’

  So far, she didn’t think much of his methods, but Rainsford had said he’d come with a reputation for results and she had another meeting to get to. One she couldn’t miss.

  Anna sighed. ‘Don’t do anything stupid.’

  ‘Moi?’ Woakes grinned as he trotted out of the hotel in hot pursuit.

  Twelve

  Alone in the hotel lobby, Anna poured out what was left of the coffee. She took a mouthful and spat it out. Stone-cold. Like Rosie Dawson’s case.

  She could have stopped Woakes; of course she could have. But frankly, he was beginning to irritate her. So, for now, a little bit of distance between them would do no harm and there were other things to consider. Charterhouse, as Woakes had said, could wait. But Anna now had no car and she needed to get to Worcester by 2 p.m. She rang Holder.

  ‘Justin, I’m catching a train to Worcester. Can you meet me at the station there?’

  A small but perceptible silence followed before Holder said, ‘Does that mean what I think it means?’

  She didn’t answer him directly. She didn’t have to. ‘I’ll let you know what time my train gets in after I board. But you ought to leave now.’

  Bath Spa station sat on the river at the southern end of the city. She walked out of the hotel past Waitrose, and then turned south. Bath was a handsome city, there was no doubt about it. The mandatory sandstone helped lend it a consistency sadly lacking in most cities she’d visited. It also helped that you could walk everywhere because it was much smaller than Bristol, so long as you didn’t mind tourists blocking the pavements every ten yards by gaping at the architecture.

  She stopped in a Pret for something with minimal carbs, bought a paper, caught the 11 a.m. train, found a seat, and let the paper sit unopened on the table while her brain pondered the wisdom of her actions. If you looked at it coldly, there was nothing at all wise about visiting a convicted serial killer in a maximum-security prison. Shaw was complex. The conventional psychiatric assessment of him was that he’d lost control of an already unstable borderline personality type. The trigger: when his daughter committed suicide by throwing herself under a train.

  As a GCHQ computer networks expert, Shaw had found out that his daughter had been groomed by an underground group trawling suicide chat rooms, coerced into participating in a sick online game known as the Black Squid in which serial tasks, if completed, ended in a suicide note and death.

  It sounded ludicrous, but it targeted vulnerable individuals and was known to be responsible for the deaths of several teenagers, Abbie Shaw’s amongst them. Shaw’s victims all involved administrators and proponents of this ‘game’. He’d also killed his alcoholic wife, whom he blamed indirectly for Abbie’s murder. As a result, he was now serving a life sentence with no chance of parole.

  Anna’s relationship – she snorted when the word popped into her head – with Shaw had also been complex. His daughter, had she lived, would have been about the same age as Anna, something Shaw had pointed out on more than one occasion. Thinking about it always made Anna shudder. Freud would have a field day.

  Some years ago, in another life, at a time when she allowed all the shiny things that appeared on her computer screen t
o distract her, Anna had seen a viral video of a lioness in the wild who allowed a baby baboon – after having killed its mother – to try and suckle it and eventually escape. One of nature’s curious quirks. Anna equated Shaw with that lioness. Dangerous and capable of killing at any moment given the chance, but somehow identifying her with something in his life he’d once cared about. But, as with the lioness, she was under no illusion that if circumstances changed, the outcome could be very different. Anna’s instinct – not the weird one fed by her dreams, but the good copper’s instinct that she shared with Shipwright – was to be highly suspicious of what happened afterwards to the baby baboon.

  Whatever it was Shaw saw in her, it was not a relationship she wanted to encourage or foster, but Shaw had revealed more information to Anna about his thoughts and victims in just a few short interviews than he had to anyone else in all the years he’d been in prison. She knew the authorities, Rainsford included, were hoping for more. And so, here she was on a train, a baby baboon stumbling towards a hungry lion, wondering just what Shaw wanted to say to her and knowing that she had to listen, no matter what.

  She thought again of Shipwright and what he’d have thought of her analogy. In her head, she imagined his pithy reply.

  Come on, Anna. You know I don’t do Disney.

  It brought a smile to her lips.

  Anna watched the fields and towns rush past her window, contemplating the concern she’d heard in Rainsford’s voice when Shaw came up. She’d worked hard to get where she was and was grateful to people like Shipwright and Rainsford who believed in her. But the attack on her in Badock’s Wood had taken her longer to get over than she thought it would. She was back on the horse, but so far she’d allowed it to do nothing but trot, and seeing Shaw would mean taking some jumps. Resilience was a fine thing, if only they sold it in handy, easy-to-swallow pills at Holland & Barrett.

  Anna turned from the window and walked through the carriages to the buffet. She needed a cup of railway tea.

  Holder was waiting for her at Worcester station an hour and a half after she left Bath.

  ‘Afternoon, ma’am,’ he said as she got into the car. He had the air con blasting out cold air and the radio tuned to a station playing dance anthems.

  ‘How come you’re on a train? What’s happened to Dave?’

  ‘Following his nose, Justin. We’ll see what he sniffs out. My guess it’ll be nothing but a waft of hot air, but we shall see.’

  Holder nodded and pointed the car north. ‘Didn’t think we’d be coming back here, ma’am.’

  Anna’s turn to nod. The last thing she’d said to Shaw when he’d tried to set up another meeting with her was that she was never going to see him again.

  ‘Yes, well, we all live and learn, don’t we?’

  Holder threw her a glance but said nothing.

  * * *

  Whitmarsh was a category A prison. Britain’s prison system was arranged on several criteria including crime severity, sentence length, escape risk and degree of dangerousness to the public. Category A contained the most dangerous prisoners who’d committed the worst crimes. Within its walls there were further risk categories based on likelihood of escape. Shaw remained an exceptional risk category despite his cooperation with Anna. No one wanted him getting out.

  Someone had stuck a new air freshener in the stark and familiar interview room at Whitmarsh, with its black plastic and tubular steel furniture. Anna wondered if the grey paint on the walls had a pretentious name, like Drum Dust, or Ostrich’s Breath. She’d played a game with Shipwright to come up with a few. Her favourite, by a long way, had been Lifer’s Tan. The cheap air freshener failed miserably to mask the aroma of stale sweat and urine that seemed to seep out of the floor. Two uniformed prison officers sat at the rear of the room.

  Shaw looked up when Anna entered. He didn’t acknowledge Holder’s presence and instead sat with his forearms on the Formica-topped table, legs apart on the black plastic chair, his chin low.

  ‘Hello, Anna.’

  She sat, not wanting to show him how much her legs were trembling, and placed a digital recorder on the table.

  Shaw watched her do it.

  ‘Can we talk about Petran?’

  Shaw smiled. ‘Straight to the point as always, eh, Anna? How long has it been – six, maybe seven months? I like your hair. The lighter colour is a nice contrast with your youthful face. Are you well, Anna? Fully recovered?’

  ‘Mihai Petran,’ Anna said.

  Shaw blinked. He did so slowly, carefully. Anna had come to learn that it was a good barometer of mood. Too slow and it meant trouble. When he replied, it was to say only one word: ‘Scum.’

  Holder said, ‘If you weren’t his partner in crime, how come his blood and yours turned up on Tanya Cromer’s clothes on the night she was raped?’

  Shaw turned his gaze on Holder before turning back to Anna. ‘Do you have any theories, Anna?’

  ‘Either you and Petran were working together and Tanya fought you both, or you and he fought and your blood ended up on Tanya’s clothes.’

  Shaw gave nothing away. He turned back to Holder. ‘Let’s see if the apprentice has done his homework. What do you know about Petran, DC Holder?’

  Holder threw Anna a glance. She nodded.

  ‘Petran was in the UK on a work visa but went AWOL after two women reported he’d attempted to sexually assault them.’

  ‘Gold star for you, Justin. Don’t mind if I call you Justin, do you, Justin?’

  Holder shifted in his chair.

  Shaw kept talking. ‘Those were just the things he’d been caught doing. Petran was scum and an ignorant prick. He was in chat rooms, looking for info on pubs where he could find underage girls in different towns. He couldn’t help himself, and the younger the better. His English was crap. He left a trail that wasn’t difficult to follow. I was looking for links to the Black Squid sites. The administrators mainly. But there was some overlap with men targeting vulnerable girls. Then his name came up somewhere else. Another site.’

  ‘What site, Hector?’ Anna asked.

  Shaw smiled. ‘We’ve got a bit of a way to go before we get there, Anna. He was a busy fucker, though. Nasty bastard. I dragged Petran off Tanya Cromer, though I was too late to stop him assaulting her.’ He let his head drop, exhaling. Anna read it as regret. ‘I wanted to make sure she was OK but I let him get away. I should have killed the bastard there and then. When I found out Tanya went missing three months later, I knew it must have been Petran. And I was right. He killed her because I ripped off his mask in the fight and the paranoid bastard was scared she might pick him out in an ID parade.’ Shaw shook his head. ‘It was too dark for her to see. He shouldn’t have done that.’

  ‘How do you know he killed her?’ Holder asked.

  Shaw didn’t smile. ‘Because he told me, amongst other things. She was just a bit of fun for him. Nothing to do with the Black Squid. But he did show me where he’d buried her, remember? Nice little spot, wasn’t it Justin?’

  Holder shook his head. ‘How do we know it wasn’t you who kidnapped her and killed her?’

  Shaw’s smile was mirthless and transient. A sad ghost of a smile. ‘I’m not a rapist, Justin. And Petran wasn’t his real name. It was Krastev, Boyen Krastev, Bulgarian origin.’

  Holder snorted. ‘Jesus. When are you going to give us something real?’

  Anna turned to Holder. ‘Justin, give Trisha a ring, ask her to find out what she can about a Boyen Krastev.’

  Holder looked annoyed, like he wanted to protest.

  ‘Now, please.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’ Holder got up. Security at Whitmarsh meant that mobiles were left the wrong side of the scanners. He’d need to use a landline. When he’d gone, Anna said, ‘What do you want from me, Hector?’

  ‘Inspector Gwynne,’ Shaw said with mock indignation.

  ‘You know I can’t change anything here. I can’t get you any privileges.’

  Shaw shook his head. �
��All I want is for you to do your job, Anna. Look at me as the oil for your engine.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘You got Willis, didn’t you?’ Shaw paused before adding dramatically, ‘The Woodsman.’

  ‘He almost killed me.’

  Shaw beamed. ‘But he didn’t, did he? Besides, he’ll be inside soon, with all the other monsters.’

  His Mancunian accent had a nasal edge as he dragged out the syllables.

  Anna said, ‘I doubt it’ll be here.’

  ‘Nah, his snake barrister will get him into Rampton or Broadmoor for a couple of cushy years, but then he’ll come out and join the rest of us somewhere. And then we’ll see. Be patient, Anna. Be patient.’

  She tried to suppress the little shudder that went through her but failed, shifting in her seat instead in an attempt at concealing it. For someone as astute as Shaw was in reading signals, she might as well have screamed in protest.

  For inmates to have influence in other prisons and outside prison with illicit access to phones, even in a maximum-security unit, was not unheard of. And someone as intelligent as Shaw must have known all the angles.

  She looked away and then back again. ‘So, do you have something else to show me?’

  ‘Just say the word, Anna. It’s summer, there’s lots of light. We can stay out until it’s late.’

  A tendril of horror flickered along her nerve endings. She became aware that her fingers were icy cold. She squeezed them together under the table. The pain helped her stay in control.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Sussex. That gypsy bastard Krastev used to work in a pub over that way. Never been there myself. I’m looking forward to it.’

  ‘Who’s there, Hector? Do you have a name?’

  ‘No. But Krastev drew me a map.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I asked him to. Trouble was, I had paper but no pen. Why is there never a pen when you need it? So, we improvised. I suggested his blood. There was plenty of that.’