The Girl in the Ice: A gripping serial killer thriller

by Robert Bryndza

  ‘What did you do before all this technology?’ asked Peterson, pointing at the television screens and satellite weather maps.

  ‘Good old fashioned noise,’ said Mike. ‘If a storm came, we’d lift one of the nearest man hole covers six inches and let it crash back down. The clanking sound would echo down the tunnels and hopefully give the blokes down there enough of a warning to get the fuck out.’

  ‘Is it just blokes who work down there?’ asked Moss.

  ‘Why? You want to apply for a job?’ quipped Mike.

  ‘Very funny,’ said Moss.

  They came back out of the van and looked at the sky. The cloud above seemed to be clearing, but was growing darker on the horizon.

  ‘We’d best get on with it,’ said Mike, moving over to where the four men had set up a winch above the manhole, and were attaching themselves to safety harnesses. Erika went and peered down the shaft where iron rungs stretched away into blackness.

  ‘So what are we looking for, a phone?’ asked Mike.

  ‘It’s an iPhone 5S, we believe it’s white, but it could be black,’ said Moss. She handed them each a laminated photo.

  ‘We realise it’s been down there for almost two weeks, but if you find it, please can you avoid touching. We need to preserve any remaining forensic evidence. I’ll give you these evidence bags, which it will have to be placed into immediately,’ said Erika.

  They each took a clear evidence bag. They looked skeptical.

  ‘So, what? We’re meant to levitate this phone out of the shit?’ said one of the lads.

  ‘We really appreciate your helping out here, lads,’ said Peterson. ‘You’ve joined us at a crucial stage in a very harrowing case involving young girls who have been murdered. Finding this phone is a large piece of our puzzle. Just try not to touch it with bare hands.’

  The men’s attitude changed completely. They rapidly put on their helmets, and started checking their lights and radios. When they were ready, they all stood around the manhole as Mike lowered in a probe.

  ‘We’re checking for poisonous gases,’ he said. ‘It’s not just shit and piss we have to worry about down there. There’s carbonic acid, which miners used to call chokedamp; carburetted hydrogen, which explodes; and sulphurated hydrogen, the product of putrid decomposition . . . You’ve all got your chemical detectors in your suits, lads?’

  They all nodded.

  ‘Jeez, wouldn’t you all rather work in a supermarket?’ asked Moss.

  ‘This pays much better,’ said the youngest of the lads as he went first and was slowly winched down into the manhole.

  They watched as the remaining men were lowered down into the darkness, their lights illuminating the brown grimy interior of the storm drain. Erika looked across at Moss and Peterson as they leaned over. They exchanged tense glances.

  ‘Like looking for a needle in a haystack,’ said Peterson. Slowly, the torchlight below began to fade and they were left in silence. Mike went into the van to watch their progress.

  An hour later there was nothing to report, and they were stamping their feet in the cold. Then a call came through on the police radio. There was an incident at a supermarket in Sydenham. A man had pulled a gun, and shots had been fired.

  ‘We’re on call today,’ said Moss, looking up at Peterson. ‘We’d better scoot. Marsh said this wasn’t high priority.’

  ‘You guys go; I can stay here and wait,’ said Erika. Moss and Peterson hurried off and she was left alone, realising again that she had no badge, no authority. She was just a woman hanging around an open sewer. She stepped into the van and asked Mike how they were getting on.

  ‘Nothing. We’re almost at the point where I don’t want them to go any further. The network branches off in several directions towards central London.’

  ‘Okay, where does it all end up?’ asked Erika.

  ‘Sewage treatments plants around London.’

  ‘So . . .’

  ‘So the chances of a tiny little phone showing up are slim,’ he said. ‘It’s not like a dog who’s swallowed a diamond ring and you . . .’

  ‘Yes, I get the message,’ said Erika. She came back out of the van, perched on a tree stump and smoked a cigarette. The church loomed above her in the cold, and a train clattered past in the distance. The men emerged an hour and a half later, caked in mud, exhausted and soaked in sweat. They shook their heads.

  ‘As I thought, it could be anywhere right now. Out to sea even. The storm drains have been opened twice since the 12th of January, and so much would have flowed through, nothing would stay down there under that amount of water pressure,’ said Mike.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Erika. ‘We tried.’

  ‘No. They tried,’ said Mike, pointing at the men. ‘I said to your boss, it was bloody hopeless, a wild goose chase.’

  Erika wondered if that was the reason why Marsh had arranged it. As she walked home in the rain, she remained convinced that Andrea’s phone had to be found. She thought of the letter she’d received and the things left in her bed.

  She felt like the only person who knew that the police had arrested the wrong man.

  40

  Three days passed with no word from Moss or Peterson. All Erika’s enthusiasm and positivity drained away, made worse by having nothing to do. On the third day, she was poised to call Edward and face up to visiting Mark’s headstone, when her phone rang in her hand.

  ‘Boss, you’re not going to believe this,’ said Moss. ‘Andrea’s phone has just shown up.’

  ‘What? In the sewer?’ asked Erika, gripping the pen.

  ‘No. A second-hand mobile phone shop in Anerley.’

  ‘That’s only a few miles away,’ said Erika.

  ‘Yeah. Crane circulated the IMEI number around local second-hand phone dealers, saying that if a handset with this number came into their shop they were to contact the incident room urgently.’

  ‘And they did?’

  ‘He also said they’d be paid the value of a new unlocked iPhone 5S, which must have sweetened the deal.’

  ‘How did it show up in Anerley?’ asked Erika.

  ‘A woman found it. The huge amount of rain and melt water last week caused the drains to overflow on the lower end of Forest Hill Road. The drains were so overloaded that high-pressure water was forced up through the sewage system, tearing through the tarmac. We’ve figured the phone came with it. She saw it, and even in the state it was in thought she could get a few bob for it.’

  ‘And it’s okay? It works?’

  ‘No, and the screen is badly cracked, but we’ve whisked it over to the cyber team who’ve put it at the top of their work queue. They’re trying to get everything they can off the internal memory.’

  ‘Moss, I’ll come in.’

  ‘No, boss, stay put. If you’re going to come down here, wait until you have a reason to storm in and read them the riot act.’

  Erika started to protest.

  ‘Seriously, boss. I promise I’ll phone you the second I know anything.’ Moss hung up.

  Six long, tense hours later, Moss called to say that the Cyber Crime Unit had pulled a substantial amount of data from Andrea’s phone.

  Erika took a cab to the address Moss had given her, and met her outside the central London Cyber Crime Unit, which was based in a nondescript block of offices near Tower Bridge. They took the lift up to the top floor and emerged into a huge open-plan office. Every desk was busy; sitting at each was a weary officer poring over computer screens, beside them a phone or laptop in pieces, or a mess of wires and circuit boards.

  On the far back wall was a row of what looked like viewing suites with tinted windows. Erika shuddered to think of the things these officers had to watch behind those screens.

  A short, handsome man wearing a threadbare woolly jumper met them at the water cooler. He introduced himself as Lee Graham. They followed him through the office to a large storage room with racks and racks of computers, phones, and tablet computers, all bagged up and se
aled. They passed one low shelf where a laptop was wrapped in plastic and encrusted with dried blood.

  He took them over to a messy desk in the far corner where Andrea’s phone lay, battered and cracked. The back was off and it was hooked up to a large PC with twin screens.

  ‘We got a lot off this phone,’ said Lee, sitting and adjusting one of the screens. ‘The hard drive was in good condition.’

  Moss pulled over a couple of chairs and they sat beside Lee.

  ‘There are three hundred and twelve photos,’ Lee continued, ‘sixteen videos, and hundreds of text messages going back from May 2012 to June 2014. I’ve run all the photos through our facial recognition software; this crunches through the national criminal database and uses facial recognition to look for any matches. It flagged up one name.’

  Erika and Moss looked at each other, excited.

  ‘What was his name?’ asked Erika, keenly.

  Lee tapped away at his keyboard. ‘It wasn’t a he, it was a she,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ said Erika and Moss in unison. Lee swiped his way through a series of thumbnail images, then clicked on one: a familiar face.

  ‘Linda Douglas-Brown is in the police database?’ asked Moss, in surprise. In the picture, Linda and Andrea sat at a table in a bar; Andrea stared confidently down the lens and looked immaculate in a cream blouse. The buttons were open, displaying a dark, full cleavage with a silver necklace nestling between her breasts. Linda, in comparison, was ruddy-faced with unkempt hair. She was wearing a roll-neck black jumper, which rode high enough to nestle just under her double chin. The jumper was embroidered with images of small poodles cavorting across the fabric. A large gold crucifix hung around her neck. Her hand was slung around Andrea’s and her face wore a drunken grin.

  ‘Is this is the victim’s mother?’ asked Lee.

  ‘No, the victim’s sister; there’s four years between them,’ said Erika. They let that hang for a moment.

  ‘Okay. Well, I’ve pulled her criminal record; it’s just printing off for you now,’ said Lee.

  41

  Lee found them a spare workstation in the office, where they first read through Linda’s file.

  ‘Jeez, Linda has a considerable record going back several years. Arson, theft, shoplifting . . .’ said Erika. ‘Between July and November last year, Andrea’s fiancé Giles Osborne made three complaints to the police, saying Linda was harassing him and sending him threatening mail.’

  ‘Officers spoke to her on all three occasions,’ said Moss, reading.

  ‘Yes, so no arrest. Giles Osborne’s first complaint was in July 2014, concerning abusive emails he received from Linda; in one she threatened to kill his cat first, and then him. The second complaint was a month later. His flat was broken into and his cat was poisoned. Linda’s fingerprints were found in the property, but her lawyer successfully claimed that her fingerprints would be in there because she had recently been a guest at the dinner party he threw to celebrate his engagement to Andrea.

  ‘Linda was also caught on CCTV in the next street to Giles Osborne’s flat within minutes of the break-in. She then capitulated and stated that she went into the house after the break-in to try and save the cat, who seemed in distress when she looked through the window.’

  ‘Sounds like she’s got a damn good lawyer,’ said Moss.

  ‘Perhaps, but there wasn’t enough proof to substantiate this either way. The third complaint was October last year when Linda caused eight thousand pounds’ worth of damage to Giles’s office. She threw a brick through one of the large glass window panels. Here, they even caught her on CCTV.’

  The picture was over-exposed and black and white, but a bulky figure could be seen in a long overcoat, a baseball cap pulled down over her face. The coat had opened when the figure pulled back to throw the brick, and a jumper could be seen underneath, bearing an illustration of dancing poodles.

  Moss was carrying her laptop in a bag. She pulled it out and switched it on. ‘Let’s work through the photos from Andrea’s phone,’ she said, fitting a USB key into the drive, which contained the contents of Andrea’s phone. They waited while the laptop whirred and hummed and booted up. The tiny little light on the USB key began to flicker, and then a scattergun of photos began to skim by on the screen.

  Andrea was pictured at several parties: there were many selfies, pictures of Andrea topless in her bathroom mirror, cupping a breast seductively, tilting her head back. Then a series of photos that had been taken on a night out at a bar. It looked to be at the same bar as in the picture with Linda.

  ‘Stop, go back!’ said Erika.

  ‘I can’t stop, we have to let them load,’ said Moss.

  ‘Come on,’ said Erika, impatiently, as the laptop paused on a blurred photo of blackness, obviously taken in error – then the photos began to load again and finished. Erika began to flick through.

  ‘Yes. Here we go, these are the most recent ones, from the bar,’ said Erika.

  ‘Who’s that, do you think?’ asked Moss as they peered at the screen. A tall and broad man in his early thirties was pictured with Andrea. He was very dark with large brown eyes, and he had close-cropped stubble on his handsome, chiselled face.

  The first few photos were taken by Andrea holding out the camera. In all of them, she was leaning into the man’s chest. He was incredibly handsome.

  ‘Dark-haired man,’ said Erika, in a soft, excited voice.

  ‘Let’s just steady on,’ said Moss, who also sounded excited. Erika clicked forward through the photos. They were all taken at what looked like the same party: people filled the background, sitting at tables or dancing. Andrea had gone mad taking pictures of herself with the man, and he’d happily let her. The poses began with them side-by-side, Andrea staring up at him with the love-light in her eyes. The pictures progressed to him kissing Andrea, their mouths locked with a glimpse of tongue, her red fingernails grazing his chiselled stubbly jaw.

  ‘These were all taken on the 23rd December last year,’ said Moss, noting the date stamp of the pictures.

  ‘That picture of Linda with Andrea. It was taken the same night. That’s the same party . . .’

  The picture from which the National Criminal Database had recognised Linda’s face popped up again.

  ‘It’s towards the end of the evening by the look of it; they look a bit worse for wear,’ said Erika.

  ‘So Linda was there at the same time as that guy. He could have taken this photo,’ said Moss.

  They pressed on through the photos. The date stamp showed a gap of a few days, and then they came across photos taken on a bed with pale sheets. Andrea lay with the dark-haired man, again holding out the camera to take the shots. His chest was powerful and covered in a smattering of dark hair. Andrea had her arm hooked under her naked breasts. The photos progressed to become more explicit: a close-up of the man with Andrea’s nipple drawn up between his white teeth, a full frontal picture of Andrea laying back on the bed, smiling. And then Andrea’s face filled the screen. Her lips were locked around the base of the man’s penis. He looked to be cupping her chin. One of his large thumbs rested on her cheekbone.

  The next photo was abruptly less X-rated. Andrea and the man were pictured on the 30th December, hand-in-hand on the street. They were both dressed for winter. A familiar clock tower was in the background

  ‘Shit. That’s the Horniman Museum,’ said Moss.

  ‘And that’s four days before she went missing,’ said Erika.

  ‘Do you think this is the guy she was seen talking to in the pub?’ asked Moss.

  ‘This could be the guy who killed her,’ said Erika.

  ‘But he’s got no record that we know of; the National Criminal Database software didn’t flag him . . .’

  ‘He looks Russian, or – I don’t know – Romanian? Serbian? He could have a record overseas.’

  ‘But we don’t have a name, and that could take time,’ said Moss.

  ‘But we do know someone who could have h
is name. Linda Douglas-Brown,’ said Erika. ‘She’s pictured the same night. In the same bar as him.’

  ‘Should we bring her in?’ asked Moss.

  ‘Now, hang on,’ said Erika.

  ‘What do you mean, hang on? She’s obviously withholding information, boss.’

  ‘But we need to be very careful before we bring her in. The Douglas-Browns will lawyer up the second we do anything. It seems they have spent a fair bit of cash keeping Linda on the straight and narrow.’

  Moss paused. ‘You know what your flat could do with, boss?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Some nice fresh flowers.’

  ‘Yes. We should pay a visit to a florist,’ said Erika.

  42

  Jocasta Floristry was tucked between an elegant jeweller’s and a polished granite office block on Kensington High Street. The window was optimistically decorated for early spring. There was a carpet of real grass, and daffodils, tulips and crocuses pushed up in reds, pinks, blues and yellows. Several china Easter bunnies sat on the grass, or peered out from behind toadstools and giant speckled eggs. At the front, up close to the glass, a small picture of Andrea, smiling into the camera, sat on a red velvet cushion..

  Moss went to open the glass entrance, but saw next to it a small white bell and a neatly printed sign with the words: RING FOR SERVICE

  Erika pressed the button. Moments later, a small elderly woman with severely scraped-back hair peered up at them from under hooded eyelids. It was the same lady who had answered the door at the Douglas-Browns’ house. She waved them away dismissively. Erika held down the bell again. They realised how thick the glass was when she pulled open the door and the sound of the bell amplified.

  ‘What’s this about?’ she snapped. ‘We’ve spoken to the police, you have a man in custody. We’re preparing for a funeral!’ She went to slam the door, but Moss grabbed it.

  ‘We’d like to speak to Linda, please, if she’s here?’

  ‘You’ve got someone in custody, haven’t you? What more do you need from the family?’ the woman repeated.