Her phone rang, making her jump. It was Moss.
‘Boss, where are you? We’ve had a positive ID on the girl.’
‘I’m just around the corner. Who is she?’
‘A Nina Hargreaves, aged nineteen.’
‘And you think it’s right? That the ID is reliable?’
‘It should be. It was her mother who called the hotline number.’
Chapter Fifty
It was very late when Nina Hargreaves’s mother, Mandy, arrived at Lewisham Row. Erika and Moss took her up to the conference room on the top floor of the station, and they got one of the uniform officers to go out and buy some decent takeaway coffee.
‘Thank you for coming in to talk to us, Mrs Hargreaves,’ said Erika. There was a large sofa in the corner by the window, and she indicated for Mandy to sit. Erika and Moss turned two of the chairs around from the long table and sat opposite. At this stage they wanted the chat to be as informal as possible. Erika hadn’t yet ruled her out as having valuable information, but the best way to get people to talk was to have them relax. The officer arrived with cappuccinos and handed them out.
‘Thank you,’ said Mandy, taking the cup and cradling it in her hands. She was a small woman, in her fifties, but she wore her dark hair very long, past her shoulders. She had clear olive skin and was very beautiful. She wore blue jeans and a tight black jumper and looked much younger than her years.
‘What made you call us?’ asked Erika.
Mandy took a sip of her coffee.
‘Because I think my daughter will be safer in custody.’
A look passed between Erika and Moss.
‘You saw the details of our enquiry?’
Mandy nodded. ‘My neighbour saw it on her Facebook page. The picture from a CCTV camera. She knocked on my door and I went over, watched it on the BBC London news with her.’
‘Your daughter is wanted for questioning in relation to a murder.’
‘I know.’
‘Now, you positively identified her from this image,’ said Erika, pulling the image from a folder.
Mandy took the printout and bit her lip. ‘Yes. She looks thin.’
‘We also believe that Nina has been involved in the deaths of two other people, and may have been involved in, or witnessed, a third.’
Mandy gave a gasp and then broke down. Her hands shook so badly that her coffee spilled out onto the floor.
‘I’m sorry, so sorry.’
‘It’s okay,’ said Moss, grabbing some napkins and helping her clean up. Mandy took one and wiped her eyes. Her mascara had started to run.
‘I’ve been estranged from Nina for almost a year now… It’s not like she went off the rails… Her dad, my husband, died when she was eleven. Heart attack. He was a delivery driver, and I’m sure it was all those long hours and fast food… Nina was my little tower of strength. I was the one who crumbled to pieces, and she was there to look after me, perk me up… She’s my only child.’
‘How did you become estranged?’ asked Erika.
‘After she left school, all her friends went to university, but she was lost. She didn’t know what to do with herself. I wanted her to go to university, but we couldn’t afford it, and she wasn’t that keen so I thought what’s the point of her getting into debt with loans for the next twenty years. She got a job at a local chip shop. There was this guy working there, older guy, who she got obsessed with. His name’s Max Kirkham.’ She sniffed and wiped her nose with the napkin.
‘And are they still together?’
Mandy picked up the printouts from the CCTV camera. ‘I’ll bet you anything that’s him,’ she said, pointing to the image of the man wearing the blue Von Dutch cap with his head down.
Erika looked at Moss, whose eyebrows had disappeared into her hairline.
‘How can you be sure this is Max Kirkham?’ asked Erika.
‘It looks like him. The hair, the nose, even though it’s blurred, and because the only way she’ll escape him is if they get caught, or if one of them dies. And then that would be the only way she would come back to me…’ She shook her head and the tears started to flow again.
‘What do you know about Max Kirkham?’
She took another napkin from Moss and wiped her eyes. ‘Very little. No parents that I know of. He says they both died and he was sent to a children’s home. No other family. He’s obsessed with weird stuff, like conspiracy theories and the Illuminati, guns and weapons. He tried to join the army but he was refused on psychological grounds. He keeps hunting knives; I know he got into building air rifles.’
‘How old is he?’
‘He’s, he was thirty. We went to his thirtieth birthday drinks.’
‘We?’
‘Me and my ex-partner. We broke up six, seven months ago. That birthday party was an education. If you can call a bunch of angry white young men going mad in a pub a party. That was the night that the rot set in. I hadn’t been happy about her and Max, and then things kicked off.’
‘Which pub was it?’ asked Moss.
‘I think it was The White Horse on Carradine Road, in Crouch End. Filthy, violent, shithole. I tried to get her to come with me that night, just to come home, to get out of that place and let Max sleep off whatever he was taking and drinking… but despite all the drink and the people, it was like he had eyes in the back of his head and was watching her. He came over from the other side of the bar and started hurling abuse at me. Called me the C-word.’ She shook her head. ‘Nina took his side, said I’d been the one who was confrontational. She told me to go home and calm down. She said I’d upset him. I’d upset him.’ Mandy shook her head again. ‘It was after that they moved in together, or she moved in with him.’
‘Do you know where they moved?’
‘No.’
‘You don’t know her address?’ asked Moss, sounding a little incredulous. Mandy looked up at her.
‘Do you have children?’
‘Yes, I have a little boy.’
‘Being estranged from your child is one of the most awful things in the world. I tried to keep in contact. But she blocked me from Facebook; she deleted me from her phone. She dropped all her friends. She dropped off the face of the earth. I did hire a private investigator at one point, but he was hopeless and cost me the earth. He couldn’t find her. Her friend Kath managed to find her through a friend of a friend and look at her Facebook profile, but she’d stopped updating it. Does that satisfy you that I’m not a heartless bitch?’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Moss. ‘I know this must be hard.’
‘Yes, and we’re very grateful to you for coming to talk to us, especially so late. Do you have a photo of Nina?’ asked Erika.
‘I’ve got loads of her, and I’ve got one of her and him,’ said Mandy wearily. She picked up her handbag and took out a small plastic Snappy Snaps album. ‘The photo of him is in the back. I only kept it cos… Cos I thought I might have to give it to the police.’
‘You thought Max might murder someone?’
‘No, I thought Max would kill Nina.’
Erika and Moss took the album and flicked through the photos. They showed Nina from when she was ten years old, wearing a Brownie outfit beside a Christmas tree. She had her mother’s dark good looks and smiled cheekily, her hands on her hips. She was an active young girl, and another photo showed her with a blonde girl in a swimming pool, another sitting on the sofa cuddling a cat, and then the photos moved to when she was in her late teens, and Nina was sitting in a restaurant, blocking the camera lens with her hand, a smattering of acne on her jawline. As they reached the back of the album, the final photo was of Nina behind the counter in a chip shop, wearing a white coat, hat and hairnet.
‘I took that one without her knowing,’ said Mandy. ‘Her first night working at Santino’s chip shop. That’s where she met Max.’
‘When was this?’ asked Erika, holding up the photo.
‘August, last year.’
‘How long did she work the
re?’
‘A couple of months. They both got fired for not turning up. Then they signed on, although Max deals drugs on the side. That’s his real income.’
Erika found a photo tucked in the back of the album. It was taken by a car in a sunny street with terraced houses. Nina sat next to a handsome lad with long blond hair. She wore small pink shorts and a white T-shirt. Her feet were bare and her long hair tied back. She had her arm hooked through his, and her head was turned to him. He wore football shorts, a sleeveless T-shirt and a baseball cap.
‘Can we use this photo?’ asked Erika.
‘Yes. That’s why it’s there.’
There was silence for a moment.
‘Officers, what’s going to happen to Nina? She’s not herself; she’s been brainwashed by him. She’s scared and I think he’s been asking her do things under duress. I just want her to be safe. Do you take that kind of thing into account if you catch him and her?’
‘Yes, it is something we will take into account,’ said Erika. Moss glanced at her and they both knew that she was telling Mandy what she wanted to hear.
There was a knock at the door and a young female officer entered.
‘Mandy, this is Detective Constable Kay Price,’ said Erika. ‘She’ll take you home, and will be our point of contact.’
‘That’s it?’
‘Yes, it is for now. We’ll let you know as soon as we have any more information.’
‘Nice to meet you,’ said Kay, smiling and shaking her hand.
‘There is one more thing,’ said Mandy, as she got up to leave. ‘One of the last times I spoke to Nina, she was on holiday with Max. They were in Devon, and she called me from a phone box. I don’t know if her phone was dead. She said she’d been attacked, and Max had done something about it.’
‘How do you mean, “done something”?’
‘She hung up and I called back. I called 192 to try and find out where the number was, and it was just a phone box by the motorway which leads to Okehampton. When she came home, she laughed it off and never spoke about it again. She said they’d been drinking, but it didn’t sound like she was drunk. She sounded—’
‘How did she sound?’ asked Erika, putting a hand on her arm.
‘In the grip of terror. Absolutely terrified…’ She started to cry again. ‘I haven’t slept properly in months, I stopped living my life. My relationship crumbled… I saw on the news what they did to that bloke. So I’ll either see my daughter across a table in a prison visiting room, or on a mortuary slab. Either way it will be some kind of resolution.’
Erika looked across at Mandy, and thought how sad and defeated she must feel to say this.
Chapter Fifty-One
The armed response team arrived in Kennington very early the next morning, just after 5 a.m. Erika and Moss were stationed in a support van around the corner from the front entrance to the high-rise block of flats. It was a grimy 1970s building, tucked away in the maze of houses stretching away from the tube station and The Oval. It made up the Wallis Simpson Estate and three other blocks rose up to form a grid of four. They had traced Nina Hargreaves, and in turn Max Kirkham, through the benefits office to a one-bedroom flat on the ground floor of Baden-Powell House, and Erika had rapidly put together an armed response team to arrest them both. Neither of them had been named in the media coverage the previous night, but there was still a chance they could have seen it and run.
It was freezing cold in the support van, and Erika and Moss were watching on a screen as the firearms team moved into place, surrounding the building. The team was twelve strong, and headed by DI Parkinson, a determined woman with red hair.
‘She’s like a thinner version of me with a rifle,’ Moss had joked, after Erika had conducted the 3.30 a.m. briefing at Lewisham Row.
‘We’re in position. There are no signs of anyone inside the flat, no lights are on,’ came Parkinson’s voice through the radio.
‘Just be on the lookout from above,’ replied Erika.
‘Above, below, our eyes are everywhere. This is a bloody rough estate…’ There was some interference and the radio fell silent. Erika wasn’t directly in command: it was down to DI Parkinson, but this was the first armed response team Erika had been closely involved with since she was an officer in Manchester, and she was extremely nervous.
There was another burst of interference and Parkinson’s voice came booming through. ‘We’re activating our cameras.’ There was a monitor set up on the desk in front of Erika and Moss, and it lit up with six screens.
‘Jeez, the wonders of modern technology,’ said Moss.
Each video feed was being beamed wirelessly from the lapels of the armed response team. The night-vision footage was tinged with green and a little grainy, but they could see three slightly different angles of the large floodlit car park filled with a smattering of parked cars. Another feed showed the doors of the first floor flats stretching away along a concrete hallway, and the fourth and fifth were being beamed to them from a little way along the street and looking at the opposite side of the building.
This was a new development for policing. Body-worn camera technology had only been rolled out to the Met’s front line officers six months previously, and this was the first time Erika and Moss had seen it in action.
‘Okay, we’re moving in,’ said DI Parkinson. The grainy footage on the top row of images shook as the team stealthily moved forward.
The front door moved closer towards them on the screens. Two other video feeds showed a view along the concrete hallway, where two officers were stationed either side of the communal staircase. As well as night-vision cameras, three members of the armed response team had been equipped with night-vision goggles.
This had been questioned earlier in the evening during an emergency meeting with Marsh and Superintendent Hudson.
‘This is a busy block of flats. The flats are very small with communal lighting,’ Marsh had argued. ‘There are floodlights in the car park, and London is heavily light polluted.’
Erika had then told them about the interview with Mandy Hargreaves, and how she had told them about Max’s obsession with the army and weapons.
‘We don’t know what we’re going to find, and we can’t wait to go in until daylight,’ Erika had argued. ‘You do realise that night-vision goggles have been approved for some pretty crazy stuff. Staffordshire council have used them in the past to catch dog walkers who didn’t pick up after their dogs, and police in Swindon used them to catch a gang of allotment robbers. This is a multiple murder investigation!’
Marsh had relented and authorised the use of night-vision goggles.
On the monitor, Erika and Moss saw the team approach the front door of the flat, the images steady as they moved slowly. But on another feed from the bottom of the communal stairs there was the sound of footsteps and then two lads in tracksuits and baseball caps rounded the corner. They were very young and their eyes opened wide with fear at the sight of the armed response team.
‘Go back up, and get back inside,’ hissed the officer. On the screen they saw a gloved hand signal for them to go back up the stairs. The lads turned and dashed back up the steps.
‘Oh, here we go,’ said Moss, indicating another video feed showing an officer at the front window of the flat.
‘The kitchen opens out straight onto this main corridor,’ said Erika. The image on screen went dark as the officer peered through the window. There was a long pause, and a burst of static and murmuring. The four video feeds at the front door suddenly pulled back, and they saw the building rapidly receding through the video link.
‘What’s going on?’ asked Erika. ‘Can you hear me?’
‘Everyone fall back immediately,’ came DI Parkinson’s voice through the radio. ‘I repeat, fall back immediately. It looks like an explosive device has been rigged up in the kitchen, on a large table. It looks like a small explosive grenade, and it’s connected to a wire.’
‘Shit,’ said Erika, turni
ng to Moss.
‘We need to evacuate the building, and get the bomb disposal unit down here fast,’ said Parkinson.
Chapter Fifty-Two
It was just after 7.30 a.m. when Mariette Hoffman entered Bunhill Fields cemetery and walked towards the gravestones. The sun was just coming up and lighting the sky with blue and gold. The tall trees were now bare, and her white trainers looked grubby against the carpet of orange and red leaves covering the grass. She carried a bag of shopping and another small carrier bag with cloths and cleaning supplies. It was a calming place amongst the surrounding chaos, and the sounds of the traffic were muted. Mariette loved the early mornings, when the day was fresh, new and full of opportunity. She’d bought a scratch card, and it sat in the shopping bag with milk, butter, and nice wholemeal bread. The thought of it filled her with hope. She was going to pay her respects, and then go home and make herself a nice cup of strong tea and a couple of rounds of hot buttered toast. Then she’d try her luck with the scratch card. Last month at the Tesco Metro, she’d watched as a woman had won £500 on a quid scratch card – and she’d looked pretty well off in the first place. It was now a new month, and surely it was time for someone else to have a chance. Even a hundred quid would be a gift from God.
The cemetery was tucked away less than a mile from Mariette’s ground floor flat on the Pinkhurst Estate. She was a regular visitor and liked to lose herself amongst the moss-covered gravestones. There were even some ornate tombs with carved marble and topped with angels and cherubs, and she’d often stop to read the inscriptions dating back to the 1800s. There were young women who’d died of consumption, babies who’d only lived for a few days and then succumbed to yellow fever.
She’d scattered Thomas’s ashes a couple of weeks back, on the grass by a row of benches. She was too poor to afford a plot or a headstone, and she’d had to ask the council for financial help just to have him cremated.
Cold Blood: A gripping serial killer thriller that will take your breath away (Detective Erika Foster Book 5) Page 21
