Blood Runs Cold_A completely unputdownable mystery and suspense thriller

by Dylan Young

  Woakes put up a large schematic. ‘This is at the rear of houses but is not overlooked. Someone came up on Grace’s blind side and struck her from behind. The blow was severe enough to knock her out. She fell and suffered a facial fracture from contact with the ground. She was dragged behind bushes and we assume Rosie was abducted at that point. No one saw anything there but witnesses described a man in army fatigues leaving the park with a very large rucksack, exiting on Highdale Avenue near the church a short time later.’ He pointed to the label ‘Christchurch’. ‘From there, we have no further sightings.’

  Anna, one ear open to Woakes’ voice, sat thumbing through her copy of the file, already thickening from the addition of her own notes. What Woakes hadn’t said was that Rosie’s grandmother always picked her up from school, and because it was summer, she preferred to walk if the weather was good. Rosie liked seeing the squirrels and sometimes went to the play area in the park. Small details that were probably irrelevant. Except that small details were sometimes the most important in cases like these. They were the threads which would pull the patchwork together.

  Woakes pinned another image up on the board. Bones, small and white, arranged at the bottom of a black plastic bag, the skull on top. All that was left of Rosie Dawson.

  ‘Fourteen months later, some walkers found a plastic bag containing human remains beside a path near Charterhouse in the Mendips, twenty miles from where she was abducted. Dental DNA testing threw up a match for Rosie Dawson. The bones were bleached, with strong traces of hypochlorite. Forensics said they were also boiled. So, there’s the abduction site and the discovery of remains site. But no crime scene otherwise. The remains yielded sod all forensic information other than traces of Rosie’s DNA, handsaw marks on the vertebrae and knife marks around the long joints where the head was removed and the long bones separated. Probably for ease of disposal.’

  Khosa looked troubled. ‘I don’t want to ask but I presume this was all done post-mortem?’

  Woakes nodded. ‘They were specific about that. No ancillary cut marks around the vertebrae like you might get with movement if the victim was struggling and alive. Knife marks on the long bones suggest that the flesh was cut through to the bone before the saw was used to sever the joints.’

  ‘It’s butchery,’ Holder said.

  Woakes nodded.

  ‘But nothing that tells us how she was killed?’

  Woakes shook his head.

  Anna said, ‘OK. He kills Rosie, dismembers her, boils the remains to strip the flesh, then uses the bleach, the hypochlorite, to destroy any DNA traces he’d left rather than to try and hide who Rosie was. Her DNA would still be in her marrow and inside the teeth. He must have known that. It suggests that he was not expecting anyone to find them, but if they were found, he’d not leave any evidence. So, he’s careful and very methodical.’

  Holder said, ‘So we don’t know when she died?’

  Woakes shook his head again. ‘We don’t know how or when. The bag was black plastic, like you’d find lining a million bins. Sold in two of the big four supermarkets across the country. No fingerprints. As for when, you know the stats on child abductions. Usually, if the victims are killed immediately they’re found within a five-mile radius. If the killing isn’t immediate, then they’re usually kept alive for twenty-four hours maximum. The child becomes a liability. They’re too difficult to keep under control.’

  ‘So, because she was found twenty miles from the location of the abduction we can assume she was kept alive somewhere for longer. That’s irregular…’ Holder exhaled loudly.

  ‘Exactly. That’s the kicker. The other thing that stands out is the fact that Rosie had Down’s syndrome,’ Woakes added.

  Anna broke her silence. ‘So, do we think Rosie was targeted because of it, or is it irrelevant? Must be something the investigating team looked at? Other Down’s syndrome victims. But it’s worth looking again.’ She turned to Trisha and said, ‘We’ll need to run that through HOLMES,’ before standing and walking towards the whiteboard to stand with arms folded. ‘And the fact that the bones were left near a well-walked path is particularly odd.’

  Trisha nodded. They’d use indexers to input data into the Home Office Large and Major Enquiry System, but Trisha’s role as an actions coordinator meant that she would have a handle on what everyone was doing, gather up their reports and ensure they were indexed.

  ‘It could suggest the killer wanted them found,’ Khosa said

  Anna nodded. ‘Or that they were discarded in a panic. And why this particular path? I think it’s worth a visit. But Justin’s right, it means he must have kept Rosie somewhere. Maybe when she was alive, but certainly for her disposal. If he was boiling body parts, he’d need something big enough to use for that too.’

  Trisha had gone very pale.

  ‘He must have had somewhere safe, somewhere he wouldn’t be disturbed to hide her, to do that sort of thing with the body,’ Holder said.

  ‘God, is this a man or an ogre?’ Khosa said.

  Woakes nodded. Anna turned back to look at the rest of the team. Khosa was busy making notes, Trisha was shaking her head slowly. But Holder could only nod. He kept on nodding for several seconds, his eyes focused on the pen in his fingers. He could get a job with the manufacturers testing the longevity of the spring in the retractable mechanism the way he kept pressing again and again. Anna knew that look. These were difficult cases for her young team to deal with and did not make for easy listening. It wasn’t their first murder and it would not be their last. But child murders, and especially ones with this degree of planning and execution, were mercifully rare. She broke the uneasy silence in the room to bring them back to focus. ‘What about the recent input?’

  Khosa sat up. ‘You already know that our Hi-Tech unit got flagged by the Belgian police. They carried out a raid on an illegal pornography site administrator a couple of months ago. They run everything child-related through new facial recognition software now and they got a hit on Rosie. Hi-Tech have now sent that image over, ma’am.’

  Holder’s eyes snapped up and Trisha frowned.

  Khosa shook her head and reassured them. ‘No, don’t worry, it’s not even category C, but they’re pretty certain it is Rosie.’

  Sexual Offences Definitive Guidelines had been in existence since 2014 and related to indecent images of children. Categories A and B were the worst. Category C were often non-overt, so Khosa’s reassurance was a very welcome clarification.

  Khosa punched her keyboard and rotated the screen for the others to see. It showed a little girl sitting on a blanket in a grubby vest, her tear-streaked face smeared with dirt, staring into the camera. Khosa was right, there was nothing at all suggestive about the image, but that did not make it any less disturbing. The lost and desperate look in Rosie’s eyes was difficult to look at. Anna concentrated on the accessory details. A concrete floor and an unplastered drywall, bottles of water and, in the corner, a bucket. Black plastic with a wooden handle.

  ‘Is this where he kept her?’ Trisha asked.

  ‘Probably,’ Woakes said.

  On the image, a caption read, ‘PPV – Soon.’

  ‘What’s PPV?’ Holder asked.

  ‘Pay per view,’ Khosa said. ‘That’s what Hi-Tech said.’

  Something cold and unpleasant uncoiled inside Anna.

  ‘We need the tech guys to help us with this and pronto,’ Anna said to Khosa.

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Meanwhile, let’s see if there’s anything that gives us a clue as to location, any branding on the water bottles, a sales tag on the bucket. Was Rosie wearing the same clothes as when she was taken? Anything that might help.’ Anna turned to Trisha. ‘Get everyone a copy.’

  Trisha nodded.

  Anna sighed. ‘So, minimal forensics. No time of death. No clue as to where she was kept until now. And no one was arrested or interviewed?’

  ‘Lots of people interviewed. The dad, uncles, vicar at the church she
went to, oh, and a doctor she’d seen. The one they thought was a nonce.’

  Anna registered Woakes’ slang. Nonce was a prison term for a pariah within the prison community. A child abuser or a grass. Her preferred term was known sex offender, but she let it slide.

  ‘What about the family?’

  ‘Small family unit. Mother, father and grandmother. Rosie had a sister who was seven at the time. No interfering uncles or neighbours. Everyone was interviewed and checked out. CCTV at the school showed her teachers leaving and they were all traced.’

  ‘Father?’

  ‘Worked in the bearings factory. Day shift. They had to go and fetch him when they found out what had happened. Clean as a whistle.’

  ‘What about this suspect with the rucksack?’ she asked.

  Woakes nodded. ‘Rosie was 47.5 inches tall. She weighed 33 kilos. A big rucksack can have a 150-litre capacity.’ He put an open laptop on the nearest desk and clicked a few keys.

  Anna watched as a 4-foot replica dummy – folded, knees bent, arms restricted across the chest, mouth and eyes taped – was fitted into the huge backpack with ease. They threw in 30 kilos of weight, and the uniform in the demo lifted the pack onto his back and started walking. It looked heavy. But it also looked very plausible.

  No one spoke as the film ran.

  ‘So, he was fit enough to be able to carry one of those with a 33-kilo load,’ Khosa said.

  Woakes killed the video.

  Anna opted for magnanimity. Rainsford would be proud. ‘OK, Dave, lines of enquiry?’

  Woakes had a checklist and copied it to the board. ‘Divvy up the reports: witness statements, interviews, etcetera. Go down to the abduction site and the discovery site, and see them for ourselves. Re-run what little forensics there are. See if any of the new tech can squeeze anything from the few samples they had. The plastic bag or the bones. And get Hi-Tech to tell us what they know about the images.’

  Anna nodded, but it all felt a little rushed and insubstantial. Almost as if he knew this would lead nowhere.

  ‘Worth asking anyone any more questions?’ Khosa said. ‘There is a witness list. People came forward after the appeal. Two people said they’d seen a man carrying the rucksack leave the park. Two others said they saw either him getting into a van or a van leaving the area at that time, and an off-duty special constable confirmed the sighting.

  Anna nodded. Direction of travel for a perpetrator was always useful. ‘See if anyone is still around.’

  Khosa nodded. ‘Trisha’s already started tracing them, ma’am.’

  Cold cases suffered from the real possibility that witnesses had moved away. Sometimes even abroad after this length of time.

  ‘I’ve traced one so far,’ Trisha said.

  Anna nodded. ‘Great, I’ll take that. Oh, and can you find out if the special who saw the car is still on the force?’

  Trisha nodded.

  Woakes, realising he’d dropped the ball, chipped in. ‘Yeah, of course. Tick all the boxes.’

  Holder said, ‘What about reinterviewing the family?’

  The frown lines on Woakes’ head deepened. ‘I’d stay away from them for now. We don’t have anything new to talk to them about and I don’t think showing them the Belgian images would help. If something comes up, we’ll get a FLO to link up.’

  Anna nodded. A family liaison officer was always needed in these instances.

  ‘But given this new image evidence, I reckon this doctor the previous team interviewed might be worth a shout.’ Woakes looked down at the file. ‘Name of Hawley.’

  Anna narrowed her eyes. ‘In what way worth a shout?’

  ‘Pretty obvious, isn’t it? Whoever did this is no fool. She was taken on her route home – he knew where Rosie went to school. Knew how big a rucksack he’d need. The other suspects all had tight alibis accounting for their whereabouts at the time of the abduction. But his was iffy. Claimed to be asleep in his room after a night shift with no witnesses. I’m a great believer in low-hanging fruit, ma’am. Especially when it’s easy to shake the tree to see what falls off. Bish bosh.’

  Anna could spot a scattergun when she saw it. Woakes had his finger on the trigger of one here and it grated. It wasn’t her style to make assumptions. Apart from reviewing what already existed, the one concrete piece of new evidence was the image found by the Belgian police. The logical thing to do was prioritise that and analyse the outcome.

  But Rainsford’s words rang in her ears. She didn’t want to be accused of not letting her team take the weight. It was also useful to reinterview suspects – as long as it didn’t scare them off.

  ‘OK. Set it up for Monday,’ she said, already regretting it. Something told her that Woakes’ ‘bish bosh’ approach was going to lead to trouble.

  ‘But we also need to start doing the legwork. Once we’ve interviewed this Dr Hawley, you and I need to visit where all this started, Dave. Get a feel for the case.’

  Anna took the contact details for the witness Trisha had given her and went back to her office. She sat at her desk and dialled the one confirmed number next to a name.

  Valerie Cobain had been walking her dog on the afternoon Rosie was abducted, and she reported seeing a man dressed in army fatigue trousers, a green army T-shirt, sunglasses and a hat emerge and cross the road. She’d been walking away from the man, but when her dog paused to relieve itself, Valerie had glanced back from 100 yards. The man’s quick and purposeful stride, and the fact that the backpack looked very heavy, struck her before she’d reached down to scoop her dog’s poop into a plastic bag. Valerie had been sixty-five at the time.

  Valerie answered Anna’s call immediately and listened while it was explained to her how Avon and Somerset were looking again at the case. Her account tallied exactly with the witness report Anna had in front of her. The man, Valerie explained, walked purposefully, leaning forwards because of the weight of the rucksack. He had not looked up but she remembered he’d worn sunglasses and a camouflaged floppy hat. A bush hat.

  ‘Of course, we lost poor Roxy two years ago,’ Valerie said.

  ‘Roxy?’

  ‘Our Lab. The one I was walking.’

  ‘Sorry to hear that. Valerie, do you remember seeing him get into a car?’

  ‘No. But he must have because one minute he was walking up the hill, the next he’d gone. He must have got into one of the parked cars. But I don’t know which one. I didn’t see.’

  ‘Were there many cars parked on the street?’

  ‘Quite a few if I remember rightly. Always are there. People using the park, you know.’

  ‘Notice any vans?’

  ‘Not really. I wasn’t looking, if you know what I mean. There might have been.’

  ‘And this was,’ she scanned the notes, ‘about four forty in the afternoon?’

  ‘Yes. I used to take Roxy out after her tea.’

  Anna made a note. Always useful to have someone who was a creature of habit when it came to drawing up a timeline.

  ‘Does this mean you know who it is?’ Valerie asked, her voice hushed.

  ‘We’re following up on some new information. Cases like Rosie’s are never completely forgotten.’

  ‘I hope you do catch him. Terrible it was. The whole town was shocked that it could happen to one of our own. In Clevedon of all places.’

  ‘Valerie, if you remember anything else at all, here’s the number to get in touch with.’

  ‘Let me get my pen.’

  Anna repeated the number twice.

  And so it begins, she thought.

  Four

  Blair had stopped crying. For now anyway.

  The cave smelled funny. Old, like the toadstools under the wet wood in Haugh Park where she sometimes went for walks with Kirsty. The dog man had left her a little lamp and told her to leave it on all the time and if it went out there was another one and another one. A miniature fridge hummed in one corner, containing milk and water. There was no window in the cave and the wall
s were too smooth and it was dead quiet. Quieter than when you hid under the bedclothes in the dark because you’d heard something on the creaky landing at home. It didn’t help that she’d lost her hearing aid.

  She’d wrapped herself in the duvet because the cave was cool, though she wasn’t cold now. She thought about everything that had happened but it was hard because her thoughts were coming all at once, jumbling and mixing her up. The policeman had noticed her T-shirt. Maroon with a ‘G’ in yellow letters. He said it was the right thing to have worn because where they were going was magical, just like Hogwarts. He told her how Kirsty had collapsed and had to go to hospital and that was why he’d let her out of the van. He said there were bad people after them and that one of them cursed Kirsty and that was why she’d got all funny and twitched. He told her how he had to take her, Blair, away from the bad people, the ordinary people because, just like in books, she was special. A good witch. Blair witch. He’d laughed then.

  The dog man said he had to take her because the bad, ordinary people wanted to hurt her. They didn’t understand how special she was. He’d fetched her because they had a really big, scary adventure to get through before she could go back and tell Kirsty all about it. Tell her who she really was.

  She’d wanted to believe him. He wore a kind of uniform and he had Banshee too. But a part of her remembered Kirsty twitching on the floor of the van. A part of her, deep inside, cowered, terrified, because Kirsty had told her things. About bad men who wanted to steal you into their cars. Kirsty told her if it ever happened to scream and run away. She had screamed and the man put tape over her mouth as well as Kirsty’s. And he hadn’t left Kirsty for the ambulance, he’d just thrown her out of the van in a field with poor little Banshee. And then he’d driven the van into a bigger lorry and driven her to the cave.

  A part of her knew this wasn’t real, not the magic part anyway. But the rest of it was. The bucket in the corner where she was supposed to go to the toilet was. The smell, the duvet, they were all real. Not having her mum was real. Not knowing if Kirsty was OK was real.