Blood Runs Cold_A completely unputdownable mystery and suspense thriller

by Dylan Young

  It was something of a stretch, Anna had to agree. ‘And you do not know any of these victims personally?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  Anna stood and used her phone to take photos of the two boards and then wrote down the names in her notebook.

  ‘Do you have anything else?’ she asked.

  ‘Is this where you take my laptop?’ Hawley remained sitting, looking up at her with that same mistrust.

  ‘Should I?’

  ‘There’s nothing on it.’

  ‘Then I don’t think it’s necessary.’

  Hawley nodded. Anna sensed that she’d met with some sort of unspoken approval when he said, ‘I do have something else to show you though.’

  Hawley reached into a magazine rack at the side of the leather sofa and removed a silver MacBook. He went to the table and fired it up, his fingers quick on the keyboard. His hands looked soft, the fingers long, like a piano player’s or a surgeon’s. Anna had a thing about hands. She hoped that they were not going to reveal something that would incriminate Hawley here. That there would be no way back from.

  ‘Pick an address,’ Hawley said. ‘Any one.’

  Anna went to the nearest board. Lily Callaghan, eleven years old when she went missing in 2014. She read out the address and Hawley typed it in. Google Maps came up, he used the trackpad to zoom in and flicked to satellite view. Anna stared at a street and watched Hawley pan around, past a front gate and semi-detached house before zooming out to a bird’s eye view of the adjoining streets.

  ‘I’m only showing you how easy it is, these days, to find things. I realise you know this, but if I wanted to go to Lily’s house I could plan my route long before I ever got there. She was taken from the corner on her way back from a shop to get some milk. As far as I know, the police got no further.’

  He was right, of course. Compared to the resources available to her, this was hardly cutting-edge technology but he’d given this a lot of thought. Anna stared at the screen, trying to make her mind up about Hawley. He’d been caught on the hop with his victim boards. Could it be that he was simply stringing her along here? Had he taken Rosie and perhaps all these other girls? Was he playing some sick and twisted game by showing her how? Or had the trauma of being a suspect truly sent him down this path of trying to make sense of what had happened to him and these girls? If he was involved in these other cases, it would not be difficult to find out. But her instinct told her something else and she’d learned to trust that. Hawley was damaged. A distrustful, mistreated animal unsure of whether this hand reaching out towards him was also going to slap him down.

  ‘Ben, I can see that you’ve spent a lot of time on this.’

  Hawley snorted. ‘One way of putting it.’

  ‘I don’t know how useful any of this is. To us and to you. But I’m going to take all this away with me and see.’

  ‘Are you going to turn up at my door unannounced again?’

  Anna smiled. ‘No. We have your number. And I’m sorry about Sergeant Woakes. About earlier.’

  Hawley stood and shook her outstretched hand. It felt warm and dry in hers. He saw her out.

  ‘We’ll be in touch.’

  Hawley said, ‘I’d rather it be you, not we.’

  ‘OK,’ she said, not quite knowing why.

  She walked back to her car half-expecting to see Woakes get out of his. But there was no sign of the DS or his vehicle. She rang his number when she hit the M4.

  ‘Where the hell are you?’ she asked when he answered. From the background noise, it sounded like he was talking to her from a moving vehicle.

  ‘I’ll be back in Portishead in about twenty.’

  ‘Don’t you want to talk about what just happened?’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Hawley, what did he say? Is he going to complain?’

  ‘Not as far as I know.’

  ‘Didn’t think so. He’s got too much to hide.’

  ‘You were over the top, Dave.’

  ‘Too bloody right. Sometimes you need to push these bastards. Squeeze them until something pops. Did he pop?’

  ‘He has a theory about Rosie’s case being linked to other missing girls.’

  Woakes stayed silent.

  ‘Dave?’

  ‘And you believe him?’

  ‘I think it’s worth a look. Why, what do you believe?’

  ‘I reckon he’s got skin in the game. I reckon he’s a nonce and we’ve caught the bastard out. We could easily get a warrant for his Bristol flat.’

  ‘No. No warrant. I see no reason to go in all guns blazing, and you know you were out of order going into that bedroom.’

  ‘Door was open, ma’am. I was looking for the loo. Innocent mistake. His word against ours.’

  ‘Dave, it’s not the way we do things here. Hawley might be useful and you almost destroyed any credibility we might have with him.’

  More silence.

  ‘Sergeant, did you hear me?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  Do you though? Do you hear anyone but your own voice?

  ‘Get everyone together for a briefing at midday. Meet me in the car park at ten to.’

  Woakes didn’t answer.

  ‘Did you hear me, Sergeant?’ Anna asked.

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  Technically, Hawley had assaulted a police officer and Woakes could, if he wanted to, make waves. But there’d be no hiding from the provocation and Hawley had been an easy target. She tried to think about how it had been for him when he’d been under suspicion for Rosie’s abduction. An ordeal, no doubt. And the press were worse than sharks when they picked up a chum line like Hawley’s. The whole overblown episode had cost him his girlfriend, possibly friends and maybe family, too. She’d seen that happen. A tiny little worm of self-consciousness wriggled away at the back of her head. What was she doing thinking about Hawley and his relationships?

  She reached for the radio, found a channel and listened to a politician trying to explain why they still couldn’t extradite known criminals back to their country of origin for fear of infringing their human rights.

  It was a wonderful world she lived in.

  Sixteen

  Hawley sat alone in the kitchen of his aunt’s bungalow waiting for his heart to slow and his mind to settle. The police were long gone but still he couldn’t believe how completely, totally, bloody stupid he’d been to leave all that stuff in the bin bags. He hadn’t thought for one minute that they’d follow him here.

  ‘Shit, shit, shit!’ He thumped the table, and something from the disembowelled laptop fell to the floor. He bent and picked it up, threw it down onto the surface again. Hadn’t he learned the last time not to trust the police?

  Woakes, belligerent and confident, reminded him of the worst of the detectives he’d had to deal with last time. The way they’d assumed he’d had something to hide. Disregarding the fact that he was a professional and that you had to use charm and subterfuge when you dealt with kids as a doctor. How easily they dismissed that as something sleazy. It had made him ill then and he felt sick again now.

  The cuttings boards were still leaning against the wall. The inspector, Gwynne, had seemed genuinely interested but he knew part of that was because she only wanted to pour oil over the tsunami that Woakes had threatened to cause. He’d told her everything, knowing how mad it sounded, how desperate and pathetic, because what else could he do? And now they had him down again as a bloody person of interest.

  Hawley closed his eyes and let his head fall onto his forearm resting on the table.

  Stupid. How could he have been so bloody stupid!

  He lifted his head back up, staring out into the conservatory and the garden beyond, remembering the look of hate on Woakes’ face and still not understanding how someone who knew nothing at all about him could despise him so for something that’d taken just a minute of his time, once, in a clinic years ago.

  Hawley’s eyes drifted
across to the tool shed in the garden. He’d painted it earlier in the year. Put new locks on the door. He wondered if the police had seen that.

  For all he knew they might have someone watching the bungalow and him. Like they did last time. Hawley grimaced; it was starting again. All over again.

  But they hadn’t asked to look inside the shed.

  For that, at least, he was grateful.

  Seventeen

  Woakes was leaning against his car, arms folded, as Anna pulled in to the car park at HQ. He pushed off and walked towards her when she got out. They stood a few feet apart, out of earshot of anyone.

  Anna raised her eyebrows. ‘I thought you’d prefer I do this here than upstairs in the office because two bollockings in two days will get people talking.’

  He gave her a guarded shrug.

  ‘Tell me you know how wrong what you did was?’

  ‘I told you he was hiding something.’ Woakes’ tone rang sullen.

  ‘He was. And now he’s on the back foot and knows we’re looking at him again.’

  Woakes let his gaze drop and put his hands in his trouser pockets. His left leg kept jiggling, like a puppet on a string.

  ‘Dave?’ Anna insisted.

  His head snapped up. ‘OK, what I see from this morning is that we got a result. I was right, yeah? I’ve seen this before working serious crimes, or the human exploitation directorate as the PC brigade insist on calling it. We broke up a gang grooming kids. Nonces are nonces forever. They never stop. And they’re all fucking cowards. We squeezed a couple in the Midlands and they started singing. Led us to all sorts.’

  Anna’s brows lowered. ‘Hawley was never a nonce, Dave. He was cleared completely.’

  ‘Then why does he have a list of victims stuck to the back of two landscapes in his bedroom?’

  ‘Definitely the more interesting question and I haven’t got an answer for it yet. But it isn’t the point. Dave, come on. Your instincts are good, spot on in fact. Hawley may be valuable to us. But your way is not my way. I need you to understand that.’

  ‘We’ve got the bastard on the ropes, haven’t we?’

  ‘Exactly. His defences are up. He knows we’re looking. But what I want to know is how familiar he is with Clevedon. Is he a hiker? Someone who can carry a heavy backpack? The sort of thing you learn from subtle interrogation. Do you think he’s going to volunteer that sort of intel now?’

  Woakes sighed. ‘This is the way I function. I need to get stuck in. Ma’am, all I’m trying to do here is be a good copper. OK, I admit I can be a bit… overenthusiastic.’

  ‘Let’s hope Rainsford sees it that way.’

  Woakes let his head drop. ‘Oh for fuck’s sake, do you have to—’

  Anna snorted. ‘Of course I have to. Rainsford’s expecting us to close the Morton case. How do you think I can explain us messing up his apprehension, let alone walking all over Hawley for no good reason?’

  Woakes’ expression hardened. ‘I don’t think you’re being very supportive.’

  ‘Supportive? Is that how you see it? Jesus, Dave, smell the coffee here. All I see is that you’ve walked in wearing size twenty clown shoes and thrown a grenade into my team. No one gets to do that.’

  Woakes shook his head. Small, repetitive movements with his gaze deflected. ‘God, they told me you were a frosty…’ He caught himself just in time.

  ‘They? Just exactly who are they, sergeant?’

  Woakes’ mouth hardened. ‘I didn’t see you pushing Hawley’s buttons. I mean, with all due respect, what did you do? Just sat there, watching him, waiting for inspiration.’

  Anna nodded. ‘Yes, exactly that. Watching and waiting. You should try it sometime. Because what I saw as I watched and waited was that he lives alone, uses the preparation of the property for sale as an excuse to hide the fact he hasn’t been bothered to redecorate, though he lives there most of the time judging by the six-pack of light beer and a couple of bottles of good wine in the fridge. There were no spirits in the drinks cabinet. Probably doesn’t trust himself. The mail on the table was addressed to him there. You saw the recipe books and the shopping full of fresh vegetables and some cuts of meat, I take it?’

  Woakes stared back at her.

  Anna went on. ‘All this means that he’s self-contained, looks after himself, and can’t decide whether to keep his aunt’s bungalow or not because it’s a safe haven away from his professional life. But you, of course, got all that, too, simply by shaking the tree, yes?’

  Woakes responded with a dismissive shrug. ‘I spoke to his colleagues in two A and E departments. They think he’s weird. He won’t see kids. Runs a mile from them.’

  ‘Should it surprise you after what he’s been through? He’s probably terrified.’

  ‘You saw he had new locks on his garden shed, did you?’

  Anna snorted. ’Yes, I did. And he has every right to do that. And we have no right to ask him why.’

  ‘Christ, I can’t believe your defending this bloke.’

  Anna nodded. ‘Believe what you like. But you need to start doing as you’re told and learning to be a team player and showing the rest of us, me especially, some respect. Second and last warning, Dave. I can always have you working on something else if you’d prefer?’

  Woakes said nothing.

  ‘I said is that what you’d prefer?’

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  She could have turned away and left him standing there. But she’d learned from Shipwright that a dressing down should be delivered swiftly and decisively. Once done, best forgotten.

  ‘Right, now, let’s get this briefing sorted.’

  Upstairs, Anna told the squad about their meeting with Hawley, while Woakes sat at the back. But he looked distracted and she surmised he was still smarting like a schoolboy caught smoking in the bathroom. She ignored him and concentrated instead on what she’d learned from Hawley.

  ‘I know how this sounds,’ she said after writing the names of Hawley’s victim list on the whiteboard, ‘but I’m coming at it from two angles. The first is that we’ve caught Hawley out and he’s involved in some way in these five cases. The second is that he’s trying to make sense of the distressing experience he had as a suspect. That the original investigators had a point when they focused on him, but they didn’t realise at the time what it was exactly. And it’s made him believe that perhaps these victims were connected somehow by their medical histories, or the doctors they saw, or the hospitals they visited. Either way, it’s worth at least looking and ruling out any connections.’

  Holder spoke. ‘But if he was involved, why show you all this?’

  ‘He didn’t have much choice once Dave accidently discovered his cuttings library on the back of a painting.’

  Holder turned to look at Woakes. ‘Intuition?’

  Woakes didn’t answer.

  ‘There is that,’ Anna said. ‘Or as Hawley’s solicitor might interpret it, an illegal search.’

  ‘The obvious thing to do would be to find out if Hawley’s ever worked in the places the victims lived,’ Khosa said.

  ‘Good idea, Ryia. Let’s throw it into the mix. Justin, drag the files up from Hawley’s list and find out if and where they were treated. Then ring the hospitals and see if Hawley ever worked there. Where are we with the image?’

  Holder shrugged. ‘We’ve had it enlarged and gone over it. There is no branding on the bottles. The clothes Rosie wore were what she was abducted in. She had the vest on under her school uniform. No price tag on the blanket or the bucket. There’s nothing there.’

  ‘There must be something,’ Anna said.

  ‘I’ve spoken to someone in Hi-Tech, ma’am. They can get to us tomorrow.’

  ‘No. Not good enough. This is fresh evidence. The only fresh evidence in nine years. We need their input and we need it now.’

  Holder nodded. ‘I’ll ring them again, ma’am. See if they can get someone to us today.’

  Anna looked at her watch. ‘By clo
se of play today, Justin. OK, Ryia, that gives us three hours to get over to Charterhouse where Rosie’s remains were found. Sort out the location and you’re driving. Let’s say, thirty minutes?’

  Khosa nodded.

  Anna turned to Trisha. ‘I’ll dig into Hawley’s background.’ In her peripheral vision, she saw Woakes sit up. But Anna ignored him. ‘Trisha, let’s get some fresh search terms into HOLMES. Hospital sex offenders, links to doctors, nurses, etcetera.’

  Trisha wrote on her pad. She’d have access to indexers who provided admin support, inputting the various reports their lines of enquiry generated, and extract data from the cross-referencing queries. But Anna knew that Trisha did the interpretation and analysis of what these database searches threw up. She was the receiver. They’d need filtering for relevance and then phone calls to follow up. The end result, if anything of use did appear, would be her well-written summary. It wasn’t simply a question of pressing a button.

  ‘Any joy with military links?’ Anna asked.

  ‘Not yet, ma’am.’

  Finally, she looked at Woakes and the red flush spreading up from his neck. ‘Dave, you get on to the SIO involved in the original enquiry.’

  ‘Haven’t you asked Ryia to—’

  ‘I’m on it, ma’am,’ Khosa said. ‘Trisha, did you follow that up?’

  Trisha consulted a notepad. ‘The original senior investigating officer was a DCI Sutton. He’s now in Thames Valley.’

  ‘It’ll carry more weight if they know it’s a DS who’s asking,’ Anna said.

  Woakes let out a mirthless laugh. ‘I thought you wanted me with you at Charterhouse?’

  ‘Getting a handle on the previous investigation is as important. We may be lucky and find one or two people still around. I’ll leave that to you.’

  Woakes’ eyes slid towards the ceiling, but Anna turned back to Trisha. ‘And let’s set up a board for these four. Nothing elaborate. Dates, places, witness reports. I’ll send you the photographs I took.’

  ‘Blair Smeaton’s on that list, ma’am,’ Holder said.

  ‘I know. Since it’s an ongoing, I’ll speak to Edinburgh myself, but only if it becomes relevant. It’ll be manic up there and I don’t want to complicate things unless we get something concrete. For now, this stays on our radar only. Everybody happy?’