Frozen

by Lindsay Jayne Ashford

‘Did you see anyone come in here while I was in the canteen?’

  ‘No. I nipped out for a sandwich but I was only gone ten minutes or so.’

  Delva marched down the stairs to the front desk.

  ‘Have you let anyone other than staff into the building over the past hour?’

  The security guard was a scrawny, elderly man and Delva towered over him. Her abrupt manner took him by surprise and he stared blankly at her for a moment before glancing at the visitors book in front of him.

  ‘Er, no. Not since twenty-five to seven.’

  ‘Who came in then?’

  ‘A guest for the programme: Stuart Booth. You know – you interviewed him about the turkey rustlers.’

  Delva sighed impatiently. ‘I know who he is. Look, is your boss still in the building?’

  ‘Er, I shouldn’t think so, no. Shall I check for you?’

  Delva took a deep breath, trying not to lose her temper. ‘Yes, if it’s not too much trouble.’ She barked out the words and the man fumbled with his walkie-talkie, turning his face from her withering gaze.

  ‘Hello, Frank? Has Dave Simon gone home?’ The walkie-talkie squawked a reply and the guard turned to Delva apologetically. ‘I’m sorry, he’s gone. But you can phone him if it’s something urgent. His number’s on the wall in back security – okay?’

  ‘Thanks.’ Delva spat out the word between clenched teeth, covering the distance between the front desk and the back entrance to the building in a matter of seconds. This so-called head of security was going to get a roasting.

  As she approached the security booth she could see that the door was slightly ajar. Two men were sitting inside, leering and sniggering at something in a newspaper. She slowed down, creeping softly as a cat along the corridor. The newspaper’s masthead had given them away. From the doorway Delva saw what they were looking at before they saw her.

  She marched into the booth and snatched the phone off the wall, the two men jumping from their seats in bewilderment.

  ‘What’s the matter, Miss Lobelo?’ The older one put a hand on her arm but she shrugged it off.

  Ten minutes later the head of security arrived.

  ‘What’s the problem, Miss Lobelo?’ David Simon looked from Delva to the guards with a look of concern.

  ‘I’ll tell you what the problem is,’ Delva blazed. ‘I came down here to tell these prats I’ve had another sick letter and what were they doing?’ She snatched the newspaper from the table and thrust it in his face. ‘See? Just the sort of filth that sets off the bloody perverts in the first place!’

  ‘Yes, I see.’ David Simon glowered at the guards. He screwed the newspaper into a tight ball and tossed it into the bin. ‘I can only apologise and promise you that it won’t happen again. Will it, lads?’ He gave them a stern look.

  The men looked at him sheepishly. ‘No, Mr Simon.’

  ‘Now, what about this letter?’ He looked at Delva. ‘Where did you find it?’

  She explained what had happened.

  ‘What did it say?’

  Delva hesitated, unwilling to go into a detailed description of the contents in front of the two guards.

  ‘It was a very disturbing photograph,’ she said. ‘Of a woman.’

  Simon nodded. ‘Similar to the sort of thing he’s sent before?’

  ‘Well, similar, yes – but much worse.’

  ‘I think one of your colleagues is playing a practical joke, Miss Lobelo. A very sick joke, granted, but I don’t think you should let it get to you.’

  ‘Is that all you can say?’ Delva turned on him. ‘How would you like it if your wife or girlfriend or whatever was getting stuff like this in the post’

  ‘I understand how you must be feeling, believe me.’

  ‘I doubt that!’

  ‘Look, I’ll see if we can get a CCTV camera set up in the newsroom. That should put a stop to it.’

  ‘And how long will that take?’

  ‘If we get the okay we could get it installed by the New Year.’

  Bloody great, Delva thought. She was going to have to call Megan.

  Chapter 7

  Megan poured herself a large whisky and took it up to the bathroom. All evening she had been feeling jumpy. It wasn’t just the bodies and the photographs she’d seen. It was those shells. Ridiculous, she thought. It had to have been Emily. It was just the kind of thing she would do. But the feeling of unease refused to go away.

  While she waited for the bath to fill up, she lit the candles in the wrought-iron candelabra on the mantelpiece. Then she started picking at the wallpaper by the window. The room needed redecorating and she was planning to get it done after Christmas. But there was a loose bit of border paper sticking out and it had been annoying her for ages. She had tried pasting it down but the condensation kept making it come loose again. As she pulled it a whole strip of wallpaper came away with it. The wall underneath was a mottled terracotta colour: a mixture of old, painted plaster and dried-up wallpaper paste. In the candlelight the bare wall had a certain charm.

  She tugged at another piece, thinking about the profiles she’d been working on. AB just had to have a police connection. Whoever killed Tina had known too much about forensics. A con with that much knowledge would be on file, for sure. So who, then? She thought about Rob Donalsen. Leverton already had him down as bent. Could it be him? He certainly didn’t fit the profile.

  She had ripped off nearly all the paper on one wall when she realised the bath was on the verge of overflowing. She put her hand in to pull out the plug. The water was lukewarm because the hot had run out.

  ‘Damn!’ she said, pulling her bathrobe back on.

  There was no point waiting for the water to heat up again. She might as well go straight to bed.

  She snapped on the light. Turning to reach a bottle of cleanser from the cupboard, she caught sight of the stripped wall. It looked a complete mess. The romantic ambience of a faded Tuscan farmhouse had given way to something reminiscent of a vandalised council flat. Thank goodness there was no-one but family visiting her for Christmas.

  She was in the middle of brushing her teeth when the phone rang. She spat hurriedly and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand as she grabbed it from the floor.

  ‘Megan, it’s Neil.’ He sounded out of breath.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘We’ve had to take Joe to hospital.’

  ‘Oh my God! What’s happened?’

  ‘Don’t worry, he’s okay. He started throwing up everywhere. It’s called projectile vomiting or something. They’re going to have to operate but it’s not serious.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. The doctor says that’s why he’s been screaming all the time. The operation should put it right.’

  ‘Where’s Emily?’

  ‘At the hospital with Ceri – I’m going up there now to fetch her back. Ceri’s going to stay the night with Joe. They’re doing the operation first thing in the morning.’

  ‘Do you want me to come over?’

  ‘No, it’s okay. There’s nothing you can do at the hospital – they only allow parents to stay – and I can cope with Emily. I’ve got tomorrow and Thursday off.’

  ‘Are you sure? I mean if you wanted to stay at the hospital as well I could have Emily.’

  ‘No. Thanks for the offer, but they wouldn’t let both of us stay. Listen, I’ll phone you in the morning as soon as I hear from Ceri, okay?’

  He put the phone down, obviously in a rush to get to the hospital. Megan stood for a moment staring at the bath as the last of the water gurgled into the plughole. She shivered and ran to jump into bed.

  Sitting hunched under the covers she felt frustrated and useless. Her nephew’s tiny body, only two months old, was about to go under the knife. She wished she could be with Ceri to help her through it. As if she hadn’t got enough on her plate already.

  Megan was just drifting off to sleep when the phone rang again.

  ‘Megan?’ I
t was almost a whisper.

  ‘Delva, what is it? What’s happened?’

  ‘I’m really sorry to phone you so late but I’ve had this awful photograph…’ Delva paused and Megan heard her take a breath, as if she was trying to stop herself from crying.

  ‘What photograph? Has he sent you another of those magazine cuttings?’

  ‘No. This is a real photograph: one he’s taken himself, I mean, and it was delivered by hand. There’s this poor girl lying on a bed and she looks drugged or unconscious or something. I think the police ought to see it but I wanted you to look at it first.’

  ‘Of course I will.’ A host of possibilities ran through Megan’s mind. Delva’s voice sounded so different: like someone on the verge of a breakdown. There was a note of paranoia in that barely audible whispering. Megan wondered if this photograph could really be any more disturbing than the cuttings she had seen in Delva’s office.

  ‘Where are you now?’

  ‘I’m at home.’

  ‘I’ll come over.’

  *

  Megan had never seen Delva without make-up. Usually her brown, almond-shaped eyes were expertly outlined with black kohl pencil, the lids and brows highlighted with shimmering ochre or terracotta shadow.

  But now her face was bare. There were dark hollows under her eyes and although she was several inches taller than Megan she seemed to have shrunk. All the buoyancy and sparkle that made her such a natural on TV had disappeared. She stood shivering in the doorway, fragile as the leaf skeletons frozen to the path beneath Megan’s feet.

  ‘Come in.’

  Megan went ahead of her into the living room, glad to see a fire blazing in the marble-framed hearth. Two vast honey-coloured sofas stood either side of the fireplace. On the coffee table between them was a bowl of fruit, a pink envelope propped against it.

  ‘Have you shown this to anyone else?’ Megan picked up the envelope with her gloved hand, prising out the flap as carefully as she could.

  ‘Er, yes – does it matter?’ Delva looked worried and confused as she sank down onto one of the sofas.

  ‘Only if it’s been touched. There may be fingerprints, you see: just because he hasn’t left any up to now doesn’t mean we can rule it out.’

  ‘Oh … I never thought of that.’ Delva looked as if she might burst into tears. ‘I, er, I showed it to Jane. She was the late night sub in the newsroom. She didn’t actually touch it, though, I don’t think. I can’t really remember…’

  ‘Anyone else?’ Megan sat down next to Delva on the sofa, sliding the photograph gently out of the envelope.

  Before Delva could reply, Megan gasped.

  ‘It’s shocking, isn’t it?’ Delva glanced at the photograph and quickly looked away. But she was unaware of exactly what about the photograph had made Megan catch her breath.

  It showed a woman, slim and of mixed race, lying on a bed. The naked top half of her body and her head almost filled the frame. There was a tattoo in the shape of a butterfly above her left breast and her head was slumped to one side, wisps of long, black hair concealing most of her face. But it was the arms that had startled Megan. They were stretched out above the woman’s head, the forearms crossed, and there was something grey and shiny in the top left-hand corner of the photograph at the point where the woman’s wrists would have been. The camera had been too close to its subject to get the wrists in, but Megan’s instant impression was of a woman handcuffed to a bed.

  ‘You – you don’t think she could be dead, do you?’ Delva’s voice trembled.

  ‘I don’t know. I think the police need to see this as soon as possible.’ Megan had no intention of upsetting Delva even more by telling her what was going through her mind. ‘Apart from the woman you were working with last night, does anyone else know about this?’

  ‘Yes.’ Delva’s face tensed as she spoke. ‘I was furious when I found it on my desk. I’d just come up from the canteen and I couldn’t bear to think that this pervert could actually get right into the newsroom without being seen. I had a go at the security people about it.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘It was a complete farce. I caught a couple of them drooling over a Page Three girl. They didn’t hear me coming and they tried to cover it up, but it was too late – I’d already seen it. I was so angry I called their boss. He was a bit more human. Gave them a bollocking and promised it wouldn’t happen again. But I don’t think he took the letter seriously.’ She pursed her lips. ‘He said it must be one of my colleagues playing a practical joke. All he could offer was the possibility of putting a CCTV camera in the newsroom – but not until New Year.’

  ‘Big deal. What did you say?’

  ‘Not a lot. I had to read the 10.30 bulletin so I tried to calm myself down and finish my shift.’

  Megan slid the photograph back into the envelope. ‘These security men – did they actually handle the photograph?’

  ‘No. I didn’t even show it to them. I was going to; I mean I had the envelope in my hand, but when I saw them leering at that newspaper it put me right off. When the boss arrived I just told him I’d had another sick letter and then I started off on this rant about pornography.’

  ‘So the only prints on it are likely to be yours and possibly your female colleague’s?’

  ‘Yes. I can check with Jane whether she actually touched it. She’s on with me again tomorrow.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re up to working at the moment? This must have really shaken you up.’

  ‘Yes, I’ll be fine, honestly. I’m better off going to work – it takes my mind off things.’

  ‘But what if you get another one?’

  ‘I’ll phone you straight away – if that’s okay?’

  ‘Of course it’s okay. This is much more serious than some sick fan telling you what he’d like you to do to him. Whoever took this photograph has probably committed a serious offence.’

  Megan paused, hoping that Delva would fail to put two and two together. She wasn’t sure what she was going to say if Delva raised the possibility of a connection between the woman in the photograph and the murders of Donna, Natalie and Tina.

  Whatever Delva was thinking she remained silent as Megan rose to leave.

  ‘I’ll take this to Detective Superintendent Leverton,’ Megan said. ‘I mentioned the letters to him. I’ll ask him to get it analysed for prints.’

  Yes, she thought grimly, he wasn’t the slightest bit interested, but I think he will be now. She wondered if Delva realised just how much she was playing the whole thing down. Anyone who worked in a newsroom was bound to know enough about the murders by now to make a connection with a photograph like that. Perhaps she was just too shaken to put her suspicions into words.

  Megan slipped the envelope into a clear plastic wallet she had bought with her and put the package into her bag.

  Past experience indicated that the search for fingerprints would be a waste of time, but when she had been looking at the photograph on the sofa the flickering firelight had drawn her attention to something else that marred its shiny surface. Closer inspection had revealed a tiny, white, crystalline blob in the bottom right hand corner. Unless Megan was very much mistaken, that blob was going to be Martin Leverton’s most important piece of evidence to date.

  *

  ‘Morning Doctor Rhys!’

  Eric’s booming voice was all Megan needed. She nodded at him and hurried past the porter’s lodge, stifling a yawn. She’d only had four hours’ sleep. Leverton wasn’t answering his mobile. No one at the station seemed to know where he was.

  She got coffee before she even looked at her post. There were three Christmas cards on the top of the pile of internal mail in her pigeonhole. As she tucked them under her arm she couldn’t help noticing Patrick’s mailbox. It was next to hers in the row and was stuffed to capacity with envelopes of all sizes and colours.

  Megan found herself wondering who they could be from. Most of the students had sent their Christmas cards
to the staff last week when they broke up for the holiday. Perhaps they were from people in Holland – but why would they send them here rather than his home address?

  She resisted the temptation to delve into the pile to look at stamps and postmarks. Why on earth should it matter who Patrick was getting cards from?

  The minute she had sat down at her desk there was a knock on the door.

  ‘Can I come in for a minute? I’m here for my gory details. Fair exchange for that packet of Maltesers, wouldn’t you say?’ Patrick’s eyes twinkled and the frown disappeared from Megan’s face.

  ‘Sorry, I’ve got to go out in a minute.’ She hesitated, glad to see him.

  He smiled. ‘I was hoping you’d help me celebrate?’

  Megan stared at his downcast eyes, a puzzled smile on her face. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s my birthday. Would you like to come out for a meal with me tonight?’ Megan was amazed to see that he was actually blushing. ‘Don’t worry if you can’t. I know it’s short notice. You’re probably going somewhere already. Christmas party or something…’

  ‘Oh. I, er…’

  ‘It’s okay,’ he cut in. ‘I thought the answer would probably be no.’

  ‘No! I mean, I wasn’t planning anything apart from writing a few dozen overdue Christmas cards. I’m just amazed that you’re asking me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, I would have thought you’d be out partying with the students.’

  ‘You’re joking! I haven’t got the stamina for all-night raves any more!’

  ‘Taking one of them out for dinner, then.’

  ‘What on earth would I talk to a student about for a whole evening?’ He grinned and put his mug on the desk. ‘All they’re interested in is sex and drugs.’

  Megan nearly choked on her coffee. ‘What?’

  ‘They keep asking me about what sort of things you can buy in the sex shops in Amsterdam and whether policemen smoke cannabis in cafés – that sort of thing.’

  ‘Whereas I, by contrast, am only interested in sex and violence.’ Megan’s smile widened. ‘Are you sure you want me for a dinner companion?’

  ‘As long as you promise not to mention 3-speed vibrators or Lebanese Gold.’