Blood Runs Cold_A completely unputdownable mystery and suspense thriller Page 16

  ‘Are you saying he’s not up to the job?’

  ‘I’m saying that some HR nob had suggested a change of scenery for Woakes so that another force could try and deal with his failings.’

  ‘Do they have a label for these failings?’

  ‘The word paranoid was used. Sandwell shied away from saying “disorder”.’

  ‘Bloody hell. How come we’ve been lumbered with this?’

  ‘Ah, well. That’s the thing. He struck lucky with a couple of cases. Blundered in on his own and did the job. That got him a sympathetic hearing with the ACC up there in East Mids. I wouldn’t blame Rainsford as he’s probably had his ear and several other appendages bent to find room.’

  ‘I knew it. I could smell it.’ Anna gripped the steering wheel. ‘What am I supposed to do now? Sit back and let him play captain bloody chaos?’

  ‘Keep Rainsford apprised. These things tend to have a way of working themselves out.’

  ‘Is that what you’d do?’ Anna asked, fishing.

  ‘Yes, as well as keeping the bugger at arm’s length. Find him something he can get his teeth into like a hit and run in Perth.’

  ‘Why Scotland?’

  ‘I meant Western Australia. That’s about as far as you could throw him.’ Shipwright chuckled.

  Anna grinned. ‘Don’t think Rainsford would stump up the airfare.’

  ‘No, I know. All you can do is be careful.’

  She thanked Shipwright and rang off. Not what she’d wanted to hear, but confirmatory nevertheless. She toyed with taking Holder and Khosa into her confidence but decided against it. If Woakes was already paranoid, the last thing she wanted to do was give him more ammunition.

  It was well past lunchtime by now. Anna found a Costa and took a flat white and a salad to a table at the rear and set up her MacBook.

  The visit to Janice Dawson had made her mind up about Hawley. Woakes’ ‘shake the tree’ approach was all wrong as she guessed it would be; Hawley had nothing to drop.

  Anna knew Danaher was working on the images, but she believed what Varga had told her. Further discovery was not totally dependent on resources alone. It needed either luck, as had happened in the discovery of Rosie’s photograph, or a trawl of websites that were hidden from plain sight. It would all, in Varga’s words, take time.

  But the knot of dread in Anna’s gut told her that time was something they didn’t have when it came to Blair Smeaton. She needed input, a direction, something that might push her towards where to go next in the case. She needed more intel on the image.

  And there was one person who knew a lot more about this sort of thing than she did. Than anyone she knew did.

  She forked chopped salad into her mouth, logged on to the cafe Wi-Fi and opened a particular folder in her email. Since her run-in with the Woodsman, Anna had received several emails from someone called HuSH.

  She’d shown the first couple to Rainsford, who’d enlisted the help of cybercrime to try tracing.

  ‘Unfortunately,’ the man had said, ‘it’s using a pseudonymous remailer. A software programme that anonymises email addresses. The ‘nym’ server receives the normal email, strips headers and replaces them. The message is then encrypted and sent out through a random three-stage chain to arrive at the server. It is decrypted there and sent to the recipient. This particular one does not allow replies.’

  She’d listened, not understanding all the technical terms, but understanding enough to know that she would never want to reply or have these communications traced. She had not shown Rainsford any more of the emails. They were private and she suspected – though he never mentioned his name – from only one possible source.

  Hector Shaw.

  Each message was brief. Initially they were sympathetic, with Shaw wishing her well after her ordeal, but always spiked with coded messages that he and only he could know anything about from their conversations at Whitmarsh. But it was the one she’d received after her discharge from hospital as she’d recovered at her own flat that she opened now.

  Anna, I hope this finds you well and almost ready to return to work. They miss you, I’m sure, and we both know there is much more work to be done. I can find you work, Anna, you know that.

  Your parents must be very proud that their odd daughter has found a niche in which to flourish. I say parents, though of course only your mother remains alive. Your father would, I’m sure, be delighted with your progress. His death must have come as a great shock. For him to die alone must have hurt you, Anna, given that you were so close. If only your mother could have found it in her heart to let him enjoy those last few weeks under his own roof, it might not have ended so tragically. But then you know your mother. I suspect she is an unforgiving soul. A good trait to have inherited as a police officer, but less attractive when it leads to ending thirty years of marriage. Was she resentful? Were you the cause of that resentment, Anna?

  Does that thought prevent you from sleeping?

  I, on the other hand, sleep soundly every night.

  So much to discuss, Anna. I look forward to our next meeting,

  HuSH

  Anna closed her eyes and breathed deeply. How did he know so much?

  But she knew the answer to that one, too. Shaw’d had a hand in the broken jaw which eventually shut her drug-dealing ex up. It was obvious, too, from the email that Shaw had gleaned much from Tim Lambert’s outpourings before they were stemmed.

  He must have used someone else to send the emails. It had to be through a third party because a category A prisoner like Shaw would have no direct access to the internet or a computer. She could have asked Whitmarsh to investigate, but the truth was that these contained too much information. Why on earth would she want the contents of it to be made public? She’d stored the emails away on her laptop, still wondering how Shaw had managed it without any access to a PC.

  But what if he did have computer access?

  The thought stuck its head above the parapet. Anna’s common sense told her that it was impossible, yet the concept blossomed, not because of what Shaw had done, but because of what he might do. She’d considered proposing it to Rainsford, suggesting giving Shaw supervised access to allow him to help her in her investigation…

  The notion fluttered briefly before scattering like charred paper on the wind.

  Rainsford would laugh her out of his oh-so-tidy office. But still the thought wafted in and out of her mind, stimulating the wriggly worm to gnaw away at her skull. With that thought came something of a revelation. Disturbing as it was, Anna had begun to trust Shaw. In so far as believing that he would not waste her time or deliberately lie to her anyway. She shook her head as she imagined attempting to explain that concept to Ted Shipwright, whose description of Shaw at their first meeting was ‘a card-carrying nutter’.

  His objections to what she was proposing echoed in her head in Dolby surround sound.

  Giving Shaw access to a computer would never happen; besides, Shaw had not been near a computer for years. Yet the idea wouldn’t go away. What might Shaw be able to tell her about the Dark Web that Varga could not know?

  Incredibly, she felt tears brimming and she wiped them away, angry that remembering Shaw’s email triggered fresh memories of her father’s death and its shocking abruptness. It had hit her like a hammer. No one knew how long he’d lain there in his two-bedroom rented flat alone. She’d pushed the coroner for an answer and the pathologist finally suggested no more than eighteen hours. The fact that he hadn’t rung anyone or called an ambulance also suggested that it had been sudden and catastrophic. Myocardial infarctions were not always lethal. But one that provoked ventricular arrhythmias and resulted in pump inefficiency could result in no blood to the brain. At least it would be quick and instant.

  Every day she hoped that was how it happened. And every day she wished she’d been there to say goodbye. The urge to see him again now was overwhelming.

  * * *

  An hour after leaving Janice Dawson, Anna t
urned her car around, went back to the M5 and headed first north and then west along the M4. Once more crossing the River Severn as she gave in to her urges.

  They’d cremated Tom Gwynne and scattered his ashes in a memorial garden at a crematorium on the edge of the Brecon Beacons near Aberdare. Close to the mountains where he always loved to be. When the local authority remodelled the garden, an opportunity arose for the bereaved to purchase a stone bench and have a plaque incorporated as a memento mori. Kate and Anna jumped at the chance. Anna’s mother had seen it as an unnecessary expense. Kate and Anna did it anyway.

  The crematorium was isolated and in a wild, windswept spot. There were no rules about where crematoria needed to be situated, but if she had a choice, Anna wanted to end up somewhere like this, too. She was not religious and she’d cringed inwardly at her mother’s insistence at involving a vicar to preach a eulogy. Neither she nor Kate felt strong enough to take an active part and, numbed by their grief, they’d defaulted and acceded to their mother’s wishes, incapable of offering any resistance. If she’d had the time back, she’d have insisted on a humanist service, played her dad’s favourite songs and mouthed funny anecdotes about his wicked sense of humour. It was her one everlasting regret. At least, and through nothing more than luck, they’d ended up here: a wide-open space, a place where souls might wander unheeded by the living.

  The bench with her dad’s inlaid plaque had views over the bleak mountains beyond. Mountains where he’d loved to walk before his shortness of breath slowed him down. Sometimes, on busy days in winter when funerals stacked up, the car parks would fill and the hearses would queue outside the modern, whitewashed building. But on this bright summer’s day the place was deserted except for one or two mourners laying flowers.

  Anna wasn’t a great one for meditation. But what she wanted and usually achieved by sitting on her father’s bench was the nearest thing to peace and solitude she knew without the help of an hour’s circuit training or a good Sauvignon. What it allowed her to do was open doors in her memory and properly remember her dad. There was no need for the clichéd one-way conversations. All she needed to do was give reign to her imagination. She remembered his love of the absurd, the way he’d pretend not to enjoy board games at Christmas but then get totally involved, the way he’d sit and listen to Led Zeppelin’s ‘What Is and What Should Never Be’ half a dozen times on vinyl just for the guitar solo. She understood that he knew her better than anyone. Had nurtured her, provided wisdom tempered by an astonishing ability not to be judgemental – unlike her.

  Sometimes, his tolerance and care, the things that made him such a great teacher, made her wonder how he could possibly be her father. And as she sat on the bench that morning, with Shaw and Woakes and Rosie Dawson battering at the walls of her defences, she remembered one of his phrases. She heard him say it to her as clear as day when she was being sullen or feeling hard done by because of being Anna Gwynne.

  ‘The most fragrant roses grow from the worst-smelling manure, Anna.’ And then, being her dad, he’d cap the whole thing by saying, ‘Brownie, anyone?’

  Smiling stupidly to herself, Anna got up from the bench, turned and ran her fingers over the plaque with her dad’s name and the Welsh word for loss and longing for the departed that had no real equivalent in English:

  Thomas William Gwynne

  Hiraeth

  Twenty-Seven

  Kevin Starkey pulled in to his drive and parked. He didn’t get out immediately, but simply sat there, contemplating. Six thirty on a Wednesday evening and almost another week over. He looked up at the house. A lovely little red-brick semi with bay windows on the edge of town in a great area with good schools. Schools that had given his two a bloody good start in life. Brenda’d insisted they both go to uni. She would, of course, since she wasn’t the one paying. He wasn’t close with them and they chose to spend holidays with their mother and her lot in Shepton Mallet. He didn’t mind. In fact he encouraged it.

  This was his house, mortgage all but paid for, would be paid for by the end of this month if all went well.

  Starkey let himself in through the front door. He hadn’t bothered redecorating since Brenda’d left. Hadn’t seen the point. He kept the place clean, lawns mowed. He didn’t do much with the neighbours because, thanks to his job, he was hardly ever there.

  Except on weekends. And on weekends, he indulged himself. He’d bought a frozen fish lasagne from a fishmonger on Monday and defrosted it the night before. The other half he’d keep for later in the week.

  He took himself and his suit jacket upstairs, showered quickly and found some shorts and a T-shirt. It would have been nice to have air con in the house. How many times had he heard that over the last few days as people sweltered in offices and clinics? But twenty-eight degrees was a rarity in the UK and you could count the number of times anyone would need air con in any given year on one hand.

  He stared at his face in the bathroom mirror and thought about the phone call he’d taken from the detective inspector. She’d sounded young and efficient. So, they were looking into the death of Rosie Dawson again, were they? Well, what he’d told them all those years ago and repeated today had helped, he had no doubt about that.

  He remembered the case very well. The overtime had been brilliant. He’d been involved in door to door and the prolonged painstaking searches of open land. They’d found nothing of course. But his information on the van was vital. It was important then and it remained important now.

  Starkey splashed cold water over his face, dried it on a towel and walked back downstairs. He put the lasagne in the microwave and poured himself a glass of wine. He’d finished it before the meal was heated through so poured himself another one. He was big. Always had been. His legs were thick, his neck was thick and he’d had a gut for as long as he could remember, though he had lost a bit of weight. Being tall helped, but everything juddered under his clothes when he moved quickly.

  And he did like his beer and wine.

  He ate quickly and drank the second glass before he’d finished eating.

  After he stacked the dishes in the dishwasher – it only went on twice a week these days – he made a cup of tea and sat down in the lounge to watch the news. He wasn’t a great TV watcher, but he didn’t mind the odd documentary. True crime and forensics, material that Brenda was never able to stomach. When he’d finished his tea, he took his briefcase and walked out into the garden. The sun was still out, and thankfully the lawn had not grown too much due to the dry weather. He reached his shed – better known as his garden office – unlocked it with the key he left hanging behind the back door and entered.

  He’d wired in electricity, and a Wi-Fi repeater meant that he had super-fast Broadband on tap, too. On one wall stood a bench with small items of electronic equipment, shelves of tools and a hobbyist’s headband with magnifying lenses. Starkey switched on a DAB radio and found a smooth jazz station. On the workbench were disassembled bits of electronic equipment. Sometimes, if he failed to do the repairs onsite, he’d bring pieces back and have a go so as not to have to send items back to the manufacturers. Especially if they were out of warranty. He had all sorts of equipment supplied by his employer, soldering irons, burrs and tiny saws, specialist glues and a huge illuminated magnifier on a reticulated arm. A fly-tying vice clamped to the bench edge meant that he could anchor delicate and small items to leave his hands free.

  Someone had dropped a desk transformer at the job he’d been to that day and now it had stopped charging. He needed to strip it down, see if it was simply a broken connection or if head office would have to replace it. People never looked after their equipment. Still, it kept him in employment. He couldn’t complain.

  He worked steadily. Removing tiny screws with jeweller’s instruments. Soldering, replacing some worn contacts. After half an hour, he replaced the housing, plugged the unit in and ran a diagnostic. Everything worked. He sat back from the bench, put both knuckles into the curve of his back and arched
backwards. He needed to start exercising.

  From under the bench he retrieved an old laptop. Old only in appearance, since he’d revamped speed and memory through additional hardware. Starkey switched it on. Logged on and opened up Firefox. A newsfeed on the customised page had Blair Smeaton in a headline.

  Net widens in search for missing schoolgirl

  That led his thoughts straight back to his conversation with the police and what had made them reopen Rosie Dawson’s case. Another missing girl. Good to know they felt he could contribute. He missed the uniform, of course he did. But he had given it up for good reasons. Even so, he was more than happy to help. More than happy.

  Starkey smiled to himself. He wondered if they’d questioned other people. Other witnesses and perhaps the doctor, Hawley, too. God they’d sunk their teeth into him alright.

  But it was all so long ago. He didn’t envy them. They’d have their work cut out.

  Twenty-Eight

  Blair had no idea how long she’d been in the cave. One of the torches had stopped working and she’d had to use the bucket. The whole place stank. She almost wished the dog man would come back again and empty it.

  Almost.

  Then she wished he’d never come back, ever, ever.

  She wondered if it was tea-time at home. Spaghetti hoops on buttered toast. That was one of her favourites. Or burger and chips with peas. Or a fish supper with loads of vinegar and a Coke from Carlino’s.

  Blair squeezed her eyes shut and felt darkness all around her, as if she’d never feel happiness any more, as if it were sucked like smoke from her mouth.

  Her throat was sore, too, like it was when she got a cold. She pulled the duvet around her wishing she had Bernard to cuddle. The smell in the cave made her not want to eat any food so she drank some water instead. It helped.