Blood Runs Cold_A completely unputdownable mystery and suspense thriller Page 9

  Anna took a deep breath in through her nose and let it out slowly. ‘Why did Krastev kill this victim in Sussex?’

  ‘Because he was told to by those Black Squid bastards.’

  Anna made herself swallow. ‘You have an approximate location? Why don’t you let me have it?’

  Shaw smiled. His teeth were yellowing but still all there. ‘You know why. Because I don’t have to. And I need to see if Krastev was telling me the truth. I’d be disappointed if he hadn’t been. How’s work, Anna?’

  She didn’t answer, kept her eyes on her notebook.

  ‘Have they replaced that ugly sod Shipwright, yet?’

  She looked up then. She could have been offended but Shaw’s delivery had been almost tender.

  ‘I expect you miss him, eh? He was good for you, Anna, wasn’t he?’

  Don’t, Anna. Don’t.

  ‘But you don’t need him, Anna. You don’t need anyone.’

  She closed her notebook and picked up the digital recorder.

  ‘Just say the word, Anna,’ Shaw said to her departing back. ‘You know where I’ll be.’

  * * *

  She found Holder in the reception area.

  ‘Have we finished, ma’am?’

  Anna nodded. ‘For today.’

  ‘Did he say anything else?’

  ‘We’ll swap stories in the car.’

  Holder drove. She let him have his droning anthems, low enough so she could tune them out of her own head when she needed to. Shaw was eking out his relationship with her, she knew that. Even so, if what he’d said was true, it was highly significant.

  Twenty minutes into their journey home, Trisha rang.

  ‘Hi Trisha, what have you got for us?’

  ‘I ran a check on the European Information System, and Boyen Krastev is a Europol reoffender. Wanted in Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands for abduction, sexual assault and drug-trafficking offences. According to the Border Agency, he has never entered the UK. I’ve requested more information from the National Unit.’

  Anna knew how this worked. She’d been involved in reciprocal information exchanges before. Europol ran the EIS but also had national units facilitating cooperation between its EU partners. In the UK it was the International Crime Bureau that coordinated the service.

  ‘Whereabouts unknown, I presume? They must think he’s still at large.’

  ‘Yes. There are warrants out for his arrest.’

  She thanked Trisha and pondered this new information. If Petran was Krastev, and they’d need the police in Bulgaria to confirm it, then those warrants should be ripped up. You could not arrest a dead man.

  ‘How come someone like this guy, Petran or Krastev or whoever he is, was let in, ma’am?’

  ‘EU laws for sharing information on criminal records did not come into force until 2012. Petran was a petty criminal. His record would have been deemed of low risk. I suspect Krastev knew this.’

  ‘Do you think Shaw’s telling the truth?’

  Good question. Great question. More to the point, what the hell did Shaw actually want? Anna’d had enough time to think about that. What Shaw had done, killed at least half a dozen people in the most abhorrent of ways, made him a dangerous psychopath. And he seemed to have no issue with admitting to more murders. What’s another sentence to add to life in prison? Was he doing it because he liked her? Or because he trusted her to carry on trying to find the people behind his daughter’s suicide? If it was the latter, Shaw had a very roundabout and macabre way of approaching it.

  ‘I do. I think he has an agenda and only he knows what that is, but for now, I’ll take what he’s prepared to give.’

  * * *

  Back in Portishead, Anna checked in and thanked Trisha for her efficiency with getting information on Krastev so quickly. Trisha held her eyes for a moment longer than was necessary for the exchange. Anna returned a questioning smile.

  ‘How was it, ma’am, seeing him again?’

  Trisha was not a warranted officer. She was civilian, a single parent, and the mother of two teenage boys. A dozen years older than Anna, attractive and trim. She brought efficiency and professionalism and like now, a very welcome dollop of emotional intelligence to the squad. She knew more about Holder’s and Khosa’s personal lives than Anna ever would, because she was an easy person to share those things with. Not a gossip, just a sounding board. Anna, on the other hand, kept her personal life and its details in one of the many compartments in her head marked ‘private and confidential – not for public consumption’.

  Trisha’s question had concern stamped all over it and caught her off guard. Not because she didn’t want to answer it, but because it demanded a little bit of self-analysis.

  ‘Always a pleasure,’ she said, and winced because it was glib and a lie and there was no hiding the truth from Trisha whose penetrating gaze did not drop. Anna sighed, forcing herself to open the box and look inside. ‘The truth? It was very unpleasant,’ she said. ‘Like handling a pet snake. You know it’s dangerous. You know it doesn’t have any feelings for you but you kid yourself that the need it has to coil itself around you is affection, when all it craves is warmth. And that warmth could just as easily be a rock in the sun as your shoulders.’

  The corners of Trisha’s eyes had drawn down and Anna saw muted horror there.

  ‘I don’t know how you can face him. After what he tried to do…’

  Anna was alarmed to see moisture gathering in Trisha’s eyes. It was common knowledge that Shaw was a killer and that his meddling in the Charles Willis case had almost got her killed. It was all in Anna’s report. What wasn’t in those reports were the personal communications from Shaw that turned up like an unwanted rash. The letter and the card she’d received while in her hospital bed. The occasional untraceable email…

  She opted for the emergency escape hatch in the way of humour. ‘It’s why they pay me such an enormous salary, Trisha.’

  A smile, like a tiny fluttering bird, flickered at the edges of Trisha’s mouth and the moment faded. Anna could have used the opportunity, if she’d had any sense, to ask Trisha’s opinion of Woakes. An off-the-record chat that would not have gone any further, but Khosa chose that moment to bring over a report.

  ‘I found the FLO who looked after Rosie Dawson’s family. She’s retired, ma’am. At the time of the abduction, Rosie’s mother and father were together and there was a sister. The father worked in a local engineering works. There was an uncle who was close but he was thirty miles away that afternoon with a dozen witnesses.’

  ‘We’ll need a new FLO,’ Anna said.

  Any involvement with the family of a victim required the support of a family liaison officer. Someone who provided support when the harsh and difficult questions had been answered and the detectives had all gone. And sometimes, the families would open up and reveal information to the FLO away from the formal interviews. Information which might prove vital.

  ‘I’ll sort it, ma’am,’ Khosa replied and hesitated.

  ‘What is it, Ryia?’

  ‘I know Sergeant Woakes didn’t want us to involve the family yet, but if I ask for a new FLO…’

  ‘Don’t worry about upsetting Sergeant Woakes. This is my call. Just do it, Ryia.’

  Khosa nodded and turned away, but it left Anna with more of the feeling that Woakes’ influence was having a negative effect on her team. A feeling she did not like.

  Anna turned back to Trisha but the analyst was absorbed by her screen as usual and the moment evaporated. She went back to her office and busied herself with referring back to Shaw’s interview and making notes.

  She’d need to brief Rainsford and liaise with Sussex police, chase up whatever they found on Krastev and relay it all to North Wales police. If they got a positive ID for Krastev it might mean they’d want to charge Shaw. Anna pondered how she felt about that. He was already serving an indefinite term. The CPS might not consider it in the public interest given the costs. It could mean Shaw getti
ng away with another murder.

  Did it bother her? She didn’t think it would bother Shaw. She found herself hoping the CPS might not consider it trial-worthy. Perhaps if they got a formal confession they would avoid trial… It was a nice thought, but even as it occurred to her, the hairs on her arms all stood to attention.

  Shaw, for some bizarre reason, had made it clear how he would only talk to Anna about any and all of his crimes. Listening to the details of what he’d done to Krastev was a thought that did not fill her with joyful anticipation. Not if the autopsy report on his injuries was anything to go by.

  And she didn’t want to be used by Shaw either. But by the same token, what choice did she have? What had happened to his daughter was horrific, but the murders he’d committed in her name were brutal. She thought about how she’d explained her visit to Trisha. The snake analogy.

  She felt Shaw’s coils tightening around her.

  Five o’clock came and went with no sign of Woakes. She phoned him. It went straight to his voicemail again.

  ‘What are you up to, Dave?’ she muttered, then grabbed her bag and went home.

  Thirteen

  Inside the shed he used as a workshop, he had a laptop. One that he did not use for work. He fired it up now, having already configured his browser for a proxy server through TOR, The Onion Router, the free software beloved by everyone who believed in online privacy. Whenever he logged on he’d be using an IP address that wasn’t his. He’d tried explaining this to someone at work once. The importance of anonymity online so that people didn’t know your business. The bloke made a token effort to try and understand, but he knew he couldn’t care less. So long as he could WhatsApp his fishing mates and stick a bet on the footie he was happy.

  It didn’t matter anyway. Other people didn’t need to know. In fact, the less other people knew the better. He opened his Chrome browser. From a drawer, he took a small, black plastic oblong and a USB cable. He connected it up to the laptop and opened the SafePocket Chrome app, punched in his PIN and opened his cryptocurrency vault. He had three bitcoins, some Ethereum and Dash. Not enough, but their performance over the last year had been gratifying. He was now convinced, after gambling a few hundred pounds over the last couple of years, investing in this alternative to cash and seeing his profits soar, that this was the way forward.

  To the average person, this was all nonsense. Yet the beauty of cryptocurrency was the way it all happened – without regulation and supervision and with no central authority controlling the transactions. A safe and invisible way to move money.

  But what he also knew, what he cared about most, was that since cryptocurrency had a value, you could send any amount of money, in cyber form, to anyone in the world at any time as easily as sending an email and without being tracked, without the need for a middle man. For the sort of transactions that interested him, cryptocurrency became a game changer.

  On the wall behind him, pinned to a wooden rail, hung a collection of odd and arcane pieces of ‘art’. The most recent result of his other preoccupation. Too slow for sport, while his contemporaries were all off playing football or rugby, his mother enrolled him in the church choir. There he’d learned how to sing under the tutelage of the verger, a red-faced frotteur who took every opportunity to be as hands-on as possible. He spent a lot of time helping the younger boys, did the verger.

  But amongst his more innocent hobbies was grave rubbing. Using nothing but soap and water, the verger taught him how to wash down the old gravestones, stick butcher paper on their surfaces and use a charcoal block to bring out the carvings. He’d found it instantly calming and fascinating. Especially when some of the younger boys were crying, he would lose himself and try not to think about what was going on a few feet away in the vestry. The younger boys never complained. He had the feeling the verger had coerced them in some way, making them the guilty parties. At least that’s what emerged when the authorities had finally investigated. Mercifully, the verger was not attracted to the bigger children, and he’d been big for his age. As a result, the verger left him to his own devices.

  Later, the verger was transferred out to a less claustrophobic parish. But the one good thing the old fiddler did was instil in him a love for bringing out the textures and elaborate carvings of gravestones. He loved it for its solitude, its craftsmanship, the sometimes poignant stories he unearthed. He’d begun in local churches, but as soon as he was old enough to drive, his hobby took him far and wide. He especially liked the overgrown graveyards and the forgotten cemeteries in abandoned churches. There he would find little gems. Stories of lives blighted by poverty, sometimes whole families from the last century or before struck down and decimated by disease. In the graveyards he at last found an outlet, a way of suppressing the wanton hunger that haunted his soul. And he was drawn to specific types of gravestones. Ones with memento mori in the form of skulls and bones carved into their surfaces. Reminders from the dead of the survivors’ own mortality. When all that is left after the flesh has rotted away is the hardened core of our beings. Solid, pure, white. He liked to touch the carved curves of the craniums and run his fingers along the straight long bones wrought with such care. He liked to touch the real thing even more. Dreamed of doing just that.

  He turned back to the search engine and typed in another phrase. This time the screen changed and an image appeared. Innocuous. A flower under the title St Nicholas. Slowly, the petals on the flower all fell off to leave a naked stigma, style and ovule. Underneath was a single box with a flashing cursor. He typed in a password and once more the screen changed to a series of security questions. After a couple more layers, he got to a bulletin board on the Bopeep site. Various headlines and threads appeared. Some explicit, some less so, but all buyers and sellers. He chose one called ‘fresh daisies’. He typed, ‘New bloom available. Anyone have any suggestions?’

  Within minutes, he had a dozen answers. He smiled and typed.

  This one is special. I will post a verifying image. Thirty-second clips will be available for 0.1 bitcoin. The whole for 1 BTC. Special venue arranged. See here.

  A link led to a YouTube video. A famous Game of Thrones scene in a dimly lit brothel where the girls, paraded in descending age for the punter’s delectation were all dismissed, in turn, as ‘too old’.

  He sat back and watched the responses flow in. After a while he got bored and typed in a new address. A niche site. The place where he did most of his business now. Where like-minded individuals stumped up the PPV money. Where they’d pay for certain words to be spoken. Pay for close ups of the colour draining from a face with a final breath.

  The modus operandi was always his and his alone. But watching him do it could be bought for a price.

  He checked the bulletin boards, content in the knowledge that here, despite his own shame at the feelings he’d had for so many years, he shared a sense of belonging. There were no images here. This site was too extreme even for the most hardened of pornographers. He read words and descriptions instead that were almost medieval in their depictions.

  He still wondered at a world where technology had enabled him to monetise his sickness. But this was his world.

  Soon, he would introduce his new bloom, Blair, to it.

  Fourteen

  Tuesday

  Woakes rang at seven thirty. Anna had dawdled in the shower, muzzy from a bad night’s sleep in which Shaw’s face kept swimming up into her consciousness, making her open her eyes every couple of hours to make sure he hadn’t manifested in her bedroom. The three or so hours of the good stuff didn’t make up for the bad. Not one bit.

  She was out of the shower, her hair still wet, when the phone rang.

  ‘Morning, ma’am.’

  ‘Dave, where are you?’

  ‘At Hawley’s place, in the middle of nowhereshire.’

  ‘That won’t work with sat nav.’

  ‘Erm… over the bridge. Place called Sully near Penarth. Porlock Avenue. I can walk to the shore and wave to yo
u across the Bristol Channel if you like.’

  ‘Have you been there all night? Where did you sleep?’

  ‘In the car. What does it matter? He’s well spooked, is Hawley. At about seven last night he started shipping bin bags out to the front door.’

  ‘I am not going to ask you how you know that.’

  ‘Baa, baa sodding black sheep, ma’am. This morning he’s gone out for a run. It’s the first chance I’ve had to take a look and it’s all gold. I told you we’d rattle him. I’ve sent you some snaps. Take a look and I’ll ring you back.’

  Anna rang off and opened her messages. Woakes had sent three images. The first was of three black refuse bags tied and awaiting collection. The second showed one of the bags opened, full of newspapers and cuttings. The third had the newspapers spread out on the floor. She tapped and enlarged. Three different newspapers, but the same type of headline on each.

  Police continue search for missing girl

  Hope dwindles for little Katelyn

  Mother asks for prayers for her little angel

  ‘Shit,’ Anna said and rang Woakes back. ‘When did he leave?’

  ‘Fifteen minutes ago.’

  ‘Stay there and do not do anything. Understood? I’m on my way.’

  Fifteen miles was a damn site longer by road across the Severn Estuary. Anna knew the way. She’d mapped it dozens of times crossing the bridge between the two countries. Still travelled it when she visited Kate and her mother. Penarth had been a destination for her when she was growing up. They’d visit to walk the promenade or get fish and chips on the front and marvel at the huge captains’ houses with their rooftop lookouts. But its roots were in the profits of the heavy industry that had ripped the wealth from the valleys in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many of the houses had been built as retirement homes for the coal mine and steel plant owners, and around these bigger properties, the streets had spread and grown as money and people flowed from Cardiff. Its gold-star schools drew the upwardly mobile middle class like a cowpat drew blowflies. Sully she knew only vaguely as a spot along the coast between Penarth and its much brasher neighbour Barry. More retirement homes where you could watch the south westerlies bringing rain up the Channel and wave at the English across the water and know that your weather pain was quickly going to be shared by them.