‘I just want to do my job, Erika. I have Lacey Greene’s killer in custody, and it looks like this case is moving towards a successful conclusion. Stay out of this, or I’ll make things difficult for you.’
There was a click and she hung up. Erika slammed down her phone, bristling. The snow whirled thickly against the window, blanketing the high street. It usually lifted her spirits, the cleansing power of snow, but she felt angry and isolated in her small office in Bromley. She turned back to her spreadsheet and attempted to concentrate.
Lacey Greene was abducted, held somewhere for four days, and then tortured before her femoral artery, an artery hard to find, was cut with surgical precision.
Would a homeless drug addict have the brains or the resources to execute all of this? And why would he then hang around the crime scene, allowing himself to be seen by two witnesses?
Chapter Nine
Erika couldn’t sleep that night. After lying in the darkness for hours, she got up and went to her window. It gave her a clear view over the small car park outside her block of flats. Snow continued to fall, and had reduced the cars to humps of white. In the corner, against a high brick wall, was a line of three dumpsters for the building. It was quiet; the only sound was a faint tapping as snow fell against her window. She couldn’t get the image of Lacey Greene’s battered body out of her head. Twenty-two-year-old Lacey had her whole life ahead of her.
From past investigations, Erika knew how much fate played its part in murder cases. If the victim had left the bar ten minutes later, or remembered to lock the car door, or taken a slightly different route, they would still be alive.
She pulled herself away from the window and took a shower, standing under the hot water for a long time. She wondered how many times her twenty-two-year-old self had narrowly avoided death. How many times might she have passed a predator waiting in the shadows, who reached out to grab her, but only just missed.
When she left her flat at six it was still dark. The ground was undisturbed; hers were the first footprints in the snow, which glowed orange under the streetlights. She had emptied the small bin in her kitchen before she left, and she crossed the car park to the dumpsters, the snow creaking underfoot, seeming loud in the morning silence. She stopped at the black dumpster with the curved blue lid. There was no noise from the main road behind her building; the snow seemed to close in around her ears, muffling the world. She stood for a long few minutes, between two parked cars, and became convinced that there was a body inside the black dumpster. When she closed her eyes, she saw Lacey Greene, filthy with dirt and crusted blood, her face misshapen, a thin layer of snow covering her body with a ghostly sheen.
‘’S’cuse me,’ came a voice behind her, and she nearly cried out in shock.
One of her neighbours, a middle-aged man, leaned across, pushed back the snow-covered lid of the dumpster, and dropped in a bulging black sack. It hit the bottom with a hollow clunk.
‘Morning,’ she replied, her heart thumping.
He frowned and trudged off to his car.
Erika turned back to the dumpster and peered into the gloom. She could just make out that it was empty; his was the first bag nestling on the bottom. She placed hers inside gently, and pulled the lid closed. She moved along, sliding back the lids of the other two dumpsters: the paper and plastic, and the one for glass. They were all empty.
Erika turned and trudged over to her car. The neighbour had almost finished scraping the snow off a small van, but he was looking at her strangely.
* * *
When she arrived at Bromley Police Station, it was quiet. She made tea and took it up to her office. Breakfast was half a packet of biscuits found at the bottom of her drawer. Dipped in the hot tea they cheered her a little, and as she munched she fired up her computer. She found Lacey Greene’s Facebook profile, but it was set to be limited unless they were friends. She hovered the cursor over the friend icon, and felt an overwhelming sadness that Lacey wouldn’t be accepting any new requests. She looked up and saw it was getting light, the empty high street below taking on an eerie shade of blue. A deep freeze, that’s what the weather reports on the radio had called it.
It was frustrating that she was locked out of the Lacey Greene murder case; she was unable to access the case details on Holmes, the police database. Yesterday she had been able to access Steven Pearson’s criminal record on CRIS, the Crime Record Information System. She opened it again on her screen. Pearson’s record went back to 1980, and included twenty-five arrests for theft, credit card fraud, rape, actual bodily harm, and attempted murder. He’d served three stretches in prison, most recently, from 2003, spending ten years in HMP Blundeston for rape and attempted murder.
Erika jumped when she heard a whistle. She turned from the screen. John was behind her with a stack of paperwork.
‘He looks like a right charmer,’ he said.
They looked at the photo on the screen. Steven Pearson had a sharp little face with bad skin and was almost bald. Wisps of brown hair clung onto the sides of his head. There were large bags under his beady eyes, and he looked older than his fifty or so years.
‘He’s just been arrested for the Lacey Greene murder in New Cross,’ said Erika.
‘That was lucky; they caught him fast.’
Erika’s initial thought came back to her: would a homeless drug addict have the brains or the resources to plan out a kidnap and murder?
‘What can I do for you, John?’
‘Superintendent Yale’s been through the next draft of your report, and he’s made notes,’ he said, handing her a stack of printouts. The first page was covered in Yale’s red scrawl. ‘He’d also like to see you, after lunch.’
Erika put them on her desk and turned back to her screen. ‘John. Do you have separate bins for recycling at home?’
‘Oh lordy,’ he said, rolling his eyes. ‘My girlfriend is the biggest recycling freak: paper, metal, plastic; if it’s not in the right bin, I’m in trouble… If I was going to dump a body, my girlfriend would be more concerned that I put it in the right bin.’
Erika shot him a look.
‘Sorry, boss, bad taste.’
‘There were three dumpsters at the scene. Lacey Greene was found in a dumpster for general waste. Why that one?’
‘General waste ends up in landfill, so it would have taken much longer to find and identify her, if at all. The landfill is huge, over at Rainham. All the recycling waste ends up in a high-tech sorting facility in East London. My girlfriend made a point of finding this all out.’
‘Something doesn’t add up for me. Some of the cuts on Lacey’s body had started to heal, which means she could have been held and tortured for four days before being killed. Every crime Steven Pearson has committed was the result of a violent outburst, or drink and drugs. He could have killed Lacey, but looking at his history, wouldn’t he just have done it there and then?’
‘Even if he didn’t do it, it would be good to have someone like him off the streets.’