Catching the Ice Queen Read online

  ‘Is it true?’ he said, clutching his Viva Las Vegas mug. ‘Is there a mole?’

  She shrugged. ‘So the top brass are saying. I don’t know. But Sylvie’s definitely get some intel from somewhere, and it’s either from us or from Mephistopheles.’

  ‘Mephi who?’ he asked, confused.

  ‘Never mind.’

  He shook his head and stepped back behind the charging desk. ‘Found somewhere new to live yet?’

  ‘No. I don’t have time to look! And when I do manage to go and see a room the residents have kittens when they discover I’m a copper.’ She’d thought the last set were going to throw themselves out of the window, presumably after their stash of drugs which she was pretty sure had sailed through whilst she was being shown the bathroom. Her thoughts swung to the text she’d got that morning from her brother in Melbourne, inviting her over. She shook it away and forced a smile onto her face. ‘Anyway, not to worry,’ she said, ‘I’ll find something.’

  She turned away and bumped straight into DCC Black. Robin had hardly seen her lately, as the woman’s knee injury had mostly confined her to an office on the executive corridor. Now she stepped hurriedly back and apologised.

  ‘No need, I walked into you.’ Her voice was calm and icy as usual. To her own annoyance Robin felt her pulse hitch up at the mere sight of her.

  ‘Good night then, ma’am.’ Robin managed a polite but impersonal smile and moved towards the door. For a moment she felt that Lara Black was going to speak, but then the door banged shut and the opportunity was lost.

  Two hours later she was crossing off another dismal flat share from her list when her phone rang. It was the DCI.

  ‘Sullivan? Get yourself over to Speldhurst. There’s been a shooting and it’s all hands on deck.’

  She didn’t argue, just threw herself into her car, thumped the dash, and raced out. She made it across town without any problems and drew up outside Eridge House amidst a sea of other police vehicles. This didn’t look good.

  ‘What’s happened?’ she collared a young PC. His face was pink with excitement.

  ‘Some bloke’s been shot. Looks like a retribution-style killing.’

  Did they teach you that at Hendon? she thought, frowning. ‘Do we have a name for the victim?’

  The boy smirked. ‘Yeah, it’s Gary Greenway.’ A burst of shock isolated Robin. The world went silent, the lights of the blues and twos strobing disorientatingly. She saw the constable’s mouth moving as he continued to speak but her brain wasn’t processing what he was saying. And then everything came back with a snap. ‘…word is that he grassed up the Ice Queen, and there’s no coming back from that.’

  ‘But he didn’t,’ she protested, ‘he didn’t say anything.’ She shoved past the PC and ran towards the block. She pushed through the doors and took the stairs two at a time, only to barge straight into Goode and Bolton outside Gary’s door.

  ‘Now then, Tweetie, calm yourself.’ Bolton grabbed her by the arm.

  ‘Is it really him?’ she asked, her face bleak.

  The big DCI nodded. ‘Yeah. Sylvie must have thought he talked, and wanted to send a message back.’

  ‘You don’t have to go in there, Robin,’ said Keith, but she ignored him and walked inside.

  The narrow hall stank of blood and shit. Behind the kitchen door the remains of the man who had once been Gary Greenway sprawled in a wooden chair, his arms still looped with cable ties. His head –

  She twisted away and stumbled out, trying not to throw up. Outside she made it to the rail along the walkway and stood for a minute to catch her breath. Poor Gary, she thought, he had been so terrified that somebody would rat him out, and they had. Poor, poor, stupid bugger.

  ‘We’ve found a gun!’ shouted a voice from inside, and the two balding men swung back into the flat, returning in a few minutes with a black handgun sealed inside an evidence bag.

  ‘She’d just left it,’ said Goode. ‘Dropped it behind the door on the way out.’

  ‘You think it was her, then, Sylvie?’ Robin asked. He nodded.

  ‘Yeah, I think she keeps all the fun jobs for herself.’

  Back at the station on that endless night the news went from bad to worse. A sharp-eyed forensic technician noticed marks on the gun used to execute Greenway that showed it had been part of a consignment of weapons handed in by the public during a recent amnesty. The batch had apparently been sent to be destroyed. But it hadn’t been destroyed; it had been cleaned and oiled and loaded and then pressed against that little scrote’s head and the trigger pulled.

  ‘There were 250 other guns in that batch,’ said Bolton under his breath as they both waited for the DCI to emerge from a crisis meeting with the ACC. ‘Christ help us all if the rest of them are on the streets as well.’

  Robin couldn’t help but think that Sylvie would only have discarded that weapon after one use if she had plenty more toys to play with, but she didn’t say anything.

  The next week was a blur of interviews, reports, forensics. The whole of CID were pulled into the investigation, dropping almost everything else that had been on the books. Night bled into day which bled into night, takeaways were consumed at desks, people were found slumped in random corners, sleeping. By the time seven days had rolled by they were all shattered, but no further forward in the investigation. A ten a.m. briefing was called, and they all crammed into the CID room in a fug of body odour and bad breath.

  ‘OK, shut up and listen, everybody.’ DCI Goode’s voice was hoarse. ‘We’ve now had the update from forensics. The gun was clean, no prints, fibres, DNA, nothing.’ They’d been expecting this. He sighed and carried on. ‘As you know there were no witnesses, or none that want to risk talking to us. We’ve been on to CCTV operations, and they’ve combed through the traffic cam tapes from mid-afternoon before the shooting to the morning afterwards. We didn’t have surveillance on Dean’s house,’ and you all know why was the unspoken comment, ‘but there is a traffic camera on the corner of Montpellier Avenue which just picks up the outside of the building and the parking outside; it shows her car being driven up to the door at five twenty pm, and it doesn’t pick up any other movement until after the time of the murder. But,’ he ground his teeth in frustration at this, ‘there are no cameras covering the mews at the back of the house, she could have left on foot and been picked up by another vehicle and driven to the crime scene. Could have, doesn’t mean she was, and it certainly doesn’t mean we can prove anything.’

  ‘What about CCTV on the estate?’ Everyone jumped at the sound of the Chief Constable’s voice. Beside him stood Lara Black, her face frozen into a look of disapproval.

  ‘Um,’ the DCI cleared his throat. ‘Good question, sir. Unfortunately the cameras all went out of action the afternoon before the killing.’

  ‘What, all of them?’

  ‘Yeah. Uniform had scheduled a repair crew to go out the following morning.’

  They all held their breath. The Chief Constable’s face was red.

  ‘This is not good enough!’ he shouted. ‘Not good enough at all! This woman is running rings around us and I won’t have it!’ He jabbed his finger at Robin’s boss. ‘Get some evidence, turn a witness, sort it out, DCI Goode! And have a report on my desk by this afternoon!’

  Lionel Goode was practically grinding his teeth with the effort of not shouting back about the Chief Constable’s spineless reaction to Sylvie Dean’s harassment complaint. In the end he managed a strangled ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Some positive news to update you with, sir,’ Black’s cool tones sliced through the atmosphere of anger and resentment. ‘The shipment of decommissioned hand guns has been tracked and a number of staff at the foundry where they were due to be destroyed have been pulled in. I’m interviewing them this morning.’

  ‘Do we have any idea how many of them have ended up in the hands of these criminals?’ he asked.

  ‘About two thirds,’ she replied, unemotionally, and a wave of dismay flashed a
round the room. That’s about 160 weapons, thought Robin, shocked. DCC Black was continuing. ‘There appears to be evidence that the remaining portion were incinerated, as planned. Presumably they were too old or in too poor a condition to be brought back into use.’ Her eyes swept the assembled detectives, a strobe of icy attention that made them all shiver. ‘Sufficit to say that the sequence of events that led to the mis-appropriation of these guns is now a primary focus for my corruption investigation.’

  Silence greeted this statement. They all knew that there must be a mole in their ranks who was passing on juicy information, but this was different. Giving up a shipment of guns to the psychopathic Sylvie Dean? What on earth could be worth doing that? Money? Blackmail secrets kept? A nice little villa in Spain? I hope they thought it was worth it, because they must be bricking themselves now, thought Robin.

  ‘Right, get on with it!’ shouted the Chief Constable with a hysterical note to his voice. They all immediately rushed to their desks and started reading, typing and jabbering on the phones in an effort to look as busy as possible. ‘Goode, a word.’

  Out of the corner of her eye Robin watched their boss being hauled into the executive meeting room, presumably for more dressings-down. She was distracted momentarily by the DCC walking slowly behind them. She told herself she was just wondering how the knee injury was coming on, and not checking her out from behind. No, no, of course not.

  She sighed, and picked up her notebook. There must be some evidence out there somewhere, she thought, stuffing the pad into her bag and peeling her coat off the back of her chair. The sounds of the Chief Constable screeching behind a closed door drifted faintly over. Robin hastily joined the exodus of coppers rushing down the stairs to the front exit. It seemed that everyone was preferring to wear out some shoe leather to sitting in the poisonous atmosphere of the station. Maybe Sylvie’s slipped up somewhere, Robin thought hopefully, just maybe.

  Chapter 5

  Needless to say, Sylvie Dean had been as thorough as ever. Really, if she’d only not been a psychopath but had directed her energies into something productive she could have ruled the world, Robin found herself musing wearily some days later. But then, she was kind of on track to world domination as it was, which was a worrying thought.

  The big guns from CID had hoovered up all the juicy bits of intelligence-gathering – the informants, the CCTV, the witness statements from the snotty neighbours in Dean’s street. Robin, like all the lower ranking officers, had plodded around the Speldhurst Estate in the hopeless task of getting somebody to talk, but apparently a cloud of collective amnesia had settled over the depressing blocks and windswept corners where people gathered to whisper in faint admiration of the Ice Queen’s brutal audacity. No-one had seen or heard anything. They had no idea of what had happened to Gary Greenway except that he’d probably deserved it.

  After a few days of this Robin realised that only cursory attention was being paid to the owners of the little run of tatty shops that passed for the commercial centre of the Estate. She’d tried to suggest to DS Bolton and DCI Goode that these wary individuals might be persuadable to share what they knew, but they hadn’t been interested. In the end Keith had waved her away from whatever more important thing they were doing and told her to ‘knock yourself out’. It was hardly a ringing endorsement of her detection skills but it was good enough to justify slipping away from the others at the end of her shift and parking alongside the cracked pavement outside the offy, the betting shop, the horrible-looking takeaway, and the doctor’s surgery with its windows encased in metal mesh. This was probably also a dead-end, she thought, but Robin felt determined to at least try. She owed Gary that much.

  The newsagents/ corner shop/ off licence was staffed by a youngish man who immediately clammed up and pretended not to speak any English, despite the fact he’d clearly been reading the Daily Mirror just as she’d stepped inside. The doctors’ receptionist was too harried from dealing with shouting women and bawling children to give her any kind of answer to her questions, and the take away was shut. Robin peered at the faded menu through the dirty window and thought that was probably a blessing.

  By the time she got to the betting shop darkness had fallen and the sign on the door had been flipped to ‘closed’. Robin pushed anyway, and unexpectedly found herself inside the poky little room lined with ancient screens. The manager was a middle-aged woman with the narrowed gaze of one who had seen everything. At the end of the day’s trading the shop floor was covered in discarded white betting slips, and the woman was busy pushing a broom around when Robin came in.

  ‘We’re closed. Oh, it’s police.’ She looked back to her task, scornfully. ‘I’m busy, love.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  She gave a theatrical sigh and leaned on the broom. ‘What is it? Just ask me and then piss off, will you? I’ve got a home to go to and a dinner to cook so I’ve no time to waste with you.’

  ‘There was a murder –‘

  ‘Saw nothing, know nothing. Now, goodbye.’

  The woman’s face was already shuttered like her shop. Robin shoved her notebook away.

  ‘I knew Gary,’ she said, ‘he was a horrible little scrote.’ That got her a look of surprise. ‘I don’t think anybody ever gave a shit about him when he was alive, and even all this investigation isn’t really about him. But bastard as he was, he didn’t deserve to be tortured to death, and I want to get whoever did it.’

  There was a long moment of silence. Robin barely dared breathe in case she break the thread of attention that the manager was now giving her. Eventually the woman heaved a sigh, and dug a packet of fags out of her back pocket.

  ‘Want one?’ she gestured, voice muffled by the ciggie she’d stuffed under her lip. Shrugging at Robin’s refusal she lit up and inhaled a very long breath.

  ‘He was a shit. Came in here all hours, shouting the odds, half off his mind on drugs, booze, whatever.’ Another puff. ‘But still. He was fucked up, wasn’t he? Anyone could see that.’ Her eyes narrowed as she thought. Then she shook her head and carried on sweeping. ‘But I really don’t know anything about how he died, honestly I don’t.’

  Well, that was that.

  ‘Ok. Thanks for taking the trouble to think about it, though. I’m not going to give you my card, just in case,’ they shared a look, ‘but if you do hear anything, just ring the station and ask for Tweety. They’ll know who you mean.’

  ‘Tweety?’ the woman gave a bark of laughter that hacked away into a long smoker’s cough. ‘Men are bastards, aren’t they?’ Robin grinned, and turned to the door. ‘Oh, I’ve just remembered. Gary used to put bets on for someone else sometimes, not that we’re supposed to let that happen, but hey.’

  ‘Did he say who it was?’

  ‘No, and actually I only realised it the last time I saw him. He’d put a pony on Cherry Blossom to place at Haydock, but the stupid animal fell at the first instead. Gary said Oh! Elvis isn’t going to like that!’

  ‘Elvis?’

  The woman cocked an eyebrow. ‘I know, right? And you thought your nickname was bad! Anyway, I told him that if he was betting for someone who’d been barred from the bookies then he’d be in trouble.’

  ‘What did he say to that?’

  The woman smiled faintly. ‘Told me to fuck off, didn’t he?’

  Back at the station, silence reigned. It seemed that the day’s fruitless enquiries had prompted a group outing to the pub. Robin glanced at her phone. Nope, no text. Quelle surprise. She sat down at her desk and painstakingly added notes about her enquiries at the shops to the case file, making particular mention of the unknown associate on behalf of whom Gary might have been placing bets. As she sat there, feeling footsore and wondering whether there was any other nugget of information she could gather from her hours spent on the Estate, when her phone beeped. It was Jason, sending another photo of a white sandy beach, blue sea, and his grinning face. Wish you were here! Was today’s message.

  Laughing,
she leaned back and took a snap of her feet, sending it with the caption: ‘Twelve hours walking about trying to get people to talk. Dogs are barking! Living the dream!’

  She turned off her computer and went to stand before realising a dark uniform was right behind her. Looking up, she saw Lara Black’s face was pale and furious.

  ‘Who are you texting? You’re always texting somebody at this time of night. Are you passing information to Dean and her associates? Is that how she’s staying one step ahead of us the whole time?’

  Robin felt herself flush with anger. Wordlessly, she slapped her Samsung into the woman’s hand. DCC Black glared at her once, then looked down to scroll through the list of photos and messages. Finally she handed the phone back.

  ‘My brother. He lives in Australia, so his morning is my evening. He texts me before he starts work.’

  ‘Right, well. You shouldn’t be messaging from the incident room anyway.’

  ‘That’s no problem,’ Robin grabbed her coat. ‘I was just leaving.’

  Bloody woman! she fumed to herself as she drove home. What was she doing, anyway, hovering around the empty station? Poking around on the quiet, most likely. And what had she meant by saying that she ‘was always texting at this time of night’?

  How long had she been watching?

  The following morning Robin found herself dragged into the tedious job of cross-referencing witness statements, along with some grumbling detective constables from other teams. Around her, she noticed people giving each other careful looks, or checking who was standing behind them in the queue for the photocopier, as if anyone could be the mysterious mole. Even the senior managers didn’t seem immune: they seemed to have decided to have all really important meetings in the lift, where no-one could over hear them. After a couple of hours Robin was still hard at her collating when she noticed a timid woman from Admin Support hovering next to her desk.