Frozen (2 page)

Patrick took the hint. ‘See you tomorrow, then.' He paused in the doorway. ‘By the way, I like the stud – is it a sapphire?'

‘No…' Megan touched her nose involuntarily. ‘It's, er, lapis lazuli. It was my mother's.'

‘Hmmm,' Patrick smiled, ‘Cool or what? I've never met anyone over the age of twenty-five whose mum had a pierced nose!'

Megan ripped open a letter, suddenly self-conscious about the way he was studying her face. ‘It's pretty common in India, actually,' she said in a matter-of-fact voice.

‘India?'

‘Yes.' She scanned the letter but wasn't reading what was on the page. ‘My mother came from India. I was born there.'

‘Really?' Patrick sounded embarrassed. ‘Sorry … I mean, I didn't realise…'

‘It's okay – not many people do.' Megan turned to look at him. ‘Mum was only half-Indian; her mother was Italian. And my Dad was Welsh.' She was proud of the odd mixture of blood that flowed through her veins, but explaining it always made her feel awkward.

‘Oh, right.' Patrick was looking at her through half-closed eyes as if she were some baffling piece of modern art. ‘And I thought
I
confused people,' he laughed as he disappeared behind the door.

She was on her third cup of coffee when the phone rang again.

‘Megan –' Martin Leverton's voice was friendly. ‘Sorry about earlier. I need your help.' He was not the kind of man who bothered with social chit-chat.

‘What's happened?' Megan wondered if she'd missed something in the news.

‘Do you remember that young girl dumped in a lay-by off the M6 near Stafford about a month ago?'

‘Yes.' Megan put her mug down. ‘Have they found out who she was?'

‘Name was Natalie Bailey. Staffs police say she was a runaway from a children's home in Birmingham. They've asked us if we think the killer could have been one of the local pimps. Remember Donna Fieldhouse?'

The image of a child-woman with blonde, permed hair flashed into Megan's mind. ‘There's a connection?'

‘Yes. We've got a forensic link with semen samples from the two bodies. But I need to see you to explain it all properly. I want you to meet Sergeant Donalsen from the Vice Squad – he's been getting information from around the red light area. How soon could we get together?'

‘Now?'

‘What about your lectures?'

‘I haven't got any – the students broke up for the holidays on Friday.'

‘Right – great!'

‘I'll come to you.'

Megan pulled a newspaper cutting from a file marked ‘Murder Victims – Juvenile'. Donna Fieldhouse's face grinned from the yellowing paper. Frizzy, bleached hair, a face still chubby with puppy fat, the photograph looked as if it had been taken hurriedly in one of those automatic booths.

Megan scanned the text. One word jumped out at her. Rubbish. Now she remembered. Donna's body had been found in a rubbish bin behind a factory in the red light area of Birmingham.

She slipped the cutting into her bag and made for the lift, wondering why Martin Leverton seemed so keen for her help. She had always felt he was deeply suspicious of psychologists and he was notoriously critical of profiling.

That the two victims were prostitutes puzzled her even more. Only the most enlightened police officers got worked up about violence towards women who sold sex. The usual attitude was that they were pretty much asking for it by working the streets in the first place.

‘As if they had a choice,' Megan muttered, thinking of the age of the dead girls and the fact that both had been in care.

Leverton had said he wanted to explain it all to her properly. That'll be a first, she thought grimly.

Chapter 2

There was a Confederate battle flag draped across one wall and a framed photograph of Robert E. Lee on the desk. Amongst the police manuals filling the bookshelf were glossy chronicles of the American Civil War. The first time Megan had seen this office she thought the desk sergeant had made a mistake and shown her into the wrong room.

She had met Detective Superintendent Leverton on the Metro rapes inquiry two years earlier and his sensitive questioning of the victims had impressed her. She noticed the way detectives treated rape victims. She remembered telling her mother that he was almost too nice to be a policeman.

But that was before she had seen his office. Its civil war decor had given her the first hint of its occupant's chameleon nature.

‘Megan! Sorry to keep you waiting – blame it on him!' Martin Leverton strode into the room, jerking his thumb at one of two men who followed him through the door. ‘PC Costello – he's that keen we couldn't drag him away from the beat!' Leverton pulled two extra chairs up to his desk. ‘And this is Sergeant Rob Donalsen.'

Megan shook hands, first with the younger, uniformed man. She returned his wide grin with a neutral smile, glancing briefly into eyes that were the same deep brown as her own. His close-shaved head had the elegant shape of an Egyptian pharoah and Megan was suddenly reminded of the boy king Tutankhamen.

Sergeant Donalsen was closer to her own age. He had a broken nose and the whites of his eyes were the pinkish-red of an habitual cannabis user. He couldn't be – could he? His clammy hand seemed to grip Megan's for a fraction too long.

They all sat down and PC Costello stifled a yawn.

‘Sorry, sir!' he mumbled through long brown fingers.

‘You'll have to excuse these two. They've just finished a shift,' said Leverton. ‘I wanted to fill you in on what they've found out about Natalie Bailey.'

He laid a photograph on the desk. ‘As I said to you on the phone, Megan, we've only just had the I.D. on this one. A social worker contacted us at the end of last week – turns out she'd absconded from the children's home five times before, but because she was sixteen the day she finally ran off there was nothing they could do. From a legal point of view social services aren't responsible for these kids once they reach their sixteenth birthday.'

He handed the photograph to Megan, who had taken the newspaper cutting from her bag. The two girls looked so alike they could have been sisters. Both had dyed blonde hair, Donna's permed and Natalie's short and spiky.

Megan had been in America when Donna's body was found. The date above the newspaper article was September 21st – exactly three months ago. She stared at the two pictures in her hand. They were babies once, she thought. Had anyone in their short lives ever really loved them? The pictures blurred as she gazed at them. She was thinking about the child she might have had. It would have been a teenager now. Not as old as these girls, but almost.

‘We got the DNA results on Natalie Bailey yesterday.' Leverton's voice cut through her thoughts. ‘There were semen traces on both the vaginal and rectal swabs. We got the blood grouping of the semen early on in the inquiry, which told us that the semen in the vagina came from one man and the semen in the rectum from another. The rectal swab revealed the relatively rare AB blood group but the vaginal semen was blood group O.

‘The semen we got from Donna was also blood group O, but because it's so common, we weren't going leap to any conclusions about the two murders being linked. We had to wait for the DNA results, which are pretty conclusive. The chances of the samples coming from two different men are virtually nil.'

‘The semen you got from Donna Fieldhouse's body – was it vaginal or anal?' Megan asked.

‘Vaginal. The pathologist said there was no evidence of anal intercourse. I'll show you the forensic reports in a minute but I'd just like you to hear what PC Costello and Sergeant Donalsen have been finding out. Rob, can you tell Doctor Rhys what you've come up with so far?'

Sergeant Donalsen shifted in his chair. Leaning back with his arms folded, he addressed what he had to say to Leverton rather than Megan.

‘We know a lot more about Donna Fieldhouse than Natalie Bailey. Donna was sixteen and her last known address was a children's home in Wolverhampton, but they say she absconded last Christmas and they never saw her again.

‘Donna was a crackhead – couldn't see any further than the next rock. She'd do anything a punter wanted for the price of a fix. The other girls hate the crackheads because they drive the prices down and they'll do sex without a condom – so Donna didn't really have any friends. The only thing the girls did notice was that she always arrived at the beat on foot, which suggests that she lived somewhere nearby.'

‘Had you ever arrested her?' Megan asked.

‘Yes, a couple of times.' Donalsen looked at his notes. ‘The first time we found out she was underage and we sent her straight back to the children's home. The second time she was covered in bruises and we offered her a medical examination.' He sniffed. ‘Doctor found out she was three months' pregnant, which she claimed not to know, and when we asked if she wanted to press charges against the person who'd beaten her up she said no.' He flicked over a page of his notebook. ‘She was charged for soliciting but she never turned up in court. There was a warrant out on her when they found her body.'

Megan looked at the chubby face of Donna Fieldhouse in the photo-booth snap. Pregnant. So whoever killed her had killed her baby too. ‘Did the post-mortem show any evidence of crack addiction?' she asked Leverton.

‘Yes – they did a hair strand test,' he replied. ‘It showed she'd been taking it for around six months.'

‘What about Natalie Bailey? Was she on it too?'

‘If she was, she'd only just started. There was a trace of it in her blood but the hair test was negative.'

‘That's strange,' Megan said, thinking aloud. ‘Donna was the crack addict – the one you would expect to be selling kinky sex without a condom – but it was Natalie who had unprotected anal intercourse.'

‘I know – doesn't add up, does it?' said Leverton. ‘The other confusing thing is that Natalie seems to have been operating out of Wolverhampton rather than Birmingham.'

‘Wolverhampton? Why Wolverhampton?' Megan asked. ‘Didn't she run away from a Birmingham children's home?'

‘Yes, she did,' said Leverton. ‘We think the connection between the girls could be a Birmingham-based pimp, but one that ferries his girls to different beats around the Midlands to evade suspicion.'

He nodded at PC Costello, who took up the story, fixing her with his mesmerising eyes as he described what he'd found out in Wolverhampton's red light district.

‘None of the women on our patch had seen Natalie soliciting and we'd never arrested her. But then we spoke to a couple of girls who'd come over to Birmingham because things were getting a bit hot in Wolverhampton – there'd been a big splash in the local paper about the prostitution problem, and when that happens the local Vice usually have a crackdown to get the media off their backs – anyway, these two girls said they'd seen Natalie on the Wolverhampton patch a couple of times.

‘I went over there the night before last and the two girls showed me the spot where they'd last seen her. They said she'd been dropped off by a man in an old, dark-coloured Ford Sierra, but they couldn't describe him or remember the car registration number because it was dark both times they saw him. They reckoned he was a boyfriend rather than a punter, but they didn't think they'd ever seen him before. He definitely wasn't one of the Wolverhampton pimps, anyway.'

‘What about the local Vice Squad over there? Had they ever arrested her?'

‘No – which suggests she hadn't been on the game very long,' said Costello. He shot a sideways look at Donalsen as if uncertain whether to continue.

‘That's right,' Martin Leverton cut in. ‘The Vice Squad in Wolverhampton has something of a reputation for its vigilance.' He looked pointedly at Donalsen. ‘Even before the recent blitz the girls over there could expect to get arrested at least once a week. Some were getting done as many as three times a night.'

Megan sensed tension in the room and tried to change the subject, not wanting to be drawn into any private vendetta of Leverton's.

‘So apart from the two Wolverhampton prostitutes and the social worker who identified the body, no one knows anything about Natalie Bailey?' She addressed the question to PC Costello.

‘No, Dr Rhys. I've tried tracking down relatives – someone she might have run to when she left the home – but there's no one. Her mother was a junkie who died of a heroin overdose five years ago and according to her birth certificate the father's unknown.'

‘What about brothers and sisters, a grandmother or an aunt or something?'

‘No one. According to the staff at the children's home the mother was the only relative.'

‘Have you spoken to any of the other children at the home? Anyone who might have been her friend?'

‘She'd only been there six weeks, so she never really got to know the other kids. She'd been transferred to Birmingham from a home in Shropshire because of her wild behaviour. She was too busy running away to make many friends.'

When Costello and Donalsen had gone, Leverton took the forensic reports on Donna Fieldhouse and Natalie Bailey from his desk drawer.

‘I wanted you to meet those two before they move on,' he said, sorting through a parcel of photographs.

‘They're both due to leave Vice in the New Year – Donalsen's going to be a beat sergeant in Sparkhill and PC Costello's being promoted onto the Fraud Squad.'

‘Isn't that going to hamper your inquiry into these murders?' Megan asked.

‘I'm telling you this in confidence, Megan, and I know you won't repeat it – the fact is Donalsen's more of a hindrance than a help these days. I can't say any more than that, but I'm sure you can imagine the temptations officers face in a job like this.'