Jackson immediately screwed up his face in anger and shouted at the Daddy Pig puppet: ‘NO!’
‘What is it, Jackson?’
‘Poor Scruffy. What’s Scruffy barking at?’
‘Is that what Nanny said?’
He nodded, big moves of his head. ‘Scruffy doesn’t like that man.’
‘Which man is that?’
‘The man next to Scruffy in the park. Scruffy barking.’
‘Who was that man?’
‘Mummy said, “Get out. Get out.” Nanny said, “What’s Scruffy barking at?” Leave Scruffy alone. I banged my head.’ Jackson touched the bump on his forehead.
‘Is that why you tried to get off Nanny’s lap? Because you saw the man hurting Scruffy?’ Jackson nodded. He was becoming upset.
‘Do you know the man who hurt Scruffy, Jackson?’
Jackson nodded. ‘Daddy Pig. No, no, NO!’
‘Was it the same man who hurt Mummy?’
He nodded, kept nodding; his eyes looking far away as they filled with tears.
Chapter 26
Robbo stood next to Carter, ready to speak at the meeting in the Enquiry Team Office. The place was packed. It was the largest of the offices and always used when a meeting of the entire team was necessary. With the discovery of a new victim even Chief Inspector Bowie was present. Behind Robbo the photos of Emily Styles and Danielle Foster were pinned to one of the many boards around the walls. He pinned a new photo next to them.
‘I’ve just got the results of the X-rays from Doctor Harding – taken while she’s waiting for the body to thaw. The victim had a history of traceable injuries from when she was hit by a car as a child and we have a match with dental records. It’s definitely this woman. Pauline Murphy.’ It was a photo of a dark-haired woman in her twenties taken at a winter wedding. ‘She went missing a year ago in December 2012.’
A murmur went around the office as the team took in the timescale being talked about. Ebony was sitting at her desk opposite Jeanie. Everyone had been called in to the meeting. Jeanie had a lot she wanted to say.
‘Pauline disappeared without trace after a night out with friends. It was believed that she had started to make her way home alone when she was abducted. She was last seen leaving a bar on Upper Street at one in the morning. Like the others, Pauline was a single parent. She had a child of three who has since moved to France with the father.
‘Pauline was described by those who knew her as a loyal friend; she was a sweet-natured woman who had struggled academically because she was dyslexic. She was attending an evening class once a week studying IT.’
Carter turned and looked at the map on the board behind him. ‘He dumps a body in the middle of one of London’s best-known open spaces. The Heath covers over seven hundred acres.’ It was colour-coded for the areas. ‘She was found here.’ There was a red sticker placed over where they found her body.
‘Who patrols the Heath? Who’s responsible for it?’ asked Bowie. Bowie was handed a mug of coffee. He looked like he needed it. He had large bags beneath his eyes.
‘There is the twelve-man constabulary with dogs that patrol it,’ answered Robbo. ‘They hadn’t been out in this particular section for forty-eight hours.’
Carter spoke: ‘We are still working our way through the list of groundsmen who might have had access to the Heath on that day.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t think we’ll find him that way. He could have easily impersonated a groundsman. I think if the Heath is familiar to him then he’s likely to be, or have been at some time in his life: a dog walker, a jogger, or maintenance personnel. I would say most people who use the Heath live within a two-mile radius of it; it takes too long to get through the traffic to it otherwise.’ Bowie was nodding.
Robbo took up where Carter left off. ‘He stays within his triangle of offences in North London. His territory may be small but it’s densely populated. The trouble is, I don’t think we’re going to get that lucky with him. He might make a small mistake. He’s never going to make a big one.’
‘What was the condition of the body?’ asked Bowie.
Carter answered: ‘We have to wait for the post mortem, but her injuries and the skeletal look of her body are the same as Emily Styles.’ Carter nodded to Robbo and waited to continue while he managed to load the images on his laptop and connect with the PCs on desks around the room. The officers crowded around the shared PC screens to view the images. ‘If you scroll the images that Robbo has just sent you, you will see. There are too many similarities for this not to be Hawk. A bag had been placed over her head. She has large open wounds, ulcerated, that expose the bone in some places. She has thick makeup on her face too – we believe that this is important to him.’
There was a silence in the room apart from the clicking of mice and the tapping on keyboards. A photo of the charm bracelet came up.
‘What about the jewellery? Is it significant?’ asked Bowie.
Carter answered: ‘We know it belongs to Danielle. So it confirms that he has her. Why he’s given Pauline Murphy the bracelet we don’t know but we presume it’s to show how clever he thinks he is. In this case he’s telling us that Danielle is still alive. We don’t know whether the rings found on Emily Styles signified the same thing. We know they probably belonged to women he had killed or was about to kill. Hopefully we are going to learn a lot more about Hawk from Pauline Murphy’s body.’ Carter looked at Robbo’s laptop and the images taken at the crime scene on Hampstead Heath. ‘I am hoping that the post mortem will reveal where she’s been, maybe through soil traces, particular fibres on her body, anything that can help us locate where he’s been keeping her.’
‘Does Pauline Murphy’s body tell us anything new about him as a person, Robbo?’ asked Bowie.
Robbo was resting his back on the wall beside the boards; he had wrapped his arms around himself.
‘It tells us something very worrying – that not only is he capable of extreme torture and cruelty, barbaric as it all seems, but his calculated cruelty is something that requires intelligence. He has a type – a social type but not a physical type. I don’t think it matters to him how tall they are, dark or fair, fat or thin. It matters to him what they are going through in their lives. They have to be single parents who are trying hard to make it on their own. None of these women were stupid. They all had a lot to lose and had a kid to stay alive for. It would take someone very special to lure them into this kind of trap.’
Bowie’s face was flushed and rubbery. He took another swig of coffee and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the palm of his hand. ‘So he’s slick enough to fool them all. That can’t have been easy. He must have some charm that they fell for. We need as complete a profile as possible of Hawk, Robbo.’
‘I’m working on it, Sir.’ Robbo read from his notes: ‘We think he’s going to seem like an honest member of society because he’s likely to have gained their trust. Lives alone because he’s been able to keep them for months undetected. So he’s really clever, our guy, socially adept, a smooth operator but with a dark side that might have started on the internet. It has echoes of fantasy figures with the way they are made up. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is an image somewhere that he has copied this look from, a film maybe. We know he engages in violent sex. The post mortem will tell us more but he’s very likely to have a stash of violent pornography in his house and on his computer.’
‘I think he takes particular pleasure in parting the mother and child. ‘He tortures them mentally and physically by keeping them alive for such a long period of time and them knowing that they have abandoned their child. That’s what’s so frightening about him,’ he added. ‘I think he’s evolving, getting cocky.’