Olivia’s eyes widened. ‘What the fuck, Rach? You’re not taking that out with you. I’m not letting you.’ She grabbed her wrist, squeezing hard, but Rachel refused to drop the blade.
‘Don’t you remember how long it took me to heal the last time Daryl messed me up?’
‘He won’t touch you this time, I promise.’
‘I’m going to help Nola. I’m going to help myself.’ Tears were now falling down her cheeks. ‘I need to get away from Daryl, from all of this.’
‘You don’t know if the voicemail’s real or fake, Rach. Wake up!’
‘I heard her screams in the background.’ Her words ensured a long desperate silence between them both, until Rachel managed to find her voice again.
This time she spoke softly. ‘I heard her. She was crying for help. She said he was going to kill her, whoever he is,’ she said, dropping her knife to the floor. ‘I can’t ignore that. She wouldn’t joke about something like this.’
Olivia’s face softened. ‘I’ll go with you to the police, but let me call Daryl first.’
‘No!’
‘All right, no phone call,’ she said, putting her mobile back in her pocket, ‘but you got to talk to him sometime.’
Rachel nodded. ‘I know… Let’s just find Nola first.’
Present Day
6th November
Ice crunched under her feet as she walked over the grass verge, towards the lake where the body had been pulled from the water. Smoke from the fireworks still hung heavy in the air.
The winter sun was just beginning to break through the darkness, lying low on the horizon, and as she walked towards the white incident tent ahead, she stifled a yawn.
It had been a long night for forensic pathologist Dr Danika Schreiber, having been on call, and she could barely keep her eyes open. She was met by Claire, who was shivering in the cold, puffing on a cigarette.
‘Thought you were giving up?’ Danika said as she placed her case on the ground next to her. Her faint German accent was still audible, despite the fact she had lived in England for several years.
‘It’s been a long night.’ Claire stomped her feet against the ground, trying to revive her frozen toes.
‘For us both. That’s why I’m late. The last job took longer than expected.’ She peered over Claire’s shoulder and stared out towards the broken ice floating on the water. ‘Is that where you found the body?’
Claire flicked her cigarette from her fingers and it rolled across the ground. She nodded as she exhaled a plume of smoke. ‘Yep, and it wasn’t easy dragging her up either. You’re bloody lucky it’s only one body as well.’
‘Yes, I heard you had to rescue a boy who’d fallen through,’ she said, pulling the hood of her Tyvek paper suit over her long black hair. ‘Where is DI Fletcher? OK, I hope?’
‘He’s gone with the boy to the hospital until we can locate the boy’s parents. From what information we got out of those drunken friends of his, the mother’s a lush and the father’s not much better. We’re having trouble finding them.’
They walked under the police tape and towards the incident tent. Danika pulled on a pair of overshoes, then thin blue plastic gloves, and followed Claire inside the tent. She was careful not to disturb any potential evidence, keeping to the plastic walkway which led towards the body. She squinted under the glare of the large spotlights, one in each of the four corners of the tent.
Both women looked down at the body. The face of a young girl stared back at them. Her body was naked, with a thick chain around her ankles. Danika stared at the heavy coiled links.
‘Someone weighted her down,’ she said, kneeling next to the body. Her eyes glanced over the girl’s face and down to her toes. Then she returned to the deep cut to the side of the neck. The remains of dried blood were partially spattered down the dead woman’s neck and chest, still visible despite having been in the lake. The water had given the blood a dull hue against the skin.
‘How long do you think she’s been under the ice?’ Claire said.
‘It’s hard to say at this stage. When someone has been in cold storage, it slows the process of decomposition. It will be hard to pinpoint a time of death.’
‘She’s not been in a fridge, Danika.’
‘Yes, but being under the ice has had the same effect to some degree. If she had been found elsewhere, there would be larvae, maggots… I could pinpoint the time period. There are no obvious signs of scavengers having tampered with the body, although I’ll know more when I’ve examined her properly, but it suggests maybe she’s not been in the water very long.
‘There’s a little orange tinge to the skin, which is to be expected as she’s been submerged, but it’s minimal. Again this would indicate she’s not been here long.’ She paused, frowning hard. ‘That chain’s a bit excessive. Even with it weighting her down, she’d have risen to the surface eventually, but you were lucky to find her now before the skin started to peel.’
Danika looked up. ‘It’s looking likely loss of blood is the cause of death.’ Claire cocked her head, looking at the body at a new angle as Danika continued. ‘She has a deep laceration to the side of the neck, most likely severing a jugular vein, carotid artery and the trachea. Death would have occurred within seconds, but she was probably killed somewhere else and dumped in the lake.’
‘Ensuring most of the evidence is washed away.’ Claire’s voice was stern. Danika nodded in agreement.
‘That’s why there isn’t as much blood here as there should be.’ She pulled herself up and snapped a glove off over her hand. ‘Wherever your crime scene is, it would’ve been a bloodbath.’
‘The blood would’ve been cleared up.’
‘Yes, but with the best will in the world it would be practically impossible to clear every last drop of it. There’ll be a scrap or fine trace of it left somewhere. It’s your job to find it.’
Detective Sergeant Elias Crest rolled the biro he’d been chewing over his teeth, staring blankly at the newspaper on the table in front of him.
He’d been in Haverbridge CID less than a week and still he felt on edge. Moving back down south after living in Liverpool for the best part of eight years – five spent in CID – it was taking him time to adjust to his new surroundings.
It would take him even longer to adjust to working under yet another female DCI. His old Guv, DCI Meredith Glass, had been tough but she at least gave him the benefit of the doubt.
DCI Winters however… He chewed his bottom lip as he cast his mind back to his first morning. She’d shaken his hand, but gripped it tight. He’d wondered if that had been her way of asserting her authority without the need for words to be spoken.
He knew she would have seen his file. Seen the reason he was transferring. Not that he gave a shit about what she thought in that respect but still, it bothered him. He didn’t want her to have something she could hold over him, something she could use as leverage if she wanted.
Meredith Glass had tried that once.
He had smiled at Claire, in a vain attempt to hide his reservations. He’d asked her to call him by his first name, when she’d addressed him merely as ‘Crest’, but it had the opposite of the desired effect.
Her