Frozen Grave (13 page)

‘I haven’t done anything wrong.’

‘You took my money.’

‘You gave it to me.’

‘No, I didn’t. I lent it to you to do up the Spanish house and now I want proof that the Spanish house exists and that I own part of it.’

‘I can’t give you that. It’s too complicated.’

‘Doesn’t seem complicated to me. You sign it or I’m going to your house to see your wife and tell her that I own part of a house that her husband is renovating in Spain.
I’m sure she’d like to know that you intend to leave her.’

‘She knows I intend to leave her. She’s got to be given time to deal with it. She’s unbalanced. I told you. Now promise me you won’t go near her. You will put my son at
risk if you do.’

‘Then sign it.’

‘I can’t. You know I can’t. It’s not as easy as that. It would be stupid . . .’

‘So now you’re calling me stupid.’

‘No. Of course not. But naïve maybe?’

‘Naïve? Does that mean you conned me and I didn’t notice?’

‘Look, I’ve had enough. I’m leaving. We’ll talk later. Hopefully, you’ll have seen sense by then.’ Ellerman picked up his bag and coat and started walking
towards the door.

‘I know where you live. I traced you. Say hello to your wife and tell her I’ll be up to see her soon.’

Ellerman turned round when he got to the front door.

‘Gillian – I’m warning you – don’t go near my family. Just think about it. We’ve had good times. They may be a bit thin on the ground at the moment but
they’ll come back. When I get this contract for the yachts done and dusted, I’ll give you your money back and much more besides. Don’t blow it now. Don’t throw what we have
away. I am very fond of you.’ Ellerman pinched the bridge of his nose and his eyes began to sting with tears. ‘I’ll phone you later.’

Ellerman pulled up at a services outside Exeter. He went in and bought a sandwich and a drink and came back to sit in the car park with the lorries that were there for the
night. He hadn’t yet decided where he was going to go for the night. He had intended to stay at Gillian’s, before she kicked off. He looked at the message he’d just received from
her.

‘Jesus Christ. Why does it have to be so hard?’ he said out loud as he reread her text demanding that he give her back her money in the next twenty-four hours or it was over and
she’d go to the police and she’d be paying his wife a visit as well. He knew she was capable. Ellerman scrolled down his list of recent messages and thought about where he could get
some help with paying off Gillian. It was too soon to ask Megan – he hadn’t reeled her in far enough yet – but he needed to speak to her.

‘Have you had a good day, darling? I’ve done nothing but think of you,’ he asked as soon as Megan answered the phone. ‘I’m in a service station in God knows where
and I wish I could be back in your bedroom, holding you close. I can still smell you.’ He knew she would be smiling. He heard her sigh contentedly.

‘I must admit I half-expected you to be tucked up with someone else by now,’ she said.

‘Really?’ He laughed. ‘You must be joking. You wore me out.’

She giggled. ‘Yeah. I had to sit down to paint earlier. For some reason my legs were wobbly.’

‘Good. I hope I always have that effect on you.’

Ellerman ended the call and looked at Gillian’s message again. He switched his music on as he sat in the dusk and thought what he should do. Nothing mattered now but the end prize. He
turned his music up loud. Alice Cooper was belting out
‘
Fire’. He sent a text to his wife:

I’m coming home tonight.

After Carter and Willis left, Harding stayed logged on to the Naughties website. She watched Mark washing down the dissecting tables. She could see him through the window in her office. She
loved the way his hands moved. They were a ballet to watch; they were beautiful: light, soft, gentle. She turned back to the screen. But they weren’t what she needed, even if he was
interested, which he wasn’t. She looked at her messages. Ellerman had viewed her profile. She looked at his. She smiled to herself – tempting . . .

A message came up on her phone:

Want to play? Sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you – decided to keep you waiting. I know what you like. You like to be controlled. You like to be made to
submit.

Who is this?
She didn’t have a name against the number. She looked for previous messages – there weren’t any.

You gave me your number a few weeks ago. You don’t remember? I remember what you said – you like people to watch. You like living dangerously. Ever tried dogging?

Interesting.

Meet me next to the lorry park in Shadwell – in the adjoining car park. See you there at eleven.

Harding looked at her watch – it was seven. She poured herself another glass of wine and contemplated what to do. Another text came through:

I’ll be waiting.

At seven o’clock, Gillian put three ice cubes in her vodka and tonic and climbed the stairs up to her bedroom. She plonked herself down onto her bed and rested the glass
on her chest and lay looking at the ceiling. She thought it through. She didn’t regret the text. She didn’t regret finishing it and she meant it – but then, if that was true, why
did she feel so sad? She sat up and opened her laptop and logged onto Love Uniform Dating. She scanned through the men – nobody new, nobody worth looking at. There was the policeman again.
There were all the same men that had been on there the last two years. She gave a heavy sigh and lay back on the bed that still smelt of Ellerman’s aftershave. Maybe she should ring him and
give him another ultimatum and try to force him along a bit? She wished he’d come back and she could talk it through with him. She’d been hasty maybe. Gillian regretted it now.
She’d got into such a state about things. Two weeks of waiting for him to turn up, missing him like mad. She had too much time on her own to stew over things and some things just didn’t
add up. But she didn’t want to finish it. She hadn’t meant to get so angry. Now she was lying here on her own; that was not what she wanted. She heard the squeak of her letterbox and
waited for the sound of junk mail landing on the mat – it didn’t come; she picked up her drink as she sat up on the bed. It was then she smelt smoke.

She scrambled off the bed and ran to the loft stairwell. Between her and the front door was a wall of fire. She closed the door and grabbed her duvet – jamming it at the bottom of the
door. She was crying, her hands were shaking as she found her phone and dialled 999.

‘Help me – I’m on fire – my house is on fire!’

Gillian ran back and forth from the locked window to the door with the phone in her hand as she waited for the sound of the fire engine. She felt the heat building in the room as she coughed and
choked on the thin smoky air. She stared at the door and prayed as she listened to the roar from the other side. Then she heard the fire engine and ran back to the window and started to bang on the
glass . . . She slammed her hand against it as she saw the firemen running towards her house.

‘Help me . . . help . . .’

She looked back towards the door. It was starting to blacken and smoulder and smoke was beginning to pour through.

The heat was burning her lungs. She felt dizzy.

She screamed as she banged on the window. The front of the house was on fire now. She tried to open the window and her hand stuck to the metal handle. In that second all the holes in the burning
door joined up and it exploded inwards.

At just before eleven, Lolly made her way towards the lorry park in Shadwell. Her legs were so weary that she could hardly move them. Her backpack felt as if it contained rocks instead of her
few possessions. The day had taken its toll on her as she hid from the cold, and the last few nights had been all about staying warm. She had nowhere to go. She’d been kicked out of all the
hostels because, as hard as she tried, she couldn’t stop taking heroin. The heroin helped her to forget the happy life she’d once had. It was five years ago that her boss discovered she
was sleeping in the offices he employed her to clean at nights; that was after she lost her home, after her husband left her with nothing but debts and memories that were too painful. The heroin
helped.

Now she knew she had to lie down somewhere before she fell down.

She saw the flicker of a television in the cab as she approached the lorry. She saw the man inside shovelling pot noodles into his mouth as he watched television. She tapped on his window. He
opened his door.

‘Suck and fuck?’

He looked at her, disgusted. ‘Wouldn’t give you a pound for it.’

‘Not asking for a pound. Just need a bed for the night.’

‘All night?’

‘Yeah. We can do it again in the morning.’

The driver stuck his head out and made sure none of the other lorry drivers were watching. Then he looked back at Lolly, looked her up and down and nodded as he slid across to open the passenger
door.

‘Get in quick.’

She heaved herself up into the cab as the driver turned his attention to a car driving into the adjoining car park. It was an Audi TT, a convertible. He watched it circle and then stop.

Harding drove round to the entrance to the car park and paused as she took stock of the lorries in the adjoining park. She saw the cars to her right. As she drove in one of the
lorries flashed its headlights and she was about to make her way towards it when she felt the car begin to rock. Faces grinned at her through the windows – including a mixed-race lad with a
nasty-looking dog – and hands yanked at the door handles and started smashing at her window. One of them jumped onto her bonnet and onto her roof. His boot tearing into the fabric. She felt a
hand grab at her as an arm came through the hole in her driver’s window and reached in to open the door. She slammed the car into reverse and hit the accelerator hard as they ran after her.
She slammed on the brakes and skidded on a frozen corner of the car park as she turned, pulled and locked her door shut, and sped off down the road.

It was midnight when JJ Ellerman crept up the stairs to his bedroom. He tried to be as quiet as possible, as light as a feather on his feet. He didn’t do it because he
was kind and didn’t want to wake her. He did it in the hope of catching her out. He hoped to see a moment that revealed what was in her heart, her soul, her bed. He longed to know his wife
again.

The next morning, whilst Willis went to see her mother, Carter went to catch up with Sandford, who was working on Olivia Grantham’s car. The Fiat was just a shell
now.

Carter put on his protective suit and walked in past the drying cabinet and saw the seat covers hanging inside.

‘Was there much on those?’ he asked, stopping in front of the glass.

Sandford answered from inside the car; he talked through the gap where the windscreen had been.

‘There was. But most of it isn’t any good. Matching to the samples taken from her flat – there were at least two other people in this car after Olivia got out. Their prints are
over hers. But they wore gloves. Of course there was a dog in there as well. Its paw-prints were pretty distinct.’

Sandford carried on working on the inside of the car. He was looking slightly irritated at Carter’s presence.

Carter knew it and it didn’t bother him. ‘Care to elaborate?’ The sooner Sandford stopped resisting, the sooner it would be over.

Sandford stood, and bent backwards to ease his aching back. He was a tall man to fit into a small car.

‘The dog had blood on its paws when it made contact with several sites on the upholstery and the door frames,’ he said as he pulled off his gloves and put them into a waste bin. He
motioned to Carter to follow him as he walked across to his desk and the PC. He brought up the images of the car examination.

‘There are traces of it on the driver’s door.’ He showed Carter a diagram of the evidence recovered and where it was in and on the car. The 3D image rotated as Sandford tapped
the keyboard.

‘There were things taken from the car – the first-aid kit was ripped open. The spare-wheel kit is also missing. Not that you get much in these new cars – a spare tyre and a few
tools. But they’re gone. I’ve asked for a full list of what the car should have had in it, from Fiat. Here, highlighted, you have all the sites in the car that I’ve matched to the
two different glove-prints and the dog’s paws.’

Carter sat down to study the screen better. He counted the sites.

‘I count twelve places. They got around in that car. Can you get a print from the glove?’

‘I’m working on it. I also found traces of blue cashmere. It’s got to be hers.’

‘The blue coat the caretaker said she was wearing.’

‘Were there any fibres that match that at the crime scene?’

‘Not so far. Round up some suspects and I’ll match them to the traces left in this car. Have you done that yet?’

Carter let the question pass him by.

‘Have you had a look at Toffee’s clothes?’ he asked. ‘We got them back from the hospital.’

‘Yes, I did. There are traces of Olivia’s blood on them. Were there any swabs taken from his genitalia?’ asked Sandford.

‘No. He’d been washed by the time we got to him. He went straight down for an operation before we could take any samples.’

‘Shame.’

‘Yeah.’

‘You still might get something.’

‘No. We tried, believe me, but we have bite marks on Olivia Grantham’s body; it’s a dog – but you never know, we might be able to tie in all this information and get the
owner, especially with what you’ve found. We also have skin particles beneath her fingernails. There are several sites of bruising on her body – we might be able to pull off a
fingerprint or two.’

‘Do we know why she went in there?’ asked Sandford.

‘She was on sex sites. She went in there to have sex. Toffee says something went wrong – something he was involved in. But he also said he tried to save her. He is guilty of
something and he is our key witness to what happened to her. He had several small cuts and bruises on his face. It could have been from the train but it looked like someone had punched him in the
face a few times.’