Cold Kill

Winter. Crime scene: a London park at dusk. DS Stella Mooney stares down at the brutalised body of a young woman. From the shelter of nearby trees Martin Kimber is watching events . . . watching Stella. Next morning he walks into a Notting Hill police station and confesses to the murder. It's a fast clear-up - just what the AMIP 5 squad wants this close to Christmas. But Stella has her doubts about Kimber's guilt. So if Kimber didn't commit the murder, who did? Someone without conscience or pity. Someone who will tap into Kimber's disturbed mind. Someone with a dark plan ... Extract from COLD KILL by David Lawrence There were starlings roosting in the Holland Park woodland, their feathers fluffed because there was frost in the wind. In among the trees, the scene of crime team had pitched a four-sided blue plasticated screen and halogen lamps were sending up a cold, white glow that flooded the interior and rose in a broad beam to cut the half-light. When the wind caught the edge of the screen it furled and slapped; the starlings rose in a little cloud then settled again, softly. A crowd of hard-edged shadows moved on the blue backdrop. The shadows were a forensic team, a scene of crime officer, a police doctor, a stills photographer, a video man, and two officers from the AMIP-5 murder squad. DI Mike Sorley and DS Stella Mooney were the shadows on the far side of the screen — either keeping their own counsel or staying out of the way. Valerie Blake was also there, but you couldn’t see her shadow because she was lying in it. Everyone was wearing white coveralls, seeming almost to disappear when they moved through the crossbeams of the fierce halogen glow. The tented area enclosed a single silver birch. As the workers in that space passed and re-passed its pale, slender bole, it seemed the only one of them given over to patience and thoughtfulness. The doctor had a fleece-lined climber’s jacket under his whites, a woollen beanie under the hood; his fingers were white to the knuckle. He got off his knees and moved to join Sorley and Stella, shoving his hands into his armpits for warmth. ‘Difficult to say how long she’s been dead. Taking the ambient temperature and the wind chill into account, I’d say more than three hours, less than ten.’ ‘That’s a big window,’ Sorley observed. ‘You’ll get more from the pathologist. Sorry, it really is a tough call. She’s very cold.’ Stella looked at Valerie where she lay. Of course she was cold; it was no weather to be out wearing nothing but a DKNY T-shirt and a pair of cross-trainers. The search team had already found the rest fifty feet away: matching grey sweats, and a hoodie for extra warmth. Her door key and mobile phone were in a zipper pocket. They bagged the phone separately and handed it to Stella, who would take it back to the AMIP-5 incident room and rifle the address book for the names of people who didn’t yet know that they were ‘relatives of the deceased’ or ‘grieving friends’. Or ‘suspects’. In the same way, Stella didn’t yet know the dead woman as Valerie Blake, but that wouldn’t take long. The doctor was running down a checklist of notes. ‘Female, mid- to late-twenties, largely unclothed, dead at the scene, secondary trauma to the head, almost certainly the result of a blow with a blunt instrument though the cause of death is clearly strangulation.’ Despite the thin rime of frost coating her skin, the mark of the ligature lay on her throat like a amethyst necklace. ‘Possibility of sexual assault.’ He amended that: ‘Likelihood.’ The wind had risen with the encroaching darkness: raw-edged, carrying the sort of chill that settles and seeps in. A bird had flown into the tented space and couldn’t find its way out, despite the lack of a roof. It cannoned back and forth, just above head-level, flapping against the plastic, twisting in the air, sometimes rising on the brilliant columns of halogen light as if they were thermals, but then dropping down again, unequipped for night-flight. As Stella watched, the wind shook the lamps and the light shifted crazily. The bird grew more frantic, wings whirring as it flew past her face. Sorley said, ‘Let’s leave them to it.’ Their shadows slid on the screen, then they emerged and, despite their overall whites, were almost lost to darkness, though the man watching from cover was sufficiently sharp-eyed to pick them out from the backdrop of trees; just enough light left in the sky, just enough backwash of light from the tent. The watcher was standing close to a plane tree, any silhouette of his own absorbed by the tree’s bulk. The leafless branches thrashed above his head. He was stock-still, barely breathing, though his eyes were wide and unblinking. A smile on his lips. He was trying to picture the scene on the inside: all that lively activity round a still, lifeless centre; the quick and the dead. The watcher saw the two of them, a man and a woman, he guessed, talking a moment, their heads close together; then the man turned, moving out of the treeline and starting across the open grassy space towards Kensington High Street. The headlamps of cars shone like markers on the park road. As he watched, a gust of wind toppled one of the lamps and a shout went up. Shadows scattered, then swarmed towards the hotspot on the screen where the lamp had fallen. Stella went back in. Two forensic officers were righting the lamp, one other attending to the doctor who sat with his back to the birch tree, knees raised, head down, blood showing blackly on his forehead and also on his wrist where he’d raised an arm to block the worst of the impact. When Stella re-emerged, the watcher was still in place. He saw her strip off the white coveralls and ball them up; saw her start down towards her car; saw her drive away. She was only of passing interest. His real attention was to the tent and the picture in his mind’s eye of Valerie Blake as she lay sprawled on her back, her skin paper-white, dark hair tied back in a pony-tail, the blue-black line of the ligature across her throat. The picture was satisfying to him, even though it was incomplete: her face was blurred, her physical build difficult to determine. He stood there a long time, watching them work, watching the shifting shadows, never feeling the cold.