The Girl in the Ice (Detective Erika Foster 1)

The phone beside the bed screamed out, breaking the silence. Marsh rolled over and saw it was nine-thirty in the morning. He reached over, lifted the receiver, and dropped it down into the cradle again.

‘Did you order a wake-up call?’ murmured Marcie.

‘Course not,’ he said.

‘Ooh. That turns me on the most, you not answering the phone,’ purred Marcie. She kissed him, sliding her hand down over his stomach . . .

The phone rang again. Marsh cursed, rolled over and yanked the cord from its plug on the wall. He rolled back to her and grinned. ‘I believe you were about here,’ he said, placing her hand on his growing erection.

‘Again? Chief Superintendent.’ She grinned.

Suddenly, there was a hammering on their door. ‘Sorry, hello . . . it’s the front desk,’ came a voice.

‘What the hell!’ exclaimed Marsh, as Marcie was poised to unroll a condom over the head of his stiff cock.

‘Tell him to piss off; this is the last one in the pack,’ said Marcie.

The hammering came again. ‘Sir, sir?’ quavered the voice of the young boy from the front desk. ‘I know you said not to bother you under any circumstances, but there’s an Assistant Commissioner Oakley waiting on the line. On your phone . . . Sir? He says if you don’t pick up there will be consequences . . . That’s me quoting him . . . that’s what he said.’

Marsh leapt up out of bed and scrabbled to reconnect the phone into the wall socket.

‘Where the hell have you been, Marsh? We have a situation!’ snapped Oakley when Marsh picked up the phone.

‘I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t know it was you . . .’

‘One of your officers, that bloody Foster woman, showed up on Sir Simon Douglas-Brown’s doorstep at five this morning with an armed response unit. She’s taken him and his daughter Linda into custody. She’s taken Giles Osborne into custody too.’

‘What the hell?’

‘Now I’m up in Scotland, Marsh, on a much needed bloody holiday and I do not want to have to return to London. I trust you will rectify this.’

‘I will, sir.’

‘You’d better. I don’t often get woken up before nine by someone from the bloody cabinet office. Heads will roll on this one if we’re not careful, Marsh.’

The call was abruptly disconnected. Marsh stood there, naked, his penis now shrivelled to nothing. He picked up the phone again and dialled, shouting that he wanted to speak to DCI Foster. Immediately. Marcie pulled the bedclothes up around her, and bit back her tears. This would be yet another holiday ruined by her husband’s work.

62

Erika and the rest of the team were struggling after little sleep. They had worked into the early hours, piecing the evidence together with the new information, and at one o’clock in the morning they’d experienced a breakthrough. A frenzy of planning had ensued, and at three am Erika had sent everyone home to grab a few hours’ sleep, before they came back at first light to begin the first phase of Erika’s plan.

It was now eleven am and Erika sat with Moss, Peterson and Crane in the observation suite at Lewisham Row. In front of them were four screens. Each screen showed a police interview room.

In interview room one, Linda Douglas-Brown was agitated and paced up and down, wearing a long dark skirt and a vast tea-stained white jumper covered in black kittens. On the next screen, in interview room two, her father, Simon Douglas-Brown, sat impassively with his hands on the table, staring ahead. Despite being pulled out of bed by a group of officers in armed response gear, he had dressed smartly in dark slacks, a freshly ironed blue shirt, and a V-necked jumper.

On the next screen was interview room three, where Giles Osborne cut a curious figure. He was dressed in skintight bottle-green jeans, his belly barely constrained by a tight t-shirt with a tropical print of palm trees. His greasy hair was parted to one side and he stared up at the camera.

‘He hasn’t looked away from the camera for twenty minutes,’ said Crane, tapping his biro against the screen.

‘The only one who looks like he hasn’t got a care in the world is Igor Kucerov,’ said Erika, watching the screen of interview room four.

Igor sat behind the table, slouched back in his chair with his legs spread wide. He’d been working out when the police arrived to arrest him at his house on a pleasant middle-class street in Kilburn. He wore a tight white t-shirt with a Nike tick emblazoned across the front, shiny black Nike running shorts and trainers. His body was lean and muscly, and his skin a baked olive colour. The stubble he had in the pictures with Andrea was gone. His black eyes flicked up and regarded the camera.