The Girl in the Ice (Detective Erika Foster 1)

13

Lewisham Row Police Station was quiet at five-thirty in the morning. The only sound was the far-off hammering along the corridor from the cells. The women’s locker room was empty, and Erika stripped off her grubby clothes and went through to the huge communal showers, turning on the water as hot as she could bear. She stood under it, savouring the warmth, and as the steam rose, the tiled Victorian showers vanished, and Erika with them.

By six, she was dressed in clean clothes, and alone in the incident room, nursing a cup of coffee and some chocolate from the vending machine. Andrea Douglas-Brown stared back at her from the wall, over-confident.

Erika went to the desk she’d been allocated, located her password and logged on to the intranet. It had been eight months since she’d looked at her work email – not through any kind of abstinence; she’d not had access. Scrolling through, she saw messages from former colleagues, newsletters, junk mail, and a notice to attend a formal hearing. That almost made her laugh: she’d been notified of a formal disciplinary hearing through an internal mail system that she’d been barred from accessing.

With a long sweep of the mouse, she highlighted all the old emails and pressed delete.

There was now just one email from Sergeant Crane, sent late the previous night:

Find attached Andrea DB’s full Facebook profile history 2007 - 2014. Plus records from her phone recovered at the crime scene.

CRANE

Erika opened the attached file and clicked “print”. Moments later, the printer by the door whirred into life, rapidly spitting out paper. Erika grabbed the pile of pages and took them down to the staff canteen, hoping to find it open for a decent coffee – but it was in darkness. She found a chair at the back, clicked on the lights, and started to sift through Andrea Douglas-Brown’s Facebook profile.

It spanned 217 pages, almost nine years, taking Andrea from a fresh-faced fourteen-year-old to a sultry siren of twenty-three. In her early posts she was quite a conservative young woman, but once boys had come on the scene, she had started to dress more provocatively.

Andrea’s seven years of Facebook posts were an endless blur of party photos and selfies. Hundreds of photos with handsome men and beautiful girls, rarely the same people more than a few times. It seemed that she was a party animal, and one who partied at the expensive end of the spectrum. The clubs she frequented were the type where you needed to book a table, and there never seemed to be a shortage of champagne bottles littering those tables in the photos.

Throughout the years, there was little interaction on Facebook with her siblings. Her older sister Linda seemed to ‘like’ a few of the family-related posts, as did her younger brother David, but these tended to be only the posts associated with the annual holidays the Douglas-Brown family took to Greece, and in later years, to a villa in Dubrovnik, Croatia.

The holidays interested Erika the most. Taken every August for three weeks, they followed a similar pattern. At the start of each, Andrea would post some family-friendly pictures – a group photo during a meal in a nice restaurant, or the family gathered round a cabana having a casual lunch in their swimming costumes. At these lunches, Andrea always wore a bikini, and was striking a pose, her dark hair tumbling over one shoulder as she artfully picked at her food. In contrast, Linda would be hunched down, plate piled high, looking a little annoyed that she was being distracted from tucking in. Linda seemed to grow in girth as each holiday passed, and she always covered up in long T-shirts and leggings. David, in contrast, started out as an extremely skinny thirteen-year-old wearing glasses, huddled under his mother’s thin arm, and slowly morphed into a handsome young man.

Andrea seemed closer to David; in many of the photos she had drawn him into a reluctant bear hug, his glasses askew. There were barely any photos of Linda and David together. Sir Simon and Lady Diana seemed to give nothing away in photographs, pulling the same faces year in, year out: broad, yet vacant smiles. Here was Lady Diana in a swimming suit and sarong combo. There was Sir Simon in baggy board shorts, pulled a little too high over his hairy belly.

As each holiday progressed, Andrea would quickly lose interest in family time and start to post pictures she’d taken of local boys. At first they’d be a bit stalker-ish, the groups of boys unaware they were being photographed as they stood around smoking, or played football on the beach with their shirts off. Then Andrea would zone in on one boy in particular, spending the last week of the holidays seemingly obsessed, taking endless photos. She apparently liked the bad boys: older and darker with muscly torsos, tattoos and piercings. In one picture, taken in the summer of 2009, Andrea was pictured posing on the back of a giant Harley Davidson, wearing the tiniest bikini and miming driving, whilst a dark haired lad, who presumably owned the bike, was relegated to riding pillion. He had one hand on her bikini bottoms, and was holding a cigarette, its tip glowing close to Andrea’s tanned skin. She fixed the camera with a look that said, I’m in control.