‘Winter Girls’ Preview

COPYRIGHT 2025 STEVE PARKER

PROLOGUE

Ella jumped at the screams outside the room.

‘No! No! Let me go! Let me go!’

Her body jerked involuntarily as the door was wrenched open. She didn’t cry when the hulking figure filled the doorway of her tiny, stifling cell, his shadow blotting out what little light seeped through the cracked bulb above. She didn’t cry when his gravelly voice ordered her to strip, cold and devoid of humanity. She had long since learned to expect his depravity, numbing herself to endure it. But when he dragged in a kicking, screaming Mia Bentley—her face contorted in fury and terror—Ella felt a tremor of fear she thought she’d buried. This wasn’t routine. This was different. She knew it.

Instead of securing Mia to one of the rickety chairs bolted to the floor, as he did with all of his victims, he drove his boot into the back of her knee. Mia crumpled, her hands and knees slamming onto the thin, stained mattress. The pathetic padding did little to cushion her fall, and Ella winced as Mia’s knees struck the unyielding concrete beneath. On her knees now, she couldn’t see the man pull a small plastic bag from his pocket. He threw it to the ground. Ella frowned. She knew what this was. His ‘powder’. She watched disgusted, as the man rubbed the mixture onto his erect penis. His ritual.

The man didn’t flinch at Mia’s cries of pain. They rolled off him, meaningless, like rain against a tin roof. He never cared about tears or screams—they were background noise to him. Ella had learned that. From the moment he dragged her off the street, her life had been reduced to a degrading routine. Her school uniform, now threadbare and grimy, hung limply on her skeletal frame. He made them all wear their old clothes—symbols of what they used to be, mocking their innocence. It was all part of his game. Today, it was Mia’s turn to play.

He fed all four of them just enough to keep them alive, their bodies gaunt but not entirely broken. The showers were no respite—just cobbled-together pipes spitting icy bursts of water. In winter, the freezing jets became a torment, leaving their skin raw and trembling. Ella had learned to endure it with grim stoicism. Survival wasn’t about comfort. It was about abandoning everything that made you human.

She knew he watched her through the small hole in the wall. She could feel the weight of his gaze, a sickness crawling over her skin. At first, she tried to shield herself, keeping her back to the wall and hurrying through the motions. But as the days dragged on, her will eroded. Shame had no place here, only survival. She showered, he watched, and she kept moving. That was all she could do. That was all Olivia Jones-Hardy, Emily Harris, and Holly Lyons could do.

But Mia Bentley was different. Mia fought. She hurled insults, spat venom, and thrashed whenever he came near. Her defiance was a spark in their dark, suffocating world, a reminder that not everyone surrendered so easily.

‘You’ll get yourself killed,’ Ella had whispered to Mia during one of the rare moments they could speak.

Better dead than this,’ Mia had shot back, her eyes blazing with unrelenting fire. Ella admired her courage but feared it, too. Courage excited him, gave him a reason to escalate. And now, watching Mia struggle against him, Ella’s fear felt justified.

Mia screamed as he bore down on her, her fingers clawing at the filthy mattress. The fabric tore under her nails, revealing clumps of mould and foam as she tried to drag herself forward. He grabbed her shoulders with hands like steel clamps, yanking her back with brutal ease. When she wriggled too much, he shifted his weight, forcing her down harder, her chest crushed into the mattress, her knees grinding into the concrete.

‘You sick bastard! Mia spat, her voice hoarse but defiant.

Her words only widened his grotesque smile. He leaned closer, his breath foul and hot against her ear.

‘Keep screaming, little girl,’ he murmured, his voice almost playful. ‘I like it.’

Ella clenched her fists, her nails digging into her palms until they bit into her skin. She wanted to scream, to fight, but she stayed frozen. She had learned that fighting only prolonged the horror. Her breath came in shallow gasps as she watched. She wanted to shut her eyes, to block out the nightmare, but the sound of Mia’s struggles anchored her to the moment. Every second felt like an eternity, the silence between screams a void filled with the promise of something worse. When the man finally pushed himself inside Mia, the room was filled with a sickening stillness. His grunts punctuated the silence, rhythmic and mechanical, as he thrust against her broken frame. Mia grunted as the man dropped his bulk on top of her, groaned and gasped as his weight began to constrict her breathing. Her face, panicked and  reddened, gave away the terrifying knowledge that she was dying.

Ella bit her lip, a tear slipping silently down her cheek. She wanted to be anywhere else—anyone else—but there was no escape. The only thing she could do was endure.

When the man finally stilled, his breathing heavy and ragged, Ella looked at Mia. Her defiance was gone, replaced by a hollow, vacant stare. The spark that once burned so brightly had been squeezed out of her. Ella closed her eyes. Survival wasn’t about fighting. It was about losing yourself, piece by piece, until there was nothing left to take.

CHAPTER 1

Some fucker put a bullet in the back of Colin Clarke’s head, ended him there and then, and no one saw a thing. To be fair, it was early in the day. 6:02 AM. Only a few people on their way to work would have seen anything but it was unlikely. Clarke himself was only out at that time because he had somewhere to be, but he wanted to spend some time with his daughter.

Six minutes earlier, Clarke had arrived at a spot that had become all too familiar to him over the past two years. Every month, he made his way to the same spot in Bidwell Avenue, a place that served as a painful reminder of his daughter's absence. 

Ella Clarke, fourteen years old and on her way home from school in nearby Gunters Lane, had vanished into thin air, leaving nothing but unanswered questions and a gaping hole in the lives of those who loved her. The police, for all their efforts, remained clueless. No leads, no suspects, no fucking idea what had happened to his little girl. If Clarke had believed in little green men, he might have found some small crumb of comfort in her disappearance, but having nothing tore him apart.

He used to be someone, a big shot businessman with a fancy house overlooking the sea in Pevensey. The white walls and glass front had been a giant ‘screw you' to the envious locals and tourists who gawked as they passed by. Now, it all meant jack shit. Ella was gone, his wife had crawled into a bottle popping her head out from time to time just to cause a scene, and his son Elijah, barely two years older than Ella, seemed determined to piss his life away. In just two short years, everything had gone to rat shit. When Clarke wasn't fantasising about tearing apart the bastard who took his daughter, he focused his rage on Detective Chief Inspector, Alex Winter, the cop in charge of the case. She'd failed them all. His whole family. And he made damn sure she never forgot it. Every chance he got he was on her case. Every public meeting she attended he was there laying into her.  He was never going to let her forget she was a colossal failure.

Truth is though, Winter, for all her faults, never gave up. She kept digging, kept squeezing every lowlife and pervert she could find, hoping for a scrap of information that might lead her to the missing girls. Each taunt only strengthened her determination. She worked late into the night, piecing together fragments of evidence, following leads that went nowhere. And all the while she was doing that, Clarke was there, twisting the knife, reminding her of her failure to land.

But today, as Colin Clarke laid his flowers on the pavement and spoke to his daughter, someone walked past and casually shot him in the back of the head.

CHAPTER 2

It was bloody cold.  DCI Alex Winter stood at the top of a hill, surveying the chaotic crime scene below. Police officers milled about, pointing and shouting instructions to each other, their voices barely audible over the wind that whipped away their words. Scenes of Crime Officers spewed out creative cusses as they fought their billowing forensic tent as the wind threatened to rip it from their frozen fingers. A couple of uniformed coppers looked on and couldn't help but chuckle at this comedy of errors, relieved not to be the ones publicly embarrassed. In the distance, a police officer stood in front of a strip of blue and white plastic bearing the famous words, 'Crime Scene.' The tape thrashed wildly in the wind, threatening to tear apart and flutter away.

Winter pulled her collar tight against her neck and started down the hill. The lack of rain over the past five weeks had left the ground dry, and the bitter cold had frozen it solid. Still, she would need to be careful. There was nothing the boys in blue would like more than to see a DCI fall flat on her arse and slide from top to bottom, leaving a skid mark on the back of her trousers. That'd be a story they could dine out on for years, the retelling embellished beyond recognition. She wasn't going to give them that satisfaction and tip-toed precariously down the hill, arms out, correcting her balance as she went. 

She ran down the last five feet, tottering about in a pair of shoes that weren’t matched to the conditions.

'Ma'am,' said a uniformed officer as she reached the bottom. He held out a hand, which surprisingly for her, she took. Alex was not one to accept help normally, regardless of the circumstances, but her gratefulness at arriving on her legs instead of her bum made her break from her usual self-reliance. 'Thanks,' she said with a small nod of her head. 'Anyone from my team here yet?' 

The officer nodded. 'Yes, ma'am. DS Towns arrived about ten minutes ago.' He half-turned his body and pointed. 'He's down by the river already.' Winter thanked him and set off to find her second-in-command. He was a good man, and she had a lot of respect for him. They'd worked together for the last year, and she found him to be clever, competent, and efficient; characteristics she found attractive in a man. His sense of humour was the clincher. So much so that she was willing to overlook the fact that he was an Australian with all the swagger and banter that came with it. She knew he had a thing for her but never encouraged it. The mind wouldn’t allow her to breach the fifteen-year age gap despite what her desires sometimes told her.

By the time she reached him, her eyes were filled with tears, thanks to the wind. DS Caleb Towns had his back to her, shielding the body from her view. She could see a leg, the shoe and sock missing, and she shook her head. Sorrow. The foot was small, and even though she'd already been told the victim was a young girl, her stomach still did a small somersault. She buried her hands deep into her pockets. 

'Morning, Caleb,' she said.

Caleb twisted his body and flashed a smile at her, showing teeth that any Essex boy would have been proud of. 'Morning, ma’am,' he said, a bit too cheery for such a grim scene. He stepped aside and allowed her a view of the victim. A girl, probably no more than fourteen, lying face up and naked. Alex shook her head at the sight of this child and felt nothing but sorrow. She had a daughter not too far away in age and her thoughts turned to the girl's parents. If this were her daughter, she knew she would be heartbroken beyond words. She imagined the sight of her child’s innocent face marred with fear and confusion as her killer loomed over her. The thought of her enduring such pain and suffering would be unbearable.

As she thought about how she would handle telling the girl’s parents, she felt a wave of sorrow wash over her. Their lives were about to be destroyed because of the actions of some sick bastard, and she would have to be the one to deliver the news. This was shaping up to be a bad day, and it wasn't even breakfast time. 

'What have we got, then?' she said.

'Aside from the obvious—female, teen, in the nip, dead—not a lot at first glance,' Caleb replied. 

‘In the nip? I take it you mean ‘naked’?’

‘Er, yeah.’

'Well, try saying that, then. 'In the nip' isn't respectful.' 

Caleb looked a bit sheepish. 'Sorry, ma'am. No offence intended.' 

'I know. Listen, silly question, but I don't suppose we have any witnesses to the actual crime, do we?'

He shook his head. 'Not that I’m aware of.' 

'Who called it in, then?' She surveyed the area. Bottom of a small hill, trees lining the riverbank, a track running parallel to the water. On the other side, houses. Lots of them, but given the time of day, most people wouldn't have been out of bed.

'Jogger out and about in the early hours. Saw a foot sticking up, went to look, found her, called us in a panic.' Alex took a hand out of her pocket and dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. 

‘You okay?' Caleb asked. 

She knew what he meant. 'Yeah, I'm not crying, you nutsack. The bloody wind is making my eyes water. I hate the wind. And the cold.' 

Caleb gave her another big grin. 'With a name like yours, ma'am, I'd have thought this'd be right up your alley.' 

'Yeah, well, the irony isn't lost on me,' she said, putting her hand back in her pocket. She'd only been here five minutes and was already silently cursing herself for not putting on warmer clothes. 

'Where's the witness now?' 

Caleb nodded toward a marked police van. 'She's sitting in the back of the van. Heater's on.' 

'Smart girl,' she said. 'I'll be joining her soon.' Alex crouched down to take a better look at the girl. 'Do we know what killed her? Anything obvious?' 

Caleb shook his head. ‘Well, the blood vessels in both eyes are broken, the sclera is fully red on both sides. I’m thinking maybe strangulation but there’s no marks around her throat so…I’m a bit lost. Body is fairly clean, apart from the leaves and things stuck to her arse and back.' 

'Hmm.' She looked around again. 'Don't suppose we've found her clothes, have we?' 

'Nope. Nothing. I did a quick walkabout, didn't find any.' 

'She wasn't killed here,' she stated as a matter of fact, not speculation. 

'How do reckon that?' 

'Look, I know it’s fairly secluded but, how do you manage to attack a girl out in the open, take all her clothes off, rape her, and kill her without her screaming?' 

'Rape her?' Caleb said, genuinely surprised by the throwaway comment. 'Where did that come from?' 

Alex pointed to the girl's vagina. ‘Did you look closely?’

Caleb looked slightly embarrassed. ‘Er, no. Not that close.’

‘Why not? You’re a bloody detective. It’s your job to detect. You didn’t.’ 

‘I’m sorry, ma’am. It didn’t seem right somehow.’

Alex rolled her eyes at him, bent down and pointed. 'Some spots of dried blood around the perineum. Probably leaked out when she was being carried and dumped here. Killer missed it, or he was disturbed and took off before he could clean her up.' 

'Really?' Caleb stood over the girl and peered down at her again. 

'I'd bet a month's wages on it,' said Alex. 'Whatever happened here, this isn't the kill site.'