Bright Spark (26 page)

Diane
would return to work some day, but medical-sales was a less solid basis for
financing the Slowey family in its formative years. Solid arrests might not
earn Slowey dazzling commission, but he was guaranteed the ample wage and
fiercely negotiated benefits of the public sector, and the knowledge that he’d
have to screw up egregiously to stand any chance of being fired.

Next
year, he told himself, definitely, positively, absolutely for certain, he’d
knuckle down to his promotion exams. If Harkness could do it with nothing more
to finance than his next affair and his last break-up, he could do it for all
the best reasons. It wasn’t as if the work got harder as you rose through the
ranks; some senior officers of his acquaintance were so adept at delegation
that they could easily have developed a second career or a much improved golf
handicap with no obvious impact on their annual reviews. Coasting towards a
handsomely funded retirement with three pips or a crown on his epaulettes, the
girls at university and Diane furnishing a new home that could belong in the
magazines she pored over in bed: he could and should make it happen.

Yet
it was a pipe-dream. He didn’t want management, bureaucracy, sloganeering,
political initiatives and the rest of the utterly vacuous tosh of senior rank. 
He liked grilling witnesses, nailing scumbags and all those other stock
phrases.  Teasing out the evidence that would make sure some miscreant would be
stopped from spreading horror and misery, at least for now.  Consoling wretched
people in extremes of distress, when he could actually, positively make a
difference that couldn’t be quantified.

Whatever
the cliché, Slowey relished the purpose his job gave him and it troubled him
not at all that this was entirely selfish. He just didn’t think he’d manage to
get out of bed if he had to speak meaningfully to the haemorrhoid-cream
demographic, pitch marketplace synergies at sales conferences or crunch out
figures on cornflake uptake ASAP for the VP.

Slowey
perched on a bench overlooking the gently landscaped lawn and beck at the rear
of Police HQ in Nettleham. Amazingly, the grounds were wide open to the public
and a succession of dog walkers had already greeted him with a curious
deference, taking in his suit and battered demeanour and perhaps wondering what
exotic and stressful manner of work formed this copper’s lot.

He
bit into the apple that had been wedged into his lunchbox to ensure he ate at
least one green thing at work. ‘Mr Grumpy’ glared back at him from the lid, a
present from his eldest. Stowing the box into his backpack, he ambled back to
the HQ building. The first tentative gusts of the freshening northerly breeze
the weather forecast had promised found his slick brow. He dared to hope that the
murk might be dispersed but the air tasted like damp gunpowder.

In
Harkness’s absence, he’d volunteered to personally supervise the processing of
Murphy’s mobile phone. A distracted Newbould had readily agreed, still inclined
to send Slowey home to lick his wounds but equally happy to have him safely and
usefully engaged at HQ. Slowey was grateful for the reprieve and for the chance
to tell Diane truthfully that he’d been keeping out of harm’s way. Besides, the
phone could be a treasure trove and his hands were the safest on the team.

Quentin
Smith occupied his locked office in the basement in the fullest sense of the
word. The door was always locked; entry was strictly by prior arrangement,
regardless of rank or the urgency of the enquiry. With his pasty skin and
collection of almost identical food-encrusted shirts and ties, Quentin may well
have lived in the office.

Slowey
waited until his ‘Buzz Lightyear’ watch said precisely 11 o’clock then knocked
on the door marked, ‘Q Smith – Technical Support Unit’. The red light mounted
above the door frame winked off and a green light winked on. Slowey shook his
head and entered.

As
ever, it seemed that Quentin had never existed outside that office, having
evolved from the various laptops, processors, server stacks, routers, cables,
discs, circuit-boards and power leads that filled the space in what was
undoubtedly a logical order to their owner. A moth-eaten chair and an almost
clear desk had been set aside for visitors, almost but not quite in Quentin’s
direct eye-line, and low enough so that they wouldn’t interfere with his view
of the enormous LCD TV on which he could broadcast images he’d plucked off
suspect hardware.

“Good
morning again, DC Slowey, nice to see you’re as punctual as ever. You’d be
amazed at some people. Too early or too late. I ask you, why have an
appointment book at all if that’s the attitude? Oh, yes. You know the drill.
Just work your way through the paperwork and then we’ll begin.”

Slowey
skim-read Quentin’s own prolix variation on the standard pro forma, absolving
him of any responsibility for the failings of the less technologically literate
when it came to handling electronic evidence. He signed it carefully, ensuring
that not so much as a glancing stroke of ink strayed outside the signature box.

“Lovely.
I do like a neat officer. What can I do for you today, detective?”

“Well,
Quentin, I’ve got a phone for you….”

“That
was of course a rhetorical question as your online application was most
assiduous and I have been able to read around the subject and compile a few
basic facts to expedite matters for you.”

“Good,
great. Right, the phone.”

“Basic
fact number one. The number relates to a ‘pay as you go’ purchase with no
subscriber details and no payment card ever supplied. How, you might well ask,
did I establish this without the usual reams of paperwork that you will in any
case have to fill in to get this evidentially substantiated? Well, Quentin has
contacts.”

Smith
tapped his nose with a pudgy finger and winked with all the sparkle of a recent
stroke victim. “The service provider’s police liaison officer and I have a
sophisticated code arising from natural small-talk. ‘Not a cloud in the sky’
indicates this kind of phone. Do you see?”

“So,
a cash purchase of a ‘pay as you go’ phone only ever topped up with vouchers
rather than a payment card.”

“Quite
so.  And my contact wasn’t surprised we had the phone.”

“Go
on.”

“It
had made a small nuisance of itself last night, repeatedly dialling 999. Not
that pointless emergency calls from anonymous mobiles are exactly rare, but my
contact couldn’t resist telling me she’d had a quick peak at the call history.
Not that she said so in as many words, but….”

“More
code?”

“She
sings ‘911 Is A Joke’ to me.”

“How
many phrases do you have?”

“A
couple of dozen. I could email them to you if you were interested.”

“This
phone. Topped up with vouchers only then?”

“Yep.
No way of saying how those vouchers were paid for or by whom. Not unless you
fancy forming an enquiry team just to find out how many thousands of shops the
vouchers went to, on the off chance that the buyer used a card or was memorable
in some way. But we know the owner anyway, don’t we?”

“Probably. 
I never thought I’d get to say this,” said Slowey signing the evidence bag and
handing it to Smith, “but this was prised out of his cold, dead hand.”

Smith
held the bag by his fingertips at arm’s length, peering with appalled
fascination as if he’d been handed a freshly dismembered body part.

“Excuse
the fingerprint powder. You’ll need gloves. Oh, it’s been swabbed for fluids
too. It’s probably not dangerous, but who knows?”

Smith
rose above and beyond Slowey’s teasing. With the care and rigour of a surgeon,
he opened a drawer, tore off cellophane strips and donned a facemask, latex
gloves and a plastic apron. Placing the package on a clean work surface, he
produced a craft knife and sliced the top off the evidence bag. Reaching in, he
withdrew the phone and switched it on.

“Is
that it? You just switch on and take a shufty?”

“Detective,
you would not believe how much grief proprietary operating systems cause me,”
announced Smith, as he began to rummage through the phone’s menus. “There is no
Windows XP for phones. The tricky buggers all have their own dialects, which
means our poorly subsidised, bargain-basement software can’t interrogate all of
them. I think this one’s very mainstream though, so I’ll plug it in. It’s your
fault anyway; you are supposed to take the battery out and put the phone in one
of those expensive evidential boxes we sent out to all the divisions.”

“I’ve
heard about them. They’re so expensive they’re locked in a cupboard somewhere
so we won’t waste them.”

“Where
did this guy work, anyway? Abu Ghraib?”

Smith
turned the phone to show Slowey a sequence of photographs on its colour screen;
young men in prison fatigues against a background of grey breezeblock and
glossy steel, glaring hatefully into the lens from where they cowered on the
floor or lay tethered to beds. One of them could have been Firth, kneeling by a
lavatory bowl with blood trailing from his nose like a war-stripe, jaw bunched
in what could have been a yawn or a snarl.

Abruptly,
the sequence changed to show Murphy’s children dutifully posing with arms
around each other’s waists in a suburban garden, a barbecue smoking lazily
behind them, or staring joylessly up from their games around the Christmas
tree.  Suzanne made occasional appearances, but only in her specified place;
behind the kids and at Murphy’s left hand. Hers was the only unforced smile, as
if she’d been determined to make the most of the plain sailing before the
weather turned again. Slowey glimpsed again for a second the unpeeled face
blind to its own soiled lungs and cracked ribs.

“Quentin,
let’s get this plugged in and downloaded, please, quick as you like. Let’s get
to these 999 calls too.”

Smith
sensed the changed mood and quietly separated the phone from its SIM card
before connecting both in turn to one of his laptops and extracting data from
them.

“Ok,
here we go,” said Smith, scrolling through multiple pages of data arrayed in
half a dozen windows on the laptop and on the LCD screen that dominated the
room. “Happily for us, no encryption and my machine speaks its lingo. There’s
also a lot of data to plough through. I’ll stick all this on a disc if you can
hang around for a bit. But this might interest you.”

Slowey
craned forward as Smith produced a laser pointer and shone it at the a few
lines of data on the screen.

“See
that? The half-dozen lines right there” Slowey considered shrugging but nodded
instead. “They’re all 999 calls made by this handset. This isn’t just keypad
activity either; these calls all connected. As I’m sure you’re aware, emergency
calls get routed straight through to the BT operator who allocates it to fire,
ambulance or police according to what’s being screamed at them. So we can’t say
where the call was picked up or what was said just from this. But on a hunch, I
had a little look at this.”

Smith
slid a few feet sideways on his wheeled chair and angled a large VDU towards
Slowey. It displayed the familiar blue and beige grid of the force’s incident
handling system, with brief descriptions of incidents reported by the public
and the call-signs of units tasked to deal with them.

“These
are the incident logs from the early hours of yesterday morning. There’s a
match here. Four of the five 999 calls made by this very phone connected to our
call centre, a hundred yards away.”

“Pick
one. Let’s have a proper look.”

Smith
double-clicked on one of the sequentially numbered incidents, which unfolded to
show a full narrative of the call. The now familiar mobile number appeared
under ‘source’. ‘Drunk Man Shouting Help’ formed the title. The narrative was
only slightly more informative: ‘Caller in distress / says fell from bridge in Lincoln / having trouble speaking / numerous calls from this number / complains can’t feel
legs and arms / abusive language / keeps pushing buttons on phone / slurring /
heavy breathing.”

The
second page of the incident log shaded a crisis into routine banality. The
emergency operator couldn’t or wouldn’t provide subscriber details or a precise
location. The police call-taker rang the mobile number back only to hear a
generic voicemail introduction. In his last 999 call to the communications
centre, the mystery caller had become exasperated and proclaimed, “fuck you
all…too late.”

Someone
had produced a map and a patrol had been dispatched to check bridges where
city-centre drunks were most likely to harm themselves, either by violence or
an ill-advised balancing act. On an otherwise quiet night, the cops had even
made time to check the bridges on foot with torches. Over an hour, they checked
the road bridges at either end of Brayford Wharf, the footbridge spanning the
railway station between Oxford Street and Tentercroft Street, the Pelham Bridge overpass and the maze of streets beneath it, and various other side streets
and foot bridges that Slowey had only a hazy knowledge of.

To
be thorough, a traffic patrol had volunteered to check the Burton Road bridge,
driving both over and under it and finding nothing on the parapet or the road
beneath. They either hadn’t seen Mickey in the bus shelter or hadn’t thought
him worth getting out of the car for.