Human Remains (42 page)

I went back to the ANPR results and clicked on the link to the image from the camera. The car relating to the alert had passed the camera heading north, at 00:07. I waited for the picture to load, knowing that it would be dark and impossible to tell much from it.

But I was wrong. The camera was under a street-light and just for a change you could see quite a lot of the car.

It wasn’t white, it was very definitely dark in colour, even allowing for the effects of the street-light. But, more importantly, it certainly wasn’t an estate. It was much smaller. I couldn’t tell exactly what the car was, but it looked a lot like a Fiesta.

I put the screen lock on the computer and stood up, walking past Kate and out of the office, heading upstairs to the MIR.

I knocked on the door and then opened it and went in. The room was full of people, busy, on the phone, but they all ignored me. The DCI’s office was empty, and there was no sign of Frosty either. I felt panic starting in my chest.

‘You OK there?’ a woman asked me.

‘Do you know where DI Frost is?’ I asked. ‘Or the DCI?’

‘The DCI’s gone to a meeting at HQ,’ she said. ‘I don’t know about Frosty. Have you tried his office?’

‘I’ve been ringing him and leaving messages. It’s really urgent.’

‘Anything I can help with?’

I looked at her, then, for the first time: jeans, a pale blue shirt over a white T-shirt, long brownish hair tied in a loose knot on the back of her head. Her ID badge told me she was DC Jenna Jackson. She looked young. But she’d asked, and for want of anyone else she would do. She would do just fine.

‘I’m the analyst,’ I said. ‘I was working on this job until recently.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘You’re Annabel. You got us to Colin Friedland through the phone data. I read your report.’

‘Did you?’

‘Come and sit down,’ she said, pointing to her desk in the corner.

She’d obviously drawn the short straw, or perhaps been the last one at the briefing this morning. The desks were all shared ones, but hers was the smallest and piled with other people’s crap.

‘I shouldn’t be in here,’ I said. ‘They made me come off the case.’

‘Yeah. Heard about that. You want a coffee?’

‘Oh. That would be good.’

‘How do you take it?’

‘Um, whatever’s easiest? Black. Thanks.’

The single advantage to her desk was that she was next to the fridge, on top of which was a dirty tray toppling over with stacks of mugs of various sizes and states of cleanliness. Spoons that were dark brown with tannins and encrusted with sugar. Coffee and tea spilled and dried. A brown glass mug of the type that used to be given away with petrol, half-full of some liquid, which was already growing a cushion of mould. I was willing to bet this same still life was repeated in almost every office in every police station in the county.

‘Now,’ Jenna said. ‘Tell me.’

‘Do you know about Audrey Madison?’

‘Who’s Audrey Madison?’

I told her about Audrey and Vaughn and the links back to Colin, and then she started to take notes. I told her about seeing Lindsay this morning, and about Cheryl at the office where Audrey worked. I told her about the small dark-coloured car that might have been a Fiesta driving on the Baysbury Road at seven minutes past midnight, with stolen numberplates. I drank the coffee. It was reassuringly foul.

‘I just want to make sure that they are investigating,’ I said, when I got to the end.

‘I’m sure they are,’ she said, comfortingly.

‘You don’t understand,’ I said. ‘If Colin took her on Friday night, the chances are she’s been without food or water since then. He will be waiting for her to die. I mean, is he under surveillance? Surely he wouldn’t just be released without being put under obs?’

She looked uncomfortable.

‘As far as I’m aware, he was supposed to be under observation but then something kicked off in North Division and both teams were deployed to that.’

‘They think he’s low-risk,’ I said.

‘He seemed to be quite compliant,’ she said. ‘It’s always more of a concern when they’re unstable. He came across in interview as being alarmingly rational.’

‘Don’t you think that’s even more concerning, given what he’s been doing?’

She shrugged, managed a smile.

‘That’s not my call.’

‘But they don’t know about Audrey,’ I said.

‘Annabel,’ she said, ‘leave it with me, OK?’

I left it with her. I drank half the coffee and left the rest, then I went back to the main office.

I couldn’t believe they weren’t watching him, and at the same time, given the appalling lack of resources and the usual bureaucratic wrangle involved in deploying what little they had, I wasn’t surprised at all. Colin could have been doing anything. I was more certain than ever that he had taken Audrey.

Trigger and Kate had disappeared, which suited me fine. If I was going to try to break the rules, I didn’t need an audience. I logged on to the system, into Windows Explorer. They’d granted me access to the Major Crime drive where all the documents were stored – Drive L. Surely they wouldn’t be efficient enough to have removed my access already? But they had. I only had the Intel drives again. They’d shut me out.

I put my head in my hands, the sense of urgency building, growing, thumping inside my chest and my head like a pain.

I opened my email, thinking that I would send emails marked urgent to the DCI, the DI and anyone else, just as a last resort. Two hundred new emails. I scanned through them, and, finding four from Frosty, I gave a sudden yelp of delight.

Four emails, sent first thing this morning – after the DCI had taken me off the case, but clearly before he’d told Frosty about it. And he hadn’t bothered to retract and delete them. They all had the subject line ‘phone data’ and they all had attachments. Fidgeting with anticipation, I opened the first one. There were five Excel spreadsheets attached. The message read ‘A – here’s the first batch of data for Colin’s phone. More to come.’ The second email – the message just said ‘More data for you’. Another six Excel spreadsheets.

The third and fourth emails didn’t even have messages attached, just more spreadsheets. Shit, shit. It was going to take me weeks to go through it all properly, time I didn’t have. I opened all the spreadsheets and saved them to my personal drive, so it would take them a while to find them – if they ever even looked. I opened my spreadsheet that had listed all the numbers for everyone I’d identified so far, and started adding to it – each number that Colin had used, in other words each SIM card that he’d slotted into his phone, and the dates for the data that Frosty had obtained for me, so that I had a reference list to go to when it all got confusing.

I matched up the phone records with the existing ones – so now I had the rest of Colin’s call records, for all his other SIM cards.

And very quickly I spotted what I’d hoped to find.

As well as the outgoing calls from Colin’s SIMs to the phones the police had found with the bodies, there were other numbers, with the same calling pattern, going back to the earliest date of the billings. More people out there, then, that we hadn’t found. I started jotting them down. How many were out there still? I made another note to apply for earlier data, too. He’d been doing this a long time.

And then I noticed something else – the outgoing calls to the victims weren’t the only calls he made. There was a landline that featured on three sets of the billings, and when I put it into an internet search it revealed itself to be the number for the Rising Sun Chinese Takeaway, Stafford Road, Briarstone. Another landline, with one outgoing call, turned out to be a number for the Larches Residential Home in Baysbury. There was a mobile number, too – the same number came up in two different billings, with outgoing calls. The fact that the number featured on more than one set of billings was relevant. Whoever owned the phone was a real, live person whom Colin was prepared to speak to. And the latest phone contact was on a Wednesday lunchtime. Whoever they were, they were probably still alive.

I put the number into the internet search first, and drew a blank. Then I put it into the crime database and came up with nothing. Finally, only half paying attention because I’d already decided that this wasn’t going anywhere and I still had twelve sets of billings to look at, I fed the number into the incident database.

There was a match. Incident log 13-0189, dated today. The number looked familiar, and when I clicked on the link I knew instantly why:

It was Vaughn’s number. Colin had been so officious about swapping his SIMs, but he couldn’t be bothered to do it all the time. He’d used his phone to call Vaughn.

I started a log for all my searches and queries. It was true I wasn’t on the case any more, but if I was ever going to be asked to justify my behaviour I wanted a record of my thought processes to be able to hand over to someone. I wasn’t doing this out of idle curiosity, or for any sort of personal gain. I was doing it because of Audrey. Despite this justification, my heart was still banging in my chest as I logged on to the telephone enquiry page of the intranet, keeping my fingers crossed. The operation was still in my list of queries – they hadn’t removed my authorisation here, at least! Thank goodness. I went to the list of results and checked that there hadn’t been any more since Frosty had emailed them to me.

Nothing. I’d been hoping for the forensic report on Colin’s phone, the actual handset which would have been seized when he’d been taken into custody, but if they’d ordered a report it wasn’t back yet. Sometimes these took weeks, depending on the backlog of cases and the level of urgency. And, as Colin had been released without charge, the likelihood of this one being a priority was low.

The call data for Colin’s own number, the one he’d provided when they’d booked him in to the Custody Suite, was sparse. On that Wednesday lunchtime, after a brief outgoing call to Vaughn’s number, he’d made a call to an 0845 number which turned out to be a Customer Care line for a supermarket. Then, on Saturday – after Audrey went missing – three incoming calls that were not answered – from the number that I’d noted as belonging to the Larches Residential Home. After each one, an incoming text from Colin’s voicemail server. Each of these contacts registered a cellsite location – the first two calls and texts were shown as #WATER TOWER GRAYSWOOD LANE and the last call and text were #CAPSTAN HILL NR BLACKTHORNS.

I opened up the mapping software. I knew many of the cellsite locations, but these were unfamiliar. Grayswood Lane turned out to be about six miles outside of town, the other side of Baysbury, and Capstan Hill was a long, straight road heading through Baysbury village, where it would eventually form a junction with the main road to Briarstone.

The first two calls were three hours apart – at 11:05 and 14:18. Colin had been there – wherever it was – for a long time. And the last one was two hours later, at 16:33; it looked as if he might have been heading home.

I had a closer look at Grayswood Lane. It really was the middle of nowhere, starting at the junction with Capstan Hill and then winding through farmland for a few miles, ending abruptly with what looked like a track and a few buildings. I zoomed in on the buildings, which the software identified as Grayswood Farm. There were just a few houses dotted along the length of the lane, the aerial images showing the telltale bright blue rectangles of swimming pools. Halfway along the stretch between the farm at one end and Capstan Hill on the other was a circular structure in a woodland clearing. The water tower, I assumed. Of course, the cellsite location was hardly what you’d call exact – Colin’s precise location when those calls came in and were ignored could have been anywhere within several hundred metres of the water tower. But the likelihood was that the phone had been somewhere on Grayswood Lane, because where else would he have been? In the middle of a field?

I did a search on the intelligence database for Grayswood Lane. There had been a burglary at the farm in June – a tractor had been stolen. A call about nuisance motorbikes riding offroad through the woods had come in from a house called Three Pines, Grayswood Lane, in May. A patrol had been sent, but by the time they got there the bikes had gone.

The voters’ register showed that there were five houses in addition to the farm at the end. They all had names: Three Pines, Newlands Barn, The Old Manor, Woodbank and Pond House. I went through them one by one, looking at the names of the residents, in case something jumped out. Nothing did. They all showed at least two people resident at each address. This was starting to feel like a dead end.

I updated my log with all the searches and what I’d found, and made a note that I could draw no conclusions from it. Only that Colin’s phone had been in the vicinity of Grayswood Lane, probably for several hours, on the day after Audrey had gone missing. There was nothing whatsoever to implicate him in her disappearance. There was little else I could do. The priority emails I’d sent to the DCI and the DI had still not been opened. I tried both their mobile numbers one last time, just to be sure, and left another voicemail.

Just before I shut down the workstation, I emailed my log, and my notes, and the list of additional numbers – to Frosty. Just in case. I grabbed my coat and left the police station by the back exit, dialling Sam’s number on my phone as I did so.

Half an hour later we were parked in the road a few doors up from Colin’s house, obscured by the slight bend in the road and out of the direct line of sight of the windows.

‘I shouldn’t really be here,’ I said. ‘I was in so late as it is.’

‘Never mind that,’ Sam said. ‘Call it a late lunch if that makes you happier. And as I keep telling you, you’re still on compassionate leave, or sick leave, or something. You shouldn’t have gone in at all.’

‘It’s not that simple. I have to record all my hours, you know.’