And then the man turned slowly away, and a few seconds later, without lifting her head at all, the figure that was me moved and then followed him, not exactly with reluctance but just with an attitude of utter dejection.
‘I can’t believe that’s me,’ I said at last.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘Weird, isn’t it?’
‘Was there any more CCTV? Did they look at ANPR?’ This was the car numberplate recognition system used for tracing vehicles.
‘No,’ he said. ‘We did check. There’s no ANPR at the shopping centre; the nearest is on the ring road. But we had nothing to compare the data to, since we don’t know when or where he met any of the others. And it’s impossible to ID him from those images. Which is why we were all hoping you’d remember him.’
‘I don’t remember anything,’ I said, mystified. ‘It’s like looking at someone else. I don’t remember being there and talking to someone at all.’
He patted me on the shoulder, which made me flinch slightly. ‘Ah, well,’ he said. ‘We’ll get him, Annabel. You know we’re throwing everything we’ve got at this, don’t you?’
Until the next job comes along, I thought, but I didn’t say it. I went back to my list of phone billing queries, thinking that it would probably be easier and quicker to give in and do them myself.
A long evening spent sitting on a custard-yellow plastic seat that was fixed to the floor has been rewarded, eventually. I have had to watch people coming and going for hours on end. I’ve seen fights, disagreements, five separate women falling over – a cocktail of alcohol, high heels and the Market Square cobbles – and the police, turning up in the riot van and taking people away, wandering through the square in their fluorescent jackets, moving people on, helping drunk women get to their feet again.
But at last I see Audrey and her friends leaving Luciano’s. It is ten to midnight – not especially late, but late enough. My arse is almost completely numb. And I can still taste that filthy coffee.
I leave the restaurant promising myself I will never set foot inside it again, and step outside into the freezing air. I twist my muffler around my throat and over the lower part of my face, and pull the black thermal wool hat over my head to keep it warm, as well as for the benefit of the CCTV cameras that are by now paying very close attention to the masses thronging the square.
Audrey and a friend are making for the taxi rank and the inevitable queue.
I head towards the multi-storey where I left the car, and spend a few moments affixing the numberplates I unscrewed from Garth’s Volvo in the street behind the office yesterday. Just in case things don’t go according to plan.
I drive slowly around the corner towards the taxi rank just in time to see Audrey parting company from the blonde woman. Audrey isn’t going to wait in the queue for a taxi. Audrey is going to walk. I feel a little tremor of excitement. Everything is going so well, so perfectly. I could not have planned it better. I take a left turn and park in a side street. The arousal and the thought of what might happen later are making it hard to concentrate, so I stare at the clock in the car and make myself wait exactly five minutes. Then I start the engine again and drive back to the main road. It is still busy, the street-lights illuminating her path. She must feel safe, walking home, with cars and people passing her every few seconds. She does not feel alone. She does not feel threatened, not in the slightest – which is all good. Very good.
I pull alongside her and open the window on the passenger side.
‘Audrey!’
She stops walking and looks at me, at the car. Her face registers drunken confusion. She is more pissed than I’d thought. This, too, is good.
‘Colin?’ She comes over to the car and leans in a little, through the passenger window.
‘You need a lift?’ I ask.
The car is warm and I can feel the freezing air flooding in through the open window. As she bends towards me, her cleavage is on full display. I force myself back to the eye contact, back to the reassuring smile.
‘Oh, that’s kind of you. I’m nearly home, though.’
‘Come on, I’ll drive you the rest of the way. Get in.’
It’s the confidence, the easy friendliness that does it. The lack of explanation. Don’t beg. Keep it simple. Assume assent. And besides all that, her shoes are hurting her and it’s bitterly cold and what could happen with someone she knows, less than a mile from her front door?
She smells of wine and the remnants of a citrus perfume and drying sweat, and I inhale her as subtly as I can while trying to keep up a reassuring conversation.
‘So how are things with Vaughn?’
‘We’ve split up,’ she says.
‘Really? Oh, I am sorry. He didn’t say anything.’
‘No, he’s in denial.’
‘So what happened?’
She looks out of the window as we slow for the traffic lights.
‘He’s just – not the right person for me. It’s nothing he’s done wrong. He’s a decent bloke.’
‘But it’s time to move on?’
This time she smiles at me and for a second – just a second – I falter. Is this the right thing to do? I could still choose a different path here. I could drop her off at home, give her my phone number, wish her a pleasant weekend and ask if she’d like to come out with me some time. That’s what they do, isn’t it? The sorts of things people say?
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Time to move on.’
I put my hand across and touch her knee. Just her knee – no higher – but still she makes a clumsy grab for it and pushes it away.
‘What do you think you’re doing, Colin?’ Her voice has lifted an octave. ‘I know I’m a bit drunk but that doesn’t mean you can start taking advantage, alright?’
I feel the anger and the bile rise in my oesophagus.
Audrey, how could you? Ruining everything, so quickly?
‘I wasn’t,’ I say coldly. The traffic lights are on red. They shine into the car and make everything inside it red, too.
She softens, then. ‘Alright. Sorry if I overreacted. I’m a bit jumpy at the moment. It’s the next turning on the left – just up there at the top of the hill.’
I look across to her, inhaling her scent again. It’s the turning point, right here, right now. I could drop her off at home still, no harm done. No risk. Or I could take her now and move my life forward down this journey. And her attitude, the defiance in her eyes, makes me want her more than ever. She would put up a fight, no doubt about it. But taking the fight out of her would be so much better; so much more of a kick than watching people die who have no fight in them at all.
She stares back at me, drunk but challenging, almost daring me to try it.
The lights change to green and I ease the car up the hill.
I woke up early on Sunday and got dressed in my work clothes, and went downstairs. Irene was in the kitchen cooking a fried breakfast. The cat, who’d settled in far more readily than I would ever have expected, wound herself around my legs affectionately.
‘Don’t mind her, she’s been fed,’ Irene said when I came in. ‘Scrambled egg and bacon?’
It smelt good, but I wasn’t hungry. However, experience had taught me already that Irene had trouble hearing the word ‘no’ and so it was easier just to give in. ‘Thanks. Maybe just a little bit?’
There was tea in the pot on the table and I poured a mugful and tasted it. It was black, stewed, but it would do me.
They’d let me out of hospital on the understanding that I had someone to keep an eye on me, and Sam had taken it upon himself to be that person. It had only been supposed to be for a few days, but then we’d gone back to my house to get some clothes and my spare key was missing. I kept it on the bookcase and it was definitely not there. After that I hadn’t really felt like going back home, even after we’d got the locks changed at vast expense. As things stood, it looked as if I was going to be staying with the Everetts for a while.
‘You were late getting back on Friday night,’ she said. ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’
‘I was at work,’ I said.
‘Till that late? Are you sure that’s a good idea, Annabel?’
‘I was fine. I needed to get some things finished, that’s all. And they’re giving me some overtime so I’m going to go in this morning as well.’
Irene made a noise that might have been disapproval. ‘Better get a good breakfast inside you, then,’ she said, and loaded my plate with eggs and bacon. The cat started kneading my socked feet, keeping her claws tactfully retracted. She was purring wetly and probably dribbling on me too. I reached down under the table and she nestled her head in my cupped hand.
‘Where’s Sam?’ I asked. At that moment the back door opened and Sam came in, wiping his trainers on the mat and breathing hard. ‘I didn’t know you ran,’ I said.
‘First one… for ages… really hard,’ he said. ‘Any tea in there?’
I poured him a cup and he sat opposite me at the kitchen table. Irene shovelled food on to his plate too and he added a squirt of ketchup to it.
‘Sort of defeats the object,’ he said, around a mouthful of food, ‘going for a run and then stuffing my face afterwards.’
‘I guess so.’
The cat had transferred her affections smoothly to Sam, tiptoeing around his legs, her tail twisted into a flirtatious question mark. He paused to slip her a covert morsel of bacon when Irene had turned back to the sink.
‘I think that cat’s forgotten we used to live together,’ I said.
‘Don’t be silly,’ Sam said. ‘She’s happy because she knows you’re OK here, that you feel safe and you’re getting better, that’s all.’
She’s happy as long as someone gives her bacon and a scratch round the ear
, I thought. But who could blame her for being cross with me? I’d ignored her for days. She must have felt completely abandoned. It was a wonder she’d stayed around at all.
‘So where are you off to?’
Nice as it was to have somewhere to stay, with kind people who cared about where I was and what time I got in, cooked me meals and made me drink tea, I was starting to feel like a teenager.
‘Just work,’ I said, eating some bacon to try to bypass the need for conversation.
‘Oh?’ Sam’s posture had gone from slouched to alert in a second, scenting a story above the salty tang of breakfast-
with-ketchup
. ‘You’re going to work on a Sunday?’
I took a deep breath in. How could I make this sound less exciting? ‘Not really. Just overtime. Updating some spreadsheets. Catching up with things. As I’ll be going back in a bit.’
‘If they’re giving you overtime, something’s definitely going on. I know for a fact that they have no money for overtime at all. What’s happened? Is it the investigation? Have they found another one?’
‘Sam,’ Irene said, ‘stop pestering her. Annabel, tell him to mind his own business if he’s bothering you.’
‘He’s a journalist,’ I said. ‘My business is his business. Unfortunately.’
‘I’ll drive you in,’ he said. ‘And you can ring me when you’re done. I’m going into town anyway.’
‘I might be ages,’ I said, not wanting the responsibility of him sitting waiting for me. ‘I can drive myself.’
But he was quick finishing his breakfast and by the time I’d collected my bag and coat he had showered and was downstairs, fully dressed, his dark hair slicked back from his face. He looked so eager and excited that I gave up and followed him out to his car.
To my surprise, the office was not empty, as it had been on Friday night. Three of the desks were occupied and Paul Moscrop was in his glass cubicle in the corner. All of them were talking on the phone and another phone was ringing on one of the other desks. I thought briefly about answering it but decided not to. I slipped into my chair and turned on the workstation. A further surprise. The billing results for the phones I’d identified were back, forwarded on from the DCI who had been sent them by Keith Topping.
Paul came out of his office as I was opening up the attachments. ‘Ah! Annabel,’ he said. ‘Really good to see you. Have you seen the results?’
‘Just looking at them now, sir,’ I said.
‘You can drop the “sir”,’ he said. ‘It’s Paul. Alright?’
‘Right. Thanks.’
‘We did subscriber checks too, but they’re all pre-pay and unregistered. No surprise there. But the billings are very interesting.’
I waited for him to tell me all about it, wondering if he’d done all the analysis before I’d got here.
He had a wry grin on his face. ‘Have a look, and then come and tell me what you think,’ he said.
I worked through the attachments one by one, and he was right: the results were interesting. Each set of the phone billings was the mirror image of those we’d obtained from the victims’ phones. In other words, the offender was only using one SIM card per victim, and not contacting any other numbers. After each victim died, presumably he’d discarded the SIM and moved on to another. The phone numbers were not sequential, suggesting he bought them at different times and locations rather than as a bulk lot. And because the call traffic was so low, it was unlikely that the Pay As You Go account had been topped up with credit before it was discarded – he was just using the ‘free’ credit that came with the SIM – and that was probably more than enough for his purposes.
The cellsite data for all the phones showed locations around the town centre of Briarstone – not from a residential area. Unless he lived right in the town centre, he was only using the phone when he was in town.
He was methodical. And clever, too. But then I saw it, and took in a sharp breath that made me cough. Surely – surely he couldn’t have missed something so obvious?
I got up on legs that were surprisingly shaky and went through to Paul’s office. He’d left the door open and this time the wry grin was a great big beaming smile. ‘Got it?’
‘I can’t believe he could be so clever and so careless at the same time,’ I said. ‘He’s swapping the SIMs over, but he’s only used one handset.’
‘It’s not a case of being careless,’ he said, ‘to be fair to the poor bastard. People don’t use cheap phones these days. They use smartphones, iPhones, BlackBerries. They’re not as disposable, or rather they’re too expensive and people don’t want to throw them away. They think disposing of the SIM card when you’ve done with it makes you untraceable, but of course we know better.’