Once Shay had fed them to his programme, it had taken less than fifteen minutes for it to complete a job that would have taken us hours. With enough processing power, apparently, that time frame could be reduced to mere seconds, but I couldn’t see Shay openly subscribing to an ‘on demand’ supercomputing service. For now, he seemed happy enough to make do with the extra equipment he’d installed at our place in Dores.
There were fourteen Public Space cameras in operation here in Wick, and the current maintenance contractor was doing a shitty job of keeping them in good working order. Three of them had been malfunctioning on the night of the murder, including the one on the High Street. That one was close enough to Camps Bar to have been potentially useful. No sign of Visser on any of the eleven that had been working properly, but that didn’t seem particularly significant. What we knew of his movements during the earlier part of the evening wouldn’t have taken him past any of them. Had the people Visser left Harpers with been aware of the locations of the cameras? Had they deliberately avoided them? It was impossible to say.
I’d had confirmation earlier that there had been no cases of methanol related alcohol poisoning at Caithness General Hospital. That made it highly unlikely that we were dealing with a batch of local moonshine gone wrong. Industrially produced, then? That stuff was easy enough to get hold of, so knowing that wasn’t going to lead us to whoever had been responsible.
I got set up at the living room table and had Shay send me Visser’s Messenger history to look through while he got to work on the copied drive from our victim’s laptop. I hadn’t been at it for long before he made a pleased little sound.
“Something good?”
“He had another messaging application installed as well as WhatsApp Web and Messenger. That’s interesting.”
“Why?”
“They all offer standard, end-to-end encryption, but this app also has a ‘Secret Chat’ option. You can set a timer to delete both sides of any communications you want to keep totally private.”
“Like those self-erasing files you sometimes send me?”
“Not really. My system’s much more sophisticated and flexible.” It wasn’t vanity. Shay just didn’t do false modesty. “Apart from instructing the copies I send you to wipe themselves automatically as soon as you close them, they’d also instantly vanish if your camera caught anyone else trying to read your screen or if it was blocked or deactivated. I know you wouldn’t open and read them if you thought anyone else was watching, but you can’t be too careful. Apart from that, if the sensors I installed detected any unaccounted for dodgy signals nearby, that would abort the delivery attempt. Those are set to run an unscheduled sweep every time I try to send you anything I’ve tagged as sensitive.”
“So I just wouldn’t get the files?” We had to be careful, I knew that, but seriously! Too much caution could have its own disastrous consequences. “What if it was something really urgent?”
Shay could exaggerate a fake sigh more expressively than anyone I knew.
“Don’t be daft, Con. If any of my safety measures triggered, I’d be notified immediately, and you’d get the appropriate automatic message flashing up. You know, just in case I couldn’t call you myself for some reason. My system would keep trying to deliver the files safely until you’d moved to a more secure location.” He shook his head disapprovingly as he started tapping away at his keyboard again. “Honestly, Cuz, I know you think I’m a clueless idiot about some things, but please don’t insult my intelligence when it’s something I’m actually good at.” Then he mimicked back my ‘So I just wouldn’t get the files?’ at me with unerring accuracy. Alright, maybe my tone had risen to a bit of a squeak at the end there.
“It wouldn’t kill you to fill me in on your bloody security measures in the first place,” I objected before realising that was what he’d deliberately provoked me into doing. A brief, involuntary flash of a gleeful little grin confirmed it.
“You never asked,” he pointed out reasonably. “In fact, when I told you I wanted to install those sensors, you agreed it was a good idea and then immediately changed the subject. Why would I bother you with something you obviously had no further interest in? It’s not like you couldn’t have brought it up again any time you wanted to.”
“Alright, point taken,” I conceded, half-laughing. “You’re not a bloody mind reader. Can we get back to focusing on what matters now? You think that Secret Chat option is significant?”
“Why install the extra application otherwise?”
“But the messages that might have been of interest no longer exist, right? Even if you managed to gain access to the account without Visser’s phone being on and connected.”
“Oh, I can do that, no problem, but you’re right, I can’t recover those messages. The contacts list might be worth looking at, though, don’t you think? Especially if there are any names or numbers on it that we haven’t found elsewhere.”
Unlike me, he’d seen it immediately. Knowing who Visser was being so careful about communicating with could be very revealing all by itself. I left him to get on with it and went back to reading through the waiting backlog of Messenger chats. I couldn’t help smiling to myself, though. It was always a relief to see that particular, puckish grin of his making a comeback after it had been missing for a while.
By the time I decided to call it a night and leave my cousin to it, I had a few new names and contact numbers gleaned from Visser’s Messenger account; more people we should talk to. Mills could try reaching them all during the morning whilst the rest of us were tied up down at the VOW offices. With any luck, he could set up some scheduled house visits for the afternoon. That should keep the rest of the team usefully occupied whilst Shay and I went to check Visser’s flat. Before he started on my new list, though, I wanted Mills to begin by contacting the people we knew had been at Harpers last Friday. If any of them had any photos for us to look at, the sooner we got hold of those, the better.
As to what my cousin might yet discover from the account he’d found, and by checking through the rest of Visser’s copied hard drive, hopefully, he’d have a lot more for us by lunchtime tomorrow.
The morning’s interviews with the last of the boat crews and technicians didn’t throw any new light onto matters. I hadn’t had any high expectations that they would, after yesterday, but it was good to finally have that job finished with and out of the way.
Darren Mills was already waiting for us at our cafe when the four of us walked over from the VOW buildings just after twelve, and he, at least, had had a more usefully productive morning of it. His calls had tracked down three people who’d all been quite happy to send him the photos they’d taken at Harpers on Visser’s last night there. He’d also managed to reach most of the Messenger contacts we wanted to talk to. I had no idea how long Shay and I might be tied up at Visser’s flat, so there’d been no point in trying to schedule anything with the two girls I wanted to see personally. I’d have to call them when we were done there and see what I could set up.
“I let Mr Keane know that the photos were in the case file as soon as I’d added them,” Darren told me.
Good lad. I’d had my phone on silent while we were conducting the interviews, but looking now, I saw that he’d alerted me too. I spent some time looking through the photos whilst we were waiting for our food. One, in particular, showed promise when I blew it up a little on my phone screen. That was almost certainly Kaj Visser in the background, partly obscured from view by a woman with her back to the camera. She was wearing the short-sleeved red top that had been described to us yesterday. The photo had also caught the faces of the man and the girl on either side of Kaj, possibly two of the group we believed he’d left with. They were a little out of focus and hard to see, but Shay should be able to clean the image up enough to run his usual facial recognition scans. I was tempted to call him to ask how that was going but stifled the impulse. He’d have prioritised that job as soon as he got Mills’ message. Besides, I�
�d be at the house within ten minutes of leaving here and interrupting him now wouldn’t serve any useful purpose.
I let my little team set about splitting the afternoon house calls between them whilst I started wolfing my baguette down, keen to get going. They could sort all that out without any unnecessary micromanagement from me.
“Christ, Conall, where’s the fire?” Caitlin asked, breaking off the conversation to stare at me.
“Don’t worry. There’s no need for any of you to rush your lunches just because I’m in a hurry.” Just as well, really, considering their piled, steaming plates. “Did you remember to sign Visser’s keys out for me?” I asked Mills.
He fished them out and handed them over before turning his attention back to his chips. Shay’s fully stocked kit bag from Inverness was safely stowed in my car, so there’d been no need to trouble Munro’s people to provide one. My cousin had packed that himself after the briefing on Thursday, preferring to avoid the risk of finding essential items unavailable or in unexpectedly short supply up here. I wasn’t sure he’d need most of it today. We weren’t visiting a crime scene after all. Still, there was no harm in being prepared.
“Don’t forget to get the receipt when you’re done here,” I reminded them all, getting up again as soon as I’d finished eating. “I’ll see you back at the station later, but call me if anything urgent crops up in the meantime.”
It was a short drive back to our rented farmhouse. Once I’d taken the long, gentle hill up from the harbour, I soon found myself surrounded by very level ground again. Caithness had to be one of the flattest counties in northern Scotland, if not the flattest. It was nearly all open farmland once you got out of town, stretching out to the horizon in every direction. That didn’t mean that the county had nothing to offer visiting climbing enthusiasts, though. There were some very nice cliffs running along the coast here, the tallest of them almost five hundred feet high. Most stretches were designated conservation areas for the nesting seabirds, but I wouldn’t have minded having a go at some of the permitted spots if we’d had the time. Sarclet wasn’t far down the coast and Latheronwheel, further south, was less than twenty miles from here. Only we’d need to take at least half a day to make it worth doing, and neither of us would want to do that, not before we’d cracked this case.
It might be worth thinking about driving back this way for a day trip one weekend, but I suspected Shay would prefer to stick to the more varied and more convenient choices offered in the Cairngorms. He was too much of a purist to ever want to climb for fun with any kind of a safety line, and I wasn’t sure I’d feel too comfortable relying on the sandstone around here without one. At least you were on good, solid granite in the Northern Corries. The views there were pretty spectacular on a clear day too.
Back at our rental, I walked in to find my cousin practising one of his yoga sequences in the living room.
“Nice to see you working so hard on the important stuff,” I remarked sarcastically from the doorway as he slowly lowered his legs into a perfectly horizontal position a few inches above the floor. He was holding his entire weight balanced on his right hand and the pillar of his forearm, elbow tucked beneath his abdomen. Wounded Peacock Pose, a name that had never made any sense to me. I couldn’t see any injured bird trying to hold all of its weight on a wingtip. Shay held the position for a few breaths before planting his toes on the carpet and pulling his extended left arm in.
“Just occupying myself whilst I wait for more results to come in.” He bounced to his feet. “How did your morning go?”
“Not very productively, but Mills did better than the rest of us.” He followed me through to the kitchen and flicked the kettle on for me as I got my coffee maker out. “Have you done anything with the photos he sent you yet?”
Daft question, he wouldn’t have been exercising if he’d had anything more important still to do.
“I cleaned up the shot with Visser in and ended up with decent images of the pair on either side of him. I found the girl to his left in one of the other photos after that too. That one turned out even clearer. I’m running a few facial recognition searches on them both now.”
That was good news.
“And the other thing?” I asked, “You mentioned this morning that you were going to look into a number you found in that new contacts list? One that didn’t show up on any of his other accounts?”
“I did, yes. It belongs to a Mrs Melissa Soames. No obvious connection between her and Kaj Visser and no calls or messages left in the account history. Her husband, Charlie, owns quite a bit of property in the area. They’ve been married for fourteen years, no kids.”
“Ages?”
“She’s thirty-seven; he’s fifty.”
“Any criminal record for either of them?”
“Not exactly. She’s had nothing but a speeding ticket years ago and some parking fines. Charlie’s looking a bit dodgier. I’m almost certain that he beat the crap out of a guy back in two thousand. Soames must have either scared him into refusing to make an identification or paid him off or both because it never went to court. He’s been investigated a couple of times since then but never actually charged with anything. The victim, Will McLaren, was walking home from a date at the time. The girl in question had gone out with Charlie Soames a couple of times a month or so before that.” He opened the fridge to retrieve a full half-litre blending bottle of green sludge that he must have put in there earlier, shaking it up before popping the lid.
We’d just have to hope we found something at Visser’s flat to connect him to the woman. It was one thing to look through the files on a legitimately seized laptop, quite another to hack into a company’s system to obtain information from there. We couldn’t go to speak to Melissa Soames, or her husband, without a valid, disclosable reason to do so. Disappointingly, Shay hadn’t found anything else useful on the hard drive that he’d spent half the night looking through. Whatever clandestine activities Kaj Visser may have been up to, he hadn’t left any trace of them on his computer.
“I’ll read through what you’ve found later, but we should get going as soon as we can,” I told him. “Want to get yourself organised while I have my coffee?” I knew that Shay wouldn’t want to leave his laptop here, so that needed to be shut down and packed up. I doubted he planned to go out barefoot, either. He obligingly wandered off to get ready, swigging his lunch down as he went.
Things were finally starting to pick up a bit today. We had images of two of the group from Harper’s and, now, some sort of connection between Visser and the wife of a jealous man with a history of ‘unproven’ violent behaviour. It was good to know that our digging was starting to produce some solid results.
Thirteen
Visser had rented himself a flat a few minutes’ walk from the harbour. He had the top floor of a little two-storey, stone-clad house on Brown Place. I let us into his private entrance, and we gloved up at the top of the narrow stairway before entering the flat. This place wasn’t a crime scene, but that was no reason to be careless about contaminating anything we might find in there.
The door opened straight into the open plan living room and kitchen, not very large but not uncomfortably cramped either.
“Nice place,” Shay said approvingly as I closed the door behind us.
It was. A generous window let in plenty of light, and the white-painted walls and lack of clutter helped to make the space seem bigger than it really was. A few well-placed rugs decorated the polished wooden floor, and none of the furnishings had the solid, old-fashioned bulk that would have been too much for a space like this. They were all light, sleek, IKEA-type pieces.
Shay put his laptop bag on the empty coffee table and set his kitbag down on the rug beside it. “Quick check of the rest of the layout before we get started?”
There wasn’t much to explore. The only other door from the room led to a short hallway with Visser’s roomy bedroom on one side and the bathroom and a much smaller, second bedroom to the othe
r. Visser hadn’t made much use of the spare room, other than as a storage space for unwanted items. It contained a very solid old wardrobe, an equally heavy-looking chest of drawers, a dismantled bed frame and some boxes. He must have rented the place partly furnished and decided to refit the main bedroom more to his own taste. Overall, the impression that first look around gave me was of a man who liked to keep his living quarters clean and tidy.
Shay set his laptop running again and went off with his kit bag to see what he could find in the bedroom while I looked around the living room. The corner desk was as good a place for me to start as any other.
Our victim had certainly been well organised, and everything was filed away logically. One folder contained printouts of his weekly time sheets, each clipped together with the relevant monthly payslips. Another held nothing but the warranties for the appliances and furnishings he’d purchased. Personal documents were all kept in the same large envelope, passport, birth certificate, Dutch driving licence and identity card. There was also a sheet in there listing things like his National Insurance number and NHS number. Not everyone wanted to keep that sort of information filed on their computers these days.
Visser’s work contract wasn’t of much interest to me, but I did take the time to check through the tenancy agreement for the flat. There were three keys on the ring that Mills had given me, and I could only account for two of them. The agreement explained it. A garage, around the corner, apparently came with the flat. Visser hadn’t kept a car here, so maybe he’d been using it for something else. We’d have to go and check it out after we’d finished in here.
Desk cleared, I moved on to the wall unit, checking through the cupboards and shelves without finding anything interesting. A search of the kitchen area proved equally unhelpful, and I went to see how Shay was getting on.
“I don’t think our victim had any guests staying over recently,” he told me when I walked into the bedroom. “All the fingerprints I’ve found and scanned so far were his, and the few shed hairs lying around were the right colour and length for him too.” The little handheld light source he favoured was lying on top of his kit bag, and he’d moved on to the physical search. He was methodically checking the pockets of each item of clothing in the wardrobe. “Looks like he cleaned regularly, so that doesn’t rule out earlier visitors. Want to start on the dresser?”
Castle Killings: A DCI Keane Scottish Crime Thriller (Deadly Highlands Book 4) Page 11