She looked baffled. “What—like an internship?”
“Kind of.”
Clearly I looked far too old to be doing an internship on a newspaper, but to tell her the truth would take far too long.
By the time Sam came back Lindsay had placed three mugs of tea on the table, along with a bowl of sugar and some spoons. I was ravenous all of a sudden and was on the verge of asking if she had any biscuits.
“Do you mind if I . . . ?” As well as the notebook and pen he’d fished out from his canvas bag, Sam waved his phone at Lindsay. “I’m just really bad at taking notes, I always miss things . . .”
“Go ahead.”
“Thanks.”
He found the voice recorder function on the phone and put it on the coffee table in front of her.
“Have you and Audrey shared the flat for long?”
She cradled her mug of tea and, looking at how relaxed she was, I could have easily predicted her answer.
“No, just a few months. My last flatmate went traveling. Audrey answered an ad—in the Chronicle, in fact. Must have been . . . erm . . . February? March?”
“Did you get along well?”
“Yeah, I guess. I didn’t see much of her, to be honest.”
“She went out a lot?”
“She was over at her boyfriend’s, most of the time. She didn’t sleep over there that often, but I was usually in bed by the time she got in.”
“That would be Vaughn Bradstock?”
“Yes. Funny guy, he was. But they seemed to get along, until last week, that is.”
“They had a fight?” Sam shifted in his seat, took a gulp of tea.
“They split up. I think it was all her idea.”
“Do you know why she finished it?” I asked.
Sam shot me a look of surprise—it was his interview, after all—but I felt like a spare part and, besides, I was curious.
“She said he was just a bit dull. She liked him a lot, but I think she was looking for a bit more—excitement? He collects stamps, for God’s sake. Who collects stamps in this day and age?”
“Was she really upset by it all?” I asked. “I mean—do you think she was depressed?”
“I wouldn’t go that far. She had a bit of a cry and then started planning a night out with her friends.”
I frowned at this.
“So when did you last see her?” Sam said then, getting back to his list of questions.
“Friday. She was going out after work. Someone’s birthday I think. She was quite excited about it..”
“You saw her go?”
“Yeah. She was all dressed up; she looked gorgeous. I remember thinking she was quite likely to hook up with someone looking like that.”
“But she didn’t come home?”
“I went away for the weekend, to see some friends in York. When I came back on Sunday evening I knew right away she hadn’t been back. The clothes she’d tried on before going out on Friday were all over the bed still.”
“And you called the police?”
“I sent her a text and tried to call her, but her phone was switched off. I thought about calling Vaughn but then I thought maybe she was with some other guy. I didn’t want to involve him.” Lindsay put her empty mug down on the table and looked pointedly at her watch.
“Sorry,” Sam said. “Just one more question—so when did you report her missing?”
“I called her at work first thing this morning. At Arnold’s—that’s where she works. I wanted to just check she was OK; after all, she hadn’t taken any clothes with her . . . or anything like that. And they said she hadn’t come in; she’s always very punctual. The girl I spoke to was really worried when I said I hadn’t seen her. So after that I phoned the police.”
“Do you know who that was? The girl you spoke to?”
“Cheryl, I think she said. I seem to remember Audrey talking about her. I think they got along well. Cheryl said she’d last seen her walking up the hill on Friday night. She didn’t want to wait around for a taxi. She was walking up the hill on her own.”
“Can we please go to the station now?” I said, when we were back in the car.
Sam was sitting in the driver’s seat. He hadn’t turned on the engine; he was staring straight ahead with his hands on the steering wheel.
“Sam?”
“Don’t you want to go and talk to Cheryl?” he asked. His eyes were bright with excitement. I hadn’t seen him like this before. Had he been like this when we’d sat and had coffee in town, the first time we’d met? I’d been so full of suspicion then. Maybe he’d toned it down.
“I want to go and make sure they’re looking for Audrey,” I said.
“Try calling them again,” he said, turning on the engine at last. “If there’s anyone there, I’ll drop you off on the way.”
There was still no bloody answer, of course, from anyone. They were all in the morning meeting, which was where I should be by now. I wondered what would happen if I failed to show up for work. Would they even notice?
Arnold and Partners took up the whole second floor of a building behind the Market Square, overlooking the back of the bingo hall that had been a cinema when I was a teenager. We found a space in the parking lot and walked across to the building.
“Is this what you do all day?” I asked. “You wander around and pester people?”
“I’m not pestering anyone,” he said. “Am I?”
“Hmm.” I had my arms crossed over my chest. At the bottom of the hill I could see the roof of the police station, covered in aerials and antennae, all sixties gray concrete and pebble dash.
“If anything I should be in the editorial meeting,” he said. “But technically it’s my day off, so they won’t miss me.”
“Why are we doing this on your day off?”
He stopped, then, and turned to face me. “I’m starting to wish I’d just dropped you off at the station first thing.”
“So am I!”
We stared at each other.
“Don’t you want to help find Audrey?” he asked.
“It’s not our job to find Audrey!” I exploded. “Why don’t you trust the police to do it?”
“I’m willing to bet they haven’t gotten as far with this as I have,” he said, still perfectly calm.
“They can only work with intelligence received,” I said. “And at the moment I’ve got crucial stuff to tell them, and I’m farting around outside an accountants’ with Nancy Drew.”
I could tell by his expression that he didn’t know who Nancy Drew was. “Or the Hardy Boys, or whatever they were called,” I said lamely.
“You don’t have to come in with me,” he said. “I’ll pick you up later if you want. Just send me a text. Or . . . whatever.”
“Fine,” I said, giving him a backward wave and stomping off down the hill, trying to look purposeful.
The morning meeting was just finishing when I arrived. Trigger and Kate piled back into the office talking and laughing without even registering that I was sitting at my desk. “Did I miss much?” I said, in the end, as much to remind myself that I was alive and breathing as anything else.
“Nah,” said Trigger. “The DI’s got his knickers in a twist because the chief might put in an appearance this afternoon. Clear desk policy and ties on, you know. Welcome back, by the way. Are you—er—all right?”
As if I’d been off with the flu or something.
“Thanks,” I answered. “I’m much better now.”
Kate had gone next door, presumably to round up her friends for a coffee break.
I found the incident log by searching for Lindsay Brown and the address where Sam and I had had tea this morning.
CALLER IS REPORTING THAT HER FRIEND HASN’T COME HOME THIS WEEKEND
*
FRIEND IS AUDREY MADISON AGED 36 DARK BROWN HAIR BLUE EYES F507 TEL CELL NUMBER 07670 212 212
*
AUDREY WENT OUT WITH FRIENDS ON FRIDAY NIGHT AND HASN’T BEEN SEEN SINCE—WORK SA
YS SHE HASN’T SHOWED UP THIS MORNING
*
CELL PHONE IS SWITCHED OFF
*
AUDREY’S BOYFRIEND CORREX EXBOYFRIEND IS VORN BRADSTOCK LIVES IN BRIARSTONE TEL NO 07672 392 913
*
REPORT TO INTEL MAJ CRIME—ADVICE GIVEN TO CALLER
That was it. That was literally it. Nothing further on the report. It didn’t mean nothing was happening, of course, just that the log hadn’t been updated since—I looked at it again—9:15 this morning.
Something else was bothering me, too. Keith Topping said they hadn’t gotten very far with the license plate database because there weren’t cameras in the right places, and the time window was just too big to provide a useful data set. But this window of time was much smaller—and there was an ANPR camera on the main road heading away from the Market Square.
I opened the ANPR software and started filling in a query. The field for the vehicle registration number I left blank. I isolated the cameras to be included down to just one—Baysbury Road, northbound. And the time—what time had Cheryl Dann said good-bye to her?
I pulled out my cell phone and sent a text to Sam.
Ask Cheryl what time she left Audrey and where. Urgent. A.
While I was waiting for a response I put in an experimental time period for the search just to see what came back: 11:00 PM to 12:00 midnight. Just one hour, one camera, and the system reacted as if I were forcing it to do manual labor. The processor on the workstation started whirring alarmingly. I opened up the Police National Computer in another window and performed a search for vehicles linked to Mr. Colin Friedland of Briarstone, giving DI Frost as my authorizing officer.
It seemed he had a Fiesta, blue in color.
A minute and a half after I’d started the ANPR query, it came back with 1,759 hits. I put the registration number of Colin’s Fiesta into the search results box.
No results.
My phone bleeped with a response from Sam.
Midnight, she was walking up Baysbury Rd. Why? S.
I didn’t bother to reply. I felt annoyed that Colin’s car hadn’t been on Baysbury Road that night when I’d fully expected it to be. And yet—there was something else. I felt so close to it, the thrill of being right and the possibility of finding something that might be useful—something that might make a difference.
I went back to the query and changed the time parameters to ten minutes on either side of midnight.
This time the data came back quite quickly: 259 results.
Still a lot, but the likelihood was that if Audrey had gotten into a car after leaving her friend, it would have gone past that camera.
I added a filter to the results for vehicles that had any alerts on them. This was unlikely to bring up anything interesting, after all, but the alternative would be to look through each of the 259 vehicles one by one in the hope of coming up with something. Fifteen alerts. I scrolled through them: No insurance, no registration or inspection certificate. Several were flagged by the main office, so were likely to be linked to known offenders. Some of them probably with a curfew that meant they shouldn’t have been out at that time of night and were therefore most likely up to no good.
Theft of license plate.
I clicked on the crime report number and to access the details. The owner was identified as Mr. Garth Pendlebury, and the theft had taken place in Wright’s Way, the road that ran behind County Hall. Mr. Pendlebury worked at the city council, and had noticed the theft when he returned to his car after finishing work on Thursday evening. No suspects. No other vehicles targeted in the area. The vehicle was identified as a white Volvo V40 Estate.
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 streetlight and for a change you could see quite a lot of the car.
It wasn’t white; it was very definitely dark in color, even allowing for the effects of the streetlight. 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 calling 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 leave 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 there 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 at gas stations, half-full of some liquid, which was already growing a cushion of mold. 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-colored car that might have been a Fiesta driving on the Baysbury Road at seven minutes past midnight, with stolen license plates. 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 the interview as being alarmingly rational.”
“Don’t you think that’s even mor
e 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, left the rest, and 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 e-mail, thinking that I would send e-mails marked urgent to the DCI, the DI, and anyone else, just as a last resort. Two hundred new e-mails. I scanned through them, and, finding four from Frosty, I gave a sudden yelp of delight.
Four e-mails, 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 e-mail—the message just said, “More data for you.” Another six Excel spreadsheets.
The third and fourth e-mails 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.
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