The Last Straw

by Paul Gitsham

  “And don’t forget the little one,” prompted Mr Turnbull, despite himself.

  “Oh, yes, their youngest is just about to go to secondary school, but he’s been diagnosed with that ADHD and dyslexia. He always was a little bit naughty and I told him off for climbing over the fence and standing in our flower beds once or twice, but I had no idea he had a condition.”

  “Runs in families sometimes, that dyslexia,” interjected Mr Turnbull knowledgeably. “Gets it from his dad, they reckon. I asked him one day, when he was out on the porch reading the newspaper, why his reading glasses were pink. He said apparently the brain deals with colour images differently from black and white and, for some reason, wearing coloured spectacles or using coloured inks and paper can help him read more easily. I didn’t really understand it, to be honest, but he thinks it works. But their little boy has it worse apparently than his dad and they are worried that he won’t get enough help at this new school, so they might have to fund a private tutor.”

  Warren bit his lip. Susan had taught plenty of students with special educational needs over the years and, like most teachers, had strong opinions about dyslexia and other learning disorders. However, this was hardly the time or the place for that debate.

  Nevertheless, it seemed as though Crawley had been, if anything, downplaying his troubles at home, certainly in terms of finances. In fact, it sounded as if the man was in desperate need of some extra cash or the pay-rise that presumably would accompany his change in status to group leader. But was it a big enough motive to kill Tunbridge?

  It looked as though they had got all of the information that the Turnbulls had to offer and Warren started to thank them for their time. As they shook hands with Mr Turnbull his wife looked at Warren indecisively, chewing her lip.

  “Is there something else, Mrs Turnbull?”

  “Well, I’m not sure if I should say anything really.It’s just a hunch, you know.”

  “Well, you never know, Mrs Turnbull. Why don’t you let us be the judge?” Warren tried his most disarming smile.

  “I think that Mark Crawley might have been having an affair.”

  Chapter 31

  Jones and Hastings walked down the Turnbulls’ drive.

  “Well done, Gary, you have good instincts. You kept the conversation flowing nicely with the chatter about Disney World. In interviews like that, you have to remember that they are undergoing a conflict internally. People such as Mrs Turnbull are natural gossips and their first impulse is to help the police, but they are understandably reluctant to get anyone that they know into trouble.

  “The key is to relax them and get them to open up naturally, as if they are just having a conversation.”

  “I see, but why did you choose me, rather than DI Sutton or another DC like Karen Hardwick?”

  Warren smiled. “A couple of reasons. First I’m trying to work with as many different people as possible over the next few weeks, to get to know the team better; Second, I took a gamble and played the odds a bit, using some tricks my first DCI taught me.

  “He said that if you are going into an interview like that and have the opportunity to do some basic research on your interviewees, do it as it might give you some ideas about how to conduct the interview. I looked up the nearest neighbours to Crawley’s house on the electoral register and saw that his next-door neighbours were an elderly couple. I also saw that the area has an active Neighbourhood Watch scheme. It’s a bit of a dodgy stereotype to say the least, but I figured Mrs Turnbull could very well be a curtain twitcher — the local gossip that knows everything — so I decided we should pay a visit.”

  “Well, it might be a dodgy stereotype, but it seemed to work quite well. But that still doesn’t explain me being there.”

  “Well, that’s an even dodgier stereotype, Gary, and I hope you’ll forgive me. Although there wasn’t any information on the web, there’s a good chance that a couple of that age have middle-aged kids. And that those kids may well have had their own kids. It’s not unreasonable to guess that at least some of those grandkids are about your age — mid-twenties.

  “Elderly women in particular tend to be very fond of their grandsons, so there was the possibility that you would remind her a little of him. If she didn’t have a grandson, she might have a granddaughter, and you’d be the perfect sort of young man for any young lady to introduce to her gran.”

  Hastings stood with his mouth open next to Warren’s car. “You brought me along for that? On the off chance that some old lady would take a shine to me and tell us more information? I don’t know how to take that.”

  “Don’t think about it too much,” Warren advised. “It was little more than a stab in the dark and, to be honest, she was such a gossip I could have brought along DI Sutton in a tutu and she’d have still told us everything.”

  Hastings clambered into the car, still shaking his head. He looked over at Warren surreptitiously. Either he’s a genius or a madman, he decided. But which is it?

  * * *

  Mark Crawley pulled into the end of his road. He’d left work early, recognising the early warning signs of a crippling migraine. Hardly surprising, he thought, given all of the events of the last few days. He had a handful of known triggers for his migraine; some were easily avoided, such as alcohol, others less so, such as stress. He was usually a pretty laid-back kind of person — you had to be to work with Alan Tunbridge — but recently his stress levels had been sky-high. It was a miracle he’d lasted this long without an attack. Now all he wanted to do was crawl into bed with the blinds down and take his pain medication. If he was lucky, he’d kill it there and then and be back to himself in a couple of hours. At the worst, he could be bed-ridden for the next thirty-six.

  As he rounded the curve that led toward his house it was all he could do not to slam on the brakes in panic. Coming out of his next-door neighbour’s drive was DCI Warren Jones and another young man that he didn’t recognise. Forcing himself to slow his breathing, he fought the urge to turn the car around. There was only one reason that he could see for Jones to be visiting his neighbour and that was to ask questions about him.

  He saw that Jones was carrying on an animated conversation with the young stranger and was not paying any attention to Crawley’s car. Fighting every instinct in his body, Crawley kept on driving at a steady twenty-five miles per hour, past his driveway, past the Turnbulls’ and past Jones’ Mondeo. Neither man so much as glanced up. Carrying on, he drove to the far end of the road, one eye on the rear-view mirror. To his relief, he saw Jones pull away from the kerb and continue on to the end of the road, without doing a U-turn. Clearly he’d realised that the road was a wide curve, joined at both ends to the same main road.

  Now, with the road clear, Crawley stopped and executed a clumsy three-point turn. Pulling into his driveway a few seconds later, he raced into the house. Much to his surprise, the sudden adrenaline jolt seemed to have scared away the migraine. That happened occasionally and he decided to hold off taking his pain medication. The pills were strong and made him a bit dozy, so he didn’t like to take them unnecessarily.

  Slumping down onto the couch, he thought about what he had just seen. What did it mean? Why were the police investigating him? Was it just routine or did they have another reason? He picked up his mobile phone, checking for any messages. No texts, two emails to his personal account. He opened up his email app and saw that they were both junk mail, one from lastminute.com, another from Tesco. Closing the email, he automatically opened his NewsFeed app and flicked through the BBC headlines. Crawley was an unapologetic newshound and constantly read the news online. He’d not had time all morning and was craving his information fix. He flicked past the usual depressing stories about the economy and suicide bombings in Afghanistan until a local news headline made him stop, his mouth turning dry. He double-tapped the expand icon to bring up the full story. As it came up his stomach contracted painfully. The news article was brief, with few facts, but contained everything that
Crawley needed to know. Guilt washed over him like a tide.

  Feeling sick, he closed the browser and called up the phone’s dialler. The call was answered on the second ring.

  “It’s me — we’ve got a problem. We need to meet.”

  Chapter 32

  Hastings and Jones returned to the station just before one p.m. Jones headed off to his office and Hastings made a beeline for his desk. His stomach was rumbling and he fished in his desk drawer for his sandwiches and banana. Peeling the fruit, he glanced surreptitiously out of the corner of his eye in the direction of Karen Hardwick’s desk.

  The small band of detective constables stationed at Middlesbury were a fairly close-knit group, and they’d all heard about the rookie’s visit to the university with DCI Jones on Saturday morning. One or two of the older constables had been a little jealous that she had been singled out so early in her career, but Hastings was fairly sanguine about it. He knew that she had experience with that sort of environment that others in the department lacked and it seemed sensible to him that Jones should use it.

  Besides which, she is very pretty, he thought to himself. A few casual questions had ascertained that she was single and Hastings had to admit that things had been very quiet on the girlfriend front lately. Of course, if he were to explore that possibility any further, it would mean having to strike up a non-work-related conversation with her and that was where things fell down.

  At the moment, she seemed to be concentrating on her mobile phone. Ignoring the sandwiches in front of her, she was quietly cursing the handset. Finally, she flipped it over and removed the battery.

  With a jolt of excitement, Hastings realised he had been handed the perfect opportunity. Hastings wasn’t an overly religious man, but if this wasn’t a sign from heaven then what was?

  Clearing his throat and discreetly checking his hair and tie were straight, he wound his way over to her desk.

  “Problems with your phone?”

  “Uh–huh.” She barely looked up.

  “It’s a loose connection to the battery. When the phone gets warm it causes the wire to flex, which interrupts the power and the phone reboots itself.”

  Karen looked up in surprise. “How the hell do you know that?”

  Hastings smiled shyly as he produced an identical model handset to Karen’s from his pocket. “I had the same problem myself. What are the symptoms?”

  “It just seems to randomly switch itself off. I’ll be doing something, like browsing the web, reading an email or making a call and suddenly the screen fades and it switches off. It’s completely unpredictable and it’s getting worse. Sometimes I can turn it straight back on again, other times it won’t restart. Last week, it switched itself off at night and so my alarm clock didn’t work. Fortunately, it’s been so muggy the last few weeks, I woke up naturally about half an hour later. I just made it into work on time.” She laughed ruefully. “Much later and I’d have been sitting at my desk in my nightie.”

  Hastings tried not to think about Karen in her nightie.

  He motioned to her dismantled phone. “Do you find that taking the battery out helps it restart?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, sometimes. Hopefully it’ll do that today.”

  “It sounds as if it’s exactly the same problem I had. I guess removing the battery jiggles the loose connection again.”

  “Can I get it fixed? I’m guessing you’ve had yours repaired?”

  “Yeah, you just need to take it back to the shop where you got it. They send it back to the manufacturer. I read on the web that the manufacturer knows all about the fault — there’s a whole batch of them. But you need to back everything up to your computer as they don’t repair it. They just send you a replacement one. You’ll need to copy all of your files and apps over to the new one.”

  “Just great. How long will it take to sort out?”

  “A couple of weeks, I’m afraid, and they use a really rubbish courier company; if you aren’t prepared to wait in all day, you have to go to their depot in bloody Daventry.”

  “I can’t really do without my phone that long.”

  “Well, you could always try and get a courtesy phone, although they wouldn’t give me one. Failing that, if you can live without Internet access, I bought one of those really cheap ones that old people use. They can make calls and send texts and that’s about it.”

  “Oh, lovely,” groused Karen.

  “Hey, don’t knock it. The one I’ve got has extra big buttons for people with cataracts or arthritis.”

  Karen laughed.

  Result! thought Hastings, smiling back.

  * * *

  Karen Hardwick had not been oblivious to Gary Hastings’ interest, but decided that now was not the time to get involved with a co-worker. She stole a quick glance in his direction. He was a good-looking man in his own way, she supposed, with a rather cute smile, especially when he was feeling shy. He was considerably more experienced than her, coming up on three years in CID. Nevertheless, he was actually twelve months younger than her and, worse, looked at least five years her junior — she knew that she would be in for some serious teasing from her best friend Martha if she ever brought him around.

  She blinked, hard, and shook her head slightly. How on earth did she ever find herself thinking about Gary Hastings in that way, cute smile or not? Unfortunately — or perhaps fortunately — her thoughts were interrupted by the chime of an incoming email. All thoughts of Gary Hastings were now forgotten as she opened the incoming message.

  The telephone records for the three unknown callers formed a very small pile in the laser printer’s out tray. One glance at the records, each only two sheets of paper, just like the records of the mysterious young woman who called Severino, confirmed what Karen already suspected — each of the three SIM cards was an anonymous, pre-paid, Pay-As-You-Go SIM card, bought recently and activated for the first time on Saturday July thirtieth.

  As before the records recorded the IMEI number of the handset that it was used in, but again this was unregistered. Karen sighed in frustration. It was obvious that the records were a potential gold-mine, if only they could be linked back to their owners. A cursory look showed that all of the calls made by the three SIM cards, plus the mystery woman’s, were confined to those four numbers, the initial calls to Severino notwithstanding.

  With only a few calls made per SIM card, compiling them into one table using a spreadsheet wasn’t difficult.

  First Karen assigned names to the different numbers, to make the records easier to follow. Since the SIM cards were also used exclusively with a single IMEI number, she also noted the number and the phone model next to the name.

  Anonymous 1 BlackBerry Curve

  Anonymous 2 iPhone

  Anonymous 3 Nokia

  Anonymous 4 BlackBerry

  A Severino Nokia

  Next she listed the calls in order, noting who they were from; who they were to; the duration of the call or if it was a text. She included an extra column next to the labels in the hope that they would eventually identify the owner of each phone. Printing the spreadsheet out, she took it over to Jones’ office.

  Call list

  Warren greeted Karen warmly and spread the sheet out across his desk and motioned for Karen to sit next to him. “This is good work, Karen. Already we can see a few patterns here.”

  He pointed to the first set of texts, all at roughly the same time on Saturday the thirtieth of July. “This quick flurry of texts between four brand-new SIM cards — it looks to me as if they were texting each other their numbers, rather than bothering to type them in.”

  Karen nodded her agreement, before pointing at the sheet herself. “Then the next block, all from Severino’s mystery woman. That’s why I grouped them. If she was working with somebody else to set him up, then one interpretation is that she texted her co-conspirator at nine o’clock on the Friday before the murder to say that she had made contact with Severino. She then texts the following morning to s
ay she successfully lifted his clothes and swipe card.

  “Finally she phones Severino on the Tuesday, to arrange a date with him on the Friday.”

  Warren nodded his agreement. “I think you could be right, if we accept Severino’s version of events.” He moved his finger down the sheet.

  “Friday, the night of the murder. Leaving aside Severino’s repeated, unanswered calls to his mystery woman, almost all of the traffic is between her and this number here, Anonymous 2. There are five calls from Anonymous 2 to this woman between eight p.m. and about nine-thirty p.m., when they switch to texts and she starts contacting Anonymous 2. Nine-thirty is about the earliest time that Tunbridge could have been murdered.” He flicked through another sheet on his desk. “It is also just before Severino’s swipe card was used to enter the building.”

  “Well, we know from the IMEI numbers that it wasn’t Severino’s regular handset making all of those calls, although he could have been using a second handset and an anonymous SIM card to build an alibi,” Karen pointed out, playing devil’s advocate.

  Jones mulled this over. “I suppose we shouldn’t dismiss it out of hand.

  “Looking at the remainder of those calls, the last text between these two is from Anonymous 1 to Anonymous 2 at 22:07. That’s just a couple of minutes before Severino’s swipe card was used to leave the building. There’s nothing then between them until the following morning. In between those calls there were calls between Severino’s woman and Anonymous 3, then between Anonymous 3 and Anonymous 4.”

  Warren drummed his fingers on the desk in irritation. “We really need to put some names to those damn SIM cards. I think we need a few more heads in here.” The numbers were starting to swim in front of his eyes now and a headache was starting to build. He had a possible scenario in mind and he needed people with a fresh perspective to check it for holes.