I made my way up to the Incident Room and did not see anyone on the way, but when I opened the door there were three people in the office – all of them on the phone. I vaguely remembered being introduced to them all on that first day, but none of the names came back to me. I sat down at the desk Frosty had given me and logged on at the workstation. Once the system had granted me access, I opened my email and saw that there were four hundred and twenty-seven new messages. That wasn’t bad going. I sorted the emails by sender and concentrated on the ones from Frosty. There were five with the subject headings ‘Billings’, ‘More billings’, ‘Billings for 872 number’, ‘Billings for 481’ and ‘Sorry last lot I promise’.
I sighed with something that might have been pleasure. I’d worked on phone data before; other people might see it as endless lists of numbers, endless spreadsheets with no apparent meaning, but I loved it. It was the knowledge that somewhere, buried deep in tens of thousands of numbers, dates, times and durations, there was a pattern: useful information hidden inside, waiting for me to find it.
I opened the first email. There were several spreadsheets attached to them, identified by mobile phone numbers. The message read:
Annabel
Don’t know when you’ll get a chance to work on these but if you can sort them out for us it would be great. These are the billings for the phones found at the properties so far. We’re still waiting on the others. Rachelle’s looks interesting. As you know, we never found the mobile phone that she took with her when she left her parents’ house. This one was a basic PAYG. The phone downloads have been authorised and we’re waiting for those too.
Andy
I started up a new spreadsheet to record all the information, listing the victims’ names, phone number, the date range of all the billings and the phone type. Most of the columns were blank but with a bit of luck I’d be able to fill them in as I went along. I opened all the emails and added the details from the remaining spreadsheets. There were billings for the phones found at all the most recent addresses, as well as a name that gave me a jolt – Shelley Burton.
After an hour or so everyone in the office had left and it was dark outside. It made it easier to concentrate and it wasn’t long before the pattern crystallised and began to make more sense.
There were some major differences between the billings of the victims. Judith Bingham, Noel Gardiner, someone I hadn’t heard of called George Armstrong who’d been discovered while I was away, some of the others – they all had phone billings that looked normal – they made and received several calls over a prolonged period of time. There were texts, missed calls and voicemails.
As soon as I looked at the others, though, the difference was sudden and acute. Rachelle Hudson’s billing was the first. It only had incoming calls, from one number. The calls started about two months before she was found and were regular – one call every evening, lasting a couple of minutes only. No texts. The last three lines of data showed unanswered calls on consecutive evenings towards the end of March. Rachelle had been found on April 21st.
I ran a search on the databases for the number that had called Rachelle’s mobile, but it was unknown.
I went back to the billings for Judith, Noel and George and searched for the unknown number in their calls, but it did not feature in any of them. I looked for a different number that showed a similar calling pattern, regular incoming calls each evening, but there was nothing like that. I was beginning to feel more certain that these three were not part of the series.
After that I looked at the billings for the two victims found immediately after the phone call that had been made to Sam, and the next discovery after them, someone called Edward Langton, and each showed exactly the same pattern as Rachelle’s billing – incoming calls only. One each evening, short in duration. For each set, the calls were made at slightly different times. Dana’s phone was called at 18.46, 18.42, 18.44… around a quarter to seven each night. The last two calls went unanswered, and then stopped. That was in August.