earlier – 18.31, 18.30, 18.27, 18.30… and then, one isolated outgoing call, the night before she was found – a local landline. It must be the call that Sam had received. Momentarily distracted, I put the number into the search facility on the database. That was right – it came back as being the newsdesk at the Briarstone Chronicle.
I looked at the billing for the phone found at the last address – the one for Edward Langton. And again, the same pattern. Incoming calls only, this time they were all around six o’clock. Sometimes a minute or two earlier, sometimes later, but always around six. There was something about the timings that bothered me. I frowned and scratched around in my head for what it was, but it wouldn’t come. Maybe it was the regularity of it, the boldness, the sense that this was something that was being organised, planned. I went back to the spreadsheets, and the phones found at Robin Downley’s address, and, finally, Shelley Burton’s. Each set of billings showed the same defined pattern – regular, incoming calls at the same time each evening – then two unanswered calls – and then no further contacts. It was difficult to believe that they were not linked – but in each case the mobile number which was making the calls was different.
I used the internal address book to find Andy Frost’s mobile number, reached for the phone and dialled it. The phone rang once and then went to voicemail. I tried to think about it rationally but the excitement of how easy it might be to unravel the case kept me fidgeting on my chair.
The sensible thing to do would be to document everything, finish recording the summary of the data on my spreadsheet, and then complete a report with recommendations for them all to peruse on Monday.
I stared at the screen, then back to the phone, then I rang his voicemail back and this time I left a message. ‘Hello, it’s Annabel. I’m in the office. Can you give me a ring urgently, please?’
I looked at the black windows and listened to the unusual silence that I hadn’t been aware of until that moment: no tannoy, no rattling of coffee cups in the kitchen, no laughter and chatter, no phones ringing. It was as though I was the only one left in the whole building. That wasn’t the case, I knew – custody would be just warming up for its busiest period of the week, Friday night, and night duty staff would be coming in and changing over with the late-turn ones down in the patrol office. But up here… the MIR was asleep.
I started typing up the report and before many minutes had passed I was engrossed in it, so focused that I didn’t even hear the door opening behind me.
‘Hello,’ said a voice. ‘What are you doing here so late?’
It was DCI Paul Moscrop, but I had been so absorbed in the spreadsheets that for a moment I couldn’t think of his name. ‘I just wanted to get this finished, sir,’ I said.
‘I didn’t know you were back, Annabel. How have you been?’
He was leaning against the door, tie loosened, sleeves rolled up. The Friday afternoon look, except it was Friday evening and he should have been at home by now.
‘Alright,’ I said. ‘Thanks for asking. I just wanted to get back to being busy, I think.’
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Well, it’s good to see you.’ He gave me a warm smile and turned to go. ‘Don’t stay too late, will you?’
‘Sir,’ I said, ‘can you hold on a minute?’
He turned in the doorway and, although he smiled and said ‘Sure!’ again, his posture said he’d had enough and wanted to go home. But dutifully he leaned over and looked at my spreadsheet. I explained that the similarities between the billings for Rachelle Hudson’s phone and the other five linked them – and that the rest seemed unlikely to be part of the group of victims.
‘Unless there was another phone that they were using, which either wasn’t found, or was removed before the bodies were discovered,’ I said. ‘But, even so, their call patterns varied and some of them were receiving calls from more than one number – friends and family, I suppose – until a few weeks before they were found. So I think we can rule them out.’
Paul Moscrop pointed at something on the screen. ‘What’s that?’