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 interview as being alarmingly rational.’
‘Don’t you think that’s even more 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 and left the rest, 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 email, thinking that I would send emails marked urgent to the DCI, the DI and anyone else, just as a last resort. Two hundred new emails. I scanned through them, and, finding four from Frosty, I gave a sudden yelp of delight.
Four emails, 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 email – the message just said ‘More data for you’. Another six Excel spreadsheets.
The third and fourth emails 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.
I matched up the phone records with the existing ones – so now I had the rest of Colin’s call records, for all his other SIM cards.
And very quickly I spotted what I’d hoped to find.
As well as the outgoing calls from Colin’s SIMs to the phones the police had found with the bodies, there were other numbers, with the same calling pattern, going back to the earliest date of the billings. More people out there, then, that we hadn’t found. I started jotting them down. How many were out there still? I made another note to apply for earlier data, too. He’d been doing this a long time.
And then I noticed something else – the outgoing calls to the victims weren’t the only calls he made. There was a landline that featured on three sets of the billings, and when I put it into an internet search it revealed itself to be the number