for the Rising Sun Chinese Takeaway, Stafford Road, Briarstone. Another landline, with one outgoing call, turned out to be a number for the Larches Residential Home in Baysbury. There was a mobile number, too – the same number came up in two different billings, with outgoing calls. The fact that the number featured on more than one set of billings was relevant. Whoever owned the phone was a real, live person whom Colin was prepared to speak to. And the latest phone contact was on a Wednesday lunchtime. Whoever they were, they were probably still alive.
I put the number into the internet search first, and drew a blank. Then I put it into the crime database and came up with nothing. Finally, only half paying attention because I’d already decided that this wasn’t going anywhere and I still had twelve sets of billings to look at, I fed the number into the incident database.
There was a match. Incident log 13-0189, dated today. The number looked familiar, and when I clicked on the link I knew instantly why:
AUDREYS BOYFRIEND CORREX EX BOYFRIEND IS VORN BRADSTOCK LIVES IN BRIARSTONE TEL NO 07672 392 913
It was Vaughn’s number. Colin had been so officious about swapping his SIMs, but he couldn’t be bothered to do it all the time. He’d used his phone to call Vaughn.
I started a log for all my searches and queries. It was true I wasn’t on the case any more, but if I was ever going to be asked to justify my behaviour I wanted a record of my thought processes to be able to hand over to someone. I wasn’t doing this out of idle curiosity, or for any sort of personal gain. I was doing it because of Audrey. Despite this justification, my heart was still banging in my chest as I logged on to the telephone enquiry page of the intranet, keeping my fingers crossed. The operation was still in my list of queries – they hadn’t removed my authorisation here, at least! Thank goodness. I went to the list of results and checked that there hadn’t been any more since Frosty had emailed them to me.
Nothing. I’d been hoping for the forensic report on Colin’s phone, the actual handset which would have been seized when he’d been taken into custody, but if they’d ordered a report it wasn’t back yet. Sometimes these took weeks, depending on the backlog of cases and the level of urgency. And, as Colin had been released without charge, the likelihood of this one being a priority was low.
The call data for Colin’s own number, the one he’d provided when they’d booked him in to the Custody Suite, was sparse. On that Wednesday lunchtime, after a brief outgoing call to Vaughn’s number, he’d made a call to an 0845 number which turned out to be a Customer Care line for a supermarket. Then, on Saturday – after Audrey went missing – three incoming calls that were not answered – from the number that I’d noted as belonging to the Larches Residential Home. After each one, an incoming text from Colin’s voicemail server. Each of these contacts registered a cellsite location – the first two calls and texts were shown as #WATER TOWER GRAYSWOOD LANE and the last call and text were #CAPSTAN HILL NR BLACKTHORNS.
I opened up the mapping software. I knew many of the cellsite locations, but these were unfamiliar. Grayswood Lane turned out to be about six miles outside of town, the other side of Baysbury, and Capstan Hill was a long, straight road heading through Baysbury village, where it would eventually form a junction with the main road to Briarstone.
The first two calls were three hours apart – at 11:05 and 14:18. Colin had been there – wherever it was – for a long time. And the last one was two hours later, at 16:33; it looked as if he might have been heading home.
I had a closer look at Grayswood Lane. It really was the middle of nowhere, starting at the junction with Capstan Hill and then winding through farmland for a few miles, ending abruptly with what looked like a track and a few buildings. I zoomed in on the buildings, which the software identified as Grayswood Farm. There were just a few houses dotted along the length of the lane, the aerial images showing the telltale bright blue rectangles of swimming pools. Halfway along the stretch between the farm at one end and Capstan Hill