Human Remains Page 28

  Audrey and a friend are making for the taxi rank stand and the inevitable line.

  I head toward the parking lot where I left the car, and spend a few moments affixing the license plates I unscrewed from Garth’s Volvo in the street behind the office yesterday. Just in case things don’t go according to plan.

  I drive slowly around the corner toward the taxi stand just in time to see Audrey parting company from the blond woman. Audrey isn’t going to wait in line for a taxi. Audrey is going to walk. I feel a little tremor of excitement. Everything is going so well, so perfectly. I could not have planned it better. I take a left turn and park in a side street. The arousal and the thought of what might happen later are making it hard to concentrate, so I stare at the clock in the car and make myself wait exactly five minutes. Then I start the engine again and drive back to the main road. It is still busy, the streetlights illuminating her path. She must feel safe, walking home, with cars and people passing her every few seconds. She does not feel alone. She does not feel threatened, not in the slightest—which is all good. Very good.

  I pull alongside her and open the window on the passenger side.

  “Audrey!”

  She stops walking and looks at me, at the car. Her face registers drunken confusion. She is drunker than I’d thought. This, too, is good.

  “Colin?” She comes over to the car and leans in a little, through the passenger window.

  “You need a lift?” I ask.

  The car is warm and I can feel the freezing air flooding in through the open window. As she bends toward me, her cleavage is on full display. I force myself back to the eye contact, back to the reassuring smile.

  “Oh, that’s kind of you. I’m nearly home, though.”

  “Come on, I’ll drive you the rest of the way. Get in.”

  It’s the confidence, the easy friendliness that does it. The lack of explanation. Don’t beg. Keep it simple. Assume assent. And besides all that, her shoes are hurting her and it’s bitterly cold and what could happen with someone she knows, less than a mile from her front door?

  She smells of wine and the remnants of a citrus perfume and drying sweat, and I inhale her as subtly as I can while trying to keep up a reassuring conversation.

  “So how are things with Vaughn?”

  “We’ve split up,” she says.

  “Really? Oh, I am sorry. He didn’t say anything.”

  “No, he’s in denial.”

  “So what happened?”

  She looks out of the window as we slow for the traffic lights.

  “He’s just—not the right person for me. It’s nothing he’s done wrong. He’s a decent guy.”

  “But it’s time to move on?”

  This time she smiles at me and for a second—just a second—I falter. Is this the right thing to do? I could still choose a different path here. I could drop her off at home, give her my phone number, wish her a pleasant weekend, and ask if she’d like to come out with me sometime. That’s what they do, isn’t it? The sorts of things people say?

  “Yes,” she says. “Time to move on.”

  I put my hand across and touch her knee. Just her knee—no higher—but still she makes a clumsy grab for it and pushes it away.

  “What do you think you’re doing, Colin?” Her voice has lifted an octave. “I know I’m a bit drunk but that doesn’t mean you can start taking advantage, all right?”

  I feel the anger and the bile rise in my esophagus. Audrey, how could you? Ruining everything, so quickly?

  “I wasn’t,” I say coldly. The traffic lights are on red. They shine into the car and make everything inside it red, too.

  She softens then. “All right. Sorry if I overreacted. I’m a bit jumpy at the moment. It’s the next turn on the left—just up there at the top of the hill.”

  I look across to her, inhaling her scent again. It’s the turning point, right here, right now. I could drop her off at home still, no harm done. No risk. Or I could take her now and move my life forward down this journey. And her attitude, the defiance in her eyes, makes me want her more than ever. She would put up a fight, no doubt about it. But taking the fight out of her would be so much better, so much more of a kick than watching people die who have no fight in them at all.

  She stares back at me, drunk but challenging, almost daring me to try it.

  The lights change to green and I ease the car up the hill.

  Annabel

  I woke up early on Sunday, got dressed in my work clothes, and went downstairs. Irene was in the kitchen cooking a fried breakfast. The cat, who’d settled in far more readily than I would ever have expected, wound herself around my legs affectionately.

  “Don’t mind her. She’s been fed,” Irene said when I came in. “Scrambled egg and bacon?”

  It smelled good, but I wasn’t hungry. However, experience had taught me already that Irene had trouble hearing the word “no” and so it was easier just to give in. “Thanks. Maybe just a little bit?”

  There was tea in the pot on the table and I poured a mugful and tasted it. It was black, stewed, but it would do me.

  They’d let me out of hospital on the understanding that I had someone to keep an eye on me, and Sam had taken it upon himself to be that person. It had only been supposed to be for a few days, but then we’d gone back to my house to get some clothes and my spare key was missing. I kept it on the bookcase and it was definitely not there. After that I hadn’t really felt like going back home, even after we’d had the locks changed at vast expense. As things stood, it looked as if I was going to be staying with the Everetts for a while.

  “You were late getting back on Friday night,” she said. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “I was at work,” I said.

  “Till that late? Are you sure that’s a good idea, Annabel?”

  “I was fine. I needed to get some things finished. That’s all. And they’re giving me some overtime so I’m going to go in this morning as well.”

  Irene made a noise that might have been disapproval. “Better get a good breakfast inside you, then,” she said, and loaded my plate with eggs and bacon. The cat started kneading my socked feet, keeping her claws tactfully retracted. She was purring wetly and probably dribbling on me, too. I reached down under the table and she nestled her head in my cupped hand.

  “Where’s Sam?” I asked. At that moment the back door opened and Sam came in, wiping his running shoes on the mat and breathing hard. “I didn’t know you ran,” I said.

  “First one . . . for ages . . . really hard,” he said. “Any tea in there?”

  I poured him a cup and he sat opposite me at the kitchen table. Irene shoveled food onto his plate, too, and he added a squirt of ketchup to it.

  “Sort of defeats the object,” he said, around a mouthful of food. “Going for a run and then stuffing my face afterward.”

  “I guess so.”

  The cat had transferred her affections smoothly to Sam, tiptoeing around his legs, her tail twisted into a flirtatious question mark. He paused to slip her a covert morsel of bacon when Irene had turned back to the sink.

  “I think that cat’s forgotten we used to live together,” I said.

  “Don’t be silly,” Sam said. “She’s happy because she knows you’re OK here, that you feel safe and you’re getting better. That’s all.”

  She’s happy as long as someone gives her bacon and a scratch around the ear, I thought. But who could blame her for being annoyed with me? I’d ignored her for days. She must have felt completely abandoned. It was a wonder she’d stayed around at all.

  “So where are you off to?”

  Nice as it was to have somewhere to stay, with kind people who cared about where I was and what time I got in, cooked me meals and made me drink tea, I was starting to feel like a teenager.

  “Just work,” I said, eating some bacon to try to bypass the need for conversation.

  “Oh?” Sam’s posture had gone from slouched to alert in a second, scentin
g a story above the salty tang of breakfast with ketchup. “You’re going to work on a Sunday?”

  I took a deep breath in. How could I make this sound less exciting? “Not really. Just overtime. Updating some spreadsheets. Catching up with things. As I’ll be going back in a bit.”

  “If they’re giving you overtime, something’s definitely going on. I know for a fact that they have no money for overtime at all. What’s happened? Is it the investigation? Have they found another one?”

  “Sam,” Irene said. “Stop pestering her. Annabel, tell him to mind his own business if he’s bothering you.”

  “He’s a journalist,” I said. “My business is his business. Unfortunately.”

  “I’ll drive you in,” he said. “And you can call me when you’re done. I’m going into town anyway.”

  “I might be ages,” I said, not wanting the responsibility of him sitting waiting for me. “I can drive myself.”

  But he was quick finishing his breakfast and by the time I’d collected my bag and coat he had showered and was downstairs, fully dressed, his dark hair slicked back from his face. He looked so eager and excited that I gave in and followed him out to his car.

  To my surprise, the office was not empty, as it had been on Friday night. Three of the desks were occupied and Paul Moscrop was in his glass cubicle in the corner. All of them were talking on the phone and another phone was ringing on one of the other desks. I thought briefly about answering it but decided not to. I slipped into my chair and turned on the workstation. A further surprise. The billing results for the phones I’d identified were back, forwarded from the DCI who had been sent them by Keith Topping.

  Paul came out of his office as I was opening up the attachments. “Ah! Annabel,” he said. “Really good to see you. Have you seen the results?”

  “Just looking at them now, sir,” I said.

  “You can drop the ‘sir,’ ” he said. “It’s Paul. All right?”

  “Right. Thanks.”

  “We did subscriber checks, too, but they’re all prepay and unregistered. No surprise there. But the phone statements are very interesting.”

  I waited for him to tell me all about it, wondering if he’d done all the analysis before I’d got here.

  He had a wry grin on his face. “Have a look, and then come and tell me what you think,” he said.

  I worked through the attachments one by one, and he was right: the results were interesting. Each set of the phone bills was the mirror image of those we’d obtained from the victims’ phones. In other words, the offender was only using one SIM card per victim, and not contacting any other numbers. After each victim died, presumably he’d discarded the SIM and moved on to another. The phone numbers were not sequential, suggesting he bought them at different times and locations rather than as a bulk lot. And because the call traffic was so low, it was unlikely that the account had been topped up with credit before it was discarded—he was just using the free credit that came with the SIM—and that was probably more than enough for his purposes.

  The cell tower data for all the phones showed locations around the town center of Briarstone—not from a residential area. Unless he lived right in the town center, he was only using the phone when he was in town.

  He was methodical. And clever, too. But then I saw it, and took in a sharp breath that made me cough. Surely—surely he couldn’t have missed something so obvious?

  I got up on legs that were surprisingly shaky and went to Paul’s office. He’d left the door open and this time the wry grin was a great big beaming smile. “Got it?”

  “I can’t believe he could be so clever and so careless at the same time,” I said. “He’s swapping the SIMs over, but he’s only used one handset.”

  “It’s not a case of being careless,” he said, “to be fair to the poor bastard. People don’t use cheap phones these days. They use smartphones, iPhones, BlackBerrys. They’re not as disposable, or rather they’re too expensive and people don’t want to throw them away. They think disposing of the SIM card when you’re done with it makes you untraceable, but of course we know better.”

  “So have you applied for data for his other numbers? The other SIMs he’s used in that phone?”

  “First thing this morning. We’re waiting for the results, but in the meantime we got a subscriber check done on his one and only handset.”

  “And?” I was holding my breath.

  “The phone comes back to a Mr. Colin Friedland. Address in Briarstone.”

  “He registered the phone?”

  “He’s had an account with the service provider for five years. Clearly a fine upstanding citizen, Mr. Friedland. I like him already.”

  If he’d registered the phone, he was either stupid, or completely innocent, or truly believed he had nothing to hide. Or maybe when he’d registered it he hadn’t intended his current activities. Maybe it was a recent thing. I wondered if he even realized that having an account with the service provider meant that all his efforts in swapping the SIMs were pointless.

  The DCI rubbed his hands together. “I think we deserve a cup of tea, don’t you? I’ll make it. What are you having?”

  He didn’t make it, of course. There was no milk. He took me up to the cafeteria that was usually busy, but which on a Sunday was home only to a few members of the patrol team enjoying their bacon sandwiches before heading back out into the town center. We got coffees from the machine and sat with them in a slightly awkward silence.

  “I can’t help thinking about Eileen Forbes,” he said.

  “Eileen? Why?”

  “It was just a matter of hours; that’s all. If we’d taken it seriously—if we’d been a bit quicker with the trace . . . I wonder if we could have saved her.”

  I shook my head. “I doubt it,” I said. “I think she must have passed that point a long time earlier. And he obviously had some kind of control over her mind from the moment she met him. You couldn’t have changed that.”

  “We saved you,” he said.

  I didn’t answer. I thought of Sam, wondered if that was what he thought, too.

  “How’s it been, at home?” he asked eventually.

  “Fine,” I said, not wishing to embark on a lengthy explanation of how I’d ended up living with a reporter from the Chronicle I’d only met for the first time a few weeks ago. And his parents. And my cat.

  I could see him fishing around for another question to ask me, holding them up to the light for scrutiny and discarding them—boyfriend? No, too personal. Family coping? She might start crying. Children, pets? Ditto.

  “Rain seems to be holding off,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said, with obvious relief. “Shame to be stuck in here, really.”

  His phone rang then, loud enough to make me jump.

  “They’ve got him,” Paul said, when he ended the call. “He’s on his way in now.”

  Until that moment I’d felt nothing other than the excitement of being involved in a job at the arrest phase, something I’d never done before. But now, there was something else—relief? The feeling that it was over, that I was waking up from a long sleep and that my life could begin again.

  We took our coffees with us back up to the MIR.

  After that, the phones rang constantly. Now that the case was unraveling senior officers were calling Paul with offers of help, trying to find ways in which they could nab some of the credit for a job that was potentially going to be high profile. There was a lot to be gained from it. Every time Paul put the phone down again we had a bit of a laugh about how nobody had been particularly interested and now suddenly our job was the most important thing going on in Briarstone. I didn’t mention that I’d been working on the case for a while before anyone had shown any interest at all—including him.

  “So what happens now?” I asked.

  “He’ll be put in a cell while we get a search team inside his house with the stop clock ticking down. Keith and Simon will be doing the initial interview. When they get bac
k up here we’ll have a meeting to talk about the interview strategy.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Yes,” he said. “You can go home.”

  “What?”

  “Annabel. You’ve been absolutely pivotal to this whole investigation. You know that. But you’re also a victim. You shouldn’t really have come back in here after you were off. That’s Frosty’s fault, really. He didn’t know what to do with all those phone statements and he told Kate and she decided to mention it to you.”

  “I’m glad she told me. Really.” I felt choked, suddenly, as though I was being dumped.

  “We couldn’t have done this without you,” he said gently. “But we need to separate you from the investigation now, or else having you on the team could threaten any prosecution. If we get past the prosecutor’s office, you’re going to be a key witness. Do you see what I’m getting at?”

  He was right. I knew he was right. But it still felt like being punched in the gut. Well done, Annabel, thank you for solving the whole bloody case for us, now go on back to the civilian’s office where you belong.

  “You’re not going to be able to tell me anything about the interviews? What he says?”

  He shook his head. “I’m so sorry. This has to be it. You can see that, can’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said. I felt tears starting and I pushed myself up from my chair before he could see them. “Thanks, though. And good luck.”

  He started to say something else but I couldn’t wait. I logged myself out of the system while I was putting on my coat. By the time I’d done that he was on the phone again and I could give him a happy little wave through the glass partition, then down to the hall to the restroom, where the sobs began.

  Colin

  When the knock at the door came, I was half inclined not to open it. On a Sunday? It was likely to be some sort of religious nut or, worse, someone trying to get me to change my energy company. I framed my face into a polite but assertive smile, ready to get rid of whoever it was quickly.