I See You (21 page)

‘So you’re an old friend of the DCI’s, I hear?’

‘Not a friend, no. He was my DI on the Sexual Offences Unit.’

‘He
thinks very highly of you. I understand you got a commendation.’

Nick Rampello had done his homework. The chief constable’s commendation had followed several months of painstaking work tracking down a man indecently exposing himself to schoolchildren. Kelly had taken scores of witness statements, working closely with the Intelligence unit to eliminate known sex offenders and other undesirables on the police radar. Eventually, Kelly had successfully bid to use decoys – a team of undercover surveillance officers deployed to high-risk areas to pose as potential victims – and caught the offender red-handed. She was flattered that Diggers had remembered, and touched that he had smoothed the waters with Nick by singing her praises. The feeling was short-lived.

‘The DCI wants you working with someone else at all times.’ Nothing about his delivery suggested that Nick knew the reason behind Diggers’ condition of Kelly’s secondment, but she wasn’t naive enough to think the two men hadn’t discussed it. She felt her cheeks grow hot and hoped it wasn’t obvious to Nick, and to Lucinda, who was listening with interest. ‘So you can work with me.’

‘With you?’ Kelly had assumed she’d be paired with a DC. Was it Diggers who had decided the DI would need to keep an eye on her, or Nick himself? Was she really that much of a liability?

‘You might as well learn from the best.’ Nick winked at her.

‘Cocky bastard,’ Lucinda said. Nick shrugged in an
I can’t help it if I’m brilliant
way, and Kelly couldn’t help but smile. Lucinda was right, he was cocky, but at least he could laugh at himself.

‘Have you sponsored me, Luce?’ Nick said, and Kelly realised – not without some relief – that their conversation was over.

‘I gave it to you weeks ago!’

‘That was for the Great North Run. This is for the Great
South Run.’ He looked at Lucinda, whose arms were crossed tightly across her chest. ‘Think of the children, Lucinda. Those little orphaned children …’

‘Oh fine! Put me down for a fiver.’

‘Per mile?’ Nick grinned. Lucinda gave him a stern look. ‘Cheers. Right, I need an update. On the face of it there’s nothing to link Tania Beckett and Cathy Tanning apart from the adverts, but I want to know if we’re missing something.’

‘Put the kettle on and break open that secret stash of Hobnobs, and I’ll fill you in at briefing.’

‘What secret stash?’ Nick began, but Lucinda gave him a withering stare.

‘I’m an analyst, Inspector,’ she raised an eyebrow as she stressed his rank, ‘you can’t hide anything from me.’ She returned to her desk, and Kelly risked a smile.

‘If you point me in the direction of the kitchen, I’ll make the tea.’

Nick Rampello looked at her appraisingly. ‘You’ll go far. Out in the lobby, second door on the right.’

By the end of Kelly’s first day she was intimately acquainted with the kettle. Between rounds of tea-and-coffee-making she had read through the case papers and at 5 p.m. she headed to the incident room with Nick and Lucinda, and a smattering of people to whom she had been introduced and whose names she had instantly forgotten. Several free chairs littered the briefing room, but most people were standing, their restlessness a not-particularly subtle message that they had more important things to be getting on with. Nick Rampello was having none of it.

‘Grab a pew and settle in,’ he instructed. ‘I won’t keep you long, but we’re dealing with a complex investigation and I want us all on the same page.’ He looked around the room, waiting until all eyes were on him, before continuing. ‘It’s Tuesday twenty-fourth November and this is a briefing for Operation
FURNISS, an investigation into the murder of Tania Beckett, and into related crimes committed against women, namely theft of keys and a suspected burglary of a woman called Cathy Tanning. The link between these crimes relates to adverts placed in the
London Gazette
featuring the women’s photographs.’ Nick looked for Lucinda. ‘Over to you.’

Lucinda moved to the front of the room. ‘I was tasked with looking at murders from the last four weeks, but I’ve also done some work around sexual assaults, harassments and burglaries where the victims were lone females. For the purposes of this exercise I discounted domestics, but even so, there are quite a few.’ As she was speaking, she inserted a USB drive into the laptop at the front of the room; the connected projector ready and waiting. The first slide showed thumbnail images Kelly recognised as the women from the
London Gazette
adverts; the results taken from the file Tamir Barron had reluctantly given to Kelly on her visit to their offices. Lucinda clicked through the next four slides, another dizzying mosaic of thumbnails. ‘These women have all been victims of relevant crime during the last month. You’ll see I grouped them according to physical characteristics. Skin colour, then hair colour, then subcategories according to their approximate age. Obviously it’s not an exact science, but it made the next bit slightly easier.’

‘Pairing them up with the adverts?’ The guess came from somewhere behind Kelly.

‘Precisely. I’ve identified four matches, digging deeper into the case files to cross-reference the advert image against other victim photos.’ Lucinda moved the PowerPoint on, briskly summarising each slide in turn. ‘Charlotte Harris. A twenty-six-year-old legal secretary from Luton who works in Moorgate. Attempted sexual assault by an unidentified Asian man.’ To the left of the slide was a photo labelled with the victim’s name; to the right, the corresponding
London Gazette
advert.

‘Snap,’ Nick said grimly.

‘Emma
Davies. Thirty-four-year-old female, sexually assaulted in West Kensington.’

Kelly let out a slow breath.

‘Laura Keen. Twenty-one. Murdered in Turnham Green last week.’

‘That one’s already on our radar,’ Nick interrupted. ‘West MIT flagged it as a possible link to Tania Beckett because of her age.’

‘Not just possible,’ Lucinda said. ‘I’d pin it as a dead cert, if you’ll excuse the pun. Right, last one.’ She flicked to the next slide, which showed a dark-haired woman in her forties. As with the other women, her photo had been laid out next to a copy of her advert in the
Gazette.
‘This is an odd one. Ongoing complaints from a Mrs Alexandra Chatham near Hampstead Heath, that someone is breaking into her house when she’s asleep and moving things around. It’s sitting with the Safer Neighbourhood Team at the moment, but there’s been a bit of a question mark over it from the start. Apparently the attending officer wasn’t convinced anything had ever happened, even though Mrs Chatham is adamant someone is coming into her house.’

Lucinda surveyed her board. ‘Then, of course, we have Cathy Tanning – another victim of a possible midnight prowler – and Tania Beckett, our murder victim. Six. So far. I’m still working on it.’

There was silence in the briefing room, as Nick allowed the significance of Lucinda’s update to sink in, then he pointed to Lucinda’s closing slide, on which the six confirmed cases were listed next to their relevant advert. ‘In total, eighty-four adverts have run so far, which means there are seventy-eight women yet to identify, who may or may not have been victims of crime. Copies of these adverts are here,’ Nick indicated a second whiteboard, ‘as well as in your briefing pack.’ There was a shuffling of paper, as everyone immediately began looking through the
stapled document they’d been handed on arrival, while Lucinda continued to talk.

‘I’m still working on matching the adverts that have run with crimes against women carried out in our force area, and I’m also in touch with Surrey, Thames Valley, Herts, Essex and Kent, in case there’s anything cross-border that might fit. I’ve found a couple of possibles, but I’d like to wait till I’m certain before muddying the waters with those, if that’s all right, boss?’

‘That’s fine.’

‘You asked me to do some work on the similarities between the victims, and between the crimes committed. I haven’t got a lot for you, I’m afraid. At first glance the crimes are very different, but when you strip out the obvious – the offence itself, the primary MO – the common thread is public transport: all these women were on their way to, or from, work.’

Nick nodded. ‘I want all their journeys mapped. Let’s see if there’s any crossover.’

‘Already on it, boss.’

‘What do we know about the offender?’

‘Offenders,’
Lucinda said, stressing the plural. ‘Charlotte Harris describes a tall Asian man with a distinctive aftershave. She didn’t see his face, but he was smartly dressed, in a pinstripe suit and grey overcoat. Emma Davies, who was sexually assaulted in West Ken, described her assailant as white and significantly overweight. We’ve got very little on the Turnham Green job, but one of the CCTV images shows a tall white man in the vicinity immediately prior to Laura Keen’s murder.’

‘Cathy Tanning’s keys were taken by an Asian man,’ Kelly said. ‘The CCTV doesn’t show his face, but his hands are clearly visible.’

‘Six crimes,’ Nick said, ‘and potentially six different offenders. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that the adverts are a key part of this investigation; our focus will therefore be on identifying who is placing them.’ He moved to stand at the front
of the room, and Lucinda clicked on to the next slide, which showed an enlarged version of Zoe Walker’s advert.

‘The adverts have been running since the beginning of October. They appear in the classifieds, on the second to last page, and all in the bottom right-hand corner. None of the photos have been professionally taken.’

‘Zoe Walker rang me yesterday,’ Kelly said. ‘Turns out her photo was taken from Facebook – she sent me the uncropped version. It’s a picture of her and her daughter, Katie, taken at a wedding a few years ago.’

‘I’ll check out Tanning’s and Beckett’s Facebook pages again,’ Lucinda said, pre-empting Nick. ‘There are similarities between all of the photos, in that none of the women are looking directly at the camera.’
As though they didn’t know they were being photographed
, Kelly thought.

Nick carried on: ‘Every advert carries this web address.’ He pointed to the top of the screen, where www.findtheone.com was written.

‘A dating agency?’ The woman next to Kelly had been taking copious notes in a spiral-bound notebook. She looked at Nick, her pen poised. A detective on the other side of the room was looking at his phone, glancing up at the screen to double-check the URL.

‘Possibly. None of the victims recognise the name. Cathy Tanning was a member of Elite for a while, and we’re in touch with them to see if their systems have been compromised. Tania Beckett’s fiancé unsurprisingly insists she’s never been near a dating site, and Zoe Walker says the same. As some of you have no doubt already discovered, the web address takes you to an empty page, black except for a box asking for a password. Cyber Crime have taken on this aspect of the investigation and I’ll keep you updated on their findings. Okay, I’m conscious of time. Let’s move on.’

‘The phone number,’ Lucinda said. She turned to the
whiteboard behind her and underlined a number, written in large red letters: 0809 4 733 968. ‘No trace on our intel systems, and an invalid number, which makes its inclusion on the advert – unless it’s an error – rather pointless.’

Nothing was pointless. That number was there for a reason. Kelly stared at the enlarged
London Gazette
advert on the screen behind Lucinda. There was a line of text beneath the photo.

The website, yes, but then what? What was the password?

Nick had moved to stand next to Lucinda, issuing actions and impressing upon the team the importance of keeping him updated. Kelly stared at the adverts, wondering what they were missing.

‘At this stage of the investigation we’ve got lots of information coming in, with no clear understanding of how it’s linked,’ Nick was saying. ‘Whoever put these adverts in the
Gazette
is either announcing their intention to commit a crime, or facilitating the commission of crimes by other offenders.’

Kelly was only half listening, her mind twisting itself into knots. What was the point of an advert without a call to action? Why send potential customers to a website without giving them the means of accessing the site?

She sat up, jolted by a sudden thought. What if the phone number wasn’t a phone number at all, but a password?

She made sure her phone was switched to ‘silent’, opened Safari and typed in the domain name.

The cursor blinked at her. She typed
0809 4 733 968
into the white box and pressed enter.

Kelly suppressed a sigh. She’d been so certain the phone number was the key. Just as she closed down Safari a text message flashed on to the screen.

The abbreviated words and the combinations of letters with numbers would have told her the text was from Lexi, even without seeing her sister’s name. Kelly didn’t know anyone else who still wrote texts as though it were the nineties. She imagined her sister frowning over the tiny screen, patiently holding down each key on her ancient Nokia to cycle through the letters.

0809 4 733 968

A thought began to take shape, and she brought up the keypad on her phone. She looked at the number four; at the letters beneath it.

G. H. I.

Reaching one-handed for her notebook, she flipped it open randomly, flicking the lid off her pen and writing down the letters without taking her eyes off her phone.

There were four letters beneath number seven: P, Q, R, S. Kelly wrote them all down.

Up next, two number threes: the letters D, E and F.