The Last Straw (30 page)

“It just seems to randomly switch itself off. I’ll be doing something, like browsing the web, reading an email or making a call and suddenly the screen fades and it switches off. It’s completely unpredictable and it’s getting worse. Sometimes I can turn it straight back on again, other times it won’t restart. Last week, it switched itself off at night and so my alarm clock didn’t work. Fortunately, it’s been so muggy the last few weeks, I woke up naturally about half an hour later. I just made it into work on time.” She laughed ruefully. “Much later and I’d have been sitting at my desk in my nightie.”

Hastings tried not to think about Karen in her nightie.

He motioned to her dismantled phone. “Do you find that taking the battery out helps it restart?”

She nodded. “Yeah, sometimes. Hopefully it’ll do that today.”

“It sounds as if it’s exactly the same problem I had. I guess removing the battery jiggles the loose connection again.”

“Can I get it fixed? I’m guessing you’ve had yours repaired?”

“Yeah, you just need to take it back to the shop where you got it. They send it back to the manufacturer. I read on the web that the manufacturer knows all about the fault — there’s a whole batch of them. But you need to back everything up to your computer as they don’t repair it. They just send you a replacement one. You’ll need to copy all of your files and apps over to the new one.”

“Just great. How long will it take to sort out?”

“A couple of weeks, I’m afraid, and they use a really rubbish courier company; if you aren’t prepared to wait in all day, you have to go to their depot in bloody Daventry.”

“I can’t really do without my phone that long.”

“Well, you could always try and get a courtesy phone, although they wouldn’t give me one. Failing that, if you can live without Internet access, I bought one of those really cheap ones that old people use. They can make calls and send texts and that’s about it.”

“Oh, lovely,” groused Karen.

“Hey, don’t knock it. The one I’ve got has extra big buttons for people with cataracts or arthritis.”

Karen laughed.

Result! thought Hastings, smiling back.

* * *

Karen Hardwick had not been oblivious to Gary Hastings’ interest, but decided that now was not the time to get involved with a co-worker. She stole a quick glance in his direction. He was a good-looking man in his own way, she supposed, with a rather cute smile, especially when he was feeling shy. He was considerably more experienced than her, coming up on three years in CID. Nevertheless, he was actually twelve months younger than her and, worse, looked at least five years her junior — she knew that she would be in for some serious teasing from her best friend Martha if she ever brought him around.

She blinked, hard, and shook her head slightly. How on earth did she ever find herself thinking about Gary Hastings in that way, cute smile or not? Unfortunately — or perhaps fortunately — her thoughts were interrupted by the chime of an incoming email. All thoughts of Gary Hastings were now forgotten as she opened the incoming message.

The telephone records for the three unknown callers formed a very small pile in the laser printer’s out tray. One glance at the records, each only two sheets of paper, just like the records of the mysterious young woman who called Severino, confirmed what Karen already suspected — each of the three SIM cards was an anonymous, pre-paid, Pay-As-You-Go SIM card, bought recently and activated for the first time on Saturday July thirtieth.

As before the records recorded the IMEI number of the handset that it was used in, but again this was unregistered. Karen sighed in frustration. It was obvious that the records were a potential gold-mine, if only they could be linked back to their owners. A cursory look showed that all of the calls made by the three SIM cards, plus the mystery woman’s, were confined to those four numbers, the initial calls to Severino notwithstanding.

With only a few calls made per SIM card, compiling them into one table using a spreadsheet wasn’t difficult.

First Karen assigned names to the different numbers, to make the records easier to follow. Since the SIM cards were also used exclusively with a single IMEI number, she also noted the number and the phone model next to the name.

Next she listed the calls in order, noting who they were from; who they were to; the duration of the call or if it was a text. She included an extra column next to the labels in the hope that they would eventually identify the owner of each phone. Printing the spreadsheet out, she took it over to Jones’ office.

Call list

Warren greeted Karen warmly and spread the sheet out across his desk and motioned for Karen to sit next to him. “This is good work, Karen. Already we can see a few patterns here.”

He pointed to the first set of texts, all at roughly the same time on Saturday the thirtieth of July. “This quick flurry of texts between four brand-new SIM cards — it looks to me as if they were texting each other their numbers, rather than bothering to type them in.”

Karen nodded her agreement, before pointing at the sheet herself. “Then the next block, all from Severino’s mystery woman. That’s why I grouped them. If she was working with somebody else to set him up, then one interpretation is that she texted her co-conspirator at nine o’clock on the Friday before the murder to say that she had made contact with Severino. She then texts the following morning to say she successfully lifted his clothes and swipe card.

“Finally she phones Severino on the Tuesday, to arrange a date with him on the Friday.”

Warren nodded his agreement. “I think you could be right, if we accept Severino’s version of events.” He moved his finger down the sheet.

“Friday, the night of the murder. Leaving aside Severino’s repeated, unanswered calls to his mystery woman, almost all of the traffic is between her and this number here, Anonymous 2. There are five calls from Anonymous 2 to this woman between eight p.m. and about nine-thirty p.m., when they switch to texts and she starts contacting Anonymous 2. Nine-thirty is about the earliest time that Tunbridge could have been murdered.” He flicked through another sheet on his desk. “It is also just before Severino’s swipe card was used to enter the building.”

“Well, we know from the IMEI numbers that it wasn’t Severino’s regular handset making all of those calls, although he could have been using a second handset and an anonymous SIM card to build an alibi,” Karen pointed out, playing devil’s advocate.

Jones mulled this over. “I suppose we shouldn’t dismiss it out of hand.

“Looking at the remainder of those calls, the last text between these two is from Anonymous 1 to Anonymous 2 at 22:07. That’s just a couple of minutes before Severino’s swipe card was used to leave the building. There’s nothing then between them until the following morning. In between those calls there were calls between Severino’s woman and Anonymous 3, then between Anonymous 3 and Anonymous 4.”

Warren drummed his fingers on the desk in irritation. “We really need to put some names to those damn SIM cards. I think we need a few more heads in here.” The numbers were starting to swim in front of his eyes now and a headache was starting to build. He had a possible scenario in mind and he needed people with a fresh perspective to check it for holes.

Getting up, he stretched his back.

“Karen, can you go round up Tony Sutton and Gary Hastings and ask them to meet us in the briefing room in five minutes?”

Nodding her assent, Karen also stood up, but before she could take a step towards the door it burst open. It was Sutton again. One look at his face and Warren’s heart sank; he could tell it wasn’t good news.

“You’d better come and see this, guv. Severino’s mum is live on the BBC.”

Chapter 33

Sutton’s announcement sent a surge of adrenaline through Jones. “Shit,” he groaned as he leapt to his feet, following Sutton into the main briefing room. Projected on the far wall was the familiar backdrop of The Mount Prison. A local BBC anchorman holding a microphone was gesturing silently towards the prison’s main building. A scrolling ticker across the bottom announced that a prisoner on remand had attempted suicide early that morning. The next banner read ‘Prisoner’s mother blasts lax security’. The camera panned away from the anchor to reveal an uncomfortable-looking Daniel Stock standing next to a middle-aged woman of Mediterranean appearance. Beside them stood a dark-skinned man in a black suit. The woman, Mrs Severino presumably, was talking forcefully into the microphone.

“Some sound would be good!” called out Sutton.

“Sorry, leads aren’t connected. There we go.” A sudden blast of Italian came from the speakers as the stressed-looking DC fiddling with the laptop finally plugged the jack into the correct socket. They must be streaming live off the BBC’s website, Warren realised.

The woman stopped speaking and the man in the black suit took over, speaking in heavily accented English. Her translator, Warren realised.

“Mrs Severino demands that there is a full enquiry into how her son, who strenuously denies all of the allegations against him, was able to attempt to kill himself when he should have been on suicide watch.”

Another blast of Italian. “We would also want to take this opportunity to demand that the police continue to investigate the crime that Antonio Severino has been wrongly charged with. Her son has clearly been framed for this murder. Evidence found at his house is little more than circumstantial. Her son has given the police a description of a woman that he believes—” At this point Daniel Stock stepped forward, cutting off the translator mid-flow.

“About bloody time he did something,” snapped Sutton, angrily.

“Um, obviously this is the subject of an ongoing investigation and it would be unwise for us to comment any further,” the young solicitor stammered.

“Too bloody late,” said Warren quietly. “I don’t speak Italian, but it seemed pretty obvious to me that Mum said everything she wanted to.” He ran his hand through his hair. “Christ, what a mess. The press are going to be all over this one.” He shook his head in dismay. “I can’t believe the BBC gave her air time. How damned irresponsible of them.”

“Uhm, guv, I don’t think they had much choice.” The young DC who’d been setting up the laptop looked up from another computer. Warren stepped over.

“They were just keeping up with the Joneses…er, so to speak.” The constable flicked quickly through a half-dozen tabs on the computer’s web browser. Warren groaned inwardly as the front page of every major news outlet proclaimed the same breaking news, with varying degrees of breathlessness. The page that caused the coldest chill to run down his back was that of the most popular tabloid.

‘Tomorrow — Exclusive. Free my innocent son before he kills himself for real!’

Below a picture of Mrs Severino, a bulleted list promised to reveal:

‘The woman who set my son up’

‘Anger and hatred in top scientist’s lab leads to brutal murder’

‘How under-pressure police grabbed the nearest suspect’.

Warren rubbed his eyes with his thumb and his forefinger, hoping to ward off the burning sensation in his temples threatening to become a full-blown headache. “If anyone can think of a way that this day could get any worse, please don’t hesitate to tell me.”

As if on cue, Superintendent Grayson’s voice rang out across the room. “DCI Jones. In my office, please.”

Be careful what you wish for, thought Warren ruefully.

* * *

“Damn it, Warren, this is the last thing we need.” Superintendent John Grayson slumped back in his chair, massaging his eyes in the same manner that Warren had been doing moments before. Warren wondered if it would be any more successful for his boss than it had been for him.

“I agree, sir. This is an ongoing investigation. These details should not be released to the press, for fear of prejudicing the case.”

“Yes, quite, that as well. In the meantime, the suggestion that a killer is still running around Middlesbury on the eve of that huge conference could be disastrous. And the suggestion on top of it all that we arrested the wrong man means that this department will be a laughing stock. This needs sorting out and quickly, Warren.”

Well, there it was, Warren thought. It was quite clear that the biggest concern that Grayson had was political. Warren doubted he had even thought as far ahead as to what effect the threatened revelations could have on the court case.

“Where the hell did this all come from, Warren?”

“As far as I can tell, it all seems to be coming from Severino’s camp, sir.” He went on to outline to Grayson his visit to The Mount Prison and his subsequent investigations into the mysterious young woman that had visited Severino the week before the murder.

Grayson tapped his pen against his teeth thoughtfully, before shaking his head. “I don’t know, Warren, it all seems pretty tentative. Compared to the evidence that we have against Severino, this is pretty circumstantial.”