“The girls all said Anthony was wearing a large-checked blue and black shirt and black jeans. The hair looks right too. Could be him. I’m cleaning up the cropped image now.” I’d seen incredible results from his software’s deconvolution features before, and I knew he could tweak the lighting a little, so that was really promising. “Can you fill out the DDE forms for Nick’s phone and laptop for me before you get caught up in anything else?”
He wasn’t exactly bouncing with impatience, but Shay just wasn’t used to being held back by red tape, and he didn’t like it. Neither did I, truth be told. If we were working like we usually did, he’d have already pulled everything off Nick’s phone by now. I pulled a couple of the blank forms he’d printed off yesterday out of the tray and got cracking.
Twenty-Two
Shay
Most of the missed calls on Nicholas Albert’s phone were from Conall and his team. Chloe had had two goes in between her chats to Caitlin earlier, and a few of his friends had left voicemails and messages too. Most importantly, the first of those unanswered calls had happened at eight thirty-seven last Thursday night. Nick had finished work at six-thirty that day. Maybe he’d driven straight home after that, or maybe he hadn’t. Either way, just over two hours later, he’d stopped answering his phone. There had been no outgoing calls or messages during that window.
That he’d left his phone behind, and turned on, might mean that Nick wanted anyone trying to locate him to believe he was still at home, or it might mean he’d simply forgotten it and decided that going back to get it wasn’t a good idea or hadn’t been able to.
I sent everything through a chronological sorter so I could see all the data I wanted at a glance and started off my analysis with the Friday that Visser had been murdered. As Julie had claimed, Nick had called her a little before nine. Ten minutes before he’d made that call, he’d received one himself. I set a filter to show me all communications with that incoming number. He’d first received a call from it on March twenty-eighth, but he hadn’t added it to his contacts list, so there was no name attached. Since then, he’d received three more, one the following Wednesday, and two more on the night that Visser had been killed. The Tuesday after the murder, he’d tried to call it another five times without getting through. The odds seemed good it belonged to ‘Anthony’. Nick had tried again on Wednesday and also sent a text, ‘Please call me when you get this.’
Alright, I’d need to run a search on that number. Even if it turned out to be out of commission now, the metadata in the phone company’s records could be very helpful. Rather than jump through a lot of time-wasting bureaucratic hoops to get that, I hacked into their database for the umpteenth time while I thought things through. Let’s say Anthony had deliberately targeted Visser, and that Nick had no idea that was happening. When he’d found out that Visser had died that night, he’d tried to reach his ‘friend’, the man last seen driving off with our victim. He must have begun to suspect, eventually, that Anthony had ditched the phone. You’d think, at that point, that Nick would have contacted the police. Maybe he would have if he hadn’t been given good reason to distrust them.
Chloe Albert had had an unpleasant experience four years ago. An opportunistic asshole had taken her advantage of. Maybe, if the man had been sober, he wouldn’t have done it. Who knew how out of it he’d been that night or what he could even remember himself the next morning? The condition that Chloe had been in, he might even have coaxed some semi-conscious agreement out of her before he’d actually done anything. I wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he’d managed to convince himself that he’d done nothing wrong.
Going to the police with her story had been a mistake, although Chloe couldn’t have known that at the time. Big brother Nick had probably insisted, in his ignorance of the way things worked. I wasn’t even particularly shocked by the way she’d been questioned by the officers who’d first spoken with her. At least the SOLO officer had done her job properly once she’d finally been called in.
Getting attacked out of the blue when walking home was one thing. You had a good chance of building a prosecutable case out of incidents like those if you could find the culprits. But cases like Chloe’s were nearly always hopeless, especially if there were no signs of physical violence to be found. It was just another sad truth that you had to be realistic about. Running campaigns encouraging people to report that sort of thing didn’t change the facts. Like any other crime, to get a conviction on a rape charge, you needed to be able to build a solid case.
What had then happened to Nicholas was inexcusable. It was pure, vindictive harassment, initiated by a group of officers who’d objected to him complaining about their pals. I’d read the reports of the times he’d been pulled over, suspiciously ‘erratic’ driving leading to breath tests and searches of his car etc. etc. All negative. On one occasion, the excuse had been a broken brake light. Nick had sworn it had been fine earlier that day and asked the officers to drive back to where he’d been parked to look for evidence of deliberate vandalism. They’d declined, issued him with a vehicle defect rectification notice, and let him go.
The two arrests that had landed him a night in the cells each time had both been farcical. The first time, he’d luckily had witnesses on hand prepared to testify that he hadn’t been involved in the altercation the police had been called out to. There had been absolutely no reason for him to be arrested. Two men had been fighting outside The Waterfront, and two more had been trying to separate them. Nicholas and his friends had witnessed some of it but had not been involved. That was all there was to it.
The second time, he’d been pulled in on suspicion of housebreaking, on the grounds that he vaguely matched the description of someone seen leaving the scene. They’d left Nick waiting in a holding cell for nearly five hours before actually getting around to questioning him and ‘discovering’ that he couldn’t possibly be the culprit after all. He’d sought legal advice after that, and it looked as if someone here, probably Munro’s predecessor, had taken the threat of a harassment suit seriously enough to put their foot down. I could just imagine it. ‘Alright, boys, you’ve had your fun, but enough’s enough. Any more and there really will be a stink - and that could mean dismissals, understood?’ The idiot probably hadn’t even had a clue what was going on until then.
A flashing tab announced that my cropped headshot had finished rendering, and I pulled it up eagerly. It was still a bit dark but definitely clear enough for biometric scanning to work. Messing with the lighting any further would probably lose me necessary detailing. Con had gone back out into the main office to check on his team’s progress with their calls, so I started searches for a match in the PND, PNC and DVLA, and passport offices and got Nick’s laptop out of its bag and booting up.
So alright, I could see why Nick might not feel any urge to contact the police here. What did he actually have to tell them, anyway? ‘I was with the man who died that night. He drank too much, and a friend drove him home. Would you like the driver’s contact number? He might be able to tell you what happened after that.’ Not very likely! What might they try to pin on him if he did that?
Plus, Nick wasn’t unintelligent. He’d been doing pretty well at college before he’d dropped out to come home after his parents’ fatal accident. Maybe, once he’d realised that Anthony wasn’t ever going to answer that phone, he’d thought again about how quickly Visser had seemed to lose consciousness at the girls’ house that night. The papers had said the death was being treated as accidental, but Nick must have known that could change, depending on what the post-mortem examination might reveal. Surely he’d become a little bit uneasy.
Had Anthony orchestrated the death somehow? Could Nick be implicated if the police wanted to do so? And, if Anthony was a killer, did he now see Nick himself as a ‘loose end’ that might need to be tidied up? After all, who else had known anything about the guy?
Yeah, disappearing for a while, until he knew for sure that nothing else was going to
come of Visser’s death, had probably seemed like a really good idea. What did Nick have to lose? A job he’d only had for a few months and probably had no intention of sticking with for long, anyway? There was no law against taking a spur-of-the-moment holiday.
That was certainly one possibility. I didn’t like the other ones that had occurred to me:
1). Nick had known that Anthony meant Kaj Visser harm and had conspired with him.
2). He really had been seen as a loose end that needed dealing with.
I didn’t think the conspiracy idea was particularly likely. Surely, if Nick had been acting at all oddly that night, at least one of the girls would have noticed it, and I really didn’t think they’d been hiding anything during their interviews. Not from what I’d seen and heard, anyway.
Conall shook his head as he came back in. No luck with any of the phone calls then. Either Nick hadn’t run off to any of his likeliest options, or they weren’t willing to admit that he had.
“No activity on his debit or credit cards since Thursday,” I told him as he sat down. “I suppose he could have kept a good bit of ready money in the house, though.” There was no way of telling if he had or not. He could be one of those people who always kept a fair amount at hand. Looking through months of banking records wouldn’t tell me that. It was easy to unobtrusively pile up quite a stash of cash by pulling a bit more than you needed on a regular basis.
Conall just shrugged at that inconclusive bit of news. “Alright. I just let missing persons know that we’ve drawn a blank with his close friends and relatives. None of the local taxis picked him up on Thursday either.”
“He could have walked to a bus stop. Or been picked up by someone who isn’t telling or hasn’t been contacted yet. Are they sending someone out to talk to neighbours?”
“Yeah, and check around the immediate area too, just in case. Have you got more numbers for me?”
“I’ll send his contacts list and recent call history over now. Anthony’s photo cleaned up alright too. I’ll let you know when I get a hit from it.”
“Great. Any idea which number was probably his yet?”
“I’ve highlighted it for you. I should have the metadata on that soon.” We’d have to put an official request through to the phone’s service provider if there was anything in there Conall needed for his report, but that could take ages. In the meantime, knowing the locations that calls had been made from could prove useful.
“What about Nick’s laptop?” Conall asked as he looked through the call history.
“It’s already booted up. I’ll start on it when I’ve finished with the phone. I still need to check which apps Nick accessed recently and the browsing history and stuff.”
I left Conall to send the contact list on and write out another of his endless report updates. There wasn’t a lot to find on Nick’s phone. He hadn’t used it to book any travel tickets or accommodation anywhere, and his recent phone browsing consisted of nothing but video streaming and visits to news and social media sites. He had a couple of games on there that he played frequently, but apart from that, there was nothing else lately. He hadn’t added Anthony’s number to any of his other contact lists either.
The laptop browser history was equally disappointing. If Nick had made any travel plans, he’d kept them in his head and planned to book his tickets in person. Unless, of course, he’d used a different device that I didn’t know about to do that. I checked his PayPal account just in case. No recent spending there either. Plus, there was the fact that his sister had claimed that it didn’t look like he’d packed for a long trip. The picture I was getting was of someone who’d planned to do no more than nip out quickly and be back very soon afterwards. He’d got home from work, set his phone charging, probably showered and changed to get the fish stink off him and then what? Gone for a walk? Nipped to the Lidl we’d passed earlier? Answered a knock at the door?
From what I’d read about preventative treatments for haemophilia, it was likely that Nick needed an injection every two or three days. I mean, he even had a Port-A-Cath implanted in his chest. They didn’t surgically fit those to patients who didn’t need to inject constantly. When had he had his last dose of Advate?
“How about some lunch?” Conall offered once he’d caught up with his paperwork.
“I don’t want to interrupt any of these searches just now.”
“Ordering in works for me. Or I could just send someone to the co-op. I’ll go and see what the others want to do.” He dug his little coffee maker out. “Fancy a tea?”
“No, I’m good, thanks. I’ll have one with lunch.” One of my open tabs was flashing for attention.
I clicked the new window up as Conall let himself out. The metadata on Anthony’s phone was in. I made sure I cleaned up after myself properly before disconnecting from the service provider’s database. Leaving traces behind only encouraged companies to jack up their security, and that just slowed things down the next time you wanted in. It didn’t matter how keen I was to look through the data. It wasn’t worth rushing things over. After that, all I needed to do was create a read at a glance, user-friendly text file with all the scripting stripped away for Con’s benefit, and I already had a little package designed to do exactly that. It would only take a minute or two.
We were about to find out where and when Anthony had been lately, and there was even a chance that finding him might help us find Nicholas too.
Twenty-Three
“Looks like our man Anthony was busily playing quite the tourist when he got up here,” I said as I studied Shay’s marked-up map while I chewed on my sandwich. “He visited what? Seven castles?”
“And the Whaligoe Steps, Dunnet Head and the Hill O’ Many Stanes too. Do you think he’s a bit of a history enthusiast or was just pretending to be, as a cover? It’s not a bad way to scout out isolated locations without drawing attention.” We were having a brief lunch break while we waited for more results to come in. “Did you know Robert Stevenson built the lighthouse at Dunnet Head?”
“What do you think? You know what da’s like about all the old engineering rock stars.” Stevenson had built the justly famous Bell Rock lighthouse much earlier on in his career, as well as inventing the intermittent and flashing lights that gave each lighthouse its own unique signature, a great aid to mariners seeking to get their bearings at night.
Bell Rock had been one of the most impressively difficult constructions of its time and was now the oldest standing, sea-washed working lighthouse in the world. Like many others, it was no longer manned. Modern technology allowed for it to be operated remotely from the comfort of Edinburgh these days. The lighthouse stood eleven miles out at sea off the coast of Angus on a submerged sandstone reef that was only visible above the water for four hours each day. Just imagine the ingenuity, tenacity and sheer grit needed to build anything in a place like that back at the beginning of the nineteenth century! A lot of ships had come to grief on Inchcape reef before the Bell Rock lighthouse had been constructed. Astonishingly, the masonry work it rested on hadn’t needed any major repairs in over two hundred years. I couldn’t imagine any of those new wind turbines out in the Moray Firth lasting so well, and I seriously doubted they were expected to.
Starting with Robert, three generations of Stevenson engineers had built a total of eighty-two lighthouses between them, never mind their bridges and other projects. Their combined body of work had saved thousands of lives and prevented countless further shipwrecks along our treacherous coasts. One grandson, Robert Louis, must have been a real disappointment to the family. He’d abandoned his engineering studies at Edinburgh University and never built any lighthouses of his own. Perhaps he’d been too distracted by thinking up plots for his novels and stories to concentrate on the mathematics required.
“Funny, isn’t it?” my cousin said, temporarily side-tracked by my mention of da’s lifelong enthusiasm. “How the English are always so quick to claim all the Scottish greats as examples of ‘British
genius’.”
“Their own achievements would start to look a bit thin if they didn’t. Let’s face it, Scotland has produced way more than its fair share of innovators and inventors, especially when you consider how small a population it’s always had compared to England.”
Shay popped another handful of almonds into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully before swallowing them down with a mouthful of tea. “You wouldn’t think so, with all the derogatory press the Scots get down there these days. Never mind the fact that Scotland has given the world the minds that came up with macadamised roads, the pneumatic tyre, tubular steel, the hot blast oven, the telephone, the television, criminal fingerprinting, penicillin… I could keep that list going for bloody ages.”
He started on his second banana as he studied the markers on his map. “Too many big gaps to figure out where Anthony was staying. I think he deliberately kept this phone turned off most of the time. All these hits are in different places, probably away from wherever he’d decided to base himself.”
The phone had only been first activated on March the twenty-second. Definitely a burner. Apart from Nicholas Albert, Anthony had only used it to contact two other numbers, and those would probably turn out to belong to burners too. I finished off my last sandwich and wiped my hands on a paper napkin. Shay wordlessly pushed his tub of nuts my way so we could both pick at them while we stared at his tabs, silently willing them to start flashing.
We got our hit from the DVLA fifteen minutes later. Anthony Edward Tait, thirty-one years old. If his licence details were up to date, he lived near Perth.
“He owns an Ink Blue 2015 Nissan Qashqai,” Shay told me after checking for vehicles registered to our man.
“Sounds like that might be the car Julie saw if he drove his own up here. Send me the licence photo and the plate number, will you?”
Castle Killings: A DCI Keane Scottish Crime Thriller (Deadly Highlands Book 4) Page 19
