The door behind him opened. Looking up at Waters, he guessed that it must DI Reeve. She came to his desk, looked down and said, ‘Oh – haven’t seen one of these for a while.’
Smith gave only a low ‘Mm’ of agreement.
‘John and Serena?’
‘Gone back to The Towers to see if they can fill in this morning’s blanks. Chris is doing his lines.’
Waters looked up from his keyboard.
‘This is taking a while. I hope it’s worth it.’
‘What is?’
Smith said, ‘Serial numbers from the new notes that Lucy Bell had. We’d no grounds for taking them, so he photographed them but I wanted them in sequence.’
‘Nice. I assume you explained why.’
‘No, I just told him to do it. Blind obedience is an important part of police training.’
Reeve ignored him and went over to Waters.
‘Banks don’t keep a record of the individual notes they give out but central banks, where new money goes first, do keep records of where batches of notes go, to which branches. We can trace these with those numbers and find out when and to which branch they were sent.’
Waters looked at the screen again.
‘Even so – busy branches must have hundreds of customers a day.’
‘Yes,’ said Smith, unable to resist, ‘but these days they also have CCTV. If the branch can tell us the time frame in which those notes hit the counter, you can spend hours studying the footage to see if there’s a face we recognize. I don’t mean ‘you’ in the generic sense – I mean you personally.’
‘What if it went out through a cash machine?’
‘Still on CCTV – you should know that from Wilson’s case last year. It just means you get to study a wider range of dodgy customers.’
‘A long shot, though.’
Reeve smiled at Smith.
‘But sometimes, Chris, they hit the mark. The Yorkshire Ripper?’
Waters shook his head.
Smith said, ‘They caught him by a fluke in the end, and when you’ve put hundreds, thousands of hours into a case, that’s a sickener. But the best piece of work in that case was tracing a banknote he’d used. This was before all your computers and gizmos – just a very clever, very methodical middle-ranking CID man. They narrowed it down to the factory where he worked and I always think they’d have got him that way, in the end.’
Waters shrugged and resumed typing.
‘Talking of banks, ma’am?’
‘Sorry, Sergeant Smith, that’s one of the reasons I came down.’
Smith thought, I’d hate to have a boss that didn’t do irony.
‘They’ll send the statements directly to me in the morning. They were closed for training this afternoon.’
‘I expect they’re getting ready to launch the new payment protection schemes. I might be wrong but I’ve a feeling that this particular transaction isn’t going to show up in James Bell’s official balance sheet. ’
‘And I have more good news.’
Somewhere about her person she had been concealing the blue Samsung phone, still in its evidence bag. She placed it on his desk, exactly on the piece of scrap paper that named it.
‘Evidence refused to release it without Superintendent Allen’s authorization. When I went to see him, to explain, I said that this phone had accidentally come into the possession of one of our officers. At that point he interrupted me, and said…?’
Smith thought hard for a moment.
‘Did he say, I didn’t know they did that model in such a fetching shade of blue?’
‘No. He said “Smith?”’
‘I hope that you defended my honour, ma’am.’
‘No, again. But we can take a look at it.’
The three of them stared at the phone.
Smith said, ‘We ought to print it, if only so we can eliminate Waters from the investigation.’
Reeve agreed.
‘Yes, we will. Chris, do the honours but through the bag, please.’
Waters came over to Smith’s desk, picked up the Samsung and turned in on.
‘Battery’s almost fully charged. Contacts.’
His thumb flicked across the screen a couple of times and then he nodded.
‘It’s his phone alright. Numbers for Dad, East Denes, Lucy, Marinor – not loads of contacts but it’s him.’
‘Last call?’
Smith was looking at the pieces of paper on his desk now. When no reply came, he looked up at Waters, and found him frowning.
‘‘Recents’ is empty.’
He pressed other buttons and swiped other digits across the screen for thirty seconds before coming to the same conclusion.
‘There’s no call history.’
‘Which means?’
‘It’s been wiped, deleted.’
‘Or? There’s always an ‘or’.’
Waters thought for a moment.
‘Or it’s never been used.’
‘When we were faffing about with Ralph Greenwood’s laptop, you told me that even if a memory was wiped, it left traces until the space was written over again. Is the same true here?’
‘Yes – it’s just the same.’
Smith turned to Reeve.
‘Is someone going to Norwich tomorrow? Silly question I know – someone goes to Norwich every day. Can we find out who it is or they are, and get them to drop this off at one of the labs? I assume there’s a special lab for phones now. If not, we’ll send it by special delivery which could destroy the quarterly budget. And we need to do the prints here before it goes, just in case someone over there accidentally handles it.’
Waters looked as if he had not yet got over the surprise of a phone with no call history. He switched it off and put it back onto the table. Smith found the scrap of paper that represented the phone and wrote a brief note on it. Then he put it slowly and quite carefully back into its original space.
‘Contacts. I put them into my phone manually. It takes me ages. I make mistakes, press the wrong button, start all over again, get landlines in mobile slots and all sorts. But that’s how everyone does it, yes?’
Waters said, ‘If you’re putting in a single new contact, yes.’
Smith made the impatient circling finger gesture that meant, yes, there’s obviously more – get on with it.
‘But if you are setting up a new phone or transferring contacts from another phone, you’d do it via your laptop or PC or pad – load them all on in one go.’
Smith thought about it.
‘So, at that point you could, say, add in new ones or delete some existing ones that you no longer wanted on your list – then just put the new list into the new phone?’
‘Easily. It’s just a couple of minutes’ work.’
Reeve said, ‘What are you thinking, DC?’
‘I’m thinking that I’d better go home and have a lie down before this gets any more nonsensical. What would he be doing with a phone that’s got his contacts on but no call history? And it’s a phone that seems to have been a secret from his wife. A phone that has either had its call history deleted or which has never been used. A phone which he did not take with him on his stroll around Elizabeth when most people these days need to have them surgically removed if separation is necessary.’
DI Reeve said, ‘Before you do go home, I need to see you,’ and then she picked up the Samsung and left the room – which meant that he had to follow her up to her own office on the floor above at some point in the next hour or so. He had a sinking feeling that it was not about the disappearance of Jimmy Bell that she wanted to speak to him.
‘Superintendent Allen has asked me to make it clear to you that failing to attend the Officer Fitness Assessment for a third time will be viewed as a disciplinary offence.’
Smith sat opposite her and said nothing, bewildered by the sheer number of sardonic possibilities on offer.
‘And for some reason that quite escapes me, Superintendent Allen did not seem to be
in an entirely bad mood when he told me this.’
She had not offered to make a mug of tea, which was usually an ominous sign. As for the charge with which he was being confronted, on the second occasion he really had been in no position to attend, for sound operational reasons – he had been in the middle of the North Sea all day. The first assessment, a month earlier, had clashed with a dentist’s appointment, and it was conceivable that he could have moved that but decent dentists that don’t charge an arm and a leg are hard to find these days. Good oral hygiene was surely as important a part of an officer’s all-round fitness as the ability to run up and down the gym ten times.
‘So is there some reason that you are not getting this out of the way? Is there something that you aren’t telling me, DC?’
‘I think that by not going to this, I am telling someone something.’
‘And what is that?’
‘That this is yet another waste of police time. Has my ‘operational fitness’ ever been in question?’
‘Not as far as I know.’
‘Nor is that of most officers. Is the general public complaining that there are too many obese officers? No. Has the uniform budget gone through the roof because we’re three sizes bigger than we used to be? No. It’s just more bureaucratic bollocks, pardon my French. From people who’ve never caught a criminal in their lives or who did so so long ago that Jack the Ripper isn’t yet a cold case. It’s rubbish. Ma’am.’
‘Nevertheless, DC-’
‘And does it apply to all ranks? Are we going to see the CC and the ACCs doing the beep test? I’d actually pay money to watch that but we won’t, will we?’
‘Don’t shoot the messenger, please.’
He had known that this would not go away, of course. The reminders were still in his pigeon-hole, had not been immediately shredded like most of the nonsense. He had studied the list of activities that had to be undertaken and he knew that most of the officers in the station had already completed them – they were now deemed able to pursue the country’s super-fit criminal masterminds for another year.
‘If you don’t have a problem with it, DC – I mean an actual physical problem – just turn up and do it next week. You’ve made your point. Don’t give people the ammunition they need to have a go at you.’
He raised his eyebrows and sighed. Perfectly sensible advice – but as a clever man had once said to him, ‘if’ is the biggest little word in the world.
‘Thanks for getting things moving this afternoon. Especially the SOCO at short notice.’
‘Sally was secretly relieved – she gets to miss one of the reorganisation meetings.’
‘Ah, reorganizing central services again. It hasn’t been done for a couple of months. All being outsourced to Manila, I hear. But Sally’s a good hand. I’m sure she’ll be prepared to pop over for a couple of mornings a month.’
At last the kettle was being filled from the jug.
Reeve said, ‘Seriously, where are you with this Bell thing? It looks more and more wrong to me.’
‘It is but it won’t be straightforward. Lots of bitty things to do yet.’
‘Get me involved. I’ve got meetings of my own to miss, if I can.’
‘I’ve decided to speak to his father up in Newcastle. Probably just a phone call but you can take that on for starters. Detective Inspector sounds more impressive on the phone.’
‘Give me the number, I can do it tonight. Anything else? Do we need more people? I can borrow a couple of Wilson’s…’
The very thought! But he considered it seriously before he answered.
‘Not yet, but we might at some point.’
‘Do you want this black as a part of your get-fit campaign?’
The spoonful of powdered milk hovered over the mug of tea. There was little to choose between the horrors of dehydrated cow juice and the bitterness of unadulterated cheap tea bags; in the end he went for the additive and watched as it dissolved itself with difficulty into the dark liquid.
He said, ‘Let’s see what Sally comes up with tomorrow morning. Maybe a meeting at about two tomorrow with everyone in the room. We might have a new set of priorities by then.’
‘OK, I’ll be there.’
She opened a desk drawer and took out a packet of biscuits.
‘Jammie Dodger?’
Smith raised an eyebrow.
‘Does this have to get personal again?’
When he left Reeve’s office, he took the back stairs, went down the first flight, stopped on the landing and looked around. There was no-one in sight. He turned and ran up the stairs two at a time, then back down and up again. He could feel his heart pumping but that wasn’t the point of the exercise. He had not imagined it – his knee was better running upstairs than it was on the level, which made little sense. Perhaps he could ask to do his Operational Fitness Assessment here instead of the gym, and make sure that if he had to run after any villains in the future, he would do so going uphill. He could be a specialist officer – vertical pursuits.
A few days before, on the secluded part of the lawn at home, he had found the same thing; sharp pains as soon as he pushed off, sharper on the turns, followed by some hours of aching that could be bad enough to keep him awake, and then stiffness for a day or two afterwards. Physical pain had never bothered him much – he used to think that his mind and matter were so disproportionately arranged that it was easy for the former to overcome the latter – but now a new situation had arisen. The pain was enough to stop him running, and that was enough to make him fail the fitness test. At his age, they might not countenance the operation and the recovery time once such a failure had occurred. Superintendent Allen would nod sympathetically as he handed over the retirement papers and then punch the air in silent joy after Smith had closed that office door for the final time. The fact was that he might have just weeks left as a serving police officer.
John Murray and Serena Butler had returned. She had found every one of the missing residents on her side of the fifth floor but the one missed on Murray and Waters’ side remained unaccounted for. When Smith asked, Murray said, ‘Hospital – the neighbour told me.’
‘A dead loss, then.’
‘She went in on the Monday – she was there over the weekend.’
‘Going to follow it up?’ knowing full well what the answer would be.
‘Yes. I’ve got the ward, so, in the morning…’
Smith turned to Waters.
‘Anything from the people on the Tuesday helicopter?’
‘I’ve had a few replies now but no-one is confirming that they saw him. To be fair, a couple have pointed out that they wouldn’t really know if they had as they’d never met him.’
‘Even so, somebody must have noticed him. Eighteen passengers? It’s about what you’d get in a large minibus.’
Waters said, ‘I think it is just a bus to work for them. How many people would remember who was on the bus this morning, let alone a week ago?’
Smith considered it.
‘Make sure you get a reply from every one of them. Then, if anyone show has shown an interest – or even signs of intelligence such as capital letters and full stops in their answers – we might go and show them his picture.’
He studied the pieces of paper on the desk again, and the others stood, waiting for anything he might say. It was almost six o’clock.
‘We’ve got a SOCO going in at nine tomorrow morning. This might be upsetting for Mrs Bell – Serena, we’ll do that one. We’ll meet there at 8.30. John, DI Reeve should get some bank statements first thing, can you make a start on that? Chris, sort that flight list and tidy up everything we asked for from Marinor. Also, we need someone to speak to from their personnel department. Have a look at the laptop if you get all that sorted but get it printed first. Lots to do. If it looks like too much for us, we’ve been told we can get help from over there,’ pointing across to the other side of the room which was empty.
They didn’t look too excited by t
he idea either. Then he told them that it was time to go home.
Chapter Nine
Smith was twenty minutes early. He parked so that he would be able to see the car from the walkways of Tower Two, and then sat and watched the usual lack of activity. After five minutes or so he checked his phone but there were no messages, and his private email’s inbox was still empty. Then he thought about the conversation he had had with Charlie Hills on his way out of the station last night.
Mrs Bijarani had departed, measurements taken and her recommendations already on their way to the Station Safety and Security Steering Group. Soon the public entrance to Kings Lake would be redesigned. Charlie and his officers would sit behind a one-way screen, able to see who was in need of their services without being seen themselves. Visitors would press a button and speak into a microphone, stating their business. As long as they were not selling double-glazing or carrying a Kalashnikov, Charlie would then press a button that opened a door into a new reception area where he would then face them across a counter just as he did now. The risk of duty officers being assaulted or killed in the line of duty would have been reduced by a factor of eight.
Smith had been duly impressed but had to ask Charlie when was the last time that an officer had been killed on the reception desk. Charlie scratched his head and said that it must be so long ago that he couldn’t remember. Smith said he could not quite understand how zero could be reduced by a factor of eight but then, maths had never been his strongest subject.
‘So,’ Charlie had said after that, ‘who was the sophisticated, smartly dressed lady that you were having dinner with on Saturday night?’
Luck and Judgement Page 11
