‘Is this going to take all day?’
The Mayor was getting impatient. A rather obese man with a shock of red hair, his political career had languished in the doldrums until a surprise win in the Mayoral elections had elevated him to this important position; a position with salary, expenses and a pension that he wished to keep, and with an election coming up soon the last thing he wanted was some idiot wasting his time with a false ransom demand. So far all his promises about cutting London traffic, clearing the beggars off the streets and improving the public transport had come to nothing, and the only success he could claim was ridding Trafalgar Square of pigeons; and all they’d done was to fly up the road to Piccadilly Circus and crap all over Eros instead. He hadn’t formulated a final manifesto for the upcoming election yet, although he knew he wanted to cut the household rates bill, which was a surefire winner; but which unsuspecting department was going to have their budget plundered to pay for it, and how could he placate them? Probably have to promise some civil servant an MBE in the next honours list; the PM would push that through if it meant keeping the London mayoral seat within the party.
The techie was having problems isolating the ransom call and was looking for an excuse.
‘There are 4000 calls a day on this machine, and I’ve got find and then isolate your one from that lot, mate. Not easy.’
He pressed a button and a number showed on the LED display. The voice of Mrs Randels of 23 Peach Crescent, Brixton came through the speaker, enquiring about waste collection after a bank holiday. Sergeant Singh leant past him.
‘Wrong sequence – here, let me have a go. We have the same machines at the Yard.’
She pressed the right buttons in the right orde,r and the LED showed a flying decrease to ‘0’. ‘Press the forward arrow when you’re ready,’ she said, smiling at him and stepping back.
The Mayor, not known for mincing his words or for his diplomatic skills, raised his eyes from the papers he was studying to the technician.
‘I suppose you’re somebody’s son or nephew, are you? Obviously you didn’t get the job on ability.’
He shifted his gaze to Palmer.
‘You ready to hear it then, Justin?’
He was interrupted as his mobile rang on his desk.
‘Shit,’ he said as he answered the call. ‘Yes? Okay… but I’m busy now for about twenty minutes so get them coffees and take them on a tour of the building or something, all right? I’ll be as quick as I can.’
He clicked the mobile off and put it on top of his papers.
‘Bloody union officials, they think they can wander in and you’ll drop everything for them. Sorry Justin, where were we… oh yes, are you ready to listen?’
Palmer smiled.
‘Thank you, Mr Mayor, I think so.’
He raised an enquiring eyebrow to Sergeant Singh, who had taken a lead from her laptop and interfaced it through a digital recorder box and stuck a small listening microphone next to the machine, so that she would get a perfect digital copy of the call downloaded to her computer. She nodded to the technician, whose face was still a bright shade of red from the Mayor’s comment, and he pressed the button. They heard the operator take the call.
‘Good afternoon, London Mayor’s Office – how can I help you?’
An obviously distorted voice came from the speaker, sounding like a Dalek.
‘Do you record these calls?’
‘We do, sir, yes.’
‘Good. I’ve killed four people: a lady in the car park at Southfields, a boy in his home in Harrow, a man in the launderette at Acton, and one more on a tube train. All have a wound within an ear. I intend to kill one thousand more unless I get ten million pounds. I will ring you again in four days time at the same time with a little demonstration. Goodbye.’
The caller rang off.
‘Hello? Hello?’ the operator said, trying to reconnect.
The recording clicked off. Singh unplugged her leads and pushed them into her bag. The Mayor chucked his glasses on his papers and leaned back in his over-large leather chair, rubbing his eyes.
‘Well, Justin, what have I got – a harmless idiot, or a potential mass murderer?’
Palmer shrugged his shoulders.
‘Well sir, hard to say for sure – but whoever that was certainly knows more about the four murders than he would do if he wasn’t involved.’
‘Could have got all that information from the newspapers, couldn’t he?’
‘Most of it, yes sir. But the tube train murder hasn’t been released to the press yet, nor the information about their ears having similar wounds. He couldn’t know about that.’
‘That is a bit worrying. So what do we do now then? Can’t pay him, out of the question – pay one and there’d be a queue from here to Lands End.’
‘Sit tight for the time being, sir; that’s all we can do at present, I’m afraid. We’ll get a trace on the call and hope the chap’s not covered his tracks too well.’
Sergeant Singh looked up from her laptop screen.
‘It’s a mobile, sir. Not much chance of a trace result there.’
The Mayor was confused.
‘Why not? Mobiles have numbers and are registered, aren’t they? This one is.’
He waved a hand at his own mobile phone on the desk.
Singh smiled nicely as she explained.
‘You don’t have to register a mobile, sir. Just buy it, put in a SIM card, and away you go; if it’s a pre-paid voucher phone you can buy call minutes at any supermarket or corner shop. We can get the number of the phone without any trouble and trace the call back to it and find the area where the call was made; but who owns it, and where it is now – that is another matter.’
‘Probably at the bottom of the Thames by now, I shouldn’t wonder,’ added Palmer. ‘Or had its memory wiped clean, another SIM card popped in, and hey presto – a new phone with a new number, in which case it’s totally untraceable.’
‘Okay, so what about his little demonstration in four days’ time? I don’t like the sound of that.’
‘No,’ Palmer said with a frown. ‘Nor do I. Let’s hope we get to him by then.’
Chapter 4
Sergeant Singh lay wide awake in her fifth-floor Barbican apartment, looking across the bedroom and out of the panoramic window to the dark sky above, where a few dark clouds reflected the orange red lights of the city back to their source. She shifted her legs in the bed as her mind pondered the day’s work. They really had nothing to go on; just the phone call to the Mayor’s office, and she felt sure that wouldn’t yield much.
A kiss on her shoulder made her aware that Mark, her partner for the last 6 months, was stirring beside her.
It was a long time since Palmer had had a kiss on his shoulder; these days, after thirty-eight-plus years of marriage he was lucky to get a peck on the cheek when he left for work in the morning. It wasn’t morning, but was very late night as Palmer stood looking out of his bedroom window, past his back garden and over the trees and grass of Dulwich Park. Everything seemed coated in a blue hue from the moonlight falling from the clear night sky, but he could see dark clouds forming in the distance.
Behind him in the king-size double bed, Mrs P. slept soundly. The luminous hands of his bedside alarm said two ten. She would have been asleep since eleven; creature of habit was Mrs P., and eleven was bedtime, come hell or high water. Palmer had once tried to work out the number of times in a year that he actually got to bed at the same time as her, but after he got to three months and had only made it add up to five days, he gave up. Thirty-eight years married to a copper was a long time, and he fully appreciated the sacrifices Mrs P. had made with the words ‘I do’. He often wondered whether she had regretted it.
Oh well, three children and eight grandchildren kept her life full, while serial murders with no clues kept his life full. But now the adrenalin was flowing; this latest killer had broken cover with his phone call. Yes, he thought, the game was now on. He unintentio
nally said it out loud as he made for his side of the bed.
‘Game on.’
‘Oh no it isn’t, not tonight Justin,’ said Mrs P., who was still just about awake. ‘I’ve got a WI coffee morning tomorrow and I need my sleep, so behave yourself. Anyway, you know it sets your sciatica off. Night-night sweetheart.’
Chapter 5
‘What sort of demonstration?’
Claire typed away as she asked Sergeant Singh the question. It was the next morning and Singh stood coffee in hand at the wall board, hoping for divine guidance to give her a lead.
‘I don’t know, Claire, I wish I did. But it’s got to be another murder, hasn’t it? Just to prove he can do it – to prove he has the power.’
Claire stopped typing and swung her seat round.
‘God, that’s some sort of challenge to the boss, isn’t it? I’m going to murder somebody on such and such date – stop me if you can. Bit of a heavy scene.’
‘Yes, very heavy – and not much we can do to stop him at the moment.’
Singh walked to the work surfaces that ranged along one wall, and where four state of the art computers were sifting and sorting every little detail they could find on the victims. She patted one lovingly as though it was a pet.
‘Come on you little darling, spill out a match; in fact, spill out anything.’
Sergeant Singh had worked all the hours God gave her for six months when Palmer had passed her his office budget, and told her rather bluntly: ‘Get what you need, do what you want to do, but make it work.’ She’d taken the basics of every computer matching programme – from Find Your Perfect Partner to the Formula One racing optimum fuel mix programmes – ripped them apart and rebuilt them on top of the rather tired police-issue HOLMES programme software. They were programmed to look and find the slightest match between subjects, and everything was printed out; if two victims had the same tooth capped, it would pick it up; but more usefully it picked up when they had the same friend, or same tastes in food, or had been to the same primary school, or… well, just about anything that Palmer could send his team out to probe and prod, in the hope that underneath that insignificant morsel was the key that he was looking for to break a case open.
The success rate had stunned Palmer. Not one to fight shy of new technology, he had prayed it would come up with the goods on a couple of seemingly hopeless dead end case,s so that he could justify his spending to the suits on the fifth floor; more than that would be a big bonus. Not only did he get more – much more – but the side effects were enormous. The case solve time was cut by seventy percent, and the clear-up rate for his department since the computers came in was a perfect one hundred percent. The flip side, of course, was that along with the plaudits came the extra workload.
Palmer was an old style copper who solved crimes, and it was just fate that as a young detective he was put on a couple of serial murder cases that were going nowhere and had cracked them; in so doing he got himself a reputation for the genre, and now every unsolved serial murder in the UK landed on his desk, usually after local CID units had finished with them when they were as cold as ice.
Claire sighed as she checked the computers findings.
‘Nothing coming out, except that James Fennel…’
Singh moved over behind her.
‘The tube train guy?’
‘Yes. He had his mobile phone stolen.’
‘I’ve had two pinched myself. Big business now, usually two youngsters on a moped.’
‘Yes, but he had his stolen on the tube.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Because I ran all the victims through the mobile phone registered users databases to see if we could get a record of any of them phoning each other.’
The printer beside her computer started to whir out papers.
‘And?’
‘Here, I’ve printed it out. Look.’
Claire ripped the paper from the printer and laid it on the desk in front of them.
‘They all had mobiles, and none have made any calls since their murders – which is what you would expect, of course. All except Fennel’s; his mobile went mad on international calls for a period of six hours after the time of his murder, then the credits ran out and it went silent.’
‘Usual scam then, eh?’ Gheeta said. ‘Nick the phone and hammer it until you get cut off or run out of credits, then slip in a new SIM card and flog it with a new number. Easy money.’
She picked up the print out.
‘I’ll see if the governor wants anything done with this. I bet he will; probably have me tracing all the calls. Still, you never know – if the killer took it I don’t think he would be so daft as to phone home, but you never know...’
Sergeant Singh was right; Palmer had her trace every call made on the Fennel mobile. They all terminated in India or the Caribbean, which underlined her assumption that some opportunist phone thief had probably seen Fennel slumped in the corner seat of the tube and, thinking he was asleep, had stolen the mobile. Obviously being a professional thief he would have had it, and any others he’d managed to steal, into a back street phone shop within hours, and been charging half the normal cost for overseas calls to customers who weren’t bothered about the phone’s history, just the half price calls. All the calls made prior to those checked out as Fennel’s family or work numbers.
Chapter 6
The Mayor wasn’t very happy. The four days were up, and Palmer’s team had taken over his office in anticipation that this serial killer would keep his word and phone. He really didn’t need this; he was desperately trying to think up some scam to have the public praise him and landslide him back into office, and now he’d got an idiot killing his electors and demanding ten million to stop.
‘I thought you would have nailed him by now, Justin.’
Palmer smiled a ‘you do your job, and I’ll do mine’ type smile.
‘Not a lot to go on, Mr Mayor. Random killers hold all the cards ‘til they make a mistake.’
The voice print analysis had come back negative; it didn’t match any others on file. The recording had been put through the machines and the distortion taken out, to give the caller’s real voice as far as possible, and then sent for profile analysis. It came back as London, educated male; and that was about the extent of the profiler’s report. Palmer had remarked sarcastically how useful that was, as it cut the suspect list to about 7 million. Technology he could see the benefits of; psychoanalytic profiling he couldn’t.
He looked round the Mayor’s office, which now resembled the inside of GCHQ at Cheltenham: banks of terminals, high-speed tracing equipment, direct lines to phone number data banks, and several of the Met’s technicians that Sergeant Singh had pulled in for the operation; Singh was doing a last minute check on the phone amplifiers. All was ready – if the killer called, they’d have a fix on his position within 80 seconds; which might be totally useless because ransom-type phone calls usually come from unregistered mobiles, or public pay phones in busy pedestrian areas that a patrol car couldn’t get to fast. Railway stations, shopping malls, airport concourses and the like were usually favoured.
The Mayor strummed his fingers on the desk and tried to look unworried by the whole affair. His secretary fumbled nervously with her blouse collar, and the PR man was thinking that the best way out this – if it did all go wrong – was for the Mayor to make a point to the press about his faith in the police and confidence in their methods, thus subtly passing the buck from his desk to theirs
The Mayor stretched his arms above his head and sighed.
‘Looks like Microsoft’s head office in here, eh? Hope the bastard phones after all this trouble.’
Palmer was confident.
‘He’ll phone alright, sir; I’ll put my mortgage on it. This one is a very clever sod, I’m afraid. He’s got everything planned out, and so far his plan is working well for him.’
The loud ringing of the desk phone amplified through the speakers cut through the
room. Everybody stiffened. Singh put her hand by the receiver, ready to lift it for the telephonist to take the call. She looked at the telephonist, who was quite pale.
‘You all right?’
‘Yes, I’ll be fine.’
‘Okay, just be normal – like taking any other call.’
She looked to Palmer, who nodded. She raised the receiver for the telephonist, who then took it.
‘Mayor’s Office, how may I help you?’
The unmistakeable distorted voice came over the speakers, loud and menacing.
‘I know you are surrounded by police, and I know they are tracing this call. So you have precisely four seconds to put the Mayor on the line before I ring off. One…’
Singh look anxiously at Palmer, while around the room technicians were flicking switches and hitting keypads in the race to pinpoint the call.
‘…two…’
Singh held up four fingers to Palmer and mouthed: ‘Four seconds not enough time.’
Palmer nodded. He looked to the Mayor and mouthed: ‘Keep him talking.’ The Mayor nodded and stepped towards the telephonist.
‘…three…’
The Mayor took the phone on Palmer’s signal.
‘This is the Mayor speaking. Who are you, and what do you want?’
There was nail-biting silence, and Palmer wondered whether the line had dropped out and they had lost him. Then the speakers gave forth again with the Dalek voice.
‘Have ten million pounds ready to be switched into a foreign bank account by this time in four days.’
POETIC JUSTICE & A KILLER IS CALLING: The DCS Palmer and the Serial Murder Squad series, cases 3 & 4. Page 12
