Ghost in the Machine (Scott Cullen)

by Ed James

  "Aye. St Leonards." He laughed. He pulled away and turned left onto the City Bypass. "Why all the questions?"

  "Oh, no reason, really."

  He nodded his head at her, smiling. "You're thinking of applying for CID, aren't you?"

  She looked away. "Maybe."

  "You'd make a decent detective, you know," he said.

  "You think?"

  "If Keith Miller can get through, anybody can."

  She laughed. "He doesn't seem like the sharpest tool in the box."

  "Indeed."

  He pulled off the dual carriageway at the Hermiston Gait interchange that led to the shopping centre, and to the M8 for West Lothian and Glasgow. He navigated them through a series of roundabouts, turning left towards the supermarket.

  "Why did it take you so long to apply?" she asked. "Miller's only been in the force two and a half years."

  "I've been seconded a few times to murder cases," he said, "just like you are now. I applied for CID but I got knocked back because of my sickness record."

  "How?"

  "I had three bloody colds in six months, which triggered absence management," he said. "I passed my Sergeant's Exams, too, but kept getting knocked back because of it."

  They got out of the car. "That's rough," she said, over the top of the roof.

  "Bain was saying something about me being an idealist the other night," he said. "I suppose I must be. Nobody would do this job for the money unless they were one."

  As they walked over to the store, Cullen could see people looking at her in her uniform. Cullen thought that one of the biggest advantages of the number of uniforms seconded to the investigation was that it gave a certain visibility, a visibility that his suit and warrant card didn't provide.

  At the customer service counter, he showed his warrant card to the young girl, her face plastered with cheap make-up.

  "I need to speak to a Sam Weston." The name was on the invoice.

  She looked nervously at Caldwell, then picked up the phone. An announcement came over the store's public address system, calling for Sam Weston, the girl's mouth moving slightly ahead of the projected sound.

  "Should be here any second," she said. She looked past them at the next customers in the queue.

  Cullen and Caldwell moved off to the side. A tall man in a suit approached them. He held out his hand to Cullen, his smile revealing gleaming white teeth.

  "Sam Weston," he said, in an English Black Country accent.

  Cullen knew the type - Management Trainees. Get a degree from a former Polytechnic somewhere down south, work your arse off in a series of roles supervising shelf stackers then, with luck, eventually get your own store to manage with the company car, pension scheme, health insurance and all the other benefits. Cullen had dealt with a fair few trainee managers whilst in West Lothian, mainly thefts from the Asda in Livingston.

  "DC Cullen. And this is PC Caldwell." Weston nodded at her. "Do you have anywhere we can go to talk?"

  Weston grinned again, though he looked nervously at both of them. "Sure. Come into my office."

  He led them past the fruit and veg section, where he asked someone about mangoes, then through the big doors at the back of the store. They followed him up a set of stairs. Cullen had worked in the Tesco in Dalhousie when he was at school, though it was nothing like the scale of this place.

  Weston showed them into a tiny office, basically a computer on a desk with a chair. He brought through two more chairs, squeezing them into the tiny room and struggling to shut the door behind them.

  "Please, take a seat." They sat down. "Now, how can I help you?" asked Weston.

  "We're investigating the disappearance and murder of a woman named Caroline Adamson."

  "Ah yes," said Weston, "I heard about that on the news just then. Awful business."

  "We are investigating a mobile phone which was used to call the victim shortly before she disappeared. We have managed to trace the mobile to a batch delivered by the GoMobile network to your store." He leafed through his notebook, clicked his pen.

  "I see."

  "We were wondering if you could help us identify who bought the phone."

  "Do you have a serial number?" asked Weston.

  Cullen handed him one of the prints he'd got from GoMobile.

  Weston logged on to the PC on his desk. He swivelled the monitor around, to let Cullen and Caldwell watch, as he navigated through a sophisticated stock control system. He pointed on the screen. "There's the delivery. I'll see if I can trace the unit through to a transaction. The system is updated hourly, so we know exactly which units are on the shelf at any one time." He tapped away. "There. Arrived on the 23rd, 4:23pm and out on the shelves the following morning, 8.16am."

  Cullen checked the printout. "Good. This phone was activated on the 24th. Just after 2pm. We know that it was sold between 8.16 and then." He looked at the big year planner on the wall, tried to think. "Is there any way that you can check when that particular phone was sold?" he asked.

  Weston nodded. "I can have a look at the transactions database for the barcode for those units." He pulled up another system, typed through a few screens, then came up with a record. "Here you go. Found one. Sold at 11.32am."

  "Any more?"

  "Not that day."

  Cullen scribbled the reference numbers down from the screen. "Any credit card information? Clubcard information?"

  Weston's finger traced along the screen. "Sorry, no. Paid by cash."

  "Bollocks," muttered Cullen. He'd had high hopes for this.

  "We've got the time and till, though," said Caldwell. "You can surely cross-reference that to the CCTV cameras."

  Weston nodded. "Don't see why not."

  "Do you not overwrite the recordings?" asked Caldwell.

  "Not for the last ten years or so," replied Weston. "It's all DVDs and hard drives these days."

  "So you can get us the footage then?" asked Cullen.

  Weston beamed his big, white smile. "Sure thing."

  An hour later, Cullen and Caldwell were back in the Leith Walk station car park, heading to the stairwell. Caldwell carried a Tesco 'bag for life' filled with printouts of the transaction and the stock system, and a DVD with the CCTV footage from all store cameras covering an hour either side of the transaction.

  "It's frightening," she said. "The amount of information they keep. From a serial number, he managed to take it through to a transaction to all that CCTV footage. God, I shop there every other week; how many times must I have been caught on their system?"

  "Doesn't bear thinking about, does it?" he said.

  They had got stuck in the late Sunday afternoon traffic on the way back in; a combination of Sunday shopping and the ongoing hell that was the installation of the City's new Tram system. Cullen felt it would give little benefit to residents but was causing absolute irritation during the construction. There had been a failed referendum on congestion charging a few years back and Cullen wondered if this was bloody-minded retribution from the City Council.

  As they started up the stairs, Cullen's mobile rang.

  "All right, Scott?" Charlie Kidd. "You're a hard guy to get a hold of."

  "What is it?" asked Cullen.

  "You are not going to believe this," he said. "I've found Martin Webb."

  twenty

  "Show me," said Cullen, out of breath. He'd run up the stairs to Kidd's floor.

  Kidd wiggled his finger at the screen. "Look at this." He fiddled around in his browsing history, clicked on a link, and a page popped up.

  "There." Kidd pressed the screen so hard that it discoloured, as if bruised.

  Cullen squinted at the image. "What is it?" Then it hit him. The image was Martin Webb, the picture on his Schoolbook profile. "Where did you find this?" he asked, his mouth dry.

  "That search I telt you about, it came back pretty quick, ken? That's your boy there."

  Cullen's eyes darted around the screen. "What is this site?"

  "Di
gby Models dot com."

  "Martin Webb is a model?" asked Cullen.

  Kidd laughed. "Aye, well, kind of, ken."

  "What do you mean?" said Cullen, always frustrated with that sort of response from people. "Either he is or he isn't."

  "Aye, well, that's it. I think he both is and isn't."

  "Explain."

  "Fine," said Kidd. "Dinnae interrupt, okay? This is a photographic model site, ken? This page is in their stock library, so it's just full of photies that people can pay for and use in design or whatever, like adverts or that. That felly Martin Webb has nicked a photo off of this site, cropped it, and pretended it was him." He pointed at the screen. "Here, watch this."

  Kidd pressed a few keys to open Photoshop, a program Cullen was vaguely familiar with from a brief flirtation with photography.

  "See this?" asked Kidd, as he pasted the image from the website into the application. There was a logo at the left hand side, obscuring part of the image. Kidd activated the crop tool, and dragged an oblong shape around the face on the screen. He double-clicked, and created an almost exact replica of the image on Schoolbook, without the logo.

  "Jesus," said Cullen. "So how does this work? How did you find it?"

  Kidd shrugged. "No idea, I just press the buttons."

  Cullen laughed.

  "Seriously, though, I think it's something to do with just a string-matching search. An image is just a series of ones and zeroes in a set format. It's a case of matching your ones and zeroes with any other in that format. Get enough groupings of matches and you've got something." Kidd grinned. "It just matches chunks. Pretty smart, eh?"

  "This is good," said Cullen.

  Kidd held up a sheet of paper. "Here you go. This is something for Bain's file."

  "Cheers."

  Cullen raced off towards the Incident Room.

  Bain and Miller were at their desks when he got back down, Bain looking pissed off as usual. Caldwell had left the Tesco bag on Cullen's desk.

  "Ah, Sundance, there you are," said Bain. "Nice of you to pitch up."

  Cullen held up the Tesco bag. "Got something for you."

  "I hope it's custard creams," said Bain.

  Cullen ignored the comment and took the DVD out. "CCTV footage from Tesco. We might be able to see who bought that mobile phone."

  "Great."

  "Try to sound a little bit impressed," said Cullen.

  Bain grunted. "Right. Have you watched it?"

  "A bit." Cullen ran his hand through his hair.

  "And?"

  "Inconclusive at best," Cullen admitted.

  Bain snarled a smile. "And I'm supposed to be impressed?"

  "By the way," said Cullen, ignoring him, "Charlie Kidd's found that the image on Martin Webb's profile came from a photographic model site on the internet."

  Bain frowned. "Come again?"

  Cullen handed him the sheet of paper Kidd had given him. He explained the process that Kidd had gone through, in sufficiently simple language that Bain would understand.

  "So what you're saying is that this profile is a total fabrication then? Someone's created this Martin Webb."

  "Looks that way," said Cullen.

  "I'm thinking that someone is Rob Thomson."

  "I'd say that we need a bit more evidence before we can definitively say that it's Rob Thomson."

  Bain turned round to Miller. "Right, Monkey boy, I want you to look through this CCTV, see if it shows Rob Thomson buying Martin Webb's phone." Bain tossed the DVD at Miller.

  "We've not got proof that it is Martin Webb's mobile," said Cullen.

  "Eh?"

  "We only know it was used to call Caroline just before she disappeared."

  "That's a matter for the PF," said Bain. "We need to overload her with evidence." He pinched the bridge of his nose. "We've got to prove that Rob Thomson is Martin Webb, that's the only way to nail him."

  "Did you get any more resource for me?" asked Cullen.

  "Holdsworth is going to get back to me by five with some names for you."

  "Five?"

  "Cullen, just fuckin' get on with it, eh?"

  Bain walked off, muttering to himself.

  "So, eh, Scott," said Miller, "what do I do with this DVD then?"

  "Just watch it, Keith," snapped Cullen. "There's a guy buying a mobile phone, we want to know who it is."

  "That it? Happy days!"

  Miller put the DVD in his laptop with a big smile on his face.

  An hour and a half of calling through the list of Friends was soul-destroying work. Cullen could do with another coffee, but that was a carrot he needed to keep in front of his nose.

  He looked over at Caldwell. Her face was several shades paler than normal.

  "Angie," he called as he got to his feet, "are you okay?"

  "Somebody just told me that Rob Thomson made death threats to Caroline."

  twenty-one

  The new Edinburgh City morgue was situated in the basement of the Leith Walk station. Cullen wondered if putting the morgue in the basement of buildings was some sort of immutable law. He sat in the reception area, set aside for grieving relatives, waiting to identify a body - sombre colours, well furnished.

  Debi Curtis' Post Mortem was just finishing, according to Jimmy Deeley's assistant, a red-haired, bespectacled man in his late 30s.

  Cullen looked up on hearing Bain's voice, signalling the end of the Post Mortem. He looked less than happy. Cullen recognised the Procurator Fiscal as she marched off. It was unusual to see her at a Post Mortem, but then this was turning into an unusual case.

  "Sundance," said Bain, without stopping. Cullen had to hurry to catch up. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"

  "I need to speak to you," said Cullen, his voice insistent.

  "Well we're having a briefing," said Bain, "so you can wait."

  "I need to speak to you now," snapped Cullen.

  "Not now," replied Bain, turning to face Cullen. "Whatever it is, Sundance, it can wait."

  Cullen spun around and stopped in front of Bain, blocking his progress down the corridor. "It's about Rob Thomson. Evidence."

  Bain huffed when he couldn't get past Cullen. "Go on," he said, with a great deal of reluctance.

  "Caldwell's just found out that Rob Thomson had threatened to kill Caroline after their divorce."

  Bain eyed him suspiciously. "Aye?"

  "It was to do with the custody of their son, apparently," said Cullen. "It's common knowledge in Carnoustie."

  "Fuckin' hell." Bain grasped the bridge of his nose. "How tight is this?"

  Cullen shrugged. "We'll get it backed up, get a statement."

  Bain checked his watch. "Right, it's time to bring him in."

  Cullen had gone upstairs to see Kidd.

  "Whoever this Martin Webb guy is," said Cullen, sitting alongside Kidd, "that's who's killed these two women."

  Kidd scuttled his trackball out of frustration, sending it tumbling across his desk. "I know that," said Kidd.

  "Well, how are you getting on?" asked Cullen.

  Kidd pinched the bridge of his nose, not speaking for what felt like an age to Cullen. "I'm not getting on as well as I thought. I made a good breakthrough with that stuff last night, ken, but that's the easy stuff. What I want to look at is the log files and stuff like that."

  "And why can't you?" asked Cullen.

  "It's like what we were talking about yesterday," said Kidd, "they haven't given us the header data for those tables."

  "I thought they were giving us it," said Cullen.

  "Aye well, so did I," said Kidd. "But they haven't."

  "Who have you been dealing with?" asked Cullen.

  "That Duncan Wilson boy, ken?"

  "Right, I'm calling him."

  Cullen flicked through his notebook and found a phone number. He pulled out his iPhone and started dialling.

  "Duncan," spat the voice at the other end of the line.

  "Mr Wilson, this is DC Cullen. We met yesterd
ay at your office."

  Wilson sigh echoed down the line. "What is it this time? Why do you lot keep chasing me?"

  "If you'd given us what you promised on that database extract," said Cullen, "then we wouldn't have to keep calling you up like this."

  "Oh, okay. This is what your Charlie Kidd is after, right?"

  "It is," said Cullen, wondering what else it could be. "And if you want me to come back over there with uniformed officers to confiscate some of your servers, then you're going the right way about it."

  "Do you want me to go to the press with this?" asked Wilson. "I'm not sure how they'd view the police trying to strong arm a social network."

  "And I'd be asking myself how they'd view someone using your social network to perpetrate two murders due to your lack of adequate security."

  "Okay, okay, fine," said Wilson after a pause. "But I'll need to run this by Gregor Aitchison first."

  "You don't need to do that, I've already spoken to him," lied Cullen. "Just send Mr Kidd what he needs and I won't have to pay you a visit."

  "I'll be a few hours."

  "Listen, if it's not here by 5pm, I'm turning up with some uniform."

  "Okay, okay, okay."

  "I don't want to hear anything about this again," said Cullen.

  He ended the call.

  "Think he'll play ball?" asked Kidd.

  Cullen gave a shrug. "I hope for him that he does."

  Half an hour later Cullen sat in the Incident Room, finishing a large beaker of strong coffee, a filter with two extra shots of espresso. He had only managed to get back to one person on the list so far, and they'd not heard about the death threats. He checked his watch; 5pm. It seemed to him that their earlier luck had run out.

  Cullen looked through his list of Caroline's Friends ready to get back to calling people to check on the death threats.

  "Sundance," said Bain, a wide grin on his face. He loomed over Miller, staring at a laptop screen a few desks over. "Come here. Have a look at this."

  Cullen slowly wandered round. Miller looked up. He had a video player open, running black and white footage of the inside of the Hermiston Gait Tesco.