Human Remains

finishing his breakfast and by the time I’d collected my bag and coat he had showered and was downstairs, fully dressed, his dark hair slicked back from his face. He looked so eager and excited that I gave up and followed him out to his car.
     
     
    To my surprise, the office was not empty, as it had been on Friday night. Three of the desks were occupied and Paul Moscrop was in his glass cubicle in the corner. All of them were talking on the phone and another phone was ringing on one of the other desks. I thought briefly about answering it but decided not to. I slipped into my chair and turned on the workstation. A further surprise. The billing results for the phones I’d identified were back, forwarded on from the DCI who had been sent them by Keith Topping.
    Paul came out of his office as I was opening up the attachments. ‘Ah! Annabel,’ he said. ‘Really good to see you. Have you seen the results?’
    ‘Just looking at them now, sir,’ I said.
    ‘You can drop the “sir”,’ he said. ‘It’s Paul. Alright?’
    ‘Right. Thanks.’
    ‘We did subscriber checks too, but they’re all pre-pay and unregistered. No surprise there. But the billings are very interesting.’
    I waited for him to tell me all about it, wondering if he’d done all the analysis before I’d got here.
    He had a wry grin on his face. ‘Have a look, and then come and tell me what you think,’ he said.
    I worked through the attachments one by one, and he was right: the results were interesting. Each set of the phone billings was the mirror image of those we’d obtained from the victims’ phones. In other words, the offender was only using one SIM card per victim, and not contacting any other numbers. After each victim died, presumably he’d discarded the SIM and moved on to another. The phone numbers were not sequential, suggesting he bought them at different times and locations rather than as a bulk lot. And because the call traffic was so low, it was unlikely that the Pay As You Go account had been topped up with credit before it was discarded – he was just using the ‘free’ credit that came with the SIM – and that was probably more than enough for his purposes.
    The cellsite data for all the phones showed locations around the town centre of Briarstone – not from a residential area. Unless he lived right in the town centre, he was only using the phone when he was in town.
    He was methodical. And clever, too. But then I saw it, and took in a sharp breath that made me cough. Surely – surely he couldn’t have missed something so obvious?
    I got up on legs that were surprisingly shaky and went through to Paul’s office. He’d left the door open and this time the wry grin was a great big beaming smile. ‘Got it?’
    ‘I can’t believe he could be so clever and so careless at the same time,’ I said. ‘He’s swapping the SIMs over, but he’s only used one handset.’
    ‘It’s not a case of being careless,’ he said, ‘to be fair to the poor bastard. People don’t use cheap phones these days. They use smartphones, iPhones, BlackBerries. They’re not as disposable, or rather they’re too expensive and people don’t want to throw them away. They think disposing of the SIM card when you’ve done with it makes you untraceable, but of course we know better.’
    ‘So have you applied for data for his other numbers? The other SIMs he’s used in that phone?’
    ‘First thing this morning. We’re waiting for the results, but in the meantime we got a subscriber check done on his one and only handset.’
    ‘And?’ I was holding my breath.
    ‘The phone comes back to a Mr Colin Friedland. Address in Briarstone.’
    ‘He registered the phone?’
    ‘He’s had an account with the service provider for five years. Clearly a fine upstanding citizen, Mr Friedland. I like him already.’
    If he’d registered the phone, he was either stupid, or completely innocent, or truly believed he had nothing to hide. Or maybe when he’d registered it he hadn’t intended his current activities – maybe it was a recent thing. I wondered if he even realised that having an account with the service provider meant that all his efforts in swapping the SIMs were pointless.
    The DCI rubbed his hands together. ‘I think we deserve a cup of tea, don’t you? I’ll make it. What are you having?’
    He didn’t make it, of course. There was no milk. He took me up to the canteen that was usually busy, but which on a Sunday was home