Human Remains

yelp of delight.
    Four emails, sent first thing this morning – after the DCI had taken me off the case, but clearly before he’d told Frosty about it. And he hadn’t bothered to retract and delete them. They all had the subject line ‘phone data’ and they all had attachments. Fidgeting with anticipation, I opened the first one. There were five Excel spreadsheets attached. The message read ‘A – here’s the first batch of data for Colin’s phone. More to come.’ The second email – the message just said ‘More data for you’. Another six Excel spreadsheets.
    The third and fourth emails didn’t even have messages attached, just more spreadsheets. Shit, shit. It was going to take me weeks to go through it all properly, time I didn’t have. I opened all the spreadsheets and saved them to my personal drive, so it would take them a while to find them – if they ever even looked. I opened my spreadsheet that had listed all the numbers for everyone I’d identified so far, and started adding to it – each number that Colin had used, in other words each SIM card that he’d slotted into his phone, and the dates for the data that Frosty had obtained for me, so that I had a reference list to go to when it all got confusing.
    I matched up the phone records with the existing ones – so now I had the rest of Colin’s call records, for all his other SIM cards.
    And very quickly I spotted what I’d hoped to find.
    As well as the outgoing calls from Colin’s SIMs to the phones the police had found with the bodies, there were other numbers, with the same calling pattern, going back to the earliest date of the billings. More people out there, then, that we hadn’t found. I started jotting them down. How many were out there still? I made another note to apply for earlier data, too. He’d been doing this a long time.
    And then I noticed something else – the outgoing calls to the victims weren’t the only calls he made. There was a landline that featured on three sets of the billings, and when I put it into an internet search it revealed itself to be the number for the Rising Sun Chinese Takeaway, Stafford Road, Briarstone. Another landline, with one outgoing call, turned out to be a number for the Larches Residential Home in Baysbury. There was a mobile number, too – the same number came up in two different billings, with outgoing calls. The fact that the number featured on more than one set of billings was relevant. Whoever owned the phone was a real, live person whom Colin was prepared to speak to. And the latest phone contact was on a Wednesday lunchtime. Whoever they were, they were probably still alive.
    I put the number into the internet search first, and drew a blank. Then I put it into the crime database and came up with nothing. Finally, only half paying attention because I’d already decided that this wasn’t going anywhere and I still had twelve sets of billings to look at, I fed the number into the incident database.
    There was a match. Incident log 13-0189, dated today. The number looked familiar, and when I clicked on the link I knew instantly why:
    AUDREYS BOYFRIEND CORREX EX BOYFRIEND IS VORN BRADSTOCK LIVES IN BRIARSTONE TEL NO 07672 392 913
     
    It was Vaughn’s number. Colin had been so officious about swapping his SIMs, but he couldn’t be bothered to do it all the time. He’d used his phone to call Vaughn.
    I started a log for all my searches and queries. It was true I wasn’t on the case any more, but if I was ever going to be asked to justify my behaviour I wanted a record of my thought processes to be able to hand over to someone. I wasn’t doing this out of idle curiosity, or for any sort of personal gain. I was doing it because of Audrey. Despite this justification, my heart was still banging in my chest as I logged on to the telephone enquiry page of the intranet, keeping my fingers crossed. The operation was still in my list of queries – they hadn’t removed my authorisation here, at least! Thank goodness. I went to the list of results and checked that there hadn’t been any more since Frosty had emailed them to me.
    Nothing. I’d been hoping for the forensic report on Colin’s phone, the actual handset which would have been seized when he’d been taken into custody, but if they’d ordered a report it wasn’t back yet. Sometimes these took weeks, depending on the backlog of cases and the level of urgency. And, as Colin had been released without charge, the