Authors: Kevin Brooks
‘Your phone was accessed at 02.17 this morning,’ he said. ‘I take it that couldn’t have been you?’
‘No, I was definitely locked up by then.’
‘OK, well, whoever it was, they had a good look through your address book, your texts, your call logs … pretty much everything, really.’ He came back over to the settee and gave me back the phone. ‘It’s clean, by the way. No bugs or tracking devices.’
‘Thanks.’
He sat down. ‘So, basically, if it
was
Bishop who went through your stuff, he’s now got all the information on your phone – who you’ve been calling, who’s called you, who’s in your address book –’
‘You’re in my address book,’ I said, suddenly realising. ‘
All
your numbers …
and
I called you recently –’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Cal said. ‘He won’t get anywhere if he tries to trace my numbers. But if there’s anything else … you know, anyone in your address book, or anyone you’ve been in touch with … anything that Bishop could use …?’
‘I don’t think so … I mean, I’ll have to check, but I don’t think there’s anything to worry about.’
‘All right,’ Cal said, lighting a cigarette. ‘So let’s assume that it was Bishop, and that he took the cigarette packet because it had the registration number of the Nissan that this girl told you about –’
‘Tasha.’
‘Right, Tasha.’ He looked at me. ‘Do you think Bishop knows it was her? He obviously knows that you were down there talking to the girls, but would he know which one gave you the number?’
‘I don’t know … probably. I didn’t
see
anyone watching me when I was talking to her, but the cops who arrested me must have been hanging around somewhere nearby, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they saw us together, and they would have told Bishop.’ I looked at Cal. ‘Do you think I should warn her? If Bishop’s linked with this Nissan somehow, and he knows that Tasha’s a possible witness …’
‘You really think Bishop might do something to her?’
I thought about it, wondering if I was just being paranoid about Bishop, but then I remembered the story about him torturing the drug dealer in Chelmsford, and I recalled the look of venom in his eyes when he’d jabbed me in the chest a few hours earlier, and I knew that I wasn’t being paranoid. Bishop was a violent man. If he wanted something badly enough, he wouldn’t care what he had to do to get it.
‘I’ll go down there tonight and tell Tasha to be careful,’ I said to Cal.
‘Maybe I should do it,’ he said. ‘Bishop might have someone watching the girls, and if he finds out that you’ve been down there again …’
‘Yeah, I suppose you’re right.’
After I’d told him what Tasha looked like, and where he could find her, we got back to talking about the Nissan.
‘She could be lying about it, you know,’ Cal said. ‘Just making it all up … you know what junkies are like.’
‘Yeah, but why would Bishop keep the cigarette packet with the registration number on it if it didn’t mean anything?’
Cal shook his head. ‘I don’t really understand why he kept it anyway.’
‘Because he knew that I’d had a few drinks last night, and he was guessing that without the packet I wouldn’t remember the number. And if I didn’t remember the number, then I couldn’t try to track it … shit.’
‘What?’
‘Well, if I
didn’t
have the number, what would I do?’
‘You’d go back to Tasha … fuck, yeah, I see what you mean. If Bishop thinks you don’t have the number, he’s going to try to get to Tasha before you do.’
‘And she’s probably got a record, so he’ll know where she lives.’
‘Fuck,’ Cal said. ‘We need to find her as soon as possible. Tonight might be too late.’
‘I don’t see how we can. She won’t be on the streets now, and even if we could find some of the other girls, they’re not going to tell us where she lives.’
‘Do you know her surname?’
I shook my head. ‘And Tasha’s probably her street name anyway.’
‘So we don’t know her surname, or her real first name, and we don’t know where she lives –’
‘We need to look at this differently,’ I said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘We can’t get to Tasha before Bishop, can we?’
‘No.’
‘So we have to stop Bishop getting to Tasha.’
‘Right. And how the fuck do we do that?’
‘By letting Bishop know that I
have
got the registration number she gave me.’
‘Have you?’
I rolled up my sleeve and showed him the number I’d written on my arm when I was in the back of the patrol car last night. ‘It’s something I learned from my drunk days,’ I told Cal. ‘You can’t trust yourself not to forget anything, or not to lose anything, when you’re drinking. So if you
really
need to remember something, write it down where it can’t get lost.’
It was Cal’s idea to check out the registration number first.
‘It won’t take long,’ he told me. ‘Once we’ve found out whatever we find out, we can decide how to let Bishop know.’ He went over to his work desk and started tapping away on a laptop. ‘I’m still working on that other registration number you gave me, by the way,’ he said. ‘The Renault.’
‘Any luck?’
‘Not yet. I’ve still got a few more things to try, but it’s not looking too hopeful at the moment.’
‘OK. Well, let me know if you find anything.’
While Cal set about entering the vehicle details I’d given him, I gave Ada a quick call at the office.
‘I’m at Cal’s,’ I told her. ‘He’s helping me out with the Anna Gerrish case.’
‘How’s it going? Are you getting anywhere with it?’
‘Well, kind of …’
‘Kind of?’
‘It’s complicated. There’s a chance that Bishop might have something to do with it. Personally, I mean.’
‘Really?’
‘Well, I haven’t got any proof yet, but I’m pretty sure that he’s got
some
thing to do with it. He’s made it clear that he doesn’t want me looking into it, and I’m fairly sure that he’s having me followed.’
‘Did he have anything to do with you getting beaten up the other night?’
‘How do you know about that?’
‘George Salvini. He said it looked like you’d been through a meat grinder –’
‘It wasn’t that bad, Ada.’
‘You should have
told
me.’
‘Yeah, I know. I’m sorry. I was going to –’
‘Was it Bishop?’
‘I don’t know … I’m fairly sure that he wasn’t one of the men who attacked me, but it’s possible he was behind it.’
Ada sighed. ‘Is there anything else you haven’t told me?’
I thought about lying to her for a moment, but I knew
she’d find out about the drink-driving charge eventually, so I decided I might as well tell her. ‘I was arrested last night –’
‘Oh, John …’
‘It’s all right,’ I told her. ‘It was a set-up. I didn’t actually
do
anything –’
‘What was the charge?’
‘Kerb crawling and drink-driving. But, like I said –’
‘Kerb crawling?’
‘It was a set-up, Ada –’
‘And what about the drink-driving? Were you over the limit?’
‘Well, yeah, but –’
‘Shit, John. You could lose your fucking licence.’
‘I know,’ I said, looking over at Cal. He was clicking his fingers at me, drawing my attention to the laptop screen. ‘I have to go, Ada,’ I said. ‘We’ll talk about this later. But listen, if Bishop or anyone else from the police calls –’
‘I don’t know where you are.’
‘Thanks. I might be in later, but if I’m not –’
‘Just let me know what’s happening, John. All right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Promise?’
‘Cross my heart …’
‘And be careful, OK?’
‘OK.’
I ended the call, lit a cigarette, and went over to Cal.
‘I’ve got it,’ he said, pointing at the laptop screen. ‘The Nissan’s registered to a Charles Raymond Kemper. Fifty-three years old, no points on his licence, a home address in Leicester.’
‘Leicester?’
‘Yeah. I’ve done a quick search through all the usual databases – phone listings, utilities, council tax, electoral roll – but I haven’t found anything else so far.’ He looked at me. ‘Does the name mean anything to you?’
‘Charles Raymond Kemper …?’ I shook my head. ‘Not as far as I know.’
‘I’ll do some more checking,’ Cal said. ‘See what I can find out.’
‘All right, but leave it for now. There’s something else I want you to do. And we need to let Bishop know about the registration number too.’
‘Have you got his mobile number?’
‘I think so,’ I said, taking Bishop’s business card from my pocket and studying it. ‘Yeah, here it is. What do you think we should do? Just text him the number?’
Cal nodded. ‘There’s no point in letting him know we’ve got the name too. Do you want to send it anonymously?’
I thought about it, then shook my head. ‘If he doesn’t know who it came from, he might think Tasha sent it. You know, he might think she’s trying to blackmail him. And then he’ll definitely go after her.’
‘Yeah, but if he knows that
you
sent it –’
‘It doesn’t matter, does it? He already knows that Tasha gave me the number, and he must have known there was a chance I’d remember it.’
‘Yeah, all right,’ Cal said. ‘But instead of using your mobile, why don’t we use one of my untraceable phones instead? Just text him the registration number, nothing else, and sign it with your initials.’
‘What’s the point? If he knows it’s from me anyway –’
‘He’ll
think
it’s from you,’ Cal said, smiling. ‘He’ll be 99% certain that the text came from you, but he’ll still try to trace it, just to make sure. And the trace will take him halfway round the world and back. And eventually, after three or four hours, his IT people will realise that the trace is going round and round in circles, and they’re never going to get anywhere with it.’
‘And what’s that going to achieve?’
Cal smiled again. ‘It’ll keep him busy for a while, waste his time … give him something to think about.’
‘And piss him off.’
‘Yeah, that too.’
I smiled. ‘OK, let’s do it.’
After he’d sent the text, Cal said to me, ‘All right, what next?’
‘CCTV cameras,’ I said. ‘Can you hack into them?’
‘What kind of CCTV?’
‘Just the usual stuff, you know …’
‘Town-centre cameras, that kind of thing?’
‘Yeah.’
He nodded. ‘No problem.’
‘What about old footage?’
‘How old?’
‘A month or so.’
He looked at me. ‘The night Anna disappeared?’
‘Yeah. I know it’s a long shot, but if we can find any footage of the Nissan around the time that Anna was picked up that night, it might give us an idea of where
she was being taken. Do you think you can do that?’
Cal had to think about it for a while, but eventually he said, ‘Well … I’ve never actually tried hacking into archived recordings, but it should be easy enough. All the public surveillance cameras in Hey are operated by the council, and they probably store the archived footage on hard disks in their system …’ He grinned at me. ‘The security on the council’s computer system is notoriously pathetic. In fact, it’s so ri
dic
ulously easy to get into that some hackers think it’s an insult to their intelligence and they refuse to go anywhere near it on principle –’
‘Right,’ I said impatiently. ‘So you can get into it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And if I tell you as much as I know about Anna’s whereabouts that night, do you think it’s possible to track her?’
‘It all depends on the location of the cameras,’ he said, turning to his laptop. ‘All right, let’s see … the first thing we need is a site map of all the cameras …’
I must have sat beside Cal, watching him do his thing, for at least a couple of hours, maybe longer. It was an incredible experience. Most of what he was doing was way beyond my comprehension, but although I didn’t really know
what
he was doing, it was impossible not to admire the skill and tenacity with which he was doing it – his fingers skipping gracefully over the keyboard while his eyes focused almost fanatically on the screen … it was entrancing, like watching a genius at work. Of course, the amphetamine was really buzzing through me now, and I’m sure that played some
part in the sheer intensity of my enchantment, but still … it was a hell of a thing to witness.
We didn’t speak very much for the first hour or so when Cal was actually getting into the system, and that was fine with me. I’d done enough talking over the last few days to last me a lifetime, and I was perfectly happy just sitting there quietly, smoking cigarettes and staring dumbly at the inner workings of cyberspace as they streamed up and down the screen.
Once Cal had accessed the system though, we needed to work together, and that’s what we did for the next hour and a half. Cal asked me questions – what time did Anna leave The Wyvern? what route would she have taken to get to London Road? what time did she get there? what time did she get picked up by the Nissan? – and I did my best to answer them as accurately as possible. We didn’t get all that far at first because London Road was right at the edge of the area covered by the council’s CCTV cameras, but Cal quickly realised that both the railway bridge itself and the neighbouring mainline and branchline tracks were covered by a number of Network Rail CCTV cameras, and once he’d hacked into their archived footage – which didn’t take him long – we finally had the coverage that might just be enough to show us something.
‘Now all we’ve got to do is find her,’ Cal said.
It took us a long time, at least another three hours, and it was a painstakingly tedious task which gave both of us throbbing headaches and aching eyes, but eventually we reached the stage where we’d managed to track Anna – through a series of blurred and stuttered images – from the
bottom of Miller’s Row all the way down to London Road. And now Cal had loaded the footage from a camera that was located about fifty metres south of the railway bridge, looking back at the lay-by, and we were both peering intently at the screen, our eyes fixed on the smallish grey blob of a figure that we knew to be Anna Gerrish. We’d seen her arrive at the lay-by at 01.31, and now – according to the read-out at the bottom of the screen – it was 01.47. So far, nothing had happened. Although the picture quality was poor, the view from the camera couldn’t have been better. It showed the whole of the lay-by, the tunnel entrance/exit, and the road leading towards it from the bridge. There was very little traffic around at that time of night, and none of the cars we’d seen so far had stopped at the lay-by.