Authors: Paul Gitsham
After identifying himself to the officer in charge and giving the case number, he asked for Severino’s mobile phone to be pulled out. His next request was met with some incredulity.
“You want me to do what?”
“I just need you to power it up, enter his recent calls list and tell me any numbers that he called Friday night.”
“Are you taking the piss? Is this a wind-up? I’m fifty-three years old — I still miss using a bloody dial. I can barely send a text message.”
Warren closed his eyes briefly. “No, Sergeant, I’m serious. I need those numbers and don’t have time for the hour-long round trip down to Welwyn to pick up the phone and do it myself. Is there somebody…” he almost said ‘younger’ but bit his tongue at the last second “… more used to mobile phones that could perhaps try for me?”
Warren chose to ignore the mumbled profanities and references to ‘the Carphone Fucking Warehouse’, as the grumpy, veteran police officer stamped off down the corridor in search of a member of the mobile generation.
A few moments later a flustered constable who sounded as if his voice had barely broken came on the line. Warren explained what he wanted him to do. Fortunately, the phone had enough battery-life left to fulfil this simple task — Warren could only imagine the response he’d have received if he’d asked them to track down a charger as well.
The phone’s log confirmed an incoming call lasting less than three minutes from another mobile phone on Tuesday evening and then showed several outgoing calls to the same number on the Friday evening, none of which were answered. It seemed that Severino’s story was at least partially true. With that accomplished, he next got the officer to look up Severino’s fiancée’s and parents’ numbers and address for Sutton.
Finishing his call, Warren returned to the main office. Sutton was away from his desk, so Warren left the numbers and addresses on a Post-it note stuck to the screen of his computer.
Calling over Gary Hastings and Karen Hardwick, he filled the two young constables in on his morning. He handed over the number that Severino claimed belonged to his mysterious liaison.
“Have either of you ever requested telephone records before?”
Hardwick shook her head immediately. It wasn’t that surprising given that she had only just joined CID. Hastings had assisted in drafting a warrant a couple of times. Warren reminded them how under the Regulation of Investigationary Powers Act, police had to fill in a special warrant for every phone, computer or similar device that they wanted information on. Each device was dealt with separately and a justification given each time. The amount of information they could request varied, from a simple enquiry about a phone’s ownership, to a list of calls made and or received; a track of the phone’s historic movements, using either GPS or cell tower triangulation; a track of its current whereabouts; or in the rarest of cases an interception of calls, text messages, instant messages, emails or anything else that could be thought of.
Warren asked Hastings to show Hardwick how to draft a request for the ownership details and the previous twelve-months’ usage records for the number found on Severino’s phone. He had a feeling that RIPA was going to be an increasing part of a police officer’s day-to-day governance and he wanted all of his officers trained in its use. When they had completed the request, he told them they were to show it to DS Kent, who was an expert at finessing such requests to get what information they needed.
Before leaving the office, Warren did a quick Internet search and located the pub and club that Severino claimed to have been drinking in. Both were in the town centre, within easy staggering distance of each other and Severino’s house. Grabbing his car keys, he decided to target the White Bear first, before retracing the couple’s steps to Mr G’s nightclub.
Situated at the north end of the town centre, the pub had a large plastic polar bear sitting above the porch-style entrance. Surrounded by neon lights, it might look enticing and exciting in the dark, after a few beers and if small market towns in north Hertfordshire were your sole experience of big city night-life. At one forty-five on a Tuesday afternoon it just seemed seedy to Warren, who was used to the somewhat more glamorous drinking establishments on offer in Birmingham or London. The fact that the once-white polar bear was largely covered by the green mould that covered white plastic garden furniture if it was left outside too long further dispelled the illusion.
The sturdy front door was locked, but inside Warren could hear the sound of a vacuum cleaner. Peering through the window into the gloom beyond, he could make out someone behind the bar doing something with the till. Next to the door was a doorbell. Warren pressed it.
“Deliveries round the back!” a voice shouted over the din of the vacuum cleaner.
“I’m not delivering…” started Warren before being interrupted.
“Then come back in fifteen minutes. We ain’t reopened yet.”
“It’s the police. Could you open the door please, Mr…Stribling?” Warren took a guess that the person most likely to be opening the till early afternoon on a weekday would be the landlord, whose name was listed on the licence above the door.
“Oh, bollocks. What now?” Warren watched through the window as the landlord made his way to the door. It took almost a minute for him to open it, turning three different keys and sliding across two different bolts. The man was short and portly with dirty-grey hair slicked down with gel. A scraggly moustache clung to his top lip, its colour a mixture of white, grey and nicotine yellow. He had one of those smoker’s faces that could be anywhere between forty-five and sixty-five.
Holding up his warrant card, Warren introduced himself. Looking around, he noticed the faded décor and scratched tables. The source of the vacuuming came from the farthest corner where a plump young woman unenthusiastically ran the machine forward and backwards. With her back to the door and the white headphones of an iPod clearly adding their own din to that of the vacuum cleaner, Warren doubted she was even aware that an extra person was in the room.
A strong smell of cigarette smoke hung in the air, which the landlord dismissed quickly. “Must ’ave left the back door open when I ’ad me fag break.” He casually tossed a bar towel over the burning cigarette in the half-filled ashtray on the bar top, clearly hoping that Warren hadn’t noticed.
“What can I do fer you, Officer? If it’s about them sixth formers, they had fake ID, real good ’n all. ’Course, soon as I realised they was underage, like, I chucked them out.”
Not before getting a few quid out of them first, I’ll bet, thought Warren. He decided not to point out that detective chief inspectors didn’t usually investigate reports of seventeen-year-old A-level students having a crafty pint.
Now the man looked really worried and Warren wondered what he was hiding. Nothing to do with his case, he decided, but it might come in useful as leverage. By the looks of things, Mr Stribling was your basic dodgy landlord who kept his head above water by skirting around the law and turning a blind eye to some of the more dubious deals run by his customers, perhaps taking a small cut of the action for his trouble.
“I’m sure you did your duty, Mr Stribling.”
“Call me Larry, please. Every time you say Mr Stribling, I fink you’re talking to me old man!” His laugh was cut short by a wheezing cough that suggested that the person most inconvenienced by the smoking ban in this pub was the landlord. Or perhaps not, thought Warren, eyeing the faint wisps of smoke still curling from under the bar towel. He made a mental note to check out any 999 calls to the fire brigade later on.
“I wonder if you recognise this man, drinking in here on the evening of Friday August fifth.”
Stribling’s eyes narrowed and he barely glanced at the mugshot of Severino. “Nope, never seen him.”
“You seem very sure of that, Larry. Are you certain? Perhaps you could take a closer look at the photo. It’s funny how when you take a closer look at something, you notice things that you didn’t before.” He glanced meaningfully at the smouldering ashtray. “Things that you realise that you need to do something about.”
Stribling scowled, clearly uncomfortable about the idea of betraying one of his punters to the police and possibly by extension himself. Warren decided to make it easier on him. “Look, it hasn’t got anything to do with you or this bar. We’re simply trying to track the movements of this man and your pub came up as somewhere he might have stopped for a drink.”
Stribling sighed, but pulled the photo over anyway. Plucking a pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket, he squinted hard at the photo. “Eleven days is a long time ago, Chief Inspector, and Friday nights are our busiest night.” He continued looking at the photo, a frown puckering his forehead. “I have to say that he does look a bit familiar. Last Friday, you say…yeah, definitely. He was here for a few hours. I remember ’cause he sat at the bar, getting in the way of people trying to get served. I was gonna tell him to move, but he was spending a fair bit, you know. Most of the punters were students here for my Friday night drinks promotion. By the time I’ve paid the duty and VAT and taxes, the profit on each pint is two-thirds of fuck-all. He was drinking good stuff, though — probably made more profit from him than ten of those bleedin’ students.”
Warren felt a surge of excitement. “Can you remember if he was here with anyone else?”
Stribling shook his head. “On his own at the bar, like I said. Looked bloody miserable, to be honest.”
“Any idea why?”
Stribling looked at him incredulously. “Not a bloody clue. This isn’t
Cheers
, you know, where everyone knows your name. None of my business what’s upset him. I just serve the drinks.”
Warren persisted. “And he didn’t meet anyone here?”
Stribling shrugged helplessly. “I wasn’t really paying attention, to be honest. I was mostly serving down the other end of the bar. Although, come to think of it, he did eventually move from the bar to one of the tables in the corner. He might have gone over with someone.”
Warren struggled to hide his frustration; all he had so far was that Severino had gone to the pub a week before Tunbridge’s murder. He tried to picture the bar that night. Heaving with students guzzling pints of cheap lager, whilst Severino sat alone on a bar stool getting steadily more drunk. Warren looked at the bar again. It was long and straight, closed at both ends to deter cheeky, DIY pint-pourers, but with hinged lids to allow staff easy access to and from the area behind the bar. Two modern tills with touchscreens meant that servers didn’t have to turn their backs to the customers when they took their money. Two tills…
“Was there anybody else working that Friday?”
Stribling looked at him as if he was soft in the head. “Yeah, ’course. Can’t run a bar on my own, can I? Friday night it’s our Kel behind the bar and Dazza collecting glasses.”
“May I speak to them, please?” asked Warren, deliberately keeping his tone polite.
Stribling shrugged, then called out to the young woman with the vacuum cleaner.
“Kel!”
Nothing.
“Kel!”
Still nothing.
Marching around the bar, Stribling reached out and tugged on one of the leads. The earphone popped out and she jumped in surprise.
“Bloody ’ell, Dad! What did you do that for?”
“’Cause you’re always plugged into that sodding thing. Could be a bloody air raid and you’d never know anyfink about it.”
Or a fire alarm, thought Warren, noticing that the abandoned cigarette still seemed to be doing its thing. He thought he’d read somewhere that modern cigarettes were supposed to go out if left unattended. He wondered how long that was supposed to take.
The young woman was about nineteen or twenty, Warren guessed, although it was a bit difficult to tell under all of the piercings and white and black face make-up. He supposed she was what kids these days called a Goth or was it an emo now? Warren remembered them from when he was her age, although he and his mates had just referred to them as miserable buggers.
He forced a smile and introduced himself, showing her Severino’s photograph. As she spoke to him Stribling disappeared off to find ‘Dazza’, the third member of this family enterprise.
Squinting at the picture with the one eye that wasn’t obscured by her jet-black fringe, she nodded and smiled briefly.
“Yeah, I remember him.”. She pointed at a bar stool in front of the till nearest the front door. “He sat there all night, drinking. Didn’t say very much, just stared at his drink. One of those dark, moody Mediterranean types.” Clearly the sort of man she found attractive, Warren thought, amused.
“Did he meet anyone here?”
She frowned, then brightened as she remembered, then frowned again as the memory clearly irritated her. Warren hoped for her sake that she never took up poker; hiding what she was thinking was not one of this girl’s strong suits.
“Yeah, some blonde bimbo sat herself down next to him late in the evening. She clearly wasn’t his type—” Warren discounted this observation as potentially biased “—but she wouldn’t give up. Eventually they moved to the corner over there.” She pointed to a small, circular wooden table flanked by short, cushioned stools. “They had a couple more drinks and then left.” She sniffed her disapproval. “He was clearly pissed — she shouldn’t have taken advantage like that.”
Warren fought the urge to smile; he doubted that Severino had felt taken advantage of. And if he was, he doubted that he would care too much. Then his amusement disappeared like a puff of smoke as he considered that Severino might well have been taken advantage of in more ways than he could have imagined at the time.
“Did you know her at all?”
“No, but I know the type. Skinny, blonde, big tits.” Everything Kel wasn’t, thought Warren, feeling a twinge of sympathy for the girl.
“Can you remember any more details?”
Kel squeezed her eyes shut as she tried to remember one, single customer from several days previously. “I think she was wearing a pink top and jeans.”
“How old would you say she was? Was she tall?”