Paul Gitsham - The Last Straw

With a jolt of excitement, Hastings realised he had been handed the perfect opportunity. Hastings wasn’t an overly religious man, but if this wasn’t a sign from heaven then what was?

Clearing his throat and discreetly checking his hair and tie were straight, he wound his way over to her desk.

“Problems with your phone?”

“Uh-huh.” She barely looked up.

“It’s a loose connection to the battery. When the phone gets warm it causes the wire to flex, which interrupts the power and the phone reboots itself.”

Karen looked up in surprise. “How the hell do you know that?”

Hastings smiled shyly as he produced an identical model handset to Karen’s from his pocket. “I had the same problem myself. What are the symptoms?”

“It just seems to randomly switch itself off. I’ll be doing something, like browsing the web, reading an email or making a call and suddenly the screen fades and it switches off. It’s completely unpredictable and it’s getting worse. Sometimes I can turn it straight back on again, other times it won’t restart. Last week, it switched itself off at night and so my alarm clock didn’t work. Fortunately, it’s been so muggy the last few weeks, I woke up naturally about half an hour later. I just made it into work on time.” She laughed ruefully. “Much later and I’d have been sitting at my desk in my nightie.”

Hastings tried not to think about Karen in her nightie.

He motioned to her dismantled phone. “Do you find that taking the battery out helps it restart?”

She nodded. “Yeah, sometimes. Hopefully it’ll do that today.”

“It sounds as if it’s exactly the same problem I had. I guess removing the battery jiggles the loose connection again.”

“Can I get it fixed? I’m guessing you’ve had yours repaired?”

“Yeah, you just need to take it back to the shop where you got it. They send it back to the manufacturer. I read on the web that the manufacturer knows all about the fault — there’s a whole batch of them. But you need to back everything up to your computer as they don’t repair it. They just send you a replacement one. You’ll need to copy all of your files and apps over to the new one.”

“Just great. How long will it take to sort out?”

“A couple of weeks, I’m afraid, and they use a really rubbish courier company; if you aren’t prepared to wait in all day, you have to go to their depot in bloody Daventry.”

“I can’t really do without my phone that long.”

“Well, you could always try and get a courtesy phone, although they wouldn’t give me one. Failing that, if you can live without Internet access, I bought one of those really cheap ones that old people use. They can make calls and send texts and that’s about it.”

“Oh, lovely,” groused Karen.

“Hey, don’t knock it. The one I’ve got has extra big buttons for people with cataracts or arthritis.”

Karen laughed.

Result! thought Hastings, smiling back.

* * *

Karen Hardwick had not been oblivious to Gary Hastings’ interest, but decided that now was not the time to get involved with a co-worker. She stole a quick glance in his direction. He was a good-looking man in his own way, she supposed, with a rather cute smile, especially when he was feeling shy. He was considerably more experienced than her, coming up on three years in CID. Nevertheless, he was actually twelve months younger than her and, worse, looked at least five years her junior — she knew that she would be in for some serious teasing from her best friend Martha if she ever brought him around.

She blinked, hard, and shook her head slightly. How on earth did she ever find herself thinking about Gary Hastings in that way, cute smile or not? Unfortunately — or perhaps fortunately — her thoughts were interrupted by the chime of an incoming email. All thoughts of Gary Hastings were now forgotten as she opened the incoming message.

The telephone records for the three unknown callers formed a very small pile in the laser printer’s out tray. One glance at the records, each only two sheets of paper, just like the records of the mysterious young woman who called Severino, confirmed what Karen already suspected — each of the three SIM cards was an anonymous, pre-paid, Pay-As-You-Go SIM card, bought recently and activated for the first time on Saturday July thirtieth.

As before the records recorded the IMEI number of the handset that it was used in, but again this was unregistered. Karen sighed in frustration. It was obvious that the records were a potential gold-mine, if only they could be linked back to their owners. A cursory look showed that all of the calls made by the three SIM cards, plus the mystery woman’s, were confined to those four numbers, the initial calls to Severino notwithstanding.

With only a few calls made per SIM card, compiling them into one table using a spreadsheet wasn’t difficult.

First Karen assigned names to the different numbers, to make the records easier to follow. Since the SIM cards were also used exclusively with a single IMEI number, she also noted the number and the phone model next to the name.

Anonymous 1

BlackBerry Curve

Anonymous 2

iPhone

Anonymous 3

Nokia

Anonymous 4

BlackBerry

A Severino

Nokia

Next she listed the calls in order, noting who they were from; who they were to; the duration of the call or if it was a text. She included an extra column next to the labels in the hope that they would eventually identify the owner of each phone. Printing the spreadsheet out, she took it over to Jones’ office.

Call list

Warren greeted Karen warmly and spread the sheet out across his desk and motioned for Karen to sit next to him. “This is good work, Karen. Already we can see a few patterns here.”

He pointed to the first set of texts, all at roughly the same time on Saturday the thirtieth of July. “This quick flurry of texts between four brand-new SIM cards — it looks to me as if they were texting each other their numbers, rather than bothering to type them in.”

Karen nodded her agreement, before pointing at the sheet herself. “Then the next block, all from Severino’s mystery woman. That’s why I grouped them. If she was working with somebody else to set him up, then one interpretation is that she texted her co-conspirator at nine o’clock on the Friday before the murder to say that she had made contact with Severino. She then texts the following morning to say she successfully lifted his clothes and swipe card.

“Finally she phones Severino on the Tuesday, to arrange a date with him on the Friday.”

Warren nodded his agreement. “I think you could be right, if we accept Severino’s version of events.” He moved his finger down the sheet.

“Friday, the night of the murder. Leaving aside Severino’s repeated, unanswered calls to his mystery woman, almost all of the traffic is between her and this number here, Anonymous 2. There are five calls from Anonymous 2 to this woman between eight p.m. and about nine-thirty p.m., when they switch to texts and she starts contacting Anonymous 2. Nine-thirty is about the earliest time that Tunbridge could have been murdered.” He flicked through another sheet on his desk. “It is also just before Severino’s swipe card was used to enter the building.”

“Well, we know from the IMEI numbers that it wasn’t Severino’s regular handset making all of those calls, although he could have been using a second handset and an anonymous SIM card to build an alibi,” Karen pointed out, playing devil’s advocate.