51 Discovering
A/N: Harding's weirdest-ever investigation continues...
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“Something weird’s turned up, Sarge...”
DS Harding looked up from his PC to meet Patel’s eyes. “Go on...”
“You know that half-fingerprint we picked up from the bed of our second victim... er... Charles Dunning...?”
“The one we couldn’t find a match for?”
“Yeah – well, we’ve just got a match for it. Victim number five, the one that was called in yesterday. Er... George Thomlin.”
Harding stared at her. “You’re saying that our murder victim was, at some point, in the bedroom of another of our murder victims?”
“Yes, Sarge. And it gets weirder... They’ve done an analysis of the marks around Dunning’s throat. They’re a perfect match for Thomlin’s hands.”
“So our new murder victim is also a murderer?”
“It’s looking that way.”
“That is weird. I mean, it’s good because it’s a break in the case and God knows we need it, because this whole thing is weird. But it’s still weird.”
“I’ve got the lab working on analysing the marks on our other victims with the hands of... our other victims...”
He beamed at her. “Well done! I would have suggested that – eventually. What we need now is to find out how Dunning and Thomlin knew each other.”
“I am completely out of ideas there, Sarge. Sorry.”
Harding chewed his bottom lip. “Nothing’s turned up on their smart phones?”
“And none of them owned a computer of any sort,” she replied shaking her head.
He frowned. “No laptops or tablets?”
“Nothing.”
“But didn’t… er… the first one…”
“Roberts, Sarge.”
“Roberts, yeah – he’d just put in a job application. You can’t do that on a phone.”
Patel’s face brightened as she caught his meaning. “So, he must have been accessing a computer somewhere else!”
“Exactly. And since he had no friends or family, he was most likely using his local library. And if he was…”
“Ahead of you!” she replied typing the first postcode into her own phone. A few minutes later, she had completed her search. “Well, they all have different local libraries, which we’d have expected I suppose, but they are all still in use at least part of the week.”
“You know what that means, Patel…”
“I never thought much of sleeping, Sarge.”
Getting hold of the records of the internet searches carried out on every computer in those five libraries was not much of a problem, but the sheer volume of data was daunting. Patel’s reference to losing out on sleep for the foreseeable future suddenly seemed like less of a joke.
“We need a way to narrow this down. Can you find the company Roberts made that application to?”
She scrolled through the list from Roberts’ local library. “Here! He first visited the site four weeks before his death. I can see all the other sites visited that day from the same PC… What exactly am I looking for?”
“Blessed if I know, Patel. Any unusual sites?”
“Well, there’s nothing that says, ‘murder someone and paint their face’…”
“Very funny. What about… ‘smile’…?”
They looked at each other. “Don’t know about you, Sarge, but this is seriously the weirdest case I’ve ever worked on.”
“I was working cases while you were still in school, but nothing beats this one. Every time I think it’s got as bad as it’s going to get, it throws up something new. So, looking for a site with ‘smile’ in the name seems about as sensible as anything.”
She turned back to the screen. “OK… ‘smile’ it… You aren’t going to believe this… Well, maybe you are…”
With a tight feeling in the pit of his stomach, Harding looked over her shoulder at the screen, then swallowed hard as he read the line she pointed at.
“Coffee coming right up, Tom,” she said, that extra sense of hers kicking in at just the right moment.
He sank into the chair she had just vacated and stared at the screen. What the fuck was going on here? When Patel returned with two full mugs, she found him sitting with the chair turned away from the screen as if he just could not bear to see how right his guess was. He was staring into space and she had to say his name twice before he noticed her.