Someone Who Isn't Me, Danuta Kot [good books to read for adults TXT] 📗

showing the side street where Andy had parked. It led back into town, towards the harbour. ‘If, as we think, he left his car and started walking, he didn’t go back to the main road – he’d have been picked up again on this camera, here. It looks as though he was heading this way.’ Her finger traced the route in the other direction, towards the harbour. ‘He should have been caught by one of the cameras around the area, but he wasn’t. The camera on the main road is the last sighting.

Dinah tried to picture it in her mind. Andy on the phone. Someone calls to him. So – other side of the road? Going past in a car… She put her hand up and Innes nodded in her direction. ‘Did the babysitter hear a car?’ She saw Hammond nod in approval and gave herself a pat on the back before she remembered this was Andy’s killer they were looking for.

‘She didn’t hear one, but it’s a possibility. We’re going to have to check all the cameras in the area.’ Dinah had a bad feeling that she had just been assigned her role in the investigation, and her heart sank. Checking the cameras was vital work, but tedious and routine.

Hammond spoke again. ‘DS Sykes. Dave. The info on Andy’s phone might help here.’

Dave Sykes stayed in his seat and addressed the crowded room composedly. He was one of the faces familiar to Dinah, an older man who had worked as a DS for years. Dinah had heard the SIOs liked to have him on their teams because he knew what he was doing, and was thorough and reliable. ‘OK. The call DI Innes has just been talking about – Yeatson phoning home to talk to the babysitter – that’s the last call we have. The babysitter expected him to call again around twenty-two hundred to say when he’d be back, but he didn’t. That was unusual. She said it had never happened before. There’s been no other activity on his phone since then. However, we’ve got a handshake from the tower here as his phone logged in.’ He used a laser pointer to indicate a location on the map. ‘Hornsea.’

There was a murmur around the room. The signal simply meant the phone was updating its location for the network, but it also confirmed that Andy had left Bridlington and was travelling south via the meandering B-road that linked the coastal villages. ‘Have we found his phone?’ Hammond asked.

Dave Sykes shook his head. ‘The Hornsea signal is the last thing his phone sent. Nothing after that, and a search down by the estuary didn’t turn anything up. It probably went in the water.’

‘What about his car?’ Hammond asked.

‘The SOCOs have turned it inside out. There’s nothing you wouldn’t expect. They’re still chasing up one or two things, but from what we can see, Andy left the car, and whatever happened, happened away from it.’

‘OK. Let’s sum up.’ Hammond let his gaze travel round the room. ‘Remember, a lot of this is best fit from what we know so far. Don’t dismiss anything just because it doesn’t agree with this scenario. It looks as though Andy Yeatson left the station – we don’t know why, and we need to find out – towards the start of his shift. We have his car caught on CCTV, turning off Station Road and again on the main road here. We know he parked on a side street near the café arcade here, left his car and, as far as we can tell, started walking towards the harbour area. Any questions so far?’

No one said anything. ‘He calls the babysitter as expected, he tells her he’ll be home as usual, then the call is cut a bit short because he met someone – maybe someone he knew. After that, we lose all trace of him. We need to find out who that was.’

Hammond pressed a key on the laptop, and the image changed once again to the map, scrolling down and down. The roads and villages vanished until all that was left was a flat green emptiness, criss-crossed by straight blue lines. ‘That’s all we have. It isn’t much to go on.’ His gaze travelled slowly round the assembled team. ‘I’m hoping you can change that over the next twenty-four hours. Right. We’ll need a couple of you down on Sunk Island doing interviews. DC Mason – I want you to trace the cars travelling south from Brid. I want details of all the vehicles on that road that goes via Hornsea, and I want to know who went onto Sunk Island that night.’

‘Yes, sir.’ It was what she’d expected, but still… Something had occurred to her. ‘Sir, I was just thinking…’

‘It’s what we pay you to do, Dinah.’

Dinah felt her face go warm, and cursed her tendency to blush easily. ‘That pub near the harbour. The Smokehouse. Andy – DC Yeatson – spent a lot of time there on the operation to shut down the dealers. I just…’ She was going to say ‘thought’ again. ‘wondered if there might be any link.’

They all knew about the abortive raid on the pub. Dinah suspected most of the people in the room had some sympathy for Curwen. They all saw cases where they knew what was going on but couldn’t get their hands on the evidence to take things further.

‘That’s a good thought, Dinah,’ Hammond said. It didn’t sound patronising, or not too patronising, anyway. ‘At the moment, we have no evidence to show that he’s been near the pub since the raid. His work logs have him round the harbour area, but not in the pub. If he went there, the CCTV will have picked it up. We can’t rule it out, but we follow up the leads we’ve got first. For you, that’s finding who went to Sunk Island that night.’

She couldn’t argue. It made sense.

The briefing wound up. Dinah headed for her desk