‘I’m still not happy about Ray Dorridge,’ said Warren.
The team were seated around the main briefing table. Warren took another swig of his lukewarm coffee – his third cup that morning. The previous evening’s bonfire night celebrations had carried on late into the night, with random bangers that sounded more like a car bomb than a firework, being set off well into the early hours. Not that he and Susan had been in much of a mood to sleep. The enormity of the upcoming changes to their lives had finally hit home, and they had spent much of the night talking and planning for the future.
It was still a bit early for them to start choosing baby names, but both of them had lists of names that they didn’t want; Susan’s were largely based around former pupils whose passage through the school had made a lasting – and negative – impression. A number of them overlapped with Warren’s own list – for largely the same reasons.
Forcing himself to focus on the task at hand, Warren continued, ‘So far, we can find no link between Dorridge and the massage parlour, but when Moray and I interviewed him, he was clearly holding something back.’
‘After what Benny Masterson told us yesterday, I called the council,’ said Ruskin. ‘Apparently he’s complained about fly-tipping on his property three times in the past twelve months. Each time, the council shifted a lorry-load of rubbish; everything from fridges to mattresses to building rubble from kitchen or bathroom refits. They routinely go through it to see if there’s anything they can use to track down the original source, but it’s been picked clean. It’s definitely a professional job.’
‘So, the question is whether Dorridge is a victim of illegal dumping, or if he partnered up with Cullen to make some money on the side,’ said Grimshaw.
‘It’s not much of a reason to kill someone,’ said Martinez, ‘especially if the council takes it away for free.’
‘Fair point,’ conceded Grimshaw.
‘What else do we know about him?’ asked Warren.
‘He received a police caution back in February,’ said Pymm. ‘It resulted from an argument leading to minor damage in the Café Rouge on the high street. The person he was arguing with left before the police attended, and Dorridge refused to name them. There isn’t much else on the PNC.’
‘Get onto the arresting officers and see if they can add some more information,’ ordered Warren. ‘I’m particularly interested in who he was arguing with. How’s his alibi looking?’
‘We just got his phone records through,’ said Pymm. ‘No calls to Cullen’s smartphone that we retrieved from the murder scene, but plenty of calls to unregistered numbers. Including one number that he speaks to regularly; including twenty-four hours before each of his three complaints about fly-tipping.’
‘Now that’s interesting,’ said Warren. ‘If he was working a fly-tipping scam with Cullen, that could be Cullen’s business phone.’
‘Which was nowhere to be found when we searched his room,’ said Hutchinson.
‘Run it by Compliance and see if we have enough to justify a request for the phone’s records,’ said Warren. ‘If it is his phone, we might be able to use it to identify anyone else he has dealings with. We might even be able to track his movements.’
‘What does the GPS on Dorridge’s phone show for the day of the killing?’ asked Hutchinson.
‘It shows the handset as largely present on the back field from first thing in the morning until about an hour after the murder,’ said Pymm.
‘Which confirms his alibi,’ said Martinez.
‘Not necessarily – he could just have left the phone in his tractor out in the field,’ said Hutchinson. ‘The killing was clearly well organized and premeditated. Leaving his phone behind would be the least of his preparations. I’m no farmer, but presumably if he was trundling up and down his field all afternoon in a tractor, the GPS would show movement. Did the handset move during that time?’
‘The data’s ambiguous,’ admitted Pymm. ‘The GPS signal is only accurate to a few tens of metres, and the phone signal out there is too patchy to narrow it down any further. I can send it off to IT to see if they can be any more precise.’
Warren thought about her suggestion. He knew from experience that such analysis was far from guaranteed and could be costly and time-consuming. However, Hutchinson’s question was a good one. They could very well catch Dorridge in another lie.
‘Do it,’ he ordered. ‘In the meantime, Mr Dorridge stays on the suspect board. Somebody arrange for him to be picked up. I want another chat with him.’
Warren took a sip of his coffee. ‘Next up, what about Anton Rimington?’
‘He hasn’t done himself any favours,’ said Ruskin. ‘He turned his mobile off Sunday night after his argument with Vicki Barclay and after he’d rung his mate to say he was coming around. That’s when they started drinking. He switched it back on a couple of times on Monday, including ringing in to work to claim he had the flu, but he was obviously sulking and switched if back off again after ignoring Barclay three times. He didn’t switch it back on again until Wednesday morning, which was when we ploughed in and arrested him.’
‘So, we can’t use his mobile phone to track his movements the day of the attack?’
‘Nope, he could have been anywhere.’
‘Which begs the question, did he turn it off to avoid the missus or was it to help build an alibi?’ asked Martinez. ‘There can’t be many people who don’t know that we can track their phone’s location these days.’
‘What does his mate say?’
‘Again, no help. He reckons they drank the house dry Sunday night. He somehow managed to make it to work for eight and didn’t get back until gone seven p.m. He rang Rimington at about lunchtime, to see how he was, but it went straight to voicemail. When he got back, he says Rimington was already pissed again. He reckons he’d been drinking all day.’
‘How would he know that if he hadn’t been with him?’ asked Pymm.
‘Good point,’ admitted Ruskin.
‘He wouldn’t be the first person to commit a murder and then drink themselves into oblivion to forget what they’ve just done,’ said Martinez.
‘What about people in the neighbouring flats? Did any of them see Rimington at the time of the killing?’
‘Nobody we’ve spoken to was around during the day, and there’s no CCTV. The flat has its own door, so Rimington could easily have left without being seen by the neighbours.’
‘OK, let’s carry on testing his alibi,’ said Warren. ‘In the meantime, he would have needed to get to the massage parlour. His mate’s flat is on the other side of town.’
‘It’d be a walk of several miles,’ said Richardson, pointing out the pins on the wall map. She placed her tablet on the table. ‘His car’s licence plate wasn’t recorded on any ANPR cameras that day. The locations of the fixed cameras on that side of town make it impossible to travel more than halfway to the massage parlour without being tracked. If he did use his car, he’d have had to have parked it so far away from the murder scene, you’d have to ask what the point of driving was.’
‘Did he have access to any other cars?’
‘His mate took his own car to work that day – probably unwisely given how much he claimed to have drunk the night before. His place of work is in the opposite direction to the massage parlour and we have him on a fixed camera arriving and leaving work at the time he said. His car stayed in the car park all day.’
‘What about friends and relatives?’
Richardson pursed her lips. ‘His fiancée, Vicki Barclay, doesn’t own a car, nor does his mother, who is his only close family. As for somebody else … we’re looking at CCTV and ANPR in the area around his flat for a link to anyone who could have given him a lift, but we don’t really know what we’re looking for.’
‘Could he have changed the licence plates on his car to avoid cameras?’ asked Ruskin.
‘That would have required some serious premeditation,’ cautioned Grimshaw.
‘It’s worth pursuing,’ said Warren. ‘Check the PNC for reports of stolen licence plates – or even stolen cars for that matter.’
‘Unless he stole them off a car the same make and colour as his own, then wouldn’t that show up as a mismatch between the vehicle on the DVLA’s database and the car caught on camera? I’d like to see him explain that away,’ suggested Ruskin.
‘If you want to visually match all the cars in the area to their records in the DVLA database, be my guest,’ said Grimshaw.
‘It’s a good idea, Moray,’ said Warren quickly, not wanting the probationer to lose heart, ‘but a big job. Let’s see what Forensics say first; they may be able to tell us if the car’s plates were tampered with.’
‘What about other methods of transport?’ asked Martinez.
‘I’ve already contacted the local bus companies for their CCTV to see if Rimington was a passenger that day.’
‘How about cab firms?’ asked Grimshaw.
‘There are no journeys recorded on the app on his phone. There are also no calls to cab firms on his mobile or his mate’s landline,’ said Pymm. ‘I’ve arranged for his mugshot to be circulated amongst local firms to see if anyone did a pick-up off the street, although as you know, only black cabs are licensed to do that. We’ve had mixed success getting drivers to admit to illegal pick-ups in the past.’
‘Well Benny Masterson also fingered Stevie Cullen as potentially the father of Vicki Barclay’s baby,’ said Martinez. ‘If even the village drunk had worked that one out, how likely is it that Rimington didn’t know until Sunday night? I reckon he still has the biggest motive out of all of them.’
‘Let’s not narrow the suspect field prematurely,’ cautioned Warren. ‘There are still plenty of other people who probably aren’t mourning the loss of Stevie Cullen, not least Ray Dorridge. I’d also like to see the sisters’ reaction to a mugshot of Rimington. We’ll see what they have to say next time we get them in for questioning.’