Wendy sat lifeless at her desk, nursing an increasingly colder mug of coffee. Her lips were pursed, blowing away steam which no longer existed.
‘You trying to make an ice lolly?’ DS Steve Wing said.
‘Hmmm? Oh, sorry. Lost in thought.’
‘I’d noticed. You've been blowing on that coffee for the past twenty minutes. Not like your usual asbestos-tongued self,’ he joked. Steve tended to be the one to inject humour into the incident room at Mildenheath CID and Wendy was often jealous of the way in which he was able to detach himself from situations and continue to function without all of the mental baggage that came with dealing with dead bodies and victims of serious crime.
‘Yeah, just got a lot of stuff on my mind at the moment,’ she said. ‘Long days and short nights, you know how it is.’
‘I don't think any of us really know how it is, Wendy. Not with what you’ve been through. You should probably have taken longer off work, no matter what Culverhouse says.’
‘It wasn't down to Culverhouse. It was down to me. As he said, he would have had me in the next day if he could. A fortnight off was most definitely my idea, believe me.’
‘True. Two weeks is maternity leave to him. Anyway, we've got an afternoon briefing at half-past. More news on the mobile phone records and door-to-door enquiries on the Danielle Levy case.’
‘Mmmhmm. Any luck?’
‘That's what the briefing's for,’ Steve said with a smile.
‘Yeah…’ Wendy trailed off.
‘Listen, Wendy, are you sure you're all right? I mean, I can always have a word with Culverhouse if you'd rather take more time off or have a break or something. Actually, scrap that. I’ll speak to the Chief Constable. Hawes would shit himself if he thought there was a chance of you going mental and bringing some sort of court case against the force.’
‘Nah, I'm fine. Honestly. Half past, yeah?’
As Wendy got up and left the room, Steve Wing gave it a minute or so before knocking on Culverhouse's door.
The morning briefing passed in a haze for Wendy as Culverhouse updated the team with the latest developments.
‘Steve, what's the latest on the mobile phone records?’ he said, addressing DS Wing.
‘I got on to her network operator this morning, guv. Fortunately for us, she has an iPhone. Quite a recent model, and as she was in a built-up area the phone was sending broadcast signals every five or ten minutes. It was last picked up by three base station towers at 1.15pm, and using triangulation they were able to narrow it down to an area of about two hundred and fifty metres. That area pretty much centres on her house.’
‘So she was at home when her mobile was last active?’
‘Or near enough to it, yes. They could have been even more specific but it looks as though she had her phone's GPS function turned off, so they could only go by the mobile signal from the base stations. It's quite possible that she switched her phone off when she got home, or that it ran out of battery, or even that she left it at home. The thing is, the signal stops there. It doesn't mean she didn’t leave the house, though. Just that her phone was either switched off or never left the house with her.’
‘That could be about right, as her parents said her shoes weren't anywhere to be found in the house, so I think its looking likely that she left the house of her own accord. Or before she had a chance to take her shoes off, anyway.’
‘Do you think there was an abduction, guv?’ DS Frank Vine asked.
‘It's possible, but I can’t see a reason why at the moment. The step-father said the back door was left on the catch, whereas it's usually deadlocked. He says he locked it the night before and that it was unlocked when he came in from walking the dog on Friday afternoon.’
‘So Danielle went out through the back door, then?’
‘Or someone came in through it.’