At Eden House, as well as working on the onion router used by Lorna Burns, Rob Shawcross turned his attention to arranging the raids on the properties registered to Sunshine Holidays for dawn the next day, with the help of Kate and Emma, who busied herself with Lucinda Dockie’s diary. What was jokingly referred to as WPC Dawn Raid, or the ‘six o’clock knock’, had been deployed by police forces for as long as they existed. Apart from the obvious reason – to catch inhabitants at their most vulnerable, and when they are most likely to be at their home addresses, it also gives the police a distinct and very powerful psychological advantage. Rudely awakening somebody in the delicate last hours of sleep disorientates them and immediately gives the police the upper hand. Rob was trying to coordinate raids on each of the twenty-two addresses at the same time, and it was proving a logistical headache. Each raid should really have two squad cars and a response unit, with tough equipment to break down doors should the folk inside not cooperate. That meant at least eighty staff. It wasn’t going to happen and so, after liaising with DI Porter and Kate Umshaw, Rob was prioritising. A remote group of cottages up Birkhouse Moor had made the list, not least because Craig Lockwood’s witness, David Martin, had also mentioned them as a place where he had met Lisa Lau. They were stretching all the resources available to them, and Rob felt the strain of an elastic band teetering on the verge of overextending itself. He felt the tightness.
All he could do now was wait, and work on trying to discover the route from legitimate IP addresses, via Lorna Burns’ computer, to some less so. Occasionally he’d nervously swing his chair over to Emma’s desk, where she was reading the diary. He couldn’t concentrate.
The diary had been an unexpected find, with Lucinda’s handwritten updates on her life providing a clear narrative of her behaviour, emotional state and who she interacted with. It could turn out to be a crucial piece of evidence.
Emma was also looking for anything that linked Lucinda to any of the addresses on Rob’s list. She read an entry about Yus Ali.
Emma familiarised herself with Lucinda’s style, which was fairly erratic. She’d write a lucid entry, which was neat and orderly, about her day, but then on the next page, she’d daub scrawls of desperately emotional outpourings. They ranged from the rantings of a depressive, to the promises of a woman crazed by guilt and wanting to get away.
The entry about Yus was a tirade. It was extremely derogatory, and Emma saw that, when it came to the man’s failings, Lucinda didn’t hold her tongue (or pen). Lucinda wrote of him falling under a bus or drowning in the lake drunk. The paragraphs (if the piece could be described as being divided into something as sophisticated as paragraphs) attacking Yus were etched deeply into the paper, as if written by a crazed woman, full of anger and hate. Then the writing became clearer and gentler, and more decipherable, as she calmed a little and contradicted herself, and referred to Yus as caring and watching her back, ‘when the creepy man hangs about the Grill’.
Emma read it again. She took a snapshot of the entry with her camera phone and sent it to DI Porter. The entry was dated two weeks ago, which was the same time when Yus said there’d been an argument after he spotted Lucinda with fat bald man. It matched the date when Yus had made a fool of himself in the Scrag End pub, calling Lucinda out and embarrassing her.
On the next page was another irate entry, taking back all the good-natured terms she’d used about her boyfriend. She spoke about escaping. Even the creepy guy would be better than him. That entry wasn’t dated. Underneath she’d written:
I told Mandy and she told me not to do it. She said he’s not right. She almost got into his van one night and he said something weird about his sister that made her freak. Well, I think he can be nice, even though he is fat and sweaty when he pants all over the place. Mandy said anyone who likes it in graveyards is a whacko.
The word ‘graveyard’ immediately leapt out and Emma felt the excitement that comes when a small detail suddenly seems like it could lead to a big development. She took her phone and snapshotted the extra phrases, sending them to DI Porter. Emma continued to look for anything referencing ‘weird guy’ or ‘creep’ or ‘freak’. At the back, there was a list of names, and one of them was simply ‘whacko’. There was a phone number and a note next to it giving a number for ‘The Agency’, and an address. It was one of the cottages at Birkhouse Moor. Emma knew that DI Porter had collected a card for the same business, advertising the company of women, from one of the payphones in Ambleside. This time she entered it directly onto HOLMES, getting an instant hit and nodding when the link displayed on her screen: sure enough, it was one of the cards from the telephone box uploaded by DI Porter, as she sat waiting for an artist from Kendal to turn up at the Scrag End pub.
As expected, her phone buzzed and she saw that it was her boss.
‘Ma’am.’ Her previous nerves returned over her blunder earlier.
‘Well, well. Good work, Emma, keep going. Start a profile for this “whacko”. The mention of Mandy going to a van, the argument at the Scrag End, the timings, the graveyards – that’s a bit unsettling – anything else on that? So, Mandy lied to me about this too; she was close to Lucinda as well as Lisa. Her phone is dead, and so is Kian Delaney’s.’
‘You’ve been keeping busy waiting at the pub, boss?’
‘You know me, Emma, I don’t do waiting very well.’
‘I can just imagine. I’ll make a list of all the graveyards in a twenty-mile radius of Ambleside.’
‘Can you also chase the CCTV for Heaven in Ambleside? We should have heard back from them by now and we need to look for vans in the area.’
‘Yes, boss. And Kate has chased the lab for the results on the wheelie bin, they should be in by close of play today.’
‘Fantastic. We really need some developments on that crime scene. While I’m still here I’ll call Communications Data Capture to run the number for The Agency. If they can trace a number, they could possibly find an International Mobile Equipment Identity to go with it and find an owner, or at least a location. Tell Rob if they give you an IP address so he can add it to the work he’s doing on anonymous web activity.’
‘Will do. How’s the weather down there in Ambleside?’
‘Actually pretty mild. I don’t want to get stuck tonight, so I’ll be leaving shortly after I set up the artist. Maybe even before, if they don’t turn up soon.’
‘Roads are clear from Kendal so there shouldn’t be a huge delay,’ Emma told her boss.
‘I think they’re here,’ Kelly said. ‘Speak later.’
After passing the number for The Agency to technical support, Emma carried on reading. She’d learned to speed-read on her detective courses. It was a handy tool when 80 per cent of any investigation was reading endless passages of witness statements, lab reports, case files and HOLMES updates. One had to look out for discrepancies, connections and oddities, but at speed, else it would take years to crack one case. There were no dates on these entries.
I did it. I feel like crap and it hurt when he put his hands round my neck, but I let him do it. I’ve checked. My bruises are not really bad, and Mandy was wrong. He wasn’t as rough as some of the others, and he got a real kick out of it. I don’t know how I feel about it but it means that I’ve almost got enough money for the rent in Lancaster so I can start my course. One more time, he said.