Someone Who Isn't Me Danuta Kot (best books to read .TXT) 📖

came out of that café… Something was ringing bells.

He went onto Google Maps and looked on street view.

There was the café B the B had mentioned – which called itself an arcade. There was a hand car wash over the road. It was where Andy had parked that night, where he left his car, just before he vanished.

Coincidence?

Maybe.

Maybe not.

So who owned that café? A quick check in a local business directory told him it was owned by a company called Docklands Holdings. He went onto the web to check it out.

Docklands Holdings had a registered office address in Bridlington, and its director was Carl Lavery.

Connections. This whole case hung on connections; he was sure of that.

Lavery owned a café with arcade machines. They’d take money or tokens every day and they’d be emptied every night if the café stood empty. Was this what Lavery was bringing back to the pub, holdalls of cash from the arcade machines?

Now Curwen was getting a bad feeling, a truly bad feeling.

Could he have been so wrong? For the first time, he felt the whole structure of the case he was building up against Lavery start to crumble. Maybe he was just what he seemed to be: a local small businessman who was probably involved in a fair bit of minor dodgy stuff, but nothing that would help Curwen.

Because he couldn’t think of anything else to do, he went on with his checks. Lavery’s business interests were wider than Curwen expected, and the investigation started to draw him in. Lavery also owned the car wash and garage on the same street as the café, and several holiday lets. He couldn’t access more than the basic financial information on the company – where it banked, the names of the directors.

Or in this case, director. Carl Lavery was the sole director of Docklands Holdings, and the company banked with the Bridlington Building Society, a small, local mutual that didn’t look like the place a serious lawbreaker would keep his money.

On the other hand, car washes and cafés were notorious locations for drug deals and this, at least, gave him reason to keep on hoping.

Had he got the right man but the wrong business?

What had Becca the Barmaid said about the pub cellar?

He got out his phone, the burner he kept for unofficial stuff. This was the one that had received the messages he’d forwarded from Andy’s phone. He hadn’t looked at it since Andy’s body was found.

He scrolled down to the messages marked from Andy, and almost dropped his phone.

There was a new one. One he hadn’t seen.

The date was…

Shit! How had he missed it? Becca the Barmaid had sent a photograph from the cellar – the fucking cupboard! And there they were, the bags, except the silly cow hadn’t got a picture of what was inside them. And these didn’t contain petty cash or the previous night’s takings. They were bulging.

The image had been sent three days after Andy died, the night he’d been in the pub talking to her.

And the phone – fuck it! – had sent the automatic response, ‘Great’, that he’d programmed in. But Andy was dead. His phone was presumably at the bottom of the estuary. How had it forwarded the message?

Slowly, Curwen managed to calm his wilder speculations. If he just stopped to think, it was easy enough to work out. Andy’s phone hadn’t been disposed of, and it was still active, or it had been. The battery would be dead by now. Andy must have dropped it…

Curwen thought fast, running scenarios through his head. They were all assuming Andy had been taken, killed and dumped, but if he’d dropped his phone, he might have got away, might have been running. The location of the phone could give the investigation important information about where he had been killed. Dinah had already told him that they didn’t know the exact location, or not for sure.

So why hadn’t the phone registered on the searches? He knew from Dinah they hadn’t found it, but they should have been able to. He had the information right here – the phone had been active after Andy’s death.

It must be because the signal was intermittent. Sunk Island was notorious for its poor connections. There was no location for the phone when the search was made because it hadn’t been able to connect, but later, for a fatal few seconds, it had.

A high wind moving the trees around, making the tower sway – that could have given a brief connection that had picked up and transmitted the message. And that meant that somewhere in the records there would be a signal that might help them find the phone.

If they found Andy’s phone, they’d find the app, and they’d see that messages had been forwarded. The number wouldn’t link to him, but the phone records would give them a location – not pinpoint it, but give a location within a few hundred square yards. And he’d made contact with that phone at Bridlington police station, and also at his flat.

If they found the phone, he could be in trouble.

He’d fucked up. No promotion, a black mark on his record and the other high-fliers would take off around him, leaving him behind. He’d end up on a team run by Karen Innes, having to defer to her decisions, call her ‘ma’am.’ Well, fuck that. That wasn’t going to happen.

Could he locate the phone himself? No, stirring up the phone company for their records would surely come to Hammond’s attention. Best sit tight on that one.

He needed to get that information about Lavery’s company. If he could link Lavery to the drugs, just about everything would be forgiven.

Right. Who owed him a favour?

He picked up his phone and keyed in a number, cursing as he got the messaging service. ‘Dom? It’s Mark Curwen here. I need some information, urgently.’ He outlined what he knew, and hung up, praying that his mate, Dom Maskall, a forensic accountant, would be around and would