Dead if You Don’t

32

Saturday 12 August

17.30–18.30

Adrian Morris took the phone, then immediately passed it to Grace.

‘One of my colleagues spotted it being thrown out of the window of a green BMW that left the car park at high speed about fifty minutes ago,’ the steward said to Morris.

‘Did he get a description of the car or its index number?’ Roy Grace asked him.

‘Yes, sir!’ the attendant said, proudly fishing out a scrap of paper from his pocket and handing it to him. ‘It was a 2013 BMW 5 Series. And he got part of the plate.’

‘E 13 DU,’ the Detective Superintendent read out. Fishing a pair of gloves from his pocket, he tugged them on and took the phone. It was a basic Samsung. He was aware of the correct procedure that a mobile phone should be handed immediately to the Digital Forensics Unit, but there was no time for that. Later, he would write up his decisions in his Policy Book.

He pressed the button to pull up the address book. Scrolling through the few names, he came to ‘Aleksander’, and remembered his conversation with Kipp Brown.

He scrolled down through the address list and came to another name, ‘Dad’. There were two numbers. He recognized the second as the number for Kipp Brown’s encrypted phone, and pressed to dial it.

Moments later he heard Kipp Brown’s voice, sounding overjoyed with relief.

‘Mungo! Where are you? Are you OK? I’ve been worried out of my wits. Where are you? Are you safe?’

‘Apple,’ Grace said. Then went on, ‘Mr Brown, I’m afraid this is not your son, this is Detective Superintendent Grace.’

Kipp Brown’s voice sounded like he had fallen off a cliff. ‘Oh God. Don’t, please don’t say—’

‘Sir, I’m calling from a Samsung mobile phone that was found in the car park at the Amex a short while ago.’

‘What? How did it get there?’

‘Could your son have dropped it?’ Grace said, tactfully, remembering Brown had told him Mungo had lost his previous phone.

‘Knowing him, very possibly.’

‘Right, sir. As I said, go straight home and we’ll be back in touch.’

‘I’m in my car, on my way there now. Don’t you have any CCTV?’

‘That’s being checked now, sir.’

‘Shit,’ Brown said. ‘Shit, shit, shit.’

Grace waited for his outburst to finish. Then he said, ‘We’re going to find your son.’

‘You know what?’ Kipp Brown said. ‘It would be nice if I had some confidence in you people — but the way I’ve been treated by you in the past doesn’t give me much.’

A bit rich, Grace thought privately, considering that on their previous encounter Brown had lied to him and his team. ‘I’m going to do all I can to restore your confidence, sir.’

‘Yeah, right.’

Immediately he ended the call, Grace phoned through to Keith Ellis, asking him to have checks done on all ANPR — Automatic Number Plate Recognition Cameras — that the BMW might have pinged, giving him the part of the registration number he had: Echo One-Three Delta Uniform.

Then he began to study the phone more carefully.

Being careful not to delete or change anything, first he looked for text messages. But there were none. Strange, he thought, but remembered that his own son, Bruno, only really used Instagram and Snapchat to communicate. There wasn’t much functionality on the phone at all. Certainly, Kipp Brown was teaching his son an effective lesson about losing his expensive iPhone. Except that this cheap device, with apparently little data on it, was not helpful to them now.

He checked for voice messages. There was one.

‘Where are you, tosspot?’

It was from a well-spoken boy. Roy guessed him to be around Mungo Brown’s age. The phone’s voice announcement timed it at 3.32 p.m. today. The caller’s number was withheld.

Was it Aleksander — the youngster his father had seen him talking to before he vanished? He remembered Kipp Brown’s words, a short while ago:

About five minutes after we arrived — we were late because of the traffic... he saw a friend and started chatting.

Except that didn’t chime with the message.

‘Where are you, tosspot?’ That indicated this boy was waiting for him, expecting him. Then again, maybe Mungo hadn’t bothered telling his father his friend was going to be there — it didn’t sound as if son and father were getting on too well at the moment.

A few minutes later, Keith Ellis called Grace back. ‘Guv, vehicle index Echo One-Three Delta Uniform?’ the Oscar-1 repeated back to him.

‘Yes, yes.’

‘The information I have is that a 2013-registered BMW, identical green colour and model, was reported stolen in Crawley sometime between 2.30 a.m. and 11 a.m. this morning. And this is interesting, Roy, another identical BMW with the index Echo X-ray One-Three Bravo Delta Uniform — which is a match — was written off last month following an accident.’

‘Sounds like this stolen BMW might have the false plates that match the totalled one,’ Grace said. It was a frequent trick when cars were stolen.

‘It does, guv.’

‘Nice work, Keith, let me know when you have any updates.’

As Grace ended the call, the CCTV operator turned to him and said, ‘I’ve just pulled off the full number plate of that BMW you had a partial for, from a camera in car park A.’ He read it out to him.