‘Boss, there’s no need. Honestly.’
He was trying to help her, but it irritated the hell out of her. She needed to get this off her chest.
‘Let me speak, Marcel. I want to apologise.’
Marcel squirmed in his seat. He had a heart of gold and unbounded loyalty, but touchy-feely stuff always made him uncomfortable.
‘I allowed the Cobbs to get under my skin,’ Hannah continued. ‘I shouldn’t have. And then I got snappy with you, and I shouldn’t have done that either. So I’m sorry.’
Marcel shrugged. ‘No worries, boss. I get a lot worse from the wife.’
Hannah smiled. ‘If I do it again, you have my permission to give me a bollocking.’
Marcel shook his head. ‘Definitely not like the wife.’
Hannah felt suddenly brighter. I can do this, she thought. I need to start trusting my team.
‘How’s it going?’ she asked.
Marcel seemed to realise why he’d come in. ‘Oh yeah. I think we’ve hit on something. Got a minute?’
Hannah followed him into the CID room. Marcel guided her over to one of the desks, where DC Trisha Lacey was tapping away at her computer.
‘What’ve we got?’ Hannah asked.
Trisha opened up a map on her screen. It was overlaid with a number of circles. ‘This is tracking information given to us by Cobb’s mobile phone provider.’ She pointed at one of the circles. ‘From Saturday evening right through to Sunday morning he was somewhere here. Then the signal moves south to here. Later on Sunday it moves again, ending up at the landfill site.’
Hannah studied the pattern. ‘Each of those circles has a pretty big radius. Any chance we can narrow it down?’
‘Not from this data. But look . . .’ Trisha zoomed in on the map until one of the circles filled her screen. ‘Notice anything?’
Hannah stared for a few seconds, and then her eye caught it.
‘Communion Road. The tip!’
‘Yup. Body had to have been dumped there, along with the phone.’
‘Can we be sure?’
‘Couldn’t have been anywhere else, not in this area. Yesterday was a Sunday, remember. No bin collections. The tip was open, though.’
‘Of course.’
‘We contacted the company that runs the landfill site. Their logs confirm that deliveries were made from that tip yesterday.’
‘Excellent. Good work.’
‘That’s not all,’ Marcel said, a gleam in his eye.
Trisha Lacey opened another window on her monitor. ‘This is a list of calls made to and from Cobb’s burner phone. A lot of the more recent ones are from his mum, but this other number crops up a lot.’
‘Do we know who it belongs to?’
‘It’s another unregistered number, but what we do know is that its usual location is also in the area that Cobb stayed in on Saturday night. Then there’s this . . .’
Another window, another list.
‘This relates to calls on Cobb’s other phone – the number his mum gave you.’ She touched the screen with her biro. ‘This one is a call to a local taxi firm. Cobb was banned from driving, so he’s been getting around by cab. We contacted the firm and asked about the call. They told us exactly where they took him on Saturday.’
‘Where?’
Trisha shifted her pen back to the map. ‘Here. A block of flats called Erskine Court.’
‘Did they take him home again?’
‘That’s the funny thing. Cobb had arranged for the firm to pick him up again at six, but there was no sign of him outside the flats when the taxi pulled up. The driver says he gave Cobb a ring, and Cobb told him he was getting a lift and didn’t need the taxi anymore.’
‘Do we know it was Cobb who did the talking? Maybe he was already dead.’
Trisha shrugged. ‘We know it was a male, but the driver didn’t record the call, so we’ve nothing to go on. That said . . .’ She double-clicked to open another file. ‘This is a list of known associates of Joseph Cobb. It’s a work in progress, but it’s already quite the rogues’ gallery. At the top of the list is a very familiar name.’
Hannah craned forward to read the tiny text. She had recently started to think she might need glasses.
‘Ah, yes. Barrington “Drugs R Us” Daley. Why am I not surprised he rears his ugly head in this?’
‘Right,’ Trisha said. ‘But have you seen his address?’
Hannah squinted again, and it was as if the characters jumped out at her. ‘801 Erskine Court! Well, fuck me sideways!’
