Starkey’s face was expressionless, the bright blue eyes fixed on Sean’s. ‘Yeah, thanks, it is. I was looking for you as it goes. The old man didn’t know when you would be back.’
‘Just got in. Been for a wander round.’ He watched for a reaction but got nothing back. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘I thought we should get to know each other a bit, we’ve got a lot in common.’
‘Really?’
‘More than you’d imagine,’ Starkey’s laugh hit the metal door of the lift and bounced back off the concrete wall behind them. ‘Jack said you might be able to help me.’
Sean’s mouth was so dry he thought his tongue would stick to the roof.
‘I’ve got myself one of these new smartphones,’ Terry continued. ‘Your dad was trying to help me set something up, but he hadn’t got a clue. No offence, mate. Me mam’s the same, out of the bloody ark, technophobic. We’re two of a kind, aren’t we?’
Sean forced a smile; it felt like a snake slithering across his face where his mouth used to be.
‘I can have a go,’ he said.
‘It’s that Twitter I want to get on to, for the CUC campaign.’
‘Oh. There’s always the library.’
‘No, don’t fancy that, too public. See what you can do with this. No idea how to do half the stuff on it beyond phoning and texting.’
He held out a phone. Sean took it. It was a very recent model. He turned it over in his hand and noticed a set of tiny lines scored into the gloss black. Not brand new, then.
‘Nice phone. Shall we go back in? We might as will sit down while we’re sorting it out.’ Sean knocked and his father opened the door immediately, as if he’d been listening.
He had an idea that he might be able do something clever with Starkey’s phone while he was installing Twitter, but he didn’t really know what he should be looking for. The recent calls list might give him some names or numbers, but probably nothing that would mean anything. Added to which, Starkey was watching him with those blue eyes, hungry to learn how the phone worked.
‘You miss a lot inside, don’t you?’ Terry Starkey said. ‘There’s always something new.’
Sean nodded and looked up to see his father winking at him. He’d like to know how long he was supposed to have been away for and what the charges were. Jack’s mad grin suggested he’d been embellishing a story while Starkey had been in the flat.
‘It’s loading now. Do you want a beer or something while we’re waiting?’
Starkey’s eyes lit up. ‘Sweet, mate.’
‘Nowt in the place, lad. I told you,’ Jack said. ‘I’m on the Twelve Steps.’
‘You don’t mind if Terry gets a couple in for me and him?’ He risked the first name. They were mates now, weren’t they? He pulled a twenty-pound note out of his wallet. ‘Have you got wheels? I’d go but I’d have to walk, and it’s a fair hike to Tesco, now the shop’s out of action.’
There was a moment in the stifling, musty air of Jack Denton’s flat when Sean thought Terry Starkey had rumbled him. His blue eyes flickered and settled on the phone.
‘OK,’ he said finally. ‘But don’t put anything out on that Twitter until I get back. The first message from the CUC is coming from my mouth.’
‘Of course. I’ll have it all set up. No worries.’
Sean saw him out and positioned himself by the kitchen window. A few moments later, Terry came out of the flats and turned into the entry road which ran down the side of Eagle Mount One. If he’d been parked at the front Sean would have missed him, but now he had a full view of Starkey’s vehicle. He pulled out his own phone, held it up to the window and snapped. The dark blue BMW started moving. He snapped again, hoping it wouldn’t be a blur, as the car turned onto the ring road and out of sight.
The toilet flushed and his father came into the kitchen.
‘You and him are getting on all right, son.’
Sean wondered which version of the truth his father could handle and decided to keep the white lies to a minimum.
‘I didn’t realise that was his brother, the one who got pushed off.’
‘Oh, aye, terrible business. And they’ve let her out already.’
‘Looks like it.’
Jack shuffled into the living room. Sean followed him and leant against the door frame, Starkey’s smartphone in his hand. He checked that the Twitter app was loading and wondered what information he should be looking for on the phone. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, he knew the answer was none. He was a suspended constable with absolutely no powers to go nosing around a citizen’s phone.
He weighed the phone in his hand and the faint scratch lines caught his eye. He crossed to the living room window and pulled back the curtain to let the light in. The scratches were faintly tinged with fuchsia pink, like nail varnish. He slid the cover off his own phone. There were similar scratch marks, only on his phone they were white. Same as his cover. It looked like the scratches on Starkey’s phone could have been caused by a pink plastic cover sliding on and off. He didn’t think it was infringing anyone’s human rights if he noticed something that was in plain view and it was plain to see that pink wasn’t Terry Starkey’s colour. It wasn’t rocket science to assume it was stolen.
Sean looked up to see that his dad had fallen asleep, his jaw slack and a line of dribble running into the stubble on his chin. With nobody watching, Sean clicked ‘Contacts’, but it was empty. There were no missed or recently received calls either. It obviously had a clean SIM card.
Sean realised he needed to hurry up. He checked and saw the app had loaded, then started to set up the account. It was requesting an email address. He’d have to wait for Starkey to get that. He went into messages and sent a text to his own number labelled ‘test’. He could say he needed to know Starkey’s number as part of the account set-up, which turned out to be true. He went back to the home screen. Behind the date and time there was a photo. He didn’t think it had the quality of a standard issue screensaver, more like a photo someone had taken. A tree full of pink blossom curved round the screen in a garden somewhere, and to the left of the picture he could make out the side of a house, a brick wall and white window frames.
He went back to the kitchen where there was no chance of his father opening his eyes and asking what he was up to. Then he put Starkey’s phone on the drainer and used his own phone to photograph the cover image. He turned it over. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to pick up the scratches, but maybe Lizzie would know if there was some way of enhancing the image. She popped into his head and lingered there for a moment, like the hologram of Princess Leia in Star Wars, but he shut her out; he didn’t have time. If Starkey found out what he was doing, he’d probably beat him to a pulp.
He wasn’t sure what all the icons meant, so he touched various things, but nothing made sense. Suddenly, like an open sesame, a swipe across the screen opened up the settings menu. He scrolled all the way down and there, nestled at the bottom, was an icon labelled ‘About Phone’. He clicked it and scrolled slowly through a mess of words and numbers, trying to understand what they meant.
When the knock came on the door, he almost jumped out of his skin. He fumbled with Starkey’s phone, to get it back to where he’d started, and squeezed his own phone into his pocket. As he opened the door, he hoped the lack of light in the dingy hallway would cover the heat in his face.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Halsworth Grange
Lizzie carried the evidence bags back to the police vehicles. The doors to the CSI van were open and Janet was loading several more bags into its temperature controlled interior.
Janet wrinkled her nose in the direction of the bag she was holding. ‘I’m not sure this lot’s going to tell us very much, but at least we’ve done our civic duty and left the place cleaner than we found it.’