‘As agreed earlier this week, I’ve been carrying out enquiries with DC Alexander, NotMuch and the house-to-house team,’ Packham said.
‘I think you mean Detective Crown from the FBI, Ray,’ Grace corrected him with a smile.
‘Sorry, chief — Arnie Crown — nice man,’ Packham said. ‘We’ve worked along the streets bordering Vallance Mansions, checking for occupants of houses, flats, offices and B&Bs who might have enterprise grade routers.’ Looking at both detectives, he said, ‘I explained previously that these high-level routers might have picked up people walking past in the street, through their phone Wi-Fi trying to communicate with these routers. It’s been harder than I thought because a lot of the buildings are divided into flats, and it’s taken us two days to cover every property — waiting for people to return from work, or who have been away. Anyhow, I think last night we may have got lucky.’ He tapped the plastic bag on the table.
‘What is it, Ray?’ Grace asked, looking down at it.
‘Well, it came from an address in Vallance Street, directly opposite the side entrance to Vallance Mansions. Now it may of course be nothing. But...’ He tugged a smartphone from his pocket, tapped it and squinted at the display.
Grace waited patiently.
‘Flat 4, 38 Vallance Street. A young man by the name of Chris Diplock, who has a website management business, has one of these routers. It logged a mobile phone passing five times between 6 p.m. and 10.30 p.m. on the evening of Wednesday, April 20th.’
‘The night Lorna Belling died.’
‘Exactly!’ Packham had a triumphant smile.
‘Do you have the phone number?’ Batchelor asked.
He gave it to him and both detectives wrote it down. Then he continued. ‘I’ve checked with the service provider, Vodafone, and it’s unfortunately a pay-as-you-go job. But we were able to look back and Mr Diplock’s router has picked up a signal from this phone on several occasions, mostly daytime and early evening. I requested a triangulation plot of the phone’s movements and — I’m not sure how helpful these might be.’ He laid his phone down and turned it so that Grace and Batchelor could see the screen.
Mostly there were random locations in the vicinity of Vallance Mansions and around Brighton and Hove, but one in particular caught Grace’s attention. A Lewes location, very close to Malling House, the Police HQ, where they were now.
His thoughts immediately went to Jon Exton. He dialled the Detective Sergeant.
Before he could speak, Exton, panting and sounding out of breath, blurted, ‘I’m just on my way, boss, be with you in a tick.’
‘What’s the number of your private phone?’ Grace asked.
Exton gave it to him and Grace wrote it down. It was different from the number Packham had found on the router log.
‘Fine.’ He hung up and focused back on Packham’s report, and the triangulation details. ‘Interesting to see this person has been in the vicinity both of Vallance Mansions and the Police HQ.’
‘Yes, but I don’t think we should read too much into it, boss — they could have been almost anywhere in Lewes,’ Batchelor said.
‘True, but — if this is another phone involved he’s not telling us about, it could be significant.’
Batchelor nodded pensively, then drummed his fingers on the desk surface, looking down intently at the evidence bag.
Grace turned to Packham. ‘Ray, could you give us a moment?’
He stood up. ‘Sure, boss.’
‘Don’t go too far, Ray.’
‘I’ll wait outside.’
After he had closed the door, Grace turned to Batchelor and said, ‘I don’t know what’s going on with Jon, but there are a number of things I’m not happy about. In strict confidence, we are very close to a formal interview, but there’s no way I’d want to do that to him — not unless we were a lot more certain, and we’re a long way from that.’
The two detectives discussed the new information, and then asked Ray Packham to rejoin them.
‘So, Ray,’ Batchelor said as he sat back down. ‘We have someone walking repeatedly past Lorna Belling’s flat on the evening or night she died. But no way of tracing who it was?’
‘Well, not quite, Guy,’ he replied, and tapped the evidence bag again. ‘This man, Chris Diplock, owns a rather flash motor — a BMW M4. He’s had it vandalized twice when parked on this street in front of his home — all the body panels keyed, once, and on another occasion the tyres slashed. So he installed a GoPro camera concealed in a dummy headrest he made. He has it set on a time-lapse and runs it continually overnight every night, then checks the footage in the morning. He said that he arrived back from a client at around 7 p.m. on Wednesday, April 20th, and that on the morning of Thursday, April 21st, when he checked the camera footage he noticed someone behaving strangely, and furtively, who walked past his car several times.’
‘Did he describe him, Ray?’ Batchelor asked.
‘Yes, he said it’s not a good image — it was raining on and off so the windscreen was blurred. The man was wearing a baseball cap tugged low, and in the darkness he could only see part of the lower half of his face — part of his nose and chin. He said he was tall.’
Exton was tall, Grace thought. So was Kipp Brown. So were a lot of people.
‘From the position of the camera,’ Packham continued, ‘he was able to see the man enter Vallance Mansions’ side entrance, and exit some time later. It was a while before he returned. Diplock said the times correlated to when the MAC address of the phone was logged on his router.’
‘That’s interesting indeed,’ Grace said.
Batchelor nodded his concurrence.
Grace picked up the evidence bag. ‘Guy, get someone to rush this over to Maria O’Brien at the Forensics Unit at Guildford. They’ve got video-enhancing capabilities there. Call her or Chris Gargan and alert them this is top priority. Can you do that right away?’
‘Yes, boss.’
At that moment there was a knock on the door. Exton entered and handed over his private phone and laptop.
Looking hard at him, Grace asked, ‘Jon, is this your only phone?’
‘Do you mean apart from my police one, boss?’
‘Yes.’
‘This is the only one.’
Grace thanked him, then shooting nervous glances at both men, Exton hurried back to the door.
‘Jon!’ Batchelor said, suddenly.
‘Yes, boss?’
‘Are you busy at the moment?’
‘Well — er — not — nothing that can’t wait.’
‘Good, I’ll come and see you in a moment.’
As Exton left, Grace handed the detective’s phone to Packham. ‘You might as well take this with you, Ray. Can you clone it and return the original to Jon so he’s not stuck without a phone? I need you to do this in strictest confidence and report to no one but me, OK?’
‘Yes, right away.’ Then he continued. ‘Something that may be worth considering, Roy, if we get a good resolution back from Forensics — have you ever worked with the Scotland Yard Super Recognizer team?’
‘No, but we’re on the same page, Ray — I was thinking about them.’
A few weeks earlier, Grace had attended a seminar on the very new field of Super Recognizers at New Scotland Yard. The DI giving the talk explained that the average human being can recognize 23 per cent of faces that they’ve seen previously. The average police officer, despite the heightened awareness that comes with the territory, can only manage 24 per cent. But a tiny percentage of the population, now known as Super Recognizers, can achieve up to 90 per cent.
The phenomenon had been discovered during the aftermath of the London Riots, in 2014, when many of the violent rioters and looters had concealed their faces with caps, glasses and scarves. Detectives in London had discovered there were some colleagues who were capable of identifying people, with consistent accuracy, from just one single feature. An earlobe. A nose. A chin.