Other agencies were drawn into this too, for example number-crunching thousands of mobile phones present in Salisbury that day to look for suspicious activity. To give one example: a woman who had been in town that Sunday found the police on her doorstep a few weeks later after she had returned from working abroad. She had left the UK the day after the poisoning and her phone had been switched off for weeks as she was working at sea, with no signal. For the algorithms processing data, this was enough to flag her number, for she had left the country and ‘gone dark’ just after the assassination attempt.
In addition to those trawling CCTV, and working through thousands of mobile numbers, there was a third investigative team examining journeys in and out of the country around the weekend of 3–4 March. Had an assassin even been on Yulia’s plane, for example? This investigative route, like the others, however, did not produce any rapid results. However over time it was to be these data-based routes of inquiry, combining information from phones, CCTV, and airline passenger details, that would prove particularly fruitful.
As detectives worked back from the bench to Zizzi’s to the pub they got to Sergei’s BMW. He had parked in the centre at about 13.40. Early tests revealed nerve-agent contamination in the restaurant and pub, but it was his car that proved particularly significant. Traces of Novichok found on the door handle and steering wheel, touched by Sergei’s hands, led investigators definitively away from the possibility of inhaled or ingested contamination and towards absorption through the skin. This fitted too with the poison residues on keyboards at Bourne Hill police station. Scientifically, the absorption route also helped explain why it had taken hours for the Skripals to fall ill.
So had the car been contaminated and if so when? Appealing for public help on 13 March, the police tried to pin down where it had been in the hour before the car park in Salisbury. They were having problems tracking the Skripals’ movements. As I knew from arranging meetings with him, Sergei did not usually carry a mobile phone – he told me once that he had one but that it was pay-as-you-go and he couldn’t be bothered to top it up. Yulia had either left hers at home that morning or switched it off, perhaps to avoid roaming charges.
It became clear to police that the Skripals went out that Sunday morning to visit Liudmila’s and Sasha’s graves at the London Road cemetery, came home briefly and then went out again at about 13.00. In as much as Sergei had a regular ‘pattern of life’, a Sunday-morning visit to the London Road cemetery was often part of it. So had the poison been delivered while he was out by somebody who knew he would not be back for a while? Or maybe during the night, after Yulia had arrived but before they went out? The absence of contamination at the cemetery gave some weight to the idea that the Novichok was placed while they were there, not before.
By around three weeks after the attack, suspicions were finally focused on the front door. At Porton, the technicians running items and swabs through the GC/MS equipment reached an important conclusion; concentrations of A234 were significantly higher on the front-door handle than anywhere else. It was ‘ground zero’. When tests for contamination on Ross Cassidy’s Isuzu pick-up, used to collect Yulia from the airport, were negative they realized they need look no further back.
This news was greeted by detectives with a mixture of relief and dejection. It was good that there was a firm theory at last about the place and approximate time that the poison was delivered. But on the other hand it meant that weeks of work, scanning thousands of hours of CCTV from the town centre and talking to hundreds of witnesses, might well have been a wasted effort. And if the person or people who targeted the Skripals had avoided the centre altogether, made their way direct to 47 Christie Miller Road, contaminated the door handle, and then left Salisbury, the search would become a great deal harder. There were no CCTV cameras outside Skripal’s house that could provide images of someone approaching his front door.
With the door as ground zero the investigation took a different turn. The police statement of 28 March downplaying the likelihood of rapid progress also heralded a renewed emphasis on the area of Christie Miller Drive. ‘We are therefore focusing much of our efforts in and around their address,’ Deputy Assistant Commissioner Dean Haydon, in overall charge of the National Counter-Terrorist Network, announced. ‘Those living in the Skripals’ neighbourhood can expect to see officers carrying out searches as part of this.’ Additional vans arrived, bringing more police and search equipment into the area.
So, twenty-four days after the poisoning, they went around door to door again, and deployed search teams to comb the back gardens, footpaths, and all the rest. It wasn’t exactly a return to square one, but it was hardly very reassuring either that this fine-focus search was being conducted at nearly three and a half weeks on. The hope was that they would find a distinctive footprint, a discarded item of clothing, or maybe even the container used to dispense the Novichok onto the door handle. Clearly the chances of turning something like that up were diminished by then.
Another resident in Christie Miller Road, recalling the chaotic early weeks of the investigation, revealed:
The police came to us and asked the same questions four times. First time it was the Wiltshire CID, the Regional Crime Squad, then people from the Met, one lot after another, they didn’t seem to be talking to one another.
From the outset, those looking at the crime had regarded Yulia’s arrival as an important moment in the initiation of the attack. She had arrived in London on an Aeroflot flight from Moscow the previous afternoon, Saturday 3 March, had been collected by family friends Ross and Mo Cassidy as well as her father. Ross was the former neighbour who had moved away in 2012 but remained on very good terms with Sergei, and they had enjoyed many a drink together. They had chatted on the way back, hearing of Yulia’s plans. She was intending to stay with her father for two weeks.
Some of the instant theories about her arrival – like the ‘poisoned gift from Russia’ – had soon fallen by the wayside because the evidence in the house didn’t support them. But other ideas, voiced early by intelligence people and investigators, proved more persistent. Had Yulia been used to ‘fix’ a time and place when an attempt on her father’s life might be made? Could intercepted emails or calls before her departure from Moscow have provided a broad indication of when might be a good time to strike? Could tracking her phone have provided a finer vector on Sergei’s location and even their planned excursions?
Yulia had arrived in a very positive mood. She felt optimistic about her relationship with a thirty-year-old Muscovite, Stepan Vikeyev. They had been an item for well over a year and maybe she was hopeful that marriage might be on the cards. But he seemed to disappear after the attack, friends telling reporters that he was lying low. He had made no attempt to contact the hospital either. Was he just frightened or was there something more sinister going on?
There was a host of questions for Yulia and it was late in March that her health was sufficiently improved for detectives to want to question her. Doctors had experimented with reducing her ventilation as soon as ten days after the attack. In court papers submitted on 20 March, Sergei Skripal is said to be ‘unable to communicate in any way’, whereas Yulia is described as ‘unable to communicate in any meaningful way’.